Two years and one month ago to this day, I made an idiot out of myself by injuring
myself while chasing cake. Back then, of course, I was working on the top floor of the Technium in Aberystwyth, and
I was racing down the stairs of the fire escape in an attempt to get to left-over cake supplies before they were picked clean by the other scavengers in the office building. I tripped
and fell, and sprained by ankle quite badly (I ended up on crutches for
a few days).
Last week, history almost repeated itself, and I’m not even talking about my recent head
injury. Again, I’m on the top floor of a building, and again, there’s a meeting room on the bottom floor (technically in the basement, but that only means there’s further to go).
When I got the email, I rushed out of the door and down the stairwell, skipping over the stairs in threes and fours. Most of the Bodleian’s stairwells are uncarpeted wood, and the
worn-down soles of my shoes skidded across them.
The prize! Baskets of fresh sandwiches (fruit, but not cakes, are off-camera: around here, cakes go very quickly...)
You’d think I’d have learned by now, but apparently I’m a little slow. Slow, except at running down stairs. As I rounded the corner of the last stairwell, my body turned to follow the
route but my feet kept going in the same direction. They took flight, and for a moment I was suspended in the air, like a cartoon character before they realise their predicament and
gravity takes hold. With a thud, I hit the ground.
Perhaps I’d learned something, though, because at least this time around I rolled. Back on my feet, I was still able to get to the meeting room and scoff the best of the fruit and
sandwiches before anybody else arrived.
Is this really worthy of a blog post? Dan doesn’t have an accident is hardly remarkable (although perhaps a little more noteworthy than I’d like to admit, based on
recent experience). Well, I thought so. And I’ve got a free lunch. And I didn’t have to hurt myself to do so. Which is probably for the best: based on the number of forms I had to fill out to get root access on the systems I administer, I don’t want to think how complicated the
accident book must be…
We don’t get wind in Oxford: not wind like this, anyway. The air is passionate and angry, full of bitter sea salt and wild energy. It smells like Aberystwyth… and still a little like
“home”.
But this time I’m here as a visitor, of course. Just another tourist: and that’s a very strange and alien feeling, to me.
On this day in 1999 I sent out the fourth of my Cool Thing Of The
Day To Do In Aberystwyth e-mails. I wasn’t blogging at the time (although I did have a blog previously), but I felt that it would be nice to do something to help keep in touch with
my friends and family “back home”, so I came up with Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth. Every day I’d send back a bulk e-mail about something that I’d gotten up
to during my first months at the University. Some of them were pretty tame, but some were more spectacular, like the time some of my hallmates and I tried to steal a golf course, piece by piece. Many of them just appear
dated, like the one where I balk at having over 3.25GB of digital music. I was having a
great time, and I wanted to share it with my friends, even when my college-mate Richard wrote to say that he didn’t believe me.
When I finally got around to re-integrating my old blog entries (well, the ones I could recover) from the last millennium into my new blog, I also decided to include the Cool
Thing Of The Day, with a few minor amendments.
The dates on many of them aren’t actually accurate, because when I re-imported them I made the assumption that I sent one every day, which wasn’t the case (it was actually one every two
or three days, and they went on into 2000, which isn’t correctly reflected any longer). However, the date for this particular one is pretty close. On this day in 1999, I bought tickets
to see Craig Charles during his Live On Earth tour, at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
Looking Forward
When we actually went to see Craig Charles, it was after a couple
of heavy nights partying all around the UK, to celebrate the birthdays of my friends Andy and Reb (Reb would later go on to become my girlfriend, although we had a
friends-with-benefits arrangement going on for a long while before then). We started the party in a few London pubs and a club, and then Andy and my friend Gary sobered up as fast as
they could to drive back to Aberystwyth, arriving just before the sunrise, while Reb and I took the train behind them.
Cool Thing Of The Day died in January, after I became bored of it and was finding it harder and harder to do new and cool things that would justify keeping it on. Many of my
friendships with the people who received the newsletter waned, but I still keep in touch with most of the recipients of it, albeit only occasionally.
Craig Charles was pretty good. I bumped into him afterwards in the Glengower Hotel bar
where he apparently later got into a fight with a local.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
Do you remember the RockMonkey Wiki? Many years ago, Ruth bought the domain name rockmonkey.org.uk as a
gift for Andy K, who’d been nicknamed “Rock Monkey” for longer than anybody could remember. He decided that what he wanted to host there was a wiki engine, and I helped him get one set
up. Soon, every Abnibber and Troma Night veteran was using it, filling the pages with all kinds of
junk.
