Well, I've almost finished tweaking my new blog to the extent that I'm willing to link it properly from the rest of my site, and so I'm linking through to it from here. See you on the other side.

Things seem to be settling down at 2lmc, the house I live in. We have a more-or-less functional living room AV setup, with a Dreamcast for Rez, basically; we've got lots of bookshelves, so I can reduce the boxiness of my life, and we've put up the art that we brought with us. That made me think, since my room has nothing on the walls (just like all of my bedrooms since I've stopped being a student, really), and I thought it might finally be time to change that. Something else that lurked in my brain was the site someone posted to scribot some time ago which had aerial photos of all of London, and of course Microserfs, which has been a favourite book of mine for a while. The obvious crossover point? Huge blown up photocopies of London's cloverleaf junctions. Starting at the link provided for the junction between the M25 and M1, I at first followed the navigation provided, first clockwise, to the M25/M11 interchange, and then back to the strange but somehow lovely M25/M40 junction, before wondering about what other stuff there was about cloverleafs on the web, and how to explain what they are. The explanation is fairly simple. Most (British) motorway junctions have access ramps to a roundabout, which is fine if you're joining a small road, but the last thing you want to do to a full motorway is have every car slowing to 20 mph just to get under one motorway (and anyway, which one do you slow down?). So there's a whole class of interchanges to enable both motorways to continue onwards without interruption and for cars to change between them as quickly as possible. I thought these were all cloverleaf junctions, but the British Interchange Directory and the Kurami guide both put me right; most of the M25 interchanges I love are either four or three level stack junctions. Thus corrected, I carried on anticlockwise about the M25, which was pretty much designed deliberately to join up the motorways radiating from London, and hence is home to many of the bigger junctions in the UK, in particular the M25/M4 stack. There's also the M25/M3 interchange, and the also impressive M25/M23 junction, which like that for the M4, carries a disproportionate amount of traffic, as it's near a major airport. Although there are other major junctions on the M25 (the A1M, the M25/M26 and M25/M2 in particular) none are quite as impressive, and there are very few outside London; the M4/M5 springs to mind, though. There are a few sites with American interchanges, which, because they have the land (and the money) to play with, tend to be bigger, more symmetrical, and somehow less interesting. The contortions the M40/M25 junction goes through are quite interesting, and you can see that some of these interchanges have been squeaked in around houses and other existing features. Of course, despite getting all these URLs and making a biggish blog post out of them, I still haven't actually printed out or blown up the photos. Ah well, there's time for that later. And my art took two years to make it back to walls; there's no rush...

I keep thinking of things I should post, but not getting round to it. Bad me. On the other hand, when I saw this image of Europe at night from space (with fake colour showing streetlights) I got reminded of something I wrote a while ago but hadn't got round to putting up. So if you want, read nightspotting.

Key Blur lyrics: I think too much / on things I want far too much / it makes me hateful / and I do stupid things London loves / the way people just fall apart I feel so unneccessary / We don't think so / you seem starshaped All I want to be is washed out by the sea / no death star over me / won't give me any peace / all I want is light relief I'm holding on for tomorrow

They finally reopened the Millennium Bridge on Friday; surprisingly, this seemed to make the news all over the world. I'd hoped to go down there this weekend, but in the end we did a big roast lunch thing round our house on Sunday, and the shopping beforehand took care of Saturday too. On the other hand, work's not too far from the bridge, so I went down there yesterday evening. For most of the 18 or so months it was closed, the bridge was completely dark at night; now, it's lit up again, and wandering under it (the Thames was low- but handy hint, kids, soggy mud in the dark can be dangerous, do take care) and then crossing from the Tate to St Pauls was lovely. It was quite quiet, but then the bridge is surprisingly wide. I really wish I'd brought my camera; I'll have to start carrying it with me again. It's great that it's open.

