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:
Title: Typically Busy Unpublished since: March 2004
Unpublished because: Better-expressed by another post, abandoned
In this post, I talk about how busy my life is feeling, and how this is pretty much par for the course. It’s understandable that I was feeling so pressured: at the time we were having
one of our particularly frenetic periods at SmartData, I was fighting to finish my dissertation, and I was trying to find time to train for my upcoming cycle tour of Malawi.
The ideas I was trying to express later appeared in a post entitled I’m Still In Aber. Yay, in a much more-optimistic form.
Title: Idloes, Where Art Thou? Unpublished since: June 2004
Unpublished because: Got distracted by rebuilding the web server on which my blog is hosted, after a technical fault
In anticipation of my trip to Malawi, I was prescribed an anti-malarial drug, Lariam, which – in accordance with the directions – I began taking daily doses of several weeks before travelling.
It seemed silly in the long run; I never even saw a single mosquito while I was over there, but better safe than sorry I suppose. In any case, common side-effects of Lariam include
delusions, paranoia, strange dreams, hallucinations, and other psychological
effects. I had them in spades, and especiallytheweirdtrippydreams.
This blog post described what could have been one of those dreams… or, I suppose, could have just been the regular variety of somewhat-strange dream that isn’t uncommon for me. In the
dream I was living back in Idloes, a tall Aberystwyth townhouse where I’d rented a room during 2002/2003. In the dream, the house caught fire one night, and my landlady, Anne, was
killed. Apparently the fire was started by her electric blanket.
Title: Are We Alone In The Universe? Unpublished since: March 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, beaten to the punchline
Here’s an example of an article that I went back to, refining and improving time and time again over a period of years, but still never finished. I was quite pleased with the
direction it was going, but I just wasn’t able to give it as much time as it needed to reach completion.
The Drake Equation
In the article, I examine the infamous Drake Equation, which estimates the likelihood of
there being intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy (more specifically, it attempts to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations “out there”). Which is all well and good, but
the only way to put the formula into practice is to effectively pull unknowable numbers out of the air and stuff them into the equation to get, in the end, whatever answer you like. The
only objective factors in the entire equation are those relating to the number of stars in the galaxy, and everything else is pure conjecture: who honestly thinks that they can estimate
the probability of any given species reaching sentience?
The post never got finished, and I’ve since seen other articles, journals, and even stand-up comedians take apart the Drake Equation in a similar way to that which I intended, so I
guess I’ve missed the boat, now. If you want to see the kind of thing I was working on, here it is
but better-written. I wonder what the probability is that a blog post will never end up being published to the world?
Title: Why Old People Should Be Grumpy Unpublished since: October 2006
Unpublished because: Never finished, possibly bullshit
In this post, I put forward a theory that grumpy old people are a positive sign that a nation is making just enough change to not be stagnant: something about the value of
keeping older people around crossed with the importance of taking what they say with a pinch of salt, because it’s not them that has to live in the world of tomorrow. I can’t even
remember what the point was that I was trying to make, and my notes are scanty, but I’m sure it was a little bit of a one-sided argument for social change with an underdeveloped
counter-argument for social stability.
In any case, I left it for years and eventually gave up on it.
Title: The Games That Didn’t Make The List Unpublished since: July 2007
Unpublished because: I could have kept refining it forever and still never finish it
After my immensely popular list of 10 Computer Games That
Stole My Life, I received a great deal of feedback – either as direct feedback in the form of comments or indirectly in other people’s blogs. Reading through this feedback got me
thinking about computer games that had stolen my life which I hadn’t mentioned. Not wanting to leave them out, I put together a list of “games that didn’t make the list”: i.e.
games which could also have been said to steal my life, but which I didn’t think of when I wrote my original top ten. They included:
Castles and Castles 2
The original Castles was one of the first non-free PC computer games I ever
owned (after Alley Cat, that golf game, and the space
command/exploration game whose name I’ve been perpetually unable to recall). It was a lot of fun; a well-designed game of strategy and conquest. Later, I got a copy of Castles 2 – an early CD-ROM title, back before developers knew quite what to
do with all that space – which was even better: the same castle-building awesomeness but with great new diplomacy and resource-management exercises, as well as siege engines and the
ability to launch your own offensives. In the end, getting Civilization later in the same year meant that it stole more of my time, but I still sometimes dig out Castles 2 and
have a quick game, from time to time.
Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates!
