Dan Makovec’s blog

Contrast of past and present

On this day 2 years ago, Myk, Jose, Graz and I were wandering around the Sandiego Zoo checking out pandas and sealions.

Today, I’m stuck behind a workstation, counting the days (12 working days) till I leave this office for good.

Why do I care?

I’m leaving this job in 14 working days. I notice other engineers making questionable, spur of the moment decisions about the design or implementation of a “quick fix”. I immediatly feel the urge to jump in and start asking questions as to why they’re tackling a problem this way. I don’t directly criticize, mind you, I just put to them in question form the roots of problems that I see developing to see if they reach the same conclusion as me. It’s the way I’ve always worked, and I’m finding I’m in the middle of such a situation at the moment.

The question is, with only 3 weeks left in my job - why do I care? Why do I have a total inability to just keep my head down, finish my chores and let them do whatever they want, safe in the knowledge that by October 1 it won’t be my problem?

In other news, I’m reading Toby Young’s “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” (like I need any help at that). He made an interesting observation that in New York, a single woman’s method of determining a potential suitor’s compatibility is to type their name into Google and see what comes up. I thought I’d try this and found to my surprise that this blog is actually the third on the list with Yahoo search, although only ancient geek postings are showing up on Google.

Alone in London

Brian left today.

We moved out of the house this morning and went straight to Heathrow for his plane. We’ve had some great memories in that place, even though we were only there six months. We were both really sad to leave it and it took a while to say goodbye to it.

I took all my luggage with me down there then back to Bayswater. The tube map gives a rough idea of how far Turnpike Lane is to Heathrow (hint: follow the Piccadilly line from left to right). Then I took the Heathrow Express back to Paddington and tubed it to Bayswater. The only reason I’m detailing my journey is so I can remember that I did it with my big Mont backpack + daypack on my back, Laptop bag, fully loaded with computer, docking station, and various accessories slung around my neck, One of B’s backpacks fully loaded with my stuff in one hand and another one fully loaded with sizable teddy bear and clothing in the other hand.

Then there were the books… Brian got hit with a £150 excess baggage fee because he’d packed about 30kg instead of the new lower 20kg limit. So after shitting ourselves, he handed me all his books (a few kg’s) out of his hand luggage so that he could re-pack and not get as badly pinged in Hong Kong. I strapped these to the side of my big backpack in a plastic bag, and made it all the way back to Bayswater station and half way up the street before the bag burst, spilling books everywhere. Luckily a friendly trinket-selling shopkeeper ran out and gave me a new bag so I eventually staggered over to the hotel and checked in.

The room I’ve got reminds me of student accomodation. It’s basic with a TV, desk and hand basin beside the bed. There’s a small wardrobe to hang my stuff in, and I’m glad I brought some coat hangers with me as there were none in there. The bathrooms are shared and pretty basic, but I’ll survive for the few weeks necessary until Oct 11 when I catch my flight. I’ve got a temporary room on the 3rd floor, but I’ll be moving into another room on the second floor the day after tomorrow which is quite a bit bigger and has its own fridge to boot. With all that baggage and no elevators, getting everything up there was pretty painful.

Over the next few weeks I’ll gradually get rid of more stuff to lower my excess baggage. I’ve got left-over food packs, jars and tins from the kitchen, and bottles of wine, vodka and scotch, all of which will gradually be disposed of. Thera are also quite a few books, which I’ll send home via post to Brian. There’s a post office down the end of the street so it’s not a great hike. I still have to remember where the laundromat is.

The irony is that I’ve moved into the hotel next door to the one that I stayed in with Graz and Mykro at the end of Worldfest, so I’m back where I started. Effectively, my time in London has come full-circle.

I’m going out with Ed and some friends for drinks tonight. Every muscle in my upper body is aching from carrying all that luggage, so a drink, then a shower and early night will do me the world of good.

There’s a Soho gym on the street corner half way between the hotel and the tube station. They’re charging £65 a month, so I’m thinking of joining tomorrow or the day after. Their facilities are the best I’ve seen since I started going to gyms, so that’ll be something to look forward to. Hopefully I can kick the niggling cough that’s been annoying me for the past few weeks too, and knock off a few more kgs.

Other than working out and occasionally socialising, I’ll be dedicating myself to brushing up on J2EE, as I’ve seen a lot of well paid work out there for it. I’ll also be working on cleaning up my Jython integration patch for Venice so I can start using the tool for something practical (i.e. money making). I’ve also got to start looking for work in Melbourne! It’ll be quite a studious couple of weeks.

I already miss Brian more than I expected to (and I expected to miss him a lot - we’ve been practically inseperable firstly as friends and then as partners for nearly 2 years). He’s in a plane somewhere over the middle east right now, bound for Hong Kong, then onto Brisbane to see his family. We’ve already arranged our reunion: we’re flying into Melbourne, me from Adelaide and Brian one hour later from Brisbane, on October 27th. We’ll pick up in Australia where we left off in London and start a new life there.

I’m still here because my contract runs until the end of the month and if I were to leave it would cost me *thousands*, so we figured 51 days of separation would be a tolerable sacrifice to make in order to have funds to get started down under. I’ll be unemployed for 11 days, then will leave London itself on Oct 11 to arrive in Adelaide on the 13th. Time for the next life phase.