It's like, Glastonbury man, like, cool

In just a couple of hours pre-registration for the Glastonbury Music Festival closes - and we're signed up! Glastonbury is the UK music festival, 3 June days and nights of rocking out in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere, to some of the biggest names in UK and international music. Rumours are everywhere about who will be playing this year (it won't be confirmed until the tickets actually go on sale on April 1) but there's always a good bunch - last time the list included Basement Jaxx, The White Stripes, Coldplay, Brian Wilson, James Blunt, The Killers and Elvis Costello. Hopefully the weather will be nice, last time there was a freak storm which turned the entire event into a mudpool. As I'm not much of a tent fan at the best of times, 3 days of camping is going to test me enough without having to bale water out of my sleeping bag!

A little while back we went and had a look at the actual town of Glastonbury, which is only about 45 minutes from Bath. It's a pretty sleepy little place but it's really latched onto the "alternative lifestyle" thing - almost every shop sells positive-energy crystals, Wicca stuff and/or scented wellbeing thingies. Hippies seem to be drawn to Glastonbury due to its possible legendary connection to King Arthur, plus proximity to various ley lines and mystical sites like Stonehenge.

The main connection between King Arthur and Glastonbury centres around Glastonbury Tor:

This strange lump of land is visible for miles around and many centuries ago was apparently surrounded by flooded wetlands - giving rise to the legend that it was the Isle of Avalon, birthplace of Excalibur and burial place of King Arthur. Another legend says that the rough terracing (you can just make it out in the picture) was part of a huge labyrinth that led to the top, upon which you could enter a secret castle carved inside the hill.

Whatever it is, it's a big climb - we only got this far before our hopelessly inadequate footwear forced us to stop. We'll have to come back to get all the way to St Michael's Tower on the top but even from half-way the view is quite good.

Groovy man!

Happy Happy Joy Joy, Happy Happy Joy!

We interrupt your normally scheduled blogging for this important announcement:

After over 3 months of disappointment and disillusionment Johnny finally has employment!

The victims employers are called *NAME WITHHELD* - at the moment they are quite small (about half-a-dozen employees) but they have a brilliant idea, a super-high-quality group of engineers, and a CEO who's done the startup thing before with tremendous success. So it should be great fun, great technology and a good working environment (they have awesome coffee and a foosball table!) Which is what I've been looking for all this time. No not foosball - the other stuff! Oh never mind...

So what do they actually do? Well I can't really tell you, because it is a world-first, it's very cool and very clever, and we don't want any competitors just yet, thanks for asking. But I can quote from the (very sparse) website and say "it will change the way you meet and work". Hmmm - very enigmatic too!

I start tomorrow (Tuesday Feb 20) - Yeehah!

Brain-melt, part 2

Well MattyT has so elegantly solved the two problems (see his comment on the previous post) that this post is now a bit redundant. But having the solutions stashed away in the comments avoids people accidentally seeing them before reading the questions, so that's quite neat.

Nice work Matty, just let me know any time you want to form a Page-and-Brin-style techie partnership and change the world (sorry, I've been reading The Google Story and it's very inspiring!)

If you've been unable to nut out a solution to Question 4, don't worry. When we worked though my answers to the questions, my interviewers admitted than none of them (and there were four of them) were able to work out how to do it - given an unlimited amount of time!

Oh, and on the subject of comments, please note that I have enabled "anonymous commenting" so any of you guys can comment on our posts without having to have Blogger/Google accounts etc... Give it a go, it's always great to hear from you.

A bit of a brain-melter

Hey guys, Johnny here again, and in a much better frame of mind than my last post :-)

Had an interview yesterday, which I thought went really well, and I've just heard back that they thought exactly the same. So there may finally be some progress for me. The job sounds awesome - but I won't jinx it by raving on about it any more here. There'll be plenty of time for that later, touch wood.

Anyway, as sometimes happens when you're applying for jobs with techie-companies, they wanted me to complete a little test of my programming abilities and logical thinking. I had 60 minutes, and there were four questions, two of which were programmy-type ones, the other two logical ones.

I was really eager to impress these guys with my elite programming skills <cough>bullsh!t<cough> so I spent rather too much time on the first two questions, giving myself only 15 minutes to do the others. I guess my time-management skills are not so elite...
Anyway, reproduced below are the two questions:

3. I have balancing scales and 7 balls. One ball is heavier than all the rest. How do I determine the heaviest ball with only 3 possible weighing attempts?

