write.as/jonbeckett

I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room at home, sheltering from the bitter cold outside. The central heating is on flat-out, the curtains are closed, and the soundtrack from the movie “Hackers” is pumping out of the computer speakers. “Cowgirl” by Underworld is playing.

Miss 17 has been keeping me company for the day – the rest of the family are visiting inlaws. I spent the majority of the morning ironing clothes into a bag ready for the trip to Frankfurt, Germany next week. The rest of my packing is somewhat minimal – a work laptop, a kindle, my work phone, passport, wallet, and wash bag. Oh, and the various chargers for the electrical things. That’s it.

I’m already wondering what automated nonsense I will face at the airport – the last time I travelled, Lufthansa had tried really hard to remove humans from the process entirely. I always think of the scene in “Up in the Air” (the George Clooney movie) when I’m at the airport – particularly the scenes where he advises the girl with him which queue to get in at security. I’ve been there. I’ve seen people blatantly ignore the instructions, and get strip-searched as a result. It’s always their own fault.

Ten minutes ago there was a knock at the door. The peace and quiet has been disrupted by the return of Miss 12, Miss 14, and my other half – full of news, stories, and carrying a belated birthday present from my brother-in-law. I now have several cans of cider to carry me through the evening ahead. Winning!

Inbetween writing this, I’m scrolling through Amazon Prime Video, choosing TV shows and movies to fill the tablet with in preparation for next week. The hotel TV in Germany is fine – if you’re a German speaker – I am not, apart from the obvious “getting by” phrases that everybody learns – “hallo”, “guten morgen”, “guten tag”, “danke”, and so on. Without really understanding what I’m looking at, most prime-time TV in Germany appears to be game-shows involving middle aged men in glittery suits, female models with impossibly long legs in short skirts, and canned laughter.

So far I have downloaded “Taxi”, “The Only Living Boy in New York”, “Dogville”, “Broken Roads”, and “Seamonsters”. I tend to search out quiet, indie movies over blockbusters. I don’t follow the crowd at all.

Anyway. Time to go and make some of that cider vanish.

I finished writing technical documentation for the project I’m working on a little after 11am this morning, and have been scratching around for anything to do ever since. There seems little point in starting development work, given that I’m only here for a few hours – next week I’m off to Germany again.

The hotel is booked. The flights are booked. The taxi to the airport is booked. I just need to fill a suitcase with clothes this weekend – which of course means washing half my clothes, because I don’t own that many in the first place.

I need to remember to load the Fire tablet with TV shows and movies – streaming isn’t an option in Germany unless I use a VPN to tunnel through the regional restrictions. I saw that “Mozart in the Jungle” has just dropped another season – other than that, I’m hopelessly clueless about most recent TV shows. Most evenings I end up either writing, reading, or tinkering with computer stuff. This of course flies in the face of my plans to sit in the hotel bar, and pretend to be sociable.

Coffee. I need a coffee.

While walking back from an emergency grocery shopping trip late this evening, I spotted a cafe that opens late, filled with people laughing, smiling, relaxing, and no doubt having all sorts of fun. As I trudged past with my bag of shopping, with the knowledge that my evening was far from over yet, I started to wonder how other people get to have lives like that – how they make it look so easy.

I’m always going somewhere to get something for somebody or other. I always have a list of things or instructions in my pocket. Somewhere to be. Somebody to pick up. Somebody to deliver somewhere. Something that needs doing. Something that needs to be purchased. Something that needs to be taken back. Always something.

My life seems to exist in the cracks around everybody elses expectations and obligations. You try to tell yourself that you’re happy, and that doing things for others gives you something to do, but you’re not always very convincing.

I suppose there’s another part of me that knows how deceptive appearances can be. The middle-aged couple in the cafe could both have been divorced, with complicated fragments of family dragging along behind them. The older gentleman sitting on his own in a tweed jacket with a glass of white wine might have been a widower – with no family or friends to share his evening with. The young couple might have been on a first date – struggling to make conversation because either they really liked each other and didn’t want to wreck everything, or they were resolving to delete Tinder on the way home.

