Officially off to London

It's been a while since my last post, but that's just because I've been really busy.

For one thing, I've been working on an article about Why DRM Is Bad, which I'll hopefully post sometime over the weekend. I've also addded Trackback support, via HaloScan - which taught me a lesson about how important it is to have a local backup of your blogger template :-(.

For another, I've been going through my old Winnie The Pooh site, which I don't really maintain any longer, removing dead external links (or rather, replacing them with links to a page explaining that I'm not maintaining the site any more). This is a major mission, since I have to manually edit each one of the many, many pages in the site - the very reason that I'm not maintaining the site any more! My new post-processing template page generator approach that I'm using for my new site should avoid a lot of these issues in the future; more details here and here if you're interested. My solution works for me; but I'm sure that this is a really common problem and big sites must have a way to deal with it - imagine if Amazon had to manually update (or even via a script) every single page when they change their standard header! But then again, I guess it could be done fairly easily in something like asp.net, if you have a host that can handle that.

But a big reason that I haven't posted much lately is that there's been a lot going on that I didn't want to mention in public - but I have now officially resigned from my job, so it's okay to talk about it here! (Wouldn't want my boss to read about my plans here before I told him in person - that would be, at best, rather rude :P)

I resigned a bit early, but it's a bad time of year to try and get hold of people. My last month will be January, and I decided that I'll take February off to get things organised, and then I leave for London on 8 March! I plan to go for about a year; I'll come back earlier if I'm not happy there, or stay longer if I love it. There's a lot to get done - millions of change of address notifications (luckily I can just reroute everything to my parents' house); I need to sort out my financial planning stuff (I don't want to be paying a fortune on, for example, life assurance policies that won't pay out if I'm out of the country); and I have so much *stuff* that I need to throw away, give away, sell, put into storage, lend out to family until I get back ... it's daunting just thinking of it all. My lease on my flat ends at the end of Feb (and that's another saga that I was just too busy to post about), so I need to get everything cleared by then; I'll spend the last week at my parents' house, and then I'm off.

The amount of stuff to do is daunting - and that's just the stuff on this side, never mind the amount of stuff to do when I get there, like find a job and a place to stay (although I'm staying with a friend when I get there, so at least I won't be lost when I get off the plane :-) and open a bank account and register for tax and all the other stuff I haven't even begun to think about yet! But I'm starting to get excited about it now - resigning has lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, and I couldn't really look forward to going until I'd got that out the way. And sure I'll miss my family here, and I know that they'll miss me, but still, it's exciting :-)