Archive for August, 2006

The phpBB team are working at a decent speed – yesterday they released 3.0 Beta2 with 267 bugs fixed no less. Looks like we may be seeing a release candidate within a couple of months at most.

Interestingly enough, Jelsoft released vBulletin 3.6 only 10 days ago packed with even more AJAX than 3.5. It doesn’t look like Invision are planning to make a move though.

Claire organised a bowling event today so myself and John drove down to Hollywood bowl and met Claire, Norm, Jay and Gemma at about 5:30. As usual it took me a game to warm up and I ripped my thumbnail off but on the second game I managed to bowl a 111 which I was fairly pleased with as it was enough to put me ahead of everyone else.

Afterwards we headed over to McDonald’s as I hadn’t eaten and wanted to make use of my discount card before I’m sick of the food. Then finally we headed over the road to the Cardigan Arms and spent the rest of the night drinking. Although personally my alcoholic intake was very much limited due to the fact I was driving.

We set off back and it was dark by this time and raining so it was hard to see. We ended up taking an earlier turning from the inner ring road than the directions said (I blame John he was the official navigator – all he had to do was to read the directions printed from Google Maps) and we ended up on Scothall Road or maybe Harrogate Road, the one that goes past the BMW garriage so luckily I was able to find my way back from there. Just as we got onto Harehills Lane a part of it was closed off so we had to navigate round that as well though. Absolutely conspiracy against us.

I didn’t think it was that much of a detour although when you look at it on Google Earth it looks insane. The route is marked on and we ended up somewhere near Chapel Allerton.

That’s the main reason I hate driving, it’s a killer to try and navigate on our roads, especially when you are trying to concentrate on the road itself and not what route you need to be taking.

Dammit.

Absolute f****** conspiracy against me. I’m such a f****** idiot.

Apparently more than one. The light in my downstairs hallway blew recently so I finally decided to get round to changing it just now. It’s a mission though. It took me ages to unscrew it because everything is unscrewable so holding onto the right bit of the fitting was a challenge in itself. To the point where the entire thing is now sitting on my dining room table in bits.

Nor does it help that there are like a million types of bulbs. Why can’t there just be 100w bulbs, I’d even settle for 240 100w bulbs, I can work out what that means. But they all have some kind of serial code on which is all the same on the box but different to the light. As far as I can see it’s the same thing which is the one I tried although there are loads of other different classifications on them as well. It’s just a lightbulb!

On the plus side, I was getting worried this real world thing was getting to me a little too much. But I can relax a little now knowing I haven’t lost all my nerdly persona.

Another night, another load of bars to cross off my list…

• Bar Censsa
• Yates’s (Boar Lane)
• Room
• Bar Above
• Tiger Tiger

Of course I also remembered 5 more places to add to the list so just evens out lol. But yeah, I met Claire straight after she had finished work and we went to Weatherspoon’s for some food and then met John in Bar Censsa. I was quite impressed with the prices, £1.50 for a bottle, which isn’t trailing the Llama by much. We then headed to the Boar Lane Yates’s which was ok though lacking the pool tables the Woodhouse Lane one features.

After that we went into Room which is like a mega posh bar and restaurant which was interesting. It was really nice place although I felt a little self-conscious. They came over and served us and everything plus Claire tried this Room Cocktail or something which was weird but came with a strawberry on top and it looked really cool.

Next we hit Bar Above which is really nice. Again, £1.50 a bottle and had some excellent sofas, probably the only sofas I have found that challenge the ones in the Llama, and they really put up a challenge, you just sink into them. They also have really, really nice toilets – John awarded them 9 urinals out of 10! Finally we finished the night off at Tiger Tiger. It’s been a fun night and it’s great getting to know everywhere in Leeds, after all I’ve been here long enough.

No way! How did this one get past me? And it happened a while ago too, the deal went down at the end of last year. Fox Interactive Media (Fox’s new holding company for MySpace among other operations) has bought IGN, the network behind IGN.com (obviously. One of the biggestest gaming sites on the net alongside GameSpot), GameSpy, Rotten Tomatoes (one of the major movie sites on the net) and AskMen.com. Fox are really going for it.

A few days ago I was thinking “let’s face facts, phpBB 3 has been in development for years, it’s never actually going to arrive.” After which I wandered over to phpBB.com and noticed the first beta release of phpBB was released last month. Could it be it’s actually going to arrive sometime soon?

