Things are starting to move on the job change front. I had my first chat about a job opportunity today, with the prospective employer. The job in question turned out to be horribly boring, so I had to tell him after half an hour that it really wasn’t quite what I had in mind. It involved auditing and testing Excel templates for traders to enter structured trades – it sounded like I would mostly be reading through piles and piles of IF() formulas. Apparently the company has a backlog of these templates that they think would take about 18 months to work through, and they have been looking for someone for this role for the last 2 years now, off and on. I can see why.

My manager has now seen that I am actively looking for a new job, and is not at all happy about the prospect of me leaving, although he understands and accepts that I want to move after 16 months in temp contract limbo. But the team has more to do than we have resources for, and he wouldn’t like 1/5 of the team to disappear, so he is now trying to find out what he could do that would make me stay.

I have been here before… Things went the same way when I last tried to quit, in September 2004: the managers managed to entice me to stay (which is how I ended up on a temp contract). I’m not entirely happy with how this turned out – it feels like I haven’t achieved much at work since then – but not too dissatisfied either.

This time around I have a much clearer idea of what I want and what I don’t want. I’m also in less of a hurry to leave, which will hopefully lead to a more durable solution. Last time I just felt an urgent need to get out of where I was. This time it’s a longer-term desire to start moving in a good direction.

I’m also more relaxed about the idea of quitting my job. The second time is much easier. I’ve been on a temp contract with zero days’ notice for such a long time that I’ve gotten used to not having any job security, apart from being indispensable to the team. I’ve had to think from day one that this is not forever, and thought about what I could or would do when this finishes.

All this means that I’m in an excellent position to negotiate for a job. Over the next few days I’ll write down what I would want from my next job, and think about if and how this might be achieved within my current team (or perhaps by being loosely associated with the team).

I used to slightly envy Eric his family. It’s a large family, for starters, and that can’t be said about mine. It’s also a very open, relaxed and warm family. They are welcoming to guests and very obviously all care very much about each other.

As I said, I used to be envious of that. Until I realised, a while ago, that even though I don’t share the name, it is now actually my family too!

The family is what I miss most, here in London, far away.

(Just returned from Stockholm.)

Yesterday and today were spent out in Ljusterö in Stockholm’s archipelago, in delayed Christmas celebrations with the extended Bergheden family. A very varied weekend. One moment we were out walking the hysterically enthusiastic dogs, then later opening all the gifts, which due to Hedvig’s help was a rather noisy affair and involved quite a bit more running around than traditional. Then a long and animated dinner, all-vegetarian because of us two and Eric’s sister Lisa; a very nice gesture. Eric and I contributed a slight English touch: party poppers (much enjoyed by Hedvig) and a Christmas pudding (much enjoyed by the adults). Today: a late brunch, trying out some of the gifts, and generally just “hanging out with the family”, and then this evening a flight back home.

After four days of doing nothing much at all, apart from some shopping, reading, dining and socialising, I am rested and restless. Long stretches of idleness make me feel twitchy and at the same time languid and limp. There’s a very good word in Swedish for this state – seg, which literally means “viscous”, like a thick liquid, implying that the body is disinclined to energetic movement, as if it was moving through thick mud, or as if it was made of rubber, and the brain feels about the same.

Now that I’m home all my energy has come flowing back, and I am wide awake even though it is almost midnight (edit: make that “past midnight”) and I didn’t sleep particularly well last night. Unfortunately I will need to get up in just over 6 hours. With a bit of luck all this energy will still be there in the morning.

We’re in Stockholm for a long weekend (Thursday – Sunday), mostly visiting Eric’s sprawling family (sisters Nina & Lisa, brother Anders, father Christer, and all their families).

Seeing Nina’s daughter Hedvig, now almost 6 years old, is always a joy, and she enjoys our visits as much as we do. We usually stay at their house when we’re in town. I haven’t been to Stockholm since last January, I think, so she has had time to grow a lot since then. Last time she was more into playing make-believe games (involving lots of princesses who needed to be rescued), counting things and making bead pictures; this time she is more interested in drawing pictures (of houses and gardens – for princesses of course).

Hedvig’s brother Ivar is just over a year old and getting more interesting to interact with – leaving the “cute warm bundle” stage and becoming a person.

