I’d one of those perfect mornings this morning where life is almost 100% right. I don’t know how to create these mornings – sometimes, they just happen. Lately, probably via rearrangement of stuff in my life, I have been getting up around 7am – I’m aiming for 6.30 actually 7 is already good – and instead of a) messing around dealing with early morning emails or b) rushing into work I have been c) making breakfast and putting on a DVD. The DVD of choice at the moment is actually the latest surf freeby from some big corporate (I think it’s called Cancer to Capricorn and it can be downloaded from Reef (which I will do) or, is currently stuck to the front of Surf Europe. I buy the surf magazines for the pictures only. And free DVDs now and again.

Anyway, it’s one hell of a DVD, features Mick Fanning, Rob Machado and a bunch of other youngsters I don’t know, and surf breaks in all sorts of nicer-than-Dublin places. And the soundtrack is pretty hot as well and has introduced me to Mackintosh Braun and Blonde Redhead, two outfits I had not hitherto met on my music journey.

So with that, the sun shining, breakfast being made (no pressure) and lunch being made (no pressure) and great music and cool waves to decorate my life, I just felt in the zone where things were where I want them to be.

We spend a lot of time aspiring to stuff. I remember for a long time in my life wanting to be the type of person who did X, Y and Z; latterly one of those things has been getting up early; and although it’s a hard and bitter realisation, the only way you can be that type of person is to get up and do it. So I am. I get up early although to be fair one of the big annoyances for me while I was battling with that was that I used to be. College? 7.10 every morning, relaxed breakfast, whatever radio program (for a long time it was Good Morning Scotland, just to be different). Germany? 5am to start at 7.30. Early morning program via satellite on radio 1, relaxed radio. No rushing. No messing. It fell apart when I was in Paris for some reason and I never really got it back in the meantime although I came quite close in Brussels where the morning routine tended to work like a star.

To be honest, I don’t even worry too much that I still get to work at around 9 in the morning now that I am getting up over an hour earlier because I’m a lot more relaxed. Frankly I was more concerned thinking how great that film is (it is definitely one of the best) and wondering if I could possibly justify getting a projector or large flatscreen television just to watch it. Given how little television I watch however, that’s a tall order.

Meanwhile, the days are somehow a lot easier when I’m a lot more relaxed because I haven’t been rushing around in the morning. And that’s good.

Yesterday or the day before I was doing some layout design exercises and while I was doing that I built this.

There’s a blog entry here explaining the background to it. Out of interest, the beach is InchyDoney in Cork.

As I don’t push the flickr account where it’s hosted too much, I got some surprise today to discover that it had pulled oh almost 100 views since it was posted. This was 20 times as many as the other photographs posted with it at the same time. Flickr stats is not giving me an inbound link and a google search isn’t finding it either. I suspect it was picked up somewhere through the Irish surfing community so I went to one of the main surfing fora to see if it was posted there.

I’ve spent some time on their fora before and not always found the Irish surfing community to be especially welcoming. I know the odd individuals are very decent but online, my overwhelming impression is that they are bolshy and arrogant. There was a dust up between boards.ie and the surfing community over a beach in Kerry because the surfing community in Ireland are into their secret spots and, online, are prone not to have any sense nor reason. There’s a google surf map that resulted from the community in boards.ie making it clear what they thought of some of the surfing ethos in Ireland. There’s occasionally an element of elitism that grates a little. I haven’t surfed in a little a while to be honest. But that’s by way of an aside.

Over on the Irishsurfer.com forum, it doesn’t look like much has changed in the Irish surfing community. Not welcoming, remarkably possessive. In a way it’s sad because Ireland has some fantastic beaches and waves – a real, real asset. The point has been made to them – even within their own community – that it’s a bit hypocritical to be ultra secretive and possessive about surfing locations in Ireland when they’re happy to go travelling to other countries to find surf locations.

Anyway, I didn’t find an inbound link to the image above there so wherever the link is coming from I have no idea. Strange though.

Back in the days that I was in college doing a module on translation technology, one of our lecturers talked about a concept of the “green dream”, particularly with respect to translators; how being connected to data communications service would make it possible for you/anyone to export translation services to anywhere in the world because printing stuff would no longer be necessary; you could just email it. I should note that this predates the time when 56K modems were de rigueur and every house had a Gateway computer.

