I’m really enjoying having had a day off on Friday - it seems like I’ve been off for a full weekend, but I’ve still got Sunday tomorrow! Fantastic stuff! Had a pretty good game of Squash with Smiler today but still lost 3-2.
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Published by Mike Nolan on June 13th, 2008 in Rants. No Comments.
The cover of yesterday’s Daily Express featured an article designed to cause panic across the UK by putting the idea that the country is going to run out of petrol into the minds of the Daily Express reading masses. Alongside the PANIC STATIONS headline was a photograph of a Shell petrol station and some cars queueing to fill up.
But as is often the case with the Express, things aren’t always as they seem. The picture is of the Shell garage on the A59 in Maghull. It’s the cheapest garage in Merseyside and is always busy. I’ve seen 10-15 cars queueing up on the road to get petrol, but the Express didn’t show this, because it simply wasn’t that busy. When I drove past on the way home from work today at 8pm there was one car waiting for a free pump.
So Daily Express Editor, if you happen to be reading, how about you publish a front page story saying PANIC OVER. No? Of course not - you’re a bunch of dirty hacks.
If you hate the Daily Express and Mail as much as I do then check out Mail Watch and rant to your heart’s content!
I spent a good proportion of last weekend doing web development - what an exciting life I lead! First up on Friday night I finally managed to get a few moments to knock up a new Advent Calendar. Basically the same symfony-powered site as last year (which is also available for them’s that missed it) but with a new colour scheme and now using the commentable behavior plugin instead of my homebrew effort.
On Saturday I headed up to Waddecar to work on the new West Lancashire Scout County website. Mark Charlton, Pierre and myself did most of the work in a weekend before the summer but life caught up with us and it never got finished. So in 7 hours it was polished off, and that included accidentally running:
$ symfony propel-build-all
Learnt my lesson now
I’m pretty happy with the site for a first release. The top navigation bar is quite neat - a bit of JavaScript created using sfPJSPlugin which can be included on other sites in the West Lancs “network”. Should hopefully build a bit more cohesion between the various sub sites. Options in the back end allow it to be customised with different colour schemes and functionality. Already Network are interested in having some extra buttons to use across Local Scout Network sites.
My already-infrequent blog entries might be a bit less frequent while I’m updating the Advent Calendar but I’m going to try to post occasionally to the Web Services blog.
Met a bunch of cool people and heard about lots of interesting things that they’re doing. Etap Hotel gave me two rooms that hadn’t been cleaned - I must be unlucky as the same thing happened at IWMW.
Published by Mike Nolan on November 16th, 2007 in Rants. 2 Comments.
Surely it’s not just me that is getting really, really pissed off with the adverts for The IT Room that seem to be at the bottom of every single item in many of the feeds I read. Stop it. Now.
We’ve just advertised a web applications developer post at Edge Hill University. Alison has given a good insight into what we’re doing, where we’re going and why you might want to work here on the Web Services blog so go check that out.
Beijing couples intent on stealing a kiss in public are being warned they could be caught on closed-circuit television — and suspected of committing a crime, a state news agency reported Wednesday.
Xinhua News Agency said “intimate acts of lovers may be initially categorized as ‘kidnapping’ or ‘robbery’ by the computers, which are programmed to be sensitive to violations of safe distances.”