Moving the blog

It has been ages since I last posted.

There is of course reason behind this madness. I am currently in the process of setting up a new project with website and blog called TheFabulousJourney.

As it is a pet project I'm spending my free time on this.
Which is not a lot.

So, TheFabulousJourney as my personal blog is closing. Rants, Ramblings, Reviews and General-Looks-On-Life are being moved to my facebook page.
http://www.facebook.com/gertjan.filarski

You can also get Facebook to feed you. Use this rss-link to subscribe:
http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=1523512845&viewer=1523512845&key=c18b6bf6b8&format=rss20

Some people...

...understand what the Fabulous Journey is all about...



... oh and yes of course I had to google who the fuck Louis Vuitton is/was. And no, I don't care he is a french fashion designer. Whatever he makes, the guy gets it.

D 0 and no more couting!

Final day has arrived at the office, everybody is nice :)
and I have a ton of work

something doesnt feel right
I am working my ass of on some projects
while I am leaving

...

ah well

thats probably because I'll take these projects with me.

D -1 and counting

Yesterday I told all about the Big Plan of the Three Pillars. What I didnt mention however is the Other Plan.

The Other Plan involves my beloved C. and helping her settle into a life in the cold and wet and damp and... you start to wonder why she wants to come up here to begin with.

Anyways the Other Plan will kick off at the same time as the Big Plan. Now don't think that because the Other Plan is called the Other Plan it is not a BIG Plan. It is. Significantly big. But stuff needs to have a name. The Other Plan starts next friday with me flying down into Milan Malpensa and driving to Turin. Next week I will be working (some) from my beloved C's appartment and be in charge of the Great Packing. Great Packing basically means putting lots of stuff in boxes. I can do that. I am a pretty good box-packer. There is going to be some kind of office party for beloved C. that week and I am supposed to be there as well. People know I love office parties... especially those where I have to face a lot of angry people blaming me for taking the beloved C. away to NL. I am specifically refering to some big Fiat bosses.
Well if the Great Packing is done and we survived the Office Party. We will visit an antique market in the piedmontese hills on sunday December 7th. Then, planning, weather and packing permitting we will drive up north in the Little Blue Bullet with the Cat and some small essentials.
On the 23rd of December Beloved C. leaves the Cat with me in NL (we are going to have so much fun) and flies back to Italy. I follow on December 26th. On December 27th a Truck of the Expedition arrives which will be filled with boxes and furniture from the Great Packing. It will drive directly to Leiden while we run off to Milan and fly back again. The Truck of the Expedition will arrive in Leiden on the 28th where we will unload it. Friends beware... we are going to need some help there :)

And then...
And then...

The Other Plan is done.
Beloved C. starts a crashcourse Dutch at Leiden Uni on January 5th.
Sometime end of January we will visit my parents in Switzerland and I'll do some skiing.

And beyond that.
We will just wait and see.

And as my Beloved C. pointed out at D -2 and counting. The Fabulous Journey is allready in full swing.

D -2 and counting

In two days time I will be free
After ten years I will be back (released early for good behaviour)

So what's the plan? (besides having fun enjoying being free)

As of the end of coming thursday my Big Plan to dominate the world will unfold. It will be based on three pillars. All three will start seperately, but the idea is to have them converge in great bouts of synergy ...

Pillar the First: will generate the bulk of my income. I have arranged with my current employer to keep developing software. I have worked with him for about ten years and we are pretty well adapted to eachother. Besides him, I will do the same work for one or two more people. This is the cash generating part of the Big Plan.

By having my cash position secured I will have created time. Simply because I won't have to be at the office daily from 10ish to 19ish anymore. If my calculations are correct I will spend about two weeks every month on Pillar the First. Pillars the Second and Third of the Big Plan are all about investing this time in New Stuff.

Pillar the Second: the first part of the New Stuff is writing, editing, photographing etc. I am pretty far in becoming the new final editor of MacFan (what do I know about Macs, well nothing...), I am going to design a book on the mysterious history of The Church (in NL), I am about to launch a stockphoto site and in january I will make a decision on what story idea to focus my writing. I have a gazillion ideas for novels ...

Pillar the Third: more New Stuff will start in September 09. I have finished the bachelor stage of Uni and am spending some time currently at the faculty for philosophy. I do courses in antique and medieval philosophy. In September I will apply for entrance in the Mphil course at History. One of the top courses in Uni which prepares directly for PhD research.

The last Two Pillars of the Big Plan will hopefully eventually be enough to start reducing the amount of time spend in Pillar the First :)

So yay for the Big Plan of Three Pillars !

