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Cooking Mama

Posted: 14-05-2008 11:03:41
Manda made some mini Victoria sponges last night. They're very nice. I even have hundreds and thousands on a few. She's making more tonight, yum!

Weekend frivolities

Posted: 13-05-2008 16:16:51
At the weekend we got a new car (2001 Corsa, very nice compared to 1989 Polo C, even for the passenger, let alone the driver!) and had a picnic in Bradgate Park in Leicester (well Charnwood, actually, I think). Bradgate Park is a place we used to go to in the summer as kids; it's a very nice country park with a small river running through it and a path nearby you can walk along (although it's more fun to walk on the grass along the river or up on the hills at the side and climb on the rocks!) to Lady Jane Grey's old house. The house itself is something of a let-down. There is one room still standing and it has minimal learning resources. In fact, one of the display cabinets shows you what you can buy at the gift shop (9although I have no idea where the gift shop is)! Still, they have peacocks, which is cool. On Sunday one of the peacocks was up a tree, which we were amazed about. We had no idea how it got up there and were generally unaware of its flying abilities.

IKEA

Posted: 08-05-2008 12:56:38
We went to IKEA on Monday to get some extra stuff for the house. We didn't get everything we wanted to, but we got some stuff. We wanted a small table for the lamp in the living room and some blinds for the study, bedroom and kitchen. We got the table and one set of blinds (for the study) and a few other random things. We thought that being as we don't really know the quality of the blinds we shouldn't splash out on all three rooms, so we tested them out with the study blinds. They were something of a pain to put up (so I heard from the grunts - I was in the other room on the Internet, naturally) but I think we're mildly happy with them (although they don't seem to fully close, but that could be our stupid windows getting in the way), so I guess next time we go we'll be grabbing some more.

Anyway, when we were nearing the end (just plants and self-service storage area to go) an announcement came over the tannoy system that told everyone that there were some technical difficulties and that everyone should leave the store via the nearest exit/emergency exit. So that was an absolute pain, but we waited around for a few minutes and we were eventually allowed back in. Then we went straight from the beginning to the end in about seven minutes (still had to check out the plants and grab our table from the self-service place) which is our fastest IKEA run ever.

It turns out that the ice cream machine malfunctioned and set off the fire alarm!

Cool site

Posted: 06-05-2008 10:29:15
I just found a cool site. It's called 99designs and it's one of those 'crowdsourcing' websites. Basically if you want something designed you submit a "contest" to the website and loads of designers set about your task. You obviously offer a prize, and it can be any amount you want. Obviously, the more you offer the more people are likely to play along, but still, it's quite cool. And for designers it could be a quick way to make some pocket money (taxable, I'm sure). Not sure as to the legal status of submitted designs though. My guess would be that the designer retains all copyright until they get paid (and even then afterwards, with the payment maybe being a licensing fee) but with your designs out there for all to see, it may turn some people away. I guess that's the problem with crowdsourcing...

Plans, plans, plans

Posted: 02-05-2008 17:05:26
I have none. So I can't really blog about what I'm going to be doing this weekend.

Still, I like it when I have no plans. For a start plans are hard to break. Once you've said you're going to do something you're tied to that plan, whereas I quite like being able to choose what I'm going to do on the day, just in case I feel like sleeping in or get invited to something amazing at late notice. In addition to that point, it's always nice to have no plans and not do anything. Yes, it's equally good to be doing stuff with your time but sometimes it's just quite nice to have nothing to do, and fill the time with whatever happens. Usually the Internet for me, unfortunately, but it could be other stuff!

Rich is right...

Posted: 30-04-2008 10:45:03
I'm jealous of all that money he has to spend on computer games!



Some weird stuff:

People I hate
Cat clothing

Computer fixing guy

Posted: 28-04-2008 10:22:28
That's me. Although I did kinda bring it on myself. We were retiring an old computer here at work a few months ago now and I thought that I could take it and give it to my mom, being as she's got a rather old computer. So I did, and I got it working again and then took it up to Derby. But it wasn't entirely finished so it's been stewing for a bit but I finally did it and they now have a fully working computer. I even got their files transferred over from the old one, although I need to move the TV card and DVD drive over next time I'm up.

It seems that whenever I go up to Derby there's always something involving computers and either playing with (to make better) or fixing. Oh well, it's nice to help people out. Plus most of the computing pickles they get in to are my fault anyway, so it's only nice to fix what I messed up!

W00t!

Posted: 25-04-2008 12:23:23
Anyone heard of woot.com? Well it's basically an American site for a deal of the day kinda thing, where they sell a certain number of things reasonably cheaply. But it's only one a day, then it's done.

Well I've seen a few interesting things on that site a few times (although there's a lot of other stuff that doesn't interest me) and wished there was a UK version (maybe there has been for some time, I haven't really looked around). Well now there is, and it is very nice. flamingstock.com looks much nicer than woot.com to me, and you can register an account to aid buying things if you plan on making lots of purchases, or - and here's the bit I love - you can buy without signing up. I personally dislike shops that force you to register an account just to make a possible one-off purchase. I get the reasoning - usually it'll make the purchase more secure if someone has to sign up, and for companies, they get the all-important data capture and ability to send out "our great deals" e-mails. But for me as a user, I just want to go to your site, buy what I want and then possibly never go back.

Anyway, flamingstock.com has both options, and I love it. In fact it makes me more likely to 1) buy stuff and 2) sign up. Some sites that want me to sign up I'll just not bother and they've lost out on my custom. Usually, if a site offers not having to sign up, my first purchase will be done without signing up, but then if I go back (and a lot of them I do for being nice to me) I'll register, assuming I'm planning on going back more. So they win.


Anyway my main point was yay, we now have a woot.com of our own, and hopefully they'll have some decent deals!

A few points...

Posted: 23-04-2008 12:04:41
1) Sue: Talking of voting, I have no idea what I'm going to do on May 1st. Labour are the only people who are telling me about themselves (and it doesn't seem so bad). I think we may have got something from the Tories yesterday but accidentally filed it away in the recycling bin.

2) Ian: £100 doesn't actually seem too bad for that extra treatment, good work!

3) Happy St George's Day

4) Last night on TV Manda was watching something which then finished and some godawful programme called Girlfriends basically about black Americans, it'd seem, came on. It's a bit like The Fresh Prince but ten years later and not funny (or even less funny, depending on how much you like The Fresh Prince). But the episode last night was particularly bad. I don't really know much of the context but basically the programme's about black people, or African Americans or whatever. There seems to be a white person (who likes 'acting like a black person') among the bunch with whom they are generally okay (I think she may be the sister of one of the black people). But last night she was in a hairdressing salon (full of black people, obviously) and some song came on the radio and they were all singing along (including Whitey) and the dreaded N-word came up and suddenly the music stopped and they practically lynched her for having said it in the context of a song. And I don't think they ever got over it. They officially hated her form that moment on. There are so many things wrong with this, the main being she was not being offensive to anyone. She was merely singing lyrics that they were happy to sing. If it's such a bad word to say then surely no-one can say it. If people feel the pain of hundreds of years of slavery/abuse whenever the word enters their ears then why can black people say it?
Then, to make it worse, one of the black people said "Ugh, I can't believe I was best friends with her. I even called her my wigger."

WHAT???

So you can say wigger (in what could be construed as derogatory - why can't she just be a white person with specific traits? Why do you need to label her with 'wigger'?) and it's okay but she can't say nigger in a completely non-abusive or derogatory context?

Anyway, there's way too much to say on this matter and my feeble hands (and brain) can't get it out. But it really annoys me that this can be allowed to happen. I realise I'm in the demographic of people who have never (well I'm sure everyone has at some point) been oppressed or anything, so I can't possibly feel their pain, but come on! Any sensible person can see that unless someone is actually trying to be abusive to someone else, they can say anything they like. Words are words and it is the intent that is meant to hurt (or not). Be offended by someone's intent, not the words they say.


I'm done.

Fun weekend

Posted: 21-04-2008 16:23:53
Well on Saturday we gave the house a little tidy as my sister and her boyfriend were visiting, so that's wasn't quite so fun, but after it was done it felt nicer. It was good to tidy the living room as, after the decorating (and what with 2m² of wall still not being complete due to running out of paint), we hadn't quite cleared the place up yet. It looks very nice indeed, but needs some pictures on the walls, we think.

But yeah, so on Saturday my sister and her boyfriend came over form Leicester, and we stayed in and watched some TV (I forgot to ask her to bring the games and we don't have any of our own!) and on Sunday we went to the local Toby Carvery (the plan was to go to a place Manda and I like a lot, but upon calling its number the answering woman said the line was temporarily unavailable, so that was cancelled as we knew they fill up quickly).
The beef wasn't all that great, the gammon was nice but I've had better, and the turkey was quite nice indeed. Shame about not getting a whole lot of meat, until I asked for a bit more! The Yorkshire pudding was huge and I'm not a huge fan of them so by the end of it I was getting a little stodged out.

Then on Sunday evening I went for my Russian lesson which went rather well. I was quite impressed with myself. Some lessons I leave feeling that I really need to do a lot more learning, but during this lesson I was understanding things and remembering things. It was a very good feeling. I should still do some reinforcement in between lessons though, as we're learning quite a bit of vocab with every lesson now. I always dread it, but it's actually very useful when we go over quite old stuff and have a conversation in Russian. Just the usual "how are you?" "what's your name" "do you have any pets?" kind of questions, but it's quite complicated in Russian, as you might expect. And as some of it is stuff we did some time ago it's not always easy to remember the exact version of "me", "my" or "you" to use!

So that's that.

Cats for Engineers

Posted: 17-04-2008 10:47:44
Watch!

It's great!

Review: Vantage Point

Posted: 16-04-2008 14:46:02
It was actually quite good. There are a lot of things that happen in the film that either the trailer didn't tell me or I forgot about, but it was a nice surprise. Usually trailers show you the best bits and you don't really have to watch the film!

I didn't realise it, but it's one of those tells-the-story-from-the-points-of-view-of-different-people films, and I really like those intertwining-stories types, so I was also pleasantly surprised there. The only problem with doing that is that if you have five stories to tell, you don't get much time to tell everyone's story, but they managed to balance it quite well and even gave a general continuation at the end that just told one story and included everyone in it. And as usual with the intertwining-stories thing, later stories explained random events from previous ones (which I think it why I like it so much).

In terms of the story it was pretty good. Not exactly amazingly meaty (in story or action really although there's quite a bit of action near the end, which is cool) but I don't care all that much about action in films, and the story wasn't ever going to be too big because of all the different stories they had to tell. Generally it was a pretty good film and I'm glad I've seen it, but I think it could be too weak for some people.

Weekend decoration

Posted: 15-04-2008 15:38:30
So the wallpaper got finished during our week off (no thanks to me) but we were itching to get the whole room done. So over the weekend we painted the newly-papered walls. Now we have three walls of cream and one wall of purple. They look very nice (I was a bit dubious about the purple as I think I've blogged, but it's all good) and we brought the TV and other stuff back in last night and had a nice relaxing night in the living room, as we haven't for a week!

Today we're going to the cinema. We fancied "Vantage Point" from the trailer so I think we'll be checking that one out. Verdict tomorrow!

Canal Boats

Posted: 09-04-2008 15:30:14
Yesterday when I was walking to work there was a canal boat at almost every lock on the canal. Usually there are no boats in sight, and occasionally there will be one. There were five or six as I walked the short stretch of canal. It's not all that interesting but I wonder why there we so many yesterday...

