Looking Out To Sea

So, what’s up? Em, it was my birthday two weeks ago. Went to ESI (a Leith restaurant owned by an Englishman, Scotsman and Irishman) and had a good time there with Helen. The service was quite slow but the food was good and there was no faulting the company.

I also organised a sort of test-the-waters meeting of Edinburgh Haskell users. Four of us met in the pub on a Sunday afternoon, and I received two more emails from other people who would have come if I had given more notice. The time didn’t go particularly easily — one of our number was horrendously awkward to talk to — but it was a start. No plans to do anything more with it at the moment.

But out of that (and the advertisements I sent to the Haskell Cafe mailing list) I got a message from Eric Kow, asking if I wanted to help organise a Haskell Hackathon this August to coincide with the ICFP and Haskell Symposium in Edinburgh. So I’ve been thinking about that and coming to realise just how impossible it is to get anything organised while the Festival is on…

Meanwhile I feel that things are going quite well at work, which coincides with the contracting budget being cut to almost-nothing. A good handful of my colleagues are now on redundancy notice. I managed to get the one job for which there was funding, but that only lasts six months. In January or thereabouts I will be looking for something new. I’m not sure what. Helen’s horror stories from work make me think I could at least be a force for good if I tried programming with the NHS. But another part of me thinks the problem is likely to be systemic and no amount of enthusiasm or skill can make up for some problems.

It feels weird to now be looking for jobs — paying attention to the job market, at least — and realising that I have those “two years’ experience” that employers seem so keen on. I had to revise my CV when applying for this position with the extended funding (though strictly speaking it’s exactly what I was doing before) and it’s staggering to think how little experience was expanded to fill those two pages. But now I feel more confident — not only in my own abilities but also in knowing what’s important when applying/interviewing for a new position. I actually have points which are important to me as a developer. They always say you should have something to ask a potential employer in an interview, but knowing what to ask only really comes with that experience.

All this doesn’t get around the fact that applying for jobs is a horrible thing to have to do and I’m not at all looking forward to it.

From Boing Boing:

If one dislikes Monday because of school or work then why does one continue to go back to work or school? I believe that folks like this are probably in the wrong job or studying the wrong course and probably should look for something that enables them to enjoy Mondays — and every other day for that matter. Those who genuinely enjoy work or school probably won’t give “Work or School” as the reasons they dislike Monday.

Interesting, but I don’t agree with the conclusions. I think it’s specifically change that people object to. They don’t like to return to work because they’ve just had two days sitting around at home, relaxing over lunch with family — living in a holiday lifestyle. Then it all has to change.

The same happens to me every single day. In the morning I don’t want to get out of bed, and the evening I don’t want to go to bed. What I’m doing now is always far more interesting than something I might be doing later. And truth be told, last Friday I was late leaving work because I couldn’t bear to leave what I was doing.

So it’s not really about not enjoying the work. For me, at least, it’s about not enjoying the change and resenting that context switch.

Today has been a fairly good day, and despite the rain we have something to celebrate. So fish and chips with Cava sounds like a fine combination to me!

So we foolishly decided that we’d get the place redd up if we arranged for a whole bunch of people to come over all at once. Well, they’re coming over this week but there doesn’t look to be much happening on the cleaning-and-tidying front.

I built the final kitchen chair today, so that’s one fewer thing taking up space in the living room. But there’s still loads of boxes full of CDs, DVDs and books which don’t have a home because we have no shelving.

Among today’s minor successes are having a proper set of bathroom towels, and plugging my desktop computer back in. Still no internet connection, but I did put on some photos of my parents’ trip to China, so there’s more variety on the screensaver. I like watching photos as screensavers. (I’ve been teasing my colleagues at work lately by using some of Helen’s food photos as my screensaver. I got back to my desk the other day and they’d turned off my monitor to avoid seeing further tantalising food shots!)

Just now I’ve got some baguettes in the oven, but they’re too slim and are rather too much like breadsticks. But it’s all about the practice…

Things you can do no problem at all:

• Stand at the cooker, laptop in one hand for reading email, idly stirring soup with the other hand.
• Playing Tux Racer on the sofa.

Things that will take some setting up:

• Connecting up to router console port because there does not seem to be any terminal software in the default repositories.

The full title of this little gem of a book is Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse, written by Paul Carter. He’s a slightly jaded oil rig worker who’s been to a lot of terrifying and absurd places in the name of Big Oil.

There isn’t much in the book about the process of digging or the oil industry. Mostly it’s tales of derring-do and idiocy. For instance, you learn what happens if you sneak into a mosque at night and change the pre-recorded call to prayer for a recording of Ring of Fire. (The answer, in this case, is get thrown out the country as a religious undesirable.)

But you also get a picture of some of the scarier ends of the nearly civilised world — where you need a code word to exchange with your driver to ensure he’s not some random person who wants to rob and kill you.

I can’t pretend this is the best written book in the world. A somewhat scattergun approach to punctuation and the like. But it’s certainly entertaining.

I have an incredibly eighteen unfinished blog posts sitting on my computer and in WordPress, waiting for me to conclude… something. Probably that they’re useless and need to be completely rewritten, or that they’re completely out of date and shouldn’t even be published at all.

I will probably get more blogging done in the next week. Helen is going on holiday — skiing in France — and I’m staying here to enjoy the horizontal rain and furious umbrella-killing gusts that are typical of Edinburgh winters.

But I’ll be heading away to see my parents for the weekend, so probably no updates in the immediate future. But I must remember to take my CCNA book with me and do some studying.

This post is being prepared in advance. Brinkmanship was the theme of 2007: preparation is the watchword for 2008. Getting things done in advance might even mean getting them done properly.

• Studying well for the CCNA exam when it comes around in a few months’ time.

• Thinking about food in advance. Preparation when it’s possible, and execution at the last moment. Like having pancake batter in the fridge overnight, you know?

  

• Getting grown up things done — bank accounts, pensions, savings — before it is too late to be worthwhile.

• Most importantly: leaving computers to do the hard work of publishing blog posts so that I can be elsewhere, enjoying the company of my friends.

See you all in the new year!

Photograph by LynnInSingapore on Flickr.

I’m further behind in my Christmas shopping than I wanted to be… there’s some stuff I am very happy with but other aspects are a bit lacking (or, in fact, completely lacking). I should really be out scouring the shops right this minute, but I have pounding headache and a dribbling nose so I don’t feel up to it. I was out earlier this afternoon and just couldn’t stay the course.

Where did my cold come from? Well, I’m blaming my work mate, Colin. He was off work last week but came to the work night out on Friday with symptoms galore.

But there’s nothing I can really do about that. Colds during winter are just something we have to get used to. I just hope I’ll be better by Christmas, if not tomorrow. This evening we’ll be preparing stuff for our visit to our parents’ houses on the twenty-fifth. There’s a few nice recipes we’re going to have a look at this evening.

In the interest of continuing professional development and the like, I’ve started studying for the CCNA exam.

What does this mean? Well, a bunch of us at work are having regular study sessions: going through the study guides and the test questions. It’s been easy-going so far, because it’s been the ‘fundamentals’ section and it’s all been stuff that a home network tinkerer might come across. (Well, apart from frame relay…)

I’m nervous that it all just appears easy but the exams will be horrifying. Also, horrifying and expensive to resit. :-(