Archive for December, 2008

Having driven back up to Leeds on Saturday we set about preparing for a house party of our own to celebrate Liz and Sarann’s birthday (to which the latter is today, happy birthday Sarann!). As to be expected it was a night of drunk antics enjoyed by all who attended.

Importantly, the night included chicken. Kate mentioned that her Nando’s voucher, from when she found a brain in her chicken, expired in a few days so we headed over to Nando’s to get some take-out, which it turns out, they do indeed do.

It seems to be becoming somewhat of a tradition to go out and get chicken as our previous house party saw myself and Kieran disappear off to get KFC. I have to say, it’s a tradition I could certainly get used to.

Friday saw myself, Norm and Liz head down to sunny Tamworth just outside of Birmingham for Jenna’s AHS festive party. It turned out (as if we were expecting anything less!) to be a really good night talking to plenty of old faces and some new faces too.

The food was good though I think I got through more than my far share of pigs in blankets (you snooze you loose I guess) and there was much fun to be had with games of Extreme Jenga, which is like regular Jenga but the blocks have sloping slides (rhombi). It was also made more difficult by the fact myself and Norm insisted on taking two of the bottom three pieces out each time 😀 .

It also turns out that Jenna’s dad, Bob Catley is a massive rockstar. Not only does he have a Wikipedia page (as if that isn’t enough), his band Magnum have had 14 studio albums, a top 10 charting album, a Gold Certified album and have supported the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake – what a legend!

Having had a good night we headed down to Weatherspoon’s for a recovery breakfast, after all, it’s never too early for a good steak! Big thanks to Jenna for hosting said party, it might have to find it’s way into the AHS annual calendar 😉 .

I love Windows. Windows XP is an amazing operating system. Vista was a bit of a disaster but then it was always going to be when it had to follow XP, possibly the best operating system ever in the history of computing.

If you’re thinking this is heading towards a Linux bashing blog post, you’d be right 😉 .

I mean seriously, all I want to do is play media. The kind of thing you can do fresh out of the box on any Windows install. Let’s ignore the fact I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu to play DVDs for years. Let’s just take a look at what happened on Saturday.

I brought up a computer to use as a media computer to play through the sound system so we could access all the music. Actually I bought two, an Ubuntu box and a Fedora box. Two distros, one of them must be able to play a simple MP3 file right?

Of course, given the nature of my writing, they couldn’t. What was really interesting though was not the fact that Linux can’t even play MP3s out of the box, but how hard it is to get Linux to play them. It took us three, count them, three, computer scientists sat round for an hour to get them playing. So you can’t even use the excuse “oh it’s just you Chris” because there were three of us trying to work this one out.

We managed to get it working in the end, albeit it not very well though I’m not sure if that was Fedora’s fault or not so I’m not holding it accountable for that one. But there you go, XP for the win.

Well, it’s Monday morning. Having done a quick recount I actually had 6 parties in 6 days which has been rather intense but I only have another 3 days of work and then I can catch up on sleep (because I don’t need to be up till almost noon on Christmas Day this year 😀 ).

I will be catching up on everything tonight hopefully, I have loads of photos from the weekend that I have just started processing and plenty of tales to tell too. But for the moment I’m going to put my head down and try and get some kip before my boss notices I’ve got into work 😉 .

15 minute commute to work!

With schools out for the holidays and a lot of people having finished work last Friday too the roads are a dream to drive on. My commute to work normally takes almost twice as long, I could live with this all year.

After the a month of development and planning, Leeds Skeptics in the Pub is finally officially going ahead in January. The idea is that once a month people can get together and discuss a chosen issue over a few pints, though no doubt any topic selected will simply be a starting point that will be long lost after the first few rounds!

Yesterday was the first of two Christmas parties at my office. The first of two because we’re really busy at the moment so didn’t want to have a full on night and so decided to go out for a meal last night and have a proper drinking session in January. Of course last night turned rather heavy as everyone knew it would but there you go.

We started off at the Cuthbert Broderick which was absolutely packed. I don’t understand why there were so many people out on a Thursday night, maybe because it’s so close to Christmas, maybe because Thursday is just a heavy night in Leeds. In any case, I wasn’t too impressed.

Dinner was at Ha Ha Bar also in Millenium Square which was a bit of a mixed bag. The starters were very small indeed while the main course wasn’t too bad but basically you just get some kind of meat on a dish and then a few potatoes and vegetables to share. To be fair to them though the steak was cooked very nicely but then it’s not like they gave you a choice how you wanted it.

Once we’d eaten we headed out round a few bars including the one in the German Christmas market which was an interesting experience (and where I happened to run into Rosie and Danny) and then worked our way down to the Headrow. By this time it was gone midnight and so with only half our number remaining I decided to head home. Nick was buzzing and so headed off with Tom and Dean for further beers (no suprises there lol).

The damage from last night showed when I rolled up to the office to find I was the first person there. Tom arriving soon after informed me that he had gotten in 5:30 that morning having goten through a great deal of antics including Mojos, breaking up several fights and a cup of tea in Little London. Good stuff.

Massively disappointing is all I can really say about Casa Mia.

When we initially approached them to host our Winter Solstice meal they were very enthusiastic and said they loved to get student groups down there. However things turned sour a few days before the event when they started getting arsey with us and started demanding Norm’s credit cards so they could bill if we didn’t turn up with the exact number of people.

When we got down there they were alright though not overly friendly and they can’t add up apparently. They gave us 15 menus for the 16 of us, a mistake which they refused to correct, which is odd that they would get it wrong given they were so insistent we bring that number of people.

The food was alright, I rather enjoyed by rib eye steak but the portions were small and all I got was a steak with chips, nothing else which is cheap given you get a bit of salad with your £5 pub steak. I will admit the ribs were nice though.

Finally as we settled up the bill they tried overcharging us which we quickly shot down. All in all, I don’t think we’ll be ever going back there.

Afterwards we headed on to Courtyard (though the freshers went home because they just can’t keep up :p ) for a few drinks which was really good. It’s not the cheapest place but not out of line for the city centre and they have a quiet atmosphere and very comfortable seating so I stand by it as an excellent choice.

Is it really too much to ask to not have to wake up in a mini-ice age every morning?

It’s ridiculous, it’s really not that far fetched to expect our heating to work as it’s scheduled to. Or maybe it just turns on but doesn’t bother to heat anything? Either way I’m pretty sure the situation could be made better by repeatedly smashing the little control box.

It’s not like it’s ever warm in our house at the moment, I’d forgotten how cold it really gets, I mean, surely it was this cold last year? Maybe I just don’t remember it but I can’t remember it being this cold for such a consistent period and it’s only December at the moment, we have another two months of winter to look forward to.

Sunday saw the electricity company turn off our power for a few hours for maintenance.

So rather than do it when everyone was out at work, they apparently decided to do it when everyone was home. So arriving home at 3am after work on Saturday night I then had the fun of sorting all of my computers out and powering them down ready.

Once the power came back on again I then had the fun of powering them up again but of course, they didn’t all come back on again because computers don’t work that way and that would just be too easy. But I didn’t want to be able to enjoy my time off anyway.