Decorational Fun

Posted: 08-04-2008 15:07:42
Okay so I'm a day late. Kinda forgot to blog yesterday. But yes I'm back from a week off (not on holiday I'm afraid) and the decorating's been almost finished.

Not that I had much to do with that.

I did help out, but that majority of the work was done by Manda and her dad. The lining paper's up in the living room now (and the ceiling and coving have been painted) and all we have left to do is paint the walls. Due to the new paper and the refreshed ceiling, the room looks very bright indeed, but we'll soon put a stop to that by painting the largest wall purple!

Let's see how that one goes...

Wallpaper fun

Posted: 31-03-2008 14:30:11
Over the weekend we went to B&Q where we purchased a variety of things we require to do some decorating in the living room. Manda started tearing the wallpaper down in September when she didn't yet have a job, but the living room has been in a sad, wallpaperless state ever since. So we've decided to be proactive... Well Manda has, I'll see how long I can last!

We now have some very subtly-patterned lining paper and a couple of tester pots of paint. Hopefully the last of the stripping, the filling and sanding and the hanging will be done by Thursday or Friday. Then we can test the paint out, then get big pots of whatever paint we want and it'll all be done by the end of the weekend. That's the plan, at least...

Breakfast

Posted: 28-03-2008 10:04:52
I had a lovely bacon and egg baguette from Baguette du Monde in Brindley Place today. It was very nice, just what I fancied.

In the past I've gone to Mr Pickwick's Sandwich Emporium (or whatever they call it) for the breakfast baguette, but I keep being disappointed (conversely, their Thai chicken baguette is very nice indeed) so I decided to try somewhere different today.

Designer Coding

Posted: 27-03-2008 23:12:55
Video

I don't quite agree with everything he has to say (strong/emphasis), but most of it's very good practice that I obviously adhere to!

Good Easter

Posted: 25-03-2008 16:26:08
I really could have done with the week off, though. Luckily I have next week off, so all will be well. I plan on sleeping for at least half of it!

Funny goodness

Posted: 20-03-2008 16:34:46
This is an old one for the office, and it's originally courtesy of Richard, but I don't think he blogged about it so I must!

It's rejected WiiPlay games!

As an added bonus, the site (Loading.Ready.Run) have a Commodore 64 theme, which is very close to my heart. Yay!

Easter

Posted: 19-03-2008 13:57:56
Manda and I are looking forward (as everyone probably is) to a nice Friday and Monday off. We're rather busy here at the moment so it's not the best time to be having time off, but I guess if it's there you have to take it!

Not sure what we're doing. We have no plans in particular although it's almost certain my mom's coming down for a few days so we'll have to come up with some stuff to do! It's a shame the weather's looking to be less than good, but there you go.

Russian

Posted: 14-03-2008 11:00:55
Russian's going well. I'm getting quite into it but I still have an annoying problem whereby I do nothing in between lessons. If I ever want to be any good I need to do some reinforcement!

Last night was a good lesson, it was fun and relaxed. It felt a little better because we did it in a pub instead of at my friend's house, but we can't keep going to pubs, we need a productive environment in which to learn an' all that...

Our roads are inside-out!

Posted: 12-03-2008 09:45:31
Literally. What road users call the 'inside' is actually the outer part of the road. Well, as far as I can glean from phrases such as "overtaking on the inside" and Manda telling me that's the way, anyway.

I personally don't like that. The inside should be the central part of the road, and the outside the curb. It just makes sense. For a start, it'll make a lot more sense at roundabouts: the leftmost lane is the outside of the circle, with the rightmost lane being the inside of the circle. Well they're also the outside and inside of the road, respectively. With the system I think is currently going on (I could be wrong, but like I said, I have evidence) the outer part of the circle that make a roundabout is the inside of the road. And the inner part of the circle is the outside of the road!

Let me know if I'm wrong in my original assumption, though. I'd love to know that Britain isn't actually crazy.

Cool game I'll never be able to play

Posted: 10-03-2008 10:13:29
It's called Fez and apparently it's an entry for some indie game contest and was shown recently at GDC '08. The point is that it's cool!

Speaking of which (first comment I see on that video at the moment, but it'll no doubt change) it seems there's a similar one based on Escher's perspective drawings: Echochrome. I'm not sure I like it as much though. It has a habit of using parts of the scenery to block gaps to pretend they're not there. I like the idea maybe, but it seems a bit of a cop-out. Still, the larger levels look all sorts of crazy!

Labradoodle

Posted: 07-03-2008 11:12:53
I was watching Scrubs last night and Dr Cox mentioned labradoodles, now Gav's mentioning them. Weird coincidence, or did he just watch Scrubs last night?

On a different and mildly humourous note, the CMS we have in place for these blogs lists everyone's post titles followed by their name. So now in the list I can see such delights as:

I want to marry... Ed
The weather is... Ian
A lovely.. Sue
We had... Ed
Stuffed Mark
Booooring! Richard
I sound like... Ed
My daughter... Ian
Far from... Tom

And yes, the people in this office really do like their ellipses! I must admit, I use them a lot myself, but not usually in titles. I tend to use them in the middle of a block of text to show my rambling thoughts. Or at the end, possibly to say that I want to carry on but can't be bothered, and possibly because it's just a habit I've picked up...

It's still freezing!

Posted: 04-03-2008 14:49:10
But it's sunny, so it's not all bad.

29th Feb

Posted: 29-02-2008 17:27:43
Manda tried to propose earlier but I had to decline as she had no ring to give me.

So she tried to take her ring off but failed and gave up. So I'm good for another four years.

Paris, China

Posted: 26-02-2008 09:36:25
Yes, China love all things French so much that they've decided to make a mini Paris.

Here's a video I watched but didn't listen to (it's probably in French) and here are some pictures from Reuters.

I think I'm finally getting it

Posted: 25-02-2008 16:57:57
I think the Russian's finally going in. The lessons tend to go pretty well for me but when it comes to the next one I don't remember anything. It probably doesn't help that I don't do any revision throughout the week except on Sunday about an hour or two before my next lesson, but there you go.

Anyway, yesterday as I was lying in bed I was trying to name some things we did last Sunday and while I remembered two of them this Sunday, I got a good seven or so. I know it's not amazing, but like I said, I think it's finally trickling in. Unfortunately I seem to be one-and-a-half lessons behind, but that's not a huge problem. And if I actually start doing the mid-week revision it'll be even better.

I was starting to get a little disheartened as I used to be good at picking up languages, but I guess I'm now in the right gear for the learning curve!

Lunar Washout

Posted: 21-02-2008 09:56:03
Well we went to bed at midnight last night (we were supposed to go early but somehow we didn't) and I set my alarm for half 3, in the hope that I could get up and check out how the eclipse was getting on (totality being from about 3 to 3.50 I think) and I went to the window and the sky was all cloudy. Earlier on in the night it'd been a little cloudy, which then cleared up, and obviously by 3am it'd gone entirely cloudy.

Oh well, the next one's only in nearly three years!

Back to Winter

Posted: 19-02-2008 14:39:58
So we had a few days of Spring last week, now it's back to Winter. The canal was frozen again this morning, but with frost on to, too! As I was beginning my walk down the tow-path there was a canal boat breaking its way through the ice. That was fun.

I wish I'd had my camera with me this morning, actually. My phone's camera did no justice to a lot of the things I saw, including a nice frosted spider's web. D'oh!


In other news, we saw a guy kicking the hell out of a phone box on the way in today. Well he opened the door and kicked the phone in, rather than the phone box itself. It was odd to see. It's okay though, I shot him.

Canal frozen again

Posted: 18-02-2008 09:25:34
So there!

Peppers: A review

Posted: 15-02-2008 17:31:01
It was quite nice. They had a set menu going on, with taster dishes, which always scares me a little as I'm amazingly picky with food. Still, the vast majority of the menu was to my taste, which was great! And the food itself, perfectly nice. I was a little disappointed with the food they called hot, although the bombay potatoes (which they didn't call hot at all) were nice and hot.

Generally, a good night. Definitely not the best food I've ever had, but certainly good. May well go back there one day when I get to pick my own food from the menu! Yum.

Valentine's Day

Posted: 14-02-2008 14:42:40
Generally I'm not a fan of the more commercialised 'holidays'. I don't see why I should give random companies my money (and they tend to overcharge, too, as it's become something of a tradition) just to show someone I love them. And I've never been a fan of having a specific day for such things either.

So usually I make a card (not giving a large company my money) and do little to nothing else. We may do a meal together but we don't splash out.

For some reason this year's a little different. We've always been a little intrigued by the not-so-new-any-more Peppers place that opened up next to Nando's at the top of Broad Street, and Manda was looking at their website the other day, just to see what the place was all about (we got confused because it seems to be a restaurant but has the windows covered so you can't see in and even gets bouncers on certain days at certain time). We saw the Valentine's day menu and thought it was a perfect time to check the place out. I wonder how it'll go...

I had flowers for tea last night

Posted: 11-02-2008 17:56:59
They were distinctly average

Finally!

Posted: 08-02-2008 11:38:46
I ordered a t-shirt from America (it was quite cheap, but the shipping from the US doubled its price to a normal price for a t-shirt) back in mid-November.

Well it arrived yesterday, having been stuffed through my letterbox. The envelope doesn't give away that it's particularly bendable except that the general contents are a bit squidgy, so I'd hate to have got anything breakable through the same shipping company. Also paying $17odd for 2.5 months shipping service feels somewhat dirty.

I'm not impressed, but I like the t-shirt, so I'll let them off. I'm wearing it today, as one has to in such situations! I'm not sure many people will get it though - it's a bit geeky (although not on the face of it). I'd post a picture but the online store is down for maintenance, so you can await that with bated breath!


Happy birthday Gavin! And also my sister!

Вы говорите по-русски?

Posted: 05-02-2008 17:42:22
The thing about Russian is that they use a completely different alphabet to us English. And some of the letters they do share with us are pronounced differently - something that looks like a 'B' is a 'v' sound, something that looks like a 'b' isn't even pronounced!

Anyway, the point of this post is to let everyone know that I'm hopefully starting to learn Russian, starting tonight! It's my first lesson, but it's not anything official (it's a friend who's done it from GCSE to post-degree level I think) so I'm not sure whether we'll have the organisational skills to keep it up at regular intervals, but let's hope it pans out nicely. It'd be good to know another language, even if only a little. I know a tiny amount of about five languages, and I've always been interested in languages, so I really want to learn one. But maybe I shouldn't have chosen one quite so different from English (words and alphabet) to be the one, oh well!

London

Posted: 31-01-2008 16:48:29
I'm going to London tomorrow with Manda for the primary purpose of seeing the musical Avenue Q finally. I've wanted to see it for some time, but haven't been prepared to spend as much money as getting to London, staying in London and buying the tickets requires. We'll we've bitten the bullet and hopefully it'll be as great as I hope it will be.

We're in London from Friday afternoon until Sunday morning and the show's on on Friday afternoon, so we get the whole of Saturday to do Londony things, so that'll be fun.

I'll report back on Monday.

Buses

Posted: 29-01-2008 15:14:57
Why not busses?

No wonder Brummies call them buzzes, it just makes sense!

Sleep

Posted: 25-01-2008 16:07:42
I think I need to start going to bed earlier. I've been tired all day all this week. A couple of days I did fall into stupidity and went to bed at nearly 2am one night, and another we got in at about 1am and I fell asleep on the sofa fussing the cat and woke up at 2.30am really cold.

But last night I went to bed at 11.30ish, and I'm still tired today, but I probably need to keep it up for a few more days before I start noticing the effects. And I should probably make it earlier than 11.30, too. Some nights I feel really tired and say to myself that I'll go to be at ten. But when it comes to it, I just fancy doing what I'm doing. I have such little time as it is, let alone having four hours after work before going to bed!

