Shrieking.net

I went to Alton Towers this week! I haven’t been in a long, long time, and I’d completely forgotten how beautiful the whole park is. The towers themselves are a wondeful old listed building (which happens to house their haunted house, although it was closed when we went - shame), and the parks and lakes around the rides are all lovely. If you walk through to the forbidden valley you end up walking along a winding forest trail which wouldn’t be out of place in a nature resort. Awesome stuff.

The rides are great too! I went to Thorpe Park a while back and loved Stealth, so I was really excited about seeing what Rita could do. It has a bit more going on than Stealth, but as a result the speed of it doesn’t seem as important. They actually use identical technology.

Air is a really cool idea. The ride hoists you up so you’re headfirst just before it starts, so you’re staring at the floor (and the sky) throughout the ride. It’s a really fun ride but the speed doesn’t quite match up to Rita. Blue Peter did a pretty cool feature on it, as it happens.

It’s only an hour and a half’s train from London to Stoke-on-Trent - the journey was relatively pleasant, compared to the crack-of-dawn car trips I remember. I really, really want to stay at the Alton Towers Hotel now. And go to the water park. If only I had money to burn.

My relationship is a year old now! According to Wikipedia, this makes it a toddler. Alton Towers was our anniversary trip! We also went to the absolutely stunning Boxwood Cafe. Still trying to get to a Michelin Star restaurant, but this one was amazing all the same. I had the veal, Kristy had the chicken. The chocolate fondue was very, very nice, and very, very rich. Good stuff.

The other day I saw a little girl skipping across the road, all smiles and happiness, and I realised that I’ve been reading the news too much lately. It may all be falling apart in the headlines but for some people the world ticks along perfectly well and there’s no reason to be gloomy. There’s plenty of things to be happy about out there.

I did a load of upgrading stuff. I hope I didn’t break anything - let me know if stuff is busted up.

If any tech people are interested, Shrieking now runs on an Nginx + FastCGI + Passenger setup. It was a pain to get it all working, kudos to the Passenger people for making that bit of it super easy though.

I went for a run today! This is worthy of an exclamation mark because I am outrageously unfit. I’m sort of trying to change that, I think. I’m not too sure what my motives are.

What’s post-worthy about this is the funky little iPhone app that I used to track my little run. It’s called TrailGuru. You run with the app running on your phone, and when you’re done you upload it to the website and it plots your route and does all this clever stuff with it.

Here is the breakdown. Now, the stats aren’t impressive in any way, so don’t look too hard at what the numbers actually are, but instead, try to be impressed that you can see them. The Co-Op is 200m higher up than my house. That’s information that I didn’t know. I’m not too sure that I needed to know, but I think it’s fantastic that I can find out.

I don’t know if I’ll manage to keep on running but I did enjoy it and I am a bit fat, so I’ll try. If I do any running that’s worth shouting about I might even post the routes up here again.

You may be surprised to hear that I’m organised in any sense of the word, but actually, I am. I’m enough of a loser to keep a todo list on my phone of not only all the things I have to do, but all the movies I have to watch, and books I have to read. Until recently, it was not in a very good state. I assumed that it was normal for someone who looks at a computer screen all day to be unable to read or focus on anything for long after a day’s work, but it turns out, I actually just needed glasses. £200-worth of eyewear later, I am able to enjoy everything again and my eyes never hurt late into the night like they used to, so I’ve been back on the media wagon.
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Written 03/04/09, on a bus that should have had a wifi connection, but, depressingly, didn’t.

Dear reader, what a terrible host I’ve become. Back in the days when I was traveling I was a good blogger, doing my best to keep to some kind of publishing schedule and, I like to think, writing stuff worth reading, but now it seems that I’ve fallen into inactivity. I’d like to make this something more than a ’sorry for the lack of updates’ post, so let me tell you how this all works.

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Piratebeer!, originally uploaded by shrieking.

Yarrrr.

Well, 2008 is over, which is good, because it brings us another step closer to leaving the “naughties” or whatever this stupid decade is supposed to be called and joining the, errr, tens. Personally I can’t wait for the forties where we all get to be in black and white and enjoy quaint wartime propaganda and rationing.

I won’t talk about the traveling thing, because you’ve heard all about that enough already, but yeah, this year, on the 28th of June, I stepped off a plane to begin real life again in the UK. Traveling was interesting, and for the most part, pretty good, but I was very, very glad to be back. Looking out of the window on the ride home and seeing how green England was really made me very happy indeed. So, of course, did my wonderful girlfriend Kristy, who met me at the airport and pampered me and was generally brilliant.

I spent the first week or so back in absolute bliss, relaxing at my mum’s house with Kristy, being fed and watered and recovering.
I would have enjoyed the summer a lot more if it didn’t feel like a mad dash, but unfortunately putting your life back together again is a big task, so I didn’t get to do a lot of what I’d usually get up to in Summer: juggling in fields, parties, etc. Not having students around makes Summer a little harder to enjoy because it feels like less of a break.

Around the end of July I started a job at Optimor working on BillMonitor, a mobile phone price comparison engine. I started out as a java programmer, but quickly took up a python job when one of our programmers vanished off the face of the earth, and ended up taking on even more responsibility as our workforce decreased in size. It’s been a hard job but for the most part it’s been pretty cool and it’s been an incredible learning experience. When I got my job, I had nowhere to live in Oxford, so I spent 3 weeks sleeping on the floors and couches of Simon, Plau and Kate, and Maisey and Sam. I am indebted to all of them for their amazing hospitality - thanks guys! After that I found a house with Simon, Anya, and Rich. It’s a lovely house with lots of bare floorboards, a garden, a conservatory and a lovely lounge. We do a lot of cooking and we generally have a nice time of things. The house manages to stay more or less warm through Winter and we often seem to be very grown up.

I spent most of my wages from it buying all the things I was missing: a bed, a new phone, a new PC… The stuff you’d expect, really. I’ve now pretty much got myself back on track and I’m starting to save some money, but unfortunately pretty much every penny I earned over the course of 2008 went into necessary purchases.

The Winter malaise has hit me hard this season and I’ve felt somewhat stifled over the last few months, but finally it seems that Spring is coming and my 2009 can start properly. I swing from hopelessly creative to paralysed by writer’s block on an almost daily basis, but I’m hoping that this year a good Spring and Summer will sort me out.

New year’s resolutions include: go out more, learn about whisky, get more things done.

Going to try and install Nginx soon, this may break everything. If it does I’m very sorry. Go and read another blog or something.

I spent a while knocking this together once before, then deleted it, so when I set out to find it again, I found this rather handy Guide to Elixir Autoloading. Thank you, whoever wrote that!

I really don’t get why this can’t be as simple as ActiveRecord, but sure, whatever, Python does like to be complicated.

(I’m going to get myself a programming blog and move this stuff away from Shrieking, I promise!)