Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

November 26, 2012 22:08 +0000 | Netherlands

This is one I've been wanting to write for a long time now. So, as part of my series on what it's like to live, work, and socialise here in the Netherlands, I thought I'd tackle one of my most grating subjects so far: stinky people.

Now let me be clear on this: Dutch people, on a personal level, are no more or less stinky than people from anywhere else. However, I have come to understand that in this country, for some people personal odour is just somehow not a priority. More importantly, and the reason why this observation is worthy of note, there appear to be more people here oblivious to their BO than anywhere else I've been.

Lets frame this up for you. You've spent the past week or so packing up your apartment in preparation to move all of your worldly possessions to another home some distance away. For the actual moving job, you've hired a few strapping young men to come to your house and do the heavy lifting. The men in question do a fine job of lifting and hauling for a few hours and when it's all over the driver comes over to you to have you sign a few papers and you get a whiff of a cloud of overpowering man stink. You're stunned for a second, and then you accept it as part of the business of lifting heavy objects for a living. You sign the papers, say thank you, and open a window for a bit when they leave.

Now imagine walking into a cloud like that on a near-daily basis. Most people you meet enter and leave your life without notice, but about once per day, you're kicked in the face by someone's armpit stink. Strangely enough, this has never happened to me on public transit, but rather it's people who sit next to you at the theatre, or stand in line with you at the grocery store. Often these are the same people who are covered in dandruff, and are wearing pants that clearly don't fit, and they have so far, without exception always appeared to be Dutch nationals who work office jobs for a living. These people spend their day lifting pens and paper, not couches or soil.

Now I don't pretend to understand it, and like I said, the vast majority of people I've met here have been non-stinky, but my experience (and those of others I've talked to) has been consistent: the ratio of stinky-to-not-stinky people in this country is markedly higher than in other cities I've lived in and visited. Admittedly, the deoderant here is pretty terrible, but that can't explain everything.

August 18, 2012 11:09 +0000 | Movies Netherlands 0

As part of my series of reflections on my own culture shock living here in the Netherlands I thought it appropriate to cover movie going, something I do an awful lot of wherever I live.

The first thing most Canadians might be surprised by is the assigned seating. No more sitting on the floor in line for hours waiting to get into the theatre and fight for good seats. In the Netherlands you buy your tickets in advance, either at the door or online (Pathé even has an awesome mobile app), pick your seat, and show up 5min before the show starts. The only downside is that you can't move if the people around you are being assholes or if they stink.

The biggest theatre chain here also has an Unlimited club card. Take it to the theatre, scan it at the automated ticket dispenser and go see your movie... as many movies as you like, for a flat monthly rate of €19 -- roughly the price of two movies. I have one and let me tell you it's pretty fabulous. I find myself going to movies I wouldn't normally see, and walking out if they suck. It totally changes the experience.

Also, with the exception of some animated children's films, movies here are also *not* dubbed. Instead they're subtitled which is pretty awesome until you're watching a movie and someone starts speaking Russian and the subtitles... well they're already in Dutch so you're SOL.

So that's the good stuff, the bad though is pretty bad.

First of all it would appear that Dutch people do not know when to shut up. Talking (not whispering) in the theatre is par for the course here. People regularly get up, walk in front of the screen, have loud conversations and then just leave the door open when they walk out, only to return 20min later and do it all over again.

Premieres, like the one I attended the other night, are particularly worse. This is where people's inner douchebags are truly released. Whenever a woman walks on screen, half the audience shouted "Whore!" and randomly throughout the movie you hear "Homo!" and other shitty behaviour. The theatre staff remain blind and deaf to it all, and happily sell _cases_ of beer to movie goers on their way in.

Being at a premiere in the Netherlands is like being in a room with 400 drunk 12 year olds.

The event was a doubleheader, but I bailed after the first movie. The way I figure it, they should be paying _me_ to put up with that kind of thing, not the other way around.

...you're going to burn in a special place in Hell. A place they reserve for child molesters, and people who talk at the theatre.

August 03, 2012 20:24 +0000 | Movies 5

So I've finally seen the new Dark Knight movie and I can honestly say, without even comparing it to those that came before it: it sucked.