Soon, Jon launched the wiki’s first WikiGame: a maze exploration game using littered with Dungeon Master Java
screenshots and monsters aplenty (monsters like Tubgirl and Lesbians and The Splurg). This kicked off a series of other WikiGames, mostly by Jon, Andy R, and myself (although Andy K started about a dozen of them and Ruth got some way through developing her first).
My biggest contribution was probably TromaNightAdventure, a text-based adventure in which the player attempts to explore Aberystwyth to collect (at least) three Troma Night stars, some
pizza, some beer, and some films. It was an epic quest, far larger than I’d meant for it to grow, with multiple non-linear ways to win and a scoring system that told you exactly by how
much you’d beaten it (some, but few, people managed to score the maximum number of points).
The screenshot above isn’t from the RockMonkey Wiki. It’s from my relaunched version of Troma Night
Adventure. That’s right: I’ve dug up the final backup of the RockMonkey Wiki, extracted the relevant content, knocked together a mini version of the wiki engine and the
WikiGameToolkit, and re-launched the game. It’s read-only, of course: this isn’t a real wiki; the real wiki is long-gone. But it does have a few extra features than the original, like a
pictorial inventory and a nippy Ajax-powered interface. If you’re looking for some nostalgia about the old RockMonkey Wiki or about Troma Nights back in Aberystwyth, here’s your ticket:
Strokey Adamjust realised, in only his fifth blog post in the last 12 months, that it’s now ten years since he first moved to Aberystwyth. I
remember when I came to the same point, last year, and sent a scary e-mail to the new student who adopted my University username. In Adam’s blog post, he talks briefly about his experience of leaving
home and going to university, and now says that he’s “…realising that life will probably never be as much fun again as it was in Aber.”
Now I’m a huge fan of nostalgia, but I’m going to take Kit’s side on this one. Kit pointed out that “…a massive
chunk of the Aber effect is the people…”, and he’s right. It took until only a year or two before I left for that to start to become clear to me, and it never really became true
until I thought about it in hindsight, after moving to Earth.
Earlier this year, Roryannounced out that for him, at last, “It’s time to leave Aber,” going on to observe that “Most of the people reading this
have either already buggered off or are making preparations to do so. Expect to see plenty of moving related drama from us all as we rip up our roots, climb out of our ruts and
generally start fleeing for more fertile pastures.”
He was right. The exodus had already begun, as many of the people we’d gotten used to seeing on a week-to-week (sometimes day-to-day) basis had already left. In the case of Rory and I,
among a few others, we’d seen this all before – over the course of a decade you’ll see a lot of people move away from a university town. But there was something special about
the last few years in Aber: for the first time, we were finally seeing all of the “hangers-on” beginning to disappear. The people who you’d begun to suspect were never going to pack up
and go were at long last moving on.
Coming back to Strokey Adam’s thought: I don’t agree with the notion that everything in Aber was whiskers on rainbows and kittens in the sky. Sure, it was fun, but like Kit said: what
made it fun were the people. And the people still exist! I’m not denying that there’s things I miss. Liz
recently said to me that she missed that time “…when you could make a phone call or send a few texts… and within half an hour you could be sat in a pub with all your closest
friends,” and I miss that too. But it’s not as if all those people fell off the face of the Earth. There’s always some excuse, just on the horizon, for people to get
together again, whether we’re talking about the West Blockhouse excursion, Murder Mystery parties, or any of the many, many weddings and similar parties that seem to just keep on
cropping up (why is everybody getting married? I don’t know, but the parties are fabulous!).
I think that there’s a tendency for many people to remember their youth in a particular way. Nostalgia is an important part of our identity, and it’s valuable for people to be able to point at the happy events
of their past and say “That’s me. I am that person, who did those great things.” But for me, defining myself in terms of the past seems to be a little bit too much like tying myself to
it. I want to be able to move on, to keep exploring, and to find new and exciting things to be involved with and to be happy about. Sure, I’m sickeningly nostalgic (comes with age), and
I love to spin a yard about the more-ludicrous things I used to get up to during my university days… but I’d like to think that what defines me better is what I’m doing now.
Like Marty McFly, we can visit the past, but we shouldn’t want to get stuck there. Unless you really like Huey Lewis.
If you’re looking to steep in a little more nostalgia and navel-gazing, I’ve got two more nostalgia-laden blog posts planned for this month: one coming later this week,
hopefully, when I have a change to kick the magic box that will make it work, and the second scheduled for the end of this month, when as part of my On This Day series I’ll be looking back to my first year at Aberystwyth, too.
