webvictim.net

So, after being nudged into updating by a mysterious commenter, it’s time for another entry. It’d been time for quite a while, actually - I’d just been my usual lazy self and neglected the blog.

I spent Thursday afternoon - Monday evening at i34, a LAN party near Coventry which was hosted by Multiplay UK. I drank lots of beer, played lots of games, didn’t get nearly enough sleep (partly thanks to staying up late, and partly due to sleeping in a tent) and had an amazing time.

I went with what I suppose you could call a clan - we’re known as [CantFitMyN. The reason I say “suppose” is because we’re hardly fantastic gamers - we can hold our own, but we’re definitely not professionals ;-)

That said we did actually win one of our Team Fortress 2 matches over the weekend, although we didn’t qualify for the tournament in the end. The whole point is to play for fun though, and we got many compliments on how sporting we were and how fun it had been to play against us.

The question now is when I get to go and do it all over again! i35 is at the end of October, and it’s rather tempting to try and go, despite the inevitable cold weather.

We’ve put many photos online - unfortunately Facebook has just died when I’ve tried to get links to the albums, so I’ll have to update these at some point in the future…

My parents are away at the moment, and so my brother and I have my house to ourselves. This is absolutely awesome, and means that I can do lots of things I wouldn’t usually do at home. The place is starting to look a bit of a state, actually, but it won’t do it any harm.

I can’t describe how nice it is to be able to leave something on a table when you go out, and then forget about it and have it still there three days later. It sounds bizarre, but it’s such a change from the way things usually are in my house that it’s unbelievably refreshing. Unfortunately it’ll all be over next Tuesday, but I’ve only got to finish work today and then I’ve got four days off. Sweet.

In other news, Today’s XKCD is pretty similar to the way that I think in a lot of situations. Neuroses are fun!

One of the main aspects of my job is being a PHP developer for an online e-commerce platform which sells flights, hotels and holidays. As most online merchants will tell you, selling stuff online and allowing electronic payments can be a risky business, as there are lots of people out there who will try to put expensive transactions through on stolen credit cards, hoping that the goods will be dispatched and they’ll be able to do a runner before the card is reported stolen and blocked by the bank.

Selling flights is no different - there are a lot of people who will try and put expensive flights through your system and pay with a stolen credit card. You can usually spot these fraudsters a mile off - they try to make bookings to dodgy lawless places (Lagos, Accra, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Nairobi etc) that usually depart with the next few days, invariably with a card registered under the name of a third party. We’ve been selling flights online for a long time under various different platforms, and as such we have a fraud checking system that highlights bookings that might be fraudulent for review.

A little while ago we got what I think is probably the moodiest, dodgiest and most obviously fraudulent booking we’ve ever had on our system:
- The route is Dubai to Accra via Addis Ababa and Lagos
- It’s due to depart in three days’ time (20th April)
- The flight is with Ethopian Airlines
- The email address is registered in Ireland, despite the card being registered in England
- The name on the card is entirely different to the name of the person booking

I wonder who on earth thought they could get away with it?!

Just for a chuckle, I present to you all a PHP version of the recently-famous “FizzBuzz” program in the style of Code Golf!

98 bytes of pure FizzBuzz excellence.

EDIT: I know I could have made this shorter (and have done since) but it’s just a proof of concept. Besides, if I posted all my shortest solutions, everyone would be able to answer easily when it comes round to the actual Code Golf challenge…

Yesterday I went to London with Kloopy, A2 and DEATH2 for the AAC (Alphabet Alcohol Challenge).

The AAC involves visiting one Underground station for each letter of the alphabet (excluding J, X, Y and Z as there aren’t any stations that begin with those letters), finding the nearest pub, drinking a half pint and then going to the next station. We had our first half at Aldgate East at 11:04am, and finished at Waterloo at about 10:30pm. Yeggstry and genclay joined us halfway through at King’s Cross.

My feet and legs are now absolutely killing me and I can’t walk properly, but it was awesome fun. I’d think twice before doing it again, but I’m proud to say that I completed the whole challenge :)

I’m absolutely fine, I just wanted to post a picture of one of my new ThinkGeek t-shirts (-:

The panto has been and gone, and you can see me hoofing about a bit here if you have me added on Facebook and have the “Video” application. I’m the guy who comes on stage after the dog and then dances at the very left-hand side of the video. If you don’t have me added on Facebook, search for “Gus Luxton” in the London network. My picture is of me posing in a mirror in a stripey shirt and pinstripe trousers.

My birthday (last Wednesday, December 12th) was brilliant - many thanks to anyone who sent me birthday wishes by any medium at all! Being 23 is a little scary though. I logged into last.fm a couple of days ago to look at my recommendations and it came up “Male, 23, Hertfordshire” at the side… I actually had to do a double take as I realised that I was old.

I am seriously looking forward to Christmas and having some time off work. I enjoy my job and it’s been very rewarding of late, but I am shattered and just need a week or so off to actually draw breath and get back to feeling human again.

Sorry for the short sentences and the formal style - I’ve just updated Livejournal for the first time in about two months with an absolutely massive post, and I don’t have much wordiness left in me.

