I finally found a report online of someone successfully getting the Dell XPS 15Z to work with both an SSD as primary drive and a HDD in place of the optical drive. I then proceeded to order the HDD tray from here (although it seems any generic tray would do the trick as well) and a nice 240GB SSD. I spend most of my days in front of my laptop. It’s how I earn my money. I used to have a setup like this on my desktop PC so I know how much time this saves me and much happier a person this makes me. It’s an expensive upgrade from the ‘value for money’ point of view, but not making it would simply be idiotic. The sole reason I earn money is to make my life better. Buying an SSD will make my life better. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Despite it costing only a third of what I spend on the SSD, I’ve been debating for months on whether I should get an exercise bike or not. Because I have access to the Google gym I tend to not want to spend money, but I am a lot less free in my doings when I go there. If I download a new video I want to watch, I have to spend conscious effort on getting it to run on my iPod so I can watch it while I exercise in the gym. First world problems, I know, but still. I live in the first world, I have this problem, and I want to solve it. I considered cycling to work but that would just piss me off more given London’s shit weather and shit road conditions for cycling. I always have that option since my bicycle is ready to go at any time, but I want something more, so I finally bought a decent exercise bike. And I will use it too. People online always complain that they bought an exercise bike but never use it. I will not succumb to this because I will make it easy to use. And because I will put it in the living room in front of the TV I will be able to go about my business as usual while I exercise, thereby saving time.

Saving time by spending money. That’s usually how it goes. I work because I need money to experience the things I like. What’s left after that is to decide how to make the most efficient use of the time you have left. If it takes money to make more efficient use of your time, then spend it. You won’t regret it. Losing money is bad, losing time is infinitely worse.

Havana:

Santiago:

Baracoa:

Someday, all of this will come to an end; the sleeping rough, chiseled calves, calloused arse, taking 8 hours of exercise a day,  wearing the same clothes for two weeks straight, having an interesting topic for conversation, worrying about incline, gradient and road surfaces, eating like a horse, being able to eat a horse, not knowing the name of the town I’m in, forgetting the name of the person spending the night with, cycling another twenty km till lunch to save 50cents, living out of a waterproof bag in a steel trailer, saying Irlanda 30 times a day, saying no/non/niet/nine/ not Hollanda… Irrrrrrlanda, assessing the quality of a book by its size and weight as well as its content, wondering why anyone would ever wear clothes that are not waterproof/breathable/quick drying/light/thermal.

Someday,  I’ll be home; I’ll have a fridge, a cooker, a shower, a cupboard and a bed, I’ll be able to close a door and be by myself, talk to people in complex English with an Irish accent using colloquialisms, slang and very specific Alan Partridge references, I’ll be able to get out of my bed and not have to pack it away, and go to bed without waiting for darkness or asking some one’s permission, I’ll have to get up at a specific time and do tasks that someone else dictates, I’ll have a phone and a set of keys.

Someday, my life will be normal again, and uninteresting, and I’ll probably miss my stop on the train because I was daydreaming about when I lived on a special simple world called the road.

I have no excuse for my lack of testing. It’s something I could easily have figured out if I had run a speed test on my iPad or on my girlfriend’s pc. My girlfriend told me that Internet was fine but she never showed me proof so I didn’t believe her. What’s worse, I didn’t even troubleshoot the problem myself, which is very un-engineery of me. I could have found the cause easily but my knowledge of computers led me to believe that it couldn’t possibly be the wifi. Such misplaced arrogance.

The virgin mechanic told me that sometimes foreign laptops work on different wifi channels from the cable modem, which causes problems in communication, eg. Communication just cutting off after a short while. It didn’t sound very believable to me but the wifi definitely turned out to be the cause. The mechanic gave me a massively long Ethernet cable and everything just works beautifully.

I blame my own lethargy and overconfidence for not troubleshooting the problem. Had I known less about computers I would have tried more things, especially if I didn’t come home from work tired every day. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

One of the most important reasons for me to have broadband Internet is so I can back up my photos to my pc in holland. Ironically, on the same day my Internet was fixed, I called home and we diagnosed my home pc to be broken beyond (remote) repair. So sad…

People who do something for you without getting anything (significant) in return out of their own volition, not because society/other people or the situation expects them to do that.

