Aquarionics

31 Days Remaining

As of this date (28th of Febuary 2002) I, Nicholas Avenell, and my housemate Charles Cooke do hereby hand in my one - month's notice of vacation of this property.

That's it, we've handed in our notice. Within two weeks we want to have found a new place to live so we can start moving. Any ideas on where I should move to? ATM I'm looking at Norfolk or Reading, but what'll happen - probably - is we shall find somewhere really cheap to live while one of us can find a job...

Return

I’m back.

Not totally obvious, is it? You wouldn’t belive the problems we faced merely getting the site back online, DNS things, email things, and the ongoing lack of housing thing. We appear to have chosen to go to Norfolk for the time being, if not only because the price we are paying for a three bedroom small terraced house in Cambridge will rent a three bedroom detached mansion in Norfolk with gardening included in the rent and a swimming pool. I’m not joking.

Anyway, rehi. And by the way, I lied about the database dump :-)

Ketchup

Various things have happened to me, and to Epistula, while I’ve been away. Also to the blogroll. So once more, it’s time for:

While You Were Out

• Epistula got Textiled so I can write all my entries in english and the computer does the hard part. Yay.

• Aqcom got a new Projects section. It’s currently a flat HTML thing mainly as a list (As much for my benifit as yours) as to what I’m working on. Eventually it’ll become fully Epistulated.

• I got a new project, or more accuratly a reactivation of an older idea. It’s a full Geek Thing review system, which I’m building as generic as I can, and exploring all the things I learnt while doing Epistula. Plus the kind of detailed cookie-based login system I haven’t done since StoryVille (Ex fiction project. Died of code-deletion). Interesting thing about it right now is that users select a licence for user-submitted reviews & comments to be released under. This allows – for example – someone to licence all their reviews under a CC(Creative Commons) thing. The two things I would like to happen to this idea would be for reviews to be editable based on licence (So if someone releases a GDL review, someone else can edit it), but that could get too complicated, and also lead to the possibility of someone going though and replacing all GPL‘d reviews with a string of spaces. So, Freedom of Information verses Fuckwittery Of Idiots. Round one, ding ding.

• Funcom have announced a sequel to the game I was raving about last month: The Longest Journey

• I applied for jobs. I got phone calls from recruiters, I still haven’t had a single interview. I wait patiently.

• And then there is the World of Ends stuff. My response is somewhat like Stavros wrote, only less amusing. The internet is* complicated. Not in spite of, but because the idea is so simple. ”[T]he Internet was designed to hold smaller networks together, turning them into one big network” lies up there with “They’re only words written down, how much damage can they do?” in tales of “Points, Missing thereof”. The thing isn’t that the idea of The Internet is complicated, it’s that the consequences are quite so far-reaching. The document appears to be doing the classic thing of arguing about what it originally was, as opposed to what it means now. Because the internet *isn’t the simple network of networks that once it was, not in the public mindset. It’s the far more complicated idea of the people using the network of networks. From granny on AOL though to Luke The L33t Hacksaw burning though a 1024 bit/sec connection. We need a new name either for this new thing, or for the old one. Then we can have this discussion without terminology getting in the way.

• Cam returned with a well formed rant about Americanism. The US Administration still scares me, even more so now it appears to be running England as well. Blessings of any deities listening to anyone caught up in this fucking mess. That’s all of us, by the way.

• Still not king yet.

Be

Okay, So I don’t want to be what I am. News flash.

I’m a PHP Developer, at the moment. I’m reasonably sure I’m quite good at it. People have looked at my code and failed to scream in horror, which is good, I’m still digging up and using code I wrote when I was first starting PHP, which scores high on the code-reuse stakes, and I know it works because I use it daily. Well, some of it doesn’t work, like the bug that caused me to lose diary entry 5 because I forgot to save the state of a combo box, or the minor thing about lists in comments (They Don’t Work). Minor bugs that will be fixed.

So what the hell am I doing wrong?

