The days roll into nights which roll into days, and the only real constant to mark the passing of this is the degree to which my sunburn fades into an actual tan. It’s difficult to think that there is a life beyond the borders of the Cape Verde beach line; the entireity of my existence has quietly spun down to choosing where to eat, and what beach to lie on.

It’s during this time that I’ve had a chance to reflect and understand what it is I am actually doing. In a very real way, I am now out of the forest and can see many many trees in front of me. Thoughts crystalise clearly now about what was meaningful about the past, what I want my present to be, and what is motivational for my future. If for no other reason, this time away from the world has been worth it for gaining a perspective of it that I had lost.

We’ve only a couple of days left now before returning home. I feel ready – perhaps even eager – to return to my real world and begin again with those things that I am part of. I feel relaxed and focused, and figure that’s a good thing, both for me and the people that are around me.

One final thing, I’ve been reading my way through The Lord of the Rings book. It’s my favourite book to read on holidays because I immerse myself into that world and live it in parallel to my holiday world. It’s always nice to return home after saving the world.

Andy.

My face has gone that light pink colour that says to anyone looking that I’ve had my first day out in the sun in a really long time. On an island like Cape Verde sunburn marks you as much of a foreigner as carrying a sign board would. Everyone is black or deep olive in complexion, I don’t think I even saw any light skinned Europeans apart from our little trio. People like me stand out in the same way that a transvestite in tight stockings and high heels stands out in the main McDonalds in Leidseplein. Everyone is polite though, and take you in at a glance and don’t make a point of staring. So I got the feeling that they have a sense of a larger world more than other places I’ve visited, such as very rural areas of India.

The thing about being here is that you get the feeling your witnessing a country struggling its way forward into the modern world. Next to the old fish market that looks like it’s been there for hundreds of years there is a high tech ultra sophisticated glass and high grade marble shopping center completely at adds with the people that walk past it. There were a few people inside who looked like they had been imported in from some fashion house somewhere in the first world, all dressed like any self respecting fashionista. I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a sense of longing or loathing in the people of the city that it served. Was it there for them, or was it there for the growing hoards of tourists that I’ve been told are growing in number every month? I probably will never know as I’m not going to be here long enough to find out, but it was clear that it marked a change for this city and for the people that call it home.

San Vicente is at once very familiar to me and surprising unique. This is not the first time that I’ve been travelling to a second world country. The feel of the place and the people are something that I’ve come across before, but this time I’m seeing such a place as the guest and good friend of a local who is back here for the first time in six years. Everywhere we go we’re met and treated like outside family members ourselves. It’s something that can take you a little off guard the first time that you experience it. People here put great stock in family connections and friendships. For someone who comes from a little family where you can get to know all the relatives in about five minutes, the sheer amount of names can be daunting.

Tomorrow we’re venturing up to the wilds of the mountains for a hiking trip. It may not be quite Edmund Hillary taking on Everest, but it’s going to be a test of manhood, nonetheless.

Here’s hoping the trees provide me some shade.

Andy.

I can’t work out if the fast moving weather outside is being influenced by my mood, or if my mood is being influenced by the fast moving weather. Every 20 minutes a cycle repeats itself starting with overcast rain that gives way to sunlight that returns to overcast rain. This reflects my own mood perfectly, so I feel a synergy with the wind, rain and sunlight that’s outside my computer room window.

I am reminded now more than any other time of my life how strong winds can mark the onset of storms that can be tragic and beautiful at the same time. However after a period of turmoil calm will always be returned.

Andy.

Today I found myself in Ikea again. My friend kindly offered to drive me there when I complained for the umpteenth time about not having a desk lamp that worked; not having a sharp bread knife; not having a sharp vegetable knife; and not having any more Ikea soap (the stuff that smells nice and makes my skin feel soft and is cheap has hell when you buy it by the liter). So off we went on a casual Sunday drive… at a little over 130 kilometers an hour, because my friend doesn’t really like to do slow comfortable drives unless she absolutely has to, to the Ikea in the south of Amsterdam.