On this day in 2006 I’d just come to the end of a long weekend of coding
and socialising. The code project was, of course, Three Rings, and Bryn and Gareth were helping out with the big push to make the
initial release Three Rings 2 a success.
Three Rings is, of course, a project to streamline the administration of helpline services (like Samaritans) by making it easier for them to manage their rota and volunteer resources. I kicked the project off back in 2002 (based on an idea that
Kit and I had discussed as early as 2000), initially only for Aberystwyth Nightline – with whom I was then a volunteer – but it quickly
spread and within a few years had become the de facto system for Nightlines everywhere. Later, my work with expanding and enhancing Three Rings comprised a part of my University dissertation.
Among the problems with that early version of Three Rings, though, was that it had never been designed to scale, and so eventually the time came to throw it out and develop a new one,
from scratch, in the then up-and-coming Ruby on Rails framework. Gareth was a huge help in the early
development, and Bryn got burdened with the task of coming up with a means to convert the data between the old system and the new system, migrating our users across: a horrendous task,
because the two systems used completely incompatible data storage mechanisms, and the old system was riddled with quirks and workarounds. This weekend, back in 2006, was the cumulation
of that work: Bryn hacking away on his Project: Rosetta system, a stack of Perl programs to translate the data… while Gareth and I made progress on redeveloping features
for the new system.
It wasn’t all work, though: we also all took a trip up to nearby Ynyslas, a little way North of Aberystwyth, for a barbeque on the sweeping sand dunes there. As my blog post for that
weekend reveals, this involved a fantastic prank in which Claire and I “hid” Jimmy by burying him under the sand, covering his face with an upturned cardboard box, and then frightening the shit out of Gareth when he –
having been told that Jimmy hadn’t come – lifted the box to find Jimmy’s disembodied head staring back at him.
Looking Forward
Since that day, Three Rings has continued to grow and expand – it’s now used by a number of charities nationwide, and exists as a company in it’s own right. Gareth and Bryn are no
longer directly involved with the project, but parts of their code live on in the system, ticking away in the background.
Ruth now plays a major part in the development of the system, and it actually formed part of her
dissertation, too, meaning that my dissertation (which Bryn still has, after he borrowed it to help him write Rosetta) was actually cited as a reference in another
document: something which pleased me inordinately.
Claire and Jimmy got together a year and a bit ago, and they’re now living together, still in Aberystwyth (not that you’d know from reading either of their blogs, slackers that they
are).
And we haven’t had a barbeque yet since moving to Earth, but weather-permitting, the
plan is to do so this week!
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
Just thought I’d briefly share all of the different ways I’ve been saying goodbye to Aberystwyth and the people there, along with some photos:
Goodbye Friends
I’d hoped to make a proper blog post about the barbecue/bonfire we’d had to “see of” JTA and I (and later Paul, who’s leaving later this year, and sort-of Ruth, who’ll now be visiting far less-frequently), but I decided to wait until Rory got around to uploading the photos he’d taken. He still hadn’t done so by the time I left town, so, you’re stuck with the handful of pictures
that I took.
Sam, both Rorys, Gareth, Jimmy and Claire
You can even see Rory on the right of that first photo, taking pictures, the swine. As usual for our beach barbecues there was no shortage of food nor booze, and a copious
quantity of firewood. Also a huge amount of paper and cardboard which needed disposing of before the move, which lead to one of the most violently spectacular beach fires we’ve ever had
– perhaps second only to the time that Kit, Claire and I found large parts of a bar (as in, one that you serve drinks over at a pub) and ignited it , many years ago.
Satoko and Paul
As the light grew dim I recited a poem that I’d thrown together earlier that evening, for the occasion, expressing my fondness for this place where I’ve spent the last decade or so. I’d
promised that I’d put it online, so here it is:
MEMORIES OF AN OLD FRIEND AND FORMER LOVER
In nineteen hundred and eighty five,
When I was – ooh – nay high. [with gesture sadly absent when recited over Internet]
I first set eyes on this Welsh town,
It’s mountains, sea and sky.
And beach (sans sand) and shops
(now closed), and pier (missing an end).
And thought myself, “This place, perhaps,
Could someday be my friend.”
Thirteen years passed – lucky for some –
And found me here again
In search of a place to come and learn
[I had a line here about how long it takes to get here by train, but I’ve lost it!]
My open day was sunny (aren’t they all?
how do they make it so?)
