Saturday, September 09, 2006
It's been a while...
Finally the crowd (all 5 of them) shout, A blog post from Kaoru!
It certainly has been too long... At first I was tired from work, sitting at a computer typing all day can really have the effect that when you get home you don't really want to sit at the computer typing some more... Then after a couple of weeks of that I was put off writing a blog entry simply because there's too much to write about, and that's been a vicious circle between then and now when peer pressure (Carmen poking me) and reminders (Izumi setting up a new blog) have finally gotten to me. :P
So then, as usual with my 'OMG I haven't blogged in forever, so much to talk about!' entries I'll split this up into a few sections to make it easier to read...
The Job
Been working at Lokku coding for Nestoria for over a month or so now and still loving it so much, really great people to work with, I love working with Perl (in fact I'm dreading going back to university and C. :P), the hours (11am-6:30pm ish), the casual clothes, the location, the atmosphere, the lunch (burritos <3), everything is awesome. :D
I've learned sooo much Perl! Seriously before i joined I'd barely touched objects and references nor any regular expression modifiers except 'i' and 'g', now I just feel so confident and happy doing anything I want to. I love CPAN and all the modules, I love hashes and the Data::Dumper format, I don't even hate the CGI module that much anymore, I love here documents and grep and map and hashes ofhashrefs. Let's just say that KSN v5 will be coded in Perl. :P
The Laptop
I don't actually remember at what point of explaining the laptop situation I was at last time I posted something so I'll explain from the beginning... I knocked my laptop off my desk and onto the floor with its screen open and it turned on, something between the screen and the motherboard went terribly wrong, it was an old-ish Vaio model and they no longer made the motherboards so it was written off. Luckily I was able to claim on my parents' house insurance (accidental damages) and sometime in August I got a new Sony Vaio VGN-SZ2HP/B... It's basically the next model up from the next model up from my old laptop, and it's beautiful, dual coreIntel processor and magnesium alloy case, everything's lovely... Haven't really had the chance to get it working yet though. :P It came with a 'recovery partition' instead of discs and I very foolishly formatted it entirely... If I have time sometime I will make it work, I've downloaded all the SZ2 drivers from Vaio Link Europe and when I have time I'll fix things. Getting Gentoo working is another matter... For some reason whenever I play video on it the whole system freezes up... Again when I have time I will fix this. I just need to find the time.
My last laptop was called Rukia, after Kuchiki Rukia of Bleach, and since this is a higher model I've decided to call it 'Bankai Rukia' (just 'Rukia' for short most of the time.) - If you don't get this, 'Bankai' is basically the Bleach equivalent of Super Saiyan, and if you don't get that then well forget it. :)
London.pm
A few days into my job one of my coworkers Edmund invited me to a London.pm (London Perl Mongers) social at The Anchor pub in London Bridge. I had a great time discussing Japanese culture, various languages, computer games, food, operating systems, desktop environments, and even occasionally Perl. :) Went out with them again a couple of nights ago and had another great time chatting about various things. :) Shout outs to Edmund, Simon, Alex, Adam, Johan, and other people I spoke to whose names escape me . :P
They also have a fun active mailing list and IRC channel. :)
Die Connichi
This Thursday I'm heading off to Germany (National Express to Stanstead, Ryanair to Frankfurt Hahn) to meet up with the Megatokyo.de guys again (I went over there a few weeks before starting uni, so 2 years ago now) and hang out with them 'auf die Connichi', which is German for 'at a German anime convention in Kassel.' :P I'm sooo excited, I can't wait to see Anna and Moritz and everyone again and on top of that Fred and Sarah (Fred being the guy who draws and writes the non-German-version Megatokyo web comic, and Sarah being his wife) are gonna be there! And I'm not just gonna see them at the convention because we're picking them up at the airport and going out for dinner and stuff! *fanboy* :P I can't wait, it's gonna be an amazing 4 days, just as it was last time I was there. :D
I am slightly nervous about my German skills though... It's been about 2 years since I last spoke any German on more than a very very irregular basis and I have a feeling that while my self-confidence/assurance may have increased over those two years the level of my vocabulary will have dropped quite dramatically, leaving me exactly the same quiet mess I was last time, just for slightly different reasons. :P
Other bits and pieces
Happy Birthday to Carmen and John, whose birthdays passed by while I wasn't writing in here. :) My little brother's growing up, haha!
Check out this absolutely hilarious geeky webcomic. It was linked in the AnimeSoc forum shoutbox and I quickly read through the archives, it's absolutely hilarious in so many ways. I think Sandwich, Hyphen and Computational Linguists are probably my favourite. :)
The End
Well that's the end of this huuuuuuuge blog entry! Thanks for reading (if you did!) and look forward to another blog entry when I'm back from Germany! Hopefully after that I'll get into the habit of posting shorter and more regular/random blog entries about things I think about on the train home or whatever... It's been a plan of mine for a few weeks but I needed to get this monster out of the way first. :P
Until next time. :)
5 Comments:
Wooooow so much going on and you don't update your blog, whereas my life is so uneventful and I still have to make an effort to update it XD Well, nice to hear you like your job, your colleagues, and you've got a Germany trip to look forward to you lucky bugger!!! Thanks for the blog setup help, etc (and to Adam of course).. I basically want a place where I can put down my thoughts/memories as I go through life at uni, so I'm gonna blog more often now XD *hug*
By Izumi, at 11:55 PM, September 09, 2006
really glad you'll be blogging when you're at oxford *hugs* know you'll have a great time there and i wanna hear all about it ^_^
By Kaoru, at 12:02 AM, September 10, 2006
Keine faulen Ausreden oder Entschuldigungen. Ab sofort wirst Du wieder deutsch üben. Kein englisch, wenn Du in Deutschland bist! Hast Du verstanden?
Alles Gute
HHH
By HHH, at 9:17 PM, September 11, 2006
Hey dude, it was really nice working with you :-) Please do not show any signs of affection towards CGI's , they are evil and must be punished. Hope the new uni year goes well for you, take care :)
By Spiros, at 5:46 PM, October 13, 2006
Thanks dude, it was great working with you too :)
CGI's will indeed get no affection from me. :P I do need to switch this site from PHP to Perl somehow though... :P
Group project this term, got given an assignment in Perl! hahaha... Gotta teach my other 4 group members how do 'use strict' :)
Take care, hope to see you soon
- Kaoru
By Kaoru, at 10:45 AM, October 14, 2006
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