andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

That’s me. I have aged. I’m old. Older. No-one claimed it, there were no activists, it was just a sensational headline; it’s my birthday today and I’m thirty four as of 3pm this afternoon. It’s interesting, in the sense that I can remember when the idea of me being this old was a very abstract thought, it was just too far away. But here it is. I don’t know what to make of it other than I’m not married, I don’t have children, I don’t own property, I do have a car but it’s a little one, and I still don’t have an great deal of responsibilities to worry about. In other words, I don’t have very much more complication in my life than when I was twenty four apart from a relationship (So, I could be married and have children by the time I write my next post, although that could be any time within the next ten years. Don’t hold your breath.) and so, if age is affecting me then it must be a certain world weariness or physical degradation. I do feel the years pulling at me, I’m balding, slightly overweight, I don’t recover from physical activity or injuries as fast as I used to…

I’m not complaining, mind you. Just stating the facts.

Me standing on the beach in Wexford county, in February. Photo taken by my mother, Gerda. Taken 11th February 2007.. Click image to view larger version »

I went to the doctor on Friday, in fact, with a series of ailments collected over the months (Because of the spiralling cost of healthcare in Ireland, I’ve taken to doing what many Irish people do now which is waiting until various ailments reach either high levels of inconvenience/danger, or the required level of cost effectiveness per individual ailment is reached.) and I notice that more and more, these things are down to wear and tear.

In the meantime, if tonight, Tuesday 13th of March 2007, you find yourself in Dublin city centre somewhere, call into the Market Bar or call me on +353 86 856 2978 to see where we’re at. Next Saturday (the 17th) I’ll be on the town too, so catch me then instead if you want for a slightly rowdier time. It’s all good.

I am tired. I need sleep. In a few minutes, after entertaining some pretty dubious ideas and getting stressed about any number of things, I’m going to do just that thing.

Yes, I’ve been busy, and that’s why I haven’t put anything up here recently, although as always I’ve been eagerly taking notes about all sorts of interesting events and ideas from my life recently, where I’m at, where I’m going, and how exactly it feels to waste three weeks wrestling with something called a ‘mysql.sock’ file while finding new ways to explain to people why this prevents me from making their website as quickly as I had originally planned. Yes, the life of the freelance web developer isn’t quite the rose-tinted week-long party I’d conned myself into believing it was, but the contract work is going well, even if everything else feels like it’s coming apart at the seams…

Since you’ve all been asking, the new trading name is ‘andAgile’, and one of these days I’ll have a full site up, and I’ll discuss the products and services of this entity in more detail. The reason for calling it andAgile? It follows the ‘andSomething’ theme, and in many ways agility is going to be the name of the game. I hadn’t really made that clear, about the general idea; I’ve gone freelance, and now I’m contracting, I’m free to be a success or a disaster or anywhere inbetween all by myself. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and now I have it.

The abusive and esoteric comments are great, guys; I’m going to put up profiles of the regulars very soon, so we all know who we’re dealing with Look forward to more soon about mysql.sock, Robin Askwith and how to not buy coke from your local Tesco. It’s all good!

Just a quick post tonight; I’ve been busy again, partly taking some time out to relax, with getting back to work and getting stuck into some freelance jobs, and with setting up my new laptop (which I bought along with some other stuff as part of getting myself set up as a mercenary. Sorry, freelance web developer. I did say I’d post about my next few moves, didn’t I? And I didn’t, did I? I even have my company/trading name, the URL has been bought and the hosting paid for… And it’s not Kraton, Defeater of Meat Slugs, it’s a lot less exciting but more useful.

Now, I hadn’t posted this before, and I partly was waiting a little bit, but here it is. Tee, who you’ll either know personally, or know of because you read this site and you know I go on about her from time to time, has put up a moving and honest post dealing with a serious issue on her site, ideasforcheapstuff.com (the site of the three deliciously lickable girls) and it’s something that I think people should read; I should warn you now that it’s serious stuff, and you should approach it with an open mind. I think everyone could learn something from it. The events Tee writes of happened barely a week and half after I met her for the first time, so I got caught up in it all, and it’s touched me too in that sense. Just read it, and think about it, maybe follow the links she gives and hopefully if it helps even one person who reads it then that can only be a good thing.

http://www.ideasforcheapstuff.com/wordpress/2006/06/15/confronting-suicide/

So I’m glad I’ve put that up; please don’t comment on it here, just read it and think about it.

