Job 1 pays more than Job 2 plus its benefits and bonus which I wouldn't get until April '11.
F*ck. It's the middle ground job. It's my old role at the Big Bank. No career, but good money. Nice team. Banking techies. I know where I stand with them.

Time to toss that coin.

It was heads. Banking.

Sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t sh*t. I DO NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO.

I have made my bed. Almost. Time to lie in it.

I went with the coin toss. Job 1. I need cash, not benefits. The way I'm putting it is that over 18 months it's the difference between me having a house deposit and not having a house deposit.

Job 1 the people are lovely, it would be high volume but in that really matey way.

Job 1 has offered. Job bloody 1. They're almost crying that I might not accept!

I got my hair cut tonight. I now have short hair again.

Being an assortment.

• While home a few months ago, I saw an advert for Lesser Spotted Ulster, a nice TV series about a nice man who walks around the province and talks to various nice people. I was kind of delighted to see that the music chosen to accompany the ad was the (gentle, soft-spoken, but perhaps not technically nice) Walk on the Wild Side.
  
  
• One there was a nice man called Tim Powers, and he thought to write a book set in the Caribbean, combining three of the things that area is known for: voodoo, rum, and pirates. And so he wrote 'On Stranger Tides', which is a great romp, and later it was going to be made into a film. Not one of those famous voodoo/rum/pirates films... well, not yet.
  
  
• I had some cycle training a few years ago, when I lived not very far from what I do now. In fact the training started in Victoria Park, as it's a big green space reasonably nearby that I can ride around in for ages without ending up under a truck (which was a bit of a problem in those days: "Well, you've clearly managed the left turn there, and oh no under a truck again"). We then took it to the streets! Ending up on Mile End Road, trying to cross three lanes of traffic, except there wasn't any traffic there so I didn't really learn anything. Ironically the only regular problem I've had with that manoeuvre in last two years has been coming into Mile End Junction from the other direction. Anyway, I recently realised that it can't really be that far from here, and so a few weekends ago I went back to retrace my tracks. Strahan Road is where I learned to start in the road, and take turns (onto what is apparently also Strahan Road). Then down to Grove Road, where I learned turning right across traffic (past the bridge, just where you can see the car coming out), and over to the Tredegar Road, where I learned the terrors of the roundabout. Then down to Mile End Road, and the unhelpful end to the lesson. I don't have any real point here, except that I liked retracing them and fitting them together with other roads I knew around there, and I like that technology means I can share them with you.
  
  
• We had some people come in and talk to us about health insurance this week, and one of them had a leaflet describing what in each of the categories listed their plan did cover, and what it didn't. Fertile ground as always in the complimentary medicine category - if it does cover Hopi Ear Candles, what will it balk at? The answers are the mysterious sounding Vega Therapy*, and ... hair analysis. I suspect it's strand-by-strand, but hope that some people are actually trying to claim back money for someone to come in and tell them that they like what they've done with it.
  
  
• I'll do a proper post on the proper filter regarding house stuff, but holy crap!
  

*Which turns out to be some electroacupuncture business. I was hoping it was a course of cassettes on which the former frontman of Suicide explains for 45 minutes that he invented punk, and at the end you're quite glad you're not Alan Vega.

With 10 hours and 25 minutes to go, I am still no closer to anything approaching a decision.

It's like a seesaw. Which is most me? Which will make me happy? Which will...every question has two answers. Why am I such a dichotomy? Will my dreams bring the answer?

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where----' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'----so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk enough.'

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/gallery/2009/nov/11/1

A selection of the best images from around the world

A couple from last week. More over on flickr:

There's supposed to be an RAF Hercules fly-past near London Bridge at 11am, if you're in that neck of the woods.