Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

It's taken me a while to write this entry, as it's about something quite different to the usual trivia that I either extol or grizzle about.

Can lightning strike in the same place twice? It appears so.

The story begins with my uncle Paul. My uncle Paul died of cancer a couple of months ago. Nothing unusual about that, you might say; thousands around the world die of cancer every day. We weren't close, but it was quite a blow for my mother. My uncle lived in Winnipeg, Canada and I hadn't seen him since my wedding. Before that, I hadn't seen him in some 25 years. That's how the Macdonalds are.

Fast-forward to 30th March just gone. Lucas is born. In the evening of the day of his birth, I call my mother in Florida to inform her that she now has a grandson. After hearing my news and congratulating me, she tells me that she also has some news for me.

It turns out that the funeral parlour that handled my uncle Paul's death recently received a letter from afar. The letter was accompanied by a request, that an enclosed letter be forwarded to my uncle Paul's widow, my aunt Charleen. This request was duly honoured and the letter sent on.

When Charleen received the forwarded letter, she was surprised by its content. Amongst other things, it politely requested that a further letter be forwarded to my mother, wherever she may happen to be.

Upon reading the letter, Charleen called my mother to inform her of its existence and let her know that she would be sending it on.

The letter had not yet arrived in Florida when I called my mother to tell her about Lucas ' arrival. Nevertheless, because she had had it read to her over the phone by Charleen, she was familiar with its content and could at least give me the gist of it. I was rather surprised to learn of the author's identity and the nature of the letter.

I asked my mother to scan the letter and send it to me via e-mail as soon as she received the physical copy. A few days later, it arrived in my in-box.

The letter was handwritten and metrically arranged, i.e. written in rhyming couplets. This made an already unusual missive even more improbable.

The words told a melancholic tale of one man's quest to locate two people who had inadvertently disappeared from his life almost 41 years ago. They painted a tragic picture. I was left with a strong impression of a man tormented by his past, such that his past had become an inseparable part of his present and the subject of an ongoing quest into the future.

At the foot of the letter, the man had signed his name and given his contact details. His address, his e-mail address, telephone number and even his mobile number were there.

If you haven't already guessed, I am one of the two people he had spent 41 years searching for.

I was suddenly struck by the power I now wielded over this man's life and emotional well-being. By the simple act of picking up the phone and dialling the number at the foot of the page, I could end this man's fruitless, four decade search with a single, swift mercy-blow. Alternatively, I could shrug off the opportunity, do nothing and leave the man to suffer. If I chose the latter course, the man would likely spend the rest of his life not knowing what had become of the two people whose destiny had somehow slipped through his fingers.

The man in question is my biological father.

All I've ever known about my natural father is that he was very young when I was born. I also knew his name, but I've been apt to forget it for months on end over the years.

From that last statement, you might correctly surmise that the identity of my natural father has never been a topic of great interest to me. I've certainly never felt the need to go in search of him. I was adopted at a very young age by my grandparents, so as far as I was concerned, I had a mother and a father.

Unlike most people in a similar situation, it just never mattered to me that I did not know anything about the man who had helped to bring me into the world. The fact that I shared some DNA with him did nothing to distinguish him in my eyes from the billions of other strangers roaming our planet. In my case, blood most definitely did have the same viscosity as water.

Possibly, that (lack of) reaction stems from the fact that I've never been close to anyone in my family. It's my observation that the Macdonalds are a pretty distant bunch of people (and not just geographically). Without our blood ties, it's unlikely any of us would ever have chosen to have anything to do with any of the others. We're not the only such family, but most people don't care to admit their kin are this dysfunctional.

My grandmother, who raised me, would complain at regular intervals that her children, having left the parental home, would barely even bother to pick up the phone once a year at Christmas. Visits from them were, by and large, an even more infrequent occurrence. By the time I reached puberty, I felt a strong desire to fly the nest, too, so I had some understanding of this behaviour.

My grandmother loved me and, at some level, I must have loved her. Her love, however, was somewhat pathological in nature. She needed me to fill an otherwise unbearable vacuum in her life, a chasm of festering, unfulfilled desire that frequently bubbled to the surface to be vented in the form of rancorous bile towards what seemed like the rest of mankind. Me, my grandfather, the neighbours, British people, protestants... anyone would do if she needed to vent some anger.

