Moving

If you’ve been following me on twitter you may have noticed that I’ve gone a bit quiet there, and possibly other places that you expected to see me like stackexchange and the GeoServer lists.

There are two reasons for this, first I’ve abandoned my twitter account, partly because of Elon Musk and co but mostly because there is now a critical mass of people I know and people I find interesting on Mastodon. So I can now be found tooting at http://fosstodon.org/@ianturton for my open source ramblings and snark, and at http://mastodon.scot/@ianturton for more random social stuff.

That second address gives a clue as to the other reason I’ve been quieter than usual, I’ve moved to Scotland this autumn as well. Many people have asked does that mean I’ve changed jobs or something but no Astun was a mostly remote company when I joined and has become a fully remote one during the pandemic so I realised I could live any where I wanted (subject to the constraints of Brexit) so why did I continue to live in the Tory heartlands of southern England when I disagreed with most of what it stood for.

There were many reasons to move to Scotland, it’s where my wife’s family are, it’s where we met and got married (30 years ago). But also, it has a proportional electoral system for it’s government so there is a chance to finally have people I voted for making decisions. It has higher taxes and better public services and finally, a good chance of getting an EU passport back in my lifetime.

Moving house is a stressful process, especially when you are as uninterested in planning as I am, but from a sudden idea in August, we had sold our house by September and moved out in November. In Scotland we found a house we liked and had completed the purchase 20 days later! Now we’re just waiting for the removal men to have time to deliver our belongings next week and things should settle down by the new year.

So I should be back to having an office with an ergonomic workstation rather than my current laptop on a dining table in an AirBnB that I’m currently using and I’ll be back to full speed coding and writing then.