LoneCat, my girlfriend, has had countless interviews since she moved here last September. I’ve had One. Singular. It was for the Designer post at IDL, and I got it (I interview fairly well). But no matter how many CVs and coverletters I send off, how many application forms and emails I send out, how many phone calls and recruiters messages I take, I haven’t had a single interview? I know I have employable skills, and I realise it’s a sucky time to be looking for a job, but still…

Ideal job? Webmaster for the community site for a games company. No question. Building bespoke content-driven database-accessing web applications is something I can do, and want to. Esspecially in PHP, or even in any language given a few weeks to learn the basics of it. I’m applying for Junior SysAdmin roles, because it’s a job I’d like to do, and even designer things, because it’s a job I can do. But almost every “PHP Developer” role I’ve seen requires ASP. WTF?

So, I’m no longer convinced I’m unemployable. Yay. Go Me. This isn’t, currently, helping me find a job. Positive Mental Attitude is a requirement once people are talking to me, so the question is how do I get people talking to me?

Since it’s patently obvious I have no idea, I’ve put my CV online, minus a couple details. If anyone has any comments on it, shoot. If you want the rest of the CV so you can employ me, Great :-)
Ignoring layout for now (The real version is a word doc, the real HTML version is coming soon) What do you think?

Defined No Subject

Due to a cascade of errors that would put the average farce to shame, all mail sent to anything@aquarionics.com has been failing to get though. The instructions to send anything important to aquarion@suespammers.org instead still stand. Lonecat’s diary redirection page will also be up shortly. Arn’t server moves fun?

This weekend we went up to see Supermouse & Pol for Red Nose Day where the entire living room was decorated with round, red fruit and sweets, and things in red pots, and Cherryade, Apple & Blackcurrent squash & Tizer. Generally a red theme to the festivities. It has been brought to my attention that various people from overseas will have little to no idea of this Red Nose Day thing, so I shall endevor to explain.

Comic Relief is a charity set up to do good things by silly means. That is, it raises money by things like Red Nose Day – which I’ll explain in a sec – and plows it back into things like building wells in Africa, or homeless shelters in the UK, or promoting understanding of Alzheimer’s, or helping people move out of slums in both places. It operates things both in the UK and Africa. Every two years since 1999 1989 (with the first in -98- +88+, they tried annually, but biannually works better) they hold “Red Nose Day”, which is basically a whole night of fundraising television being led up to by two months of prodding people to be sponsered to do silly things like bathe in custard, jump off towers (With bungee ropes), etc. Also, large companies do special things (Cake companies make special “Red Nose” cakes with 50p of the sale of each going to Comic Relief), and they sell Red Noses of a special design (This year they had hair, previous years have been squeaky, had arms, been tomatoes, turned yellow in heat, been furry, etc etc) all in the name of Cha-re-deee.

This year they had a fantastic parody of Harry Potter (On the trip up, Pol had mentioned that when film companies couldn’t get Alan Rickman they went for Jeremy Irons, so when the parody turned up with Snape being played by Irons, we all creased up laughing), another of Blankety Blank, and Reeves and Mortimer being desperatly, Desperatly unfunny. They raised over 35,000,000 for charity in that one night, which is a fuck of a lot, and they usually double the night’s total with the results of the sponsored stuff that goes on on the day itself, which will be a fuck of a fuck of a lot.

Then we slept, then we woke, then I helped with gardening, watched more TV, ate Pizza, watched Jonathan Creek, Slept, Did fencing (Of the “Help Pol with wooden boards” kind, rather than the “Hit people with swords” kind), where I found a fence-post with a core of solid diamond and demonstrated my inability to hit nails in with the aid of a hammer due to disposition to finding diamond-core of item I am hammering nails into. Then had pancakes, then went home.

A delightful and relaxing weekend, leading upto next week, wherein if we don’t find somewhere new to live we shall be more fucked than a very fucked thing.

Fuck.

Blast, I appear to have broken my giving up swearing for lent. Oh fuck it.

