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Current entry Archive April 2001 |
My, what a terrific weekend it's been. The bees are bumbling, the leaves are...leafing, all the flowers are coming out. Yesterday was our usual lazy weekend-style day; a bit of reading, a bit of fiddling with the computer (I thought MailWatcher was done on Friday night, but then I had an idea...which led to another idea...which...); but we also had to go to Tesco's, having put it off as long as possible. I won't bore you with the litany of sweets and desserts we came back with this time; suffice it to say that when we got to the last aisle, we looked at the contents of the trolley (cart), looked at each other, looked at the trolley, and rather sheepishly put something back. We even thought it was too much.
So, have we been stuffing our faces all day with our ill-gotten loot? 'Fraid not. We've hardly been in. Today was so nice that even we felt compelled to go out in it. 
We started out very early (not much past 10:00!) and went to Waterloo, which is quite nearby, just down the street from Mike's old flat. It's on the coast, but not coast like I'm used to, all rocky and dramatic and forbidding. This area of Britain is accumulating sand all the time, rather than being eroded, so it's all perfectly flat sandy (almost silty) beach. In some areas you can walk out a quarter mile into the water and barely be up to your waist. But the sand itself packs quite hard wherever it hasn't been churned up by feet, so it's easy to walk on.
Here and there along the beach there were small trickles of water wending their way toward the ocean. I led the way across one, but it turns out that the same hard-packed sand that holds water patterns so nicely and barely takes a footprint looks absolutely no different when it is thoroughly waterlogged and has turned into mud. We sank instantly up to the ankles in serious gloop. But were we dismayed? Were we discouraged? We were not. We just went back to the house and changed trainers (sneakers).
Then we pressed on northward up the coast to Formby, where there is, believe it or not, a squirrel reserve. (This may strike anyone who has ever owned a bird feeder as rather pointless. However, the preserve is for red squirrels, increasingly rare here as they are being overwhelmed by the grey squirrels.) The preserve is quite nice; it's right on the coast as well, so it is a strange combination of rolling sand-dune shapes with enormous pine trees growing out of them. The squirrels themselves have very long fur, and tufted ears like a lynx. Quite frisky and photogenic, they were.
From there we wandered down to the beach (pausing for an ice cream along the way). It's all windswept, grass-covered dunes in the Formby area. There was even, much to my touristic delight, an oil rig just offshore. I don't think I've ever seen one before. We wended our way back via a path through the woods. All the trees were stubby, probably due to the difficult soil conditions, and many were growing horizontally. Probably they were knocked over in a single storm many years ago but survived.
Many of the trees--actually, just about everything in the area except the sand and the squirrels themselves--had the same layer of green stuff growing on them that I mentioned in a diary entry a couple of weeks ago, the day we washed the car. In the woods it was impressive; all the tree trunks were green-tinged, some of them astonishingly so. I'm including here a less extreme example, because it gives a better idea of what the stuff looks like up close.
From there we stopped in Formby itself (a town that is just as photogenic as its squirrels) in search of lunch. A bit of seeking was required but we eventually found a nice Italian restaurant. Mike had a very spicy pasta dish. I know it was spicy because at one point I said "Look at that!" and he actually did, so I stole some of it. I couldn't believe it actually worked. I must admit that a rather loud alarm had just gone off moments earlier, lending credibility to the idea that there might be something to see where I was pointing. Anyway, in my lunch, the restaurant did something I haven't seen before--they sprinkled large slivers of cheese on top. They were less than a sixteenth of an inch thick; some were very small, others an inch or two square. (Note to Tom: This really worked well. You should try it. No idea what kind of cheese it was, unfortunately. Something sharp.) And then there was dessert: We both got a chocolate mousse cake, of which Linda would have thoroughly approved. They didn't mess around with making it extra sweet; instead they concentrated on making it chocolatey.
And then we were off, continuing north up the coast, where we spent the rest of the afternoon in Southport, a Victorian seaside resort. Actually we immediately got sucked into Waterstones, and came out with three books about physics, the mind, and evolution. We also popped into Rich's, an ice cream place, even though we weren't remotely hungry; it's a Southport tradition, you have to do it. Life is tough.
Essentially, we spent the day eating sweets and desserts everywhere except here.
Now we're back home, and we've spent the evening doing as little as possible. I don't think we're going to develop any interest in dinner any time soon, considering how much we stuffed ourselves today. I guess I'll have to start in on the sweets here by myself during the day tomorrow. Well, someone has to do it. Right?
Hmm, I was thinking about going into town tomorrow, since I have piled up some more errands to run and it's supposed to be about 60 and sunny again, but all the walking today in not-really-broken-in-yet trainers has done me in. I wonder if I'll be all aches and pains tomorrow.
Created at 21:47
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So, didja read the previous diary entry? I hope so, because it took me an hour to upload it. (She said, petulantly.)
We're having connectivity problems. For a week now, sometime between noon and 2:00PM, internet access gets slow. Then it gets slower. Then it gets unbelievable. Then it gets unuseable. It hits unuseable well before the usual diary-uploading hours. So, naturally, I cleverly included graphics in the previous entry...
Uploading even a tiny page, like the 8KB current diary entry page, would send a small burst, then sit there for literally 5 minutes without transferring a single additional byte. Then it might burst another little bit, but more often than not, the connection would time out, and it would have to start over. Even when it thought it had transferred successfully, the resultant uploaded page was usually truncated.
In the end I had to resort to dialling up to H&A, transferring the files via modem to a computer on the other end, and FTPing from there. That worked fine and transferred everything in seconds.
After an initial unresponsiveness from blueyonder, a phone call this afternoon seems to have resulted in improved performance this evening. The connection alternates between perfect and really lousy, which is completely different from the consistently really lousy state of the last few evenings. Of course it could be coincidence; they may not actually have changed anything, for all I know.