As I visited the campus and
The quaint town down below
That day, as I sat on that hill, [again with the gestures! – this was Consti, of course] looked down,
And saw a pair of dolphins play
I realised I’d found a friend: this town
And loved her, in a way.
My love and I were something sweet.
My friends; they envied me,
As she and I would come back, merry,
With a traffic cone or three.
Ten years I gave her of my life,
And treasure every one.
A decade’s love and hope and dreams under
Wales’ (intermittent) sun.
But this was young love: first love, p’rhaps
And wasn’t built to last,
And so the time draws swiftly near
That it becomes: the past.
The friend I’ll think of, as I chew
A slice of Bara Brith
She’ll always be here, in my heart,
Beautiful Aberystwyth.
In other news, you have no idea how hard it is to find fitting rhymes for “Aberystwyth”.
JTA
Goodbye Samaritans
Of course, I’d hoped to say goodbye to the Samaritans branch where I’d volunteered for the
last few years, and I’d hoped to do so at an upcoming curry night that had been organised at the branch. Little did I know that more than just an excuse to say goodbye, this little
party had been geared up almost entirely to see off Ruth, JTA and I. There were tears in our eyes as we saw some of the adaptations to the training room.
The Training Room at Aberystwyth Samaritans
The meal was spectacular, the beer and wine flowed freely, and we each left with a special gift showing how much the branch cared for each of us. I still have no idea how they managed
to orchestrate so much of this without any of us having a clue that we were letting ourselves in for more than just a curry and a pint or two.
As I left the branch for the last time, I passed the reminder sign that reads “Have you signed up for your next shift?” and thought, with a little sadness – no, no I haven’t.
Goodbye SmartData
As if there weren’t enough curry in my diet, the lads from SmartData and I went
out to the Light of Asia for a meal and a few drinks (during, before, and after) to “see me off”. This
felt strange, because I’m not leaving SmartData – at least not for the foreseeable future – but continuing to work for them remotely in my office on Earth that I’ve taken to calling “SmartData’s Oxford branch”. But this does mark the end of me
seeing them (at least in person) on a day-to-day basis, and it was also an excuse to catch up with former co-worker Gareth, who came along too.
I should have thought to take a picture.
Goodbye Claire
I couldn’t have felt like I’d said goodbye to my life in Aberystwyth without saying goodbye to Claire, who’s been a huge part of it for, well, almost eight years. She and I got together
one evening in my final week, there, to break apart the QFrames (the picture frames full of mementoes from QParty). It was a somewhat emotionally heavy time, but – I suppose – an
important part of getting some closure on our break-up, last year: if there was ever going to
be a part of me that was perpetually tied to Aberystwyth, it’d be the half-dozen picture frames full of photos and letters and gifts that represented “us” that I was lugging around.
Now, I’ve got to find something new with which to furnish the walls of Earth, and my housemates seem keen to help with this mission.
It’s been a long process – saying goodbye to everybody – but at least that’s the Aberystwyth chapter complete. Right: what’s next?
It’s been said that Aberystwyth is like a black hole, and that once you’re sucked into it, you can never leave. Sure, it’s okay to fly-by, so long as you keep it at arms’ reach for,
say, three to five years… but if you get caught in the pull of the place, it becomes harder and harder to ever leave.
I realised this early on. When I visited Aberystwyth on a University open day, back in 1998, I was so impressed with the place that I came down for a second open day, in 1999, even
though I’d already decided that this was where I wanted to be. Later, after I’d settled down, I promised myself that no matter what, I’d get out of here before ten years was up. That was the personal limit, I’d
decided, to the strength of the emotional rocket boosters required to reach escape velocity once you’re spiraling into the Aberystwyth black hole.
It’s a nice place to live for a while, as anybody who’s spent any amount of time here knows. And I’m sure it’d be a great place to retire, too. But sooner or later it’s time to move on:
time to escape from the dodgy brownouts and the shaky
Internet access, to go somewhere where there are transport links and cinemas with more than one screen and shops that don’t close on Wednesday afternoon. Time to live in a place
where English is the only language of which a long-term resident is expected to have a working knowledge and where graduate salaries actually appear on the same scale as the national
average. Time, in short, to move on.
It feels like the end of a chapter. Give or take a few years, it feels like I’ve divided these almost-thirty years of my life into three distinct chapters, each set in a different
locale. Each new chapter feels like a fresh start, like opening a brand new diary for the first time, and each brings new challenges, new experiences, new friends, and new
opportunities. And that’s almost as exciting as it is terrifying.
