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I arrived at 11:00 on Monday.

I’d started at 06:00. One bus had failed to be where I thought it would be, another had recently had it’s timetable changed not to stop at our stop, and I had no idea where any of the buses I want to catch stopped. Eventually, I got to where I wanted to be, and took a taxi across Bedford.

The new office is a single huge room. No dividers, no offices. There’s a kitchen, a conference room and a Room of Junk, but the main room where everyone works (Everyone, directors, coders, admins, designers) has no divisions between people, which is slightly odd. I have my Headphones of +5 Deafness To Anything Else, though, so I’m all right.

When I went in I was pointed at a nice new desk with a nice new computer under it and two nice new monitors over it (Mmm. Xinerama) and I was handed a selection of distro disks. I opted for a download of Ubuntu instead because in a work environment I don’t want to have to explain why I’m waiting for the new release of Gnome to compile for half the morning (Which is a problem with Gentoo) and the new machine is an AMD64, so I wanted a proper 64 bit install.

The AMD64 is, by the way, terribly, terribly nice. Linux on the Desktop is still not quite as there as people seem to think it is, esspecially when it come to just being able to pick a text editor (The “Choose your default text editor” dialog is broken in Gnome 2.8 (Which I’m not sure how could have made it into a release, but never mind). A couple of things (like Wine, for example) won’t work under AMD64 yet, so I’m having to live without the office-default time/task tracking thing in favour of the web-based interface.

Most of the rest of the week was spent learning how the office works, how the software works, and where I fit within both. Surfice to say I’m doing Cool Things that – once again – I shall mention when and if I’m allowed to do so.

The only blot on the horizon is the commute. Getting from Bedford to Hitchin and back again is fairly easy, and takes about an hour. But from Letchworth to Hitchin – which is about 10 miles up the road – typically takes about half an hour, and never arrives within half an hour of my connection. So I spend half an hour getting 10 miles, another half hour waiting for the bus, and a final hour getting to Bedford.

General effect of this is that I have to get up at 05:30, and don’t get back until 20:15, leaving me an hour, maybe two, before I have to go to bed again. And it’s this that’s currently killing me.

So, Learning to drive next month, then.

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