Second leg of flying was less fun, I had another window seat and another empty space next to me, but there was no entertainment. I watched lots of Californication on my iPhone but really by that point I didn’t have much concentration left. Saw some very pretty mountains out of the window but I have no idea where I was. Plus there was loads of turbulence. That flight seemed to go on forever even though it was only 5 hours (again an hour early !) and at the other end I got terribly confused as I had to leave the security part before I could claim my luggage! Thankfully Matt and Lea had come to find me, and guide me in my sleep deprived addled state.

From there we went to In-N-Out burger, which was quite nice actually, I just couldn’t eat all of it (why doesn’t that surprise anyone). Sort of reminded me of a Burger King Whopper. Also had refillable drinks, which apparently is the norm. After that we drove back to Mountain View and Matt explained some of the intricacies of American road signage and driving. The fact everything refers to street names rather than place names is a bit confusing when you have no idea what anything is called.  Also, all the speed limits are .5, so 35mph on normal roads, 65mph on the ‘highways’. Next up, Target to buy an air bed for me to sleep on. Sort of a cross between Matalan and ASDA, appeared to sell everything under the sun but had a really small food section. Apparently WalMart is the same and they don’t have giant food shops like our supermarkets. Seems surprising for a country that stereotypically loves its food so much.

Rest of the evening was a blur, I was well out of it. I got the wireless credentials and played around with the television a bit, then  decided I’d go for a shower. Sadly this is where it all went wrong, in my clumsy lack-of-sleep state I slipped in the bath and now my left leg has an amazing purple bruise on it. It’s typical I’d hurt myself somewhere such that there is pain when I sit down. Sigh. Anyway could have been a lot worse, if I’d landed on my head or something, would have had to test out my travel insurance. Matt inflated my air bed shortly after, and I passed out  at about 11pm and didn’t wake up till 7am CA time. I think I’d been awake 30 hours in a row.

Anyway, what have I been doing. World of Warcraft wise, big success. We finally cleared Ulduar (ignoring the horrible hard mode boss) and have moved on to Icecrown Citadel. We’re already 2 bosses through, the prospect of clearing all the raids in Wrath before Cataclysm is released is looking surprisingly likely! I’m really pleased for our little crew, from such small beginnings, etc. It’s also nice to be killing bosses who drop good loot as well, I’d forgotten what that felt like. Helps to gear up some of our more reluctant raiders. Oh, also invited some new people to the fray, a level 80 rogue and a level 13 paladin – friends of friends, both at Lancaster Uni. I like making new friends, so fingers crossed they’ll fit in well

Real life time now, I’ve got so many exciting things coming up this year I can’t quite contain myself. It starts on the 3rd of March when my brand new 27″ iMac is delivered. Then on the 12th March the F1 season starts (yes I am UNBELIEVABLY excited about that), then the 15th of March I am FLYING TO CALIFORNIA to visit Matt and Lea. Yes you read that right, I am finally making the trip to the states I have always wanted to make, with the added benefit of seeing good friends when I am out there. Then I come home, and I have booked my Motorbike training for the 3rd April, and then  I might be going to Paris (conference submission pending). Then in May we’re making plans to possibly go to Turkey for the F1 Grand Prix!!!!! And in June, Heather wants me to go on a cheap holiday with her too!! My passport will be getting a real work out.

I have a feeling this is all going to make me very poor but I just can’t bring myself to care.

Been thinking a bit about what I might do when I finish my PhD (I know, putting the cart before the horse somewhat given I’m still frantically working on PhD stuff, but humour me). I’m not sure I am cut out for a career in research, well not in the sense of sitting in Infolab working on specific projects, I try but I am learning my brain just isn’t in it. I feel a bit like I want to get out and see the world – I guess this is still some hangover from not having a future anchored to employment at the university any more, and probably why I am going traveling/experience mental in 2010. Of course my ideal employment would be something in the glamorous world of Formula 1, but I doubt I am mathematically clever enough to even dream of a technical job, and everything else is being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people. So I’m back to what was my original idea as a kid (other than joining the RAF, which I guess isn’t off the cards either… I just don’t think I ever could bring myself to be physically fit enough these days ), something in the Foreign and Commonwealth office, I can be diplomatic right? I’m being purposefully vague, I know more about this than I’ll bore people with, but there’s a few possible avenues in that direction I could explore, and I guess traveling, studying, and meeting new people are all useful experience for such a career.