It’s a bit of a vague definition, but there is no hard dividing line between being nice and not nice, or being ‘obligatory’ nice and genuinely nice. The point is, there are certain actions people could do that would clearly belong into one of these categories.

Obligatory nice: carrying the heavy suitcase of an elderly person up the stairs in London. This is obligatory nice because it’s such an obvious situation that anyone would try to help, unless you’re really being a dick. In other countries (Cuba) this version of obligatory nice would come with a fee in the end if you were a tourist.

Obligatory nice: while we we were waiting in line at the bus stop in Santiago de Cuba for several hours we could not forfeit our place in line or otherwise we wouldn’t be able to take the bus. We did want to find something to eat, so a Cuban came by and offered to get us something. This is obligatory nice because the Cuban in question owned a cafeteria nearby and sold us the food at (slightly) inflated prices. It still benefited us both, of course, so we were happy.

Genuinely nice: a bit later in the same queue I wanted to exchange some big notes into smaller notes yet I had trouble telling the bus ticket office  guy that. The same cafeteria guy from before showed up and translated into Spanish for me without asking anything in return. (In actuality, the bus ticket office guy was a dick and told us to fuck off, but cafeteria guy managed to convince/trick him into changing the money for us. Yay cafeteria guy!)

Genuinely nice: after missing our first bus we were very confused if we would be able to get on the second bus or not. Bus ticket office guy flat-out refused to talk to us or give us any information, but another person stepped up and told us in broken English that we were first in line for the next bus and that he was behind us in line. This guy was really nice. He could have just told us nothing, or told us that he was before us in line, but he was honest to us and did not get any benefit in return. Great guy.

Note that I am by no means judging Cubans (or other people) by this. If anything, the previous examples reflect the actions of Cubans towards a particularly snobby tourist couple who seemed like they could be taken advantage of. I’m sure the same people react very differently among themselves. That being said, the above two examples are the ONLY two examples I can think of during our three week trip where Cubans were genuinely nice to us. Every other time people tried to scam us, beg for money or try to get us to take their taxi/hotel home/restaurant/whatever. That is the way tourists are treated in Cuba. It’s a stark contrast from Seychelles, where nearly everyone we met was genuinely nice.

Having just finished the movie, my resolve is strengthened again after months and months of stagnating in silly old London. I must travel. I’ve long debated with myself on how I will travel next. I bought a suitcase thinking I will become a traveling programmer and I will hop from city to city, hotel to hotel. Unlike the movie I am nowhere near giving up money. I will use money as a tool wherever I need to, and I won’t shun technology either. As long as it’s lightweight, has a long battery life and fits in my backpack. Cycling will be the way to go for me. I am used to it.

My goal is not to make the most extreme challenging trip I can think of. I don’t care about how I get my food or if I need to learn a whole new language to make the most out of my trip. In fact, I’d rather not as little time as possible on either of those things. The trip is about the trip, not about boasting to other people how difficult it was and how you managed to do so many difficult things. Bullshit. It’s about traveling, seeing the world, having random encounters with people and exploring life. You can do that anywhere if you’re in the right mindset, which means being unencumbered by menial things such as an apartment, a job and things. I don’t want to prove anything to anyone, I just want to travel. People who argue with me that that is not what I really want do not understand me.

A lack of extremes conditions the mind to only think in a certain way. The more you think a certain way, the harder it is to get out of that pattern of thoughts. If all you think about is settling down in London then you will become a very boring Londoner. Or the Asian parent version: if all you can think about is studying knowledge from books then all you’ll ever be is a robot. You need to get out there, do unexpected things, let life happen to you. Only then will your mind be free.

Fuck London. Next year I am cycling from New York to San Francisco.

In the beginning of this year I landed a very high-tech job at a software development company doing enterprise Java stuff. Their techniques, design patterns and best practices were of the highest quality I’ve ever seen or even read about, and the codebase I worked with was pretty much perfect. It was the most boring job I ever had. I quit after one month.

