can has job?
hullo folks, it's been a while since I've written anything, mostly because we've been
away for the last 5 months. But now we're back in London, and it's all about coming back down to reality. :( We've been back for about 6 weeks now, and we've noticed quite a few side effects (some good; some not) which have arisen from the credit crunch.
Firstly, the interest rate is at a ludicrous 0.5%, which means that we're better off investing in llama farming than putting our money in the bank. Transferring it home isn't really an option either, because the
exchange rate kind of sucks. (I recommend you switch to the one- and five-year views on the graph for some real entertainment.)
Secondly, a whole lot of shops and chains have just disappeared off the London shoppingscape after going into administration. This includes some huge ones like Woolworths (sort of like the K-marts of the UK) and Zavvi (ex-Virgin Megastore emporiums). On the flip side, there are lots of sales around in the stores left standing to entice the un-crunched shoppers to buy up. There are also some really good deals for hoity-toity restaurants in the capital - presumably because their old clientele are pinching the pennies and don't want to eat at posh restaurants every week. We've dined at several Michelin starred restaurants for cheap, and had some great 2 course weekday lunches for just £15. hurrah :)
Thirdly, it is totally a renter's market out there. The recent drop in house prices means that a lot of people aren't willing to sell their houses at the moment, so there's a surplus of properties for rent. When we got back, I expected to go through a month of hell, looking at dingy flats that were way overpriced and having to make decisions about renting them on the spot. Not so! We had a week to browse through virtually all of the properties available in the neighbourhood before eventually putting an offer in on a ridiculously cheap flat 5 days after we first saw it (and during that time the rent dropped another £25 pounds). In any other year, you would have made an appointment during the afternoon to view a flat at 6pm, and in the 3 hours between it will have gone. So, no complaints from me on that one.
Lastly, which brings me to the title of this post - the job hunting. Job hunting in London is never fun anyway, but this time around it is particularly discouraging. Previously, I've been able to get a dozen job specs and at least a couple of interviews lined up before one week is out, and every time I put my cv up on a job board, I'd get harassed by agents for months afterwards. These days, I can count on one hand the number of times I've talked to an agent in the past two weeks. I've had one phone interview for a permanent job that I know I don't want and every single job I apply for online is met with a blank wall of silence from the agency. Ouch :(
The ultimate irony in all of this is that the flow of finance jobs hasn't seemed to abate at all - there are at least four times as many finance jobs advertised compared to non-finance. So here I am, a victim of crunchy credit, trying to find a way to get a recruiter to speak to me, when people who contributed to this mess can still earn a living.
Someone, somewhere, owes me.... big time.
travel blog
Niall and I have a
travel blog, where we're going to document our adventures for the next few months. See you over there :)
some light entertainment
I know it's been a long time since I've written anything, but it's Friday (thank god); now everyone can relax and enjoy some
Human Tetris. I've seen it before, but there's so many related videos on youtube it just doesn't stop being funny!!!
A simple guide to winning French Open tickets
You know the best way to win
French Open tickets?
1. Submit an application in for the ticket ballot, fully expecting that nothing will come out of it.
2. Queue up a semi-clashing holiday to Euro Disney on a whim after seeing a commercial on TV.
3. Wait paitently until the tickets start to be allocated. When it seems unlikely you'll get any (as if you're going to win semi finals tickets to a grand slam anyway), go ahead and book your non-refundable holiday.
4. Wait three days, and presto! Tickets will arrive.
5. Get out your wallet and book another non-refundable ticket to Paris.
As Niall said, I think the chances of us winning the ballot tickets became almost certain the moment we committed money to the holiday. But I'm really excited, it's going to be awesome and full of people dressed in stuffed suits and amusing signs in french :)
(For the record, that's the only time that I have ever seen a commercial for Euro Disney on TV. Spooky.)
The Fat Stack
So I've been gymming it for 3 months, I'm feeling healthier and am 2 kilos lighter. I'm finally tackling some of that heathrow injection and I feel good. Yay me :)
Having said that, I'm now going to dive into fat theorem. There's always a pattern to the way that people gain weight (and the UK is a great place to do that). As all your hard-earned muscle and general health gets replaced by flab, one lucky part of your body is the first to receive the extra fat and the last to lose it.
The fat stack works like a
programming stack. Last bits added to the stack are the first to be removed, but the bottom of the stack always takes forever to go, because you fluctuate by adding stuff or removing stuff from the stack. It's like building a pyramid with bricks. You lay your foundations first, then each subsequent layer is carefully piled on top of the previous ones until you have a masterpiece. When you want to deconstruct it, the bricks at the top are the first and the easiest to go. The top layers are tiny! You'll get moving and feel like you're making progress in no time. However, as you make your way down the stack, you realise it gets progressively harder. Unfortunately those pyramid foundations are rock solid, and large. They'll take the most effort to remove.
