Bug Unit

Happiness is. Happiness is sitting in your new flat’s lounge, leeching free wireless broadband from your neighbour, geeking with one of your new digsmates, hanging from the crazy night before, chewing on some crumbed chicken fillet tomato based pasta, and listening to mp3’s of a band you heard about last night, called Mika. Aaah. The flat is awesome. It’s everything that I wanted, and some. It’s so comfortable… theres big couches in the lounge, a full on sleeper couch as well, an amazingly fitted kitchen with a big table that we sit around and drink wine at each night, our very own bathroom, and a lovely double bedroom with these cool slide-away-type fitted cupboards. Shoo… it’s just great.

Before I forget though… the interview on Tuesday went really great. Well, it went as well as it could’ve gone. I luckily got to overhear two of the interviews before me, whilst sitting in the hallway waiting for them. I sounded a lot better than the other applicants, which made me a lot more positive and confident when going in to the room with the interviewers. We chit-chatted for around 40 minutes, which was really great. I asked them just as many questions as they asked me… we talked render farms for a while… we talked compositing software for a while… we talked about my working permit for a while… argh. The working permit. They kindof grilled me a bit about it, asking how long it was valid for, working periods etc. I lied a bit and told them that it gives me 2 years working in the UK. They figured that out… they questioned further. Lets just say, that was a bit of an awkward moment, but I think that I got out of it okay. I assured them that, should they give me the position, I’ll worry about working permits… they just worry about having me around their company. It’s a project till the end of 2009, and they would want for me to stay with them until the end of it. This is a bit of a commitment. I’m weary, but also not too phased by it.

So we finally moved into our place on Thursday… spent the day having National Insurance interviews, then moving stuff from the hostel. Moving stuff was done on our own, and also done on our own two-by-fours. Legs were tired. It’s a 2km walk from the hostel to the flat, so walking down from the hostel to the flat twice in the day, plus another return journey to buy some brand spanking new bedding, added up to a whole lot of kaylometers. To be precise, Jen walked 10km that day, I walked 6.

Then I spent the day yesterday cracking the guy next door’s wireless router… there are a couple of wifi signals passing through this house, but his is the strongest through the lounge, and it also had the most traffic on it yesterday morning. I sniffed all the packets that were being passed between his machine and the router, all the packets that were being sent to or from his router to the internet, and after capturing about 100,000 packets, dumping them to a text file, and then using an algorithm to cross-match them all against eachother, the result was a 10 digit password that we needed to compromise his security with. It was in the bag. Logged on to his router, added some port-forwards for torrent and some other apps, and gave ourselves a nice big uncapped 2mb broadband connection. Lifes good. The only restriction, is that it works very strong right next to the window of the lounge, and weak for most of the rest of the lounge… The result is that this morning Jack and I, hungover, pushed the couches out of the way, and twisted the coffee table so that it pushes up against the window, so we can maximize the connection speed. We now have our own little office type setup, looking out the window into the gardens of the complex… it’s quite fantastic really.

We were hungover because last night the whole house went out (house also includes two other aussie girls who are sleeping on the sleeper couch in the lounge until Monday). Jen and I shared two bottles of wine before we left… climbed into a taxi, got to the pub, bought another £10 bottle of wine… talked crap… laughed a lot… almost got kicked out by this crazy bar lady who caught me on a couple occasions lighting these random candles all over the bar and chucking them in glasses… she also took away a plate of cakes that was laid out on the bar for purchase, after having Jen tunnel through the clingwrap over them, and steal two of them. She wasn’t impressed with us… Crazy bar lady. Crazy crazy.

Good night overall… now we’re meeting one of Jen’s friends from varsity who’s over here in Edinburgh, for drinks later on. Can’t even think of drinking any more wine right now, let along buying some! The house is great. Videos and pictures of it will follow soon.