Posts in ‘Personal’

Change

Since I last posted anything, much has changed in my life; so much that it may be more effective to say that little has not changed.

I used to live in Belgium, with my mother and sister. I had finished a bachelor degree in Electronics. Not so long before that point, my prospects for the next year or so were along the lines of finding a job in electronics, and that was it. I’ve been in a long distance relationship for some three years, and with me having a job, we’d get around to see each other more often. (She lived in England; Eurostar tickets are expensive.) However, she then managed to get into a university, quite far away from where her parents live. That’s when the idea of finally moving in together emerged.

Fast forward a number of months, I’m writing this post from our apartment in Hampshire where we have now lived for two months. She’s been doing well in university, and I’ve had my job as a Front-end web developer for a month now. I have gone from spending most of my time in my room living with my mother and sister, to moving out to another country where people don’t speak my native language, where they drive on the other side of the road, where they use a whole range of different units than those I’m used to, to live in an apartment with the person I love and to manage our own household. I’ve converted my web development into a career, so I’m effectively being paid to do what I love, and my employer encourages me to become the best developer I can possibly be.

It’s a change for the better, that’s for sure.

Getting there

Now that may have all sounded like a whole bunch of fortune, moving out and everything just works. When it comes down to it, it all turned out very good, but the road there was not easy. To move all my things to England, I actually used the post. Luckily that worked out fine, after failing to properly find out how to do it through other parcel companies. Once moved in, we had to get used to the little space we had to store our thing; which isn’t that much of a problem, it just makes for a bit of an untidy living room.

We spent the first two weeks in the apartment without an internet connection. Seeing as I had to find work as soon as possible, this was quite a productivity bottleneck. I went out to an internet café a few times, using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP to look for work. Once we had internet, I spent a good two weeks full-time job-seeking online. I applied to many electronics-related vacancies, signed up to a lot of websites, and just kept searching the area for any appropriate jobs. After a while I got some calls from job agencies, asking some more info about my electronics knowledge, but most often turning out to be for positions that were located too far away to be reasonable for me. Then, I ran into some web developer vacancies and decided I might as well give it a shot, even though I had no formal education in the field. The third web developer vacancy I found was thanks to someone in an IRC channel I frequent; he recommended a creative job site.

This vacancy was for a job only about 3 miles away from where we live. It was not through a job agency, so I could actually look into the company I was applying to. Boy, the company looked exciting, the first impression I got was that it was a small team of talented individual working smoothly together to create top-notch products. You can imagine how excited I was when I got a phone call from them the day after I sent my application letter. About forty minutes after that first call, I was seated in their office for a quick interview, and an inspection of some code I wrote. They seemed interested enough, for I got a task to complete over the weekend (which I managed to turn in the same evening). The next Tuesday was one of the happiest days I’d had in a long while. I got offered the position.

I like to think I’ve settled in fairly well in my new life. Life is manageable, I like my job, we’re happy.

Website update

And last but not least… actually it is kind of the least change. As you can see I’ve redesigned my website once again. It’s even more minimal than it was before, and I’m happy with that. I like having the focus on the content rather than the packaging, especially since I’m not really a designer, more-so a developer. The website you can see is now all WordPress, rather than just the blog part. It’s far easier to manage the assets/design globally this way.

Some new things I’ve been playing with in this iteration: CSS3 transitions (for the moving menu items on mouse-over), some more advanced CSS3 box-shadow things, better closure on the little JavaScript I wrote.

Also, you may want to try resizing your browser window to be quite narrow, I tried some responsive web design.

Being very much into web development all the time now (it is still my hobby even though I do it all the time at work), I intend to write some more on it here, as well as do some little open source projects. In this work environment, I’m learning a whole lot quicker than I was when developing on my own, as collaborating ‘in real-time’ teaches you so much more than working on your own does.

Time to relax + reading

So, since Monday, school is over for this year. I had my last exam (analogue electronics), and I think it went pretty well, my results will be good enough.