We spent yesterday evening in the company of Anders & Karin and Karin’s parents. Her father Sam is a rather eccentric character, but he is a writer after all, and writers almost have an obligation to be eccentric. A pleasant evening, even though the conversation tended to be about things I don’t have much interest in – the oddities of the English royal family, the hilarity of old soap operas, etc.

During daytime I have just been walking around in central Stockholm and wandering around in the shops. Normally I don’t particularly enjoy shopping, but Stockholm’s streets and shops are so much less crowded, and so much cleaner and fresher, that it’s quite a pleasant way to spend half a day. Besides, most things on sale in Stockholm are better designed and more to my taste than what I find in London, so I took the opportunity to buy things that have been on my shopping list for quite some time.

The same is true of the public transport system, for that matter – cleaner, less crowded and more pleasant to look at. in London we always cycle when we want to get somewhere, but if/when we move back here, I think I might start using the metro again.

I find it very easy to get into a smooth flow of daily activities and lose sight of the bigger picture. It is like I’m slowly falling asleep and living in a doze. Once every couple of months something nudges me and I wake up for a moment, and realise that I had fallen asleep again.

About half a year ago, I wrote the following (this was Before the Blog so it’s an excerpt from a long offline cogitation):

I have reviewed my life before, both long-term and short-term, but recently (last 6 months or so) I’ve done less and less of it, and cruised on auto-pilot. I need to provide myself with discipline and structure, if I want to stay moving and stay on track.
I spend a lot of time on things that are ultimately not important, and very little doing things that are really important.
If I did nothing more with my life than this, I would look back at it with regret.

Re-reading this a week ago, I was disappointed to see that I was exactly in the same place now as then.

I’m not a big believer in goals – goals can only take you to places you already know. But I do believe in moving, in having direction and momentum. There’s always time to tweak the direction later, but if there is no movement then there’s no chance of getting anywhere at all. (Unless a big flying saucer suddenly arrives to pick you up and deposit you somewhere else, but I’m not counting on that.)

This time around, the realisation that I had stood still for 6 months was shocking enough to get me moving for real.

One of the main things I have been dissatisfied with is my job. In a way it seems reckless and, well, presumptuous to complain about it, because it is, in itself, a very good job. (I work for an investment bank.) I’ve got good colleagues, good atmosphere, excellent pay, reasonably interesting tasks; I’m good at what I do and my work is appreciated. The only tangible shortcoming is that the hours are long.

But the main problem is that I just do not care about what I’m doing. I do not think that the job is important, in the grand scheme of things, or that the firm and even the financial industry really deserve much energy to be spent on them. While I can see that efficient financial markets play a role in the world, it’s not something that really makes a difference. Not a job I would proudly tell my grandchildren about, if you see what I mean.

The problem is that I am not sure where I would like to work instead. I know I want to move, but don’t really know in which direction.

So I’m making the first step a small one.

I intend to move from my current “financial / quantitative analyst” role into a software development role. I’ll stay in the investment banking industry, because it’ll be easier to get a new job here; I will start in Excel VBA development, but expect to gradually move on from there. Software development is a more broadly applicable skill than financial analysis, so whenever I decide to move on (which I know I will do), the next step could be a more interesting one.

It’s a step, which is good in itself as it gets me moving. It is also unlikely to lead me in a completely wrong direction so it’s not going to make things worse.

In the last few days I’ve sent my CV to a couple of recruitment firms and already gotten back a dozen job specs. This is looking promising.

I haven’t felt this excited about my life for a long time.

Cirque du Soleil is the most spectacular circus company I know of. Each act is more difficult than anything that normal circuses attempt, and performed to perfection. Individual acts are joined into a seamless performance with not a moment of silence or empty scenes. Costumes and decor are artful and resplendent. Music is written especially for each show and performed live, also faultlessly.

Indeed CdS are so far above normal circus that it would be unfair to even compare them. So I won’t. I’ll talk about Alegria, the latest of their shows to visit London, only in the context of other CdS shows.

Had this been my first experience of CdS I would have been utterly dazzled and charmed. But having seen four of them over five years, I have to say that it left me slightly disappointed. Somehow there seemed to be less life in this performance than the previous ones – the decorations are taking over and leaving less space for actual circus. Too much time was spent looking at pretty girls posing in pretty costumes. It was all a bit too courtly, where I would have liked to see more passion and energy. More action, please!

