Twiggys blog

Survived a week at my new job (Front line support wooo). People nice, work not too tricky. Large backlog of calls due to two of the four full-timers being away for now :-(. Got first paycheck today. Last ever Helpdesk@UKC tomorrow from midday-7. With luck SBS and SDS will stay up and the networks will behave. Saturday evening marks the end of my epic 8 day week. (Saturday - Saturday inclusive).

Real world overrated, but the money is all right :). Could use a rest, but that's for Sunday...!

I dislike them. Always come away feeling stupid, or feeling like I ought to have said X and not Y and that they actually wanted Z. Blah!

Anyway, got a tour of Sound Ideas' building including some super-shiny kit (18 port HDMI crossbar switches and big racks of AV equipment). Find out if I have the job in 'a couple of days time'. Not terribly confident though... think they were looking for somebody with more teamworky experience. Maybe I just have to hope the other applicants suck ;)

(Linky: http://www.soundideas.co.uk/)

Update! I've no idea how many of you people still read this stuff...it's a bit of a long one. Sorry. Short version:
-Got new job
-Leaving old job
-Masters project is fun
-mdadm is a nice tool
-Planning on returning to uni, eventually...

Pretty much everything university related other than my current masters degree has fallen through. No funding for PhD means I simply cannot afford to stick around for 3 or 4 years, as much as I would like to. I also applied for a job working for some of the CS staff working on the Java teaching tool, BlueJ, and was almost immediately rejected. Probably on the grounds of a shiyte CV and lack of Real World experience.

The good news, however, is that today I was offered (And took!) a job at select software, working support (linky: http://www.selecthr.co.uk/). They are a pretty small (~40 employees?) company which produce HR software which is apparently fully customisable, and some of this customisability leads to some...interesting...problems which need supporting. The pay is not terrific - but it's better than nothing, and I should probably be thankful to find *any* work given the state of the world, especially in a seemingly IT-phobic Canterbury. Sadly this does mean that I'll be leaving helpdesk at UKC :(, but I've told them I can be around for freshers week because it's a bit of an arse finding staff then anyway and I'd rather not burn bridges by leaving them in a bad place... must also remember to buy donuts for backdesk...

There is the possibility of moving up to developer work at select later, and the MD and lead developer are keen to provide a 'bridge' between the people doing support and those developing to keep everybody in the loop. [oh god that was a lot of business speak. I'll go get the soap and wash my mouth...]. I'm not terribly keen on doing support forever, so this chance of advancement is a nice incentive to stick at it. The company mostly writes in C#, which from what I have seen is not too far from Java. Besides, it's not like new languages are hard to pick up...

Honestly though, this job is the first bit of good news I've had for quite a while. Sure as hell needed it.

I've also been plugging at my masters project, writing code and finding bugs in JCSP which is a set of concurrency libraries for Java allowing for occam-style programming using processes, barriers and alternatives. It's been a lot of fun, and reminded me just why I would like to stick around at uni. The project is coming to an end fairly soon (14th September is the final hand-in deadline) so I really need to wrap things up and write up what I've been doing all summer. The project has evolved from 'writing some neat code that shows off features in JCSP' to 'Adding features to JCSP' along with a touch of 'finding weird bugs in JCSP'. I'll post the report once it gets written so you can all boggle at the madness... Long story short: I spent summer messing around with a concurrency library.

In unrealated news, I've been playing around with mdadm and am currently in the process of growing a 1.8TB array to become ~2.4TB. Doing this safely, backing everything up to the spare space on other disks, is taking quite a while. It might be done by this time next week...!

So... plans for the next n months, where n is "some"... Finish off and write up masters project (Oddly masters projects have no viva, it's just a hand-in thing!), work support for some time and possibly move up to dev+support work, re-apply to interesting looking PhD places (Probably UKC for the concurrency stuff, perhaps Napier and York as they are doing concurrency stuffs also, any other projects that catch my eye).

SPAG fail

Tags: life universe everything

So... be super-poor for 3+ years (Like... super super super poor, so poor that actually money runs out in year 2 and I have to sell a kidney and an eyeball), or try and get a job in a market which does not exist any more.

Well, I'm boned. :D

Bananas! Stuffs! More things!

Normality resumes June 1st...

Go to Google and type in your first name and the phrase. Copy and paste the first full sentence/phrase you get that makes sense. My notes under "E".