So as I trudge past, carrying my shopping, perhaps I shouldn’t judge. Perhaps I should just smile at the stories that might be unfolding, and remember that nobody is any better than anybody else really – we’re all doing our best, putting one foot in front of the other, and making it up as we go along.

I’m sitting in the junk room at home, listening to the soundtrack from the movie “Hackers” (Voodoo People, by the Prodigy right now), typing this into GEdit in Solus Linux on the old PC. I need to get more 90s dance music – I used to have a few compilation albums from the big clubs such as “Miss Moneypennys”, and “Ministry of Sound” back in the day, but have a feeling they went to the charity shop during a clear-out at some point.

I have nothing to write about again. I’m not going to let that stop me.

Work is ticking over quietly, our house seems to not be falling apart at the moment, and the kids seem to be doing alright (quite a contrast from the pit of despair we found ourself climbing out of at the beginning of the week). Knowing my luck I’ll have a tooth fall out, or something equally ridiculous to blow a hole in the temporary calm that has descended on the household.

I’m returning to Germany next week – flying out on Monday, and back on Friday. Given that some kind of trade show appears to be happening in Frankfurt, I’ve ended up blowing the travel budget to pieces – paying three times what I might normally. We’ll make the money back later in the year, but for this visit I’ll pretend I’m somebody imporant, and try to enjoy it. My natural inclination is to avoid expensive hotels, and their restaurants and bars – but the opportunity to spend the week watching and recording life happening around me in may prove irresistable.

A pack of new white shirts sits across the room from me. I need to get them out and press them – I’ll need them if I’m going to try and “fit in”. I don’t suppose cargo pants and space invaders t-shirt are really going to cut it if I’m seen coming and going from one of the executive suites.

Whenever I stay at a bigger hotel, I end up thinking about “Lost in Translation” – the movie where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson end up befriending each other while trapped in Tokyo. I wonder if that kind of thing ever happens – where random travellers forge unlikely friendships ? I’m guessing not, but the sentimental part of me hopes it might.

For no particular reason at all, I’m writing this post in a text editor within an Amiga emulator on the Raspberry Pi. Let me explain that a bit further – a very small circuit board sitting on top of the PC under the desk is running Linux, which is then running an emulator – simulating the hardware and operating system of a Commodore Amiga – a home computer from the late 1980s. The emulator has allowed me to connect a USB stick as a pretend hard-drive, that exists on the desktop of the Amiga – meaning I have a roundabout way of exporting the text at the end.

You’re probably wondering why on earth I’m bothering with any of it. I guess it’s partly an experiment – to remove distractions. Twenty eight years ago computers didn’t really “do” multi-tasking – so all this pretend computer can do is run a text editor. If anybody is old enough to remember MS-DOS, it’s kind of the same deal. Or not. The Amiga was years ahead of it’s time – Workbench (the Amiga operating system) allowed a primitive form of multi-tasking, although probably ground-breaking at the time.

The other reason for messing around with the emulator? (always a good reason with me) – is tinkering. I spent a couple of hours late last night playing around with the simulated Amiga, figuring out how to install it from scratch. I think perhaps the most impressive thing is the performance and cost comparison against the hardware this simulates. In the early 1990s, an Amiga 1200 would have cost about $500 – the Raspberry Pi costs about $35, and is in the region of ten times faster.

The Commodore Amiga has always interested me, because I didn’t have one. As mentioned before, our family had an Atari ST – originally bought for music, and never really used for it’s intended purpose. The Amiga was colossally expensive compared to the Atari – I can only remember one of my friends having one, and gazing at it in wonder when I visited his house.

Anyway. Here we are. I finally have my Amiga – a pretend Amiga of course, but it looks the same on the screen. I’ll admit to looking at E-Bay earlier today and scaring myself silly – it turns out retro computers have become collectable.

I don’t think “Monday from Hell” really covers it. Lets just say that when a teenager stops taking her anxiety medication, the wheels will eventually fall off both of your wagons, and you’ll spend the hour before you go to work completely and utterly losing your shit with her, before cycling to work, feeling bad about how you reacted, then returning as soon as you could to work from home from the rest of the day.