Clean

I’m not the worlds most tidy person.

Any room of mine will come, within a week, a small-scale tip, displaying the remains of temporary interests (“Woah! That’s the game I played for weeks when I was 14, I wonder if I can get it working on Maelstrom?”), long-term projects (Four reference books on C++, the Linux Admin’s Guide, the Perl Bookshelf) clothes, and at least twenty books in various states of read-ness from “Should read this soon” (Body Of Secrets), “Can’t read this while it mirrors the Real World” (Blood of the Fold), Reference works (Aladdin, Complete Works of Shakespere, a few notebooks of stuff on various Projects (including the diagrams making up the database for the MusicDB). Not to mention enough wires to tie me up and suspend me from the rafters.

So. Currently we are moving out of this house, which means doing the “Viewing” thing, which means people wandering around the house, which means even I, who in the House-Proud stakes got the wooden-spoon that still had dried-cake mix on it, was motivated to modify some of the more foot-deep aspects of my living quarters.

My carpet appears to be blue.

Wow.

Attachments

• My Room. Yesterday

Very Big Nets

So myself and my girlfriend are currently doing the slow, slow waltz of the house-hunters, Stalking though Reading with Very Big Nets and with miniture houses as hats on our heads to try to locate the house of our dreams.

Bah. It’s Saga time, here on Aquarionics dot com. Are you ready? Are you blogging comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Once upon a time, in the land of Angle there lived a Beautiful Princess and a Possibly-Passable-In-Bad-Light-From-The-Right-Profile Prince whom we shall Aquarion, for that is his name. One bright and sunny spring day, they commenced on a quest to discover a new castle where they could reside. From the castle in Ca’mbridge they galloped, reaching the next (How do I put Trains into a fantasy non-steampunk scenario? Aha…) superhorse to the big city, where they caught another superhorse direct to the library city of Reading, Land of Bojs, where they met F’Rank, Herder Of Housen, who equipped them with nets of the largest size, and they went off into the urban jungle, hunting houses.

Soon, we came across a pair sitting in the middle of a herd of housen. Herder F’Rank offered the Housen examples of it’s staple food, the Keez that grow on the lesser spotted Keeooks specially cultivated by his Herdmaster, until it was pacified and the Prince and Princess could examine it without being bitten.

This Housen was no longer young (or a “Chead”), and showed signs of evolution. A number of growths which F’Rank described as “fownke-nectars”, representing the major strains of such in the local area, littered the main cavity, and there was even an “Eye Esde’en” growth inside.

The second Housen was obviously in some pain, a great metal cage had been erected around – and sometimes inside – it, and it didn’t even flinch when we entered it without offering it Keez. When wandered around inside, it was clear why. This Housen was a mother! Inside was a litter of smaller Housen, known as “Phlaits” which refused entry without a great deal of mucking around with Keez. The Prince and Princess were perfectly willing to take a Phlait instead of a Housen for their Castle, and this Phlait was a fine example, with a beautiful central cavity and a nice B’Droom cavity, but the K’chen cavity was tiny.

The Prince and Princess, together with Herder F’Rank, placated the Phlait and it’s mother, wished it good health in the future, and left to the home of Herder F’Rank’s Guild: Vanderpump and Wellbelove (And that, I assure you, I’m not making up. That really *is* the name of the letting agency). Where they decided upon the first Housen as their Castle.

Now came the longest part of the Quest, the strange and secret series of rituals and rites that must be followed before the Housen is theirs. The Calling of the References, the Summoning of the Guarantors, and the Paying of the Deposit. The Prince and Princess returned to their current Castle in Ca’mbridge, knowing that whilst the start had ended, the end – and the new castle – had barely begun.

