Contemplating life

This holiday I’ve really started to get through a book I’ve bought. It’s called Microserfs and it’s by an author called Douglas Coupland. It’s set in 1993/1994 and it starts off with these guys working for Microsoft. It actually makes me very jealous and realise I want the kind of life they’re living. Sure, their entire life may revolve around work but they take great pride in their work, and the lifestyle just reminds me of University, which, tbh, is a lifestyle I enjoy very much, a hell of a lot more than this 9-5 lifestyle I’m living at the moment.

University is very much an unstructured work-hard, party-hard environment where, however you get with results, it doesn’t matter as long as you get them. Work seems to be more a work not as hard, party not as hard environment, which doesn’t appeal to me. At least, right now. Maybe when I’m older have a family and want to settle down, but at this moment in my life, it doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I actually quite like my current job, but I think I already know that working as a tester isn’t for me, and it’s not something I find a challenge, which is what I want.

But then again, coding may bore me before too long. Coupland suggests that a 7-year burnout for coding exists, which means that once again I’m going to have to seriously reconsider my life.

Which I suppose is why the life Douglas Coupland describes in Microserfs appeals to me. I wish I had the experience and knowledge to be able to turn DX Hosting into a full-time business when I graduate, but turning what I have now into something that I could grow and live off seems a whole different ball game.

But I’m tied into this job for 11 more months, so I just need to continue enjoying it and learning from it (I already know a lot more about software engineering than I did, and I’m inclined to believe the party line that knowing how software testing works makes you a better coder), in a year I might actually know a decent amount of C++. I was also quite interested in learning about Windows programming too, but it now seems I’m destined to work on the *nix team (which is quite ironic, especially as I’m probably one of the Windows fanboys of the CS department).

I think part of my problem is how much I miss everyone from York. Living on Hull Road may not have been perfect, but I loved it.

I was originally going to write a bit about my holiday, but I’ve decided I’m going to summarise what I was going to write. Today we went to Rocamadour, a cliffside town in the Lot region of France. It’s very different to here, despite the fact it’s only 90 minutes away. Seeing English cars whilst on holiday, even visiting tourist places near here is very rare, and something we only really see at the airport… This is not a tourist region, at all, whereas heading towards the Lot which is towards the very touristy area of the Dordogne. I hate tourists, basically (I realise the irony in this status, as I basically am a tourist). But what I hate more is how much the cultural site at Rocamadour has been ruined, everything is about making a fast buck – from the tacky tourist shops are reminiscent of the east coast of England, not an 11th century sanctuary on the pilgrimage trail. Also, the graffiti and restoration is nothing short of sloppy and ruins it. There are some wonderful paintings on the outside of one of the chapels, but during restoration, they’ve been cemented over by replacing bricks, not preserved in any way, and some people have decided to etch their names into the paintings. It’s very poor and put a downer on the whole experience. It’s a wonderful thing to look at from a distance (I’ll put photos on Flickr at some point), but close up, it’s a mess.