Karting rocks!

Today at work I went Go-Karting.

Working in marketing is great. It's not usually quite this great though. We had out whole company xmas bash today. I was only able to go to the day bit, but the fact that there were bits rather than just a meal out somewhere* is quite something I guess. "Day part" was a Go-Karting grand prix in West Yorkshire. So the first part of my day was spent chatting on the train. Then (after lunch) I was assigned a co-driver from the rest of the company at random (we were scrambled** into teams of two) taught some stuff about karting and rules, and then set loose on the track for a long-ish race.

Glee ensued.

My team came third. My boss' team came first which (since only two of us from the Edinburgh office were able to go) means the Edinburgh office is infinitely better at Go-Karting than the Leeds lot. Hurrah!

Also I got a trophy.

Oh and if you're prepared to wade through all the nested footnotes you might detect a hint that some of my colleagues played less than fairly. I don't think I'm endangering my job any by mentioning that - of the podium finishes - mine was the only team who played by the rules. A Pyrrhic victory for us perhaps, but one we cherished nonetheless.

*Not to say there's anything wrong with that - There's a meal out somewhere for just the Edinburgh office next week and I'm really looking forward to that
**The colleague who organised this shindig cheated a little*** in "randomising" the teams, and selected my boss as his co-driver, because she is a: tiny and b: awesome at Go-Karting
***and a lot on the track! Not that he was the only one...

little & often...

I love living in the city. Left work (a mere 30min late!) got home and discovered I hadn't got 1: tinyNiece's birthday card 2: paper to wrap tinyNiece's birthday presents, 3: food to feed Keith with (having invited him to pop by and hang out later).

Barely 25min later I'm home again having sorted 1 & 2 at a proper card shop and 3 at a little supermarket.

Yup. I love living in the city.

Did I mention I'm moving?

That's not as perverse as it sounds. OK, I will be more than doubling my current commute, but that still only makes it a pleasant 15 minute walk, and for that (and some more cash each month) I get to keep my excellent flatmate (Hame's moving too,) but lose my dreadful noisy neighbours, cramped street parking (new flat has a garage! oooh!) and falling-to-pieces kitchen.

Don't get me wrong, I've loved living here in this little place, but it is... little there's the garden of course which in theory offsets the smallness, but it's north facing, which at this latitude makes it useful as a place to be for only about 45 minutes of the year. And they're usually minutes I'm at work.

So we move! The new place is bigger, has two bathrooms (YAY!) and at least as much oddball charm as this place. But with thicker walls.

oops...

hm, 5 weeks since I last posted... need a distraction...

quick, look over there

phew.

Actually it is a fascinating little snippet of test they have if you have 10 mins spare (I'd have a pen and paper handy though). I got 13 out of the 15 right. Two of the mathier ones floored me.

The only annoying thing is that it didn't tell me if that meant I would or wouldn't have gone to a grammar school - anyone know?

Winter?

OK I am a bad blogger. The other night my brother was teasing me about there never being anything new to read here anymore, and I thought at the time that it hadn't been all that long since I posted... Last post was the 22nd of September Patrick, that's not recent. Thing is though I keep thinking about blogging because there's always so much going on, so it's always current in my head even if I've neglected to actually type any of it up.

So what's new in the land of splat? Well I got promoted at work about a month ago - pay rise and new job title and everything! Most exciting. Work generally is exciting, if a little busier than would be entirely comfortable. I'm not complaining you understand - what with all the talk of economic downturn and recession* it's very reassuring to be enjoying our own little boom time at the office. Long may it continue!

Working too hard is getting nicely balanced out as always though - for one thing I'm still basking in the happy afterglow of a week's holiday up in Sutherland with a bunch of friends. Way back in January 7 of us rented a large-ish house on the coast above my favourite spot on the planet: Oldshoremore beach. A stormy week in October up there is a surprisingly soothing experience**.

Most of the week was pleasantly lazy, but Justin and I togged up in our winter walking gear for one glorious day and climbed Arkle which was stunning. Chris joined us for part of the hike but was let down by his rather less weatherproof walking gear, and very sensibly retreated with wet feet before we left the path to clib the peak. Opting to go take stunning pictures in the valley instead some are already up and he'll probably post more before I get round to sorting my album (not to mention being a far better photographer than I) so if you're keening for some stunning highland scenery keen an eye on his flickr stream. Hamish also took some great photos***, as did Liz... Anita also took pictures which I'm sure are lovely, but I've not seen them, and Keith took no photos because his camera charger stayed in Edinburgh. I took some photos and I will post them soon because apart from anything else it's been far too long since I updated the pictures section of this place.

