It's not just laziness, but hopefully I'll be able to blog more soon.

Well, not dead, but at least somebody got around to firing his ass.

We've got the house, the senate, and the big ol' cherry on top that is a Rumsfeld-shaped hole at the Pentagon! Woohoo! It is a good, good day folks.

I find myself the least busy I've been in quite a while, so expect a few long blogs that I've been storing up.

I can remember three times in the recent past that I've spoken to a random stranger.

The first was on the tube, probably about a year ago now. The carriage was almost empty apart from us and we were both on our iPods. I unplugged my headphones from the socket and motioned for her to do the same. Then I handed her my headphone plug and she gave me hers. We plugged them into our respective iPods and gave each other random samplings of each other's music collection, commenting on the songs as we went until we reached the station. It was pretty fun.

The second was on the street near my house. A man came up to me and the friend I was walking with and started telling me about the crappy day he'd had, how everything had gone wrong, and how now he needed to park put didn't have change for the meter: he showed me the £2 in change he had in his hand and asked if I had 2 pound coins he could change it for? Stupidly I gave him the coins first, which he then pocketed and walked off. Fucker.

The third was on the same street two weeks later. A guy came up in a similarly blustery manner and started talking about the crappy day he'd had. Alone this time, I tensed up and waited for things to get ugly. But it turned out he'd actually just had a really crappy day. He was a carpenter and electrician, and he'd been unemployed for 3 months and had just got a job. So he'd gone to the unemployment office to sign off. There are big signs in the jobcentre saying you get £200 when you sign off, but it turned out that's only the case if you've been unemployed for more than six months: instead he'd got £24, which was all he had for the next 2 weeks to buy food and pay for his two bus journeys to his new job.

I responded by talking about how I'd been made redundant recently, and how the process of finding a new job in the same company was complicated and stressful, while just taking redundancy was easier and quite rewarding financially. We agreed that the system tended to produce perverse incentives, and that it was a funny old world. We parted ways with a friendly handshake.

So... two out of three ain't bad, I guess.

Saw The Host today with O. Not bad! As monster movies go, it was a pretty awesome monster: large enough to be scary, but not so large as to be totally unbelievable, although occasionally it fell into the CGI-monster trap of suddenly becoming a lot bigger or smaller depending on the shot.

The plot was oddly political: oddly, as in, it was obviously political in some way, but it was hard to work out what point it was trying to make exactly. It steered away from clichés and was refreshingly unsentimental: whenever it threatened to become emotional it veered away into black humour instead, which was certainly novel and generally well-done.

In all, it gave the impression of a much more realistic reaction to a giant monster lurking in a big city: life mainly undisturbed, a vocal minority overreacting in various ways, and a lot of not very clever people doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the time -- and consequently being disorganized and ineffective.

And of course: giant land/sea/squid monster thing. Shiny. Go see!

So, I was making a website as a favour to a friend of mine. The site has a gallery (not published at time of posting). Like any gallery, it has simple needs: a bunch of thumbnail images, and then a bunch of larger images conveniently sized for viewing in a browser.

It turns out there are three ways of doing this:

1. Manually: open each image in an editor, size it to two different dimensions, save the edited versions. This is slow, boring and laborious.
2. Using a desktop application: find a batch feature in one of my existing image editors to do it, or get a custom gallery-making program to do it for me. I know Paint Shop Pro has this feature, though it requires a little fiddling to get right. I'm only getting to grips with Photoshop quite late in my web development life (Paint Shop Pro always did everything I needed, and still does, but Photoshop is what Yahoo! has a license for), but I assume it can do this too, possibly involving downloading some sort of macro or something. I'd have to google it to find out.
3. Using a web service: as it turned out, the easiest way to do exactly what I needed was just to upload the images to Flickr. Flickr automatically produces several sizes of image, including thumbnails that are cropped to better show off the content of the photo. This didn't involve downloading anything and was by far the easiest method. And as a bonus, the Flickr community now has some images of the performers tagged with the event name.

