On Saturday we went to the Manchester Beer & Cider Festival, one of the largest beer festivals in the UK. It took place at the Manchester Velodrome, which is part of the National Cycling Centre and was a major venue for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.
The beer festival was the largest I’ve been to. Admittedly I haven’t been to many beer festivals, but with 300 beers and 75 ciders and perries (pear ciders), this was an order of magnitude bigger than anything I’d seen before.
Except, we went on Saturday, which was the last day – the festival ran over four days. The previous three days had been ‘unexpectedly popular’ and so by the time we arrived, around three quarters of the beers had been drunk and were sold out. Still, with 70-odd beers to try, there was still much to drink. At least until 3:30pm, by which point all of the beer had been consumed, leaving just a handful of ciders and perries to try in the half hour before time was called at 4pm – three hours earlier than planned.
Still, it was a really good day out, and it was good to visit the Velodrome, which will be 20 years old this year. Admittedly it wasn’t the best venue for a beer festival – the main festival floor with the bars was in the centre of the track, and most of the seating was around the edges of the track. To get between the two, you were required to descend three flights of stairs, pass through a subway and then ascend another flight of stairs. But it offered some great panoramic photo opportunities, as shown above.
I think it will be a while before I visit such a big beer festival again. The ‘big daddy’ of beer festivals is The Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in London, which usually coincides with a very busy period at work, although it’s earlier this year so perhaps not.
We also popped in to The Moon Under Water pub in Manchester, a Wetherspoons pub which holds the Guinness World Record for being Britain’s’ biggest pub (and rumoured to be the biggest in Europe). It can hold 1700 people and is even important enough to have its own Wikipedia article, which explains the origin of its name.
Around two weeks ago, I finally lost patience with the queues for the World of Warcraft realm that my main characters were on, and took advantage of an offer of free transfers to another realm.
Originally, when I started playing World of Warcraft almost eight years ago, I was on a ‘medium’ populated realm. This was where my then-girlfriend Hari and her friends had her characters, so I joined her there.
Fast forward a few years, and following the release of the Cataclysm expansion my friends all jumped ship, to a high population realm. I followed a few weeks later, firstly with my main character and then one of my ‘alt’ characters, paying £15 each time for the privilege.
Being on a high population realm has its benefits – a very active economy on the auction house, lots of guilds to join, and plenty of people to group with. But recently the population has continued to grow, to the point where the realm servers were running at capacity. This means that players have to queue until enough other players log off, and at peak times on week-nights these queues could be as long as half an hour.
If I was able to get home from work early then this wouldn’t be such a problem, but I don’t get home until the start of the peak period. Consequently, it just wasn’t possible to quickly log in for a few minutes on an evening – I’d have to wait in a queue, and then once connected, not log out because I wouldn’t be able to get back on again.
And, by now, most of my friends who I used to play with have either quit the game, or gone to other realms. So, all in all, I had no real reason to stay on that realm.
Thankfully, Blizzard Entertainment are all too aware of the issue with the realm (and others in the same situation). The realm has been ‘locked’, to restrict the creation or paid transfer of characters, and they are offering free character transfers to other realms. I decided to take advantage of the latter; by now I had three characters on this realm (plus a low level bank character) and I didn’t want to spend £15 per character to go somewhere with greener grass.
There are some restrictions for free character transfers. First of all, they can only be between selected realms, so I had to choose one of four destination realms. WarcraftRealms.com is useful for population estimates, and so I picked the one with the highest population and best Horde to Alliance ratio. Since I would be moving to another Player-versus-Player (PvP) realm, I didn’t want to choose one where Horde characters significantly outnumbered Alliance – I’m a big, wet, useless scaredycat when it comes to PvP.
There are also eligibility criteria for your characters. There were three main characters I wanted to transfer: my paladin (my main since 2006), my priest, and a rogue which I’ve recently levelled up. These were all fine – I just had to ensure that they had empty mailboxes and no outstanding auctions. But I also had a ‘bank’ character which I used for storage. This character was too low level – characters need to be level 10 to be eligible, and my bank was level 1. So, I spent about half an hour levelling it up.