We have about five weeks until she takes her exams, and we can then hopefully turn a page. It doesn’t help that the one friend she has outside of college is somebody that dropped out of college. If she does the same, she will end up with no qualifications, no job prospects, and no future. If you’ve every tried to explain this to a teenager, you’ll understand that you probably sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher as you waffle-rant at them.

In other news, I’m back working on the Germany project. I’m writing documentation this week, and then flying out next week to hand over the work done so far, and to plan for the next sprint. There have been murmurings about flying out three times in three weeks early in the summer. That’s going to be fun. I’ll try and find a hotel with a restaurant before then – sitting on my own in the hotel restaurant has got to be easier than finding new places to eat each night. I never thought I’d ever write that.

Coffee. I need a coffee. (Five minutes pass while I drink a pretty forgettable cup of instant coffee)

It struck me earlier that I never think of looking up bloggers in the various cities I visit with work. Would that seem a bit weird – trying to find people that live somewhere, so you can accidentally on purpose meet up for a drink while visiting the city ? I think it might have been a lot easier years ago, but so few people write journal-style blogs these days, the chances of finding anybody are relatively slim (says the person that hasn’t looked).

It’s just gone 10pm on Sunday evening, and I’m in my usual bolt-hole – hiding out in the junk room, listening to music, and emptying my head into the keyboard while the younger children sleep, and my other half watches TV shows in the lounge. Miss 17 is chatting with friends on her phone in her room – I can faintly hear her voice over the music from time to time.

I didn’t go anywhere today. While my other half took the younger children to rugby I stayed at home to keep Miss 17 company – she’s had a rough few days. Inbetween hoovering her room, and putting load after load through the washing machine and tumble dryer, I found myself tinkering with something rather ridiculous.

I’m still not sure how I stumbled upon the YouTube video showing you how to convert a Raspberry Pi into an Amiga, but within an hour of watching it I found myself sitting in front of the screen, building a USB stick to try it out. It was something of a voyage of discovery for me – I never owned an Amiga years ago, so I really understood nothing I was looking at or doing while blindly following instructions. We had an “Atari ST” in our house during my teenage years – bought to use as a music sequencer, but never used as such. My Dad spent most of his time typing sheet music into a database, and I spent most of my time playing a ridiculous football game called “Kick Off”.

Thankfully I have a co-worker that owned an Amiga back in the day – I’ll take the Raspberry Pi with me tomorrow, and hopefully he will be able to make head-or-tail of any of it. There is of course no reason to any of this – it’s a black-belt-level procrastination escapade that only I seem to be capable of.

Back in the real world, Miss 14 kicked her first conversion on the rugby field today. She finally put into practice all the things we have been practicing, and didn’t so much put the rugby ball through the posts, as put it into orbit. I think they lost the ball into the next field, and had to use a replacement to re-start the match. If she can only add a little consistency now, she will start adding more and more points to the team’s tally.

Also worth noting that today was “Mother’s Day” in the UK. My other half received a card, a book, and a magazine from our youngest, and nothing from the other children. I expressed my disappointment with them (even though I privately think mother and father’s day are both cynical marketing exercises), and made sure a huge card and box of chocolates were waiting in the living room this morning. The children didn’t have to be told that the chocolates were “not for sharing”…

It’s getting late. I should probably head to bed – don’t want to ruin the run of half-decent night’s sleep this fitness tracking watch seems to think I’m having. I used to be SUCH a night owl – staying up into the early hours. Not any more, it seems.

After spending the entire day walking back and forth from town, clearing up after people, re-filling the washing machine and tumble dryer, and putting things away after everybody else, I really didn’t feel like going out to our youngest’s school this evening to attend a school fundraiser. I get it – spending an evening playing bingo in the school gymnasium seems like brilliant fun to the children, but after a stressful week at work it was the last thing I wanted to spend my Saturday evening doing.

It’s done now – we’re home, and my pockets are empty of quite a considerable sum of money that we really couldn’t afford to lose. I get it though – with funding of schools falling every year, the parents are asked to contribute – with their contributions going towards projects and programmes not covered by the national curriculum. School trips, library books, and so on.

