sprocket i/o

This morning I brought my camera to work, to take photos of my daily sights for a future blog entry. Little did I know that this would likely be the last frame ever taken by my Nikon D300:

After that photo, I got onto the train and finished reading The Five Love Languages, which was given to me as a wedding gift by my good friend John Straiton. The book had some excellent advice in it, especially relevant because it was six years ago today that my wife and I began dating, though we would not admit to it at the time. It seems that my primary love language is Physical Touch, with Quality Time close behind it. I’m still not completely sure about my wife’s love language, but I am sure if I listen closely enough it will not be too difficult to figure out.

As the train pulled into Gare du Mons, I retrieved my bicycle helmet and gloves from my backpack in order to make room for my camera. I then tucked my pants into my socks so that I would not get my pants caught in the chain of my bicycle. I got off the train, then found and unlocked my bike, and rode off toward work. I saw an interesting view, and quickly noticed: the camera is not around my neck, and it my bag is too light for a camera to be inside it.

I had a moment of panic. Right about here:

After looking in my backpack, I soon realized that I had indeed left my camera on the train. I raced back the other way. I was on a busy one-lane road, so I went up onto the sidewalk, dodging inattentive students on their way to class. I was secretly hoping the train was still there. It was not.

I hurried into the station, found a cashier that spoke some english, and described to her what happened. She made some phone calls, and told me the train attendants would look for it on the train and would call her back. She advised for me to sit down and wait for a few minutes and come back to her.

I sat down and began to question myself.. did the camera actually make it onto the last train? Did I forget it when I switched trains this morning? I sent my wife a very frustrated and worried SMS message. After 15 minutes, I couldn’t wait any longer, and rushed back up to the register. She made another phone call, and said that they were unable to find my camera.

Doh.

The cashier asked me to go to register #5, where I met a kind lady armed with a Lost Item Report (in french). She spoke some English as well, so we filled it out together to the best of our ability. I left the terminal feeling dejected, forgetting my helmet and gloves in the process. When I came back for my helmet a few minutes later, the first cashier saw me and cast a look toward me that looked half scowling and half praying for me to get through the day.

As I rode toward work, I began thinking about my loss. Would Dallas let me buy another camera? Did I want another? I would probably wait until I got back to the US and buy a used Nikon D90 instead. The D300 was too much camera for my abilities anyways. I wondered if my home-owners insurance would cover my loss. I then began thinking about the person who was going to end up with my camera. Petty theft is so common here in Belgium, and who would resist $2000 worth of camera equipment sitting in a seat on the train? I began to hope that whoever got my camera, really did something spectacular with it. That they would move from being a hoodlum to a famous photographer.

After those positive thoughts, my phone began to ring. I was riding on the a poorly maintained road full of gravel and applied the brakes so hard that I quickly locked my rear wheel. I answered the phone “Hello, Thomas”, to no answer. I answered again, which appeared to give the lady on the other end enough time to compose an english sentence: “Hello, We have your camera at the station”.

I was ecstatic, and raced back to Gare du Mons. I wondered if they actually had my camera, or if they found some small Nikon point-and-shoot instead. I was pretty confident that it was my camera. I told myself that if it was my camera, I would get the lady’s name to buy her a thank-you card, and take a photo of her. Once I walked into the terminal, someone who looked like a railway worker in a flourescent orange vest smiled at me and waved me over to the register he stood next to, spoke something in french to me (I understood “photo”), and the lady who filled the forms out with me soon appeared with my camera. “Is this yours?”.. “Yes! Can I take your photo?”. She said “Yes”, but was blushing and quite shy. Here is her photo:

There is a part of me wonders that, had I harbored bad thoughts on whoever would take my camera home, if I would have had it returned to me. Riding back toward work a third time, I was quite paranoid about if I actually had everything with me, and stopped once to check if my camera was really in my backpack this time around. I later heard metal clang on the sidewalk, and checked if my keys were really in my pockets.

I feel very lucky today.

Yesterday I felt broken and beaten by this new country of mine: Belgium. For the first time in my otherwise spoiled life, I really feel like I have to struggle both at work and at home. Looking at my situation closely however, things really are pretty good: I just have never had to work very hard for anything before.

As of this weekend, we are finally settled down in our new apartment. We have not only a couch, a television, and proper closets, but we finally have a wired internet connection to make use of. We’ve mastered the combination oven/microwave unit, and for the most part figured out where and what everything is in the grocery store. I have come to terms with my new past-time: the 4 hour daily commute, but only because it is temporary. The problem yesterday was the realization that it is slightly less temporary than planned.