My grandmother was one of those people who talked incessantly to her television set, as if the people on it could hear her. She rarely had a good word to say about anyone and I think slagging off other people might actually have been her greatest pleasure in life, albeit a not terribly fulfilling one. She had few other pleasures to speak of, save for a gin and tonic, so it's not that far-fetched a claim.

My grandmother's embitterment probably contributed to her children staying away from her. It certainly can't have done much to endear her to them. And so I turned out to be no different. Once I managed to get out from under her roof, I rarely called or visited. I had some warm feelings for her, but our relationship was so antagonistic that if we had only spent five minutes per year in the same room for the rest of our lives, neither of us would have been able to use the time for anything more constructive than berating the other.

My grandfather was a decent bloke, but by the time I was adopted, he wanted little more out of life than to retreat behind his newspaper, coming out only once my grandmother had gone to bed, to watch the snooker. He was a mild-mannered fellow, but I was never really able to respect him, because of the shameless way he allowed himself to be derided and emasculated by his wife. Consequently, we didn't have much of a relationship, either.

I therefore left home with little concept of family. The only family I had known had appeared not to particularly like one another. Birthdays were not celebrated and, to this day, I still don't know my grandparents' dates of birth. We were a group of highly disparate and incompatible people, who -- for no good reason I could fathom -- had chosen to live together in the same house.

So, it's fair to say that I had little interest in family when I left home. I certainly wasn't about to go in search of more of it. Whoever my father was, he had his life and I had mine.

Perhaps surprisingly, I've kept that attitude most of my life. I long ago realised that if I were going to have any close family relationships, I was going to have to engineer them from scratch and create some new human-beings with whom to surround myself.

Sarah has spent the last eight years attempting to grind me down and mollify my stance on this matter, She was, from the very beginning, wildly curious about my natural father. She forced me to ask my biological mother questions about him that made me feel uncomfortable, because I didn't care about the answers and didn't want to create the impression I did.

When Eloïse was born, however, the issue of who my father was ceased to be a matter for just me. My father was, after all, Eloïse 's grandfather. At the very least, perhaps there was important medical information to be had. Perhaps my father's side of the family had some hereditary illness, knowledge about which might prove vital to the health of my children in the future.

So, I very slowly started to soften towards Sarah's insistence that I should make an effort to trace my biological father. By the time Lucas was born, I had only very recently reached the stage that I was prepared to write a letter to the popular Dutch TV programme, Spoorloos, to see whether they could and would assist in trying to locate my father.

How could I have known that, within a matter of a few weeks, my father would surface under his own steam?

I decided almost immediately after reading his letter that I would contact him. On humanitarian grounds alone, it deserved a call. The man had already served a life sentence.

The weekend following the receipt of his letter, I made contact with my father via the telephone. You can imagine what a shock it was for him when I told him who I was. I was waiting for the dull thud of him passing out and failing to the floor at the other end, but it never came.

Just like that, one evening in early April, 41 years of searching came to an end.

He still lives in Ireland, near Dublin, which is where he met and got to know my mother. He told me that he has often stopped in front of the house where the Macdonald family lived in the mid-sixties, imagining my mother, a teenage girl at the time, at the window. I wonder how many times he's stopped in front of that window in the course of the last 41 years.

I can't imagine what it must have been like, to be haunted for 41 years by the few precious memories of your newborn son, to be regularly confronted by the sight of the places you used to walk, hand-in-hand, with your long-lost first love. Imagine not knowing what happened to either... One day, they're just gone; without a trace.

I find it poetic and poignant that my mother had to lose a brother in order for her son to be found by his father. It's the stuff of a naff soap-opera, but however far-fetched this plot line happens to sound, it's perfectly true.

My father's name is Tony and it turns out that I also have three half-brothers. None of those has any children yet, however, so Tony not only made the acquaintance of his first-born son during that first conversation, but also discovered the existence of his first two grandchildren (and little Lucas was still only a week old at the time): rather a lot to take on board in one evening.

