Happy Birthday, Spectrum!

Today marks 30 years since the release of the very first ZX-Spectrum. This was the first computer I ever used, I learned in part how to read on this device while typing out games written in BASIC from magazines. It was one of the first mass-produced computers to make it into homes and was a remarkable device for its time. I have lots of fond memories of it and I will probably always be somewhat sentimental about it.

Google UK Doodle

Google UK commemorated by having a Google Doodle today in honour of the device. Happy birthday ZX-Spectrum!

I’ve always heard people complaining about turning 30 before and wondered what it would be like for me.

I’m thrilled to turn 30. I feel like I’m 20. I think I’m some kind of late bloomer, my 20′s were probably more like what teens are like for most and while I still feel young and restless, I’m slowly but surely growing more confident, more relaxed, more content, more independent and I’m becoming more and more ME.

I’ve overcome quite a lot of personal problems in the past, and I’m glad to be at a point where all my current problems are solvable without much help from anyone else (even though that means I had to mark some things as ‘wontfix’). Having said that, I’m really happy having the people in my life that I do. The people that are always there for me, whether I’m in SA or in Canada (my support network!) THANK YOU! I’m grateful for every moment we get to spend together!

I have a good feeling for this year and the future, there’s some great things on the way!

This year I just want to get more stuff done.

Motto for 2012:

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

At 16:00 today it will be exactly one year since I first landed in Canada. It also happens to be Canada day (a national holiday) so at least my Canadian anniversary will be easy to remember!

It’s been an incredibly interesting year with lots of ups and downs, I’ll blog about it in time but if I try to put it all in here today this will end up being another draft that never gets finished.

Thanks to everyone who has given help, friendship and assistance of any kind over the last year. Especially my colleagues at Revolution Linux who I really consider to be my friends. It’s deeply appreciated!

Living in Cape Town for pretty much all my life, I saw snow for the first time a few weeks ago while traveling back to Canada from the US. People here in Sherbrooke told me it wasn’t real snow because it melted as soon as it hit the ground. A few minutes ago, my car was on a black tarred driveway, now you just see snow:

Outside from my home office:

Next month when it heaps up nicely I’ll build a snowman in the front and post some pics

Too Much Noise

I’ve taken a lot of time recently to think about my future and what I want to do with my life. Part of the process in refocusing and doing what I really want to do is cutting back on distractions and some things that just take up too much time.

I unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists (down from hundreds to dozens), quit from a lot of IRC channels (down from more than 50 to 16) and unsubscribed from a big bunch of blueprints, bug reports and other stuff that sends out email in Launchpad.net. The reason for all of this isn’t because I’ve lost interest in those things I unsubscribed from, but more a case of getting back to basics. So if anyone is wondering, it’s certainly not because I got angry or bored or anything like that, I just really needed to cut down!

More Work and More Fun

At my French classes on Mondays we usually spend some time speaking about what we did the last weekend. I usually get stuck there and can’t think of much that I did besides work. I’ve spent entire weekends before just thinking or worrying about stuff that I need to do. I’m going to change that. I put together a *really* big mindmap in freemind mapping out some ideas that I’ve had that spans career choices, hobbies, stuff just for fun, financial targets, training and education and more. It’s big and I’ll probably not be able to do everything on there in my lifetime (which is actually fucking scary), but I certainly want to make the most of it and prioritize my time better. I’m going to have to learn to rely on other people much more in the future and learn to let go a bit more, which is hard, but I think doable!

Specifics will follow in more blog entries… or if things go well you’ll read about it on digg/slashdot/etc

Jumping In

I’ve had too much to blog about and not quite the time to do so! So I’ll just do a bunch of entries that combines a bunch of them.

When I was around 4 years old, I was at my cousins’ house and they were all swimming. I couldn’t swim yet but I thought something along the lines of “Hey! They’re all doing it, how hard can it be!” so I just jumped in at the deep side of the pool and tried to swim. I didn’t quite get a hang of it, and my cousins panicked and yelled that I was drowning, so my father ran to the pool and jumped in with all his clothes on to get me out of there. He said that I shouldn’t do that again. About 10 minutes later when I was dry again I did it again and managed to get it right. Since then I’ve always loved swimming. Jumping in on the deep side didn’t stop there either…

Moving to Canada

I’ve been meaning to blog about this properly for the last 3 months. A little more than 9 months ago I started working for Révolution Linux, a company that does large-scale Linux deployments around the world. I still do my work in South Africa (which has recently expanded to Uganda) and the combination of being almost-full time employed while also doing my own thing is working *great*.

