A drive, country roads and the mighty moon

Sometimes, when I've been at home too long, I lose interest in the things I genuinely like the most in life. I love playing certain games, watching certain shows and movies, reading certain books or comics, and so on. But after a while I become desensitized to it. My quickfix is to do two things at the same time: play a game that allows for sort-of passive playing while watching a TV show or movie that I can follow without paying too much attention to it. This eventually gets me to stop paying attention to either, and I lose interest in each activity individually. The mind enters a loop state from which it is very difficult to escape. But it is possible.

Exercise is my main way of resetting my brain. It nearly always works, although it will cost you time, a clean set of (gym) clothes, a shower and possibly some sore muscles. But you gain in health, lose weight and reset your mental state, which is well more than worth the cost.  The biggest cost, time, is the one that matters the most. Compared to spending two hours doing apathetic activities, I find it much more enjoyable to exercise for an hour and then be aware, self-actualized and in the zone for the  next hour, actually enjoying the thing I was spending my time on.

Cycling is the next obvious fix for me. The exercise bit of cycling helps to re-actualize yourself, but I mainly derive enjoyment and resetting from the act of being away from home, free on a bicycle, being able to go wherever I want. It doesn't have to be a speed cycle, although that's one way to keep pushing yourself after you've become too used to cycling. Distance is another nice metric. Unfortunately the weather and the landscape doesn't always lend itself to a nice cycle. If there's lots of wind I'll come back grumpy and dead, and if there's rain I will probably not even go out. Wouldn't it be great if there was an outdoor self-actualization activity that wasn't (entirely) weather-dependent?

But there is! I've got a car now! With a car you can go out whenever you want, no matter the weather. Sure, rainy drives are still gloomy, but at least the occasional rainshower won't bother you as much as when you're on a bike, and wind doesn't bother you at all. Plus, wet roads can provide their own entertainment for cars.

I guess the most important thing is variety in the things that you like, and variety within each thing that you like. You can't always keep doing the same thing in the same way, it'll dull your mind. I never would have been inspired to write this post if I hadn't gone out for a drive just now. I found some lovely countryside roads, enjoyed a pretty sunset while on the road and saw a gigantic moon come up over the hills as I was driving back. Brilliant. And sufficiently different from the other things I like to keep my mind from looping.

Fun things are fun! Many fun things are disproportionately funner!

Posted in Cars , Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged ,

Finding an apartment around London

Ever since I started my 'break' period after my cycling trip I've spent 1 to 2 hours almost every day on Rightmove and Gumtree, looking for apartments. Rightmove has a much better offer and more decent-looking apartments, but Gumtree shows private offerings of landlords who want to circumvent agencies, which results in zero fees and a much more casual way of dealing with things. Depending on the landlord this can either be a good thing or a bad thing. In my experience in London, I've been bitten once by a bad estate agent, and been incredibly surprised at the niceness of my current landlord whom I found via Gumtree. Businesses or people, either one can screw you over if you pick a bad one, I guess.

I'm quite systematic about my search. I've got about 4-5 areas that I'd like to live in, and a tight maximum budget. This means my search always ends up pointing me towards apartments that have something wrong with them. Either they're ridiculously tiny, right next to a railway line, too far away from a railway line or in a shitty neighborhood. The Deprivation Map Explorer is an absolute must-have. I keep a spreadsheet of travel times and costs for the stations around which I center my search. Another good criteria that mustn't be left out is how long the walk to the nearest station is.

Recently, since I've been seeing a lot of apartments online, I've gotten a good grasp of what a decent apartment 'should' cost in each area, so I've noted that down in my spreadsheet as well. Whenever an apartment pops up that's way cheaper than the average, I usually know to check for what's wrong. But occasionally, just very occasionally, a jewel pops up: an apartment that's 100 pounds per month or more underpriced. I've seen two of them so far, and in both cases I was too late.

