Dave’s Blog

Wow!

Had a long weekend in Amsterdam a couple of weekends back, and I must say that I love this city.  It was a weekend of firsts.  It was also a weekend that wasn’t filled with the pressures of having to check all the “must-do’s” in Amsterdam - mainly because there aren’t a huge amount.  Sure, there’s visiting the coffee shops, the Red Light District, do a canal cruise, the Van Gogh Museum, the flower markets, but apart from that, most of everything else was either just really cruisy stuff like chilling out in a pub, or cheesy tourist traps like the Sex Museum and the Torture Museum (both crap).  I will definitely return, but just to ride a bike, chill out with a beer, and take in the laid-back Dutch atmosphere.  One thing you definitely don’t come to Amsterdam for is the food.  There isn’t really such a thing as Dutch cuisine, and that, in fact, is an oxymoron.

More than 30 years ago, my Dad was in Amsterdam, working in a Chinese restaurant, for a year, before going to Australia.  It was interesting to see the Chinese community there (Chinatown was right next to where we were staying, which was right next to the Red Light District).  I’m told that the Chinese arrived on the ships, where they were hired as cheap labour, to stoke the coal-fired turbines that used to power the massive floating beasts.  Amsterdam was, and still is, a major port.  And there are heaps of Chinese there.

Of course, the two main draws of Amsterdam is a result of its liberal attitudes to two vices that are otherwise illegal in most parts of the world - soft drugs and prostitution.  And in the Red Light District and surrounds, you can have both.  It is a real eye-opener to see the windows of the RLD, and to goggle at the women, some stunning, some really not stunning, all dressed up in lingerie or skimpy outfits, displaying their bodies for passers-by.  Photos are forbidden, although many people attempt to take them.  Come on, have a little respect for these working girls.  The famous coffee shops that sell dozens of varieties of marijuana are another attraction, and the sweet smell of marijuana is prevelant where ever there are large crowds.  In fact, the corridors of our cheap 3-star hotel carried this sickly sweet smell, which started to make me sick by the 3rd day.  3-star hotels are not the same all over the world.

Ours was dodgy, but it was a place to sleep.  On the plus side, it was close to the pub we were drinking at on the Saturday night.  A combination of lack of sleep, a huge quantity of alcohol, and good friends and bar maids contributed to my first experience of passing out and forgetting parts of the night.  I did manage to find my way back to the hotel, thankfully, although my friends couldn’t find their way back to the pub to pick me up.  I guess my sense of direction is good, even when completely out of it.  Unfortunately there are photos to remind me of the evening.  My Amsterdam photos are here - http://gallery.me.com/dave.chan#100418 - but there are a few on Facebook contributed by the always helpful M, which I only vaguely remember being taken, and they certainly weren’t on my camera.

So my first trip to Amsterdam.  It won’t be my last, but I think I might go easy on the drink next time round.

Went to watch Wicked last Thursday night with J, E, and K. It was a pretty good musical, with some good singing and a cool and fun take on the whole good and wicked witches. (Let’s just say that the wicked witch was so because she didn’t have a good PR manager). My favourite character would have to be the Wicked Witch. I could feel affinity for her at times, which is what that character is all about.

We paid £42 for our seats, which is more than I wanted to spend, and I still think is more than I should have spent, but I do like my musicals. Go see this one, just don’t pay £42.

Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon at Hyde Park with S, who brought along some food for a picnic, and I brought a bottle of wine.  What a great way to spend a beautiful summer’s day.  It was apparently the hottest day of the year in London…all of 30 degrees.  I had to admit though, that even though it sounds mild, maybe its the conditioning to the cold weather that convinced us it felt hotter than that.

I’m going to melt when I get back to Perth in November.

I’ve developed a really bad habit lately, and that is that I find my normal bed time is slipping to 2am.  Despite me trying to get to bed earlier, my head seemingly doesn’t hit my pillow until 2am.

The good thing is that I’m finding more hours to do things.  The bad thing is that they’re really odd hours to do things.  Shame the shops and transport aren’t open until 2am, because then I could really do all those things I need to do!

Hmm, 1:47am now, it’s almost time for bed!

It’s 16GB, it’s black.  It’s also got a really short battery life, and the software is a bit dodgy.  Apart from that, same old iPhone.

I’m rather underwhelmed.

As a current iPhone user (since the day it was released in the UK, back in November 2007), I didn’t think of much need to upgrade to the iPhone 3G.  Three things have changed my mind:

1. Ruby wants me to upgrade to it so she can have my current iPhone.  She’s currently using my Nokia N95, and getting frustrated with it.  I can’t blame her; I was close to throwing the damn thing out of my window many many times.
2. On the recent trip to Derbyshire, we tried to use the Maps on iPhone to help guide us.  While there were flashes of brilliance, mostly it just couldn’t download the map data fast enough.  Oh, and a small bug that caused cached maps to become corrupted didn’t help matters much either.  3G would have been really handy.
3. I just need more room to store my photos and music.  It’s 8GB now, 16GB would be better.

