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.
Audi drivers really are the new BMW drivers. There is a parking space literally just off camera to the right (opposite the curb you see behind you), but this guy chooses to park on double yellow lines while he stops for lunch at the same cafe I was grabbing a sandwich from.
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.
I remember being in an assembly at primary school, which I believe was being delivered by our then headmaster, Peter Boyle.
He was talking about how we should all be polite to each other. Near the end of the talk he proposed the idea that it should be a school rule that we should all be polite to each other and suggested that we vote on it. “All those in favour”, and all the hands in the hall went up, except for one. “All those against”, and one single handle was put into the air – mine.
As a special privilege for daring to decent from the prevailing opinion, I was invited to the front of the hall, to explain to the whole school why I didn’t think being polite to each other was a good rule to have.
I obliged.
My answer what that I thought it was unfair that we should impose such a rule as to me, a rule is a rule that should be followed, and if you break the rule there should be consequences – a punishment of some kind. Yet smiling, or holding a door open isn’t something I feel fits that category. Everyone can have a bad day; sometimes I don’r want to smile, or say good morning, or hold a door for someone.
More importantly though, these are added niceties that we use to show people respect and curtsey. It’s friendly to smile and say good morning. If this was a rule, that therefore had to be followed, how would you know if someone was genuinely being friendly, or simply following a rule? Making it an optional extra gives you the chance to go that extra mile, even if it is a very, very small one, to be nice to someone else. As soon as you make that a rule you must follow, you take that away.
So, I remain steadfast in the views I expressed all those many years ago. We remain a friendly and polite society because manners aren’t a rule, not because they are.
We’re now ten years on from Portugal legalising drugs and all the evidence says it works. Drug use levels have plunged.
This has interesting implications for drug legislation in the United Kingdom because it shows that a more progressive attitude to drugs is clearly the way forward.
It’s not that Portugal have removed all drug laws – it is still illegal to be a drug dealer. But what they have done is switched from an attitude of punishing drug users, to an attitude of helping them overcome their addiction and giving them the support they need.
We should do the same.
Now of course, the first thing most people will say is “that’s a crazy idea, you can’t legalise doing drugs because doing drugs is wrong.” These people often drink alcohol and coffee as well as often smoking cigarettes as well. But those don’t count, even though it has been shown that alcohol is more dangerous than ecstasy.
But, you don’t even have to agree that it is the right thing to do to legalise drugs. The bar is far lower than that. All you have to agree is that the current method of dealing with drugs has failed. And it has. Drug use is ubiquitous with modern society. Everyone who has gone through the university system in the past few decades has at least tried drugs, don’t kid yourself that that isn’t the case.
What is the result of such widespread drug use? Massive amounts of crime! As DrugScore point out, an addict needs £15,000-30,000 a year to feed their habit and as a result estimate the value of goods stolen each year could be over £2,000,000,000. That is more zeros than there are people in the UK. Do the maths – that is £30 a year each of us are paying. The story is the same in the US – 17% of prisoners are in there because of of drug related crime[1].
Much of this could be solved by relaxing drug laws. Best of all, it’s been proven to work in Portugal. Of course, chances are that anyone reading my blog already knows this.
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.