Early during the development of Three Rings, I came across an existing company with the name Three Rings Design, based in the
US. Their major product is a game called Yohoho! Puzzle
Pirates, an MMOG in which players –
as pirates – play puzzle games in order to compete at various tasks (you know, piratey tasks: like sailing, drinking, and swordfighting). Claire and I both got quite deeply involved during the beta, and played extensively, even forming our own crew, The Dastardly Dragons, at one point,
and met some fascinating folks from around the world. When the beta came to an end we both took advantage of a “tester’s bonus” chance to buy lifetime subscriptions, which we both
barely used. Despite the fact that I’ve almost never played the game since then, it still “stole my life” in a quite remarkable way for some time, and my experience with this (as well
as with the Ultima Online beta, which I participated in many years earlier) has
shown me that I should never get too deeply involved with MMORPGs again, lest they take over my life.
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
As a Civilization fan, I leapt on the chance to get myself a copy of Alpha
Centauri, and it was awesome. I actually pirated my first copy of the game, copying it from a friend who I studied with, and loved it so much that I wrapped up the cash value of
the game in an envelope and sent it directly to the development team, asking them to use it as a “beer fund” and have a round on me. Later, when I lost my pirated copy, I bought a
legitimate copy, and, later still, when I damaged the disk, bought another copy, including the (spectacular) add-on pack. Alpha Centauri is the only game I’ve ever loved so
much that I’ve paid for it three times over, despite having stolen it, and it was worth every penny. Despite its age, I still sometimes dig it out and have a game.
Wii Sports Tennis – Target Training
Perhaps the most recent game in the list, this particular part of the Wii
Sports package stole my life for weeks on end while I worked up to achieving a coveted platinum medal at it, over the course of several weeks. I still play it once in a while:
it’s good to put on some dance music and leap around the living room swinging a Wiimote to the beat.
Rollercoaster Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon 2
In the comments to my original post, Rory reminded me of these games which stole my life during my
first couple of years at University (and his, too!). RCT2, in
particular, ate my time for years and still gets an occassional play out of me – but was pipped to the post by OpenTTD, of course.
X-COM series
Another series of games which hooked me while I was young and stayed with me as I grew, the X-COM series (by which – of course – I mean Enemy Unknown, Terror From The Deep, and Apocolypse; not Interceptor and certainly not that
modern travesty, Aftermath). Extremely difficult, each of them took me months or years before I completed them, and I’ve still never finished Apocalypse on anything higher that the
lowest-two difficulty settings.
I wanted to write more and include more games, but by the time I’d made as much progress as I had, above, the moment felt like it had passed, so I quietly dropped the post. I suppose
I’ve now shared what I was thinking, anyway.
Title: Rational Human Interaction Unpublished since: September 2007
Unpublished because: Too pretentious, even for me; never completed
I had some ideas about how humans behave and how their rationality and their emotions can conflict, and what this can mean. And then I tried to write it down and I couldn’t find a happy
medium between being profound and insightful and being obvious and condescending. Later, I realised that I was tending towards the latter and, besides, much of what I was writing was
too self-evident to justify a blog post, so I dropped it.
Title: Long Weekend Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Too long, too wordy, and by the time it was nearing completion it was completely out of date
This post was supposed to be just an update about what was going on in my life and in and around Aber at the time. But as anybody who’s neglected their blog for more than a little while
before may know, it can be far too easy to write about everything that’s happened in the interim, and as a result end up writing a blog post that’s so long that it’ll never be
finished. Or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the highlights of the post – which is all that it should have consisted of, ultimately – were as follows:
It was the Easter weekend on 2008, and town had gone (predictably) quiet, as many of my friends took the opportunity to visit family elsewhere, and there was a particular absence of
tourists this year. Between Matt being in Cornwall, Sarah being out-of-town, and Ruth, JTA, Gareth and Penny off skiing (none of them wrote anything about it, so no
post links there), it felt a little empty at our Easter Troma Night, which was rebranded a Troma Ultralite as it had only two of the requisite four people present: not even the three
needed for a Troma Lite! Similarly, our Geek Night only had four attendees (but that did include Paul, unusually).
Claire and I took a dig through her wardrobe about found that of the skirts and dresses that she famously never
wears, she owns over two dozen of them. Seriously.
I played and reviewed Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, which turned out to be a second-rate
first-person shooter with a reasonably clever alternate history slant. I’m a fan of alternate histories in video games, so this did a good job of keeping me amused over the long bank
holiday weekend.
Paul and I were arranging for a beach-fire-barbeque with Ruth and JTA when they got back, to which we even anticipated attendence from the often-absent not-gay-Gareth.
And finally, I had something to say about Jimmy‘s recent experiences in Thailand, but that’s as far as my draft went and I don’t
remember what I had planned to say…
Title: Confused And Disoriented Unpublished since: April 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Having received mixed feedback about my more-unusual dreams over the years, I’ve taken to blogging about a great number
of them in order to spread the insanity and let others comment on quite how strange my subconscious really is. This was to be one of those posts, and it catalogued two such unusual
dreams.
