So I'm here in the big bad city#

Sun, 21 Mar 2004 21:11:15 +0000

So I'm here in the big bad city. The move was successful insofar as I arrived safely with all my possessions, most of which are still working, and only minor injuries. Things I'd do the same way again:

• The van. I am very glad I got the Transit instead of the smaller Escort van I was half-thinking I could get away with, because I managed to mostly fill it.

• The van again: driving it was a lot of fun. It's just like a car except bigger, torquier, is far more susceptible to sidewinds, needed a small amount of coaxing heading fully-laden up the Chilterns, and has no rearward visibility other than anything you can see through the mirrors.

Some of it could have been done better:

• I could have taken two days off work instead of just the one

• I could have packed everything into boxes before hiring the van, thus probably needing it for only one day not two.

• Before starting to pack, locate tools necessary for dismantling stuff that needs dismantling. The Allen key was in fact in the small under-saddle bag on my bicycle; presumably it's the size for adjusting SPDs. The cross-head screwdriver I still haven't found

• it probably wasn't such a great idea to go outside and bring the van round for the second lot of loading at 11:30pm. Well, it would have been a better idea if I'd taken the house keys with me and hadn't locked myself out. Luckily I'd foolishly earlier left the back door unlocked, so I was able to scale the wall at the back of the garden and get in that way. In the process managed to scrape enough skin off my left forearm to make it look like I was getting rather more frustrated with the whole deal than was in fact the case.

• I could have paid someone to do it all for me. I might have been a few quid worse off, but at least I'd have had a full night's sleep on Thursday

Casualties so far: various cuts and abrasions, sore upper arms from carrying large boxes of books up four flights of stairs, and the PSU in my desktop, which doesn't any more. The fan doesn't go round even when prodded: I think I need a new one. That's the second PSU to die on me this year. Laptop works fine, wireless router, stereo and guitar ditto, haven't tried the imac yet. And I've lost my wireless network card, which is especially annoying as I didn't even /pack/ it, just removed it from my laptop to temporarily use a wired network card and put it down somewhere.

Still haven't had time to do anything about Havoc Pennington's Linux Desktop article, but between http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20040315/025430.html and my previously disseminated mutterings about habitable software and user extensibility, it should be pretty straightforward to guess what it was going to say.