Now it’s just up to bloody O2 to get more stock.  You see, it’s in stock and available at the Apple Store, but current iPhone or O2 customers are forced to upgrade our handsets at O2 stores.  I’m just one of many current O2 customers who are clamouring to upgrade apparently.  Or they just didn’t get enough stock from Apple.  Either way, someone is making me unhappy and unable to get my hands on a new iPhone 3G.

A very good morning/afternoon/evening to all my new family members who will be sure to discover this blog.  Since the recent passing of my Grandma, we’ve all been finding each other on Facebook.  Well, family members are isolated islands no more!

You’ll find this blog as place for my personal ramblings and updates. As the standard disclaimers go, it does not represent the views of my company, my friends, my family, my pot plants, or really, anyone, except me. Despite the fact I’m able to write posts via my shiny iPhone, I’m still not as frequent a blog writer as I’d like to be, but keep watching this space.

I’m just shocked at the number and variety of my family on Facebook.  I must get my Dad on it too…

Man am I looking forward to a weekend of staying at home and doing not much.  The last 3 weekends have been busy busy busy:

Last weekend - Brussels.  Brussels is not the most exciting city ever, but the food, the beer, and the chocolate more than compensate.  In fact, it was these three things that made me agree to go again this time (despite there being about a zillion other destinations in Europe to go to first).  Stocked up on chocolate and beer, although we’re most of our way through both which makes me want to go back (I mean, for about 1 Euro for a bottle of good Belgian beer, how can you go wrong?).  M and my favourites were the brune (or dark) Trappist beers.

2 weekends ago - Road trip to Derbyshire.  Went for a cool road trip with D as the designated driver.  Well, he was also the only one that knew where he was going, which helped a lot.  Next purchase - GPS system (or iPhone 3G…when I can get one!).  Visited some nice countryside and saw for the first time exactly what the Brits mean by chavs. Visited a castle (Warwick Castle) and watched a trebuchet being fired as well as exploring the depths of its dungeons and climbing the wonderous heights of its towers.

3 weekends ago - Hard Rock Calling (Hyde Park Calling) concerts. Saturday lineup was headlined by Eric Clapton who I’ve been dying to see live, then Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, Jason Mraz, and some other unknowns.  Sunday was headlined by the Police, then KT Tunstall, Starsailor (famous for their remixed song, “Four to the Floor”), and The Bangles.  Eric Clapton played mainly blues which bored a lot of people, but rounded out his set with crowd pleasers like Layla and Wonderful Tonight.  The Police were just great, playing hit after hit, but then some lesser known stuff towards the end made the crowd confused.  John Mayer was a crowd pleaser (especially with K, a massive JM fan), Jason Mraz was my pick playing a fantastically laid back set, KT Tunstall got the crowd going more than I thought, Sheryl Crow looks old, and everyone walked like an Egyptian with The Bangles (whose lead singer is really hot even at the ripe old age of 49).

I’ve moved into a new house with D, M, and J. Its a lovely old four bedroom terrace house that’s been partly modernised. When I say partly, I mean that some rooms have been done up, for example the kitchen and my bedroom, and others haven’t been, like the living room.

Overall we’ve been quite pleased with it, although annoyed at the landlord as it’s obvious she only got halfway through the renovations. We had actually requested to move in a week later than agreed, which was rejected, so I get the idea that she’d rather take the money. I guess in a way I can’t blame her as I’d probably do the same thing. I do wish she’d finished some things, for example it would be nice to have the curtains the agent had promised in my bedroom, if nor only for the sake of our poor neighbour.

Speaking of which, our neighbour is an interesting character. The first night we moved in we did admittedly make a bit of noise, to which her response was to set her radio outside and blaring in the direction of poor D’s window at 7:30am the next day. Now I didn’t mind so much as the music was at that nice clock radio volume drifting the wafting refrains of that old song, “Monday, Monday” through my window. I like that song and found it rather soothing. Understandably D didn’t and we all agreed that it was a very childish thing to do, but we’ll just have to be very nice to her. I for one don’t particularly want a hostile neighbour.

Anyway, we also don’t have Internet at home, so I may take longer to respond to emails and Facebook messages than normal as I’m tapping it out on my iPhone which is a much slower process than on my laptop. It’s not too bad (for example I’m typing this blog entry on the iPhone) but nothing beats a keyboard.

Work’s stressing me out.  I just don’t feel like I’m understanding enough of the systems and businesses there to justify my senior role.  I’m feeling like an old man, stuck in my ways, while these young colleagues of mine run circles around me.  Debugging code isn’t fun anymore, and hunting down bugs is a chore.  I think I need to move more into the business side, as I feel the technical side doesn’t make me satisfied as it did in yesteryear.  I’m learning about systems that are completely new to me, written in an in-house language which I find befuddling and mystifying.  They’re backed by a database which is also in-house and we access all this through an IDE that is, quite frankly, out-dated.  Don’t get me wrong, the tools do the job, and those that learn them, can get the job done efficiently.  You know, like how those UNIX command line gurus can be efficient.

I think I’m getting to the stage where I just want computers to work.  I value simplicity.  I want an interface which doesn’t require me to analyse and decode pages of documentation in order to comprehend it.  Computers don’t need to be so hard.

Unfortunately, I think I’m in the wrong industry.