Apparently, my uncle Paul's death was announced in an obituary in a local Winnipeg paper. Jason, Tony's youngest son, found the obituary using Google and showed it to his dad, who must have muttered something along the lines of, 'My God, it's them!'

Tony only recently told his other children about me. They were enthusiastic and wanted to help him with his search. If Tony had told them a few weeks earlier, my uncle Paul would have still been alive and they wouldn't have found his obituary. If they had been told a few weeks later, the obituary would have already been removed. Thus, there was a relatively short window of time in which their search would have yielded the desired results.

I don't believe in fate, but fate is making a pretty good case for itself in these circumstances.

And so it comes to pass that the company known as Google exerts its mighty, life-altering influence on me for the second time. Lightning strikes twice, indeed.

I'm still reeling from the realisation of just how profoundly Google and, by extension, the Internet, are able to influence and affect our lives. There must be thousands of people out there with stories like mine. Even back in 2001/2002, we were already receiving e-mails from people who had found lost family members or diagnosed their own illness and managed to save their own life. Amazing.

Since our initial telephone conversation, Tony and I have exchanged a few e-mails. Whilst he has my blog and our photo gallery to tell him what kind of person I turned out to be, Tony is still something of a mystery to me. The first photos from his side arrived in my in-box only a couple of days ago, so I've only just discovered what he and my half-brothers look like.

There's definitely a strong resemblance between Tony and me. There's an expression on his face in those photos that I've seen spread across my face in photos of me.

The initial telephone conversation was quite relaxed, all things considered. Any initial nerves soon subsided. However, I think if we were to continue the communication by telephone, things might soon become rather stilted. After all, we don't know each other at all, so it would be a bit forced to call each other up and attempt to chat as if we had the slightest clue about the daily grind of the other's life.

It's therefore important that we meet up soon and consolidate the contact we've already had. The plan is for Tony and his wife, Bernie, to come here on 12th June and stay with us for a week.

Assuming that contact goes well -- and I can't imagine that it wouldn't -- we will then head off to Ireland during the summer holiday to meet the extended family.

The idea of an initial meeting in a smaller circle is appealing. There's a lot of catching up to do, and many questions to be asked and answered; on both sides. Much of that will be better suited to a small group, as it would be difficult to focus on a lot of this personal history with a wider audience, most of whom weren't born when the events being discussed were unfolding. I suspect it may also be easier to speak frankly in a smaller circle.

30th March was a memorable day. Not only did I gain a beautiful son, but I also learnt that my biological father was looking for me. I had expected to gain a child that day, but it came as a rather large surprise to also gain a parent.

Life is bizarre; it really is. I thought the turbulence of my youth had finally been left behind when I turned my back on Silicon Valley and headed home to sleepy Amsterdam to raise a family. Little did I know that precisely that very concept -- family -- was soon to send such huge ripples radiating across the placid waters of my life.

Even when your life is as peaceful and seemingly uneventful as mine, the next surprise is always lurking just around the corner, right when you least expect it.

Amazing.

News has reached me in the last few weeks of the death of two of my former Google colleagues. Both of them were software engineers. At least one died of an illness. It's not yet known what the other's cause of death was.

While I was still working there, two other colleagues died. One had a dodgy heart, the other committed suicide.

A couple of years ago, a bloke I had been instrumental in hiring also committed suicide.

That's five deaths that I, alone, know of; and two of those were within a matter of weeks. Who knows how many others have perished in parts of the company whose grapevine doesn't reach me?

It's enough to make one feel mortal.

After a seemingly unending sabbatical, Google have finally called in my number. Some time in early June, I ceased to be an employee.

My manager-to-be (if I were to return to work) had recently written and told me that it was make-your-mind-up time. I had been having a terrible time of it, mustering the strength of character to close the book on the last five years and say goodbye to this amazing company. There were so many other things I wanted to do with my life, but there's only one Google and it's doing incredible things, too. What we've seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg of what's to come in the years ahead. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?

And so I vacillated endlessly, not wanting to return to the rigours of the working week, but also not wanting to sever my ties with Google. When I was forced into a corner, however, what I had actually known for quite a while became very plain, indeed; namely that it would be very hard to resume a position I had once held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, many thousands of kilometres away in Amsterdam.

