First dive at Nemo 33, Bruxelles.
You don't need an insulation suit, or any weights. The visibility is perfect and the environment is great for exercises. A dive takes around 40-50 minutes (max - in our case it was 27 minutes) and costs 22 Euros.
Dive data for the dive:
Time In: 12:24
Time Out: 12:51
Max Depth: 11.4m
Water temperature: high (no insulation suit needed)
Weights: none (no insulation suit, 12L steel)
Visibility: perfect
Air consumption (12L):
In: 180 BAR
Out: 100 BAR
Tuesday, May 4
Thursday, April 29
on forgiveness
In ultimate analysis, your choice to make is between being right and being happy.
(excerpt from "The Book of Utnapistim", which is not yet written)
(excerpt from "The Book of Utnapistim", which is not yet written)
Forgiveness is not something you do for another but something you do for yourself. I am talking here of the exact moment when you let go of all the pain, of all the anger and resentments and your shoulders drop suddenly. You all of a sudden feel very relieved and ... possibly happy again.
It is a moment of great release.
This kind of forgiveness is not about accepting everything that happens to you, or letting someone walk over you - in fact you should remove yourself from a situation where you get hurt as soon as possible. What I am talking about is not clinging to the pain after you've been hurt.
Forgiveness is the awesome power to let go of what happened, to be fresh again in the next moment. This is one of the keys of lasting happiness.
When seen from this angle, forgiveness is the opposite of letting someone walk all over you. It is a way of saying "my life is not about <whatever hurt me>". In fact, what happened matters so little that I have already gotten over it - it just doesn't matter in the long run.
In the end, this king of forgiveness is simply the right perspective to go with.
This forgiveness begins with acceptance - with the unconditional acceptance of the situation as it is now. If you were hurt, accept you were hurt. If you are angry about it, accept your anger.
Accepting means that you will stop rationalizing it, justifying it, thinking about what happened, spinning it, reinterpreting and going over it again and again, thinking <what ifs>, and <I should have>s, making scenarios, explaining it in your head, and generally all that jazz*.
We do this all the time: some event makes us feel pain, then we spin it in our heads for minutes (the lucky ones), for days (that would be ... me) or - in the worst cases - for years to come. Instead of moving on, your whole existence becomes "about that".
I don't mean that it's bad to keep it going, or that you should or shouldn't or any such crap.
It's just that this kind of suffering comes from what is basically clinging to your own pain and what you get out of the whole process is just more pain (although while you're at it, it may look like some kind of "justice", some form of "I was injured", or "poor me", a settling of accounts or proving yourself right). In the end, clinging to your pain is just more pain (just like getting revenge, in the ultimate analysis is just more pain).
In the end the key to forgiveness is this: look at all the hurt and face it like an upstanding human being (to the degree that there is such a thing as an upstanding human being). Embrace all the pain you may feel with all that you are at this moment.
When you do this, your tension towards it is gone, and you may come to realize something startling: you're not actually that hurt, it's not as bad as it seemed while you were fighting it and it is in fact quite small; You may even discover it's insignificant.
When you are here, forgiveness has already happened (and no, nobody walked over you in the process).
* Come to think of it, jazz is actually quite nice. Don't go starting to associate it with mental pain now.
Thursday, March 11
Sunday, March 7
Saturday, March 6
Friday, February 26
Change is Good
This is my last day in this company. I was hired for two projects here, both of which were successes (methinks) and now it's time to depart.
I will have to clear my browser cache, my local files (I kept my CV in My Documents and all that), and I will have to make sure I didn't leave any incriminating papers on my desk (err ... not that I'd have anything to hide - I mean).
Seriously though, as strange as it may sound, I will miss the one hour drive to office every morning (I drove with the window open as I came uphill this morning, to catch the morning's fresh air in the small forest).
I will also miss the too-sweet-not-warm-enough-cappuccino made by the machine down the hall and these guys that I've known for three months, and whose jokes I still don't understand (as they speak French among themselves and they speak too fast for me to understand).
