January Summary

Well after the tremendous start to the year this blog seemed to fall down dead. Part of the reason is I have been very busy the other part is I am just that lazy. Regardless I will attempt to quickly sum up what has been keeping me busy this month.
On the 4th I managed to drag myself out of bed and headed out for my pre-planned birthday drinking at The Roxy in town. Always had fun in the past and despite feeling tired and having not eaten properly after getting some kind of random illness I had a great time. Loads of people turned up but I ended up making my way home a little earlier than planned since I was just so tired. Thanks to everyone who made it.
I spent the next few days recovering from my illnes and even took a day off work to try and get myself 100% better before starting the next lot of shifts.
I got a date for my interview for the job I wanted to move into at work, it was on the 16th so I spent a lot of the time before then trying to get in a bit of Linux studying, fiddling with a spare computer at work and downloading the latest Fedora operating system, and starting to read a giant book. Probably not very interesting to a lot of you out there but I was enjoying learning something new after such a long period of basically going through the motions.
The 16th happened to also be D's birthday but since it was a work night she didn't plan a big night out, I treated to her at a meal at a restaurant she chose, Cafe Pacifico in Covent Garden.
Very nice restaurant tucked away down a little side street, with a variety of Mexican food, it was very busy when we arrived and with a recommendation from the waitress we set ourselves up with a pitcher of the fruit margheritas, very tasty and went very well with the food. I'll have to try the fajitas next time I visit they always look so appealing when brought out sizzling on those little black skillets.
The interview I thought had gone ok, even though it was an internal application I was still very nervous in the first part, and my technical knowledge of networking was no-where near good enough probably because I'll normally plug everything together and only look deeper at the networking if it doesn't work as expected. The second part was a little troubleshooting exercise and although I managed to diagnose the problem in the end I went through all possible problems first rather than asking when it last worked and what had changed since then. The rest of that part of the interview really just felt like a chat which is quite a good sign.
On the 19th when I had finished my next set of shifts I went out with D and met up with some of her friends, we had drinks at the Porterhouse in Covent Garden and then took taxis to Cosmo Bar up near Farringdon. The Porterhouse was very busy and mainly a lot of walkways which somehow worked as there were plenty of small alcoves for friends to group in. Cosmo Bar was also a lot of fun, there was a smallish seating area overlooking a small square dancefloor almost adjacent to a bar, basically everything seemed to fit into such a small space and still work incredibly well, I only realised there was a whole additional club area downstairs near the end of the night.
The next time I was back in work I found out I had not gotten the job, citing that I seemed nervous in the interview and to brush up on my Networking knowledge. Taking that on board I spent the next few days learning about subnetting which was the nature of the quiz in the first interview. At the end of that lot of shifts I popped home to see my family who hadn't seen me since before my birthday and I was able to claim Half Life 2 : The Orange Box as my birthday present from my little sister. Only spent one night there and then back to London got some shopping and made plans with D to watch films and go to the cinema.
Off to see Sweeney Todd any minute now, seen lots of other films and played lots of games during January too but I'll summarise those another time.

Birthday fun

So it was my birthday on the second, I spent the first 8 hours of it at work but at least I had a couple of presents to open. I'm looking forward to getting a chunk of time to sit and play Mass Effect, I had great fun playing both the Knights of the Old Republic games and am hoping for more of the same.

After the fun of opening the presents I managed to stay awake for the remainder of my shift which is pretty good considering almost nothing happened and I had the unenviable joy of working by myself. A short drive home and I was soon fast asleep until the middle of the afternoon and preparing myself to finish my birthday with another night shift working on my own again. Normally I don't mind, its quiet and I'm more than capable of dealing with whatever this job throws at me since I am able to prioritise tasks. Today though I appear to have been struck down with man flu. By that I mean, my face feels hot and my body feels cold and to top it off my throat is sore and I have no cough sweets to hand. Had there been someone else here I'm sure I would have made my way home at least 6 hours ago. That to anyone who knows me is testament to just how ill I feel, I haven't had a day off work ill for a couple of years now. I am sort of proud of that but then since there isn't any monetary benefit for me being healthy I sometimes feel like a bit of a sucker.

On a more upbeat note I haven't got to work again until Monday and have plans to properly celebrate my birthday on Friday at the Roxy. Lots of my friends sent me happy birthday messages and one even pointed out that it was still my birthday where she lives thanks to the time difference across the atlantic. Soon I will go home, drink a couple of litres of sainsbury's smoothie which was on offer the other day for the bargain price of 99p, then sleep all day I am confident that will cure me of what ails me, if not I do have some ice cream that will probably make me at least feel better.

Games wise I finished Assassins Creed on the 31st before the party and have been going back to complete the investigations I missed out and hunt down Templars to assassinate and flags to collect. That'll keep me revisting the game for a little while yet. I have also been enjoying the video/cartoon reviews of Zero Punctuation that I heard about on on of Major Nelson's podcasts. Yes that's right I'm going to link to websites that I visit from time to time, I enjoy them so why shouldn't you.

Happy No Years!

So it's a new year and I decided in my infinite wisdom to create a new blog about things I have been up to and have it in a little more accessible location than my old myspace blog.

For a bit of an introduction I work in IT, enjoy watching films and playing games particularly on the xbox 360 at the moment. I currently live in London, went to Uni in Brighton and my parent's live in Luton.

So to kick things off I spent new years eve at a great friends house party close to my place in London and after a few rounds of the drinking games 21 and the name game we all celebrated the new year and then danced and drank the early hours of the morning away. By 5 in the morning the number of unconcious people was outnumbering the conscious so we all headed home for some much needed rest.

I didn't get up until 6pm and made some bolognese to go with a couple of plates of pasta and shared it with D the girl I have been seeing. I then dropped her home on the way into work. Yep first day of the year and I'm already in work.

I haven't yet decided how regularly I'll be updating this blog, if I can manage a quick update a day then I may do that, but I'll probably just pop on talk about films I have seen, games I have been playing and anything significant going on. On that note its my birthday tomorrow so I'll update with all the exciting things I'm sure will happen between now and this time tomorrow.