Russian bars	Trampolines

The music is a case in point: it was pretty enough, but almost indistinguishable from last year’s, and from the year before that, and therefore not very memorable.

The first CdS performance we saw was also the best: Quidam. It was a bit more adult and less sugary-sweetly pretty.

The two best acrobatic acts: tumbling on two long trampolines, and Russian bars (which is a wide bar in some sort of semi-flexible material, held on the shoulders of two men, on which a third performer performs somersaults).

But for the first time ever, my favourite part of the show were the clowns, especially one scene that was more mime than traditional circus clowning. The clown walked on stage, opened a large suitcase, took out a coat and hat, and hung them on a rope ladder. Another rope ladder laid on the floor, plus sounds of an old steam engine, hinted at a railway station. With that as his only props, he acted out a tender scene of taking farewell: his left arm animating the left sleeve of the coat, he was playing both voices of the conversation. He did it so well that the performance was vividly tragic and simultaneously absurd.

The next scene showed the same clown alone in a snowy emptiness. Then it started to snow little bits of silk paper. The snowfall grew until it swelled into a magnificent snowstorm, with howling winds and swinging lights, and “snow” falling over half the audience. It was so unexpected and over-the-top immersive that I laughed aloud out of joy.

I found “It’s the Demography, Stupid
” via Arts & Letters Daily. The author argues that the importance of Western civilisation / liberal democracy is in decline in the world, and Muslims will be the new dominant group. A few decades from now Muslims will make up the majority of the population in Western European countries, and on a global scale “the Muslim world” will outnumber “the developed world”, due to differences in birth rates. As a result, society in those countries will also be increasingly dominated by Muslim values.

It’s an opinion piece (in the Wall Street Journal), so one shouldn’t have too high expectations regarding balanced views or supporting facts, and indeed the whole thing reads more like a rant than anything else. But one part caught my interest: his argument that the weakness of Western culture is its lack of confidence in itself. The notion of tolerance is sometimes being pushed to such extremes that it isn’t even acceptable to be intolerant of intolerance; “diversity” is taken to mean that every opinion is allowed, even those that violate the basic precepts of democracy. Saying that our way is better, on the other hand, is seen as unjust Western domination.

The default mode of our elites is that anything that happens – from terrorism to tsunamis – can be understood only as deriving from the perniciousness of Western civilization. As Jean-Francois Revel wrote, “Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.”

What’s the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture?

Permanence is the illusion of every age. […] so-called post-Christian civilizations – as a prominent EU official described his continent to me – are more prone than traditional societies to mistake the present tense for a permanent feature. Religious cultures have a much greater sense of both past and future, as we did a century ago, when we spoke of death as joining “the great majority” in “the unseen world.” But if secularism’s starting point is that this is all there is, it’s no surprise that, consciously or not, they invest the here and now with far greater powers of endurance than it’s ever had.

Yes, I’m reading and writing blog posts at work… I’ve got a piece of long-running code – several, in fact – and while one of those is running, it takes up most of the resources on my PC, so simple reading / writing is about all I can do while I wait.

“Quicksilver” is nothing like it’s name. Apart from its weight, that is – it’s a 1000-page book, and that’s only part 1 of 3 in the Baroque Cycle. Indeed, sheer mass and size is my main impression of the book. I’ve read my share of long books, but this was in a class of its own. There is so much going on that it is positively overwhelming. (Indeed, it’s baroque.)

It’s not clear to me what the book was about, or what the point of it was supposed to be. “Developments in late 17th century Europe, with England as the centrepoint” is the only way I can think of summarising it. It talks about how “things” changed radically, said things including science (as natural philosophy emerges from alchemy), politics (religious freedom), financial markets etc.

That’s one of the book’s great weaknesses – it sprawls. There is no overarching theme and no real plot. Instead there are numerous interwoven threads and themes; not just one but three main characters. The story is even broken into three parts that are quite different in character – the first revolves mostly around scholarly pursuits and English politics, the second is more of an adventure story, and the third deals more with international politics (mostly intrigues) and finance (mostly market manipulation). I found myself wondering when he would get to the point, or the central story, and he never did.

