It's been a long two(ish) weeks since we moved to our new flat, and despite various problems, we are now connected in the broadband sense of the word! We had the small issue of a missing phone point to contend with, then a lack of space at the junction box (in the street) from which our line should orginate, and then the issue of the un-booked appointment (on BT's Part) with a BT engineer to fix the issue! But finally, we were connected; yesterday we rejoined the webbernettatron super-spamway (its in the dictionary, take a look if you dont believe me*)

So now I can write an (ahem) interesting blog post about what i've been up to!

The new flat is awsome (yes I am allowed to use that word despite not being an american teenager), it is much much bigger than our old flat, and it has recently been gutted and re-decorated. Unfortunately this means there have been a few teething problems, such as an extractor fan (with no extractor pipe, or even extractor hole) set to extract into the panel of a cupboard, resulting in a funny noise. This continued until I dug out the installation manaul and fixed it :) (Handy man Matt - Hatt)

If anyone is interested, we will probably have a bit of a party in a couple of weeks. Let me know if you want to come! :)

Work wise, things are going pretty well, i've got lots of stuff going on, and will be off on a few training courses soon (one is in San Fransisco which i'm also looking forward to) and a number of interesting conferences to look forward to! So far i've been to three conferences/seminars, all broadly fraud related, but next week is a true Forensic Computing conference (F3), but I am basically a backup delegate if my boss can't make it :( I am of course merely a new 'grad' Consultant in my company, so I am bottom of the pile! But thankfully, that doesn't mean I dont get to be involved with the cool stuff! (We are also opening an IT Security section as part of our service, which I hope to become involved with! - I think they'll be recruiting soon, so email me ur CV if ur interested! I think I get a kickback if they employ you, from which i'll take you out for beer!)

Life as a commuter (note the lack of the letter p) is certainly a bit strange; dragging myself out of bed at 6 and marching to the station for 7 not to return home until 13 hours later hasn't quite lost is, erm, novelty, but I do manage to get alot of reading done, mostly to do with computer forensics, but I hope to start reading some interesting papers about communities and pervasive computing, which links into my final years dissertation project: MyGRL. I hope to write more papers about the subject, and may start to redevelop the system for commercial use? (not sure about the legality of this, but JCW and I will become rich beyond our wildest dreams soon!)

I am currently working on a theory of train travel, whereby the carriage that you least expect to have a seat available (the closest to the gate), is the one that in fact is most likely to have the hallowed two person seat free for your very own and personal use! This seems to work up until 10 seconds before the doors close for good, as its where the last stragglers leap onto the train with no regard for their own personal safety (i've seen people trap whole limbs, laptop bags, coats and heads in the closing door with only a minor grumble in the knowledge that they've managed to get most of their person aboard) before it departs and slump down next to you all sweaty and panting, and you are forced to put up with it for most of the journey. This theory is, of course under review, and I welcome any comments and tips! :)

Laura has been busy busy busy now that she is doing a full time college course, and is also trying to fit in full time hours at work! When my wage packets start to come in, I hope she will be able to cut her hours down!

For those that remember him, I noticed that Aiden is in India and has an interesting blog about it all which I suggest you read!

Also, Neil seems to be buggering off down the yellow brick road (is there any connection to) to Oz(?) very soon, which is a bit of a bummer, because I wont get a chance to have a beer with him before he goes. I'll just have to take the ladyfink for a holiday and have a couple of tinnies in a warmer climate!

I hope to start posting some actually very interesting posts about technical work stuff soon, maybe, but I will probably just keep writing boswellox.

I also intend to see the west-end hit, Spamalot very soon, as I hear it is very very funny.

*not really, I made it up.