Sometimes, making a choice between a concrete good thing and a potentially better thing is hard. Life is full of little idioms and cliches about choosing the concrete over the possible, going with the certainty of the ‘pretty good’ instead of the possibility of the ‘awesome’. One of my favourite quotes from General Patton is such a quote. To paraphrase, he said that a good plan, executed immediately is always better than an excellent plan executed some time later on. For the most part, I completely agree.

Except that yesterday I did the opposite. I had a job offer. It was mine, all I needed to do was commit and my ‘Fredericton experiment’ would have been over. I had an out. It’s been something I’ve been seeking out for years now. But it meant moving to Toronto.

Excellent company. Good bunch of people, doing something I would have really been into. Except, what happens when you’re not at work? Toronto is one of those places where a person would have a hard time being bored, especially if they enjoyed dense urban living, and the social scene that accompanies it. And I realized that those things are not important to me, and I’d rather be in a place where I had an out. Parks. Greenery. A lower cost of living. Not being tethered to an office chair. Maybe working remotely from several different places, like I used to. Those were really good times, and I was obviously productive during them. The logistics were probably not going to work either. I’m not sure how quickly I would have been able to get up there. While I don’t have family in Fredericton, I have family close to Fredericton, and TO would have put me farther away, in some ways.

And so, here we are. I do wish things work out with this company, maybe in some other way, perhaps. Much respect for them.

Anyway, what else. Lots of reading these days. My goal of digging through several books on software design patterns was derailed by a moment of weakness when I discovered a stack of classic sci-fi novels on sale at a local book shop, and so now my queue is full again, but with fiction rather than fact. Finished reading ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ again, which never ceases to amuse me. Heinlein managed to get away with a lot when he wrote that book. Some of the things that Jubal says are shocking. Also finished reading ‘A Cambodian Prison Portrait, One year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21′, by Vann Nath. Nath was one of only seven inmates to emerge alive from S-21, the infamous prison where Deuch (Kaing Guek Eav) had almost 14 thousand Cambodians killed. The work is a translation of Nath’s stories, and minces no words. It is published by White Lotus press and is worth a read.

The track for this post is about the uncertainty of journey. I’m looking back to one of my favourite Finnish metal bands, Insomnium, with In the Groves of Death.

At the dawn of a quiet day
I strolled from the woods, returned to the hearth
And with a restful mind I roamed
The dreary shores, the darkling wilds
Greeting all the days that befall
Taking life as it comes

I was thinking about this over the week. The decay that we appear to see in today’s world seems to parallel something in the microcosm of our own lives. When you buy something or invest in something new, there is a period of time when you really put a lot of care into that thing. New car, whatever, you look after it. It stays nice for a few years. And then, as it becomes used a little, scratched a little, maybe not as shiny, you tend to neglect it a bit, and for a while it still functions as it was intended, maybe because of initial build quality, or possibly out of sheer luck. Or maybe it exists simply because no one has noticed that it’s beginning to tarnish a bit.

When it fails, or when you finally notice that it is on its last legs, well there is the problem. You need to fix it. You can repair it, sure, but often at a greater expense than getting something to replace it. I wonder if we are at that point with some elements of our society. Infrastructure and policy have perhaps become too huge, too cumbersome. Fixing them is far too expensive. Do we need to scrap them and start over? Radical new ideas? Implement massive change and just force everyone to adapt? Maybe this is why relatively new societies like Finland are doing so well. They haven’t had time to tarnish?

Imagine if the world ran out of oil. Right now. Well, we’d really be up the creek, but could we adapt? How painful would it be? It will happen eventually — fossil fuels are a finite resource. Perhaps not in my life time, but it will happen. What about fresh water? Same thing, probably. But society, too. Health care, education, all sorts of things — they need overhauls. Does short term memory hurt us in these cases? Do we only remember back to when we thought it was good, and all new generations just assume that “this is how it is”? Maybe that is why we are not solving any of these problems. Or at least, not solving them quickly enough.

The track for this post is A Bar in Amsterdam, by Katzenjammer, a fantastic female quartet from Norway. They are folk, and folk rock. A departure from what I normally listen to, but way awesome.

I return to my office tomorrow, after being away from it for ten days. Partially because I was attending an iOS development seminar, but also because of long weekends and such. Incredibly productive, these ten days were. So much so that I’m not really looking forward to being back in the office. Tons of stuff to do.

