Aquarionics

Happy New Year

Aquarionics is seven today.

Meaning I’ve been writing stuff for seven years.

Golly.

Happy New Year, people, and I’ll speak to you all more next year.

Promise.

Another One

Aquarionics Year Eight starts like this:

I had a good New Years.

I went, as I always go, to Wales for Gid and Suzi’s awesome brand-new-number holiday spectacular. I saw people I haven’t seen for years, months and in a couple of cases days. I drank some beer, quite a bit of vodka and passed on the wonders of vodka and cream soda unto a new generation.

My new resolutions for the year are:

• New Job
• New House
• New Car
• Leave the Country
• Become 26
• Live
• Get a new Macbook Pro
• Write more on Aquarionics. Starting with documenting New Years, The Stag Party, The Interview, and Aquarion’s Adventures in Javaland.
• FINISH TOFFIA

But for now, I have a hotel to find. Follow my adventures on Twitter

Conflict

On the one hand: “Rah! Only just finished Christmas! Rampant commercialism! Grr! Argh”

On the other, I have both tea and hot cross buns.

Double Plus

Half my life ago I was a teenager.

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me.

Anyone fancy a drink tomorrow? Say, Cambridge, The Castle, Early Afternoon?

No?

Just me then.

There are just two things that I blog

I do humbly apologise to anyone expecting to read this weblog for techical stuff. It’s all gone a bit cheese sandwichy, hasn’t it?

There’s a reason for this.

The first is that we started off as a cheese sandwich blog, and then I decided if I was going to do a cheese sandwich blog I could do it on fucking livejournal and this was going to be only for splendid and worthwhile posts on technology and XML and Linux and Sysadmining and all kinds of neat stuff.

Then I, you know, stopped updating. Because all the stuff I was doing on technology was stuff I can’t talk about because the company didn’t like it when I do, and sysadmining stuff went away because there is only so often you can bewail the existence of EIMS on OS 8 before it begins to suck the very life out of the most vibrant and exciting places.

(This does not count as one. In the last couple of years I’ve lost you all, haven’t I? You’ve all fucked off to more interesting weblogs, cheating on me, damn your eyes.)

So, this is what will happen: I will update this damn thing again. I will tell you what I’m working on in home projects and – assuming the new company don’t object – work projects as soon as I’m allowed to mention they exist. Should there be any.

But first:

THE NEW JOB

I went to my leaving do for Evolving Media last friday, and was somewhat… worried. “Why”, said Linda the accountant when handing my my final paycheque, “Are you leaving at all?”, and she had a point. I was leaving, and I had nowhere to go to on Monday morning. I would be Unpaid, Unloved and In Trouble. I resolved to spend the entire weekend applying for as many jobs as I could find with my skill-set or below it.

Instead, I went to London to see people, play with Wiis and deliver crack.

This, you will note, is not exactly compatible with finding a new job. And you would be wrong, in this case, because I was discussing with Charles – whose Wii it was – how the company he works for needs a web dev. I’d already emailed my CV, but wasn’t expecting much from it. (I have applied for several dozen jobs in the past three weeks. I am annoyed by how few bother to reply at all), and he suggested I post a more “pure” webdev CV (My usual CV is a mix of Sysadmin and Webdev), which I did.

He passed it on to his bosses, with a note that I’d be passing by the office in a few hours on my way home, which I was, and could pop in if they wanted a chat. They did.

Next day, I went back in at their request to meet more people. They liked me too, and made me an offer.

This gave me about a week to find a way to work in Kings Cross without it costing me a number of bombs. My solution to this is to move to London, which I’m doing as of tomorrow.

This means I’m going to be paying rent for two houses this month, which means I’m going to be very poor indeed. If anyone knows a way I can make a few hundred pounds without spending any time or effort on the enterprise, please let me know…

Non-literal crack

I’ve moved house. Again.

And so a series of things happen, meaning I’m now living in Walthamstow. Fortunately, I am a member of Walthamstow Pool Hall already, and I have friends here, and it’s close to the tube, and stuff.

The house has been without the tubes of tinternet for a couple of weeks, including the week or so I’ve been here, but now they are back.

I went to Pub Standards on Thursday, which I discovered by stalking Natalie Downe via the wonder that is Twitter. This eventually involved a nice pub, an amount of beer, and the discussion of jokes about breezeblocks with the internet’s Dean Edwards. Do not ask me to tell you the breezeblock joke.