Political Correctness

Posted: 23-01-2008 16:27:45
Pedestrian crossings aren't very politically correct. There's a red man standing still and a green man walking.

Where's the pregnant Indian lady?

And how do they expect wheelchair users to cross the road given those directions?

Knifed!

Posted: 21-01-2008 09:21:26
I got knifed yesterday. By myself.

Serves me right for trying to cut a melon with a steak knife, I guess.

Other than that, my weekend was good. Saw a friend I haven't seen in some time on Saturday and went out to the Wellington quiz yesterday with Matt and Jen. That was fun.

L@@K!

Posted: 18-01-2008 09:49:39
Why do people think that looks cool?

Furniture, acutally

Posted: 16-01-2008 10:27:01
Our new coffee table and TV stand look very nice. They're a light oak effect and while I'm more into light beech and maple, it's quite nice. Definitely fitting in with our cream theme in the living room. Unfortunately we still have a huge CRT TV so that's still in and on its own stand. And the fireplace that the TV stand will replace is still around, although moved to the back of the room. We need to get rid of that soon.

By the way, is anyone on Lovefilm? They have free downloads of oldish-but-not-particularly-old (and a few older but good) films here.

Typos

Posted: 15-01-2008 10:38:51
I just typoed "because" as "beach". I think I need a holiday!

This weekend

Posted: 14-01-2008 09:56:29
I mostly did things. On Saturday we went to town to get some jobs done that we've had since Christmas (a refund, an exchange) and buy stuff. I now have some darts that I'm happy with for now. But I haven't used them yet, so who knows how they are? In the evening we went to the cinema and then on Sunday we had our regular Sunday roast at Manda's parents' house. That was gorgeous as usual.

And today it's Manda's birthday, so happy birthday to her!

Furniture

Posted: 11-01-2008 11:26:11
Well we're not having it delivered until Tuesday (it was originally booked for yesterday but no-one was around to get it so I deferred it until Tuesday) but we're finally getting some living room furniture. We already had sofas and chairs, and we have a TV stand that came with the TV, so really it's not such a large deal. But anyway, we're getting a much needed coffee table and a new TV stand that hopefully looks much cooler. Now we just need that flat screen TV to go on it.

The problem is that it comes from Argos. While not necessarily a problem in itself, Richard had said that he's had mildly substandard furniture from Argos before. We got our little home office tables and stuff from Argos and it actually looks really good and we like it, but there are a few jagged edges and not-quite-perfect fitting areas. We just assumed that was us, but maybe it's the not-particularly-expensive nature of Argos. Oh well, I guess we'll see.

Poisoned?

Posted: 09-01-2008 10:52:47
I had a lovely (and large) meal on Sunday. We went to a friend's house for an Orthodox Christmas meal as it was Orthodox Christmas on Monday. We had a turkey stuffed with a guinea fowl and a duck (separately) and a load of veg. It was really nice and I was very happy... Until the next day. I came to work feeling quite bad and, well, I ended up going home. It wasn't as bad as the last time I had food poisoning but we've all come to the conclusion that it was food poisoning, although somewhat mild, I guess.

Other than that small downer, the weekend was pretty good. We did a lot of socialising as, on Saturday, we also went to see one of Manda's friends' new flat. And today I'm seeing some university friends after work.

This weekend coming is town and relaxing time, we think. Next is probably family. Working really sucks your time away.

Drink

Posted: 04-01-2008 10:09:38
On Wednesday, after work, we went to the Wellington because I just had to try the 10% 'A'-rated ale they had. One tends to find that the stronger beers are usually darker, so it was interesting to see this and, as I said, I had to check it out. Well actually it wasn't very nice at all, tasting a bit like sherry or similar fortified wine, but I managed to power my way through it, although I did only manage one pint in the time it took the sensible people to drink two pints of the usual HPA (4%). And the pint of 10% beer cost £4.50! Ouch. But 5.68 units of alcohol in one drink is interesting. No wonder I was feeling somewhat merry on the bus on the way home!

Finally!

Posted: 03-01-2008 16:16:27
I finally have a new phone! My old one was driving me crazy, with its non-working joystick and camera that decided not to actually take pictures most of the time and lost battery cover (admittedly my own fault, there).

I had a k750i, and when I first got it it had everything I wanted in a phone: lots of space for messages, camera (with torch-like light), notes storage, Java games, maybe a few other things I can't think of. Luckily, most of that is a staple of Sony Ericsson phones, although my new phone (k530i) is a little more limited in functionality.

The k530i is a newer phone so it has a few extra things (like the very useful 'flight mode' and a slightly nice interface) but the camera's lens is fixed, so no focusing or macro mode, and there's no flash - not even a light, which I loved about the k750i. But oh well, it's similar enough to make me very happy, and it works! No more joystick hell for me, four-buttons all the way from now on...

Happy Anniversary!

Posted: 02-01-2008 13:26:12
I've just remembered I've been here exactly one year as of today. It feels like it's gone really quickly, but also it feels like I've been here for years. Is that possible?

Happy New Year

Posted: 02-01-2008 10:01:59
Christmas and the New Year were pretty good. Nothing amazing happened but it was great to have a bit of a break (although I got very little done that I thought I would with all the free time) and see the family. We hosted an intimate New Year's Eve party with my family and I cooked my second roast ever on New Year's Day - Lamb this time. It was very nice.

But now it's back to work, hurrah!

Last day of work EVER!!!

Posted: 21-12-2007 09:20:28
Well, until next year...

It's nice to have a bit of a break for Christmas and the New Year, here's hoping we can get all our work done in time!

Brr!

Posted: 20-12-2007 14:24:32
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before, but since Manda started working in Brindley Place, I walk along a short stretch of canal to work every morning. Today the canal was frozen over for the most part. Some time last week it looked like it has frozen a little and a boat had gone through it, as there were bits of slush all over the surface, but today no boat had gone by (maybe they can't) and it was properly frozen. I even picked up a medium-sized stone and threw it along the ice and it didn't go through or anything, just skated along the surface. It's a shame I didn't find a few more stones long the way, it'd have been nice to test the integrity of the ice at various points... Oh well.

Oh my days!

Posted: 19-12-2007 12:28:24
I hate that phrase. I have no idea where "days" came from, I think that's probably what annoys me the most. God, gosh, goodness is all good, makes sense, but days...?

Blah

Posted: 17-12-2007 15:50:47
Unfortunately I don't really have anything to say. I guess that means this will be another short post, lucky you!

So the Christmas lunch on Friday was good, and we had a little party afterwards. Some interesting photos were taken, but I'll leave it at that. Afterwards a few of us went out to the Wellington, but it was a bit packed and we were a bit merry, Gav and Matt even carried on, although I went home.

And my weekend involved very little. We visited Manda's uncle and his family on Sunday, which was nice, and then went out for a carvery at the Punchbowl near our house.

That's about it.

Xmas Meal!

Posted: 14-12-2007 10:18:20
I can't wait for our Christmas meal at lunchtime!

Wallpaper through the ages...

Posted: 13-12-2007 10:13:23
So at the moment we're tiling the bathroom, ready to install a shower. Well specifically, Manda's dad is tiling the bathroom. But in our recent free time we've been stripping the wallpaper to make it more ready for tiles and adhesive.

Suffice it to say, the woman before us had interesting taste in wallpaper. Generally we got the house in an alright state of decoration. She was an old lady, so it's kinda old lady style, but she has alright taste. There are a couple of overly flowery rooms, but the stuff she'd had done in the last 18 months (maybe she was planning a move) was a bit more modern. But underneath some of the wallpaper we're getting rid of (living room and the aforementioned bathroom) lie particularly garish designs. The bathroom was a particularly good source, as there were about five layers of wallpaper! One that we can't see as we scrape it off (as it's too stuck to other paper) that we managed to see rather well once the shower curtain rail (and no, she didn't have a shower) was taken down was all sorts of pink and flowery. Another one that I assumed was the facing paper of the plasterboard which now turns out to be wallpaper is really bad. It's a white background with a kind of blue marble effect, but much worse than you're imagining...

Sweeping generalisation time...

Posted: 12-12-2007 11:18:44
Motorcyclists are idiots.

Well, the ones we tend to come across are. The thing that particularly annoys me is the whole driving on the lines between lanes. Yes you are small enough to do it, but that does not mean that it is in the slightest bit safe to do so. Last night was a particularly pertinent example - we were just coming out of Bearwood Road onto Hagley Road West. As we were going to turn right, we were in the right-hand lane. A car playing annoyingly loud music was next to us in the left-hand lane. Just when I thought the thunderous noise couldn't get any louder, someone on a motorbike came down our inside and stopped in between us two cars at the front of the queue for the lights. Manda complained that because that motorbike was there, she now couldn't quickly get off the mark to turn right (if there was an opportunity to beat the oncoming traffic) as she'd have to wait for the motorbike to get out of the way. Then, as the lights changed, the motorbike actually went rather slowly across the junction and stopped halfway. It was only then we realised it wanted to turn right, of course without letting anyone know, and technically overtaking on the inside. So I took my gun out and shot him. Well actually we had to wait for him to get out of the way once the traffic was clear so that we could turn. We were not impressed.

It's no wonder so many motorcyclists get knocked off their bikes by cars, they're (mostly) all idiots! And I especially hate the adverts that say to car motorists to watch out for motorbikes because you're stupid and kill them all. No, I'm not stupid - they're the ones that come out of nowhere, weave in and out of traffic and overtake on all sorts of sides when you're trying to turn. You just can't win.


Having said that, I'm sure there are a few very safe motorcyclists somewhere.

Cheap goods, anyone?

Posted: 11-12-2007 09:36:05
Amazon.co.uk are doing an amazing deal whereby you have the chance to be offered some quality merch at pretty discounted prices (either 75% off or 25% off) for doing practically nothing.

Basically you vote on which deal you think is the best deal (75% off a PS3, or Wii or Xbox 360) and if the deal you voted for wins the vote, you have the chance (they give 250 of them at that price) to buy it at that ridiculously low price. If your product was one of the ones that didn't win the vote, you have the chance (250 again) to be offered to buy it for a more modest (but still good) 25% off.

Unfortunately the best deals (aforementioned) are now gone, as the voting round was yesterday (and no, I didn't get offered the Xbox 360 for £209 - 25% off), but there are still two round left, I'm gonna go for the sat nav tomorrow, as I can't really use an HD DVD player and I don't need an MP3/4 player really.

Crossing Guards...

Posted: 05-12-2007 17:21:22
Remember a few months ago I blogged about the pointlessness of crossing guards (lollipop people) at pedestrian crossings? Well they're following me! About a week or two before I made that post was the first time I'd ever seen it, and when we moved in to our new house they were behind us forever. Well until about October, anyway. (Well maybe late August when the kids went back to school but I didn't really notice it until mid-October.) We have between four and six of them every morning at the two pedestrian crossings near us (and near to each other) selflessly protecting the small children from cars running red lights. Because, of course, if a car does happen to zoom over the line, the crossing guard will stop the car dead and the children won't get hurt.

Manda made a partially good point, in that they wear fluorescent jackets, so if the perpetrator happened not to be doing it out of malice but just happened to be distracted by something, they'd see the jackets and be able to stop in time. But still, I bet a lot of people-being-run-over-crossing-at-a-pedestrian-crossing cases are ones where the person just felt like going too fast, ignoring the rules, and all that business. Anyway my main point is that they're not in my neighbourhood, and there are between two and three of them at each crossing every single (school) day!

