Daily Life

New year, old habits

Posted on 2015-03-07 16:21 by rv

Today, for the first time this year and for the first time since almost 6 months, I cycled. I finally put on some new handlebar tape, pumped some air in the tires and tightened the brakes. This is where I went.

I've been coming to this road for quite a while now, ever since I moved to my current place almost 3 years ago. This road is just about the perfect distance; the same as the distance I used to cycle to the seaside back in Japan. That said, the current track is way more difficult because there's some serious uphills and downhills.

Usually I cycle a bit further than this road to end up at the Denham airfield, but I can never find a decent place to have a break there. There's people, planes and horses in the way. So this time I just stopped at this road, put my bike to the side and had a seat in the grass. It was an amazing view, and for once there was no one else around so I could enjoy a moment of peace. The feeling of sitting on top of a hill looking at amazing scenery after a tough workout is one of the best feelings I have ever experienced. Nothing I could experience in a car could come close. It's just an entirely different feeling.

A brilliant feeling. My body hurts like hell. I should do this more often.

Posted in Cycling , Daily Life

Yup, still searching

Posted on 2015-02-25 16:53 by rv

We haven't found a house yet, but we are learning many things as we view more properties. Here's some thoughts I had on the topic while searching for a new home.

We're getting better and better at narrowing down properties that are worth viewing.
As a result, filtering properties is absolutely not an issue after you've started looking. There's only 1 or 2 new properties every day that match our criteria.
There's no point for me to improve on Gumbug. I could make it better, but manually looking at 2 properties per day, even if they're mismatched, is not a time sink.

We'll get there. It's just a matter of time.

Posted in Daily Life , UK

Infinite loop of the head full of snot

Posted on 2015-02-23 12:41 by rv

Maybe I should play Minecraft, but my PC keeps running out of memory. I've been considering buying a second machine for a home server, to host media and other things like Minecraft. So I head out to Amazon and Tom's Hardware to check reviews and prices. Then I decide that I don't really need one just yet. Maybe I should check in with work like I said I would, but my head is full of snot and I wouldn't be able to concentrate on problems, so there's really no point. Maybe I should do something random like going out for a cycle. Yes, going out for a cycle sounds nice, especially because my head is full of snot and I haven't cycled in months, making it an utterly random, irresponsible thing to do. Can't go wrong with that. Except that it's about to rain. Oh well, I guess I'll stay inside then. Maybe I should play Minecraft..

Unsnot yourself faster, head..

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged snot

Thoughts on buying a house in Greater London

Posted on 2015-01-16 22:51 by rv

North-West Greater London properties

Watch out for BISF houses, they're worth less.
Shared ownership is a lie. It only complicates things.
A reasonable house will set you back at least 300k, a good house 400k.
A reasonable apartment will set you back at least 250k, a good apartment 300k.
Watford station will close down soon, don't buy around there.
Check the deprivation index before you view.
Bloody hell, Chesham, that is one massive hill you got there. Check altitudes and routes to nearest public transport on Google Earth or street view.
Anything close to public transport may not have good parking spots, so check for residents parking. You'll still piss off people who are driving over to visit, though.

Estate agents

I have called at least 6 different ones so far and have been unable to arrange a single viewing in the past two weeks. Either the place is already gone or they don't call you back.
There are no deals to be found from oversight; you won't find a place that's cheaper than market price. Everything is appropriately priced. If something's cheaper than you'd expect, there's something wrong with it: close to a railway line, very old building, massive hill in the way to the nearest tube station etc.
The only 'deal' you might be able to take advantage of is getting there first. Monitor the real estate sites for new ads, but also go to estate agents in person and get them to notify you. Oftentimes they'll recommend you crap that you don't want but you can do the filtering. What's important is that you know about properties before they are advertised on the internet.
Do not trust them.

Mortgage

Holy shit.
There is a fuckton of things to research about mortgages. The more you know, the better.
Do the calculations yourself. It's the only way to be aware of what's going to happen to your money in the long term.
Check for yourself what's the difference between variable rate and fixed rate for various years.
Do the math yourself to see what a huge difference it makes if you can pay off more in the first few years.
Make sure that compound interest will not hurt you more than you can take.
Take into account that interest rates will rise, and assume a worst-case scenario.
Compared to renting and saving, getting a mortgage seems to almost always make more financial sense.
Getting a massive loan to get a really nice place is fucking stupid, don't do it. Get a more reasonable place first and then upgrade later. It'll be way cheaper. But don't trust me, do the math yourself.
Mortgage advisors (and some estate agents) are very eager for you to leave everything to them, no questions asked. Do not trust them. Ask questions. There are many lenders out there, you can always choose another.
I still cannot find any concrete info about when it is okay to renegotiate your mortgage.

WIP.

