If you're a twit or a tweeterer or whatever it's called, you can now follow my life, in bite-sized chunks, on twitter.

Some people said it wouldn't happen, others said it shouldn't happen but we've only gone and started a new web comic: Creative Catharsis

Enjoy responsibly.

OK people, on the 9th of Feb I will be entering my very late 20's and will be celebrating the event in a mature and adult fashion with a few beers on Saturday the 7th.

As ever, I have no real plans and currently very limited space for people to stay, however if anyone fancies a day out in Brighton with a meal and beer later in the afternoon / evening / night, feel free to join me.

There's been a recent power shift at work and I'm now in charge of a team of two developers. When I took over we had a meeting, just the three of us, and I stretched my leadership capabilities by giving them a bit of a pep talk on what the future held, for us as developers, within the company.

In a stunning vindication of my faultless leadership abilities the person I thought least likely to listen to me handed in his notice yesterday! I know that's not generally considered to be a win in the management world but he did exactly as I told him.

I know people are going to ask, so this is roughly how the pep talk went: 'As developers we don't really have a future in the company and we're not going to get anything even remotely interesting to do in the foreseeable future. I would suggest we all start looking for new jobs and if there's anything you feel you're weak at let me know and I'll create an internal project to help you develop those missing skills.'

Heh. Now I just need to take my own advice...

Man, I love this time of year!

So much happened last week, which is often the case when you get away from work and remember you have a life.

I had one fantastic date and one bad date, with the same woman, before you ask. Which just reaffirms my belief that women are crazy and there's no helping them. How do you go from "I don't want the night to end" to "I don't want a relationship right now" in the space of one (mediocre but quite funny) movie?

I saw Rome Burns play with hardly any significant interruptions and bought a copy of the fabled album. Not bad. I caught up with old friends over the next day or so, wrote a fair bit, generally dossed around doing little at the Dreaming. It may be still under construction but the shower is amazing and I'm incredibly jealous of the cinema room. Especially now ulfilias seems to have bought an Xbox...

Friday I headed to London, bought comics, talked to random skinheads in the Dev Hobgoblin which was er... good. Later on I met simonsatori and morbidfrog in the fairy kingdom before heading over to the Victoria and Albert Museum to listen to Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie talk about their latest book, Lost Girls, pornography, bad movies, and to see them sign a duck. Ask Simon for the why's and wherefore's of the duck signing. Later we met up with Nick for some goth club I can't remember the name of. There was an amazing (?!) film involving a werewolf and a flower though...

Saturday was a crazy mix of things. I lost a friend to an illness and I lost a dream I was never going to make true. And I'm not even going to begin to tell you what Nick got up to.

Thanks to Lee and Nick for putting me up on my brief tour. Thanks to everyone else for just being themselves.

TV licencing.

When I moved into the new place there was already a letter from the TV licencing people waiting for me. There always is. In my rather extensive experience of moving the TV Licencing people are almost always the first to send a bill through your door. I had a TV licence. When I was in Norwich I had a TV and I dutifully paid my licence. Even though the only thing I watched was the Simpsons if I got home from work in time. That's ½ an hour of TV a day, at most five days a week. And that's on Channel 4 and as I understand it the TV licence is only applicable to the Beeb.

Anyway.

I phoned them up and explained the situation: I had a TV licence, I'd recently moved citing my previous address and my current address, I no longer had a TV and wanted to cancel. The guy I spoke to was very helpful and updated everything, even sending me a refund on what I'd apparently overpaid. All fantastic and I thought nothing more of it.

Until I got woken up by the door bell one saturday morning.

The woman at the door explained that my flat wasn't registered as having a TV licence. I told her I'd phoned up about that weeks previously and everything was sorted. She said that was fine (she didn't ask to check for a TV) and said she'd list my flat as being empty for six months. Slightly confused I asked why. She told me there was nothing on her form for people with no TV so it was either list the flat as empty or have someone banging on the door every weekend.

