*insert witty tagline here*
WoooOoOOoOOOooo I’m moving on out of my house and in to Bob’s house! Hanne and I are staying with him for the time being while we get our lives together. Unfortunately BT are crap and they’re not gonna get the phone line installed in the house until the 13th of September, so I won’t be making any updates here for a while… Doh!
Who knows when/where the next update will be made? Only smarties have the answer…
So the interview went quite well… I think I presented myself fairly well, however the problem of security clearance once again reared its ugly head. Basically I cannot get security clearance because I’ve lived out of the UK for so much of my life, which immediately excludes me from any job that involves dealing with the government (e.g. MI5, MI6, GCHQ, etc)! Damnit!@#
Oh well… I wouldn’t trade my past experiences for anything, so if this is the result then so be it. I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, even if one cannot immediately see what that reason might be.
I also received several phone calls / emails today for future interviews, so I now have a telephone interview on Wednesday with a Web design company in Bristol, an interview near Gunnersbury (west London) on Thursday, and an assessment centre next Wednesday! Oh, and I was also comissioned by a friend to develop a website for his musical act AND Amit has thrown a bit of work my way that should result in a bit of extra moolah too! Cheers!
On my way to the interview I was reading through todays issue of Metro and found several interesting snippits:
There has been another possible celebrity spotting in Bath! While I was walking in town the other day, around the Abbey, I saw someone that looked strikingly like Anthony Head… while i’m not 100% sure it was him, when discussing the matter with my housemate Dave later on he mentioned that Mr Head had been into PC World recently to buy a new computer, and that he does indeed have a house in the Bath area…. ooOOOOOOoOoooo.
Finally, I’d just like to issue a formal written apology to Ben who pointed out that it was originally HIS idea that Bob allow Hanne and I to use his spare room. Thanks Ben. 
PS The title of this post is referring to the seagull incident of yesterday… it proved to be fairly lucky after all! 
Friday the 13th didn’t turn out to be very unlucky in the end… in fact it proved more to the contrary, as I was invited for an interview on Monday! The company is based in Gloucester, but the interview will be held at the offices of the recruitment company. If that’s successful then i’ll be invited for a second interview in Gloucester… wish me luck!
Saturday was fairly uneventful… I was looking through my website traffic logs when I noticed a fair few hits coming from Amit’s site… He made the mistake of linking to an image located on my site, which is very bad manners on t’Internet, as it uses up my bandwidth! So I decided to teach him a lesson by replacing the original image he linked to with a compromising photograph of himself from our grape picking adventure in France… heh heh heh.
Today I finally got my arse into gear and went to the gym for the first time in a few weeks… as I was waiting at the bus stop a massive seagull with a case of violent diarrhea flew over me and dirtied all over my jacket! I guess it’s a good thing I’d decided to put on the jacket otherwise it would have been all over my shirt and I would have had to go home. Some say that for a bird to shit on you is good luck, but it definitely didn’t feel very lucky.
Hanne will be here in two days! Neither of us have jobs sorted yet, but at least we have somewhere to live for the time being, thanks to the kindness of Rob! Yay. And with any luck my job situation could be looking a lot brighter by tomorrow evening… go, Gaz, go!
I’ve added a couple of new pages to the site:
On a side note, I use quite a few ABBR tags on this site which I recently discovered are not supported by Internet Explorer… grr.. stupid Microsoft. If you’re gonna use Windows then you should get a real browser, like Mozilla Firefox… it supports tabbed-browsing, has a built-in Google search, it supports loads of great themes and plugins, and best of all it’s not affected by any of those stupid viruses that try to take over your browser!
I finally got around to uploading the photos from our cycling trip in south-west France (around Bordeaux). Excuse the lack of captions… the whole thing is becoming a bit of a mess, so I’m gonna redo my entire Gallery as soon as Gallery 2.0 is released, then I can create some neat plugins to use on this site like “Photo-of-the-Day” modules and stuff.
One last note: Be careful, as this Friday is FRIDAY THE 13TH! You have been warned.
So here’s what happened yesterday…
The plan was to do some more work (doing the magazine thing again with John) and to look at some houses for Hanne and myself, so I get up and getready nice and early, when just I’m about to leave I get a call from the estate agent telling me the house has already been let. Bummer!
