Palfrey's life

I appear to have a social life again. After spending most of the past 4.5 years with not much of one, this is a definite change of pace. I've gone from having a social event maybe once every couple of weeks (I'm including random pubbage, but not counting the movie night as I never really seemed to talk to people there. There were some exceptions, but never for very long) to multiple things per week. Such is life back in the City. I'm managing to meet a lot of new and interesting people (hello everyone!) as opposed to repeatedly repeating the same 3 conversations ("how are you adapting to life in Delft"; oddities of the English language; explaining my work) and never really getting beyond the small talk phase. Actually managing to have decent conversations about fun topics is a breath of fresh air (as well as a good way to get to know more new people). Some of it has been a tad overwhelming, but that's what happens after a prolonged drought of such things. Time to adjust is required, and I think I'm getting a good handle on things. Calendars help...

I am, in short, *very* glad I've come back to London. For most of the social stuff, I can thank friend_of_tofu/alextiefling and the Facebook group 'Single in London', without whom a great deal of this wouldn't have happened.

Of course, there's always more to be done with these sorts of things. One notable thing would be getting around to seeing a few more people I haven't caught up with yet. raygungothic, this means you (especially as I still haven't met your fiancée), as well as the still-resident-in-Bristol-folk, and the at least 3 people I've promised to have lunch with at some point already. Oh, and anyone else currently resident in London (or passing through) that I haven't seen in far too long, which is probably a very long list. Admittedly, I've only been London-resident again for about a month, so I think I'm doing quite well so far.

(They're not over yet, but that's as good as a title as I can think of at the second)

Figured I might as well catch up on my last few days. They've certainly been more eventful than a lot of my last few months that I've talked about... Went to the Tate Modern (Slides!) on the 30th with hazyjayne, alextiefling, friend_of_tofu and various new people whose LJ-names (or real ones for that matter) I can't remember at this time. Bundles of fun, even if I did decide to avoid the 5th floor slide - 4 floors of bone-juddering slide is more than enough for me. Of course, there was art as well - some of which I've seen before, others not. There's some photos somewhere, including some vague attempts at getting shots of people coming down slides (which fails miserably when you don't have enough notice that they're coming down).

Then we have New Years. Plans were horrendously hazy/non-existant until pretty much the day, but luckily friend_of_tofu and alextiefling came to my rescue, dragging me along to the party of various people whose names I mostly can't remember (my name memory is horrendous). There's also a large collection of LJ-names I need to track down down at some point, and if anyone wants to give me a hand that would be nice. To some extent I was a teeny bit worried at the beginning - given a brief visual recee, I was worried about fitting in. But it all worked out pretty damn well. One really cool point was that as a computer scientist (and with most people able to tell that I'm one just from glancing at me), I usually can't make it through a party without someone asking for my advice about how to fix their computer. With this party, not only did I get through without anyone asking for help (given the signs of this being a predominantly geek household, this isn't entirely surprising), I was able to both describe and get some useful opinions on some of the ideas I've been kicking around re: thesis things, which was amazing. That a substantial proportion of geeky people have some level of interest in the general problems of lingusitics and semantics helps me tho. Lots and lots of people who I'm going to try and at least keep in contact with *some* of them, if not as many as possible. Oh, and there's the little detail of my first kiss in 3.5 years (and my first just-post-midnight-on-new-years kiss), which is definately a good trend to have finally managed to bloody break.

Uh, other things: read a lot (~8 books), failed to bring laptop back from dead, introduced parentals to Fluxx.

Life has been somewhat busy these past few. Spending a lot of hot weather time on the Tube is not so good, but getting to see people and places is. So, here's a recap:

• Sat: Met up with ariiadne, alextielfing, friend_of_tofu, and hazyjayne and wandered Borough Market. For a while there, I thought I was never going to be able to smell anything aside from cheese ever again... for those of you in the London area who have never visited, go now. Bought New Forest Cider, a bizarre gueuze/mead mixed thing, and some very nice fudge. Me and ariiadne then wandered off, doing a brief bit of the whole tourist thing (I now I think I probably have been on Tower Bridge at some random time before, but damned if I know when). Nice to see a bit of the old home city again, if only for a brief while. Pics from this day are here.


• Sun: Got up at the crack of dawn (9am) and went to see kentish grandmother. Bought fudge from the good shop in Chatham. Returned back to London, being dropped off at the Tesseract on the way (name of ariiadne/alextielfing's place) for fun geeky evening :-). In addition to the aforementioned people from Saturday, I also met voodoo_canape and envoy. Much fun, cookies, my first game of Mao, MST3K, game theoretical discussions re: life, universe, everything, etc, etc. Much fun. Also got lots of music off of hazyjayne which I still haven't had time to sort through.


• Mon: The previously mentioned transhumanist meeting thing. Pretty interesting discussions, mostly on a "where do we go from here/what the heck is the role we should be going for" stuff, which is one of those things that I've never really figured out, so I'm glad that others have the same problem. There appears to be a current attempt at rebranding from "transhumanism" to "transhumanitarians" (partly a "people don't like -ism's" thing, partly a note that humanitarians tend not to get called elitist). To be honest, my involvement with the whole movement is fairly minimal, and my level of actual effort is even smaller. I'm just going with the "wait and see" attitude. On the plus side, I got a discounted copy of Kurzweil's latest ("The Singularity Is Near").