This weekend, the air conditioning in the server room at work died, so on Monday morning when people began arriving it was over 100°F in there, and half the equipment had shut itself down or frozen (heh). This included the router that connects the H&A network, so the entire WAN was down. Getting someone in to fix the air conditioning is apparently going to take a few days, so this morning it was the same story. Two of the servers recorded a temperature of 121°. (That sounds worse than it is--a server's temperature sensor would necessarily be in the server, which would be hotter than the room at large.) It all proved to be too much for the WAN router--something in it melted this morning. Amazingly, they managed to get a replacement by mid-afternoon, which is more than can be said for the air conditioner.
Net result for me is that in the mornings, while my internet connection is still responsive, the H&A WAN is down, and by the time someone arrives to fix it, I've lost my connection.
Still, mustn't grumble!
I especially mustn't grumble because really, these are just trivial inconveniences, however frustrating they may be at the time. Meanwhile, at the farm where Helen and Kevin live, the farmers noticed a sore on a calf on Saturday. Nobody was allowed to leave until the vet could investigate on Sunday, whereupon the worst was confirmed. By Sunday evening all the cows had been slaughtered, and the sheep were due to go within a day or so. If you saw my photos from my May 2000 UK trip, you might remember one that was taken out Helen and Kevin's front window, showing the cows grazing in the field in a Ben-and-Jerry's-esque pastoral scene. Those cows have all been slaughtered and probably burned by now. After a waiting period, Helen and Kevin are now allowed to come and go, provided they do so through the door into the front garden rather than the one that opens near the barn doors, and they have to disinfect their shoes and the car. The cats can't go out, of course. I don't know what happens to the farm owners now.
Which illustrates just how trivial bandwidth problems really are.
Created at 22:59
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"He always thinks everything has to mean something," said Ridcully, who generally took the view that trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn't learn anything new.
--Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld
The internet connection bandwidth problem seems to have gone away, hooray!
In the reading queue, I've gotten around to Science of Discworld, mostly because Mike just read it and did quite a lot of chuckling, so it immediately elbowed its way to the top of the queue. It's excellently done; the chapters alternate between well-written explanations of scientific topics and events occurring at Unseen University on Discworld, as the wizards create (and subsequently try to understand) a highly improbable Roundworld universe. The science is so approachable, and yet so good, that I want to recommend this book to everyone I know. The only snag is, it won't be nearly as much fun if they haven't read a dozen or so of the Discworld books.
Work-wise, things are rather esoteric just at the moment. I finally tracked down the cause of a persistent time zone problem in the email system. The fix is a rather labour-intensive and time-consuming process, and of course has to be performed while nobody is using the email system. That has been easy for the few offices we have in the western time zones, but now I have to do all the ones in Eastern time--that's 10 offices, including all the big ones, all at once, before anyone gets to work. Hmm. Tomorrow morning may be interesting.
I've also made more progress with my new FaxPress; I have the SMTP gateway working (which turns incoming faxes into email messages)! Except...there's a problem. It has some serious limitations that our existing fax-to-email gateway doesn't have; they may even be show-stoppers. Consequently I spent a lot of time today working with the FaxPress manufacturer's software development kit (SDK), trying to decide whether I should write my own. It probably wouldn't be all that hard, except...there's a problem. I don't really speak C, but all the code samples they give are in C. Still, I'm making progress at figuring them out, and I've even written a very tiny app, which does nothing except try to say hello to the Faxpress, except...there's a problem. It doesn't work. I thought I was doing something wrong, but I tried using some of the sample utilities they include with the SDK, and they fail in the exact same way. So, I've sent a description of the problem to their tech support, but I happen to know from prior experience that they don't answer support requests. So I'm not sure what happens next. Usually I beat my head against the problem until I eventually find a solution (which is how I got the SMTP gateway working in the first place).
I have a terrible confession: We ordered pizza last night (again!), and I...I tipped. (Shh, don't tell Mike, he doesn't know.)
Created at 23:17
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Aside from finishing Science of Discworld, I've been fiddling with MixPix all day. I'm still mostly working on the documentation, which essentially consists of a standard Windows help file. I am not very good at writing these beasties. The problem is that there are just so many ways the information can be organised, and I want to do them all. This is definitely overkill for a little utility like MixPix, but it's very hard to stop myself. See, I know that people think in different ways, so if I only do one of the possible ways to present the information, most people won't find it useful. When I install an app, and go into its Help system, only to find that they haven't bothered to provide a Find feature, I pretty much write it off on the spot. But I know that other people have the same reaction if they aren't presented with (for example) step-by-step instructions for how to do each thing they might want to do.
To give you an idea, here are some of the ways you can organize a help file (and I'm sure I'll forget some):
See what I mean? And it's not as if they are mutually exclusive. I can provide all of these. But doing so without writing a lot of repeating stuff is like trying to construct a six-dimensional labyrinth.
Whenever I can't bear to work on the Help any more (or whenever writing a Help topic makes me notice a potential improvement), I work on MixPix itself some more. For a week or two now, there's been one topic in particular bugging me...
In MixPix, you have to select the directories that contain your wallpaper. How do you do that?
M:\Wallpaper\Andy, right? Wrong! Actually, only M:\Wallpaper is selected. The Andy folder may be blue but it isn't open, you see. You've only clicked on it, not double-clicked on it. Tsk tsk!
None of these are real winners, but a lot of searching hadn't found any more alternatives. I'd grudgingly settled on the primitive VB controls as being the best of a bad lot.
But today, some unrelated searching serendipitously turned up a way to call a more Explorer-like folder-browsing Windows API function. Mysteriously (and annoyingly), it's not included in VB's listing of the Windows API, which is why I hadn't found it previously. A few hours of tearing-and-swearing yielded exactly what I was looking for in the first place. It's far more intuitive and it's designed for selecting directories. Better yet, with a little (OK, a lot) of work, it can do some validating--if you click on something invalid, the OK button greys out.