The next issue was that this character was also a guild leader, with a guild bank full of various crafting materials. Guild leader characters are ineligible for transfer; as this character was the only one in the guild, I made the decision to sell just about everything in the guild bank on the auction house. This took a few weeks, but eventually just about everything sold and it netted me a few thousand gold in the process. I then had to disband the guild.
Finally, there are also limits on how much gold characters can take with them when transferred, which vary by level. My three high level characters were fine, and well within the limits, but my bank character had way too much. Level 10 characters should have less than 300 gold; mine had more than ten times that, thanks to all of the auctions. Of course, this was easily solved by distributing the money amongst my other characters before I transferred them.
So, I made the transfer, and have been playing on my new realm ever since. I’m pleased that I don’t have to queue any more, and I’ve been able to find a reasonably nice and active guild to be a member of. It hasn’t cost me anything, and means I can play the game more often and get more value out of my £9 per month subscription. Indeed, I would not have bothered transferring my bank character had the transfer not been free. Generally speaking the transfers only take around an hour to complete, so there’s not much downtime away from the game either.
If you play on a realm with queues and are offered a free transfer, then unless you have ties with people on that realm, I’d definitely recommend moving. After all, you’re paying for the game – so why not make the most of it?
Over the past two years, I’ve backed 12 projects on Kickstarter. All 12 have reached their funding goals, and I’ve paid out approximately £40 in pledges in total.
Some of those projects have now produced the products that they were raising money for, so I’ve decided to look back at each one, over the next few months. I’ll be writing about why I backed the project, and what I got out of it.
I’ll post the first entry next Sunday, and then a new one every Sunday until I’ve reviewed all of the projects I’ve backed. Obviously, if I back any additional projects in the next three months, I’ll tag those on the end too.
It’s that time of year again – another birthday for the blog. This time, if this blog was a human living in the UK, it would have started secondary school in September.
I can’t believe that, 12 years on, I am still writing on this blog. Though my interest wanes at times, and I can go several days without posting, I’m usually able to come up with something at least once a week.
I didn’t have any suitable photos to use on this entry, so I quickly drew the above birthday cake with a multi-coloured biro, and then Instagrammed it. This is why I’m not an illustrator.
Even though our wedding is all paid off, I expect 2014 to be another expensive year for us – namely because we’re intending to buy a house. So far we’ve been renting, which is fine when you’re still getting established as a couple. But in the long term, it’s expensive (our mortgage repayments are likely to be less than we’re paying in rent), and it’s restrictive – we can’t really decorate, for example. We’d also like to move out of a flat and into a proper house with a garden.
My parents gave us quite a bit of money towards a mortgage deposit as a wedding present, but we’ll probably need a bit more. Also, something else has to happen before we can buy: we both need to learn to drive.
Learning to drive
Right now we’re restricted to living close to Sowerby Bridge railway station, and on a main bus route, as neither of us can drive a car. So we are both going to learn to drive this year, allowing us to choose a home a little further off the beaten track. Those of you who have read this blog for many years will know that I had driving lessons in 2006-7, however, after failing my practical test twice I gave up, and haven’t tried since. Though I won’t be starting from scratch, there’s a lot that I’ve forgotten in six years and so I’m not expecting to be qualified until the summer. I also need to re-take my theory test; though I passed it last time, it was only valid for two years and so has now expired, and it has got more difficult since.
So learning to drive will be one of my New Year’s Resolutions. Another will be going to the gym more, as that has fallen by the wayside somewhat since the wedding (not helped by a series of colds since September). Whilst giving up lactose has helped me feel less bloated (and so clothes fit better), I could still do with losing a bit of weight and improving my fitness.
May, as well as being our first wedding anniversary, will also play host to my 30th birthday. Which is a somewhat daunting prospect.
Weddings
We have been invited to two weddings this year – one in March, in Nottinghamshire, and another in the summer, in the Lake District. Hopefully one of us will be driving in time for the latter but we need to sort out transport for the former very soon. As many of our friends are at the same stage in life as us, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up being invited to more weddings this year. I’m just pleased that I won’t have to organise one again.
