A rare opportunity to hear me sing has arisen! I’ll be joining the chorus of BUSOM in their summer concert entitled ‘Never Work with Children or Animals’, featuring songs from popular musicals on the theme of childhood and animal magic.
I’ve helped with BUSOM behind the scenes for some of their main shows like Moby Dick! The Musical and Little Shop of Horrors, but this will be the first time I’ve sung in front of an audience since secondary school – karaoke excepted. I wouldn’t say I’m a great singer (and have some issues with timing that need sorting out pronto) but apparently I can hold some semblance of a tune. At least, enough to be part of the chorus.
The concert is this Thursday, in the Escape Bar, Student Central at the University of Bradford. It starts at 7:30pm and tickets will be available on the door.
I’ve passed the test before, but that was way back in October 2006, when I last had driving lessons. Because I didn’t then pass my practical test, my theory test certificate expired in 2008, meaning I had to take it again.
The test has changed a little bit since last time. Firstly, there are more questions – 50, instead of 35 – and a higher pass mark; you now need to get 43 questions right instead of 30. 5 of these questions form a case study, which was also new compared to last time.
The second part of the test is hazard perception, where you watch several videos and have to identify the hazards that take place. This is to make sure that you’re aware, and would have time to react appropriately in a real situation. This was new when I took it last time – back then, a series of actual video footage was used. Nowadays the videos are mocked up using reasonably realistic CGI – right down to the idiot BMW driver who pulls out in front of you.
I actually didn’t expect to pass. Even though I’d passed it before, in the week running up to it, I heard of two people who had failed it, so I assumed I would too. As it happened, I got 47 questions right out of 50, and scored 58 out of 75 for the hazard perception. To practice and revise, I used the Theory & HPT app from SmartDriving, which was recommended to me by my instructor. It’s up-to-date and comprehensive with hundreds of practice questions, and available on iOS (iPhone and iPad), and on Android. There are many other apps out there that I haven’t tried, but this one seemed to work for me.
Now I just need to pass my practical test. This week’s driving lessons suggested that I’m most of the way there but there are a number of areas that I still need to improve. Hopefully I’ll be able to take the test in the summer, by which time I’ll have had lessons most weeks for around a year.
This morning, I’ll be flying off on my first overseas trip abroad for work. I’ll be visiting various middle eastern countries in order to recruit students for the university where I work.
It will actually be a number of firsts for me. First overseas trip for work. First overseas trip on my own – every time I’ve left the country before, I’ve been with a friend, family member or partner. First time in the middle east. First time that I’ve been away from Christine for more than two nights since we moved in together in November 2010.
It will be a busy week whilst I’m there – this isn’t some overseas jolly; I’ll be working every day without a break and with some overnight air travel. In all I’ll be taking 8 flights over the 8 days, with the longest at around 7 hours.
The countries I’m going to are significantly less liberal than Britain, with a very different culture. I’m hoping to spend part of the long flight over there reading about customs and things to do and not to do whilst out there.
I’ve been making use of TripIt to help with planning my itinerary (which runs to eight pages when printed – told you I’d be busy). I’ll do a full review later but being able to forward confirmation emails to have it build out your plans really helps.
I’m hoping that it’ll be a good experience, and, if it goes well, this will be the first of a number of overseas trips that I’ll get to make for work. I’m excited to go, but also a little daunted at just how much work I’ll have to do whilst there. That being said, my iPad is loaded up with books, magazines and Pocket articles to read as and when I’m stuck without internet access and need something to pass the time.
I’ve got a couple of blog posts queued up to appear whilst I’m gone, but I doubt I’ll have much spare time to post anything new whilst away. I’m hoping that I’ll have plenty to talk about on my return, next Friday. See you then.
It happened the day before he was due to play the role of the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, so working with the same theatre group on Moby Dick this year brought back a lot of the memories from twelve months ago. Indeed, a page in this year’s programme was dedicated to him, appended with a quote from Terry Pratchett about death. It was rather cruelly ironic that Pratchett himself passed away last week as well.
Whilst I’ve lost friends and family before, Dave’s death affected more than any other. Part of it was its sudden nature; he hadn’t been ill, or been recently rushed to hospital. He was alive and well, then, a few minutes later, he wasn’t. The shock of it meant neither myself, Christine, nor our many mutual friends had any time to prepare for it emotionally like you do when someone is ill before they die.
But also, Dave was someone that I saw at least once every week. There are so many things that I used to do on almost daily basis suddenly had to be done without him. So his passing affected not just me, but many others who knew Dave so well.
