This self-post was originally posted to /r/OxfordBrookes. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.
There’s a list of UK subreddits, including a sub-list of Universities, at: http://www.reddit.com/r/raerth/comments/cwtow/brittit_british_and_anglocentric_subreddits/ – might want to get yourself added to that…
Next week is half-term. Why does that matter? Because I’m back in education.
Since last month, I’ve been a student again. Not full-time (I’m not falling for that one again), of course, but I currently spend my Monday evenings studying towards a Certificate in Counselling Skills at Aylesbury College.
It’s actually a qualification I’ve been looking at for several years, but it’s only recently that I’ve lived somewhere even remotely close to somewhere that it’s taught: while there’s a lot of counselling theory that can be learned by distance learning, there’s naturally a lot of hands-on counselling practice that demands a classroom or clinical setting, and for that… you really do need to be within reach of a suitable school.
Not that Aylesbury‘s exactly on my doorstep. It’s not even in the same county as me (it’s just barely over the border, in fact, into Buckinghamshire). And this can make things a little challenging: whereas many of my classmates walk or cycle in, I have a special little dance that I have to do every Monday, in order to make my study possible.
I arrive at work early, so that I can get out of the door by 4:30pm. I then leap onto my bike and pedal furiously through Oxford’s crowded afternoon streets to the East side of the city. There, I lock my bike up and hop into a borrowed car (more about that in another blog post), pick my way out between the growing pre-rush-hour traffic, sprawling 20mph zones, and deathwish cyclists, and hammer along the A418 in order to get to class for its 6pm start.
Three hours of theory and roleplay later (as well as a break to eat a packet sandwich), I’m back on the road. It annoys me more than a little that now that I’m not in a hurry, the roads are usually clear and empty, but it’s a good excuse to crank up the volume on Jack FM and enjoy the ride back through the villages of East Oxfordshire. Back in Oxford, I pick up my bike and cycle home: I’m usually back before 10:30. It’s quite a long day, really.
So what’s it all for? Well: ultimately, if I stick with it, it leads to a Certificate in Counselling, then to a Diploma in Counselling. If you take that and couple it with a stack of distance learning modules, it adds up to… well, this Foundation Degree in Counselling, perhaps.
But that’s not what you wanted to know: what you wanted to know was, “What are you doing, Dan? What’s wrong with the degree and career you’ve already got?”
Well firstly, of course, learning doesn’t have to be about qualifications. This is a field that I’ve been interested in for longer than I’ve been blogging. Plus: I’m sure that my various pieces of emotional support work, like my work with Oxford Friend, will benefit from the experience and learning that I bring to it.
But also, it’s about the idea I’ve always had that a good mid-life crisis ought to benefit from planning: it’s too important to leave to chance. And I’ve been thinking that a career switch might be a great mid-life crisis. The social sciences are fun, and while counselling might not be exactly what I’m looking for, there’s some doors opened by studying it. With less than a decade before I’m 40, and with part-time study being an ever-so-slow way to get things done, I’d better pull my finger out.
Doubtless, I’ll have more to say about my course as it progresses, but for now, I’m just glad that it’s half-term week, which means I get a week in which I don’t spend my Monday running around like a headless chicken… and I get twice as long to finish my homework.
Ah, Oxford. You are so
eccentric. Click to embiggen.
As a result of a couple of different health issues and the death of my old and much-loved mobile, August wasn’t shaping up to be a very good month already. But the biscuit was really taken this week during what turned into An Unexpectedly Expensive Night Out.
An Unexpectedly Expensive Night Out
It started okay: Ruth and went out for tapas, then for cocktails, and then to the cinema to watch the (pretty disappointing) Cowboys & Aliens. So a good start, getting worse. The food was cheap (hooray for vouchers!), the cocktails were reasonably priced (although we did have… a few of them), and the cinema was aided by Orange Wednesdays, so all seemed to be going pretty well, so far, until we came to going home.
Because when we got back to the cycle racks, my bike wasn’t there. By the look of things, somebody cut through my bike lock and had away with it, rendering me bikeless. Suddenly, it became a far more-expensive night out than I’d planned for.
They say that you haven’t lived in Oxford until you’ve had your bike stolen[citation needed]. Well: now I have, and I’ve learned an important lesson about the ineffectiveness of moderate-security cable locks like the Kryptonite HardWire (the lock I was using) when up against thieves who are willing to put in the effort to, for example, bring bolt cutters on a night out.
I spoke to a police officer yesterday who’s going to see if any of the nearby CCTV cameras are going to be of any use in finding the bugger. But in the meantime, I’ve had enough of August. It’s had highlights, like Liz & Simon’s wedding, but mostly it’s been less-than-great.
Wake me up when September begins.
Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, this last month, include:
That’s quite a lot of stuff, even aside from the usual work/volunteering/etc. stuff that goes on in my life, so it’s little wonder that I’ve neglected to blog about it all. Of course, there’s a guilt-inspired downside to this approach, and that’s that one feels compelled to not blog about anything else until finishing writing about the first neglected thing, and so the problem snowballs.
So this quick summary, above? That’s sort-of a declaration of blogger-bankruptcy on these topics, so I can finally stop thinking “Hmm, can’t blog about X until I’ve written about Code Week!”
Last week, I saw X-Men: First Class at the cinema with Ruth. The film was… pretty mediocre, I’m afraid… but another part of the cinemagoing experience was quite remarkable:
There’s a bit in the film where Xavier, then writing his thesis at Oxford University, and a CIA agent are talking. As they talk, they walk right through the middle of the Bodleian Library, right past my office. It’s not just Morse and Lewis and the Harry Potter films that make use of the Library (at great expense, I gather) for filming purposes! “That’s my office!” I squee’d, pointing excitedly at the screen.
Needless to say, the student-heavy audience cheered loudly at the presence of parts of Oxford that they recognised, too. It’s been a while since I was in a cinema where people actually cheered at what was going on. In fact, the last time will have been in the Commodore Cinema in Aberystwyth. But cinema-culture in Aberystwyth’s strange anyway.
Paul and I seem to be featured in today’s Oxford Mail.
From the article –
Friends Dan Q and Paul Mann, of Kennington, decided to mark the [superheroes] theme by dressing as characters from the silver age of comic book heroes, the Flash and Kickass, far left.
Mr Q, 30, said: “We wanted to take part in the march because first of all it’s an excuse to dress up, and also to show that Oxford is home to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and they should be represented.”
Apart from the obvious fault with the age of our characters – Kick-Ass (here correctly hyphenated) is a very new comic book character, designed in from only 2008 – which could have been corrected with a quick Wikipedia search, the article’s not bad. I’m reasonably pleased with my soundbite quotation, there: the journalist we spoke to caught me off-guard so I just reeled off the first thing I thought of, but it’s not bad, at least.
Ruth managed to carefully avoid appearing in any press photographs, but I think she’ll have been hard-pressed to avoid all of the shots my the Pride photographer, who ran around enthusiastically in a pink day-glow jacket, snapping away.
The Oxford Pride parade was fun, with the exception of the Catholic protest on Cornmarket, with their calls to “repent” from our “sinful lives”, and it was nice to lounge on the grass at Oxpens and listen to the music at the fair. Paul came second, by my estimation, in the fancy dress competition, and then I leapt around on a bouncy-castle/slide-thingy and sent all of the alcohol in my bloodstream rushing to my head.
Later, it rained, and I was too drunk to care.
Remember about three weeks ago when I re-met a Bodleian Libraries employee whom I’d first met many years ago? And then went on to meet their friend, who turned out to have been somebody with whom I’d been trying to schedule a meeting anyway!
Well today I had that meeting (and was formally introduced to my friend-of-a-friend). And when I got back, I found the following (edited, here) email in my Inbox:
Hi Dan,
You may remember me from such RT requests as #1234567. I have an inkling that we may also have met (if you attended) at the National Nightline^W^WNightline Association AGM in Leeds a couple of years back. I used to be a Nightline volunteer at Oxford.
<snip>
Alex
This chap works for the Computing Services department of the University, and as a result he’s been helping to deal with my (many, many) tickets and request-for-change forms as I’ve tried to get access to all of the systems to which I’ve needed access. And recognised me, apparently.
It’s a crazy, crazy small world.
Last weekend, I was cycling through Oxford, as I do, enjoying a reasonably leisurely pace. I say leisurely, but it’s been my experience that compared to the cyclists in Aberystwyth, where the city planners decided to build every single road on the side of a hill, the cyclists in Oxford are somewhat… wussy. They’re numerous, certainly, but very few of them actually put their backs into the activity, instead preferring to crawl around at a frankly pedestrian speed along their overcrowded cycle paths.
On several occasions, I’ve routinely seen people get off their bikes and push to get up even mild to moderate slopes like that outside the hospital, around the corner from Earth. The slope is long, certainly, but these people aren’t even giving up half-way… they’re giving up at the bottom! It just makes me want to send them to Aber for a few years to learn what real hills look like.
So there I was, cycling into the city centre, overtaking other cyclists as I went, when another cyclist… overtook me! This was only the second time this had ever happened to me since I moved to Oxford last summer. The other time, like this one, the perpetrator was a fit, lean young man, clad from the neck downwards in skin-tight lycra, donned with a streamlined helmet and riding a bike that just screamed out that it wanted to be raced. It was almost begging me to give it a challenge. So I did.