This may not sound like much to you, but I'm ecstatic. It's cause for little victory dances and a lot of evil cackling.
Created at 00:01
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You can use this Guide to work out your tax bill, if you want to.
You don't have to work out your tax bill yourself. If you don't want to, make sure your completed Tax Return reaches us by 30 September. If we receive your Tax Return after 30 September and you haven't worked out your tax we will do it for you but we can't guarantee to let you know what to pay by 31 January.
--Tax Calculation Guide for the year ended 5 April 2001
Hmm. Things suddenly got busy.
Neither of us are, as many of you might already know or suspect, what you could describe as naturally inclined to gardening. Gardens strike me as a hopeless business. There's a never-ending parade of tasks to be performed. You just get it weeded and it needs weeding again. Ditto for mowing and hedge-trimming and fertilizing and pruning and dead-heading and all those other mysterious rituals. Not only are these all things I don't enjoy; I'm also not even good at them. I can, despite the best of intentions, kill any plant known to humanity, and have frequently done so. I have an undisputed brown thumb.1 And on top of all this, there's my usual inability to notice when these things need doing; it always seems like suddenly you look out the window and the lawn desperately needs mowing again, already.
Mike is, it has to be said, much better about all this than I am; he proactively mows and hedge-trims and the like. But on the other hand, his gardening knowledge outside these areas may be even more limited than mine, if that's possible. (I can at least identify five or maybe even six kinds of flora likely to be encountered in a garden.) So between us, the back garden has been managed by the system of Benevolent Neglect, a system instituted by Mike long before I got here of course, but carried on since with my full agreement and collusion.
Under this regimen, the back garden has thrived. Unlike the northeastern US, where plants wither and die if you look at them sideways, the automatic behaviour here is for everything to grow. Enthusiastically. Wildly, it might even be said. I'm quite sure that the garden plays a game of red-light-green-light, growing visibly whenever I'm not looking. (That first photo is Mike's, by the way.)
Anyway, it became clear that our infrequent, halfhearted bouts of dutiful attention to the garden were never going to be equal to the task of hacking it back down into shape, so a month or two ago we agreed that we'd probably better get a gardening service in. On Friday, I took the shocking step of actually calling one. So, on Monday, they came and and basically ripped it out. It took their crew of four most of the day.
I'd thought that while they were doing their thing, I'd just carry on working as normal. This turned out to be very difficult. I was quite preoccupied with what was going on. Probably this was because the destructive potential of four people is quite a lot, especially when they are working fast, so it was very unnerving to look out the window and see what looked like devastation taking place. They just dug out most of the existing plant life layer, and carted everything out in a wheelbarrow. For most of the morning it looked like the whole back garden was being transplanted into the front yard.
Of course now the problem is that where before we had a lush collection of plant life, now we have basically empty flowerbeds. We're going to have to go buy things2 and plant them, or something. Should be interesting. Neither of us has any idea what we're doing.
The crew was Irish. It turns out that we only get Irish Lite in the US. They must be damping down their accents for our benefit, because I could hardly understand a word these guys said. When the crew leader came to look at the situation on Saturday morning, he went on and on about how we really should let them put down a thick layer of "ornamental bag" everywhere. I couldn't imagine what he was talking about--something plasticky? something mesh-like? Wouldn't it look awful?--but I figured that between me knowing nothing about gardening, and the likelihood that the British garden differently anyway, that it was probably just something I hadn't encountered. Only just before he left did I finally figure out that he was actually saying "ornamental bark". He pronounced it almost like a Kennedy would--baah(g), where the K was slightly voiced into a G.
They did a good enough job on the back garden that we arranged for them to come back Tuesday morning and do the front yard.3 The paving stones in the front yard had, through weather and age, become almost black, especially in the rain, and also had cute fluffy clumps of moss growing between them, and a slick of mold on them. Plus we'd ignored it and let weeds grow between them. Anyway, their job was to clean it all up and give the stones a good scrubbing. And scrub they did. They used what looked like wire-bristle push-brooms in combination with a suds-producing mixture of bleach, ordinary soap, and probably toxic waste. Tuesday was therefore nearly as hopeless as Monday for working, because it sounded like a Steven King movie involving street-sweepers running amok was being filmed in the front yard.
Astonishingly, the stones in the front yard turn out to be two different colours, sort-of-grey and sort-of-white, alternating in a pattern. It's quite nice, really. Every time we go in or out, or walk near the front window, we keep staring at it in vague bemusement. What happened? Should we wear sunglasses?
In the meantime, on Tuesday morning a giant envelope showed up, containing my UK tax paperwork.4 Bleah! Well, this is bad because it's a lot of paperwork I have to figure out, but good because it means that the person at the Tax Office I spoke to way back in December, who promised me she'd send me the necessary Self Assessment paperwork in April, remembered and really did it.
I had a look through the pile of stuff, and found that although it's surprisingly straightforward, I'm still not sure exactly what I have to do. There is an extra form for determining that I have "split year treatment" status, but nothing on that paperwork indicates amounts of salary that are thereby liable to UK tax, and nothing on the main paperwork that allows me to split salary. So this all spurred me on in my on-again, off-again quest for a UK tax accountant. I sent out a couple of emails to firms mentioned by my US tax accountant. No response from either yet. I do suspect it's a busy time of year for them, though, so I won't draw any unfavourable conclusions just yet.
Meanwhile, I hope you Americans are properly amazed and horrified by the quote at the start of this entry. That's the beginning of the tax form instructions; it's what I first saw when I opened the envelope. How's that for a slightly different tone from the IRS? Plain English! Helpful! What is the world coming to?