New design of AqCom is happening. I’ve got a better idea of what I want the site to look like now. Elements of this, bits of that, and some magic of Ajax. The design is now on paper. Next stage is colour, then mock-up in PSP, Photoshop, or something. Then cut up and CSS/HTMLify, hack Epistula to do the things it needs to do that it doesn’t do already (Epistula’s coming up to five years old now, and there’s very little I actually need to change from the original basic design. Apart from the lack of proper templating, which I should have done properly the first time. One day I’ll have another two months free to rewrite it…)

First week at work has been fun, with gunfights and tea and monitors and laptops and meetings and code and designs and jam. I’m unlikely to specifically start talking about exactly what I’m doing – at least not for a few months or we get a company blog or something – but the results of some of the stuff I’m doing may get refactored and turned into articles. Possibly.

The company as a whole has Clue, which is nice.

But yes, I have Moved. That is this place here is now Home, and that place up there is now Away. At some point soonish, I’m going to shift the rest of Away into my new Home (Having moved from an entire two bedroom house into that studio flat, I’m perfectly sure I can now fit it all into a single room in a shared house. Oh yes). Today me and Brother The Second wandered up to Bedford to pick up the pile of cushions I laughingly refer to as a bed and shift it down here so I can stop sleeping in the living room.

The world continues apace.

Aquarion and the Legal System

So, I failed to pay my council tax.

(Council Tax, Americans and other aliens, is a local authority tax for paying for things like police, roads and county swimming pools. There is no way around it, no way though it, and they can charge basically what they like, hiking way above the rate of inflation and then saying that any less would mean fewer policemen on the streets, which ranks alongside “taking your liberties solves terrorism” and “This is a magical hat that protects me from tigers when in London” in undefendable statements. Anyway.)

I do this every so often. Bedford CC don’t let you pay by bank transfer, which is my money-management drug of choice (I had a bad experience with an authenticated random-amount DD going batshit-insane a few years ago), so I have to do it manually over the phone/counter/something, and what with Amsterdam, and leaving Bedford, and quiting EM, and general arsehattery on my part, I entirely failed to do so. And, being the fourth time this year I was late…

...The weekend after I started living in E17 (Where I now live) my smallest little brother – who has a car – kindly helped me transfer essentials (such as bedding, bed cushions and tea) to London. This was the point when I opened my mailbox to discover a court summons from the county council.

Of course, sending out a little piece of paper summoning me to appear before the court of the land is not an inexpensive process. Just that little A4 sheet and accompanying letter cost them £60. It wasn’t even very good quality paper, to be honest, and I do worry how much of the budget goes on paper if it costs them quite that much.

£40 underpayment plus £60 muppetry tax = £100. Quite a chunk in a month where I’ve moved house.

I said a number of unprintable words at this point, distinctly unimpressed. At this point I still believed – as is apparently engraved on my heart never to be forgotten – that Council Tax runs from March to December, skipping January and February. Also, my my council tax is a bit more than £40/month, so the £40 made no sense for a missed payment.

So I forgot about it for a while (Hearing wasn’t until March) before sending an email. “I have”, I said in my email,
“now moved house. I now live [HERE], if you could cancel my ‘accounty thing’ with you, that would be handy. Incidentally, I’ve recieved a court summons. If you could also give me a breakdown of where I missed the payment that would be useful”.

They got back within a couple of hours.

Like many things engraved as mentioned above, it is no longer true. KV doesn’t heart DC 4evar, we will forget what happens when war is declared, and council tax runs from April to January. However, being a muppet, I can never remember how much the payment is, and so over the course of 2006 I had almost – but not quite – overpaid enough to cater for the missed month. I owed £40.

But, since I was moving out, I didn’t need to pay for March. They would recalculate, and they would send me a letter.

They did.

Because the calculation was wrong, the summons was invalid and I don’t need to pay the £60. Because I didn’t need to pay for March, I get some money taken off my bill. This entirely wipes out the £40. Because I overpaid, Bedford Council now owe me £23.

Which is a decent result from a court summons.

TWO THOUSAND

This is journal ID 1900. I mean 19100. I mean 2000.

Bet you never thought you’d see those jokes again, did you?

See?

Eak

Washing machine go ‘splody boom.
Drum thought rubber seal could do with spin dry,
Kitchen flooded.
Send ark.
Rats drowning.
Silver lining: Floor clean.

All we want to do is eat your brains

So, went to Maelstrom.