In other news, today was my first day as a contractor for a company I’ll be doing work for over the next while (it’s ‘web stuff’, that’s all you need to know, and it is very exciting stuff to be working on for someone like me.) which was great, although I had to take a lot of technical stuff in and now my brain is full, which when added to what I’ve had to deal with in setting up my laptop (I’d rather punch myself repeatedly in the nuts than install a PC or a Mac for my own use again.) is almost too much to deal with and I’m toying with the idea of turning into a fully-fledged psychopath tomorrow, perhaps murdering some innocent bystanders on my to attacking my colleagues in the office with a chainsaw. Well, I might have considered it, but this evening I saw a Czech movie in the Czech embassy (Thanks for organising tickets to that Michaela!) and it was so remarkably miserable (And believe you me, the Czechs know how to do misery better than anyone, even people from Longford.) that you’d be incapable of harming anyone after watching it. You’d just think about it, and then break down in tears, while nearby children laugh and frolic, unaware of the sheer meaningless misery of life. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but it just seems that the point of view there is that everyone is either a bastard, or a weak fool, and everyone gets what they deserve, or gets betrayed, or things just go pear-shaped for everyone generally. Also try to see a movie called ‘Czech Dream’ (‘Cesky Sen’), where some students get a grant and then set out to make everyone very miserable, even though they were all perfectly happy to start with, just to make a point that they weren’t really all that happy to begin with. I’m being fairly facetious about it, but it’s not far off the mark, and bloody typical too.

I was blown away as I was walking down Talbot Street; it just felt fantastic to be walking down this street, the energy that was there, the feeling that anything was possible, and it was hard for me to believe that I was walking down a street in Dublin where I’ve been living and working, on and off, for the last thirty-three years. New shops, people from so many nations, and a real sense that a lot of these people were here because you can really make things happen here, there’s enough money and if you work hard you can have your share of the cake too. I thought that maybe the money in Ireland is now like a siphon effect, in that there’s a certain intertia which means after the whole economic boom of a few years ago the whole show just keeps itself going, drawing in more money and the people to earn it, which in turn draws in more money.
Talbot Street, recently; this is Ireland’s future, and it’s a hell of a rush! Also there are cheap clothes. Click image to view larger version
The other thought I had was more personal, and that was this: the way I feel about Dublin is actually a reflection on how I feel about myself. If I dislike it (which happens frequently) then what it really means is that I’m unhappy about myself, my circumstances, other personal issues, which I project onto the city and the people in it. If I like it, if I think it’s interesting, if I think I’m seeing it in a new light, or having new ideas about it, then that too is a reflection on my own circumstances, and I should really look to myself to interpret those feelings.

So, you might be wondering then what my conclusion was about my feelings last Saturday, why I was feeling so positive about Dublin and excited to be a part of it, and if you haven’t heard about it already, then read on. In fact, read on anyway, because you might enjoy the detailed explanation. I felt good because last Thursday I handed in my notice on my job.

I quit.

It’s not that big a drama in many ways, and if anyone hadn’t expected it then it’s because they don’t know about the job, the company or indeed read my blog much, or even know me. If you know me in any capacity then you know what I do for a living, and how I feel about doing that for the company I work for, which is that I build web sites (Or rather, I build the display or output for web-based content management systems, and web sites. I’m quite good at it.) and that I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with my job, hating it even.

I think the biggest part of the drama is that for people over the age of about twenty eight or so, leaving a job voluntarily is a big deal, and you only do it if you’re guaranteed of a new job which is something I’m not, at the moment. I had been looking for a new job for a while but not terribly enthusiastically since I hadn’t seen anything which was substantially better than the job I’ve just left, but the thing I’d been overlooking all this time was that at my age, with my experience, with my contacts, getting a new job in Ireland won’t be too traumatic; when I was in Australia two years ago, I found a reasonable job in two and a half weeks in Melbourne under adverse conditions (No money, Working Holiday Visa, limited contacts, skills not very saleable) from a standing start. Conditions this time around are considerably better in every way, so I’m pretty confident in everything being ok on that front.

People have been both curious and concerned about this whole development (Me too, let me tell you!), and have been asking me a lot about it, and there’s a pattern to the questions so I’ll tackle it in a web-friendly ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ style. It’ll make your lives easier, I think.