I've been thinking about writing a script that spiders Gumtree every x hours, in certain categories, looking for certain keywords. In fact, I'm very tempted to do this already, but I suspect it'll take a lot of fine-tuning to get usable results out of it. The things that can be wrong with an apartment can't always be easily spotted by a script. Hooking it up to the deprivation map explorer would be a must, and it would have to make heavy use of the Google Maps api to find the nearest station(s) and walking distance to each station. Most of the important criteria can already be filtered out in the url (area, max price, only ads with pictures, no agencies) so the core bit would be the scraping. Notifications can be sent out by email either immediately after the scrape, or consolidated every x hours or days.

I might give this a go if I'm still unsuccessful in finding an apartment next week. After all, there's always that golden rule of scripting: if you have to do it once, do it manually. If you have to do it twice, do it manually. But the third time, write a script.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech , UK

A car

I don't feel like wasting words today, so I'll get straight to the point: life is exceedingly limited if you don't have a car.

These are excuses I've used in the past to justify my not having a car:

  • Public transport is convenient enough
  • I don't need big grocery shopping if there's small shops nearby that have what I need (this excuse kind of ceased to work after I moved to the UK)
  • I don't want to deal with foreign language paperwork needed for a car purchase (whilst I was in Japan)
  • Money
  • Lifestyle
The last is perhaps not exactly an excuse, but more of a consequence. People with cars go to different places than people without cars. There's some overlap between places, but in the end you're severely limiting your options if you don't have a car.

Here's what you can't do (or can only do less comfortably) without a car:

  • Going to a superstore outside of town for big grocery shopping.
  • Buying large things for your home at a DIY (online ordering just isn't a very good alternative if you're not at home to receive the delivery).
  • Picking people up from the airport or leave your car at the airport for a weekend trip.
  • Doing day trips to faraway places or places that don't have good public transport connections.
  • Not getting annoyed at people on public transport.
It is possible to live without a car. But you'll limit the places available to you. You can still go anywhere, and even if you pay for public transport and/or taxis, you 'll probably end up being cheaper off than by owning a car. Money is not the issue, time spent in/outside of your comfort zone is. This is why a car, still, even in car-unfriendly countries, is freedom.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts | Tagged

Freedom of choice

It's been two weeks since I'm back from the cycling trip, and I've decided to take some time off work. The project I was on is running fine and I left it in good condition, or so it would appear given that I didn't get any emergency calls or tech questions in my mailbox while I was away. Rather than jumping immediately back into it again I'm going to take a few weeks to reorganize my life a bit.

My life tends to be quite single-threaded. Or rather, there's always a main, most-important thread, and any brain time left over is assigned to stuff that's of secondary importance. I'm not really good at concentrating on two important tasks at the same time. For example, focusing on my job while also occasionally going cycling or doing a half-assed programming project at home is quite common for me, but I find it impossible to focus on, say, finding the perfect apartment while also focusing on my job. When I do that, the quality of either task suffers, and I don't want to do that to my employer (or myself).

So yeah, one of the things I'm committed to this summer is to become a 'citizen' of London. Which, to me, means finding a proper apartment even further away from London and buying a car. Quality of life is either impossible or unaffordable when close to the center, and I'm committed to being close to the countryside already by my very nature, so the choice is logical. I've been holding off on this decision for a long time, always stalling, always waiting, because there's always some reasonable reason to delay. Either I'm too busy with work, got a big holiday coming up, gonna eventually move in with girlfriend, etc. etc. There's always some excuse. I've eliminated all possible excuses now, so it's time to inject some quality into my living situation.

At the same time I'm trying not to overdo it too much. Work can at worst be stressful but even at best there's still this constant pressure and feeling of not being able to let your guard down, so I'm relishing the feeling of not being responsible for a massive project for a while. A sudden complete lack of responsibility is kind of hard to cope with when you suddenly find yourself in the middle of it. I keep on wanting to compulsively check my work email but have to tell myself that it's not necessary. Another side effect of being able to do anything I want at any time I want, is that I am doing anything I want at any time I want. But only for a few minutes, and then I get bored of it. So I end up switching from playing a game to reading a book to watching a TV show to playing another game without ever really committing to any one thing.

That's what happens when I let myself run on freeflow, and I can't say it's terribly brilliant. It's not so much the lack of motivation, it's the lack of determination that prevents me from accomplishing things. Things like writing blog posts ;) . Exercise helps a lot. When I hop on my bicycle I get a chance of scenery and a good workout, waking up my body and my mind, which helps me focus greatly. Variety in life is really important to stay determined.

