In the continuing saga I like to call "Dave, what's wrong with your ex-employer today?", I'm still missing large chunks of my pension. Finally had enough of my former employers not giving me any answers or claiming to be looking into it, as I've been asking since around last March. As per this guide, I've started making efforts to resolve the problem myself. The first step has been to formally request a copy of the pension scheme's dispute resolution procedure. I sent them an email last wednesday and hand delivered a letter last night, giving them until the 9th February to supply me with the procedure. If by then they haven't I'll contact the The Pension Advisory Service. I'm hoping it won't come to that, but given the lack of any progress in the past, I'm not holding out much hope.

Some one on a mailing list pointed out this cartoon and thought I'd share it with people:

On the way home, someone asked me where I wanted to go when I died. My initial reaction was Tahiti. After thinking about it, I'd quite like to see New Zealand.

Clint, I don't know about Belgium, but in the UK, the norm is a month for most people and 3 months for senior members of staff. Of course, you may or may not be given work to do during that period. Usually your employers will want you to document and help hand over to a new person. However if you have a bad relationship with your employers, they may put you on garden leave where you arent in the office, but are being paid. Presumably this is to stop you stealing their data or doing some other malicious act. All this stuff is normally written into your employment contract. Without one it is possible to leave your employer within a week.

22:07 <@Laura-> no, there is another

Not only does my girlfriend use irc, she quotes Star Wars. *squee*

So far, in the last 12 hours, I've discovered that my payslips from this time last year bear no resemblence to reality, my pension company has failed to recieve approximately 1900GBP of money that should have been paid into it and O2 have managed to transfer my mobile number to completely the wrong SIM. I'm still waiting for April so I can call the Inland Revenue to find out what happened to all the student loan repayments I made at my previous company (Approx 700GBP).

Have spoken with O2, who are going to transfer my number ot the right SIM, hopefully in the next 2 hours. Need to speak to the guy that does payroll in the office, when he comes in next.

Sucks to be me.

Update: Phone now works.

Found out that I'd been libelled by an old school friend last night. Apparently I was mentioned as part of LugRadio's highly amusing Look Queer for the New Year competition. Listen to the stream here (about 2 minutes in). I mean how insulting is it to be told you look queer by a guy who looks like this:

I don't know if I'm more insulted about only coming third or by the fact that I don't get a prize. Wish I'd slept with his girlfriend now (or at least her sister).

You can run Jono, but you can't hide.

I now have one less reason to visit Cambridge. Brighton is getting its own Cult Clothing store. Frankly, it's the best clothes shop I've found.

Today is the first day this year where I've walked out my door and thought "What a lovely day. Spring is officially here." The sun was shining and and it was pleasantly not cold. Lunch was spent eating a lovely thai style chicken ciabatta from Redeli sitting on the beach. Was warm enough in the sun to sit without wearing a jacket. This was why I moved to Brighton.

Half an hour after returning to the office, it rained.

I shall not be eating thai at the World's End tonight now. :( That is all.

I shall be eating thai at the World's End tonight. That is all.

Been a while since I updated, so here is a braindump. Last friday evening was spent with Clare at the Pav Tav. Fridays is quickly becoming one of my favourite nights out. Em sadly couldn't make it cos she was ill, but I still had fun making Clare dance and singing loudly to the Killers and Kate Bush covers. Got to sleep about 2am and then woke up about 6am to catch a coach to Norwich. Brighton city centre at 7am on a saturday is a very strange and peaceful place. If I remember I'll go take some photos one weekend. Walked round Norwich with Charlie in the afternoon and got scared by Castle Mall which, no matter which floor you are on, has an exit at ground level.

The gig itself was fantastic. The first support band, Ghostride seemed out of place and there were just two lonely blokes moshing. Hell is for Heroes were fantastic as ever, but their set seemed really short. Looking forward to their album on Monday. Some girl lost her shoe moshing and Charlie went around asking if anyone had seen it. :) Biffy Clyro were fantastic. Moshed. Came out to find snowball fight going on :) and Charlie managed to embarrass herself in front of HIFH. Sunday was spent travelling back to London, where I met Charlie's boyfriend, PJ and watched live comedy. I think I've falling in love with comedy and need to find something like the weekly event in Kingston.