( Google Meme )

Fail shift has been fail. First email falls over and I get a half-hour of nonstop phonecalls [thanks to foo and dmc for fixing that, out of hours ...], and for the rest of the day some nasty-ass virus is screwing around with DHCP on the SBS.

I need a curry.

40 pints of beer are now brewing in a big 5-gallon bucket in my room.

Lessons learned: Sterilising stuff takes quite a long time
Buckets probably make for better water-carriers than pans
Remember to sterilise absolutely everything *before* starting, not afterwards
Stuff
The goo in cans (it's a kit, I'm not boiling up stuff and making wort) smells really, really tasty =)

There seems to be some

Been a while since I've posted. Figure I ought to keep the few of you that read this up to date on what on earth I'm up to these days.

Managed to get my 50k for NaNoWriMo. Also bought a NaNo T-Shirt (Which arrived today, yay!) to celebrate the onset of RSI. It was an interesting experience, really quite tough but well worth doing. The aim was to write 50,000 words of story in a month, and I did it. Woot. The secondary goal, for me, was to see if I could stick at something for a month and write without going totally insane (Maybe that ought to be *more* insane, you have to be a bit 'speshul' to think NaNo is a good idea...) in preparation for masters dissertation stuff. Then today I came across this: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/teaching/08/modules/CO/8/80/EXTRA_FILES/guidance.html ("A reasonable length is 7,000 - 10,000 words...Take 12,000 words as a reasonable maximum limit")... oh well, that's rather less words than I was expecting...!

Still carrying on with uni work, wandering up to campus to lectures 5 days a week. Also working helpdesk usually 2 or 3 of those days with the occasional Saturday shift.

Got fed up with my ancient amp with its dodgey right channel and bought one of these: http://www.cambridgeaudio.com/summary.php?PID=283&Title=Azur+340R+5.1+HDMI+AV+Receiver (Except it's in GOFF black rather than silvery colour).

Still unsure of the future *wibbleylines*

Thanks to trappermcintyre for the link to the word count thingy!

10,942 / 50,000 (21.9%)

So, I'm a little ahead (Close to 1000 words) and have managed to write every day since the start of November. Currently got three plots sort of running side by side which makes writing quite a lot easier. I can pick and choose a plot to follow per day ;). Of course this will all need to come together at some point. Eep.

I'm not really ready to unleash any of my creation onto the world *quite* yet and want to get it typeset nicely (Latex probably) first. As well as a massive wave of SPAG checking.

Anyway, it's pretty fun so far, and the IRC chat for NaNo is busy and full of crazy people all doing the same crazy thing.

Today was long - 10-5 with only 1 hour break(!), and tomorrow is similar. Except with no breaks at all. :'(

Stolen from ingridgirl and morti

01) Are you currently in a serious relationship?
02) What was your dream growing up?
03) What talent do you wish you had?
04) If I bought you a drink what would it be?
05) Favorite vegetable?
06) What was the last book you read?
07) Create your own question seven and answer it.
08) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.
09) Worst Habit?
10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?
11) What is your favorite sport?
12) Do you have a Pessimistic or Optimistic attitude?
13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?
14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?
15) Tell me one weird fact about you.
16) Do you have any pets?
17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?
18) What was your first impression of me?
19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?
20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?
21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?
22) What color eyes do you have?
23) Ever been arrested?
24) Bottle or can soda?
25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?
27) What's your favorite place to hang out at?
28) Do you believe in ghosts?
29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?
30) Do you swear a lot?
31) Biggest pet peeve?
32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?
33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?
34) Favourite and least favourite food?
35) Do you believe in God?
36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?

I haven't posted for...well... ages, mostly because I've been rather busy this summer.

I've been working for the university with Oziris and a couple of people from AVS refitting computer rooms and upgrading machines on campus. Oz and I think we did 15 rooms worth of machines, which is a heck of a lot. I did the same kind of things last year too, so a fair proportion of the machines on campus were built by me! This had the side-effect of 'spare money' which went towards a new graphics card (The 7600GT I had didn't play games too well, upgraded to 9600GT which is full of shiny and yay) and some bills (boring!).

Towards the end of the work, I got a Very Important Phonecall. Turns out the uni found me some money so I'll be getting my fees paid for and a generous amount to live on. Far more than I got from student loans, in fact. May end up stashing some of that away for later...

At the same time, got a slight upgrade in helpdesk job. Working 2 7 hour weekend shifts a month once term starts. Time and a half woooop!

