Depressing

One of the worst things about this detox is when I join the other folks from the office for lunch in the canteen. I go and find a table all by myself (picking up a fork on the way, brushing past everyone with the plates piled high of gorgeous, decadent food) and sit there with my tupperware, waiting for the others to arrive.

Naturally, with the wonderful selection of food at MS, it takes a while, and when they finally appear, trays full of sweet desserts and creamy, rich lunch, I'm almost relieved. Oh, and I always finish first too (no puns please), so have to sit there, staring at their plates as they devour them.

Anyhow, interesting though the above is, that's not the depressing bit. The depressing bit is when I come home, and watch my housemates. Now that I'm no longer cooking for them, they're like lost sheep. Today they were arguing over how to cook Super Noodles.

Nice.

The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project

I recently stumbled across a little something that really made me smile. Nothing like the power of the human spirit and a little sense of community - and it's even better when there's no real point past the sense of achievement and a bit of brightness in the day.


_{Click to enlarge}

The 16th Avenue Tiled Steps Project was a neighbourhood effort by some folks in San Francisco and has led to 163 steps in their area becoming absolutely beautifully tiled with mosaics. Visit their site for some more pictures and the full story.

How to enable spell-checking in Firefox 2.0 or later

I recently noticed that an install of Firefox on a new machine didn't, for some reason, have the spell-checker enabled, which probably led to one or two typos on this blog (sorry!). So, for those of you who haven't worked out how to fix this, or never knew it existed - this simple fix should have you literate in no time.

1. Right click an editable text box (The body of an email you're writing should be good).
2. Choose 'Add dictionaries'
3. Pick your language (they even have Welsh!)

Oh and, don't forget your Firefox addons

--

If you're using Internet Explorer - check out iespell.

Four days of healthy eating down, twenty six to go

I've so far managed to religiously stick to my detox plan, despite the dangers of temptation, and the even more perilous dangers of forgetfulness. I got all the way to sorting through my change in front of a vending machine at work before remembering I couldn't have a Mars bar :(

So, to answer a relatively common question I've been getting, here's what I've been eating to date:

Sunday
Lunch - Porridge, with honey
Dinner - Salad with lemon and lime drizzled
Supper - Banana

Snacks - Nuts, raisins, apple.

Monday
Breakfast - Banana
Lunch - Lettuce wrap (think a healthy fajita) containing; peppers, cucumber, apple, raisin & cashew nuts.
Dinner - Home-made carrot, parsnip & apple soup

Snacks - Nuts, grapes, raisins, banana

Tuesday
Breakfast - Banana
Lunch - Rice salad (Brown rice, raisin, cashew nuts, peppers, apple, lemon), fresh orange juice
Dinner - That soup again

Snacks - Nuts, grapes, raisins, dried apple rings (gorgeous)

Wednesday
Breakfast - Porridge, cooked with pure apple juice instead of water or milk, and with a stick of cinnamon in whilst cooking. Absolutely brilliant.
Lunch - Nuts, grapes, raisins
Dinner - Carrots & peppers roasted in honey, chunks of apple and cucumber

Snacks - Banana, more grapes

Disclaimer

It's come to my attention that there's been a fourth occurrence of someone(s) imitating things I've done whilst drunk (or whilst on the way at least). Now I realise I tagged Forxspresso as a recommendation, but clearly I wasn't being serious. As for the Purple Spinners and alcohole (or if you prefer, alcohole in pictures), I thought I'd made it clear that those should never be reproduced.

Still though, I already know of these four copycat incidents, and there have been no deaths so far, but I really must impress upon you, dear readers, the importance of not doing anything I do, ever.

Right, I now can't be sued for any future deaths - back to Top Gear..

Freebies

One of the great things about working at MS is the amount of promotional material flying around - especially over in DPE, where we work with nothing but the brand new stuff. On an average day I'll get something small, such as a pen or a stack of paper or a keyring or something. One some days however, I get t-shirts or even more bizarre things (Visual Studio 2008 Database Developer Edition tattoos were pretty weird I must say).

