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One of my colleagues (Tracy) is leaving for South Africa shortly, so some of us went out on Thursday for ‘a farewell drink’ (although she’s not quite gone yet). My memory is somewhat hazy, so I’ve partially reconstructed the night with some help from some photos that probably shouldn’t ever be made public…

17:00 – Stop work
17:05 – Leave work
17:25 – Arrive 06 St. Chad’s Place (which is quite nice actually – but busy)
17:55 – The first 2 bottles of wine have gone
18:30 – My legs refuse to take me on a straight-line path to the loo.
18:45 – Food arrives (well, 4 bags of crisps).
??:?? – (lots of photos, no idea what happened)
20:45 – More food (2 massive bowls of chips, which are polished off in about 5 mins)
21:20 – Left St Chad’s, and moved on to the Big Chill. I remember having trouble walking the short distance between them.
21:30 – Decided I’d better start drinking a bit less, or I’d never make it home. Had a coke, and watched some drunken dancing by my colleagues.
21:50 – Started drinking again (onto Vodka and Coke)
22:10 – More dancing (including me this time)
??:?? – (I know we stopped dancing, and sat down for a bit. Then we started dancing again)
23:30 – Started on my way home (cos I don’t live in London like some people…)
01:30 – Got home.
01:45 – Went to bed.

06:45 – My alarm went off…
07:45 – Pondered the ethics of vomiting on a packed commuter train. Decided it would just be plain rude. Also shameful and embarrassing.
08:05 – Came out of Liverpool St. toilets feeling much better.

From what I can remember, it was an excellent night out. But ugh.

(paraphrased)

This is a security announcement. For security reasons, flash photography is forbidden on the station. If you wish to take photographs, you may do so with flash turned off.

Wonders who/what/why/how brought inspired that announcement

Thursday night, whilst waiting for the trains to restore themselves to semi-normality, I went to the official opening of the Jester Bar (their bar-within-a-bar) at The Cross Kings with a few people from work. To celebrate the occasion (and bring in the customers!), they had free food and free entertainment.

They didn’t just have typical pub entertainment either. They had some very impressive magicians. And a creepy vampire guy, who when he wasn’t on his perch (often upside-down), played stalker. He was quite impressive actually.

Everyone else who went considers it a brilliant night out. I happen to agree with them completely.

Photo highlights

Creepy vampire guy having a rest
Levitating a cigarette
Bloke wondering what the hell kind of pub he just walked into
Creepy vampire guy scaring Bridget for the umpteenth time
Bridget and Tracy demonstrating what they like to do to random guys they meet in bars

I’ve often wanted to one of those people who take pictures of random things that they come across. The problem is that I’ve never had a camera that I’ve been able to accomplish that task with.

March 2004

I bought my first camera (a Nikon Coolpix 4300).

It has always taken fairly decent pictures, but has a couple of really annoying features:

• In ‘auto’ mode, the camera never stops autofocusing. This wouldn’t be so bad, except the autofocus is noisy.
• It’s built like a brick. It’s 52mm (2″) deep – and that’s when switched off and the lens retracted. It’s also quite heavy. It is definately not pocket-sized. By the time I’d have found the camera at the bottom of a bag, I’d have probably missed the opportunity to photograph whatever it was I wanted to in the first place. So unless I was going somewhere I knew I wanted to photograph, my camera stayed at home…

May 2006

I bought my current mobile phone – a Nokia N80.

One of the reasons I chose this phone was the 3-megapixel camera (with flash). However, that plan went down the drain as soon as I started using the camera – it’s shockingly bad. I wasn’t expecting great things from it, but it doesn’t even have an adjustable focus (auto or manual). Combined with a very slow shutter, this means that it’s generally not worth even attempting a photo. Especially when it’s dark (I learnt that lesson the hard way…)

January 2007

I bought a Fujifilm FinePix F31fd.

It’s pocket-sized, it takes high quality pictures and it’s easy to use. I’m impressed.

Comparison

So, having bought a new camera, I wanted to test it out against my existing 2. The results are below (N80, Coolpix 4300, FinePix F31fd). The pictures were all taken at a resolution of 3megapixels (which is the best the N80 can do).

As you can see, the picture from my phone isn’t really worth having. And although the Coolpix 4300′s output is perfectly acceptable, the FinePix F31fd has picked up a lot more fine detail (as well as having colours that are pretty much spot-on). So I’m more than happy with my upgrade.

Now to find something interesting to take a photo of!

Went for my annual checkup yesterday.

As usual, they were running late.

As usual, I was told that my teeth are absolutely fine.

As usual, my ten minute appointment was actually over in 2 minutes.

However, this time I was charged £15.50 (last year it was was £5.84). Whilst not quite Beckham-esque, it’s certainly not a bad rate for the dentist. Especially when the NHS will be giving him some money as well (the average rate for ’1 unit of dental activity’ is £24). That’s £20/minute!

The situation

• Take a large voluntary organisation’s online shop
• Add a 20% discount for members of said organisation – provided that they supply valid membership details
• Add a box to the checkout screen that asks for a membership ID
• Add another box to the checkout screen that asks for the name of the entity possessing the membership if it’s not the person placing the order (because memberships are normally in the name of an employer, and not the employee who happens to placing the order).

The Result?

• Approximately 50% of our customers can cope with this
• 50% can’t.
  • Approx 25% manage it after they see a big red error message that explicitly tells them that if the membership isn’t in their own name, that they really ought to be filling in the box marked ‘membership name’ and not leaving it blank.
  • Approx 15% manage it on their 2nd/3rd/4th and in one case 6th attempt.
  • About 5% manage to fill in the name OK, but the membership ID they supply bears absolutely no resemblance to anything correct
  • About 2-3% make a typo that is quickly corrected
  • The rest just give up after a couple of attempts

Why does this worry me?