To combat our losing run, and the rapidly depleting mood of our children, I started thinking outside the box.

While quietly sitting, pressing the special bingo pen into the numbers on the sheets, I began whispering “I got that one!”, “I got that one too!”, “AND that one!”. The children caught on pretty quickly (we have the same stupid sense of humor), and began doing the same. Before we knew it, we were laughing so much we almost missed several numbers – resulting in a look from my other half that could probably have rivalled Elsa’s ice-generating antics in “Frozen”.

After calming down somewhat, Miss 14 began losing things – or rather, every time she turned around, I silently removed something from the table in front of her. At first she didn’t notice, much to the amusement of Miss 12. She certainly noticed when her pen and bingo paper vanished. As she turned and reached for the non-existent pen, Miss 12 exploded in laughter.

I love how children try to invent their own jokes too. Miss 14 had a packet of chewy sweets hidden in her pocket, and swore blind that she wasn’t eating them – despite not being able to open her mouth to answer my questions. While she thought I wasn’t looking, she tried to throw one into her mouth – and I caught her – mouth wide open, fingers stuffed between her teeth. We got told off for laughing again.

I think perhaps the most entertaining win of the night was a little girl who’s family obviously filled out a bingo card for her – she screamed “BINGO!” at the top of her voice, and skipped all the way from her table to the bingo caller – giggling as she went, and ticket held high in the air. The only problem was she wasn’t about to let go of the ticket to have it checked – it took all the skills of a member of school staff to persuade her that they were not stealing her ticket.

Please excuse me while I do a regulation “Thank f*ck it’s Friday” happy dance. Of course I’m not really doing a dance – I’m still sitting on my ever-so-slightly worn-out office chair at the ever-so-slightly broken desk in the office at work. It’s trying to rain outside, and a guy across the way is trying to drive us all insane – sanding a piece of wood with a screaming electric sander of some description.

The project I have been stressing over for the last few days has finally gone live. I promise not to pollute this out-pouring of my head too much more with vague posts about JavaScript for the foreseeable future.

What can I share from the recent past (read: since the last blog post) ? Perhaps the story of this morning might have the most entertainment value.

Miss 14 let slip on the way home from youth-club last night that she “probably wasn’t going to go to school tomorrow”. I warned my other half last night as much, so we woke this morning with confident expectations of a long and drawn out war to deliver her from her bed to the front door, and off to school.

While clearing the kitchen and getting my bag ready for work, I overheard raised voices upstairs, and a rather lengthy lecture going on. I wandered up to see if I could be of assistance – which resulted in me standing in her room, bringing her world crashing down around her. After a few moments of not really negotiating at all, she lost her phone, laptop, tablet, and bedclothes. I also opened her bedroom windows as wide as they would go, and told her if she didn’t appear downstairs in 5 minutes, I would call the rugby coach to pull her out of the cup match on Sunday.

The resulting wailing, screaming, shouting, and barrage of complaints were somewhat muffled by her bedroom door, that I closed behind me as I left. Apparently I am mean, nasty, and a terrible parent.

I looked in a few minutes later, and discovered her still lying on the bed. I raised the phone in my hand, and began looking for the rugby coach’s number. She lifted herself upright, wincing in theatrical pain at the very thought of moving, before half stumbling, half hopping across the room.

“Where are you going?”

“My school clothes are downstairs!”

I watched her make her way down the stairs, a step at a time, eyes screwed up in pretend pain. I made a coffee while she carried on her act.

Five minutes later she re-appeared downstairs.

“Can I use crutches?”

“If you use crutches, people will laugh at you. Oh look – here she comes – the girl that has every Monday and every Friday off school with a pretend injury – and now she’s on crutches for the day”

“FINE – I WON’T THEN!”

She stumbled, and half hopped her way to the front door, eyes screwed up in pain, leaning on things for support, and making a real song-and-dance about the whole thing.

And then it all went wrong.

You see, she didn’t think that I might watch her walk away from the house. As soon as the front door shut, she was miraculously cured, and confidently walked away from the house with no trace of the life threatening injuries that half an hour before had caused her to be bed-ridden.