Posted in Daily Life , UK

Living responsibly

Posted on 2015-01-05 04:20 by rv

The new year is here already! I have thunk so many interesting thoughts in the past few weeks but haven't blogged about any of them. I imagine that my blog is telling me off about this in a very stereotypical grandma-like voice. If you've got a job, work. If you've got a car, drive. If you've got a blog, write. So here's some random thoughts.

It's almost 4AM right now and I have just become completely awake. The reason for this is that my girlfriend and I came back from Japan yesterday and I decided to do something I've hardly ever done lately: go to bed when I'm tired. Which, in my case, was about 9PM.

People always use the new year as a reason to make random wild claims about how one will improve one's life in the future. I tend to use the ends of holidays. Fortunately the two coincide for me every once in a while. Even if nothing comes of it, it's important to reflect and see how you can do better. A blogpost is a great way to write down what you would like to happen in the near future.

This year I only have one primary goal; one addition to life that I want to spend my energy, brainpower and money on. A house. Last summer I decided I wanted a car and a better apartment. I got a car, and searching for a better apartment made me realize that renting a more expensive one would not make sense at all in my 'grand scheme of things'. Regardless of the circumstances here, I'm realizing that a lot of things I naively thought, or wished, were variables in my life, are really constants. I tend to pride myself on being flexible and leaving my options open, particularly when it comes to where to live. But sometimes, sometimes you just have to choose a side, and reap all the benefits (and negatives) that come with it. I've already made my choice, now it's time to formalize it.

There's a lot of other things I want to do in the span of the next 12 months. Traveling. Cycling. Driving. Getting fit. Expanding my knowledge on various topics by doing some serious research and experimentation. Some of these will happen, some of them won't. There will be an inevitable lack of holiday time, willpower time or money, making it unlikely that I'll be able to do all the things that I want. I am able to say these things right now because I am fairly clear of the 'mind fog' that waitbutwhy so excellently describes. This is what good holidays do: they clear your mind and make you able to see things in the long term, accepting things that are not possible for what they are, rather than feeling frustrated about it.

This post-holiday clarity of mind is a feeling that, in my case, gets lots very easily when I go back to work again, usually within two weeks. Depending on my circumstances, I can resist the dull drone of daily life for a while, or I can choose to embrace it fully, knowing that there will be another holiday coming up in a few months. Why would I not resist it? Very simple: in daily-life-mode I am a million times more effective as a programmer. In clarity mode I think about all kinds of things, both related and unrelated to the task at hand, and I question a lot of the decisions I and others are making. In daily life mode I focus on the job at hand and don't let anything else in.

When I'm in daily life mode it's not easy for me to focus on anything else after I come home from work. Even if I leave at a sane time and don't work late I find myself not having the mental energy to delve into new things for extended periods of time. Daily-life me is displeased by this fact and kind of unhappy about it. Clarity-mode me is like "Whatever dude. It's all good, just enjoy life, man".

I've tried many coping strategies and I can't find any that work on me. The only way to deal, it seems, is to lower my expectations. If I've done a full day's work but not done anything new personally in the evening, that is perfectly acceptable. If I want to learn something new and unrelated to work, I can take time off to focus the main part of my brain on it, or, if work is not too hectic, I can accept the performance decrease at work and keep my brain in clarity mode for a while. The core point of this whole strategy is convincing my daily life self that living this way is okay. Unfortunately I need my claritic self to remind me of that, and he's not always there.

A new year, a new coping strategy. My personality changes less and less as time goes by. Some of my issues I've ironed out, others still exist. I'm getting better at being me.

There are always amazing things to look forward to. :)

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

"Survived another week"

Posted on 2014-11-09 17:41 by rv

I caught myself thinking this recently. Despite the fact that my life has never been better, my goals are far away, which sometimes makes progress indiscernible. It led me to think about how I could progress towards my goals faster. A provoking thought entered my head. What if I really let myself go?

I've never really given myself one hundred percent towards a goal for an extended period of time. I've never had to. Every time I do, I find that either the goal changes, or I become adept at reaching it so I don't have to devote one hundred percent of myself. If someone waved you a check of a million dollars or pounds in your face and told you to type the entire text of the bible over and over again for several years on end, sacrificing your social life, your personal hygiene, your health, would you do it? If not, where do you draw the line? Would more money change your decision? The promise of a better life? Or would you do it if you could give slightly less than one hundred percent , like maybe if you could keep a small part of your social life?