Speaking of updates to splateagle.com - there's a minor overhaul in progress, and if I tell you all that I'll have it done by next weekend there's an outside chance it'll be finished before next year :D. Nothing links-and-RSS-feed-breakingly drastic - the structure and look/feel of the place won't change - mostly I'm just doing a bit of tidying up in existing sections. I'm also adding a new bit to cross-reference all the other places online where I occasionally make an impact (for when things go all quiet here) watch this space, but not with baited breath please: I don't want to be held responsible for any asphyxiation.

What else? Oh I've managed to rack up around 8,000 miles since May in that car I bought for driving at the weekends... oops. It's been great though! Right now Hobbes is away on a long visit with his mechanic. On holiday an (already known) oil-seal related fault saw him chug through over four litres of high-grade engine oil, before finally blowing his turbo. Happily even in smoky sans-turbo form he's a hoot to drive and the turbo is under warranty... also I seem to have found a great mechanic for getting him sorted when things like this happen. Part of the ownership experience of Italian performance cars is getting on first name terms with the fellas who fix 'em I guess.

* Edinburgh's local economy still seems to me to be holding up better than most, but on the other hand I don't think the repercussions of HBOS and RBS faltering have fully trickled down yet...
** surprising to anyone who's not been there that is.
*** though if you're reading this more than 30 seconds after I've posted it, don't be surprised if he's revamped his site again and broken all my links! ;)

Just so.

I nodded so emphatically at this that my head nearly fell off.

Happy

What a busy day/week/month/year!

Good though, all of them. Very good.

I'm 31 now. I like that.

Will post properly soon.

of RSS and netiquette

To say that my friend Hamish changes his electronic particulars as often as he changes his socks would be unfair, he doesn't go through socks that fast. ;) OK that's a gross exaggeration: He's had the same domain name for as long as I've known him, but he does like to fiddle with the details. I've long since lost track of the number of things which have appeared before the @ as his email address, but I'm pretty sure it numbers in the double digits which is impressively inventive! Periodically he also likes to tear down his whole website to start over. I get it, that kind of a striving for perfection... but it also highlights how much of a house of eCards our modern interconnected existences are, because changing the details of one's online presence invariably breaks a bunch of the stuff that other people had built up to keep in touch.

So Hame's just completed one of his 'tabula rasa' reworkings of his site, and in doing so he borked the LiveJournal friends feed I (and assorted other people) used as a convenient way of keeping in touch with his blog. Bit of a nuisance but for the time being it just meant I wasn't reading his blog and, lets face it, he's only across the hall so I'm hardly out of touch with what's going on in Hamsterland. Anyway it came up last night in one of those "I blogged about..." conversations. He mentioned something he'd mentioned online, and I fessed up to having stopped reading since he'd pulled the feed I was using.

Just to be clear, I don't mean to suggest there's anything wrong with Hame changing his stuff - it's his stuff after all - but it got me thinking about how I relate to all this virtual-self stuff.

Personally, whenever I've made significant changes here at splateagle.com I've been meticulous about ensuring that - as far as possible - they don't wreck the way people use it for keeping in touch with me. That is the point of the place after all. For example when I changed the site structure to its current form a few years back I moved the blog page to a new place. So I told people who I knew had the old location bookmarked, left a note up at the old location and checked my referrer logs periodically for the next few months to check the move hadn't thrown people too much. That just seemed natural and polite to me, an extension of telling friends and family your new address when you move... but with all the myriad ways other people now connect with each other where does our responsibility for this stuff end?

Most people abdicate responsibility for managing their online self by using a pre-packaged platform like LiveJournal or FaceBook, where someone else decides what does and doesn't get supported, arguably better solution until the 3rd party you've entrusted your stuff to moves/loses/changes that stuff and you have no say in it...

Later in the evening Hame prompted me to try Safari's RSS handling feature again, and it turns out that - since I last looked at it - it's matured into a better way of pooling the various friends' blogs I read, than the LJ solution I'd been using. It now seemlessly finds and compiles the broadcast feed on everyone's blogs... except mine!* Drat. Need to fix that as soon as I can work out why...

*for some reason the feed for my page only appears (in Safari) if you point the browser directly at it here