After a couple of months of private projects, traveling and CV polishing I found my current job: a Python developer at Potato London. I love this job because it is everything that the other job was not. In my current job I am working to build up something from scratch; there is no such thing as a perfect codebase on my current project, but we’re improving bit by bit while under heavy pressure to release our work in time. The sense of urgency, the feeling of code ownership and the fact that we’re making massive improvements to a less-than-perfect system is what gives me great work satisfaction. Little info blurb: the project I am working is called Get Your Business Online by Google. There’s a Get X Business Online for a massive amount of countries. Here’s the British one.

So work-wise I am sat[urated,isfied]. Socially I can’t complain either; found a girlfriend, had a wonderful trip to the Seychelles with her in the summer and I see her almost every day. And I’ve decided that’s all I’m going to say on that topic on this blog. Privacy must be preserved, after all.

There’s one thing that’s been creeping up on me while I am living here in London, and that’s this: London is not Japan. This is a very duh statement, I realize, so I must explain. I find myself being annoyed by so many tiny things while living here that I never had a problem with back in Japan. Little things like always having warm water, a shower not breaking, trains running on time, being able to buy food wherever, whenever I want to. On a more surprising note, I found Tokyo to be less busy than London. People gather in higher concentration at certain areas in Tokyo, leaving other areas only mildly busy, whereas in London everywhere is fucking busy. Especially in the weekend, you can’t go out anywhere. You have to get out to the countryside to get rid of all the people but in order to get there you have to endure hours of traffic jams. This city is fundamentally broken.

Call me spoiled if you will, but I don’t think I am. From my point of view as a person being able to live in either of the cities, there is absolutely no reason why I would choose London. I realize that I have been idolizing Japan after I’ve left it, but I haven’t forgotten the things I didn’t like about Japan. Whenever I think about that, the first thing that comes to mind is that Japan has no grass. You can’t find a free patch of grass to sit on anywhere in the country. How shit is that? I grew up with grass (har har) and I do miss it when I’m in Japan. Another thing I didn’t like about Japan is how every little piece of land has its designated purpose and is actively used by someone. You won’t soon find a park that isn’t used, or a massive parking lot to a place that nobody goes to. Every bit of land must be used, there’s simply not enough to go around. But I still prefer that to the UK.

I haven’t mentioned Holland here yet, and I’m not going to speak about Holland a lot. A thought that I was toying around with for a while finally crystallized in my mind this year: I really hate Holland. I just seem to have lost all the desire to live and be part of Holland. Actually, it’s not just Holland, it’s Europe in general. I just have an irrational dislike for it. I can’t explain why. All I can say is that Japan is ok, and what little time I spent in the US made me think the US is ok too. It’s just Europe that isn’t. Maybe I just want to be far away from my origins. Or maybe it’s because all Europeans are assholes. Who knows.

My thoughts on Europe (and Holland in particular) are something I never really spilled in great detail on this blog, although my close friends already know how I feel about it. Considering that this is my personal blog I guess it’s time to formalize my thoughts. And that leads to the question: where to go next? If I really dislike Europe then why am I still here? Well, like I said before, there are two things here that I really like: my job and my girlfriend. And I’m making it my goal to get at least one of them to go with me . I want to do a lot of traveling next year: visiting my buddy Brian in Africa, perhaps revisiting Japan if the flights are cheap. But finally I want to settle down somewhere in America, north or south. When I came back from the Seychelles last summer I decided that I don’t want to live for a long time in any single country; I want to experience new countries and new cultures. The United States may sound like the default option for most English-speaking people, but it sounds fun to me. Especially Silicon Valley because crazy things happen there. That would be a great place to be for a while. And after that (or before) there’s plenty of interesting places in South America to be a software developer too. I could spend 6 to 9 months in each country and then move on. How cool is that?

I will not be in Europe in the future. And that’s a good thing! Let’s live a little.

Polish Mead. Splendid stuff this.