Stu.ie – A boy named Stu

On Saturday I got a lift to London with Gordon and Claire because they were going to see Noel Fielding and I was going to watch the grand prix with JonP, Emma, Rachel, and then JonP’s friends Sam and Stephanie too.

On the Saturday night I met JonP at Oxford Circus and we went to Hamburger + and had burgers and Coke floats. From there we went for a fairly long walk around parts of London. I saw Nelson’s Column, Big Ben, and some stuff like that, and then we walked right under the London Eye and along the south bank of the Thames for a while until we reached the OXO Tower (snigger).

We found a pub there, but it was too busy, so we walked into the city again where we found a bar that was too quiet. I said the next bar would be “juuuust right,” and JonP said “only until the bears get back.”

We reached a third bar on the way to another and decided to go in. It was a Canadian themed bar. JonP got the first round of Sailor Jerry at just over £12 for 2 drinks. We moved away from the bar, and this was when we noticed that there was a stuffed bear in a glass case right beside us. I don’t know how to work out the chances of something like that, but they must be absolutely minuscule!

From there we went to a bar called The Porterhouse and had a couple of pints of Frulli. A man we introduced to Frulli did not like it at all! One of the rounds came to £8.80 and I gave JonP £10 for it. Imagine my surprise when he gave me £8.80 change! The bartender apparently isn’t very good at his job.

After that we went for a walk that took us through Soho at night. A very interesting place, to say the least. One woman asked if I was looking for girls and one man asked if I was looking for anything, and JonP and I agreed that he probably meant pretty much anything.

We took the world’s longest route to the next bar, which was a blues bar. We spent the rest of the night in there drinking Sailor Jerry, listening to a band who sounded like they performed the original recording of the Pulp Fiction theme tune (they actually did play it, as did the following band), and hanging out with a couple from Sleaford named Daryll and Kerry.

We stayed out until 3 and then gradually made our way to a bus stop without any food shops near it, caught the N7 to JonP’s street. I tried to get off the front of the bus, which you’re not supposed to do, but the driver eventually let me off.

When we got in I put my phone on charge and everything else on a table. JonP promptly poured a glass of water over my belongings and then we cleaned it up and went to sleep! It was after 4am by this point.

At 9:30 we woke up so we could get ready to go to Emma’s. JonP’s friend Stephanie arrived before we were quite ready and then we waited for Sam, who had decided to join us.

It was really sunny and quite warm all the way to the tube, which was nice.

The grand prix itself wasn’t super-exciting, but much fun was had at Emma’s house anyway. A short while afterwards I had to get back to the other side of London to meet Gordon and Claire, so we left again.

I travelled most of the length of the Victoria line and then hung around for a little while for Gordon and Claire to arrive. I also gave away my tube ticket, after much effort.

All in all I had a really great weekend, and now I’m moving to London.

I recently bought my first Final Fantasy game since the day FFVIII was released. I’m really enjoying being immersed in that sort of a game/world again.

I can see me spending quite a lot of the near future battling monsters, spending gil, and wondering exactly why Sazh has a chocobo chic in his hair.

I can also see that the immediate future will involve a lot of weekends spent watching the Formula 1 season progress with intense interest. Starting today! Yay!

Tomorrow I will go to London to hang out with JonP and Emma (and possibly Rachel, I’m not sure) and spend Sunday afternoon with my eyes glued to the screen. Yes yes yes! Can’t wait.

I went to York to visit Ania this weekend as a last minute sort of thing. It was a really good weekend.

Most of Saturday afternoon/evening involved being by myself while Ania worked. I decided to go for a York walk to buy a book and maybe get a haircut.

I put a star on the location of Ania’s work on Google Maps and then searched for a local Waterstones. I found the shop straight away with no messing (admittedly it was a straight journey aLong one road). I bought a copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and set off in a random direction.

I found a street that looked like it might have a barber shop on it, and walked along for a while. Towards the end of the street I found that it actually did have 2 hairdressers. They were closed, so I looked at the map on my phone and saw where I was, then sauntered along a different route back to the city centre.

I went for a fairly twisty-turny walk through the city centre and then found my way back to Ania’s workplace. At absolutely no point did I worry that I could get lost, knowing that I had my phone with GPS and Google Maps.

I love smartphones!

I was just reading a BBC News article about the death of presenter Kristian Digby, who I’ve never watched on TV before, or even heard of before he died. I found a sentence that I completely misread because of the grammar.

“The property expert, who was born into a family of property developers, worked on a number of other shows including Double Agents, Living In The Sun, House Swap and Buy It, Sell It, Bank It.”

The problem I had was in the list of shows. Due to the lack of a serial comma I read one of the show names as “House Swap and Buy It” which is obviously not a show once you read the rest of the sentence, but seemed like one at first.

Adding the serial comma would be a nice start, but would still potentially cause confusion in the final item of the list, which contains 2 commas of its own. Normally when one or more list items contain internal punctuation (their own commas, for example) you should separate the items with a semi-colon.

I was going to use point 2b on this page on the Northern Illinois University website as my source, until I read the rest of the page and noticed that they’d written poles instead of polls. That’s not to mention that the top of the page includes the phrase “weak period” which I don’t particularly want to get into.

