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.