I’ll write something better when I’ve finished moving and have a working phoneline. At the moment my new house is full of half opened boxes and piles of junk. Yesterday I went back to the old place to collect the last of my things and mop the floor. While I was there the landlord appeared with two people to look round the place. He told me to just post the keys through the door when I was done and text him the address to post the bond cheque to.

My new house is good so far. More room, a mysterious void under the entire house that is full of water and funny smells. While poking a torch through the air bricks under the stairs I half expected to find a skull looking back at me, CSI style. The only evidence of previous inhabitants was a pile of final demand noticed from British Gas and a bin full of wallpaper and electric cabling.

A full, lengthy post about the fun of moving, with picture will be written up once I get back online.

Yesterday I went to a new teacher’s conference in a hotel that was run by my new school. In addition to cramming lots of information into our brains they gave me a laptop I’m now trying to convince it to connect to a wired network. It’s been locked down tigher than my own network and is proving to be a tricky sod. It sees the cable, but doesn’t like the DHCP server. No idea why, another laptop works fine.

Got this through the post today…

I am pleased to inform you that at the meeting of the Board of Examiners held on 15 June 2007 it was recommended that you be awarded a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (Schools)

Blah blah well done, come to the graduation ceremony in November, blah blah wish you well

A squiggle

Oh for fuck’s sake

I decided to ring the estate agent’s just to make sure there wasn’t anything else I needed to bring. Good job really since the woman who does the rentals is out until Monday.

Gah… Just… gah…

So that means I have to wait until Monday to get the keys and move and stuff.

It’s fortunate the van-hire people are flexible, isn’t it.

Amusingly I’ve just been out to do something. On the way home I had the choice of doing a detour onto the motorway to get to the estate agent’s quickly, or drive past my house and go the long way. For reasons that escape me I took the long route, then randomly decided to pop into my house (to put my washing away of all things) and then thought ringing the estate agents would be a good idea.

And a bloody good idea it was too, that would have been a two hour wasted journey and a lot of money in unusable van hire.

Now rather than the nifty plan I had sorted for this weekend I’ve had to quickly work out something else for the week.

Memes are funny things. One minute you’re a sensible, thinking being writing a post on the Internet, next minute you’re on teh interwebs spouting all sorts of nonsensical junk. It’s really weird, nobody sits down and says “OK, this is a new meme, you can reply to anything with all your base… and if you feel like it, the form I iz in ur <noun> <verb>ing ur <other noun>“. We just sort of vacuum them up from each other. Wouldn’t it be great if actual, real information was transmitted in the same way?
Seems even the real world of printed text isn’t immune, as this story from the Houston Chronical of all places shows.  It’s amusing watching someone attempt to report on Internet culture, unless you visit several hundred message boards a day it just doesn’t make sense It’s like trying to explain a Monty Python film to someone who’s never heard of them - it just doesn’t work.

I’m off to pay a deposit on my new house now. Or is that I is in ur shopz payin’ my depositz, can I has keys pleez? Damn you Internet

Once again proving that there’s nothing magical about the insides of a computer, this website shows a binary marble adding machine in action. It’s a six-bit binary adder which uses a system of rockers and marbles to add numbers together. The marbles fall down channels onto rockers which then dump their marbles onto the rockers below, performing simple binary addition. And to all the techies reading this, yes he rigs it up to do 31+1 causing a fun cascade effect as the carry “bit” walks through the machine

If you’ve never really understood how binary works, have a watch of his included YouTube video, it might make things a bit more clear.

Today has been a very productive day. It began with me phoning the estate agent and being told everything was OK and that I could move in on Saturday. I can go tomorrow to get the keys and pay the first month’s rent (in cash!). Then I phoned British Gas and told them I was moving, they just told me to phone back on the day and they’d sort it all out. Must remember to take a meter reading first.

After that I phoned BT and got all that sorted out. This line will be turned off on Wednesday, and then some time between then and the 4th of July the new line will be turned on. They’ll try and do it from the exchange and SMS me if it works, otherwise an engineer will have to come on the 4th to do something.

Next on my list was my ISP who I want to change away from. I sent them a message using their website, and while stuffing things into boxes received a phone call. This was a really strange call, the bloke was from my ISP and essentially he was trying to convince me to stay by doing me a “favour”. This favour consists of not cancelling my account, but dropping it to a £9.99 one instead for two months. Why? Well, when I moved here last year they paid my house moving fee but cleverly didn’t explain that I then had to stay with them for a year before that fee is wiped off my bill. The man on the phone said that instead of paying £47 now to settle the moving fee, he could keep me as a customer until the fee expires and then shut my account - or decide to sign up again, he was quite hopeful I would do this.

So instead of paying £47 to leave, I’m paying two lots of £9.99. That’s assuming I want to leave them still, you know I might decide that since they were so nice to me I might come back.

