I finally leave work at the end of this week. Don’t ever let anyone try to convince you that signing a contract with a three month notice period is a good thing. Mm.

So, I’ve been “working from home” for the last couple of weeks. Hm, that makes it sound like a pleasant semi-holiday period, doesn’t it? And it’s true that the volume of work’s been reduced - no development work to support, and far fewer ops work now that we’ve transferred our public-facing services elsewhere, for a start. But, er, I’ll write a bit more about that at some stage in the future.

Anyway, the most productive thing I’ve done of late (apart from a quick spot of gallivanting) is to rip 343 cds to nice pristine FLAC format (and then transcoded from there to 128 and 256 kbps oggs for portability). Which is, er, about 100 more than I’ve managed to rip in the past eight months. At this rate, I might have my entire library finished at some stage in 2009. Go me, etc.

Anyway, to be written-about in the near future: the decline & fall of Sendit.com, the joys of job-hunting, and various techie bits (moving VMs from Xen to KVM to ESX and back again, observations on CPU vs I/O vs power consumption, the joy of having a properly-configured working environment, etc). All with an absolute minimum of emoicity. Hurrah!

344 CDs ripped now. Can I really own *that* much shoegaze-y stuff? Er, yes, it appears that I can. Oops.

Online resizing of Reiserfs partitions is really, really, really cool. That is all.

…and I’ve been terribly impressed by Translink’s new CAF 3000 trains. They’re quiet, fast, clean, and, best of all, they look like they come from some sort of futuristic world in which everyone dresses up like a Power Ranger and travels in their own personal bullet train. Journeys take a third as long as they would on the bus, and cost only two thirds as much.

This morning, though, Great Victoria St station was bunged; there mustn’t have been a conductor on a busy inbound train, so there were perhaps a hundred people lined up at the ticket booth. Not to worry, thought I, as I’d left plenty of time, knowing that queues were likely on a Monday morning. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the crowd of giggling Aussie backpackers just in front of me, who insisted on discussing every possible permutation of a trip to Newry and Dublin.

“All stops to Lisburn!” shoted the guy at the gate.

Me, and the twenty people behind me glared at the girls in front of us.

“Last call for Lisburn!”

Agh! “Can I pay on the train?”, I shouted over.

“Yes, if you hurry”, was the reply - so I, and most of the other people in the queue hurried over to the barrier, and on to the train.

So, there I was, without a ticket, heading to Derriaghy - a little unmanned halt, with no waiting room, let alone a ticket barrier. Which is just as well, ‘cos I forgot to flag down the conductor to buy a ticket for myself.

Now, I got a week ticket that afternoon when I remembered - so I wasn’t doing anyone out of any money. But it’s still something I haven’t done before. I mean, everyone else seems to have gone through a brief burst of childhood klptomania or whatever, but I was always too prissy for that. And yes, I do feel suitable guilty, thanks.