Home of the Dutch Gecko

Having pestered my parents for a few years claiming that I desperately needed a camera update, they granted me with a fantastic birthday present last May. I will be attending a workshop with legendary landscape photographer Joe Cornish in a few weeks time as a result, and I cannot thank them enough for this opportunity. Their half-jokingly reasoning for the gift was that I “should be able to use a good camera before getting one.” I of course totally disagreed and therefore purchased a brand new Olympus E-520 digital SLR last week. I’ve been keeping my eye on this range since Olympus entered the mid-range SLR market with the E-500, and the wait has been worth it. Boasting features such as sensor dust removal, in-body image stabilisation, live view with autofocus and 3.5fps constant shooting in one of the smallest and lightest bodies available on the market, this is a serious piece of kit. I’m quite wary of Joe Cornish’s dislike of digital cameras, but I feel more comfortable with being able to cock up a few times without repercussions.

I took the camera for a half-day spin around York, shooting the typical photogenic sights. Never have I been so pleased with a purchase - the extreme versatility makes photography so enjoyable. The automated systems (mainly the focus and exposure settings) often need a helping hand, but that’s exactly what I’d expect, and it doesn’t really matter since making those adjustments is totally effortless. The whole thing is designed for people who know what they’re doing, which makes such a change from most of the technology that I’ve experienced. It’s exhilarating to be able to do exactly what I want and not have some gadgetry or algorithm messing with me. Every mistake which came out of the afternoon is mine, and that’s fine. Every perfect shot produced is also mine, and that’s great!

I’ve decided to adopt “It won’t mess with you” as my new programming mantra. While I think of something to program, look at these.

The last few weeks I have been working. And I don’t mean the kind of work where I spend a whole day staring at my mass of illegible code, interspersed with a few sessions of DotA. This is real life in-the-office nine-to-five work.

Well, two days a week.

I’m working for Web Certain, a search engine optimisation company based here in York. They’ve been working multinationally for years, and recently aquired a few Dutch and Belgian clients, and needed a Dutch speaker who could participate in the mind-numbingly dull task of “link building” - the act of creating new links to a website so that search engines such as Google notice it more, and consider that page more important. Link building requires no real thought, and where better to find bored, semi-qualified and cheap labour than on a campus!

Amusingly I was contacted via Facebook, which is certainly a new recruitment method to me, but hey it could become popular. Do a search for fields that interest you (e.g. home address - the Netherlands), and mass spam the results that appear. You’re practically guaranteed to find the right person. You never know, it might work for love as well.

So, I now spend my Mondays and Thursdays in an air-conditioned office at the other end of York, after huffing and puffing five miles uphill to get to the place. And I get paid to, essentially, surf the internet. It’s not really that simple of course: I’m expected to either be looking for website directories, similar to the famous Open Directory Project, or to be applying to these directories to have links added. At least the searching involves some thought, even if the twinkling at the back of my brain is constantly diminished by having the same sites turn up time and again, but the actual application part is tedium beyond measure. Visit site. Search for category. Check if indexed by Google. Click “Submit”. Click the automatic form filler. Click “OK”. Next site.

It’s just too complicated to be completely automated, but at least I’m winning against the machines (for now). But the work leaves my brain with free cycles (they’re cycles, right?) to do what it pleases in the background. Having to keep this spare thought literally work-safe, I’ve instead made a few observations.

1. Dutch websites are butt-clenchingly face-gurningly ugly. Now I’m sure that many sites will be absolutely fine on the eyes, but for a country so reliant on the internet and with quite a rich design history, the fact that these abominations even exist is terrifying. The process to get a .nl domain is already pretty difficult, why not add “your site may not cause permanent sight loss” to the terms of service? The nerds amongst you may want to laugh/cry at the underlying HTML for those sites too.
2. Directory sites don’t mind lying. Despite claiming to be “SEO optimised” and “guaranteed to improve your search engine ranking”, many will resort to dirty tricks like asking for a so-called reciprocal link: we’ll include a link to your website, if you include a link to ours. Such practises were figured out by Google a long time ago, and nowadays are more likely to harm your ranking than help it. Amusingly these sites are running themselves into the ground by encouraging this technique.
3. Most multinational companies don’t have the time to work on SEO, instead outsourcing the bulk of the work. Last week I was collecting sites on which Microsoft Belgium could post their link, since they apparently aren’t doing too hot in the Belgian Google index (I’ll do them a free service here). And now the talk of the office is about a new order from Xerox needing to publicise some of their newest laser printers. These are big, big companies, and Web Certain appears tiny in comparison, but apparently they’re the team to pick.