Through all that, I have this feeling of change, of new beginnings.
I still have no idea where I'll be Monday morning, but at this point it doesn't matter.
Change is good.
I will have to clear my browser cache, my local files (I kept my CV in My Documents and all that), and I will have to make sure I didn't leave any incriminating papers on my desk (err ... not that I'd have anything to hide - I mean).
Seriously though, as strange as it may sound, I will miss the one hour drive to office every morning (I drove with the window open as I came uphill this morning, to catch the morning's fresh air in the small forest).
I will also miss the too-sweet-not-warm-enough-cappuccino made by the machine down the hall and these guys that I've known for three months, and whose jokes I still don't understand (as they speak French among themselves and they speak too fast for me to understand).
Through all that, I have this feeling of change, of new beginnings.
I still have no idea where I'll be Monday morning, but at this point it doesn't matter.
Change is good.
Wednesday, February 17
The Dark Side ... of Your Resumé
If you were to look at my resumé, youd' see a lot of wonderful things:
It says I have ten years of experience in IT and five years working with C++.
It sais I have a very varied experience, having worked with performance-critical apps, multi-server systems, cryptography, security protocol design and some others.
It's designed to make you feel you know what I'm talking about, after you have read it.
Here's what my resumé won't say:
I also have experience with having to maintain inefficient crap that should have never seen the light of day.
I've maintained over-engineered code, redundant and dead code and generally things that should have been rejected, before seeing the light of source control. To be fair, I've also written that kind of code, mainly in my first two-three years as a software developer.
I have seen obvious mistakes being made in early design that were taken all the way to implementation and maintenance because (probably) someone didn't want to admit their mistakes.
I've seen code that was so ugly that it survived only because those who saw it's ugliness for ugliness were not mad enough to touch it, and the others who were not savvy enough to recognize the ugliness just didn't bother.
I have been asked to stay over the weekend to fix my mistakes, or (in the last years) someone else's mistakes in design (as I tend to learn a bit from mine - as slowly as I sometimes do).
My resumé doesn't say all that, and it will not, because the software engineers who understand that aspect of the job, do not participate much in the hiring process.
Instead you have to impress the others: the ones not savvy enough to understand - either the managers, or the people we tend to talk about over a beer ("I have this guy at work who ...").
Very seldom will you see the hiring decisions being touched by the people that will be actually affected by those decisions, the people that you will be directly working with.
In the last company I worked with, I was interviewed by my would-be manager - the technical guy I was to be dirrectly under, once I passed the interview.
I was lucky that way.
Most of the times, in order to get hired, you need to put on a suit (that you will not wear past the interview) and your best business face, then speak to somebody that evaluates your skills based on your own description and the amount of achronyms on your CV (my CV says I've done OOA/D and maintained a HP/HA server system with a MTBF of a year or so).
In a typical interview you will probably speak to somebody that is interested in the business side only, or that has (at best) seen some code a few years ago. The only apport technical people have in these jobs is (maybe) to advise the management on a test they should give to potential candidates.
In the cases where you have a technical interview it is usually the second (that is, if you pass the non-technical one).
Sadly most companies dismiss the best developers at the interview stage (because if they were able to speak business they'd be business people, not developers).
It says I have ten years of experience in IT and five years working with C++.
It sais I have a very varied experience, having worked with performance-critical apps, multi-server systems, cryptography, security protocol design and some others.
It's designed to make you feel you know what I'm talking about, after you have read it.
Here's what my resumé won't say:
I also have experience with having to maintain inefficient crap that should have never seen the light of day.
I've maintained over-engineered code, redundant and dead code and generally things that should have been rejected, before seeing the light of source control. To be fair, I've also written that kind of code, mainly in my first two-three years as a software developer.
I have seen obvious mistakes being made in early design that were taken all the way to implementation and maintenance because (probably) someone didn't want to admit their mistakes.
