neuro.me.uk

The first rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

The second rule of Lunch Club is you do not talk about Lunch Club

Third rule: If someone says “nachos!”, orders a garlic bread, or eats with their fingers, the lunch is over

Fourth rule: Only one plate to a person

Fifth rule: One course at a time

Sixth rule: No napkins, no salad forks

Seventh rule: Lunches will go on as long as they have to

And the eighth and final rule: If this your first day at Lunch Club, you have to munch

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!

Got back from Develop at Brighton at the weekend. Got some choice quotes from the couple of days I was there.

• “Do you do a fish butty?” (asked in the fish and chip shop next to the Hilton Metropole)
• “This is fucking awful!” (said by an unknown woman to Peter Molyneux outside the Hilton)
• “I’m on the same panel as the guy who created Loco Roco!” (said in gushing tones by an conference attendee)
• “There’s nothing serious about a My Little Pony butt-plug” (overheard by accident at an after-conference meal)
• “You’ve been drinking all our fucking booze!” (an irate gamesindustry.biz employee getting a bit stroppy)

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.

I like to blog, but I’ve been remiss in posting. So what better time than the end of the year to post what I’ve been up to.

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him … and says “Catch up”.
    — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Verk

I’m now working at Concept Systems in Edinburgh, very much a Linux-friendly shop. It’s great to be working full-time with operating systems I love, and this is the third company in a row that has given me the opportunity to do so. The commute is probably the longest I’ve ever had to do on a regular basis — 41 miles from door to door — and the last 9 miles are through Edinburgh city centre traffic, but it’s worth it to be in a friendly professional environment, surrounded by people who have a genuine passion for what they do.

Oh, and Google have updated their Earth imagery for Edinburgh, and it turns out that every morning when driving up Maybury Road, I’m passing a big Poo! in a field.

Interweb Technological Gadgetry

Now that I’m no longer working for an ISP, sadly I’ve lost the perk of free broadband, so I signed up with Web Tapestry. They’re a great little outfit, courteous and knowledgeable, and I’d recommend them in a heartbeat. In fact I’ve been recommending them for months, and everyone who I’ve referred has been very pleased. I even get a nice wee kick back if you mention my name to their support team after signing up with them

Something else I’ve enjoyed this year has been Sipgate’s Voice over IP service to give me 1000 landline minutes a month for under six quid. Real phones plugged into a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter make life so much easier than having to piss about with headsets and PCs just to call people.

Schtuff

I’m watching a programme from Artsworld that I taped last week, Morricone Conducts Morricone. It’s fantastic to listen to (and watch) a great composer conduct his own music with a full orchestra — the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in this case, with guest performers — but something that stands out is the number of other composers work I can hear in the performances. This isn’t to say Ennio Morricone is a plagiarist, but rather that his work has had such a profound influence on so many other composers. I could hear twinges of Don Davis, Michael Kamen and even Jerry Goldsmith. Genius.

On a different tack, something dawned on me the other day. I thought how cool it would be if you could simply wish yourself back in time to an earlier period in your life to perhaps unfuck something bad, or to revisit something good, but then an interesting thought entered my head. Perhaps we can all do this already, but we can’t change anything when we get there, so events unfold exactly the same, and we have the same memories as we would have anyway, meaning we don’t really remember actually going back in time in the first place.

Public Service Announcements

The Nokia N70 is poo. Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in 25 years. McDonald’s mint chocolate milkshakes are vile. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgt Eft” is the first Linux distribution that makes me feel comfortable on a computer away from Windows XP. My Sky+’s 40GB hard disk is too small. I sold my Xbox and a pile of Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube games I didn’t want/need and got a PSP for virtually nothing. Did I mention the N70 is poo?

That is all.

Lang May Yer Lum Reek

It’s now 2007, so a Happy New Year to you and yours. Chi-ching!

Microsoft WMF Patch — it’s live and available.

Atkins named in the UK�s Top 10 Best Big employers — pah!

Group HR director Alun Griffiths says: �This is great news and reflects the effort and investment we have made in recent years to make Atkins a terrific place to work. As well as providing first class career opportunities, we support the training and development of individuals at all levels, including 200 graduates who join us each year.”

A company that railroaded staff from consultancy to frontline support because someone didn’t think some chancers from Scotland could hack it? Pah!

Crap.

I love blogging, but sometimes I just zone out and forget all about it. So it’s time for another CramBlogEntryDuNeuro™ …

november > new car > dj’ed (!) at john and sabrina’s wedding > videoisland died > december > firefox 1.0 > rediscovered celestia > blagged myself a free iPod mini (a gold one, bling bling) > culturekitchen > smoothwall’s site got hacked > new phone > chill out! > finally sold the tivo > sun must buy red hat or die! > rediscovered dooce > cheerio blunkett > ny times firefox ad > ruff! > strange people at my work make christmas video card > equally strange, but absolutely superb, works night out > on call from 24th to 31st > enjoyed quiet christmas with family, slightly marred by getting called out on xmas eve, plus some evil boxing day late-nightness due to some bloody worm > tsunami badness > rediscovered chunk’s snowball > finally managed to download grand theft auto 2 > january > came off call, drinkies, sore head, oy > thank god the west wing is back > rediscovered queen of sky > pro evo soccer 4 kicks serious arse > brad and jen split up — so she’ll be shopping around then … > learndirect sucks > so looking forward to huygens landing this friday …

… and relax.

Quick entry before I head off to work. Yeah, to work, I’m no longer working from home. Most people who know me know this already, but I left SmoothWall Ltd. last month to work in sysadmin at Lumison, formerly edNET, an Edinburgh-based ISP. As my post to the SmoothWall community says, it was just a good offer that I decided to pursue, nothing wrong with the company or the staff at SmoothWall Ltd. and I’m very much keeping in touch with them as they’re a fantastic bunch of peeps. I’m still a member of the open source project, so I’ll still be around in the community helping to shepherd the project along

The folks at Lumison are great (and some of them are good drinkers too, as I found out on Friday night!), and the atmosphere in the office is very friendly. I’ve been plopped straight in the deep-end of work, in a good way tho’, and I’m loving the water. We’re moving to new datacentre soon, and that’s just gonna rock. Me and a building full of racks of kit — the phrase kid in toy shop springs to mind!

I was just about to go make some brekkie, waiting for the Phill Jupitus breakfast show to start on 6music, when I heard a weird crackling in the office. “Crap, something’s on fire,” was my first thought, my second was to start reaching for a fire extinguisher … then I turned off dabbar, and listened … the noise was coming from throughout the house! Finally, I twigged – the crackling rapping noise was especially loud from the wee skylight in the bathroom – hail!

I looked out the front door, and holy falling clumps of ice, batman, if it isn’t hail from hell!

more photos »

So beware — random falling ice can scare the crap out of home workers at weird times of day! The perils of telecommuting!