My manager would be a long way away, my colleagues would be a long way away, and the focus of my projects would also be a long way away. To top it all, the atmosphere and ethos of all that I regard to be what Google actually is would also be far removed. No more Google cafés, massages, guest speakers, etc. In many ways, the Mountain View campus, the company's headquarters, is Google, as far as I'm concerned. That's where it all happens; that's where the projects are (for the most part) conceived and developed; that's where the top hackers beaver away into the small hours.

Yes, working from home in Amsterdam, I doubt that the Google experience would have felt very much like Google at all. I would have been marginalised, trying to accomplish by e-mail and telephone calls what a walk down the corridor and a few words in someone's ear used to achieve. That's what I tell myself, anyway.

It feels a bit like leaving school, in that end-of-an-era sense. Jobs come and go, but there's only one Google. Not only was it a unique place to work, but it has changed the future course of my life, rendering me (and my family) independent of and free from the shackles of wage slavery. As such, it wasn't just a job and I have come to feel very sentimental about it.

But now it's over and the time has come to make my peace with that fact, however much I wistfully and privately reminisce about my days in Mountain View. It's time to look to the future, not yearn for the past. Ha! Easier said than done.

By the way, Google Earth is now available for Linux.

Last weekend was a lot of fun. My friend Peter ventured up here for the weekend at short notice. Peter who?

I shared an office with Peter at Google in Mountain View for about three years between 2002 and 2005. We listened to each other's CDs, watched episodes of The Office and Ali G, shared company gossip, discussed our post-IPO plans, reviewed the day's Tour de France stage... shit, we were even known to work on the same project together. Rarely did we piss each other off.

Yes, I could have done a lot worse for an office mate, and so it was with a broad smile that I headed towards Schiphol airport Friday evening to pick him up. Peter lives in Zürich now, having moved there from Mountain View just a month ago to work in Google's Swiss office.

Peter's still very much a Google employee in heart and soul, whereas I have only token Googler status these days. He's probably more motivated in his job now than at any time during the period in which we shared an office (a causal relationship?). For me, on the other hand, Google feels very much a part of a bygone era. I harbour vaguely romantic feelings for that phase of my life, but it's all wistful nostalgia and doesn't feel real any more.

Anyway, apart from talking about the good old days, we spent the weekend walking around Amsterdam and drinking plenty of good coffee.

On Monday, we drove to Zandvoort and went for a walk on the beach. In spite of the freezing temperature, it felt relatively mild, as there was very little wind. Later in the day, we drove to Haarlem and had a look around the city before dropping Peter off at the airport on the way home.

It was nice to have a visitor for a few days, especially since we know so few people in Amsterdam these days. Human contact rarely goes beyond interaction in shops and cafés. Sad, but true; we need to put some effort into changing that.

Even to someone like me, it's shocking how much information is publically available on-line. Becoming an amateur private detective is getting easier all the time.

Case in point: our new house. I wanted to know who our new neighbours were, so I requested the ownership records for the parcels of land on either side of our new house.

This ended up costing me €2.83 per house, so the information's not free, but it is publically available. At this stage, I already know the names of our neighbours and the amount they each paid for their respective houses; this in spite of the fact that the owner of the house to the right of us hasn't even moved in yet.

Armed with this information, I turn to -- what else? -- Google. By now, everyone has heard of the concept of googling prospective boy- and girlfriends. Naturally, the technique works equally well for any other type of human-being.

Within seconds, I've found a genealogical site with details of my right-hand neighbour's children and wife. I know the number of children he has, their names, where they were born and even the names of his wife's parents. The only barrier to my discovering more is the speed at which I can read and assimilate the information.

After a couple of minutes, I know my right-hand neighbour's current job and employer, as well as his last two places of work. I also know a couple of locations where he has lived in the past. To top it off, I have a photo of the man, so I'll recognise him the first time that I see him.

Now it's the turn of the left-hand neighbour. I can't find anything about the man of the house, but the lady of the house starts popping up all over the place. She has quite a public function and I realise I've probably seen her on local TV.

What about the current owner of the house we're buying? Of course, I'd already done the research on this person as soon as I discovered his name in the draft copy of the deed of sale I was sent for review. He turned out to have had quite an impact on the world, having invented something that has gone on to become ubiquitous in first-world households.