I've seen code that was so ugly that it survived only because those who saw it's ugliness for ugliness were not mad enough to touch it, and the others who were not savvy enough to recognize the ugliness just didn't bother.
I have been asked to stay over the weekend to fix my mistakes, or (in the last years) someone else's mistakes in design (as I tend to learn a bit from mine - as slowly as I sometimes do).
My resumé doesn't say all that, and it will not, because the software engineers who understand that aspect of the job, do not participate much in the hiring process.
Instead you have to impress the others: the ones not savvy enough to understand - either the managers, or the people we tend to talk about over a beer ("I have this guy at work who ...").
Very seldom will you see the hiring decisions being touched by the people that will be actually affected by those decisions, the people that you will be directly working with.
In the last company I worked with, I was interviewed by my would-be manager - the technical guy I was to be dirrectly under, once I passed the interview.
I was lucky that way.
Most of the times, in order to get hired, you need to put on a suit (that you will not wear past the interview) and your best business face, then speak to somebody that evaluates your skills based on your own description and the amount of achronyms on your CV (my CV says I've done OOA/D and maintained a HP/HA server system with a MTBF of a year or so).
In a typical interview you will probably speak to somebody that is interested in the business side only, or that has (at best) seen some code a few years ago. The only apport technical people have in these jobs is (maybe) to advise the management on a test they should give to potential candidates.
In the cases where you have a technical interview it is usually the second (that is, if you pass the non-technical one).
Sadly most companies dismiss the best developers at the interview stage (because if they were able to speak business they'd be business people, not developers).
Thursday, January 21
Nothing Else Matters - on Cimbalom
My mother called me tonight and told me about a youtube video of Radu Seu, playing Nothing Else Matters ... on a cimbalom.
The movie was shot with a phone camera, in a Restaurant. It started circulating a short while ago and it's apparently been passed around the internet virally.
It's good to see that people recognize it for what it is.
I mean, it's shot badly, and people still forward it.
It's in a restaurant, with people's voices in the background, and people still forward it.
The sound quality is bad and people still forward it.
It gives me a good feeling to see this.
Edit: Here's some more:
Bach's Ave Maria
He Who Loves and Lets Go (traditional Romanian Folk):
The movie was shot with a phone camera, in a Restaurant. It started circulating a short while ago and it's apparently been passed around the internet virally.
It's good to see that people recognize it for what it is.
I mean, it's shot badly, and people still forward it.
It's in a restaurant, with people's voices in the background, and people still forward it.
The sound quality is bad and people still forward it.
It gives me a good feeling to see this.
Edit: Here's some more:
Bach's Ave Maria
He Who Loves and Lets Go (traditional Romanian Folk):
Sunday, January 17
not a zen koan
These are all things I've done before: the thoughts, the actions, the gestures, the ideas, the aspirations, the wishes, the illusions of illusion and truth, the sensations, the search, the questions and the answers.
I'm trapped in the iron circle, and the only exit is through the middle of a puzzle, burned to ashes, scattered by the wind and washed away by rain.
Where is my exit now?
I'm trapped in the iron circle, and the only exit is through the middle of a puzzle, burned to ashes, scattered by the wind and washed away by rain.
Where is my exit now?
Impromptu Skiing - in France
Quite late, too late for any sane organizing to be done, I was asked if I wanted to ski this weekend.
I said yes, without thinking about it.
I spent Friday morning getting winter tires, Friday evening driving (then drinking) and today morning coming back, as it rained all of Saturday night.
We got through a good day of skiing though, which is a lot more than no skiing at all in my book, and I got some good rain pictures to boot.
A good weekend all in all.
I said yes, without thinking about it.
I spent Friday morning getting winter tires, Friday evening driving (then drinking) and today morning coming back, as it rained all of Saturday night.
We got through a good day of skiing though, which is a lot more than no skiing at all in my book, and I got some good rain pictures to boot.
A good weekend all in all.
Wednesday, January 13
Tuesday, January 12
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