Posts Tagged ‘life’

Chronicles of the econocalypse

July 16th, 2009

salesA couple of nights ago, 5 friends and I went for a meal in Brussels. We were young, crazy and expat together once, and that creates a bond. We like to meet up once in a while.

We all moved on since that first job. Three of us are employees, three of us went freelance.

One of the employee friends had gotten his notice recently. Funnily enough, soon after his soon-to-be ex-employer asked him to do a substantial job in Croatia, so he made them an offer … freelance, and for a decent amount of money. Typical organisational cock-up: oops, fired the wrong guy.

Another one has finally obtained his dream job at a bank, but things are looking uncertain. The director of the department has just been promoted away, and they don’t know what’s happening, exactly. He is the most recently hired employee.

My third employee friend is a consultant. His job is safe, because he’s working on integration for the bank’s merger – which will take at least a few years.

One of my freelancer friends has an ultra-safe and ultra-boring job managing tests for a bank backend system. The backend system developers generate lots of bugs, so his contract is extended year after year.

The other freelancer witnessed the crash and burn of Kaupthing live from their front office. Even before that, he’d started a company with a friend, and they’d developed a product for financial quantitative analysis. They’ve just landed a good development contract, with large-ish license payments coming up in 2010. For them, the question is whether, and when, the customer will pay. He reckons that if they pass 2010, they’re really up and running.

And then there’s me, who remained on the technical side of things, and left banking behind 5 years ago. My aim is to keep it interesting, and somehow i had trouble seeing that happening in a bank, at the time. Not sure it’s the soundest choice, financially, but then money was never my main priority (though living comfortably is an important secondary goal, obviously).

It’s funny, how one evening can paint a picture of an economy that is shaking and cracking at the seams. Nothing stays the same, certainties erode, and lives change. So far, everyone manages to make it work, more or less.

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The pendulum and a certain kind of madness

July 5th, 2009

I read the “Pendulum of Foucauld” of Umberto Eco when I was 20, and it made a strong impression.

The story of the Pendulum is the story of an italian man in the seventies, who (after some tribulations) ends up working for a publisher, who amongst others has a collection of books around the ‘paranormal’. As part of his work, he gets to know some of these characters, and also gets to read a whole lot of essays in that category.

He starts to recognize the patterns of such works, the interpretation of every single detail to prove the theory advanced, the fact that these authors ignore inconvenient truths, and even common sense. The fact they make the craziest of connections, based on nothing but a vague similarity.

So him and two friends start decide to build up The Plan, which is a conspiracy theory spanning the centuries, picking and mixing historical details to come up with a beautiful and moronic story. They have a lot of fun doing it, until things start going very, very wrong.

futurology

And indeed, Umberto Eco was spot-on. There are many of these theories floating around. Spend enough time on Youtube. Try anything connected with 9/11, or the googoo stuff of David Icke, some of the ideas in Zeitgeist … Lots of theories blaming mysterious groups of puppeteers, master-minding big catastrophes, to further their own goals.

Quoting Eco:

Someone – was it Chesterton ? – said that when men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

It seems a lot of people are having trouble with life ‘as is’. A vast, indifferent universe, where we live only for a short while, and really horrible stuff happens for no apparent reason. A place mostly out of our control, where we (as a race) manage to be ridiculous and terminallly stupid/greedy. So these people invent patterns and connections, to make it all make sense. Thinking: someone’s behind this. Bound to be.

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Sand mandalas

March 21st, 2009

Sand mandala’s are drawings made of sand by tibetan monks. Their full significance may be lost to me, as i’m not a buddhist, but one aspect is clear: a layer of unfixed grains of sand is not made to last.

And that is their point – nothing lasts, everything is transitory.

Often, that’s how being a developer feels like: drawing with sand. However beautiful the patterns we implement, however elegant and succinct our code, we just know that its life expectancy is about 10 years at best (some kernel code excepted).

A better framework, a new paradigm or more simply a newer version is going to come along, and our lovingly crafted software is going to be dumped faster than you can say ‘rm -rf *’.

(Not that it’s any different for other human endeavours. As technology, fashions, consumerism move more and more quickly, obsoletion is fairly instantaneous)

So maybe that’s the spirit in which it should be done. A mandala. A thing of beauty, here today, gone tomorrow.

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Posted in developer, life

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Something to say

January 30th, 2009

Us from the IT-and-new-media communities often feel quite pleased about being “on the edge of things”. We have the ‘net at our fingertips – the shiny netbook, the edgy phone, the niftiest tools. We master the medium. We feel like an elite (or l33t, if you will *cough*).

But sometimes it feels empty of anything meaningful. My father once said about an acquaintance:

“he’s able to spout platitudes in 12 languages”

Implying that speaking 12 languages was all very well, but language is just a way to convey meaning, and if you’ve got nothing to say, then it’s a waste of brain cells.

This is how I sometimes feel about this whole “revolution” that the internet represents. We’ve got a whole lot of tools to communicate with our peers, in sound, in video, in semantic tags. Great. But do we have something to say ?

</dark_mood>

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Posted in media, web2.0

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9002

December 30th, 2008

I’m no Zarathustra or Nostradamus, and i’m a bit lazy, so i’ll leave off the predictions. Resolutions are possible, though – the only thing we can hope to control is, possibly, ourselves.

Last year i made some, and forgot about them immediately. Now i can check whether i realized them (doh).
Let’s see:

  • Professionally – yep, did most of what i wanted to do. Could do better on the AI front.
  • Personal: sheesh, not so good.
    • Didn’t go anywhere (except a conference in Berlin)
    • didn’t do either singing or wood working. Started doing Ashtanga yoga though, happy about that.
    • I am marginally less shy, but i expect that’s just continuing the trend of these last 33 years.
    • This blog is doing OK, but with lapses.
    • Let’s not even get into the really personal stuff, that would only be depressing.