Flatline. Movies & Writings

Yesterday was fun. For fifteen minutes yesterday we didn’t have a flat because the landlord refused our rent offer. This was resolved over a series of phone calls by LoneCat, and we now have a flat again, albeit one without an ISDN line…

(It’s the downstairs flat, the one we had before was the nicer upstairs flat)

Yesterday I received a box. It was about DVD sized, and had a DVD in it. That DVD was Bridget Jones’ Diary, which Cathy sent me because she saw it was on my Wish List and didn’t want it anymore. Did I mention I love the Internet? I love the internet.

So we watched that, and it was funny and far better than we thought it was going to be, and I am currently resisting the urge to go all Cassie Claire on you, which isn’t fair because I really should have said “All Bridget Jones”, but that’s not who I associate the style with.

Still not employed yet.

Also went to see the (Oscar Winning) Chicago, which was very fun indeed. We ran into Nattie and Ben outside, who happened also to be going to see it.

The film is a direct translation of the musical, and rarely has one been done better. The songs were there without looking silly, the costumes were perfect without being out of place, and if they’d done all the songs (They missed out three that I counted) it would have been perfect. Whether the musical fitted into a film is debatable – though the Oscar panel obviously thought so – but as a faithful adaptation of the musical that I like, I’m happy.

Those of you who visited yesterday evening were greeted with the constantly shifting front page as I attempted to restock the writings page with all the content that used to be there. The Fanfic and Cevearn stuff is there (Including the unpublished bits for Worlds Apart, which will now never be finished), though the short stories (ie, the bits that have ever even been close to being published) arn’t yet, but will be.

Rollen' Rollen' Rollen'

So, today we are packing. Ccooke arrived yesterday, and has now packed everything and gone, LoneCat’s stuff has half gone with her parents, now I just have to get Things Sorted. Stuff is happening tomorrow, and I’m transfering stuff to a storage place in Reading

(Find Storage Place…. Check)

But have totally failed to find a van for hire over the weekend in Cambridge, despite phoning six companies. What is it, Local Move Your Stuff Day? Bah.

(Find & Hire Van… Uncheck)

Dealt with legal threats from ISP due to unpaid bills due to emails not getting though. Yay.

But the best bit was the most suprising. Early this morning whilst on my normal scan of the job-emails I saw a reply inviting me to take a appitude test on Linux, MySQL, ANSI SQL, Unix & Oracle. Once I got over being unimpressed by the test’s not working in anything but IE, and filled in the preliminaries and stuff, I was asked 60 random questions about those subjects, to be answered within 45 seconds each.

Scary thing, really, since I haven’t taken any kind of exam in a while, I haven’t even installed Oracle, let alone admined it (Though I learnt SQL on it), and am not really Sysadmin level on either Linux or Unix.

Nevertheless, I passed. In fact, I scored within the top 5% of candidates (of which there were about 100). I apologise for this terribly blatent self-pleasedness, but I’m currently only just restraining myself from bouncing off the walls.

On top of this, I made chocolate cake. It is good chocolate cake, it is a tasty chocolate cake. It is _my_ chocolate cake :-P

Attachments

• The Chocolate Cake

Fline

I’m just shutting down the network here at the geekhouse while I move house. Not sure how long it’ll be gone, possibly a week, maybe too. Be aware @gkhs.net mail & servers will be down ‘til then.

Back soon, live from Reading :-)

Fools

I have a connection thanks to the unceasing efforts of Pol, so stuff is happening.

Well, would be. I’m currently still waiting for the references to come though for the new place (V&W have said “Soon”. I am failing to hold my breath over the prospect) whilst staying with Pol & Supermouse and avoiding redesigning Aqcom.

I was halfway though a April Fools thing for this place, where I redesigned the entire site to be pink and bright green with animated gifs for all sections and the titles and the most deeply horrible colour scheme my fevered mind could come up with, but four days of moving boxes, getting places, tidying houses and generally being stressed has put paid to that idea. Photos of the move and the rest of the March 03 Photo Collection will be up as soon as I have my scripts that will do it nicely back, as well as the rest of my life, spread currently between Kent, Bedford & Reading (Two locations therein).

