Day2Day

Either email posting to LJ doesn't work any more, or a flurry of test posts are going to show up randomly from me sometime soon. I wonder which...

Quite a shock to see some actual real life activity in the anonymousclaire community!

Which prompts me to ask - who among you are going to the Nine Worlds convention next month?

I work with lots of other people to make computers show writing and pictures about fun or interesting stuff you can listen to or watch. We want it to look beautiful and be easy to use when you want to find something out. Some people draw pictures of how it should look on the computer and it is my job to make it look exactly like that even for the people who don't have the best computers. It isn't very easy because some computers don't work nearly as well as we would like them to. Groups of us often get together in a room where we talk about the work we are doing and we decide what is the most important bit of work to do next. The people who have the last word on it all listen when the rest of us give them good ideas and they often check in with us to see how it is going. Every so often we get together with even more people and show off the work we have done. Sometimes we answer questions they ask and they give us more ideas about making our work better.

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Want to give it a go? Go over here:
http://splasho.com/upgoer5/

The story so far:

So I said "I've got a boyfriend" and people said, "Tell me about him!" and I said "Tell you what?"

Then you said things like, "Well, is he a larper?" and I said "Not yet."

You remember that, right?

Well, now he is.

I'm going to miss stuff out, I know, but off the top of my head in no order at all:

Hot:
- Doing set up. It was tiring, I was too inexperienced for some of it and too short for other bits, but I kept myself busy, learnt new skills, and went to bed worn out in a good way each night. This was made fun and worthwhile by the excellent company and teamwork.
- Fab lammies that make people discern as winners
- Ushering Ittimin a few feet backwards for her own safety when she accidentally stepped into our camp
- Feeling integral to things happening. In particular, being called to answer to the sword lady who was cross at us for not making our swords better and being needed to summon the big bad for the final fight.
- Being in the right place at the right time and being invited onto the Muster Chef judging panel. Awesome mushrooms from the Bears and yet they were outclassed all the same when we reached the Gryphons and were served a restaurant level four or five course meal that had been cooked in the field. Other entries were good, but the bar was set so high for future competitions!
- Watching the Warrior and Wench competition. Ridiculously overplayed parts, and greenskin indignance were hilarious.
- People agreeing to get involved with stuff I asked them to help out with.
- Cornering the urchins, keeping them on carpet, and finally understanding how all the Black Flame plot fitted together.
- Yelling at Satuun and vampire cult leaders.
- Talking to Incantors with excellent IC reason to do so, which builds a bridge to letting me hang out with them more in future - since the Crows congregate there and Sue NPCs this is a good thing.
- Nice weather during packing up, and cars allowed on site - I was so concerned during Sunday that it would be otherwise and I'd spend 6 hours filling my car with sopping wet kit.
- Finding the Fireball liquer at Asda - haven't seen it on the shelves since last year and everyong who tasted it liked it.
- Nice roleplay around forging the seven swords into something a little bit closer to their ultimate destination.
- Phobos and his scary secret messages. Finding out later, out of character, that an item I created previously was used in the downfall of someone who wished me ill.
- Being considered competent: Ravenfire asked me for protection, Planar Cartographers came looking for me regarding rites, I was called to talk to the sword lady, and I helped train up some newbie healers to a level of competance on the field.
- Having endurances and not dropping on the first hit.
- Being bemused by a Leviathan ancestral trying to control me.


Not:
- Cold and wet, and failing boots in the mud
- Red paint, green pain, unnecessarily large staples
- Not getting to see either of the big bads in the final fight, despite being marked as one of their primary targets
- Doing lots of organisation for the Armourers linear and having our people turned away, then pulling out because the party ready to go looked woefully inequipped and the Harts were sure it was a suicide mission that couldn't possibly succeed with that party configuration.
- Feeling stretched at times. Barely made it to the healers guild and felt like I should be doing more around organising the sword forging.
- Wearing bad footwear and getting blisters the first night of time in.

