Friday 26 December 2008

Being sleepy and headachey

I woke up this morning at about 5.30am but didn't want to get up in case it made me get a headache from being too sleepy, so I went back to bed again but didn't really get to sleep again, then got up about 8am.

After breakfast Clare said I needed to take Ben out to get some milk since we'd run out. Milk is very important for cups of tea. So I thought me & Ben might as well go down town to get some milk and see if any shops are open. On the radio they had said that stores were having their biggest ever sales this year to try and get shoppers spending again.

Clare said that Sainsbury's wasn't open, Mac checked the pinternet and Tesco's was nae either, so that meant getting the milk from rip-off Spar. I asked Shaz if she wanted to go down town with me and Mac and Ben and she said she did, but would be about an hour as she was still in bed.

So I watched Ben play on Lego Star Wars for about an hour while I waited for Shaz. It was very boring as Ben just does the same thing over and over and always bes pointless. When Shaz was ready Rad said that he was going out as well and could get the milk, so I said he might as well get it. Then Mac and Shaz decided to go out with Rad and Clare instead, so just me and Ben went down town by ourselves. Blockbuster was open, but we didnae go in there. Woolworths was open, so we went in there. They were selling things like stock trolleys for £50, DVDs for about £20 with 60% off (so £8, still expensive), and boxes full of empty green Xbox DVD cases and empty DS game cases for £20 for a box (maybe a reasonable price, still seemed quite expensive to me). The only reasonably priced thing I saw in there was a bin full of plastic bags for £5, but it was only useful for novelty value so I didn't buy it since it would take up quite a bit of room and I'd have to lug it home.

After that we went in Waterstones, which was the only other shop I could see that was open (though we didn't walk up the road much or check the shops around St. Mary's place. Whilst I had bought my Waterstone's gift vouchers with me, I still didn't buy anything. It looked like they had about 10 different books at sale prices, and everything else was at RRP. They did have a large Ansel Adams American West book reduced from £50 to £25. That was probably a good deal, but still too expensive for me, especially since it looked like it was just photos and info on the places rather than information on technique.

When we got back home I checked my email, then we had lunch.

After lunch I tried to get the £3 free Amazon mp3s. First of all I had to decide what to get, so I spent quite a while looking through their selection to see if they had any £3 albums of interest. They had Britney Spears' new album 'Circus', also a best of the Thompson Twins album and a Best of Go West album. In the end I decided I'd probably rather just get some singles. So I got:
  • Terry Wogan & Aled Jones - Little drummer boy
  • Status Quo - It's Christmas Time
  • Geraldine McQueen (Peter Kay) - Winner's Song
  • Geraldine McQueen (Peter Kay) - Upon A Christmas Song


But when it came time to checkout it wouldn't accept the code Amazon had emailed me, saying the offer had stopped and to check the terms of the offer. I checked the email they'd sent me, and it just said it was valid for Christmas day and Boxing day, no mention of expiring at mid day on boxing day or anything.

So I checked HotUKdeals to see if anyone else was having problems. On there someone said that Amazon had changed the terms of the deal, so instead of entering the code you pay normally, and then they'll refund the money to your card. Apparently lots of people had somehow been able to download loads of albums and tracks using the code for free. I guess Amazon didn't limit the voucher to one use per customer or sumat.

Anyway, I tried checking out, and it said something like 'Order successful' but also had a message saying there was a problem with my payment and I should re-submit the order. So I did this, but then it said that I had just ordered the same items and shouldn't re-submit the order unless I want to order the same things again. I didn't want to risk ordering the same mp3s twice and getting charged for the second lot, so I decided to check my email and see if Amazon had sent me an order confirmation email.

Amazon had sent me an email, but just to say there was a problem with my order, so I clicked the link in my email and it went to a page with a list of all my cards registered with Amazon, so I deleted all the old ones that don't work okay. After that it didn't say my order could go through or anything so I read the email from them again and it said I would have to re-do my order again. ANNOYING! So I added all the tracks to my basket again, but when I clicked my basket to check out, the basket was empty. So I tried again, and when I clicked the add to basket button next to the songs I wanted it definately said 'added to basket', but they still weren't being added to my basket.

So I gave up, I wasted more than £3 of my time, and even if I had got the free mp3s they only would have been worth about £0.20 to me as whilst I only listen to mp3s, I much prefer physically owning songs rather than some bits and bytes that can easily be deleted. Thanks Amazon.

After that I did some more work on my website and fixed a couple of syntax errors. One of them was with my DELETE statements. If you use a DELETE with multiple tables, e.g. if your DELETE statement contains a LEFT JOIN to find rows in one table that don't exist in another table, then you must use DELETE tableYouWantRecordsToBeDeletedFrom FROM tableYouWantRecordsToBeDeletedFrom LEFT JOIN othertable...

I wasn't doing this, I just thought it would delete the records from the table specified after FROM. Mysql website info: DELETE Syntax.

Whoo! I just discovered that there is a <code> tag so you can write code instead of using blockquote and bleh stuff. Probably I should do a custom template for this blog, but I cannae be bov-cheese at the momentre.

After getting that working on my website I decided to take some photos of the flowers on a Succulent plant I've had in my bedroom the last week or so. I brought it up here from the living room to take photos of the flowers but have been too busy doing other stuff.

I took a few photos, haven't processed them yet. I think probably I should look at other people's flower photos to try and get some inspiration. After that I playd on Animal crossing for a bit, then it was dinner time.

After dinner I went on Animal a bit more, then me, Mac and Ben watched Lost. Then I went on Animal Crossing a bit more. It was annoying because there was a snowball near the beach, so I found the other snowball and rolled it down to the where the other snowball was, but then the first snowball wasn't there anymore. So I looked all round the map to try and find it again, but it wasn't anywhere, and when I came back to where I started the other snowball had gone too.

I didn't see any more snowballs. About 9pm I went to bed as I had a headache, probably from not getting much sleep last night.

The weather today was a mixture of clouds and sunshine, with the day finishing with a pretty clear sky that lit up a nice orange colour after sunset.

Food
Breakfast: Bowl of Chocolate oat crunch cereal mixed with Rice Crispies; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Beef with mustard and crunchy salad sandwich; 2x cheese twists; Prawn cocktail flavour pringles; banana; Cadbury's caramel mini-roll; Bailey's chocolate truffle; Galaxy truffle celebration; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x Cheapo sausages; mashed potato; peas; carrots; potato; 2x small Yorkshire biscuits (Yorkshire puds that were hard like biscuits). For pudding I had the last of the Christmas pud with custard and cream - delee!! Coffee.

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