For the greatest time, I never expected to be here this long. When I was doing my degree, I couldn’t have forseen that I would stay here for long after I finished my degree – perhaps to hang around in academia for a few more years, or perhaps not. But
by then I’d met Claire, and that was a game-changer for me: the end of her (extended) degree would have conveniently
put me close to my ten-year limit, but when she was offered the opportunity to stay on and do a PhD, funded, in the specific area of her choice, that gave me reason to rethink. Eleven or twelve years can’t be
so bad, can it?
Of course, after Claire and I broke up last year, my plans changed, and it wasn’t long after
then that I announced that I’d be leaving town
in 2010. I spent some time considering all of my various options for habitation, work, and the like, and it’s only this and last month that plans have really begun to become concrete.
So here’s the plan:
I’ll be leaving town in the first fortnight of next month, and moving to Oxford. There, Ruth, JTA and I (and later to be joined by Paul) will be living in
the house that we’re renting, a little to the North-East of the city. Ruth will still be working where she is now, and – confusingly – I’ll still be working primarily for SmartData, here in Aberystwyth. While everybody else in the world is looking at living where it’s cheap and working where it’s
expensive, I’m going to be doing exactly the opposite, at least for the time being.
That’s our new house! And for those of you of a The Sims-playing bent, there’s a floorplan below for you to print out. You’ll have to make your own dollies of the four of us to
play with in it, though. You freak.
I find myself filled with apprehension and anticipation at what seems to be an exciting new step forwards in my recent life, but also with an almost-overpowering sense of nostalgia for
everything that’s happened here in Aberystwyth. In a way, this blog so far represents precisely that – the Aberystwyth chapter of my life – the last decade. I’ve had some great times
with some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met: some of them since moved-on themselves, and others still here, caught in the Aber tractor beam. Packing up the remnants and
artefacts of my life here, it’s easy to let my mind wander, find my way back to all the things I’ve done and been.
It’s a happy chapter, overall. And this upcoming move, next month, is a fitting end. When you heard the tone, please insert the next CD to continue the story.
Oh, and now the important bit: we’ll be having a fire on the beach (probably including all of the furniture that we don’t want!) on the evening of Friday 28th May,
instead of Troma Night. This will be the “goodbye Dan & JTA (and Paul, later)” party – I’ll be around for another week and my final Troma Night in Aber, the following week, but
JTA will be gone. Anyway, I’d love to see you there, whoever you are. I’ll announce more details closer to the time through the usual text-message based channels, but if you don’t
usually receive those and you would like to come, leave a comment and let me know. Ta!
It may come as a surprise to you that the stuff I write about on my blog – whether about technology, dreams, food, film, games, relationships, or my life in general – isn’t actually
always written off-the-cuff. To the contrary, sometimes a post is edited and re-edited over the course of weeks or months before it finally makes it onto the web. When I wrote late last
year about some of my controversial ideas about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with telling children about Santa Claus, I’m sure that it looked like it had been inspired by the run-up to Christmas. In actual fact, I’d begun writing it six
months earlier, as summer began, and had routinely visited and revisited it from time to time until I was happy with it, which luckily coincided with the Christmas season.
As an inevitable result of this process, it’s sometimes the case that a blog post is written or partially-written and then waits forever to be finished. These forever-unready,
never-published articles are destined to sit forever in my drafts folder, gathering virtual dust. These aren’t the posts which were completed but left unpublished – the ones where it’s
only upon finishing writing that it became self-evident that this was not for general consumption – no, the posts I’m talking about are those which honestly had a chance but just didn’t
quite make it to completion.
Well, today is their day! I’ve decided to call an amnesty on my incomplete blog posts, at long last giving them a chance to see the light of day. If you’ve heard mention of declaring
inbox bankruptcy, this is a similar concept: I’m
sick of seeing some of these blog articles which will never be ready cluttering up my drafts folder: it’s time to make some space! Let the spring cleaning begin:
It’s been a bit of a day for nostalgia. It started even before I woke up, when I was dreaming about an argument that could have marked the end of Claire and I’s relationship, if it weren’t for the fact that it didn’t even slighly
represent the actual circumstances of our seperation (I’ll spare you all the details). I was woken by a phone call from a company with whom I used to deal. Later, I caught up
with an old friend via instant messanger, in what was probably my only delibrate act of nostalgia of the day. Finally, while working this evening on a techy project that’s been part of
my life for about the last eight years, the random number generator in my MP3 playing software decided all of its own accord that what I’d really like to listen to is the same music
I was listening to when I first started on the project.