Everybody has a different foundation of fat. Thigh-based-stacks are common. Other people will start with the hips, maybe the abdomen, or the arms. The fat will eventually spread its wings and anchor itself everywhere, but it has to start somewhere.
Me? My fat stack always starts with my
face. That's right: I have a face-based-stack. This has the unfortunate affect of making people think that I am chubbier than I look, which is kinda frustrating, especially in photos :p I don't think it's very common, but I'm only guessing here.
I envy people like Nigella Lawson, because she's got a really thin face in proportion to her body. She can take that "never trust a skinny chef" saying and sprint with it, cause when you look at her face, it doesn't give away the size of her body. She can eat with impunity and still get away with it. Jealousy! (I think hers is a chest-based-stack, which probably makes her the envy of many women who find that the chest region is the first to pop off the stack.)
I will continue on my gym regime until I get some movement on the face. I need that loss, baby. I remember seeing a girl on CSI miami who shares my fate. Maybe we should get in touch and start a support group.
It's raining, it's.... pouring?
It doesn't normally rain much here, but we're getting
some crazy weather because of a big storm cell from the atlantic ocean. It's even hailing a little bit (I literally mean a little bit, the hail is less than half a centimetre in diameter). This country's public transport sort of falls over whenever anything out of the ordinary happens - 3 cm of snow, winds blowing leaves onto tube lines, temperatures of 30 degrees bending the tracks, etc - so it'll be interesting to see what happens in rush hour tonight.
Of course, today is the day that we decided to eat at the local Japanese restaurant and got caught in the storm on the way back. Was worth it though. :)
The beginning of a new era.
Today is the beginning of my new and exciting life philosophy. Like
the Summer of George, it is a time that will change my life for the
better. A time for action. A time, ladies and gentlemen, that will
bring me happiness, enlightenment, and hopefully some rock-hard abs.
Today, for the first time in my life, I joined a gym. :-o
A real life gym, with a real life monthly membership fee of £63, with
real life intimidating gym eqipment monitored by real life peppy
instructors.
I've done the "I can wuss out at any time by adopting a pay-as-you-go
strategy" trick before, which served me nicely in Sydney and
Marylebone, but my daily commute has once again hit an hour and a half
round trip and I work late (read: old habits die hard, OR I'm a lazy
sod and don't get to work on time so I need to stay back to make it
up), so when I finally get home at 7:30 or 8pm, I'm hungry. The last
thing I want to do is forego dinner to exercise, especially since the
gym near my home is choc full of people all the time. I've walked past
the pool at night and seen lanes shared by up to 8 people. Like,
what?!
Enter: the opening of a new gym near work late last year.
I've heard people at work raving about this gym, so I bit the bullet
today and went to go and visit. This gym is soooo shiny. The change
rooms have wood panelling, are nice and clean and supply you with
endless white fluffy towels, free shampoo and conditioner. There are
HAIR STRAIGHTENERS you can use to style dry your hair before you go
back out into the real world. There's a steam room, a pool, a huge
room of brand new gym equipment, a boxing ring, a golf simulator, and
when the summer comes around there will be a rooftop garden with bar
so you can go and relax in the sun after your workout.
The best bit: because it's so new, there's nobody in there right now.
woohoo! I toured at lunch and there were 4 people in the pool, 10
people in the equipment room and about 8 people in an aerobics class.
I've signed up on an opening special monthly rolling contract, so
technically I haven't actually committed myself to exercising for the
next 12 months, just the next 4 weeks. I bet I'll either be a brand
new gym enthusiast by April, or 10 kilos heavier. Hopefully the
former (with bonus rock hard abs :-)
the green park buskers
London is a very organised city. The transport system in particular is engineered to handle huge people volumes, and it does quite well. I can't express how much more enjoyable and easy it is to get around in London than Sydney. There is
an excellent site to help you manage your ticketing and journey planning, which kills CityRail in comparison. You can expect trains to leave on time here, and tubes to come every 3 or 4 minutes on average. Most bus routes run every 5-10 minutes, so you're rarely waiting around with idle time like you are in Sydney.
The
Transport for London site will find you the quickest route from A to B using all forms of transport, and it's pretty accurate - a mammoth task considering that London has 12 tube lines, hundreds of bus routes, overland train routes and light rail, all of which you'd need to know to get your connections right. When things go pear shaped on any given route, the journey planner will take the stuff-ups into account and calculate you a new route. You can elect to receive daily SMS alerts about line stuffups at a time you nominate (e.g. at 8am) to help you work out how to avoid problems, and you get emails to notify you of line closures on the weekend several days in advance. Handy.