Not much been written here recently, has there? I am a bad blogger, possibly. Anyway, what's been going on? Well, on Christmas Day my old Mac laptop died. It just refused to boot. Richard lent me a another Mac laptop so I got all the data off it, but it seems to be just dead enough to be annoying (I can get the Happy Mac but no further.) Of course, I've not been working since September, so I could hardly justify running off and buying a new Mac, but thankfully Simon who I live with had a spare-ish laptop that I've been borrowing shamelessly since then. Hence, I've undertaken a longer foray into either Windows or Linux than I've managed for years otherwise. I found a really nice desktop manager (called further), seen KDE and Gnome for myself and been distinctly underwhelmed, learned how to use Putty, realised bootstrapping wireless drivers is a pain in the arse, and generally come to pine for Macness. Finally, this week, I've got far enough through the jobhunting world to acquire a job offer. As a result I've gone and bought a Mac laptop so I can actually get some work done. As I was walking back from the wonderful place in Walthamstow I got it from (they're called Shaye, and it's run by some very nice Jewish people; it's a motherlode of old Apple hardware (they have the gorgeous Applevision 17" displays that are controlled via ADB, for example), gazing at the silloutte of the electricity pylons marching up the Lee Valley, I realised that I was like Cypher in the Matrix. He's given the choice of freedom, but eventually turns it down for the comfort of his illusions. I've been wandering in the Linux world, where I'm free to choose any window manager, any text editor, any graphical file manager, any shell; in fact, it's all there for me to change. And I've turned my back on it, for home use, anyway. I like the coddled, happy world of BBEdit, of the Finder, of Airport drivers that hide all the complexity. Sure, I'll still have Linux boxes at home and at work, but if past experience is anything to go by, they'll be there as heavy lifting, not primary machines (although maybe I should give learning Emacs another go or two). This isn't anything particularly new. But then, at some point, I do feel the need to explain stuff like this.

Random item, two. Catching a football from kids playing inside one of those strange chain-link fenced play areas you only see in cities, after the goalie had tipped it over the metal (which is, of course, an acheivement in itself, if you have the hand-eye co-ordination of a drunk sloth) and manging to succesfully chuck it back in to them so their game can continue.

Last Monday, the first morning in the new house, I didn't sleep that well, so I got up with the workers and went for a walk. Of course, whilst moving, we'd been examining the A-Z quite heavily, and I'd noticed that the new house is on the same double page as Hampstead Heath, and as the forecast was for one of those lovely crisp autumnal days, it seemed a good plan. So after an hour and a half's fairly gentle stroll past Caledonian Road and Tufnell Park, I wandered up Parliament Hill and looked at the layered skyline over the City and West End. That was going to be my walk, but it was only half past ten, so I headed off, half heading for Primrose Hill, with perhaps the hint of the idea to go down to the Regent's Canal instead. Two and a bit hours later, after glimpsing the Trellick Tower from somewhere in the vicinity of Swiss Cottage (which is one of the scariest bits of road I've come across in London yet) I was near the tower itself. It was somewhere around here I had this (not amazingly original, probably) thought: London is fractal. You can look at one part of it (say, the area around my house in Islington) at a number of scales and, whilst there are bits that break the overall pattern (scummy housing, say, in a nice part of town, or a small block of shops), generally it's self-similar at differing scales. (I also like the influence on the geography of the city of natural features; the incursion into the north-east of the city where the Lea Valley reservoirs live, industrial areas around the contours railway lines stick to, and so on). I carried on up to Harlesden, which is a pretty grim industrial area nestling in a knot of railway lines, run through with the more-or-less abandoned Grand Union Canal (Paddington Branch). It was a bit annoying to find that the train back from this five hour walk takes only thirty minutes, but that's pointless walks for you. Ho hum.

So, I've moved out of Manor Park (or East Ham; people seemed to know about the latter as it's on the tube map, whereas the former's a mainline station) for the less dodgy Barnsbury (part of Islington, and between the Victoria and Piccadilly lines- a whole new world of London Underground to explore; yes, I've changed my preferences on the TFL travel alerts site to reflect the lines I use now). (Parenthetically, London seems to have contracted a bit. I've changed from a zone 1-3 to 1-2 travelcard, and when I wanted to go down to a shop in Wimbledon last week, it turned out I'd need a zone extension, of all things. Somehow, this feels very odd indeed. Combined with the fact I took a rather gentle walk down to Covent Garden on Sunday, and I can feel the city shrinking. Odd.) What's better? Well, there's the 'being shitloads closer to Central London' bit, and also closer to friends (so much so I worry a bit I might suffocate some friendships to death; ho hum); Islington is a much nicer area, as I said before (I can now go to pubs down the road). On the other hand, I'm now sharing; the people are nice, but three years of solo living mean I've accumulated a lot of stuff (mainly falling into the three categories media, Lego and computers) which is currently sitting in boxes. I need some sort of storage solution; I'm incredibly tempted by the Muji tube shelves, but maybe I should succumb to the lure of Ikea like everyone else. (Anyone used the Muji ones? Do they work OK?) There was also the painful week or so when I was mulling whether or not to rearrange my room completely. Now I've done so, it seems a lot better than it did. Flatmates also mean we can share the cost of broadband, so once we hassle the right people, there should be ADSL and wireless goodness at the new place. Woohoo. Oh, there were the two days of moving boxes in and out of vans, and the three days either side of assembling, dissassembling and fretting, and the worrying about deposits, but let's ignore them now, eh?

You know how some people who have blogs manage it every day, and others go for ages, adding only a little bit? I'm a third type; every now and again I dump about a week's worth of crusty outgoing branejuice to this thing. Here's a bit more.