Aquarionics

Since LoneCat and Adrian have both put up lists of “Stuff they are taking to CCDE” (CCDE being the event half the people I know are going to this weekend. We shall be in a field, camping) I decided to put my list up:

Aquarion’s List Of Stuff Wot He Should Take To CCDE:

• Clothes
• Sleeping Bag
• Money

• Aquarion

  Of course, this is heavily biased to the fact that I’m going with LC, who – as you can see above – is quite prepared enough for the both of us.

  Work is… interesting. For various reasons, I’ve been working alone all week (Either from home or in the office, where the CEO has been out in meetings or just out) and I’ve started the coding on The Project. This means that I’ve had to set some precidents about how we’re doing things (Mostly based on how I do things) which is slightly worrying, since I have a feeling I’m going to be recoding everything again. It’s also worrying that I’m the person opening up and locking up, since I’m sure I’m going to walk in one morning and discover I did something really stupid like leave the window open.

  Life Goes On…

So, I mentioned that we had a squatter problem here at Catrion towers, and they were evicted. The tale can now be fully told.

When we arrived, there were squatters. Mid-May they were evicted by the letting agents. So fine, so hoopy.

They came back.

Not immediatly, but after a couple of weeks they returned for another fortnight and were gone again, since I told Vanderpumps – the letting agents – they were back (…and then told them Vanderpumps were coming), They left, leaving all the windows open.

I phoned Vanderpumps, and said all the windows were open, it was the wettest week this year, and could they send someone with a key to close them? They said they would, they didn’t. What happened? The squatters returned though the window. My suprise was immeasureable, and so I gave up. They are not the Worst upstairs-neighbours++… I’ve ever had, apart from the occasional 3am shouting match all was well. Oh, apart from the assurance that “Whatever happens up there, don’t worry, you’ll be safe”, the point where the bloke stabbed himself in the arm because he was so angry at her (!!!) and stuff. Besides, I sympathise slightly. Both of them have fallen though the cracks in the system. The girl (and this is purely based on talking to her, but I’m reasonably good at noticing when people are lying to me) can’t get beneift (No fixed abode) and certianly can’t summon up the cash for a deposit. They have no idea where to go to fix this, or how to begin. So, while they were no trouble I left them alone, and they left us alone.

This was somewhat modified last weekend when we got back from London to discover all their windows smashed, and complaints from the landlord. Enter Peter.

Peter is the Landlord of the flat next door to theres (This is a semi-detached house, each floor of each house is rented out), and since his tenants are moving out, he wasn’t terribly happy with the idea of having to try to let a house next door to one in the state ours is in. We have absolutly no clout with Vanderpumps at all. We can’t afford to move out, We have another four months left on the contract before we can anyway. Peter is a landlord with several properties. He does have clout. When he says “I’m looking for a new letting agent. Go jump” Vanderpumps say “How high?”. Peter visited us a couple of days ago. I mentioned our landlord and his lack of interest in the place, the squatters, the inability of Vanderpumps to do any of this, and lots of other stuff (I’d spent the day fighting with DHTML. I should have worked out my irritation on someone else. Mostly because I had no idea of our landlords name – I realised later – and for all I knew the landlord of #64 might be ours as well. Fortunatly he wasn’t, really). He said he’d talk to Vanderpumps, though he didn’t have any properties with them.

He did. That was Tuesday. Within two days the entire flat is boarded up (which looks crap, but is better than broken windows) with a large notice on the door saying “Keep Out! 24 Hour Patrol! This building is empty!” (Those last two sentances are interesting, but anyway) until the Landlord deigns to do anything about it. My only problem now is that the sign reads “This building is empty”, and I’m slightly worried that the postman will assume they mean our flat as well.

Ah well.

Once, there was irise and pete.nu, and they were sepereate entities who knew not of each other.

Then, there was pete.nu and Rise, and not only did they know of each other, but were really cute whilst doing so.

Now there is only Into The Wild, wherein Rise and Pete.nu can live together in blissful co-habitation.

Awww.

And now, I really should go to work.

Lack of entries, you may have noticed.

Apologies for that, but I’m a little harrased. Mostly because of the standard First Month Of Job stuff (That I have to pay rent etc. as well as travelling costs from my non-existant cash flow until I get my first pay-check, not at all helped by the Job Centre taking six weeks to process my claim), but also because of general Stuff Happening. Planning stuff for this weekend (where I go camping with AFP), experimenting with anything new in PHP5 that might help me, MySQL4 (Which has just hit this server, so expect an upgrade of the search facility soonish) as well as theorising interfacing stuff like Trackback and PingBack with The Work Project.

On top of this, I’m redesigning. Well, not so much redesigning as designing. I’m making this masterplan to collate my non-aqcom projects to a new server where they can live without cluttering up AqCom’s navigation. This includes Forever and Threadnaut, at least one of which I’ll have to write now that I’ve mentioned it.

Aquaintances has been upgraded to use the latest version of Mark’s feedParser, meaning that if a feed returns a redirection, the config file will be rewritten to the new address. Aquaintances2 is in planning, and will include a simple NNTP server to access it. Epistula’s Gallery module, which has always been the most hackish of everything – mostly because 90% of it was lifted wholesale from the last version with minor tweaks – is suffering an extensive rewrite. If I can do this without breaking URLs I will do, but it looks like some major issues need to be resolved.

I’m also trying to avoid letting my RSI come back. This is so far involving watching Cowboy Bebop and West Wing episodes.

Countering the Anti-RSI activity, I’ve been playing Syberia, a nice return to the traditional adventure format, including actual character development. Sadly, the ending is somewhat annoying, but I expect the forthcoming Syberia 2 to fix that. I’ve also been watching videos of Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest 2 and The Sims 2, all of which look very, very cool.

So, today I watched a video on Fork Lift Safety. The soundtrack is in german, yet somehow it doesn’t matter. Everyone who can view WMV files should see this.

Fork Lift Safety

(Warning, contains traces of laughing at the amusement and decapitation of others)