• Oh my God! Are you ok?
  Yes, yes I am, I’m very ok and feeling better by the minute. Leaving a job is high and everybody should do it at some point (unless you happen to have a job you truly enjoy, in which case hang on to it! They’re hard enough to come by.). It’s all good.
• What happened???
  A number of issues built up over time, and working in Parallel became harder and harder to do effectively while still feeling relatively good about the experience. After yet another blazing row with Pavel over something fairly inconsequential, I realised that the stress we’re all under was making itself felt, and changing my personality and the way I react to situations. So where was all that stress coming from?
  • First off the working environment isn’t great (and do keep in mind that this is to a degree subjective, and others will have their own opinions on these matters). Now, it’s far from a bad place to work, but at the same time, in order to provide what we call ‘solutions’ to what are known as ‘problems’ (not in the day to day sense, but in a web development sense) a developer needs support, organisation, planning and infrastructure, all of which I believe were lacking for me and some of the people I work with. This leads to stresses and strains on projects and personal relationships, breaks morale and makes life very difficult. There’s a lot I could say about this, and go into ridiculous detail, but that is as much as anyone should need to know. I hate seeing things being done badly, when I’m involved with whatever it is that’s being done badly. If you feel your working environment is militating against you, then even the smallest tasks become difficult and stressful. Very stressful. And you know what they say: Stress is a killer.
  • Secondly, working in Parallel is no longer doing my so-called career any favours. I haven’t learnt anything new, which I haven’t actively pursued for my own purposes. There’s been no advancement, no financial reward, no expression of the experience I have in the field. That is bad. I mean, if I was hopping around between jobs and trying out different things, then of course I could expect to have little in the way of ‘career advancement’ but if I stay in one company for several years then either things should advance, I should get more responsibility, more pay, more training and experience, or things stop moving and I become obsolete. Remember that my work is primarily in the Internet field, building stuff for the Web. If there’s one thing which everyone knows all too well about this area, then it’s that things move fast. Very fast. I very much doubt that in Parallel I’ll be able to make a good case for making use of any of the new, upcoming technologies in my work, and that will fairly soon render my skills obsolete.

    There are knowledge areas which I have some very advanced knowledge in which won’t become obsolete any time soon; for example, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because although it’s a simple technology which takes a day to learn, it takes years of painful experience to master. On the other hand, that’s one small part of the whole Web Interface skillset, and some other areas can change rapidly; an old technology which has suddenly come to forefront is something known as AJAX, which I’ll need to become skilled with if I’m going to keep working in this area and stay competitive with the ten-year-olds who learn this stuff at school. Then there are bigger jumps, such as moving from the User Interface stuff to different areas such as application programming with an actual programming language such as Java or C#.

    The other aspect of career development is that as well as knowing more and gaining knowledge, there’s the aspect of vertical career movement, whereby I would be managing other guys who know this stuff, and for several reasons I don’t see that ever happening for me at Parallel, from lack of opportunity to typecasting. So, apart from getting better at what I do, I’m not going to progress in any other way.

    To summarise; if I’m going to keep doing this web stuff for a living and take it further, then Parallel is probably not the best place to advance my career.

  • Lastly, there’s the small issue of the shares. Some people know about it, some don’t but here it is in a nutshell. Five years ago, in the heady days of the Internet Gold Rush in Ireland, everything related to the Internet was worth it’s weight in gold and diamonds and when the opportunity came up to invest in Parallel through a Government tax incentive scheme (known as a ‘Business Expansion Sceme’) a number of us jumped at the chance and put money in. Like some others, I took out a loan to finance it, over a similar period of time, to the tune of €7,300 or so. All good. However, things turned sour, the Internet bubble burst and Parallel did badly. Better than some which sank quickly but even so things were rough and this is a story for another day, suffice to say that the company survived and soldiered on. The shares recently matured, and so far appear to be worth nothing. At all.

    As you can imagine, having a fair idea of why exactly the company and therefore the shares might be worth nothing, I have no intention of sticking around to watch any more of the show unfold, given that in my mind I’ve paid for this. My money, funding a situation which I certainly wouldn’t allow if it were my company, evaporating (closer to the truth is that it has long since evaporated). At the end of the day I learnt a lesson and the hard truth is that investments are a risk and that’s life, you win you lose, it’s only money.

  So, last Wednesday I thought about it one last time, and then I wrote the resignation letter, and resigned on Thursday morning. It’s a cracker actually, one of my better pieces of prose recently and it’s a shame I can’t post it. You have to do these things with a sense of humour if you want to stay on the same page, that’s all I’ll say, because there are no silver bullets.