We haven’t yet booked a holiday for this year but we’ve talked passively about a trip to Ireland. I’ve never been but Christine had family living there for a while so she has spent quite a bit of time there as a child. We also have tickets for a concert in Manchester in March. And we’ll be spending New Year’s Eve (i.e. this Tuesday) with friends, probably drinking the leftover champagne from our wedding.
So, to all of you reading this, I would like to wish you a very happy, prosperous and loving new year, and my best wishes.
This time every year I do a blog post looking back at the year that has just about finished, and all of the things I did. So this year it is the turn of 2013 to be analysed. You can read my previous posts from 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2009.
January
We started 2013 with friends near Blackpool, playing the tabletop game Last Night on Earth (the zombies won). We had a trip to Manchester, to visit the Peoples’ History Museum, and again later in the month to set up our wedding list at John Lewis in the Trafford Centre.
With two months to go until the wedding, we sorted out the flowers and received the remaining RSVPs from guests. We belatedly discovered The IT Crowd, and have since watched every episode (including the new, final episode broadcast this year). We later moved on to Black Books, and I got the complete box set of Father Ted for Christmas, to complete the Graham Linehan set.
At the beginning of April we went to a friends’ wedding in Greater Manchester – literally four weeks before our own. And at two weeks before Christine and I went on our respective hen and stag weekends, which we had been kept in the dark about right up until the day. We both had a good time and weren’t too embarrassed by our friends.
My soon-to-be mother in law gave me her first generation iPad that she was no longer using, which has proved very useful in the time since. However, with it only capable of running iOS 5, and an increasing number of apps no longer working, I may be looking for a newer model in the future.
At the end of the month we came over to York to make the final arrangements for the wedding.
May
Finally we made it to May, and our wedding on Saturday 4th. We both had a lovely day surrounded by friends and family, and the weather was nice enough for us to get plenty of good photos. That being said, we still haven’t ordered any prints, or our album as yet, so that’s a job for 2014. As is sending out the rest of the thank-you cards which we’re still working on.
Following the wedding, we went on honeymoon – five nights in Paris. I’ve been to Paris a number of times but it was Christine’s first visit. It was a relatively modest holiday – we stayed in a Holiday Inn, travelled in standard class on Eurostar and had to budget for meals – but we had a good time.
In July, my post at the university was re-graded upwards, resulting in a small pay rise. Having still got quite a lot of debt on my credit card from the wedding at this point, this was quite welcome. It was also during July that I discovered that I was lactose-intolerant, and so we started ordering our groceries online from Ocado because of their bigger selection of dairy-free products.
Christine turned 30, so we had a small party in our flat. Towards the end of the had a weekend in London, to visit friends and a couple of museums, and this included a stay in a lastminute.com ‘secret hotel’ which sadly wasn’t a great experience. The rest of the trip was good, though.
In October we went to yet another industrial museum, this time in Armley, near Leeds, for a Steampunk market. There was also a visit to a beer festival in Huddersfield, and another trip on the Transpennine Real Ale Trail, calling at some different pubs this time. And I went on the third of three stag weekends (the second being my own), this time in Birmingham.
I decided not to do Movember again this year, partly because in early November we went to another wedding, this time in Hertfordshire. I unfortunately had to miss the broadcast of the 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who due to a birthday (everybody seems to be turning 30 at the moment) but thankfully caught up the following morning on BBC iPlayer. Which meant going into complete social media hibernation in the intervening period to avoid any spoilers.
Following my grandfather moving into a nursing home earlier in the year (he’s in his nineties now), we sold his house and therefore inherited a few things. We now have a much bigger dining table and some nicer chairs, amongst other bits.
And finally to this month, which has featured three separate trips to York – one of which was a pub crawl, and another was for Christmas. I donated my fifth pint of blood, and somewhat surprisingly managed to get our Christmas shopping sorted quite early this year, in comparison. We also went to see The Hobbit Part 2 at the cinema, which I enjoyed despite some of the mixed reviews it got.
On Sunday I’ll post about what 2014 is likely to have in store.
I’m lucky that I can give regularly; I work near to a donor centre and am able to get time off work for donations. There are only 24 centres in England and some cities like York don’t have them. And I’m also lucky to be relatively healthy and don’t have any medical conditions that prevent me from giving blood.
