Mon, 25 Dec 2006
18:43: Merry Christmas
Merry christmas!
As with a few years ago, if you are offended by this goodwill, good!
Category: /misc
Thu, 16 Feb 2006
13:56: A work friday night
A work friday night
This picture was taken after work last friday (the 10th) — we were giving a colleague a send-off to wish her luck at her job with the Medical lot.
Category: /misc
Sun, 12 Feb 2006
23:02: Glasses
I promised afterglow that I would write fewer geek posts—so here I go.
I managed to lose my last pair of glasses on friday night. I'm currently using an older pair which had a broken arm, with a spare arm stuck on the side as a temporary measure.
I’ve put an order in for a new pair via specsdirectuk.com. This is one of a crop of no-frills, low-overheads on-line glasses retailers.
The site had pretty poor pictures of the glasses frames, but I thought I’d try it anyway as the cheaper ones were only 13.45 GBP (vs. about 80 from specsavers or similar). I had a recent prescription from an Opticians to feed into the site—although I had to measure my “pupillary distance” myself.
Straying back into geek territory for a moment:
I couldn’t actually complete the order without a bit of
messing around. The “Checkout” link was not a conventional
HTML link but a javascript onclick event,
calling the submit() function. This function wasn’t
actually defined—a quick look through the page source shows that
a submitEvent() function was, however. IE must treat
submit() as guess the correct form element for the
page and submit it.
I managed to progress by pasting
javascript:submitEvent() into the address bar.
Category: /misc
Mon, 16 Jan 2006
11:36: Strange week
Last Tuesday I received a letter from my University College informing me that Ollie Streatfield, a friend from University, had died. It turns out that an e-mail was circulating amongst my graduation year with further details, although no-one forwarded it onto me: he committed suicide at the new year.
I received the letter on tuesday night and the funeral was the following thursday, so I only had that night to write out a condolences card for the family.
That made an already stressful week all the more upsetting. The first full week back at work since the holidays and a lot of meetings and work to catch up on. One piece of work was some statistical analysis of a questionnaire. I'm not too good with statistics: Actually, I'm terrible, but at least I am aware and acknowledge this, which puts me a few rungs of the ladder above the average CS graduate.
I also had my second driving test on the friday, which I thankfully passed. This may not seem like a big deal for you non-british, but the british driving test is now insanely hard. It's a two-parter, the first being theory (complete with a virtual-reality style drive-along) and the second being a 40-minute practise test. My girlfriend took about 6 attempts at the test and a close friend is still trying, having taken roughly 6 attempts so far, too.
I did not sleep properly from the tuesday night until the friday night in anticipation. I can hardly believe that I did pass. I thought my driving was significantly worse than during the last test.
Now begins the next chapter of my life, where I don't have to arrange short working days to get home for driving lessons, I'm several hundred quid better off every week, and I can get from place to place without a sickening dependence on friends and family ;)
Category: /misc