riddlermarc

Came across this band from a review on last month’s Total Guitar magazine - they are definitely worth checking out if you are a fan of early Metallica, Sabbath and CoC, excellent stuff!

Website and myspace page..

My God I have a savage headache today Hopefully it’s a combination of me coming down gradually off the steroids and also I am getting quite dehydrated so that can have consequnces for headaches too.

I am finding it difficult to drink much a the moment, my stomach is quite inflamed so I have been put on a tight “diet” whih means no tea, coffee, milk, fatty foods, chocolate etc.. I’m having dry-ish toast for breakfast and having lightly flavoured water to drink throughout the day and a diner that’s not too spicy or fatty (which we rarely have anyway).

Two weeks I have to do this, then go back to my GP and see how it’s going - I have a suspicion I may have a ulcer thanks to the long-term painkillers and steroids I have been on.. something the GP should be able to advise on after we see how my diet helps

We took Sam to Milestones yesterday, it’s billed as “Imagine an open-air museum inside a massive modern building… a network of streets with shops, a village green and even a pub… dating from Victorian times and the 1930s… it’s fun… a surprise around every corner!”.. we all loved it, it was a wicked laugh. More photos to come when I work out how best to upload them to my Flickr account from Linux, at the moment it’s a manual upload to my web server

Us dressed up in some period costumes:

More to come later

Just had a txt message from Hayley saying that Sam had insisted on buying the following with his pocket money and wearing it all round town

Nutter..

The first (and probably only) snow of the year in Basingstoke:

Sam and Hayley have taken a walk over to her parent’s house but I am soooo cold I’m staying in for a bit God I must be getting old, I would have been out like a shot a few years ago! Damn my ill health bringing my core temp down

More at my Flickr page.

<rant>

I’ve been thinking about the current crop of programming languages that currently abound, and I’ve come to the conclusion that PHP,RoR etc. are just a waste of time if you are really serious about learning something job wise. Too many kids leave school, buy PHP for Dummies and then proclaim themselves “a web developer”. Give them a look at something a little more proper and they’d run a mile.. it’s not just CSS and PHP out there in the Real World™ and they’d be stuck - write a framework in C#/.NET and make the transition from unique to Master Pages, anyone?

It also really bugs me when people say “SQL? Yep, grab a copy of MySQL as it’s free and the same as SQL Server” - of course it isn’t!

Technical differences in MySQL and SQL Server when it comes down to the ANSI SQL standard:

• MySQL does not support Triggers, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support User Defined Functions, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have Cursor Support, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not support Stored Procedures, SQL Server does.
• MySQL does not have FULL JOIN capabilities, SQL Server does.
• MySQL has limited Import/Export capabilities, SQL Server has full support for Import/Export.
• MySQL has limited Transaction Support while SQL Server offers full Transaction Support.

I’m a complete fan of FOSS/non-MS stuff and I do know PHP and MySQL pretty well but unfortunately in the Big World out there you need MS SQL Server knowledge most of the time to keep abreast. I did implement some PHP into a site at work, it did fit the spec pretty well as it was to go on a Solaris box running Apache, hence no MS-based code.

</rant>

We finally got round to hosting our house-warming party last night and it was a roaring success. People turned up from 7.30pm and the last ones to leave did so after 3am.

Big surprises were Chris and Colin turning up, haven’t seen them for ages and it was really cool to catch up
It was really good to see Richard, Hannah, Gray and Donna too - it was definitely an evening for some good catching up with old friends!

Probably the best event of the night was the “Let’s compare JD and Jim Beam Black” blind drinking test. Max and I started it off by trying to identify them blindly, then other people thought it would be a good idea to try it too and the rest, as they say, is history.

I think Richard had had nearly enough by this point

The obligatory foetus shot:

See the rest of the photos on my Flickr page.