Did I not get the memo that this is National Nostalgia Day, or something? Is everything conspiring around me, or is this all a coincidence?
The thing I’ve learned about nostalgia is that it’s generally best left as it is: a collection of figments in your mind. Some are accurate, some mis-remembered, and all are seen through
glasses tinted with the colour of hindsight. And that’s great: that’s exactly how your brain is supposed to experience times past. If you’re an optimist, like me, it’s easy to pick out
your favourite memories and pretend that your life gone by was all as great as your happiest moments. If you’re a pessimist, well: you probably do the same thing, but compare those
great memories to how awful things are right now (and you’re wrong, but I can’t just tell you that and give you a more rational worldview, just as your cynicism won’t “fix” me, either).
That’s inevitable, of course: think back to the moment in your life at which you felt the most content that you ever have – at least that comes right to your mind. Unless your time on
the planet has been a continuous curve of improvement, with no ups-and-downs, then there’s something remarkable about that moment: it’s not right now. Well duh, of
course it isn’t. The most elementary mathematics would indicate that of all of the experiences in your life, there has to be some kind of regression toward the mean going on: what
you’re experiencing now should, on average, be representative of your life so far even before you factor in the Von Restoroff effect and other cognitive biases.
But I digress. My point was this: I would love to be able to finish what I’m working on and go play a game of Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle with folks like Bryn and Kit and Liz and Strokey Adam, just like I did over six and a half years ago. But
that’s not my life nowadays. And while I can get all doe-eyed about how awesome the Ship & Castle used to be before they gutted it and made it look like a trendy wine bar (apologies to
those of you for whom this is the news being broken of its demise), or I can pine for the days that those friends – now long-gone – used to all live a stone’s throw away from me, but
that’s not the full story. I don’t miss being even poorer than I am now, I don’t miss having to juggle my academic life with holding down a job, and a certainly don’t miss being quite
so arrogant as I was back then (for those of you who’ve only recently met me; think of me now, only more so).
Nostalgia is like alcohol: it’s great in moderation, but if you get too much of it, or you become dependent upon it, then you’re liable to get stuck and not be able to move on. And I
think that’s the message I should be taking away from this morning’s dream.
(and now, in a somewhat ironic and roundabout way, I’d better stop writing so I can go and play board games with the current Aber crew, as part of a tradition that
started with Chez Geek in the Ship & Castle, all those years ago…)
I’d just like to take a moment to say how amazing my friends are. It’s likely to be a little sappy: for those of you who like your blog posts on the other side of the wall, please
switch off your eyes now.
Earlier this month, I blogged about Claire and I’s break-up. For many of the people I know, this will have been the very first they’ll have heard about it. Over the 36 hours or so that followed, I was
completely swamped by consolations and concern: by comment, text message, Facebook,
instant message, e-mail and phone – as well as in person from those I’ve seen in the meantime. Every single one of those messages is appreciated so very much. Thank you all.
And that’s not even mentioning the check-ins that people have made in the weeks since. It’s so kind of you all. I hope that Claire’s feeling as supported as I’ve been lucky enough to
feel.
So how’s it going? That’s what everybody asks. Well…
…it’s still difficult. I’m not sure why I might have expected anything else: Claire and I were together for a quarter of my life so far. I still cry quite a lot, especially when
Grooveshark Radio conspires against me and decides to queue up a whole series of songs that remind me of her. I
don’t see as much of her as I used to, and I miss her, but when we’re together I often find it quite painfully awkward: even just down to little things, like the times that I realise
that for the last few minutes I’d forgotten we aren’t a couple. I’m intensely keen on us being friends, and at least salvaging the awesome friendship we’ve shared for most of the
millenium, but it’s not as comfortable as I’d like.
As I’ve said to a handful of people, now: without Claire, there’s no compelling reason for me to stay in Aberystwyth, so in the New Year, I’ll be aiming to leave town. I’m not sure
where I’ll go, yet, or what I’ll do, but I’ve got some ideas. Today, I told my boss about my situation and that I’d like to start taking steps to make sure that the company can do
without me: the joy of small-team development, eh?
When I first came to town, I promised myself that I wouldn’t get caught in the trap of being “stuck” here. I realised that Aberystwyth was a place that I could really fall in love with,
and I promised myself that I wouldn’t stay more than ten years.
That was ten years and two months ago. I think it’s time to leave my love behind.
To: Daniel Hill <dlh9@….>
From: Dan Q <dan@….>
Subject: Aberystwyth University Is Awesome! Warning: Your Experience May Differ.