Today was probably a bit of a record for goodies though, as I managed to lay my hands on:

• Two copies of Vista Ultimate


• Two copies of Office Ultimate


• Two copies of Windows Live OneCare


• A (very nice) t-shirt


• A thin tin case for 10 cds or so


• A stressball


• 'Golf On The Go'

...all for free! :)



_{You can rake the sand-trap to make it more difficult - how awesome is that?}

Kids need bullying

I've said it before and I'll say it again - this crackdown on bullying in schools has left us with a generation of complete wimps. I recently stumbled across a news story, in which a set of schoolgirls, upon being confronted with a field of cows sparked off a major search & rescue operation.

Scary Cows Spark Schoolgirl Rescue - from Sky News.

In a farcical waste of resources, we learn that the coastguard, police, hospital and ambulance services were all 'scrambled' to help this party of 14-15 year olds after the shocking revelation:

"The children were concerned because they realised they were going to have to walk through a field with cows in it."

After a whole range of people had persuaded them that cows weren't in fact dangerous - our brave girls proceeded to cross the field, but then:

"They got to the other side of the field but were feeling tired and it started to rain so someone from the centre called the coastguards."

Fortunately, there were no fatalies - although there was one very close call:

"None of the girls suffered any injuries, although one girl who complained of feeling cold was taken to hospital to be checked over by medical staff."

Pathetic eh?

Detox

Today I start on a 30 day detox program which may well cause me to embark on a number of small killing sprees as it begins to really dawn on me that I can't eat any of the following:

• Meat


• Fish


• Eggs


• Dairy


• Mushrooms


• Refined sugar


• Salt


• Wheat – bread, pasta, cake etc


• Alcohol


• Caffeine


• Soya


• White rice

I'll be taking a few supplements to help ensure I don't die, but other than that I plan to mostly be living on water, fruit, veg, honey, rye, brown rice and nuts - with a couple of other bits I'm allowed.

I'm sure the temptation to wave doughnuts, pork chops and cans of Coke in my face will be enormous, but rest assured folks - I will have my revenge if and when you do so.

Anyhow, I'll keep you up to date with how I go, and what I manage to actually find to make meals out of, until you're bored of hearing about this. Should be a fun adventure if nothing else - although ideally I'll lose a bit of weight and get rid of all the crap building up from all the fast food and processed junk I've been eating since becoming a student.

Oh and, did I mention I can't have tea, or alcohol? I'm going to go cry in a corner now...

Strange and disturbing games for the Nintendo DS

There have been a few games for the Nintendo DS recently that have made me wonder - who actually buys these?

For example, there are currently no less than four games of the 'I'm a princess and I have a horse' genre, which presumably are aimed at young girls who've already learnt to strive to be upper-middle class, when really they're lower-middle class. A quick game of Pippa Funnell 2 (they made TWO?) and they'll be throwing dinner parties and acting socially aware in no time.

I've also counted at least three 'I wish I was a vet' games, which sounds like a reasonable concept after the success of Trauma Centre. Prime amongst these is Zoo Hospital, which offers the facility to give a panda an enema:


_{This may feel a little cold..}

We've got nothing on the Japanese though, who have some absolutely unbelievable games. When they came out with Brain Training, the westerners went for it - and I've got to say, it's a great set of minigames, if a bit bizarrely presented. I can even see the attraction in Sight Training. But...face training?:



When you thought it couldn't get any worse - there is one further game I'll mention here - Touch Little Girls. That's a YouTube video too, but I won't embed it as YouTube have flagged it as for over 18's only. I only skipped through the video myself, but I'm pretty sure that's not because it's explicit. I really, really hope not anyway.

Drinks in Prague

I don't think I've actually mentioned yet that the reason I was over in Prague was for some 'soft skills' training with work, alongside a bunch of other evangelists from around Europe and Africa. It's great being in a classroom environment with this type of audience, because you get so much interaction and contribution from everyone else - although with everything being in our native tongue, the brits were probably a bit louder, as you'd expect ;)

After a hard day's work, DPE folks are also great at partying. The first night was spent trying to find some 'authentic' Czech bars, and drinking some 'authentic' Czech beer. We eventually found some bars where the majority of people didn't seem to be speaking English, and where herring was on the menu instead of steak and chips, and so we settled down for a few drinks.

