graham.reeds/

Worst service ever

We went out for a New Year meal with friends. They picked the venue, based on the rave reviews that people gave it. The place was the Happy Valley chinese restaurant in Norton. The service was bad. It was worse than the Akbar Dynasty. We were seated at about 9.00pm at the correct time, which was the only thing they got right all evening. This is a blow by blow account of that evening.

As a table of 9, we were probably the largest table in the restaurant, and we weren’t exactly sat there in silence. But after an hour no one had come to ask if we would like drinks, or even given us menus. So we went up and ordered them ourselves; a couple of bottles of wine, a few beers, bottles, etc. They told us they would bring it to our table. But nothing arrived, we went and asked and they told us they lost the order. We reordered. They bought a bottle and then went around serving every other table before finally bring us the rest of the drinks (as you will see this is action repeated).

At some point in here we got our menus. Essentially there was a choice of 6 main courses. So it was fairly simple, one of each and 3 extra of what seemed to be the most popular. Took about 30 seconds to decide. Pity it took them at least half hour to actually ask us.

So, just to recap: We got there at 9pm and we haven’t had anything to eat till 10:30pm.

First course: Soup. Chicken, ham, peas, mushrooms, and gelatine. Yes big lumps of gloopy jelly at the bottom of the soup bowls.  Not must appetising.  Then there was a massive wait until…

Second course: Prawn Toast, Spring Rolls, Kebabs in Satay Sauce, Salted Chicken and Crispy Seaweed. About as good as what you would get from Iceland.

Third course (Part 1): Strips of cucumber, carrot and spring roll, Hosin sauce and a 10 minute wait.

Third course (Part 2): Crispy fried duck and a 5 minute wait.

Third course (Part 3): Pancakes! By this time Mrs Bear was so hungry she even ate the duck, which still feels guilty about.

Fourth course (Part 1): A plate of pork slices and a 5 minute wait.

Fourth course (Part 2): All the other meals, and the plate that had held the pork was taken away.

Fourth course (Part 3): Two bowls of rice. By this time we had gorged ourselves on the other courses.

As you can see there wasn’t much happiness in the Happy Valley from our table. Seeing tables that we seated a long while after us (even it was just a couple) get served before us was wholly wrong. If they were understaffed, then that is their problem to sort out – they knew how busy it was going to be. The only thing that stopped the evening from being a complete loss was the company we had and we spent most of the night laughing – probably because we got drunk on empty stomachs.

As for midnight, we only realised about 30 seconds to go (or two minutes depending on whose watch you used). No count down or anything from the staff. We did the count down for the entire room.  We did get a bottle of Asda Asti for the table though.

• Service: 2/10 (The only way it could get worse was to not serve us at all).
• Atmosphere: 9/10 (We bought our own atmosphere).
• Food: 7/10 (It wasn’t bad, but we were so hungry it could of been dog food).
• Price: £35
• Overall: 4/10
  

2 comments.

Happy New Year!

And a Happier New Decade!

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas Everyone

I hope you didn’t get too many cups/mugs!

0 comments.

Back To The Future

Well I have uninstalled Windows 7 and gone back to Windows XP MCE 2005.

There were too many problems with it from the lack of response to the remote control, the frequent and unidentifiable pauses while browsing menus in Mediaportal and my inability to get DXVA working.

The developers blog notes that MP isn’t supported on Win7 and now I can see why. Give it a few months and I am sure they will have it working smoothly – probably with 1.1RCx which is a long while overdue (the reason?).

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Resize a VirtualPC disk

My 10GB disk on my VirtualPC was nearly full to overflowing so I went looking on how to resize the virtual disk. There’s a free product that does this for you, but to quote an old song “I waved that thing all over the place, my boomrang won’t come back”. In fact I was using the app correctly but not understanding what the app actually did. This guide showed me the way.

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Windows 7 Thoughts

I preordered Windows 7 Home Premium from Amazon. These are my thoughts.

First off I thought I backed up my system. Unfortuntely I didn’t. I assumed it worked as there was a large amount of files copied and it took a long time. So I lost all my app settings.

I dropped the 64bit version into my drawer and rebooted. Selected the SSD, formatted it and installed.  It was quick compared to WinXP MCE which was on there previously.

A few problems after initial install: Sound thought it was running through SP/DIF (it isn’t), Belkin Wireless G USB wasn’t working, and there was a mysterious yellow exclamation mark. Gigabyte drivers for the mobo and onboard sound fixed the sound issue but Belkin doesn’t issue 64bit drivers it seems.  So I plugged in my Netgear WG111T usb wireless. That worked.