In the first, I was at my grandma’s funeral (my grandma had died
about two years earlier). A eulogy was given by both my mum and – confusingly – by Andy R. Afterwards,
the crowd present booed them.
In the second, I revisited a place that I’ve dreamed of many times before, and which I think is a reference to some place that I found as a young child, but have never been
able to determine the location of since. In this recurring theme I crawl through a tunnel (possibly of rock, as in a ruined castle) to reach a plateau (again, ruined castle-like), from
which I am able to shuffle around to a hidden ledge. I have such vivid and strong memories of this place, but my faith in my own memory is shaken by the very “dreamlike” aspects of the
event: the tunnel, the “secret place”, as well as the fact that it has appeared in my dreams time and time again for over 15 years. Perhaps it never existed at all: memory is a fragile
and malleable thing, and it’s possible that I made it up entirely.
Some parts of it are less dream-like. For example, I’m aware that I’ve visited this place a number of times at different ages, and that I found it harder to fit through the tunnel to
re-visit my secret childhood hiding place when I was older and larger.
A few years ago, I spoke to my mum about this dream, and described the location in great detail and asked where it might be, and she couldn’t think of anywhere. It’s strange to have
such a strong and profound memory that I can’t justify through the experience of anybody else, and which consistently acts as if it were always just a dream. Maybe it’s real, and maybe
it isn’t… but it’s beginning to sound like I’ll never know for sure.
Title: The Code In The School Unpublished since:May 2008
Unpublished because: Never finished; abandoned
Another dream, right after Troma Night 219, where it seems that the combination of the beer and the trippy nature of the films we watched inspired my brain to run off on a tangent of
it’s own:
In the dream, I was visiting a school as an industrialist (similarly to how I had previously visited Gregynog on behalf of the Computer Science department at Aberystwyth University in 2005,
2006 and 2007). While
there, I was given a challenge by one of the other industrialists to decipher a code represented by a number of coloured squares. A basic frequency analysis proved of no value because
the data set was too small, but I was given a hint that the squares might represent words (sort of like early maritime signal flags). During mock interviews with the students, I used the challenge as a test, to see if I
could get one of them to do it for me, without success. Later in the dream I cracked the message, but I’m afraid I didn’t make a record of how I did so or what the result was.
A particularly famous message represented in maritime signal flags (click for bigger version)
Title: Absence
Unpublished since: May 2008
Unpublished because: Forgotten about; abandoned
At the beginning of the long, hot summer of 2008, I wrote about the immenent exodus of former students (and other hangers-on) from Aberystwyth, paying particular attention to Matt P and to Ele, who left for good at
about this time. And then I forgot that I was writing about it. But Matt
wrote about leaving and Ele wrote about being away, anyway, so I guess my post rapidly became redundant, anyway.
Title: =o( Unpublished since: June 2008
Unpublished because: Too negative; unfinished
I don’t even know what I was complaining about, but essentially this post was making an excuse to mope for a little while before I pull myself together and get things fixed. And that’s
all that remains. It’s possible that it had something to do with this blog post,
but without context I’ve no idea what that one was about, too. Sounds like it was about an argument, and so I’m happier just letting it go, whatever it was, anyway.
Title: Spicy Yellow Split Pea Soup Unpublished since: November 2008 Unpublished because: Got lazy; unfinished
I came up with a recipe for a delicious spicy yellow split pea soup, and wanted to share it with you, so I made myself the stub of a blog entry to remind myself to do so. And then I
didn’t do so. Now I don’t even remember the recipe. Whoops!
In any case, the moral is that pulses make great soup, as well as being cheap and really good for you, and are especially tasty as the days get shorter and winter tightens it’s icy
grip. Also that you shouldn’t leave just a title for a blog post for yourself and expect to fill it in afterwards, because you won’t.
Title: (untitled) Unpublished since: December 2008
Unpublished because: Too busy building, configuring, and working on my new PC, ironically
December is, according to Rory, the season for hardware failures, and given that alongside his troubles, Ruth’s laptop died and Paul’s computer started overheating, all at the same time, perhaps he’s
right. So that’s when my long-serving desktop computer, Dualitoo, decided to kick the bucket as well. This was a particularly awkward time, as I was due to spend a weekend
working my arse off towards a Three Rings deadline. Thankfully, with the help of friends
and family, I was able to pull forward my plans to upgrade anyway and build myself a new box, Nena (which I continue to use to this day).
I began to write a blog post about my experience of building a computer using only local shops (I was too busy to be able to spare the time to do mail order, as I usually would), but I
was unfortunately too busy building and then using – in an attempt, ultimately successful, to meet my deadline – my new computer to be able to spare time to blogging.
But I did learn some valuable things about buying components and building a mid-to-high spec computer, in Aberystwyth, all in one afternoon:
Daton Computers are pretty much useless. Actual exchange:
“Hi, I need to buy [name of component], or another [type of component] with [specification of component].”
