Category Archives: Drink

Alcohol!

The Youth of the Nation

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The modern day youth has gained a reputation of being a menace
youth crime
Growing up in an age of mobile phones, mp3 players, broadband Internet, Internet banking, and DVDs, & information is at your fingertips.
But with this has come the youth that hangs around outside shops with a group of mates at the weekend stereotypically wearing a hoodie and drinking cheap white lightning

The UK government tried to tackle the most problematic youths by introducing ASBOs (Anti Social Behaviour Orders) in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act and has updated this several times since then.
ASBOs don’t necessarily just apply to youths, but largely they have been the ones issued with them. Have they worked? Depends on your point of view. The cynics say they haven’t because those issued with them tend to turn it on it’s head and brag to their mates and the ASBO gains a badge of honour status. And then there are those who have found that ASBO’s have sorted a local problem and are therefore huge fans. It’s hard to guage.

That aside, there have been several other schemes to stop youths loitering and causing trouble such as the sound that only young people can hear that is designed to repel troublemakers. It’s supposed to work on the principle that as we get older we lose the ability to hear higher sound frequencies, and this noise is too high a frequency for adults to hear. You can download the sound and see if you can hear it it’s supposed to sound like a mosquito. According to the report it was a large success at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon.

The theory has again been turned on it’s head with The ringtone that those over 25 can’t hear. My hearing is fairly shoddy anyway because I had surgery on both my ears aged 3 and 10-15 years of loud rock music have taken their toll. I couldn’t hear the mosquito one, but could faintly hear the ringtone – to me it sounds a bit like one of those hearing tests I did when I was at school. See how good your ears are with the mp3 link on the page. Notice that they’ve conveniently missed out the 25-30 age range on the chart though, so they could get a convenient straight line descent with age!

While I was in Boston in September, I was watching a bit of CNN, and they reiterated the story of how the UK has more CCTV cameras than anywhere in the world and supplemented it with a story from Middlesborough. They’ve started a scheme where the camera operators can Speak to the people who they are watching. I don’t know about you, but to me it’s a bit much, and further evidence of the Nanny State that we are increasingly living in. Things like banning Fast Food adverts between children’s programmes don’t do much to change my view on this.

But enough of my side-track, onto the next one which I heard about last week.
New lights make faces and acne shine pink – couldn’t find a bbc story on this so you’ll have to have the trashy tabloid the daily mail as the source!
They did a test of it on radio the other day and they suggested it didn’t work particularly well, but we’ll have to wait and see the results

And of course, a rant about youths wouldn’t be complete without a story about teenage drinking on the rise and the obligatory Child aged nine admitted to hospital unconscious from alcohol. I made a note of this yesterday because it’s going to be shown on tv tomorrow and they’re claiming the figures came from the NHS (so i’m interested in where it came from):

Panorama’s Booze: What Teenagers Need to Know will be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 19 November at 2215 GMT.

So, we’re using technology to tackle the problem, giving special powers to give out ASBOs, and drinking in teenagers is on the rise.
I was no model youth, and was underage drinking when I was a teenager. But I wasn’t being told I was acting antisocially, wasn’t drinking until I was hauled into an ambulance (though I came pretty close while I was at subway city at university). Is it all the teenager’s fault, or should the ASBO go to the parents to sort their child out? I dunno, but it always strikes me that those who get into this sort of mess are given an unfair start which they never make up for. Just my 2¢ worth plus a lot of links to keep you busy

Last Couple of weeks

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I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location

Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch

Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.

Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.

Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there

I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)

And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one

We won the cup at the Tup

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I’ve not been around the interweb much the last few days mostly cos i’ve been busy
One of the things i’ve been up to is winning the pub quiz this weekend at the Marylebone & TUP pub
It was a quality event having never entered this quiz before I didn’t know what to expect, but our team of Me, Rav, Nigel, Camilla and her friend who is a Finnish American sent us straight to the top at this quiz.
There was Nigel’s sports knowledge, Camilla’s literary knowledge, my ludicrously “useless” trivia knowhow, Ravi’s general knowledge and her friend being finnish but half US helpfulness. The whole team came together as “Nigel’s Nob” to win by 1/2 point
Quality night out after the cricket to win this trophy:
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It’s our cup till next sunday – unfortunately nigel has gone back to liverpool, the finnish/american girl will be in spain and I don’t know if camilla will be around so it doesn’t look like we can defend our cup as Nigel’s Nob… but i think we need to show our face with other members to try and defend it, plus it will be good fun

In other news Sri Lanka managed to get a draw in the Cricket Test match against England which was awesome since they weren’t doing well the first two days. It all looked like England would exploit the conditions and take a 1-0 lead in the series. Being half Sri Lankan I was supporting Sri Lanka the whole way and glad they can still make an impact at the next match n Birmingham

Disaster Strikes & Keychain!