And I've just realised why I've only noticed them since mid-October: we've been driving in at school time (8am) since Manda got her job around that time. Before that, we were driving in at good ol' 9.30am...

Nice Break

Posted: 03-12-2007 10:40:48
Well in case you didn't notice from my lack of blogging I've just had a week off. I didn't do anything special, just laid about at home most of the week, but that's what makes it a fun week off.

We went to see Peter Pan the musical on Saturday evening, and it was quite fun. Obviously it was mainly for the kids, but I definitely had a good time, although they lacked a nice catchy song like all musicals should have. To be honest, when I first heard about it I wasn't too up for it but I made the fatal mistake of mentioning it to Manda. Luckily it was a pretty good show, so I'm glad we went in the end! Shame about 'Mother' forgetting her lines a few times, and a few other technical hitches, but hey.

In addition to that, I cooked my first ever roast dinner yesterday. I cooked for my mom, her partner and my sister and hers. So my first roast dinner was for six, which was fun. To be honest it was a bit stressful by the end, as I'm never good with vegetable cooking timing, but the chicken went brilliantly, as did the roasted potatoes, which is the main thing! We were about 30 minutes overdue, but other than that it all went pretty nicely and everyone said how nice it was, so I may be doing it again soon! Manda had to dart off to pick two of us up, so she didn't get to do as much as she wanted, but she took care of looking after the vegetables and her falafels while I was carving. Still, I wanted to do as much as I could on my own to see how much of a disaster I could make of it, so the less help the better for me.

I may do a nice bit of pork next time. Or maybe some beef, although I fancy some lamb right now...

Claws

Posted: 21-11-2007 13:19:56
Holly's a bit of a clawer. She hasn't got annoyed and scratched me (yet), but I have scratches on my hands. She's one of those cats who really likes to claw when she's being fussed (yes, all cats do it, but she really likes to do it) and she has really sharp claws, so it's quite painful. Still, I let her off because she's cute. She also likes to scratch the carpet, kitchen units, doorways and sofas. We're in dire need of a scratching post... or forty.

Euro stupid car parks

Posted: 20-11-2007 11:36:42
Euro Car Parks really annoy me (and Manda). Basically the charge isn't too bad for a near-centre-of-Birmingham car park, £3.95 for 8 hours of parking, and they do a system where you can pay just £1 for one hour, or £2 for 3 hours or something, up to £19.95 for a whole week. This is great, we thought, but then the problems started to creep in.



Sort it out, Euro.

Pussy Galore!

Posted: 19-11-2007 10:59:16
Yes, Manda and I have our new cat, and she's great! We've actually settled on Holly, which isn't very much the kind of name we were originally thinking about, but she looks like a Holly and it's nice. As can be seen from the below picture she's a black/gold tabby, and she's absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, enough of my mushiness, on with the picture:


























Oh, and Mark, it's bane, but curiously "bain of my life" produces twice the amount of Google results as "bane of my life". Weird stuff...

What the...?

Posted: 16-11-2007 13:58:26
Ooh, Makka Pakka didn't want to ride on the Ninkynonk, he just wanted to give it a wash. Isn't that a pip?

And the song:

Makka Pakka,
Akka Wakka,
Mikka Makka moo!

Makka Pakka,
Appa yakka,
Ikka akka, ooo

Hum dum,
Agga pang,
Ing, ang, ooo

Makka Pakka,
Akka wakka,
Mikka Makka moo!


And you all thought I was going to blog about winning darts and my very nice curry. Well you were wrong...

Heaven And Hell

Posted: 14-11-2007 09:23:17
Manda and I went to the Heaven and Hell gig last night at the NEC. It's not really my bag, but I kinda got into it as it went on. The main disappointment was that they didn't play the classic The Devil Cried. Oh well, maybe next time...

Lamb of God were a bit too heavy for me. All the songs sound the same, with pointless guttural shouting all the time. And the guy was obsessed with insulting his fans (by calling them names). And yes I know that's part of the show, but hmm. And he kept calling Heaven and Hell Black Sabbath, which was kinda funny.

And we didn't get there in time to see the first band Iced Earth, but there you go.


All in all, I had a good night out, but it's a bit of a shame I'm not totally into the music. Manda liked it, though, so there you go.

No mince pies this Christmas...

Posted: 09-11-2007 09:52:16
It seems Oliver Cromwell outlawed it in the 17th Century, so there you go.

Other fun laws (taken straight from the linked article):



[via BBC News]

Subway and vegetarianism

Posted: 08-11-2007 17:53:04
I'm glad I'm not a vegetarian. If I was I'd never go to Subway, and that would be a tragedy. Other than the distinct lack of choices for a vegetarian (salad on bread or 'veggie patty' which, admittedly, is quite nice) their 'sandwich artists' are sloppy. Very sloppy.

In every single subway I've been in (and I've been in a few) they rarely think about vegetarians. Sometimes they offer to change their gloves (for instance if I order a meaty one and then Manda orders a vegetarian one) but that's about as far as they go. The main problem I've noticed is that when they do MY food (whether I'm with a vegetarian or not) they're very happy to touch my meaty fillings (with their nice clean gloves) and then wipe their meaty hands all over stuff like the salad or the cheese. Some subways avoid major catastrophe by having a bread+cheese person, a filling person and a salad person, but many don't. And even then, at peak times, salad people have got my meat out of the microwave and squashed it into my bread. And then touched the salad bits.

Anyone else noticed this? Anyone else care? Obviously I don't, but it's not good for vegetarians. And maybe I don't want to know what else they do wrong in the kitchen that I don't see...

Cat!

Posted: 05-11-2007 10:00:05
We went to the Cats Protection Birmingham Adoption Centre yesterday morning (the only free time we had in our busy weekend when they were open) and we registered our interest in adopting a cat. We have a house visit this coming Sunday to make sure the house and area are suitable for a cat. Apparently they just make sure there's a garden and there's no main road. I'm a little worried as our back garden (the safest) has no grass, and we live in between two dog houses, but the woman said that'd probably be fine. I'm mainly worried because we may have accidentally picked out and reserved a cat for ourselves, and it'd be a shame to be told we can't have her now.

After registering we went through to the pens where we could see all of the cats they had, and then go outside to see a few more. They had the cutest kittens (of course!) but we're not really in the market for kittens as we don't really have the time to devote, what with us both working, but we found an extremely gorgeous and friendly 4 year old female tabby... called Tiggerbelle... that we'll rename. On that note, does anyone have any good ideas for names? She's a girl, and we like the idea of Arabic-sounding names (we're not pretentious!) My sister's cat is called Ayse (Aisha) and a cat nearby is called Sifa (not sure on the spelling, but it's pronounced see-fa) so we like that kinda thing. Answers to alex@ if you fancy lending a hand. I jokingly said we should call her Tabitha (as it would shorten to 'Tabby') but we actually like the idea! So that's that, we're hopefully getting a cat on 24th November and everything will be right in the world, hurrah!


And no, I didn't get a picture. Stupid me.

Something I remembered...

Posted: 01-11-2007 15:52:24
I saw a pigeon pecking at some southern friend chicken earlier. It was interesting...

Trickle Treat!

Posted: 01-11-2007 10:46:34
Yeah, I used to think it was trickle treat. And no, I didn't bother to ask what the hell that meant. But that was when I was 4 or something. And yay! We only got one ring of our doorbell last night, and that was our curry being delivered!

So on Tuesday Manda and I went to see She Stoops to Conquer at the Rep. It was a little hard for me to get into it in the first twenty minutes or so, a lot of it wasn't really sinking in. I blame the fact that I wasn't entirely prepared and they use oldspeak (and fast)... Still, once I started listening properly I got into it and it turned out to be quite a good play. It was a little predictable and mildly farcical, which isn't usually my cup of tea, but I enjoyed it. Still, out of the four I've now been to see (Chinese Elvis, Uncle Vanya, Hysteria (Salvador Dali et al.) and She Stoops to Conquer) Uncle Vanya is the best, with this being second with whatever else was second to Uncle Vanya before.

One good thing about this play (similar to Uncle Vanya) was that they didn't try to downplay the set changes. Most plays have people in black come on looking stupid as if we can't see them. Now I know the whole idea of a play is to suspend your disbelief and open up your imagination (e.g. ignore the people in black, imagine it's an actual scene, etc.) but the normal set-change people look silly. Uncle Vanya simply had the cast that were leaving, coming on or staying helping out with the set changes, in a kind of ignoring-the-whole-problem-of-the-set-change thing. She Stoops to Conquer goes one step further: the servant characters in the play actually do the majority of the set changes. So they're getting the servant characters to play the servant roles in the set changes. Quite clever, I thought. And not only do they do that, but they also had the servants having a little bit of a play time as well, that is to say that in a few scene changes the servants came in, ran around a bit as if they were playing with no-one around, and then took out the tables or whatever.

Lazy days

Posted: 29-10-2007 11:55:20
I really like not really doing anything amazingly productive every now and again. For the past two weekends, Sunday has been that day. With Manda out for the day (visiting a friend last weekend, shopping this weekend) I don't feel too guilty about sitting at my computer being boring and reading/watching stuff. It's good that it's only one day a week, any more and I think I'd start feeling really bad.

Anyway, Saturday was good this weekend. We went to see the family, including my sister and her boyfriend, and all went out for a Turkish meal. It was really good, and Claire and Ertan paid for the meal. So soon they're all coming to Birmingham and we'll pay, but we're not entirely sure where to go. We were thinking Pasta Di Piazza but we're already going there this weekend for Manda's nan's birthday! Hmm...

The weekend

Posted: 22-10-2007 15:08:30
I managed to do pretty much nothing. I caught up on a few videos I've needed to watch, but other than that I did nothing productive. Manda got a few things done, but she also didn't do a few things she wanted to do. It annoys her more than me though.

Curry, curry, curry

Posted: 18-10-2007 12:23:39
It's not particularly funny, but there you go.

We finally got a cooker on Saturday (from my sister who now has a new one - that's why we were holding off getting one) so we're now able to do hob cooking, which means that I can now make curries, chicken tonights, fajitas, and all that other lovely stuff again. So naturally, on Monday I made a curry. Because Manda's a vegetarian these days (and the curry jars are still the same size as before) I still make the same amount of curry, but I only use half of it at a time. So yeah, I had a curry on Monday night. Then on Tuesday we were going to go to Manda's house and cook some fajitas but we ended up ordering in curry, and then last night I had my second half of the curry I made. So that's curry three nights in a row! I wonder what I should have tonight...

Life is good.

Third monitor

Posted: 15-10-2007 14:02:19
Well a little off-hand comment on my blog earned me a new monitor. Man, I wish I had a million pounds... Anyone? Okay, fine!

But yeah, I came in this morning and Ian said he had a present for me, and it was a nice monitor to sit next to my others. Unfortunately it's smaller and isn't held up by the interesting contraption holding my other ones up, so it was a bit odd when I first set it up, but I've tweaked it all about and now my mouse moves smoothly from one to the next rather than suddenly jumping down six inches.

The reason, by the way, I wanted a third monitor was not absolute greed. It was about 80% greed and 20% the fact that it's so amazingly useful. Basically, part of my job it to take a picture of a final design and actually turn it into HTML code. When doing this, there are three things I need to be looking at: the original design (the picture itself), the current rendering of the page (i.e. in a browser) and the code that makes it all work (a text editor). Before I had three monitors I had to have the code and the design on one and the browser on the other, and keep switching between the code and the design. Now I can look at all three at the same time, thus increasing my productivity. Woohoo!

All in all, I'm very happy, and you're thoroughly bored. I think my work here is done...

