Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Apparently.

I got a letter through last week from my insurance company telling me “it has been suggested you were involved in an incidient.”

I mean, what the is that supposed to mean? Several phone calls later and I am told that it was reported to them by another insurance company but all the details about the incident were blank. I told them to close the claim because I had no knowledge of it or indeed any kind of accident and they said they would sort it out and phone me back.

They didn’t phone me back.

So I phoned them once more today and they told me they didn’t really know what was going on with it so I explained it to them again and apparently they are going to sort it. Hmmm.

It’s not even 10am yet and I am awake and watching Doctor Who. I’m not like out of bed or anything, but I’m fully awake and able to blog and everything.

Personally, I don’t think this is a good thing. I’m getting far too old when I’m awake at 10am. You would think being awake so early would give me more time and yet, we’re half way through August and I’ve only just started on series 2 of Doctor Who. Summer is running out…

Short tags. My one victory of the night.

It’s been one of those days.

I got my new equipment delivered today in preparation for the podcast. The mic stands are, well, awful. They are way too big. Still I’m sure I can look beyond that if only Behringer had got back to me in terms of configuring my mixing deck so sound comes out. I haven’t got that far yet so I’m now sitting on lots and lots of very expensive equipment that I can’t get to work and we start recording the show in just over a week.

A-Soc. I had to redo the artwork for the membership cards because everyone prints different “standard size” business cards apparently. I don’t know if my artwork has sent because all my SMTP servers sent my email then told me it had rejected it. And I can’t order the hoodies because people aren’t answering their phones after they haven’t responded to my emails. I can’t test the A-Soc website locally because the MySQL server keeps rejecting my connections.

Finance. I’ve had £170 go missing out of my account which means I have had to cancel my card so now at some point I need to go home and get my new card and no doubt spend time on the phone activating it too as well as going through the fraud procedures.

Web. My web host isn’t returning my emails with regards to the fact they have lost my database. I still can’t commit all of my files to the SVN for House Metrics but the one victory I have had tonight is short tags. Having finally got everything running, anything without a full

…but everyone from Birmingham is bad news.

I got into my car to go to work and sat fiddling with my MP3 player, stationary at the side of the road when a taxi comes past and a crashes into me!

But what really tops it off is his excuse for why he drove into me.

I’m from Birmingham, I don’t know where I’m going

How about, not into other cars. That would be a sensible start, wouldn’t it?

Luckily my car was for the most part fine other than some scuffing on the bumper. Seriously though, how much of an idiot do you have to be to drive into a parked car?

You’re probably reading this on Facebook or Netvibes.

Therefore it probably has slipped your attention that my homepage has a completely new look. Having managed to fix the site and looking for a new style to give the podcast mini site I decided that it would be better to just come up with a whole new look for everything and use that across the site.

And, for the first time, my blog has a separate skin which matches the main site as well! Finally, that integrated look which I know Kieran has been suggesting for so many years ;). So, give me your feedback, what do you think, does it work in your browser, have you found any problems?

You may notice once you start playing around that the image at the top keeps changing. At the moment there are only 6 that it “randomly” selects out of each time (I put randomly in quotes because most of us know how bad computers are at picking out random numbers, on saying that, humans are no better), two of them are photos – from graduation and Rationalist Week, two of them are collages of loads of different pictures of me and two are of composed of some of my favourite stock photography. As the months pass I’m hoping to add more and more until there is a sizeable library of them.

Walking up to the Deer Park on Friday we heard a few fireworks going off.

Except they weren’t fireworks. They were gun shots.

We arrived at the Deer Park, got ourselves a drink and sat down next to the window looking out across the street. The next thing we know there are loads of police, crime scene investigators and news reporters turning up.

It turns out there had been an armed robbery as a Securior can dropped off cash at the Abbey branch in which one of the security personell was shot in the leg. West Yorkshire Police are currently appealing for witnesses. Given it happened on a busy street opposite a busy pub it seems suprising if nobody had.

Having got in from work rather tired on Monday evening I got a good 2 minutes to sit down before we headed down to the part for some kiting.

It’s been a good decade since I’ve flown a kite and they’ve changed just a little since I was young. I don’t remember them being twice as big as me and I was a lot smaller back then. Still, that only makes them far more fun. I was good to get to Roundhay Park there – that’s actually the first time I’ve been since we moved next door to it.

The wind wasn’t amazing so we didn’t manage to get on the board but hopefully this dead summer air will soon make way for something a little more interesting and the real fun can begin :D. Never the less it was a lot of fun even it if could technically be counted as a sport.

Life isn’t ever going to slow down it is? I hoped it would when I graduated, that it wouldn’t be quite as hectic. I didn’t want it to slow down too much, I would have settled for just a bit. But I’m not sure I’m actually going to get that.

Having had our house warming on Friday at which I managed to work my way through a bottle of spirits without being too worse for wear on Saturday we headed down to the Deer Park for some recovery steak. Having eaten that I headed off straight to work for an interesting night of watching smartly dressed Opera in the Park goers look very out of place and made it home to bed for around 3am.

Once again dragging my ass out of bed a little earlier than I would have really liked to we headed back to the Deer Park for Sunday lunch. Having got back from that I then spent the afternoon battling through a week’s worth of freelancing work I needed to catch up on before heading to the pub quiz.

Friday saw our long time coming (though possibly not so awaited) house warming.

I never really put much thought to it, I’m not even sure I got round to inviting people and was quite suprised when quite a number of people began to tell me throughout the week that they would see me at the party on Friday.

Still Friday having arrived it was all but dead until 10:30. Still with Kieran having turned up all the way from London, a few other select guests and there being plenty of alcohol in the house, we had sufficent company and drink to make it a good night anyway. Not that it was a problem was once the night drew on the guests began to flood in.

The party ended up going on till around 5am before the approaching daylight sent us running for cover. Not too bad for a group of suburbian based OAPs ;).

It occurs to me, as of last Friday, I’ve now been blogging 4 years.

Over that time I’ve clocked up a total of 1,328 posts. That works out as a little under one post per day (4 years is 1460 days). Looks like my posting average is slipping :p.