Blog Catchup... Again

Oookay, it's been a while since the last blogtacular update but I have been kind of busy.

I managed to get all of my moving stuff sorted out and I am now (happily?) settling in at Leeds - both the city and the University. It's kind of weird living by myself, but my flat is so hella-awesome that it makes up for it.

Quite a few things have happened over the past couple of months, some of them with pics (and videos) to go with them.

There was a SingStar extravaganza at Irina's place before I left Manchester for good:

SingStar Party

This was followed by the eventual move itself and all the stress involved with that:

The big move

This left me with a couple of days of unpacking etc until actually starting at work. So far, there has been plenty to learn and lots of new people to meet. There seem to be SO MANY meetings that I have to go to but there was a very useful NGS face to face meeting in Leeds, which meant I got to meet almost everyone who is involved with the running of NGS.

I haven't actually got to see much of Leeds itself - I have been good and not gone out on a "school night" and seem to have been sepnding my weekends elsewhere. Vijay came for a weekend visit, which was really an excuse to get some help from me with some course work. I introduced him to Doxygen, which apparently impressed a lot of people with its auto-generated PDF documentation for his source code. Cool-e-oh.

Nicki was over from US and A with her family, including the new addition, Blaney. I have to say, he is possibly the cutest baby I have ever seen... Well done Nicki :)

I managed to find time to go to the Leeds Barenaked Ladies concert at the start of this month. Dragged Mitch along as well and, predictably, enjoyed it very much. BNL always put on a good show. I wish I had taken more pics, but I thought that they wouldn't come out properly. Guess my phone is better than I thought.

Barenaked Ladies

The Easter weekend was good. The university was closed from Thursday afternoon 'til Wednesday morning. I had Aradhna and her two (awesome) housemates, Janine and Sophia, round for basically a weekend of Wii/Gamecube/SingStar fun. Vijay turned up for some of it as well. Amazingly, we managed to get out of the flat at some point and even managed to make it (on foot!) to the local park where we managed to have fun on our improvised "obstacle course". I didn't take any pictures of this stuff for some reason, but Janine did. We then moved on the the skate park for our races, and ended up with injuries all round... happy days. I did take some "food porn" pictures though:

Steamed, Fried Dumplings

Oh yeah... WOKMANIA in Leeds totally sucks. Never, ever, ever go there.

Last, but by no means least, I spent the last weekend in Blackpool. Kitu and Piku, as always, were brilliant. Seriously, the best kids I have ever known. Their little brother, Krish, is getting on as well. Approaching his 1st birthday and walking already. He can't quite speak yet, but manages to voice his displeasure at my presence in his house quite clearly. Once we can have a sensible conversation, he'll come round - bribery will save the day if nothing else. One of the highlights was the appearance of a quad bike for the weekend... I loved this thing. Some of the girls (i.e. Vijay and Piku) fell off, and to be fair I cam close a couple of times, but there was no permanent damage... just more bruises to add to the ones from playing around over Easter.

And that's about it. A lot to cover in such a short space. I'll try to keep up with things as they happen from now on. Should be easier now that I'm settled in.

One last thing. I stumbled across a site that asks you a bunch of stupid questions to tell you which Star Wars character you are. This is how it turned out for me:




While I'm not sure I identify with this too much, it did remind me of my realisation that R2 D2 is basically the same as Kenny in South Park. I'm convinced that he's a foul mouthed little devil, but nobody (apart from C3PO) has any idea what he's saying.... not too hard to fill in the obscenities though.

Click the link and see who you are. I know it's stupid, but it's kind of fun :)

Blog Catchup

I think the chances of me actually catching up with past events in proper detail so I'll just make a short (ish) summary of events from the new year post 'til now so I can get to the good bit. Almost everyone I know already knows it though. Makes it seem kind of pointless in a way.....

