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GnomeThingYou are on the archive wiki. The new wiki is here. Mark Ferry. CLAWthing of 2002. Currently located in Merrie-Olde-England in Cambridge. You'll catch me on CLAWsOnIRC? as Gnome?. My contact details are kept up to date here. I'm still helping with the administration of the CLAWs Mailing Lists?, so messages to mailto:clawthing@yahoo.co.uk arrive at my inbox. Note that this mail address is used only for messages concerning CLAWs mailing list administration. Some orphaned pages I've adopted: Friday 30 December 2005 Ping. New CLAWs webserver on Byatis. Friday 8 July 2005 This is waaay old. See GnomeBlog (Blog:1). Blog links don't seem to work very well. Wednesday 6 October 2004 Hooray! Welcome back ClawWiki! er tiki. Wednesday 1 September 2004 See, see the hacker sky Tell me, madam do you Thursday 29 July 2004 Quick news: Simon arrived in the UK yesterday! w00t! Was reimbursed £350 by the bank for fraudulent transactions that appeared on my debit card after I had lost (and cancelled) it! Listening To: Cyndi Lauper - All Through The Night Tuesday 13 July 2004 So I've been in the UK for a year and 14 days now. The time has gone quickly. I'm exhausted. Nokia is leaving me quite disillusioned with working in any computer related field. My right knee has been giving me trouble recently. I cancelled a weekend trip to go windsurfing in Fuerteventura Canary Islands) although my knee wasn't the only reason. Kait and I have booked a trip on the Eurostar to Paris for early September. £60 return is as cheap you'll get it. Bought two DVDs on the weekend (£5 each): Ferris Bueller's Day Off and one of my all time favourites, The Big Blue (Version Longue) Can't sleep. Can't concentrate. Can't work. Have given notice to housemates. I'm moving to London. Tuesday 12 May 2004 Updated my e-mail address. See hereHave full net connectivity again after finally getting ftp to work over a socks proxy run through an ssh tunnel setup from work to the ssh daemon listening on the Secure IMAP port on my IBM machine. w00t! Tuesday 4 May 2004 Day one at Nokia. No ssh access but I'm working on it. Have a nice big 19" monitor. And an RFID tag around my neck. And a Nokia 6230 to try out. Monday 19 April 2004 Yet More Pics!.Nikki's, (URLs point to http://gluon.za.net/mark, hopefully they'll switch back to http://light.mth.uct.ac.za/mark soon...) Tuesday 30 March 2004 New! Updated! Pics! and! Videos! at! http://light.mth.uct.ac.za/mark/Still a few sets of photos outstanding - Xmas and New Years, I forgot to batch convert these for some reason. the wee hours of 26 March 2004 hey mawk, there are indeed tshirts left, but sean says you can't have a medium, as it would be porno - d@vid Wednesday 25 February 2004 Banana Jam Café 5pm onwards, R11 cocktails (woot!) Tuesday 27 January 2004 1337 Romeo & Juliet: Thursday 22 January 2004 Happy Birthday !!! from ArchAngelThank you! Thank you! :)
Wednesday 12 November 2003 Winchester is crap. Have spent every week night at work for the past three weeks or so. I ordered my laptop a couple of days ago. Weekends are spent with friends in London, have seen a few movies (see later), been clubbing a bit, but generally this is an island loaded with chain-smoking, pub-crawling peasants. Thank god for the few (hah!) Australians and South Africans. The housemates. They're pleasant but uninteresting. I had a lot more fun with Sonja, Mike and Paul at the digs in Finchley. But perhaps that was just because it was summer and I wasn't working. Both the girls are light sleepers. The house is generally grubby, but the bathroom has the best shower I've yet experienced in the UK (although not quite as nice as the one in your Putney house, Aha). I eat. I haven't bought a winter coat yet. It really hasn't been cold enough to warrant it. Movies: Lots of travelling time between Winchester and London. An hour if you're lucky, three if they've got engineering works on over the weekend and you have to catch a bus in between two stations. I haven't played the piano since Mum and Dad were here. Have been drooling over some digital ones though. Will see how that works out with my plans to come back to SA in February. Yes! Right... Y!IM: clawthing Winchester Hampshire SO22? 6EP Thursday 23 October 2003 Photos! Yes indeed. I bought a new Canon A70 camera and, well the news is here and the photos are here. And that's not all. There's even a short video clip I took just to test my new camera here. It's just begun to get rainy and cold. I have a 20 minute walk to and from work every day. Now I have to do it in the cold. In the rain. Alone. This explains why I spend so much time at work. Tuesday 9 September 2003 Yay! And the Wiki's back up after an upgrade! w00t ElfBoy! Have spent the past two weeks working for ]]. Some interesting stuff, but quite a lot of reading through existing code and attempting to work out what the hell it does. Thin on comments as usual... I'm also in the process of moving to Winchester. This involves hopping madly between friends' living room floors. Sunday 31 August 2003 End of the second month. Have given notice to housemates. I'm moving to Winchester. Damn I'm hungry. Friday 29 August 2003 I've started a job as an Embedded Software Engineer with a company called Teleca AB, an engineering/software consultancy for the mobile telecomms industry. I started working at the Winchester branch last Tuesday and well, I haven't had that much