Last Sunday in the Motherland

Brilliant weekend, here's a pic. Having a BBQ now, more later, maybe

Big day

Yesterday was...interesting. Work was really good, the web site overhaul I've been working on got the thumbs up from the big boss man, and I'm really happy with it which never happens with web dev stuff I do. Here is a long awaited photo from the office:



I've not mentioned the gym before, but when I got back from Durham I joined, intent on getting 'beach ready'. I got two programs, upper body/abs and lower body/CV/abs. I've gone religiously over the past 5 weeks, and have seen a big improvement in my overall fitness and strength. Recently though it's become obvious that beach readiness takes a little more than 6 weeks and now fatigue and the heat are making my performance fluctuate. It is so frustrating to take a backwards step with the number of reps, or weight I’m working with, so yesterday I packed it in after 45mins and went to sulk in McDonalds with a cheeseburger. I’ll go again on Tuesday hopefully feeling more positive about what I know is a hugely beneficial activity.

I finally got to speak to someone at SFSU about my graduate course, cleared up a lot of misunderstandings and felt thoroughly reassured about the whole event. I phoned Madeline, who was deep into an intense 4 interview day in SF, and shared with her my findings like a proud hunter showing off the days kill. It was then that Madeline put a dampener on my mood by pointing out that there were only two semesters.

An hour of panic ensued as I attempted to confirm how long I would be studying for. It turns out; “on average the course takes 2 years”. My heart sunk. Everything we’d planned had been flipped upside down. I then had to wait for Madeline to finish another interview before breaking the news to her.

She was awesome, as were my parents. There isn’t much we can do, and although it’s a shock, it’s not the end of the world.

I’ve got to go catch my train to Sheffield now, so expect a report of that soon, and perhaps more on my now 2-year-graduate-program! :)

Rishworth Memories: Roy Wong

When I was at boarding school, I was fortunate enough to become very good friends with an international student from Hong Kong called Roy Wong. Life in a boarding community is completely different to regular school, and the bonds you form with the people you live with are unique. Roy and I studied mathematics and further mathematics together, so we spent a considerable amount of time together in and out of school.

Roy and I haven't seen each other in three years; yet speaking to him this evening on MSN, it was just like old times. It brought back so many happy memories of an amazing two years. The photo above is probably the one I cherish most from my time at Rishworth. It was taken in my room in lower sixth just before an evening basketball game. Tom Lawrenson, Ben Lloyd (now of Sale Sharks), Roy and I played regularly, and it provided much needed relief from the serious world of rugby!
The following year, Roy became captain and I became vice captain. Roy has just graduated from Manchester University with an amazing 2:2. His persistence with education in a very foreign country is both humbling and inspiring. Many nights I would go to ask his help with a maths problem and he'd be working incredibly hard on his English which progressed insanely fast, having already completed his maths work.

I love this picture because it sums up every graduation ceremony; the graduate attempting to appear nonchalant and uninterested while proud mum straightens the hood :)

Roy is applying for jobs in both England and Hong Kong at the moment, and I very much hope that he'll be able to visit me next year in San Francisco. I look forward to reminiscing about the glory years :)

Final trousers down and Dedication

This Saturday I’m making my way to Sheffield to celebrate two of my friends’ birthdays, Bean and Henners. It’ll be great to see a lot of people from Durham again, and being my last weekend in the country, it’ll be nice to spend it with friends.

On the birthday theme, Facebook informs me that tomorrow will be the birth anniversary of my good friend Dave Jones. Dave is a proud technophobe, although recently he’s succumbed to the power of facebook, and even announced proudly that he had a Blog.

Joining Facebook was a U-turn of astronomical proportions coinciding with the realisation that post-university life was terrifying, and that any medium through which a link to the glory days could be maintained was good thing. His blog stemmed from the ICT requirements of his teaching course, yet he has no idea what to do with it and has no intention of finding out.

In an attempt to try and re-excite his dormant technological yearnings, today’s post is dedicated to Dave. Happy birthday, see you on Sat!

Boxing Day

Better weather than Christmas day prompted an energetic stroll around Nene Park and Orton Mere to work off some of the BBQ excess :) . Here is a rare shot of the Dalziel family (and Dave).



So it's been another hectic weekend, but very worth while. It's a bit weird to think I'm not going to see Mandy for approx 12 months, but hopefully with her embracing Flickr and even tucking into a little blogging, we'll keep in touch a bit better. I'll be interested to see what they think of Aus. Coincidently, I got hold of my school rugby tour photos this weekend from all the way back in 2002:



I'm quite looking forward to the drive to work tomorrow. I'm trying to broaden mums musical intake and so far we've had the Beatles White Album, Snow Patrol, Norah Jones, Sufjan Stevens, the Divine Comedy and even a little Milltown’s Grace! Tomorrow its Coldplay's debut album Parachutes so that should be a treat for all involved.