Life isn't usually that simple. There's never a simple case where you can simply do X for Y days and receive Z, at least not for significant values of Z. There will be interruptions, unclarities and changes of mind. It might look simple to you at first glance, but it never is. The best way to simplify your situation is by knowing more. Know more about your profession, your situation and what you're good at. The more you know, the more you'll realize that it's not an easy road. But also, the more you know, the more you realize that there is a road and it is possible to travel it. If you know what you're doing.

tl;dr: expand your knowledge, don't expect anything.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

As days go by

Posted on 2014-10-30 15:58 by rv

I haven't blogged in a while. Despite having switched from enjoying-life-mode back into grind-and-earn-money mode, I've managed to maintain a remarkable sense of self-actualization over the past few weeks. I think the reason for that is partly because I try to work less long days, as I mentioned in the previous post. I get time to recover and clear my mind at the end of the day, rather than never fully clearing it and piling up new workloads the next day without having fully processed the previous day.

Working less hours is part of the reason, but also a consequence of something else. My goals in life have become startlingly clear to me after I found out exactly how much money I need to buy a house in this bloody country. It'll take years and years of savings to fully pay off a nice house. Even if I found a better paying job, the difference it would make will never be as significant as I want it to be. And even with a better paying job you're bound by obligations and forced to work for the better part of the year. Given that fact, I'd say I've got a pretty damn good job right now, and I see no reason to change it for something marginally better.

Financial independence is the final goal. It's not even worth thinking about what I'll do after I achieve it, because the possibilities will be endless. In the past I tried several times to 'do a startup', sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. But what I've come to realize is that the startup life is not something that I want for myself. I'm usually quite introverted, and although I learned that I can muster up the extroversion needed to function capably in a startup role, it's not something I enjoy doing or would feel comfortable with doing for a long period of time.

This is the point where people tell me "but to gain something you will have to step out of your comfort zone". Well, yes and no. Stepping too far out of your comfort zone is simply not sustainable and will wear you down. For me, I think I function at my best while 95% within my comfort zone, using the remaining 5% to explore new territories. I need to find things out for myself. Advice from others only helps at the most superficial level, any concrete advice will be noted only for reference while I make my own mistakes, from within that very comfortable 95% plan.

Realizing that I am more reluctant to leave my comfort zone than I previously though, I began to list my options. The list is limited, of course, compared to before, but the remaining options are those that I feel much more enthusiastic about than anything else. And because the options are 95% within my comfort zone, I get to expand my knowledge while actually enjoying it rather than feeling stressed out.

I don't believe that any advance in knowledge in the field of programming is going to help me to make progress as a human being. While it's true that I'm getting better at coding, especially within a project atmosphere, most of the things that I learned, that I value highly, are as a result of interactions with people. Focusing deeply on a topic will teach you two things: in-depth knowledge of the topic, and how to focus deeply. I think I've learned enough on how to focus deeply on something to apply it to things other than programming. Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But I find that a lot of my peers see coding as the final goal, whereas whatever the thing is that they're coding is just a happy side effect. I want to use programming as a means to an end, whatever end that could be, even if it has nothing to do with coding or dev-ops or anything technical. I believe that if I can use programming in this way, I can become better as a person.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , Thoughts

The law of diminishing returns

Posted on 2014-10-13 15:05 by rv

There's an ideal amount of time you can spend at work, working. In fact there's more than one ideal amount of time. In my case, I find that if I work for 6 hours and then go home, I still have enough mental energy left to work on personal projects after the commute. Working 8 hours is also good, although productivity does decrease a lot in the later hours. But it's better than working 7 hours, because in that case I find myself both mentally tired and not with enough time and mental energy to do stuff at home.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech

Everything in its right place (?)

Posted on 2014-09-20 12:35 by rv

Right, let's get a little life streamwrite out of the way before starting the next phase of my life.

I am officially back to work after several months of break. I have to admit that I'm quite pleased about how I'm back at the old place, working with the people I know and like so well. While I've been away, absolutely nothing has changed in the company. It's comfortable because I know what to expect. Too comfortable, perhaps? We'll see.

Only four days ago I was relaxing at a tropical island with my girlfriend. We spent the whole week doing non-supervised scuba diving at the various dive sites of the island. It was pretty amazing. The perfect ending for a long period of holidays.

But everything must end, and everyone who is not filthy rich must eventually go back to work. My life always seems to be in either a self-actualized, enough-sleep, learning-new-things kind of holiday or semi-holiday period, or in an utter grind to level up and earn more money. There seems to be no middle ground. I can already feel myself slowly descending into grind mode. Self-awareness helps to keep yourself in the holiday mode for a bit longer, but it never last forever.

Some events can easily push you over the edge and make you lose self-awareness. In my case, I only barely caught myself at this yesterday. For the whole summer my home had been quiet, relaxed and peaceful, but yesterday all the housemates were back from holiday, and they were being noisy, instantly making me regret the decision I had made in quieter times to not find a new apartment but save up to buy one instead.

This place, where I live now, is absolutely not where I want to spend the rest of my life. But it's comfortable enough to serve as a temporary base of operations until my girlfriend and I get enough money to buy our own home. Given that we are living and working in London, with some of the craziest house prices in the whole world, that is not an easy task. Given that I am committed to living here, the fact that I am powerless to affect my housing situation for the better makes me lash out and try to blame anything and everything. My housemates for making noise, my landlord for the rent price (even though he's the nicest and most reasonable guy I've ever met and I like him a lot), the entire country for being so politically fucked up that they can't do anything about this, and so on.