Character got sinking feeling as massively bad things happened which are partly his fault, due to treating entities as people and vice-versa. Consort not with angels, for Shit Will Happen.

Water doesn’t work at home, due to boiler deciding to start screaming sometime about 2am.

Currently at my desk at work – since 7 – because work has tea where home doesn’t.

More, better updates when I have brainspace and can say more about work.

Because nothing says piracy like youtube

From Monkey Island:

(The fact that this video appears to be titled "A pirate I was mean't" to be just makes my brain hurt)

And, while we're on Monkey Island, here's "Press Play on Tape": playing it:

And, returning to Aquarionics after a long absence, We wants a training day

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day, internet

Yarr

A new location has been unlocked!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any man of drinking age who has recently moved to London will be looking for a local pub.

In this city "Local" isn't very much a function of geography, as a pub that is half an hour's walk away is equal to a pub half an hour's bus-ride away which is nevertheless miles out. So far in my London Life the pubs counting as "The place I usually go to" would be Chads - which is just outside work and something of a Default Option at 18:00; Caminos - Which is also in Kings Cross, sells beer by the pitcher with iced glasses and has decent lager and good food; Celsius - which sells variable beer, but is close to home and cheap; or De Hems - Very, Very nice beer, good food, but not cheap and something of an arse to get to (or at least home from).

Then:

I went back to see my parents & brethen before one of them sods off to Thailand for a while, and their new copy of the Good Beer Guide had arrived, so I looked though it for places near me, registered one as being potentially interesting, and promptly forgot about it.

I'm vaguely looking for a new flat, and looking at different areas. In one of the flats I was looking at, I put the postcode into a search for pubs to see what was nearby. One of them looked interesting, and rang a bell, but I didn't end up visiting the flat (The agent never rang me back) so I forgot about it.

A little while later, a somewhat long-lost friend of mine posted to his Livejournal about how he was in this particular pub, not far from where I was, and would anyone on his friends list like to join him? I had almost completed Peggle, and I did that instead. This was a mistake.

Yesterday. Mr Cooke - who I work with, lived with in Cambridge, was best man for, and am friends with - mentioned a pub in Hackney that he and his wife were going to most weekends, it had lots of decent beer and games and even did games evening. Also, it had free wifi. I should, he said, go with them one Sunday.

Slightly later yesterday, Long Lost Friend - who is also connected via people I now know though the Maelstrom LARP community, he's that kind of Nexus - posted in his LJ that he now had a job at a pub in Hackney, working Sundays and...

...So I brought this up on the LARP channel, because nexi of coincidences like this really, really start to scare me...

...and it turns out that this used to be a favourite pub of several people on channel, when they used to live in London.

The same pub. Which was named after the village my grandparents live in.

Where the hospital in which I was born resides.

--

There is a moment, to paraphrase someone, in RPG games where the unnamed masses stop responding to you with "*sigh*, Times are Tough", or "Mustn't Grumble", or "I wonder if the crops are okay?", and instead will mention uncles on a continent you've not seen before, or how they're saving to sail there, or how they hope their brother (who sailed to this continent) is okay. You look at your world map, and you discover there is now a third continent where once there were potential dragons. At this point you know, without yet being told, that the next place you'll be going involves a long boat ride.

I need a bigger universe.

And Now

And now it’s time for special festive edition of Spot the Ninja:

Happy Holidays!

So here it is

Redesign Aq15

Stripped back, back to blues, purples and (for reasons best known to the bits of my brain that aren’t talking to me) orangey-salmon-pink.

Epistula’s implementation – finally – of a views system means I can have different templates for the front page and the rest of the site, which is handy, so the front page becomes all about the latest article and a more traditional weblog down the left hand side, a host of things I’ve favourited on Youtube, added to Del.icio.us, star’d in Google Reader, Deviantart, taken photos of and added to flickr or – hopefully – liked at all. That’s being merged together by Venus, Sam Ruby’s fork of Planet.

Coming up: Indicators on the Otherwhere panels to show where it came from and when, a return of the AqCom sections and Recent Comments bits, a redesign of the Comments field and the implementation of the old banners into the new banner area for areas where specific banners apply.

Plus, it’s not pink.

Quotation

Bilawal Lawalib, the Oxford alias of the new political leader Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has a facebook profile. On the day his mother was assassinated, he updated it.

To his favourite quotes, he added one from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:

Well behaved women rarely make history

It will be interesting to watch what happens next. I hope he gets a chance to make a major difference.