Anyway! After the awesome new year celebrations, I was up working with Steve doing my usual server configuration and other bits and pieces. One of the schools was to have a new IT room with the usual complement of 30 PCs and one projector/smart board combination, but the electricians were unable to finish on time, so we were left with not much to do there and had to leave it until a later date. Following that, there was a visit from Martin (alone, initially) and eventually Sarah as well. Always good to spend time with them, even if we did seem to spend a rather large amount of time walking around... We were showing Wolfgang, one of Sarah's friends, the delights of Manchester. Among these was a space invader that Sarah hadn't managed to get a good picture of in the past. I had my trusty new phone to hand to catch the moment, and here is the invader in all his (?) glory:


After saying my (internally) tearful goodbyes to Sarah, Martin and Wolfgang and getting absolutely DRENCHED..... TWICE.... I found myself in Blackpool for Kirtika (aka Kitu) birthday celebration as well as a celebration of Lodi. Lots of nice food was on hand and I ended up staying for a couple of days to help out with homework etc. I found myself re-living the experience of teaching Anu fractions, decimals and percentages all those years ago. It was kind of enjoyable but also a bit trying - it's probably the first time I have made Kitu (and Piku) sit and study and have to fend off their attempts at wriggling out of it. In all honesty, they probably took a lot longer to do the work than they should have and there was far to much giggling (from them) for it a proper study session like the ones I was subjected to. Anyway, I think that they still like me and that they actually learned something new. Not only that, I think that they, Kitu at the very least, were HAPPY that they had learned how to do these things. I felt really very good about myself for a change :) I also got to spend some time around their new (ish) baby brother, Krish. He still cried whenever I went near him, but at least the amount of time it took to happen seemed to be getting longer! There are some pics from the Blackpool happenings here:

Blackpool January 2007

I would have stayed longer, but I had to get back to Manchester to get a job application in on time. A few days after that, I got an email saying that I would have an interview (at Leeds university) in just under a weeks time. In the mean time, I had to put that out of my mind since I was preparing for a visit from AK followed by a fancy dress SingStar party at her place.... Oh yes. So I managed to get hold of some slightly tattered blue jeans, a white t-shirt, a leather jacket and some HUUUUGE and hideous sunglasses to go as George Michael. I didn't manage to get hold of any crucifix ear rings, but I went without shaving for a good few days before the event to make up for it. The party itself was good - SingStar is never bad - there was even sushi to be had.... how cool is that? I managed to pollute/corrupt/subvert many of the people there with White Russian, which was kind of funny. I don't have any pictures of the party - I was too busy singing to be all trigger happy with my phone - but I will try and get hold of some and get them online.

A couple of days later (23rd of Jan) I was on my way to Leeds for my interview. Not only was this interesting because of the possibility of getting a "real" job, but also because I would be hopefully meeting up with Mitch. Anyway, the interview went quite well... a few tricky questions, but that was to be expected really, but on the whole I felt reasonably happy with the way it had gone. It was a bit odd having lunch with the other people applying for the job, but it was certainly an interesting experience. Anyway... after around 5 hours and 2/3 interviews I was free to relax with Mitch. While we were in the student's union playing pool (me not sticking out in my suit at all), I got a call offering me the job! So I am now officialy going to Leeds to become "Grid Support Officer" for the NGS service and White Rose Grid. Exciting and kind of scary all at the same time. In case you are wondering exactly what that will entail, you can get a look at the job description here.

Now, I'm in the process of trying to sort out all of the details of moving (bills, new place to stay etc.) and to finish off my thesis. Neither is happening at a rate that is to my satisfaction. Possibly the only plus side to all of this is that it has made me actually start organising my in a more efficient way - I'm using Google Calendar to map out when things should be happening in order to make sure I get as moved as possible to Leeds before I start on the 1st of March. They wanted me to start on the 1st of Feb, but that was just not enough time for me to get myself sorted out.... The extra month might not be enough either! The weeks since finding out and the coming weeks seemed to have filled themselves with events and house hunting stuff to such an extent that the thesis is taking more of a back seat than I would have liked. Although it's all very stressful, it is exciting. Getting it all down in blog form makes it all seem a bit more... something, not sure what.

At least I'm mostly caught up now. :)