conflux

I am sure most of you will have seen this already...

This is a quick test – does cross posting from DW to LJ work as it should?

Unlike others who have moved to DW I think I will end up keeping both. Please add me to your circle thingy on DW if you are on there though.

I don’t always keep up with LJ, DW or Facebook but I do look at them from time to time and I have now setup email notifications which I will always read.

I had a fantastic time at BiCon. Thank you to all the wonderful people that made to so excellent. Special mentions to eather, 2eyes, plumsbitch, B, K and of course my fabulous xanna. The only down side was not seeing enough of thekumquat due to flat allocation mess ups and not being able to talk or spend enough time with everyone I would have liked to. I failed to take any pictures that are sufficiently decent to go on a website, so please let me know if you have any?

thekumquat and I got home late last night to find our bathroom is now more of a rumble room. It seems when they took the bath out it fell in half and all the walls were only held together by the old tiles. Still work has been progressing fast, although there was a leak into narnee's flat.

On the 21st of January I am going to the Masquerade Ball with a whole host of lovely people. Now we are trying to juggle tickets so that everyone who wants to can go. We are currently at least one short. So does anyone have a spare ticket that they would be prepared to sell?

If you are looking for a job in London, or know someone who is, my company who are in Wansworth (although they claim they are in Putney as it sounds posher) are fairly consistently recruiting at the moment. The latest job summaries for our network discovery product team are

2x Developers for Web-based GUI applications, including Java J2EE
skills, JDBC, HTML & Javascript, ideally in an Apache-Tomcat, WebLogic
or Jboss environment. They should have knowledge of database systems.

2x C++ with strong UNIX development skills, strong software
development skills, knowledge of database systems and ideally a deep
understanding of networking technologies (e.g. SNMP, TCP/IP, CCNA
desirable)

and I can give you more details if you are interested. They will also pay me a bounty if I find someone, which I will split with you.

Another thought is that as my company are American owned they may be better than most at sorting out work permits for Americans who want to come to the UK.

In other news, I had an excellent weekend in Leicester for PolyDay. More on that later.

I am not saying anything new but here are some of my thoughts.

No one is perfect. We all have our flaws and who is to say what perfection is anyway? So if you think everyone should conform to a set of ideal standards then you are likely to be disappointed. This is one of the reasons I seem to have a problem with fundamentalists or one-true-way-ists of any kind. They have come up with some often fairly arbitrary idea of what they think is the right way to do things and give anyone who disagrees with them a hard time about it.

In my experience most people try their best to do what they think is right. Some people (in my opinion) have a very funny idea of what they think is right and, where I can, a like to challenge their ideas and prejudices and at least get them to think about their choices. Often they are just going by what they have been told to believe rather than thinking through the issues themselves.

There are some people out there who are deliberately unpleasant, usually because they think they can gain something from it. I try and avoid these people and have been known to go to some lengths to get even with them when they have wronged me (by tracking them down and informing the police for instance). Often these people seem to lack any empathy or understanding of other peoples feelings but sometimes they are just nasty to other people anyway and come up with excuses about why they are different from them in some way to justify their actions.

I have been told that I am very excepting of people's flaws. What is closer to the truth is that I try not to prejudge people. I try to find out their reasons for why they do things before making up my mind about what I think about them. Even then I don't expect anyone to be perfect but look at the overall picture. If that makes me seem non-judgmental then fair enough.

Love can make us blind to someone's flaws initially but in my experience if your love for someone is going to last, you have to see the whole person, with their good and bad points, and love them anyway flaws and all. The same is also true of friendship.

We put a load of random things we didn't want on ebay recently when it was free listings day. This is more to give us a reasonable seller feedback rather than because we expect to make large amounts of money from them. This is just as well as we are currently making a grand total of £2.40 from all 5 items.

Random ebay stuff

Happy Birthday labyrinth_lizzy and sweinhodge.

So it looks like I am a hug slut, but then you knew that already didn't you?

( The sordid truth )

So thekumquat and myself are back! Did you miss us?

We have been to the island of Cumbrae in Scotland for the last 5 days with lizw, djm4 and the three kids B, C and R. It was wonderful, even when it rained, which means it must have been good. It has also failed to put me off wanting children, be very afraid.

Millport, the only village on Cumbrae, seemed to have been caught in a time warp. It was very reminiscent of childhood seaside holidays and has not changed very much since Victorian times. Anyway, you can read a much more eloquent write up on thekumaquat's LJ but highlights included.

Lots of beautiful scenery and walks.
Making up bedtime stories with B for C and R.
Seeing more wildlife in 5 days than in two years in London.
Remaking the Matrix after B discovered that my camera could take video - staring and directed by B as Neo, C as several agents, and Piggy as Morpheus. Piggy was acting against type as she normally spends most of her time being carried around by R.
djm4's roast dinner and fresh scones.
Snuggling with lizw and thekumquat.
Going on cycle rides round the island.
Feeding acrobatic seagulls on the ferry back.
Generally just chilling out and getting away from it all.

Special thanks have to go to lizw, without her we would never have gone.

First of all thanks to everyone that came to my birthday party last Saturday. It was fantastic to see so many people, some of whom I hadn't seen for far too long. It was an excellent evening. Oh, and special thanks to those who helped tidy up the next day. Many people have already put up photos and I will put up the few I have at some point soon-ish. Thank you also for all the cards and presents.

One of my birthday presents was from the thekumquat and is a weekend away with her in a fancy hotel. We are heading off there tonight and I'm really looking forward to it. Unfortunately this means that we won't see people in the pub tonight or at the ungoth party tomorrow. I hope you have much fun and we will see many of you next week.

Last night was my fencing clubs annual one hit epee competition. This is where we fence using the same rules as pentathlon fencing tournaments with each bout being decided on a single hit (also known as sudden death) and everyone gets to fence everyone else. It tends to be a lot most about not letting nerves get the better of you than the normal 15 point matches so maybe being half asleep helped. Anyway, much to my surprise, I won after winning 9 out of 10 bouts. So I now have a (fairly small) trophy in what I think is lacquered bronze which will have my name engraved on it. I usually fence in team events so this is the first individual competition I have ever won.

The perils of Internet shopping. We meant to order 5 bananas and accidentally ordered 5kg. We now have enough bananas to stoke a medium sized elephant.

Apparently spikeylady is listening to Bon Jovi and it is all my fault.