Mentalechoes

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 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. 

So here I was sitting in front of the TV looking for inspiration for tonights little masterpeice; hoping that some topic would fall from on high and get me started. My new employer graciously gave me a mac laptop with a wireless network connection, unshackling me from the confines of my little office, and giving me the freedom to sit anywhere, so now I write from my couch, which is about 3 meters away from my office. Sure it's not far, but it's the novelty that really matters. On TV was that NCIS show, which a dutch friend of mine raves about, he reckons it's the best thing since TimTams, so when I saw it on during the channel flip I figured I'd give it one eye worth of watching.

It's pretty amazing how shit it really was. I mean, I'm fairly liberal with my concept of entertainment nowadays when it comes to TV. I watch so little of it as I have a whole bunch of other stuff I do to amuse myself, that when I do actually watch something it's normally just so I can veg out and let my brain go into neutral. It goes without saying that you have suspend belief in reality in TV, but for fucks sake, I didn't just get asked to suspend belief in NCIS, but kick it in the balls, set it on fire and throw it out the window. At one point I started wondering if I was watching some show about a parallel universe where they had computers and the internet, but it was all built by morons instead of geniuses.

I spent most of the time slagging off the show; the characters; the storyline; what they wore; and of course anything at all they did with the internet and computers. The chick I was watching it with at some point turned around and asked if I could please shut the fuck up so she could at least see the end without my ranting in the foreground. The ending was complete shit – of course – and totally unbelievable in the real world. As the credits rolled at the end though, I realised that whole shittiness of the show had actually been enterntainment in itself, and I was totally engaged as a viewer for the whole time I was on the couch.

Maybe this is how entertainment has evolved; TV has come full circle and instead of us wanting well thought out good shows, we really just want stuff that we can slag off and jeer at how bad it is. Thus making us feel like we've seen something worthwhile and engaged our brains at the same time. Perhaps this could be a new carreer, since I am sure I can write TV as bad as anybody out there today.

Padwanna! 

Lifes on the up and up; I've quit smoking, made it passed my probation period at the new job and been given a permanent contract, and turned over a new leaf when it comes to doing gear as part of the usual weekend blowout. I'm feeling pretty good, even though I'm not really looking it. One of the problems giving up smoking is that craving to snack constantly. As much as what you used to smoke, and then a bit more. So my once slim stomach has been reshaping itself to resemble a spare tyre from an SUV, but that's okay, it's winter, I spend my days wearing two layers of shirts under a long sleeved jumper. Everybody looks slim this way.

So with everything so good, why is there still this feeling of wanting to pack up and move to some small corner of the world and give all this excitement away? I've spent my whole life running away from a life ordinary and dull as fuck, so what's with the big urge now to head to the nearest deserted beach and spend the rest of my life doing fuck all? I don't know really. I don't have any answers for that. I'm just wondering if it will pass.

Well either way, I still have to get up tomorrow morning and go about my day, so there's no point in daydreaming too much about founding my own hippie community on a Thai beach. Though I reckon that's definitely something worth doing at some point. Only, I think I'd make sure there were no guns or crazed meglomaniac English chicks around to hijack my doped out little group of lost travellers. If it's one thing I learned from that movie, it's that rampaging chicks and guns will fuck up a good thing faster than bad acid will turn your couch into a blue monster that will try to devour you whole.

Trust me!

Padwanna!