Wednesday/Thursday, as I said, ccooke moved out, Friday my dad came up and we moved one load of stuff to the storage place in Reading, Saturday my mum & brother joined us and dad & Ben wandered to Reading whilst mum & me cleared out my room. Adrian O, star that he is, volunteered to look after some stuff too, so we filled up all three cars (Ben’s, Dad’s & Adrian’s) and sent them to their various homes. Then on Sunday LC’s parents arrived to rescue her stuff, we delivered stuff to the tip before they escaped too, and then Pol volunteered to pick us up (To take her home and me here). Supermouse and Pol both helped us do the final cleaning up bits whilst I was being shattered and LC was being ill (allergy to dust is terrible, and moving everything wasn’t helping) and then we left the Geekhouse in Cambridge for the final time ever.

So, once again because of circumstances completely within my control but which I screwed up anyway, I am of no fixed abode for a little while. I really should have got organised better this time. Anyway…

Whilst sitting here temporarily connectionless (Actually, whilst sitting in Cambridge between the server going offline and me doing so) I had a couple of Epiphanies on how I should do crossreferencing of external sites and stuff, but which is going to take a bit of work. In the meantime, I should document a couple of things before they go online, like the new RSS2 module I’m working on. Blogiters should hear about it soon…

In more “Parish Announcements” stuff, the Misc section is back online after a three month absence, including fully working versions of the Timecapsules – Aquarionics as it looked in 1999 & 2000 – and the blogite archives. And Epistula’s caching appears to have a bug where it doesn’t wipe article name cached pages when they are updated. Case issues, I suspect. Ah well, something to fix…

Gets Worse

Right, The Story So Far:

Aquarion moved out of Cambridge, looking at a flat in Reading. Flat in Reading was found, applied for and first part of deposit (£250) was paid as an Admin Fee. Aquarion stays with pol & Supermouse while references are found, this should only take a week.

A week later references are returned, and ours are bad due to reasons I don’t explain. Letting Agents will only accept the application if my parents are also responsible for the rent. Shit happens, stuff resolved, We have to open a joint bank account.

I can’t.

I can’t because in order to open an account, I need photo ID, which I don’t have. My passport is lost, my Driving licence both provisional and non-photoed, and I have no other ID save my Birth Certificate (Only acceptable for under 20 y/o, an arbitary decision which annoys me) is in storage somewhere between Reading & Kent, and all the forms I do have (Such as a letter from my existing bank – who can’t give me the account for more Reasons) arn’t accepted because they arn’t on their little black and yellow form of What The FSA Accept.

So I can’t get the account, so I can’t sign the contract, so I can’t move in, so I can’t get a permenant address in Reading, so I can’t convince the job-agencies I don’t live in Cambridge, so I can’t get a job.

Meanwhile, I’ve stayed longer with Pol & Supermouse than I intended, and am now going to go home for a while.

LC, meanwhile, may need to live within commuting distance of Northampton if she gets the job she interviewed for, which will really stuff things up. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that we will probably be abandoning the flat we reserved in Reading, and looking for a private Landlord who won’t be quite so difficult.

So if any Reading people have the website of a local paper (Or a copy of the local paper they can post to me), I’d be grateful.

Real life sucks.

Home

So, Once more I’ve returned to the fictional town of Paddock Wood. I was born within five miles of here, I lived here for twenty years – give or take, what with large amounts of time in Sunderland and the last year in Cambridge, and I’m damned if I’m going to die here.

Why is it fictional? Because it never changes. In the year since I went to Cambridge, the gravel in the back garden has grown two feet into the lawn, and the signs on the Natwest in town have been painted red. And it’s always been thus. In the years I spend away, nothing changes. If I come back for a week, they’ll redo the entire town-centre.

With any luck I’ll be in Reading within the fortnight too.

