Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

:(.

I’ve spent the second half of this week in bed ill. Which was mighty inconvient given I have loads to do (still, went don’t we these days?). It also unfortunately resulted in me having to cancel my presentation at Skeptics Anonymous and my Valentine’s Day date with Chris from the CU. Still thanks to mt housemates, plenty of sleep and an endless string of DVDs I’m now back on my feet, at least provisionally.

Guess the song. (Seriously, make some really obvious guesses or you’re going to be kicking yourself when you Google the title of this post).

Saturday saw the first Wendy House arrive so we – we referring to the whole Sarann crew (or are we Norman and the Jets; or are we the Chris Worfolk experience featuring Michelle) kicked things off with a warm up at Circle Party Central. The night included some drinking, some spinning of the old records on my shiny decks and even some karaoke (an event we hope to repeat under the new name of “An audience with Bryony Gaskell”).

It was good to see a few people I haven’t seen in a while. Notably, Sophie who has to strain with the problems of post-graduation life and Fonze who has now come crawling back to his real friends (what’s the emoticon code for sunglasses? :p). Plus any excuse to use my sound system is a good one – as Norm correctly points out, the whole point of the night was just to play Cascada really.

Wendy was good as always. I got bought a drink by a girl at the bar which was rather cool. Evanescence – Bring Me to Live was just coming on and being desperate to get back to the dance floor (she explained) she asked if I was being served and if so could she put her drinks through with me). I told her I wasn’t being served and she took this to mean “I am being served I just don’t want to help you” and bribed me with a drink. I then went on to explain it still wasn’t going to save her anytime but that was my limit. At some point, it’s just not worth trying to avoid a free drink ;).

All in all (how often does the last paragraph in my blog post end with those three words?) it was a good night and indeed a very good 3 days. With exams overshadowing the whole of Chrismukkah (not to mention the holidays themselves never really being a nice time) it was good to properly unwind a little. Ah well, back to the grind I guess.

Having had a battle every time I want to stick some food in the freezer because of how full they always are I have finally seized my opportunity and monopolised the freezer with ready meals :D.

Ok so, it’s a bit of a posed picture. Some of them are stacked vertically to hide everyone else’s food behind them. But it still amuses me :D.

As we all know, Facebook is on the way down. It’s bad enough that they now allow non-university students to use the sites but now with all these pointless applications (as well as now having the types of users that will use and spread them) which people constantly send you requests for and putting a million different boxes on a user’s profile so you have to scroll for 30 minutes to reach their wall, how much better is Facebook than MySpace?

Well, still quite a lot better. But the gap is closing. I was using MySpace today (viral marketing, it’s still the biggest social network in the world) and they have really been working on it. The layout is good, the functionality works. It’s a huge improvement on what it would have been like a year ago.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube‘s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?

Christmas Day sucked. Having been up late and not getting to sleep until like 4ish because I had been at work the night before so didn’t have a 9-5 sleep pattern I got dragged out of bed at 9 and then proceeded to spend the day having my family attempt to engage me in mindless conversation. I really don’t care how many Christmas specials Strictly Come Dancing has – I have a life so no, I don’t watch it.

Today was a little better though. It got back to the true meaning of Chrismukkah – earning money. 13 hour shift at time and a half, that will do nicely.

• Ok, even I am willing to admit it’s getting fairly close to Chrismukkah now. We’re getting to the point where I actually might start shopping soon, that is how close it is! Not that I’m excited, I really don’t care. All the good stuff has already happened. Well for the most part. As a general rule from here on in it’s just having to spend time with the family, lots and lots of FYP and annoying song after annoying song.
• My sister is back from uni – and she is already stealing my car!
• Charlotte is back from uni. About time too! I can finally spend some time with my real friends as we would say Michelle would say :D.
• I’m back on the case this week. Last week was my slightly more relaxed lets take a week off. It ended up really busy and with me not getting as much sleep as I would have liked but it was fun anyway. Now it’s time to do some serious work though.
• Before I kick into revision mode next week I’m spending some time on my FYP and I’m pleased to say I think I’ve managed to make a decent indent into it. I’m glad to be doing so. The deadline will be on us before we know. I mean, we graduate in 6 months, how crazy is that!

Apparently.

That’s the reason my blog, and indeed most of my sites, all my DNS, the list goes on have been down for the past 3 days.

My scripts are fine based on all the checks I have done so I don’t know where the security leak was. So much for managed hosting.

Thursday saw us head down to the Slug & Lettuce on Park Row for the Atheist Society Winter Solstice meal. Despite Jack’s pessimism when I told him I had booked for ten people and the fact that term had ended so a lot of people had gone home, we managed a turn out of eight which isn’t bad at all for an A-Soc social event.

While I was at first skeptical when we stepped into the Slug & Lettuce it turned out to be really good. They seated us quite fast once we had insisted that we actually had made a booking and it started to thin out so service wasn’t affected either. The one criticism that could be made was the music was pretty load but it is half a bar so I guess we can let that one slide.

The food was excellent, I was quite impressed and everyone else I discussed the issue with was also very impressed with their meal. Being two for one on desserts when you order main meals we made our way through quite a bit of food including some amazing chocolate-puddle puddings.

All in all it was a really good night and it was good to have an A-Soc social outside of the pub. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pub visits but it was great to do something a little different and I like to think everyone else enjoyed it too.