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Eloïse 's American passport arrived on Friday, so she's now free to leave the US and travel abroad. Her Dutch passport should also arrive within the next couple of weeks.
Down at Maternal Connections on the same day, Eloïse weighed in at a very respectable 4570 g, although all of the other parents continue to comment on how small she is. I can't explain why their babies are so huge for their age, but Eloïse 's growth is well within the expected and desired range.
Jo alerted me to a campaign being waged over at Consument en Veiligheid (Consumer and Safety).
Their new Veilig Slapen (Sleep Safely) campaign claims that children who do not sleep in their own bed are 40 times more at risk of suffocating than those who do.
This preposterous claim is backed up by no evidence. Instead, a rather alarming TV ad has been produced to promote this destructive notion. And that's why Jo passed it on to me; she was afraid that we were putting Eloïse at risk.
As usual, there's another side to the story, one laid out in De Voordelen van Samen Slapen (The Advantages of Sleeping Together). This article makes references to the research of James McKenna (no relation to Sarah, as far as I know), which was conducted at the Mother-Baby Behavioural Sleep Laboratory in the US. The FAQ on this subject makes for interesting reading and reaches much more nuanced conclusions than the polarised Dutch campaign.
As Meridith Small put it:
For millions of years, the normal sleeping position of human infants has been on their backs nestled next to mother. Only in western cultures do we force babies to sleep alone, thinking they are more safe and independent placed in a crib with no contact. But history, and how most babies sleep in other cultures, suggests that the West is out of step with what is best physically and emotionally for our children."
And some people say that I glorify all things Dutch. Hah!
Finally, I can reveal to you the plan that has been in place for, well, I no longer even know how long; more than one year, but less than four, that's for sure.
So, without further ado, beating about the bush, procrastination, delaying tactics or stalling: Sarah and I are moving to The Netherlands on 12th August; back to Amsterdam, to be precise.
In anticipation of this move, I have resigned from my position at Google and am now serving out my notice. My last day of work is expected to be 2nd August, but I'll be using up a couple of weeks of accrued holiday prior to that.
We have also given notice on our house, so we've pretty much sealed our fate on this side of the Atlantic. On the other side of the ocean, we have rented a house in the gezellige neighbourhood of Amsterdam known as de Jordaan and are looking forward to moving in.
As most of our friends know, we've actually had the plan of moving back to The Netherlands every year since 2002, primarily because I would reliably reach an annual point whereby I felt I couldn't stand another moment living in the US.
Somehow, with considerable encouragement and propping up from Sarah, I would manage to find it in myself each time to persevere with the pursuit of significant financial gain, rather than yield to the more immediately gratifying option of resigning and leaving behind the misery of living in the US.
The idea was that, if I could just bend over and take it like a man for a few more years, it might just end up being the very last time that I would be beholden to another person or institution for a living. Sarah was right; it made sound financial sense, but it went against the grain, because I have never before opted to remain in a situation that I felt was soul-destroying. It was hard and there were a multitude of moments along the way at which my spirit flagged.
This all makes it sound as if Google has been a horrible place to work, but that's actually far from being the case. On the contrary, the company has been incredibly good to me, paying me handsomely, feeding and massaging me, taking care of all of my US immigration bureaucracy and, most recently, allowing me a stupendous seven weeks of paternity leave. It's hard to have complaints about treatment like that.
No, it's more the case that the US for me, personally, has shown itself to be an incredibly suffocating and toxic place to live. I could ramble on incessantly about my experiences as a stranger in this strange land, but suffice it to say that I have experienced this country as obsessively politically correct, environmentally irresponsible, globally contemptuous, geographically ignorant, woefully poorly educated, historically oblivious, gullible, jingoistic, beligerent, falsely proud, maniacally religious, selfish, greedy, poorly integrated, uncaring, apathetic and generally bereft of any sense of community or collective purpose beyond self-aggrandisement, a pursuit fuelled by the usual government-instigated sabre-rattling and concoction of a common enemy du jour.
As usual, the rest of the world gets dragged along in the wake of this clumsy playground bully of a nation, sending shockwaves rippling across the entire globe, consequences with which the rest of us must live.