This is important because of what it says about how people will use web applications: not because they particularly need portability or central storage or any of the "web" aspects of the service, but because the application is easy to use and does exactly what they want. It's only recently, as average bandwidth has increased and interfaces to services have improved, that it was at all possible that a web service would be a better user experience than a dedicated desktop application. But this is where, eventually, almost the whole application space is going to go. That's been the consensus amongst the kind of people who make it their job to think about these things for a while, but it never really struck home for me until just now.

The astute amongst you, dear readers -- and, really, amongst you there are few who are not astute¹ -- will have noticed a larger than usual gap in the already fairly patchy narrative of my life that is this blog. In particular, you will notice that in early October I got made redundant, only to get a new job a little over a week later, promising "details soon". But those details never arrived. So what's been up?

Well, a lot, as it happens.

The week we were all made redundant was, understandably, pretty terrible. We were told that our positions had been made redundant, but we had not: as valuable, loved, huggly-cuddled employees, they wanted to keep us. So we had three months in which to find alternative positions within the company. In a company the size of Yahoo!, this is fairly practical: we always have dozens of unfilled positions even within the relatively small London office, and over at HQ in Sunnyvale it can be hundreds. And speaking of Sunnyvale: yes, they said, we could apply for US positions as well, and if we were qualified and willing to move, a US position would be no harder to arrange than a UK one. So, this in mind, I applied to the obvious place first: the EU web development team, based in London. I also fired off my details to a few of the more interesting-looking jobs listed at the US office, but I didn't expect much to come of that.

My interview for the EU webdev position was one of the toughest I've ever done, and for good reason: those guys are all shit-hot at what they do, and don't want anybody who isn't. Much humbled by an interview process which asked me questions about HTML that I didn't know the answers to -- about HTML! that thing I've been doing for a decade! -- I was both surprised and honoured when they offered me a place on the team. I accepted the position, and blogged to that effect.

Meanwhile, however, other forces were afoot. To my surprise, people in the US office had received my CV and started getting back to me, asking if I could interview with them. As some members of our team had to head over to Sunnyvale to talk to our former team-mates about handing over responsibilities anyway, I joined that group and we prepared to head over, although at that point I was merely very excited about going to SF, more so because a friend and colleague of mine who used to live in SF had arranged for me to stay with some lovely friends of his while I was there, so I had the weekend to wander around the city as well. A job offer would be nice, but mainly it was just an unexpected vacation.

So I arrived in SF and promptly fell in love with the city, somewhat predictably. Much less predictably, the city, or at least that portion of it composed of hiring managers, also seemed to like me: one interview turned into three and four, and I ended up spending most of the time I was there talking endlessly to different Yahoos, all of whom had a different idea of what an interview should be: sometimes they were checking my sense of humour, sometimes they were asking me to wax eloquent about the nature of user interfaces, and sometimes they were asking me to find a method of sorting a list in order log N (I needed lots of hints). At the same time, I was getting used to the campus, the commute (Sunnyvale is a long way from SF), and the weather (it's great!).

Widgets and The City

In the end, all four groups² offered me a position -- it was just up to me to pick which one I liked best. Confounded by this embarrassment of riches, I took several days to weigh things up and finally decided on Yahoo! Widgets (formerly known as Konfabulator). I'll post more about Widgets and why I'm backing them in a later post, but I start with them in January and I'm very excited about it. And that leads naturally to the rather bigger news, which is that I'm moving to San Francisco.

Yep, three and a half years since I left uni and just under seven years since I moved to London, I'm leaving: it's on to the big US of A for an indefinite period of continental exploration. It all only became official enough to mention today, when I received an official offer letter and contracts and t-shirts and things, delivered by the UPS man in a big purple box which, I kid you not, yodelled at me when I opened it³. Currently it's all dependent on visa applications, so the move itself isn't likely until be early next year, tentatively mid to late January.