Now, we'd already heard of Budweiser (the real stuff) and Pilsner before, so we decided to order the other beer available - which had a name I'll never remember and had no chance of pronouncing. Turned out to be a quite sweet and very, very nice dark beer, and I stuck to drinking this for the first two nights.

On the third day however, I was told by one of the Slovakians on the course that dark beer was traditionally drunk by...Czech women. The big, hairy Czech women, to be more precise. Well, hey - I drink girly drinks back home too, and I'm pretty sure they weren't selling Bacardi and Coke there anyway.

Ah well, very fun times - I don't remember much of the first night, but I do recall catching the end of England's loss to Croatia in that most homely of Czech lodges - 'Fat Boy's Bar' on the third night. I also managed to turn up very hungover and half an hour late to the first morning of training (I thought it started at 9, not 8:30, in my defence), which was pretty much an expectation being the resident student there :)

MIT (Men In Technology)

I get really annoyed when I hear the phrase 'positive discrimination' - because the person using it is generally under the impression that it's a good thing, despite the fact that they've just clearly stated that it is still discrimination. Probably the worst example of this was a manager I once had being told he had to hire 'someone black' - I'm sure you've heard similar stories before.

Something I'm not so sure how to feel about however, is when a set of women take something which is generally unisex, and form a 'girls in' or 'women for' club. Examples of this in my world would be the Girl Geeks or Women In Technology. There are other examples in other areas here, but it's the gender thing that generally gets me - and that's mostly female > male rather than male > female.

I may be being naive here, but in my experience there's no general air of sexism in the techie industry - or any discrimination really, which is one of the reasons I love it. Geeks are logical people, and if one person is better than another at a certain job, then they'll get the gig - regardless of anything else. The internet's brought a lot of dubious contributions to society, but one can't argue that it's helped us to judge people a lot more on personality rather than physical attributes.

As such, when I hear a group who recommend companies with, and lobby companies for an "open and explicit commitment to inclusive recruitment policies" I get quite annoyed. What's an 'inclusive recruitment policy' anyway? In my mind, that means that they'll actively try and recruit from both genders/all races/a range of ages/etc. An 'exclusive recuirtment policy' would likewise indicate some degree of discrimination too - only a recruitment policy which doesn't mention this issue can be truly open to all.

For a bit of lighthearted humour, and to make this point in a friendly (if not so subtle) way, I've recently redecorated some of the Women In Technology stickers that were lying about the office, and even put one up near my desk :)

Airport Security

For this wonderful trip to Prague I had the pleasure of flying out of Gatwick airport - home to a hilarious web of bureaucracy and security. I'm sure no-one wants to hear me complain about all of that fun (and to be honest, if you can read English and have common sense, it's not that much of a hassle), but here's a couple of amusing observations/anecdotes:

1. The 100ml rule
The 100ml rule states that no liquids may be taken on a plane unless they're inside a sealed container with a capacity of not more than 100mls. This container must then be inside a sealed, transparent bag, which must have a maximum volume of 1 litre.

Now then, I'm firstly quite bemused by this. Why restrict me to 100ml bottles if I can happily take a full litre of explosive substance onto the plane, presuming I bother to go and get 10 separate containers.

Secondly, given that I can take on pretty much any solid I want, including one which could say, melt at room temperature during the hour I'm waiting for the plane after I'm past security, why are they being so fanatic about liquids?


_{For the chavs amongst you, that's the same as 4 shots of White Lightning}

Thirdly, what happens to all of the confiscated liquid? Well, I can tell you that from what I saw, two things happen.

At the point of confiscation, it's thrown into a large dustbin-type container. Yes, you heard, hundreds of litres of almost certainly explosive liquids are thrown together, with little tenderness, into a bin surrounded by potential passengers and customs officials.