:yay:

It's going to be a fabulous journey :)

Missed call in life

I missed my call in life. I just got the results for my first exam in classical philosophy. I scored 95 out of 100.

I think I may celebrate that.

:celebrates:

So that's them all down from Thales of Milete to Plato. Next stop Aristotle till the neoplatonists.

But philosophers are weird. They let the classical period stop around the time of Plotinus. The official reason being that after the first half of the third century Greek is replaced by Latin. But I smell fake arguments here :)

I think that the real reason behind it all is the fact that us medievalists really really really want to claim Augustine of Hippo and Boethius. So I guess we just have to invent the 3rd and 4th centuries as 'the very early middle ages'.

All in favour raise your hand.

:raises my hand:

Remembrance Day

As NL was neutral in WW I we don't do November 11th. Instead we have remembrance day on May 4th, the day before Liberation Day. On May 5th, 1945 German occupation forces surrendered to the Allies. Slowly we start to become aware of the impact November 11 has on countries surrounding us like Belgium, France and the UK. Many Dutch people travel south to Ypres to witness the ceremonies.

Now, as I am rather busy these days I completely overlooked the 11th this year. I was pointed to it by User Friendly. A webcomic I read on a daily basis for it's ultra dry (but oh so true) ICT humour. These days it gave me a pause though.

I included them here ... visit the site to get more.

Time doing what it's supposed to do: going on.

Do not, just do not, expect some smart and clever remarks and insights on the US election from this blog.

Expect mostly sentences that start with zzzzz and end likewise.

Yes, yes I watched...
I watched it all the way.

All the way being till 0600 this morning or sometime roundabouts.
Which would be absolutely cool and perfect
*IF* I had already been freelancing...

... but as I am not - for at least two or three more weeks... - the alarmclock at 0900 was not very appreciated by yours truly.

Yours truly now pretends to be a zombie at work (but hey, what's the news in that?)
A very sleepy zombie though, you know one that would have prefered to remain lying in its grave.

Anyways, 3 hours of sleep, been witnessing a historic night which I really believe can have an enormous influence on the world as we know it. Thirty years of reactionary conservative extreme capitalism (to give a few adjectives) might be coming to an end. To mention that's a pretty sight is quite an understatement for any liberal progressive person.

There is now only one more thing to do for witnessing history junkies, and that's wait. But hell, that's what we usually do... that's the fun side of this hobby. You actually don't have to do anything to see time go on :)

Monday Monday (lalaaa lalalaaaa)

0407 - Turin: wake up alarm call. Lovely C. tells me to sleep a bit more
0410 - Turin: second wake up call. C. was serious when she said 'a bit' more (3 minutes! yay)
0420 - Turin: getting a cup of tea, packing my bags
0435 - Turin: get in the car to drive to Milan
0515 - Italian highway: breakfast stop at a roadside restaurant/gasstation
0520 - Italian highway: leaving for Milan
0610 - Milan Malpensa: parking car
0620 - Milan Malpensa: romantic goodbye of lovely C.
0640 - Milan Malpensa: passed security
0645 - Milan Malpensa: start EZ boarding
0700 - Milan Malpensa: boarded plane
0715 - Milan Malpensa: reading Arabian Nights
0717 - Milan Malpensa: pilot warns of half hour delay due to fog at Amsterdam Schiphol
0735 - Milan Malpensa: finished reading fairytale, starting to doze off.
0740 - Milan Malpensa: push off plane starts taxi
0745 - Milan Malpensa: take off for Amsterdam Schiphol
0746 - Airborne: fall dead asleep
0855 - Airborne: pilot announces 'cabin crew prepare for landing', waking up
0915 - Amsterdam Schiphol: touchdown
0925 - Amsterdam Schiphol: exit terminal, find dad waiting for me with car
0952 - IJmuiden: arrive at parents home
0953 - IJmuiden: meet mum, drink tea in a futile attempt to wake up
1015 - IJmuiden: get back in car drive to office
1035 - Haarlem: arrive at office, start work
1230 - Haarlem: doing some quick groceries to provide lunch
1300 - Haarlem: eat lunch
1320 - Haarlem: read email from freelance customer, have to work tonight
1800 - Haarlem: flee work, being seriously tired
1810 - Highway A4: traffic jam
1815 - Highway A4: call Thijs to have a look at work tonight
1820 - Highway A4: call dad for a quick update
1835 - Leiden: park car
1840 - Leiden: enter home
1845 - Leiden: unpack suitcases, switch on TV
1850 - Leiden: Thijs calls to change meeting tonight
1900 - Leiden: crash on couch watch some Mythbusters with one eye
1905 - Leiden: answering email with other eye
1930 - Leiden: run off into kitchen to prepare some dinner
1950 - Leiden: having dinner, Mythbusters is nearly done
2000 - Leiden: kick feet on couch, try not to fall asleep
2001 - Leiden: switch channels to BBC Prime to watch Spooks
2055 - Leiden: Spooks is done, switch off TV and quickly grab bag and keys
2100 - Leiden: Start car, drive to Thijs
2110 - Leiden: Arrive at Thijs, quick call to lovely C. who is going to bed (I want tooooo)
2115 - Leiden: Get to Thijs' appartment
2130 - Leiden: start working on articles
2355 - Leiden: finish working, agree to meet tomorrow at 2000 to continue
0002 - Leiden: in elevator, very good friend calls for some serious personal advice (which I gladly give)
0030 - Leiden: managed to console friend, starting car
0040 - Leiden: finally arriving home ...
0041 - Leiden: Hell, can't find a parking space ...
0045 - Leiden: need to be off by 0900 tomorrow anyways, park car at illegal spot
0050 - Leiden: yay, bed! nearly clocked 21 hours ! :woot:!!
0800 - Leiden: nooo, wake up... car honks, honks some more... fuck what's up
0801 - Leiden: small riot in the street, garbage truck can't pass... there is car in the way... police car arrives
0802 - Leiden: shit ... that's my car
0805 - Leiden: halfly (but decently) dressed run out just in time to save me from being ticketed (thanks officer)
0806 - Leiden: start car, park it somewhere else and legal
0810 - Leiden: yay, what a briliant start to a new day, go home again to have breakfast ...

