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Jono’s post about taxi cabs and close calls with death reminded me of how little hassle I’ve usually had with cab drivers.

I usually chat away to cabbies, and tip pretty generously on most occasions, but one guy in San Francisco took the biscuit, and didn’t get tipped. Or chatted to, as I was giving him directions.

I had to go 8 blocks from Clay to Green carrying a load of crap in plastic bags, so thought “fuck it, cab”. There was one across from the hotel. “Battery and Green”, I’d asked. “Do you know how to get there?” he replied? I thought he was implying it wasn’t that far, or did I know where I was going? Nah, he was asking because he didn’t bloody know where it was. Then, when I gently discussed how cabbies in the UK have to do The Knowledge before they’re let loose on the streets, he told me that that was “not true, they can just go out and drive like here”. Hey, don’t mind me, I only bloody live there. I ended up having to guide this guy to the destination as, by his own admission, he’d only been working for two days, including that one.

Then there was the private cab driver who, on taking me from Chelmsford town centre to Stansted Airport on a Friday afternoon, seemed to be dominating the conversation. He was basically chatting me up. He even broke my cardinal rule, which is when taking a cab for work travel, expense the bare fare, but pay with a tip. That way, the tip comes out of my own pocket. But nooooo, this guy threw an extra fiver on the receipt. “There you go, mate, something back for yourself”. Brrrrrr. I took a meal off my expenses that week to counter it.

It’s time for another Cram Post, Neuro Style.

june » to san francisco for a couple of weeks to acclimatise to linden lab culture and processes, very chilled yet productive fortnight, i can now convert pounds sterling to/from US dollars and PDT to/from BST in my head; july » had great fun trying to procure a macbook pro for work, to wolverhampton for lugradio live 2007, gave a quick talk and demo about second life, got more enjoyment out of picking up an xbox 360 on the cheap, to brighton for the develop conference and a linden recruitment event, beer is not cheap in brighton, got to meet peter molyneux and aleks krotoski which rocked – aleks, the pigeons are still not safe!, saw the simpsons movie – basically a 90 minute episode of the simpsons and that’s not a bad thing, housemates who moved in here in march are moving out to a bigger pad near glasgow *schniff*, the geekha.us shall continue tho!

Today, I start my new job working as a Distributed NOC Engineer for Linden Lab, developers of Second Life. This is the crest of a hill I’ve been climbing since early March, when I was made redundant from my last job: I spent a few minutes converting my rich text CV to plain text and applying for a position that I knew I could do, but wasn’t sure I could get. Within a fortnight, and after two interviews — one of them “in-world”, i.e. inside Second Life — I was invited to Linden Lab’s offices in San Francisco for what turned out to be five interviews in one day.

Fast forward through a month of waiting, deliberating, and sheer willpower, and I was finally offered the position; another fortnight and everything was 99% sorted. The stress load I’ve been under has all but vanished. I’m so looking forward to this job it hurts, but in a good way!

After a couple of weeks orientation “in-world”, i.e. inside Second Life, I’m going back out to San Francisco to properly meet everyone I’ll be working with. Given what I’ve already heard about the environment, it should be fun!

And no, this doesn’t mean I can give you free land / free objects / free Linden dollars / fix your account / [insert any other item from a resident's wishlist], even if you bribe me well ask really nicely. Fixing the grid at 2am SLT if there’s problems, on the other hand, will probably be slap bang in the middle of my remit, but that doesn’t mean you can hassle me about it

Oh, Talk Like Yoda Day, today is. Talk like Yoda, you must! For today, anyway.

cram post á france » thursday 6th july > trip down to portsmouth, hot as hell on the m6 toll, nice smooth sail overnight on brittany ferries; vendredi 7éme juillet > en france, lunch with friend jc who owns l’equinoxe bar at agon coutainville, crashed hard after reaching the gite near coutances; samedi > spent the day in gévezé for stage 7 of le tour de france, beers at half ten, vin rose for lunch, coffee on the way home dimanche > lazy day, gutted at france being put out of la coup du monde on penalties; lundi > lazy day, finally started watching season two of lost; mardi > went to villedieu-les-poêles for the weekly market, usual mix of fruit+veg, faded-in-the-sun DVDs and leather wallets — left with today’s international herald tribune; mercredi > visited memorial at caen — huge memorial site commemorating wwii and the cold war, met up with friends starting their holiday in coutances today; jeudi > lazy day, picked up new sony headphones, munchies at oncle scott’s country restaurant et bier mexicaine, found the horse soldiers on arte in english with french subs — woot! — then packing, packing, packing; vendredi > bastille day: vive la france, last minute shopping, un grande dejeuner á l’equinoxe, nice leisurely drive to cherbourg, high speed ferry back to portsmouth, ; saturday > » sore back, had breakfast with amanda, back still sore, warm drive, ow back, home, unpack, ow back, collapse, ow

Dippy Bint

Originally uploaded by neuro.

This dippy bint, driving a Citroen with number plate R734 TSR, decided to track the inside lane of slow moving traffic two miles from the roadworks ahead. She eventually pulled in at 800yds. This is the second time I’ve seen someone attempt to take the road traffic laws into their own hands in 7 days; I’m getting a bit pissed off about it now

Hols. France. Back.

US budget airline JetBlue have satellite TV built into the aircraft. Each passenger can watch live TV as broadcast on the DIRECTV platform (similar to Sky here in the UK), which is pretty damn cool. Something similar could surely be done with Sky on UK domestic flights, which would make up for the utter lack of entertainment on BA shorthaul

I’ve been home since about half past ten this (yesterday) morning, caught up on email (about 2,200), said lo to lots of online people, slept, watched some stuff I’d taped onto the TiVo and Sky+, slept a bit more, ate, and I’m here typing now plugging in all the offline blog entries I’d made and linking up some photos from the weekend.

Definitely time for bed

Dunno how, but the Vaio’s battery is down to 17% — I don’t remember it being this low earlier I’m up on the top mezzanine floor in Top Crust, just chowed down on some Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes (breakfast of champions), am still munching on a chicken and stuffing sandwich, and I have some weird yellow pastry/cake thing to eat later. My flight still doesn’t leave for another two and a half hours, my check-in desk doesn’t exist yet, so I’m back to killing time instead of just being unconscious.

This is now officially the Longest Period of Time I’ve Spent in an Airport: we got here at about half past five last night, and I’m now into Hour 14 of 16, soundly trouncing the six or seven hours Ade and I spent in Schiphol three years ago.

One thing I’ve observed while travelling to, and being in Ireland, is the much higher ratio of attractive women to us men. I think it goes something like this …

Incidentally, the yellow cake thing is sort of lemon flavoured.

The Vaio is now complaining about having less than 10% battery left — I think the earlier drain was me plugging in the WiFi card and running Net Stumbler for like 2 minutes at about 1am. I didn’t pick anything up, but I haven’t heard anything about nodes here in the airport — maybe this is something we’ll see soon

5% now, and that’s only after a couple of minutes … time to go!

The first time I leave my seat in hours, and someone nicks it. And it’s a soggy bint to boot. I wandered away from my makeshift crash zone to check the screens so I knew roughly where I was checking in (row 8, as it happens), and when I got back — and I only mean about sixty to ninety seconds later — some bint was in my seat. I asked her if I could have my seat back, and she just apologised and laughed politely. Fab, another foreigner It was way too early to argue, so I just sat next to her and waited for her to leave, which took about 20 minutes. Sleepy time (again)!