So. Gardeners. Tax forms. What else? Oh yes. On Tuesday morning, one of my automatic matching-job-mailers sent me something that sounded vaguely interesting, so I went and had a look. It turned out not to be so interesting, but I noticed a job still posted that I first saw back in March sometime. They're looking for an IT person experienced in GroupWise to convert them from Exchange to GroupWise. I thought what the heck, and sent an email to the recruiter.
Minutes later he called, all excited. I suspect they don't run across very many people with years of GroupWise experience. He asked some questions about my background, and requested a slightly reorganised version of my CV. Just now he's called back; the client wants to interview me. Hmm. I'm not sure whether I expect anything to come of this, but at the very least it will be good to get some practice interviewing; it's been a really long time since I had to do one. From that side of the desk, anyway.
Of course this means I'll have to drive there by myself...Prudent people might want to avoid the motorways in the Manchester area on Tuesday.
Friday and Monday are both holidays here, so we'd been toying with the idea of doing something this weekend anyway. Then, last night Mike arrived home with the news that he'd unexpectedly been given today and tomorrow off (in recompense for having worked basically all weekend to finish some documentation). So I took them off too, and now we have a really long weekend.
So, what to do? So many choices. Some places are indeed closed because of foot-and-mouth, but not all. We settled on going to Jodrell Bank, which I had no idea was near here. It's the home of the largest radio telescope in the world, and one of the oldest (1957), as is clear from looking at it--they didn't have a system for building them when it was built, so it looks very strange and home-grown. You can see what I mean in the photo on the right. The dish is pointing straight up because they are resurfacing the interior; we could hear the banging and clanging. In the second photo, you can see patches that are missing. Whether these are due to the work being done, or are part of the reason the work is being done, I don't know. (These photos are both Mike's. You wouldn't know it, but just about the entire day has been gloriously sunny.)
The main dish itself was the most interesting part. The exhibits were nice, and well done, but they mostly covered ground we both know well anyway. There were a lot of children there, which was somewhat tiring, but I was heartened to see how many girls were there. Apparently they haven't lost interest in maths and science just yet. They should start selling a Space Shuttle Barbie. That ought to help.
On the way back, we decided to see if a place called Tatton Park was open. I drove, which is notable only because it was the first time I've driven somewhere that neither of us has ever been. Up to now, I've driven routes Mike already knows, so that upcoming hazards are known and I can be warned. All in all I think it went quite well. (It was closed, by the way. Not surprising; they have a deer park, and I assume deer can catch foot-and-mouth. But it was worth checking.)
Tomorrow, though I can hardly believe it myself, we might go to a garden centre and buy some deck sealing stuff and some weed killing stuff and actually do the things the gardening service said we ought to do in order to preserve the dazzling state of the front yard. And tomorrow night, we're having dinner with Mike's mother (much belated from Mother's Day). Friday we're probably off to northern Wales, going wherever looks good at the moment.
Like I said: Busy.
1Those of you who might be tempted to bring up the example of the aloe vera would do well to remember that Tom had to save it from certain death. Twice.
2This is a technical term.
3Note for Americans: "Yard" doesn't mean the same thing. (Neither does "garden", for that matter.) "Yard" specifically refers to a paved area, the paving consisting of large blocks of stone or cement, not asphalt. Most (urban) houses I've seen here are at least partially paved in the front-of-the-house area. Our front yard is almost entirely paved, except for a couple of stones that have been removed to accommodate rose bushes.
4The UK tax year doesn't coincide with the calendar year; it runs from 6 April to 5 April. Hence it just ended last week.
Created at 20:29
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I'm being optimistic here. Right now the cable modem is down, and has been for most of the evening, so chances are I won't be able to post this even if I do finish it. Yet I persevere!
When the heck was my last entry? Oh gosh, that long ago? Oh dear. Well, that's what comes of having too much fun.
Last Thursday we really did go buy patio sealant, and weed killer, and spent a while in the afternoon applying the sealant. Smelly stuff. Very smelly, actually; we rendered the front parts of the house uninhabitable for the rest of the day due to the smell wafting in. We probably made things a bit unpleasant for the neighbours, too; oops. We weren't looking forward to going through the whole thing again when we put down the second coat. But we found a good way to handle it: We applied the second coat in the late morning the next day, and then immediately scarpered off to Wales.
We couldn't even stick to a plan during the drive there; we spontaneously bailed from the motorway and took local roads, just to see what was there. We booked a room at a B&B in Llandudno via mobile phone on our way there. I love this country; even on a bank holiday weekend you can get away without much advance organisation.
The B&B in Llandudno turned out to include a four-star restaurant, so we had dinner there. Wow, was it good. Definitely worth the four stars.
Llandudno is a Victorian seaside resort, the only one I've seen besides Southport. Now I know what Disney is imitating with their Boardwalk. There's a glorious sweep of gently curving beach, lined by a promenade the entire length, and fronted the entire way by genteel Victorian hotels with gratuitous architecture. The beach happens to be Maine-like, in that it's not sandy, but more like Seawall. But--this was cool--there were bricks among the worn-down, rounded rocks! Bricks! Worn round and smooth and tiny by waves! There's a long pier with little kiosks on it, selling stuff that would send Pete directly to Tack Heaven without passing Go. (Although we did venture into a little bookshop, with the happy result that we bought a small but thick book called Chocolate and Baking, the mere illustrations of which are enough to send me into a frenzy.) If Tom had been with us, we'd have lost him on the pier, because they rent fishing rods for something like £3 for the entire day.