Instead I point you to Essentials of English Grammar: a practical guide to the mastery of English by L. Sue Baugh.

Now you know.

I was just reading a bit of documentation–the RFC in fact–for SRV records when I had to stop and read the same sentence a couple of extra times because it was so unclear the first time. Here it is:

Name
The domain this RR refers to. The SRV RR is unique in that the name one searches for is not this name; the example near the end shows this clearly.

I did a bit of a search around and I found a site called Debian Help that had this to say on the topic (emphasis mine):

name
Incomprehensible description in RFC 2782. Leaving the entry blank (without a dot) will substitute the current zone root (the $ORIGIN), or you can explicitly add it as in the above _http._tcp.example.com. (with a dot).

Oh well. It seems I don’t need it.

I finally got back to work today after the flu kept me off last week. It was quite nice to be back in the office, actually.

I managed to get quite a bit done on something that had me stumped before I became ill, as well as fixing a couple of new bugs with some Javascript changes. Felt good to make progress.

Hope the rest of the week goes so well.

For the last couple of days I’ve been feeling really ill. It started out on Sunday evening when I was watching a film with Dave and Hayley. I started to shiver pretty constantly. I though I might actually just be feeling the cold, as it is February. An hour or two later it was a lot worse. My face was boiling to the touch but I was still shivering. I was also feeling sick.

I decided sleep was the answer, but ended up being sick first.

Sunday night is one of the worst nights I’ve ever experienced. I woke up at least 10 times during the night. When my alarm went off at 6:30 I also had a sore throat, so I sent an email saying I wouldn’t make it to work.

Throughout the course of the day my knees and hips began to ache a lot. Ibuprofen helped keep that dulled down a bit, and my fever disappeared. I did have a really stiff neck though, at which point people told me to look for a rash thinking of meningitis. Pretty sure I don’t have that though.

Shortly before I fell asleep on the sofa I began the whole feverishness thing of shivering while being boiling to the touch. I managed to drop to sleep, but woke up less than half an hour later with a shout because my right hip was absolutely killing me.

I managed to talk myself into getting up from under the warm blanket so I could get ibuprofen and gargle with Oraldene then go to bed properly.

I woke up in the night completely covered in sweat, which was horrible enough, but also the ibuprofen had worn off and my hips and knees were hurting again.

I sent another email saying I was still unwell and slept until the pain woke me again. Now I’m in bed trying to work up the courage to get up.

Ugh. I hate the last day or so!

My mum called me on the phone at about 11pm tonight. I decided to ignore it and call her back when a show had finished.

Shortly before I called back I prepared for an argument. One happens just about every time we speak. Especially if she’s had a drink.

She answered the phone in a good mood. She called to tell me about a sketch on TV reminding her of when I failed to get a job at McDonalds once. Itold her that it was at KFC, and then she started about how she once applied there when she was desperate for work, but refused to give them a photocopy of her passport.

I said that there was a good reason for having ID of people being hired, and it was just a photocopy. I don’t actually see the reason for it, but I doubt KFC are in the habit of selling photocopies of passports to let illegal immigrants in, as my mum shouted at me.

She then went on to shout about how they’re all drug dealers there because they found a hypodermic needle in the baby changing room once. I tried to point out that that only meant some scummy drug user had been there, but she’d moved on to how all of the NG18 postal code was run by drug dealers, and it wasn’t safe for her to go outside any more.

This is where I gave up trying to talk to her and came to bed.

This whole thing is getting old, fast.

I was altering some code in Vim a little while ago. I had recently undone some warnings because I thought I didn’t need them any more. It turned out that I did. I started typing :redo :redo :redo and the changes were coming back gradually, but it was a pain to type the command each time.

In Vim the ‘.’ key repeats the last action, so I figured it would save me a lot of time to just press that instead. Bad idea! The ‘.’ character will not repeat the :redo command, it will repeat the action that the :redo caused. So if :redo inserted some text then pressing ‘.’ will cause that same section of text to be inserted again.

This is not only a bit annoying, but also causes a divergence from the history meaning you can no longer use :redo to get back to where you were going.

A useful shortcut for redo in Vim is Ctrl-r. I’m slowly becoming less of a Vim n00b.

Now I better get back to typing in all of my warns.

For the last week or so I’ve been chasing around after the bank and my solicitor to try to keep them on their toes so that the mortgage and house can finally be transferred into just my name.

It’s not been particularly stressful so far, just expensive. It’s going to come to somewhere in the region of £600 which doesn’t include the £150 fee that Natwest will add onto the mortgage amount. I’m hoping the whole thing can be sorted in the next week or two. Lizz has had an offer accepted on a new place, so it seems silly that she should still be on pieces of paper linking her to Crown Street. Luckily I believe the mortgage has already been changed, but I don’t know if that counts for anything before I’ve filled out some forms for the new mortgage.

I’d just like to take a moment to say how absolutely brilliant it has been to use Natwest’s free callback service. I put my phone number in, say I want a phone call in so many minutes and they call me. It saves me looking all over the Internet for an outdated 01 or 02 number that I can call from my mobile phone. Thanks Natwest.

So yeah, that’s what I’m doing with my life at the moment. Exciting stuff, huh?