Robert Small, The blog thereof.

I’m currently sitting on the plane back home. This has been a so far uneventful journey with the exclusion of leaving a considerable time after we should have. There’s minor turbulence because we have a tailwind, however this does somewhat speed the journey up. The boys (and girls) in blue didn’t bother me at all at the gate which is nice considering the horror stories people keep telling me.

However, not everything is good, although I’m pleased to be returning home with the view of working on some new projects, seeing my parents again and enjoying some - hopefully more productive* - fishing; I’m not pleased to be leaving my girlfriend and she’s not pleased to have me leave. Luckily for her I left some chocolate and most of a pack of digestive biscuits, luckily for myself my mum sent me a text saying she was making cake. My mum’s cake is good. I predict the next few weeks being taken up solely with comfort eating and work as I did far too little while I was on holiday.

A friend of mine has told me that while going through regular separation I’ll love every little thing that reminds me that we’re together when we are. then when we’re permanently together they’ll start to annoy me. The example she gave me was snoring, my girlfriend doesn’t snore so I’m sure I’m safe from this problem.

(A break of a few hours.)

The plane continues to be involved in quite some turbulence, I don’t mind turbulence unless I’m trying to drink at the same time, then it’s just annoying. One of the things I really enjoy about KLM is the service, I actually get a decent meal with real knives and forks. The dinner was a nice Italian pasta served with cold chicken and rice salad and a nice chocolate cake.

‘Oh the weather outside is frightful,
but the fire inside is quite delightful,
and since we’ve no place to go,
let it snow, let it snow’

This song will definitely bring memories for the next few months, it seems a popular one on US radio and with those creating Christmas CD’s; fortunately I like it. It has a lot of good times from the last month attached to it and I will find it a pleasant trigger to remind me what fun I’ve had.

It’s always sad to leave somewhere you’ve really enjoyed being, I never knew how bad it was to know that you’re leaving someone behind. The last time wasn’t quite so bad, I’d spent a lot less time with her, this time it was every minute possibly. The lesson I’ve learnt is that it’s very important to scope your view on life. You can waste your life looking forward to something which lasts for a few minutes or you can enjoy every moment as it comes. There’s always a silver lining.

Watch The Shawshank Redemption, he crawls through a long pipe of sewage and other undesirable muck and as he exits he raises his palms to heaven basking in the rain and the storm. He is free. If he’d not had that to look forward to he’d never have done that fete of human persistence and perseverance.

What I’m attempting to show is that all the time there’s something to comfort yourself with and drive yourself forward with. Whatever your lot is you have to extract the good bits out of it and live them up. If you don’t scope your life to the good bits and be very careful to always check the bigger picture then you will waste days sitting staring at the wall. I know, I’ve been there. Life is always worse when you don’t have perspective on it, Looking in the short term today I was leaving the arms of my closest and best friend, but put into perspective it’s a brighter day than it may seem. When I return I can contact the American embassy and start applying for a Visa, I can start working harder and get some of the big projects I’m working on up and running. So by going through the tunnel to the light I’m giving myself the ability to stay for more than 90 days and to earn the money to make my stay more enjoyable than it might have been otherwise.

If you ever have anything you want to talk to me about or you’re feeling a bit down in the dumps then please contact me. A lot of people have found it very helpful, but don’t expect to hear what you want because I have no problem with telling you what you need to hear instead of what you want to hear.

I’ll be announcing a few new projects and possibly even some milestones soon, I’m sorry that I’ve neglected nearly everything over the last month. At least I can return to my work totally refuelled and ready to create some great things. I expect the Linux GPS site to be off the ground soon, get your content ready!

Those of you who know about openhardwaredatabase, John has done some incredible work on it. Kudos and a very big thank you to John for this. I’ll be publishing some more about this soon and showing you how it (hopefully) will transform the way you decide which hardware to buy for whatever machines you have. Again John; thanks, great work so far!

One thing I’m loving is having a laptop sitting here running at 600MHz with no fan activity, very little disk activity and averaging just over 7W power usage! Having 1GB RAM does help this, having a system I’ve tuned finely to do this also helps, but I think that my choice of hardware has really helped too.

I’m flying just below the eastern tip of Iceland at the moment, It’s dark, It’s been dark over most of the journey because I’ve been quite northern and it’s winter. Although my ticket says that it’s a windows seat there was someone already in my space so I’m sitting by the aisle, I’m not objecting as my cabin luggage probably weighs about three times the prescribed amount.

People will always ask me - unless their name is James** - what the differences are between England/Europe and America. There are a lot of small ones, all of which seem to boil down to a very close score if someone were to be keeping count. One big difference I’ve noted is that Americans seem to generally be far more patriotic and of the opinion that there’s nothing too interesting out there, Europeans and the English seems to be generally more metropolitan; we realise that there are other currencies and that the world is not completely contained within our country. Please remember that these are generalisations and not stereotypes.

Another difference seems to be the environmental orientation, it could be due to the greater price of fuel or the greater media coverage. This seems to cover cars, lights, heat, and flying.

In England we have pretty boring coffee, it could use some cheering up, some excitement. In fact, the best coffee I’ve had in England would be one I’ve made at home using a percolator or maybe one Lloyd gave me a while ago - Lloyd being rather a coffee nut. American coffee is far more interesting and enjoyable, you can have far more than coffee, weak coffee and milky coffee. I’ve never really bought coffee in Europe, nor have I discussed the practise, it may be different in other countries. Still, I like American coffee.

Clothes are in general somewhat cheaper, however, they don’t come with free medical insurance and all the rest that we get from our heavier taxes. They’re generally the same quality and a reasonably compatible style.

The way that we pay for our medical care is another big difference, I think the standard of care is probably pretty similar, the only difference is the method of payment. In England most people pay for their care from their taxes, in America their insurance. I do like the concept of public health care, I believe that it should be a common human right to receive reasonable medical care, whatever your health or income. One area I can see that this might not be entirely applicable to is cases where people are smoking or drinking and it’s making their condition worse while they’re refusing to be involved in any plan to remove them from their addiction.

I arrived safely at Norwich airport around 9:30AM GMT0 DEC3, this was as far as I’d got writing so I left it as is.

Kind regards, Robert.

* Two fishing trips got nothing.
** James recently asked me if they had eggs in England.

Tags: Cultural differences, Films, Flying, Mobile computing, Philosophy, Ramble, Shawshank Redemption

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.