Anything else?

Apart from real work I’ve been doing some fake work as well. I recommend checking out the new improved Artotron, a showcase site for artists. Do art? Sign up in the forums. The community is still small and needs your input!

I’ve also been secretly designing a big web-programming project, but I need to learn more PHP and MySQL before I can get on with the nitty gritty. It could easily take a few years, but you’ll hear more about it as it starts to become more complete.

Since I failed to (re)complete my last post, I’ve passed the year, and things are dandy. Heleen passed her year too after some resits. I’ll get round to rewriting the last post “soon”

It’s probably not worthy of international news, but some of you may be aware that York is currently very, very wet. It simply hasn’t stopped raining once in at least 24 hours. My poor girlfriend is heading back home today and the weather is not welcome news at all. Thankfully she’s taking the bus to the airport - there are no more trains leaving in that direction.

I walked the half mile to her house this morning to help her pack her last things and wish her farewell, and was thoroughly drenched by the time I got there. If my clothes are literally dripping wet when I get inside, I tend to get a little downhearted.

Not wishing to make the journey back on foot, I waited with her for her taxi, and asked the driver if he would be driving past my home, which is the normal route. “No way. It’s totally flooded.” So it was hugs and kisses right there and another trek through the torrents in an effort (believe me, it was a lot of effort) to get back to a dry house.

One of the trickiest parts of the walk was crossing one particular road which floods a little too easily. By this time there was no tarmac left to see, and instead of mucking around I just walked straight through. I couldn’t get any more wet. Once on the other side, a miracle happened - a car driver on my side of the road realised I was stood next to a particularly deep patch, and that he was about to cover me head to toe in road-gunk, and then slowed down. Have you ever seen a car slow down to avoid soaking pedestrians? I was stunned. I raised my hand, defined as the traditional method of thanks in traffic situations, and the driver raised his. I sincerely hope he saw my wide smile underneath my waterproof hood.

Update
Some more news and videos from the BBC:

• Summary of the day
• In video form
• Some stunning amateur footage
• And a number of helicopter rescues in Sheffield

Hmm, two decades. I dunno, seems like a while to me. Luckily I’ve been busy enough to keep me away from this site, so at least I’m over the initial shock now. But still… I’m twenty! What do I do?

It seems the best thing to do is blog, and write Ada. Well, not any more, since the assessment is now truly finished and I won’t need to touch the language again until the third year, when we use it for programming a real-time system. Yup, we do all sorts here…

So, Ada was done, I took a well-earned weekend FragSoc break with my housemates, and then I started the next piece of work - doing a literature survey. I finished it today. I still don’t know what a literature survey is. But in any case when I’ve fixed my linux partition I’ll be putting both code and drivel on this site for all to enjoy.

Of course, any project that takes more than three days must go hand in hand with some awesome procrastination, and Ada didn’t disappoint. I have two photos and the very small beginnings of a PHP-based CMS which I plan to one day install on a snazzy VPS like SliceHost, along with a new snazzy domain to keep me happy. If you want to make me a very happy man, either buy me a few years’ worth of that stuff or give me a job that’ll let me pay it off. And gives me enough spare time to finish the PHP.

Stuff that is awesome:

1. Mountain Dew, especially the new cherry flavour
2. Ubuntu 7.04
3. Procrastination
4. Laid back guitar music

Stuff that is not awesome:

1. Exams
2. Broken headphones
3. Procrastination
4. Untidy room

Two days ago I commenced a bold journey into the darkest corners of my room… I hoovered the floor. This doesn’t happen very often for two reasons:

1. I’m lazy as hell
2. Our hoover sucks at sucking

It’s one of these bagless designs, and relies entirely on a series of filters to actually do something useful rather than just spreading dust around (unlike Dysons which use some airflow trickery to keep dust inside the container). Sadly it partially fails, which means that the filters very quickly become clogged and reduce the suction, as well as ejecting fine dust into the air. Some of you may know that I’m a hayfever sufferer, and you can probably imagine that my bedroom becomes very uncomfortable for me after I’ve got my cleaning fix.

I went to bed with the window wide open and a runny nose, and it appears that good ol’ influenza decided to take a shot at me while my immune system was down. So yesterday I woke up with a pounding headache, joint pain, a strong desire to itch all of my skin, and a barbed wire throat.