Immediately inside, I got this feeling again of being really middle age old! I was surrounded by families and kids of all shapes and sizes, and couples deep into the nesting phase with each other. Jezuz… at one point it almost became too much to bear, I swear my skin started to smoke and turn black! I could only handle about 10 minutes in the kitchenware department before I had to get out, the pain was starting to get too much. Particularly watching the other men around me, with youth and life sucked out of them – probably through their eyeballs by a womans evil spell – to be replaced by a broken will and Ikea kitchen goods.

Fortunately 10 minutes was still long enough to get a six peice stay sharp knife collection in a handy plastic holder that is really quite stylish. Not too mention a great deal on two white plastic cutting boards which on their own was a wicked buy, but taken with the knives was truly excellent. To top it off, I also got a fabo replacement desk lamp in white decor, and about 3 liters of soap. For a total of 35 euro, it was as good a bargain as you can get this side of the Anjuna open field markets in Goa.

I wouldn’t mind going to Ikea a little more often to replace some of the very old items in my flat that look like they have outlived their usefulness – in some cases, a half a decade ago. But the place makes me feel so damn middle aged in an old way, I just can’t bring myself to go there more than once every half a year or so, otherwise I would start to visibly age and lose my hair like all the rest of the regulars.

Hip people who look young (even when they are my age) go somewhere else to shop for these things, but as yet, I haven’t found out where. But they have to, otherwise how do they manage to be so hip?

Andy.

Tags: ikeakitchen, shopping, knives

Ironically, after writing my last post, I actually came across a couple of online news stories about World of Warcraft addicts; the type of person that spends 16 hours a day, every day, to the exclusion of all else, playing World of Warcraft. It’s this person that actually gives the rest of us internet jocks a bad name, and for those in the know, there is a very big difference between this person, and me, and the people I have as friends, and the people I work with, and the people I cross paths with online.

I will actually admit, that people who get so sucked into a virtual reality setting (like WoW or AoC or LoTRO or EQ2), that they completely ignore anything else in their real life has a big problem. But someone spending 16 hours a day in a game, is not the equivalent of 16 hours online doing other activities. I’m someone that lives on the very bleeding edge of an internet technology lifestyle; I work in a company that operates on the very edge of internet technology and produces the latest in consumer entertainment services; most of my communication, entertainment, news all come from internet based services. In short, I am about 5 – 7 years ahead of the average joe in the burbs. For me being online means socialising; means keeping up with current events; means keeping in touch with my family back in Australia; means finding on what’s on around town; means checking out what’s latest and greatest in new stuff on the internet; and means buying those essential and luxury items from all over Europe, as I try to get the best bargain. It also means from time to time playing some games, but that represents a very small part of what I do online.

So people like me are the evolution of the cash consumer from last century. Eventually everyone is going to have a house connected 24/7 with a flow of information going in and out that will be their interaction to a new world. You can’t fight the digital future, but nor should it be demonised by pointing fingers at those fools who consciously choose to live life in a completely imbalanced way that causes themselves and others around them emotional harm.

In the end it all comes down to living a digital life in the same way you would a real one; everything in moderation, and keeping control of what you do. But just like in real life, some people just can’t do it, and so there will always be hopeless lost causes.

Don’t judge us all that way!

Andy.

I’ve been reading more and more articles in places where I get my news about the scourge of internet addiction! Yes apparently some very prominent – read: very fucking loud no nothing idiot – people in the addiction treatment circles are becoming worried that the internet is destroying lives just as surely as crack, heroin and Jerry Springer reruns. I normally laugh these types of things off, but wired news just ran an article about how one doctor is saying that internet addicts are most likely brain damaged with something akin to asperger’s syndrome!

Basically internet addiction, according to the experts , is something like this:

• Preoccupation with the Internet. (Thoughts about previous on-line activity or anticipation of the next on-line session.)
• Use of the Internet in increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction.
• Repeated, unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use.
• Feelings of restlessness, moodiness, depression or irritability when attempting to cut down use of the Internet.
• On-line longer than originally intended.
• Jeopardized or risked loss of significant relationships, job, educational or career opportunities because of Internet use.
• Lies to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet.
• Use of the Internet as a way to escape from problems or to relieve a dysphoric mood. (e.g., feelings of hopelessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.)

Which essentially is me fucked! Hell… I don’t even DO withdrawls anymore because I always have two of the four computers I own permanently online! It’s been this way for about 5 years, so it’s totally normal for me… and all my friends, and the majority of people living in Amsterdam! High speed, low cost bandwidth is as much a part of my life style as is cheap and easily available drugs.

