Dan Makovec’s blog

Only 3 days left

This Sunday, I’ll be handing back my keys to the flat that’s been my home for the past year at Baron’s Court, and crashing around Brian’s for a week before we move into the new place together at Turnpike Lane.

It’s been a fun year and a great home. I’ve done things and met people I never thought I would. Nick Ingrid have been a hoot to live with - we’ve gotten along fine and we’ve had few disagreements. I’ve grown accustomed to my cosy little room and used to not having too many material possessions around me (although I still make a hell of a mess with what I’ve got). I’ll miss the 4 minute walk to the tube station, and the gym just across the street!

The new place looks exciting and with the warmer months approaching, I hope to be making the best of it with barbecues and lazy afternoons lounging in the backyard trying to work on a tan as best as I can in the English sun. There are all sorts of little shops really close and I should be saving a fair bit of money too, so the slightly longer walk to the tube (9 mins) and commute to work (currently 20 mins, soon to be 45) seems a small price to pay for having our own place to do what we want in.

I’m expecting to be offline for a few weeks while at Brian’s and setting up the utilities at the new house, so maybe I’ll be able to concentrate on my J2EE studies and getting a photo album ready to publish online when we go live again in March.

Coming out

A few people around me have come out as being gay in recent times. Some of them completely, some of them just to their friends and not their family, others to their family and not their friends. It’s a shame to say that in many parts of the world this is still a really *big* deal and involves more stress than most people can imagine.

To the come-out-ee, the burden of keeping a secret like that can feel as heavy as, say, the secret of knowing you’d murdered someone would be to most normal people. There can be an enormous sense of shame, guilt and fear associated with the whole episode, and often the person going through the process feels completely isolated and alone, even if they do have some supportive friends.

When telling people, reactions can be varied. Some give the “oh yeah I knew all along” (I’ve *never* experienced that - nobody ever picks me for batting for the other team) to “get the hell away from me, I never want to see you again” (I’ve had this once). Most often it seems, the reaction is somewhere in between.

In many of the worst cases, people start off with the latter approach and keep that up for a few days or weeks, then tone down to grudging acceptance over a few months and eventually not giving a damn. When those people are close friends or family it hurts most, but can become most rewarding later on when they eventually come around.

The important thing is not to take this first, shocked/fearful/guilty/”where did I go wrong”/hysterical approach too much to heart. Often it’s just their mind trying to sort out what to them has become a topsy-turvy situation and make some sense of it. Neural connections within their brains get messed up and confused inner monologues come out as crazed rantings (ever see the scene in Matrix II where Neo confronts the Architect?). It just takes time.

It’s hard for me to believe that it’s been 9 years since was a terrified, suicidal, absurdly mood-swinging teenager huddled in a university computer lab trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with myself, having realised I couldn’t go on the way I was. One of the loneliest things was having people on both sides of the fence - those who were happily living in Straightsville oblivious to my own personal hell; and those who had long ago made the leap to accepting their sexuality and coming out to everybody, completely forgetting how big a deal it was getting over the line of coming out. Worse still for new players, some folks have grown up in a completely gay-friendly environment and never had to go through coming out, so can’t understand why anybody can have such a hard time dealing with it.

Sometimes I find myself slipping into the category of the jaded who find the whole issue soooo yesterday’s news. I guess if something good arises from this, its’ that once the gut-wrenching torment of the transition period is over, life can go on as normal, so just ride the waves and don’t give up hope.

Weird luck

My luck’s been a bit weird lately. I got my wallet pinched on Saturday night [BAD], but ended up ahead rather than behind [GOOD]…

The previous week I’d switched my Oystercard from a monthly to a weekly, and the guy at the station gave me the appropriate refund. Thing is though, the monthly ticket never got cancelled, so it’s still active. The monthly ticket cost £77, and the weekly one £20. So I ended up with £57 cash back for nothing. It looked weird on my account until the ticket got stolen, since both weekly and monthly tickets showed up on the account. When I contacted customer service to order a replacement card, the operator I was talking to mistakenly thought I’d cancelled the weekly for a monthly and so destroyed the weekly instead. Hey, I wasn’t going to correct him [GOOD].

Monday was B and my 6-monthaversary [GOOD]. Just before I left the office to go home and change for dinner, I got a rather odd email that completely threw into disarray my plans for the Spring [BAD]. Later on that night at about 4am I got a SMS from the US that told me to forget about the email, I could continue with my plans [GOOD].

Dinner was great, and we’re both really looking forward to moving in and spending the next 6 months living together [GOOD].

Last night, I sat down and got into day 2 of my “Teach yourself J2EE in 21 days” book. It was 50 pages of reading, then a half hour exercise which I didn’t quite complete, due to the differences between J2EE 1.3 (the most widely used version and documented in the book) and 1.4 (the version Sun pushed me to download onto my computer) [BAD].