Ill

Posted: 12-10-2007 14:44:33
I have a cold. And it's the worst one I've had in some time. Yesterday I woke up with all sorts of bad stuff and I just couldn't come in to work. Today I'm feeling better so I went into work but I got sent home so I don't infect anyone else - after all, we don't want all the cherries unable to work! So now I'm working from home, but it's harder than at work. For one thing I only have one stupid monitor at home, whereas I have two (although I really need three, but that can be the subject of another blog post) at work. In addition, it's much harder to communicate with people. It's easier to speak and gesticulate an idea than it is to type it out, and maybe drawing helps when you're really stuck (although MSN does have that ability).

HEY!

Posted: 09-10-2007 10:16:32
I didn't write that!

I was just reading my blog (y'know, to make sure the post turns out alright and stuff) and noticed I blogged on my first working day of my week off, which was odd, but sound like something I'd do. The post also sounded a lot like something I'd write, but I really don't remember writing that so it couldn't be me... could it?

Tom's dance

Posted: 09-10-2007 10:03:40
I really like Tom's dance, what with all the arm-flailing.

Doing it ourselves

Posted: 08-10-2007 19:36:39
So we got some new office furniture delivered on Saturday. Previously, we'd been using a dressing table and a chest of drawers that the woman left behind in the house as office furniture. Now we have proper desks and everything! Unfortunately, we had to put it together, and some of the drawers are a bit wonky (not our fault, though - bad Argos!) but generally it's really good. It takes up a lot more space than I expected but it looks good and gives me a tonne of space, so I'm happy.

We have a corner desk for me, and a normal straight desk for Manda. In the middle of the two is a shelf with a drawer underneath for scanner and storage. To the left of my corner desk (around the corner) are two three-drawer units (stationery, medium-sized and large with add-ons for filing fun) and then there will be a cupboard when we put it together. I'll try to get a picture soon, but I really like it. Now I just need a second monitor as mine looks all lonely sat there on its own...

I'm going on my holidays...

Posted: 01-10-2007 13:05:01
...well not exactly. I'll be doing various bits of DIY around my house but nevertheless, I'll be away from work for a whole week which, incidently, equates to 168 hours. Having said that, 168 hours only covers a period of seven days when in actual fact, I won't return to work until a week on Monday which is 9 days. My calculation therefore is somewhat incorrect, I will actually return to my desk in some 216 hours (I haven't taken into account the fact that I finish work at 1800 leaving a potential 6 hours earlier than midnight, nor have I taken into account the fact that I don't start work until Monday morning at 1000).

See you then.

Mmm... Curry...

Posted: 27-09-2007 17:02:13
The curry last night was really good. And I'm having it again tonight!

Okay, normal people would be a little disappointed at that, but I love curry so much I'd be happy having it every day for at least three weeks before getting a little bored with it. In fact I'd really like to do that - it'd give me a chance to try out different ones. I'm a bit boring when it comes to curry as I find a flavour I like and tend not to waiver, so as not to be disappointed.

Anyway, I think I might go for a madras tonight, as I usually have the pathia from this place, and while it's good, it's not great. And I'm told the madras is nice.

IKEA

Posted: 25-09-2007 16:58:28
We went to IKEA on Sunday looking to buy some cool new stuff for the house. We'd seen a coffee table, TV stand and even some computer desks online and just wanted to make sure we liked them in the flesh (and save ourselves a £30 delivery charge) and then get them. Unfortunately, they were either a little too big or a little too small, but we eventually settled on what we'd get (the large coffee table and think about the TV stand (really deep, not sure it's worth sacrificing the space we don't need to waste) and computer desks) and went to buy it. Well it turned out they didn't have the coffee table we wanted (the large one), after about ten minutes of searching the area it told us to go to. So we even decided to have a look for the smaller one. That one was also gone! It was a rather large disappointment, and if we hadn't been so unsure about the TV stand we probably would have gone and looked for that, just to say we managed to get something at IKEA. Well in the end we came out with a pack of candles and three candle holders, totalling just over £5. At least it was a cheap trip!

Firefox is great!

Posted: 21-09-2007 17:27:07
I really like Firefox as a browser. When I first switched to Firefox from IE I was a little dubious. In fact for the few months beforehand I really didn't want to switch at all, I mean IE does what I want, I don't click random things that put spyware/adware on my system, so it's all good. Plus Firefox doesn't allow ActiveX controls! What would I do without my precious ActiveX controls???

Well it turns out they're useless. I thought that a lack of ActiveX controls would mean I don't get things like Flash, Java and even Microsoft plug-ins but actually there are Firefox versions of the most popular plug-ins one needs so that's fine. And Firefox has add-ons that can do all sorts of great stuff for you. I currently have 17 add-ons loaded in my version of Firefox at work, and something like 25-30 at home. To be honest I really need to trim my list down as they do make the startup of Firefox slower, and they can break sites in certain circumstances (although not really in my experience). But I find the vast majority of them useful, particularly in web development. I have add ons that allow me to edit HTML, CSS and cookies live in the site, and see the effects immediately. I can turn Javascript and styles on and off so see how that works.


Anyway, my main point of this post is that I have just one major problem with Firefox, and even that I don't use the feature particularly often. It's the history. As I said, I don't use the feature all that often, but when I do it really annoys me. I can search my browsing history, or I can list all my sites by the date on which I visited them, but I can't get much information out of them. If I want to know the URL of a page I have to either go to the site and then copy it form the address bar or add it as a bookmark, gets the properties of the bookmark, copy the URL and then delete the bookmark. If I want to know when I access this particular page I can't do so in a search - it just lists everything that it found. It's just a really basic interface, and not in the good way. If it had a feature like Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) whereby by default it'd just list what you searched for (or filtered by day) but then you could enable a 'detail' view and sort by particular columns, that would be fine by me, but alas it doesn't.

My take on the weekend, well Saturday specifically

Posted: 20-09-2007 16:51:03
It was really good!

The beer festival itself was a little rubbish, but the company was all good and the lunch/dinner at Nando's was also pretty great because I love it so. I say lunch/dinner because Manda and I ate lunch at a sensible time (1ish) as we walked to the beer festival, and everyone else decided against it. So at 4ish when we left everyone was hungry. Manda and I weren't particularly hungry but I can't say no to Nando's, so we had a rather filling early dinner. Then later on Manda and I went to our friend's house for her birthday thing and everyone had curry. I was still amazingly full from the Nando's but I swear I could've eaten a whole curry to myself.
Later that night was Matt's party at the Hare and Hounds which was particularly good. Generally not my kind of music but at least a quarter (maybe) of them I recognised and liked, so that was cool.
By the end of the night my feet were hurting and I was getting tired, I have no idea how Gav and Matt kept going until 8 in the morning, but they're probably hardened to it - kids these days, eh?

Maybe I don't get it...

Posted: 18-09-2007 12:52:44
...but lolcats just aren't funny.

Thai food

Posted: 14-09-2007 13:27:02
So yesterday we were all set up to go to The Thai Orchid on Bennetts Hill. Then we got there, perused the menu and picky mister me decided there was nothing I'd definitely like. There were quite a few dishes I liked the sound of but they all had one ingredient that I don't like and didn't know how much it'd overpower the taste:


Neua Pad Ped Bai Grapraoi: Strips of steak stir fried with fresh chilli, basil leaves and Thai herbs.

Gai Pad Bai Graprao: Stir fried chicken with basil leaves, fresh chilli and Thai herbs.

Southern Thai Chicken: Grilled marinated breast of chicken with lemon grass, garlic, pepper and soy sauce served on a sizzling dish.

Neua San Nai Prix Thai Dum: Sizzling fillet steak pieces cooked in dark soy sauce with Thai herbs and black ground pepper.


Basically I don't mind small amounts of basil or coriander or other herbs I don't particularly like in food, but if it overpowers the food (Indian curries and coriander, anyone?) it just ruins the nice taste of the meal. Soy sauce I don't like (as far as I know) but I could imagine a certain dish tasting alright with it (especially dark soy sauce, maybe) but I don't want to pay for a meal only to not like it. I think I need to go with people, order something bland and small and just taste other people's food to work out whether I like it before eating it.

Anyway we went to Wagamama in the end, and all was right in the world, although it wasn't quite as nice as I remember.

Bed!

Posted: 12-09-2007 14:03:35
So we finally got a bed on Monday, after having lived in the house for over a month. It was put up yesterday while I was at work so all I had to do was come home and sleep, good stuff. I've been a bit particular about the bed, as a lot of the time there's no chance to see it in the 'flesh', so we've had to look at the returns policy and all that business. Anyway, we finally went with this one and it's all good. The only problem is that the slats aren't actually screwed down to anything so they make a bit of a bang when to get on to and off of the bed. I think we'll have to sort that out...















ABC and adverts

Posted: 10-09-2007 14:14:10
So, here's what usually happens on normal commercial TV stations:

Programme starts, 11ish minutes pass, advert for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 11 minutes pass, end of programme, adverts for 4 minutes, rinse and repeat.

Here's how ABC (an American channel run by Disney et al.) does it:

Programme starts, 2 minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 7ish minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on, 7ish minutes pass, adverts for 4 minutes, programme comes back on for the last 2 minutes, next programme starts for two minutes, etc.

To put it in the context of a times schedule:


Channel 4, ITV, Sky One, normal channels:

6.00 - Friends Part 1
6.11 - Adverts
6.15 - Friends Part 2
6.26 - Adverts
6.30 - Simpsons
...


ABC, hopefully not all channels in America:

6.00 - Scrubs Intro (possibly ending with the title sequence???)
6.02 - Adverts
6.06 - Scrubs Part 1
6.13 - Adverts
6.17 - Scrubs Part 2
6.24 - Adverts
6.28 - Scrubs Outro (yeah I hate that word - "outroduction"?)
6.30 - Little ABC logo and then bam, straight into 8 Simple Rules (where obviously one turns off the TV)
...


Okay that's not definite, but they definitely have the ending of one programme running into the beginning of the next, with an advert break either side, although they may be smaller than a normal TV advert break. Either way, the point is that it really annoys me. But it's kinda clever: you have to sit though all the adverts in order to watch the whole of your programme. And then you accidentally get hooked on the next programme and have to watch all of those adverts. That's a double whammy for ABC, but a rather annoying experience for me. Still I like Scrubs a lot, and if E4 or Paramount Comedy have got something rubbish on I'm forced to watch ABC. I also have a feeling that maybe all (or at least the majority of) American TV (y'know, over in America) is probably like this. I'd love to go and live in California one day (probably isn't going to happen, but I'd quite like to) but if the TV's that annoying I'm not sure I could. Luckily I don't watch a lot of TV seriously, so the annoyance at the moment is only when I fancy watching something funny while I'm cooking food.

Buses!!!

Posted: 06-09-2007 10:56:12
Well today was the first time I've used a bus to get to work. It wasn't very good at all. The bus stop advertises 31 minutes to Colmore Row from my stop, it actually took 50 minutes. I got up earlier, I left the house earlier, and I arrived in town much later. We eventually stopped at Colmore Row at about five minutes to 10, so I ended up actually being late for work. Now unfortunately I don't know if it's always like that or whether it's something to do with the kids being back at school, but either way that was annoying. And to add insult to long-journey-injury, it was really hot on the bus, and we regularly were stopped in a traffic jam in the sun. Not good.

Other than that, the journey was pleasant. No people blaring out music or generally taking loudly or kicking up a fuss. I was impressed. I think I'll go back to the car method for now, though...