Several people in the office have looked at the layout/wording on the checkout page, and concluded that there’s nothing wrong with it. However 50% of people trying to purchase something fail miserably at basic reading comphrension. And these are the people that look after young kids whilst their parents are out at work…

I discovered last night at a birthday party that I love Cherry Lambrini¹

¹Yes I know Lambrini is a girl’s drink, but it was free alcohol…

1 x Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
1 x 500Gb Hard Drive

Total Cost (inc. VAT) £23

To say that I’m happy with that would be something of an understatement. Unfortunately I can’t tell you how to get the same deal, because it’s exclusive to myself – my supplier owed me a big favour.

1. Blog more
2. Move out of my parent’s house

That’s it really. I’m not fat, I don’t smoke and I’m not an alcoholic.

Happy New Year!

Sizewell A and Dungeness A were the first two commericial nuclear power stations in the UK, and both will be shut down at the end of today.

Trivia: Several years ago I had a guided tour of the inside of the Sizewell complex (Sizewell has 2 plants – A and B) – including the parts that are normally off limits to the public (i.e. not just the visitor centre). At one point I got to stand pretty much next to one of the reactors inside plant A – I was about 10m away from it. The reactor itself wasn’t very impressive looking – but then it was encased in concrete…

This year, I have spent approx £3520 on train tickets. That’s a lot of money…

To Everyone I Know (both online and/or in the real world),

Have a very Merry Xmas, and a fantastic New Year.

Doug

Q: What has a mouth that doesn’t speak, and a bed but doesn’t sleep?
A: A river

Q: What does an auctioneer need to know?
A: A lot

Q: Who invented fire?
A: A bright spark

Q: Where did we go for our Xmas lunch today?
A: The ever-excellent Cross Kings

Q: How long were we there for?
A: Approx 3.5hrs

Q: How many people went?
A: 13

Q: How much did we spend?
A: Over £400

Q: How?!
A: Not sure of the exact figures, but it was something like £120 on lunch itself, £270 on alcohol and a £40 tip.

Q: Would we do it again?
A: Absolutely

Thursday was my work Xmas party. We hired out an entire pub (Newmarket Arms), and had a fun (albeit cheesy) 6 hours (5pm-11pm). It’s also the first (and last!) time that I’ll find myself at the front of a conga line…

I just don’t see the point – especially this example from Transport for London I was invited to fill in after making a complaint earlier this afternoon.

Do they have targets to meet? What would happen if they failed to meet their quota of 0.5% of complaints being filed by “Disabled transgendered, bisexual Hindu females of White & Black Caribbean origin who are in the age range 52-61″?

Seriously – what would they do if the numbers revealed that a certain ethnic/racial/religious/age group didn’t use the buses as much as other groups? Somehow, I don’t think they’d be introducing a ‘whites only’ (or any other group-only) bus service…

I stubbed my toe this morning when trying to get back into bed after turning off my alarm clock (it’s positioned on the other side of my room from the bed, so that I actually have to wake up to turn it off).

It fuckin’ hurts.

I’ve never been in so much pain – and that includes the 48hr buildup to the time my eardrum burst, and I got blood pouring out my ear. Just putting a sock on my foot made my whole body recoil/shudder due to the pain.

I’ve just come back from a work ‘away day’. We went ice skating at Somerset House (with mulled wine afterward), followed up by 10 pin bowling at Bloomsbury Bowling.

Both parts of the day were enormous fun. I was a little nervous before the ice skating, because I’d never been before, but it turns out that I’m actually fairly good at it. Not good enough to skate backwards or anything, but good enough to get around the rink without falling over¹ or holding on to the handrails.

¹ although I was knocked over twice by kids – at least one of whom I swear was actively targeting me, because he nearly knocked me over again later…I never lost my balance because of my own skating activities

I turned 23 yesterday.

Although I didn’t really celebrate yesterday, I did on Friday with my workmates – a nice pub lunch at the Newmarket, and then drinks after work at the Cross Kings. Hadn’t been in the Cross Kings before, although it did come highly recommended. It looks quite run-down, but has a unique atmosphere – the lighting was a combination of neon + candles, the bar staff were very friendly, the wine list was excellent (according to those who know about such things…), 2 cats, cheap drinks and very comfy sofas. We liked it so much that we’ve decided we’re going to have the departmental Xmas lunch there (I didn’t even know we got a departmental Xmas lunch!).

Other things I learnt – ages of colleagues, details of their primary schools, various other mundane personal details, and that one of my colleagues is a lesbian. That means that I now know a gay bloke, a lesbian and a bisexual bloke. Always nice to know a different type of person.

The last batch of MS security updates, updated the Microsoft XML libraries (MSXML). In fixing whatever security flaw they found, they broke DVDFolks usage of them. Since I’m not even close to being an expert on MSXML (my usage of it was copy/pasted from somewhere several years ago) I’ve fixed DVDFolks by simply not using it anymore.

Internally, DVDFolks constructs the XML to be passed to DVD Profiler as a single long line of text. At the end of processing, this is displayed to the user. Since a single long line of text doesn’t look very nice, DVDFolks used MSXML to prettify the text displayed – e.g.

<a><b><c>foo</c></b></a>  //xml as constructed by DVDFolks

<a>
  <b>
    <c>foo</c>   //xml made pretty for the screen
  </b>
</a>

By disabling MSXML, DVDFolks is left with the single long line – just as effective, just not as pretty.