Haecceity

Who knew that bus shelters could be so cool? Polar Inertia has some awesome photos of soviet era bus shelters…

In a watery contrast to the real Venice, The Venice Project surfaced from stealth mode recently (and I just fixed my blog, so I figured I’d get caught up). Our blog has some more official news and buzz, too.
People who know me at this point will be wondering why I’m involved in a TV project when I hardly ever watch TV, but we’re actually aiming to solve much of my irritation. Colm writes about what TVP solves for him, and I agree that the social aspect is one the fundamental points to our work. We’re seeing - via MMORPGs, blogging communities, etc - the attraction that connectedness has and the importance people are beginning to attach to sharing and aggregating data effectively.
Leo has written about some of the underlying technologies that parts of the project are using, although unfortunately he somewhat takes the reasoning behind the choices for granted.
My other major problem with TV is timing. This one is pretty obvious, but being able to build channels with content that I want to watch, and watch them when I want to is pretty compelling.
And I’m looking forward to combining these two…
So what am I doing? I’m broadly doing operations, with - unsurprisingly - a Linux bent… But more about that later.

One Self - Bluebird is the track on the Nextmen mix cd that I hadn’t worked out.

Carmen San… that’s not right. Anyway, people who saw my earlier blog entry might wonder why I’m not in San Francisco or New York, and blogging about the US.

There’s a good reason for that. I’m not in the US.

(I’m not quite in Amsterdam, either. But they say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and I’m lazy. So there!)

I’m actually in a town called Leiden, best known for the university and for being the birthplace of Rembrandt.

I’ve already posted about this elsewhere, so those who’ve seen that can probably skip to the bottom of this post.

For everyone else, I’m leaving Claranet at the beginning of June to go and seek my fortunes in a brave new world. (eventually!)

Without the flowery language, this actually means I’m going to be working for Mochila, based in their New York office. Of course, this is all subject to the whims of the US Immigration Service, and up until October or November (in theory, anyway) I’m going to be splitting my time between working in London, San Francisco and New York.

I’m going to be a senior sysadmin, but this is a startup so I guess the job role will cover just about anything and everything, which should be fun!

I’m really looking forward to this - the chance to move to New York for a few years is really the icing on the cake - because the job’s going to cover a lot of my interests, including a lot of design and development work for test and deployment infrastructure.

I think this is pretty good going for a 24 year old…

(The red countries are ones I’ve visited)

This has to be the best part of leaving a sys-admin role. Deleting one’s self from the monitoring systems. No more nagios spam at 4am.
No more disk space low warnings while you’re trying to have a quiet beer. I could continue in this vein for quite a long time.

I’m spending most of this week catching up with old friends who I’ve just been too busy to see over the last months. I also seem to be spending most of the week hungover and bleary eyed, too.
I’m finding, though, that I’m still far more ”with it” than I was for the last months of my old job. I guess having a job that’s interesting, fun, and extremely challenging will do that!

Thomas notes that it’s August, not Autumn. That is all.

So one of my esteemed friends and housemates has decided that he’s going to learn to cook. All well and good, you think, lots of meals cooked for me while he practises. Aside from a slight hitch…
He’s spurning the usual method of cooking, ie buying raw materials and applying heat, and is taking a whole new approach.
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, he’s learning to cook in Final Fantasy Online.