I think I might downgrade and get the basics before going leading edge. If I don’t do day 3 tonight, I’ll wait till I’m alone tomorrow and hammer out 2 days in a few hours. Still, I think I’m grasping the concepts of the system. I now know from the complexity of it that a potential employer would throw my CV away if I simply said that I “know J2EE”. I’ll have to figure out an area to focus on once I’ve done the groundwork.

Up and down

An interesting weekend!

Friday night was pretty quiet - we went out to a restaurant and ate up big, had a little wine then came home with a DVD (Ripley’s Game), but never ended up watching it since we were too tired.

I watched it the next morning, tho B wasn’t in the mood. It wasn’t as good as the first movie, although John Malkovich put in a great performance as a much older Tom Ripley (from The Talented Mr Ripley, originally played by Matt Damon), set in the present day.

That afternoon, we finally got up and went to Earls Court, where we had breakfast at a cafe called Benkitos. The service was crap - “no, we don’t do menus here - check out the pots and tell us what you want”.. 45 minutes later: “yeah the food’s coming, have some more bread”… 20 minutes later the food arrives, scooped out of the pots we had looked at an hour before and bunged in a reheating oven, with a pathetic order of salad served on what turned out to be an unsanitary wooden plate which upset our stomachs later on that night. We won’t be going back there again.

We caught a tube down to Richmond and walked around. We were originally trying to get to Richmond park, but since we were both too lazy to check our A-Z’s before going, we never found the place and had to settle for a mocha in Starf*cks, a perve at the local Scottish rugby match (yum) and a stroll along the Thames. Actually it was a really pleasant few hours walk! We discovered that the original meridian (0 degrees longitude) was set in Richmond, rather than Greenwich on the other side of London. The line was still a line on the ground marking the original position.

After doing a loop of the town and river we went to the nearest pub for a pint, and discovered it was actually a friendly gay bar (what are the odds?). We picked up some magazines, and after browsing them (the hot models in various nude poses, the kinky personals ads, etc), we checked out the gig guide and decided that we should hit a club that night.

A brief stop off at the supermarket and back to Baron’s Court to whip up a Valentine’s Day meal of hickory smoked pork chops, mash potato, salad and a lovely bottle of white by candle light. Then I discovered the roses (thornless!) Brian had bought me (awwwww) and regular Valendine’s mushiness ensued.

Later on that night, we tubed down to Vauxhall where we bumped into Nick on the way to the club (more bizarre odds). He was just coming home from his bf’s place and preparing for his trip to Switzerland, so couldn’t join us. We got into the club (Colosseum) just before 11 and I was impressed by how much it had changed (since the last time I was there with Nick in April). The place had a turkish theme going, with huge soft embroidered cushions for cuddling up on in the chill-out area, and a sound system that beat anything else I’ve heard in London. The music for most of the night was good, although as seems to be the norm in this town did tend to get a little hard and mechanical towards the end around 6am.

Lowlight of the night was my losing my wallet. I can’t say what I was doing when it went missing, or whether it fell out of my pocket or whether I was pickpocketed (likely), but it had just under 30 pounds in it, my Switch card and Oyster card. All my other cards were home - I generally take all of my cards out when I go clubbing, as much so the wallet doesn’t bulge too much in my jeans when I’m dancing as for security reasons. The only reason the Switch was in there was because I’d run out of cash and went to an ATM just before entering the club. I wasn’t really that worried when I discovered it missing at about 5am, and even while searching unsuccessfully for it when they turned the lights on in the club at the end, it was more a case of “oh, bummer” than anything else (perhaps I was under the influence of something that stopped me feeling so bad). We got home about 7am Sunday, and I cheerily called the bank and had a laugh with the operator as we arranged for a new card, then got online and transferred all my money out of the account into one of my other cards. No big deal there.

The Oyster card was even better - report it lost on the net, and they send you another one out quickly. Even better though: if you buy tube or train travel tickets while your card is missing, you get a full refund on them when you get your new card back so you’re not left out of pocket. So in effect, the wallet loss meant that I ended up spending a total of 50 quid on Saturday night, which is actually pretty normal for a night out.

Yesterday afternoon at about 4pm we went to a luggage shop and Brian bought us new wallets (he’d been wanting a new one too), then we went to Chi (chinese buffet in Covent Garden, sister restaurant to Tai in Soho where we took Bron and Adrian) for a super one-meal pigout, which was to be our only meal for the day. Then back to Lewisham for SLEEP.

Today’s our 6 month anniversary, so we’re hitting another restaurant. I swear that we’re cutting back to home-cooked food after tonight to cut costs. Only 2 weeks, 5 days till we move in together!

Relief

Ever been caught short? I mean *really* short? Like, say, you’ve been drinking heaps of water and whatever fluids all day, and you’re stuck on a bus, caught in a traffic jam on the way home from the other side of town. You’ve only just got on, and you know it’s a long way home. You also know there are no public toilets between the bus stop and your house, and it’s a 15 minute walk there.