Tonight, some of us will be having a few drinks to remember Dave, like we have on several occasions over the past twelve months. Because, for someone like Dave, one memorial just isn’t enough. I still miss him so much.
I wear a watch on my right hand – even though I’m right-handed. It’s not a fancy watch – it’s analogue, and as well as telling me the time it also shows the day of the month (although it’s usually wrong). It doesn’t automatically adjust for daylight savings time, or have alarms. It doesn’t even have a stopwatch, which means that I, ironically, have to use my phone as a stopwatch, rather than my watch.
But it’s simple, and in the 3-4 years I’ve had it, the battery has only had to be replaced once after running out of charge. It doesn’t need charging, updating or to be in range of another device.
Yesterday Apple finally announced pricing and a launch date for its new smart watch. Brits can expect to pay £299 for the most basic model, with more expensive models available at prices that make my inner Yorkshireman cry. It can do all sorts of things, like display text messages, make and answer phone calls, manage your calendar, display maps and monitor your fitness, and you can install third-party apps to make it do even more. It’ll even work as a watch and display the time – which is kept up to date from internet time servers.
Which sounds all rather flash. But I won’t be buying one.
Having a smartphone has changed my life – indeed, I’ll soon be facing a week where I’ll have patchy internet access and I’m already trying to work out how I’ll manage. But I don’t think I need yet another device that does the things my iPhone can do.
And the battery life is a concern – it’s estimated to last 18 hours, so I’d need to charge it up every night. A big change from my current watch that needs a new battery every few years.
I’ve yet to be convinced about the need for a smart watch, but I’ll try to retain an open mind. I’m sure Apple will sell millions regardless.
If you’re like me, then this may be the first time you’ve heard of a musical theatre adaptation of Herman Melville’s famous book. The musical version dates from the early 1990s – it had a brief run in London’s West End at the Piccadilly Theatre, but closed after a four month run due to poor reviews. Don’t let that put you off though.
Moby Dick! The Musical is essentially a meta-play – a play within a play. It follows the girls of St Godley’s School – faced with closure, they put on a performance of Moby Dick to raise money to save the school. Whilst the cast is predominantly female, the role of the headmistress/Captain Ahab is usually played by a male actor in drag.
Christine has been working on the show for months now and it’s been great to see it come together. There’s just a few more rehearsals before it opens on Thursday night, with further showings on Friday and Saturday.
You can buy tickets online – they’re £10 each, or £8 for concessions. If you’re local to Bradford, it would be great if you can come along and support the students who have worked so hard to put on this show. I hope I’ll see you there!
Last night, I went along to the opening night of the new Bradford Brewery. Once it’s fully up-and-running, it’ll be the first brewery in Bradford city centre since the last one closed in the 1950s.
Whilst the brewing equipment is still being assembled, the Bradford Brewery’s brewpub, The Brewfactory, opened yesterday. As well as various beers and ales from other local (and not so local) breweries, there is the first of the Bradford Brewery’s own beers available to purchase, called The Origin. It’s an IPA – smooth with a slightly spicy after-taste, although overall I found it a little bland. It’s being brewed at the Baildon Brewery for now until the on-site equipment is up and running, which should be within a couple of weeks.
The brewery is located in a small former factory building on the corner of Westgate and Rawson Road, behind the Oastler Centre, with the pub occupying most of the ground floor. As a factory, moisture meters were built there to measure moisture in wool (to discourage dampening the wool to increase its weight), and its industrial past is reflected in the decor. It’s a bit sparse at the moment, but then the place has only just opened after all.
North Parade
The Bradford Brewery is just around the corner from North Parade, home to Bradford’s independent quarter and an increasing number of bars. I wrote about the Record Café last year, which joined The Sparrow and Al’s Dime Bar on the same street. The Brewhouse is another bar due to open there shortly.
Good quality new bars are always welcome in Bradford and hopefully a sign that the trend for pub closures might be easing, at least in certain areas. The Brewfactory certainly has a great selection, with eight handpulls for cask beer, several more keg pumps and a variety of canned beers. It’s aiming towards the top end of the market – the only mainstream beer available on tap was Amstel with most of the rest coming from independent microbreweries.
Whilst The Brewfactory will be the home of the Bradford Brewery’s beers, the brewery has ambitious plans for production once its equipment is commissioned – with the aim to produce over 10,000 pints per week. So hopefully their beers will be widely available across the region, and maybe even further beyond. And conveniently, they’ve been able to start production (albeit offsite) just in time for next week’s Bradford Beer Festival in Saltaire.
