Archive for July, 2006

Work sucks. I really don’t want to go back to work. And I’m working like every other day so I don’t have a massive amount of hours and yet I never get a gap big enough to really put it out of my mind. It’s just so stressful. The problem is it’s not rocket science. Which is bad. If rocket science is anything like computer science then it will be incredibly complex but there isn’t actually that much to it, it’s just learning it and applying it. The job is simple stuff but it’s a lot of simple stuff. And it’s practical not theory. I don’t thrive in that environment.

Did my first shift today. Was pretty good, everyone is really friendly although it’s all about absorbing as much information as possible which takes a while to do. Btw here are some tips when going to McDonald’s. Order a quarter pounder! It’s a lot easier for us :p. A Big Mac is needlessly complicated and this whole Summer Quarter Pounder is no easy make either.

I’m working tomorrow and Sunday too and on Tuesday evening I’m working till 2am though apparently it’s closer 3 by the time you actually get out. Although I guess if you’re working all night anyway it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re getting paid for it.

I dragged my ass out of bed at 8 this morning (which is the equivelant of 6 for you non-students). I’ve come into uni to see my tutor to get a reference he has written for me then I have two hours of bar training at Gilds. That should finish with just enough time for me to get home and get ready for work. Fun day.

Still, even though I’m working till 11, I can sleep in until at least like 9 tomorrow when I have to be up for work again. Still it should soon give me the funding I need to pay my “event access authorisation fees” providing they haven’t sold out by then.

I’m not sure how much I will appreciate that fact by the end of the day though.

I’ve had quite a bit of chicken recently. When my parents left on Friday I had chicken steaks for dinner. Then Saturday I had chops. My one non-chicken dinner. Since then I have had KFC on the Sunday, grilled chicken on the Monday and chicken casserole yestersay and today. I’m not sure I have any non-chicken food for tommorow :D. Plus I may have chicken nuggets for my meal on Friday when I am working.

Just had orientation at McDonald’s. Was pretty cool was it was 6:30 till 9:45ish so 3 hours that I am getting paid for, for basically sitting around listening to Helen talk, watching some video segments and a few other things.

Pay isn’t great, £4.50 an hour but it’s more than the suckers under 18 get (of which there may have been one other person who was 18 in the group, I’m not even sure about them though, I may have been the only one! I felt so old!) as they are only paid £4.25. It’s more than my sister gets too, BHS are getting slave labour out of her at £3 something an hour.

It really seems like a good place for a first job though. I mean what other company would give you a 3 hour induction and that hasn’t even started on the training as well as a big pack of information and a full uniform, they really have their employee system down to a T. I guess you have to when you have such a turn-over.

My first three shifts are Friday, Saturday and Sunday which aren’t great but it actually worked out really well given I wanted to do all my Gilds training which I can so I don’t want to moan too much because it turned out as well as I could have reasonably expected. Sunday at 10am should be interesting though given I have no plans to miss Oblivion on Saturday night :D.

The problem with the internet today is that it is fully of newbies doing silly things like installing spyware and visting phishing URLs. And so, enter the concept of the newbie browser. All the functionality they need without the worry of them doing silly things (although some sort of block on Google would be a much needed addition).

This morning MySpace got taken out by a power outage. Totally. For a few hours the entire site was unreachable apparently. I’m sorry, this was the site that was recently claimed to be the most visited domain in the US and they are working out of one datacenter that can be taken out by a power outage? Am I missing something?

As suggested I had a search through Technorati for “MySpace not working” and came across an endless amount of posts along the line of “MySpace isn’t working, it’s driving my insane!” Which is the issue with running your entire life on a social networking site. Especially one that is constantly bringing up error messages and getting hi-jacked by Flash movies.

I came across this which is really cool. It allows you to stream Pandora, internet radio and your MP3 connection by connection to your network (and also the internet via your network obviously) wirelessly allowing you to listen to music anywhere in the house.

It looks awesome as one of the problems I have at the moment is I want to listen to music while cooking but I don’t want to have to burn my music to CD.

The only issue is, it’s not a complete unit, it needs to be hucked up to speakers or a stereo system. And the $300 price tag. But minor bumps in the road to the plan of filling every room in my house with music :D.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube is now the fatest growing website in the world. Traffic is up 75% from last week alone and they are now reaching 12.8 million unique users per month. It just shows you how much potential there is in the Web 2.0 startups. Back at the start of the year YouTube was nothing – they didn’t even have a business model. 18 months ago, they didn’t even exist. Now they are serving over 100 million videos per day.

I think it also shows you just how right YouTube got it. While the video is the core of the site, the fact you can just copy and paste a line of code and put it anywhere makes it great for webmasters and taps into MySpace’s awesome success and the community aspect (comments, friends, playlists) is turning it into a mini version of MySpace in itself.

They may be suffering a bit with the increased load though, I’m still waiting to hear back about approval of my director’s account.

Arranged to meet at the Quilted Llama for pre-drinks with Claire and Kieran at 7. This was organised at 5:15 so I had a mental hour in which time I made dinner, ate dinner, sorted the house and computers out ready to be out of the house in an hours time. I actually arrived at the Llama on time to find it shut so we ended up at The Fenton.

After John turned up the two of us went and got some food and then headed up to the union, bumping into Fonze and Janine who informed us Oblivion had been moved to next Saturday. So we went back and joined the others at The Fenton.

So overall tonight’s activities consisted of no Quilted Llama, no Oblivion and getting to watch Fonze and Janine be coupley. Although at least they were the only ones, so it wasn’t too bad on the whole couples count. Plus I had a good time sitting round talking with everyone, we hit some quite interesting topics.