A title this would be, had I the originality.

I read "The Avatar" by Poul Anderson. At first I thought it was nothing related to Avatar, the movie.( Read more... )

Er... that's about it really.

Just sent out this email to most UK friends that I still have the email address for, since I'm panicking a bit, my reality having just dawned on me:

[Edit: see below for update 2. I messed up!]

Yes, I know I've left sending this out way later than I should!

In a couple of days, Thurs 4thFri 5th Feb, I'm returning to the UK for 2-4 months to complete the last step of interviews, medicals and paperwork in the process to becoming a legal resident in the US, where I'll live with my wife (I'm married. Whee!)

So, I'll be standing lost in the Gatwick terminal with no home or job to go to. Fun.

Anyone got a floor I can sleep on 'til I can find my own place? Anyone recommend any cheap short-stay tenancy places? My main criteria is "cheap", but also preferably within affordable reach of the US embassy in London, and with net access.

Depending on the price of where I'm staying, I may also need a job. Anyone know of any work for a programmer (PHP, C, Perl, Java, VB, whatever?) or any work, period, that could keep me going? If the work's project based, I can stay 'til it's finished, if I got my visa before the job's done.

I'll gladly work for room, board and a decent internet connection!

- Dewi.

Update:
So I messed up and am arriving a day later than I thought.
Revised plan:

1) Arrival: Crash at Almostwitty's Friday night. Maybe I can help him tidy up, and from there see my bank, and get myself a disposable phone.

2) Short term: From there, pop over to see Rob Oldham earlyish Sat morning, and catch up, stay with him a few days until I know what's happening with the visa and how much time I have to waste before the visa people get their fingers out. [Unconfirmed! Rob's our from sat afternoon for a couple days, so this might all go to pot... we'll see.]

3) Long term: Then from there, up to Yorkshire to get my stuff back from Al and say g'bye to people there.

All interspersed with visits to relatives, and Lee :)

Thank you all: I have so many good friends :D

Jan: Fiancée visited, seeing my family; Obama inaugurated (I don't buy the hype, but voting him in did wonderful things for the US' international image).

Feb: A wedding date is set, and plane tickets are bought.

Mar: Google Wave tech demo comes out.

Apr: Furcadia 0.27: whisper update, followed quickly by the optional 0.27B update that supported groups.

May: Lost my job, but get an offer from DEP - I'm moving up in the world!

Jun: I go to Canada, meet my future mum-in-law, get married, meet Ghost Tiger, Nemo Kiana and Heaven's Cat, and more new family.

Jul: Honeymoon and birthday at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, meeting DEP and more Furcadians than I could count, then a road trip down to Texas to see the DEP HQ; meet Richard "Lord British" Gariott at his castle ranch, along with the Fat Man, Mike McShaffrey, most of the DomainOfHeroes.com crowd, and many more industry greats.

Aug: Getting my own apartment in the US.

Sep: Meet John Romero; apartment floods; return to the UK; phone got stolen; hacking attack lets me improve much furc security; big family get-together; say goodbye to my UK home.

Oct: Return to Austin, TX! This is home, now.

Nov: Furcadia 0.27C is the first update I'd been involved in; start working on 0.28; my first US Thanksgiving; buying "Zombies!" board game on Black Friday.

Dec: Got two cats!; My first Christmas and New Year's in the US; working on my first big update; my first missed deadline!

Christmas was fun: had a good haul of fun books & toys (Lego! Whoo!), chocolates and whatnot... even a bottle of Ribena! :D We were in "crunch mode" until about Christmas eve, working 16 hour days and sleeping in the office trying to get a client update written in time - then finally we could tell it wasn't going to happen, gave up, and flopped about gloriously. Very relaxing!

Money's tight as always, but we're sticking to our budget like glue, even over Christmas, so we're actually managing to put money aside! Yay, us!

American Christmas food is all about the ham, rather than turkey; and most foods tend to be much sweeter. But other than that, it's the same deal: tree, present giving, and so on. I got people here cheap books that I liked (so if they hate them, they can give them to me next time, yay!) and a book token (so they could get books they liked themselves).

We were made to feel very much part of the family by everyone here, but still, I think we'd maybe have liked more family around. But Thanksgiving tends to be the family-get-together time in the US, it seems: Christmas is for households to enjoy themselves stresslessly. And Heidi's dad'll be coming down for a few days in a week, and my mum might make it over next year, so it's all good :)

And now we're back into "crunch mode"... *sighs, gets back to work*

Poll #1490850 Cats: how would you like yours?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

Gender?

