creamed-coconut.org

So, I turned 23 on Thursday. I took some cakes into work for everyone to share. I had to hold my birthday party on Wednesday night, because that was the only time when my friend Naomi could make it. She works very long shifts at the “place of doom”, as she calls her workplace, so it was really difficult to find a time when we were all free! As Wednesday was Valentine’s Day, it was really hard to find a restaurant willing to take a booking. In the end we had to book up at the Townhouse, but in my opinion the food there isn’t as good since it was taken into new ownership. Anyway, it was still a really good night. After the meal we went 10-pin bowling, which was fun, even though there was only 3 of us playing (me, Naomi and her sister Sarah). I came second in both of the games.

On Thursday I went to the cinema with Mum. We were originally hoping to see The Pursuit Of Happyness, but it turned out it wasn’t on that night, so we had to see Epic Movie instead. I thought it was funny, but Mum didn’t really like it and she kept falling asleep! We also had a meal at the Chinese Riverbank buffet restaurant.

On Saturday I took Mum and Terry for a meal at the Malaysian Delights buffet restaurant (I paid this time!) It was the first time we had ever been there, and I really liked the food, and there was a nice atmosphere too. Mum and I especially liked the “roti canai” pancakes. We decided that we will probably go there regularly from now on, possibly once a fortnight or so.

Going back a week, last Saturday Mum and I went to see Dreamgirls at the cinema. It’s all about a girl group who become famous, and apparently it’s based on The Supremes. Mum enjoyed it more than I did, as I think the music was more from her era.

So, all in all I’ve had a cracking week!

So over the last few days I’ve been getting used to my new computer! As the computer didn’t come with speakers and my old ones weren’t compatible, we went down to PC World to buy some brand new ones. They’re much better than the old ones, as you can alter the bass as well as the volume, and they take up less room on my desk.

Last Saturday evening I went to see my niece Anya perform in a local dance festival. Her dance school was competing against several other schools from the local area. Unfortunately, her dance school didn’t get through to the next round, as most of the schools were doing traditional dancing (eg tap, ballet and country), whereas Anya’s school does contemporary dance, and the judges were rather old-fashioned. They got 81 out of 100, when they needed at least 85 to go through.

On the Sunday I went to the cinema with Mum to see the film Happy Feet. It was good, but I still prefer the other 2 films I’ve seen this year: Night At The Museum and Flushed Away. It looks like there will be a lot of good films out this year, there will be the new Mr Bean film and Shrek 3 for starters.

It’s my 23rd birthday next Thursday. And I am forced to go to work that day. I did try to book it off as a holiday, but I wasn’t allowed to because my manager said there are already 3 other people on holiday that day. I’m not used to having to do any kind of work on my birthday – when I was at school and college, I was lucky because my birthday almost always fell during the half-term holidays. Last year, when I was in my old department, I managed to get the day off work as a holiday. In this new department, they are much stricter about when people can take holidays, as they always have to make sure there’s enough people to do systems testing. It doesn’t really matter though, as I’ve got my holiday coming up just a couple of weeks later.

Early last week, my site got hacked into. The whole server was affected, and everyone’s index files were deleted. The worst thing was that the host didn’t have backups of anyone’s index files, so I had to re-upload all mine manually. As I have quite a lot of folders and subdomains, it took me nearly 3 hours to fix everything. I had to totally re-install WordPress and upload all the themes. I used it as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of files and pages which I don’t really need anymore. For example I got rid of my message board (it was hardly ever used anyway) and my PHP scripts pages, such as my blogging script, my form-mail script and my file management script, all of which I wrote a couple of years ago. I haven’t had a chance to work on any of my scripts for many months, so I was concerned they might now be insecure, which is the main reason why I decided to take them all down. Sadly, my fanlistings are ruined. I will have to change from PHPFanBase to a different script.

But apart from that, 2007 has been a really good year so far! This week I finally got a written contract about my secondment at work, so that’s all completely official now.