After this, the materials are then 'disposed of' (from what I hear, crushed - applying high pressure to explosives is always a great idea), except the ones that are used around the airport to demonstrate the dangers of not following the 100ml rule. Yup, they put loads of potentially explosive substances in nice glass stands all around strategic points at the airport. Nice.

Finally, this amused me:
Vatican Air passengers have Holy Water confiscated

2. Shoes
It was great fun watching female passengers with fancy high-heels having to strip them off for the 'shoes' part of security. This policy was recently introduced after someone, somewhere, had something bad in his shoes and didn't get caught. Makes it pretty tempting to try getting a bomb through in a bra doesn't it lads?


_{Even airport-friendly shoes need to be taken off. What the hell makes them airport friendly by the way?}

I heard a great story about how this bit was handled in one airport a colleague travelled through - where the shoes were taken by a security official and banged hard against a table to check for explosives. Brilliant.

3. Metal detectors
Over at Gatwick I went through a full-body metal detector, which I'm sure you'd expect. As quite often happens, I made the thing beep, so someone came along with a hand-held thingy and pushed it around me. Once we'd decided that it was probably the buttons on my jeans causing the beep, I was let through.

It wasn't until I got off the plane at the other end that I noticed I'd kept my wallet in my pocket, complete with penknife I'd forgotten to take out. Lucky I'm such an easygoing guy with no particular dislike for any countries eh?

More later, off to get food that won't poison this weekend's visitor now :)
Xx

Back from Prague!

I'll spam regale you with tales aplently later, once I've sifted through the reams of work, email and other stuff that require my attention, but I just thought I'd make it clear that I'm now back, and you can therefore all start making me cups of tea again.

Also, as this post is pretty much worthless as it stands, here's a quote from the Interns discussion alias (quite fun, sometimes) about the Social discussion alias (my favourite, as close readers here will have noticed):

Things that social like –

• Touting only things they see fit


• Spending hours and hours discussing rubbish things


• Having no fun


• Pouncing on innocent members of the Microsoft community and “bullying” them to relieve their own insecurities


• Ian MacGillivray


• Talking about the state of the car park


• Any other tedious subject they can think of

How sweet of them to think of me :)

Flying visit

Not much time for an update I'm afraid - need to go start packing and sort some other stuff out. So, quickly;

Lucie came up this weekend for her birthday present - I took her to Waltham Airfield outside Maidenhead and she flew a plane whilst I sat in the back and re-discovered religion - great fun apparently.

New comic up at http://www.tiedyeheart.com - I can now no longer claim that website contains no lesbians.

Off to Prague for 4 days tomorrow with work. Wish me luck.

Xx

Masterful Advertising

I'm sure we've all had days when we've considered having everyone that works in marketing rounded up into a large pen and shot. On rare other days, such as today however, I might let them off with a light hanging, and then some tea and biscuits. Why this sudden orgy of generosity? Well, sometimes, they really do get it right.

Hopefully you've all by now seen this masterpiece from Cadbury's:



The impressive point here, isn't that it's just a cool advert, and well shot. It isn't that the fact it's so 'out of the box' that everyone remembers that crazy gorilla. It isn't even that this is something that grips the viewer and sometimes draws more attention than the program it interrupted. The really amazing thing about this advert is that everyone I've spoken to doesn't think of it as 'that gorilla ad', but as 'the Dairy Milk ad'. I'm not entirely sure how they've done it, but they've managed to make a really cool advert which everyone still associates with the product.

The viral response to this advert was massive too, with spoofs and clones popping up everywhere. Viral marketing is something I see attempted a lot, but often fails - mostly, I think, because someone actually started a campaign with the idea of making it viral. Just because someone came up with the buzzword 'viral' doesn't mean it's something you can force. The internet is a fickle place that can be swayed by the most obscure things, and that can ignore the most big budget flashy things there are. Just make a great product and advert, and hope for the best - don't try and force some kind of following or set of spoofs.

The second thing I wanted to bring your attention to was a recent Natalie Dee comic, which has probably generated more traffic to her site than anything else - and she's already very popular with tons of great cartoons and t-shirts. It even worked on me, because I'm blogging about it, and giving her some more links:



Just brilliant.

