London

Two weeks ago my life underwent a few relatively major changes.

I quit my job with a large company and started work for a much larger company.

This required me to move to London where, since I haven't managed to sell my flat in Swindon yet, I'm having to rent with some flatmates (who are wonderful people).

Incidentally, both Yahoo and Sophos are hiring at the moment, so if you're based in London or near Oxford (or willing to move) then get in touch and I'll pass your CV on to the right people. Yahoo is looking for web developers who know their way around standards and have lots of other jobs available. Sophos is looking for a backend coder (who knows or is willing to learn Perl), a front end designer, and an administrator, as well as a bunch of non-web jobs.

Since I have to live in London, with its lovely air quality, I'm planning to take advantage of it as much as possible.

My third evening in London I managed to go to a recording of Old Harry's Game. I wasn't sure what to expect, but the basic procedure turned out to be that everyone got nudged into the theatre's bar for half an hour or so, and then we filed through to the theatre itself.

The producer welcomed everyone then Andy Hamilton came out and gave his greetings and read out a few warm up jokes before the rest of the cast joined him on stage. We got a brief summary of The Story So Far (since this was the recording of episodes 3 and 5) and then they launched into a real time read through of the script.

This was followed by a pause while the cast mercilessly mocked Annette Crosbie (who, like the rest of the cast, was absolutely wonderful) for knocking over a bottle of water. This formed a puddle under her chair, so I'll leave it up to your imagination to work out exactly what type of comments were made.

Then the exercise was repeated for the other episode. It was a very good evening and I'd recommend watching recordings of BBC radio programs to anyone. I also suggest you keep an eye out on the Radio 4 listing so you can catch the new series of Old Harry's Game when it airs.

The next evening I was meeting people for drinks, so I had some time to kill with the flat being rather out of my way. I put stage one of Operation: Tourist in Your New Home Town into effect and went down to the Embankment to take a look at Cleopatra's Needle.

Since then, there isn't a great deal to report. I've been meeting people, running up to Swindon to pick up odds and ends, and settling into the new job.