Dominic's Diary

Bored

Now I'm bored. Why can't I start the job yet?

I seem to have accommodation firmed up though — on Sunday I went to visit Twofish's house, where I will be living for the next year at least. Nice location, shame about the uphill cycle on the way home from work...

The last couple of days have been fun. Lots of security things to be dealt with the most important of which was OpenSSL. Luckily only two machines I run had SSL services to be faffed with. But, much more importantly, I am finally, finally, learning to drive. I've had two lessons so far, and I'm absolutely loving it. Between the first and second lesson (which I had this morning at some silly hour like 9am (no, don't tell me, I know I'm going to have to have sane waking hours when I start work)) I found myself getting a lot better at working the gears and so on, and already it was starting to feel natural. That has to be a validation of the processing of new information overnight theory. Another lesson on Friday. Yay.

Of course, you'll be wondering what's my excuse to rabbit on here tonight. Well, the alternative would involve me turning my room upside-down and sorting things out so I can dispense with 21 years of accumulated crud and start in Oxford with a reasonable amount of stuff. Which won't be fun.

Job!

I've been offered, and have accepted, a job as a Unix Systems Administrator at the department of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. I'll be starting in September.

In other news, well, woody has been released (so, as a friend said, Hell must have frozen over) so it looks like I might be spending a while upgrading some of the Compsoc machines so we can get users using the new box with up-to-date apps.

Well, I suppose I might as well put it here. I found out last Sunday that I have a Pass degree from Oxford. Which is better than nothing I suppose, but I can't help feeling it was a wasted opportunity.

Hopefully employers won't feel the same way.

Came back on Sunday evening from UKUUG's Linux 2002 conference which I was lucky enough to be able to attend. It was a great event, even if some of us did spend rather long fiddling with obscure networking :) Did a load of PGP keysigning, and met some big names in the Linux world. I took (unusually for me) quite a few photos on my antiquated APS camera (yes, a digital one is quite high on my list of toys to buy) and they'll be on my photos page when I've finished off the film.

I went home via Oxford and showed Marcelo Tosatti, the maintainer of the Linux 2.4 kernel, around Oxford before going to an OxLUG talk by Christoph Hellwig on JFS. Predictable pub visit, and a return to Stevenage via the Oxford Tube, followed.