My natural first response to this is to groan loudly, which I did. This didn’t relieve the situation, so I groaned some more. Satisfied that this was the real deal I made a vague attempt at moving to the vertical position, which simply made me feel the need to groan more.

I stumbled to the sink, grabbed a half-dirty glass from my desk and drank some water. I rooted around in the cupboard and found what I was simultaneously looking for and dreading. Paracetamol tablets. See, I bought these back at the start of my first course in 2005, and at the time the denizens of Costcutter offered me the brand-name tablets or the generic half price selection. I went for the latter of course, totally unaware that they go out of their way to provide value for money and are nearly an inch long. Combine this with the raspy throat and I may as well be swallowing the Eiffel tower.

On the plus side, I needed several of the suckers over the last two days and there is now only one left. On the down side this means having to buy new ones, which involves either walking somewhere or remembering to get some on our next Tesco trip.

I still feel rotten, thanks for asking, and haven’t been able to do anything productive. I don’t even feel like watching a movie or something. I just want the headache and the itch to go away.

I did two things today: got a girlfriend and got a haircut.

It’s late and I’m waiting for my music playlist to finish, so here’s a nice follow up from the last entry. Or something.

Currently completed off list:
Revision cleaned off floor (and promptly replaced with other crap), the random chair has been removed, the battery has been ordered (but has not yet arrived), I have sold one pair of speakers (still loads of stuff to go), I have done a little guitar practise, I have a double duvet now, and I have done some photoshop.

That means that the following have not yet been carried out:
Haircut. God damn I need one. RAM doesn’t work yet, room is still a mess with stuff lying around, the layout has not changed (and probably won’t, on second thoughts), I don’t (quite) have a girlfriend, I have read absolutely nothing, the yoghurt went off, no movies have been selected, the printer is still dead, the perspex is still uncut, the microphone is still flat on the desk, the website has not advanced much, I haven’t learned any new cooking recipes, I still have a lot of chocolate (to share with future girlfriend?), my wardrobe has not expanded, my mouse has not increased in mass, the speaker has not been raised up a foot, and I am still lazing.

That second paragraph is somewhat thicker than the first.

On the plus side, Tesco sells dried, ready-to-eat papaya in a bag. Yum. Playlist is over, time for bed at the wholesome hour of 4AM. Good night.

Exams suck. No really, they do. Though everything seemed to float by pretty smoothly this year (as opposed to the incredible feeling of “oh shit” last year), nothing could make me feel more relieved than getting back to a normal student rhythm. Modules this term are actually looking pretty interesting, with even the maths appearing doable at first sight.

With the frightening regularity of it all, a new feeling is entering the fray - I feel like a sack of tatties (that’s potatoes to you southerners). I’ve ceased doing anything, with the height of activity being hoovering the house on Sunday - after waking up in the afternoon of course. There’s been a shocking lack of photography on my behalf, and there’s loads of other stuff to do as well. Even simple things. I need a haircut, but the hairdresser I went to has closed up. All I need is a new hairdresser. I haven’t looked yet.

I do make plans. Making plans doesn’t require any effort, and so seems a safe bet. I am going to (really I really am) play around with my PC tomorrow to get the memory working properly, and rearrange some of the hardware inside. I am going to clean all the revision off the floor. I have stuff in my room that needs to be tucked away properly. I might rearrange the room. There’s a random chair here that I don’t use and can go elsewhere. I have an old cheap-as-chips laptop here that needs a battery. Appallingly, I have a love interest that I need to pursue (dear god I hope she doesn’t read my site). I have books and magazines to read. I have stuff to sell. I need to practise the guitar some more. I need to finish the yoghurt before it goes off. I need to pick some movies in advance that I’m going to watch on the way back home, now that the MP4 player actually works. I might have to consider getting a new printer, since the yellow seems to have stopped working forever. I have some perspex that needs to be cut (PC again). I need to get bedding for a double bed (not directly related to love interest). I need a desktop microphone stand. I need to do some real maintenance to this website, and get some graphics going. I have a photoshop project that I need to finish. I need to check out some recipes which I should try making. I have a lot of chocolate that needs eating. I should get some new t-shirts. I need to make my mouse heavier. I need to put a speaker stand together to get the speaker at the right height. And, quite simply, I need to throw some stuff out, like my lazy ass attitude.

So, tomorrow (well, later today), I’m going to be nice and geeky, and on Thursday, try to be nice and romantic.

Yup, I need to be myself again.