4. On the shelf you have 10 identical bottles of identical pills (let's say there are 100 pills in each bottle). However, one of these 10 bottles contains cheap knockoff pills. The only way to differentiate fake pills from real pills is the weight - while real pills weigh 1g each, the knockoff pills are only 0.9g. You have one digital scale that shows the exact weight (down to the mg) of whatever is weighed.
How can you tell which bottle contains fake pills with just ONE weighing?

Thinking-caps on. Answers next blog-post!

Snow!!!!!!!!

Yes that's right, after 2 months of Winter and a Christmas sadly lacking in the white stuff department, it finally snowed all across England last week!! It's apparently quite rare for it to snow these days, particularly over here in the (slightly) warmer South West, so when the weather boffins said we could expect snow overnight on Thursday we were all understandably quite excited.

After an initial disappointing look out the window when I first got up for work, seeing no snow to speak of, I started to get ready for work but was soon called back to the window by Manda to see the white stuff falling quite steadily over our street and slowly building up on the cars and pavement. How exciting!! Driving in snow was quite a new experience for me, and while it proved a bit tricky getting out of our street - being quite a steep uphill road, Beatrice lost traction a few times - once onto the main roads it wasn't too bad, just a little wetter and slower than usual. They send lorries out to put grit and salt down on all the main roads when there's a chance of snow, to stop the snow from settling and help the car tyres grip the road.

So basically I just cruised along to work, grinning stupidly because everything looked so pretty covered in snow. I managed to snap a few photos with my mobile:


It snowed again on Friday, not so much down in Bath but up in Cirencester where I work it was snowing most of the day. I couldn't stop staring out the window, but luckily as it is so rare here I wasn't the only one. Although most people were grumbling about how annoying the snow was and how the roads would be dangerous... while I was just excited about the novelty of seeing my work car park covered in snow!

Sad Johnny does some housekeeping...

... well it's all I can do at the moment, still unemployed, nobody loves me, waste of space grumble, mutter, sulk...

I think it's fair to say I've been having a frustrating time so far in England, finding a job has been a lot harder work than expected. I've been a little spoilt in the past when switching jobs, so perhaps I was a little bit complacent, but it also hasn't been entirely my fault.

Take Job 1 for example. I was called up in mid-December about this opportunity to work in central Bath in a very good role, on a 6-month contract at an excellent rate. They liked my CV, and it all sounded magic. Then the main decision-maker goes on holidays until mid-January, so no progress for a month. Finally he gets back and I go for an interview. They ask me all sorts of curly questions (example: "So, how do you learn?") and I do so-so. The feedback comes that they like me but perhaps not for that role, there was a different one available, but would I be able to complete a technical challenge? I would, and did. I write 14 pages of research and analysis in less than 3 days. They invite me back for another interview with some different people. They say they like me. They say they like the work I did. Then they say they don't want to give me a contract, they want me to come on board permanently. Now I'd been honest from the start, and said that our long-term plan is not to be in Bath for ever, in fact by the end of 2007 we'll probably be elsewhere. So I couldn't really then take up a permanent position with them and then quit in August could I? Well, not if I'd like a nice reference. Hmmm. Sad.

So over a month of waiting, 2 interviews, and 14 pages of useless research, for nought. Then there was Job 2. Nice little 3-6 month contract, not Bath-based but not a terrible location, and the work would have been interesting, and in a new domain for me, Defence. And therein lay the problem. Despite having been born in England, having a UK passport, British father, and quite liking a pint of room-temperature ale, I was unable to pass a low-level Security Clearance. Mainly because I'd been away from the motherland for too long. Apparently change is coming, and in just a few months Commonwealth citizens will get cleared as easily as Brits do, but that's no use to me. Hence all jobs that mention defence (and there are a lot around here) are out; very sad.

So now Bec - who leads the job hunt two-nil so is qualified to advise on these matters - has recommended that I be slightly more economical with the truth. I'm now looking at both permanent and contract positions, which expands the market massively. The South-West isn't exactly overflowing with contract opportunities. So now I'm applying for permanent jobs, and keeping my big mouth shut about going anywhere.

Now, where was I - oh yes, housekeeping.

