Entries from Simon Butcher

Awoke this morning with a goal of getting the real part of the road-trip started. Now that the wedding was over, it was time to decide which way back to Brussels we were going to take. Specifically, we were trying to decide which side of France to traverse.

Armed with the 2€ road atlas that Scott and I bought on a whim just prior to taking our trip and a coin, it was decided relatively adventitiously that we would return via the Eastern side of France…

After a long sleep-in, we awoke to a boiling hot day in Aigua Blava. Since we could see Wedding HQ from our rear terrace, we noticed things were a little bit hectic over there. This isn't really surprising, considering Cath & Max were to be wed today!

We decided to head into Begur for some lunch, but indecision kept us from choosing a place to sit down for lunch…

After catching the last remnants of breakfast, and a brief visit to the ATAC in Aumont-Aubrac for some bottled water (and some other… stuff…) we headed back on the A75 through the Massif Central.

While heading over a ridge, I noticed a bridge in the distance that appeared somewhat familiar, if not somewhat enormous. An excited idea popped into my head that it could be the Millau Viaduct — the very bridge Scott and I were looking for when we were crossing back into France from Spain…

Being invited to Cath & Max's wedding in Spain, Aline and I took it upon ourselves to take a little holiday. Living in Belgium, it seemed perfectly logical to go on a little road-trip — there and back.

Two years ago Scott and I embarked on a road-trip that had many ups and downs but taught me many things about how a road-trip can be conducted. Scott has fortunately maintained his website, Smile in Europe, which contains a few photos taken along that particular journey.

My audits are in full swing at work this month, which is why I'm fairly quiet lately. Each year I get dragged into several audits because of my line of work, including an internal audit, an external audit, and a federal audit.

Needless to say, it's a pain. More-so, it's a terrible detriment to the environment. The photo shown here is one security report from our system in a format that our external auditors prefer. Each year, a small tree gets printed, each page signed by management, and approved by the auditors, all in the name of Sarbanes-Oxley — Ha.

I'm sick of fixing other people's code. I love the open-source community for all of the free and high-quality software that's out there. I've even contributed my own little bits and pieces, mostly in the form of patches, here and there.

What I hate about the open-source movement are the egos. The problem is that the people who started a project end up actually belittling the project because of their own arrogance. Suggest something, or even provide a patch, and these particular people will tell you that your idea is wrong, that you don't know what you're doing, and so forth. On the other hand, they may never respond. I can understand this to a certain extent; I work in IT, and we're all control-freaks at some level.

Over the next year or so, I'm going to start rewriting my blog from the ground up, because this is ultimately the only way I can get the performance and feature-set I want without hacking at someone else's system. This also means my little DVD collection database will be frozen and remain incomplete until I rewrite that part too.

With my birthday coming up in a few days, I've been struggling to find some time for myself. I keep inventing projects for myself, but never actually have the time to dig into them and make any satisfying progress.

One example is that I still haven't made any progress on my appalling level of French, and there's no hope in hell that I'll be running in the 20km of Brussels half-marathon this year.

I suppose I need to keep in mind what Ferris Bueller once said, “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Submarine cables have always fascinated me, initially from the sheer length of some of these cables, or from the sheer number of them, but also from the fact that the concept was commercially proven as long ago as 1850!

Of course, back then the cables were simple copper wires wrapped in gutta-percha (a kind of latex) and couldn't compete with today's fancy multi-strand fibre optic self-healing rings.

Curiously, PIPE have formally opened a blog that follows the installation of their new PPC-1 cable between Guam and Australia, which is set to be quite interesting.

This evening I had the privilege of being taken to Delirium, the amazing multimedia spectacular from Cirque du Soleil. Needless to say, I was completely blown away.

This production superbly combines dance, acrobatics, live and pre-produced music, along with live and pre-produced video into an incredible well paced audio-visual feast that couldn't give anyone a chance to get bored.

It's been quite a while since my last little Benespection post, and considering it recently snowed for the first time this year — surprisingly just as winter officially ended — I thought I might share some snow pictures with you all.

Being Australian, I tend to have a slight fascination with snow, but on this particular occasion some of us were actually trapped by it…

Rollercoaster Season has once again rolled around as marked by the opening of the Walibi season for 2008 this weekend. As with last year, an early glimpse into what's changed within the park — or what's not working yet — is somewhat necessary.

This season opener didn't highlight anything spectacular to report, except that the Vertigo was once again being tested and wasn't taking passengers. There was once unique aspect of this visit though: It was snowing!

I've found myself needing access to the Internet from some remote areas, so it made sense to finally “bite the bullet” and give up; After many years of deliberation and procrastination, I recently bought myself a GPRS/EDGE data plan for my mobile phone.

So why would someone like myself — who carries around a Nokia E70 — not have bought into this earlier? Well, it's very simple: The cost of data through a mobile phone is ridiculously high compared with other more conventional broadband Internet connections.

It's not just Internet connectivity that's expensive, but SMS text-messages also seem disproportionately expensive compared with e-mail. A while ago, someone with too much time on their hands went a bit overboard detailing the cost of an SMS but neglected to understand the big picture.

I like movies.

I hate cinemas.

I'm a home theatre kind of guy.

While I may not actually have the fantastic home theatre setup now, my DVD collection has grown significantly over the last two years. People around me have taken notice, and it's become a common gift for me, especially since I'm a difficult person to buy presents for.

This collection has grown to the point where it's become somewhat of an addiction: I'm now faced with a queue of DVDs I've bought or been given as gifts that I still haven't watched!

Today the Vatican announced the first update to the list of deadly sins since the 6^th-century, expanding the list from seven sins to fourteen sins.

Each sin on the list is guaranteed to give you a nice warm spot writhing in agony amongst fire and brimstone and all that good stuff, so I thought I'd have a look at the list from my agnostic perspective.

I am, at heart, a bit of a greenie, although not the kind that would rush off to chain myself to trees or destructively paint slogans on the side of Japanese “fishing” vessels. I am however strongly opposed to so many things that are permanently scaring the natural world, such as the aforementioned logging and whaling, and my opinion on climate change is that while it's a natural process, we have done so much to speed up the process.

Recently, to my absolute revulsion, a disgusting court case that epitomises the insalubrious legal system of the USA has once again highlighted the human obsession with sweeping major problems under the proverbial rug in order to convince ourselves that someone else will deal with the problem.

The problem is — as I realise every time I need to vacuum my apartment — that this mysterious “someone else” won't deal with the problem.