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I'm back in Cambridge again. Try not to look shocked :)
I've just come out of an informal interview at ARM Holdings, which went extremely well: I aced pretty much every test they put in front of me. Comforting to know I've learned a thing or two in the last ten years... So I guess we'll see how that goes.
Tomorrow, we're off up to Derby to celebrate a friend's wedding by camping in a field and having a ceilidh. And there's no metaphysical discussion for me to hide in this time, so I have to dance. Such hardship.
In other news, Maelstrom went well. The Undead were attacking all weekend, and not only did we manage to hold down the camp and keep them out almost all the time, the times they did break through they did minimal damage. No characters my character cares about died, despite their best efforts, so a good weekend. Next up is Odyssey, then a couple of weekends off (well deserved).
So, back from Craig's wedding, and my suit is straight off to the dry-cleaners. Why? Well, on Wednesday night, ARM are holding a recruitment evening at their Cambridge campus. Working with them would be Quite Nice, and they've been on my to-apply-to list for some time. The recruitment evening blindsided me to some extent (a friend who works there heard about it on the internal mail and passed it to me), so I'm not prepared, but I'm capable enough.
Unfortunately, it's set to start at 1830 in the evening, and Cambridge is a good three and a bit hours away by train, so it's going to eat a good part of my day. In order to retain my sanity, I've decided to take the day and the following day off work, and travel earlier in the afternoon to be there in good time. So my wednesday currently lays out as "collect printed thesis from the binding shop, hand in to Sussex Uni, come home, put on suit, pack bag, go to Cambridge". I'll be staying with friends overnight, and coming back the following day, more or less off-comms for the duration.
It's exciting, and slightly terrifying. I've been thinking that I'd like to work for ARM for quite a while now, they seem like my kind of people, and they do work that interests me. And now I'm going to meet them, and see their campus, and hear about some of their projects and vacancies. I don't quite feel grown-up enough to be doing this, which is kind of tragic, but not overly surprising (I've been in academia a little too long). But it'll be fine. I shall wear ConferenceFace and ConferenceDemeanour, and I will hopefully impress people and so on.
For now, though, I'm frantically attempting to hack together some business cards and finish my CV, so I can run it past reviewers tomorrow and find out what needs fixing. Hackety-hack, hackety-hack...
So here I am in the witw meeting, discussing what went wrong, and what we're doing next. And I'm deliberately not volunteering for anything outside my core responsibilities, because I'm already continuously at something like 90% of cognitive load at present, and while the witw project is a lot of fun, I'm becoming aware that I have hard limits, and I'm starting to bounce off them occasionally.
So why am I so busy? Let's see now. Here's my workload for the next month.
So, all of that to do. And I have to prep for my viva (which is going to be in the last week of february, we think). And my entire lab (five rooms, including computers, furniture, heavy machinery, workshop and testbeds) is moving down the road to Brighton University.
Which brings me to the one positive thing in my life at the moment. The atmosphere in Brighton uni is so very different. Where Sussex is beaten, crushed, resigned to whatever upper management do to us, Brighton is vibrant and energised, people moving and talking and laughing. When we went to lunch in the restaurant, we had to walk down brightly-painted corridors, past menus that change daily and posters and windows and large atriums (atria?). And when we entered the restaurant, every table was chatting, smiling, giggling and sharing ideas. And the food was good.
Once the paper is out, and the viva presentation is over, and the AMS course has toggled over to being written by the guy responsible for the latter half of the course, this will be quite livable, and I think I'm going to be happy at Brighton. Until then...
Well.
If I give up and fold into a tiny ball and hide under the stairs now (like I'd quite like to), I won't get there. So, in the words of a friend, "Bollocks to that". Bring it on.
I'm slightly annoyed with myself. I just spent the best part of three days writing part of a chapter for my thesis based on a wiki page and my own (fairly reliable) memory of the subject in question. I finished, I looked back at it and thought that (a) it was alright, but not great, and (b) it didn't have any references in it. So I went looking for some papers to reference, to reinforce my points, and discovered several hundred. Not only that, but they pointed to some fairly key things I'd not written about.
*sigh* Rewrite time, for that couple of pages at least. That'll teach me for not doing the right reading.
One of those days, following one of those weeks (so far, at least).
So far this week, I've not gone to a NaNoWriMo meet because I was going to fencing instead (at which I stood around trying not to go hide in a corner for no clear reason, and did a bit of coaching and reffing instead of, you know, actually fencing). Also, I haven't done the development kit upgrade I was supposed to do because I got caught up in a language reference manual I'm reading instead, which is going to be inconvenient in the meeting tomorrow. I think a working knowledge of SDL (the language in question) is potentially very useful in our future work, but I wish I'd learned it six months ago or so.
What with that and picking up the teaching load for an injured colleague, its been ... busy. I've not written word one for NaNoWriMo in the last three days and, although I've beaten my somewhat ignominious 13000 score in 2006, I don't see a lot more getting written. Which is a pity: I like the plot, and the characters, but...
I should be LARPing for a day at Brighton Below, this weekend, though, which will be a nice break, if nothing else goes wrong and I manage to get the makeup and costume sorted in time. Maybe I can just wander off into the Below. Yeah, that would be nice.
If this is really all life is, I want my money back.