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Well.
Well well well.
I live in Cambridge. And I work at (but not yet for) ARM. Life is more or less good. And I'm back on the net, as this entry shows. Hello again.
I have a (rented) house, which is still a mess, because I haven't finished unpacking (it's traditional, you know).
I have a job, and I'm responsible for a manual the company will be releasing soon. This is ... well, not going perfectly smoothly, but so it goes. I'm doing the best I can under tricky conditions, and I don't think it'll be too late (but when one's co-author, manager and mentor all independently go on holiday at the same time, there's only so much a new hire can manage).
Life is, for the most part, good.
Watch this space, I guess :)
So, I've been moved in for a bit over a week now, in theory, and I've unpacked .. some things. By the gods, do I have a lot of stuff. I've gone from a room and a half to a house and I'm still having trouble finding spaces in which to put everything. But, so it goes. If I unpack a box every so often, it'll get sorted out eventually.
I'm due to start work on Monday, and all the details for that are sorted out now. I still need to finish servicing my bicycle for the commute, but that's a couple of hours' work, and will probably be done on Saturday morning. Then I just have to find the route...
Not a lot to say here, really, but thought I should just put up a "things still happening" post. Money is tight, as expected after just moving house, but all the major bills are taken care of and I'm (barely) solvent this month. Once I'm actually being paid again, and Brighton Uni get that last pay-cheque to me, everything should be just fine.
For now, well, I guess it's cheese sandwiches for me :)
Having the river and Stourbridge Common thirty seconds' walk from my door is a lovely thing, though. I'll try and get some pictures at some point, and post them here. Realisation of the day, though: rowing skiffs have head- and tail-lights, and they appear to be exactly the same models as used on bicycles - horizontal lines of LEDs, powered by two AAA batteries per unit. It's odd, and interesting, to see the same design reused in a way I'd never have expected.
Well, as of this morning I have a house in Cambridge. We signed the contracts (which are ...detailed, but not particularly onerous), got the keys and set up the standing order to pay the rent, and now the house is pretty much ours. It's furnished, with a lot of things the landlady has provided, and we popped out and bought most of the missing bits today. Unaccountably, this does not include a vegetable peeler, because apparently nowhere in Cambridge sells ones I like.
There are a few issues I need to raise with the letting agency, mostly relating to the security of one of the external doors and the fact that the doorbell does not work, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with it. Once I've raised my list of issues, I wonder who the letting agency will think is more anal, me or the landlady... Given the place has fire safety posters, smoke alarms and fire extinguishers everywhere, she probably still wins.
Ah well. That's sorted, and I have a work contract in my bag to read and sign tomorrow. Things are coming together. Tomorrow I go back to Brighton, and finish putting things in boxes, then start moving in earnest. For now I have a new bed, and some Egyptian Cotton sheets. Tomorrow can wait :)
The workload ramps up as the deadline draws closer. It's one of the constants of life, I think.
So, I'm pretty busy at the moment. I'm packing the world into boxes in the evening, when I'm not packing for Maelstrom. I'm writing yet more extensions and plugins and patches and add-ons for the Winter in the Willows website. I'm wrangling a frankly unhelpful letting agency in Cambridge, forcing them to follow their own process and hoping they'll get everything sorted out before I need to move in. I'm ... still waiting for a contract for my new job, despite everything now having been agreed, and my being more than halfway through my notice period. And that notice period? I'm still lead programmer on a critical project at work, and likely still will be until the day I leave, because without meaning to sound insulting, I am actually better at what we're doing than the other guys on this project. Exactly how they're going to cope when I'm gone is not my problem.
I'm ... almost coping. It's like holding slightly more than a handful of marbles - things keep falling out when I'm not paying attention, and then it's two weeks later and I realise they need doing right the hell now, and I didn't have the time before and I don't now. On some of the bigger projects above, I'm supposed to be part of a team, and the rest of the team seem to be hiding a lot of the time. But. I keep at it, and look forward to the long weekend I have at the end of September, before I actually start working for ARM properly, and after I've moved to Cambridge. I'm going to need the rest.