Révolution Linux had a requirement that I go to Canada and work there for 2 months for integration and to get to know everyone properly. I was initially going to come over around the end of 2009, but my work permit took way longer than expected and I only ended up getting it in June. Initially, while deciding what I’ll need to take over for 2 months (that’s very long for me to be away from home), I wondered whether I shouldn’t perhaps go over for 6 months instead. Then I could sell my car, get something cheap and nasty on the other side, cancel a bunch of stuff that I wouldn’t need anymore like gym membership, etc. I started wondering what actually stops me from doing a complete move, and then I just decided on a whim to pack up everything and move.

Lots of people asked me why I’m gone, how long I’ll be gone, when I’ll be back (especially on Facebook) and I just haven’t had a time to answer everywhere properly. In short, I love Cape Town and I want to live there again. However, I’m not sure when that will be, I decided when I came over here to split my long-term future plans in 2 year periods (almost like the Ubuntu LTS releases), so I’ll be staying here in Sherbrooke for the next 2 years and decide somewhere in between what will happen next. Maybe I’ll move to Brazil then, maybe Spain, maybe back to Cape Town, we’ll see how it goes

So far Sherbrooke has been quite good. It’s certainly a mixed bag. It’s nice and small and quiet but it’s also very old fashioned and the food here is horrible, but I have uncapped Internet now which kind of makes up for it! The people at work though are awesome, there’s a real sense of community between a lot of people at work, we see each other a lot outside of work hours too which is quite nice, I haven’t had that much with other places I’ve worked. I also have a flatmate for the first time ever. I’ve known Stéphane for a while know since we worked together in the Ubuntu community before, and we both work for Révolution Linux so it turned out to be very convenient, so far it’s been working out great. There’s also a big bunch of other people from work living in a 2km radius around us, which is quite cool.

My New Gym Buddies

I’ve gone to gym before, but it was mostly cardio and even when I’ve done weights, I’ve done it completely wrong (or so I recently learned). Max and Simon from work signed up recently and it inspired me to do so too and go work out with them every day. It’s the first time I’ve ever had gym buddies. It helps a lot and Max is an awesome “coach” who does a good job of telling me what I do wrong and how I can improve. It’s not even been two weeks and I can already feel the results (yesterday I couldn’t even lift my arms!).

I initially thought that I’d be at least better than Simon with the weights since he’s deceptively thin, but I learned quickly that I completely suck when it comes to doing exercise properly! The great thing is that now that I can learn from their experiences I’m actually learning and improving my physical health much better and faster than before. It kind of feels dumb not always being able to keep up with them, but jumping in the deep side with this definitely helps!

French Lessons

About two weeks ago I started taking French lessons. In Québec, around 90% speak French as their first language, which means that it isn’t really optional!

Some people I’ve met there didn’t know that these classes existed and some of those people have been here for nearly two years already, so if you’re ever in Sherbrooke and need French Lessons, contact Denis Charest at 819-823-8853 for more information.

There were about 50 people there the day I signed up, we’re divided in to classes of around 6-8 people. All the other people in my class are from Columbia. Now and again when I get stuck with French I just blurt out one of the Spanish sentences I learned while in Spain and they think it’s really funny. They’ve been really nice and I already consider them my friends. Columbians are officially awesome. I think most of them did French as second language in school or something because their French is *way* better than mine. It’s kind of hard starting a class when you start being behind everyone else, but they’ve done a great job at helping me when I get stuck and it certainly helps that they have a sense of humour. It makes jumping in on the deep side just so much easier if you have a great support network, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to gain that in the short time I’ve been here!

A few weeks ago I moved to Québec, Canada. Today I bought this car from a colleague at Révolution Linux, he doesn’t need it anymore since he’s moving to Montréal. He bough it just a few months ago from another colleague who moved to France.

It doesn’t have a CD player, instead, it has a tape deck, which plays analogue magnetic tapes. They’re horribly obsolete now but this was how I listened to music way back when I was a kid. Another college that lives down the street from me has a hi-fi with a CD player AND a tape deck. I was planning to go there to write the Offspring Smash album to tape, it’s one of my favourite driving albums and I never tire from it.

All the tapes from 2 owners back was still in the car. I decided to remove them when I got home this afternoon. The *first* tape I took out happened to be this one:

I was amazed and delighted! Then I removed the next tape:

It had “High voltage” written on it, which is very close to my IRC/Identica/Twitter nickname, “highvoltage”. If I were at all superstitious, I’d take it as a very good sign that this car will serve me very well!

After a long wait for my travel documents I finally arrived in Montréal, Canada on Friday afternoon!

Sherbrooke will be my new home from now on. I have lots to say but if I do that now this blog entry will never get finished, I’ll do some subsequent posts instead

So far everyone I’ve met here have been super nice, I’ve met quite a few of my colleges at Revolution Linux over the weekend and tomorrow is my first day actually at the office (already had a tour yesterday ). It’s certainly taking some adjustment being here but I’ve already had Poutine and learned some important local words so I’m already on my way to becoming an official Québécois!

I’ve been more or less absent from everything the last two weeks, but that should also be better now. Have a good week!