Hmmmm…

The rest of today has been spent stuffing things into boxes, stacking the boxes and then restacking them when it looked like they’d fall over. It’s a bit like Tetris, only the boxes don’t go away when I make lines. There is lots of glass things and bits of computer that must not get damaged. The picture frames are proving to be hard to pack - being both fragile and large.

Oh, and my trolley appeared today. It looks like it should do the job OK. God knows it’s going to get enough of a test on Sunday when I buy a fridge and freezer. And a bed. And retrieve a chair. Did I mention I have hired a van too? This is going to be a fun, but expensive weekend. I’m off to bed now, there’s not a lot else to do since it’s in boxes Had a bit of a worry when I thought all my mugs had been packed, but then I found one so I can still make tea.

Tomorrow I have to pay for the house, collect a van and then park it outside somewhere and hope some of our less intelligent locals don’t think it contains stuff worth stealing.

The estate agent phoned. My credit check is OK They’ve not heard from my employer though So I rang them (my employer) to find out what’s going on. The very helpful man I spoke to told me he didn’t have the authority to give out payroll information, and that I need to contact someone else who can.

So now I’ve given the estate agent this other person’s details to fax my application form off to.

I’m sure wars have been ended with less hassle.

Hurry up… I’ve got a van to arrange and boxes to pack, not to mention about 20 places to ring and get my address changed with.

I hate waiting for people, it’s frustratingly slow.

I’m rewriting some software that used to use the MFC, and converting it into whizzy new .NET and Winforms. This involves running Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio 2005 simultaneously, and the differences are amazing. I’ve always liked VS6, it’s a tool that was quite obviously written by people who use it daily, rather than Word which acts like it was coded by a bunch of monkeys who have never really used a wordprocessor before.

VS2005 is even better, the dialog layout tools are so much better. Controls snap to the edges of other controls making layout simple. Dialog resizing is even handled in a sensible way. The whole thing just makes my life easy, and unfortunately Linux is miles behind - KDevelop is OK, but compared to Visual Studio it’s like trying to do everything the hard way. Writing a GUI app in Windows is easy, really really easy and I’d kill for something this simple in KDE (I’m not touching the mess known as GTK+ again, it’s just overly complex). It’s a tool that has many small features that don’t seem too important until you use them.

Sucks system resources something rotten though. My poor laptop is barely coping with running them both together, think I need more RAM.

My house is full of boxes. I’m slowly packing everything up in readyness for hopefully moving on Saturday (if for some reason my application doesn’t go through I have no idea what to do). It’s quite hard boxing your life away, while also still retaining something that lets you have clothes, technology and something to do in the evenings. Also shows how little I actually use my CDs.

Went into the estate agents in Wakefield on Friday to hand in bits of paper and the £194 fee. Well, I tried to get into Wakefield. The first hint that something was Wrong was when I got stuck in a traffic jam outside Horbury. A traffic jam that continued all the way to Wakey town centre. I slowly shuffled down the road, wishing I’d had a pee at the last petrol station I passed, watching my GPS tell me there was absolutely no way to escape the traffic, and that I had to just sit it out. Time passed, my bladder became fuller, the cars shuffled down the road.

Eventually I came to the cause of the jam, a mere hour later and really really needing to pee. The drains had burst and the centre of Wakefield was now in the domain of ducks, large lorries and idiots who think their cars are aquatic - and of course then breakdown recovery trucks and the police. Sorry people, your car doesn’t work under water so don’t even try.

Joyfully the nice policeman (wonder if he needed a piss as badly as I did?) directed me back up the road I had just come down all the way back to bloody Horbury almost. My GPS then told me to randomly turn left and go down another (equally jammed) road. Fortunately this one went past a supermarket and I had the most satisfying and wonderful emptying of my bladder ever (well, possibly since the time I spent three hours sat on a boat with a bunch of kids and a broken engine waiting for a lift… that one might have been more satisfying).

To continue the theme of being stuck in traffic I was off to meet Amy in Scunthorpe later that evening. After seeing the traffic on the motorway I thought “sod that, I’ll go along the back roads”. Hahaha Bad Move! Barnsley was a total carpark, and even the random detours I invented (my GPS is the best thing ever!) didn’t help. Took me three hours to do a one hour journey Again I needed to pee quite badly, think I’ll get my seat converted into a toilet!

The M18 was fun, lots and lots of rain to the point of me wondering how soon it’d be before my car went skidding sideways off the motorway. The giant ruts in the road made by the lorries don’t help much. The thunder and lightning was fun to watch, but the sheet rain that chopped my visibility to nothing wasn’t.

OK estate agents, ring me now! I need to phone about 20 different companies and tell them I’m moving house and sort out a van. The new place is nice, I’ll put up pictures when I get it.