• What did Tom say??
  Tom is the CEO of Parallel, which makes him my (former) bossman. I think he was slightly caught off guard but I can’t imagine that he wasn’t expecting it in the long grass. Not with the granularity of the way things have been, and the way we haven’t been getting our ducks in a row. At least now that we’ve squared the circle and engaged with the situation, we’ll be able to decouple and kick it to touch.
• Really am I ok??
  Yes, really! Buzzed man, buzzed!
• How do I feel now?
  Slightly jittery, in a way, but truly free. Empowered. I can make decisions. It’s scary and yet exhilarating. I’ve been saying to people it’s quite a buzz, an adrenaline rush and I should do this more often. It’s like an extreme sport. I guess it’s why people gamble with large sums of money.
• What did Annette say??
  Annette is my housemate/landlady. Well, Annette knew that I was thinking about it but like everyone else probably didn’t expect me to do it until I had the new job in the bag. It’s the Guerilla Career, ladies!
• Do I have a new job lined up?
  Not yet, but there are a number of possibilities, some which were about before I did this, and some which have cropped up in the last couple of days. It’s not looking too bad, I just have to decide what to do. Full-time, part-time, contract, freelance, maybe something completely different altogether (writing, anyone?)… The possibilities are actually the problem, there are so many.

  If you have a suggestion of any sort or a job lead either comment below or call/text me (+353 86 856 2978), or email me!

• Bxx5!
  Yes, very much so. But it could go the other way too, and that mightn’t be a bad thing, unless it collapses. hUxx0rz!

So there you have it. The best move yet of 2006 and fully in line with the master plan, so expect more daring and surprising moves quite soon. There are plans afoot…

In the meantime, I’ve seen ‘Dig!‘ the riotous, messy story of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, which is great demonstration of how not to pursue your creative dream; I thoroughly recommend it to you, especially if you have any interest in the creative process or music. It’s a rollercoaster. I also went to see ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston‘ a week ago which is a movie treading a similar path and again I recommend it, rivetting stuff about the fine line between creative genius and madness. I’m not a creative genius, and never will be, but it’s humbling to see how people who do have it can make a meal of it in one way or another. I need to be happy with what I have and just work hard to get where I’m going to.

(Continuously re-edited to solved a line-break problem. Am I the only person who hates Internet Exploder this much?)

Shouts out to Oana and Moni, who are sometimes reading my rambles on this site out in Romania, for reasons best known to themselves. And Tee and Lids and Dee, who also check it out, and Garv and Shell. And the rest of the crew.

That’s me, going home from somewhere. Click to get full size.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but I’ll say it again because I enjoy a bit of repetition; I like running. There has been an interesting idea that people have had from time to time which is that I’m not lazy. It’s rubbish. I am lazy. If I could sleep for twenty hours a day, I would, occasionally foraging for food and the toilet. If I could sit somewhere and stay there forever, being endlessly pandered to by divine beauties, I would. (Hey, who wouldn’t?)It’s good for me and keeps me fit. It’s challenging (occasionally bordering on brutal). It’s hard work, which conflicts directly with my inherent laziness and I like the challenge of that too. I always wanted to get into running but I never had the discipline or the lifestyle to accomodate it so I didn’t do it, which is a shame because now I’m that bit older and it’s harder work than it used to be.

I don’t like running on pavement or roads, which is part of what’s discouraged me in the past; the run to anywhere with soft ground can be sore on the knees and ankles. I like ‘off-road’, running cross-country, grass, mud, trees, uneven ground, holes, branches, obstacles, small vicious, hungry creatures… It’s more interesting and a lot less hard on the legs. Running on hard ground can really damage your legs through the impact they have to take, even with good running shoes. Also, I like mountain-biking, a sport that sadly I can’t really indulge in because I don’t live near any mountains, and I don’t have a car to get to them with. The Phoenix park is allegedly the biggest walled city park in Europe. I don’t know about that, it may well be true, but although truly massive and a great place to running or walking, an odd fact is that half of that isn’t accessible to the public; there is the President’s residence, the American ambassador’s residence, the Ordnance Survey offices… All sorts of stuff that you can’t get into because it is private. Which makes it a lot smaller in practice, and a little annoying to navigate around.Anyway, now I live beside the Phoenix Park and I’ve made myself do the seventeen or so minute run to the park and then run around there like a psychopath for as long as I can manage before I have to run back and get changed for work. Yes, I do this in the morning before work, in the dark, sometime between 6 and 7. I cheat sometimes, because Annette offers me a lift in and generally speaking I’d be a fool to pass that up. I’ll have to stop though because I’ve realised that I might be less focused when I get out of the car and start running, partly due to Annette’s sparkling company (which makes me believe there may be more to life than pain and misery, at the crucial moment when I need to believe in pain and misery), and partly due the fact that her car is a warm comfortable place to be. Once I get out I’ve lost some of my puritanical desire to inflict health and pain on myself in equal measure.

