Well I have managed to move successfully and seamlessly and now instead of living in the city centre of Birmingham I am now living in the centre of Meriden which is apparently also the centre of England! (The centre of the centre! was also tempted to throw in a HTTP 301 reference, but I’ll spare you that)

Anyway, Meriden is a wonderful and quiet little village roughly 6 km from Birmingham International and around 3 miles from where I work, which has cut my commute down to 5 minutes by bus which is awesome.

I find that I am a lot happier here with friendly people from the village who say hello and don’t mind if you talk to them. Also not having to pass through Birmingham New Street station is a plus as the entire place is just pure depression and to be honest, it is not what you need first thing on a Monday morning, especially when that is combined with the arrogance and ignorance of inner city dwellers/commuters.

Anyway, I have a bigger flat that is actually a one bedroom flat and not a tiny little studio. It has a kitchen, bathroom and separate living and bedroom. Combined with the lack of drunkards walking past the window at night and central heating (oh my god electric storage heaters are utterly rubbish at keeping you warm) my sudden departure from Birmingham doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all, however I am lacking in the freezer, computer desk and land line department, but those will be sorted out in due course I suppose.

Looking forward to trying out the Heart of England way and attempting to walk down towards Henley-In-Arden and perhaps see some remnants of the Arden forrest.

Sadly the internet is in the form of net book and E71 which sometimes can be fairly stable and other times wont stay connected for more than a minute, which suffices for day to day Facebook browsing. Another development concerns my Nokia E71 and how woefully unstable it is becoming. It no longer can produce sound out from the speaker, so that means no ring tones, no alarms and certainly no text message alerts which is rather infuriating and also indicates that I will need a new phone in the very near future. Another thing is that it seems to be getting more and more unstable as time goes on. The web browser takes an age to load and running a few programs usually causes a kernel panic and the phone reboots without warning at random intervals, which is both worrying and vexing.

Geeking wise, I haven’t been up to much at all recently. I’ve set up Subversion and Trac to play with when I have the free time and to also get all my code up in to a central location as I keep loosing things that are scattered over several hard disks and machines. I am also going to get accustomed with Nagios again so that I have a playground to fiddle and break so that I can finally get that monitoring server set up at work (Which has been on my TODO list for around a year now). Started coding for a project handed to me by a friend over a year ago and another that started in November. Very slow progress as the last thing I want to do is code when I get in from work during the week.

Anyway all is good in the land of Meriden, we had a drugs bust in the flats across the way which was talk of the village, so it’s all happening here, very glad I moved.