Thursday Jun 19, 2008

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Argh, it's been so long! Man I've been busy lately.

So, since last time we spoke, or - "Last time on Narshada... our hero wrestled with a bear, defeated an army of assasins, saved the world from nuclear annihilation, got the girl, roughed up and rehabilitated the bad guy, solved Fermat's last theorm, invented a cure for coldsores and still walked away looking sylish, unruffled and smelling like the grass on the banks of a gently bubbling pasture stream after a light rain..."

Man... - I forgot how good the last blog was! It's going to be tough to top that...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaannd we're back.

So, Pinks and I went to NASS last weekend, (almost mistyped and wrote NASA, which ok, granted might have been more impressive and lead to more high-octane action like the last blog as described above, but listen, this bit gets better.) and for those of you who don't know what NASS is, it's the National Action Sports Show. Basically a weekend festival centred around skateboarding, inline, bmx, motorcross, stunt riding, music... you get the idea.
I got free tickets for us from work and then got a free pair of shorts, (nice brown Krew ones,) because one of my colleagues who was working at our stand took pity on me wearing jeans, as it was a lovely hot, sunny day, despite weather predictions.
We saw lots of cool stuff - a guy who did some incredible wheelie tricks on a Suzuki road bike, 5 motocross jumpers:

Who did everything I've ever seen done on a motox jump - superman's, backflips, the lot - really impressive; some vert ramp stuff (skate, inline & bmx,) skateboard slalom, and we also caught some of the skate competition:
.
I ended up getting some (free) new bushings for my (free) new trucks I'd got the day before. I also have a free deck waiting for me and 3 blank decks that me and Pinklet are going to paint our own graphics on and hang up when we move in together.
There are one or two perks of my job and I take 'em when I can get 'em. smile

We sat and watched the slalom for a bit with an alcoholic beverage each:

And a fun day was had by all.

One night this week I was surprised to hear a meow at my window, and this young furry person:

and I enjoyed the pleasure of each other's company for a while.

Tuesday was my friend E's birthday, so we went out for drinks with S. First time I've seen E in a month or two, so it was nice to catch up. She'd dumped her "perfect on paper" man and managed to pull her boss. I hope that doesn't get complicated as he was really nice and the funniest Frenchman I've ever met and E looked happier than I've seen her for a good long while. smile
We ended up in a little cafe E used to work in, so they gave her/us a big slab of chocolate cake and a shot of raki each on the house and sang happy birthday, or Turkey's version of it anyway:

and after E was finished with it, I got to wear the pretty princess hat:

See my glee!

Wed I met Pinks and iannnnnn for food in Nando's - If you're a veggie or don't mind veggie food, I implore you to try their Portobello mushroom burger with Haloumi, it's excellent.
After food we met former member and still undisputed heavyweight of Bristol, (at what, he won't tell us,) TheDuke and went to the cinema and watched the, "Shhh! Don't mention the first one..." Incredible Hulk.
{Is it ok if I say "Ang Lee"?}
(Get out.)
I'm a big fan of Edward Norton - I'll watch pretty much anything with him in and even enjoyed Death to Smootchie. Overall I enjoyed the film, it was certain more of a visceral thrill ride than the first one,
(What did I say about not mentioning the first one?)
and Ed did his part in playing the tortured Bruce Banner,
{Can't I just say, "Eric Bana"? )
and Liv Tyler was ok too, who I'm not such a fan of. I wasn't keen on the design for the baddie (I won't spoil who or what for those yet to see,) it looked a little over the top for me. Let's just say MacFarlane toys will be doing the figures.
(Seriously, get out. I will set the fucking dogs on you!)
Well worth a watch. As much as I tried to like the first one, because I could see what they were trying to do with it, it never really won my heart.
(Right, that fucking does it!)

{Ok, ok, I'm going! Sheesh!}

Anyway, Pinks and Ian headed back off to Bath and TheDuke and I wandered back for a while chatting before heading in our disentangent vectors. (Disentangent may not actually be a word. Good though innit?) Hope to see both guys again soon.

At work, I've been busy. The first couple of days this week I've spent developing an ASP based website as our intranet. Slight geek out follows, so skip ahead if you're not that bothered about reading my feverish burblings about the back ends of websites. (Ooo-er!)

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

At Uni, part of my course was programming. I'd never done any before, apart from a little HTML. We started on Pascal and I got a taste for the wonder of writing code that made the computer 'do stuff'. Then we moved onto Java and almost all of my interest in programming left me during that unit in a seemingly impotent rage of frustration and futility. Oh god WHY wouldn't it work? Sometimes it would mock you by pointing to a line and saying "the problem is there and it's to do with syntax." You'd look at the line. Nothing. You'd spend half an hour staring at that line of code, going slowly potty before noticing that the line above it didn't have a semi-colon in the right place. Hellish.
Anyway, I've been tasked with creating an intranet site that colleagues can log jobs with me on, instead of just walking up to my desk and talking at me.
I started doing some reading on XML, which is interesting and may come into use in a later phase and then I downloaded some ASP script from a site that pupported that it would email you from an HTML form and would work if you only changed the email addresses in it. Sadly it didn't but I think the problem lies with our network setup, (which to get into here would be too geeky even for me,) not their script.
I started to look at the code and try to adjust it, and ended up reverse-engineering it to the point where I started to get a feel for VBScript, which ASP is written in.
By the end of the next day, with the help of an ASP primer/tutorial on one of the first sites that popped up on a google search, I had a basic site which used HTML for the form, CSS for the style sheet and ASP to take data from the form, with error checking so if someone forgets to fill in a section or click a radio button, it lets them know and does not continue until they have done so. Once they have, it thanks them and tells them the task has been logged and gives the current date and time.
Ok, so it's a long way from done - the data from the form doesn't go anywhere yet and I'm not sure I'll be able to get it to email me, so I may have to look at parsing it into XML and then saving an XML file that I can then open in Excel or something.
Anyway, I'm proud of what I've achieved so far. XML is a doddle by the looks of things and ASP is not nearly as hard as I thought it would be and actually makes sense, for the most part. (I did have one, "Oh what the fuck?" episode with it - one section of the form would NOT work with the error checking, even if I copied and pasted a similar part and renamed the variables, until I realised that I had named a variable with a reserved word. Doh.) It got me thinking about careers and maybe looking at trying to get a more web-design based role maybe.


</geekout>
If you read all that and you're not computer-techy then fair play to you. I get excited about this stuff because I'm a geek but I realise to most people, that stuff is as dull as fucking dishwater. (First person to make a joke about fucking dishwater gets a free drumroll!)

Tomorrow Pinks is coming over and we're going out to meet for a drink with the lovely
Nikhita, who is back briefly from Espanol. Yays! biggrin

She knows I can't resist her when she goes all black and white and sultry...

Drives me to distraction I tells ya.

VIEW 6 of 6 COMMENTS
ortus:
Good to hear good things. smile

Sounds like you're making progress with the website. Web design is always something that has interested me too. And people do teach themselves it and go on to make lots of money through it.

Say hi to Jenn for me, and a tip of the cap to TheDuke when you see him next. I love that guy. I'm always wasted when I see him, but I still love him. wink
vindice:
What do you mean, "even" enjoyed Death to Smoochie??

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