Archive for September, 2012

Last week, my friend Brett was up in Leeds. He wasn’t up for a particularly good reason, but never the less it was a fine opportunity to catch up, so we headed over to the Cuthbert Brodick to take advantage of more fortuitous timing – Tuesdays are of course steak night at Cuthbert!

It really did make me wonder why we don’t do steak night more often. It’s like £7 for a mixed grill and a drink! You just can’t beat that.

After, we headed over to Browns, to take advantage of their good range of non-alcoholic cocktails. Their menu seemed somewhat more limited than it has been previously, but maybe I just have a distorted memory of the good old days.

What a disappointment.

First of all, it’s a very poor effort that Apple don’t do live streaming of their media events. It then took them ages to post it – I was hoping to watch it, but when it didn’t appear by 10pm, I just read about it instead. I didn’t find it on the Apple website until the next morning.

Beyond that, the product itself is disappointing. I’ve always upgraded through each iPhone improvement but there seems very little point with this one – it’s just git a bit bigger screen, but other than that I’m simply not excited by it.

The best reason I can think to get it is that I will be able to see more events when I’m in my calendar – how does that justify a £600 outlay?

I got Sky Go so that I could watch the live Formula One and NFL. I pay for NFL GamePass but unfortunately even though I’m paying a lot of money for it, they still black out any games that Sky Sports are showing.

Overall, I’m disappointed.

Firstly, I can only put it on two devices. Now I have loads – a laptop, a phone, a work computer, a tablet, all of which I would like to use it on depending on situation. But I can’t, because I can only register two devices.

Secondly, they have disabled display mirroring, so I can’t plug my iPad into a TV and watch it on there. It’s just stupid though, because I can just plug my laptop into a TV and do it that way, so they’re not stopping anything.

Streaming has worked quite well though. I was able to stream last Sunday night’s NFL with only a few stops for buffering and it looks pretty good on my 27″ screen.

Due to Freshers’ Week, Wendy House was moved to a week earlier – which means Wendy House sooner, but then of course a huge gap between this one and October’s. It also should have landed bang on Norm’s birthday, but ended up seven days earlier – inconsiderate.

Never the less, we took quite a good crowd there – we booked taxis for 19 people and despite still not drinking, I made it to a very respectable 2am before heading home.

Once again, the PECL installer. In order to get the Mongo driver for PHP working, you need to install it manually.

mkdir mongo
cd mongo
wget https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-php-driver/zipball/master
unzip master
cd mongodb-mongo-php-driver-df8b217
phpize
./configure
make install

Add the extension to your php.ini file.

extension=mongo.so

Restart Apache, and Mongo should appear inf your phpinfo() output.

To be clear, you shouldn’t quit your job. Well, maybe you should. In any case, read on…

We’re all trapped like rats in a capitalist system, right? None of us enjoys going to work. Sure, many of us are in jobs that we describe as liking, and in many ways, I do like my job, but that is a subjective term.

What we mean when we say we like our job is that we’re content with it – as jobs go, we’ve got one we want to be in, with the alternative being in a job that we don’t want to be in. But ultimately, we’re not doing jobs for fun, or voluntarily, we’re doing it because we live in a society where we are forced to work to live.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to break out of said system so the best most of us can hope for it just to play the game as best we can. The better you play the game, the more money you earn and the better job you can get – better probably meaning less work, because it’s an inverse pyramid – those Crew Members at £4.30 an hour (and that is what they are paid if they’re under 18!) are doing a lot tougher work that us sat in our offices in salaried jobs. Meanwhile, Richard Branson starts each day with a swim around his private island – more money equals less work.

So how do we play the game better?

The best tip I can give you is to leave the company you are currently with.

It almost never pays to stay with the same company. Even if they’re giving you good promotions and good pay rises, you can almost certainly get even more by going elsewhere, to a different company.

Why? Because the current company has you and thinks you will probably stay with them because it’s a hassle to switch jobs. Another company doesn’t have you, and is hiring, so it clearly in need of extra resource and knows it will have to pay to go out there and get it.

Don’t just take this statement is automatically true, though. I’m not claiming to be an expert on the subject. But I got the inspiration for this blog post when doing analysis on my pay rises over the years. Here are the results:

The results are striking – the years when I stayed with the same company, I achieved pay increases of 19 and 21 percent, while the years I moved to a different company, I achieved 58, 39 and 124 percent.

Those aren’t small, insignificant differences – we’re talking double the pay increase, at least, by moving company. Clearly, it pays to go elsewhere.

Recently, the following tweet appeared on my timeline.

I’m not ensure sure what so called men’s rights activities are. People who the author feels are not actually interested in men’s rights but have some other kind of agenda? How would you tell the difference between these people and people genuinely interested in men’s issues?

This recurring theme is very interesting though, as it suggests, as many comments have done recently, that someone can be disqualified from having an opinion or interest in equality, because of their gender.

This seems very strange to me. The idea that you could improve gender equality by banning one gender from having an opinion.

To me, having a fair and equal society is everyone’s business. Some people may consider it advantageous to their specific demographic to be privileged, but I believe that it is everyone’s interest to work towards equality.

Indeed, it may be considered more admirable for such individuals to fight for equality. Fighting for your rights if you are at a disadvantage is a welcome attitude, but ultimately, you are only acting in your own self interest. But those who are in the privileged group, and still fight for equality, are the epitome of morally conscientious citizens.

On Thursday, it was Leeds City Toastmasters “humorously speaking” competition. The club holds biannual competitions, one in the spring for motivational speeches and this one, for comedic ones – these then advance to the area competition and then continue moving on and up from there.

We started the evening meeting at Nawaab, an Indian restaurant on Wellington Street. It was good value at £11 for a three course meal, but my stomach certainly wasn’t too happy with what I put in it and the desserts were straight out of the freezer – packaging included and no time to thaw.

We made it to the competition just in time and I certainly didn’t fancy my chances – all three of the other speakers who had entered the contest were senior members of the club, one a former area governor who regularly speaks from the advanced manuals.

Somehow, I turned up with the victory though and now move onto the area competition in a few weeks!

It was Wednesday evening and Elina was being too lazy to cook (we take it in turns, and it was hers). So we decided to head out to grab something to eat and eventually settled on La Grillade.

As a French restaurant in the city centre, it has tough competition from Sous le Nez.

We decided to take advantage of their three course set meal. I say set, we went for the slightly more expensive one, from which you can just pick any starter and dessert off the main venue.

I decided to go for the frogs legs as I haven’t tried them before. Turns out they taste a lot like chicken, but not as nice. I don’t think I’ll be having them again, but it was an interesting experience.

For the main we had a rack of venison, that was cooked to perfection and extremely delicious. It also came with a wide variety of side dishes – you wouldn’t think you could do that much with chips and veg, but apparently, you can.

The desserts were excellent too – you know what you’re getting with a mouse au chocolat, and the lemon sorbet lived up to expectations as well.

All in all, a fantastic meal, but comes up at least as expensive as Sous le Nez, so I would expect it to. Recommended, in any case.

Last week, we had dinner at Veritas. It’s a great pub, so we thought it would be nice to try the food.

It was reasonable, though I can’t even remember what I had, so clearly not very memorable. Elina had the special chicken and bacon pie, which she described as “a lot of meat”, which is definitely a compliment. Don’t think I’ll be rushing back there for the food though.