Crayon Physics - for your inner kid

There's plenty of games out there where one can draw a couple of lines on a tablet PC and have the on-screen objects react, towards some kind of goal. Line Rider was a massive fad along these lines, and InkBall's a pretty fun new Windows game in this genre too. However, Chinny recently linked me to this video for Crayon Physics, which looks absolutely awesome - can't wait to get my hands on it.



Up above is 'Crayon Physics Deluxe', but go download Crayon Physics Freeware for now :)

Two new favourites

So, Will recently lent me a bunch of books, in his infinite kindness. I've got to say, that two of them are amongst my favourite books of all time (and yes, I'm including the Guitar Hero manual there).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

A beautiful, funny and most importantly, believable tale of the lives of two young Jews in America, starting with World War II and moving on to the rest of their lives. Unlike many great books of this sort, which focus on the War and its consequences, this book manages to shift the focus over to escapism (of the literal, and metaphorical sorts) and comics, of all things, whilst retaining its very serious air. It's a wonderful story, with characters that'll become close to you than your own family, and superb prose.

We need to talk about Kevin by Lionel Shrivel

Written as a series of letters, from a wife to her estranged husband, the prose has an interesting and very seductive tone right from the start. The common failing of a book, where you feel you're standing on the outside looking in is thrown away, with every word sounding like it's directed straight at you. The story focuses on their interesting son, recently convicted of mass murder in a school shooting - I won't spoil any more than that but I highly, highly recommend you give it a read.

--

So, if you know someone who's into literature, then there's a couple of good Christmas ideas for you. I'm currently reading the hilariously tongue-in-cheek Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh, which I got from a set of 10 books from The Book People for something like £10. Disgracefully cheap and superb quality, with great service. Go to it kids.

Test your English (and help charity)

I recently came across this very tough little game online:

Free Rice

Every time you get an answer right, some rice gets donated to someone who wants rice (I didn't read the specifics). That's lovely and all, but the best part is clearly the 'vocab level' bit which rises slightly every time you get a few hundred right, and crashes back down as soon as you make the slightest mistake, or so it appeared to me.

My top score so far is 44 (I've stopped playing since I fell from that giddy height all the way down to 38) - go see if you can't beat that. A University lecturer friend of a friend apparently got up to 50. Ouch.

I strongly believe that the new Aston University logos are horrible

Not too long ago, it was announced to all students here at Aston University that we have a new 'brand'. Now, the old 'brand' was a very tasteful, simple affair, which worked well and had a bit of class about it:


_{The old logo}

The new logo is rumoured (no idea of the reliability of this) to have cost £60,000 to develop. After the London 2012 fiasco I can readily believe this, but I certainly hope it's not true - given that the new thing is absolutely horrible and looks like it was knocked up in MS Paint in a couple of minutes:


_{The new logo}

Within no time, a Facebook group had sprung up, with the title I've appropriated for this post, I strongly believe that the new Aston University logos are horrible. It's now 650 people strong and still growing - you wouldn't believe that 'students have been thoroughly consulted', as we're told in the communications that came from the University. None of the people in the group have yet mentioned that they've been contacted or consulted, and plenty have explicity said that they haven't...

The group's organising an online petition, and hopefully through that we should be able to get the Students' Guild to put pressure on the new(ish) Vice-Chancellor to get this atrocity removed. So, if you've the time and inclination, go sign the petition, and if you're still up at the Uni, consider putting this wonderful picture up at choice locations (the VC's office door, car windscreen...you get the idea):


_{Kudos to Jason Whyley for this one}

Kappow!

This lunchtime I was treated to one of the most bizarre spectacles I've witnessed in the atrium of Building 2 at work, and that's saying something. The entire centre of the atrium had been cleared, for Team GB's Karate 'arm' to demonstrate some of their skills to us.

These guys were really impressive, and the shouts that accompanied some of the kicks and punches must have scared the hell out of some of the folks working upstairs in Building 2 who hadn't noticed the signs that this thing was going to take place.

