As a result of changing jobs I have to move to Brighton and find somewhere to live. So with this in mind I drove down on saturday, to Brighton to have a look at a couple of places. One of the places sounded really nice, in a fantastic location and I'd seen it from the outside the weekend before, so I was rather pleased when it was just as nice inside too. The second bedroom was a little bit small for a double bedroom and the bathroom was downstairs next to the kitchen, but I could live with those.

After looking at another place I decided to put a holding deposit on the first flat. Trundled down to the agents and handed over 200GBP cash and picked up some forms and then headed to the pub to celebrate finding somewhere. After about 20 minutes I got a phone call from the agents just to get some details to tell the landlady about me. About 15 minutes later I got another phone call telling me that when she had phoned the landlady, she said another agent had taken a holding deposit on Friday, but she hadn't bothered telling the agents I went through.

So now I'm back to square one and still don't have anywhere to live. Did a bit of retail therapy and bought a nice warm coat for when I have to walk to work in the cold Brighton wind and rain. Oh and as I was still stressed, I got my ear pierced.

I use bitlbee for talking on MSN and other IM protocols. It is a irc to IM gateway so I can use my normal irc client to talk to people that insist on using silly protocols. (Predictably I use irssi) The reason I use bitlbee over something like gaim that when I used to use gaim or kopete I found that having a second window to check for activity meant that I would either ignore stuff on irc or on msn while talking on the other. Using bitlbee fixed this problem as an MSN chat just appeared as another privmsg. Plus I could use the same logging system for both.

For the last few months I've been using a public bitlbee server at im.bitlbee.org, which had been working perfetcly find until the tail end of last week when it kept getting connection refused. Suddenly on Saturday morning, that machine changed from running a bitlbee server to running an ircd for the Net24 irc network. As bitlbee works by joining you to your own private #bitlbee channel where you talk to a bot to control the client, when a proper ircd appeared, everyone using that server suddenly joined the global #bitlbee and several people auto-authenticated to the channel, revealing their passwords.

It's times like this when I'm glad I never get round to doing things like setting up auto-identifying to bitlbee.

Today I resigned from my current job, because I have accepted a new job in Brighton, working for Runtime Collective. They seem more into the idea of open source than SMT were. Their main product is an open sourced content management system written in Java. It seems their main source of income is selling support, hosting and customised versions. They are based right down on the seafront; about 50 metres from the beach and opposite the best pub in Brighton. :)

I'll be joining as a member of their support team. For those interested, the geeky details of the job can be found in the job advert. They have already mentioned to me about doing debian packaging for the CMS. They are also interested at doing corporate GNOME desktops.

As SMT haven't given me a contract after 6 months and the new company are desperate to get me started as soon as possible, I've given SMT a week's notice. They wanted me to start on the 15th, but I've said to them that I'll start on the 22nd so I have time to search for somewhere to live. For at least the first week I'll be staying in the youth hostel, which is two doors down from the offices. I'm looking for a 2 bedroom flat to rent in the North Laines area. I really want to live close to the city centre and near the trendy area. I'm fed up with living in the middle of nowhere, driving everwhere and not drinking.

I think I'm going miss lots of people and places, so you are all welcome to come visit me and I know I'll be back lots, especially to the Soundhaus which has very quickly become my favourite haunt on a Saturday night. I hope I can find somewhere just as good in Brighton.