Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

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From yes­ter­day night.

13^th December 2005, 11pm
Sitting on a train in the middle of the night, freez­ing cold out­side, with your best mate spark out across three seats, listen­ing to what sounds like “One Giant Leap” through his head­phones, as you spon­tan­eously make your way to London, all the time try­ing to men­tally begin the writ­ing of an amus­ing speech about how the Earth is flat… yup, we’re home.

Been back about 10 days, and oddly enough I’m feel­ing slight pangs for the rel­at­ive pla­cid­ity of Uni life com­pared to what I’m now exper­i­en­cing. The morn­ing after I got home I was up in time for a 9am inter­view half an hour’s drive away, and since then have been work­ing 8.25 till 6.15, Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, in a mail order ware­house. And it’s manic. Blows my week­ends too, as I now only have Sundays, and the break mid-week basic­ally means most of the time I don’t have a clue what day it is.

But apart from that everything’s good — it’s nice to be back, though just for a month. Nice to sleep in a bed whose mat­tress wasn’t bought on a budget in a lot of a thou­sand, and isn’t battle-scarred by red wine, chocol­ate ice-cream and yoghurt.

Still wait­ing for the masses of free time to mater­i­al­ize, how­ever — still haven’t sub­mit­ted any pho­tos to dA in the last I don’t know how many weeks, haven’t done any work on the assign­ment that needs to be fin­ished before I go back, and haven’t done any Christmas shop­ping yet. Eek. But I have picked up my gui­tar again, have taken the odd photo, have got back in touch with old friends, and have star­ted get­ting decent nights’ sleep.

It’s good to be back on the LAN side of my net­work too. Started pri­cing up a new Linux server; in the mean­time I’ve moved the exist­ing ones around so they make less noise, blown the dust out of their innards, and tidied up all the wir­ing in my room.

Also went to see Tommy Emmanuel play this even­ing, which was even more excel­lent than the first time. Highly recom­men­ded. Regrettably had to leave before the end (to get this train), but what we did see was pure class.

But enough. We’re now at some place called Sanderstead, which I’ve never even heard of, sup­posedly head­ing towards Victoria, the Santa Claus lookalike across the car­riage is still peer­ing at his mobile phone as one does a curi­ous insect, and I still need to write this speech. Gawd.