Ahum.
OK, I’ll make new ones … one can only try.

  • get a haircut (start small …)
  • really travel this time. I’m working on a paper for a conference far, far away. If that fails, i’ll just book a trip anyway. As a matter of fact, i’m going to do a Last Minute before starting my new assignment, in a couple of weeks. Yeeeeeehaw
  • stick my nose into mobile applications and pervasive computing
  • expand my social life (in more than one way …)
  • keep things interesting generally – seize the day

That should work ! Bring it on.

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And talk about the weather

October 19th, 2008

I’ve grumbled like everyone else about what a grey and soggy summer we had. But now is the time to notice that we’re having a fantastic fall season. This is october, and it’s been a succession of bright golden days. Skies bluer than baby eyes, soft temperatures, softly tumbling leaves all round.

Everywhere in Brussels i’ve seen people enjoying a terrace in the sunlight. More bikes for this time of year than usual. The parks are turning brown and red and littered with bittersweet-smelling leaves.

And this is why i like living in temperate climes – of course it’s not sunny all year, rather the contrary. But variation has its charms. Each time of year has some shining days, picture book examples of what the season should be. What more to ask ?

and with that, a little music

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Blog Action Day: Poverty

October 15th, 2008

We human beings are blissfully forgetful – we do know deep down that things might not be going well in the world, that the planet might in a bad state, or that we have one problem or the other. We are very good at shoving all that aside and enjoying our morning coffee. Which is just as well – we might not be able to live without this quality.

However, sometimes it is good to remember. For having known people who suffered from real poverty, i can tell you: contrary to the capitalist creed, we are not given the same start. Those of us who are successful often have a structured and loving family and/or the opportunity and incentive to education and/or decent intellectual capacities.

When you’ve been badly fed as a child, your family is troubled, your youth was spent surviving emotional storms, what seems the obvious rational strategy to a peaceful, prosperous adult, might not be that obvious. You struggle from crisis to crisis, taking one bad decision after the other, wondering why these problems keep on happening to you.

And i’m talking about people who live here, in Belgium. God knows what it’s like when you live in a developing country and are not one of the lucky few. Probably economic darwinism is even more merciless there.

So sometimes it’s good to remember – to thank the dice that they rolled us a six – and maybe think of what we could do to even things out. Justice might not be a scientific concept, but it sure as hell is one that makes us human.

Options: donations, microcredits (Kiva, Triodos …), doing something for a charity with our skills (for me a website), generally exercising compassion

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Posted in economy, life

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Moving abroad doesn’t make you happy

August 16th, 2008

around the worldOr unhappy.
There’s lot’s of valid reasons to move abroad, and it’s an educational experience – but i would advise against moving abroad because you’re vaguely dissatisfied and think somehow it will be better out there.
Been there, done that. This is what i learned.

FACT: people are the same everywhere. The cultural undercurrents are different, but you get the same shares of nice people and narrow-minded stupid people. If anything, less prosperous or war-scarred countries might make it more difficult to find out who are the nice ones.

FACT: to put it bluntly: you stay yourself. The ability to be happy depends largely the ability to make the best of what you’ve got, to see the positive side of things, and to be able to spend a time doing things you like. That works wherever you are.
The psychological luggage that makes your life what it is just now will be with you when you get off the plane. If you want to be happy anywhere, you need to work on that as well, not just move and think you will be a new you.

FACT: change of scenery also means change of habits, assumptions. You’ll need to get into the local culture and history to really start to get half of the casual conversations. Think of film references, jokes based on advertisements from 20 years ago, religions and childhood figures. Open-mindedness: position of females, outlook on homosexuality, other aspects vary widely.

It might be even more of a shock in the US or Australia, where people look like us, talk a familiar language, but definitely have a different culture. Not to underestimate.

Most conversations will start with ‘where are you from?’, which can get annoying after a while. Also, while being a foreigner makes you attractively exotic, it also makes you a bit of an outsider. A lot of expats end up ghettoing away with their own countrymen, just because the effort it takes to get past those barriers.

FACT: it takes time to build a new support cast. You will miss what’s going on in the lives of your current friends and family. A loving group of people you understand is also an important component of being happy, for most people. That will only come clear to you after a few months, when the excitement wears off, in what’s known to most expats as the first bout of homesickness.

So anyway, it’s not that easy. It’s better to start for the right reasons (job opportunities, nature, weather), and with reasonable expectations. Then the experience will be worth it.

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Reset

July 5th, 2008

My week on the Isle of Oleron: great weather, blue skies, sea breezes keeping the temperatures to loveably warm. The aromatic smells of mediterranean vegetation competing with brine and sea weed from the coast. Long trips around the island on rented bikes, swimming in the sea, eating fresh foods in the garden.

It’s still possible to be sad there, but it’s much harder to sustain for any lenght of time. Lots of light is good for the soul (even with factor 50 sun block twice a day).
Isle of Oleron

The Age of the Guitar Builder is over for me. Seven years of perpetual storm ended up in us both concluding that we might be happier apart. To our credit, the ending was very civilized – no cheating, no entangled property, no children. Almost as if we knew deep down that it would come to this.

I expected to fall apart, but in fact i’m mostly stunned. There’s a whole area of my brain that needs reconfigured: the part wondering what he would like for dinner, worrying about him or asking him where i’d left my keys.

On the bright side, now nobody will complain if i install FreeBSD on a spare computer, if i hoard old pieces of hardware, or if i prepare dishes containing olives, anchovies, chicories, rabbit, corn, sweet and savoury combinations. See ? there’s always a bright side to everything.

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