This being the middle of a work week and all (no bank holidays this time around!), I thought I’d just throw a couple of pictures of things that are in my daily life.

Here’s the bus that took me home from the office today. I like riding on top of the doubledecker buses. It provides a nice perspective to take things in.

This is my local pub. Nice people behind the bar, the crowd seems nice enough, they have real ales and they even serve burgers. Never fear, I don’t live there, but it’s nice to go in fo a pint once in a while.

This is Newington Green. Believe it or not, it’s actually just a big ass traffic circle. But there’s this nice park in the middle.

Anyway, just a little something to show you what I see everyday. This is all within about 3 steps of my bus stop.

PS – I’m trying so hard not to make any comments on Jerry Falwells death. I’m trying to be a good boy, I swear!

So here I am in a foreign country. One thing I always love is internet access. I have been internet-less for a month now when I’m not at work. In and of itself, it’s not deadly. I can do what I need when I’m in the office. But, there are things I like to use the internet for: skyp-ing loved ones, posting pics to this blog, watching my class and not having to lug my laptop to work and then download the whole thing which lend itself to having a network connection at home. Plus, as an IT person, I have times where I need to get back into my office during odd hours (like tonight, for example). I can’t do that from home which means I have to come into the office.

Anyways, Britain has deregulated the telco world here. In a nutshell, it means, instead of one company gouging you for crappy service, there are multiple. Doing my research, I found the most freedom I would have would having a BT phone line. It was an hour long ordeal of being on hold waaaaay to much to get a freaking phone number.

Once I had that, I thought I’d have a million choices for internet (if I’d kept my Virgin media line, I’d have been stuck with their internet as well and not have any other options). Well, one company didn’t have my telco exchange set up for internet (I live in a middle of freaking London!). Another one insisting on hijacking my phone service when I’d just set up new service. A third would be hooked up in my exchange, but not until the end of May. So I left for Stockholm all pissed off, assuming I’d be stuck with BT and their 12 month contracts and still without internet.

I was then turned on to this nice site, The Broadband Resource. They allow you to look up your local exchange and get all sorts of cool geeky info. I looked at my exchange today, and saw this note:

Be Unlimited has enabled the Canonbury exchange for their service

Well I’ll be damned. These were the people who claimed that they wouldn’t be ready for me until the end of May! So I checked their site and now I can have internet from them if I want. I do believe i’ll be signing up tomorrow!

So the internets showed me info that is publicly available but in a useable format and, hopefully, I’ll have internet — in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I just set myself up with cheap ass international calling (again, through the internets). Let’s see if it’s as cheap as they claim and make some calls 🙂

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Add to that the fact that I have no internet at home and I’m working until 7 and 8pm every night, and there ain’t much time for updates. I assure you, I have lots of fun to share and it’ll all get dumped on those of you who read this soon. For the moment, here’re some random things:

1. Tomorrow, I take my first trip back to the Continent. Alas, it’s not all fun and games. It’s to Stockholm, which isn’t exactly warm in April and it’s for work. But hopefully, the work will only be done at 7am on Saturday and a little bit of work really really early on Sunday and I can enjoy myself some of the time 🙂
2. I’m rich! Well, not exactly. But the British pound is now worth double the US dollar. So all you people still living in the US with it’s high trade deficit, flat incomes/savings and treasury bonds being sucked up by foreign countries, enjoy!

hee hee. I’ll have tons of pics and andventures posted this weekend, i hope.

I’ve been good and not mentioned the cats in a while (I think). Since I have no internet at my apartment yet (i’m still not sure who my phone line is provided by!!) which is where all my photos are, I’ve been remiss in keeping people really up-to-date on some of the fun I’ve been having. So let me fill you in on the fun my cats have been having.

Since I last wrote about them in full, Anna and Chewy first travelled 1000 miles to Connecticut. There, they found two loving people who have been taking excellent care of them and a cat who had a rough first few years of life and didn’t take too kindly to having two strange cats invading her turf. So, for a couple of months, the three cats took turns having free range of the house. Finally, at the end of March, they all got loaded up in a car and went a little closer to Anna and Chewy’s world: Michigan.

Since then, all three cats, now that they’re in neutral territory, are apparently getting along marvelously. Meanwhile, being the wonderful cats that they are, they’ve managed to win people over. My parents keep threatening to not let them move to London when they are legally allowed to (the bastards!) and my uncle, who normally rips on cats constantly, has taken an immense liking to Anna (because of her dog-like qualities, but it’s impressive nonetheless) and referred to himself as Anna’s new ‘master’ (as if!).