Also went to the Bournemouth air show and saw the red arrows, along with helecopters which did loop the loops, a really awesome plane called the "Sea Vixen" and many other really quite impressive planes. Apparently they're doing it next year too, I'll try and get to it! Thanks to Stotty for putting me up and BleanD for giving me a lift down there =).

SociableTwig continued in August; went to visit people in Stansted Mountfitchet for #bored.uk v3. Beer, cheese, strange creatures in Spore and more beer. Yay people! Thanks Moo, and *upmiddlefinger* at the newly National Expressified rail services' replacement bus service for taking 2 hours to go 3 stops down the line. And then not having a connecting train. Morons!

AllenJB, Eek and Elate have now moved in and seem settled. Today I decomissioned Stotty's old box which ran weatherbot and stuck the weatherbot software and hardware onto my server downstairs. This means slightly reduced power use (Offset somewhat by the presence of 3 additional geeks...). Also bought myself a CurrentCost electricity meter thingy which can spit out data and send it to a PC. Pretty graphs of power use will appear once the thing actually arrives.

Sister+Dad came down to Canterbury this weekend. Went to Dover Castle to have a wander round. The tunnels in the cliffs are fairly...hm...strange. I liked the flickery lights and sounds of shells hitting the place - nice touch! Went to Carmen's for Tapas and sangria. Yummy food, sangria pretty good too. A little pricey for studenty types though I think. Would probably make a pretty good place to have a light lunch provided you didn't mind paying a fair whack for it.

I've also just signed up to possibly the most insane thing ever. NaNoWriMo (Linky: http://www.nanowrimo.org). The idea is you write a  very rough draft of a novel, 50,000 words+ between the 1st and 30th of the month. That's about 1667 words per day, which isn't too terrifying provided you don't get behind. If you've read this far into this post....well I'll keep you up to date and probably spam updates once a day or so with a word count. I'll not post the story till the end of the month, and even then I may deem it too rough around the edges to actually show anybody else.

If you're expecting to have lots of free time in November and fancy a challenge, sign up to NaNoWriMo and hack yourself a short story. Myself, I'll be juggling being sociable (Well...maybe. This is me....), getting to lectures, reading up on things for lectures, doing coursework, doing the occasional helpdesk shift and writing for NaNoWriMo. November will be fun!

[edit] woah, what a lot of drivel. If you've read this far, here's a free coupon for a hug next time you see me *gift* [/edit]

Maybe I missed something fun?

It's too warm here and I have work in 8 hours 18 minutes. Eep.

Beat someone else at Go (Won by ~40 stones this time). Yay.

Graduated with a 2(i). Dressed up in silly cloak and hat (although wish could wear cloak all the time... :D). Curry afterwords with family. omnomnom (Curry, not family...).

Currently playing lots of Go on gokgs.com's servers (Play me! I'm 'twigathy', ranked 22k). It's a deceptive game. Amazing how much difference a single stone in the right place can make sometimes.

Helpdesking sporadically throughout summer. Possibility of pay rise and job title change (Senior helpdesker!). Interviews to be gone through first. Working again tomorrow and Wednesday.

Back home this weekend, probably dissapear Thursday or Friday. (Actually am up in York but...away from CT2 anyway).

MSc place confirmed a short while back. No word about funding yet (eep). Money tight as ever. Boo :-(.

Eek's moved in, seems to be nocturnal! Think elate may move in in August, or with AllenJB when term starts in September.

Managed to get rowlf set up to display pictures and pipe sound to the rather spangly TV downstairs. Now just need for more people in Canterbury to watch silly films..

Now I need sleep.

http://community.livejournal.com/too_much_info/5135419.html?view=65972539

Ahhh, internets. You do amuse.

[edit - looks like they deleted the entry :(]

off to france - back Saturday. Usual stuff about contact. See you in a week o/

I realised today that I've not read a good book (read: something that isn't a technical manual [blah!], textbook [meh] or scientific paper [interesting, but ultra-dense]) for quite a while now, so I've taken one of the entries on that top 100 list.

I thought starting at number 50 would be a good idea, and sure enough on the parental unit's bookshelves lay Ian McEwan's "Atonement". It'd be great to cross off more than just this one though. I'll keep you all posted... :)

Stolen from skeldof

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, add an strikeout the books you read but didn't like.

[Updated: 29th June 2008 - no. 50 - Attonement]


Too long didn't read [hurhur...]: 26/100 read. That's quite a few. I feel I should have read some of the ones I haven't, and am curious about those that I have never even heard of.