Again, another disclaimer is perhaps in order. I have nothing against Americans as individuals. I have many good friends who happen to be American (er, Sarah, for example) and they, too, are appalled by what they see happening to this country. They, too, are sickened by the religious psychosis of their so-called leaders and the apathy or resignation with which this is generally met by their fellow citizens.
It seems that after decades upon decades of being governed by self-serving profiteers in a two-party system, Americans as a people have come to expect no better. Huge numbers of them are resigned to the fact that, no matter who is in power, they are pretty much fucked anyway and at the mercy of whichever flavour of glib liar happens to inhabit the whitehouse at the time.
As an alien (such a lovely word), it's time to put my money where my mouth is and extricate myself and my family from the system. My feet are itching to walk on board a plane and distance myself from all of the god-fearing, Bush-voting, flag-waving, chest-beating, SUV-driving, latte-sipping numbskulls with a 'Support Our Troops' bumper sticker. You may all collectively kiss my arse.
It's time to pull the plug and resume real life where I left it five and a half years ago, far away from the tinseltown that is Silicon Valley. Thankfully, Sarah shares my belief that a better life awaits her elsewhere, so there's never been any disagreement over the decision to leave. With little Eloïse recently having put in an appearance, the timing really couldn't be better, as Sarah's life has also reached an important watershed.
Will I miss anything about the US? Definitely. Friday lunches with friends at Clarke's; free refills on soft drinks; criminally good milkshakes at The Creamery; Krispy Kreme; Pizza Chicago; the innumerable good places to get breakfast at the weekend; the scenery of the hills around the peninsula; biking up the beautiful Marin Headlands and looking down over San Francisco Bay; the Californian coastline; the wonderful National Park Service; the many squirrels in our area; the colourful birds that fly in our skies; the balmy climate; the relatively close proximity to Hawaii (a pleasant 5 hour flight from here); the amount of personal space living in an uncrowded part of the world affords you; and, not to be forgotten, having worked for one of the hottest and most influential companies currently on the planet, alongside the smartest team of sysadmins I have ever had the pleasure of calling my colleagues.
But that really does sum up the good points about living here, as far as I'm concerned. Every other aspect of living in the US irks me and has slowly eroded my patience to the point whereby I can no longer leave the house and walk in any direction of the compass for sixty seconds without being riled by some trivial, yet cogent testament to stupidity or grotesqueness. Fuck this shit; enough is enough.
So, what's next for us? In the immediate future, full-time parenthood. Eloïse won't be a baby for long, so we intend to enjoy every moment of her burgeoning youth and miss out on nothing. Obviously, that means that neither of us has any plans to work for the foreseeable future.
Naturally, some things cannot be put off. Sarah will enrol in Dutch language classes and I will be attempting to shed the 20+ kilos of tripe and flab that I have gained since moving to the US. Both of these projects will take some time to complete, although I sincerely hope to no longer be a fat bastard some time before Sarah can speak fluent Dutch.
Our new home is a six month lease with the option to renew for a further six months. We chose this particular construction, because we intend to quickly begin the search for a more permanent home to purchase. (Thanks, by the way, to Marc and Jo for viewing the property and voicing your opinions.)
In the meantime, the supermarket is just a few doors away, with a natural supermarket just a little further up in the same street. In fact, our street has its own home page, with a list of every business that operates there.
It's going to be so nice to be able to push Eloïse in her pram when we need to do groceries, rather than having to take the car. Indeed, we have no plans to own a car in Amsterdam, as bicycles and public transport will cover almost every eventuality. For the other occasions, there's Greenwheels.
In the longer term, Sarah and I will both need to find ways to socialise and achieve intellectual fulfilment, the most obvious voids created by the vacuum of our abandoned jobs. Sarah will have her Dutch classes and a mother's group; I have a number of computer projects that I can work on, but those are solitary pursuits, so the need for socialisation will remain.
I may therefore look into starting my own company. I'm currently considering what exactly such a venture would offer, but I'm sure it would have something to do with the Internet and possibly also music. I'm also entertaining the idea of running a coffee and cake shop, although I'd probably want to find an experienced partner to join me in such an endeavour, because I know bugger all about the catering business.
