Crazy week

What a crazy week it’s been so far, haven’t really had chance to sit down since Thursday morning…

Fantastic Four

Went to see this with Kirk at thefilmworks on Thursday, as I hadn’t been to the cinema for a while and it looked rather good from the trailers. The film wasn’t too bad; there were several funny moments but overall the plot was a bit jerky. Almost the entire film was devoted to explaining how the Fantastic Four were created, leaving only about five minutes for a confrontation with Dr Doom at the end. I think they could have easily cut down/out some of the introduction and got into the action a bit sooner. Having said that, it was nice to go to the cinema again and just watch something without too many expectations.

Job interview

I had an interview at IPEC on Friday (after getting asked “can you come in tomorrow?” the evening before!), which was my first proper and formal face to face interview. All the jobs I’ve had before haven’t required me to have an interview, more a demonstration of what I can do, with the exception of the f2o internship (although that was conducted over IRC which isn’t really the same). As such, I was really nervous about the interview, although my main worry was questions like “what do you think you could bring to the company?” and “what are your strengths and weaknesses?” (I know what they are, but putting them across in a way that doesn’t sound immodest/defeatist is the difficult part). Thankfully though, I didn’t get asked too many difficult questions and, after being shown around the workplace, I left with a job offer, to start on Monday. Top tip for anyone going to an interview, no matter how informal it might be or whether you know someone there already: make sure you wear something smart, preferably a suit. It really does make all the difference, even if you end up feeling a little overdressed when you get there. Whilst I don’t think it necessarily got me the job, one of the interviewers said he appreciated the effort I’d gone to (the dress code is pretty much “whatever you’re comfrtable in”) so that was nice.

Several people have already asked me what the job involves, but it’s a bit difficult to answer that seeing as I’ve only been there two days. So far I’ve been mainly hacking away at some CSS to make parts of a site more integrated, and fixing some JavaScript and PHP bugs. There’s a fairly large todo list on my desk now though, so I’ll probably be busy for at least the rest of this week with that stuff. My general role seems to be doing all the niggly little jobs that really need completing but aren’t quite important enough to warrant moving one of the permanent members of staff away from their normal duties. Other than that, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to know what my role is because at the moment I’ve not really been doing the job long enough to know myself.

Adventures somewhere South of Birmingham

I went down to Essex (somewhere in the South East, sort of just North of London and South of Birmingham 😉 to see Lizzy this weekend, which is why I’ve not been on MSN or replying to any emails. Here’s what happened…

Friday

After landing myself a new job, I headed back to see Kate, who had kindly let me leave my suit at her house over the weekend (much easier than wearing it on the train or carrying it all the way). I got to see her cats for the first time, who were absolutely adorable and did exactly as they were instructed when told to “scram” out of the living room. Aww, I so want one as a pet now! I also got told off (sort of) for reading “grown up” magazines.

I left Kate’s a bit later than I expected, but I managed to get to Piccadilly in time for the train I was planning to catch. The route down to London was fairly mediocre, but we got in on time and I managed to get on the tube without any problems, even though I was worried about delays given recent events down there. I had to walk from Moorgate to Liverpool Street as three of the lines going there were closed, but it wasn’t very far and I got there without any of my usual oreinteering mishaps. In fact, I got there so quickly and the timetables leave so much time for getting across the city that I was actually in time to get an earlier train to Witham, which I did so, although I was very confused by the pronunciation. If it’s spelt “Witham”, I would expect people to say “With-am”, but it’s actually pronounced “Whit-em”. I realised this fairly quickly, but I did have to jump off and double-check the departures board to make sure I wasn’t going to end up somewhere miles away from where I was due to go.

Lizzy met me at the station and gave me a lift back, and thankfully her mum had something more or less ready for tea because I was starving, having not eaten since about noon. Afterwards we went for a walk and ended up at the pub (no surprises there) where I got absolutely trounced at pool with Lizzy beating me three games on the trot. Rubbing my poor bruised ego, we headed back and watched 28 Days before calling it a night.

Saturday

We set off for Colchester fairly early in the morning and started off by going round the castle there, which was quite interesting. There was a really cool computer stand with a virtual tour of the Roman temple that used to be on the site where the castle now stands and also shields and armour that you could try on (unfortunately I wasn’t quite quick enough with the phone camera to get one of Lizzy with one of the Norman shields).

After the castle we went for coffee (there are hundreds of tea shops in the area, but not a single Starbucks for some reason) and then stumbled across this amazing shop which sold pretty much every board game imaginable, including every variation of Monopoly. We had to be back for lunch though so didn’t hang around very long.

Lunch was followed by a couple of games of Monopoly, which went fairly quickly given that we’ve both played enough times to know nearly all the prices and rents off by heart. We also decided to give Freeport a try, seeing as they had a bowling centre and a cinema. Fortunately the bowling wasn’t anything near as busy as we thought and it worked out as £9 each for two games or £10 for three so we ended up staying there a while (although you’d be surprised how quickly three games of bowling go when there’s only two of you). We also went to the cinema to watch Madagascar, which was incredibly funny and we laughed nearly all of the way through. As with most “kids” films, there were some jokes in there that were clearly aimed at adults as well, which is great because I’m still at the age where I can laugh at the jokes catered for both audiences. Meet Joe Black was also on BBC 2 so we watched that when we got back before going to bed.