Next morning we went to Bodnant Garden, one of those infamous enormous estates with a sinfully gorgeous garden. The house itself is incomprehensibly large and old and impressive, but the garden defies description. Even the house doesn't convey the sense of age and continuity that the garden does. There were trained plants (and sometimes trees) that must have been started a hundred years ago--they are twisted and contorted into the most fabulous shapes. They had some of the most enormous trees I've ever seen; some had trunks thicker than I am tall. (They even had a couple of sequoias.) And it just goes on, acre after acre, terrace after terrace. Streams, waterfalls, photogenic bridges and old stone buildings, gentle mossy glades, reflecting pools, strange flowering trees and shrubs, precisely cut hedges...If Verna had been with us, we'd have lost her there. We'd just have to come back for her in a few days. (By which time she'd no doubt be on their staff.)
(Just to infuriate those of you who still have a foot or two of snow on the ground, I'll mention that Bodnant is nearly past its "spring" phase--the spring flowers are already giving way to summer ones. They also had an apologetic sign posted at the entrance, to the effect that some grounds keeping activities haven't taken place yet due to the "late winter". What winter?)
On to Penrhyn Castle we went. It's not an ancient one, but a neo-Norman throwback built in the 1800s. It was still impressive, especially because the owner made his fortune from quarries, so it included an almost obscene amount of carved stone. The Grand Staircase reportedly took 10 years to finish; the most impressive thing about it was that among all its columns and bannisters, the same patterns weren't repeated. Each one was unique.
Onward to our second night's random accommodation, this one on the Isle of Anglesey in a tiny village called Red Wharf Bay (immediately corrupted by Mike to Red Dwarf Bay). This one wasn't as excellent as the one in Llandudno, but then, it was up against serious competition.
Sunday morning it finally started clearing up. Did I mention it was cloudy all along? Kind of grey and overcast, for the most part, but without usually being actively rainy, so it was still easy to be a tourist. Sunday turned out blue and glorious.
Sunday went rather fast; first we went to an old gaol (jail) in Beaumaris, which was suitably grim. From there we had a quick peek at a nearby ancient ruinous priory. Then we had a quick stop in the one place in Wales that most Americans will probably have heard of at least once--Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. I remember reading about it in the Guinness Book when I was just a little kid. And then we figured we'd head for home, but we had to stop in Conwy for lunch, and in the process we were sucked into an Elizabethan house that has been restored by the National Trust, and then into Aberconwy House, a 13th or maybe 14th-century house that is still standing and in use. Terrible how these things happen. We did manage to have lunch (and tea) in there somewhere, which is something.
So why did we go home on Sunday, when Monday was a holiday as well, and the weather was improving? Well, you may remember that I had a job interview Tuesday. Today, in fact. I didn't want to have to find the place today, so we'd planned to do a dry run of the drive on Monday. It seemed a bit much to drive back from Wales on Monday and then still have the drive to Manchester and back to deal with. So we came home on Sunday and got plenty of relaxation in during the remaining time before having to go back to work.
Speaking of driving, I probably did more driving this weekend than I'd done so far put together. I even tried my hand at driving on those picturesque one-lane country lanes, hemmed in tightly by hedgerows or stone walls. A bit scary to drive, they are. Everyone here is used to them, so they take them at much higher speeds than I can manage yet. But I didn't hit anyone, so it all ended well.
I also drove to my interview today, by myself, which of course wasn't scary at all because why should it be? It's not as if Mike's presence has been saving me from major disasters; he mostly just tells me when I'm breaking laws or being rude. So today I just got to be rude obliviously, I guess...Anyway, I got there and back without incident, and didn't lose my way or cause any traffic fiascos, so I'd rate that as a success. I think I'd just gotten used to the idea that I was too unpracticed to drive by myself, which I probably was and may still be, but I've now experienced most (I think) of the uniquely British road hazards I'm likely to encounter, so what's left is just the fact that I'm not familiar with the area. And there's only one way to fix that, I'm afraid.
Today's interview went well, I think, although it's not really easy to tell; I think all interviews seem to go well. They could hate you without it being possible to tell. But they contacted the recruiter within a couple of hours and asked him to arrange a second round of interviews, with their HR people and also with one of their IT people in the US who runs the existing GroupWise system. This is because they don't know anything about GroupWise (which is kind of the point of hiring someone who does), so they couldn't very well grill me on a technical knowledge basis.
There are pluses, but also quite a few minuses. It's not worth doing much thinking about whether I'd take it, because there hasn't been an offer yet. I'll just go with the flow, and start weighing the decision only when there is one to weigh.
For anyone who has been following the foot-and-mouth disaster here, I can report that we went the entire weekend--much of it on Anglesey, a badly-affected area--without seeing any pyres of burning animals or even any sign at all of the trouble. Some sites, generally those with grounds that include deer or sheep, were closed, but most were open. If anything, we were surprised at how little exclusion from the countryside there was. At Penmon Priory, while Mike was taking pictures, we suddenly realised that the stone wall we were leaning against was actually the boundary of a sheep pasture. Needless to say we backed right off, but there had been no signs or warnings or closed roads or anything that you might expect. Indeed, most of the roads we drove along had sheep or cow pastures next to them, with serenely untroubled sheep and cows doing whatever it is that sheep and cows do. (Eat, mostly, I think. And gambol, if they are lambs.) Things are, indeed, terrible for the farmers here, but I think there may be an impression that the entire country has been turned into one giant reeking pyre, which just isn't the case.
And now, after I try to upload this, I think I'm off to buy a digital camera. I found one that appears to have a really good zoom, yet a decent megapixel rating--something that wasn't true a year ago, at least not for less than about $4,000.
Created at 23:02
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OK, so there might be a decision to weigh.
Today I went back for the HR interview, which also seemed to go well. Astonishingly, they gave me a personality test (not the MBTI). The test consisted solely of rows of four words. On each row, I had to rate which one was most like me, and which was least (and ignore the remaining two words). Fine, except that in most cases, all four were like me or all four were nothing like me. I mean, what do you do with a row that reads like "Dutiful, easily led, courteous, life of the party"? Not that any row was exactly like that, but that's the general flavour. Still, it did somehow manage to come out with a profile that I agree with somewhat.
