Back when I was younger, New Years might have been about drinking and partying, but not so much these days. I enjoy a quieter time with some friends to see the New Year in. With this goal in mind, as I have done in other years, I went up to Watford to have a movie marathon with Lee and Rob.
Continue reading Happy New Year!
Well, it kinda arrives… it’s in it’s beta, invite only stage right now. For some time now, I’ve not been a fan of Facebook. I’ve moved them into a similar category as Apple in that I just see them as a little bit evil. Some people worry about Google knowing so much about them, but as I see it, they only want this information so they can show you ads of things you might want to buy. Surely those are the best adverts to see? Facebook wants information on you to sell to other people, who knows what they’ll do with the info. They will gather this info in sneaky ways too, so even if you’ve reasonable privacy settings, if you’re friends don’t, and they can see your info, it can be sold. They also have a history of changing their minds of devs and then introducing something similar themselves.
Continue reading Google Plus Arrives
One of the nice things about Waitrose is that we have a Social Committee that take the time to organize events for us all, one of which was a trip to Ascot yesterday.
So it all began back in September and it seems like it’s flown past. At week 13 we still had two undefeated teams and these two top seeded teams made it all the way to the most watched Superbowl (in fact, most watched TV show) of all time.
Once again the Redskins massively under achieved, with one of the easier schedules they’ve had they still struggled in games they should have won and finished the season 4-12. The only good news is it meant Zorn was given the elbow and Mike Shanahan has been brought in to take over the ship with a nice high draft pick next year.
Last weekend I went along with Lee to Warwickshire to take part in the latest i series LAN, i37. iSeries are LAN’s run 3 times a year for 2,000 gamers in a huge hall.
We arrived on Thursday just afternoon and got the drinks in. This went on until we finally decided to join the queue to check in at around 8pm. It was a fairly large queue and Lee was now rather drunk, but by 9:30pm we finally got our passes.
The Cardinals in the Superbowl for the first time, facing the amazing defence of the Steelers. We had a few people round to watch the big match, playing some Madden and Wii Sports before hand with plenty of junk food and ordering Pizza to keep us going into the night.
I was worried one team might blow the other out, but it turned into one of the most fantastic Superbowls ever. The Steelers built a lead on the back of a 100 yard TD return for a score at the end of the first half. Warner and Fitzgerald brought 
them back into the game and into the lead with less than 3 minutes to go, but Rothlesburger and Santonio Holmes struck back with an amazing score in the corner of the endzone to take their 6th title.
Meanwhile, snow was falling as people headed home close to 4am in the morning.
Thursday night was our Waitrose AGM, once again at The Oval. It starts of with a presentation about how we’ve done this year and what we’ll be doing in the future before heading upstairs for a meal of rather small proportions. It was some kind of meat hanging on the end of the bone followed by a strange Creme Brule with seeds and green bits in!?!
Once the excuse for a meal was done with, the music started and the drinking began! Feeling rather tired myself, it was a dissappointment that they didn’t have RedBull to go with my Vodka, so I had it straight instead. After 4 or 5 doubles I definitly started to feel them.
Unlike me though, some people didn’t know when they should slow down… Some of the stories going round on Friday. Bottle’s of Vodka being downed, minesweeping tables at the end of the AGM, vomit on tube station platforms, phoneboxes as toilets, thrown out of clubs, not allowed into others, collapsing on floors… it was a good night!
2008 saw the John Lewis Partnership achieve another great set of figures leading to all of us being given a bonus of 20% of our years earnings in one lump sum. That’s over 2 months pay paid in our March pay slip, woo hoo! Unfortunately, most of mine is gone, half into bonus save (again) for the future and the other half paying of my credit card…
Anyway, such a great bonus called for celebrations, so off to the Gunmakers pub we went!
A pretty good turn out for a Sunday with 20 -30 people bearing the cold conditions in the name of consuming much alcohol. It wasn’t long before someone called for the Tequila and Vodka shots (who on earth was that…) and things started to get a little messy.
Still, it was a fun evening, with minimal casualties I believe… here’s to 22% next year!