Monthly Archives: June 2005

Conference season

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Today marks the first day of the summer vacation at Warwick and already there are plenty of conference delegates wandering around campus, dressed entirely inappropriately for the heat. I sat on the piazza alone while I ate my Viva lunch and read my Guardian, remebering what it felt like twelve months ago when I used to do the same on an almost daily basis, whilst being attacked by wasps.

Back then I was a mere graduand, with no plans and no degree certificate. Now I have both of those, albeit without a job after the 29th of July. I intend to use up what savings I have travelling during August and September and arrive in London after that to desperately start earning some more money before Christmas. Oh, and finding somewhere to live.

But for now, the most important thing I have to worry about (apart from the threat of Europoean innovation in software going down the pan, of course) is my tan lines, which seem to have got worse after the weather at Alton Towers on Friday was unexpectedly alright.

I’m looking forward to Gran Canaria lots, at least because it’ll give me a chance to get rid of them. Three days to go!

Resignation

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Congratualations to Martin, Dave, Jamie and anyone else who’s had results through in the last couple of days.

Although I haven’t had any results through myself, I have today handed in my notice and have therefore joined the long line of people who have very little left to keep them at Warwick.

It’s a strange mix of feelings I’m feeling right now. I’ll miss sitting out on the piazza and nights out at Top B, but it feels good that I’m moving on to new, exciting things elsewhere.

Finality

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You know you’re drunk when you wander home taking photos of all the traffic signs that you pass on the way. Fortunately however, this time I wasn’t sat on top of any of them.

I think the finality of it all just hit me last night, in a way I’m not sure that it did last year. Back then I had no plans beyond having arranged a few weeks’ work to pay off the excesses of the previous few weeks. I certainly didn’t have any firm plans to leave Warwick, which is perhaps why I ended up staying for another year.

This time things are different. Last night was probably my last Top B ever.

Richie and Jamie

Longest day today!

Monday morning

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It’s been a while since I had a weekend like the one just past. I hadn’t had a whole two day period off work for some time, and I can’t remember when the last time that I’d had so much going on in my life over that period that I just didn’t think about work at all was.

So today is a reflective day. Lately I’ve been too close to certain things to think about them clearly. Today I feel there’s some distance there.

Photos of Saturday to follow.

Big vs. Small

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I’ve been thinking lately about what kind of company I want to end up working for when my time at Warwick is over. In particular, the question of whether I should be applying for big corporate graduate programmes right now, or whether I whould just land in London in the autumn and find a job with a smaller company has been bothering me. Are there more opportunities for me in a multinational IT consulting firm, or in a smaller firm where I’m more likely to find something that I’m actually passionate about?

At the moment, I’m leaning towards the latter. This is good, because apparently small is the new big for organisations, at least according to Seth Godwin. Now if only I could remember where I’ve heard of him before.

In other news, I’m almost certainly not running on Sunday. The doctor thinks I may have splintered the bone in my left leg and warned me off doing anything too streunous with it for a little while. I guess that rules out 10km runs, eh?

Beautiful Day

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I felt pretty crap last night, largely due to a combination of sitting in front of computers for too long, disagreements with housemate #2 who is refusing to pay her share of the council tax bill and the fact that my leg injury still hasn’t gone away and is threatening to stop me running on Sunday.

Today is better. Kerrang were playing U2’s Beautiful Day as I drove onto campus in the morning sun. I have been productive too, having logged a Blogbuilder bug about Planet failing to parse Giles’s and Milly’s blogs due to the weird characters that it puts in the RSS markup for some reason. I think I may go to the gym later. But no running 🙁

Welcome to Planet Afterlife, Tal! That’s one less broken RSS feed to deal with, yay!

Photo nostalgia

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Today started off as rather a non-day. I intended it to be such, having told myself I wasn’t going to touch any work at all today and have some time off.

In particular, I vowed I wasn’t going to do any more coding on the semi-work related monitoring tool I’ve been writing in Python over the last week, and which has been taking up large amounts of my time, both at home and at work. I tried doing some more work on it yesterday whilst at work, but I just couldn’t focus at all and ended up just watching Big Brother on the plasma screen in the office. I’m hoping having a day away from it will help and I can be more productive tomorrow.

So looking for something else to do (aside from putting my washing out on the line and having to bring it in half an hour later because it’s pouring with rain) with my day, I ended up installing F-Spot on my computer to have a play around with it.

It took a few minutes to import the fourteen thousand or so digital photos in my Photos directory, but it did so without a hitch, leaving me ready to begin the laborious process of adding tags to the photos to describe their content. I was a bit sceptical about how managing your photos in an iPhoto-type application was better than just arranging them in subdirectories on my hard disk as I’d been doing until now, but now I’m a complete convert. Having all your photos available in a single place that you can browse by date or by the people in them, or by the place they were taken at just rocks and I’m discovering photos I’d forgotten I even had.

F-Spot

Suddenly looking through my photos is a pleasure rather than a chore, and I’m hoping that this will help me put together the photography portfolio that I’ve been wanting to do for a little while now. All thanks to F-Spot, which is possibly the first bit of Novell software I’ve used that actually works.

Birthday season

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I never did understand why so many people that I know have their birthdays around this time of year, but it seems it’s that time of year again, anyway.

So last week was marked by Kevin’s birthday meal in Oriental Star on Saturday and Jamie’s birthday outing to Crash on Friday. I have camera phone photos from both, but the picture of Kevin with a blow-up man has to win over the picture of Jamie pointing at a bottle of Blue WKD. Even if the bottle was supposed to represent Romania…

Kevin and 'Little John' in Oriental Star