Some bits I agreed with:
Some bits I really strongly don't agree with:
Yuck! Those make me sound awfully fragile, don't they? I already have a surfeit of confidence; the last thing I need is more of it. And the fewer rules and guidelines, the happier I am. I hate rigid structures. Ah well, I do agree with some of it.
At today's interview, they kept apologizing for talking as though I had already accepted an offer. They also said the next step was to put together an offer package with "T&C" (Terms and Conditions). These both imply pretty strongly that an offer is probable. Thus, despite what I said in the last entry, I'm thinking about the decision. Shouldn't be, but I am.
About the company: Amusingly, the company is American. Well, it's a UK company that was only recently taken over by an American company. Thus they're not put off at all by my barbaric American-ness; they're already resigned to it.
About the job: In case I haven't explicitly said so before, the job starts out as a single project: Convert them from Exchange to GroupWise. (No, I didn't type that backwards, Pete.) After that's done, be their GroupWise and Novell person. Implement cool ZENWorks and NDS features. They don't really know what, because they don't know Novell or GroupWise; it'd be part of the job to tell them what is possible and Make It So.
Just for fun, here are some of the pros and cons:
There are other cons as well, but they are not specific to this position; they are the cons of no longer working from home, so I don't count them. On the other hand, there are also generic pros; for instance, I'd become at least slightly less complicated tax-wise by working for a real UK company. Plus there'd be a sense of finally having arrived. I told Mike that beginning to work for a UK company would feel like I'd finally jumped. He said that I'd jumped a long time ago, I just haven't landed yet.
I'd been thinking that even if they made me an offer, there were some drawbacks that would keep me from accepting it, regardless. For instance, everyone I saw, including the IT staff, were dressed in suits and ties. I got the impression of a rather formal, stodgy company, so I expected they'd want rigid work hours, which would be bad in combination with the long commute: It would mean getting up really early, and sitting in traffic every day. But it's apparently not like that at all. I even asked if I could wear jeans and a heavy metal T-shirt and dye my hair purple, and they were totally unfazed.
After all the advice I've given people recently about it being a long, gruelling process, and all the times I've quoted statistics about the average job-hunt taking 6 months and something like 100 interviews and 1000 resumes sent or whatever it is, it really would be ironic if an offer came out of the first CV I've actively sent anybody. I really haven't properly job-hunted at all. (I was going to say the first and only CV, but it occurs to me that I sent CVs to two job postings from the same recruiting company on the same day, but I never heard a word about the other one. So maybe that makes it all OK.)
Of course right now I'm being guilty of the very thing I kept cautioning Dave about: Piling too much expectation onto an interview that seems to have gone well. That's the whole point of the process being long and gruelling: You keep thinking you're nearly there, only to have the latest promising thing fall through. There still isn't an offer in hand (and even if one does, there's no guarantee that it will be one I can't refuse), so I really shouldn't be thinking about it at all. Hmm, I'm quite tempted not to post this unless and until an offer materializes, just to save myself the embarrassment of being revealed as someone who doesn't follow their own advice.
Ah, what the heck. You all knew that already.
Created at 23:30
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Heh. An offer did, in fact, materialize today. So, now I (we) get to spend the weekend thinking about it.
It's a verbal offer at this point, with a physical letter likely to arrive early next week.
Created at 23:01
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Events are moving very quickly. Yesterday morning's post brought with it a complete offer package (letter, terms & conditions, some forms, some pamphlets about benefits). So, there's a real offer, on paper. There really is something to consider. We concluded that we could best evaluate it by scarpering off to Blackpool for the day. So we did.
What is Blackpool? Hmm. Difficult to define.
Start with a Victorian seaside resort. Take approximately equal parts Atlantic City, Coney Island, and Hampton Beach. Mix well, until individual bits are indistinguishable. Pour out evenly along more than a mile of perfect, sandy beach. Garnish with three enormous piers, themselves containing little microcosms of everything.
There's low-key gambling (slot machines and the like), amusement-park rides (roller coasters etc), exhibits and shows, fortune tellers' kiosks, endless video game arcades, and a bustling nightclub scene. But most of all, there is glorious TACK! Tacky, cheesy shops selling tacky, cheesy things are everywhere. My favourite was shorts that incorporate a plastic bottom (so when you're wearing them it looks like the shorts have no bottom...). We had a great time discovering the variety of tacky things we could buy.
While you're trying to picture this, remember that the backdrop scenery is incongruously Victorian. All the waterfront buildings are old and elaborate, gingerbreaded within an inch of their lives.
I guess this is all my way of saying you just have to see it for yourself.
I also finally got to try Blackpool Rock. It's candy, much like a candy cane except that it's more breakable (you bite bits of it off), and porous (you can breathe through it, a little bit, as if it were a straw). It comes in various flavours and colours, and occasionally has lettering incorporated into it. Other places sell it, but given that it's associated with Blackpool, I wanted to try it there first. Then we had candyfloss (cotton candy). I haven't had that since I was about 10; I forgot how good it is. Then we tried some clotted-cream fudge (oh my). We were probably a bit wild-eyed by this point.
One Blackpool landmark is its tower, built in the 1800s sometime. It's more than 500 ft tall, altogether, although the viewing platforms don't go right to the very top. The base of the tower is a vast building, including various unrelated things such as a circus, a ballroom (in which there was an actual ballroom dancing competition taking place), a dinosaur-themed ride, an aquarium (with really big turtles!), and several science-amusement exhibits. We wandered around these for a bit and then took the lift to the top.
