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I sent this email around the office yesterday afternoon:
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P.S.
Sorry I've not updated much. I'm back to my normal self - working hard, playing hard, burning the candle at both ends.

I think having short hair makes me look younger than I do with long hair. (I don't mind either way, but I do very much prefer the hassle-free nature of a grade 3)

Today I signed up to LinkedIn, applied for a few jobs and ate left over curry. I shall shortly once I've got dressed be heading out to the pub for Bi Underground. Who else is going?

I had the second interview yesterday. I meant to write about it at the time. It seemed to go well, and I got a couple of favourable responses to some of my answers. But it's very hard to tell with these things. Not that I've been watching that closely, but I'm only aware of 1 other person who's been invited back for a second interview. (Admittedly there is the possibility that some took place via telephone). That said, I do know that there are two positions so I'm quietly confident.

I haven't yet been given a timescale for the decision. *fingers crossed*

Tonight I called my mum for a chat, and my sister was visiting her so I was able to speak to both of them. Rather than end the call or get the bus and annoy the folk thereon I decided to start walking home and see how far I got before I got bored.From Chancery Lane I made it to Chalk Farm. About 3 miles. Not a massive distance by any means, but comparatively large by my normal standards. I should do that more often. It took me 1hr20mins, but I did stop off in the supermarket. When I got home I checked Google maps for the suggested walking route - seems I was spot on.

* * *

I had my bank card clone about a week ago. The bank decided that me drawing money from Chancery Lane and then a few minutes drawing money from Libya was not a likely succession of events so phoned to check. Should have the money back in a couple of days.
It wasn't my idea (was mentioned in TheOtherPlace), but I'd quite like a card that only works in the country of issue - I wonder how much it would kerb fraud.

* * *

I now have a working machine at home. I bought one of the eeepcs. Expect more regular updates.

* * *

Work is going really well at the moment. The company is growing, particularly in number of clients and so we're preemptively shuffling staff around into different teams, partially merging a couple of departments and creating another. Summarised like that it sounds pointless, but I'm not going into much detail for the sake of brevity. My reason for mentioning it though is how it affects me. I'm going into one of the new departments, and it's very much a role I'm looking forward to once I complete the transition. It's comparable to an R&D role, and less involved with customer support which is something I've done as a large part of my jobs for something like 8 years, so it's quite unsetting &emdash; but in a good way. I've been working on some fun things, and there's more to come.

* * *

I'm being intentionally vague because I don't like to rock the boat, but earlier this week I caught up with someone with whom things had been drifting a little. Not that anything was wrong, per se, just that we'd been speaking less than we used to. Good to know that nothing is wrong and thing are their normal self.

* * *

Gosh, it's an hour later than I thought. G'night.

Ugh. So this going-to-bed-earlier lark didn't work out well. Not that I haven't enjoyed myself - far from it - just that I'm struggling with the lack of sleep. It doesn't seem all that long ago when I use to regularly get by on 4-5 hours a night with the occasional 6-7 catchup. Now it seems to be a 7-8 with a slightly less common 9-10 catchup.
Anyway, so what've I been up to this week? (I've been asked about my mini hiatus from writing in my journal by more than one person. It's hugely flattering to know you're that interested in my blatherings. I've made notes of what i've been up to but am waiting for when I have time compose a worthwhile entry.)

Tuesday night I went to
Marine Ices
And then to a bar with
Bluehelen.
Was great to catch up without having to fight the bustle that is typical of our usual mutual haunts such as
Bmovie.

Wednesday wasn't awful, it just didn't turn out the way I had intended. By way of preamble, a friend has done a load of resoration work on a church in the city of london. It's not as well known as one might thought, considering how well-known is a song in which it appears. These bells haven't been in a functional condititon for over 100 years. They now are, and I've rung at a couple of services there during the week when I worked next to
The gherkin
This friday is a fundraising launch party and publicity event, and I was going to help set up equipment there. The spanner in the works (pun not intended, but left in for good measure) was that the trailer which was going to be used to transport things over was blocked in by an unknown vehicle. I had reached the church and was waiting for a while so again it was very late when I got home.

Last night I went out with colleagues from work. There were 2 departments (loosely speakingcustomer servies and tech), and it was good to finally meet some of the people I'd seen on the internal ticketing system. (the two depts are at different offices)
Ended up staying out very late, but still managed to get the last tube home. Once again it was a noisy bar and I was struggling to hear at times, particularly toward the end of the night when I was tiring so coping even less well.

Given loud enough background noise am sure even fully hearing people would struggle to hear, but though my hearing (as far as I know) is normal, based upon the facility with which most of my peers conduct conversation in noisy atmospheres I seem to struggle more than most. Having spoken to deaf people about it, I've heard occasional mention of cognitive deafness.

I don't know if any such tests exist, but that's pretty much what it feels like. I find it so tiring as I concentrate so hard and people sometimes mistake the resulting facial expression for aggression.

Towards the end of the night I spent it talking to one person who pointed out that I was "on edge". His english was easily converasational, but I think I would have struggled to explain the above. There's a story i've started using because it's easier to explain in noisy circumstances, that I fell asleep next to a bass canon in a club a few years ago. After that he took much more care to speak clearly. I know it's perhaps missing the hugedifferences between the two types (well, ok there are many more) of deafness, but in loud situations I rarely have the ability to explain.

I was intending this post to be a short one. Oops.

Back to the grindstone for today, carter usm gig this evening (and having heard through the grapevine, I know loads of the people going), then to katie and Zeke's housewarming.

Using bash to generate DOS shell commands.

New icon

Friday morning, though I booked it off work, I got bored and installed Nagios on the work servers so that we can be alerted when stuff goes wrong.