In my last post, I mentioned travel, and the tension in the middle East. Things continue to bubble there, with a recent bombing in Marrakech, specifically, at the Cafe Argana, a place I frequented many time when I visited there in 2009. To think that the cafe has been reduced to a smouldering heap, with lives lost, is sobering.

This was a photo I took from the roof top, showing the Square at night during Ramadan.

Will this impact my desire to travel? No. Is it a sober realization that we are all connected? Certainly.

I finally finished Nick Thorpe’s book, “’89: The Unfinished Revolution”, which I found incredibly enlightening. I am now moving onto other fare, also dealing with Eastern Europe. “Berlin: A Portrait of Its History, Politics, Architecture, And Society” by Giles MacDonogh. It comes highly recommended, and I am sure I will glean much.

Election day tomorrow. Should be interesting. I voted Green in the advance poll.

I found out today that the paper submission for the Public Knowledge Project conference in Berlin this September was accepted. So, I guess we have to actually do something for the paper now. No matter, the work itself is done, most of the technology is finished, and because this is sort of official now, I feel a lot better about booking flights to Germany, and eventually beyond.

Beyond. The Mid-East is looking a little tense lately. Seeing as how I will be in Syria in October, I guess I can hope for one of two things. First, I hope the tensions there resolve in some manner, hopefully for the betterment of Democracy. Second, I will probably get amazing photo opportunities. Let’s hope I don’t screw up. I had briefly (only briefly) given thought to switching up the travel plans and then decided that no, I wasn’t going to do that. That is a dangerous path to start down, living uncertainly, and it’s not something I want to become acquainted with.

Coffee has been especially good lately. I have been enjoying a single origin Colombia san Alberto Espresso roast from 49th Parallel Roasters. I really need to finally go the subscription route. It would make life simpler.

Track for the post is Not Breathing, by Draconian. Great metal band from Sweden. Enjoy.

Easter is a tough holiday for vegans. It’s not so much the main course dishes that are problematic, it’s more about the symbolism and the eggs. The freaking eggs. There have been Easter eggs at Easter for as long as the holiday has been around. The Zoroastrians first painted eggs for Nowrooz, their New Year celebration. The Jewish people have hard-boiled eggs called Beitzah. This seems to be one holiday for which I can’t brush off the egg as some pagan thing not associated with the ‘true meaning’ or something. And yeah, I know what the true meaning of Easter is supposed to be about.

What would a vegan decorate for Easter? I think my absolute favourite thing at Easter when growing up were the Lilliput solid chocolate eggs, the small ones in the shiny foil. Those were awesome. That’s what my parents would hide around the house for my brother and me. There appears to be a vegan version in the UK. Maybe next year.

I made some more cookies yesterday, but I was in a hurry and didn’t document the process this time. They were carob chip cookies, a twist on the chocolate chip cookie I did last time. They weren’t for me. There is a disconnect here, a conduit that probably needs help making a connection. We’ll see.

Where do we go when we go from here
Feels like a circle around me while I wait for more
Know that I wanna know where I follow you
Don’t wanna go down the street where you once came from
And I wanna know

What’s the point of doing anything
If you’ll never notice
I would sit and wait for you again

– What’s the point, Johnossi.

Stormy day today, typical of April, although it lacks the warmth I normally associate with April rain. I’m writing this from the confines of my sofa near my front window, and I’m staring up at the old chainrings I’ve hung from my curtain rod, watching them move and spin, the light from the window reflecting off of them as they spin round and round, buffeted by the vent from my air exchanger. There are tens of thousands of miles on those rings, solo rides, races, easy rides through meadows, fast rides down the sides of mountains. Crashes, laughs, sunny days, and days like today. The sprockets have been worn into points, and look like misshapen shark teeth. They didn’t shift well any more, and it was time for them to rest.

It sounds unpoetic, but really, it’s kind of cool. The storm’s rain is hitting the window, and it is beading into rivulets and trickling down the glass. Chaos theory deems the predictability of how those streams will combine to form larger ones is impossible. My eyes alternatively focus on the rain, and then on the rings, and occasionally settle on a null point between them, where everything I look at is slightly out of focus, soft, indistinct.

Life can be like that. Soft, indistinct. Out of focus. I need it to be that way, at times. Like now.

There’s really only one track that I can think of for this post. And there it is.