Change is coming... (not just of the Obama-kind)

Okay, for the record, in case some historian in the far future stumbles upon my blog and writes up a thesis based on my political preferences: I very much support Obama. So there, say bye bye to your PhD research :P (instead you can now start debating if I am serious -for the second record: yes I am-)

Not that it matters.
Me no american.
Me no vote.
Go and write some history about that.

Now that's settled (with some minor distractions) let's talk about real change.

Of the 'yesterday-I-quit-my-job-to-go-fulltime-freelancing' kind...
Of the 'my-italian-girlfriend-is-moving-to-NL-at-the-same-time' kind...
Of the 'oh-my-god-what-the-f&?k-am-I-doing' kind...

Yay for the fabulous journeys!
The world belongs to adventurers :)

:Goes of adventuring:

Jacques Brel (R.I.P October 9, 1978)

Great artists seem to have a habit of dying in October. Today it is thirty years ago Jacques Brel died of lungcancer. Horrible disease.

Edgar Allan Poe (R.I.P October 7, 1849)

Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be still.

The night, though clear, shall frown,
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven
With light like hope to mortals given,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee for ever.

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
Now are visions ne'er to vanish;
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more, like dew-drop from the grass.

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

Edgar Allan Poe died 159 years ago on October 7th. October is that romantic month of fall, ending in All Hallow's Eve. It was a good month for Poe to die in.

Happy Eid! Happy Rosh Hashanah!

*munchmunchmunchmunch*

As a true liberal westerner I, of course, don't participate in any fast. Consuming must go on, especially with these highly interesting economic times - the Wallstreet crash on monday was the biggest in history, including 1929 -

Anyways, not fasting does not mean that I won't celebrate Eid! Especially not when an islamic colleague started bringing in all kinds of maroccan sweets :) Call me opportunist, call me unbeliever, I don't care as long as you feed me ...

We had a nice chat on the essence of Islam. He said that you should differentiate between pure Islam and cultural Islam. Islam has fused with local customs over the centuries. Customs that many people associate with being islamic while they in fact have much older maroccan or african tradition. He mentioned female circumcision, this is nowhere taught in Islam. The few Islamic countries practicing it are under a lot of pressure from deeply islamic countries to bannish it. Simply because it is *not* taught in Islam.

Now this sounds familiar, I mean look at christian aureoles or the dating of christmas! I wrote a whole thesis on the fusion between christian and pagan traditions and values in Norway in the 10th century. Anyways, he very much believes in this pure form of Islam. So I asked him how he would define "pure Islam". Not surprisingly he answered that this was limited to the teachings of Muhammad as written down in the Quran and the Hadith. Okay, I said, but these teachings are very much part of a fourteen centuries old middle-eastern culture. You are right, he answered, if you approach it from a scientific point-of-view. I confess, he got me there, and I could do little other than agreeing with him.

