It's here! The much-anticipated theme for the wintery season (Can't offend people by saying 'Christmas'). Unlike every other year, I've had 90% of this designed for about 2 weeks beforehand, and it needed a quick minor redesign right near the end. Something about IE not playing well with fixed backgrounds. The snow is back! It has a bug, whereby if the screen is below a certain height on the homepage, it'll twitch like a baby on steroids. Only happens in Firefox though, the silly baby-junkies.
This is the last 1st day of the month I'll be seeing in New York - I'm going HOME! on December 17th. My flight is booked, my seat is picked, my hostesses have been pre-flirted with, it's all good. Actually, that's not true - currently, no-one has started the process to have a nice company pick up all my stuff and ship it back to the UK. I need to kick some ass on that one somewhere.
I've been faffing with secondary DNS. After perusing the reports at DNSStuff, I realised that there were a few problems with the current DNS implementation. Of course, misconfigured DNS is baaaaaaad as it helps nasty people to do DoS attacks. I think. Anyways, I found EveryDNS who provide secondary DNS hosting for free, so I've gone with them. Reliability and cheapness :)
In other, less geeky, news, I'm getting slightly concerned about coming home. I've got a whole bunch of stuff that gets packed up by a nice company and carted off to my house in London, making a brief stop in customs along the way. The problem is that I'm flying back in 2 weeks and no-one's done anything about organising the shipping of my stuff. Also, I'm not living at the same address in London that I was when I moved my stuff here. In further addition on-top-of-that, I'm not going to be at that address for most of December. I can see this one getting quite screwed up.
Anyways, everything here is wonderfully cold, just like it should be in winter :)
The time is here. It's my last day in the office for my overseas placement. I know it's a Wednesday, but I threw caution to the wind and wore jeans as though it were a friday. I like to live dangerously :) I might even get a chocolate brownie at lunch, a mild celebration of spending 184 days in the US. It's 184, because if I spend 185 days here, the UK government remove my residency status in the UK, despite the fact that I'm renting a flat I'm not living in over there.
So now I'm sitting here with a lot of paperwork that needs to be mailed/given to different people at different times, half of which I don't have the right address for. Still, it's only customs/tax paperwork. Not like that's important.
So tomorrow, I'm finishing all my packing and then some nice people are turning up on Friday to put it on a plane for me. I probably won't see it again until 2007, but I'm not too bothered about that. Not sure what I'm going to do with myself after everything's been packed. I'll do my usual going to the airport 6 hours early to eat the free food thing on Saturday, but it's not going to be that interesting. I hope it storms, or something.
I saw this on Slashdot and whilst it's not a 100% original idea, it brightened my day :)
I've had an interesting day. I fly back tonight and thus the past two days has been festival of packing everything. I am still of the opinion that I posess the greatest packing skillset of anyone I know. That was, until, this morning, when I was just collecting my wallet, phone and keys....... I couldn't find my keys. After scrabbling around the apartment for a good half hour and unpacking everything from the two large and one small suitcases that my worldly possessions fit in, I still couldn't find them. I'm resigned to the fact that I've either managed to throw them away (can't see how), or they are packed somewhere and I missed them, twice.
Anyhoo, I forgot about that and tried to get my act together and spent an hour trying to find a cab. Eventually, one stressful journey later, I arrive and I'm sipping wine and waiting for the spa to open. As the large family of 7 babies park up next to me, I don my noise-blocking earphones and reflect on what a peculiar time this has been. I've learned a good many things, some positive, some negative. Primarily, I like England, English people, and English beer - I most definitely am looking forward to my first real pint in a long long time. Aside from that, I learned some boring work stuff, like how Americans work and think, which will probably be useful in the future.
Overall, I'm happy to be returning. Very happy as it turns out, as a day longer here pushes me closer to the magic number of days you have to spend in the US on a rolling year before they start wanting money off you. As long as I don't return to the US for more than 2 weeks total between now and June, I'll be fine. I should be able to manage that......
Off to buy earplugs. Can't remember if you get them on the plane and I'd actually like to sleep this time. BA have been advertising new beds - hope they're comfier than the old ones :)