We’re nearly halfway through our trip to London, and thus far it has exceeded my expectations. Last time I was in London for less than 8 hours, and I knew I wanted to see more. Now that I’m here, the feeling is only stronger – I could live here quite happily (not that I’m planning to move in the near future.)

Things I will remember for a long time:

• St. James Park & Trafalgar Square – Epitomes of public space
• The tailors on Jermyn Street
• Crivelli and Rubens at the National Gallery
• The shocking splendour of Westminster
• Standing on the spot where 4 centuries of kings and queens have been crowned, with Newton to my left, and Chaucer to my right.

It’s a wonderful city, and through and through extremely civilised in a way that is sort of difficult to describe. Tomorrow is a day of shopping: Oxford Street, Harrod’s, M&S, and maybe back down Jermyn street. With luck, there will be time left over for the Waterstone’s on Piccadilly, Europe’s largest bookstore. The next day we hope to give over entirely to the British museum.

In the meantime, we are absolutely bushed. We’ve walked everywhere thus far, not for cheapness (though London is an expensive city,) but for the sheer proximity of it all. Imagine half your world, half the things you’ve heard about growing up, street names, famous buildings, etc. being within a 15 minute walk.

We’ve taken plenty of pictures, and while I have (evidently) brought my laptop along for the trip you’ll notice, if you pay close attention, that I have left my camera cable at home. Hence no pictures for you, the reader, save this one up top, taken moments ago, which nicely sums things up.

Among my alarmingly-stable, astoundingly-long-term and unsurprisingly-incestuous social circle there will be, over the next 18 months or so, a large number of birthdays. This, in itself, is not surprising, or particularly noteworthy. What is noteworthy though, is how many of those birthdays will involve ye olde tens columne rolling over from the youthful and carefree “2” to the urbane, sophisticated and terribly mature “3”. I, for one, welcome fogeydom, or will, I suspect, when the time comes.

To that end, there has been some discussion of late, at the Sousa’s most recently, but in other environs as well, about the idea of having some kind of gargantuan bash to ring in our triumphant ascension in group form. We could, of course, get together and just drink more alcohol than usual, but the impression one gets from these discussions is that more moxy is desired.

Continue reading “Party Like It’s 2008” →

So it turns out that Mozilla, having been an open source project before it was a foundation, let alone a corporation, has a pretty heavy IRC presence. IRC is (reasonably) universal, (reasonably) democratic, and (usually) free, so it’s a natural fit.

But several of the people who read this blog, and you know who you are, will recall that even before Mozilla existed, there was an IRC presence of a different sort in #42. I acknowledge that I wasn’t there from the very beginning, but I was there when people like Lemmyn and AuntieMae were still around, I was there before we left QNet, and without meaning to upset anyone, I will remind you all that this stuff was happening > 10 years ago. Heck, this page is 7 years old, and that was very late in the game.

But I digress. The point is this: I am, by virtue of my newfound employment, and indeed have been for some time, a perpetual resident of irc.mozilla.org. And wouldn’t you know it, my mIRC install still wants to auto-connect to #42 wherever I go. I’m the only one there at the moment, of course. But that could change.

I remember when Heather and Linds tried several years ago to get things up and running again, and I think it mostly fizzled out because people had forgotten how to have a conversation that way, and besides which, you couldn’t really count on anyone actually being there. Well I may be idle, or I may be otherwise occupied, and I may be uninteresting even when I am present, but I can offer some reasonable level of assurance that for a high percentage of the next several years, I will be lurking in #42.

You could come join me, if you wanted to.

And of course, if you happened to have some code, writing, bugs, or ideas to contribute to Mozilla’s various projects while you were there – well everything would just be that much more convenient, wouldn’t it?