At the top there was, first, a glassed-in level, and then some open-air levels (reached by obviously-very-old iron spiral stairs). The very top levels were closed for a wedding. Mike wanted to take pictures from the open-air levels, but they had a sort of wire mesh at eye level that was too small to take pictures through, so we went back down to the glassed-in level. When we were done and headed back for the lifts, I was obliviously leading the way when Mike said something like "Wow! Look down! ...No, wait, don't look down! Oooh, sorry!"
Some clever designer, you see, had replaced a 6-foot square of floor with transparent plastic. It was straight down to the street from there, and I was walking right across it without having noticed it was there. I was nearly across when I looked down... Fortunately my momentum had already carried me off it before what I was seeing had time to sink in.
I hate having edge-o-phobia. It's so irrational! I don't mind airplanes at all, or being very high up and looking down, but I don't like edges. Looking over an edge gives me the willies. Why? If I'm afraid of falling, why don't heights in general bother me? I quite like looking down out of airplanes. It must be something to do with falling, though, because the possibility of an object falling off an edge is just as bad--I have trouble watching Mike take pictures over an edge, even if I'm nowhere near that edge. And, of course, some people will clearly remember the Film Canister Cap Incident at the top of a certain lighthouse in Bermuda.
Thing is, it's such a stupid phobia that I can never quite believe that I have it. Every time there's a high place proposed, I'm all for it; I'm sure that it can't be a problem, it just wouldn't make any sense; mind over matter you know! But every time it happens anyway.
So I was vindictively pleased to hear that my dad, who is no doubt the genetic source of this phobia, had just as much trouble at Hopi Point on their recent Southwest trip as Pete and I did. (Hopi Point is one of the more dramatic viewing areas at the Grand Canyon. Picture a spoon sticking out over a few thousand feet of nothing, and you have the general idea. Or picture the Decisive Light-Sabre Battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in the ventilation shaft in Empire Strikes Back.)
Anyway, after these careful, considered deliberations, I have concluded that I will accept the offer. This means I'll be starting at my new company on Monday the 14th of May, three weeks from tomorrow.
Created at 23:35
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Hurrah! I have joined the ranks of the noseprint-polishers. The digital camera showed up today! It's an Olympus, like my current film-based camera, and actually has quite a lot in common with it. This will help shorten the learning curve. But at the present moment, I have only begun to browse through the manual to figure out what kinds of things it can do.
Some cool things:
One thing I'm not entirely sure about yet is the viewfinder. The camera is an SLR, but it achieves it by presenting an LCD image in the viewfinder. This is bad because the colours look all wrong, and the view doesn't change smoothly as the camera is moved. On the other hand, it may be that the view it's showing is a better representation of what the actual shot would look like. Experimentation is required to find out whether that's the case.
I have to go play with some more camera features now...
Created at 22:32
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Oh dear, one of those horrible accomplishing-things days.
Today I (we) joined the AA (no, not that, it's like AAA but minus one obviously superfluous A) on the grounds that a roadside service membership seems like a good idea in light of my soon-to-be commute.
I also signed up for driving lessons, heh heh, starting Tuesday. The idea isn't to teach me how to drive (if I don't know how after this many years I'm never going to figure it out), but rather to un-teach me. I have plenty of American (or--horrors--maybe just Bostonian) driving habits that probably won't wash on the driving test. A professional driving instructor will know exactly what habits the testers expect to see to consider me to be safe and in control of the car. For all I know they might fail me if I don't use the hand brake every time I start from a stop. Plus it just seems like a good idea to spend some time with someone who is well-versed in what the tester's expectations will be.
And, I finally have a UK tax accountant. He seems to think that it will be possible to avoid taxation on my US-based income almost entirely. I guess I'll wait and see what actual plan he proposes.
But who cares about all that? More fun with the camera! Mostly these are things I read in the specs before I bought it, but forgot about until I actually had it here in my hands.
I played with all of these modes last night and today. I must say, as far as the manual selections like ISO and white balance, the camera does a remarkably good job in Auto of selecting the best settings itself. When I took four pictures of the darkened hallway, one each in Auto, 100, 200, and 400, the Auto picture was indistinguishable from the 400 picture, meaning it had recognized the low-light condition itself and reacted properly. So, cool features I may have, but the camera is so much more knowledgeable than I am, it would almost be counterproductive to use them. Except, of course, that I'm not actually wasting film, so there's no real reason not to experiment with settings to my little techie heart's content...
And there's other good stuff:
I also tried the digital zoom. Turns out my understanding of digital zoom was just plain wrong. I knew the optical zoom was what really mattered--that's what is actually done with the lenses. I still don't know how the digital zoom works, but it's not as useless as I thought. This afternoon I took a picture of the unfurling leaves on the sycamore tree from 50 feet away! It looks like I took it in macro mode, except that it's slightly out of focus. I suspect that the out-of-focusness will be unavoidable at maximum digital zoom.
I also tried taking a 20-second movie. It came out not half-bad, really. It's kind of jiggly, but for all I know, that might be fixable by the judicious setting a few dozen options. Plus the camera turns out to have a small integrated microphone. I thought I'd have to buy a microphone if I wanted to record sound with movies. If I ever record movies.
And just now I've been playing with the panorama feature. It's not at all what I thought it would be. I was expecting it to take an actual panoramic shot. I've seen other cameras that offer a pseudo-panorama feature simply by cropping the top and bottom from a normal shot, thus resulting in a wide, thin image. This one doesn't do that. Instead, you take several pictures, and then the software on the PC stitches them together. Very strange. It is more like a true panoramic camera as a result, because the perspective changes from the left end to the right end of the image.
Oh heck, here's the one I did (56 KB). You can clearly see the stitching-points of the original three frames I took, but then I wasn't really trying; I just turned and snapped. To do it properly I'd probably want to use a tripod and get the camera as level as possible, which would certainly make the stitching process easier as the shots would have better vertical match-up than these did.
