jojomojo

I've just moved to Loughborough, as of Friday. Well, sort of; we've applied to rent a place but the wife's university is proving incredibly useless at providing a 'landlord's reference' (because they aren't a landlord, she isn't a tenant per se, she gets to live here rent-free as part of her job as a subwarden, so finding out who's supposed to do it is ugh). Supposed to be signing the lease Wednesday but looks like that's going to get pushed back. Meanwhile the cat and I are illegal immigrants in her subwarden flat on campus.

Started a new job at ARM Loughborough as of Monday, formerly Apical, doing stuff with machine vision and image recognition and FPGAs - lots of low-level C, Linux kernel etc stuff. I'd forgotten how much I missed doing embedded work - it's more fun to have a desk strewn with FPGA boards, logic analysers etc, and it's also more fun when the eventual end product is a physical thing people can actually go out and buy in a shop. Co-workers all seem very nice, and it's a very international company. Boatloads of Russians for some reason.

Other than that, trying to plan final move into and furnishing of new house which, again, is all being delayed by the bloody reference. Hopefully bae can shout at them tomorrow and sort that out.

Oh, also - went out for a pint with co-workers yesterday and got change from a fiver! 2 quid even! After the £5.10 I paid for a pint in Oxford a couple of weeks ago I find this...refreshing.

My pet personal tech project can now compile this to a working 64-bit Windows executable:


extern USER32.DLL:MessageBoxA(Uint64 hwnd, Byte^ text, Byte^ caption, Uint64 type)
extern KERNEL32.DLL:ExitProcess(Uint64 val)

Byte^ text = "Hello World"
MessageBoxA(0, text, text, 0)
ExitProcess(42)


(it already does the equivalent on Linux with raw syscalls instead of Win32 API calls.)

Still trying to find somewhere new to live since my current landlady is selling where I'm living right now.

Twice now, I've gone to view a property the letting agent has assured me is ok with pets, put in an application, and been turned down. The first time 2 other people applied on the same day as me and the landlady picked one of the people without a pet. Fair enough, fine I guess. Just today I put in an application on a place and got told the landlady had changed her mind about pets and now wanted to wait for viewings from petless people. For heaven's sake, they wanted a deposit of about two grand, exactly how much damage do they think one housecat is possibly going to do?

It wasn't easy finding somewhere the last two times, but this is ridiculous. I've got 6 weeks or so to go, but I'm considering the doomsday scenario of putting my furniture into storage, finding a room with friends/a B&B, and trying to find someone to take care of Fang for a month or two til I can find a place. :(

Well, 2014 is drawing to a close. It's been a stable kind of year; I'm now just past my second year at Sophos. Technically this means I now have the right to take them to an employment tribunal if they mess me around! Fortunately, that's not likely to happen. It's a really nice company to work for, actually; not at all what I expected of working for a big(ish) company (Sophos is ~7000 people, the largest company I'd worked at before that was like 100).

Other than that, same old same old, I guess. I did indeed barbeque some things. I didn't get around to growing any things. I've learned (finally) how to make proper roasties I'd not be ashamed to serve my mum. I've done a bit of random tech nerd stuff (and in the general spirit of dusting things off I should post about them on my old tech blog at some point, I suppose).

Hope everyone else is having a good New Year's Eve; I'm actually quite looking forward to 2015. :)

I shall think of you tonight as I munch on my Austerity Thanksgiving Dinner (ham-flavoured-turkey and swiss cheese toastie) :)

Barring the usual credit check, previous landlord's reference, &c I shall be moving here at the beginning of next month.

Doesn't have the character of my current house, but it's considerably roomier, centrally heated (trust me, 18th century cottages are very quaint, but they're a bugger to keep warm in winter), has a garage/shed, and for the first time in anywhere I've ever lived a proper garden. I might even try letting Fang go outside; the neighbourhood is pretty quiet, though there was a black and white kitty in the front garden at the viewing who seemed to think he owned the place.

Going to have to watch my pennies given I'll be paying deposit+first month's rent while I'm still not out of the old place, though :/

I still watch the Daily Show, well, daily, albeit about 16 hours after those of you in the US watching it live (acquired by...nefarious means since it doesn't show on TV over here any more than Americans get Have I Got News For You). I have to say I've been enjoying it this week - I love when Jon Stewart gets legitimately pissed off, drops some of the jokeiness and really lays in.

It is a bit of a reminder of how alien American politics can be, though. Not that the UK's is a Utopian bed of roses by any means but we don't literally have half the government shut down and not going to work thanks to a small bunch of literal nutcases. This is crazy shit.

In a nod to the many years I spent in the US, I had another go at making corndogs just as I did last year, plus fried chicken and coleslaw. Corndogs turned out much better this time around; not quite State Fair but in the ballpark (pun not intended). I wish I could teleport some to minnesattva :) Hope you're all having fun over there.

There's a type of rain peculiar to the UK whereby you just know it's going to last all day. It's desultory but persistent; you hear it drumming on the roof and know that there's no escape, it's going to be there until you fall asleep, you have no chance to survive make your time.

Oddly, I've missed it.

More or less anyway. Nice warm days, no need for a coat, chirping birds in the trees.

( Random life update )