Still I stressed my point, how do you define what is 'pure' based on cultural ideas of the 7th century AD. He agreed that this was very difficult and that he was not qualified to interpret these texts. He did offer an example though, the Quran teaches polygamy and combines this with property rights for women. In his view this was an incredibly progressive idea in 7th century Araby - and I agree with that, polygamy was born from the idea that women are protected in marriage and as such hold legal rights - in his point of view this should now be put in a modern context. Had the prophet lived in the 21st century he would have taught full equal rights for men and women, because that's what the :idea: meant. So pure Islam is about the idea not about the literal text.

A very liberal thought indeed! And one that I can fully subscribe to. I mean, that is exactly how I read ancient texts, including the Bible. It also illustrates the real issue: any religion based on a fixed unchanging text, and no that's not limited to Islam, needs a constant interpretation based on current culture.

I enjoyed talking with him. As did he, because this was the first in a very long time that he was not attacked over his religion by the UIWAO (Uninformed-Idiot-With-An-Opinion).

So now, if anything we concluded that I am not a UIWAO :)
Yay.

With that, again, happy Eid.

Now this makes me think. Bear with me a little bit more... I mean we make a huge problem of making Eid a national holiday. We strictly observe the Christian days and be done with it. When, in the end, islamic observance of Eid is in general much more deeply religious than the consumerfest that Christmas has become. Isn't it a very liberal and progressive idea to just give everyone a limited number of flexible holidays for religious festivals? In that way, employees can observe whatever festival they personally enjoy/believe in. Everybody happy! No more idiotic discussions of cancelling Pentecost in favour of Eid. You believe, you choose.

Ah well. Who knows. Someday.

And yes in the title it also mentions Happy Rosh Hashanah. As everyone of course knows, today is Jewish new years as well. So welcome to the year 5769. And if I had had a jewish colleague I am sure I would be nicely chatting with him or her as well. Pity.

I am back

And office live is turning into a nightmare (which is not so weird after months of total freedom) ... oh and my direct colleague left. Note to those not in the know, besides programming he also did the system management at the office... so thats up to me now. Maybe I am just not designed for Helldesk work... in a * very * BOFH-like manner the following conversation literally happened a couple of minutes ago:

Beancounter: "my keyboard doesnt work"
Me: "yes it does"
Beancounter: "no it doesnt"
Me: "YES it does"
Beancounter: "well it does but it is on Dutch"
Me: "You are dutch"
Beancounter: "Yes but I want it on international english"
Me: "than set it to do so"
Beancounter: "Yes but I cant find the button"
Me: "configuration screen, regional settings"
Beancounter: "No it's not"
Me: "yes it is"
Beancounter: "no it is supposed to be on my start bar"
Me: "thats the same thing"
Beancounter: "but it's not there"
Me: "it's the same thing"
Beancounter: "but I want it on my start bar"
Me: "Get lost..."

(and another satisfied colleague leaves my office)

On five weeks of Italy

One picture says more than a thousand words. I am currently for five weeks in Italy and have shot more than 1700 pictures. According to the saying that would mean I now have a serie of four novels over a thousand pages each. All in all it is high time to send some message out into the world.

Consider this post as a replacement for the standard ansicht from Italy. I made a selection of about 60 pictures and put them online at http://www.apms.nl/italycheers/index.html.


My adventures in highspeed:

So I am for two months with Chiara in Turin, here follows a digested selection of stories from a total of 1.700.000 words.