to do except read project documentation to get up to speed. I should have a desk and a PC soon (rather than borrowing someone else's). Quite disorganised, the British. Thanks to a huuuge power failure it only took me five hours to get home last night. Then after half an hour we started crawling. Then stopped completely. The lips of the people around me drooped in to a quiet unhappiness or pursed in annoyance. Eventually I discovered the buffet car, ordered a capuccino and a muffin and went and sat in First Class undisturbed. It was half past eight by the time we got to Waterloo. The station was packed with travellers, necks craned, staring dazedly at the empty schedule screens. Reflecting the misery in their glasses. Once through the station and out on to the street I walked, whistling, to Embankment, then hopped aboard a bus that conveniently manifested in my way. At Oxford circus, on foot once again. Past desperate sardinated masses, I raced the buses along Oxford street. Singing now - perhaps the chaos makes me happy? By Marble Arch and ten o'clock I finished off a chicken burger and waited for the 86. Wednesday 16 July 2003 Can't really believe it's been almost three weeks already. I'm still staying in Philip's room, and am getting along quite well with the housemates - 3 South Africans who've all been here for at least two years already. I've been recklessly abusing the housemates' computers and the household ADSL. Broadband is SOOOOOO cheap here it's ridiculous. Last Saturday night I went to a housewarming for Ashton Mason, ex-Capetonian and friend of CLAWfounder? Anthony Steele's. Saw Zara and Anthony again (Ant didn't remember me but says "Hi Chivaugn!"), and met Ashton (who made great margaritas!) and even Chutney! (Robyn Weldon, ex-CLAWs). Then joined Zara, Andy Shack, his girlfriend Ester and Glenn Jones in going to Slimelight. What a wonderfully appropriate name. What you don't realise around here is how long it takes you to get anywhere. The tubes stop running around midnight so you have to catch busses. After leaving Ashton's place at just after midnight, we finally got in to Slimelight around 2am. (Cover is £8, which is about the same as a main course at a decent restaurant). Slimelight is quite a hole. It's located in an old wharehouse in Angel, a dodgy part of town (apt, considering the show by the same name). The club is separated in to three main areas: a kind of entrance area, and two dancefloors. Industrial/House/EBM is up the top and Goth/Metal down the bottom. What was incredible to see is the effort the club-goers put in to their dress, make-up and hair. Some of the stuff they do is truly stunning. I have to laugh when I consider a comparison with what I've seen at the Turtle or cough Lestat (Playhouse may have been different, but sadly, I never made it there before its demise). The job search is progressing, producing a number of replies but no interviews yet. In the mean time I'll be looking at doing temporary work, probably bar-work for corporate or sporting events (mm, anyone else thinking Fight Club?!?) - the sort of work I can drop at short notice if I get the job offer I'm looking for, but providing enough to relieve the guilt of spending savings. Back in SA, Kait's got all her visa application stuff in order (except a letter invitation I must still write). Hurrah! Should be over here by November! On top of that, both Lindsey and Robyn have mentioned making their way here in the coming months! w00t! Very much looking forward to that! But, feeling hungry now, so going to heat up one of those microwave dinners they're all so mad about here. (They're cheap too, see). ciao Sunday 29 June 2003 wahey! Alo London! First three days in London have been incredible. Haven't stopping meeting people and haven't stopping running (hobbling, but that's a different story). First day was meeting Philip, and going to my sister (Andrea's) place, met old school friends at a pub in Putney that evening (SURPRISE!). Am currently in London abusing Andrew Sturman's network connection. Philip, Glen, and Andy are playing some Cthulhu game set in 1666, and Rene is sitting working on the machine next to me. Ack gotta go. Will be keeping you updated... Thursday 19 June 2003 Well it's true... By 7pm on 26 June 2003, you shall all be rid of me at last! To celebrate this happy event, I'm having a get together at Everyone who knows me (and wants to say ciao) is welcome. :) I'm relocating to the UK for about three years (with frequent holidays back home, of course) and would like to see you all before I go. For those of you already overseas: I'll be staying in Philip's flat in Finchley for July and will hopefully be seeing you all soon... Sunday 15 June 2003 Flight booked and confirmed for 2pm on Thursday 26 June 2003. Oh, of course, I'll be having a farewell gathering. Friday 20 June. Hope you'll all be finished writing exams. Tuesday 03 June 2003 Well that plan didn't last long. I've delayed departure and am now aiming for sometime soon after 22 June. I haven't got any further with job-hunting but Philip has kindly offered me a place to crash when I get to London so short-term accommodation is organised. Wednesday 30 April 2003 I booked a flight out to the UK this afternoon. I fly out on Sunday 8 June at 3pm, spend 3 hours in Joburg then fly Virgin Atlantic to London. Of course, I'll have to get my ass in to gear if I want to have job interviews lined up by the time I get there... |