I'd like you to tell me what you understand a podcast to be, please. This is a result of a recent conversation leading to intrigue on my part. Comments will be screened in the short term to avoid bias in answers caused by reading other people's responses. I'll unscreen them and do an update with explanation at a later date.

I may find I need to rephrase this later for more honed responses, but I'm hoping not.

Eastercon was... odd. I went to bed early both nights I was there and didn't stick around for the third one.

I had brief conversations, I trawled the dealers room and got an awesome hat, and I went to some programme items. Somehow, though, I just failed to really engage and feel like a part of it. Conversations dried up easily, the hotel irritated only slightly less than last time I was there, and I spent much of Sunday wondering why I'd given money to the London Worldcon bid.

Too many people I'd expected to see were missing, and everyone seemed so busy, so I spent a lot of time feeling a bit like I was looking in on something I didn't belong to. I don't think I'll bother next year. Which is a pity, I used to really like conventions.

Well, I was going to go to Picocon tomorrow. However, having wondered why I wasn't catching the colds all around me were carying for the past month or so, I have finally succumbed. I may still go along, but I may just lie in bed for hours instead.

After Batty died we went hunting for companions for Willow as rats don't do so great as solitary creatures. It didn't take too long. A thirteen year old in Plumstead (less than five miles from here) had a couple of baby females still available having, so far as we can tell, bred her show rats without telling mum and dad. Introductions went extraordinarily well, and after some initial insistance from Willow that the hammock was for her use only, she relented and the new girls are settling in nicely. They are TINY, at seven weeks old, and very fast. Mouse is a dark brown, known as "mink", and looks very much like a mouse at the moment. Her sister is a rex, possibly, Hayley thinks, a double rex. I am clueless. Apparantly it's all about being bred for a wiry curly coat, but if you breed two together then they can end up with bald patches. The owners talked about how rexes moult, but Hayley says that isn't normally the case, but this little one has some very thin fur around her shoulders and rump. So she might go bald, it might grow back, or she might have varied bald spots throughout her life, we'll just wait and see. Hayley thinks she looks like a frog. Personally, as she scales the cage sides I see Gollum but Hayley says we can't call her that. At the moment she's Frog, or as the auto-correct decided, Froggle. Pictures under the cut.

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I have just raked the leaves out of our garden. There are enough to fill about four wheelie bins, which is a pity because I filled the wheelie bin meant for garden waste with the weeds that I found under the leaves. I might have felt a little bit bad about raking leaves onto the street but for two things. First of all, they're not my leaves! They fell off the three great big trees outside my property and took refuge in my garden where they escaped being cleared away by the street cleaner type ride-on machine that blew all the others away. Also, I am paying for the street-cleaner device and its driver not only through my council tax, but through an additional "estate charge" which came as a bit of a surprise to me last weekend when the bill arrived, backdated to 2009 and demanding payment in 28 days.

That's all fun and games too. I have gone through all my mortgage paperwork and read around the issue. It turns out that I have to pay council tax which would usually cover this kind of thing, but in this case it doesn't because the council don't actually own the street here and the trees and any house owner who isn't the original owner has to cough up. When the previous owners ticked the box on the mortgage paperwork saying "we don't have to pay estate covenants" they weren't lying but neglected to say I would. I have told Gallions they won't be getting the money in 28 days, and could they work out what I actually owe them, since I only moved into the property in the September of 2009. They will then sort out a monthly billing strategy of some sort. Probably. So far, we've got as far as "I can't handle this by phone, could you put the request in writing?" followed by a letter dropping through the door asking me to set up passwords and so on so they can talk to me by phone and be sure it's actually me. Fun. Not.

Meanwhile, though, work has been going okay and they're willing to fund an MSc that I can do related to my work, run by Bournemouth and Bradford universities. Also of interest, I wrote some code for our part of the site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio) which is being looked at and may be repurposed for the homepage and for iPlayer (the javascript that makes the content scroll past when you click buttons on pages like http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/stations/radio1). Yay me, I'm ace!