Househunting Part 1

As a result of changing jobs I have to move to Brighton and find
somewhere to live. So with this in mind I drove down on saturday, to
Brighton to have a look at a couple of places. One of the places
sounded really nice, in a fantastic location and I’d seen it from the
outside the weekend before, so I was rather pleased when it was just
as nice inside too. The second bedroom was a little bit small for a
double bedroom and the bathroom was downstairs next to the kitchen,
but I could live with those.

After looking at another place I decided to put a holding deposit on
the first flat. Trundled down to the agents and handed over 200GBP
cash and picked up some forms and then headed to the pub to celebrate
finding somewhere. After about 20 minutes I got a phone call from the
agents just to get some details to tell the landlady about me. About
15 minutes later I got another phone call telling me that when she
had phoned the landlady, she said another agent had taken a holding
deposit on Friday, but she hadn’t bothered telling the agents I went
through.

So now I’m back to square one and still don’t have anywhere
to live. Did a bit of retail therapy and bought a nice warm coat for
when I have to walk to work in the cold Brighton wind and rain. Oh
and as I was still stressed, I got my ear pierced.

The dangers of relying on others

I use bitlbee for talking on MSN
and other IM protocols. It is a irc to IM gateway so I can use my
normal irc client to talk to people that insist on using silly
protocols. (Predictably I use irssi) The reason I use bitlbee over
something like gaim that when I used to use gaim or kopete I found
that having a second window to check for activity meant that I would
either ignore stuff on irc or on msn while talking on the other.
Using bitlbee fixed this problem as an MSN chat just appeared as
another privmsg. Plus I could use the same logging system for both.

For the last few months I’ve been using a public bitlbee server at
im.bitlbee.org, which had been working perfetcly find until the tail
end of last week when it kept getting connection refused.
Suddenly on Saturday morning, that machine changed from running a
bitlbee server to running an ircd for the Net24 irc network. As
bitlbee works by joining you to your own private #bitlbee channel
where you talk to a bot to control the client, when a proper ircd
appeared, everyone using that server suddenly joined the global
#bitlbee and several people auto-authenticated to the channel,
revealing their passwords.

It’s times like this when I’m glad I never get round to doing things
like setting up auto-identifying to bitlbee.

New Job

Today I resigned from my current job, because I have accepted a new
job in Brighton, working for Runtime Collective. They
seem more into the idea of open source than SMT were. Their main
product is an open sourced content management system written in Java.
It seems their main source of income is selling support, hosting and
customised versions. They are based right down on the seafront; about
50 metres from the beach and opposite the best pub in Brighton. 🙂

I’ll be joining as a member of their support team. For those
interested, the geeky details of the job can be found in the job
advert. They have already mentioned to me about doing debian
packaging for the CMS. They are also interested at doing corporate GNOME
desktops.

As SMT haven’t given me a contract after 6 months and the new company
are desperate to get me started as soon as possible, I’ve given SMT a
week’s notice. They wanted me to start on the 15th, but I’ve said to
them that I’ll start on the 22nd so I have time to search for
somewhere to live. For at least the first week I’ll be staying in the
youth hostel, which is two doors down from the offices. I’m looking
for a 2 bedroom flat to rent in the North Laines area. I really want
to live close to the city centre and near the trendy area. I’m fed up
with living in the middle of nowhere, driving everwhere and not
drinking.

I think I’m going miss lots of people and places, so you are all
welcome to come visit me and I know I’ll be back lots, especially to
the Soundhaus which has very quickly become my favourite haunt on a
Saturday night. I hope I can find somewhere just as good in Brighton.

Keane – Hopes and Fears

I decided to listen to my Keane album today on the way to work for
the first time in probably 3 months. I realised that as I listened to it
I couldn’t work out which songs had been singles. I could put this down
to either every song being a single or all the song sounding the same.
Annoyingly I also found myself singing along to it. God knows how I’d
managed to learn the words to the songs.

I can’t say I particularly like this album. If you like Snow Patrol
and Hope of the States, you’ll probably like it. The album is pretty
much inoffensive and I think that is my problem with it.

Keane - Hopes and Fears

Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko is on Filum Four right now. The opening credits have just
reminded me exactly why I love this film. It is a perfect combination of
music and cinemaphotography.

If you haven’t seen this film yet, then you should be ashamed of
yourself.

Oh and this film is the reason I’m secretly in love with Drew
Barrymore

Mushrooms

I’ve left my self a note to blog about mushrooms and I can’t for the
life of me remember why. I think it might be something to do with the
fact that mushrooms invoke strong reactions in people that other foods
just don’t seem able to do. People either love them or they hate them.
They are like marmite in that respect. I fall in to the latter camp. For
me it is more of the texture of them than the taste, but I really can’t
eat them.

Leeds

Last weekend was the UKUUG Linux Conference and this year it was held in
Leeds, which is where I went to university. Even though I left 3 years
ago, it was very strange walking around me department again after all
these year. I know I spent 3 years there and that it should feel
familiar to me, but I was shocked at just how familiar it felt. It was
like I’d been there just a few days ago and the last 3 years hadn’t
happened. A few things had changed, but everything felt exactly the same
as it did when I left.

AFK

Over the last few weeks events have meant that I have been away from
computers and the Internet for extended periods of time. A few months
ago, not using irc or reading mail for 2 or 3 days would have brought me
out in a sweat. Strangely, recently, this hasn’t bothered me at all. If
anything, I’ve not looked forward to returning to all the mail and blogs
I need to read.

I think this is a good thing.