You can also organise all of your ticket purchases online and avoid queues, because your ticket is an RFID card called an
Oyster. I buy weekly or monthly tickets for the tube, but I've also got a random store of cash on the card for "pay as you go" journeys when my ticket has expired or I travel beyond its boundary. It basically means that I don't need to worry about actual paper tickets for any non-standard journeys I make, because the card calculates it for me. How brill is that? The best bit is that I can set my card to automatically top up the random store of cash whenever I fall below a minumum balance, so I actually never need to talk to a human being at a ticket office,
ever. That's seriously hot.
Anyway, I'm digressing from the point of the post, which is this:
Buskers in public transport thoroughfares. This city, bless its little organised heart, has turned busking into a
licensed activity, at least in the tube system. I find it so amusing that London has worked its organisational mojo on a normally haphazard and impromptu event, and turned it into something orderly and regimented.
The basics of it is that there are designated "busking areas" in certain tube stations, carefully placed in out-of-traffic-flow areas, where people who have been auditioned can show off their talents. (I'm not sure how strict the auditioning is these days though.) The busking area is marked by a semi-circle of paint, and you get fined for busking out of these areas - probably because they've worked out the probability of an unruly busker causing major delays on the Circle line by holding up foot traffic in a major thoroughfare. Who knows.
I travel through a major interchange station - Green Park - every day on my commute to and from work. It is notorious for its extremely long corridors to change between lines, which gives it plenty of room for a busker area.
Sometimes (mornings especially) the buskers are unwelcome because they interfere with the music I'm listening to on my iPod. They'll take up half the walkway with their keyboards or guitar amps and force the stream of traffic into a narrower flow, making it difficult to overtake the hordes of tourists with suitcases bound for Heathrow Airport. I'll walk briskly past on the "nuisance" days.
At night however, I'm much more open to the songs they play, and sometimes you get some really awesome and unusual people. Like the guy who was there tonight, singing Italian opera, or trumpet players with some funky jazz numbers. I've had a a bad mood mellowed by a busker who had an accoustic guitar, a beautifully husky voice and a sign at his feet saying 'smile :)' The buskers are an interesting variable in my normal routine, it reminds me of a different lifestyle and activities that are so unlike my current life. I like that the music can sway me one way or another. I've never had a busker put me in a
bad mood (you can always walk away from them!), but I have had ones that make me linger and put a smile on my face. Whatever London is doing with their buskers, it works for me.
mac rumours
So I'm sitting on
http://www.macrumorslive.com/ (thanks Paul!) waiting for Steve to announce what shiny new mac toy will be released in laptop terms. He's clearly getting through the boring stuff first and building up the tension before getting to what everyone
actually wants to hear.
I want a tiny mac book pro type thing. I don't need a touch screen, just something nice and light and uber sexy :)
It's a nice distraction from working out how to deploy workflows in SharePoint services when you don't have MOSS installed....
christmas time in the city
Wow, this year has really flown by. Especially the second half! Seems like only yesterday it was June.
In a case of history repeating itself, I am once again going to be unemployed over Christmas (but willingly), going to spend Christmas day in London, and then I'm hopping on a plane and flying to Seville, coming back before New Years' Eve. Heh. There is one big change, in that most of the Christmas period will be spent with Niall and his parents. I'm pretty sure I'm breaking several "parental holiday laws" by going on one 2 days after meeting said parents, but hey. At least the shopping in Seville is teh AWESOME, especially the shoe shopping. I know that Vik is agreeing with me all the way from Mexico.
As I mentioned, I'm currently unemployed, and I'm loving it. This week has mostly been sleeping in a whole lot, plus some christmas shopping, followed by TV and more sleeping. I have an unsigned agreement to go back to my old workplace in the new year. At first I thought I'd be insane to do it, but the new contract will be working on a shiny new project (no maintenance! hurrah!) that will be using .NET 3.5, and has the potential for really large scope in the cinema industry, which is cooooool. I've even bought reading material to supplement my learning while unemployed. How keen is that?
I also finally, finally,
finally have internet again. I can't emphasise how exciting this is for me. w00t :) I think it was 13 or 14 weeks without internet all up, which is positively criminal for someone in IT. I'm back to hardcore planning of holidays for next year. Niall and I are working out a schedule for a weekend in Sweden at the
icehotel, staying in one of their art rooms if we can swing it. Plus some husky dog sledding and wacky adventures on snowmobiles to remote places. PLUS I need to build a snowman... I've never made one!
Other exciting news is that as of the 4th December this year, I am a highly skilled migrant. The visa gives me another 2 years in the UK without restrictions on working, and it makes it much easier to find work as well - less hoops to jump through. And now, if I stay another 3 on top of the existing 2 years, I'll qualify for a british passport......... ;)
Thankfully most of the chaos that has featured prominently in the last 6 months of my life - moving house, no internet, last minute parental trips, sorting out visas - has settled down now, so bring on Christmas, even the freezing cold weather. Things are looking up :)