- Drinking cocktails on a busy piazza in the centre of Turin around midnight (because the temperature at that time finally allows me to wake up a bit).
- Questing for partially disappeared guardtowers from the 9th and 10th centuries that kept the region south of Turin safe from raids by Muslims from Switzerland (of all places…). Honest, I am telling no lies :) it is at least as exciting as it sounds (sometimes I feel like half an Indiana Jones in this place).
- Following a Roman canal carved from sheer bedrock, climbing through a cave to get to the mouth of the canal and go swimming in an ancient ruined Roman port (I did tell that I feel like Indiana Jones!).
- Priceless: while swimming in said port finding a rectangular carved piece of polished marble. I have no clue whether or not it actually is Roman, but as long as nobody proves me otherwise it is a good story.
- Trying hundreds of new cheeses and salamis, accompanied by ample amounts of aqua and better: vino. Something that I still don’t understand at all, but the deal currently is that I choose beer and ales (because Italians totally suck at making beer) and Chiara selects the wine. And cold beer is the best when you are high up in the hills of Tuscany in the heat.
- Protecting myself from mosquitoes with a killerinstinct, they are capable of stabbing me to death within half an hour (tally 28 bites).
- Cruising almost 5000 kilometers across Italian tollways. In a small blue Lancia equipped with a Telepass! That means indeed: avoiding the long trafficjams that stretch for miles filled with tourists waiting for the tollbooths! We have a private lane with priority :P
- Oh and about the heat, last week the thermometer measured in Tuscany about 38 degrees centigrade! In the shade around 14:30 ...
- Hiking in that heat over gravelroads in search for an Etruscan Necropolis dating back to the 7th century BC (and finding it of course!)
- Learning a new language, and no that’s not Italian, but its ancient predecessor Latin. I got permission for this by my very intellectual girlfriend who now has to translate a little longer between me and the Italian world around me. Still, I am currently capable of following the general sense of conversations… but that’s also about where it ends….
- This language deal does kind of mean that I had to promise that after Latin (and I am going pretty fast) I would start immediately with Italian. Looks like a fair deal to me, I mean, Latin grammar is essentially a very complicated version of Italian. We both kind of assume that as soon as I am done with Latin, Italian is going to be a so called cookie.
- Oh and a final word about the languagedeal... it also means that I had to commit myself to learning Harry Potter part 1 by heart. Chiara has bought the Philosopher’s Stone in Dutch and faithfully goes through it like a studybook. She expects me to read it out aloud for her, after which she repeats it. Dutch really seems to sound pretty weird for the average Italian. It’s not that I have an average girlfriend but it remains a weird language. For some strange reason it is not the gurgling G sound that proves the most difficult but the R. To return to the Philosopher’s Stone, I bought the same book in Latin. I am not yet capable of reading it (grammar in Latin is a tiny bit more complicated than Dutch) but I will soon go faithfully over it a second time.
- Flying twice back to NL because I got tickets for concerts of Leonard Cohen and Iron Maiden (I know, I know, the music styles are kind of different but that’s what happens when you have a broad taste like I do. To make it more complicated I bought here recently a cd with medieval churchmusic by Hildegard von Bingen).
- Returning back to Italy after Cohen and listening the entire concert back with good vino and a sky full of stars.
- Oh and after a barbeque in the middle of the night driving through the backroads of rural Italy in a car that’s running dry. There are sooooooo many fuelstations… but really, they are all closed at 2:30 in the night. And 24h-selfservice in Italy means a lot of self but very little service… most just don’t work.
- Falling Stars! (enough said)
- Trying to get WIFI access on an airport... at Amsterdam Schiphol: piece of cake, at Milan Malpensa: well, do we have a minute?
- At dark deciding that you really don’t feel like driving back over the highway but prefer backroads through forested hills.Yes it takes about three times as long and yes you see about four foxes and three boars. Other than that it is mostly dark, really dark, really incredibly dark, and what you now imagine as being dark multiply that by ten and you’ll have about the level of darkness we had (and yes exaggerating is an art).
- Jumping in the Mediterranean in Liguria and wondering who peed in the water. It’s about that warm. Oh, and the mountains run straight into the sea so taking two steps off the beach (which actually is little more than a collection of gravel) and the undersigned who is about two meters tall can no longer stand.
- Burning to kingdom come at said beach up to an extend that I was compared to Hiawatta skincolourwise.
- Searching antiquemarkets at Italian villages and finding out that we share the same taste in old junk.
- Italians love towers, towers with clocks and heavy bells. We love climbing towers, we are also clever, we are not going to climb such a tower at say, 11:55… but you’ll assume you’d be safe when you go up around 11:10. Unless you just happen to find that one single tower whose clock is running late. And in that single tower we arrived at the roof, about half a meter from the bells when it started to toll …
- Climbing a wall that hadn’t been restructured since the middle ages. Finding out that on the other side of that wall the hill makes a sheer drop of about ten meters.. Trying to keep your balance at said wall who is warning you “that it is actually too old to do this”. Still being stubborn enough to stay on top of that wall, risking life and limb to take that one single fantastic shot…. Which kind of disappoints you when you see the result… All for the sake of Art.
- To travel to Pisa to pick up Thijs from the airport and afterwards go into town with the masses to admire Piazza dei Miracoli. At said piazza ignoring the tower and searching for that one single windclock that is being ignored by all tourists simply because we think it’s cool and we know it must be there. Oh, and finally on aforementioned piazza entertaining yourself by taking pictures of tourists taking pictures of the Tower. People take up the weirdest poses to pretend they are pushing the tower over or (how original!) pushing it back.

So far my five weeks of Italy and the above short version doesn't do it justice.