Hair type?

Breeding?

Age?

How many cats?

I have an announcement.

Auora and I have decided that now we're settled in our new home, it is time that we started to try for a... cat!

We're getting one from the cat rescue place. We're planning to get one or maybe two older ones; spayed/neutered shorthairs. Older cats are quieter, mellower, and a lot harder to find homes for. Finding homes for two together (siblings that have always been together, etc) is very tricky. But for us, two older cats who're already familiar with eachother is probably perfect.

Here at work, everyone is gearing up for Thanksgiving. They've been cooking for two days, and the house smells gorgeous, with the smells of ham, turkey, stuffing, pies (pumpkin, apple, pecan...), cinnamon rolls, and various unidentifiable roasting things all mixing together in the office, making it quite hard to concentrate on work!

Tomorrow's "Black Friday", the most profitable day of the year ("black" here is a positive adjective: it's the day when businesses go from the red, into the black). Everywhere has sales on, so we'll be stocking up on cat things, game things, maybe a new monitor for Heidi and a hard drive for me (mine died!), and plastic crates for all our stuff, because the closet flooded again, and cardboard boxes cope poorly with floods!

I'll be returning to the US on the 11th/12.
( Read more... )

If you have a bunch of lights in series, and you know the mean time before failure (MTBF) per lightbulb, how do you calculate your overall MTBF? Or, same question, but substituting "lifetime" for "MTBF"?

I suspect it's not as simple as "each bulb has a 1 in 10,000 chance of failing in any hour, I have 100 bulbs, thus my MTBF is 100 hours", since the failure graph isn't linear, it's bathtub shaped.

This post will be written retroactively at some point (once I get enough comments!), and will be written in the future, so that as many of the comments as possible make sense.

So please comment creatively!

I can see it going several ways ways: people building upon each other's posts (which might shoehorn me), or competing with different topics (which might make the initial post harder to write), or they could do something I don't expect, or they could just not comment at all...

Phone had all my passwords from everything. If you've ever given me access to anything, please revoke it and change your passwords to be secure.

Admittedly, the passwords were encrypted, but there's no telling whether the reader of the encrypted files makes a temp version that's undeletable when it read them. I *think* it takes steps against that, but never tested. So just be safe.

Well, woke up to find a note through my door saying we were overdue for a bill we'd already paid, had to go to my landlord to sort that out.

( Read more... )

Day wasn't a total loss, though. I cooked us pizza and didn't burn it. Yay.

John Romero is probably the biggest Name in the gaming industry. Sure, amongst my circle of friends, Richard Gariott is bigger, but John Romero has household name status, and there's prettymuch no other game designer that can say that.

( Read more... )

Please sign this petition to stop the 2-warnings silliness. It's the one the ORG are recommending.
http://38degrees.org.uk/page/s/mandelsonweb

Someone on the nano forums asked this question. Here's my effort to answer it.

( Read more... )

There seems to be a common strawman attack (or a confusion?) that there exist people who claim that gods logically cannot exist. People who don't call themselves "atheists" claim this is what "atheism" means.( Read more... )

Went to the IGDA picnic at Richard "Lord British" Gariott's castle ranch today. Shook hands with him, the Fat Man, Mike McShaffrey(who did U8/9), most of the DomainOfHeroes.com crowd, and many, many others. And I ate far, far, FAR too much SaltLick bbq.

RG is currently suing his recent employers NCSoft for $24M, touring the country to give talks on his recent trip to space and preparing for another trip to space where he'll... get this... skydive down from space.

Tomorrow I prepare to drive 2000 miles back up to Wisconsin with Heidi, to pack up Her stuff and truck it all back down here.

I woke for the last time in my flat, my phone waking me after just two hours of sleep. I went one more time through my checklist: rubbish and recycling was out, a note was stuck to the letterbox to ask people not to stick newspapers through the letterbox, and so on.

( I was ready. )

No, WE are married :)
More later.
Please don't phone/txt about it though, it costs crazy money in Canada.

Photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=100404&id=574621894

More later.
So tired.

It's getting close!

http://dewimorgan.livejournal.com/41687.html has our plans for the trip.
I'll try to take pics and stuff of the wedding, and stick 'em up here and My FaceBook.

We'll be meeting GT there too! Whee!