Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

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.

Camping having been cancelled, it was down to Chris the wonder kid to throw together some kind of A-Soc event to ensure we did something over the weekend. So, us now having a dining room and all we throw together a dinner party for those of us that were still around over summer.

In the end it turned out rather well – we managed a full seven courses as well as offering people a choice with several courses and best of all, nobody died. Nobody at all. There was a turn up for the books indeed. So given I haven’t really cooked for like a year or two now, I’m going to chalk it down as a victory.

It also presented some interesting experiences. I gave the port a try, which I didn’t find very drinkable but there you go, it wasn’t particuarly good port anyway, and some of Norm’s fancy Brazilian coffee which I did manage to stomach. I think that is a sign of me getting old. But should be good for all nighters I guess. Not that anyone is going to be pulling out a cafetiere during such times.

So Wednesday was graduation. I want to talk a little more about the general concept later but for now I thought I would offer a run down of what happened as it’s certainly an experience even if it is one that you can happily live without.

Heading out from home we took no less than 4 cars down there and somehow managed to stay together as a convoy which is quite an achievement in Leeds given there is so much traffic, lights and junctions. We even made it out too despite them locking the car park barrier and forcing myself and Kieran to drive over the grassy embankment designed to keep cars out which was rather wet and muddy. Go Astra.

The experience of picking up our gown was an experience in itself, not only do they provide you with one but they also having a robing room where they dress you in it.

The ceremony itself was your standard pompous and boring event. The vice chancellor opened procedings with a speech and then the degrees were presented and we filed up to the stage one by one to collect them.

Later in the day our head of school, Roger Boyle was to say to Kieran

You know, someone told the Vice Chancellor they were going to do drugs

Or at least something to that affect. He also added, “I hope it wasn’t one of our lot.”

Wishful thinking Roger. I mean seriously, who do you think it was? Just, and this is a purely off the cuff suggestion, the same kind of person that would put a lolcat in their FYP ;).

Ok, let me explain a bit more. I arrived on stage and shook the Vice Chancellor’s hand. He then asked me “so, what’s next in your life?” I could have explained to him my plans for my start up, my extensive vision of conquering the business world, finding love and founding the Chris Worfolk Foundation to solve the world’s problems, or even the fact that I’ve already moved on to the next stage and am now happily working in a job.

But he didn’t have time to hear all that. And right now all I could think about was the amount of caffeine and alcohol I was planning to consume when I finally get some time to celebrate (or in my case, commiserate) my graduation. So I gave him the short snappy answer he was looking for – drugs.

Anyway, afterwards we stopped by the school for some of Kieran and Norm’s hard brewed GLPale which went down an absolute storm and then headed off to Loch Fyne in town for a celebratory dinner. Taking no less than 29 people I was rather pleased with the amount of people I managed to get down there, though Graham is also owed just as much credit.

I was less than impressed with the food to be honest and it didn’t help that I felt rather ill during the meal but everyone else fully enjoyed the meal and once I got round and talking to people I felt much better. We also met Rachael, the new Ms Wharton who seems very friendly and outgoing – but I’m sure they make a good match none the less :P.

Finally we finished up with a few drinks in The Terrace and then headed home. I can’t say I particuarly enjoyed it but I’m glad my parents did, mainly because I made them pay for most of it and having spent most of the day with Kieran I could see he enjoyed it which I was glad of (even if I could physically feel the smug radiating off him and burning my skin) as it really was well earned on everyone’s part.

The central locking is finally working again on my car!

It has been a bit of a mission though. I got a phone call from Evans Halshaw to inform me that the part that had been on order was finally in so I booked it in for a service to take place this morning. Phoned my dad up to see if he could give me a lift to work once I’d booked it in.

Turns out, he had his car booked in for a service at the same time.

I mean seriously, what are the odds? Let’s assume that the car goes in twice a year, that means his car is going in once every 150 days meaning that the probability is like 1%. Still, we worked in some kind of plan as he was picking up a curtesy car.

I was 15 minutes late down there because a lane of the inner ring road was closed off and there was an accident down near Hunslet road combining to some rather large queues. Then we had to navigate our way back to Evans Halshaw Nissan to drop my dad’s car in and finally get me to work. By the time I got to work I felt like I’d done a days work :P.

If you want to allow access to SVN via Apache, it’s actually nice and easy to install and configure it on a blank system. First, install Apache.

yum install httpd httpd-devel httpd-manual

Next, install Subversion.

yum install subversion

Now we need to bridge he two.

yum install mod_dav_svn

Once you have done this, we have everything we need. So we can go ahead and edit the Subversion configuration to add the Subversion directory to Apache.

vim subversion.conf

Finally, start and reload Apache, then go about creating your SVN repository.