Sunday

Sunday got off to a slightly more relaxed start (i.e. “someone” decided to stay in bed for an extra hour!) and we played more board games before tucking in to the lovely Sunday lunch that Lizzy’s mum had prepared (it was also raining quite hard at this point and I got accused of having brought the Manchester weather down with me). The only downside to this was the washing up afterwards, but between the two of us it didn’t take too long. After lunch we went upstairs and chatted for an hour or so until Lizzy’s dad took us to the station and I got on a train home. It took me six and a half hours to get all the way back, by which time I had just long enough to explain the weekend to someone on MSN before collapsing into bed, after taking an ibuprofen to get rid of my splitting headache.

All in all, it was a great weekend and a good laugh, bit of a shame that I’m unlikely to see anyone from down there again until September now though. I managed to survive nearly three days without Internet access as well, despite Lizzy’s tauntings as to whether I wanted to check my emails or not.

Dungeons and Dragons

Monday was, as usual, our role playing session at Lucy’s flat. Things started off fairly slowly and as expected, with Lucy, David and I heading back to the village to get Kate’s character in the hope that she could help us defeat the skeleton that had nearly destroyed us in the previous session. Kate was still looking after the ferrets, so David and I headed to the pub to get some food. Unfortunately, David’s character isn’t very welcome in the tavern anymore, partially because he turned into a dog and relieved the village’s cleric of one of his hands, and also because the barman’s wife has a crush on him (which, as you can imagine, isn’t too helpful when you’re talking to the innkeeper). As a result, I went in and had some food by myself, watched with a degree of suspicion by the villagers.

A couple of minutes later a resounding crash was heard from the side of the tavern where the trapdoor to the cellar was located. I sort of guessed who might be behind the noise and tried to stop the villagers from dashing off to make mincemeat out of David, but I wasn’t very successful and ended up chasing after them in an attempt to stop the violence. However, one short elven sorceror against a crowd of villagers is never going to work and it wasn’t long before they were surrounding the trapdoor and also unbolting the door to the stairs leading down to the cellar.

At this point David could have hidden, tried to explain himself or just run – any of these options would have been perfectly reasonable and he might have even got away with it. However, anyone who has role played with him before will know what is coming up – PSYCHOPATH MODE! Yes, instead of trying to avoid a confrontation, David decided to encourage one by running up the stairs and driving his sword through the first person coming down, who happened to be the innkeeper. The poor guy didn’t stand a chance (especially with the number of positive modifiers David had to his attack and damage rolls) and fell down to be pulled away by the villagers. Attempting to bring some order to the chaotic situation that was rapidly spiralling out of control, my brave sorceror held back the villagers and prepared to storm down the stairs to deal with the out of control fighter. This turned out to be a mistake, as David plunged his sword right into me as well, and given that I had a measly five hit points I hit the dust immediately, not only unconcious but dying as well.

Thankfully the townsfolk managed to drag me to safety (I imagine I was probably somewhat in their good books at this point, having attempted to resolve the situation) and Lucy dragged me off to Kate for some healing. Thanks to some extraodinarily jammy dice rolling from Kate, I went from unconcious with a big gaping hole in my chest (although I had stopped bleeding at this point so I wasn’t actually getting any worse) to fully healed almost instantly, and promptly headed straight back into the fray.

During this time, David had managed to whack another villager over the head, but the sheer weight of numbers bore him down and, several pitchforks and arrows later, he lay on the floor in a similar situation to the one he had put me in a few minutes earlier. At this point I arrived on the scene and managed to use my smooth tongue and diplomacy to stop everyone from finishing him off (I was tempted to blast him down with a magic missile or two at point blank range, but I’m playing a lawful good character and that wouldn’t have been what I was expected to do).

Instead of finishing David off with a lynch mob, we decided to try him for his crimes instead, at which point I immediately positioned myself to be the judge and hastily appointed a jury. The whole process was handled as fairly as it could be, given that the judge was somewhat biased as the defendant had already run him through once that night, and it didn’t take long for a unanimous verdict of “guilty” to be returned. I promptly sentenced David to death (I decided it was safer for us all!) and two sturdy lads went to retrieve him from the cellar. In a final twist, David lept out in dog form and bit one of the villagers on the leg, but I’d anticipated this and the archer I had positioned to one side had no trouble firing an arrow directly into the creature, finishing him off for good.

So, the game ended with the death of one character and the beginning of the creation of a new one as David wants to continue role playing with us. Fortunately, Jon has decided that the next character that appears will be bound by a gaes, which basically means that there are restrictions on what that character can and can’t do (e.g. “you can’t kill someone who hasn’t attacked you first”). You can’t go against a gaes as even trying to do so will cause unbearable pain instantly, so if Jon chooses wisely we won’t have this happen again.

Anyway, that just about wraps up the last four or five days. 🙂