Honestly, it's as if the writers just went on vacation and left a couple coke heads to bang out a script and stamp "Batman" on it, confident that the money would just roll in. This movie was so riddled with continuity errors and inexplicable plot holes, that even my rather forgiving willingness to suspend disbelief was seriously challenged.

The rest of this is full of spoilers, so if that bothers you, you'd best stop here. To start with the obvious: Bruce Wayne, a billionaire playboy in prime condition and with no more villains to fight, locks himself inside his mansion for eight years and his body somehow just falls apart. A doctor x-rays his legs and tells him that there's no cartilage in his knees, at which point Wayne responds by jumping out a window and repelling down the building. He later proceeds to beat down a bunch of bad guys and participate in a motorcycle chase. That little brace on his right leg must have been pretty amazing.

Then there's Bane's destructive campaign and the over-the-top plane hijacking at the start of the film. Bane, with all his resources and a small army of devoted followers is able to line a city of 11million with explosives to detonate concurrently, but can't kill a few guys guarding a scientist. Instead, it makes far more sense to highjack a plane... from the outside... while in flight.

While a pair of glasses appear to be enough to hide Superman's identity, a kevlar suit, cape and cowl just don't seem to cut it for our hero. Batman's true identity is apparently so easy to guess that a beat cop figured it out all on his own by the expression on his face. Bane knows too, some crazy how.

Tate's mission is to destroy Gotham, and the smartest way to do this is a convoluted plot to develop a brand new clean energy technology, build a reactor under the city, kidnap the only scientist who knows how to turn it into a bomb and fake his death. With resources like that you're telling me she couldn't riddle the sewers with regular explosives, or even just build a regular fission bomb?

Every good guy is either rich or a cop. The rest of us are apparently willing to follow a guy who blows up stadiums full of people. The exception to this rule is Hathaway's Catwoman, who was fun to watch and I'd love to see her get her own flick.

Commissioner Gordon's soul-searching letter, revealed to the public by Bane, while shooting up the city is supposed to somehow betray Gordon to the public and make Bane look what... righteous? Wasn't he just executing civilians? Why would anyone believe anything this man has to say?

Catwoman wants a blank slate so bad that she'll kidnap a congressman and kill people, but she can't find a way to sneak into Cuba.

Bruce Wayne, literally beaten and broken, with a piece of vertebrae sticking out of his back is left at the bottom of a pit in some far away failed state to watch his city burn on television. The solution? a good punch in the back (that'll fix that pesky back bone) and lots of push ups. He then manages to climb his way out, at which point he magically transports his barefoot and penniless self back to Gotham, a city under siege and barricaded on all sides. All of this takes place in the span of five months. He shows up just in time to have a relaxed conversation with Catwoman, grab his gear and with his cartilage-free knees, still fight the bad guys to save the day.

And then there's the nuclear explosion which, really just.... I'm so mad about this.

Look, if you have a thermo nuclear device on a really big string, and you fly it out over the ocean for 1:30, you're just not going to get far enough away from the city to save anyone. I don't care how fast the SuperAwesomeAntiPhysicsBatPlane is. You're detonating a nuke in the atmosphere off the coast of a major metropolitan city. At the very least we're talking massive nuclear fallout, poisoning the air for hundreds of kilometers in all directions, and that's not even considering the flesh-melting effects of the initial nuclear flash. This was a bomb designed to destroy a city of 11million... a little distance isn't going to help anyone.

Lastly, a big screw-you goes out to the writers for comparing the 99% to the murderous cult of Bane. From Kyle's heavy-handed foreshadowing about the poor taking back what the rich stole, to Bane's populist revolt murdering rich people in their homes, it's nice to be equated to terrorists and thugs. Screw you guys.

So no, I didn't like this movie. It's possibly the most overrated flick I've ever seen and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Go see Seeking a Friend for the End of the World instead. At least that one was witty.

July 21, 2012 17:12 +0000 | 1

It's a strange thing to hear stories about what the taking of Vimy Ridge and the battle of the Somme was like. As someone born into this century, I've come to know the concept of warfare very differently. Today we see war on television and whether we admit it or not, we understand the concept of warfare to be much as it's portrayed in movies and video games. In our minds, war is a comparatively clean business, where the sides are unbalanced, the bombs smart, and communication instantaneous. We imagine battles fought from inside control rooms with three dimensional displays serving up real time information, and video from self-guided warheads streaming back to headquarters thousands of kilometres away.

Fighting a battle in the Great War was of course, nothing like this, but I still found myself surprised by just how very different things were. There was no radio in WWI. Messages were literally run from HQ to the front -- a 8km stretch through winding trenches. The messengers dodged bullets and shrapnel along the way and wore a red arm band to alert soldiers huddled in the trenches to (a) let them pass quickly, and (b) not shoot them in the back for being a deserter. Unfortunately this also marked them as a target for the enemy, and messengers had an average lifespan of only a few days. The trip from the front to HQ and back could take up to 20hours, assuming the messenger survived, and only then, would your CO know how and when to advance. Imagine being outflanked by the enemy and only finding out 10hours later, then issuing orders to counter with the understanding that those orders won't be executed for another 10.

Due in large part to the limited communication, the tactics back then were very different. By necessity battles were fought in terms of months rather than hours: trenches and tunnels were dug in advance of a standing army, artillery was positioned and fired in an effort to reshape the landscape with craters and hills to limit visibility, and graves were dug in advance to accommodate the bodies the officers knew would result from the fighting.

All of this preparation, and then a few ranking officers would lead a division of usually under-informed, often illiterate boys into battle -- the plans of which, for security reasons, resided no where but in the heads of those officers. When the officers were killed (as was often the case), the operation fell into disarray because no one knew what was going on. Soldiers slept in pools of urine, rotting flesh, rats, and lice, and would do so slouching in the trenches knowing full well that artillery could make sure they'd never wake up.

The memorial at Vimy is just that: a memorial to the thousands who fell attempting to secure that patch of land, and it's as beautiful as it is tragic.

July 11, 2012 20:54 +0000 | Activism Economy Environment 0

This is going to be a ranting post, so you may want to skip it if that sort of thing isn't your cup of tea.

I went to a meetup tonight called CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Amsterdam, a new group started here making efforts to build a community to encourage social responsibility here in the city. The guest speaker was Kumi Naidoo, executive director and "chief troublemaker" of Greenpeace International, and his talk was, for the most part, both informative and interesting -- but something rubbed me the wrong way, and I need to rant about it.

Naidoo claims that the world is suffering from a great imbalance: the rich European countries, he said, spend more on feeding their pets in a week than is required to feed an African family for a month. Here in the Netherlands, we subsidise cows to the tune of something like €2/person/month, and yet such a large portion of the world still doesn't have access to electricity. Both of these statements are true, but they're both completely irrelevant to the cause of environmentalism and only serve to alienate rational people from it.

This isn't just about the fact that the world is not going to be fixed by making people feel guilty for feeding their pets. It's about Greenpeace painting the entire environmental movement as a bunch of out of touch hippies driven by irrational guilt to redistribute wealth from stable, richer nations to less stable, poorer ones. Statements like these imply that there are simple answers to the complex problems of militarism, corruption, unstable regimes, and corporate influence, instead framing everything as if we should all feel guilty for having pets.

There's nothing wrong with managing the welfare of your citizens by using their collective wealth to secure a supply of meat and dairy. Having pets and buying frivolous things, while not exactly constructive for the betterment of humanity, isn't the source of the problem. If Greenpeace really wanted to go after this imbalance, they'd do better to go after corporations (and those who buy from them) that pillage poorer nations, like precious metal mining companies in South America and Africa, but now that he's already blamed pet owners and milk drinkers for the ills of the world, he's lost half the room.

Seriously people, stop it. It's hard enough being an environmentalist in this world, I don't need help like this.

June 17, 2012 11:02 +0000 | Oxyor/Marketsims Ripe NCC 2

So some of you have already picked up through my various social networking feeds, but for those of you who haven't, I thought I'd say something here and offer a little more detail for the curious.

For the past few months I've been looking for a new job. Not that working at Oxyor was terrible or anything, far from it. The people I work with are friendly and good at their jobs and I feel respected most days. No, the big problem for me was the size of the development team. Most days, it was just me, with the occasional input from our designer, and for someone like me, who learns from working with others, this hasn't done much for my skillset, and by extension, my career.

And so, I started looking, taking the opportunity to be picky and find a company that suits my skills and interests and can offer me the kinds of opportunities I want for my career. After months of searching and interviewing with some really great companies (and some grossly unprofessional ones), I found Ripe NCC.

Ripe is a non-profit corporation that, for lack of a more technical term, handles the nuts and bolts of the internet. They handle IP registration (organising who is and isn't allowed to use what address online) and they develop tools for their clients to aid in network diagnostics around the globe. I'll be working on a project they call RipeAtlas, which uses many of the technologies I've been tinkering with in my free time, like GeoDjango and Embedded Linux. I'll also be working with RipeStat, a high-traffic statatistics capturing and rendering system. It may not sound very interesting to most people, but believe me when I tell you that it's pretty damn cool for me.

Ripe is a much larger company, with a good sized team of developers for both projects. There's lots of stuff for me to learn there, so I'm pretty stoked to get started. My first day is August 1st.

Until then, I'll be helping to shore up my work at Oxyor and stabilise the project to a place where I can confidently walk away and know there won't be too much trouble for their end. I'll probably be doing occasional contract work with them for a few months to assist in the transition, and I'm told that they're already looking into finding a replacement. There's also going to be a lot of fun documentation to write, and probably lots of repeat explanations of how things work. They'll be fine though, I'm not worried.

So that's it. Yay for new job!

May 04, 2012 20:32 +0000 | Netherlands War 2

My grandfather fought in the second world war. I hesitate to call him a "hero" as that word is used all to often, but he was a good man, a young man who answered his nation's call to fight in a war on the other side of the world. This post isn't really about him, but his story helps me frame what I want to talk about.

Gerard Quinn, my father's father, was initially sent to Sicily to run with the infantry for the Allied push into the so-called "soft underbelly of Europe". His tour, like so many others in the region, was far from "soft", and at some point along the way, a canon that hadn't been secured properly, fired and rolled backward and onto my grandfather, crushing his legs.

Fortunately for him (and his future grandchildren I suppose), the Allied position held and he was evacuated to the UK where he, once recovered in hospital, was returned to his company, as they prepared to invade the Netherlands. As a newly injured soldier, this did not favour his chances of returning alive, but Fortune intervened again: he was reassigned... to radio duty. As it turns out, my grandfather's penmanship was so exceptional, the Brass felt his skill would be more useful to the war effort receiving and transcribing messages from inside a helpless tank with a wooden gun barrel.

And so it is that my grandfather survived the War and helped, in his own small way, to liberate this place I now call home. I just learnt today that he was given a medal for his efforts in liberating the Netherlands -- just months before he died.

Today is Dodenherdenking, the Dutch day of remembrance for the war dead. It precedes Bevrijdingsdag, or Liberation Day and consists of an 8pm ceremony much like what you'd find in Canada on November 11th at 11:11. There's the two minutes silence, Taps (though it sounds slightly different), and laying of wreaths... even the Queen is there. I attended the services here in Amsterdam along with thousands of others and let me tell you: those 2minutes of silence: not a sound. Not cell phones, not even undisciplined children or dogs barking. The whole of Dam Square collectively remembered and observed for a full two minutes.

In those moments, as I do every November 11th, I thought of my grandfather, a young, dumb kid, doing what he thought was right at first, and ultimately doing what he could to survive. I'll think of him tomorrow too, while the country celebrates its liberation. I think he would have liked to see that.

April 06, 2012 22:16 +0000 | Family Travel 1

So this post is a little late, but I did promise Noreen that I'd write something before the week is out. My parents came to visit last week, all the way from Kelowna, BC. It was wonderful to see them walk off that plane, and exciting to be able to show them the life I'm carving out for myself here. I lived in Ottawa and Toronto for about six years and with the exception of a brief visit from my father (and surrogate uncle) in my final year, I never really had the opportunity to share what my life outside of BC was like with my parents. This time however, the experience will be a little more thorough.

For the most part, their first experiences with the Netherlands was rather similar to my own: The instinctive aversion to the sound of Dutch, getting screwed by the NS (transit authority) payment system, and surprise at the low cost of food -- though my father did note that the Dutch appear to wrap every damn thing in plastic.

For tourist destinations, they mostly relied on me to point out the interesting sights in the city. Obviously, they wanted to visit the Red Light district (where my mom noted the absence of male prostitutes: "All I'm asking for is a little equality damnit"). At my suggestion, they checked out the Erotic Museum and giggled at some of the exhibits, and they also made a point of visiting somewhere-not-amsterdam. Since I live in Bussum, they decided to visit Utrecht, where they spent the day wandering through the old city and apparently marvelling at the soup in a cafe there.

They had the opportunity to meet and spend some time with Christina as well, which was prety neat. They all got along, and my parents were pretty impressed with her. I have a few nice pictures of Christina trying to explain my smartphone to my dad.

I suppose the other highlight for their trip was the Keukenhoff, a sort of Dutch Playland for flowers. Imagine walking for hours through gardens of sculpted flower beds: colours, and perfume pretty much everywhere. It's kind of a big deal here. Personally, it didn't do much for me, but my mom was pretty tickled :-)

Unfortunately, that week was mostly about them exploring the Netherlands on their own, since I had to do the day job thing. I wanted to ration my vacation across the year this time, so I only took one week off for their being here: this week. You see, after they left my apartment in Bussum on Monday, they went to Barcelona, and at this very moment I'm on a highspeed train to Paris where I'll be meeting them for some touristy goodness. We'll check out all the Paris stuff, take some pictures, and then head onto London, and eventually to Dublin. It'll be nice to get away from the day-to-day stuff and really do the vacation thing with my parents again. After all, the last time we did that... I think I was in high school.

Anyway, the entire visit is being catalogued online in pictures. If you're into that sort of thing, you can head on over to my G+ gallery.

March 29, 2012 11:38 +0000 | Stupid People 0

"...and that's why I don't believe that there is life on other planets" he said, "the conditions for the existence of water are just too difficult to find in the universe. Now let's talk about facts, not science fiction."

Mr. Loewen was the crotchety old man of my high school, and our introduction to physics from grades 8-10. He was desperately boring, doing his very best to suck the excitement and wonder out of the sciences and very successful in his quest. On more than a few occasions he literally told me to "stop asking stupid questions" when I was only trying to understand some of the more interesting riddles about the universe. His attitude pushed me out of physics, and contributed heavily to my abandonment of the sciences in general, and to this day, I still think of him from time to time whenever I read something like this.

Suck it, Loewen.

March 13, 2012 08:39 +0000 | 10

Just before the end of 2011, I went ahead and did a couple drastic things in an effort to enter the new year somewhat "cleaner" than I was before: I paid off my student loans, ditched my Big Bank for a credit union, and after considerable thought, deleted my Facebook account.

The Facebook thing actually happened because Facebook changed their rules (again). Suddenly, when someone "recommended" that I join a group, I was automatically added to said group -- a move that resulted in a new email sent to me every 10minutes or so: "Friend X said this on Facebook! Click here to read more!"

Imagine checking your email after only an hour or so and finding a whole wack of useless emails directing you to a site you detest... and now imagine blaming the friend for sending you those mails, rather than the contemptuous corporation that did so on her behalf without informing either of us.

That's the key to my disdain of Facebook: they use my friends to manipulate me.

I've lost count of the times I'd been tagged in a terrible photo, or was invited to join some game about zombies and vampires. I was "friends" with people I hated because not accepting their (constant) requests meant even more social awkwardness in real life than we already had, and despite all of the so-called connectivity Facebook allowed, I still had 50+ messages from people that roughly boiled down to: "How have you been?"

Facebook is a tool I never liked using. The interface was crowded and ugly, it innundated me with emails, and censored my posts (just try linking to the Pirate Bay). It cheapened my interactions with people I love, and was constantly pushing my friends to have me use it more and more.

So in a fit of logic I realised: I had friends before Facebook. For thousands of years people have managed healthy social relationships with people they like without the aid of amoral corporations. It followed therefore that I could conceiveably drop Facebook and keep the relationships ... at least the ones worth keeping.

And you know what? It worked. I don't miss that social vampire at all. If you really want to keep tabs on what I'm doing, there's still three sources out there on me: this blog, my many Twitter feeds [1], [2], [3], and Google Plus. And honestly, if you can't be bothered to read any of those, don't worry about it. We don't need technology to maintain our relationship.

This isn't a pitch to try to convince you to do the same. Maybe you like Facebook, and maybe you don't have issues with how they treat you and your friends. I just wanted to explain things better for those who might be curious. I will however, leave you with this: