the corner office

We've moved into our new flat. Now to get off the fence, pick an ISP and order us some broadband!

I just came across a jarring and sad piece of news while catching up on the past two months' worth of Kerneltrap posts: ReiserFS file system developer Hans Reiser was arrested and charged in October on suspicion of murdering his ex-wife, whose body is still missing.

It was cold and gusty tonight, but we made our way into town for the Wallingford Medieval Christmas festival. Crowds of people, good fun... hog roast, farmers' stalls, minstrels all kitted out, shops open, and many proprietors in period outfits. The only thing missing was some poor git in the stocks. We got to try roasted chestnuts, which might've tasted better if we'd grown up eating them. Like South Africans and milk tart.

The medieval battle re-enactment was a bit of a hoot. I think this involved the local LARPers being rounded up, getting to very quickly choreograph a bit of a set-to, and then being sent out into the town square to do and die. After rather convincingly having at it for a while, they did some sort of (presumably) semi-traditional war-cry, shook their arsenal of large pointy cultural weapons menacingly and then hauled out the wine. I had a chuckle at the prospect of seeing a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth people getting all boozed up, but we (perhaps prudently) moved on before seeing any re-enactments of ye olde medieval drunkenne brawle.

Off to Oxford tomorrow. Burger King, here I come!

... we got to visit Ikea today. I'm not quite sure what I'd expected but I was neither blown away nor turned off by the place. We got ourselves loaded up with bits and bobs for the flat.

The most interesting part of the visit was driving into London. Maybe we just drove through an unexciting part of the city, but it looked like every semi-detached and terrace house for about a gazillion miles was based on one of 3 architectural plans. All same size and dimensions... most with big bay windows on ground and first floor, front door to side and small window on first floor. Wealthier and adventurous types got bay windows on both sides, and poorer folk got no bay windows at all. I wonder whether one architect was responsible for all those houses, or whether architects in the early 20th century just came to work and churned out copies of exactly the same plans, day after day after day?

Life is full of small coincidences. Our new telephone code is 01491. Same as the telephone code in my old home town in ZA when I was growing up.

I use my blog's initials, TCO, quite a lot: in the favicon, as package names for my Java projects, and so on. I hadn't made the connection until some time after starting my blog, and the only other person to pick up on it was my uncle, but TCO also used to be Carletonville's car number plate prefix in the 70's, when I was a little'un. I get a kick out of small bits of my history still being part of my life.

In South Africa, you used to have a single choice for broadband: you got Telkom ADSL and complained bitterly about it. Then Sentech and later iBurst came along and you could choose to use wireless broadband instead. You'd chat to some mates, read some posts on the usual forums and know that you could more or less make an informed choice, and be happy with the result.

Here, it's totally different. The array of choices is near overwhelming. Even the crappiest service is likely to be a whole lot better than Telskum's offerings, but that's scant help when you're trying to get the best bang for your buck.

It's wonderful to see what you can get with some real competition, but the competition also leads to some obfuscation. Contract-free ISPs still charge you a 'cancellation fee' if you cancel within a certain time period. Unlimited ADSL packages have 'fair use policies' which, if you dig through enough fine print, limit you to 20GB or 40GB or 60GB or whatever. Now, that's an insane amount of data for someone who's used to squeezing the most out of 3GB a month, but still: I'd like to find an ISP where I read their blurbs and don't feel like I'm being lied to.

We signed the rental agreement this week, and the 1000 year old town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire is going to be our new home. This is where my sister and brother-in-law stay, and we long ago decided we'd like a change from big city living. We're close enough to cities like Oxford and Reading to not feel too isolated, but in a small enough town to feel like we're away from it all.

The town itself oozes history. It's more like a village, but as some pamphlets take pride in pointing out, the town received its charter before London did. It still has the remains of a castle built by William the Conqueror, many of the buildings and churches are centuries old, and every day we walk past mounds which are the remains of the town's original Anglo-Saxon fortifications from around the 9th century. It's still hard to wrap my mind around the idea of living in a place that's been around and steadily populated for so long.