Phoenix park, early in the morning. Traffic jam already. Click to view larger.

I run, then I walk or jog, then I run, I sprint, I walk or jog, I stand and survey where I am in the darkness, I run, I walk or jog, chase deer and so on. It goes on like this for anywhere up to two hours (not in the morning runs, as a rule), by which time I can’t feel my legs any more. I do it more regularly recently, too.

It’s a bit Lord of The Rings in the park, sometimes. Click to view larger.

So, we’ve accepted that I do this thing, this running, which has me up and hurting myself at stupid hours of the morning, no matter how wet or cold it is. But why? I mean, I like running, but I also like ice cream and I haven’t tried to drown myself in it yet. The motivation is the maintainance of my health and fitness, which are things becoming ever more precious and dear to me now that I’m scant weeks away from being thirty-three, and also because the highlight of my week is the hour of five-a-side football that I play badly every Friday evening with a bunch of guys, most of whom are a lot better than me at football… Fitness is about the only thing I can count on to make sure that I don’t look like a complete fool on that pitch; I can break that down into two areas, my ability to sprint, and my remarkably large lungs, and obviously that’s all covered by fitness.

Fantastic views, beautiful meadows, deer, the park has it all.Shame it’s too dark to see any of it. Click to view larger.

But there’s more! I’ve had an ongoing obsession with my weight over the last few years. I have a stocky build and a slow metabolism, and combine that with the aforementioned apathy and you have a recipe for getting a bit too big around the middle for comfort. Before I forget, I’ve recently realised another possible motive for all of this; I’m living in a house with three attractive, sexy, strong-minded, independent women. I’ll be fairly surprised if I haven’t started lactating and synchronising my periods with them within another month. It’s great, sometimes I think it’s like a Carlsberg house-share, but maybe I’m secretly worried that I’m going to lose my manliness. It is true, as far as I know, that men sharing a house have higher testosterone levels; and a guy sharing with a group of women… I had better find my ruler and keep an eye on this… More about life in the house to follow.I’m never going to look like Johnny Depp, but at least I can avoid waddling around like the late John Candy (and I’ve come close, in dark days when I got stuck into my comfort food.). So, I feel I’m perpetually fighting the flab and trying to get back to seventy five kilos, like I was when I was nineteen or so… I actually managed to get very, very lean in Australia due to the eight hour a day workout from stacking boxes which were anywhere up to twenty kilos, higher than me, and that was no joke (aided by not being able to afford to eat huge amounts of food, which helped to stave off the extra fat). Running really is a great way to lose weight in a hurry and I have no doubt I’ll have a whole new set of stretch marks around my midriff to prove it.

I also started swimming in a pool near where I work, but that’s been a much less successful effort. Watching me in that pool, you’d think I hadn’t swam before. I drank my way from one end of the pool to the other like a huge ungainly water slug, I’m surprised they didn’t try to harpoon me on the way down to try and preserve the water level in the pool, and I’ve been finding all sorts of excuses not to get back into the water there. If came across Jaws and he decided to have a go at me, I’d just drink everything and strand him on the spot; it’s not an idle threat either. I’d do him.

Somewhere between this renewed assault on my health and fitness, and the season (it’s Spring, for those who hadn’t noticed) or perhaps the full moon, or maybe stress from work, I was feeling down this last weekend. I couldn’t sleep late last week, maybe getting two or three real hours of sleep in between being half awake, tossing and turning, thrashing around like a sweaty dying carp and waking myself up with talking loudly in my sleep. It was pretty awful and I was completely burnt out by the end of Saturday… The Friday night football game was great but my fitness deserted me as if I hadn’t been training during the week which was a bad feeling. That didn’t help, and I think the lack of sleep probably went a long way towards that.

So, that is the epic story of me and running. I probably haven’t put in half of what I intended but there’s more to come shortly about the delicate art of disorganised five-a-side football, and some other odds and ends…