Monday morning involved catching a train back to Brighton in time for work. Thanks to trains being late I managed to get into Brighton 20 minutes early. :S Wednesday was spent picking up the pieces after a powercut in the office. Only real casualty appears to be the hard disk in our external router. One quick replacement and reinstall later we were back up and running. Need to find out why fsck can't find /dev/sda3 and drops you into a shell, yet if you run fsck -a manually and then carry on with the boot process everythign works. Wondering if udev is involved somewhere. Spent Thursday trying to get Linux and Windows talking to a Nokia 6630 without luck. If anyone knows a decent phone that can sync with evolution 1.4 and can be used as a modem, I'd love to know.

Thursday night was spent in the Pav Tav with Em. 3 pints of vodka and coke before we went out directly contributed to me not remembering any music they played, me trying to drunkenly pull a croatian girl with bad fashion sense, waking up with a hangover and failing to work out what I did with a twenty pound note I had the night before. Managed to make it to the train station on time to find out my train hadn't. The train left 20 minutes late, waited 5 minutes at Gatwick where the driver said there were some problems with the train, moved off and stopped again in the middle of nowhere for anothr 10 minutes and then crept into East Croyden where we were all kicked off. Finally managed to get to London Bridge and catch the underground to Waterloo. The guy at the gates told me my ticket wasn't valid on the underground despite being to Waterloo and the fact that a women had let me onto the underground in the first place. Arrived at the Eurostar terminal just as the train was due to leave so I managed to miss my train. Thankfully the nice women at the ticket desk happily put me on the next train with no charge and got to join Noodles, mjg59 and stargirl. I'll do a further update on FOSDEM late in the weekend. Braindump over.

This morning I phoned my tax office to tell them that I no longer have a company car and to get my tax code changed. I'm currently paying 120GBP tax on a benefit I don't have. It turns out they didn't know I was working for my last company. They never submitted the P45 I gave them, telling the tax office I had started working for them in late April. They never submitted a P11D tellling the tax office I had a company car and they never submitted a P46 telling them I left in mid November.

This leaves me wondering if the company never told the tax office I was working for them, did they actually pay my tax or National Insurance? Did they pay my student loan? If not, what happened to the money and what will happen to me in April when the tax office sorts the end of year stuff out?

Oh and does anyone know where I can find the CO₂ emissions on a Vauxhall Vectra LS?

I found out today that one of the sales guys at my old job has been made redundant after him being there for about 9 months. He started shortly before I did, so I'm glad that I got out as quickly as I could, even if it meant they declined to give a reference.

Interestly it appears they still haven't sorted out the contract situation with everyone else in the company, so it is possible that someone else will leave them in the shit by giving them a week's notice.

Monday evening I managed to scratch my right eye taking out a contact lens just before I went to sleep. I've scratched my eye before and didn't think anything of it. Just went to sleep thinking it'll be fine in the morning.

It wasn't. It still hurt as much as the night before. Had a shower and it wasn't feeling too bad, but had the occasional twinges. Put in a contact lens in my left eye and headed to work and was in discomfort all morning so at lunch time I decided to find an optician I could visit, just to put my mind at rest I wasn't going to end up blind or something. Annoyingly my optician is 120 miles away, near my parents, in Milton Keynes, and the nearest branch is a 20 minutes train ride away.

First I tried Boots, only to be told that they don't do emergency appointments and I would need a full eye test, but they couldn't fit me in today anyway. Next was Specsavers, who basically told me they wouldn't even think about looking at me unless I became a customer. Finally I went next door to Eyesite who said I'd probably need a full eyesight test but they could fit me in early afternoon and would cost me �18.50. That sounded the best offer I was likely to get so I went with that. When I went back later they did a full test including taking photos of the back of my eyes, which I'd had done before, but I'd never seen them until now. He said I did have a small scratch on my eye but it looked to be healing and would probably be healed by tomorrow and he booked me a quick appointment for the following lunchtime. By the evening my eye was feeling a lot better and didn't really hurt at all.

And then I went to sleep. Woke up this morning in more agony than I was yesterday and my eye was causing me all sorts of grief during the morning. Went to the optician who said that it was quite common for th eye to heal 90% during the day only for the eyelid to stick to the healing area during sleep and reopen the scratch when you wake up. He has said to get some anti-bacterial lubricating ointment from a chemist today so that it shouldn't happen again tomorrow morning. In the mean time I'm wondering around with everything blurred to my right and in mild agony. Ho hum.

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.

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.

Last weekend was the UKUUG Linux Conference and this year it was held in Leeds, which is where I went to university. Even though I left 3 years ago, it was very strange walking around me department again after all these year. I know I spent 3 years there and that it should feel familiar to me, but I was shocked at just how familiar it felt. It was like I'd been there just a few days ago and the last 3 years hadn't happened. A few things had changed, but everything felt exactly the same as it did when I left.