And yes, Dave, I really hate the fact that Birmingham buses don't give change. What's that all about? I guess it saves them a little time, and earns them quite a bit of money. Stupid Travel West Midlands. Pah!

Jonathan's

Posted: 04-09-2007 10:00:42
On Friday it was Manda's parents' anniversary. As such we decided to do something nice, so we went to Jonathan's on Hagley Road. While somewhat pricey (link) the food was really good. I was part-dreading it as most of the mains had some form of mushroom or seafood in. Still there was always the meat-free meatballs or the pork wrapped in smoked bacon. Well it turns out (and yes, I asked) that the meat-free meatballs were made of Quorn (mycoprotein = fungus byproduct) so I was left with one choice, and what a choice! The meal was absolutely gorgeous. There was a fillet of pork in bacon that, while moderately difficult to cut through, was really tender and tasty, but also a bit of the meat/fat/skin layer. I don't usually like to eat fat if I can avoid it, as it's usually chewy or slimy, but this was really good. It's a shame (and they probably did it on purpose, but I wouldn't have) that the crackling wasn't hard. It was soft as was the fat and meat underneath, but the whole thing was very nice. I didn't have a dessert but when we had hot drinks at the end I had a tea and it came with these gorgeous chocolates (with glacé cherries in) that just melted in your mouth perfectly. They reminded me of the Lindt Lindor chocolate centre, the one that feels cold in your mouth and melts so easily. Yummy!

All in all a great, albeit expensive night. Totally worth the money, though.

My weekend

Posted: 30-08-2007 16:55:33
Yes I forgot to blog for over a week. I'll try to blog more often, I just rarely have interesting things to talk about.

So finally, on Thursday, I'll talk about my weekend.

On Friday Manda and I went to a gig of one of her friends. They're a metal band, which isn't completely my kind of music (although moreso than some others!) but I actually had a good time. They have a few of their own songs and they do a few covers. I had a good time, got in on NUS discount for £3 and I only had one pint, so quite a cheap night, too!

On Saturday Manda and I went up to Derby to visit my mom and her partner. It was very nice, and on the night we went into Derby town centre to have a meal. We were deciding between the Turkish restaurant and Nando's. I absolutely love Nando's, so I really wanted to go there, but I also like Turkish food (particularly kavurma, a kind of lamb stew-like thing) and being as we go to Nando's pretty much every time we go out in Derby we went to the Turkish place. It was actually very nice. I ended up having the rather un-Turkish steak with peppercorn sauce, but hey. And unfortunately it had small mushrooms in the sauce (I thought it may have, but being as there was a whole steak with creamy mushroom sauce option I figured it wouldn't, d'oh!) but I managed to pick them out and power on through the meal. As I said, the meal was actually quite nice, although I think I may have preferred Nando's, in hindsight. Oh well, it was a nice change.

On Sunday we had a nice Sunday roast at the local pub. We decided to all (except vegetarian Manda) go for the lamb, and it was very nice. That's about all for Sunday.

On Monday we came back home via my auntie's house in Coleshill, said happy birthday to my granddad (although I've always spelt it grandad, granddad looks wrong to me, how odd) and had a chat with everyone there.


So yes, my main point in this blog post (other than necessity) was to talk about the Turkish restaurant, although I ended up not having much to say except that it probably wasn't as good as Nando's would have been. Yep, that's me!


Sorry.

Oh well

Posted: 22-08-2007 14:01:06
Turns out we had Chinese. But it was really good. I usually get chicken fried rice or chicken chow mein, but yesterday I went for chicken in black pepper sauce and it was very nice! Yum!

I want to go on holiday!

Posted: 21-08-2007 11:56:35
So there.


We have some of Manda's friends round tonight to check the house out and we're getting a takeaway in. I hope it's curry!

Death On A Pizza Base

Posted: 17-08-2007 14:07:18
That's a loaded pizza!

Complete with hot dog sausages and hamburgers!

Medium £10ish, large £15ish...

My weekend

Posted: 13-08-2007 10:24:12
There was one job on the agenda this weekend (well I'm breaking myself in slowly to this house-owning lark): putting the curtain poles up. Manda bought new curtains for the living room and our bedroom last week, so they needed to be put up this weekend. Saturday was a very nice day, and at about 4pm we had two options: put curtain poles up or a walk in the country park.
So when we got back from the country park at about 6, we attempted the poles. The house decoration is somewhat bodged together (luckily we want to change the majority of it eventually) and the existing curtain rail was on a wooden support, which we thought we'd use. The screws for the curtain rail were a little shorter than those for the poles, so we decided that screw re-use was a good idea. So after unscrewing a few of the curtain rail supports from the wood and marking up where our new holes needed to go, we attempted to simply make the new holes by screwing into the wood. This worked moderately well until about halfway in. Then the screw became amazingly hard to turn, actually ruining the head of the screw because the screw driver kept slipping. I'm going into way too much detail here, I'll speed up. So the screws wouldn't go in, and we decided to drill the holes. But alas, we didn't have a drill or any masonry bits.
Sunday came, and we went to see if Manda's dad had any masonry bits - he did - so back home to drill some holes. I think we had the wrong bits as the masonry ones were refusing to dent the wood much (we had masonry ones as behind the wood - or so we thought - was brick) and we didn't have any normal bits to start that off. So we called in Manda's dad and in his tests to see what was behind the wooden curtain rail support he found that there was yet more wood. But we couldn't get the screw in! Well he tried with the drill and yes, it all went rather well indeed. Oh well, the curtains look good, and we still have our bedroom to do all by ourselves... Yeah.

In unrelated news, it's now been a week since I stopped biting my fingernails and it feels good. I've had a clean-up nibble over the weekend to straighten out the edges, but other than that it's going rather well indeed.

Very sorry about the long and boring blog post - if you will force me to write, expect stuff you didn't really want to read : )

TTMUICU - 7

Posted: 10-08-2007 13:10:01
'Baby On Board' Signs

They do nothing for me. Not that I'm a driver, but I once was and that's not even the point. I'm a careful driver, careful drivers are careful drivers, careless drivers are careless drivers. A sign saying "hold on! Slow down, I have a baby in my car!" won't affect the careless drivers. I'm sure they care more about their own lives than that of a baby they don't know, thus if they're willing to put their own (and yes, others') lives at risk then they most certainly won't heed your sign's advice.

But I'm told by Shaun that they were originally invented so that people can alert the emergency services that there may be a small person in the back of a car if there should happen to be an accident. This makes a lot of sense, so maybe they do have a point. But, like Shaun said, they're kinda pointless anyway because people leave them in their cars even if they don't take their kids along on a trip. So that's that.

What I said...

Posted: 07-08-2007 13:25:34
was that he looked like Dominic Monaghan, or specifically him in Lost. When Matt didn't know who Dominic Monaghan was I said "y'know, Charlie from Lost. He was in Lord of the Rings too... as a hobbit."

Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

Just to let you know

Posted: 01-08-2007 14:41:17
I now officially own a house. It's over a month late (we 'needed' to be in the house by the end of June as we were renting and that's when the contract ran out) but it's finally here. Keys are in-hand, now the fun task of moving in, and working out whether it's cheaper/easier to get the bus or to drive to a train station and get the train to work, and work out the new times of such events.

Wedding

Posted: 31-07-2007 18:22:23
I went to a wedding at the weekend. I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. For one, I'm not a fan of wearing 'smart' clothes. I like nice, comfortable t-shirt and jeans. Another reason was that I didn't know the bride and groom at all, and I only partially knew some of the other guests. Basically I was a complete outsider. Still, I went and I'm very glad I did - I had a great time.

The night before the wedding we went to a nice Italian restaurant, although it wasn't as good as Pasta Di Piazza, and had a good laugh, getting to know each other. The wedding itself was a little religious for my liking, but I guess that's what you get when you go to a wedding in a church. The evening's festivities were very fun, the entertainment was a Irish-jig-band-like-thing so we did a bit of Irish dancing, and they had a break every now and again in which more contemporary music was played - and the selection was generally rather good in my opinion.

All in all I had a good time, although it was a little expensive to do too often. It could have ended being much more, though, as the meal on the Friday night was very kindly paid for by the bride's mother.

Exchanged

Posted: 26-07-2007 16:50:00
Definitely moving in on August 1st. Well, unless something goes majorly wrong. Which is more than likely.

Adverts...

Posted: 25-07-2007 14:13:58
"Whole grain means the whole of the grain..."

What? Really?

Crisps

Posted: 24-07-2007 15:02:22
I had some Walkers Cajun Spice crisps today. The packet says that they are new, and I've never seen them before, so there you go. In my opinion, they're not particularly nice. Then again, I'm picky with crisps.

I don't like crisps that get stuck in your teeth. Now, all crisps get stuck in your teeth, but some get stuck more easily than others, and some come out more easily than others. A good crisp is a Quavers crisp. They're light and fluffy, so they come out pretty easily, I find. Bad crisps are those corn things. I can't remember what they are, but I remember that corn has something to do with them. Monster Much aren't too great, but they taste really nice (well the Flamin' Hot ones do, not the pickled onion ones) so I'll let them off. Anyway, these were plain old normal Walkers crisps with 'cajun' flavouring. I wasn't very impressed with the flavour. I expected them to taste hardly of anything at all, and was impressed that they actually boasted some flavour. Unfortunately, the flavour wasn't particularly nice for me. And the consistency once they've been chewed up a bit wasn't as good as other crisps.

I won't talk about crisps again.

I knew it wouldn't happen...

Posted: 23-07-2007 15:38:20
I got an answer phone message on Friday (my phone keeps turning itself off randomly, which is rather annoying considering the news) from my solicitor saying that the completion date's moved to 1st August. Unfortunately I couldn't do anything about it until today, what with it being the weekend, so now I'm going to phone him. Not sure what I'm going to say exactly...

That beer festival...

Posted: 19-07-2007 16:53:26
I'm so lame at blogging. Anyway, on to the story at hand - we didn't go. The festival was at Derby Assembly Rooms, but when we got there the queue was massive. Thus, we decided to go to a pub called The Flowerpot. I've been there before - to see Rollin' Stoned (a Rolling Stones tribute band) - and it was good. Unfortunately, on Saturday there was no event on there, so we just had a few quiet drinks. On the way home (as seems to have become the tradition) we went to Nando's for some supper.

On the Sunday we went to my sister's house in Leicester. It's actually quite a good house. It's s smallish one bedroom terrace, but it was nicer than I was expecting. The kitchen needs refitting, and it's got me on the bug of wanting a nice new kitchen. Unfortunately we can't really afford frivolities like that at the moment. If we needed a new kitchen, we probably could, but being as the current one's perfectly alright it's a bit silly to waste money on that when a few other things could do with being done. Stupid money.

And speaking of which, it looks like we may actually have it some time next week. Provisional completion date is Monday but it's unlikely to happen - more likely to be a day or two after, but I'm reserving judgement until I get a confirmed date! I've heard that line one too many times already.

Art Competition?

Posted: 18-07-2007 10:21:14
I'm no good at art. I could get Manda to do it, but that would probably be cheating. Stupid rules...

Also, I'm not sure where all Manda's art materials are being as we're in house-limbo. They could be fun to find.

Houses

Posted: 13-07-2007 16:55:00
I wonder when I'll get my house.

But on to the main point, my sister got the keys to her own house today. I haven't seen it yet, but Manda and I are head there on Sunday after going to derby for a beer festival tomorrow night. Apparently it's not just your average beer festival - there are live (tribute) bands and everything. I guess I'll let you know how it went on Monday, if I remember.

