Sadly, after 3 long years with us, we must say goodbye to Bertie, our faithful and loyal company mascot. Your tank was never too smelly, your incessant sucking and dropping of the gravel never too annoying, and your occasional freaking out and bopping your head off the top of the tank was always a welcome sound to startle us from otherwise mundane work-based reverie.

A picture from happier (i.e. less dead) times

Yes Bertie, you shall be sorely missed. It may seem as if we are replacing you, with a slightly differently coloured, and hopefully more hardy version, but you may rest assured that no fish will ever hold quite the same level of affection in our hearts. Apart from Tim’s heart of course, he never took to Bertie like the rest of us. In fact, if I wasn’t so sure he understood that his job was on the line if he were to kill Bertie while I was away, I might have suspected foul play.

But no, it was simply Bertie’s time. He has lived a long and full life, amongst those who cared for him, and has now gone to that great big fish bowl in the sky, with a slightly superior grade of coloured gravel, and somewhat less algae and fish crap in the water. Farewell dear friend.

Just a quick note, mostly to push the sunshine post off the top because it’s cooled down a bit (and I’ve correspondingly gotten less grumpy). Off to Develop Brighton tomorrow, which should be good. I’m not too eager to take the days out of my MGS work, but I have to think about longer term business as well. It’s all too easy to get focused on a nice tangible problem that we can solve, and neglect the other important things. But there are games to be made, partners to develop with, and lots more interesting stuff besides.

Definitely looking forward to meeting up with my contemporaries who I have been sorely neglecting, and finding out about new opportunities, and just generally being nosey about other people’s business (and in certain cases, other business’s people).

It might just be my Scottish breeding showing through, but when it’s hot like this, I just want to curl up into a ball and die. It doesn’t start that way; I just wince a little at the bright sunshine and shade my eyes. After that, I gripe a little when it feels like the sun is scorching down on me when I have to go to or from the office. And the sweaty back from hardly any exercise makes me grumpy. But after 6 solid days of unrelenting, stifling heat with no respite, I start cursing the sky and generally rambling on and being  this mad old bastard that is having trouble dealing with the world.

I think it’s the fact that I’ve done everything, up to and including lying in a bath of cold water, and it only gives me a temporary break from the heat. I do realise there are many places hotter than 30 degrees out there, that’s fine, I wouldn’t want to be there either. I like Edinburgh’s climate. It’s cold and it’s grey and it’s windy, but you know what? I never find myself sitting in a chair in a stifling room, knowing that every other room in the damn house is worse, thinking about how  nice it would be to just get a single bloody nights sleep. Against all my pre-conceptions about the way the world is supposed to work, it doesn’t get any cooler at night. I can’t even see the sun, why is it still so damned hot! Anyway, you get the picture. Heat = grumpy Chris.

I made a trip into London on Saturday (where it was equally hot) to meet up with some folks from The Chaos Engine, which was nice (if too hot). I made the joke with Professor Schminky that a meeting of industry people who know each other only through an anonymous internet forum was bound to be fraught with issues, but it turned out my suggestion that we all wear paper bags over our heads with our forum avatars printed on the front was unnecessary. Thank Jeebus for that, because it’s really hard to drink wine through a paper bag.

That’s about all the interestingness I’ve had the mental capacity for recently. Tim tells me that Edinburgh is suffering the same blistering heat that Reading is, but at least he’s in a basement office with a north facing window. Right now I daydream about being back in the office, just because I know how lovely and cold it can get. Mmmm, cold…