I raced.
I guess part of me was offended that he happened to have come across me on a day when I was taking it easy. Traveling to and from work, for example, I’ve been pushing myself: the other week, I beat my personal best, making the 2.4 mile journey from the Bodleian‘s bike sheds to my garage door in just a little over seven and a half minutes. How dare this… enthusiast… overtake me when I’m just on a gentle meander in the sun.
I raced.
We were just pulling into high street when he passed me, buzzing past in his fancy orange-and-black cycling shorts like a bumblebee riding a bullet. Ahead, cars and buses were coming to walking pace, backed up as far as I could see as the bank holiday traffic ground what was once a trunk road into little more than a car park. Between the vehicles, cycles picked their way around, darting in and out of the lanes of traffic. This was to be our arena.
My pedals span as I dropped back into a less-comfortable gear, picking up speed and pulling around a police van to get right onto the tail of my opponent. His speed advantage had been reduced by having to evade a taxi cab, and within a few seconds I was able to pull up into the wake of his slipsteam. Ahead, a bus began to pull away from a stop, and he overtook it. Seeing my chance as the bus began to indicate, I went around the inside, pulling almost alongside him as we streaked across the first of the pelican crossings and into the next block of traffic. Car, car, van, car, bus… we passed each one on one side or the other, and I occasionally caught a glimpse of the young man with whom I was competing.
Up ahead, the second pelican crossing switched to red, and we pulled up to the line together. Surprised at having somebody alongside him, I think, he looked across at me, and looked even more surprised when he recognised me as the person he’d overtaken a little while back. He eyed up my bike, as if he were assessing his chances. He seemed confident: and why not – he was riding a lightweight racing bike, designed to make the most of every bit of its rider’s strength to propel it along. I was on a mountain bike, designed to be rugged and durable – multi-purpose, nowadays. Weighed down by mudguards and pannier frames, I didn’t fancy my chances either. But my bike was running very well – I’d recently stripped it down to its component parts, washed and re-greased each, rebuilt it and fine-tuned it – and if ever it was set up to take on this racer, today was the day.
The lights changed, and we were off. He wasn’t holding back, now, and by the time we were half-way to the junction with St. Aldates I was panting, gulping down air to feed to my legs, pumping away beneath me. Our routes sometimes put us side-by-side or one behind the other, sometimes put us on the other sides of lines of stationary cars, but always kept us in sight of one another. This was going to be close.
The lights at the junction were in our favour, and we both rocketed around into the downhill section at St. Aldates. Buses crawled along the street, but there was plenty of room on the wide, slick surface, so we accelerated as we shot down the centre of the road. Ahead, heat haze made the black surface glisten like oil, and I was suddenly aware of how much I was sweating. Summoning all of my strength, I stood up and leant forwards, searching for just another half a mile an hour to catch up with him; his slender bike and slender body cutting through the headwind and pulling away from me. It worked: by the bottom of the road, I was alongside him again, and we were almost to my destination: the bridge at the bottom.
“My stop!” I called out, holding my arm out to indicate (mostly to him; there were no cars behind us at even close to our speed) where I was to go. I came to a halt, glad that I’d thought to tune up the brakes during my recent maintenance. He pulled alongside me, and for a moment I wondered if he perhaps had the same destination as me.
“Are you in a cycling club?” he asked, and I noticed that he, too, was beginning to get out of breath – although not so badly as I was.
“No,” I replied.
“You should be!” he said, “That kind of speed, on a bike like… that…” He gestured to my bike.
As he sped away and I started to look for a place to lock up my bike, I felt a great sense of satisfaction and pride. I didn’t know that I’d be able to match pace with him, but through sheer grit and determination, I’d managed. And then, just as I was chaining my bike to a conveniently nearby fence, another thought occurred:
I was still holding the letter that I’d meant to post on my way here. The postbox was back at about the beginning of the race… you know; where I was slowing down to begin with.
This story actually relates to an event that happened in mid-2010, but I only recently got around to finishing writing about it.
Once upon a time there was a boy named Dan.
Dan lives in a big house with his friends Ruth and JTA.
(their other friend, Paul, lives in
the house, too… but he isn’t in this story)
One day, Dan and Ruth and JTA went on an adventure. They packed up a picnic with all their favourite foods.
Big soft sandwiches, teeny-tiny sausages, cheese-with-holes-in, and a big box of chocolates. Then they got onto a bus.
Soon, they saw a big, wide river. “Let’s get off here,” said Ruth. JTA pressed the button to tell the bus driver to stop.
At the river, there was a man with all kinds of boats: boats with pedals, boats with paddles, and boats with poles.
“Can we borrow one of your boats?” Dan asked the man.