To save a lot of questions later, "Show us your Bristols" is a reference to the Cockney rhyming slang term "Bristol Cities". The rest is left as an exercise for the reader...

Bec used our digital still camera to take the little video snippets, apologies for the quality, but how clever is she? She seems to have a built-in probable-goal detector - she captured both Bristol goals! We started to think she was actually somehow causing them, but sadly not.

Oh, and I'm 30 next month. I'm not asking for any gifts or donations, please just wish/pray/sacrifice small animals for me to be employed by then, otherwise I'll be a 30-year-old unemployed living-at-home computer nerd. Now that is sad.

Show us your Bristols!

The other weekend we went along to see Bristol City FC play Middlesbrough in the fourth round of the FA Cup. For those not familiar, the FA Cup is the annual competition where every single soccer (aka Football) team registered with the English Football Association has a chance to go all the way to the top and play at Wembley to win the aforementioned cup, and hence (in theory at least) be the best team in the land. It's the oldest such competition in the world, and with over 680 teams playing in sudden-death knockout format, and soccer being a low-scoring sport, there is always a chance for a "giant-killing" performance where a minnow from the lower leagues can have a dream run and knock off mega-clubs like Man United or Arsenal.

Bristol City have had a bit of a run like that, being a League One team (that's the 3rd-best league) and now taking on the Premier (topmost) League might of Middlesbrough. To put it in AFL terms, it would be like the Northern Bullants taking on a side like Geelong. Anth did brilliantly to score us four tickets down by the sidelines on the wing for the big match - it was a complete sellout - but his internet force is strong. Here's the view we had:

The atmosphere for our first-ever English soccer fixture was fantastic. Chanting, singing, ridiculously one-sided P.A. announcements, dancing girls, the works. Almost the entire stadium (20,000) was Bristol City supporters, with just one little pocket in the corner for brave - some would say foolhardy - Middlesbrough fans who had made the six hour trek from Yorkshire. They were pretty confident of a win however, and league positions would tend to back that up. Sure enough, they started proceedings quickly, banging in their first goal within 3 minutes of starting! This temporarily silenced the crowd, which until then had been happily chanting the City club song, and other great tunes like I'm City Till I Die - reproduced below in the correct West Country accent:

Oym city till oy doy,
Oym city till oy doy,
Oy know oy am,
Oym sure oy am,
Oym city till oy doy!

Borough then fired in another goal to make it 0-2 at half time. The Boro' fans were loving it, singing (to the tune of La Donna e Mobile):

That's why we're Premier League,
That's why we're Premier League...

etc etc. The City boys must have had something very special in their oranges at half time however, because they came out breathing fire, and quickly converted a penalty kick.
The crowd went absolutely berserk - their Bristol boys had got one past Boro' (and Australia!) keeper Mark Schwartzer!


1-2, and a whole new round of chants were unveiled:

To the tune of Guantanamera:
Small town in Scotland,
You're just a small town in Scotland

Fifteen minutes later, and City headed in another penalty to equalise! The roar nearly collapsed the stadium!



The City fans delighted in taunting their Premier League opponents with:

Two nil.... and you f#@%ed it up,
Two nil.... and you f#@%ed it up
to the tune of Go West.

The match finished at 2-2, with smiles all around. They'll replay it up at Middlesbrough in a few weeks, but I think we'll cheer from afar. Come on you Reds!

Job update - Bec's a Star!!

Well it's about time I posted an update on my job situation, as there have been a few developments in the last month. You may recall I landed my first English job with Lloyds TSB just before Christmas, which was certainly cause for celebration. But unfortunately the happy times were short-lived as I soon discovered the role wasn't exactly what it had said on the tin... While there were definite good points about it - really nice, friendly people; good working environment near Bristol harbour, close to shops and restaurants; cheap, good quality cafeteria with all-important coffee corner; and let's not forget the convenient ATMs on site - alas, the work itself bored me to tears, quite literally.

And so, after much deliberating, I decided to opt out of Lloyds and have accepted (and started!) a new job with Star Technology. A much smaller company, based in Gloucester which is just under an hour's drive from us here in Bath. Not exactly close, but then it had been taking upwards of an hour and a half just to get to Bristol what with the crazy traffic, so this is actually an improvement! After a week and one day I'm already enjoying the work a whole lot more, so it looks like I made the right decision. I do miss those coffees though...