Lastly, I intend to show Sarah around Europe and then the rest of the world. We have a lot of ground to cover before Eloïse reaches schooling age. I've promised friends in Switzerland and New Zealand that we will visit them soon after relocating, so I have to make good on those promises, too.
So, just in case you were in any doubt, I can assure you that we're going to have no shortage of things to do. Between caring for Eloïse , Dutch lessons, house-hunting, world travel, our hobbies and looking into business ventures, we're not going to find ourselves twiddling our thumbs in boredom any time soon.
Sarah and I are both very excited at the prospect of living in Amsterdam (again). Whilst we've been extremely privileged during our time in Silicon Valley, it's been taxing, too, and I, for one, am feeling quite exhausted after the last half decade here. I'm looking forward to slowly recharging my batteries over the course of the next couple of years, Eloïse 's demands notwithstanding.
As luck would have it, we already have our first visitor booked to come and stay with us. My good friend Geoff has already purchased his plane ticket and will be coming to stay with us for a week in October. That's going to be a lot of fun.
If you're interested in the area in which we're going to live, check out some of the links below:
It arrived! I've only played four of the concerts so far, but the quality is outstanding.
I can't wait for the North American tour in September.
Eloïse 's Dutch passport finally arrived yesterday in a FedEx envelope. It was waiting on our doorstep when we returned from the annual Google company picnic.
This signals the end of the baby bureaucracy on this side of the Atlantic. What a lucky girl she is, with her dual-nationality and double passports. Those are things that neither her mother nor father can boast.
Tomorrow will be my last day in the office at Google.
In the morning, I will get on my bike and ride for the last time my route along Showers Drive, California Street and Rengstorff Avenue, finally arriving at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, where the security guard will check my badge and tell me to Have a great day! I still don't know his name, even though he's been waving me into the grounds of the campus ever since Google took over the building from SGI in early 2004.
I think one of my colleagues is arranging an off-site lunch for me tomorrow, so I might actually have eaten my last lunch in the Google café this afternoon. I didn't even stop to consider it at the time. As usual, I just got annoyed at the speed (or lack thereof) at which people were choosing their food and equipping themselves with cutlery.
Shit, I'll miss that café when I'm gone; I've almost been institutionalised by it. Thanks to that café, one need never carry cash or cook for oneself. Only at the weekends does one flounder and wonder what the gnawing in one's stomach might be.
My in-box of my work e-mail is down to a single message, one reminding me to pick up a beach towel if I happened to miss out on them at the Engineering off-site party a few weeks ago. That towel will almost certainly be the last item of exclusive Google company gear that I get to bring home with me.
I have one outstanding piece of code left to check into our source management system. Once my office mate performs the code review, I'll check it in and my slate will pretty much be clean. No-one is waiting for further code reviews from me, everything is documented and I've fixed all of the bugs I can fix.
There won't be much left for me to do in the afternoon, except clear my desk and wander around and shake a few hands. Bollocks! I'm making myself feel melancholic, just thinking about it.
Four years is a significant chunk of my life and four years at Google feel like eight spent anywhere else. I've been dreaming of this day for years and, now that it's here, it's bittersweet. I always knew it would be, though; this isn't the first job I've resigned from, but it is, in many ways, the most memorable. It will affect the rest of my life in ways no other job has or really could. For that, I will always be grateful beyond mere words.
Officially, I still have a couple of weeks of paid leave before I take my final leave of the company, but in practical terms, my retirement begins the day after tomorrow. That's only a day away and yet, even at this late stage, I still can't even conceive of not having to work again; or even of having been to work at Google for the very last time. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge at that company and I find myself feeling very sentimental about the place at this moment in time.
Bollocks! Tomorrow's going to be a tough day.
It's been a bit quiet on the bash completion front this year. Work commitments, the planning of an international move and the care of a pregnant wife, later followed by the birth of a daughter, have sought to keep me away from hacking much code in recent times.
20050121 was the major release of the year, followed by 20050712 some eight days ago, which incorporated the vast number of patches I had received in the last six months. Inevitably, a couple of bugs sneaked into that release, so I've just released 20050720 to remedy them.
