Planet Nectarius

Wow it’s been a long time with no blogging.. Just thought I’d post some abbreviated updates.

The lease on my current place runs out on the 31st, so I’m looking for rooms again.

I saw Fever Ray at Shepard’s Bush Empire on Thursday. It was amazing.

At Last.fm we’ve been working hard on the next iteration of search (with neat auto-completion) and launched a beta to subscribers on Wednesday.

I’ve been playing with HBase, and loaded a 700 million cell table into a 5 node cluster with no problems at all. I’m also setting up this mini cluster so I can run Dumbo jobs over HBase.

Also of note: Last.fm is hiring.

25ish hours on a plane, over.

I’ve finally got a set up on flickr here.

Being in Melbourne again, hurts. There are people here I really really love and don’t want to leave behind again. I hear it’s common to get culture shock when you get back home. I think I skipped that, because firstly I’ve had that before after returning from  months of hitchhiking and hanging out with yogis, and secondly I know I’m not staying.

But, I had pretty high expectations of being here. I thought every day I’d be hanging out with friends drinking beer, drinking coffee, having brunch etc etc etc… For the most part that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, but I really do get exhausted by people and organizing meeting them. I need to be able to take it for granted that they’ll be there for another day we can hang out. If only everything could just be done on a whim.

I feel like having a midnight picnic on a warm night, but I just know it’ll be only me if I try to round people up at the last minute. Ah well, I refuse to plan it in advance or even think about it. I will whimsically buy wine and drink myself to sleep in a park on my own if I have to.

In some ways it’s great to be working from home now for the last of my stay here. It gives me a something to do other then mope about time and everyones busy schedules. I do like moping though.

It’ll be a good next week and a half.

I like tokyo. It’s busy and different and exciting. The traffic seems a little more civilized then London so far.

I think I’m still getting over the jet lag. Today I walked around Shinjuku all day. It made me want to play The World is not Enough again. Unfortunately I left my DS in london.

The first thing I did was go to a mega book store next to Takashimaya Times Square. They have half a floor for foreign language books. Weirdly they’ve pretty good mathematics text book section. I bought an Atlas of Tokyo.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around various record shops (as well as an anarchist book shop) recommended by Tokyo Damage Report. Also found a couple of Punk clubs. I nearly went to one but was tired and too cheap to pay the 1700 yen door charge.

Final belated post.

My last day in Prague I got up super early, had a long breakfast.

Packed and took the tram / train PT to the old square. Each day has been colder.

Spend an hour in the Dali exhibit at Rebecca’s recommendation, it was great. Lots of water colours and suitably weird things.

Bumped into one of the Americans from last night on the way out, Ken, traded mobile numbers. That was good, I didn’t feel so guilty for leaving them at the stairs up to Swan Lake.

Took the metro to the end of the line. Wandered around in the frost for a while wondering where the airport shuttle left from. Consulted my lonely planet. I found it. There was a big mass of people with lots of luggage and a big sign with a plane on it. Ran for the bus.

At the airport I was over 2 hours early.. Blast, I could have gone to the other exhibit. Had a hot chocolate at starbucks. It was rather poor. I wonder what the coffee was like.

I tried to check into the wrong airline by mistake. They were confused by me.

Waited around a lot, I realised my lips were really sore. I think all this cold air and beer has me dehydrated. Or maybe it was the cold wind.

The plane trips were uneventful, I can barely remember them. Oh I think on one of the trips there was a New Zealand girl with a half English accent next to me. She was speaking about irritatingly trivial things in a loud whisper. It was very annoying. I usually really like New Zealand accents.

At Zurich airport I found a meditation room. It was really just a room, with some chairs in it.

When I finally got home I think I watched some torrents then slept till lunch the next day.

The end. Now I can go back to never updating this blog.