Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

It was always going to be an interesting train to London as we went down to attend GRAM. It was a 7:30am train and by 8:30am, the speaker had announced that they had sold out of all beers and ciders!

Who is drinking at that time in the morning? A quick bit of research told me that Leeds were playing away at Millwall today. Leeds and Millwall have a long time rivalry with whose fans can be the biggest hooligans, so it turns out they were going to stop serving all alcohol on trains from 10am anyway.

Not fancying returning in the middle of a large crowd of angry football fans, and given it was only a mere £15 extra (of which I did not expense, of course), we decided to upgrade to first class.

Overall, I’m not sure it’s worth the upgrade cost. The seat is very nice and big, and the complementary food is good, but being on a weekend, isn’t hot, nor is alcohol included. It was also very quiet though, and you do get unlimited wifi included, so maybe it wasn’t too bad.

A Wendy House without The Fonze? Oh the horror. Somehow, we survived it though, with good memories intact.

We went to Leeds City Museum to see the Stolen, Saved, Smuggled? exhibit. It was pretty disappointing to be honest.

If you are trying to run CruiseControl on Gentoo Linux, you may find that you get an error similar to the following.

line 109: /bin/java: No such file or directory

There is due to the Java path. You can find it using the following command.

whereis java

You can then create a symlink to it.

ln -s /usr/bin/java /bin/java

Try running the command again and it should work.

At my birthday meal, we managed to eat our way through £557.54 worth of meat :D.

I tried out my new lens at the pre-party. Unfortunately, I had to be in Donington the next day, so I was getting my coat out of the cloak room as people were still queuing to put theirs in. Never the less, good times were had.

Recently, we dined at Kendalls Bistro, a French restaurant on St Peter’s Square. They had long candles in wine bottles, where the way had all hugely overflown and run down the bottle, to the level where you can only assume it is some kind of art.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of it, or could find a uncopyrighted photo that looked anything like it, but it looked something like this. Anyway, you can read my review of Kendalls Bistro over on Know Leeds.

Today marks the first anniversary of my 25th birthday. Thanks to the spread bet I placed, that means £100 in my pocket, and an additional £100 for each year after that I survive.

If you’re running Mac OSX Lion and trying to update your locate db, you may get the following error message.

-bash: updatedb: command not found

You can call updatedb by using its full path instead.

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You could also create a symlink in your bin directory which would then allow you to just call updatedb as normal.

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side: