Searching for Tao

So I've been building a list over this past year of All the Things the Netherlands Does Well and Those Not So Much. The original intention was to write one Really Big Post on the whole thing, but it occurs to me that there's no reason I have to do that. Instead, I'm going to break it into a series. Today I'll start with one of the things the Dutch do well (sort of): Transit.

In comparison to Canada, the Netherlands is tiny. It's about half the size of New Brunswick and can be traversed by car in a matter of hours. In terms of geographic obstructions, we're talking more about streams and tiny lakes than mountain ranges or rivers. In other words, it's more-or-less perfect terrain for the trains that criss-cross the country and lead into Belgium, Luxenburg and Germany.

The trains are largely commuter rail, but the tracks double for freight outside of rush hour as well. The station across the street from my apartment regularly sees freight trains rip through the station. This can be quite loud, but homes like mine have been constructed with this in mind: close the window and you barely notice.

The commuter trains aren't particularly high-comfort (with the exception of the newest Sprinter trains) but they're a ltitle cleaner than the average SkyTrain or TTC subway. The exception here though is the graffiti. For some reason there are a few assholes that insist on tagging the occasional train car (inside or out). This is cleaned eventually, but most trains have at least a few marks.

The quality of stations ranges from sketchy (like Diemen Zuid), to Shiny and New (like Bijlmer ArenA), but in terms of safety it's all about the same: super safe. The Netherlands is (well -- feels, and based on my own limited research, appears) super-safe... but that's another blog post.

The service, like most things in this country, appears to be at the whim of the workers and their interest in your welfare. I've been late to the airport twice now because my train decided that stopping at Weesp just wasn't in the cards that day. Weesp is a major transfer point to Schiphol airport, roughly between my home and Amsterdam. I've been abandonned at a station well after midnight least once (they don't run after about 1am) and for New Years, rather than running later to handle the late-night traffic, they stopped running as early as 2030h. When I mentioned this to a Dutch coworker, his response was: "Well the train workers need to celebrate too!" -- it's a wonder the police and fire departments don't just go on holiday on Easter... but that's another blog post too.

They use a system here called the OV Chipkaart, an NFC card that you keep in your wallet and swipe at the station before getting on the train and again as you're leaving the station. It carries a balance that is debitted every time you swipe out based on the distance travelled. It's a smart way to run a transit system that both Vancouver and Toronto are likely to see in the near future. London, Seoul and Tokyo have been using such a system for a long time now to considerable success.

But the Dutch are dicks about it. In order to ride the train, your card must have a minimum of €20 on it, a ridiculous sum when you consisder the single-digit minumums required for the aforementioned cities. In addition to that, most of the stations don't use fare gates so it's all too easy to pass right by them without checking out. Suddenly, your €4 journey just cost you €20: you're welcome. Also, as far as I can tell, they actually store the credit balance on the card, so someone with an NFC writer and a little patience can game the system. For a second attempt at such a system, the Dutch get a C- on this one.

But for all the gripes I have with the service and shoddy fare system, the network is just too awesome. I can literally cross the street, step onto a train, and be in Berlin in a few hours. Commuter rail to Amsterdam Centraal, and then hop onto a 400kph ICE express train that shoots across the country and into the next. I can be in the Hague by commuter rail in about an hour and half, or be in Paris by Thalys in 3 hours. Have a craving for Belgian waffles one morning? You can be there in about 2hours.

Just make sure that you go on Saturday... nothing is open on Sunday. But that's another blog post.

I suppose blogging in general took a big hit in 2011 eh? I mean, everywhere you look now, people are using tumblr, Facebook, or even Google+ for blogging these days, and the old-fashioned site-as-blog has more or less evaporated. But I've always been part futurist and part luddite, so I've no intention on following suit. This blog may have become sparse over this past year, but it's still the one place where I can post anything I want, on any topic I want, and still retain control over my content. I'll likely keep this up and running right until Diaspora becomes more portable/accessible, or some other similar project comes along and does a better job.

