Phil Sumner

The hate, the bile, the lies and the rhetoric on every social media platform since the EU referendum results were announce has driven me away.

Twitter is an echo chamber for left wing liberals. Let's be honest about it, so when the result announced didn't match the social media users' expectations, everyone, and I mean everyone who voiced an opinion voiced one of shock. The idea that a significant portion of the population holds a different opinion to them seems like a challenge to many who I really thought better of.

That I can maybe understand. What I cant understand is the scaremongering, lies, manipulation, overreaction and stupidness being spouted by people who 48hrs earlier were accusing the exit voters of the same thing.

So, I've given up for now on the hope that these people I used to trust to be fairly sensible may decide to use their rational thinking muscles and not act as slaves to their knee-jerk reactions, and decided to take myself away from it all until it calms down.

Slowly slowly slowly we're getting there. The house is "operational" as in, the bits we need to use are all good. The "office" is a state, the spare bedroom is vaguely functional (as in, you could sleep in there, just).

It's a culture shock for us, this place. Couldn't be any more different to the old house. From new build to weirdly modernised 1930s house.

I'll get round to taking some photos when I feel like it's not too embarrassing.

And relax. Well no, don't relax. Now we have to find space for all this stuff.

Our old house was a relatively new build, on a corner so some of the rooms were slightly weird shapes but that gave us so much room. The new place is an ex-council house, I suspect 1930s-1940s build, full of nooks and crannies but not, on the whole, with any rooms that big. Actually I lie slightly, the kitchen/diner is big. It's long and thin though, so doesn't feel huge.

So now we're in the process of trying to get all of our stuff in. It's only when you have to move it all that you realise just how much crap you own.

Moving in, we've had issues with electricity, gas, Sky & the phone line. From a services perspective, that sucks. However at least we got a phone line on Monday and internet connection even if it is dog slow right now (<1MB/s!?). With any luck it'll train over the next few days and get quicker. Tomorrow should be the last thing with the visit from a Sky engineer.

This weekend coming is NineWorlds! I'm quite excited about this. Last year's event was fabulous, and this year's line up is looking just as awesome. We go down on Thursday and come back Monday, and it's the closest thing to a holiday I'm likely to get this year.

And even more exciting, at Nineworlds, I might get to meet elmyra, after following her on LJ and Twitter for probably 10yrs and never yet being in the same place at the same time.

Aren't you glad I've started using LJ again just as I'm moving house?

So we've completed the spare room, the office and the bedroom is half-way there. I'm still concerned at quite how smoothly this is all going. If things keep going this smoothly, we'll be finished by Monday.

We have a fridge and washing machine coming to the new property on Tuesday, a bed will be coming at some point through the week, as yet unknown (I managed to break ours by trying to move it, one half of the divan base is leaning terribly).

The van comes on Wednesday, and well... that's it. We then clean the old place as much as we can until we can clean no more. That's the worst bit with renting. If you're selling, you can leave it in any state. But with renting...

So much packing. We take the tenancy on the new house on the 27th, and we're moving on the 29th July, and have started seriously packing. This means the majority of the stuff that we don't really need is in boxes, but clothes and the kitchen haven't yet been touched.

I have a worrying feeilng that we've missed something this time, because it's all going far too smoothly.

The only major snag I've hit so far is removing the Nest. I don't know how it was installed by the installer and while I'm confident playing with low voltage, 230v is a different matter. I might have a poke at it and see if I can figure out how it was all installed before I pay someone to remove it.

I hate moving house...

I've been trying to find a way to write this on Twitter, but I can't do it justice in the character limits. So here it is.

pipsytip and I are watching the DVD of the film adaptation of The Last Five Years. If you don't know the show, here'a s short intro.

The show is a two-hander, starring Cathy and Jamie. Both follow the story of their relationship from beginning to end in different directions - Jamie running forward in time through the show, Cathy running backwards through the show. The two only directly interact during the song "The Next Ten Minutes", and other than that they are telling separate but related stories. It's an interesting story-telling technique and the music (by Jason Robert Brown) is beautiful.

The film doesn't do it justice. It's not the actors' performances that I'm disappointed by; the singing in general is good (even if Jeremy Jordan is no Norbert Leo Butz) and the acting in general is good, but some of the directorial decisions are weird.

Making Jamie sing Shiksa Goddess to Cathy was bizarre. The song is about how he's waited his whole life for someone like her. He's not directing this to her, he's directing it to himself. Almost like he's going "I don't believe it's finally happened!".

The ending, where the two characters are singing two different but intermingling songs, managed to confuse me. The film has the two characters singing these directed towards each other, but at this point of the story they are at two completely different points in time (Jamie at the end of the relationship, Cathy at the beginning). They should not be directly interacting.

Some of the dynamics seemed off. The beginning of "Moving Too Fast" starts with a chord, and Jamie should be in strong, with his "Did I just hear an alarm start ringing?", in a song about how awesome and talented he is, even if life is moving a bit fast. The film version starts out quietly, almost timidly, which I felt was wrong.

The only time I remember seeing Jamie display any real emotion was towards the end of "If I Didn't Believe In You".

I appreciate that taking this concept and making it into a film was difficult. I'm not convinced that if I were coming to it blind I would know what was going on.

All said, it's not terrible, but it's not what I was hoping for.

So you've never heard of the three peaks challenge? That means that you're not a walker who's done much hill walking in the UK then!

The three peaks challenge is to walk up and down each of the three highest peaks in the UK within 24hrs. That's Ben Nevis (nr Fort William, in the Highlands of Scotland), Scafell Pike in Cumbria (north-west England), and Snowdon in north Wales. To give you an idea, here's a map showing the route driven:

And that doesn't include the drive to get from Wrexham to Ben Nevis in the first place.

Ben Nevis was largely unknown and the highest of the peaks. Snowdon is our "local" mountain, and familiar to everyone involved. Scafell was unknown to almost all the walkers, as well as being completed partly in the dark, and has a bit of a reputation for being a tough walk.

I wasn't walking, like a fool... no no no, I was driving. With 3 minibusses, there 6 of us keeping each other awake and driving through the night to get the walkers to where they needed to be. We had a nice relaxing drive up, and the walkers set off in a fine and enthusiastic mood.

A few hours after they started Ben Nevis, we were having a discussion about who was most likely to kill themselves up one of the mountains, hoping it wasn't really going to happen, when I got a phone call...

http://www.crewechronicle.co.uk/news/nantwich-woman-rescued-britains-highest-9605477

Turns out that one of our walkers had fallen over and gashed her knee badly enough that bone was visible. Their challenge was over. Mountain Rescue were summoned (not international rescue, sadly), and a helicopter sent from Prestwick (that's MILES away!).

By the time most of the other walkers had made it down, we'd come to a decision. Of the three minibusses, we had enough people and enthusiasm to take a bus full of walkers who wanted to continue the challenge, while leaving enough capacity for everyone else to get back safely. We weren't far behind our expected departure time from Ben Nevis; it was still possible to complete the challenge.

So off we went, leaving Ben Nevis around 2230, driving through the night with our sleepy (and slightly stinky) cargo. We arrived at Wasdale, the foot of Scafell Pike, at about 4am. The sun was just about rising, the clouds were dark but not yet too forboding, and our walkers set off. About an hour after they set off, we drivers were sleeping in the bus, when I was woken up by the most horrific thunderstorm I have ever seen. The clouds had turned from mildly forboding to deeply ominous, water was flooding over the bus like someone was throwing buckets at it, and there was lightning flashing every few seconds. This went on seemingly forever.

One of the (arguably) more sensible walkers had turned back at some point and came to sleep with us in the bus, leaving the other 5 to carry on in the storm. We slept some more, waking when the rest arrived back at the bus sometime around 0830. The poor souls looked like they'd been dragged through a river and had some stories to tell. We'd (sensibly) pre-booked bacon/sausage sandwiches from the Wasdale Head pub for the morning, and as there were now 8 of us instead of the expected 24, we chomped our way through as many sandwiches as we could squeeze in!

We let the walkers change into dry clothes, and set off in an even sleepier and even stinkier bus for familar territory - Snowdon.

We dumped the walkers at Snowdon just around 2pm, leaving them a rather challenging 3hrs to climb up to the peak of Snowdon and make it back down again. While they did that, we headed in to Llanberis to find coffee, food, more sleep, and to try to catch up with the other people who we left at Ben Nevis. It turned out that after being airlifted off the mountain, our injured walker was taken to the local hopsital in Fort William and stitched up with 13 stitches. Everyone involved was amazed to see them walk out on their own, if a bit stiffly. They were all almost back at base.