Simon’s site search thing inspired me to do almost exactly the same thing with Aqcom/Epistula, the search link above (Replacing the FAQ link which wasn’t useful) works using the MySQL FullText stuff, and is whole phrase only until I can find a decent excuse for trying for MySQL 4. The related discussion on Simon’s site that wandered into the realms of Vector Placement Searching is also interesting, and something that I’m considering for [E]3, The Great Rewrite, which will work with Epistula itself being a daemon that sits and serves XML files to a waiting front-end client. This will make it easy to do the heavy data-processing stuff that perl does so much better than PHP, leaving me able to write an interface in PHP (Which I feel works better for the web-facing stuff). The daemon will probably end up being in perl, but I could see Python or C being options for it.

Of course, if I did it in Python I’d have to learn Python, and also provide the ability to import Vellum plugins to it.

What else is around? Oh, yes. The new Six Apart venture of TypePad, a hosted Moveable Type platform (which was mentioned in The Guardian) at around the same time as Dean announces the Textpattern platform, TextBox (Which was not mentioned in the Guardian). May the best system win, and soon Stuart will be announcing Hardback, the new Vellum hosted platform; and Aquarionic Industries will announce Epistulation, the new Epistula Powered hosting platform, sponsered by Snackispores, which will also not be mentioned in the Guardian.

Cope

This Entry Has Been Deleted

Thought

Moving

So, Kathy has moved to her shiny new .co.uk at http://www.bentbacktulips.co.uk, and everything has finally happened to put me back in a home :-)

Tomorrow at 9:30 I will be in the offices of Vanderpump & Wellbeloved signing my life away for the sake of a roof. This is going to require me catching a train at twenty to seven tomorrow morning (===yawn===). What this will do to the flow of Interesting And Enlightening articles spinning your way though the medium of Aquarionics, I’m not sure. It’ll be a little while before we get ADSL back. Nevertheless, I shall see you soon :-)

...and relax

Busy Busy Busy.

Saturday started early, when at 6am we discovered that the contract my parents were due to sign had to be witnessed. At 6am this was a complication, so instead of the Plan (which was for me & LC to wander up and do the contract thing and parents to follow after) Mum drove me up to Reading at half seven in the morning. We got to Reading. We parked. We found the place. We signed the contracts. We have a flat.

We found the flat.

I’m not sure what I can say about the new flat. To say it isn’t quite as nice as the old house is to do the old house a disservice. The carpets are uniformly horrible and stained, the paint work patchy and scratched, the kitchen cupboards are bowing, the fridge last saw daylight in the seventies, and the oven barely works (and is the type where you have to reach over the rings to turn off), and the people in the flat above are occasionally noisy. I suspect I’ll be more impressed with this as a place to live when we have furniture – this place is unfurnished – but for now by HappyBunnyometer is set to “Watership Down – Bright Eyes Bit”. So we brought a couple of boxes of my stuff down from the storage place (Getting terribly lost on the way back in), tried to find a supermarket (Getting terribly lost on the way around), and then gave up on the day and went to the AFP Green Man Meet instead, and met Marco, and a Good Time Was Had By All.

Sunday was spent waiting for LC’s parents in the morning (Who are good, because they brought LC’s Futon down as well as the rest of her stuff, so I’m not sleeping on the floor anymore until we have furniture. Not that I shall be sleeping on the floor then, but anyway. Then finding the Supermarket again (We’d managed to find Sainsbury’s the day before. Not when we were looking, natch, but when we were walking to the station to get to London. Gah). Then AdrianO wandered down with the stuff he had been storing for us, and so I had my computer back. That was Sunday.

Monday was interesting.

Monday morning I wandered out to a phone box to get our land line connected (Because Calls Are Free When You Phone BT. But not if you are on a mobile they aren’t, and a half-hour queue at 20p per minute is not a good thing). At 11:00 I put though the order. At 13:15 they sent me a text-message saying the phone line was working, and at 13:45 we got our very first wrong number. At this point it was tipping it down with rain, so I decided to do the indoor bits, like changing the address of my credit cards. Whilst doing this, I heard drips falling into the sink. Suspecting the tap to be leaking, I went to turn it off. I discovered to my surprise that the tap was not leaking. The roof was.