It’s quite exciting as I look forward to being able to pay around with the new version once it goes stable. Or indeed in the beta versions if I feel bored one afternoon.

Ok, yeah, let’s just get it out into the open. I bought another domain. But I had to! I saw this wallpaper of Lindsay Lohan and it captured my imagination so I thought about building a site around it. Then later I was over on NamePros checking out the developed sites for sale. They are all crap, mostly just sites people have just built to sell and are doing so straight away.

Almost all of the celebrity sites on there are “less than a month old so assume no income or traffic,” that are just getting sold on for $30 or so. I don’t know why so many people bid on them, the biography is always copied straight off Wikipedia and a few generic photo pages complete what is they claim is a “developed site.” Why don’t people just bother to put a little time into the site? They could fetch a lot more for it if they did.

With that in mind, I’ve launched Simply Lindsay Lohan. It’s not integrated to the rest of my network like most of my sites are so it’s easy enough to sell if I want to later. Then again I was planning to sell City Ruins but by the time it came to selling it, I didn’t want to loose it :D.

It’s also given me chance to flex my design skills a bit as the entire theme which is a custom half built from scratch (I created the design as a static page first but then still used the default WordPress theme as a base and ported my new HTML into the files) and is completely done in CSS, not a table to be seen.

I actually did some coding this evening. Not much but I did some quick is important. Today has been very much a deadbeat day. I didn’t get up till 3:30-4:00ish given what time I got to bed this morning. I got my 8 hours pretty much exactly but obviously when you have sleeping times that are that messed up it just leaves you knocked for six for most of the day (what’s left of it).

I’m going to get myself sorted though as much as possible, I was going to go to bed shortly but I think I’ll stay up a bit longer as I want to watch the Buffy movie which is starting shortly on BBC1. I don’t have a particuarly late shift tomorrow though so I can keep a normal pattern there and after that I’m not working again until Thursday (which is another close that will probably destroy my pattern again) unless I get called in. I’m a little hopeful I will actually, I could do with some more hours as I only have 2 shifts next week.

Still I will appreciate the time off, it should help me get back on track. I haven’t done much coding for a while, I’ve hardly done anything for the past week given work is imposing somewhat of an ajustment period on me. I think with the gap I have though I should be able to get back on track, especially now I am settling in (and also hopefully releasing how much I need to keep going with my work as the sooner I can get it generating me a substancial living the sooner I can stop doing crap I don’t want to do).

I have a few projects I could really do to put some focus on and get them out there, some of which are fairly close to being finished (although a project is never really finished, but at least released) and just need a bit more time to get them out there.

I’m home! You know, I remember my dad used to go to work and it would be dark when he got to work and dark when he left during Winter. While of course it’s Summer at the moment, I think I have quite a good system in leaving for work while it’s still light and not getting back until it’s light again :p.

I had a 10 hour shift which was 4pm to 2am which I have been dreading given the longest I have worked is an 8 hour which dragged and that would be working on the assumption that we would get out at 2am which I wasn’t as everyone said they never do. We got things done fairly quickly last night and got out at 2:30 so the 2am finish is really stretching the truth on the schedule. Still it’s an extra £0.50 an hour after midnight so there is a plus side.

The shift actually went ok. I had my break at 6:15-7:00 so the result was I had to work 7 and a half hours straight after that but once it got past about 10 o’clock when we had pretty much shut most things down and had very few customers it was fine as it was just cleaning and such which is more relaxed than during the day.

Afterwards we all hung around outside the restaurant talking for a while then the 5 of us working close (myself, James, Rich, Danny and Kayleigh) went back to Rich’s and played Buzz which is a PS2 quiz game. Well, after a quick stop off at Tesco for alcoholic based supplies :D. Although I was not benifiting from said purchase as I wasn’t going to drink while I had the car.

I also have money on the way. I’ve seen the pay I’m owed and that was only up to midnight last night so you can add on the morning hours and my shift on Saturday to my first pay packet. The downside is I’ll get taxed on it which while I can claim back, means I won’t have the money straight away. Mooching government. They are so lazy to not even work out if I should be paying tax or not, it’s a system that really screws students as most of us don’t pay tax but could really use our money asap.

Anyway, I have food in the oven for breakfast then I am going to get some sleep. Later today I am going to continue blogging about some interesting topics which I think I need to leave until I have a fresh mind.