But at least I have an out. It's a steep climb and it will take time, but there is a way out to reach a situation that I would be ultimately happy with and could find no fault with from my current perspective. Many people here don't even have that chance because they simply will never earn enough money to buy a house.

It's going to be a tough period before the winter holidays. It's like that every year. But I've found my direction. I know what I'm aiming for, I know how to measure my progress, and I know that I can make it. Perhaps that's enough.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

GT86: first impressions

Posted on 2014-08-15 17:19 by rv

(written on 2014/07/19) So, I bought a car! And not just any car. I thought about saving money and going for an economic model, or an old second hand one, but I couldn't help myself. I went to a used car lot to have a look at a BMW 1 Coupe, but as soon as the diesel engine started and the smell of it reached my nose I realized I did not want a diesel. With that incident my resolve to get an impractical fun level reached the threshold, and I bought a second hand GT86. Woohoo!

The meh:

Fuel consumption is not exactly great, but on the bright side, it doesn't seem to consume that much more fuel if you drive it like you stole it, so no need to hold back :)
After a week of driving I've gotten used to the power and the sound rather quickly. It's all very civilized. That's probably a good thing considering it's my first rear-wheel-drive car.

The awesome:

Dashboard is excellent. Very focused, a joy to use.
Lovely short gears. Wow. Such shifting.
Handling is ridiculously sharp and does nothing unexpected whatsoever. It feels perfect.
Suspension is firm but not too firm. Excellent feel for the road.
Very good steering wheel and feedback.

I've taken it out almost every day this week, to get a feel for the car and to get to know the roads in my area better. Going northwest of Watford there's a lot of nice B-roads, where this car seems to feel the most at home. Although you can tell that there's a lot more potential and power in there that would not be legal to unleash on public roads. Most importantly, the car feels comfortable and confident during longer drives. It's a great place to be in, and that's what I wanted. More, much more, to come :D

Update, a few weeks later. I'm doing pretty much exactly 35mpg, which is the manufacturer-reported mpg. My driving style is a mix of extremely conservative while in city traffic and mildly enthusiastic when getting onto a nice road. I guess everything is as expected. There have been no odd surprises, no unexpected behavior, no strange quirks. The car is as predictable and tame as you'd expect it to be during normal road usage. I can only imagine what it'll be like on a track, and perhaps I'll have a chance to take it out on a track day this year. I did have a chance to see a near-identical GT86 perform a parade lap on a track. Oddly enough it was the quietest car there. Literally every other car was louder than the GT86! I couldn't believe it really. It's such a tame car when not pushed to its limits. That's my pervading image of it as I'm driving it. It doesn't have as strong a presence (personality?) as an RX7 or even a Subaru Impreza would have. All other sportscars seem to be more.. unique than the GT86. Or perhaps I'm just thinking that because I own one now. Still, this is my first (real) sports car. Our personality will grow as we grow.

Update, another few weeks later. The car is fun! I'm becoming more confident in driving my new friend, but I have a lot to learn. I'm really enjoying it though, and I feel excited every time I take it out. My attitude while driving is still mostly 'get good fuel economy', although sometimes I have moments of "drive it like you stole it". The car accommodates either. I've been reading about it online to see if it has any quirks, and the only thing I could find was the so-called torque gap in the mid revs, which I do find I actually notice, since the high revs tend to be a bit off-limits on most public roads, so the mid revs are where you want it to start pulling to get up to speed with things. An ECU + exhaust kit apparently fixes this quite nicely, but I'm not quite ready to think about that just yet.

Side note: I also got my first damage.. Just after I parked the car at a supermarket, a middle-aged lady decided to reverse-park into it as I was just walking away from the car. As soon as I heard the scraping I turned around and saw the woman performing the worst ever reverse-park that I ever saw in my life. Fortunately it was only bodywork damage, but it will need to get fixed. What a fucking hassle..

Update, today. The power and rear-wheel-drive-y-ness does let itself known when you're parking on slopes, especially combined with grass or gravel. It's entirely possible to either spin the wheels too much or do something naughty to your clutch if you're not careful. Makes for good training though.

People have been reporting that the GT86 has a torque dip right in the mid range of the revs where it's slow to pick up compared to the rest of the rev range. I've actually noticed this a lot myself lately, because I'm usually too much of a pussy to use the higher revs on public roads, so the highest I go tends to be the mid range. Mild annoyance, easily dealt with by changing driving style a bit, getting an aftermarket ecu and optional exhaust fix, or just putting up with it.

Posted in Cars , Daily Life , UK | Tagged gt86

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