So I go off to start doing the magazine thing, when I get a call from a recruitment agency regarding a job with a company in London… it’s not an interview, but at least they’ve put my CV through. I’ll hopefully hear more next week. So I go about my merry way, popping the magazines through the letterboxes and thinking about the logistics of having to move to London, and I get about 1km down the hill that i’m working on when I realise that the magazines in my trolley are running out… doh! I left the box of spares up near the top of the bloody hill!@# So off I go back up, pick up the box and head back down to the trolley, when my phone rings… it’s my landlord.
“Hi Gareth… did you put some clothes in the washing machine last night?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Well, it overflowed and flooded the kitchen, and the room beneath it, before setting off the fire alarm… but don’t panic”
“Uh… ok” *panic*
So now the landlord wants to strip all the floor from the kitchen and the room beneath it to replace the wood underneath. Luckily the insurance will cover it, though i’ll probably have to split the insurance excess with the landlord. Actually I was just speaking to the builders, today, (they’ve started ripping up the floor) and they said that this has happened several times over the past few years… I’m gonna have to have a word with the landlord as to why I should pay anything, if this house is a bloody wreck.
Anyway, so I go back to handing out the magazines, now thinking about this recent turn of events, and as I’m walking up a driveway littered with childrens toys I trip over a small toy bike, slip on a skateboard, and fly through an open doorway at the feet of the startled owner…
“Your copy of Bath Life, ma’am?” I squeal through gritted teeth, trying to ignore the pain that’s shooting through my sprained wrist. After she got over the shock she was very apologetic for the mess in the driveway, probably praying that I wouldn’t sue for damages.
Anyway, so I set off again doing more magazines when I got another call from a company in Birmingham, inviting me to an assessment centre on the 25th of August. Woohoo! This day is just chock-full of ups and downs. The job is for a Java/J2EE programmer dealing with clinical trial management systems, and sounds quite interesting! I’ve gotta really, really try for this one, as both cash and time are running out (and it’s not feasible to move back to America… yet).
At lunch time I went off to see another house available for rent.. this house was a bit of a mystery, coz it’s a 2nd floor apartment on Grosvenor place, with two bedrooms, a big living room, and a nice kitchen, yet the price was quite cheap (compared to everything else Hanne and I had looked at)… so we assumed that there must be something wrong with the place. So Hanne did a little scouting on the ‘net and came across this page… check the 9th listing down. Now I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, as I’ve never seen one myself, but just because something hasn’t been seen or hasn’t been explained doesn’t mean it isn’t true, so this discovery spooked me a little (I guess it also didn’t help that, during the evening, I had been playing Doom3 with the volume up and the lights off). *shiver*
The rest of the day working was (relatively) uneventful… when I got home I mopped up pools of water from the kitchen and drained the washing machine… oh yeah, and to add insult to injury my clothes weren’t even clean!@#
So far today has been a beautiful day, i’ve looked at one apartment (which was a bit too small), and now i’m gonna clean my room, get some lunch, and go and read a book in the park next door. Hasta luego!
Ok, i’m too tired to write a full explanation of todays events, so i’ll do it tomorrow.
As you might have noticed, i’ve redone the framework for this site. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but only a few niggly details.
So is it better or worse than before?
I’m back, and bigger than a breadbox… er… yeah!
We had an excellent time in France! The weather was perfect (even too perfect at times, as it was approaching 40C by the end of the week… even the tar on the roads was starting to melt), the food and wine were plentiful, and the cycling was most enjoyable. Football and smelly cheese jokes aside, France is a beautiful country and the people were exceptionally helpful and accomodating. Vive la France!
We averaged about 50km per day for a grand total of 250km over the five days of cycling, which was just about enough to give us a bit of exercise while allowing for plenty of stops for picnics, cafe breaks, etc (to counter any health benefits we might have gained from the actual cycling). The B&Bs in which we stayed were out of this world… marvellous old buildings that have been renovated and modernised, such as the Chateau de Grand Branet. I’ll post the many pictures from the trip as soon as I’ve sorted through them all, and received the ones that my uncle has on his camera.
In the meantime I finally got around to uploading pictures from my graduation!
There’s only two weeks left until Hanne moves to England, and I still have so much to do (such as finding a place to live, and a job… minor, nitty-gritty details like that). On the plus side I just found out that my green-card application was extended, therefore I am still eligible to work in the US! Now to convince Hanne…