Double dress-ups
Posted 31 July 2007 06:37:47 by Michelle
Filed under: Living Overseas
Two Saturday nights and two costume parties! First up was a Great Gatsby Garden party hosted by fellow Chiswickites Bette, Jason and Les. Unfortunately the changeable Melbourne-like weather we’re having ruled the ‘garden’ part out, but the loungeroom provided just as good a backdrop. ‘Twas lots of fun.
And last night we got back to the 80s at a party in honour of Cath’s birthday. It might seem to some of us like an odd way to celebrate our beautiful friend but we think she would have loved it. Ridiculous costumes, drinks flowing and lots of laughs with our good mates.
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British Gas stole our money…
Posted 28 July 2007 11:05:10 by Ben
Filed under: Living Overseas | Video | Whinges
If you can’t be assed watching this painful video here’s a summary of the pain we’ve been experiencing with British Gas.
Over the past few months, British Gas has been mistakenly direct debiting our account – adding up to around £500 worth of electricity that we didn’t use. In fact, they’re not even our electricity provider!
Turns out they’ve been charging for electricity used by a few of our neighbours to the bank details they hold for our gas account. Bit of a worry.
We’re now trying to get the money refunded. At the end of my most recent phone call to them – in which I’m told they still can’t refund the money for various stupid reasons – the polite customer service lady finishes with “…and finally, we have a wide range of other products and services which may be of interest of interest to you Ms Steel. Would you like me to run through them with you?†She was kidding right? Aaagggh!!
Update: sorry about the typo in in the video.
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I finally figured it out…
Posted 28 July 2007 08:33:52 by Ben
Filed under: Blog | Geek | Living Overseas | Observations
Yep! The astute reader may have noticed that when you loaded up stickfly this time that it should have loaded about 5 times faster than normal.
Thanks to a great piece of software called YSlow- a firefox plugin – I was able to diagnose the bottleneck that kept causing sticky to load sooooo slow.
For those interested, it was a flickr album plugin that I wasn’t even using that was taking up the precious bandwidth. Over time I’ll figure out how to speed him up even more but this is a great start.
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It’s my first day…
Posted 24 July 2007 19:57:08 by Ben
Filed under: Living Overseas
Yesterday I started a new job working for a consultancy on a project working with Tesco – a very popular supermarket chain over here in the UK and elsewhere.
My first day was pretty cruisey, just ‘get the lay of the land’ kind of stuff but today I had to go out to the client site – a 2 hour commute each way – and was thrown into the thick of it.
Tesco headquarters is a huge campus like complex which accommodates thousands of employees in numerous buildings each with their own canteens, gyms, etc. They even have their own wind turbines to help with their power needs. They are grossly in need of more office space however, as it’s an ‘every man for themselves’ kind of environment when it comes to finding some desk space and a chair. I’ve never seen so many people crammed into every nook and cranny.
Today, I learned a fair bit about the project I will be working on and my initial impressions leave me feeling like I will learn a lot which is fantastic.
I am well over the 4 hour travel time already though. Thank god, I only have to spend about 20% of my time up there (fingers crossed).
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Super Mario Bros on Piano
Posted 20 July 2007 06:38:58 by Ben
Filed under: Living Overseas
Following on from Cath’s post about reminiscing about mario bros I found this version of the theme song played on piano.
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