This on it's own would have been pretty cool, but it was actually in aid of Get Safe Online Week, and as such, some of the poor souls from Team GB had to read out monologues from a script on online safety.

I'm fairly sure it's safe to say that their passion laid with their (superb) martial arts, rather than preventing phishing, so it was rather surreal to hear karate shouts, see a karate demonstration, and have the entire thing overlaid with a less-than-enthusiastic set of helpful tips on staying safe online. And all this when I was just going for lunch...

Scary stat of the day (taken from some brochure which didn't quote its sources, pinch of salt recommended):
24% of folks online use the same password for every single website they visit.

Scarier stat:
100% of folks references in the above statistic were stupid enough to admit this.

Contact Juggling

I was on Wikipedia last night, browsing around things related to M.C. Escher to confirm whether or not he did actually enjoy torturing fish. The answer, by the way, is that he didn't, but a quick Wikipedia edit from myself could quickly change that bit of history. Oh how I love the internet..

Anyhow, I got onto looking at Henderson, Lucas & Bowie's film The Labyrinth, which I've still never gotten around to seeing. Anyone got a copy I can borrow? I learned that during that film, Bowie appears to be 'contact juggling' a lot. Now, I'd never heard of contact juggling, let alone seen it, before then, so naturally I popped along to YouTube.

Wow. Contact juggling is far, far cooler than 'toss juggling', just see:



That being said, a man by the name of Greg Kennedy certainly had a good go at restoring the balance not too long ago with his conical juggling routine:

Wednesday's going to be fun...

My placements tutor, [name edited out], whom you may remember from my rant about him or rant about placements was recently the subject of a couple of Google queries, by some folks who later contacted him.

Well, lo and behold, if my little old blog doesn't come up as the second hit once SafeSearch is turned off (naughty naughty). Two hours passed, and at 4am this morning, he sent an email from his personal email account, cc'ing in two other folks from Aston (the head of placements, and...his boss? Not sure of the relationship there).

In his usual style of poorly placed sarcasm and 'broken English' (if you're reading [name edited out as requested], it wasn't me that coined that description of you) he complained again about my 'professionalism', 'maturity' and 'respect'.

Well now, I was in a bit of a pickle as to how I replied. The mail was from his personal account, so I felt quite justified in letting rip, but then he'd cc'ed in professional colleagues...so perhaps I'd better tone it down.

In the end, after consulting a few folks, I removed the bits deemed 'potentially slanderous' and stuck pretty much to the facts. I've kindly offered to remove his name from the metadata of the First Circle Of Hell (though, I'm not entirely sure I'm obliged to do so) and I've even given the folks at the University a free shot at having the post taken down if there's some University policies it violates (again, I'm not entirely sure I'm obliged to do this, but no harm in playing it safe).

I couldn't resist this little crack though:
"I'm afraid that 'respect' has to be earned. My respect for you dropped much, much lower than it already was once I got phone calls, emails and instant messages in response to that post. Maturity we'll leave up to debate, and I'll let professionalism speak for itself, however anyone wishes to interpret this post, and the below email exchange."

If only I could have put in the rest of what I'd written - but if it's too potentially slanderous to be cc'ed in to two of his colleagues, it certainly doesn't belong on the net. Feel free to pm me though kids :)

To clarify the title - I'm meeting him for my 'placements visit' this Wednesday, which should be a pile of fun. I'll let you know how that turns out.

--

...and to think I thought I was going to be bored this Sunday :)

Worst Guitar Hero Video Ever

So this video was recently brought to my attention after I posted that vid about the 8 year old 5*ing Psychobilly Freakout:


_{Warning: Do not watch unless you have a legally bought copy of this South Park episode. Or don't care about IP laws. You bastards.}

Now I've not personally gotten the 1million award yet, because I can't find anyone good enough to play multiplayer with me on the XBox version. But, when I do, I assure you I will be told I'm not a fag, I will be told that 'I rock'.

And, let's face it, is there anything more life affirming than such a compliment from that most divine entity, Guitar Hero? I think not.