Dear Daniel,
There’s an age-old tradition amongst Aberystwyth graduates, and in particular amongst Computer Science graduates. But to truly understand it, you first need to understand a
little bit about Aberystwyth University. Also, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion (you’ll “get” that joke by your second year, if you don’t already).
As you know, your username is “dlh9”. There’s a reason for that: The letters are your initials. “But I don’t have a middle name,” I hear you cry (or, at least, not one that the
University know about), “Where’s the ‘L’ come from?” Well, it turns out that Information Services, who look after all of the computer networks, have a System [TM]. And their System
[TM] is that staff get usernames like “abc”, undergrads get “abc1”, postgrads get “abc12”.
(this has lead to some awesome usernames: for example, “bed” used to be the username of somebody from Residential Services, and “sad” was once the username of one of the counsellors
at the Students’ Union)
Anyway, I digress. I was talking about usernames. The digit in your username is the year you started your course. So, because you’re starting this year, yours is “9” (see, ‘cos it’s
2009 – get it?). You’re not allowed to spend more than nine years getting your degree, so that’s a pretty good primary key (you probably know what one of those is, but if not, you
will before the academic year is out). Postgraduates get two digits because they often hang around for years and years. I don’t know what would happen if somebody spent a century
getting their PhD, but I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be pretty.
And so there’s been a long-standing tradition amongst Aber grads, and particularly Comp. Sci. Aber grads, and especially particularly Comp. Sci. Aber
grads-who-graduated-and-got-jobs-in-Aberystwyth and never got around to leaving… that when their username comes up for “renewal” – when a decade passes after they first started their
course – they finger (you’ll learn what that means soon enough, too) the Aber computer systems and check if their username has been re-assigned. It’s a great way to make yourself feel
old, as if the annual influx of younger-every-year Freshers didn’t do that perfectly well already.
Over the years, I’ve seen many friends play this little game. Some of them won, but most of them lost – it turns out that the odds aren’t really on your side: there are 17,576
conceivable username combinations each year – from aaa9 to zzz9 – and only 3,000 new students, so odds are less than 50% whether or not you ignore the statistical biases that mean
that things like “qxz9” (Quentin X. Zachary?) are basically never going to turn up.
So imagine my surprise when I, for the first time, get to play the game, today… and I not only win, but I get a double-win, because the person to whom my old username has been
recycled is an undergraduate in my old department!
Yes: I was the last owner of “dlh9”. I was “dlh9” from 1999, when I started, to 2004, when I graduated, an alumni of the Computer Science Department at what was then the University of
Wales, Aberystwyth (it changed it’s name to Aberystwyth University shortly afterwards – this, combined with the fact that I have since changed my name by deed poll, means that I am
the proud owner of a degree certificate that contains neither my name nor the name of an existing university!). At the time, my name was Daniel Huntley – I didn’t have a middle name,
either – and I spent five years getting a four-year degree in Software Engineering before I started working for a software company here in this very town. I haven’t yet got around to
leaving.
It still feels strange to write an e-mail to your e-mail address – my old e-mail address. It feels like I’m writing an e-mail to myself. I wonder what I’d have made of it if I’d have
received this e-mail when I first arrived at University. It’s not so hard to imagine: the person I am now would be unrecognisable to the person I was back then, just like I am a
complete stranger to you, but writing to you nonetheless. But even if you discard this e-mail and never think of it again, you’ll have done me a wonderful service by allowing me the
chance to participate in a fascinating thought experiment that has granted me a great and deep nostalgia for the time I spent at that University.
(by the way; I apologise if your e-mail address is still getting the spam it used to get when it belonged to me)
Like me, Aber’s changed over the last ten years. The University’s changed, and the Computer Science Department has changed too. But I’m sure that you’ll find the place as beautiful
and as satisfying as it has always been: this remarkable town on the West coast of Wales, where the mountains meet the sea, full of strange and quirky characters, a million miles from
anywhere, and truly unique. I find myself longing for you to have *my* experience of Aberystwyth; to do all the great things I did, to meet all the great people I did – but you won’t.
You won’t have the same lovers; you won’t discover the same music; you won’t join the same clubs; you won’t have the same beautiful sunsets while you roast burgers on disposable
barbeques and the rising tide laps at your ankles; you won’t have the same hangovers; you won’t scrape through the same exams; you won’t steal the same traffic cones; you won’t climb
the same mountains. A different story told differently.