Well, my last day at Google came and passed very much as I expected it would. I tied up all of my loose ends, went out to lunch at the Palo Alto Creamery and then spent the afternoon walking around the various buildings, shaking the hand of a lot of people with whom I've worked over the last few years.
Then, I collected a few items together and biked away from the building for the last time, with the strains of the Inspiral Carpets' Two Worlds Collide in my headphones. Somehow, this song, playing at random, captured the mood of the moment very well.
Before I left, I managed to have a very brief chat with my boss, Marc. It turns out that neither he nor his boss wishes to accept my resignation. Instead, I've been informally offered the opportunity to keep my job and work remotely from Amsterdam. It seems they would rather deal with the inconvenience of having me work from the other side of the world than lose a senior member of staff.
Whilst I'm incredibly flattered by the offer, I'm currently unable to assess how I will feel about it three months from now. The last few years have been incredibly tiring and I have spent the last twelve months growing accustomed to the idea that I would be leaving the company. Accordingly, my head is filled with exciting plans for the future, none of which involve the demands of holding down a full-time job.
On the other hand, Google is one of the most dynamic companies on the planet and has realised just a small fraction of the endeavours with which it will dazzle the world in the years to come. Many people would give their right testicle for the chance to work there, so wouldn't I be crazy just to turn my back on the place and walk away, even if I no longer need the money?
It is with these thoughts that I now wrestle.
I've proposed to my boss that I embark on a three month unpaid sabbatical, at the end of which I would either make a firm commitment to continue working for Google or shake hands and go my own merry way. I have yet to discover with what kind of reception my proposal will meet.
Even if I were to decide that I would like to stay with the company, there would be a lot of details to work out. Apart from salary and secondary benefits, would I work from home or bike into the local office each day? What work would I do? Exactly what I do now, a subtle variation or something wildly different?
It makes no sense to speculate at this point, since I know neither whether this offer will continue to solidify, nor whether I will have any interest in it once Sarah and I have started to live our new life in Amsterdam, with the myriad new opportunities and distractions it will offer.
We'll just have to wait and see what develops.
Bloem Esther Lotte has been born to my good friends Jules and Linda. If you can't read Dutch, you might still appreciate the photos.
Jules and I used to work together at Sonera (which has since abandoned its Dutch operations). When Red Hat later headhunted me, I arranged for Jules to be hired, too. We left for England on what we thought was a one month trip, but Red Hat reneged on the deal and required us to stay in England. I walked away in disgust, but Jules stayed for a full year.
I then returned to Amsterdam, where I met Sarah, which resulted in my taking a job with Linuxcare (now Levanta) a few months later. I was supposed to spend the first month in San Francisco, then return to Amsterdam. Oddly enough, Linuxcare changed its mind and asked me to stay in the US. Déjà vu or what?
The moral of the story? If you get offered a job with an overseas company that claims to be willing to allow you to work from your own country, be very suspicious. It works out perfectly fine for many people, but has yielded bizarre results for me.
Still, it worked out OK in the end and, after 5.5 years, I'm finally getting to return home, with my own little daughter. I'm hoping Wiesje and Bloempje will become good friends, just like their parents.
Briton Gary McKinnon was recently arrested and is awaiting extradition to the US. He is charged with penetrating US military networks and causing huge amounts of damage, although this BBC radio interview with him paints a more subtle picture.
Whilst he did, indeed, penetrate US military computers, he did so with the default administrator passwords of Windows systems that had been connected to the public Internet. Gary is facing 70 years in a US prison. If he goes down, they ought to send the system administrator of those boxes to share a cell with him, because allowing systems like that to hang on a public network is nothing short of criminal negligence.
Anyway, the interview is fascinating, because Gary claims to have been in search of and found proof of US involvement in the use of extraterrestrial technology. Gary talks candidly and lucidly about his experiences and paints a picture of himself as a tragically obsessed individual whose life became synonymous with the pursuit of more information. If he is to be believed, he caused no damage at all, beyond creating a clinical need to reinstall the systems through which he passed, as these had now been compromised and could no longer be trusted. Of course, any system whose administrator password has not been changed before it is connected to a public network is, by definition, untrustworthy and must be regarded as compromised.