Now, you may think that I should not have been surprised. After all, given the description above of a flat that hasn’t been polished in a while, it wouldn’t be too surprising, right?

Yeah, but this is a ground floor flat and the roof is leaking.

So I phone Vanderpumps. “We’ll get someone over” they say.

A couple of hours later:
“This is Reading Maintenance. Someone will be over tomorrow”
“Er, the roof is starting to bulge. I’d appreciate it if you could do it today”
“I’ll see what I can do”

Pause for about a half-hour. Then:
“Hi, This is Reading Maintenance. Someone will be without in about 45 minutes. It would be quicker, but he has to pick up the keys from Tilehurst for the flat above.”
“Can’t he just ask them to let him in?”
“The flat above is vacant”
“Um”, dynamically stated your resourceful hero, “No it isn’t.”
“According to our records, 64 is vacant”
“Then it looks like Vanderpumps have a squatters problem then, doesn’t it?”
“Um” said the maintenance people “Yes. I’ll let them know”.

The previous day we were called upon by a gentlemen from upstairs, who mentioned he was moving out today and that if we wanted we could buy his furniture dirt cheap. He offered us a wardrobe and matching cabinets. Long term readers of this saga might remember that we originally wanted the flat above us – the one he is living in – and so I recognised the description of the furniture that was in that flat when we viewed it. I declined.

So, what we had suspected (after seeing the tenants – and yes, that’s judging by appearances, and I’m sorry – and the torn bit of paper on the door that mentioned squatters rights) was really true, the flat above was being squatted in.

I wasn’t surprised, really. The flat had been empty since January, mostly because the landlord has priced himself out of the market. The rent for that one is more than this one, and this one is too expensive for what it is, or rather the state it is.

Apparently, when the gentlemen – and his dog – had moved out the previous day, he had taken his washing-machine (I’m paraphrasing here. The flat – when we saw it – had had a washing machine. That will teach the landlord, because if he had accepted our original offer we’d have moved in there, and he wouldn’t be down a washing machine. But I digress) but hadn’t unplumbed it properly, flooding the back of their kitchen and then – eventually – ours. It’s repaired now, and Vanderpumps are working to evict the people above (I didn’t suggest this. They aren’t bad neighbours, they only are loud in daylight, they’re friendly and everything. As I said, I more or less knew they were squatting when we saw the notice, but it wasn’t really a problem).

So, we have a phone line (Although LC’s laptop is the only Internet connection right now until my modem makes it down. Broadband in 9 days) and we have a house, and LC has a – albeit temporary – job. Things certainly could be a lot worse.

The Saga Of The Shelving

The Saga Of The Shelving

There once was a house on a hill.

The house was neither large nor overly small, and was in fact just large enough for two people to live happily in them.

Or, in fact, for one person to live in comparative happiness while the other slowly began to hate the world, one person at a time.

Yet I digress.

So, we rented this place as of exactly one month ago. When we got it, it had no furniture at all and we spent a week sleeping on camp beds (LoneCat) and a Futon (Me) (The futon was in the front room, which has the twin benefits of facing a bright street lamp during the night and East during the morning). Yet after a while, we acquired furniture: Sofa, beds, table, chairs and a sideboard. Also after a while, my desk and bookshelf (The only furniture I own) were withdrawn from storage. This means that between two book-geeks with many three-quarter metre cubed boxes of books between them had one (1, singular, uno, two divided by two) small bookshelf.

Except that when it was taken down, the bookshelf base had split, leaving us with Zero, Zap, Nada and no book-cases that would actually hold books without falling over, and a lot of short planks of wood.

My solution was two-fold, first was to create shelves from the planks of wood and the boxes; second was to cast “Summon Ikea” and get shelving.

