Entries from Simon Butcher

Chumby!
He was once a little green slab of clay. Chumby!
You should see what Chumby can do today. Chumby!
He can walk into any book, with his pony pal Pokey, too.
If you've got a heart then Chumby's a part of you.

In the wee hours of the morning, I was privileged to receive an invitation to purchase a Chumby — not a Gumby — through their “Chumby Insider” product launch. Needless to say, I was excited!

Alas, it wasn't meant to be…

Lately I've been doing an awful lot of cycling. At least that is to say: an awful lot relative to the amount of cycling I've done over the past decade. While I'm not cycling as much as I should, I am managing to do at least a couple of bicycle commutes a week, which in itself is a fairly short ≈18km round-trip.

To pick this new habit up properly, I read a lot of blogs, forums and other sites about commuting by bike in order to glean some tips and pointers. Unfortunately these sites only contained information from people who have been commuting to work for so many years they could do it in even the most bitter of weather conditions, half-asleep.

While I'm not a psycho, I have already managed to clock-up over 500km of riding with the new bike. Because of this milestone, I thought I should share some of my experiences.

Recently I mentioned that an Ex of mine was to arrive for a short visit. These plans didn't come together when I put my foot down last night, effectively cancelling them.

Ordinarily I wouldn't air such things out here, but in this instance I felt I really needed to let it out into the open and allow the funk to dissipate.

One week ago I was awoken earlier than usual by the sound of what I initially thought was a chainsaw. This being somewhat odd and inexplicable, I made the effort to get out of bed and take a peek. It seemed workers had arrived to shut down the fountain and, from what I could tell at the time, they were starting to encase it in wood.

Being a little too weird and therefore difficult to comprehend at the extremely unsociable hour of 7:30am, I went to vegetate under the shower and wake up. Once outside, I still failed to comprehend what exactly was going on here.

Death seems to be a common theme lately. I seem to know or at least know of several people who are currently going through their grieving process right now, as if it's some sort of organised or seasonal event. Indeed, death has come to my family, with distant relative Geoff Echberg, who could be considered my Great Uncle, passing away last Saturday at the age of 92.

Another busy month has passed by, and it's not long before the year has passed by completely. It does seem that 2007 is flying past and it's starting to really irritate me as I cannot find any major personal accomplishment this year. There are accomplishments there, but nothing spectacular.

Lately I've watched everyone around me fall ill as we move into Autumn and finally succumbed to a particularly nasty cold about a week and a half ago that's done a fantastic job of drowning my brain-cells in snot. I still managed to take photos of a few things however, and I thought that I should once again wrap up the month using my invented word.

Life rolls on…

When you look back into your past at the people you once new, the situations you were once in, the places you once frequented, and the things you once did, how exactly do you feel? Do you feel sad? Angry? Regretful? Revolted?

Something the Victorian education system failed to teach me is that history is important; it tells you where you've been, who you are now, and where you're going. Without history, we'd all be moronic shells, bumping into the same problems we never knew existed and never really going anywhere new.

Lately I've been in a very retrospective mood. Most people would tell me that I'm living in the past and it's time to move on and look forwards into the future, however my personal “balance philosophy” tells me that a little retrospection is a good thing. (I will write about that later, in great detail, I promise Steve!)

People don't seem to realise that computer programming is an artistic discipline rather than procedural office work. Those outside of the field would probably scoff at that remark, after they've put together a pivot table within excel. Just because you can cook doesn't make you a chef.

Your average manager fails to understand the difference between someone within an artistic job and someone with a procedural job — the difference being that to accomplish their goal one designs and constructs while the other follows list of tasks. Just because you're a mechanic doesn't make you an automotive engineer.

Sleep is one of my most favourite things.