But this post, I couldn't skip out on this one. It's the annual recap post. It's like the Christmas Card I never sent to anyone that recaps what's happened in my life this past year. Like all of its predecessors, it's a long one, so you might want to grab a beverage ;-)

An Unhappy Start

2011 started out pretty down for me. I'd been laid off from my less-than-enjoyable gig at Work [at] Play and had, on the advice of my good friend Chris Rhodes, decided to take the opportunity to look for work in Europe. I had moved out of my $1300/mo apartment in Vancouver's West End, and into my grandparent's basement in Delta, and was actively looking for work overseas: France, Germany, and the Netherlands were all candidates, and Japan & Korea were both pie-in-the-sky hopeful locations. I got three interviews in Europe, two in Munich and one in Amsterdam, and from them, two offers. Unfortunately, I didn't much like the prospect of those offers, and the 3rd company wasn't interested (I wasn't sufficiently enthusiastic about Perl). I was unemployed, in debt, and living in my grandparent's basement. I was 31.

But then Shit Got Real

Things started to look up though after I had an interview with a Dutch company who offered me a gig literally 15minutes after the phone interview. They offered to handle my visa and arrangements for my initial lodging, and wrapped this in a six month contract for a rate that seemed reasonable. I was set. I was moving to Europe.

I said my goodbyes to my friends, and then to my family, packed all of my worldly belongings into three bags, and got on a plane. It wasn't scary, rather I had gone into that "autopilot" mode I have, where the future is committed, there's no sense in worrying about it. In retrospect though, I'm still surprised that I managed it with so little stress.

Money!

Just when I thought that money was going to get super-tight, I stumbled into two $5k cheques: one from the Canadian government, a tax refund for the six years I'd been putting off doing my taxes, and the other for my involvement with TheChange. Together, these two helped pay off my growing credit card balance and finance my move into a new, unfurnished place here in Bussum. Kids, never let it be said that money is the problem. It's not. If you line up everything else, it always seems to work out.

Five Weddings in Five Cities

Then there were the weddings. Jesus Christ people, did you all have to get married all in the same year??? I'd missed Annie & Desmond's nuptials back in 2007 and will regret it forever, I wasn't going to let that happen again with some of the closest people in my life. Shawna & Michael had their ceremony in Yeosu, Stephen & Irena had theirs in Toronto, Chrystal & TJ had a reception in Vancouver, while my brother & Shawna got married in Kelowna, and Noreen & Craig rounded out the year with their wedding in Honolulu. If you're curious, that works out to roughly 35,653kilometres (about 1/10th of the distance to the Moon), about $5507CAD (before carbon credits, Mother Earth hates me) and 26 days off work (105% of my vacation)... and I'd do it again. Each wedding was an exciting experience and a milestone in the lives of people I love. I can think of no better way to have spent my time and resources this past year.

Politics and Missed Opportunities

Somewhere in there, Canada got a new King government, a new NDP Official Opposition (yay!), and the Green Party saw it's first MP elected (more yay!). Politically, it was a HUGE year in Canada and I really felt left out of it all. There are days, on this side of the Atlantic, that I feel like I gave up on a life I could/should have had when I left Toronto, or Vancouver, and I wonder if it was the Right thing to do. What would it have been like to work with Adriane Carr on her campaign? Could I have helped enough to see her take a second seat? If I'd stayed in Toronto, could I have helped keep Ford out, or even just helped another candidate take a council seat? Would I be running for a council seat in the next election? I suppose that the biggest lesson learnt from this year so far has been that each decision commits you to walking through one door to the exclusion of others, and that commitment requires a certain acceptance of this fact.

Rounding it all Out

I ended the year with a trip home for Christmas with the family, paying off my student loans, and closing my account at CIBC. I entered 2012 100% debt-Free and unsupportive of big banks. I even managed to ditch Facebook.

The bulk of the rest of the year was filled with weekend trips to different cities and towns around the Netherlands, a pair of trips to London and Paris, a short romantic relationship with a lovely girl that turned into a wonderful friendship, and a few more friends on top of that -- all of this wrapped in a cloud of shell shock, excitement, and frustration that comes with living in a new city, new country, new continent, and new culture. It's been good for me I think, and I'm glad I've made the decisions that brought me to this time and place in my life.

It turns out that the Netherlands declared itself neutral in WWI, and so were able to (mostly) escape the horrors of one of the bloodiest wars in human history. For the Dutch, November 11th is St. Martin's Day, a Christian holiday converted into a sort of Halloween without the costumes. This isn't to say that the horrors of war aren't recognised in Holland though. As they were occupied during the second world war by the Germans, May 5th marks the Dutch Liberation Day which, as I understand it, is both for celebration and reflection.

For Canadians though, it's a big deal. Some provinces mark it as a holiday (why it's not a national holiday is beyond me), and everywhere, regardless of time off, cities close off streets to accommodate the thousands of people who attend. Veterans march and non-veterans clap... but we don't cheer. A poem is read, sometimes even sung by a children's chorus, wreaths are laid, and war planes fly overhead. At 11:11, a moment of silence is had, and the children in the crowd are left to stir and wonder why everyone has stopped talking all of a sudden.

It's been a ritual for me for as long as I can remember. I would go with my veteran grandfather to the old cenotaph in Abbotsford, and when I moved to Ontario, I took part in the massive ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa or Old City Hall in Toronto. When I returned to Vancouver, long after my grandfather had died, I was always at Victory Square for the morning. I've only once missed the ceremony before today, when I was in Korea, where the day was transformed into a corporate holiday to sell chocolate.

There may not have been a ceremony, but for my part at least, there was an observance. I took a few minutes, left my phone at the office and walked into the central square here in Bussum, waiting quietly in silence for the moment to pass. I watched people go about their lives, shopping, playing with their kids, and riding their bikes, while I tried to imagine what it must have been like to live here while the Germans had occupied the country during WWII: I couldn't do it. I really can't understand what it must have been like for the Dutch to have their home occupied by a violent, racist invader. We Canadians attacked and liberated, but we've never known what it was like to be conquered. I guess this is another part of my European learning experience: perspective.

Christina suggested we do a bike trip from Amsterdam to Ouderkerk with a steak at the end of the journey and I couldn't say no. The steak... well it was just ok, but what came after was just crazy: we decided to continue south to the tiny town of Nes, and beyond that... well why not just continue onto Utrecht?

We didn't know at the time, but after finishing the entire trip to Utrecht Centraal, we had travelled a total of 50.5 kilometres.

For some semblance of relative scale, that's like riding a bike from Vancouver to White Rock, or Toronto to Oshawa... and having a full, separated bike lane for roughly 95% of the trip (there were a couple spots where the road was really small, or the bike lanes were under construction).

In total, the trip took roughly six hours (OMG) and since my bike isn't adjusted for my height (oops) it was pretty damn painful. At times it was dark, or foggy, or spider-webby, and the sky was HUGE, with a red sun going down and an orange crescent moon. It was beautiful, and cold, and awesome.

Matt & Shawna got married this weekend, and I got to be the Best Man. It was a beautiful ceremony and the reception was a lot of fun. For those of you who might be interested, the photos are up on Google Plus, since my own image gallery is... well it sucks. I need to make a bunch of changes to it and frankly I've got more fun things to work on right now. But yes, the photos are up there and they're public, so you don't need an account to see them.

I wanted to post my speech for the couple here though, if only for my own records, since this is the one body of data I tend to keep tabs on. A file called "speech.txt" tends to get lost :-) Big props to Melanie who helped me with it, and to the happy couple who inspired it.

Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name's Daniel Quinn and I'm Matt's brother and Best Man tonight.

When contemplating what to put into this speech, I initially thought I might pepper it with fun stories about what a bad kid Matt was, but I'm not going to do that. Don't get me wrong, Matt was a Very Bad Kid growing up, but all of those stories are just stories that outline a singular truth about who he is:

Matt does what he wants, however he wants to do it.

He will not be dictated to, and he will not be advised. He doesn't follow rules that he hasn't tested by breaking them at least once, and instead charges headlong into the world with a map drawn only by his *own* past experience. Often he'll run clear into walls, fall down, get up, and run at that wall again and again and until it comes down. Matt was the kid that mashed puzzle pieces together to make them fit. He does things his way, or not at all and I've spent my life wishing I could be as bold as he is.

...it's probably better that it didn't turn out that way though, Dad's hair can only go white once.

Now that he's found Shawna, he's still the same headstrong smartass he's always been, but in her he's found a partner. Someone who puts up with his attitude, but doesn't give him a free pass, and has shown time and time again that she'll be right there with him barrelling through life, shoulder to shoulder with Matt, knocking down whatever stands in their way. Alone, Matt's a force to be reckoned with, but together these two are unstoppable.

Shawna is exactly the kind of person I always wanted to see with my brother. She is patient and smart, enthusiastic and wilful, and genuinely gets Matt on a level that few others do. And so I'm thrilled to welcome Shawna to our family.

Congratulations to both of you.

It's a strange thing being an expat, stranger still being a rather patriotic one. I manage to keep up on what's happening in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Amsterdam thanks to the wonders of social networking and do what I can to facilitate a cultural exchange with those around me. My coworkers teach me about kibbeling, and I teach them how to properly make use of the word "eh".

The thing is, as an expat, you start to feel like a sort of ambassador for your country and culture. Our traditions, geography, food... people ask me about these things and I do my best to represent Canada when they do. In my short time here, I've given crash courses on poutine, prorogue, and Parliament, explained numerous times that we don't all speak French, and painstakingly outlined our core differences from the Americans. It's an honour really, to serve in this role, but I find my enthusiasm for it is not as strong as it was only a few years ago. Canada is letting me down.

Our reputation abroad has been thrown away by our Glorious Leaders in the key areas of human health and climate change. Canada, a nation that at one time served in a role of moral leadership in these areas, is now being rightfully attacked by the international community for our abysmal track record.

We are being singled out as being the most damaging influence on the issue of climate change, worse than the United States, China, and India. Al Jazeera even did a recent story on our embarrassing track record. As if that wasn't enough, our duplicitous policy of banning the use of asbestos in Canada, while exporting the poison abroad is making headlines now... it's hard to proudly represent a country that you're just not proud of.

Canada is the nation that saved the world by inventing peace keeping. This, and acts like it earned a name for us in the international community as a fair, diplomatic voice, but as our attitude toward the world has changed, so has our reputation, and when we lost our seat on the UN Security Council, our Prime Minister openly stated that he really didn't care.

I've been told that I shouldn't worry about such things, that Canada is just like any other country: hypocritical and tainted with self interest. We "can't be Good about everything" is the thinking, but I disagree and see this as defeatist. If we accept the Canada that is destructive and disingenuous to our neighbours, then we'll never see the Canada we want. Instead, I must learn to be honest about who we are, and fight for who we should be... it's just that some days, it's so very difficult to be proud of my country and this makes me sad.

I know that it's been a while since my last update, and I'm sorry about that. I think that Twitter is slowly killing my appetite for blogging, but I promise to keep this one open for good, updating from time to time.

I thought that I might take a minute to talk about branding. It may not be obvious to those of you who haven't tried to build a life in a foreign country, but product brands play a big role in how your life works.

I'm one of millions of men who literally spent years looking for the one right stick of deoderant, and the toothpaste that tasted like it was doing a good job. I know the best stores in which to buy everything from towels to shoes to underwear, to hard drives, and this knowledge took A Very Long Time to accumulate.

None of that information is useful here.

Suddenly I'm faced with a myriad of dermatological choices: deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, soap and shaving cream: you buy one for €5 and it dries your skin, another makes everything oily. It's trial and error of everything I've ever purchased, and it's all in a foreign language too.

It gets especially exciting when you introduce pharmaceuticals (the leagal-in-Canada, over-the-counter kind). That pill you used for hayfever? Nope. The only brand of cough syrup that works for you? No one here has even heard of it. Sometimes you get lucky and the brand names are the same on one or two boxes, but the logo is different, and there's a good chance that the dosage/effect is different too. Differing legislation and markets means that products you love in one country might be unavailable in another, or worse, they're available, but taste/act different.

For example, Oreos exist here, but they taste like dust, and Reese's Peanutbutter cups are unheard of. Kellog's Corn Flakes pretty much taste the same, but the variety of cereals I can find in the local grocery stores is limited to 6 choices.

Some days it feels as if no one here has ever heard the cautionary tales of what would happen if the Big Scary Communists ever took over: abolition of consumer choice, one supplier for everything... it's not quite that bad, but let me tell you, Albert Heijn completely dominates the grocery market here, and strangely, the locals seem to think it's the Best Store in the World. Contradicting them on this point of view is not advised.

