The beaver is a proud and noble animal

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 :)

Got a call from my movers this morning on my way to work. They were supposed to call me either last friday or today, so I'm not really fussed about that. They tell me that I can have my furniture delivered tomorrow! or sometime in the upcoming weeks. The lady on the phone is of no use whatsoever because she's “not in charge of the booking”. Thank you. Why are you calling me then?

This shoots my plans of having it delivered on friday so I can have a long weekend all the way to hell and back. Also, since my boss is away for the moment, I don't even know if I can take tomorrow off!

*seethes*

Update: it's 3pm and I'm on the phone with these people. I need to find out when the hell my furniture is being delivered, and it's now unclear as to when that's actually going to happen. It seems that nobody has the answer and the one person who might know is now on lunch. I need to book my time off with my boss before the end of the day. The worst case scenario is that I take the day off and they never show up. The lady on the phone just now suggested that I schedule the day off work tomorrow, but go into work anyway, and they can call me on one hour's notice to give me time to get back home if they're coming.

Am I the only one who thinks this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life????

2^nd update: It's 5pm and after much hemming and hawing, I've finally managed to get them to pull the finger out and they're supposed to come by my place some time in the morning. I'll believe it when I see it, but ok. The annoying news is that all the senior people here at work are on vacation today, so I can't get anybody to sign off on the leave I want to take. The most senior person here isn't senior enough to approve it, but he says that I can have it done retroactively and it shouldn't be a problem at all – the place isn't really that fussed about paperwork as long as there's a good reason and it's not like I didn't try to get the paperwork done. My boss, his boss and the big boss are all away on personal and business trips. The senior people after that, who usually cover for the big bosses when they're away are also all on vacation at the same time, so there's nobody here bus us peons.

Ingredients

2 duck breast
salt
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 orange, juice only
85ml/3fl oz white wine

Method

1. Preheat a medium frying pan.
2. Preheat oven to 250C/500F/Gas 9.
3. Rub the duck breast with salt and soy sauce.
4. Prick the duck with a fork. Place the duck, skin side down, in the fry pan.
5. Fry the duck over a high heat until the skin is golden. Remove the duck from the frying pan.
6. Place the duck on a roasting rack, skin side up, and roast in the oven for ten minutes, or until slightly pink in the middle.
7. Prepare an orange sauce by pouring the fat from the roast duck into a small pan.
8. Add the orange juice and wine to the duck fat and boil rapidly until reduced and is the consistency of a nice glaze.
9. Place the roast duck on a plate.
10. Pour over the orange sauce and serve with vegetables of own choice.

Notes: Use good quality soy sauce – naturally fermented one, not chemically produced. It makes all the difference.

The roasted potatoes are dead simple to make.

Blanch some quartered new potatoes in salted water for 5 minutes. Drain and put them in an oven dish. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and cook them in the oven at 400F for 30 minutes until golden brown.