You'll notice that I don't tell you what he invented, nor what my left-hand or right-hand neighbours do for a living. Why? In a word: privacy. Yes, this is all public information, but it's one thing for me to do the research to satisfy my own curiosity and quite another for me to dump the results in my blog and reveal people's identity and the location of their private residence.

Along the same lines, although I also googled the address of our new house and was able to piece together which businesses had been run from there before the property was converted into a house, I can't be specific about what I discovered without revealing its location. In fact, there's probably already enough information in this entry for a determined researcher to start their own investigation and ultimately uncover the facts. Not that I terribly mind people knowing where I live; there are a lot of nutters running around, but what are you going to do? Hide? Nevertheless, not everyone is as comfortable with the idea.

As time goes by, this trend of people, who, once upon a time, could expect to remain all but anonymous, becoming unwitting public figures, is likely to continue. If you ever speak at a conference, write for a magazine with an on-line presence, talk to a reporter, hold a public function or simply rise to the top of your profession, the chances are that your identity can be ascertained and various facts about your life pieced together. Google, public records and a little bit of patience are all that's required.

Well, it's been all go over at Macdonald Acres.

Our big move happens next Friday and we're still in the thick of packing up our belongings. Jack, Sarah's brother, arrived this afternoon and will be staying with us for a couple of days. It's nice to have a visitor again.

My theoretical last day of employment with Google came and went, but not without event. Senior staff with four years of experience working for the company are something of a rarity and cannot, by definition, be hired afresh, so I have been made a generous offer to remain with the company even after our transatlantic move.

After some surprisingly easy negotiations, the upshot is as follows. I will leave Google Inc. (the American company) and receive the offer of a transfer to Google BV (the Dutch company). The new salary I have been offered is generous by Dutch standards and the small number of unvested shares I have outstanding would continue to vest at the same rate as now.

Since I honestly don't know how I will feel about the prospect of full-time employment three months from now (after all, I've spent the last year thinking that I would take on the role of full-time father and travel around Europe with Sarah), I'm going to take a three month unpaid sabbatical from now until early November.

At the end of this sabbatical, I will either accept the transfer to Google Netherlands or simply thank them for their kind offer and choose a new path in life.

If I do choose to work for Google Netherlands, it doesn't actually mean that I'd be working for the Dutch company in an organisational sense; it merely means that I'd be on the Dutch payroll and enjoy the benefits afforded workers in The Netherlands. I'd still work for Operations, doing much the same work as I do now. My boss might change to be someone closer to home, probably in Ireland, but that would be about the only concrete change from my current circumstances.

I'm not yet sure whether I'd work from the Google office in Amsterdam or simply toil from home. It would depend how much of a distraction having Sarah and Eloïse around turned out to be. Furthermore, having colleagues in an office forces one to be sociable, so that's another aspect I might enjoy. On the other hand, the Amsterdam office is really only a sales office and I don't want to become the de facto Windows helpdesk bitch (which is virtually impossible, anyway, as I know very little about Windows desktops these days).

Anyway, this is all just so much musing and theory at the present time. Right now, it's hard to imagine continuing to work full-time for anyone, even Google, after our move. I mean, Google's a fantastic company to work for, but how can any job be so much fun that it's more attractive than all of the other things one could be doing with one's time? A great job is still just a job, right? It can surely never be more fun than biking through the Ardennes, sipping coffee in a Parisian café, glacier-walking in Iceland, snorkeling in Hawaii, trekking to Machu Picchu in Peru, visiting the hill tribes of Thailand and Vietnam, listening to street musicians in Cuba, riding a horse in Mongolia, ascending the mountains of Pakistan and Nepal, or immersing oneself in the culture of Iran and Syria.

We'll see how I feel three months from now. At the very least, this new development means I will now remain an (unpaid) employee of Google until at least November.

I've put up new photos of Eloïse from weeks eleven and twelve. These will probably be the last photos for a while, as the movers turn up next Wednesday to pick up our stuff. We then fly out of here on Friday and will have no Net access for a while, unless someone in our neighbourhood happens to have an open wireless access point (fingers crossed).

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.

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.