I have had one failed donation; when the needle was inserted it somehow missed a vein. That meant having to re-arrange for a new appointment a couple of weeks later, which thankfully went fine. I now give blood from my right arm, even though I’m right-handed, as I seem to have better veins there. This does mean that I can’t really use my right arm for a couple of hours afterwards, so my appointments are in afternoons, after work. The failed donation also shows on my record, so I’ve had my ’5-9 donations’ card for a while even though at the time I had only donated four pints of blood.
Despite donating regularly, I still don’t like needles. I have learned how to cope with this and whilst it’s never a pleasant experience, once the needle is in and the blood starts flowing it doesn’t hurt. I have a similar coping mechanism for my annual ‘flu jabs. Sometimes I get a bruise on my arm as well.
I’ve also opted in to the Bone Marrow Registry, as this can be done at the same time as a donation.
At some point in future I may decide to donate platelets, which fewer people do. It’s a longer procedure, taking around 90 minutes, but can be done more frequently – as often as every two weeks in some cases. However, platelet donors can’t also give blood the regular way, so I wouldn’t be able to take part in the Interval study.
My next appointment is at the end of February, for pint number six.
Tomorrow, the 23rd November, is the 50th anniversary of the first episode of Doctor Who. A special extended episode, called The Day of the Doctor, will be broadcast simultaneously across the world, and in 3D at selected cinemas.
Sadly I will be out at a friend’s birthday tomorrow and so will have to avoid any spoilers until I get to watch it on BBC iPlayer on Sunday.
The build-up to the 50th anniversary has been huge – doctorwhosavetheday.com has been unlocking short clips once a certain number of tweets and status updates with the #savetheday hashtag have been posted. There have been a number of specially-commissioned TV shows, such as last week’s The Science of Doctor Who with Professor Brian Cox, and a documentary drama called An Adventure in Space and Time (iPlayer link). And miniature TARDISes have been popping up in other BBC programmes such as Eastenders and Holby City.
The biggest surprise of all was the release of the prequel to The Day of the Doctor, conveniently called The Night of the Doctor:
Without wanting to reveal too many spoilers, the mini-episode fills in some gaps in the Doctor’s timeline.
It’s a very different situation to ten years ago, at the fortieth anniversary in 2003. Back then, Doctor Who had been off our screens for several years, and had a reputation of being a low budget show with wobbly sets and cheesy special effects. Nowadays, the announcement of the new Doctor warrants a half hour special TV show, as happened earlier this year when Peter Capaldi was confirmed as the twelfth Doctor.
I was a bit too young to watch Doctor Who the first time around, so I picked it up with the revived series in 2005, and the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. And since then I’ve been hooked – never missing an episode and owning many of them on DVD and Blu-Ray. I even read up on some of the background information on the characters, on sites such as the TARDIS Data Core. And I’m not the only one, as many of my friends are fans of the show.
I’m really pleased that such a classic British show is still popular, and, if you excuse the pun, constantly ‘regenerating’ for new generations to enjoy. Let’s hope it’s still going in another fifty years. You never know, time travel may even be science fact in 2063, and not just science fiction… 🙂
But now I’ve moved on to Airmail. Like Sparrow, it has a clean and simple interface, support for a unified inbox, and it tries, where possible, to display pictures beside your emails. These can come from your address book, but Airmail also looks for a ‘apple-touch-icon.png’ file on the domain and will display that from time to time, hence the PayPal logo in the screenshot.
As well as supporting IMAP accounts, Airmail will also accept POP3 and even Exchange accounts. It also supports the various IMAP extensions used by Gmail. And like with Sparrow, attachments can be sent using Dropbox as well, although Airmail adds Google Drive, CloudApp and Droplr on top.
Most of all, Airmail seems very fast, light and stable. It opens quickly and doesn’t hang much. And it doesn’t slow your computer down so it’s fine to have running in the background whilst you do other things.
I really like Airmail and I’m happy to have it as my default email client on my Mac. It manages to tread the delicate balance between simplicity and depth of features very well.
