Dan Rooke’s Blog

It’s been a while since my last update, sorry about that!

The last month has seen many things: Becca starting her job at Greenacre School, us collecting a van load (yes, literally) of mine and my Dad’s belongings, collecting wedding photos and going quad biking for Becca’s birthday, buying Becca a bike and getting out on them (occasionally), passing my probation period at work and getting a contract, Becca’s brother Kieran and his girlfriend Becca (yes, it gets confusing!) are starting at Uni this month at Newcastle and Huddersfield respectively and … I think that’s enough in one sentence!!

Another highlight was visiting the Black Sheep Brewery at Masham and enjoying a very nice lunch accompanied by a very clean pint of Emmerdale. With a tour of the village after, I found an excellent sweet shop selling home made fudge off the block, I had to get some!! They even had black sheep ale fudge! I went for more conservative choices and very enjoyable it was too.
On a more geeky angle, I’ve moved our home broadband over to Zen Internet and we are now enjoying a reasonably priced service with good support to back it up. I’m also in the middle of migrating my websites over to a new UK based server, Chris‘ server Baldrick that is. My blog is already on the new server and I hope that you will have noticed a speed improvement!

Work is going well with a large project I’ve been working on almost since my start date nearly out of the door. I have recently been researching dedicated servers as we are looking at consolidating out hosting onto one machine as well as working and experimenting further with PHP5’s exception handling, the Zend Framework, SOAP as well as various other little tasks. I would quite like to start an engineering type of blog for the company to keep a track of various technical discoveries I make / solutions I find. It could be useful for somebody!

As most of you will be aware, we have had a busy few weeks preparing for our wedding and honeymoon. Well we returned from honeymoon early this afternoon and so it’s all over and done with now

We had a fantastic day and we think that everybody else did too! This is what made it so great. It was a reasonably informal service and reception afterwards which is the main reason we think it went so well.

Thank you to everybody who gave us presents, our house deposit fund is looking reasonably healthy already.

I’m afraid this is a short post as there are a few things to get done before work starts on Monday! There are some pictures over at wedding.sarzeau.net for you to have a look at - not complete though yet! If you have pictures that we don’t have yet, please email them to me.

As reported by Jess, Chris‘ better half, we now have our degree results. I received a 2-2 which is equivalent to a C grade overall for my degree.

I am pleased with this result as my final year, which holds double weighting, has seen a few difficulties along the way. Although not as high as I would have hoped for, I am pleased to have completed the final year and to be moving on with things.

I’ve had a great four years at the University of Huddersfield and have learnt an awful lot about my field and life in general. It has been a thouroughly worth while experience and I’d recommend it to anybody. Thanks go to Chris and Jess, Andy and Sarah and of course my wife to be (in less than four weeks!) Becca.

I’ll spare you all any more of my acceptance speech! For everyone else yet to receive their results, good luck!

As Chris quite rightly mentions, we both went to see Zero 7 play at Leeds Met. Students’ Union on 1st June.

I was very impressed with the set and the fact that you got four artists for the price of one, namely: Fink, Sia, José González and Zero 7. I particularly liked the performance of one of José’s songs (can’t remember which I’m afraid) with Zero 7 supporting.

The Thursday and Friday were a long days but it was well worth it. If you get a chance to see them, take it! I do have some photos which I will try to upload when I get chance.

I’ve now been working for newmediaboutique for a full week and I well and truly feel like a working man!

I was a little sceptical at first having been working with an existing project, but now the team are looking at new projects which I am able to guide the development of and so feel more comfortable. Working with other developers’ code, dependant on the standard, is very time consuming and can be quite energy sapping! The first few days of working 9am - 6pm really took it out of me - hence the blog post a week after starting!

On another note, we made good use of the weekend by not only doing the usual grocery shopping etc. but also visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, Wakefield. We also visited the local cinema on Saturday night to watch X-Men: The Last Stand. The film was good however the company not so good. The row in front of us had a group 5 individuals who were sharing a bottle of Courvoisier throughout the film, one individual left to get a pizza from Pizza Hut half way through and at the end of the film one proceeded to light up a spliff! We were a little annoyed to say the least so spoke to a manager about it and we were offered a pair of guest tickets in compensation. Apparently cinemas aren’t allowed any CCTV cameras trained on the audience due to copyright issues.

On Sunday, I was in our garden shed and found a wasp nest. It was only very small and there only appeared to be the one wasp tending to it. A quick bit of research showed that this will have been a queen setting up the nest by laying some workers. It could then grow to about a 1000 - 5000 strong nest. Thankfully we caught it early and destroyed it.

Anyway, I had better be off to work on what looks to be a gorgeous sunny day in West Yorkshire.