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I haven’t been updating my blog recently for various reasons.
Firstly, with my new job I haven’t had as much free time as I had before, there’s been a lot of cricket on (England v India, South Africa v Australia and Sri Lanka v Pakistan all at the same time), and then on Thursday evening a bit of a disaster happened.

I was making a copy of the Greatest Game (see last blog post) for a couple of mates, as Sky Sports had repeated the highlights and i’d recorded it on DVD-R, so with my DVD burner i was able to quickly make copies. I was just testing the disc had copied ok in Frontrow (which had a kind of hacked installation to make it work on my mac) when it got jammed on fast forward. I couldn’t stop it, force quit frontrow, switch applications or anything, leaving me with one choice: Force restart!

9 times out of 10 this would probably have been fine, but this time something went very wrong – instead of the lovely boot panel “Welcome to OSX”, what I got was this at startup:

I left it till Friday before doing anything as I had a far more important “executive meeting” at the pub and thought it should be a simple case of archive and reinstall OSX. However, on friday, i tried booting up from the install DVD and it wouldn’t even do that. My biggest fear… Hardware fault sprang to mind. Out came the toolkit to take things apart and find out where the fault was. To confuse things further, I was able to boot into OS9 and could see the hard drive there – this suggested something else was at work, and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

While taking things apart i narrowed the problem down to the OSX hard drive which for some reason, when it was on the ATA bus it wouldn’t boot into OSX regardless of the startup media. So, i needed to replace it and Saturday morning is the computer fair in Central London. With a wad of cash I went there to fix things up while not causing too much bank balance damage.

It was a successful day, and for £147 I came back with two new hard drives, and a Firewire 400/USB2.0 enclosure
For the internal, I replaced the faulty Maxtor 120Gb with a Seagate Barracuda 120Gb – I wasn’t particularly bothered about the brand
For the external, I purchased a Maxtor 300Gb with 16Mb Cache – this would serve two purposes: 1. To recover what I could off the faulty drive, and 2. To actually be a backup drive

Here’s what the enclosure looks like sat atop my mac (the white box behind with all the Green LEDs is my ethernet switch, and you can see part of my cannon scanner to the left of the picture):
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Apologies for the quality of the photo, I took it with my 1megapixel camera phone and transferred it by bluetooth, as i couldn’t be bothered to get all the cabling out for my proper digital camera!
I think the silver goes quite well (it was also available in black) and at £20 for the enclosure including Firewire and USB cables i thought it was a bargain.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, 2 1/2 days later (copying 100Gb worth of files several times), everything is nearly back to how it was and I recovered all my data. Just need to reinstall a couple of GUI tweaks, Dev tools and reinstall a few add-ons again.

I will decide later on in the week whether to try and fix the old Maxtor hard drive and use it as my second internal hard drive, as currently I have the original 20Gb drive there. The extra 100Gb would be very useful and allow me to free up a fair amount of space on the OSX drive. Plus 120+120=240Gb which is less than the 300Gb external drive, so I would still be able to back it all up.

Just before setting out for the computer fair a package arrived for me in the post from my good friend MacHeadCase
It was a very useful gift, and it is now on my keyring:
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It joins all the other junk I have on there like my Pentium Processor that I drilled a hole in
It’s not just a keyring of a lizard, it’s very cleverly shaped tail and foot act as a bottle opener. Given how much I like beer it will almost certainly be of great use for times at a party when there’s bottled beer about!

