Happy New Year

It’s been a funny old year, circles or circuits  completed, ends beginnings, metaphorical repeats of previous years events or strange parallels  with the past. History repeating itself maybe (but not quite).

On this day last year we were in Ribamar Spain, looking forward to dinner in the company of Dutch, German and English travellers much like ourselves, looking for a bit of adventure and sun, before it’s too late to do so anymore. Before continuing our journey around Europe.

Today I’m in a double locked data center SCC (service control centre) in Woking Surrey. I’ve been living four days a week in a B&B opposite Woking station for the last month and a bit; sleeping in a child size single bed, eating take away’s or subsisting out of a Coop on the walk to this place of temporary work, while Amanda has been at home alone getting us ready for Christmas and keeping house ... in between going to work of course.

It couldn’t be more diametrically opposite last years situation; separated by work, stuck in one country miles apart. It’s a Yin to last year’s Yang, poetic justice administered by fate, a karmic backlash. The makings of metaphorical soup.

I’d like some space to get my head around all the changes and to re-cap and recount the year and the events since the last post and this one. But that wasn’t the purpose of the blog, and it’s not relevant (I may have a scribble for my sanity, writing certainly helps with compartmentalisation) , and I shouldn’t be looking to excuse our absence this last month or three.

What I’ll do, is prepare another photo set of the year and post it in the New Year. And we will live in hope that next year (when hopefully a full-time role closer to home comes through) that we’ll be getting out and about again looking at stuff.

In partial mitigation technology has let us down; both of our laptops were bulging at the seams with photos. Our tiny Netbook developed a fault, so I transferred the photos to a terabyte drive for safety. And the unit I’m using now had a Google Chrome induced illness (fixed now), that meant the hard drive was being tetchy so all the photos from it went to the terabyte drive (then compounded by me being away so much) so that as I write today I have no access to our pictures. I think in the New Year, I’m going to set us up some `Cloud’ space, and get our technology re-aligned. The `Cloud’ what a lovely metonym. I refer to the post before last; we generate so much data now that it’s simply become a scary prospect to have it all under one roof, fire, flood etc could see it all lost.

Final word: I’m working in the `Cloud’ or one of the Clouds, all six acres over two floors of it, the machine world where people tend and care for electronic property, the trillions of ones and zero’s defining every aspect of modern life including every word on this page. At this moment I am conflicted, by my loathing of this environment, the wonder at what it contains, and the terror of how much would be lost if an intergalactic EMP actually went off right next to our little planet.

Happy New Year to all those who work in the 24 hour, 365 days a year environments that we have created to make our lives simpler ... oh the irony.