nostalgia – Page 5

On This Day in 2002 (New Job!)

This will be the first time I’ve ever written an On This Day post where I haven’t been able to link back to a blog post that I actually wrote in the year in question. That’s because, in 2002, I was “between blogs”: the only thing I wrote about online that I still have a copy of was the imminent re-launch of AvAngel.com, my vanity site at the time. In that post, however, I did mention that I’d re-written my CV, which was relevant to what was going on in my life in March 2002…

Looking Back

On this day in 2002, I first began working for SmartData, my primary employer for the last nine years. A few months earlier, Reb – my girlfriend whom I’d moved in with in 2001 – and I had broken up, and I’d recently found the opportunity to visit Aberystwyth and visit friends there (the trip during which I first met Claire, although we didn’t get together until a little later). On that same trip to Aber, I also met Simon, who at that point had recently accepted a voluntary redundancy from the Rural Studies department of the University and was getting started with the launch of his software company, SmartData. He’d recently landed a contract with the National Dairy Farm Assured Scheme and needed an extra pair of hands on board to help out with it.

Sorting out premises was coming along somewhat slower than he’d planned, though. As part of the SpinOut Wales scheme, SmartData had been offered cheap accommodation in a University-owned building, but they were dragging their feet with the paperwork. On our first day working together, Simon and I crammed into his tiny home office, shoulder-to-shoulder, to hack code together. The arrangement didn’t last long before we got sick of it, and we “moved in” to the room (that would eventually be legitimately ours) at Peithyll, a former farmhouse in the village of Capel Dewi, near Aberystwyth.

The entrance to Peithyll, Capel Dewi, near Aberystwyth. — The entrance to Peithyll, where SmartData established itself for much of the first six years of its life. It was quite a cycle to get out there every day, but in the summer it made for a great office: not many people can sit at their desk and watch red kites hunting outside, or go for a lunchtime walk up a hill with a picnic.

Over the last nine years since, as the company has grown, I’ve always felt like a core part of it, shaping it’s direction. As we transitioned from developing primarily desktop applications to primarily web-based applications, and as we switched from mostly proprietary technologies to mostly open-source technologies, I was pointing the way. By working with a wide variety of different clients, I’ve learned a great deal about a number of different sectors that I’d never dreamed I’d come into contact with: farm assurance schemes, legal processes, genetic testing, human resource allocation, cinema and theatre, and more. It’s been a wonderfully broad and interesting experience.

Looking Forward

When I began making plans to move to Oxford, I initially anticipated that I’d need to find work over here. But Simon stressed that my presence was important to SmartData, and offered to allow me to work remotely, from home, which is most of what I’ve been doing for the last year or so. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, this has worked reasonably well: VoIP phones keep us in touch, tunneling and virtual networks allow us to work as if we were all in the same location, and webcams help us feel like we’re not quite so far from one another.

But this wasn’t to be a permanent solution: just a way to allow me to keep contributing to SmartData for as long as possible. Last week, I was offered and accepted a new job with a new employer, here in Oxford. Starting in April, I’ll be managing the administration and the ongoing development of the website of the Bodleian Libraries, the deposit library associated with Oxford University.

Clarendon building, Bodleian Library — My new office, right in the heart of Oxford. It looks a lot less green, and a lot more prestigious, than Peithyll.

It’s a huge change, going from working as part of a tiny team in a West Wales town to working with hundreds of people at one of the largest employers in Oxford. I’ve no doubt that it’ll take some getting used to: for a start, I’m going to have to get into the habit of getting dressed before I go to work – something I could get away with while working from home and that might even have been tolerated in the office at SmartData, as long as I threw on a towel or something (in fact, I have on more than one occasion taken a shower in the SmartData offices, then sat at my desk, wrapped in towels, until I’d dried off a little).

This feels like a huge turning point in my life: a whole new chapter – or, perhaps the completion of the “turning a page” that moving to Oxford began. My new job is a brand new position, which provides an exciting opportunity to carve a Dan-shaped hole, and I’ll be working with some moderately-exciting technologies on some very exciting projects. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I’m settled in, but for now I’ll just say “Squeee!” and be done with it.

Oh: and for those of you who follow such things, you’ll note that Matt P has just announced his new job, too. Although he’s a sloppy blogger: he’s actually been working there for a little while already.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2004

A little bit tongue-in-cheek, this one.