Been feeling a bit weird recently, sort of homesick for my parents’ house. I think I just miss having someone look after me. I have lots of friends in Lancaster of course, and beyond, but there’s nothing quite like being looked after, and fed, and just being able to recline in the living room watching crap on TV. So what I’m saying is I want a servant. No, wait that’s not right… Seriously though, I went home for the weekend and it was really nice, lovely warm house, very relaxing. Of course parents are parents, they get on your nerves a bit, but I reckon with a real internet connection staying there would be really good. As long as I had my desk and everything else of mine down there. I think really its just like being in a bubble, nothing to worry about, forgetting about the real world, just letting it pass you by. And I can’t really do that, I have things to do and a PhD to finish!! Makes me wonder what I’ll do when I reach the end of my funding though, come November. I think its likely I’d just move back there for a buffer, bit of breathing room. We shall see.

Anyway, lets end on a less introspective and boring note. Television! I have regained my appetite for television. Firstly, I am becoming something of a Doctor Who nerd, of the highest order. I’m ridiculously excited about the new series starting soon, and I’ve been re-watching loads of the 2005+ stuff. I’ve downloaded some original Who, but I am struggling to work out where to start watching it all. It’s complicatedly ordered and impossible to order which upsets my digital OCD. Other than that I watched the new series of Silent Witness on the BBC and it was amazing. Literally amazing. I recommend people go watch it, I’m sad it has ended, and on such a whimper really too. I didn’t even know it had ended, got excited when I saw there was more on TV and then realised it was them re showing the previous season. Which I haven’t seen so that’s sort of good but… Lastly I’ve finally got around to watching Life on Mars (series 1 so far so no one spoil the end for me), and that is amazing too!!!!! So many TV shows, so little time.

Will end here, I have rambled enough. Removes my guilt for untimely updating for a while at least.

Best present this year was a car, yes you heard me correctly, someone gave me a car for Christmas and it is glorious. And yes that is left over snow, unbelievable all round.

Unfortunately the car also coincided with a good friend moving away to California :- you can’t pack a car into your hand luggage unfortunately. Regardless, I don’t think the car was worth the disappearance of the friend, but the Internet is a marvellous tool so I have no doubt we’ll remain in good contact. I’m even willing to investigate this new fangled ‘Skype’ thing all the cool kids have been raving about. I don’t really do *talking* to people.

And so now it is new years. I’m not normally one for big celebrations on new years, I think back to the years of Heather, Alex and myself driving about listening to music, finding vantage points to watch fireworks, and then retreating to watch Bill Bailey dvds in Alex’s living room. I enjoyed those years a lot, but unfortunately Heather was busy this year. I was invited, but the event was spending the evening in Manchester city centre, moving from pub to club, meeting up with various people. I really didn’t fancy it, I don’t like going out in Manchester at the best of times let alone new years eve.

So instead I retreated to Lancaster, bringing with me my new fileserver! I’d built it at my parents’ house but sadly they don’t have any monitors, their TV was too old to have an HDMI port and even if I’d overcome that hurdle, there’s no way I could realistically download a linux install disc over 3G. Upon turning it on here the first issue was that it wouldn’t output anything to a monitor. After some panicking, and disassembly, and finally stooping to reading the manual I discovered that in the 8 years its been since I last built a PC in anger, things have changed. You have to run separate power to the CPU, else everything goes tits up. Never have I been so relieved to hear post beeps.

There’s a lot more to be said about the fileserver project, but I’ll save that for a future blog entry. I’m trying to document what I did as I am a moron, and I don’t remember anything. Blogging it seemed as good a way as any.