--

By the way: Just beat Dragonforce's 'Through The Burning Storm' on a custom Guitar Hero disk, and had a 4x combo going quite a few times. Still only 3* though :(

Best Guitar Hero Video Yet

My best score so far on this song is a paltry 120k with 4*. This kid's brilliant, I'm pretty sure it's not faked too...

Lottery scratch cards withdrawn due to poor maths skills

From The Manchester Evening News:

Lottery cards withdrawn due to poor maths skills

So it seems that Camelot have had to withdraw some scratch cards from the market because they caused mass confusion, with many people believing they'd won. The aim of the cards was to 'find' (scratch off) a number that was lower than the initial number given to you - there was some penguin theme involved I believe.

Anyhow, you wouldn't believe how dense some people are...or maybe you would. Here goes:

"The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8..."

Work or Lego? Why not both...

Last week, I accepted a meeting request with no real idea of what the meeting was about. I was simply enticed in by the words 'Lego' and 'Free Lunch'. Turns out the whole thing was to help with promotion for the First Lego League, but it turned into a very exciting day.

Can you imagine what happens when you give a roomful of creative & enthusiastic guys (and a couple of girls), who spend all day playing with techie toys a massive bag of Lego? Well, try to think how bad it would get if you then casually throw in the words 'plan' and 'challenge'.

Between us we got a bunch of cool stuff built - including a car, a railway and a space station. I was unfortunately a bit too busy with the free lunch so I ended up with a house to build, which was actually surprisingly fun when I realised the roof came in about a hundred different bits or so.

Great day, great fun, great job. Enjoy my masterpiece:


_{Don't think any of this was easy, even the flowers took 10 steps to assemble each}

One is from Sutton Coldfield, *not* Birmingham

Staying in one place is rather boring, wouldn't you agree? I'm in London at the moment, as I didn't get to go to TechEd in Barcelona, but I still owe you a blog post about the rest of my time in Birmingham before I can move on to what's been happening in Reading.

Just kidding, nothing ever happens in Reading.

So after a Friday night rediscovering the joys of Mah-Jong with the old team (Tim, Terra & Julie-oh) I popped online to make my cryptic post about: Vodka espressos, broken bones, job offers and inappropriate clothing.... I've elaborated on three of those by now, and I'm afraid the last, broken bones, isn't that dramatic to be honest.

Julie-oh had something big fall on her hand whilst at work, and ended up in a bunch of pain. She then (probably) put some eye-make up on her hand to simulate bruising and claimed breakage, in order to get tea brought to her in the morning.

We popped along to A&E in Sutton Coldfield, where I got to see a bunch of the NHS software I've been working on in practical use, which was actually extremely interesting and pretty useful for me. Julie was in and out of the entire place within an hour, with an X-Ray giving her the all-clear. The lesson here is; if you want prompt, efficient and friendly medical service, go to the posh part of town.

I was also quite amused by the fact that she was admitted to the Minor Ailments ward as a non-priority, and even within there had a pink folder, which I presume means less serious than blue folders - carried by those who were bleeding. Other amusement came from the bullying leaflet, which put 'being left out' on a par with 'being attacked because of ethnic origin'.

We also found an open-air market in Sutton which was awesome, and full of great little handmade trinkets. Highly recommended if you can find it again, some of you'll be having your birthday presents coming from there :)

Anyhow, back to this meeting.

Xx

--

Vaguely related picture of the day (I mentioned drama) - Microsoft's internal tools are apparently designed by someone with a bit of a flair for the theatrical. If ever anything goes wrong with this particular tool (in this case, a group wasn't found), you get an amusingly hyperbolic error message:


_{I dread to think what message comes up if a server goes down}

National Graduate Recruitment Exhibition - Birmingham

Thursday night, as I mentioned in my last post, involved a couple of drinks, and a bunch of biro scrawled onto my torso. What I didn't mention, was that I spent the night in an absolutely gorgeous top which Julie-oh had hand made for my in Ghana. Amongst the many lovely features of this top was the fact that it has a fairly wide opening at the top, which makes it wonderfully suitable for a night out in a warm pub, but not so suitable for representing one's company at a fair of this sort.