This means that it’s time to relax a bit, which I’m glad about. Tomorrow, I’m heading to England, to see Brittany again after 4 months apart. I’m pretty pumped about that. Packing is mainly done, I’m ready to leave tomorrow. Up there we’ll probably being playing ITG and DDR often, as Britt has her own machine. I’m looking forward to that too, as these dance games are next to exhausting also a lot of fun.

Britt will be following up on the world cup, which might just give me an opportunity to do some coding, as I’m frankly not interested in football, that’s not to say I find it boring and over the top (but let’s not go on about that).

Tomorrow I’ll be spending quite some time on trains, so I had to find something to do in that time. Part of the time I can still use Internet on my mobile phone, but the bigger part will be Internet-less. I’ve decided that I won’t be spending that time on my laptop, instead, I’ll be boring and read a book. Recently, upon reading a friend’s blog, I realized that my English vocabulary really isn’t all that. From chatting and general Internet communication you don’t get the more ‘advanced’ vocabulary down.

The best solution I saw was to get my hands on some English literature, so I let Derek, of whom I know reads/has read a lot recommend me a book. He recommended me Robert Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit- Will Travel”, which is a science fiction story. Apparently it is his favourite book, so I decided to just get me the book with ebay. I got it for about €6, for that matter.

So here’s hoping I can enjoy the book, and improve my vocabulary a bit. I’m off to have a great 9 days, see you guys later!

Sociability / Social ability

I have a problem. That problem is that I’m not sociable at all. One problem usually causes other problems. In my case, not being sociable has caused me to spend most of my time in front of my computer, alone in my room up here. Which is obviously not good for one’s physical and mental health, and only causes the problem to get worse.

The interesting part is that I am very sociable with people online. I’ve met well over 60 people online which I still talk to every now and then, some of them daily, all over the course of 2 and a half years. When it comes to getting to know new people in real life though, it’s a bit tougher for me. I feel uncomfortable whenever I get in a situation where I have to talk to a stranger. This causes me to avoid social contact with them as much as possible, as I feel far more comfortable in my own little world of thoughts.

When you see me on a train heading for evening school, you’ll notice I have earphones in, and I’m mostly using my my mobile phone. What I’m doing on my phone? Chatting with people online. This can be the people in the chatroom of TAP, or just people on MSN. In fact, I get really annoyed when I don’t have network coverage on the train, because that means I’m alone. It’s kind of ironic that I can’t stand being alone when I have nothing to do, yet I don’t talk to people (in real life). I basically take my Internet social circle with me everywhere I go.

Anyway, I think I’m the most comfortable with getting to know people in real life by first having relatively short moments together, preferably with someone I already knew around. I’ll be honest: at first I didn’t feel very comfortable with my classmate and electronics teacher in evening school, simply because I didn’t know them. By now, the end of the year, they’ve become good friends, and we have inside jokes and everything. At the very start, I was uncomfortable with them, mostly because I don’t know how to behave myself with people I don’t know. I seem to be petrified to get into awkward situations.

Needless to say, I won’t be the one that starts a conversation with a stranger, unless it really is required for something. I do want to get over this. I’ve been told by people that I’m a friendly guy, but I’m pretty sure that’s only from people that have known me for a while. I may be friendly, but I don’t think many people who only know me in real life know what’s really spinning in my head. I’m a closed box, because I’m scared to be judged about things. I wish I could just stand up and not care about judgments, and just be who I am, talk about it to people without constantly fearing awkwardness. I’ve realized that being afraid of awkward moments just attracts said moments. This knowledge hasn’t solved that problem in its entirety though.

I want to get over this, I want to actually become sociable and dare to talk about myself, talk about things I actually care about more openly, while actually stating my opinion. I can’t get more sociable by just being forced to spend a long period of time with people I don’t know; I want to find another way to slowly build myself to not be a ‘wuss’ and just shamelessly talk to people. Without the need for a bit of alcohol.