Got a train up to Manchester and headed back to xugglybug's place where we got pizza and watched Phenomenan.

Saturday headed into town for BiFest, which was fab. Was great to meet up with people who I don't get to see very often. I miss Manchester loads, having spent almost a third of my life there, though I love London too. A weekend doesn't seem long enough - I may spend new year there if I don't move into another place here in London (if I do then I'll most likely host a party myself). Introduced a few people to the wonders of the game Set.

Sunday: went into town again and met up with phuturatica and was introduced to Suburb - lovely place, and cheap too. Randomly saw Chris. Stayed there much of the afternoon and headed to Moon Under Water for food, only to find out they'd sold out of most dishes. Still had a fab meal and left for the train shortly before 2000. It would've been a 2 hour journey, getting me home for 2230 ish, though my train was cancelled so I had to do it in two stages changing at Birmingham. I got home at 0130 ish, later by than the original journey would have taken.

Didn't have the energy to do anything other than sleep, so flopped into bed.

Friday: I never made it home on Friday night - I went out for drinks with the people from work. They're a really fun bunch of people and I think I'm going to very much enjoy working with them. It was a fab night out and hopefully I'll remember the few names that I learned for when I start for real tomorrow morning.

I was getting tired so decided to get a train home with a colleague because he'd be taking a route similar to my own. This was around 2330 ish, and we were told at the station that the last train had already gone. Luckily there was a tram waiting so we got that. I would've been going to Wibledon (I think - I forget now) and hten a train into town to catch the night bus home. (There's a direct route from Trafalgar Sq). This would have been fine, had the tram not terminated mid-route. This was at the Depot, in the arse-end of nowhere. Tried calling TfL but there were no routes so we tried about 5 cab companies and eventually found one who'd take us home. I couldn't face the journey home so ended up kipping at his place.

Small world sydnrom: his flatmate was the guy who recruited me for the job.


Saturday: Also a fab day. I headed out to Surrey to see kelemvor, as a mutual friend (one who I'd not seen in about 5 or 6 years) would be there. I entered the living room, said hello and quickly sat down as though it was the most normal thing in the world. The look on Paul's face was priceless! We took a walk along the river and fed the ducks. We had walked quite a bit so stopped off at a cafe.

We were standing outside the garden reading the menu and noticed punctuation errors on it. We speak of this and I say something quite loudly and sarcastic along the lines of "Fucking illiterate retards". Then we enter the garden and go to the bar. Someone walks from behind us and lets herself into the bar area we realise it's the proprietor. She looks at us and asks "Is someone questioning my spelling?" :-) She took it well though - I don't think she read malice into the comments. Still, I was quite embarrassed, though it was rather amusing in retrospect.

Then we headed back and played a few games of Flux (Hmm. I must get myself a deck as it's good fun) and watched Doctor Who.

I got a lift to the station and got the train to Waterloo at around midnight. I pondered walking home (to complete number 98 from my 101 in 1001 list and got as far as Leicester Sq. but as I didn't have my map I didn't know the rest of the route - that and I would be up early in the morning, so I got a bus.

A choice phrase from Paul which the rest of us are determined to incorporate into the vernacular was "Feed the toilet", meaning "make use of", in case it's not evident.


Sunday: Sunday service bellringing as usual in the morning and then went back to mrk for lunch. Ate a huge mountain of a lovely roast. His mum certainly can cook well. In the afternoon we returned to church for a quarter peal - that's 40 minutes of continuous ringing. (1260 of Grandsire Triples, using 3 parts of the 12-part Parson's 5040 for those who care - this probably only mean something to one of you, though others might surprise me).
This was quite an achievement for me because I've not really done a lot of advanced ringing for a year or so, and not for a sustained period.

Today: Spent much of it napping and fighting off a headache, mainly due to overdoing it over the weekend.
Might bake some brownies in a mo for me to take into work and keep people sweet - pun not intended, but left in for good measure.

Tuesday:
Woo! We had snow in the morning. Some of it was even settling.
I'd forgotten today was a bank holiday, and had (before Christmas) arranged a meeting for "the 27th". Thankfully vampwillow was able to offer a lift so all was good in the end. The meeting was over by about 1300 something, so I then made my way to South Kensington to see stuflyer and saintmaryuk for a bite to eat. We were pondering heading back to the Science museum, but it was too late, so we stayed in the pub for a bit and then made our respective ways back. You'd harly think I'd left Manchester the frequency that I'm seeing people ;-)


Wednesday:
Got a haircut today and did a bit of tidying in the flat.
Went out for dinner this evening with Russel (WINOLJ) and met up in the cold in Leicester Square. I feel like a native already; I had 3 groups of people ask me for directions, and better yet I was able to direct them :-)
We went to a lovely vegetarian place called Woodlands and though I was a little hesitant due to my fussy eating habits, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I guess I'll be returning again some time soon.

This post has been brewing for a while, but this post made me put pen to paperfingers to keys and actually write it.

There is something strangely beautiful and surreal, yet strangely daunting about driving on a completely empty motorway with only the cats eyes and lane markings visible. I noticed this when driving to/from Paisley the other week. It reminded me very much of a runway, where the lights are the main thing which stand out, even in bright daylight.

I love Manchester - I love the city and my friends here. It's going to be incredibly hard to move to London, but I'll need to for the sake of my career.

I don't watch a great deal of TV, but I did make a point of watching the live epsiode of the bill shown on the 22nd. It was just fantastic. I know that all TV was live in the very early days, but this was a scripted program with excellent drama and special effects. I was thoroughly impressed with how well it was put together.

I'm off out now to the pub to meet up with colleagues from my old employer, because they're moving onto a new place and they are some of the last remaining "originals".

Catch you later.