So, project one then. We have four large boxes devoid of content, between and on top of the first two boxes goes the left hand side of my original bookshelf. This is held in place by the shelf-holders (metal pins) which stick out of the plank, those pins were punched though the top of the boxes, holding the shelf in place over the horizontal plane. On top of these boxes go two more boxes, with the right hand side of the shelf between those. The first shelf is then loaded with two piles of books stacked vertically to half the height of the boxes and one of the shelves of the original book-case on top of those, giving me two shelves of space, which I filled. The same stacking system is then placed on the second shelf, and a third set of two boxes is put on top of the second to weight it down. These shelves are then filled with books, CDs, DVDs, computer hardware and yet more books, while the clothes are dumped into the remaining boxes.

At this point your humble narrator wanders online to Ikea’s website.

Ikea is a company who make furniture that is rotatable and stackable. All of it. It’s mostly all wooden, it’s all designed to fit together with other Ikea furniture, and they do modular shelving units which you can erect, modify, take down, buy new bits for, make watertight, paint, climb on and otherwise abuse. It’s like what would happen if Lego made shelves, it’s great, and it attracted me because a) it’s geeky, and b) it means that when I have an actual job, I can extend it to take more Stuff. So I was researching all this when from behind me came the loudest and most heart-breaking crash I have yet to experience as my entire Jerry-rigged shelving unit tipped forward and dumped Books, CDs, DVDs, Computer Hardware and yet more books upon the hard carpeted floor of my adopted bedroom.

At this point I discovered that not only was there no Ikea near Reading (or within a hundred miles, give or take), but also that I had to get to an Ikea in order to place an order. Solution One was now collapsed in an expensive heap that was going to make getting into bed complicated, and Solution Two had proven complicated. Right.

Solution 2b: Ask Parents (who have car) to go buy shelves for me from their nearest Ikea (Which is closer than mine, plus they have a car) and get them to deliver to Catrion Towers. Hah! Beat that, Fate!

Solution 1b you’ve already seen, my working station up until earlier today was three computers on a desk, each flat surface (and non-flat surfaces, such as monitor tops) piled three feet high with DVDs, books and CDs and yet more DVDs (The Yet More Books were still on the floor where Solution 1a had dumped them). This had one major up-side (It looked cool, and felt like working in an overfilled library) and two minor downsides (Lack of places to put Tea, and the fact that every so often a pile of DVDs would fall on my head). A better solution was required.

Solution 2b fell apart less literally than 1a when my parent reached Ikea and discovered that they were out of stock of some bits, and that shipping the others was going to cost more than the shelving did. By this point Shit had Gone Down and I couldn’t afford the shelving, and I certainly couldn’t afford the shipping. Thus with 1b causing occasional concussion and 2b being not to be, parents went on holiday and the shelving situation became slightly more static, with the occasional dynamism as a plank overflowing with books decided that flat surfaces were uncool, and diagonals were the way to go.

This morning parents bought me shelves. Yay.

The thing about flatpacks – especially easy assemble ones like these – is that I’m deeply cynical of them. I spent two years studying Design and Technology at school, and never made anything more complicated than a box with wheels. And the sides fell off that.

To say that I am bad at anything to do with wood-work is to understate quite heavily the situation. And to those who think easy assemble is just that, it’s not as easy as it looks.

Anyone who was watching the Web cam today would have seen the process of the shelves. It’s highly amusing. It started off with my careful consideration of the instructions, and then discovering they weren’t actually instructions, and that they were actually buying guides, I set forth.

Once I worked out that the staples that held in four little metal rods, and stopped me from being able to hook the shelves into place, were actually there to be removed so I could withdraw said metal rods and hook the shelves onto them, live became easier.

Sadly, this took me an hour.

Nevertheless, the shelves went up. The cross-brace braces the back, the little rods hold up the shelves, I have shelving once again.

I have a video of the web cam over the last day. It’s really cool. It’s also 79mb, because I lack the video-fu to make it smaller, anyone who has any great – free – ideas on this should contact me.

If I don’t post for some time, it’s because the shelf collapsed on me in the middle of the night.