Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Some pictures of tonight’s podcast…

While at the White Rose as explained previously I always ensure I pop my head round to take a look at the food court’s D to see if I can spot anyone as I know a few of the managers there.

As usual, I was disappointed to see a lack of recognisable faces and so turned away until, what the computer scientist in me would probably want to call echoic memory (I realise it’s not actually from computer science but we cover it in HCI) kicked in and at second glace I spotted Gary running kitchen!

Of course, this won’t mean anything to you as none of the right people read my blog for this to be of any significance. But there you have it. We all miss Gary. He was a legend. And fantastic if you got talking about cars, plus actually has some real money so rather than driving around in a crappy little one litre Cosrsa he now powers around in a Mondeo ST. Living the dream people, living the dream.

Glyn having gotten chips and curry sauce for lunch today set me on a mission to go find a curry for lunch.

I was going to see what Co-op had to offer but Matt having never been to the White Rose suggested we take a trip there and so we headed in to see if anywhere in the food court offered such a meal and as it happened, several places did.

I ended up getting chicken tikka and chips from the Asian food place. What I got, I was highly impressed with. Not only was it still fairly warm when I got it back to the office (I drove back so technically I got a tikka to ride 😉 ) but it was very nice indeed, having spent the last several years eating at student takeaways you really appreciate the difference when you enter the real world. Good stuff, recommended.

Saturday night having come round again, Michelle and Norm’s joint party (that Norm didn’t have any say in and couldn’t actually come to 😉 ) had arrived.

Being unable to get the time off work I didn’t finish until late and given an unending series of problems ending with the building alarm refusing to set leaving us waiting around for the morning shift to turn up I didn’t make it to the party until gone 3am.

I was greeted by a rather drunk Moz who seemed rather pleased to see me. As pre-arranged with Nicola (who was passed out on the couch) I tried to take her up but she was a little too drunk to stay conscious for more than 20-30 seconds at a time. For someone who is such an outgoing party animal she’s quite a light weight (though to be fair she had, had a long day and is keeping up with me for hours at work at the moment).

The real winner of the evening was the amount of drunken stories that emerged that night and the next morning. Always entertaining.

The long awaited office night out took place last night. We headed down to town straight from work to Beckett’s Bank on Park Row which was rather busy, but then I guess that has town written all over it on a weekend, especially when people are just getting out from work.

I’m not sure I’m a fan of town on the weekend. There are too many old people and everywhere is packed. It’s probably worth suffering the sleep deprivation to go out on a week night as you just seem to get a better atmosphere, at least until I have a few more years on me.

We moved onto a bar named Henry’s which is just round the corner. It was an interesting mix, it seemed quite a classy place and yet they were playing the most generic cheesy music that you would expect to find at Fruity and Mental Mondays back when Bondi was open.

After a few drinks here everyone else headed off to Tiger Tiger to meet up with some from one of our clients that also happened to be out while I stayed back for another drink. With hindsight we should probably have traded numbers as Tiger Tiger was abandoned by the time I arrived there so I don’t know what happened to everyone else.

The night was far from a write-off though as Nicola invited me back to hers to take a look round her new house which isn’t too bad for a student house (it has the generic bedrooms in random places and no form of hallways but that is to be expected) and the price is pretty good so I’ll give my thumbs up. Especially given she got the best bedroom by far lol.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.

When I left work on Wednesday, it was dark.

Though that was mainly due to the fact that I didn’t leave work until 21:45. That was a long meeting. Dean said it would finish around 6 when we first planned it. Of course none of us actually believed that it would ;).

I headed over to Napa to get in a quick drink for Michelle’s pub thing before finally grabbing some dinner and going home to get some work done. Managed to get to bed at 2am which wasn’t going to result in a good night’s sleep. Still as long as the podcasting session the next day didn’t go on too late…

We headed over to Oakwood McDonald’s for dinner this evening.

As I pulled in I found a BMW parked across the pedestrian crossing which then started to reverse and almost went straight into me. I presumed he was just picking someone up and was about to leave so I thought nothing of it.

However as we walked back round we saw the guy in the car talking to some youths and hand them a small bag of something.

We headed inside and having been asked what I wanted I replied, “you know, there is someone selling drugs outside.” The shift manager then disappears off and doesn’t return for 10 minutes. I went out to see if something bad had actually happened – no sign of the shift manager but the car was still sat there and greeted me with a

what the fuck you looking at?

Luckily, having gone back inside the shift manager re-appeared 5 minutes later so I don’t really know what happened there. Maybe he actually did get killed and replaced with some kind of evil clone. Who knows. The important thing is I didn’t get stabbed, which I think is a line I’m going to end most of my stories on from now on ;).

The chances are that most if not all of my friends (well technically they aren’t friends, they are colleagues as they are outside the circle) from work are never going to read this blog post. Never the less, I would like to say thanks for this weekend. It’s been amazing.

Having got out at a very reasonable time on Saturday night we settled down on the benches outside for a beer and sat around chatting for a while before heading off to Cass for a sandwhich. It was so like old times. It’s something that has really been missing from the night shift but very gradually, we’re bringing it back.

Sunday night we headed down to the pub quiz to spend our winnings from last week. We didn’t fair quite so well in the quiz this week though we did manage a rather impressive turn-out. We soon found our way to drive-thru and then by a series of interesting events, the car park at Tesco Garforth where we had spent countless nights over the years. Maybe my youth hasn’t quite slipped away just yet.

I went out on Friday for John’s birthday at which there was also in attenance quite a few people I knew from high school. Sometimes you really don’t appreciate your life and what you have achieved until you meet up with your former peers and compare. There is just something nice about being able to take a deep breath and think to yourself, “I am such a better human being than you.” Good times :D.