Madeline is at the theatre at the moment with her grandma and mom, who celebrated her birthday earlier in the week. I'm going in waves of hating the world for making us live apart for so long and absolute jubilation for the impending reunion in 10 days. I also can't help but think how lucky we are.

Dave starts his new job on Monday, so good luck to him!

Merry Christmas

Today my family and I are celebrating Christmas because Mandy and I will be away in December. It's the first time I have been to Mandy's house and the first time I have met her boyfriend Dave:



My parents bought Mandy a Flickr Pro account for Christmas so that she can put her photos up when she's away over the coming months and beyond. They're off to Morocco soon and then have an amazing month lined up in Australia.
Other presents given and recieved included an external hard disk housing and USB connection (!), lots of lovely framed photos of the family, CD's etc.

Mandy got me a new PSP game called LocoRoco which is close to being the best game I've ever played. It's so original, well designed, beautiful, and unlike any other game I'd usually play. It's amazing how a little yellow blob singing along in Japanese to weird music makes me smile so much. I think life as a little yellow blob would be nice.

Embassy Visit

Yesterday I went to the American Embassy in London to interview for my visa. I got the 5:45am train from Liverpool Lime Street, which arrived promptly in Euston Station at 8:20am. I had Google maps print outs telling me exactly where I needed to go, yet I managed to head in completely the wrong directions, overestimating my natural ability to predict which way was north/south.

After a little de-tour to McDonalds and the BBC building, I eventually found the embassy where I was subjected to various security checks before I could even enter the building. The whole process was really efficient and well managed, which came as a bit of a surprise. I had every piece of documentation you could imagine which paid off as I sailed through both stages of the day before 11:30am.

With a few hours to kill, I strolled back to Euston via Regents Park, which was AMAZING! I'd visited Hyde Park with Madeline earlier in the year, but this was a different class. Photos on Flickr as usual

All in all, a successful day, and pretty soon I should have a visa, and the butterflies will begin to build. 2 WEEKS TODAY!

Words of the day

• Tokenistic: This was used to suggest an image was merely symbolic or perhaps even better, token. 9/10 for creativity
• Matrixes: Having been taught by very sad, picky and lonely mathematicians for 3 years, I can't help but cringe at this. I didn't have the heart to correct the offender who's ignorance spread around the meeting like wild fire as people took on the novel word. I just put this in MS Word, and it didn't highlight it as wrongly spelt. I hope this is not a legitimate American word...

Don't misconstrue these posts as being arrogant or snobby, but they bring a little entertainment to my day. It's reassuring to know that I'm not alone in my spelling, language, grammer mistakes.

A little harder to forgive was a reaction prompted by a request for a preamble to accompany a document I was adding to the intranet. I was cut short, being told to speak English, and to remember that I was no longer at University. Preamble? Really?

Auto Highlighting Navigation

I found this page "Automatically highlight current page in menu via JavaScript" within the Media Division Developers' Blog.

It's pretty clever and has saved me a lot of development time already, but I found a bug in it that can prompt error messages.

The script relies on the tokenising of the URL in the browser window, comparing the final tokens with linked pages within the navigation area of a page. This works really nicely unless the URL is incomplete, for example http://www.mysite.com/folder/. This has no file reference such as "index.htm" to work with and rather than handling this, it stumbles over the JavaScript version of a null pointer error looking for an item in an array with index -1.

The fix I'm using is a conditional statement, which makes sure that everything has been setup as expected, allowing it to bow out gracefully, (i.e. not highlight anything) rather than throwing up errors. Here's the effected function:

function extractPageName(hrefString)
{
 var arr = hrefString.split('.');
 if(arr.length >= 2) {
  arr = arr[arr.length-2].split('/');
  return arr[arr.length-1].toLowerCase();
 } else {
  return "x";
 }
}

Office Snippets

I'm working in a rather nice open plan office over the summer doing web development. It's on the top floor of quite a tall building in Liverpool and it has wonderful views of Liverpool bay and beyond.

I'm enjoying work a great deal and it's great to experience professional web development first hand after so many years as a hobbyist. The highlight so far though, has be snippets of conversations I pick up on whilst beavering away in Dreamweaver. Here are my two favourites from the past 3 weeks:

• I heard a little bit of a lengthy story, which can be summarised as follows: "A girl was watching a thunder storm from her bedroom window when she was struck and died". This was followed by the clarifying statement that "I'm not sure whether she was struck by thunder OR lightning, but it must have been pretty powerful to kill her...”!

• "I’d advocate a giraffe if I had that much land"

Ricky Gervais isn't so smart. He didn't need to script the Office, he could have just filmed 6 days here for an entire series worth of material.

After the Gold Rush?

I've been raving about blogs for ages but haven't got round to starting my own. I'm completely wrapped up in Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace so it was only a matter of time I guess.

I See this serving two purposes:

1. To tie together photos from Flickr with explainations, stories and references
2. To share occassional wonderings and thoughts

It's as simple as that!