Which makes me wonder who the fuck are these people anyway that decide that this generation of high end internet users are mentally ill? I walk past residential flats of an evening after grocery shopping and I see the same people watching the same mind numbingly boring television shows week in, week out. Now reality TV is socially acceptable and therefore normal. However I play two MMORPGs very regularly, and watch almost no TV (let alone absolute crap reality television), and yet I’m the one about get listed as having a mental disorder (in some Asian countries)!

Which all just makes me wonder, who the fuck decides who’s normal and who’s not anyway! Seriously this could all go like a scene out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. At some point someone is going to strap me into a chair and give me electric shock therapy to cure me of my Age of Conan enjoyment problem!

Obviously the only reasonable response is for geeks to arm ourselves with military grade weaponry, and defend our homesteads and bandwidth with lethal force! Actually fuck guns, I reckon I could pretty much dual wield one hand axes now after playing my Barbarian character on AoC! The only way someone is going to take my servers away from me is from my cold dead hands! Who’s with me? WHO’S WITH ME?

*sigh*… You know I only got one phone call over the weekend to see if I was up to anything. Maybe I do spend too much time in front of the computer…maybe I should unplug for a while and get outside?

AoC anyone?

Andy.

So this afternoon, after waking up at the very reasonable hour of 1.30pm, I decided that it was time to do something about backing up my babies. Those being my weblog posts across my numerous weblogs, and my websites, all of which I host at home, on a lovely little server that is something akin to Frankenstein in the PC sense; with a peice taken from this old dead computer, and a peice taken from that old dead computer… you get the idea. Believe it or not, this blog your reading is now over three years old, which is a lot of history really to lose to the inevitable harddrive crash that will happen again, as it has happened to me before. Fortune smiles on us in serendipitus ways, and through another – somewhat technical – blogger I learned of a cheap offsite storage service (called rsync.net for those who are into that sort of thing). Without boring the absolute shit out of you with details, yesterday I signed up for a storage plan, and this afternoon I wrote the backup script that will tuck all my babies into nice compressed beds each and every night and send them all to aunty rsync’s house for safe sleeping. Now if ever the worst should happen, which is definitely the harddisk eating its own head, which can literally happen I’ll have you know, I won’t even shed a tear, much less scream and go on a psychotic rampage with an axe. No, I’ll hack another working part from another computer and transplant it into the server and then replace them babies with a few taps of the fingers. Job done!

All this got me thinking, if only life could be backed up in the same way. Whenever we make mistakes, or we hurt someone, or ourselves; whenever something happens that we just wish hadn’t, wouldn’t it be just great to roll back to the last working version and continue on! Yes I do realise this is just a silly fantasy, but lets just suspend belief and say we could do that for a brief moment, we could roll back our lives to a saved point whenever we screwed up, or life threw us a curved ball we didn’t want to have hit us in the head. You know what the result would be? We’d end up learning nothing, because we only really learn anything when wounds are inflicted, and during the time it takes to heal. Maybe that’s why gawd didn’t give us the backup option in the first place. Because nobody would ever have a life that moved forward, we’d all just be pretty fucked up people from having everything our own way!

Which makes me wonder, is there some deeper meaning in the pain I hadn’t considered yet? This seems to beg for further introspection.

Andy.

I’ve been obsessed the last few nights with trying to get my entire CD collection digitised. I don’t have that many discs, maybe somewhere around 160 I would say, perhaps 10 or 20 more. But they’ve been sitting in a dark closet for the last three years, waiting for a home on a bookshelf that I promised them I would make. Three years on, they are still sitting in a dark closet, actually pretty well protected from light and dust, so they are all still in pristine condition, which I guess is one consolation of them never being used. But then a couple of nights ago I decided I would rip a couple of Moby discs I have because I just had to listen to a couple of my favourite tracks of his, so I decided to rip them to the computer using winamp. Then I figured since I’ve done the Moby cds, I would just rip one or two of The Chemical Brothers discs I had. Thus started what has become an maniacal obsession to rip every single disc that was in that closet.

