First Housewarming 2007

"First" because this is only a 6 month lease, and there may well be another one this year :-)

Lots of nice people there, mostly friends of Amy, since I haven't been here long enough to get my own! But Rebecca, Gemma and Gemma's friend Holly also came along, it was a perfect sized gathering for our little place.

Some people shots, Gemma, me and Amy:



Kris, Cheryl, Amy and Marcus:



Mike, Amy and Gareth:



Ellie bought us a housewarming gift of twister, so of course that had to come out too:



All in all a very good night :-)

The new digs!

Here's some pictures of the new place, which after some money tribulations (thanks ANZ for NOTHING) we eventually moved into:

Job seeking

I spent a lot of time job seeking.

What this actually means is waiting for the employers you've been interviewed by to call you back and give you the offer you suspect is in the works, while fending off rabid recruiters.

After putting my CV online on three different job sites, I received no less than 3 cold calls every single weekday. This is heartening for the first couple of days, then it's just annoying.

After my interview at Yahoo!, I had a couple more interviews at various places.

In the end I had two offers, and they were both very very good. In the end I had to pick one, and Yahoo! was it. I was pretty sad to turn down the other mob though, they were a great bunch, a lot like Internode, and obviously going places. The recruiter called me back and told me the company was 'gutted', and would I come out for a drink with them? I decided to in the end, though I didn't expect to change my mind. It didn't make it any easier, but in the end I stuck to my guns.

If things don't work out at Yahoo! at least I will know I was wanted by 'other company', and perhaps they would extend their offer again. I have no expectations at all in that regard of course.

So now I have the paperwork for starting at Yahoo!, I begin next tuesday. To tell the truth it'll be nice to start work again, apart from getting paid :-) it'll be nice to have a purpose again. There's only so much sightseeing that's fun by yourself, with no money.

Pancakes and Tate Modern

Sunday morning was pancake morning!

Amy and I made pancakes for breakfast (so hungry by the time I got there!), and after injesting twice the legal limit of maple syrup we set off for ... places.

One of them was the Tate Modern. Lots of good stuff there, like some Dali, Pollock and more. The laughing small men were a bit disturbing.

The main entry hall is huge:



And the slides are very cool, free but it was way too busy for us to get a go:



Also saw St Pauls, but it was a bit too rainy for outdoor photography. Negotiating the slippery millenium bridge was an art in itself :-)

Greenwich

Trotted off to Greenwich to see the famous meridian, and a few of the other pieces of interestingness around, like the Queens House (not Liz, older Queen, you wouldn't know her).

While climbing up towards the meridian and the observatory, the view is quite spectacular:



Unfortunately we got there about 5 minutes too late to get into the actual meridian marker! Luckily, GPS in hand I was able to deduce that the marker is a fraud! Well not really, it's all about mapping coordinate systems. At any rate, I walked about 100 metres east and had my own little private moment with the WGS82 longitude zero meridian.

A nice walk around the surrounding park, we saw some deer (in an enclosure) and many squirrels. Confusing signs pointed us at non-existent roman ruins. Eventually the sun went down and we got back on the (driverless!) DLR train and went home.