As I write this, going over the event again, I feel like I've suffered a blow to the head. This can't be right. It makes no sense! But this is what happened.

I'm right aren't I? This is crazy?

I keep meaning to write something because so much has happened since I last wrote anything. Because of that you get the short version.

After nine weeks in hotels and six of those weeks being completely homeless I've finally found somewhere to live. I've got a flat in Brighton and a very large thanks go out to Adelle for helping sort out just about everything. The flat is reasonably OK, in that it's convenient for everything. The drunks out the front, the nightclub out the back, the lack of furniture and the current lack of heating are kind of annoying, though. I might not mind about the boiler dying again but it's the second time it's happened in the couple of months I've lived here and I currently have an absolute stonker of a cold which isn't helped by four days of cold showers.

The job I moved here for is steadily going down hill. My boss was fired a couple of weeks ago and his replacement is hell-bent on outsourcing all of the development work. I'm pretty sure my job will be either redundant or as good as redundant in six months time. I'm not sure whether to start looking for a job now or to hang out for possible redundancy. I haven't even really made any friends in the company either. I think it's the large corporation style office, there's limited socialising and the people I directly work with are either eeyores or tiggers and I'm not interested in hanging around with either.

The weird thing is, despite a long list of woes, I'm actually OK.

lightmark

You probably haven't heard of him, but you'd recognise his voice anywhere. Don LaFontaine, the guy who does the voice over for every movie trailer ever, has died.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/09/the_world_is_now_higher_pitched.php

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
4. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
5. The Bible -
6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
7. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Loved the first one
9. Great Expectations
10. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
11. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
12. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
13. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read a few but nowhere near all
14. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
15. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
16. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
17. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
18. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger didn't think this was all that good TBH
19. Middlemarch - George Eliot
20. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
21. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
22. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
25. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
26. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
28. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
29. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
30. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
31. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
32. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
33. Emma - Jane Austen
34. Persuasion - Jane Austen
35. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown I intend to read this because I'm expecting to hate it
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
99. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I don't know what happen to book 100... Or 3, depending on who you ask.

Anyone going to see Turisas play at the barfly in Chalk Farm tonight? Gig details can be found on the barfly website.

I got my ticket, thanks to a heads-up from morbidfrog

Well, I've been homeless now for about a week due to the moving out part working but the moving in part falling through. With this being my fourth week in B&B's / hotels I've not really noticed it too much. It's slowly starting to get to me, I think, it's hard to tell. It's not pissing me off at all, I just feel very numb. Robotic, almost. Most of my responses during the day are automatic, I don't really feel myself "coming through" very often.

The new job is going well. I'm gettng to grips with everything and it doesn't seem nearly as overwhelming as it did a couple of weeks ago. The company is quite odd though. The real brain-trust of the team, developer-wise, are three contractors who are being "phased-out". Two are leaving at the end of the month, the other at some unspecified time after that. The two who are leaving have both been with the company for two or more years, while the rest of the team are all new: a year of service or less. It's very odd.

The funny / annoying thing is I find more common ground with the people who are going than with those remaining. The two remaining I think of as Eyore and Tigger. That probably conjures up enough of a picture!

The really handy thing about the job at the moment is they're sending me on training courses in London for the next fortnight. Having just payed for a "cheap" hotel in Kew Gardens I can no longer afford to move, and as I'm going to be in hotels for a fortnight anyway, I don't really feel the same pressure to move as I did before.

Right, I'm off to the pub.

Oh yeah, Crawley sucks!

Tinariwen

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23667&l=f4214&id=544024471

Ladytron

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=23670&l=cbb06&id=544024471

Is anyone going to see Pythia support Ministry next week in Kentish Town? I could see Ministry in Norwich but I kind of want to see Pythia play.

Well, that's it, I'm leaving Soup and I'm leaving Norwich. I've been offered a job as Senior Developer in Crawley for embarrassingly large amounts of money and I have most graciously accepted.

Anyone know anything about the area? I know it's close to Brighton so that will be a possibility for moving.