You won’t have any of the things that made my time here in Aberystwyth so wonderful for the last ten years, but don’t dispair, because you’ll have something far better – you’ll have
all of your own marvellous experiences. Mine are mine in nostalgia alone, but yours are yet to come. And I hope you have an ass-kickingly good time, because that’s what every Aber
Comp. Sci undergrad deserves when they come to this magical corner of the world.
When you get as far as your lectures, tell Richard Shipman I said “Hi”. That’ll put you in
his good books, I’m sure. ;-)
And if you see me around town, give me a wave and I’ll buy you a pint. If you got nothing else from reading this old man’s drivel, you just earned yourself a free pint. When I was a
student, I’d have called that a win-win. Your experience may differ.
I’m going to be up on the University campus all day tomorrow (Monday 28th September), helping out at the Samaritans stand at the Freshers’ Fair. If you’re on or near Penglais, come by and say hi, or drop me a text and we can hook up for
lunch.
Sloppy blogging, on my part, but I’ve been a busy boy lately and haven’t had time to say a lot. On the other hand, I’ve been twittering a little (but don’t worry, you’ll never catch me telling the world what’s on my sandwiches at lunchtime or what song I’m listening to right
this second… unless, of course, it’s a dolphin steak and cream cheese sandwich or I’m listening to the 1995 Beatles Reunion Album or something else that’s actually worth remarking about).
Adam’s Big Birthday
What have I been up to, then. Well; there was Adam‘s 30th birthday, which shall probably hereafter be known as
“Adam’s twenty-mmgphhnn <cough> th birthday”, which – as it seems he’s not going to say anything about, I suppose I ought to, not least because it’s an excuse to share
some photos I might not otherwise have bothered to.
His birthday fell on a Troma Night, so Ruth baked a stack of muffins which were subsequently decorated by everybody who got to Troma Night before Adam did. The idea was to decorate
them with “all of his favourite things”… can you begin to imagine what a stack of muffins look like when they’re iced with the BBC logo, twinkly little stars, ejaculating penises, a
TARDIS, and – on one particularly well-decorated muffin (thanks Penny!) – a fabulous looking Dalek.
The Dalek is particularly impressive, yeah? I was impressed, anyway.
Andy & Sian Visit
The other thing that’s occupied plenty of my time is the string of visiting friends we’ve had in town. First up was Andy & Sian, who came up from Cardiff to open the new football stand for Aber Town,
in memory of Sian’s brother, who died suddenly a few years ago.
It was great to catch up with them, eat curry with them, and play board games with them, especially as I hadn’t expected to see either of them again before the oft-promised Cardiff Is Amazing (are we still doing this, folks? how does the new proposed date sound to everybody?).
Jen & Nick Visit
Next up on the visiting queue were Jen and her new man, Nick. She’d been planning to come as part of her tour of the UK (I gather that she was at a wedding somewhere over
here, too).
Nick’s a fab chap, and he and Jen make a great couple. Oh, and I got a video of Nick and
Claire singing karaoke at the Inn on the Pier.
Incidentally, Jen: is this your watch? If so, you’ve left it here – where do you want me to post it?
Matt P Visits
Next up was Matt‘s visit, over Easter weekend. Claire and I hadn’t even gotten around to putting away our inflatable bed since Jen & Nick had borrowed it the previous weekend, which turned out to
be convenient on account of the fact that it saved us from having to get it back out again.
Ruth organised a collaborative Easter egg hunt for us all (by which I mean; she supplied us all with Easter eggs, each with somebody else’s name on, which we had to hide) out in a
nature reserve in the Rheidol Valley, which was a lot of fun. Rory‘s posted a fantastic video from the event, featuring mostly me looking like a prat as I hunt for the most
obviously-hidden egg in the history of egg-hiding.
On Easter Sunday I ate too much. But I didn’t turn into a
butterfly, just a big flabby ball of chocolate-muching.
And There’s More…
Andy & Faye are in Aberystwyth
until tomorrow morning. Didn’t know they were here? Nor did I, until Andy was
already on a train. I guess this counts as a “stealth visit.” I got to meet up with them for a smoothie after work yesterday, but couldn’t make it out to the pub with them. I
invited them to Sci-Fi Night, though, but I don’t know if they’re up for that or not. In any case, you all know where to find them, now, so I feel like I’ve done my part to decloak
them, in that way I do.
And I gather that Bryn will be down for the weekend as part of some variety of LUG gathering. Don’t people phone, text or blog ahead any more? What’s the world
coming to?
Plenty more to say, but I’ll save it for another day.