“Okay,” he said, and gave Dan a long pole.
Ruth and JTA got into the boat and sat down. Dan stood up on the very back of the boat. It was very wobbly!
Dan used the pole to reach all the way down the bottom of the river, and pushed the boat along. It was hard work!
They found a shady tree in a park, stopped the boat, and ate their picnic.
They drank some fizzy wine and felt all bubbly and dizzy. Soon it was time to get back on the boat and go back along the river.
One time, Dan almost fell into the water! But luckily he didn’t, and he, Ruth and JTA got back safely.
And they all lived happily ever after.
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.
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.
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.
Ruth, JTA, and I have found our way to Earth – our new home, in Oxford – after the most exhausting house move I’ve ever done. Particular challenges in getting things to Earth included:
But that’s only the beginning of the problems.
My Sister’s Mystery Illness
Arriving in Oxford, we were all exhausted, so Ruth, JTA and I worked on unloading the minimum possible amount from the van (enough that I’d have bedding to sleep on and that the computers could be stored safely indoors) while my dad and Jenny – who’d been driving the van – went to check into their nearby B&B. Having reached our goal, Ruth, JTA and I sat out in the garden of our new house with a beer each and, exhausted, congratulated ourselves on a successful day. Unloading the rest of the van could wait until the morning.
That’s when my dad reappeared on our doorstep, looking flustered. He’d just received work that my sister, Sarah, had just been rushed into hospital with excruciating abdominal pains, and he needed the van back to get up to her in Preston ASAP. Quickly we formed a bucket chain and rapidly unloaded the entire van, without regard to where anything belonged, into the garage, freeing up the van.
Oh, and JTA stabbed me in the hand with a penknife. In order to remove those things which were roped-in to the van as quickly as possible, he began slicing through them with his Swiss army knife, and, in a moment of ill communication about which of the ropes that I was holding needed cutting, he ended up gouging a big hole in my thumb. Which goes nicely with my punctured feet, making me look like the result of the least-effective case of crucifixion ever.
My dad got away, and my sister seems stable and safe, by the way, although the hospital still aren’t sure what’s wrong with her.
Network Issues
An important part of my unpacking plan was to get my study set up so that I’d be able to get back to my day job – which I’m working at remotely – as soon on Monday morning as possible. It was during this set-up that I discovered that I was completely unable to connect any VPN connections. This later turns out to be a fault in the latest firmware of the ISP-supplied router. For those of you not fluent in Geek: the magic Internet-box we were delivered wasn’t very good, and needs downgrading to make it useful.
Not a problem, I think: I’ll just plug in my old router and configure it to work, instead. Great plan, sure, but unfortunately JTA’s desktop PC didn’t want to play nice with my old router, and took some kicking to get working. Meanwhile, I’d started experimenting on getting the new router working, and before you know it, we’ve had half a dozen different (but similarly-named) wireless networks floating about, all with different passwords and settings, and nobody has a clue what’s going on.
Eventually, we got together an Internet connection that not only works for everybody but follows all of the standards we care about, and not just some of them, but it was one more challenge than I’d have liked when I’d hoped to do a house move without taking any time off work. Which is in itself, it turns out, a silly idea. Next time I undergo this mayhem, I’m taking at least a long-weekend to do it.
I’m sure there’s a lot more to say, but I’d better get back to work! The short of it is: I’m on Earth, and it’s mayhem.
Normal blogging will resume shortly, but I just wanted to quickly take advantage of a period of strong mobile signal as I sit on this Thames Travel bus (oh yeah: I’m in Oxford for a few days) to share with you a feeling of warm fuzziness I experienced earlier today. (note: this blog post took a few days to get “finished”: I’m now stuck in a small town outside Oxford by heavy snow)
In her latest blog post, my sister Becky writes about achieving a couple of things on her “to-do before I die” list. And when I read about her revelations about the nature of domestic abuse and her selfless willingness to go out of her way to help her fellow man, I was filled with an immense sense of pride.
I’ll remind you that, unlike about a fifth of the regular readers of this blog, my sister has no formal training or experience in active listening or counselling skills. She’s never been taught how to listen without prejudice, how to build rapport, or how to show empathy. She knows that this certainly isn’t part of her job description. What we’re looking at there is plain old, genuine human compassion. And it makes me proud not only of her – as my sister – but also of humankind in general, that this kind of caring for one another still exists, even for a stranger, within the general population. That’s simply awesome.
In other not-dissimilar human-compassion related news, Ruth and I were offered a lift – saving us a two-mile walk through the snow, after midnight – by two complete strangers the other night, after our bus was cancelled. It’s been a good week for stories of people being nice to one another, both in my immediate experience and in the news. I like it.