Needless to say, we've been out shopping for home stuff. It's pretty difficult buying things when you have no idea whether what you're buying is reasonably priced or not. I mean, I barely knew what constituted an expensive duvet cover in South Africa, but at least I had some context in which to decide how affordable something was. You feel a bit silly continually asking daft questions like "is this a good price for a pillowcase? Is this an expensive kettle?".

On the subject, the coming week will see the next big adventure: Ikea. We're quite excited. When we can roll our eyes knowingly when people talk about the place, we'll feel like we've settled in.

Jam doughnuts are made with raspberry jam here, not apricot jam like in ZA. This is a change that'll take some getting used to. Waitrose make mean Chocolate Berliners though, a treat I'd never had before. Chocolate-filled doughnuts - whodathunkit? I'm hooked.

On the subject of jam, there's no superfine apricot jam either. In fact, it seems that jam here isn't jam unless it's chock-full of fruit. I can understand that many people would regard this is a good thing, but I'm a fussy eater and personally, I like my jams to bear as little resemblance to the original fruit as possible. I've discovered that 'conserves' are closest to the ZA concept of jam.

I soon learned that you can get chips with almost anything. Chinese food, Indian food, you name it. That's pretty cool in a decadent sort of way. Burger King isn't bad, is definitely better than Macdonalds (which is, as expected, reassuringly the same), but I will miss Steers. I see franchise opportunities. Ronwen and I have tried a good few restaurants, but I've enjoyed traditional English pub food the most, by far. And of course, English ale is a wonderful thing. It is only through the utmost exertion of self-discipline that I haven't drunk a whole lot more of the stuff.

Needless to say, I got over here and needed a laptop pronto, so after spending ages back in ZA researching Dells and Thinkpads, I needed an off-the-shelf and decided to hold off on investing in a dream machine just yet. Instead I got myself an Acer Aspire 5630, which looked like a solid buy, and is so far turning out to be quite a nice machine. The integrated graphics card isn't ideal, and WXGA feels a little claustrophic, but I can't complain.

This baby came with XP Media Centre, which I'm sticking with for now, and running Linux inside a VMWare partition. I brought all my hard drives over with me as carry on luggage, but I soon realised that my current VMs weren't going to do me much good, since they were all 64 bit, and I'm back to 32 bit now. So a new Ubuntu server it is.

As for XP Media Center, I was rather chuffed to discover that it has a fishbowl screensaver. It reminded me of the old Macintosh After Dark screensaver from the 90's, but needless to say, fishbowl screensavers have come a looong way since then.

I'm going to be rambling about new versus old experiences a lot for a while. Newest adjustment: British keyboards. I keep getting my quotes and @s mixed up. It's kinda cool to have a £ symbol on a keyboard though. I like it. £££.

Well, we're here, and our first week is almost over. I didn't think it would take me this long to update my blog!

The break in Durban was great, but it went by far too quickly. In addition to lots of visiting of family all over KZN, we also spent some time in the Drakensberg.

Our Durban break was marred a bit, though. On the day before we left for the UK, we were woken up at 4h30 in the morning by the house alarm going off. Some thieves had broken into the garage, and made off with my mom-in-law's car. Netstar got it back pretty quickly, but the theme was, as usual, how lucky we were that nobody came into the house and that it didn't turn violent. It was a reminder that despite the fact that we've tried to focus on the positive reasons for moving overseas, the negative reasons for getting out of South Africa also played a big part.

Anyhow, there are enough positive things to focus on now. The weather's cold and miserable, but I'm loving it. This early sunset thing has thrown my body clock for a loop, but it's getting better - I'm no longer wanting to go to bed at 7 at night. As expected, there are a million things to get used to and learn and unlearn, but it's all fascinating and exciting, and we're getting there.

The most amazing part of our week here so far is just how beautiful this part of the world is. We're staying in Oxfordshire, so between Oxford and Reading and all the local villages, this is fairy tale country. Job and flat hunting are underway, and with some luck, we'll stay in this part of the world for a good while longer. Absolutely WOW.