'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

The voteamabob once gain threw up the traditional pasta night games of Ticket to Ride and Dominion, so jonners99_uk did a bit more number-crunching and instead selected Scotland Yard and Galaxy Trucker as being the two games with the most first-choice votes. Perhaps the voteamabob app should take rankings into account when we eventually get round to writing it? Anyway, Sarah, Vicky and Martin played Scotland Yard with Matt leading them on a merry dance around London (and managing to get to the end without being caught!), while myself, Paddy, jonners99_uk and Beth played Galaxy Trucker.

We started off with a practice session to try and get to grips with the rules, then reset the scores and tried again for real. In the first round I think we all were on fairly even scores, but then it all went horribly wrong for the second round - the very first card Paddy drew was Epidemic which wiped out most of my crew (including my purple alien which I'd picked up to try and bolster my firepower). Then a few cards later we turned over a Slavers card, and without the alien I couldn't present enough firepower. So the slavers took the rest of my crew, and I was then out of the game with a crewless ship on all of 8 credits (having not managed to collect any cargo, and also having lost a chunk of my ship due to a pirate attack). The others made it through to the end with scores of 30-something credits, and we called it a night rather than add insult to injury with the third round.


On the way to pasta night I was listening to Radio 1's 10-minute takeover. The first track picked was Gorillaz's Feel Good Inc., and for a brief moment instead of being stuck in a queue on the Chichester bypass I was transported back to my degree at Sussex University all those years ago. In particular it reminded me of that common area tucked away at the top of the EDB building (now called Silverstone) - it had WiFi, power points, and was a good place to settle down with the laptop and bash away at a bit of coursework (when I wasn't playing Worms Blast or completing random LiveJournal memes). There used to be one of the many little cafés tucked away as well, and a computing cluster that was always deserted and so handy if I needed to be on the main uni network. Sussex was full of odd little common areas and cubby-holes - I found a good number of them (Mantell common room, Pevensey I, Pevensey II (I spent so much time there along with talismancer and ptristan that the porters joked about placing a "reserved" sign on one of the tables), Essex house, loads throughout Arts A/B and the Library, and of course the Pevensey Bridge) and I'm sure there's just as many elsewhere in the campus still waiting to be discovered (I never did find the ENG 1-3 tunnels that pewterfish once described).

It's odd how an apparently random snippet of music can remind me quite strongly of a given place and time.


I know I keep saying this and yet do nothing about it, but I do miss Sussex University and I do want to go back there and study again one day. Returning for a Masters or even a PhD is actually possible, and is not a completely bonkers idea. The trouble is I'm torn as to what to do as while Brighton is an amazing place to live and study in, I actually quite like Fareham and don't want to move away (and that's without contemplating moving to Cornwall...). Wait, that's not quite right - it's more I don't want to move away from the friends I've made in Fareham, and in particular church and housegroup. Two years ago I'd have happily moved, but over the past year-and-a-half I've finally set down roots here.

Perhaps I could commute to Sussex? Again, not totally bonkers although it would involve either a daily drive along the A27 past the bottlenecks of Chichester, Arundel, and Worthing, or instead the joys of Southern FailRail and an east/west change across Brighton station (which is just slow because the timetables don't line up). Actually, no, that's not an option thanks to the RMT's contempt for passengers - the train journey I could deal with (have 3DS, will game), the unreliability makes it completely impractical. Perhaps I could move a bit of the way along the coast and be within a reasonable travelling distance of both Fareham and Brighton?

Or I could even not go to Sussex and instead continue my studies at another university. Southampton and Portsmouth both have major universities, and those aren't the only ones within a reasonable distance of here. Except Sussex is a campus university, sitting in the South Downs and surrounded by the countryside, while Southampton and Portsmouth are city universities and that's just not quite the same.

In any case July's a bit late to be suddenly applying for a 2017 course. But for 2018... hmm...

So here I am, once again in a holiday cottage (the same one as last time) in Falmouth, Cornwall. This time it's only 3 years since I was last here.

The biggest thing that's struck me about being here is just how quiet it is. Growing up in Horsham there was always the distant sound of traffic on the A24. In Brighton there was more traffic, and in Fareham I live next to both a major road junction and a train line (though it's amazing how good the brain is at filtering it all out). Here, it's almost completely silent. There's just the whirr of the laptop hard disk, some gentle Jazz on the radio, and the odd ping from the heaters. If I turned that lot off then all that's left would be the faint noise of the wind (unlike last time it's not stormy, merely damp).

Let's go slightly off-topic for a moment here (it'll make sense). Some of you may know that I have a grand plan: to get a Master's and a PhD. The reason for doing so is largely "because", but I consider that a sufficiently good reason for a grand plan. Actually, there's a bit more to it than that - I did enjoy the time I spent at university and the people there, and would love to go back to it. The plan's also come on a bit since it originally came into being five years ago. I recently looked at doing a masters via the open university, and decided that it actually wasn't what I wanted. Almost all the modules I already know to some extent, and the ones I didn't I looked at and went "is that actually any use to me?". I think what I really want to do is a research degree rather than a taught one, something where I can come out at the end with having actually done something. I've got enough ideas for potentially cool things (some practical, some less so) that I'm sure there's something I could do a research project on.

Besides, actually working for a few years gives you a better work ethic and I'd probably do a lot better with the project this time (there's something to be said for doing a course with a sandwich year - while university gives you the knowledge and skills, it doesn't really prepare you for the world of work). Then again as my grandfather always says if you got a first or a third you spent too much or too little time studying, so I think I did quite well with my 2:1. Certainly it was good enough for the job I got straight out of university.

Anyway, back on topic: the reason I'm writing about my grand plan is I've decided I now have a second grand plan: to live in Falmouth (though I'll settle for seaside Cornwall in general). Of course it's completely impractical due to a total lack of software jobs in the area, but no-one ever said grand plans have to be practical. Merely that they should be possible. Then again in this day and age all you actually need for a software business is good connectivity. The people behind World of Goo, for example, describe their office as being whichever coffee shop with free Wi-Fi they're in today.

Neither of these plans is going to happen tomorrow - they're several years away at least. The first plan has been in a perpetual state of "in a couple of years" ever since leaving Sussex due to the money required for a Master's/PhD constantly increasing. The second plan has only just come into being as an actual plan rather than a vague answer to the "if you could live anywhere where would it be" question. But in five years time, who knows?

Well, it's quickly approaching the time when I need to have decided just what I'm going to do next year. Do a Master's or go to work, stay in Brighton or move elsewhere...

I'm actually having to make hard decisions about my future. So far it looks like stay here and do a MSc in computing or AI, but even there I need to decide just which flavour of MSc to do.

Ah well, time to throw applications at anything that's not moving fast enough (and some things that are).