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:

• De Elandsgracht

• Photos of the Elandsgracht

• Where is the Elandsgracht?

• Businesses along the Elandsgracht

• Het Claverhuis Community Centre

• Jordaan Info (Dutch)

• Jordaan Info (English)

• jordaanWEB

• Jordaan Online

• Streetmap of de Jordaan

I was lucky enough to have a seat today in Kirk McKusick's course, FreeBSD Kernel Internals, based on his book, The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System. Today was the first day of the course, which has been organised by Google and is being held on-site on Thursdays in February.

How nice to be able to spend one day a week listening to a recognised expert on the UNIX operating system, as he runs through the design and implementation of the system that's been keeping me in work all these years. And to think I get paid to sit there and listen to him, too. Poor me.

The Finance department was having an ice-cream party when we stopped for a break in the mid-afternoon, so we even gatecrashed their party and tanked up on dessert.

It's a hard life sometimes.

After a weekend spent showing Geoff around Amsterdam, we're at SANE 2004 for the next 5 days. We're currently in the Black Hats tutorial, which rather amusingly started with a number of examples of how you can use Google to find password files and such like. I knew that people did this, but it was amusing to see all of the good hacks in a single session. Some very creative use of Google's advanced features was demonstrated.

Incidentally, there's a public transport strike in Amsterdam today, but we hired bikes and rode here, so experienced no hassle.

It's good to be home and it makes me look forward to returning here on a permanent basis, the changeable and gloomy weather notwithstanding.

So, the expiry of the 15 day lock-up period finally occurred and we were able to sell 5% of our Google shares today. It was quite a relief to finally be able to take a bite out of the carrot that has been dangling in front of us for several years.

Being at work was a unique experience today, as our small circle of friends compared trading experiences and prices obtained. It seems that everyone did very well and the market remained buoyant throughout the day.

It's another media feeding frenzy today.

As I left work to go to lunch around noon today, I noticed the van of a news team parked on the verge of Amphitheatre Parkway. They were setting up cameras and erecting a satellite dish on top of the van's roof, but I couldn't tell which radio or television station they represented.

Anyway, one of the news men overheard me telling a colleague how to walk to our lunch destination. He tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, "Do millionaires still walk?"

Not being a lawyer or a sportsman or a spokesman or some other public functionary, I'm not used to being approached by the media. Given that I administer Linux computers and Internet services, I consider this incident yet another amusing anecdote with which to regale my future children a few years from now.

Whether or not any money is generated by this whole escapade is, in some ways, secondary to the whole experience of having been party to the rise and continued rise of Google. The last few years have represented a unique period in the history of Silicon Valley. I consider myself very fortunate to have been a part of it all, regardless of how things pan out. I don't expect there to be another phenomenon to match the Internet boom in my lifetime.

My reply to the reporter, by the way, was, "I can't even be seen to smile at you, or they'll cut off my head."

I was lucky enough to be able to attend a talk today by Burton Malkiel, esteemed author of The Random Walk Guide To Investing and A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

With an IPO on the horizon, my employer has taken the amazing step of inviting companies and speakers to come in and educate us, the humble workforce, about the shark-infested world known as the financial investment market.

Slowly but surely, I'm learning what index and mutual funds are, as well as small vs. large cap stocks, actively vs. passively managed funds, etc. I now know what an 83b election is; I even largely understand AMT tax and grasp when I would pay short term capital gains tax vs. long term.

Of course, for all the education, my attitude hasn't changed very much: I don't actually want to know any of this. It's just plain bloody boring. Things were a lot simpler when I had neither a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it through, as the saying goes.

The rush of advisors and investors, all eager to get me on the hook as a customer, serves to remind me that some people are taking the IPO very seriously, indeed. It's a useful reminder that behind all the hype, something quite unique is coming to pass. And true enough, it could turn out to be a life-changing event.

We'll see what happens. I come from a very modest background, so it's hard to imagine ever really transcending that, especially by way of something as patently silly as a stock market floatation. My parents taught me that if I worked hard, I would be rewarded. At the same time, they worked hard and died poor.

IPOs really go against the work ethic. Roll into work around noon, lazily tap some things into a computer and you stand to make a fortune. Meanwhile, ambulance drivers, firemen and teachers struggle to make a living. It's strange what society values and decides to reward, don't you think?