TTMUICU - 8

Posted: 12-07-2007 11:52:59
'Lollipop people' at a pedestrian crossing

Since moving in with Manda's family I've been getting a lift to the station every morning through Bournville at about 8.55. But also, the other day, in Longbridge area (I think) I saw the same sight. School crossing patrol officers (to give them their correct name) are generally good. When you have lots of kids and a busy road they're excellent to stop the traffic, teach kids about road safety, and all the other things that make lollipop people great. When you have a pedestrian crossing, complete with traffic lights they're a little redundant. I really hope it's not my Council Tax that's paying their wages. Along this particular stretch of road, there are two crossings and two crossing patrol officers within about 40 yards, just to make it even more stupid.
I guess they originally had some use, and when the traffic lights were put in, someone couldn't bear to let them go, so they're still there, telling cars to wait at a red light, and thanking them for doing so. The really annoying thing is that they press the button for people to cross, and then as soon as the lights are on green again they press the button straight away. Luckily, traffic lights are clever and don't stop straight away, but these people are rather annoying indeed. Oh well.

Picture (complete with reflection of the car's mascot, Monkey):












Belated picture

Posted: 05-07-2007 10:00:58
Holiday picture from the top (or near to the top) of Golden Cap. And yes it was a bit of a grey day, at this point it was raining, but at the beginning of the walk it was beautifully sunny.

Forgot all about posting this, oops!

















House situation

Posted: 02-07-2007 12:18:27
Well we moved out of our rented house on Saturday. Unfortunately we don't yet have our actual house, so we're staying at Manda's parents' house. It's nice and they're great but we're itching to have a house of our own. Still, we should be on the property ladder within two weeks, assuming our solicitor isn't lying again. Hmm...

Pink Jeans

Posted: 29-06-2007 10:15:18
Yesterday I washed my jeans with a purple t-shirt and an orange t-shirt. Today my jeans are a pinker hue. And the 'worn' bits on a fold (e.g. pockets, bottoms of the legs) where there are the white threads showing through are rather pink indeed.

It's quite cool.

It's sunny and hot...

Posted: 28-06-2007 09:51:33
...and yes I'm wearing a hat. Get over it.

Ambling...

Posted: 27-06-2007 10:29:16
Today I ambled to work. I usually can't do anything but walk at a reasonably fast speed. I don't really see the point in ambling - if you know where you want to go you should really be going there, and the sooner you get there the sooner you can sit down or be done with whatever needs to be done. Plus walking faster keeps your heart working harder and thus helps it, like power walking, right? Obviously there are exceptions to this rule: walking for fun. If you go on a walk or want to walk along a beach or something, ambling is perfectly fine as you (in a way) don't know where you're going, you don't have a goal as such.

Anyway, so ambling in somewhere like a city centre while on my way to work or shopping annoys me, and I just can't naturally do it. It particularly annoys me when other people do it in my way. People can amble all they want, but if they're blocking my (fast) way, it's quite annoying.

So... I ambled in to work today. I'm not sure why, I just thought I'd try it, and it was alright. At first I had to force myself to take small steps and slow down, but then I kinda got used to it and started ambling naturally. It's still a little annoying though. I could see Baker and Finnemore (a large busines at the top of Newhall Street) getting closer, but it was so slow. Usually I power up that hill, but today it was rather slow.

So that's that.

I'm back!

Posted: 26-06-2007 10:18:38
Actually, I was back yesterday, but you know me...

So yeah, my holiday was very nice. It was a very welcome break, although we should have gone for two weeks. Obviously, much fossil hunting was done, although not a great amount was achieved. We found lots of small ammonites, but no nice big ones. And we only really got the ones made of iron pyrite, rather than the proper fossils in the rocks, but still, the iron pyrite ones are pretty good. I'll clean some of mine up and try to remember to get some photos.

On Thursday we went for a walk, and this was the only day it really rained particularly annoyingly (yeah, the day we were a couple of miles from the car with lots of hills in the way) so we were pretty lucky. We even had baking sun at times! The walk was over Golden Cap, supposedly the highest point on the south coast, although at 191 metres, I'm not sure how much I believe that. Maybe 191 metres is a lot, but it doesn't sound a lot. Also, wher we were up there it didn't look a particularly high place, looking down at the sea. Oh well, it was still cool and it was a great walk before the rain came. Luckily the rain only came in after we started walking towards the nearby town of Seatown from Golden cap, so the majority of the walk (towards Golden Cap) was particularly enjoyable, In fact I was too hot at times.

Anyway, I've said rather a lot so far, and a lot of it is waffling, so I'll go now.

Holiday!

Posted: 15-06-2007 16:36:58
Celebrate! If it's sunny, that is. That's right, I'm going on holiday tomorrow to Charmouth, and I won't be back until next Saturday, so I'll see you all when I get back.

From the looks of the past few days it will be rainy, but the beginning of this week and the end of last week were rather sunny and hot, so we might luck out. We're taking a disposable barbeque, anyway!

We plan to get up to some serious fossil hunting (how can you not?) and maybe some fish and chips on a harbour somewhere. Unfortunately, Manda's car failed its MOT the other day so we can't travel as planned, but it's not too bad. Just means there'll be four of us in one car instead of two in a car and two on a motorbike.

Silent night

Posted: 14-06-2007 16:00:50
I think the students have died.

Hurrah!


(Only joking, but they didn't wake me up last night, which was nice...)

Students (reprise)

Posted: 13-06-2007 10:12:52
AAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!

Seriously, I never wake up in the middle of the night because of noise... But last night (and the night before) they were just too noisy. Last night, at about 3.10, they were just outside in the street wailing and shouting at each other. I have no idea why, but I assume (and hope!) alcohol was involved. I think I heard someone go out and tell them to shut up (but nicely, complete with guilt-tripping 'how would you feel...?') although I'm not too sure, but either way they went inside. Then they continued to shout at each other, making silly wailing noises and just weird sounds with intermittent 'quiet' patches of loud talking. Oh, and the occasional banging around and hitting radiators. This lasted until about 3.40 when they seemed to go off to their separate rooms, turning the landing light switch off as they went. Then about five to ten minutes later, and for the next 15 minutes there was occasional turning of the light on, talking, walking about and screaming at each other again.

I was not impressed. I'm tempted to lodge a complaint with the council, but I guess I should talk to them first. But then again, I'm away next week and we're out of the area by June 30th, so there's not much point.

Students

Posted: 12-06-2007 13:07:01
Students are annoying. Our next-door neighbours are particularly annoying students. The other side is a nice family, although they seem to have a painted disabled parking spot that thye use all the time and no disabled badge (maybe it's there from months or years ago and it hasn't been removed, but it's common knowledge (but not to us) that it can be used). Anyway, back to the students: they're always making noises, and generally we don't care too much. It's not loud enough through the walls to make a particular disruption, although they do do it a lot, which gets annoying. Anyway, beside the not-so-annoying house noises they make, they regularly have parties, with drunk people out on the street being loud and annoying - and this is much worse. One day a guy was just banging on their door for ages, and we eventually heard him on the phone (presumably to people that live in the house with him) saying that he'd lost his keys and that they should come back (again, presumably from their night out) to let him in. He then proceeded to carry on banging on the door, and this was probably at about 1 - 2 in the morning...
Last night we got woken up by drunk loud people at about 3.45 am, which was also rather annoying. And they must have been particularly loud, as I usually don't wake up in the middle of the night.

Still, soon we'll be living far, far away from students. With a dog on either side. Uh-oh...

Going out

Posted: 08-06-2007 12:56:43
I'm going to Resurrection tonight at Subway City, and Matt'll be DJing. We're going because some of Manda's friends have now officially finished at uni (she finished a week or two ago) so it's a going-out-for-that kinda thing. Still, it should be fun, although I'm not drinking so maybe not. And I have no idea whether I'll actually like the music, although I hear they still have a rocky room on the non-rocky day, so I could always retreat there. In fact, I bet it's where we're all going to go anyway - but this time I'll go and check Matt out.

And no, I haven't forgotten about TTMUICU, I just can't think of annoying, pointless things off the top of my head very easily. As they come to me I'll try to remember to blog them, although one did just that the other day and I've forgotten it.

The new Olympics 2012 logo is rubbish

Posted: 05-06-2007 14:43:13
I mean, how can they justify spending 400k on ANY logo, let alone that pile of rubbish? I can barely see spending a few thousand on a logo, I mean all you need is a good graphic designer for a few days, don't you? Obviously not, I don't know, I suppose that's why I'm not a manager of anything.

Matt's clevercherry.com logo is cool though... We should use it on the front page when the Olympics are being held. Although that is five years away. I also quite liked the fun that the Metro had with the logo.

Trapped In The Closet Goodness

Posted: 31-05-2007 10:16:46
I haven't watched it all, just little bits that mark showed us, I'll watch the full thing tonight, but it looks amazing. I particularly like the incredibly detailed narrative.

TTMUICU - 9

Posted: 30-05-2007 10:39:48
'Push' doors with a handle

Why? Just why?
Anyway, apparently these doors are called Norman Doors after Don Norman who wrote a book on design and he (possibly) makes specific reference to these types of doors. I finally found an image on page nine of Google Image Search (poor show Google... or me for using a bad search term "push door handle") and the image happens to be linked in another person's blog post about the same. And the image, hosted at Flickr, was described by the submitter as a Norman door, so I guess the nested linking can continue with me. Obviously I'm not the only one who hates these things, anyway.

A Norman door





































Top Ten Most Useless Inventions in Common Usage - 10

Posted: 29-05-2007 11:53:20
In no particular order, and only mentioning one of the list as I haven't thought of the rest yet (I'll do it in parts...):

Burglary Alarms - car and house

I have no idea why people still use these. Well I guess they're some weird form of deterrent, but they're about 1% useful and 99% pointless and annoying. In fact they're pointless because they're annoying; they go off and no-one cares. If you hear a car or house alarm you simply ignore it and get annoyed at the ongoing siren sound. No-one goes to investigate, and most people don't even bother looking to see what's happening any more, just thinking "oh, that alarm's going off again, stupid wind" or whatever. Where I live we regularly get car and house alarms going off, and where we lived a month ago the playground-up-the-road's alarm was regularly (well about three or four times) set off on a Friday and we had to endure it until they came and turned it off on Monday morning. I know I'm part of the problem, in a way, in that I should either do something like investigate an alarm event or call someone to turn the damn thing off, but I guess if I started doing that I'd never rest - they're always going off! I dunno, it's just weird why people use them, because I bet the majority of the time, when an alarm goes off it'll be by accident - especially car alarms.


Well that's it for today's instalment of Top Ten Most Useless Inventions in Common Usage. Tune in another day for number 9!

I wonder if I can actually think of ten of these things...

Flies

Posted: 25-05-2007 16:21:35
Mosquitos also like me too, although usually not my face, although I have had a few annoying ones before. I once had a mosquito bite on my eyelid. That was not good.

Manda's cousin has his 18th birthday tomorrow (or at least the party...) so we're going to that tomorrow night. And Sunday I think is a free day, which will be extremely nice. Ever since I started working I don't get any time, as all the things that were dotted around the week now take up the weekend. It's not good. The bank holiday will be nice, though. So free days on Sunday and Monday. Yum!

4 Days Late...r

Posted: 24-05-2007 11:33:35
We went to see 28 Weeks Later on Sunday. It was pretty good. Because I left it so late, I can't really remember it enough to give much of a review, but I remember it being pretty good, although a lot of moments I saw coming. It had some really good parts, but I can't really say much about them without spoiling it a bit, so I'll say no more.

