Posts Tagged ‘sky’

Pro cycling outfit Team Sky have unveiled their design for the 2019 team buses. 2019 will be the last year the time exists in its current form, with Sky announcing that it will end its sponsorship deal with the team after the 2019 season.

Sky as recently acquired by US media giant Comcast, after a bitting war with 21st Century Fox, who owned 40% of Sky’s shares prior to the takeover. Sky’s takeover was, ironically, partly made possible by the collapse of the pound after the Brexit vote.

I have been working with Sky Sports as a client for a few years now. However, at the end of December, I decided it was time to move on to pastures new and said goodbye. It has been a great place to be a part of, and we have done some cool stuff with technology. I hope they can continue a level of independence even if the Murdock takeover goes through.

They were good enough to throw me a rather large leaving party.

Sure, some labelled it as a “Christmas party” instead, and pointed out that I also had a leaving do earlier in the week at the Lamb & Flag. But those in the inner circle knew what was really going on. It was held at the New Dock Hall, which is opposite the Royal Armouries.

The food was pretty poor. Some kind of vegetable soup served independently of any bread, followed by a sad roast chicken dinner. The generic chocolate dessert made up for it a little, but the nazi waiters refused to let us keep the desserts of the two people who had not been able to make it, despite the fact that Sky had already paid for those meals.

The drinks prices were also a joke. £7 to pre-order a jug of orange juice. Orange juice! Or, you could have a bottle of cider, for which I was charged over £5. Not recommended as a venue.

Luckily, these events are defined by the company you keep, and not the quality of the food and drink, so all was well. I would like to thank everyone who made the effort to attend my leaving do, especially the people who had no idea who I was.

If you work at Sky’s Leeds Dock offices, chances are you will walk in from the city centre. Once you get past the traffic lights on Crown Point bridge you can choose to go left, taking the steps down by the waterside, or go right and take the road round the back of Mumtaz. But which way is fatest?

To find out, I set about recording my walk time from the traffic lights to the post outside of Sky 2. I did six runs in total, trying to mix up the days randomly to get a representative average. Here are the raw times I recorded.

Here is the same data, in seconds, with averages.

Based on the table, we can see that the road seems to be around 9 seconds faster than the steps (211 seconds compared with 220 seconds). However, the typical variation, 8.82 seconds, is almost as high as the difference. Therefore we can only have so much confidence the results are accurate. It also suggests that other factors such as weather and fatigue have as much impact as route selection.

Conclusion

On average, the road route seems to be slightly faster than the steps route. However the difference is small and so it seems a sensible choice to choose the steps instead if you prefer the more scenic route.

Following on from the success of the first Sky Leeds Bake Off, we held another to raise money for Sports Relief. In the end, we raised £275, which feels like a good effort. I blogged about my preparation last week.

Here was my final creation:

The beach was made of gingerbread. The sea was made from buttercream frosting, with a chocolate finger jetty. The sea cupcakes were blueberry with lemonade frosting. The beach cupcakes were brown sugar with a salted caramel centre and salted caramel frosting.

Alas, the judging was changed from the Great British Bake Off-style present all twelve as a piece, to one cupcake from each batch being selected and given to the judges. While mine were tasty, they were not tasty enough to sway the judges on that alone. However, all was not lost. Gaz did Editorial Ops proud with a 3rd place.

Later this month Sky at Leeds Dock are holding their second bake off. The first was an open cake competition; this one is a cupcake challenge. Last time, Dave won it with a cake baked by his wife. This is dubious enough, even before you discover he made her get up at 4am, despite being heavily pregnant, to finish it. I’m not bitter about the whole experience, but I do want to up my game a little this time.

I made loads of variants: different cupcakes and different toppings on the cupcakes. In the end, these two won out.

The Sainsbury’s salted caramel cupcake boxset actually produces a really nice cupcake that is light and airy. However, my homemade golden caster sugar cupcakes with salted caramel frosting eventually bested them in the taste test. It produces a denser cupcake that is easier to eat.

This is a prototype of the blueberry cupcake. The actual ones will be different however. They will be more blue in colour, and use lemonade flavoured frosting that is a lighter blue, rather than the turquoise shade of this fudge-based frosting.

This stuff should be illegal. It is a jar of salted caramel that you would eat with a spoon. If heroin is banned, this definitely should be.

I am working with Sky Sports at the moment, who recently relocated their office to Leeds Dock. They are encouraging everyone to talk about how good it is, so here is my contribution.

It was a smooth transition and everything is up and running. It was only a few months between signing the lease and moving in, so there is still plenty to do. It will be great when we get the other buildings up-and-running to give us additional meeting space.

It is a nice location and you get a good view of the dock.

That floor is as slippy as it looks. You can pick up a huge amount of speed on the new chairs: great for chair racing. You can also see that there is no roof. This is the same across the entire building. Everything has been left exposed, which is a design feature. There are screens everywhere, so you feel like you are in the future.

Noise levels were quite high initially but it seems to be calming down now. There is also a cafe that Sky subsidise. So for example, I can of pop that would be £2.50 on the high street is £1.00 in the cafe.

Whether it quite puts us up there with Google and Facebook as one of the best campuses in the world, I suspect probably not. But it is a cool place to work. And ultimately it is the people that make Sky a great place to be.

One of the few benefits of my recently drastically extended commute to work is getting to enjoy the morning sky.

I am normally pretty disappointed with the camera in my iPhone. However, some results are not too bad.

I decided there was no point taking my 50mm prime lens to Scotland. Then I got there and realised that that was exactly what I needed for photographing the night sky! As it happens, Ullapool puts out a lot of light anyway, so the photos were not amazing. I have seen far better skies in the middle of nowhere. However, it was certainly better than Leeds.

I got Sky Go so that I could watch the live Formula One and NFL. I pay for NFL GamePass but unfortunately even though I’m paying a lot of money for it, they still black out any games that Sky Sports are showing.

Overall, I’m disappointed.

Firstly, I can only put it on two devices. Now I have loads – a laptop, a phone, a work computer, a tablet, all of which I would like to use it on depending on situation. But I can’t, because I can only register two devices.

Secondly, they have disabled display mirroring, so I can’t plug my iPad into a TV and watch it on there. It’s just stupid though, because I can just plug my laptop into a TV and do it that way, so they’re not stopping anything.

Streaming has worked quite well though. I was able to stream last Sunday night’s NFL with only a few stops for buffering and it looks pretty good on my 27″ screen.