Archive for January, 2012

With my auntie in Leeds for the weekend, we headed out for a family meal at the Queen’s Arms, which has since been taken over from it’s former life as a generic food-serving pub and become a Toby Carvery.

Overall, it was a mediocre experience. The staff were reasonably friendly, but they got one of our drinks orders wrong – a dilute orange arrived instead of a fresh orange, but my Gran not wanting to make a fuss bless her, just accepted it. That is until she tasted it and realised how weak it was.

The food was enjoyable, the meat was very nicely cooked, but the Yorkshire puddings really let the entire event down. To say we are actually in Yorkshire, they were the worst Yorkshire puddings I’ve ever had. The only comparison I can really make of them was that it was like eating a giant prawn cracker. Also, their strawberry ice cream turned out to be regular ice cream with a bit of strawberry sauce on, but the chocolate fudge cake was excellent.

Overall, I would rate the experience as acceptable, but below par. Maybe they just had a bad day with the Yorkshires, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

Yes, you can update views in MySQL! A lot of people seem to be under the impression that you are unable to, but this simply isn’t the case. There are a lot of restrictive rules, which can be found in the MySQL manual, but as a rule of thumb, you can update them, but only one table.

For example, lets say you have a view which links table A and table B.

You can run an update on this view, but only if you are only updating the columns from one table. So you could run a query that updates a number of columns from table A, or you could run a query which updates columns from table B – but you can’t run a query which updated columns in both table A and table B.

If you need to accomplish this, you need to use a join instead.

However you dress it up, Christmas starts with Chris.

I actually gave in this year and put some Christmas decorations up. What is the world coming to?

With it being that time again, we set about having the work Christmas party. It was the worst one ever. Not that it was a bad event, but last year, the Buzz Social Committee (myself and Jason) were consulted and we suggested murder mystery dinner. The year before, we saw a great night of karaoke. This year, we weren’t consulted, and so the end result was a standard meal, without any theme. Good, but not as good as if Row One had been consulted as they should have.

The dinner started at 12 noon, and we were sat next to a table from RBS, though they wouldn’t officially admit they were from RBP for fear that they could get a load of abuse given they were enjoying a rather expensive Christmas lunch at our expense (our referring to use, the tax payer).

After that, it was Row One to the rescue (along with Average Matt), trailblazing the path to the German Market where we enjoyed good times, stein’s of beer and the live band. Finally, we finished the night at Shooters, were Wendy took a bit of a sleep. I ended up going home just before 10pm which I’m pretty proud of given we started at 12 and I’m still off all alcohol and caffeine!

The next release of SocietasPro. Here is what we’ve changed:

• Implemented a password recovery system
• Location is now shown on the events listings page
• HTML Purifier is now used for filtering
• Custom columns are now supported by import members
• Custom columns now supports select boxes
• The control panel now has a version checker
• You can now change a member’s password
• Custom columns are now included in exports
• There is now a high contrast stylesheet for better accessibility
• Improved visual editor
• System pages have now been styled
• Added a calendar view to events

Last month, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza hotel for a meeting of Leeds City Toastmasters.

Toastmasters is an international organisation that organises local public speaking clubs, where people go to increase their speaking, presentation and leadership skills. It looked pretty interesting so I decided it was worth checking out, just to see what it was about.

The meeting itself was very enjoyable. People presented a number of talks to which they were given up a topic and then asked to talk on it for two minutes, without any preparation. Everything was very regimented – the agenda contains exact times of when everything should happen and there was even someone assigned to make sure we kept to those times.

It was also quite inspiring to see people who had speech impediments or were clearly very anxious about public speaking, getting up and giving fantastic talks. It’s very intimidating to be honest, especially knowing that my talks are literally riddled with “erms” and other bad habits. Never the less, it looks like a great organisation and I am planning to attend on a regular basis, starting next month.