And to think that the only reason I went into this business was that I liked playing with computers. I could just as easily have been turned on by sociology, and where would that have put me now?

Work hard, my arse. It's all about luck. You make your own decisions in this life, but you need a fair amount of luck as well, to get ahead. I hope mine holds out a little longer.

Google held its third annual party for its Engineering wing employees today. It was in the usual place, namely The Beach Boardwalk, down in Santa Cruz.

I wasn't really in the mood for it this year, truth be told. Intellectually, I realise that not every company pays for its employees to spend a day at the beach, but... well, I'm spoilt, I suppose. I woke up in a foul mood and it took a work-out back at the gym in the late afternoon to dissipate some of my bile. I didn't even bother to go on any of the rides, having ridden on all of the interesting-looking ones last year. Still, it beats a day in the office; that's for sure.

Anyway, the occasion presented another useful opportunity to get to grips with our new camera, prior to going on holiday in August. As usual, the photos have been placed in the gallery.

It's so easy to take the good things in life for granted.

Now, I'm not saying that my job is perfect (shit; no job is perfect), but how many companies will bring in a team of professional mechanics to fix your bike, feed you a barbecued lunch outdoors in the sun, and hire a band to play chilled out ambient music for you while you eat?

And how many companies will do all of that for you on the same day?

The old folk like to tell us that we young folk don't know we're born. Although I'm not exactly young any more, I think they're right. In so many ways, we've never had it so good. Sometimes it's hard to remember that this is a job, not just some place to hang out, eat and chat with friends.

It's a bizarre experience to work at a company about whom a news story appears in the media at least once an hour. Reporters have even been known to hide in our bushes, so we now have security guards in the car park, ready to shoo away anyone who comes poking around.

This is one of the interesting things about living in Silicon Valley. I could move back to The Netherlands and spend the next 500 years working at a couple of hundred fresh, exciting, new companies, but I guarantee you that not one of them would ever come in for the attention that this one does.

How come?

It comes down to the difference in mentality between Americans and the Dutch (but not just the Dutch, of course; substitute any other European country here). In business, Americans -- especially denizens of The Valley as it's called around here -- view the sky as the limit. Ideas that would be dismissed as fantasy elsewhere, receive massive funding here and come to life.

Of course, those ideas are fantasy, but that's not the point. The point is that they can be made into reality by hard work, brilliance and not a small amount of luck. There's one other quality that's required however: sheer, unfettered imagination; and that's where we sober Dutch come a little unstuck. We have good ideas, but immediately consign our more fantastically conceived ones to cloud cuckoo land.

But Silicon Valley is cloud cuckoo land. Here, no idea is too brilliant -- or, as we've seen all too often in recent years, too idiotic -- for its conceiver to dismiss it as not representing a viable business model. Thanks to venture capital funding and a plethora of rich potential angel investors always looking for the next big thing, it's possible to obtain the necessary backing to get your idea off the ground.

In The Netherlands, in contrast, you'd be laughed at.

"It's 1998 and you want to start a search-engine? Er, have you seen Yahoo? Alta Vista? Excite? Search-engines are an established phenomenon and this area is a solved problem."

Being Dutch myself, I thought much the same thing back when I first started using Google, but it just goes to show you what is possible with, yes, that unfettered imagination I spoke of earlier, plus all of the other ingredients I mentioned and probably a few more elements too intangible for me to readily quantify.

That said, there's nothing quite like home. What the Dutch lack in imagination, they make up for socially. The Yanks may be flamboyant in business, but they're ultra-conservative in most other regards and living in the US can be a remarkably remote and stifling experience.

The Dutch are quite the opposite, so whilst I may have trouble finding an interesting job after Google, I'll at least be able to know that my future children will be living in a place where prime-time television doesn't consist of women engaging in expensive plastic surgery in order to become worthy of the moniker The Swan.

The IPO speculation continues.

Meanwhile, some people are starting to actually write some sane things about Gmail.

Interestingly, not one of my friends have even asked me for a Gmail account. I don't know what conclusion, if any, to infer from that. On the other hand, Sarah's colleagues have been going crazy to get an invitation from me.