Around all that, vast multitudes of facts. Descriptions of scientific experiments, of sea battles, clothes, London streets, political scheming, etc etc etc. At their best, the facts are very funny and curious. Description of implements for an operation to remove kidney stones, anyone? The different parts of Newgate prison? The tactics of naval battles against pirates? All there. At other times it almost reads like a history textbook, with all those names and who-tries-to-conquer-what. In the end my brain couldn’t take any more of them in and just skimmed through them, retaining nothing more than their general character.

I get the impression that all those facts are there for two reasons – one, because the author wants to share his knowledge of them, and two, to set the mood / atmosphere. They are certainly thoroughly researched and give a strong impression of the atmosphere at that time. But you can’t build an entire book out of that. And that’s the problem with not having a theme: there’s nothing to relate the facts to. The point of a theme or a plot is that it helps the reader distinguish essential facts from embellishments, and provides a structure that makes it easier to remember them. When everything is equally important, nothing is.

As one reviewer at Amazon ways, “This is what you get when you have a talented author who knows a whole lot of interesting things involving some of history’s greatest people and wants to make a novel out of all that great material… but can’t find a story.” Communication always happens on the terms of the listener, and here the speaker has paid too much attention to himself and his curiosity, and too little to the reader. Too much showing off.

The middle part – the adventure story – and related sections of part three were easiest to enjoy, while still giving a good impression (as far as I can judge) of life at that time. Think “The Three Musketeers” but with one man and one woman: an appealing mixture of adventure and humour and history.

Key to making these parts interesting were the characters: Jack Shaftoe, vagabond, and Eliza, ex-Turkish slave, now putting her brains to good use in French palace intrigue, finance and spying. While Eliza isn’t entirely believable, at least they actually do things, whereas the leading person of the rest of the book, Daniel Waterhouse, mainly just hangs around. His raison d’être is to provide an observer to all the events and more interesting people that are there waiting to be observed: the plague and subsequent great fire of London, the works of Isaac Newton, English religious politics etc. I found him utterly bland. I’d much rather have read more about people who actually did something interesting, such Newton or Leibniz or Hooke.

The whole thing would have worked much better if it had been broken into two separate parts – one for the adventures and intrigues, and one for the evolution / birth of modern science, and the changes in London. The latter would need a new lead character and a lot of pruning – and a story!

I’ve enjoyed Stephenson’s other books (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash) so I had high expectations of this one. And while it was interesting, or at least never really boring, it certainly wasn’t as good as I had hoped, and I’m not entirely sure it was worth the effort (because it certainly was an effort). Had it not been by Stephenson, I might have given up partway through part 1 (or hopefully just skipped to part 2). Actually, I would probably have kept going, the good parts are really engrossing and always seemed to promise improvement. I will probably read the other volumes as well (still in the hope that improvement is near), but I don’t feel any overwhelming urgency to do so. I need to rest from this one for a while.

This year’s most immediately successful Christmas present: a Sony PSP + Lumines. It’s a Tetris-like game but more and better. After a while, Tetris just comes down to having incredibly fast fingers. Here, planning and forethought matter more, and it’s possible to get a lot better by practising. Higher levels are not just faster but also different, and require different tactics.

The “colorful, swirling backgrounds” that the review describes as “clear and clutter-free” are anything but, in my opinion (big flashing things in colours that are very close to the colours of actual game elements) but I’ve got to admit that they are quite pretty.

There are also “time attack” and “puzzle” modes which are good for short games – a full game now takes me about 30 – 60 minutes, depending on how well it goes. A very nice game; the first one in a long time that I’ve really loved, and quite addictive.

Microsoft’s advice regarding the latest Windows vulnerability is so far removed from reality that it’s laughable:

Users should take care not to visit unfamiliar or un-trusted Web sites that could potentially host the malicious code.

Have they never seen a real user surf the web? The whole point of the web is that you can click on links which take you to previously unvisited, potentially interesting sites!

Actually the vulnerability itself is interesting too – opening an image is just about the most innocuous action I can think of. If something that basic can open my computer to malicious code then there’s really no code in Windows that I can trust to be secure.