I won't say I don't have any reservations about the move: it's a huge step, leaving behind a whole country and a way of life and a group of friends whom I dearly, dearly love. But I did exactly that when I left Trinidad, and it worked out pretty well for me then. Yes, the US is ruled by the wrong man, but the democrats have conveniently seized power just as I'm about to arrive and pour money into their presidential campaign. Yes, the hours are long and vacations are, well, pretty much non-existent. But California is a playground full of places you only hear about in the movies, Silicon Valley is full of my geeky bretheren, and I hear rumours that San Francisco may have some sort of gay community. This is a job that was built with me in mind. The original move from Trinidad taught me that leaving everything behind is not nearly as traumatic as one thinks, and the friends who really matter stay in touch, and I hope that will be true again.

So, then: onwards and upwards I go. I'll let you know when the leaving party is as soon as I know when I'm actually leaving ;-)

[1] And what the hell, I'm feeling complimentary: you're all very attractive, too.

[2] For the record, the other three were 360, Groups and Mobile. And I would very happily have worked for any of them; deciding between them nearly killed me.

[3] Coming soon to eBay: a light-sensitive yodelling device.

So as part of our departure, our department has taken all the junk from our desks and organized a charity auction. Everything must go, very reasonable prices! Highlights include:

• One of those snazzy credit-card sized tube maps -- usually £10-£15, yours for £1.51!
• A rather fine picture frame, featuring a picture of our illustrious leader.
• A supercool Yahoo!-branded sports bottle. Yodel as you jog!
• Just in time for christmas, a set of christmas lights -- plus an extension cord!
• And more, much more! :-)

Get bidding! All proceeds go to the RSPCA.

My friends Alex and Sup tied the knot today in the amazing chapel at Pembroke College, Oxford. It was a lot of first for me: it was the first wedding I've been to where I was a "primary" guest, i.e. the bride and groom were personal friends rather than extended family or friends of family. It's also the first time I've been to a wedding in Britain -- lots of new etiquette involving what to wear and buying gifts -- and the first time I've been genuinely moved by the service, not to mention the first time most of the guests were my own age: yikes, I'm now in the Marrying Years.

Probably because of all of the preceding firsts, it was also the first wedding where I've thoroughly enjoyed myself throughout. The ceremony itself was an excellently-managed mingling of Christian and Hindu tradition, presided over by both a priest and a guru. Having been to a hindu wedding before, I was throughly impressed to see the hindu portions of the ceremony compressed to less than an hour, even if it did involve the guru speed-reading through various prayers.

The dinner and reception were an experience I won't forget in a hurry: in a 17th-century hall built by King James I and featuring portraits of Queen Anne and other assorted royalty, we had dinner on three huge tables, Harry Potter-style, and then they were all magicked away and we danced on the ancient flagstones, to a mixture of pop from the 50s to the 2000s, intermingled with bhangra and bollywood tunes. There were even dance-offs.

Congratulations, guys, and thanks for the invite :-)

It's just a bit sad that one of mine is now to have 50 connections on my LinkedIn profile.

You know when you're in an elevator and you've gone up lots of floors in a single go, and the elevator decelerates as you approach your floor, and for a few seconds you feel lighter? I love that feeling. It's like you've finally figured out how to fly, and you're about to take off.

Unrelatedly, a question for the floor: I was reading this article about an ancient Greek analogue computer. The damn thing was thousands of years in advance of the previous earliest known analogue computer of equivalent complexity, which depending how you define these things was either in the 1640s by Pascal or not until Babbage's difference engine in 1822. Of course, there were earlier clockwork devices for predicting planets, notably the Chinese had one in 1000BC. So it wasn't, like, unprecedented. But still pretty amazing.

But the difference between the Chinese and Greek civilizations is that the Chinese one is still there, but the Acropolis is in ruins. So what happened to the ancient Greeks? Did their civilization collapse? Was there a famine? Why don't they rule Europe in science and technology now? Enlighten me about European history, folks.