So in conclusion, it is 2010. A new year, a new start, that’s what people say. I’ve never held much stock by resolutions, or life changing decisions happening just because the calendar rolled over, but its sort of nice to feel like everything is getting a new beginning. This year didn’t end well, 2009 certainly contained some of the most miserable events of my life so far, but ignoring that I think the good has outweighed the bad. Hopefully at the end of 2010 I’ll be able to say the same.

I guess that’s some kind of irony, missing the meeting you were worrying about because you were worrying about it. Anyway, turned out to be okay, I had a separate meeting later in the day, sadly missing my second supervisor, but we’ve arranged some things for me to be doing over Christmas. Everything feels better now. I had some more fail when I got into the office, pouring orangina all over my desk, laptop and monitor. I now have a sticky escape key. Thankfully the adage of bad luck coming in threes doesn’t seem to have held true.. yet. I’ve just spent the rest of the day with a lack of sleep headache, which I should be rectifying now by sleeping, but I felt like writing something. Blogging is kind of addictive when you get into it.

Watched ‘Taken’ this evening, film about Liam Neeson’s daughter being kidnapped by people traffickers. It was.. alright I suppose. Entertaining enough, but the premise didn’t seem to make sense. I understand he’s seen a lot of terrible things in the world, but kids go on holiday all the time, he didn’t need to have an irrational fear of his daughter going to Paris. And then the horrible something that did happen seemed so unlikely, why would they get picked up by people traffickers from the airport, why would people traffickers take obviously rich and well connected young Americans? Surely that’s just asking for trouble. Maybe I’m over thinking this…

It did make me want to watch Love Actually though (Liam Neeson is in it..), I know it makes me a big ol’ girl, but I really do love that film. I actually paid real money for the soundtrack yesterday, as I realised I’d lost my copy, it makes me feel happy for some reason, not entirely sure why. Doesn’t evoke any particular memories. Which is probably a good thing at the moment to be honest.

Tomorrow is the Christmas Meal for Computing and I’m looking forward to it, me and Faisal are going to watch the lecturers in their natural habitat, propping up the bar. More than anything I am excited about the guild meetup on Saturday. I hope there is enough room for everyone in the house, Friday is going to be a day of shopping and tidying up I feel.

So this evening we were all set up with 10 raiders to into Ulduar on the raid lock we’ve been keeping alive since 3.2 hit. It’s been working quite well for us, being a small one-night-per-week raiding guild, starting from scratch in an instance every week was taking its toll. Keeping the lock alive allowed us to see new content without feeling like we were missing out on ever reaching the end. (on the other side of this, the fact we got to the point where we could clear Naxxramas in one evening before any of this hit still makes me stupidly proud). Anyway, we logged on and prepared, and found that 3.3 hitting last week wiped out our saved raid lock. Cue lots of sighing.

As it happened, it may have been something for the best. We were able to pick ourselves up and head to the new Onyxia. I’d never seen this encounter before, I encouraged the rest of the guild to give it a try when I had to miss a raiding session a couple of weeks ago and they’d had a bit of fun and wiped a lot. Coming back this time, we were pretty quickly into our stride and we got her on the second attempt

Onyxia's Lair

Since we had so much time left, we decided to head into Trial of the Crusader. We’d attempted the first boss there once before and not had much success, but I’d now consider ourselves wiser and better geared. We wanted to give the place a try also because the second boss happened to be the subject of this week’s weekly raid quest, and five emblems of frost were very appealing, but we didn’t actually hold much hope for downing boss one. As it happened we were on a streak of luck. We managed to get Northrend Beasts on attempt 2, and Lord Jaxx first time! The second boss was mostly a healing intensive fight; I like encounters where I hold the real power

So all in all it was an awesome night, we had a first time raider with us who’s gear was … lacking, and he was managing ~3000 dps! Almost everyone present got to take away some decent purple pixels, including me (some new legs), and hopefully it’ll have rejuvenated everyone’s interest in raiding – well those who haven’t already been re-suckered in by the 3.3 badge/dungeon finder changes. A really good way to end the year’s raiding!

Should I be worried that something in a virtual world has inspired me to write such a gleeful blog entry? Hmmmm.