I wonder if I should inquire how long it took her to walk to school when I get home later this evening ?

This week seems to be going on indefinitely. I’m sure there’s an end to it somewhere, but I’m not entirely sure where that might be. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been head-down on development this week – making changes to perhaps the biggest code-base I ever worked on, and for a huge client. It’s the project I worked on a couple of years ago – the one with tens of thousands of lines of code. Working on it scares me. I have one more day scheduled on it – tomorrow – and need to get the changes into production. It’s going to be a “fun” (read:stressful) day.

Change of subject – I’ve written enough about nerdy rubbish recently.

I forgot to mention that we took Miss 14 to her school “options” evening last night. For those in different school systems, or elsewhere in the world, in the UK children learn a fixed curriulum of set subjects until they are 14 years old (year 9). Towards the end of year 9 they get to choose a number of the subjects they will study over the next two years towards their first formal examinations (GCSEs). They don’t get to choose ALL of their subjects – English Literature, English Language, Maths, Physical Education (as a non exam subject), and “Combined Science” are compulsory. They can however fill the rest of their timetable with subjects of their own choosing. Miss 14 seems interested in doing History, Citizenship, Physical Education (as an exam subject), and Food Tech – so we spent a couple of hours wandering around the school with her, talking to the various subject teachers. I felt sorry for them having to work incredibly late, and very probably having the same conversation a hundred times.

She desperately wants to join the police when she is older. She has always wanted to be in the police, right from when she was little. She watches “fly on the wall” documentaries on YouTube day in, day out, and never passes a police officer in the street without making conversation with them. When we had to call the police at home recently, I think she thought all of her christmases had come at once – asking the officer sitting on our couch 101 questions about police training college, the law, and what it’s really like. He was wonderful with her – taking her very seriously, and talking very earnestly and enthusiastically about her prospects.

Tonight was “Youth Club” – she was dropped off at 8pm, and I wandered up at 9:30pm to pick her up – wondering what a group of 14 to 17 year olds might get up to in the local youth centre. I discovered Miss 14 on the hard football pitch outside, playing as goalie among two teams of older boys. As I approached she made a fantastic save, and several of the boys cheered her name – giving her high fives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her smile so much.

Oh – nearly forgot – I got all my hair cut off this morning. When I arrived at work, one of my co-workers exclaimed “JESUS! Are you joining the army?!”. I didn’t think it was THAT short – but it is pretty short. I’ve grown to hate having long hair. Once upon a time I had hair down to my shoulders, and learned that having almost no hair was preferrable to washing and drying it every damn morning.

While getting my hair cut, I almost caused the girl cutting it to wet herself laughing. The salon was quiet, so all the girls working there ended up standing around talking to me while drinking coffee – I think I was the first customer in the door. Somehow the subject turned to me being all-too-used to being surrounded by women, given that I live in a house with four women.

“I think living with four women got a lot easier when I realised that no matter what I do, or what I say, it will always be wrong in some way or another.”

Like I said – she nearly had an accident.

As I said – while the one girl was cutting my hair, her co-workers appeared one-by-one. The last to arrive was probably the most distracting of the lot. I hate to label people, but she had curves bursting out all over place, wore revealing clothes, had bleached hair, perfect makeup, and… well… she looked like a porn star. I don’t mean that in a horrible way – I just mean she looked like she couldn’t possibly be real. If I had met her as a teenager, I would have stumbled over words and made a fool of myself – of course as an adult you realise that she just spent an hour on her perfect appearance before leaving the house, and probably lives in the gym for several hours a week. Nobody gets to look like she did by accident.

She had noticed my bike chained up outside, and asked about it. I volunteered that if I didn’t cycle to work every day, my backside would quite probably form it’s own gravity. She nearly spilled her coffee.

I wish the rest of the day had been just as entertaining, but as mentioned earlier, it was filled with JavaScript, and endless phone calls while attempting to decypher requirements, expectations, and the location of the ark of the covenant.

Tomorrow is Friday. Tomorrow is Friday. Repeat after me – tomorrow is Friday.