Looking Back

On this day in 2004, I’d just finished my first marathon session of playing Half-Life 2, a spectacular new video game that quickly became one of the best-selling computer games ever. Despite New Year celebrations and other distractions, I managed to sit and play the game for a couple of days and finished it very soon after.

The launch of the game was delayed – I’d pre-ordered it 17 months before it eventually got released – after being plagued with development difficulties. One of the many delays to it’s launch was blamed on the theft of part of the source code: I remember joking, after the thief had been caught, that now that they’d got the code back they’d be able to release the game, right?

Meanwhile, Paul swore that he would have nothing to do with the digital distribution platform – Steam – that remains the only way to get a legitimate copy of Half-Life 2. On his blog – then on LiveJournal – he listed all of the many problems that he saw with Steam, and I countered a few of them in an argument in the comments. For years to come, he’d go on to refuse to play some of the most fantastic computer games to be released on principle.

Looking Forward

Things change. I can’t remember the last time I saw Paul playing a video game that he didn’t buy on Steam, for one (except for a handful that he bought from Good Old Games – which is well worth visiting, if you haven’t already).

Some things stay the same: Half-Life 2 remains one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and has been followed by two spectacular sequels (Episode 1 and Episode 2) and a number of spin-offs (including the mind-blowingly awesome Portal, which stole my life for a while, although not for long enough to make my 2007 list of life-stealing games). We’re still all waiting on the much-delayed Episode 3, though…

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2009

Looking Back

On this day in 2009 I’d just announced that Claire and I had broken up after our seven year relationship. I attacked Virgil‘s omnia vincit amor (love conquers all), countering that our love for one another was not sufficient to prevent the difficulties we’d been having. That the breakup was among the most structured, carefully-negotiated, and amicable of I’ve ever heard detracted only a little from the pain of the ending of the romantic part of our relationship.

You’ll note that I’ve always been careful not to say that our relationship ended, because it didn’t. It changed: we transitioned (bumpily, and with difficulty) from a romantic relationship to a friendly relationship. You’ll also notice that I don’t use the term “just” friends unless that clarification is absolutely necessary (after all, why are friends “just” friends: what’s wrong with friends? – I’ve another blog post on this very topic under construction).

Looking Forward

It’s gotten easier, over this last year, to deal with the breakup: but it’s still hard. We had a huge place in one another’s lives, and that doesn’t simply evaporate. From my perspective, at least, I still feel at least a little bit “derailed”: like, if you asked me 18 months ago about where I’d be living now, or what I’d be doing, then I wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty that it would be this life I now have. That’s not to say I’m not happy: I’m enjoying what I’m doing now (although a little more free time wouldn’t go amiss!). It’s merely that I haven’t yet fully got used to the fact that I’m not quite living in accordance with the same plans that I used to have.

There are folks who’ve criticised our breakup, saying that we’d both have recovered from it better had we tried harder not to keep in contact, not to remain friendly, etc. I don’t know whether I agree or not – but I dispute that it would have necessarily been better. One thing that’s actually been really helpful over the last year (for me, at least, and I’d guess for Claire too) is that we’ve been able to get support from one another. That’s a remarkable and unusual thing: but then, we were a remarkable and unusual couple.

And isn’t supporting one another what friends do?

Getting better all the time. Sorry to mope.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

It is Windy in Aberystwyth

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

Looking Back

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.

Troma Night Adventure

Because I promised you some Aber-nostalgia.

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:

Go play Troma Night Adventure 2.0 (now with features!)

Nostalgia And The Aber Effect, According To Other People

Strokey Adam just 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, Rory announced 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 2003

Looking Back

On this day in 2003 I wrote a short blog post about a very important event in the lives of two of my friends. This was the end of the week during which Fiona came down to visit us in Aberystwyth: the week where she first met Kit in person. And the week where they became a couple.

In my blog post at the time that it had been a long time since I’d seen Kit so happy. Normally a reasonably controlled and sedate young man, his mood this week could be better described as “bouncing off the walls”. He’d had a hard few months of unemployment, and the contrast in his mood was spectacular. I also noted at the time that I’d never seen Kit so loved-up: the closest I’ve ever seen him to that sickening lovey-dovey phase that many new couples go through was at about that time.

Kit wrote about the event, too, in his usual charming style; almost downplaying the significance of this awesome event by starting the post with a deadpan explanation, “Well its been an interesting few days. Somewhat busy too – which explains at least partially the lack of posts.”