As I'd slept in a house other than the one my things were stored in, I was forced to turn up to the fair with nothing but the clothes I'd spent the night in, and a slight hangover. This added a nice festive air to the start of the proceedings, until a nice, corporately branded and oversized polo shirt was found instead.

As I usually do at these things, I managed to get 'round pretty much every other company's stall, before and after the busy periods when I had to man the Microsoft one, as resident techie. I met a fair few folks who'd gone to Aston, which was nice, and lots of other interesting guys who did interesting things at interesting companies. I also got lots of lovely freebies, of course (I typo'ed that as 'freebirds' twice, I love GH & LS too much)

One of these guys did some very interesting things indeed, and I got chatting to him about these. Some of it was very hush-hush, but I was intrigued, and noted that it sounded like a very interesting place to work. At this point, the chap gave me his phone number and the offer of a job when my current contract ended. I think it was the hair that impressed him so.

I'm still undecided, but it's very tempting. I also have the card of another fellow who seemed quite interested in me, and also did very interesting things for an interesting business, but I don't think that one constitutes an unconditional offer too. Interesting stuff eh?

Final point of awesome; free beer for all exhibitors at the end - Nice.

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"Vodka espressos, broken bones, job offers and inappropriate clothing..."

Three down, one to go.

Forxspresso - The return to Karaoke

This Thursday I decided to ditch my lovely, young-professional life in Reading and delve back into the seedy underworld of student-dom. Committed to doing this right, I therefore went for the full extreme - the students' guild on a Thursday night, with low quality karaoke and lower quality drinks.

Surprisingly I still knew most of the people there (and those that I didn't, I soon scared off), and unsurprisingly, Snakebite still tastes like ribena, mixed with sugar, mixed with stale water - slightly carbonated. Fortunately, a new drink has been invented, by the legend that is Forx, and named in his honour.

The Forxspresso is a drink of a type most people haven't tried before - a Hot Shot. Here thar be instructions for making your very own (if the well-trained Aston bar staff aren't to hand, for some reason):

1. Pour one shot of vodka into a small glass (half-pints work fine)


2. Pour one piping hot double espresso into a separate cup


3. Add two teaspoons of sugar to the espresso


4. Stir well


5. Add the espresso to the vodka (Do Not Add The Vodka To The Espresso)


6. Stir, thoroughly but promptly


7. Consume, all at once


8. Fall over (vodka)


9. Stand up (sugar)


10. Jump around (espresso)


11. Rinse


12. Wash


13. Repeat

Unfortunately, a few of these makes it rather hard to remember what happened over the course of the night. Fortunately, there aren't many pictures to enlighten me. Here's one though, and I'm still wondering who was drunk enough to lend me their glasses at a point when I was drunk enough that I wouldn't remember them doing so later on:



Also, many thanks to whoever kindly scrawled a large heart, and 'Ina FTW' on my chest at some point. That went down a treat the next day when I was working ;)

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"Vodka espressos, broken bones, job offers and inappropriate clothing..."

One down, three to go.

Birmingham fun

Vodka espressos, broken bones, job offers and inappropriate clothing...

Details to follow, off to hospital now :)

Xx

I love this job (still)

A couple of weeks after starting here, I noted that I love this job and that's still very, very true.

I get to do what I want, when and how I want to do it, so long as it helps to realise the targets of my job/team/department, and see some really interesting stuff along the way. Ever wondered how massive steel structures get built? How countries worldwide manage their healthcare? How a lot of the technology you use every day is really put together? If so, I recommend a job here at Microsoft :)

The latest bit of joy comes from the fact that I've just found out that on the 20th of November I'm off to Prague for a few days of training. Not only is the stuff I learn likely to be much more useful in the 'real world' than anything I've learned at University so far, but it's going to be fab visiting a new country, and in style too - with all expenses paid (of course).

In February, I'm off to Seattle, for either one or two weeks, for Tech Ready, which should be absolutely awesome. Now if you'll excuse me, I can't sit around blogging all day, I've got work to do. Specifically, there's a lego space station that needs some more bits adding to it. Pictures to follow when I get them...