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Once you have been to a proper English college dinner, you can really understand how realistic something like Harry Potter can be. This Sunday Kath had me and Ben (out of team BaM) up for a traditional Sunday dinner to her college up at Oxford. You walk into a room where the coat of arms (a Lion and Unicorn) decorates the front banners while long dark benches lit with candles fill the rest of the hall. A high table up front hosts the evening’s guest while the rest of the college members and guests sit at the dark tables. It was a great three course meal, with a hearty traditional Sunday meal of mushroom soup, roast lamb, three veg and mint sauce, and a rhubarb pudding to top it all off! Though slightly surreal it really felt like we were dining in the halls of Hogwarts!

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Christopher Wren contributed a lot to London’s landscape and seeing as yesterday was a rare winter day in London (bright blue skies, warm sun, but of course still really cold), I thought it would be good to go and visit another one of this famous buildings, the Monument to the Great Fire of London.

The Monument is 202 feet high (62 metres), apparently the distance it is from the origin of the fire that first started the Great Fire of London. There are 311 steps in a winding corridor that you have to climb to reach the very small viewing platform. At the top of the monument is a Gilded Urn of Fire, representative of the Great Fire. The bottom of the monument has a number of inscriptions and drawings depicting the events that conspired during this time.

The city maintains this historic building and there is a very small entrance fee of £2 for adults and £1.50 for children (up from the 6p it was when it first opened).

The Monument can be found closest to Monument Station (Central/Northern Line), or by foot on Monument Street, London, EC3R 8AH.

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Despite have lots of signs even a bus stop named after it, I really think they should have called them the Remains of the Temple of Mithras instead of just The Temple of Mithras.

As you can see from the photo below, there really isn’t much of a temple. This one was moved (almost all of these were below the ground) was moved to Temple Court on Queen Victoria Street and historians believe that it was built in the middle of the 2nd Century AD.

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What a surprise to be asked by someone at a client from a different department to run an agile workshop. It’s a great sign that some people want to hear more about it, and even greater to be recommended by a fellow client developer to run it.

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I’m lucky enough to be working with a client within walking distance of home, but I’ve been suffering under the ridiculously cold and windy weather than has been hanging around London (okay, not cold compared to Russia or other places), and it’s not much fun walking around in it. There have been signs of snow (2 minutes of sleet/light snow here or there) but the closest thing we got today was just more cold rain… Hmm… 40 degree heat and blue skies doesn’t sound too bad right about now.

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London is one of those central hubs of the world (a few European and American cities come to mind as well) where dance music thrives, so it is only appropriate to at least get yourself to a dance event worth going to. This Saturday, I found myself standing underneath a row of lights beneath London Bridge Tube station with a bunch of mates, waiting in a massive queue only to get into the February Raindance. It was kind of surreal standing with at least hundreds of other people beneath the tunnels, wisps of smoke pervading the air and the occassional car, and not-so-occasional (read frequent) hawker trying to sell their wares (glo sticks and other stuff).

Raindance is a rave held three times a year somewhere around London. This time it was held at Seone and like most things in London, people came out in scores to visit. Though entrance was pretty low, be prepared to pay handsomely for essentials, especially the bottle of water (at £2.50 a pop!) but is still worth the fun night everyone had. There were several major rooms, each playing different types of music including Hardcore, House, Club Classic, Old Skool, Jungle Drum ‘N Bass, House, Hard House, and Breakbeat. My favourite room was definitely the D&B room but doubling as a major thoroughfare meant it was completely packed all night long.

Thanks to Grandpa Mushroom Joe and Mike for organising the entire night and the rest of the gang for making it an awesome and tiring night!

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Firstly I just wanted to apologise for any popups that any of you may have been getting in visiting my site. I have been getting them myself and thought it was other sites causing this. It was becoming quite frequent and I found out that the free service I use for web-traffic analysis had changed and started doing little popups (this was the little icon that used to be on the menu).

They have now been replaced with another service. If you still see the icon, make sure you do a SHIFT-F5 on your window to make sure you get the latest, but do post a comment if you have any other issues.

Thanks.
 

TheKua.

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London is an interesting place to be looking for a flat, as what you get is never as good as what you want it to be, yet expect to pay through the roof for it. We advertised last week for a flat mate, but after having gone through the process, we learned a few lessons posting an advert for them. Admittedly, one of our other housemates posted it, and they didn’t exactly put too much effort into it.

Here are a few good things to put into an advertisement that might help weed people out and give people looking a better idea of what they’re getting before you have to arrange for people to come around and visit:

• Number of rooms in the house – The number of rooms in the house gives people a better idea of how big the place is.
• Number of people in the house – It’s not uncommon in London for people to room-share, or even just for couples to be flat sharing in a large house. Talking about the number of people in a house gives you a better idea of what the dynamics of the household might be like.
• Talk a bit about the people who live in the house – Their backgrounds might help determine if people want to live with you (such as if you’re all students, or all professionals, or all Antipodean).
• List all of the amenities – Talk about things like how many bathrooms, toilets you may have, talk about if the kitchen is fully equipped, what is included in the room, whether or not you have a washing machine, how many fridges you might have.
• Discuss the additional features – Such as whether or not it has a lounge room (such a rarity in London), balcony, garden, etc.
• Talk about it’s location – How close is it to the tube station(s)/train station/buses, what major things are nearby (supermarkets, parks, high streets, etc).
• List all of the costs – List the monthly rent (especially if you pay by the month), how much the deposit is going to be, any additional fees (e.g. reference check by agencies, etc).
• Discuss the bills – People like to know how much bills average a month, and what things are included (gas, electricity, TV licence, council tax, Internet) or not included
• Type of person you’re looking for – We were trying to keep a balanced household, so we only were looking for females, but sometimes you don’t want students or want people staying for longer than a certain period of time.
• Room availability – Discuss when the person needs to move in.

Finally when you have listed details about the place, it’s also good to ask for details for the people who are viewing because you will need to weed people out, and it helps to have more information than less. Think about asking for their:

• Name – Believe it or not, people with obscure emails without a number ask to see a place, yet forget to tell you who they are.
• Gender – Sometimes it is important to know, especially if their names are not indicative of a particular gender.
• Profession – A good indicator of whether or not they’ll be able to afford the rent and/or have issues with paying bills. It also means a good indicator to the lifestyle they might have.
• Mobile Phone Number – When you’re ready to organise viewings, it’s much easier to do it over the phone and get an immediate response from someone than it is to do it over email.
• Availability – When you are available to move in, and when you are available to see the flat.

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