I haven’t remembered to update for a few days.

Dave came voer the other day and we made the best batch of flapjack so far. Much better than the others.

The next day (Monday) we decided to make a dinner. We ended up choosing a chicken pie, but without mushrooms and peppers because we wanted Lizz to eat some of it. We also decided we’d make our own pastry, too. Then we chose to make a dessert, too. We came to an agreement on a white chocolate chessecake with raspberries in.

We went to Tesco and bought everything we needed. Came home and baked for somewher ein the region of 6 hours.

Amazingly it all came together really well and we all ate some really nice home made food. There’s no way I could see anyone doing that regularly though. Not for every meal. It’s just so expensive and inconvenient. Makes me appreciate oven chips and microwavable meals! 😀 Just a shame they don’t taste as good and you don’t get any sense of accomplishment.

I decided to make some pumpkin bread quite a few days ago. I went out and bought pumpkins and spices and stuff. Yesterday I chopped up half of a pumpkin. Today I finally got around to making the actual bread.

It’s baking in the oven at the moment and I really can’t wait until it’s done. I don’t know if I’ll be able to wait for it to cool down.

Assuming it goes well I’ll be making another couple of loaves today… I’m pretty sure I’d eat it all before it went off.

I’m updating from Katy’s iPhone.

I just read a notification email from Facebook that Shaun had replied to a comment I posted. I suddenly noticed what was being advertised beside the email. Those things are supposed to be relevant product placements.

How on earth is that relevant?

I had an interview for a job today. The whole thing came about rather suddenly. I updated my CV on Monster.com for the first time in months and months, made it searchable again on Saturday. At 10:05 Monday morning I received an email asking if I was interested in a position. It was a position as a Perl Programmer/Web Developer, which is exactly what I was talking about wanting to do a few days ago. It’s what I find myself doing at work anyway.

So I spoke to a man at a recruitment agency and he asked for my CV in Microsoft Word format along with some examples of my code. I was at work at the time so I was kind of limited with the examples I could send. I ended up sending about 4 things I’ve written for the IT Centre, some code I wrote for mapping the amount of news happening in any given country on an SVG map of the world, and then I was struggling for a final piece.

I remembered the code I wrote to control the robot/laptop I have had on hold for the last few months. I booted up the laptop, and to my surprise (and annoyance) it shut down straight after. After a fair amount of troubleshooting, including borrowing a USB keyboard, connecting a monitor, and then connecting the original laptop keyboard by ribbon cable to the motherboard I managed to get booted up into a boot CD. I stuck it into terminal mode and mounted the hard drive and a memory stick. Copied the code over and put the robot away again.

With those examples and my CV together at the very end of the day I sent the email.

The next day I received several messages from the recruitment company man asking me questions about various things. He informed me that he’d suggested £35000 as my salary. Obviously I was a bit overwhelmed by the that idea. He also informed me that I had an interview on Friday morning at 10am, if that was ok. I said it was, then booked the day off at college.

Lizz decided that I couldn’t go to an interview without buying a new tie, despite my objections. We went to Next and I bought the most expensive tie in the whole world. It did seem worth it when I got ready this morning though. I think I need a suit!

I caught a bus into Nottingham and walked down to Castle Boulevard. It took me a couple of minutes to find where I was looking for, and I was a bit early, so I called my mum to tell her I was about to have an interview and stuff.

15 minutes before the interview was scheduled to begin I knocked on the door. A man came and let me in and asked me to sit on a nice comfortable sofa in front of two big Dell boxes. I sat there for a few minutes and then one of the directors of the company, Jonathan Brealey, came to interview me.

The interview lasted around an hour and it seemed to go well. All of the usual questions got asked. Obviously the wage got brought up. Because of a lack of any actual professional development it would be silly to expect £35000, not that I would have turned it down, of course. A more reasonable number was agreed upon. After a little bit more talking I was told that was the end of the interview and I should expect a call before the end of the day.

I left the building and began walking to Nottingham city centre for some breakfast. I bought some food from Greggs and let some people know that I was out of the interview already. After a few minutes I went back into the Broadmarsh Centre where I was grabbed by one of the people selling Dead Sea Salts and moisturiser and stuff. I eneded up speaking to her for a few minutes and she asked why I was in Nottingham. I explained the interview and so she brought up a book called Secrets that apparently gives a lot of credence to the power of positive thinking. She said I would definitely get the job. I told her that I would only buy the stuff from her if I did get the job.

Two minutes later I got a call from the recruitment company offering me the job.

I went back and bought the stuff. I also got a high five from her and her friend.

After that I met up with Len and Stacey. We walked around John Lewis for a while, admiring the Hallowe’en and Christmas decorations already present. We also spent a large proportion of the time looking at various pots and pans. From John Lewis we headed to the American candy store where I bought some root beer and Len and Stacey bought about £1000 worth of sweets.

We decided a celebratory drink was in order before I headed back to Mansfield, so we went into Wetherspoons. It was much busier than I had expected, but we managed to find a seat.

I set off after a dink and unfortunately there wasn’t a bus until 3:45. It got me back to Mansfield for about 20 past 4. Lizz had been waiting for 20 minutes by this point. Luckily she wasn’t too angry because of the good news. 🙂

Adam and Milly came over and saw the house for the first time. It was good to catch up, and hopefully it’ll happen again soon.

I think now I’m going to go to bed and get a much better night of sleep than last night… Besides thinking about how I’m going to hand in my notice at college.

Today I am angry with BT. When we moved into the new house (22nd of September) I waited a day before I called BT to update them. They informed me that the line was still active in the name of the people who lived there before us. Those people told us that they’d sent a letter to cancel the line. They also called on the 23rd to cancel it over the phone.

After the line had been terminated at our house I called BT to get our number moved over. I was told it would be done within a couple of days. A couple of days later I called to see why it wasn’t working. After speaking to 4 people over the course of 27 minutes of my 30 minute lunch I was told it was because we were taking over an active line, even though the man at BT confirmed that the line wasn’t active anyway. I was told it would take 11 days.

I received a call from BT last week informing me that the line would become active at 6am on October the 8th, which was 6 and a half hours ago. Surprisingly it’s not active yet. I spent 20 minutes on the phone to BT again today. I got through to the Home Serve team, passed security, explained the problem, and they passed me on to the Customer Service team. I passed security again, explained the problem again, and the lady there told me she’d pass me through to the Home serve team!

I told her that she wouldn’t be passing me back through to them because they’d just passed me through to her. I asked to be put through to someone who knows what they’re talking about. She said that’s what she was about to do, until I said “they obviously don’t know what they’re talking about because they just passed me through to you!” She asked me to go on hold for a moment.

Five minutes later she came back and told me she’d sent off a message to a different team who should resolve whatever the problem is and get back in touch with me within 48 hours.

While all this rubbish was happening with BT we’ve received a letter from Sky telling us that BT have told them we’ve cancelled our line, and therefor Sky have cancelled our broadband. This will take up to an additional 15 days to re-activate once BT have pulled their fingers out and activated our phone line.

It absolutely infuriates me that it’s taking so long. BT must do this sort of thing thousands of times a week. How can they still cock it up so immensely?

Sky also piss me off. If they’d made the effort to contact us I could have explained the situation and then I wouldn’t have to spend another 15 days sorting shit out with them! Grr!

I’m angry.