I went to the Troon Real Ale festival on 5th October with some other ScotLUG members. Although it's much smaller than the Paisley Beer Festival, it still had a good variety of ales. Here's what I tried while I was there:

• Broughton "Clipper IPA"
• Glenfinnan "Standard Ale"
• Traditional Scottish Ales "Ginger Explosion"
• Tryst "Brockville Dark"
• Windie Goat "Peden's Cove"
• Dent "T'Owd Tup"
• Wyre Piddle "Piddle in the Cold"
• Newton Court Perry

The Newton Court Perry tasted exactly like one that Kevin, Scott and I had at the 2005 Paisley Beer Festival, which was the best perry I've ever tasted.

While I was in Troon, I had a discussion with Andrew about T-shirts for the next ScotLUG beer festival trip. He suggested T-shirts with a list of previous beer festivals the group has attended, and something like a SQL statement to go along with this "table".

After a bit of playing around, I managed to create a couple of tables in MySQL and a query that mentions both ScotLUG and Beer Festival which produces the correct output. The query looks a bit weird since the inner join is completely unnecessary, but it's the only way I could think of to get both phrases in.

Now I'll have to look around on the web to find what the dates of the previous beer festival trips were.

The aKademy conference is now over. I was part of the local team, helping with the organisation, and had lots of fun doing so. I helped out with networking, recording a couple of videos (1 2) and moving stuff around. I managed to see a couple of presentations, and met a lot of people. Here's a photo with some of the local team in the office. More photos are available here.

We've got tickets for Download Festival at Donnington Park from 9th to 12th June. Train tickets are booked too, so all we need now is a tent.

This weekend will hopefully involve hillwalking, mountain biking and a subcrawl. Then on either the 21st or 22nd of April, I'll be off to the 19th annual Paisley Beer Festival.

On Saturday, Agnieszka and I went to Stephen and Megan's housewarming party. We had a great night, and I remember drinking a lot of Żubrówka and eating some lovely Polish food.

On Sunday afternoon, we walked up Arthur's Seat. It was surprisingly warm and sunny for January. At the top, we got photos looking North West, Nort East, and one of ourselves.

This weekend started off with Kyle's 25th birthday celebration. Dave and I had a few pints in The Counting House then moved onto The Phoenix. Scott, Michelle, Mrben and Mrsben moved on to Frankenstein's where I stayed until it closed.

I went for lunch with Agnieszka (who I met the night before) in La Vita on Saturday then went to visit Stephen in Edinburgh and helped with some sanding. In the evening I met up with Agnieszka again and joined Ceri and various friends for Stephen's (a different one, who I'd not met before) birthday night out at Bar Soba.

on Firday night I was at Michelle's 21st birthday night out at Khublai Khan in the Merchant City. The turnout was great and the food was amazing. I'd definitely go back there. On Saturday I was at the Bloodhound Gang concert with Michelle, Dave, Neil, Ceri, Charles, Howard and Stuart. It was such a good performance, and I managed to end up almost at the front of the crowd. Now I'm preparing to drive to Dornoch in the morning where Agnieszka and I will be staying for a night. Looks like it'll be better weather there than in Glasgow, and then the possibility of snow on Tuesday.
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I've now being going out with Agnieszka for 4 weeks today, and what a fun 4 weeks they've been :-)

We had a Halloween party last weekend, which had a good turnout. Photos are available here.

Work has been really busy over the past 3 weeks, and I've had a few 10-hour days. I think coffee has been the only reason I've been awake some days.

I've been too tired or spent too much time going out or partying at weekends to get much more mountain biking done. I'll probably squeeze another trip to Pollok Park in soon.

Climbing is fun! I was at the Glasgow Climbing Centre with Neil and Jamie on Monday. It's the first time I've done it since the climbing wall at school. I need to work on my upper body strength (or just learn to climb properly as Ceri points out).

I've tried a few more ales this weekend, namely Cairngorm Wildcat, Roosters YPA and Doctor O'Kell's IPA. I met up with Kev, Carol, Scott and Dave for a few drinks on Friday night, then went on to meet Gayle at the GUU. We discovererd it was the Swimming Team's night out :-)

On Saturday morning I bought a Camelbak in preparation for Sunday's trip to Gelntress.

Saturday afternoon saw another pub crawl followed by Sara's 21st birthday party.

So Saturday night was the second night of exploring different ales this weekend. Michelle and Scott arrived around 17:00 and we watched two episodes of The OC which Scott had on his iBook. I had another look at converting pairs of lattitude and longitude coordinates into distance in miles. We headed off to the Bon Accord but unfortunately arrived just after they stopped serving food. That turned out not to be such a bad thing... I discovered yet another thing I really like about this place... they let us bring in an Indian takeaway from Panjea and provided us with plates and cutlery. I had Old Peculier, Magus and Godiva before we moved on to Solid Rock which was having a big celebration for its 30th birthday, then onto Bloc where I met a nice French girl who I'm going to meet up with at The Shed tonight. |

I've started experimenting with the Google Maps API, and overlaying information from my Pubzilla database. I must say Google's API is very easy to use, although I seem to have had less success in getting to work with Internet Explorer.