When I don't sleep I tend to lose my ability to multi-task and eventually I get stuck in an infinite loop — like a record skipping — on singular topics that honestly never seem to reach any formal conclusion other than to recursively become ever-more circuitous than would otherwise be necessary, and ultimately the introduction of some form of interruption is usually the only thing that can put an end to my redundant cogitation, forcing my brain to return to functioning with syllogism; and in my current state of excessive verbosity would compel me to stop writing this esoteric yet amaranthine dissertation that I nonsensically continue to slowly dribble into this post painfully like a daydreaming slug slithering through a dry salt pond and onwards towards oblivion…

Several people have urged me over the past month to look at the a new web service known as Spock. I avoided doing so, partly because I'm sceptical of anything named after Star Trek characters, their little blue man logo reminded me of every horrible Web 2.0 site, but mainly because it sounded like yet another social networking site — another way for “trendy” people to justify their pathetic friendships publicly. These sites seem to be taking over the minds of once rational people as SMS speak once did, like an incurable sexually transmitted fungus that is making everyone itch but nobody is willing to openly talk about how bad the problem is.

Spock however, isn't exactly a social networking site. It looks like one, and acts like one, but it's main goal is to be a search engine for people. To this end, Spock sucks the lives out of existing sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook and other such CamelCased “network” sites, and carefully plucks out information to build personal profiles with complex metadata rather than just a flat index as Google would.

The world just got a little bit smaller… again.

Lately I realise my life is amazingly out of balance. I'm now forced to play catch-up with everything going on around me, not only at work but in my personal life; Everything's out of kilter, and this is why I haven't had time to return phone calls, answer emails, scratch that bloody mozzie bite on the side of my arm, or write blog entries.

I've started to write about several things, but they've never really gotten anywhere beyond simple statements. As most of these are inspired by something I've seen, I thought that the best way to deal with them was to sporadically compile a little post that was somewhat closer to a photo-blog. In a moment of weakness, I unfortunately invented a little word for this; Apologies in advance.

The one thing that occurs to me lately is that getting healthy can be very expensive. Oddly, I always knew that eating healthy was horribly expensive compared to buying junk food, but now I realise the cost of things to help you be healthy are equally expensive.

I love my empty calories, and as my metabolism is slowing down like the rest of my family, I'm regaining the pot-belly I once grew while I baked myself in the sun at a resort in Pattaya back in 1992. Get me another watermelon juice, slave!

It's time to put an end to all that, and get a bit of catabolism going, beyond just walking everywhere. I've been saying for months that I should start running, but I couldn't motivate myself. Cyclocity instead encouraged me to cycle, and unfortunately for them I wound up buying my own bike.

Over the weekend just passed, the Brussels Summer Festival (formerly known as Euritmix) wound up the last big batch of their 280 free concerts being performed through-out the city. Me being me, I missed out on most of it, but I couldn't possibly miss the action when it arrived on my doorstep!

The weekend was probably the busiest weekend I've had in a long time, with many errands to run and much out-of-pattern spending to be done, and yet I still managed to spend a lot of time watching bands from my window ledge. For my own future reference, I thought I should jot down some notes about these unknown bands, which is represented by this post.

As I try to refrain from The Lovin' Spoonful references, I have to say that lately I've been feeling more and more at home living in the city. I love summer in Brussels, because all the plebs that live outside the pentagon bugger off on their holidays and the city centre turns into one amazingly friendly village (so long as you ignore the tourists).

Brussels also comes alive in a certain indefinable magic way, not only because it has it's own beach on the canal, or the arrival of the carnies at the medieval city gate in the south, but because of a fantastic summer festival.

This year, the festival has come to my doorstep!

Anybody else have problems with phones or Internet within the nineteen-communes today?

Around 4am this morning, Belgacom suffered a major outage that impinged upon everything in the Brussels area including phones, Internet connections, business data circuits, EFT networks, and even Belgacom's own mobile phone network, Proximus.

By mid-morning, Proximus, most land lines and EFT networks were available again, but related problems continued between networks such as Mobistar and BASE. A significant number of business services are still unavailable across Brussels, and should only be restored over the weekend.