Fascinating listening. Check it out.
Today is the 6th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day, so go on, appreciate me!
Whilst browsing around, looking for a new version of the firmware for my iRiver H140, I chanced upon Rockbox, which, in its own words, is Open Source replacement firmware for the Archos Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio MP3 players.
What that description fails to mention is that Rockbox is also in the process of being ported to the iRiver H1x0 series of audio jukeboxes. The code is still in alpha state, but this comparison of features in the original firmware and the Rockbox firmware makes for impressive reading.
I was intrigued enough to give it a whirl. One very slick feature of Rockbox is that it turns your iRiver into a dual-boot system. If you depress the Record button whilst turning on the system, it boots the original iRiver firmware instead of the Rockbox firmware. That's handy to get access to the FM tuner, for example, which still isn't implemented in the Rockbox firmware.
Another nice feature is the very fast boot time, which is around 5 seconds, comparing very favourably with the original iRiver firmware boot time of about 20 seconds. There's also the oft-requested feature of truly gapless playback, which is nice for ripped DJ mix CDs, amongst other things.
Other cool features are some trivial games and demons (Mandelbrot, Snake, Patience, etc.), the ability to customise the main display, by using a so-called WPS (While Playing Screen) template. This basically allows you to design how you want the main screen to look, including title and artist information, battery life, etc. It's incredibly flexible, even allowing you to scroll items and alternate between multiple items per line.
Here's a sample .wps file with the resulting display on the iRiver:
· %s%?it<%in. %it|%fn> · %s%?ia<%ia|%d2> · %s%?id<%id|%d1> %pc/%pt %?pp<[%pp/%pe]|> %pb %?It<Coming up in %pr:|%acRetrieving data> %s%?It<· %In. %It|%?Fn<· %Fn|%acfor next song...> %s%?Ia<· %Ia|%?D2<· %D2|> %s%?Id<· %Id|%?D1<· %D1|>> %?It<%?pn<· [%pn]|>|%?pn<Playlist: %pn|>> %pm %acBattery: %bt (%bl) %fc %?fv<%ffHz| %ffHz> %?fv<%fbK VBR| %fbK> |
|
Rockbox offers a large choice of fonts to use on the display. In the above photo, you can see the Atadore font.
Rockbox also has support for interesting features, such as crossfade and replay gain, things completely lacking from the official firmware.
There are a few glitches in the Rockbox firmware and I've managed to crash my player a couple of times, but it offers enough niceties that I think I'm going to stick with it from this point forward. And, when I need the FM radio or something else not yet supported by Rockbox, it's trivial to boot back to the official iRiver firmware.
If you have an H1x0 player (or one of the other supported players), have a look at Rockbox. It'll breathe new life into an already great device and set it even further apart from the iPod.
I don't like to leave things to chance, and I really don't like to leave my data to chance, so I decided that I need an extra layer of security with our upcoming move. With all of my computers soon to be in the hold of a ship, what happens to my data if the ship sinks? Exactly.
I'm planning to carry my laptop onto the plane, but it has no room for my data (loaded with OGG files, you see), so I needed an alternative. A quick trip to Fry's later and I was the proud owner of a 400Gb USB Seagate drive.
That baby has now been formatted with a single ext3 file-system and is now happily soaking up all of my CVS source code, OGG files, photos, Web site pages, home directories and what have you. There'll be bags of room to spare when it's finished, too. The only bummer is that my fileserver appears to have only USB 1.1 ports. It's a good thing I'm not in a hurry, but I'll have to fix that at some point in the future.
When we leave for Amsterdam, that drive is going with me onto the plane. I don't want a dirty great thing like that in my hand luggage, so I'll probably entrust it to the hold of the plane. What are the chances that our suitcases get trashed and the boat carrying our belongings sinks or suffers flooding? Never say never, I suppose, but it seems unlikely. And if the plane goes down, well then, I won't be needing my data after all.
This page contains all entries posted to Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger in July 2005. They are listed from oldest to newest.
June 2005 is the previous archive.
August 2005 is the next archive.
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