It’s the Secret Santa at work tomorrow, and I have to say that some of the people upstairs are absolutely ruining it. They watch the present box like hawks, and as soon as anyone brings a present up, they’ll run over and check who it’s for so that they can make a note of who bought what for who, and hold them accountable at a later date. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Secret Santa, it’s where you put everyone in an office/club/group’s name in a hat and randomly draw one each, so you get someone to buy a Christmas present for. There’s a budget of £5 in our office, and the (unofficial) idea is usually to get embarassing or amusing gifts. The main point of the whole thing is that you don’t tell anyone else who you have, though - that’s why it’s a “secret” Santa and you can get away with buying some very amusing things indeed. I am currently devising a scheme where I will be able to get my gift into the present box without them noticing.

I met up with Xsara this evening for the first time in a while. She’s doing alright and looking well. I thought she’d disappeared off the face of the earth but no, I was wrong. It’s a good job I didn’t eBay the DVDs she left at my house like I was planning to…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIdcHkMCzQw

The first time I watched this, I couldn’t stop laughing. It still makes me chuckle on the fourth viewing… sheer awesomeness.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_y36fG2Oba0

I found that absolutely hilarious. Kudos to SIR-Millar and the_angry_angel for bringing it to my attention :-)

It is Friday, and I am bored at work. I have spent a large proportion of today on the excellent Facebook (that site truly is a procrastinator’s nightmare) and I am looking forward to going home.

This week has been absolutely exhausting to say the least. I was in a meeting room at hotel in Stevenage for the first three days of it, doing massively long days to try and get a project finished in time for Thursday. We were ready on time in the end, but circumstances changed and so the launch date has now been moved forward to a few weeks from now. I can’t say I’m not delighted about it - it’s given us more time to thoroughly test things so that we can actually release a top-notch product. This week has totally taken it out of me though, and I am seriously looking forward to crawling into bed and sleeping for about twelve hours this evening. There will be some beer being drunk in town first though, as that is definitely called for.

The show (Daisy Pulls It Off) went fantastically well in the end. We had big audiences every night and were sold out Friday and Saturday night, which was excellent. It’s much easier to perform when there’s a big audience and they keep the atmosphere and the laughs going - comedy is quite hard to pull off (excuse the name based pun) when people don’t find it funny. It was brilliant fun though and I was totally demoralised when it was over. I thought I’d escaped the post-show malaise as I was fine on Saturday night, but I think that was because I was at the after-show party and was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. It all hit me when I had to disassemble the set on Sunday morning with a bit of a hangover.

Not to worry though - rehearsals for the Christmas pantomime have now started. I’m playing Jack (one half of the famous “Jack and Jill”) and it’s looking to be quite a laugh so far, although far more energetic than what I’ve been used to! We had our first attempt at doing the dancing that goes along with the first song last night… not only was it absolutely knackering, it was damn hard as well. I’m totally out of practice! I’m looking forward to it, though.

I think I may have to be purchasing Halo 3 - having done some 3-player online on release day, I think it’s definitely going to be added to the games list. Awesome stuff!

I went to Brighton last weekend to meet some guys from IRC - namely #linux on irc.netgamers.org. I’d met a few of them before (idimmu, SIR-Millar and HRH_H_Crab) but the others (Jeekay, RR|Away and queball) were all new faces to me. It was a good fun day though - we sat on the seafront and drank quite a few pints, visited a good chip shop and talked a lot about things.

One of the highlights of the day though was visiting Choccy Woccy Doo Dah, which is a rather flamboyant cake shop. They apparently made all the cakes in the recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film, and I have to say that when I set foot in the shop, it was quite apparent. The cakes were absolutely massive, and for £3.95 you got a huge slice, drizzled with chocolate sauce and garnished with strawberries. I selected a cake that was all chocolate, with chocolate buttons on the top, chocolate filling and chocolate icing. It was totally decadent and I did almost feel guilty afterwards, but I have to say it was totally delicious. I just about managed to finish the slice and felt there was just the right amount there. Unfortunately for queball his eyes were bigger than his stomach, and he ordered a chocolate sundae *and* a slice of cake with jelly babies on - this wasn’t bad in itself, but he got the biggest slice of cake I have ever seen! It was nearly the size of his head, and he didn’t manage more than half of it before having to give in through sheer sugar overload.

I heartily recommend the place though, although it’s so unbelievably over the top, the cake is delicious and really something to try if you ever visit Brighton.

Here’s me enjoying my cake…

While playing the increasingly-addictive World of Warcraft last night, I discovered that my warlock (who was the second character I got to level 60, in the days before The Burning Crusade) is absolutely awesome. In some cases, he’s so overpowered it’s unreal - I soloed a level 63 elite with him last night. Considering that elites have about three times the HP of a regular mob, hit three times as hard and usually have special abilities, I’m quite pleased with that. I needed a healthstone and a healing potion, but that was only because the chain fear I was using failed and he hit me over 1000 in a single hit :/

In slightly less geeky news, what the hell is going on with the weather?! As a person of slightly larger proportions, I don’t tend to complain about the weather not being as hot as it should be (it means I sweat less, and I can’t stand sweating) but seriously. It’s July and there seems to be no sign whatsoever of the sun. In fact, there’s a sign up on the wall in our office kitchen - it says, “MISSING: Large round yellow object that emits lots of heat and light. Usually seen in the blue mass above known as the sky. Answers to the name “Sun”. If you see him, tell him it’s f**king July!”

It made me chuckle when I first saw it.