“Well, you’ll need to bring your computer in for us to have a look at.”
“Umm; no – I’m building a computer right now: I have [other components], but I really need a [name of component] or something compatible – can you help?”
“Well, not without looking at the PC first.”
“WTF??? Why do you need to look at my PC before you can sell me a [type of component]?”
“So we can tell what’s wrong.”
“But I know what’s wrong! I only took the shrink-wrap off the [other components] this morning: all I need is a [type of component], because I don’t have one! Now can
you sell one to me or not?”
“Well, not without -”
/Dan exits/
Crosswood Computers are pretty much awesome. Actual exchange:
“Hi, remember me? I was in here this morning.”
“Yeah: how’s the rebuild going?”
“Not bad, but I’ve realised that I’m short by a [type of cable]: do you sell them?”
“We’re out of stock right now, but I’ve got some left-over ones in the back; you can have one for free.”
/Dan wins/
It’s possible to do this, but not recommended. The local stores, and in particular Crosswood, are great, but when time allows it’s still preferable to do your component-shopping
online.
I later went on to write more about Nena, when I had the time.
Title: Child Porn Unpublished since: April 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; too much work in writing this article
I had planned to write an article about the history of child pornography, starting well before Operation Ore and leading up to the present day, and to talk about the vilification of paedophiles (they’re the new terrorists!) – to
the point where evidence is no longer as important as the severity of the alleged crime (for particularly awful examples of this kind of thinking, I recommend this article). I’m all in favour of the
criminalisation of child abuse, of course, but I think it’s important that people understand the difference between the producers and the consumers of child porn, as far as a
demonstrable intent to cause harm is concerned.
Anyway, the more I read around the subject, the more I realised that nothing I could write would do justice to the topic, and that others were already saying better what I was thinking,
so I abandoned the post.
Title: 50 Days On An EeePC 1000 Unpublished since: May 2009
Unpublished because: By the time I was making progress, it had been more like 150 days
Earlier in the year, I’d promised that I’d write a review of
my new notebook, an Asus EeePC 1000. I thought that a fun and engaging way
to do that would be to write about the experience of my first 50 days using it (starting, of course, with reformatting it and installing a better operating system than the one provided
with it).
Of course, by the time I’d made any real progress on the article, it was already well-past
50 days (in fact, I’d already changed the title of the post twice, from “30 Days…” to “40 Days…” and then again to “50 Days…”). It’s still a great laptop, although I’ve used it less
than I expected over the last nine months or so (part of my original thinking was to allow me to allow Claire to feel like she’d reclaimed the living room, which was being taken over by
Three Rings) and in some ways it’s been very-recently superceded by my awesome mobile phone.
Title: El De-arr Unpublished since: September 2009
Unpublished because: Too waffley; couldn’t be bothered to finish it; somewhat thrown by breaking up with Claire
Over the years I’ve tried a handful of long-distance romantic relationships, and a reasonable number of short-distance ones, and, in general, I’ve been awful at the former and far
better at the latter. In this blog post I wrote about my experience so far of having a long-distance relationship with Ruth and what was making it work (and what was challenging).
I’m not sure where I was going with it in the first place, but by the time Claire and I broke
up I didn’t have the heart to go back into it and correct all of the references to her and I, so I dropped it.
Title: Knowing What I’m Talking About Unpublished since: October 2009
Unpublished because: Never finished; got distracted by breaking up with Claire
On the tenth anniversary since I started doing volunteer work for emotional support helplines (starting with a Nightline, and most recently for Samaritans), I wrote about a talk I gave at BiCon 2009 on the subject of “Listening Skills for Supporting Others”. It was a little under-attended but
it went well, and there was some great feedback at the end of it. I’d helped out with a workshop entitled “Different Approaches to Polyamory” alongside fire_kitten, but strangely it was this, the workshop whose topic should be that which I have the greater
amount of experience in, that made me nervous.
This blog post was supposed to be an exploration of my personal development over the previous decade and an examination of what was different about giving this talk to giving
countless presentations at helpline training sessions for years that made me apprehensive. I think it could have been pretty good, actually. Unfortunately a lot of blog posts started
around this time never ended up finished as I had other concerns on my plate, but I might come back to this topic if I give a similar presentation at a future conference.
So there we have it: a big cleanse on my perpetually unfinished blog posts. I’ve still got about eight drafts open, so there’s a reasonable chance that I might finish some of them, some
day: but failing that, I’ll wait until another decade or so of blogging is up and I’ll “purge” them all again, then.
And if you had the patience to read all of these – these “17 blog posts in one” – well, thanks! This was more about me than about you, so I don’t mind that plenty of you will have just
scrolled down to the bottom and read this one sentence, too.
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.
