Another month gone by

It’s again been a while since my last update and the reason, once again, NO TIME. At work I’m no longer at probational period, and work has started to pour in. Currently the workload is rather good, not overwhelmingly much but enough to keep me busy. Surprisingly lots of travel. I have travelled more during this four months than in last year. It’s still ok and I am still confident that this was a right choice for me. Workwise, I get to do more concrete things now than before - less powerpoint and more technology.

Homewise it’s been ok. It’s not too dissimilar from the situation at work. The family keeps me again very busy but there’s a direction for the better now. Even my wife is not anymore constantly sleep deprived and she really has enjoyed her part as stay-home mummy.

Finnish summer is again what you would expect and I have managed to find some free time again, so I guess I should not complain. Let’s see where I am in a month or so…

Random thoughts for the spring

It’s been an interesting 2009 so far. With my daughter learning to walk and the new job and lots of travelling, every day has been very busy. I would like to take it easy for a change. I fear that there’s no more time available to take it easy - but I will certainly try to organize my time better and concentrate to the things that deserve the most time.

One such thing is friends. It’s been so awfully difficult to find time to meet even the closest ones. It’s not entirely my fault since they are quite busy too, but having a small child and hectic work is not helping at all. It’s easier to meet those friends with children since they typically have similar schedules, but again, having the kids around makes it more difficult to really be together. There’s always interruptions and things to organize and take care of. I have started to feel quite lonely lately, so I will definitely need to do something about this soon. And the fact is still that it’s so damn difficult to make friends that keeping the existing ones should be a priority.

Another such things is peace of mind. I find myself constantly worrying about things that I really don’t have that much control over. I won’t give you examples since those are too personal to be shared in the internet. But nowadays I spend a good part of the day working and taking care of things that I must to do. Things such as shopping for food and clothes, cleaning the house, helping others with their things, maintaining myself in a good shape and generally just trying to manage. During the free time I have, I spend way too much time worrying over things. This needs to stop since it really really makes my life shitty to say at least. I just need to find a way to actively concentrate on things that I can solve and simply drop the rest.

And finally the third topic is work. I will not take it so seriously anymore. This meaning that I will keep demaning that work is done in a sane way and properly and not with the constant fear of failure. The explanation that I hear everywhere: “We’re constantly suboptimizing, doing things in a crazy way and generally acting likeĀ  a scared bunch of rabbits because OMG there’s a recession” has at times caught me too. This will change. The recession, when I look at it, seems just like a scam to keep people scared and push them to do even more unpaid overtime and give up benefits and job satisfaction. I have never been paid more or gotten more attractive headhunting attempts than during this so called recession. I don’t know anyone whose job would be in danger because of the so called recession (that being the real reason) or would be unemployed because of the recession. The prices are just the same as before, the people keep buying and selling just as before and everything else, when looking through my eyes, seems JUST AS BEFORE. So, from now on, I make a holy promise to do the work the best I can and actively keep improving the way the work is done because just grinding teeth and pushing overtime is not working out too nicely. For anyone.

Spring is a time of renewal. I’m not entirely sure what this means for a thirty-years-old working nerd father, but I’m extremely certain that I’m off balance. The kind of balance I’m talking about is that of body and mind. Currently they are closing to a divorce, yet both longing for each other but not finding the time to meet and talk things through.

I raise a toast to body and mind and hope you both successful spring!

Greetings from Brussels

Hello all, just wanted to say hello from the capital of EU. I’m currently doing a 5 day course here and then spend the weekend here with my wife and daughter.

There’s very limited connectivity and I don’t have too much time to blog from here, but I have done some writeups offline on my mobile. I plan to post those here, perhaps even today. Good that the Android phones are just about to be released, so that I can start to really maintain my blog. Seems like all the keyboard time I currently have go to something else than creative work…

Anyway, this city seems nice enough. It’s very much possible to bicycle here and it’s very easy to get around. The traffic is pretty ok and food and beer is good. Prices seem to be pretty standard across EU nowadays so no big surprises here.
Belgian people are quite much like the french, but bit more friendly and helpful and at least here they tend to know a few words of english.

This course almost feels like a vacation. Title is “Embedded Linux” and it’s organized by Linux Belgium. Nice people and interesting agenda. I basically wanted to know how nowadays people do embedded systems using linux. When I last did lowlevel stuff in Linux it was back in the 2.2 kernel days. It’s totally a different system nowadays and you have all these cool tools like Busybox. It’s very cool stuff that’s happening and now that everyone is creating devices on top of Linux it’s very nice indeed.