I wish the team behind the Bradford Brewery the best of luck – their plans have been in the pipeline for a long time, and it’s great to see them finally coming to fruition. It was busy when we visited last night and I hope that it remains so.
One of my first projects after moving to the new server was to sort out a SSL certificate. Until now, any secure connections to this site have been using a ‘self-signed’ certificate which brings up big red warnings in most web browsers. Which is fine for me as I know I can ignore the warnings, but not ideal.
Two things were holding me back from getting a certificate in the past: the need to have an extra IP address, and the cost.
Extra IP address
Traditionally, if you want a SSL certificate for a particular domain, that domain would need to have its own, unique IP address. This was something that my host offered, but only by raising a support ticket and having it added manually. On the new BigV platform, I can easily add up to four IP addresses, allocate each to a domain name and set the reverse DNS. More IP addresses are available if needed, but on a request basis – after all, there aren’t many spare IPv4 addresses left.
Cost
I also had it in my head that SSL certificates were expensive – I was expecting at least £10 per month. As I’m saving £6 per month on my new hosting package, I decided to spend some of that saved money on an SSL certificate. Richy recommended Xilo to me via Twitter, and they offer SSL certificates for £16 per year – which is much cheaper than I expected. Xilo are a Comodo re-seller.
Setting up the certificate was really simple – it took me around 10 minutes, following Bytemark’s user manual. It’s been in place for a week now and works fine. I can’t get an Extended Validation (EV) certificate which shows the green bar in web browsers, as I’m not a company – individuals have to go for the more bog standard certificates.
Right now SSL is there as an option if you want to use it, but it isn’t the default. I may change my mind and make the site HTTPS-only, but this would require me to fix every link to every embedded image over 13 years of blog posts, and I’m not sure of the effect on my server’s load. That’s a project for another time.
House number one was terrible – a major water ingress problem with the roof, and only partly-renovated.
House number two was much better and was our favourite initially. I’ve written about these two before.
I quite liked the third house, but it wasn’t practical for us. It was up a very, very steep hill – as in, so steep that it has steps and cars have to take a longer route around – and was across four floors with narrow curved stairs. The interior was nice though, and the views out of the windows were great.
House number four was big, and had several large rooms and a nice kitchen. It was also the only property we saw with a decent garden. Inside it had been renovated but there were some rather old-fashioned fixtures and fittings.
The fifth and final house we saw was lovely inside, with a great bathroom and new kitchen, but no garden, and it wasn’t in a great area. It also had a leaking roof – top tip, look for houses in winter so you can feel how weather-proof they are.
The fourth house wasn’t perfect but the things that we didn’t like could be changed relatively quickly. We ended up putting three offers on, with the third accepted for a little below the asking price. We’ve also had approval in principle for a mortgage, and have enough money in our savings to cover a 10% deposit and fees.
House purchases can take time and there are various surveys to be undertaken first – plus the current owner needs to move out – but hopefully we’ll be moved in by the summer. The new house is only a few minutes walk from our current flat so moving shouldn’t be too difficult, and we can still reach everything we need by public transport. I’ll keep you posted.
I apologise for not posting anything for the past few days, but I’ve been waiting for the DNS on the domain to switch over to a new IP address. It should have happened on Saturday but it was actually the early hours of yesterday morning before it took effect, and in the meantime the new server was running an image taken from the old server on Saturday. So that the old server and new server were not out of sync, I decided to wait a little while – and besides, this week has been very busy for me at work.
So that’s the apology out of the way, now on to good things!
I’m still hosting my site with Bytemark, but I’ve moved to their new BigV platform. Mainly because they’re phasing out their older Virtual Machine platform but also because BigV offers more for less.
I was paying £15 per month (plus VAT) for the old virtual machine, which got me 500 MB RAM and 10 GB of storage on standard magnetic disks (plus 50 GB backup space). The new BigV virtual machine has double the RAM (1 GB) and 25 GB of storage on a solid state drive, although no extra backup space. But it’s only £10 per month plus VAT, so it’s a third cheaper. And because there’s more RAM and it’s running on solid state drives, it should be much faster.
Of course, I should really have left the upgrade until Monday, rather than doing it on a Saturday night when there was no-one at Bytemark to help me when it went wrong, but we’ve sorted the issues out now. And Bytemark did provide detailed instructions for moving across.
Next, I’m looking to install a proper SSL certificate on here. But for now, back to your erratically scheduled blogging.