I will try to blog more. This summer is a great summer!

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Nope

Life proceeds normally. No mad scrambles before the trip, no urgent things to take care of. I've got plenty of time to resolve all things peacefully and am mostly focused on work, but even work has been taken care of and has largely been transferred away to other people with brain capacity to spare. This weekend I will go on a 2-day hike plus wild camping with my girlfriend. It'll be great training for the cycling trip. I'm expecting to be in civilization a lot while on the main island of Japan, but Hokkaido will be different. Distances will be larger, population and conbini density will decrease, and it will be a lot colder. Dartmoor in April might be a good preparation for Hokkaido in late May.

Posted in Daily Life

Good customer service != good company

I used to get my mobile phone broadband from Giffgaff. They're a company with a nice fresh image and they offer unlimited data for 12GBP per month. They've always disallowed tethering, but until recently they didn't enforce it. I really need the tethering though, because my home internet is utter crap (thanks Virgin) due to a technical problem that my landlord has to fix, so I can't do anything about it myself.

So naturally, when Giffgaff started enforcing the no-tethering rule, I switched to Three. They offer a 15GBP/month contract that allows for unlimited tethering. Their website said (and still says) that coverage in my postcode is good, and when I first received my sim card it was fine. But not long thereafter I lost all signal inside the house. I notified Three about this and they promptly came back to me and let me know there was an issue with the cell phone mast, and then I had signal again. But not for long. It's been broken for three weeks now, and I've finally had a chance to contact Three about it.

The situation is pretty crap. Apparently there have been 'changes to the network' and they're not going to fix the signal in my house. They didn't say that outright of course, but that's how it is. They continue to claim that they have good signal in my area, but that's basically a lie. And instead of fixing it, they've offered to send me a box that I connect to my broadband connection which will give me good signal inside the house. Given the flakiness of my internet connection and the fact that it's actually my landlord's, not mine, I doubt that I can take this option. The other option they offered was a discount of the monthly rate, which I think is pretty damn good actually, at least until they've solved the network issue.

I've noticed this phenomenon a lot lately: companies mess up, but they're extremely quick to react to any mishap and offer compensation via polite and adequate service. The only problem is: it doesn't reduce the number of fuck-ups! I am no longer impressed by companies having good customer service; it's pretty much the standard these days. What impresses me is a company that doesn't fudge the facts about their signal coverage.

Posted in Daily Life , Tech | Tagged , ,

It doesn't have to be perfect

It doesn't have to be perfect.

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts

Busy days

Just a record of my day for my future self. I worked over 9 hours today. My team is building a CMS. The job is demanding, at times technically challenging and at times technically tedious. But my team consists of great guys and I love working with them. Lately I end up working during lunch time, and the job becomes more and more about simply typing than it is about thinking. But I know this is only temporary and things will return to 'normal' sooner or later.

Tonight I ended up eating at my girlfriend's place, watched some silly short movies on vimeo and then commuted home. Had a shower, and now I am typing this blogpost. Today there was hardly anything out of the ordinary happening. And that's why it's worth writing down.


I am not happy with my new housemates. I am not happy with the shitty internet connection that keeps breaking. I want to move somewhere else.

Posted in Daily Life

Reflective thought of the evening

Life is normal. And that's great.

Posted in Daily Life , One-liners , Thoughts

Thing A

Thing A is a thing you'd normally never do. You might, from the safety of your comfort zone, consider it, but in the end you never go through with it. But then, one day, you happen to read about thing A in the morning and start to see it in a different light. It's a nice bump in the right direction, but such a bump always eventually wears off because thing A is just too far out of your comfort zone. But then you get another, much larger bump: someone you know and respect also tells you about thing A, and suddenly it's a possibility. One thing leads to another and suddenly you're scheduled to do thing A in the near future. That's all you really need to achieve new things: consecutive bumps that kick you out of your comfort zone.

(No, this post is not about something dodgy!!)

Posted in Daily Life , Thoughts