Anyway, here’s a pic of Anna and Chewy in their temporary home (which is one of the things I need to post more about!). I can’t wait to see them again.

**Update** She finished in 4:27 in extremely bad conditions. Congrats Carolyn!!!!!!!!!!

In about 7 hours, Carolyn will be running the Boston Marathon. For those of you unaware, she has raised almost $5000 for Cancer research as well as training for the run. I’m very sad I’m unable to be in Boston to cheer her on, Nor’easter or not, so I’m sending her lots of good vibes all day and will be tracking her online (she’s bib #20221). If you’re in Boston, go out and brave the cold and cheer her and all the other crazy runner on. AND, if you haven’t donated, do it now! 🙂

Good luck Carolyn!!!!!!!!!!

I’m normally never too big on birthdays, but this one feels odd. First of all, it’s one of those milestone birthdays. Today, I turn 30 years old. That’s odd enough. But putting myself in a new country with very few people I know makes it a little odder. I turned 21 in Italy, so it’s not the first milestone birthday I’ve celebrated abroad, but this time, I’m right in the thick of relocating as well as working my ass off and, that time, I had already been over there for a few months and was pretty settled.

Anyway, it’s a blog and I figured I’d be a little self-indulgent. Happy birthday to me 🙂

Time for a little random post not related to the unpleasantness from yesterday. I’m sure all of you are aware of spam. Well, since spammers are the essense of evil, they try to find anywhere they can to post crap for viagra and cialis and so on. Now, I have a pretty good system to keep myself pretty immune from spam in email (my personal email addresses get maybe 3 a week), but the spammers managed to implicate me in one form of it: comment spam. This is where they post comments to any blog they can find (blog software is pretty dumb in that the install usually ends up in a similar URL so they can find them easily) with either those weird psuedo-philosophical/gibberish comments or with links to pr0n or discounted drugs. Well, for a long while, if you searched for my name on google, you would find that some spammer decided to use my name as a spam commenter. Very odd!

Anyway, now I have my own blog and I guess it’s out in the open now because I have some comment spam. Now, you might be asking yourself ‘where is this so called comment spam? I’m on the site right now and all the comments appear to be from people like God (thanks Dina!) and my mom.’ Well, the blog software has a sweet piece of spam catching and the 20 or so pieces of spam that have been posted have been swallowed whole! Thank you wordpress!

Thus endeth my random naval gazing for the day. We’ll be back to regular programming (hopefully with a new apartment, photos of my funky hotel, as well as trips to Cambridge, Brighton and Stockholm) shortly.

Just a quick note. This morning is my last day in the office. It’s really a half day as I have to meet with movers in the afternoon. Then I make a massive push to get my shit together in the next 2 days and then hop a plane on Sunday night and begin my new life. I’m completely freaked out at the moment, but it’ll all be worth it very soon! 🙂

I have pics and some fun info about last weekend (lots of fun activities) and I’ll write about them soon, I swear (mom!!).

So today was a milestone of sorts. It was the day I got the page in my passport with my visa! It means that, after 2/25/2007, I can work in the UK and come and go as I please. It sort of makes this whole thing seem very real. Anyways, my plan at this point is to have a few friends over on Friday to celebrate my departure back to the Old World, wake up the next day and shake off the hangover and pack. Then I’m going back to London for 2 weeks for more work and house hunting. After that, I have a quick two weeks back in the US and, at the end of March, I make the final move. Meanwhile, I’m slowly but surely churning through my list of things to do.

I promise to try to make my next trip to the UK more entertaining from a blogging (god i hate that word) standpoint. Pictures and stuff will be a-plenty! For now, it’s just a lot of busy work and a little bit o’ fun. wheee!

Alrighty, I’ve been waiting on this for a little bit before I could put anything out there, but now it’s been publicly announced so I can actually begin my adventure! I’ve accepted a position in the Morningstar UK office. I’ll be working there for the next 2 years as one of their network analyst (ok, it’s the same position as a network administrator, just a shiny British name). I’ll be writing more about this whole evolving process as it happens. For now, I’m in cleaning hell as I try to get my apartment cleaned so I can sell it.

I’m in the process of some exciting things. Keep your eyes on this site as things become official and I can out and talk about everything and start sharing with the world a little more 🙂