I’ve been losing sleep over this too. It will get to 1.20am and I will be keenly watching the ripping progress of a cd, saying to myself, I’ll go to bed after this one has finished. And when it’s finished, I have this brief little internal struggle, and then put another cd into the computer, and say again, after this one I’ll definitely go to bed. I literally have to pry myself away from the big cd stack which I’ve made in front of the computer and console myself that they will be still be there tomorrow waiting to become part of the new digital collective.

I have discovered two things about myself while undertaking this project: -1- I have really great taste in music, and if I didn’t know me and I visited my flat and saw my music collection, I would be totally impressed and want to be friends with me so I could borrow stuff. And -2- I might be slightly obsessive compulsive, which would probably explain a whole lot of bizarre behaviour that women in my life put down to “personality quirks”. When it’s done I will be both happy that I’ve got all of my cds part a shiney new digital library I can listen to anywhere, and sad because I will have run out of cds to rip. Then I’m going to have to find something else to obsess about.

Andy.

I arrived back from New York this morning at some ungodly hour that I haven't seen myself voluntarily for years. In some ways it was a dissapointment to be back so early, and in other ways I was glad to be home. New York was unlike anything I had really expected. I went there thinking it was going to be all fat people with guns, who did a quick draw on anybody that had a funny accent. With all the bad press going in about yanks in the European newspapers, I would seriously have to be forgiven for thinking like this. However what I found was a place starkly in contrast; the locals were very polite people with a good sense of humour and a good knowledge of the world around them. Oh and they certainly weren't fat. I would say people in London have a higher fat arse ratio by far, based on my unscientific people watching while living there. I had a really fabulous time in New York walking around the streets, saying hi to random strangers who would say hi back to me with pleasant smiles. Even taking the time to stop and ask if they could help with finding somewhere! Not to mention eating and drinking in some great places. I even had a person kind enough to walk me to a direct subway station I needed to get home that was out of his way, something which I've not seen or even heard about here in The Dam or London; the places where I spend most of my time.

I came to realise at the end of my trip that I was as guilty as anyone at holding on to predjudiced opinions and believing things which I had only seen in the news, and heard from uninformed individuals. I had always thought I was an open minded person, who didn't judge before seeing for myself. But the extent to which I had already judged New York was evident by my overwhelming surprise at how different it was from some mental image I'd formed so long ago. Well, the few Americans I have met travelling the world, and here in The Dam, don't really reflect well on their cultures, but you shouldn't judge the whole based on a few.

The experience in New York has also had an effect on me coming home. After the high quality service I've had from waiting staff and shop assistants, it's going to be really hard to deal with the Dutch "fuck you" customer service attitude they are very famous for. The New York bars and restaurants genuinely made me feel like they were happy to have me in their establishment, and never made me feel like I was being a prick for actually asking for something. I've since changed my mind about the whole tipping thing; if it brings you service with a smile, I'm happy to pay 15% more for it. At the very least here in NL, I'd pay that just to get the sneer off their faces.

Andy.

So I'm starting to learn the value in doing little things when you can, rather than trying to find time for a really big thing that you just can't find time for. See I've always been this sort of person who wants to be able to sit down and have an endless amount of time for one sort of project or activity, so I can make some meaningful headway. But who's got that sort of time now in a busy life? Not me, and I know friends of mine don't – well most of them, there are some exceptions – and anyone who has "manager" in their job title probably doesn't either. I figure of all the 4 billion people on the planet, at least 95% of them have "manager" in their job description. So really nobody has time for anything anymore. At least not like our parents used to back in the old days before computers were around to suck time out of our eyeballs.  I realised though, if I add up all the odd 15 minute segments of my day that I spend sitting around doing nothing in between the big other things (normally for work), I've actually got at least an hour spare that's idle time each work day. Well, this is what I'm going to use to make time for things like writing – cause I never have enough time for writing – and other activities I really can't think of right now, that I always complain I never have time for. Very new age of me I have to say!

So I also have a countdown now for my first ever trip to The Paranoid States of America. Work is sending me over there, and I am going to experience finally what it is to see America and Americans on their own turf. Going to be interesting to say the least. Now that I know that America thinks Australia is part of the Axis of Evil , I wonder what sort of reception I'll get!

If I'm not back in a week, send me TimTams to gitmo!

Andy.