Looking Forward

Kit & Fiona married in October 2004, and the same folks who’d been around when they first got together made a spectacular road trip all the way to the North of Scotland for the wedding. They still live in Scotland, and we see a lot less of them than we would like. They came down to Aberystwyth early this year, though, and introduced us all to geocaching, for which nobody has yet forgiven them.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2006

Looking Back

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.

Aberystwyth Escape Velocity

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!

Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used To Be

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…)

Your Experience May Differ

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.
              
                Good luck, and best wishes;
              
                —
                
                Dan Q
              
                  Home

Congratulations Alec & Suz

Alec and Suz‘s wedding was this weekend, and I went along to the wedding reception on Saturday evening, along with Claire, Jimmy, Liz and Simon. We turned up stylishly early, and took advantage of the bar while we waited for anybody else we knew to appear (okay, so there was the bride and groom, of course, although they were generally pretty busy socialising with all their other guests, and a handful of others like Andy and Siân).

All said, the night was amazing. The venue the happy couple had chosen was County Hall, the Marriott hotel across the river from Westminster Abbey and a stone’s throw upstream of the London Eye, which is an amazingly beautiful hotel in a great location. The balance of traditional and modern wedding reception themes was strikingly cool. Oh, and Alec and Suz both looked fabulous, if a little exhausted.

It was great to catch up with so many folks I haven’t seen even remotely enough of late, like Bryn, Matt R, Matt P, Liz, Andy, Siân, and Sundeep, as well as hanging out with folks I still see regularly, like Ruth and JTA. It was also fab to re-meet folks I’d only ever met in passing before (in Aber, like Caroline, or in the bigger wider world, like Simon).

And so we drank and danced the night away to a (generally) great selection of music. Liz has an impossible supply of energy and kept dragging Aber-folk up to the dance floor, and getting down to the bangin’ choons with the old gang filled me with a sense of nostalgia. I’m pretty sure I even saw Jimmy dancing when there wasn’t a girl dancing with him, which is a first, although he’ll certainly deny that ever happened.

Also of note was the hotel’s response to Matt P’s arrival. Matt P turned up late in combat pants and a t-shirt, and carrying a backpack, and strolled in to the five-star hotel, and I’m pretty sure that – as I helped him change into the suit he was carrying, in the gents toilets – at least one member of staff came in to check what somebody dressed like that was doing in their hotel. Fun and games.

There was other stuff. Having travelled as far as London it made sense to do a couple of touristy things, too, as well as to meet up with a London-based potential new volunteer developer for a software project I’m working on, but the wedding reception will remain the highlight of the weekend, and perhaps the social highlight of the year. It’s occurred to us that with QParty last year, Alec & Suz’s wedding this year, and Ruth & JTA’s planned wedding in 2010, that we’re lacking an excuse to get the usual suspects together for any reason in 2009. As it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see a wedding or similar event on behalf of, for example, Andy & Siân, we may have to find some other reason to have a get-together in the coming year. Claire’s looking into the possibility of a group holiday (like the Pembrokeshire fort trip early this year), which is an option, and Matt R proposes Cardiff Is Amazing 2009, a party which (so far) has no more premise than can be inferred from it’s name. Nonetheless, Alec & Suz’s wedding has reminded me how much I miss many of the people I used to spend time with on a weekly basis, and I’m keen to see one or both of these plans come to fruition.

Oh, and – congratulations, Alec and Suz! Have a great honeymoon, and enjoy the rest of your married life together!

I’ve Been Q’ing For A Year Now

Post Offices, eh? But those aside, it’s now been a year since Claire and I changed our surnames to the letter “Q”. Here’s a quick look back:

The Good Things

It still feels like it’s “ours,” and something that’s ours alone – a great sense of identity and togetherness that we probably wouldn’t have gotten in any other way.
It still makes people’s minds boggle, even after they get past the “disbelief” stage. It still baffles me how many people try to “guess what it stands for,” even after being told it doesn’t stand for anything.
The junk mailers still don’t seem to have caught up with my new name, which makes filtering my postal mail very easy – it’s it’s for my old name, it’s junk; if it’s for my new name, it’s not.
It really wasn’t very hard to do!
The game of “comeing up with children’s names for Claire and I” seems to have gone out of fashion at last. I still feel that the winner was “Barbie.”
I’m yet to find anybody with a shorter name than me, although I suspect that at least one exists (there are plenty with same length of name, including Ron Ng, Wu Man, and many other people with romanised Chinese names).

The Bad Things

Some companies (and, in particular, their computer systems) seem to have a great deal of difficulty with my surname. It hasn’t caused any problems as yet; just inconveniences – and I’m on several databases as “Qq”, “Qu”, or “Q[space][space][space].”
We spend longer at customs desks at British airports than we used to. Those guys have no sense of humour.
I spend longer spelling my name to people on the phone than I used to, which feels unusual considering that my old surname had at least two spellings of which mine was the least common.
My mobile phone contract provider still refuse to believe that my first name has changed, too. They have no problem with my last name. Weird.

So, no: I don’t regret it, it’s been fun and fabulous and it’s something special for Claire and I to share, and I fully expect to have this surname for the remainder of my life… although I am sometimes tempted by the idea of a one-letter first name, too… :-)

Edit, 22/03/2008: Fixed a spelling mistake.

What Is A Door And Why Do I Care

Geeky post with little value to most people: ignore if you don’t want to learn a little about the history of the BBS, “Doors”, and the subculture around them. This post is written for folks like Ruth, who seemed interested, and others, who seemed possibly-interested.

Before about 1994, even the few of us who had been on the internet hadn’t had much exposure to the (young, at the time) world wide web, but for a decade or more before then, there stood a great remnant of what had come before. And for years to come, still, when internet access was still something for which you paid both monthly and for your call time, and probably to a “local” rather than a “national” ISP, there was another option for getting your “fix” of cyberspace.

That fix was the network of independent bulletin board systems (BBSs) that existed across pretty much every Western country. The US was full of them – pretty much every small town had a young geek somewhere with a spare computer in his parents’ basement. And here in the UK, small BBSs flourished as their members logged on and off and passed files around over now long-dead protocols.

BBSs were small, usually-local, centralised computers with one or more modems (or even acoustic couplers – primitive modems that connected to existing telephone handsets using little rubber suction cups and “spoke” analogue signals to one another across the telephone lines), often operated by hobbyists. To connect to one, you would need to know it’s phone number, and lists of these could be found wherever geeks talked. You’d simply configure your dialler software to “connect” to the specified number, and, a few pips and squeaks later, you were in. A short registration process would give you access to message board, file trading facilities (ah; all that – ah; all that porn), live chat (on the bigger, multi-line boards), and sometimes even internet access – e-mail, newsgroups, etc. Later, some of the more successful BBSs would become ISPs, and some of these maintained a BBS, too, that provided software that you could use to connect to their systems. BBSs had all the benefits of the internet at the time – albeit with a smaller user base – but frequently also had a distinct local feel and a “community” sense of belonging.

Another feature that became quite popular on BBSs were the so-called door games. These were pieces of software installed onto the BBS server computer – usually games – which could be interacted with by the BBS server software through one of several standardised interfaces (e.g. Fossil, DOOR32). It’s almost certain that the writer of Wargames had seen door games in action before he wrote his “Global Thermonuclear War” game into the film script. A majority of these games – like the one in Wargames – allowed a single player to play against the computer, online, with perhaps a shared, centralised scoreboard that all players can access. Later door games allowed a degree of interactivity, sometimes even “live” interactivity, between the players who were playing the game simultaneously.

When I ran Dice BBS (from my bedroom at my mum’s house), I had a selection of door games running on it, selected for their inter-player interactivity: P:TEOS (space trading sim), Legend Of The Red Dragon and it’s underrated sequel (all from Robinson Technologies, who still write computer games to this day), and a MOO (an object-oriented MUD [multiplayer text-based adventure] often with an emphasis on social interaction [like a MUSH]). Later, after Dice BBS’s closure (the internet had become too ubiquitous; too cool; there was no need for it any more), I hacked Legend Of The Red Dragon 2 to pieces and wrote a Pascal front-end to allow it to be played in a protected network environment, developed L2:PC, and deployed it to the Preston College network, where it became so popular that several players rarely did anything else, and one person was even thrown off their course, their grades suffered so badly.

Nowadays, door games are a bit of a forgotten breed. The MUDs and the MUSHes grew up into the MMORPGs of today (think “World Of Warcraft”, “Everquest”, “Ultima Online”, “Puzzle Pirates”). The need for the other games to be played in a centralised manner was negated by high-speed internet links and modern, multiplayer games. But there are still special places where BBSs run (usually adapted in such a way that you can reach them using the telnet protocol, over the internet), and there will always be a home for them in the hearts of those of us that lived aboard them.

Thanks for listening to a bit of nostalgia.