{"id":2762,"date":"2017-04-08T19:05:33","date_gmt":"2017-04-08T18:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=2762"},"modified":"2017-04-08T19:05:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-08T18:05:33","slug":"whats-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=2762","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s Going On?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>should I be linking to or inserting the various songs I reference in blog post titles? serious question &#8211; I name them that way because it amuses me, but I wonder whether either of the readers of this thing have <b>ever <\/b>wondered, &#8220;What&#8217;s that a reference to?&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>this one seemed appropriate as an update title, and I have no idea whether it&#8217;s more or less obscure than a reference to what I&#8217;ve been listening to, on and\u200b off, for most of this week. that said, De La Soul&#8217;s &#8216;Ring Ring Ring&#8217; &amp; &#8216;Me, Myself, and I&#8217; still hold up as classic tracks, at least to my ears. As does Bran Van 3000&#8217;s &#8216;Drinking In LA&#8217;.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s now three weeks in at ESRI UK.<br \/>\nGoing fairly well, I think, though last Friday falls into the category of &#8220;I should have been able to do that better, though I didn&#8217;t\u00a0know how to&#8221;, which caused a certain degree of The Stressing.<br \/>\nAs did the whole finding a place to live thing.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>That last one is sorted.<br \/>\nAfter worrying about references (and thank you to those folks who said they&#8217;d say nice things, or at least allowed me to believe that they would) and the myriad of problems which seem to come up when you don&#8217;t really have an official record of &#8230; anything &#8230; in a country, the first place I looked at was nice, Wendy the live-in-llandllord seemed to like me, the cats didn&#8217;t appear to hate me any more than cats routinely hate anyone, and after a bit of chatting back &amp; forth she offered me the room.<br \/>\nAnd I said yes.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;d messaged a number of places on spareroom.co.uk<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\u2020<\/span>, and because the idea of comparison-shopping for places to live makes me want to live in\u00a0a tent in a rowboat on\u00a0the canal, I&#8217;d decided that whoever was first willing to take me as a tenant in a place I liked the look of would be the winner.<em><br \/>\n<\/em>As a side note, a few people contacted me on spareroom (there&#8217;s a rather impressive messaging system there, so that you&#8217;re simultaneously searching for a room while advertising yourself as a tenant, so contact can flow in either direction) almost as soon as I signed up;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One was in Hemel Hempstead, 20-odd miles away. I could use public transport, but if I&#8217;m going to live in suburbia, there&#8217;s closer suburbia to live in.<\/li>\n<li>The other was near Edgcott, 13 miles away, but out in the countryside.<br \/>\nSadly, not on any useful public transport routes, and they were quite clear in their listing that you&#8217;d need transport, so I had to say no.<br \/>\nI\u00a0<strong>did<\/strong> ask whether I could contact them when I do have transportation<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\u2021<\/span>, because it looked awesome, and living in the countryside sounds nice, so it&#8217;s possible that I already have my next place to live lined up.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I move on Wednesday, after work, though I&#8217;ll see about wandering off early so that I don&#8217;t have to contend with commuter crush on the train. To the extent that there\u00a0<strong>is<\/strong> any commuter crush on the Aylesbury to Aylesbury Vale Parkway route.<br \/>\nThe train trip\u00a0is from the second to last station on the line to the last one. Takes about four minutes.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s cheaper by bus, I&#8217;m told, but the bus does stop every 100m or so, which sounds wildly annoying.<br \/>\nThere&#8217;s also a cycleway option, at somewhere between 3 &amp; 5 miles &#8211; Google Maps wants to route around a particular section of the A41, but there&#8217;s no indication as to why, so I&#8217;ll have to look into that.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\u2020<\/span> <span style=\"color: #800000;\">One of these people, who mentioned only looking for male flatmates because it made it easier when wandering out of the shower wearing a towel, did message me back to say that he sometimes wanders around naked post shower while making a cup of coffee, and that he probably should have mentioned it, but that he&#8217;d like flatmates who are OK with that.<\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #800000;\">Might just be me, but that feels like the sort of thing you&#8217;d mention earlier?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">\u2021<span style=\"color: #800000;\"> I don&#8217;t really\u00a0<strong>want<\/strong> to own a car.<br \/>\nThey&#8217;re convenient when you need them, but also can be a right pain in the arse the rest of the time, because parking is almost always an issue.<br \/>\nScooters are an option, and it turns out that the whole field of plug-in electric scooters has come a long way, so for an option that is enormously cheap to run, &#8230; ?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">So, as of the middle of next week, I&#8217;ll be living in, or next to, Berryfields, which is a development served by the Aylesbury Vale Parkway station. I&#8217;d put in a Google Maps link or something, but there&#8217;s a complication there; The roads are present, but the imagery hasn&#8217;t caught up, so it&#8217;s\u00a0<strong>still<\/strong> all just fields around there.<br \/>\n<\/span>The train station opened nine years ago and it&#8217;s not on the pictures, so I have no idea how old that imagery is.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>The job seems to be going well.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m still learning where to set that line between &#8216;stuff I need to do&#8217; and &#8216;stuff everyone else needs done&#8217;, and Friday was a classic example of the difference between theory &amp; actuality.<br \/>\nI&#8217;d decided to set aside the afternoon for training and admin. My supervisor had told me that I should feel fine doing that, and agreed with it when I told him. And then, three minutes later, had to put something else as a higher priority, because of <em>course<\/em> that&#8217;s what happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>should I be linking to or inserting the various songs I reference in blog post titles? serious question &#8211; I name them that way because it amuses me, but I wonder whether either of the readers of this thing have ever wondered, &#8220;What&#8217;s that a reference to?&#8221; this one seemed appropriate as an update title, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-its-what-happens-next"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-Iy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2762"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2765,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2762\/revisions\/2765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}