But yesterday, was a Great Day. Yesterday, I was introduced to a tiny little shop in Amsterdam called Eichholtz. It's a privately-owned store that sells imported brands of food... the stuff unavailable in the Netherlands for whatever reason. There must have been twenty kinds of breakfast cereal there, and another twenty brands of chocolate bars. Peanutbutter, popcorn, and all sorts of stuff. It was glorious. I bought a tiny box of Golden Grahams (American), two cans of A&W root beer (Canadian), and one 3-cup package of Reese's peanutbutter cups (UK). Total cost: €15! Yes, I was that desperate.

Christina, my Greek/British friend who introduced me to this wonderful little shop, tried some of all three purchases and approved. Now if only I can get more people on board, maybe, just maybe I can create demand... that'd work right?

In case you haven't heard, the hacker group LulzSec has just released a Great Big List of Emails along with their passwords. They haven't revealed where or how they got the list, rather they've released it simply to watch the chaos that ensues.

This is a very big deal, and your email address might be on the list, so I've re-posted it here (without the passwords of course), so you can go down the list, and search for your own address(es). If you find one on there, change the password immediately (if you can) and if you've ever conducted any financial business through that account (orders on Amazon, etc.) watch your credit card records for the coming months for suspicious activity.

When they were just hacking into and defacing websites or disabling company services, I was a big fan of LulzSec, but now that they're targeting innocents, they've lost my support and I can't be alone. Please, if you don't do so already, make sure that you follow these rules for passwords on your various Internet accounts:

• Use a different password for each account.
• Change that password (or the way in which you generate it) regularly.

On the one hand, they've done a lot of damage here, damage to people who really didn't deserve it. But at the very least, we can take this as a lesson on how to better protect ourselves online. It's only going to get more complicated from here on.

I just read a really fascinating article about a new technology called "distributed cryptocurrency" and its far-reaching implications into world economies and government policy. If you haven't heard of BitCoins yet (a form of cryptocurrency that's gaining popularity), it's basically an uncontrolled, untraceable currency that's presently being used as payment for services on some websites. The assumption is that at some point this currency will break into tangible goods (if it hasn't already) and then everything changes: taxation, welfare, markets, everything:

The author of the article, Rick Falkvinge, is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party. Far from a joke, the Pirates already have a small number of seats in the European Parliament and are gradually gaining support if for no other reason than that they actually understand concepts like peer-to-peer file sharing and distributed cryptocurrency. If you're curious at all about where we're headed, Falkvinge's blog is a good place to start.

It's been more than a week and I'm only now able to write about it. I was so upset about the whole thing the night of the election that I actually got drunk on soju -- which is a pretty big deal when you consider that I really don't drink. This is what the progressives in Canada have been fearing for years: a majority Harper government.

Those of you who have read my previous few posts on parliamentary democracy will probably note that strictly speaking this is a Conservative majority and not a Harper one, but lets be honest here: this has always been about Harper and his lust for power. He runs his party like a monarchy, and even under a minority government, his attitude was routinely autocratic. He has made it his mission to kill parliamentary governance for a very long time and now we've given him the keys.

Good job Canada.

I'm speaking of course to the 39% of voters who actually think this was a good idea. My only hope is that now that he has Absolute Power for at least 4 years, the people who "voted for Harper" will start to actually blame him for what goes wrong, rather than find a way to pin it on "the coalition", or some other boogeyman.

Yes, the NDP is finally getting the support it deserves, and yes we finally have an elected Green MP, this is all good news. But in a majority government, run by an autocrat like Harper, I have little faith in anyone being able to get anything done unless it be his will.

Honestly, I fear for Canada's institutions, the things that make us great: Universal Health Care, The CBC, Peacekeeping, even the Charter. Most laws that can be written can also be undone, abolished under one government and restored by another, but institutions like these have taken nearly a century to build, and Harper has been clear about what he'd like to do to them. I'm honestly afraid for the future of my country, and I will hold each and every one of that 39%, as well as those who didn't even bother to show up accountable for whatever he does.