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This Monday just gone was a bank holiday (the last one we get until the end of August). As it was raining really heavily, and had been all weekend, Mum and I decided to go to the cinema. We’d planned to see The Bridge to Terabithia and go for a meal afterwards. But once we reached the ticket desk at the cinema, the lady behind the counter said that she’d sold the last 2 tickets just a few seconds earlier and that there wouldn’t be any more showings that day. This film has actually been out for several weeks, so I was surprised it was fully booked, but I suppose it happened because everyone wanted to go to the cinema because rain meant it would be no fun to do anything else. Also, the new Pirates of The Caribbean film had just been released, and because that was full, people had obviously decided to see The Bridge to Terabithia instead, making that full as well.

But there were no other films we wanted to see, so we just left it and had a meal at the Frankie & Benny’s restaurant, where I had a chicken burger and fries, and then we bought some DVDs and watched them at home.

At work I will soon be learning to use the Microsoft Reporting Services software (part of SQL Server). One of the objectives I have been set is to convert some of the databases from Microsoft Access to Reporting Services, so that the reports can be viewed over the company intranet. So in order to try and get a head start, I thought I’d try installing Reporting Services on my home computer last weekend. It was a nightmare. I went to the official Microsoft site and they had a free download of SQL Server 2000 – I know it’s 7 years old but I thought it would be fine for practising on. When I installed it, the dialog boxes said that it is recommended to have several other programs installed as well, including Visual Studio. I then remembered I had an old CD of Visual Studio 6.0 from when I was a student, which I had to use for my programming assignments. So I installed that, but then I found that it’s the wrong version and it’s not compatible with SQL Server. I don’t even understand how to start up SQL Server and start creating database queries with it, and the instructions seem to be aimed at professional network/server adminstrators rather than someone learning for the first time. In the end I gave up and decided I would just wait until it’s installed on the computers at work. At least there the installation would be done for me and they will (I hope!) teach me how to get started.