Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

And don’t you want to hear about how I am getting on

First week down and I’m still alive. Its been a close call thing with rather too much sitting on trains and rather too little sleeping. At least I’m getting some reading done.

The job itself is going OK, I’m taking over from someone I worked with a long time back, which is cool ‘cos that means I can already understand his coding style, as well as catching up with him. I’m working on Mobizines, doing mobile client programming, but won’t bore you with more details than that.

Its unusual (for me at least) not to be hit by a wall of doom entering new offices – these guys still have something of a startup buzz to them, but with a little more world-weary cynicism than my last proper startup. How bright the future is I don’t know, and I’m sure theres someone, somewhere, with their hand just reaching for the ‘doom’ dial, but in the meantime it’ll be nice to see how these guys think it should be done.

The trains this week only had one bad day (out of ten journeys), where they’d lost a train somewhere near Biggleswade and dug around in the sidings to find us another. The tubes had a couple of busy days, but not quite as bad as the days of pushers on the Yamanote line at Shinagawa.


10 comments

  1. *waves*
    yay for aliveness! who needs sleep? ( says she who goes to bed at 9pm. jetlag ate my brain)
    shout if you want to meet up for coffee or whatnot :)

    • Meeting for coffee would be cool – I’m working in Fulham, travelling through Kings Cross, so somewhere convenient for one or other would be good.

  2. i;ve determined that you are actually neil.
    when do you want to meet for coffee or whatnot?
    my only plans at the moment are going to an antique fair tomorrow…

  3. Its not something for the risk-averse, but it can be very entertaining, especially if you already know how doomed they are.

  4. Its a habit you can train yourself out of – taking risks is great, as long as you’re aware of them and can quantify the potential outcomes, and have some buffering against those outcomes taking you down altogether.

    I assume you’re wondering about meeting up sometime in June, in which case that is *way* beyond my current plan horizon, which extends as far as Friday, but longer term probably involves being in London most weekdays for the next few months.

    • I’m about this afternoon/evening, if you’re free at all? Beyond that, it’ll probably have to wait until next weekend :(

        • maybe one day during the week then? I don’t get back to Waterbeach ’til 8ish (if I manage to catch the train) and I need to be in bed by ten….its a small window, but maybe long enough for a curry?

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