The WG111T caused a few blue screens. Turned out the exclamation mark was Away Mode system being 32bit. No crashes since I disabled it in BIOS.

The new interface will take some getting used to. Also where do you put your own codecs now? You used to drop them in system32 and run regsvr32.  There isn’t a system64 and everyone on the net makes stupid directories in the root for them.

Doesn’t feel any faster.  In some cases it feels slower. This is on a dual-core AM2 5300+ running at 2.7GHz with 2gb of memory. Also memory at start is 500mb.

Installation of MediaPortal was pretty straight forward if not without slight hiccups.

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More Updates

MiL is now home: Been told to take it easy for a couple of weeks but I think she will start cooking before the end of the week. All lines have been removed from Mrs Bear which is good. However she is now in some discomfort, in no small part due to the amount of fluid she needs to drink (7 litres yesterday). She’s also been visited by the dietician whose promised not to change her food choice from the non-KPI but vegetarian Quiche to the KPI friendly but non-vegetarian Ham Sandwich. Also from this change she can get her hands on Cheese and Biscuits.

Final Comment: I am becoming a dab hand with the rear wheel turning wheelchairs!

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Operation Update

Just to let you know that I am back from spending 2 nights in a dingy motel on the outskirts of Newcastle!

Mrs Bear went into theatre about 2 hours after MiL did, at 2pm yesterday. They managed to remove MiL’s kidney by keyhole which was a surprise since they thought they’d have to do it via standard surgery. Mrs Bear left Recovery near midnight, but they allowed me and FiL to visit her while there just briefly. She was very pale and quite puffy. Early today, about 10am-ish, she was still pale and weak, drifting in and out of conciousness as the drugs she was being pumped full of kept her sedated. This afternoon saw a marked improvement. She was sat up in bed, chatty – moaning about the horrid hospital food – and talking to the patients/nurses. We bought her some prawn sandwiches and laters some Ploughmans which she was grateful for. MiL was quite nauseus this morning but feeling a lot better in the afternoon. Me and FiL went on a wheel chair hunt that took us what seemed like two hours to find one (though it only took 45 mins) – they are like gold dust! They had a good chat before wheeling back and we relinquished the ‘chair.

Hopefully Mrs Bear will be home later next week!

1 comment.

Facial Recognition

Picasa has had what all programs seem to get at some point in their life: A .5 update release.

This one is pretty good too. The feature I’ve wanted since I poured all my photos I’ve ever taken is now here and it is pretty good too: Facial Recognition.

The interface is nice and the algorithm is pretty good.  I have several shots of a friend with red hair and then a few with black hair. If you’ve use the interface you’ll know that Picasa groups faces together that might be similar. I’ve seen her face several times while removing the majority of the faces (me, Mrs Bear, etc) and getting down to the less photographed. So I tag her the first time, tag the second, but the algorithm they use must of decided that the larger sample of her face now does include the photos with black hair and so decided to include it. Another example is it accurately tagged a female friend at a fancy dress party as a pirate – complete with beard.

While it is quite accurate there has been some mishaps – two of my friends ended up with photos in each others folders, one being indian and the other white. Pictures of faces side-ways to the camera seem to get lumped in together. For the pictures which Picasa is unsure of it gives you a little tick or cross to decide, though sometimes it mistags a person and doesn’t give that interface. Speed could do with a bump – 18,000 photos took about 6 hours to analyze.

Now I have 9,300 faces to sift through…

1 comment.

Update

It’s been a while since I posted, so what has been keeping me busy?

Work, it’s getting easier – I think I am getting into the VB6 mindset, but I still hate VBA with a passion. When is the nice .NET extension becoming available? Is it already, and could Reporting Services save our souls (not to mention our sanity)?

Space is coming along very slowly. Any time I sit down to work on it I have to spend about an hour refreshing my mind on what I have done – and I only have about 40 mins to do it in.

Had my birthday: One of my presents was an iPod from Mrs Bear – which gave me a lovely opportunity to hate iTunes all over again. This time I accidently deleted my play list, there is no undelete and then it synced it – wiping it. I’ve installed iTunes 9 but I don’t hold out any hope for them fixing all the problems with it. Another present is an ant farm – so along with my Sea Monkeys you could say I have Surf’n'Turf.

Another side effect of my birthday was my the choice of venues for a meal.  Since I’ve always wanted to eat there I picked Kaminaki and had some of the nicest fish I have ever eaten, and definately the nicest pitta bread ever. All this and despite the grumblings of some of my friends.

1 comment.