• Tues: I have a hell of a lot of books. So many in fact, that I lose track of exactly which ones I have. Therefore, cataloguing is necessary, but in some way that doesn't drive me nuts. Hence my recent purchasing of an old :CueCat off of eBay. After some work (and two different ps/2=>usb adaptors), I now have a way to easily scan in the UPC numbers from the back of my books, which get translated to ISBNs, and then other software goes off and grabs author/title/cover data and dumps all of this in a little database. Yay. So far I've scanned two shelves worth (actual scan time was ~5 mins, more time to setup software), and hopefully I'll get enough time to do the rest of the books that are still here and not in the lockup before I go back. Eventually, I'm going to build a nice frontend for all of this, possibly even dump them up online, and have a copy of the collection dumped into my old Palm Pilot so I can get at the list while I'm in secondhand books trying to remember whether I have the nth book in a series or not.

Oh, and having dropped the gueuze/mead thing in the freezer last night, intending to pull it out 20 mins later but forgetting, I've now got a frozen solid bottle. Darn. Hopefully it'll defrost without too much damage. Of course, I've never had this particular drink before, so I won't be able to tell what is freezer damage and what isn't...

The New Forest cider people have a nice rhyme on their site which I feel is worth sharing:


K, must go and do other things now...

A couple of weeks ago, I was doing nothing during this time back. I had visions of spending all my time reading and watching telly. Not quite correct... things done since last entry:

• Returned briefly to Bristol to see the very odd A Midsummer Night's Dream from the East. Bascially, A Midsummer Night's Dream, but in Korean (with some alteration towards traditional Korean fairytale creatures and a tiny smattering of English). Despite not being able to understand what was being said, it was still good. That, and getting to see amicu, Chris, ghostpaw, the_smut_fairy and all_five_aces, made for a good evening. Unfortunately, I was only able to come down to Bristol for a short time, and so wasn't able to see the rest of you lot. People need to organise centrally-located (i.e. walking distance from coach station) things around Xmas/New Year time.


• Took pictures, including a fluffy kitty and some frogs watching the kitty.


• Starting making what can be best described as computer scientist art - all PVC piping and old junk CDs. I've had the idea running around in my head for the last 7-8 years or so, and have been collecting 4 feet worth of junk CDs, most of which are now used up. When I get more, the piece will be completed. I have some ideas for another piece I want to make - anyone know where to get 2-inch squares of stiff material in Rubik's cube colours? 2mm plastic would be best...


• Finished watching Sex and the City. Not a awful ending, I'm not sure what they could have done to make it better tho.


• Watched Shark pilot. Think House, but with lawyers and without the "I'm a cynical bastard with no connection to humanity" that made House so watchable. The main character has a 16 year old daughter who decides to stay with him FFS. Gah. I want House Series 3... (5/9/2006 apparently)


• Read about 4 6 books (I'm counting the Pratchett Witches books as 3 despite the fact I read them in the collected form).

Oh, and an interesting note - my parents house now seems very noisy to me. I appear to have gotten used to quiet little towns.

Plans - as here (I didn't see the Pipettes in the end - it was too damn hot), plus:
22 day, 23 eve - plans of and related to ariiadne's household, assuming I get an email...
26: Goto BSFA thing with Peter Hamilton speaking. London SF people? Hello?

Saturday was a very busy and much traveled day. We start with the whole tram/train/plane/tube/car thing to get to my parents; collapse and be friendly for about an hour or so; and then I get right back onto bus/tube/train. Obviously, there's a pretty good reason for me subjecting myself to all of this, and that would be the opportunity to finally meet up with ariiadne and her household. I think I mentioned the whole ariiadne thing a while back (used to talk online about ~10 years ago, then I randomly message her on OKCupid about 2 months ago without knowing exactly who it is, and more evidence for this being a very small world is gathered), and so getting to finally say hi was a lot of fun. Bristol folk, they remind me a lot of you - the standard bi-poly-pagan-gamer-geek types (with the usual provisos regarding not everyone being all of the above). It was a heck of a lot of fun - barbeque food, odd conversations, games of Fluxx (which I won one of :-) and of Chrononauts (which I also won. hmm. may not get invited back), and chatting with ariiadne until 4am. Much, much fun. I'm not sure why I forgot to take my camera out of the bag.

So, I'm now around London for the next two weeks. Planned stuff so far:
15/7: Possibly go and see the Pipettes album launch (HMV Oxford Street @ 5pm). Debating about this one. Anyone else interested?
23/7: Visit grandparent.
24/7: See Natasha Vita-More and Anders Sandbergs do a thing on the proactionary principle and general way ahead stuff for transhumanism
28/7: V&A is doing this 'Friday Late' thing, with a 'contemporary take on the traditional English fete' (6:30pm-10pm). Sounds worth my time - sounds more fun with other volunteers...

Anyone else want to add things I should be doing?

Update: 20/7: go to Bristol in order to go to theatre with amicu et al.

Probably should have brought this one up earlier, but what with my insane life in the last couple of weeks it kept skipping my mind to mention this to everybody. So, I'm coming back to London over the Easter weekend (plus a fair few more days) - 12th-17th April to be exact. My schedule for those days is fairly empty (aside from going to the Turville book fair + pub lunch with the family on Saturday), so if anyone's bored and wants to meetup for lunch or a drink or whatever, I'd love to get around to seeing a few people again. I will of course have to be getting in 3 months worth of sausages, due to the complete lack of anything resembling a decent one around here.....