Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’m pleased to say that after much blood, sweat and toil, we have finally launched ZonePlay live with one of our internet partners, PlanetWin365. It’s been a tough couple of months with plenty of late nights, early mornings, but it’s very gratifying to see the product go live in a brand new outlet. Full credit to Russ and Andy who have worked their metaphorical socks off to get it there.

Earlier this month, I attended a Flying Without Fear course.

It consists of a morning session which looks at both the theory behind flying and why it is safe, and the psychology of anxiety and how to control your mind. After lunch you head over to the airport and actually take a flight.

The theory part was brilliant. Captain Dom explained the basic physics which keep you in the air, the various sections of the flight, what he does on take off, the backup systems they have in place – this was absolutely fascinating. Unfortunately it didn’t calm my nerves as I know a lot of the science behind it and I’ve never been worried about whether the plane is going to fall out of the sky or anything like that.

The psychology section was rather disappointing though, which was rather a let down as I was hoping this section would actually be useful to me. Unfortunately, the course uses Neuro-linguistic programming which has now been almost entirely discredited. Why? Because it’s all nonsense.

That isn’t to say their hearts weren’t in the right place. All of the course leaders (most if not all were volunteers who had given up their time to help out!) were incredibly supportive and that is the real benefit of the course. I’m incredibly grateful for the support I received from Sarah, Jill, my dad and everyone else on the course (if you’re reading this, thank you SO much!). They got me here:

Smiling and everything. Because the irony is that I love the idea of flying. I mean, it’s really awesome right, being so far up in the air, watching everything down below like you’re living all those hours spent on Google Earth. If only I didn’t feel ill every time I got near a plane, it would be a magical experience.

Still, I’m now one step forward in the battle for Los Angeles.

If you have a complex SQL query, you might find that performance isn’t exactly ideal. Worse still, you don’t actually know which part of the query it is that is actually taking so long.

Luckily, MySQL comes to the rescue with the ability to explain.

All you have to do is start your query with the keyword EXPLAIN and MySQL will, rather than returning you a recordset of results, will instead provide a break down of everything it has done, including how it made the table joins and what order it did everything in.

EXPLAIN SELECT a INNER JOIN b ON a.col1 = b.col2 WHERE a.col1 > 1 AND b.col2 > 2;

New Year’s Eve has a lot to live up to. That is why when choosing your NYE party destination, you need to pick somewhere with a proven track record of throwing a good time. Having had amazing parties in 2010, 2009 2008, it was no wonder that 25 people all chose to welcome in the new year at our apartment. We’re proud to say that we did not disappoint!

Recently, we’ve been trailing round different health clubs to find a good one and finally made it to Virgin Active, previously Esporta, located in The Light.

It has the advantage of being an over 18s only gym, which is great, and the facilities are very nice too. The only issue was that they treat their pool water with something different to any other pool I’ve ever been in, which resulted in Elina feeling like she was going to be sick every time she accidentally tasted any of it.

They do have two hot tubs though and if there is one thing I appreciate – it’s a redundancy-based service continuation solution.

Our office car park is located down a side road in Headingley. This makes it difficult to pull out to head into town on an evening as the amount of cars going away from town down Otley Road quickly pile up at the traffic lights.

This shouldn’t be a problem, if people were considerate enough not to stop right across the junction and instead leave a space for those of us that are turning right into the far lane, but often people don’t – sometimes people just block the junction, usually people in Audis (the new car of choice for your garden-variety wanker).

So, on the first of November I wrote to Leeds City Council highways department, asking them to paint a keep clear sign on the road so that people to remind people that occasionally, just occasionally, other people like to use the road as well.

They prompted responded to me saying they would need to investigate and said they would respond by 22 November. They didn’t quite make this, but after a chaser email they responded to me on the 19 December, stating they agreed it was a problem and that they would arrange for a keep clear sign to be placed on the road!

I’m very pleased with the outcome. It might not be world peace, but it just goes to show you that you can bring about change for the better, with a relatively small amount of effort.

To make Christmas feel a bit more like Finland, Elina and I made a ginger bread house.

As part of working out what gym we wanted to join, myself and Elina headed down to the Crowne Plaza Hotel to check out their Spirit Health Club.

It was pretty disappointing. The cool was 15m in length, which is shorter than The Marriot, and it had kids in as well. Most annoying, was the depth – which went down to one mentre at one end which made it almost impossible to swim properly.

Other than that, it was perfectly nice, but not quite up to standard with the other places we’ve tried.

If your insert statements are not time critical, you can use insert delayed in your SQL to speed things up. The syntax is as follows.

INSERT DELAYED table (col1, col2) VALUES ('a', 'b');

Insert delayed can be used with MyISAM and Memory, but cannot be used with InnoDB.

The advantage of using insert delayed is that the MySQL server returns a success message straight away so the script can keep going, without it actually having to do the insert. This allows the MySQL server to carry it out when it isn’t busy, and do several at the same time.

It’s appropriate for tables such as logs tables where it doesn’t matter too much if they don’t go in straight away.

Recently, I decided it might be good to join a gym. Not because I had any intention of doing some kind of work out or using any of the gym equipment, but because gyms often have pools and I quite like to go for a swim.

So I phoned up the closest gym with a pool to me and asked how much it would be to join. Apparently though, that isn’t how it works, you have to go down there and check it out and only then will you be given a price list. Normally, that means it is really expensive.

So myself and Elina headed down there to see what it was like. The staff were very friendly and the pool was a reasonable size (15m was our estimate), though it was disappointing that it was a constant depth of 1.2 metres. The hot tub was also out of order, which was very irritating. Never the less though, it seems like a nice place and is reasonably priced for a gym (that means it’s really expensive, but no in comparison to other gyms). Might see what the others have to offer first though.

They also have a rule against using phones in there, which is really irritating as I was planning on getting a waterproof case for my iPhone for when I’m on call.