Weekend

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Am going to be away for a couple of days till Sunday afternoon to celebrate my birthday which is today
Going out with my mates down to West Sussex – have loaded the car with booze and with a bit of luck should be a good trip

Have spent today pottering around on the internet, and stumbled on a couple of interesting links
The first is a site Apple must be annoyed they didn’t register the domain for:
macosx.com
Looks like quite an interesting site, particularly their HowTo section which has the quick way to sleep your mac and hidden dashboard features

I also stumbled on this homepage for yet another OSX maintenance app called mac help mate. It looks nice but it only works on OS X 10.4.x Tiger and is still in beta testing – haven’t tried it yet

Oh, and those who are more observant may have noticed that I’ve added a weather plugin to the sidebar. For a day or so it was showing the weather for somewhere ridiculous because i hadn’t realised that it draws the location from multiple places

New Year’s Eve

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Happy New Year Everyone!
2006 here we come – hope everyone had a good celebration & all
I quite enjoyed it this year – it had everything that was required – went to a house party with my former uni mates, plus some of their friends
Until midnight it was going surprisingly well with no damage to the house whatsoever – which is pretty impressive for a combined new years and house warming party
It didn’t go badly wrong but it certainly was a bit of a change when the cheapo “Champagne” or more accurately Asti was being drunk shortly followed by the Fireworks….

Ok, I will set the scene, the house is my ex flatmate from uni’s and letting off the fireworks are his two mates from school and himself.
Starts off fairly well, though the fireworks are obviously the extra value cheapo set, but they make a few bangs along with some pretty fountains
But when one of his mates set off a rocket directly from his hand which went flying into the garden of the house two doors down you could tell that something mad was a brewing
He then proceeded to light fireworks while about 3 feet away from one that was going off and lit one and threw it into a corner of the garden
I think about that point most of the group went into the kitchen to watch from the safety of indoors
But, then one of the fireworks had blown a hole in the pots they were using to set them off and the nutter set one off which was pointing in the direction of everyone else and was not well secured. And you guessed it… it was in the pot which had the hole in it!
Firework goes whirling round to shout of it’s coming this way
Those that hadn’t gone inside (like myself) now ran for the kitchen door, which only made it worse as the end of the firework flew out, bounced off the patio, through the kitchen door. All the while it was chucking black smoke and sparks bounced off peoples’ legs (including mine) as we ran further into the kitchen!
Eventually it went out, fortunately causing no injuries and we can only be thankful that the kitchen had a stone floor rather than anything expensive or flammable as it was now covered with firework debris on the floor and up the walls.

I dont think anyone could quite believe what had happened, and on reflection how lucky we all were. A bit of soap and water and the floor and walls were good as new and the last two fireworks were set off by the other two to a muted applause.

After that everyone needed a few more stiff drinks and 2006 had arrived!

The rest of the party went well, apart from the cream carpet getting covered by several red wine stains which just had to happen. Amazingly no breakages, which was very impressive considering the amount of alcohol that was consumed. It all ended at about 3:30 in the morning and we all laughed about it in the morning.

On an unrelated note, i got an interview letter for one of the jobs i applied for, and with a bit of luck i feel confident that i can get the job
I think i’ll be celebrating some more tonight *raises glass* cheers

UK Drinking Laws

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Well, it’s been a week now since the UK drinking regulations have changed
A brief history of the regulations before can be found in Wikipedia’s information on the Defence of the Realm act and it’s page on UK licensing laws
What it boiled down to was that all normal drinking establishments (or pubs) were only allowed to remain open until 11pm Monday-Saturday and until 10:30pm on Sunday
This law did not affected night clubs which have always been able to open till later
Some pubs in the past paid for special licenses in order to open longer

As of last Thursday this all changed and most pubs are now allowed to open longer hours. In fact last Friday i was still down my local at 1:30am

So, how is it a week on since the new laws? For me personally, apart from last Friday i haven’t been down my local late, though it does appear that one place does seem to want to have more gigs, as on Saturday they had a Live Band playing covers.

Perhaps for a few weeks we’ll find people drinking silly hours, but overall it should be good in the long run, as the regulations came from the past for reasons that are no longer relevant and we’ll see the benefits of less restrictive laws.
Of course the newspapers made a huge thing about how there’ll be 24 hour drinking and nobody will be able to cope, but it doesn’t seem like that’s gonna happen now