Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Dragged my ass out of bed to get down to HSBC to pay a cheque in before getting to work for 11:30. Timed it a bit wrong actually, I was almost late. Work dragged a bit at the start although because people had called in sick I ended up doing dining area (clearing and cleaning tables, emptying bins, sweeping up, etc) which was an interesting change despite the fact my entire training for what my responsabilities were and how everything worked was Tom quickly explaining so I could cover him on his break.

I also tried the McChicken Premiere which is really nice, I’d highly recommend it if you are in the mood for chicken. I’m slowly working round everything on the menu :p. I ended up staying until about 7:05-7:10 to cover for the people that were off which wasn’t too bad as it was only an extra half an hour. Ash was stuck on for an extra three. Although Charlotte did offer me her close :p.

So that is it for work until Friday. Although that it’s going to be a mental weekend as I have a close on Friday, working till 10 on Saturday and another close on Sunday.

I don’t think it would quite work to start a post off with a smiley. It would look too weird and besides, do you end the sentence there or do you continue it?

Anyway, I’ve just come off what turned out to be a little over a 9 hour shift. I was expecting 10 as I started at 5 and was working till close which is pushing 3 a lot of the time but we got out at 2:10 which was cool as it’s the earlier close I’ve had (not that I have done many, this is only my third).

It was quite a weird shift actually, though we had quite a few people in when I first got in at 5, it wasn’t ultra-busy. Enough to have a few of us working grill though. Then it just died, it was like a ghost town. I didn’t get my break until 8:36 which was cool as I like my breaks as late as possible so that I have less to work in the second half. Although when you’re doing 5-2, I still had 4 1/2 hours when I got back, I’ve had my break as early as 6:15 and given we didn’t finish until nearly 3 that was like an 8-hour block.

We had people right up until the last minute though. At midnight when we close we got a drive-thru order. Quite a good thing we hadn’t thrown everything out and shut down like we did on my last shift :p. So it was quite an impressive close time given we were cooking so late.

But relating to what the post was actually about (well it was about my shift two, it’s a combination hybrid post), I’m quite a fan of Carpie Diem (the phrase not the place, it’s Latin for “seize the day”). I don’t often practice it because of my neurotic and generally unconfident personality but if I had the guts to I would practice it more often. I finally did today so I no longer have to spend hours every day beating myself up over my recent failure to. Those who know, know, those who don’t, sorry it means that I secretly hate you and resent our friendship. Ok, that’s obviously not true :p. I was quite touched by the concern actually. Please consider yourselves absolved from worry :).

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.