Haecceity

The “foiled” terrorist attack looks suspiciously like an attack on the underlying system, rather than an actual attempt to blow planes up - it’s almost laughable that terrorists in this day and age could hope to get explosive devices onto planes in hand luggage.

If we decide that the terrorists aren’t stupid, the attack begins to look decidedly different. They’ve succeeded in causing absolute chaos in one of the busiest weekends in the british airline calendar, the effects of which will probably drag on for a few days. If you wanted to be really nasty, they’ve also caused a large number of people to be trapped in one place, and extremely vulnerable to attack. The BBC report says Heathrow Terminal 1 is “jam packed”.

I suspect that a terrorist organisation will look at something like this as relatively cheap, too - 18 peons arrested, sure, but we know they can afford the manpower and they’ve once again demonstrated that the air travel infrastructure our society is so reliant on is extremely fragile and vulnerable.

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)