Everything in Belgium is slower, though one must make an exception for how they run their trivia games at the bar. Dinner often takes two hours, though I have yet to learn how to properly eat slowly. It took us 5 weeks for our internet connection to be enabled, though it is not unheard of it taking two months to get a phone line hooked up. While we applied for residency in January, the earliest appointment for turning in the residency application was not available until March 23rd.

License Transfer: Catch 22

I had planned to wait until March 23rd to buy a motorcycle, as it fits in nicely with both the reception of my annual bonus and acquiring formal residency. This was mostly a financial decision, as insurance as a non-resident is quite expensive, and limited to 60 days. However, I have now been informed of an interesting catch that would make Yossarian jump up and down.

• I can legally drive in Belgium on a US/International Drivers License
• Once I recieve my residency card (4 weeks after your application), I can no longer legally drive.
• With a residency card, I can transfer my US license to a Belgian one.
• Transferring a US license takes 6-10 weeks, and requires you to hand in your US license
• You cannot drive during this time period.

While I can buy a motorbike two weeks from now, I will have to let buy overpriced insurance, and then let it sit in the garage for 6-10 weeks while they investigate my driving record in the United States. In the big picture, it’s not a very long time to wait. The difference is that I believed I would only have to deal with this commute for another two weeks,  whereas in reality it would appear that I will have to wait until June.

Isolation

To live in a foreign country is to know a special kind of isolation. It is one thing to visit a place and not know the language, but on a day to day basis, it eats away at you. When people ask you a question at the train station (which they seem to do quite a bit here), it really bothers me as a know-it-all to not be able to answer them. A third of these questions are in Dutch, which I can slightly understand, and the rest are in French, which I understand less of than I thought I would.

At work, we speak English, but the isolation I know there stems not from a language barrier, but that of a knowledge barrier. I am the only software developer in my office, and the only member of my team in this timezone. The ability to bounce ideas off of people sitting next to you is a gift that cannot be understated.

Timezones are a sense of isolation I thought I knew well from living in Sweden while my friends were in the United States. It gets even worse working for a multi-national company, where you are trying to coordinate your daily activity with people who are just starting to get into work while you are eager to get out of work. The most difficult challenge is that my meetings generally run after the last train to my home runs, which means I don’t get home until 9:15pm on those days. This combination of factors makes me feel like I have plateaued in my learning here, but it is mostly due to me not putting forth the proper amount of effort to rise above these difficulties.

Thankfully, due to the various meetup groups and my wife, I get to spend my weekends generally having a good time. This weekend I was able to go bowling with Dallas’s friends, and went on a 15km hike with the Brussels A Club. The weekends are what keep me going here.

In Closing…

Belgium has been a most excellent teacher of patience. In keeping with my buddhist philosophies, I have been trying to examine the positive side of every challenge. My commute has afforded me an opportunity to stay in shape, and to stay well read. I have had the time to read Heinlein, Pratchett, Heller, Booker T. Washington, and the great WEB Dubois, where I read this quote that really resonated with me:

…before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

While I think it would be an insult to compare my current state of being with the struggle of the Negro in the early 1900′s, I found it inspirational nonetheless. While I no longer have time or ability for my two favorite hobbies (motorcycles and open-source software), I know that I am learning. I know that though I struggle at both work at home, that the best things in life never come easy.

Today I had one of those experiences that shows yet again that clever code can sometimes make the worst assumptions. I’ve got this project at work, which is a web application that generates pretty graphs and tables based on SQL queries to a handful of databases. The users have a fair amount of control over the queries, mostly to handle different geographic locations, date ranges, and how to group the results.

This is a long geeky post, so I’ve hid the meat just behind the cut…
[Read more →]

This entry is really just a test to make sure the WordPress bleeding-edge build doesn’t mangle carriage returns anymore.

It’s 10am and Dallas and I are still laying in bed with sore throats, sucking on Ricola lozenges. No real plans for today except to buy a pair of jeans, do some laundry, and perhaps buy some component cables to hook the Wii up to our new 32″ LCD Television. We also had the Blu-Ray player delivered yesterday, but have yet to hack it to play our DVD’s from Region-1 (USA). We have to sit on either a beanbag or a bench to watch television at the moment, but on Monday, IKEA will be delivering us a couch!

Once we have a hard-wired internet connection, things will begin to feel like home here.