Last night we went to see "The Witches Of Eastwick" at the Crescent Theatre. It was quite good, although as I tend to find with amateur drama, the accents could really do with being American or English. There were some people putting on a good American accent but some were pretty bad, in fact just English. It just sounded weird. And some of the peoples' singing was a bit shaky, although the three main characters were generally good.
All in all, it was a good night out, but you could tell it was amateur dramatics. Not that there's necessarily anything particularly wrong with that.

Madeleine McCann

Posted: 21-05-2007 17:41:39
Why is she such huge news?

Don't get me wrong, it's most definitely a tragedy and it's not like I don't care or anything. I'm just somewhat perplexed that it's (inter?)national news, and such big news. (British) people are taken all the time in the UK and outside of the UK and as far as I know you rarely hear much about it, but Madeline's case has just blown completely up. There are random people donating millions of pounds to help find her, there are tens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people forming campaigns to find her, and it just amazes me. Obviously, I have nothing against all of this - it's a great thing that people are so altruistic - it's just that this doesn't usually happen. I'm probably very, very wrong, but it almost feels like people care more about one little girl and are donating so much money and time for her than they did for the tsunami victims. Like I said, that's probably completely wrong, but I think you might know what I mean.

I dunno, it's just weird. But good.

House Woes

Posted: 20-05-2007 15:15:52
Well over a month in and something has finally started happening. Apparently our solicitor has now "sent a request for a draft contract to the seller's solicitor" so hopefully the ball's properly started rolling now. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we're probably going to get it before our tenancy contract runs out, so we might have to spend a few days (or weeks?) with Manda's parents, who have been kind enough to offer us their house (for living) and garage (for storage) for an indefinite amount of time. The main problem is the double-moving. It'll be a pain to do and could cost an annoyingly unnecessary amount of money. Oh well, I guess there are always problems with moving house, what with having to rely on other people.

Happy Birthday Ed for today (I think)!

Noah

Posted: 16-05-2007 11:36:47
Yesterday it rained. It rained a lot. It reached its peak at about the same time Matt and I left work to walk 15 minutes through town. About a minute in, I'd pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be a little wet by the time I reached the station. What I didn't account for was actual flooding of the roads (and pavement at times). We had to cross a road that was at least 2 inches deep (if not double that, my estimation skills are pretty lame) so that pretty much soaked my feet entirely. And if that wasn't enough, an important bit of paper fell out of my pocket during my trying-not-to-get-my-feet-wet dance across-the-road so I had to chase it down the river - I mean road - thus completely soaking my feet and the first few inches of my jeans. This may well have actually been a good thing, though, as, now my feet were soaked, I didn't have to do silly walks to avoid getting my feet wet. I just walked normally, and that warm squidgy feeling of waterlogged trainers is actually quite nice when you get used to it.

I'm just glad I managed to borrow an umbrella from work, otherwise it would not have been quite so much fun.

This weekend I will mostly be doing...

Posted: 11-05-2007 17:08:12
...very little. But that's the way I like my weekend.

See you on Monday!

Realistic Human Characters aren't that realistic

Posted: 10-05-2007 13:11:41
This article's a few years old now but hey. It's quite interesting, I never realised it before but it's true. If something's trying to be life-like, we'll always pick up on the flaws, whereas if something's not very life-like we'll fill in the lack-of-humanness gap and believe it more than the life-like version. Well the article will explain it better:

The Undead Zone

News Roundup

Posted: 08-05-2007 10:32:56
A lot happened since my last blog post, so I think I'll follow Richard in a bulleted list:

Bowling

Posted: 04-05-2007 14:51:09
I'm going bowling tonight with Manda and her family. I really like bowling, it's one of the few sports I'm good at, probably because it requires little physical exercise. Other sports/games I like include snooker/pool and darts, so there you go. I haven't actually played darts all that much in my life, and I definitely haven't done it recently, but I do like it, and I'd like to do it more. Matt informs me that the Wellington has a new dart board, so I may be popping in there more often to have a go.

I'm looking forward to Mark's birthday fun on Sunday, but I guess it's best left until Tuesday to talk about that!

My view on public transport

Posted: 02-05-2007 10:11:41
Generally I have good experiences with public transport. I don't get the bus much at all in Birmingham; I think I've only ever got it five or six times in the four years I've been here. I do use the train very regularly, though, especially since I've started working. But back to buses for now, my five-or-six experiences with Birmingham Buses were reasonably pleasant. A driver once lost his way and I had to direct him into town, but other than that I've had not much of a wait, seats to sit on, and no 'IIB's (good term, Ian). And the train's even better. the train I get is regularly on time but, generally, if my train isn't on time it's no big deal as they're every ten minutes for me, so at least one train will be with me within ten minutes. Of course, in four years of train usage there'll be problems, and there have been: they change the schedule around for 'leaf fall' and when it snows they go out-of-whack (although not as much as the buses or even plain old driving!) and track repairs mean that there's a replacement bus service sometimes, but it comes as regularly as the train would and is a moderately pleasant journey into town.

Back in Leicester, going to school every day for seven years, I had very little problem with buses. Come late-November up until Christmas they became more and more packed on the way out of town at the end of the school day, but other than that I generally had good experiences. I regularly wonder to myself why people drive their cars when public transport isn't all too bad. Obviously I'm just one of the lucky ones!

As for prices, they aren't awful, but also not particularly good. A day return on the train is £1.50 for me, whereas the bus is £1.20 (ish) either way, so the train's cheaper for two journeys, but if I'm going into town for a night out and will be getting a taxi home (or walking) the bus is technically cheaper. However, I have a rail pass thingy which is just under £30 per month for me, which comes out at £1.50 per journey if I do twenty days of journeying in a month (and I'll most probably do more) so those times I might want to make that one journey, the train's free, so that's cool.

Hot Spunk!

Posted: 01-05-2007 15:31:49
I went to see Sam's other band, Hot Spunk on Saturday at the Barfly. It was actually quite a good night. The Barfly generally had nice people, the music was alright (and got better as the night went on) and people even seemed to enjoy Hot Spunk. There was one idiot, but there always is one idiot. After Hot Spunk finished the music for the general club night got better than it had been before, and a good time was had. We also decided to walk home, which was good but we ended up going to bed at something like half 4, which is never good. Managed to sleep until half 1 on Sunday too, which is also not too great. Oh well, we don't do it too often!

Hysteria

Posted: 27-04-2007 16:33:45
Last night we went to the theatre to watch a play called Hysteria. It's weird but cool. Out of the three I've been to see recently (Martha... something and a Chinese Elvis, Uncle Vanya and Hysteria) I'd have to say that i prefer Uncle Vanya, with Hysteria coming last. Of course, last does not make it particularly bad, it's just not as good as the others. I'd give it about 6-7/10, with '...Elvis' getting 7-8/10 and 'Uncle Vanya' getting 9-9.5/10. If I knew Russian I'd quite like to see it in Russian. Someone I know has seen it in Russian with subtitles, but I'm not a fan of subtitles - they distract you from what's actually going on, but sometimes a necessary evil.

I have no idea what I'm doing this weekend, but I'm sure my life for the next few weeks is stored on a piece of paper at home somewhere. I know next Saturday I'm doing something, even if I can't remember what it is right now, so maybe I'm doing something this weekend!

Summer's gone

Posted: 24-04-2007 11:41:24
Because people refused to talk about the amazingly gorgeous weather, it decided to cry. That'd be the rain. It's not awful but it's not particularly nice. And I should really throw away my shoes with the holes in the soles.

And Gav, they use planes to get the anything-near-high resolution shots and they don't usually do it themselves. They buy the pictures off of normal aerial photographing companies. But for Australia Day this year they actually told people they'd do a flyover of Sydney and even gave them times the plane would be at certain places. Unfortunately they didn't get the air clearance and missed most places, and by the time they actually did take photos most people had gone home. But there was a lot of stuff with companies going out to advertise themselves, people spelling things out in bodies, and other banners. Very few actually go in though. Oh well...

I have a house!

Posted: 16-04-2007 15:57:04
Put an offer on a house this morning and it's been accepted. I'm too young to be buying a house. I'm scared.

Speaking of houses, we moved into a new house over the weekend. In case I haven't already explained it, what happened was that someone bought the house we were renting. It's a rubbish tip of a house, so he'd quite like to do it up, and he offered to put us up in another of his houses which is much nicer for the same rent. So we moved into there on Saturday. Not all of my stuff is over, yet, as I'm lazy and didn't pack all of my stuff up on Friday night like Manda did, but most of it's there. I actually really like the new house. It's farther from the train station for me, but closer to the university for Matt and Manda (although they don't really need to go much any more). The bed is really nice compared to our old one, so that's all good. And now in two months we'll have to move again - we're just hoping the house goes through in 10ish weeks, as the contract we have runs out at the end of June, so if the house isn't available for then we'll have to move temporarily into Manda's parents' house, and then into the new house. That could be three complete moves in three months.

Not fun.

Weekend plans

Posted: 13-04-2007 16:37:04
This week's gone awfully fast, but it was only three days, I suppose.

As for the weekend, I have lots of possibilities for Saturday night, ranging from going out to Subculture at the Academy with one of Manda's friends, going sky gazing in Coleshill with my telescope and family (my personal preference) and going to some party with Sam. On Sunday we have another house to view, so that should be fun. Oh and on Saturday in the day I'm moving (rented) house (it's complicated!).

So no relaxing. Oh well...

Relaxing weekend...

Posted: 12-04-2007 17:45:35
I wanted a weekend with no plans so I could just do nothing all day. That didn't happen, but it was still nice and relaxing.

I really can't remember some of the days, so I expect that they were spent doing very little. Friday is one of those days.
However, on Thursday I went out with a few workies after work, then went back to Smelly Oak and went out to Sam's second gig in six months in a garage nearby. It was rather cool but I got tired and we left earlyish.

On Saturday Manda and I went to a barbecue at a friend's house, and although there were only four of us for most of it, it was quite good. We ate spuriously-cooked food and drank (rather moderately), and all was well.

Sunday is another one of the I-don't-remember days, but the evening was filled with the usual trip to Manda's parents' house for a nice roast dinner, so that was particularly great, as per usual.

On Monday we went to a carvery for another roast dinner (you just can't get enough) for Manda's dad's birthday and relaxed and watched The Meaning Of Life in the evening.

Tuesday was probably the busiest day. We went to view a house, then saw a mortgage advisor (I hate the word adviser, even if it does make more sense (advise +[e]r)). After being kept talking to the mortgage advisor for at least two hours (we thought it'd be about 1 hour max) we then had to rush out to my auntie's house in Coleshill, as it was also her birthday on Sunday. We stayed there for a curry and general merriment and came back, rather tired, and went pretty much straight to bed.

And Wednesday I came back to work. You really didn't need to know all that.

Stuff this week...

Posted: 05-04-2007 11:06:05
I went to Sam's show on Monday, and it was pretty cool. It's not really my kind of music - a bit too shouty and not enough singy - but it was pretty cool. Easy to move to (whether it be head-bobbing, foot tapping or full-on moshing!) and I even liked the songs generally. And there were melodic moments in the clamour of noise being propelled at my face, which is always a good thing :)
The band that were on after Blakfish - Enjoy Destroy - were more my kinda thing. There was more singing, although they too were loud. I think I preferred the general performance (including songs as well as stage performance) of Blakfish, but the music was more to my taste with Enjoy Destroy. We didn't stay for the third band (yes, the headline act), so I can't really comment there.

As for other stuff this week... On Tuesday, Ian decided to be a very nice guy as gave us the following Tuesday off, so today is Friday and we have a whole five days off! So it's back to work on Tuesday all sorts of refreshed, awaiting the new challenge.

That's the plan, at least..