I've been productive today.

I've registered at the surgery nearest to my house (as I'd been meaning to do for a while now) and I have a checkup next tuesday. Nothing's wrong, I just need a referral for an ophthalmologist.

I've been told by Barclays that since I'm foreign scum, I can't open a bank account with them. I wanted to get one so I could have a savings account separate from my natwest checking account. Screw 'em, I'll get a natwest savings account. I have now called NW and they're sending me the paperwork to sign.

I've vacuumed my apartment to get rid of most of the schmutz on the floor resulting from the bubblewrap bomb that went off on tuesday.

I've spent a morning bidding on stuff at Cheffin's military antique and attic sale. I bought some cool russian decorative plates to use as wall hangings, a victorian silver whiskey decanter, two little prints and the birthday present I wanted to get for my dad.

As a side note, auctions ROCK! I was good, and didn't spend too much money. I'd set aside 100 pounds and ended up spending 110. There are a few lots that I'm really not happy about letting go, but the last thing I wanted to do was get auction fever and end up spending 175 pounds for RAF commemorative plates of the end of the battle of britain (I stopped at 50 pounds for that lot). There was a lot of WW2 stuff that my dad would have loved, as well as some decommissioned guns – though I have no idea how I'd manage to ship him an AK-47 or an Bren MK1 machine gun. I would have loved to get the german officer leather trench coat, but that thing went for an insane amount, as well as a genuine RAF fleece-lined leather aviator jacket.

The attic sale was a fun jumble. The difference between lot prices is amazing. A damn big mahogany side-board with a huge mirror went for 40 pounds. If it would have been possible to fit the thing in my already cramped apartment, I'd have gotten it. Bargains to be made, I tells ya.

Plus, maybe it's because I'm a newbie, but I really got a rush of bidding, especially when you get in a little war with someone else (who, most of time, has deeper pockets than you do). I'm going to have to do that again :)

As a side note, I had the strongest feeling of deja-vue while I was there. Meh, I'm used to that. Side-note #2, I was the youngest person there by a longshot. However, I didn't stand out when compared to the 40 year old dude with the jackboots, ugly-ass handmade tats and razorhead tshirt… Side-note #3, it's so hot today that I've already changed my tshirt twice.

You know, there are songs that you just associate with people, for a variety of reasons.

For example, the song that's playing right now will always remind me of my friend PO (and goes all the way back to CEGEP, all those years ago).

So my question to you, general public, is what song reminds you of me?

I started a new book today, The Dice Man, from Luke Rhineheart.

After having lived in moderate happiness with moderate success with an average wife and family for seven years, I found suddenly, around my thirty-second birthday, that I wanted to kill myself. And to kill several other people too. […] Now the desire to kill oneself and to assassinate, poison, obliterate or rape others is generally considered by the psychiatric profession as 'unhealthy'. Bad. Evil. More accurately, sin. When you have the desire to kill yourself, you are supposed to see it and 'accept it', but not, for Christ's sake, to kill yourself. If you desire to have carnal knowledge of a helpless teenybopper, you are to accept your lust, and not lay a finger on even her big toe. If you hate your father, fine – but don't slug the bastard with a baseball bat. Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself. It is a conservative doctrine, guaranteed to help the patient avoid violent, passionate and unusual acts and to permit a prolonged, respectable life of moderate misery.

It shows promise :)

I slept in my own bed for the first time in over a month last night. It's weird, cause I need to get used to my mattress again. I've also discovered that the back garden is FULL of songbirds that think that 4am is a perfectly wonderful time to start tweeting. I must consider investing in a shotgun.

People have been asking me if I like my new job and what exactly it is I'm doing here. Short answers for both: I love my job and I'm designing and implementing web services for ontology and controlled vocabulary lookups.

It's amazing the surge of productivity I've seen in myself since I moved here. The job I was doing at McGill was, to put it mildly, not up my alley. I could do it, but I hated every minute of it. To those people who know me well, this will say it all: I'm looking forward to go to work in the morning now and I haven't been late once! (though the fear of missing my only means of getting to the office might have a bit to do with that last one)

As to what I'm doing, we need a centralized source to query ontologies like GO and MeSH (to name a few). Things like that's the ID associated with this term, or what are all the child terms that are linked to this ID. Since this is going to be reused by a few people, we decided to go for broke and make a nice series of webservices, cause we're nice like that. You'll find the database schema and the class diagram below:

 

This has been my moment of geekiness, please ignore all of the above if you're not computationally enclined.

They were in and gone by 9:30am this morning. It's now 4pm and there's bubblewrap everywhere in my apartment. Every step I take makes noise. The big pieces are all unwrapped and rebuilt. I have a set of sheets in the wash right now so they can have that fresh-laundered smell. I only have about a half-dozen boxes that need unpacking. I'm halfway done on all the dishes I need to wash before I can pack them away. My apartment suddenly shrank by half :)

I have my stuff.

yay :)