Archive for September, 2008

The long awaited office night out took place last night. We headed down to town straight from work to Beckett’s Bank on Park Row which was rather busy, but then I guess that has town written all over it on a weekend, especially when people are just getting out from work.

I’m not sure I’m a fan of town on the weekend. There are too many old people and everywhere is packed. It’s probably worth suffering the sleep deprivation to go out on a week night as you just seem to get a better atmosphere, at least until I have a few more years on me.

We moved onto a bar named Henry’s which is just round the corner. It was an interesting mix, it seemed quite a classy place and yet they were playing the most generic cheesy music that you would expect to find at Fruity and Mental Mondays back when Bondi was open.

After a few drinks here everyone else headed off to Tiger Tiger to meet up with some from one of our clients that also happened to be out while I stayed back for another drink. With hindsight we should probably have traded numbers as Tiger Tiger was abandoned by the time I arrived there so I don’t know what happened to everyone else.

The night was far from a write-off though as Nicola invited me back to hers to take a look round her new house which isn’t too bad for a student house (it has the generic bedrooms in random places and no form of hallways but that is to be expected) and the price is pretty good so I’ll give my thumbs up. Especially given she got the best bedroom by far lol.

I went to Leeds Bradford International Airport on Thursday to pick Michelle up and I have to say, it’s a bit of a joke.

I mean, international airport? Granted there are some international flights but few if any that would be considered real international flights. How many scheduled flights fly to America for example? They are all crappy like chartered package holidays.

But they like to keep up the pretense. Having found my way through a series of basically country lanes which is what they were, it suddenly opens up into a big duel carriageway – for 100 metres! Seriously, who are they kiding?

Being a developer I don’t drink tea or coffee. That’s not exclusively true, if we’re making proper coffee at a dinner party I will have a cup but I tend to play that down as I feel a slowly developing taste for coffee and the fact we throw dinner parties are both signs that I am getting old. But back on the point, when I need that pick me up, it’s all abou the energy drinks. You just can’t beat them.

Just reading over the front of my can of Red Bull though I notice is proudly announces…

0g fat
123 calories
0g salt

Which is great. Though it makes me question why it would be an achivement to have no fat or salt in a drink. I mean, is that normal? Did it used to? It’s like when you see “suitable for vegitarians” on a chocolate bar and wonder why it wasn’t before (interestly, McDonald’s strawberry milkshakes only became suitable for vegitarians about 6 months ago, think about what that means :p).

Futher round the back of the can it goes on to say…

A serving (250ml) contains the equivalent of approx. 0g of salt

What does that mean? Approximately means it actually does contain some salt I presume. And equivalent means it has some kind of salt substitute equal to the amount of salt that would be in there if there was salt in there? Which means none as there isn’t any? So they have replaced the salt with 0g of something similar?

What are the betting lawyers were involved here?

Tonight I am a man of few words.

Electricity.

Pineapple.

Time.

This is all.

Oh, we’re still alive btw. You win again, science!

Last night saw another A-Soc summer social. I arrived for the commitee meeting to find the union was locked down for a commerical event, of course, they didn’t bother to let us know. Not only could we not get in The Terrace but they actually closed down the front of the union and just presumed people would find their way to The Old Bar. Luckily the bouncer was kind enough to point people in our direction so it wasn’t a total write off.

We archived a nice healthy 16 people to the meeting and the preceeding committee meeting was attended by twice as many commitee members as last week so things looked fairly good. I think we’ll chalk another line on the old success tally for this week.

…the world ends tomorrow ;).

Does anyone else miss Microsoft?

Say what you want about their business practises, you never found this in Internet Explorer’s EULA:

You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Due to massive pressure Google have now removed this. But how anyone can make the claim that Google aren’t just as much a faceless evil corporation as anyone else these days is beyond me.

The early hours of Friday morning saw my new podcast launch onto the world wide web!

The first episode recorded by myself, Moz, Liz and Fonze is, as with all the episodes, officially about “religion” nut completely off topic constantly. From now on a new episode will appear each Friday and judging my the standards of last night they are going to get better and better as we go along.

You can find the podcast on my website and there is also an RSS feed so you can subscribe with RSS readers, iTunes, etc.

Thursday saw us do a second session of podcasting. Luckily my new studio mixer arrived that very afternoon so we were able to huck up all 4 microphones and all the sets of headphones so that pretty much everyone could have their own mic and headphones plus I dropped my Maplin on my way home to pick up a few more accessories.

Paul, Moz and Nicola turned up along with Liz and Sarann eventually joining us which resulted in a good solid number and some random conversations. We made it through 3 episodes though didn’t really manage to discuss any of the official topics for any length of time lol.

All in all it was really good although we were up talking until about 1:30 or something and because I had work to do after that my early night turned into getting to bed at 3:10! Needless to say I was rather tired Friday morning.