We managed to completely miss the walkers' arrival back at the base of Snowdon, but others who'd made their way to Snowdon after arriving back at the base said all of the walkers were running down the footpath, desperate to beat the 24hr target. They all made it,. with completion times ranging from 23hrs 45m to 23hrs 57m.

That was one hell of a drive, and an experience that I'd repeat any day. We went prepared, and made the right decisions. We managed, despite the severe setback, to safely get everyone to where they needed to be. If I do it again, I'd like to find some way to get more sleep. In the end I think I managed about 3hrs sleep in the 36 we were away, which isn't a great idea.

I spent the weekend just gone down with friends in Ilford, at a BBQ and general house party. It was a really nice weekend, their house is gorgeous, and I love spending time with them. It was interesting to meet some of their friends too!

This weekend coming, I am driving some colleagues around the country who are doing the 3-peaks challenge - climbing Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon, hopefully within 24 hours.

I then hopefully get to spend some of the weekend after that with the absolutely lovely xanna and J.

From then onwards, it's basically packing. I don't think I've mentioned it here yet but we've been given notice on our current house because the owner wants to sell and is an idiot. We've found ourselves another place which we take on the 27th July, so we have a week's crossover, more than I'd like but hey...

I really hate moving, but that's one of the joys of renting in the UK market :-\

The worst thing being that it costs so damn much. Consider that there's £250 in agency fees alone, plus moving costs (either hire a van or pay someone), finding the deposit to pay the new place before the old place has returned theirs, charges by car insurance companies who think it's funny to charge for a change of address, and so on.

This coming Tuesday is Oracle Midlands #10. Oracle Midlands is a fabulous resource for any Oracle DBAs who can get to Birmingham for the events. The speakers attracted are big names, e.g. Jonathan Lewis is doing two talks this month, we've had Martin Widlake talk, Joel Goodman and many other really big names in the Oracle community.

It totally helps that I manage to wangle these things so that I manage to spend time with xanna too. Totally worth it.

Tonight, we're experiencing the highest temperature of the year so far. I'm melting, I feel for you lot in the south-east. I can see on the cloud/weather radar that there's rain and lightning, almost everywhere in the region apart from here.

Let's start with work. It's where I am most of the day. Work is weird. I still haven't got my head around how anything actually gets done in this place. I think it's largely that I'm used to being fairly central in the IT change process, whereas there is no IT change process here.

I find actually making any change a very difficult thing. Not because I don't know how or have confidence that it'll work or anything, but because there's no defined process for the kind of changes I want to do (the kind of changes that will affect the business) I have to scrabble around trying to find the right people to arrange stuff with. It's not efficient and the lack of process is annoying.

Musical theatre group - I've made the decision to quit being on the committee. I enjoy it, sometimes, but I don't enjoy the frustration of trying to get change happening (I sense a theme here).

Life outside of the above. I've been busy. Went to the Warner Bros. Studio Tour with Jane, and despite not being that much of a Harry Potter fan, had a great time there. We spent 4hrs wandering through the exhibits and I have a ton of photos.

SFX Weekender #6 is coming up at the end of March. That'll be awesome, a weekend away in Pwllheli with some friends. Lots of geekery, and lots of board gaming. Board gaming is somewhat taking over at the moment, with all kinds of cool stuff and cool games and awesome people.

NineWorlds is all booked up for August, had such a good time last year I'm very excited about this.

I was at the wedding, this last weekend, of chained_girl and ukcougar. It was a fabulous event, and really bizarre to see all these faces that I hadn't seen since, well probably 2010 or even earlier than that.

Does that cover every aspect of life for the past *mumble* months? Ah it'll do.

Section of letter from Premium Credit about the credit account we get for choosing to paying monthly:

Under the terms of the new credit agreement we have the right to charge a fee of £10.00 if we have to remind you to provide a signed credit agreement (on line or paper).

We will write to you again to give you notice before any fees are applied to your account; but don’t wait for us to write to you, please go on line now and click to sign to avoid any possible fees.

So you claim that you can enact charges, under a new agreement which I haven't yet agreed to, for not "signing" the new agreement?

ROFL!