The camera allows stitching of up to 10 individual shots, and a complete 360° view is possible.
New toy. Fun.
Created at 00:04
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Wow, I was right about the viewfinder! It does show what the picture will look like, not just what your eye would see through a normal viewfinder.
You've probably had the experience of taking a picture of (for example) a castle on a beautiful-blue-sky day, only to find that the sky has come out white when you get your pictures back. With this camera, I can point at the castle, and see, right in the viewfinder, that the sky is white. I can then pan upward, towards the sky, and watch the sky turn blue and the castle become dark and contrasty. I can pan until the balance between blue and dark looks as optimal as I can get it, and only then take the picture. (This isn't perfect, because if I've been panning around, I'm probably no longer pointing at the thing I wanted to take a picture of in the first place, but the camera is prepared for that--I can lock the exposure settings, which prevents the exposure settings from changing as I frame up the shot I actually wanted.)
Of course, any digital camera gives nearly-instant feedback about whether the sky came out white, but getting this information real-time, right in the viewfinder, is just slightly easier than taking a picture, looking at it, deleting it, adjusting things, taking another picture, looking at it...
Hmm. I wonder if Mike's camera will do the same thing on the LCD screen?
...Turns out it does. Actually, in thinking about it, it could hardly do anything else. I just never put 2 and 2 together before now. So, all those of you who have digital cameras: You can see the same thing on your LCD screen! (But, Mike points out, watch out, because what you see on the screen is highly affected by your angle to it.)
I'll tell you what else: This instant feedback is wonderful for learning how all those complicated camera settings really work and interact. It's all very well to read a book or two, take some pictures and see (a week or two later, if you're organized) how they came out; but if you didn't take notes about exactly what settings you used, what do you learn? OK, this one came out with white sky while this one's is blue, but what did I really do different? Generally, for me anyway, the answer is: No idea.
I played with the panoramic feature a lot more yesterday. It's strangely compelling. I want to go take panoramas of everything! One obvious problem is that as I turn and snap, the lighting changes dramatically, especially if I try to do a 360° panorama; the sun is in there somewhere, unless it's an overcast day. But practising in the back garden means I'll be aware of all these things before the next time we dash off somewhere scenic.
Which brings me to the one teensy little problem with all of this: I already take a lot of pictures...How much worse are things going to get?
Spent some time playing with the site tonight, entirely due to seeing an idea on someone else's page that I liked and therefore promptly stole. I don't know the name of the owner of the page, because it's not on it, so I can't give him/her proper credit. Anyway, the idea was to provide a link to Amazon from each of the records I display on my various Books pages. Thus anyone who is curious can immediately look up reviewers' comments, etc about a particular book. I generate the contents of the Books pages automatically, so it was just a question of modifying the queries that dump that data. It's still not perfect yet--I don't know enough about how to direct a query at Amazon from outside, so sometimes the keywords I pass to Amazon don't hit, particularly in the case of a book with a very long title. Still, I expect I'll figure it out eventually.
Created at 23:18
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Whuff. TGIM. I need to rest up from the weekend!
Yesterday we actually spent considerable time on garden maintenance. I weeded flower beds and between paving stones; Mike mowed the lawn and mercilessly uprooted dandelions. This led us, tangentially, back to the store to get some more weed killer for between the paving stones. But as long as we were in the area, we also picked up some car-related stuff, which led to cleaning all the windows on the car and applying Rain-X to the windscreen. By this time Mike was on a roll, so he went on to dusting, hoovering, and general tidying, and even a general cleaning of the bathroom. I just did washing up and more tidying.
This is housework-as-usual for the non-J. I can't speak for all non-Js, of course, but I prefer to leave it and then do it in batches, rather than do little bits all the time. This is, I gather, very difficult for J-types to imagine. It's not that we're lazy, just that we prioritise differently. I find it very unpleasant and counterproductive to be interrupted all the time by little niggly bits of housework; I don't want to be a slave to the house. Much better to let it build up until I find a time when I'm not absorbed in anything else, do a whole bunch of it at once, and then leave it again.
On Friday, out of idle curiosity, Mike picked up my History of Britain, a gorgeous coffee table book that's been in my buying queue since I watched the television version back in about October. He was just going to have a look at the preface, that's all. It has turned out to be a strangely long preface. He's up to about William the Conqueror and it shows no sign of ending. Heh heh.
Today, on the grounds that my need for my National Insurance number has become rather more urgent (I have to provide it to my new employers), I finally did some investigating to find out what's become of it. Way back in December when I applied, the nice DSS staffer told me that if I hadn't received the number by about April, I should call her. So I started by calling her...except the number has been disconnected. Strange. So I called the main number at that office and asked for her. "Who?" Erm. That's not a very auspicious beginning! I explained that she had taken my National Insurance number application, blah blah. They settled for putting me through to Personnel. Unfortunately they thought I was looking for that staffer particularly, and were quite suspicious as to why. Following my explanation, it was just like a replay of when I was first applying for it--they insisted that they have nothing to do with NI numbers, that I should call Inland Revenue. Dead end.
A bit of lucky research on the web (starting at a very handy site listing just about all UK government agencies--a site I didn't know existed back in December) turned up a Newcastle phone number for the National Insurance Contributions Office. This seemed like an excellent place to start, because when I applied I was told that the applications go to Newcastle. I called them and suddenly everything got easy again. They were a bit distressed that I hadn't been given an "'A' number" when I made my application, but they were able to find me in the database anyway (always a good sign), and said they'd post the necessary information. I get the impression that they probably already did, once. I wonder what became of it...
And tomorrow, I have...ahem...a driving lesson. I signed up with AA, not for the normal full course of driving lessons, but rather for something more specific to my situation. Tomorrow's lesson is two hours, by the end of which I should be thoroughly wrung out.
Created at 20:18
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