Imagine surviving all of the journey, the walk home, fumbling round like crazy for the keys in your pocket, bursting open the door, running to the bathroom to find somebody already in there, dancing around and banging on the door for 5 minutes until they finally emerge, running in, slamming the door behind you and relieving yourself for what feels like 15 minutes straight.

Imagine the agony of the lead up to the moment, then the prolonged relief as it all comes out.

Now, imagine that agony stretched for 3 months solid, and the relief taking the form of a rather large cheque which finally arrives.

That’s how ^%$£@#!! long I’ve been waiting to be paid by this bloody company! When ITG phoned me today to say the cheque had arrived, I nearly orgasmed right there and then. I had to run upstairs to a quiet room and phone Brian to let him know, in extremely exulted tones! He probably wondered if I’d popped an E or something

Job hunting

Work is screwing me over again (they’re 3 months late with my pay), so I’ve hit the job market hard while simultaneously conducting some self-education.

Knowing as I do my current sense of disenchantment with my life as a certified IT geek, I’ve decided to inject a little knowledge into my brain and set a direction. While not completely certain of the long-term future, I’ve decided I want the following for the short term:

1. I want to work in the finance sector
2. I want to develop in Java

Looking around, there are plenty of jobs out there (over 20,800 on Jobserve alone at the moment - 100% up on the same time last year), and narrowing my queries to this specific area of interest is yielding some rather high-paying work available.

I have two problems:

1. While I’m great with Java, I haven’t worked with it on a consistent and regular basis for some time - meaning I’m a tad behind the 8-ball when it comes to some of the latest technologies.

2. I have no financial sector experience. This is the most limiting factor, because just about every man and his dog wants somebody who’s done it all before.

I’m tackling this on three fronts:

Firstly, by keeping my expectations low as to what sort of salary I can get. While it would be nice to take on another short-term contract at 80k+ p.a. like my first one, it’s probably not going to happen first time round in this industry. I’ll set my sights lower, although hopefully not much lower than what I’m pulling now, which is after all permanent rates.

Next, I’m going the carpet bomb approach. I’m averaging about 3 job applications per day, and I’m also mass-mailing my CV to every registered agency on JobServe - no mean feat, since there are about 500 of them.

Finally, I hit Borders the other night and picked up a couple of books in the SAMS “Teach yourself XYZ in 21 days” series. I really like these books. They’re a bit like the Dummies’ Guides, but with an accelerated learning curve. I’ve already used them to get into C++ and XSLT on previous occasions.

My choice of books this time are J2EE, and JavaServer pages. so that’s 42 days or about 6 weeks of solid education. And I do mean solid. For J2EE at least, each day’s lesson is 50 pages long. I’m slowly working my brain into learning mode, though it has been so long since I’ve really studied anything that it’s taking a lot to get moving.

The reason I chose to study these technologies is that they’re huge in the investment banking and stock broking industries. I’m hoping that within about 6 weeks, the job interview requests will start coming in at about the same time as my new skills.

Each week as I study a bit more, I’ll update my CV with the latest buzzwords that I feel comfortable I have a decent enough knowledge of. The whole point is to get it past the automated CV scanning software they use, then take on the real challenge of proving my knowledge during interview time. It’s not too far removed from taking school exams
Hopefully I’ll land an OK job for 6 months, to get me out of here. Then at the end of the Summer, I’ll take off for a quick holiday before a return to Oz, where hopefully the mere appearance of a job in the right sector in the UK will be enough to get me something sweet back there.

This should be fun!

Blame Canada!

I hit the gym on Monday night for the first time since the week before Christmas.

I got on the scale, and discovered to my horror that I’d put on 6kg! I knew I’d felt fat lately, despite the assurances of my friends that I was just menstrual.

I blame it entirely on the food on the other side of the pond. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the copious amounts of chocolate, sugar and other carbs I’ve been gobbling down in recent weeks in efforts to keep illness at bay, without exercise
Speaking of illness, I think I’m losing that fight too. I’ve had a sore throat the past couple of days, and I’m generally feeling weak and lethargic. Hmm, maybe that’s just because I’m at work. I dunno.

I seem to handle stressful situations pretty well. The past few weeks I’ve had to deal with possible unemployment and moving house at the same time, throughout which I maintained my composure. But we signed the deal on the flat a week ago, and I got my contract confirmed on Friday, so starting Sunday my immune system decided that the heat was off for a bit, and it needed to collapse.

Nevertheless, I’m hitting the gym hard with an aim of getting back in shape before my April 13ish return to Adelaide for Graz’s wedding. I’m following the Mykro-patented technique of burning the bugs out of my system by doing heaps of cardio and a little bit of weights. Hopefully I’ll see results over the next 24 hours.

I wasted 25 quid on the gym last month, having never used it. Since this is my last month in the neighbourhood, I’m going to make the most of it. I haven’t found a replacement gym at Turnpike Lane as yet. Brian says he might be interested in taking up running again, so it’s possible we could map out a route together around the neighborhood parks and run that every other night.