Yesterday I felt like a random night out, so got in touch with some people and John, Scott and I started off at the Three Judges which is a real ale pub. I tried three different ales: Highwood Harvest Bitter, Ridley's Spectacular, and Buffy's Hopleaf. We met up with Malcolm, Michelle and Miranda there then moved onto The Goat where we met up with David. Malcolm and Scott went their own way, the girls went home, and David, John and I went to The Clinic.

This afternoon I've been working on a "Pubs near this one" feature for Pubzilla, but being hungover I had difficulty remembering my basic trigonometry and ended up surfing Wikipedia for a while and discovering things like the Sinc function.

On Sunday night I ended up being too tired to The Shed and stayed in and messed around with Mono and XSP instead. Monday was my Mum's birthday so I went down to visit for a while, then struggled to get to The Stand without being too late for Dance Monkey Boy Dance. This is the first time I've been back at the stand after their few weeks off at the end of the summer. I've been working on a project involving CGI scripts running inside Apache web server on Microsoft Windows this week, and not having a good time. Apache randomly crashes and usually takes 5 minutes to pass requests onto the Perl script. I'm now building Apache 2 from source to attempt to work out what's going wrong. |

This weekend was my 25th birthday. I was out for a meal with my family on Friday, followed by seeing a few bands at King Tut's with Neil and Michelle. Satruday involved McPhabb's and The Goat, and Sunday involved the Lansdowne Bar, Bean Scene on Woodlands Road, then ending up at Otago for dinner with Edward and Neil's family. By that time, I couldn't handle any more going out and had to go home shortly after Edward.

I've also been messing around with Sun Ultra 5s and now have Debian running on one as a desktop with NIS and NFS set up.

It's been too long since I wrote anything here. I'll start with this weekend...

Friday: Dad's bithday - went to Elliot's on Bath Street for food. The food was amazing, and the live music was good too.

Saturday: Vikki's birthday night out. Vikki, some friends, Neil_ and I went to Arta for dinner, and stayed late for drinks too. This was my second day in a row of eating mussels in a restaurant... yumm!

Sunday: Went with my family to a garden party just outside Perth for my dad's cousin's silver wedding anniversary. I probably recognised less than 10% of the people who were there. It was a good day though, and draught beer on tap in your house is always a good thing ;-)

I'm now attempting to have a quiet week in. Tonight I'm dist-upgrading a debian server (to the newly stable Sarge). This box will be used for hosting sorn.net while I'm moving to a new flat. I was quite surprised to find that the version of PHP on MacOS X Tiger has no image manipulation support, so I'm currently installing MySQL on a Gentoo box for messing around with a database-driven website with dynamically generated images.
And now the biggest news for me this week (aprt from Sarge going stable) is: Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors

Thursday: ScotLUG with Big Kev's VoIP talk, followed by the Cathouse

Friday: off work for Cat's birthday day/night out where Cat, Vikki, Neil and me went to see H2G2, which I can safely say was the best film I've ever seen in the cinema. It followed the book well and was hilarious. Scott and me managed to get back into Rufus in the evening, then we met back up with the others at a private party in the Library, before moving on to the Garage.

Saturday: Gary and Angela's wedding. It was in the afternoon thankfully, so I was wide awake by that time. Despite what the forecast said, it was a lovely day. Wedding and reception both went really well and we all had a great time. I took some photos at the ceremony and the reception. The photos that Graeme took are also online.

Saturday involved breakfast at Ikea with ScottMac followed by lots of MTV and coffee. Sunday involved putting Kubuntu onto the laptop. A Debian-based operating system that's aimed at KDE users. Nice! |

A collection of photos from ScotLug at Paisley BeerFest 2005...
MrLithic's Photos
ScottMac's Photos
JaavaaGuru's Photos

That was a totally amazing weekend: Gary's stag night in Edinburgh. Starting off at a pool hall on Morrison Street, followed by food at The Great Wall on Lothian Road, then I think the next place we went to was Finnegan's Wake - and excellent sauna just up from Grassmarket. Some of us made it as far as Subway after that... we seemed to get knocked back from elsewhere due to the size of our group which was a bit annoying. Finnegan's wake is actually an Irish themed pub, but it was roasting inside!

Followed last night by Kenny's birthday night out in Glasgow, starting off in Elliot's and finishing up in The Garage. Methinks it's time to avoid nights out for a while!

Sorn.net updates...
I must appologise for the outage from approximately 2pm yesterday until 3am this morning. Someone (unsure who since we had people staying over last night) had turned off my router (again). Today I'm going to move the router to another location, out of the way of fiddling fingers.

At the moment, www-2.sorn.net is hosted with a friend in Edinburgh, but within a week or so it will be moved into the same rack as www, and a few other sites that were co-hosted on the same box will also be moved here. Lets see how well the bandwidth stands up to it :-)

Slightly different weekend. No going out to pubs for a start. Spent most of Saturday afternoon walking around Glasgow, then went to see a play in the evening with Tina. It was excellent! Spent most of Sunday playing around with the website, and looking at what some previous versions of sorn.net had, like the blog. Still trying to get OSX to mount WebDAV shares from my web server, without any progress at all. |