Anyway, for reasons which I won’t go into, a lot of interesting blog thingies are turning up in my life. Blogs about being a freelance webdesigner, freelance writer, freelance programmer. All those good things. The latest of them is this one. To be honest, I haven’t looked too much into the idea of freelance programming distributed although I know a few people who do it from Ireland for customers that are a a few thousand miles and timezones away. It’s a nice set up in some respects if you can get it; albeit not without its disadvantages. Most people I know want home to be separate from work.

One of the points made by a commenter to the piece above related to the fact that the original writer liked the global possibilities offered by distributed programming, but the project itself wanted to hire people who were located in New York. Only. Which, given that the piece is lauding distribution across five states is odd enough. Someone else was unhappy at the thought that programming work for US companies could be distributed outside the US via this sort of distribution.

On balance, while I can understand the frame of mind that creates that concern, the other way of looking at it is if you’re in the US, you can fight for the right to work from the US for customers elsewhere, like Europe, for example. As in, you can offer competition, not suffer it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I consider things like 1) infrastructure in Dublin and 2) property prices in Dublin and 3) current job opportunities.

We have a government who apparently are interested in the whole knowledge economy thing. We have a way of doing things in Ireland that leans to the centralisation. We have a management mindset as well that doesn’t always recognise the benefits of distributed working areas.

If we are to get this right, we need to change the way we think about work and how we value it. We have all sorts of tools that could allow us to distribute work around the country, not just in incubator locations in Dublin and Dundalk for example. One of the key benefits of the construction boom was that it removed the necessity for internal migration for a while. It was not a sustainable way of doing it; but we could turn the entire country into a development island if we were forward thinking enough about it. And we could take some high quality development and design work into the country. According to Dublin City Council, the creative industry is worth a few billion to the city and to support it they have set up an organisation to foster it and new entrants. It’s called Creative D and it also provides links to the same industry elsewhere.

A key requirement for this is obviously comms infrastructure. UPC are getting there slowly. Eircom are 10,000 miles behind. I’m stating this on the grounds that I’ve just ordered 30Mb broadband from upc and will be cancelling 8Mb from eircom. But we need to reassess the education system also.

In a way, I think there’s a social tendency to fear change upfront. Our education system while it works, does not work well enough. And our way of approaching it is too regimented. It lacks imagination. We generalise education too far – up to about age 12. We are not effectively teaching numeracy or communications skills. And we don’t value work creatively. A lot of working in Ireland – not just in Ireland as it happens – is perception over reality. Working to the clock and less to the job. All this needs to be adjusted if we distribute a lot of work that could generate export credit and benefit the trade balance country wide.

The original Celtic Tiger – I hate that term – happened because we invested in a future that offered some potential. We killed it when we refused to face the economic reality of an economy that was growing on consumer spending and property driven credit. We are going to have to face some imagination again. Identify a different way of doing business and working it. And this time, instead of going for the quick buck, go for the long buck.

For various reasons I am looking at going back to college next autumn. In fact, the whole college thing has been under consideration for three or four months but the bastardisation of semesterisation in Irish colleges means that on average, intake is in autumn and that is it. This is in contrast to Germany where you can start in spring because you can make up the credits up in any order – to some extent.

So the whole investigation was shelved pending further information on some fronts. I have some prior qualifications. I have a degree in languages -French and German, postgraduate diplomas in conference interpreting and information technology. I did look at doing a continuation masters for the IT stuff but I can’t see that it’s still available.

In part, I’m stuck between a couple of principles. Firstly, I think that you should – as far as practical – study stuff you’re interested in. But I’m in my mid thirties and even now still have an eye on career implications and so this doesn’t leave me much scope for taking 4 years off to go back and study mediaeval history, for example.

With that in mind, I have started looking at options in the local universities and will also examine some options in the distance sector. As far as Ireland is concerned, that is National Distance Learning at DCU which is clinically insane since I live down the road from DCU, or the Open University which is expensive.

My interests are a bit varied. I’ve been looking at options in mathematics, multimedia, graphics design and maybe more information technology since what I do is hyperspecialised and will definitely not be around for the rest of my life. Some adjustment is called for.

For practical reasons, I’m interested in part time options. Ireland isn’t good at this. Much of Ireland’s college scheduling has a single market in mind and that’s school leavers. But browsing part time courses is hit or miss.

DCU, for example, if you’re looking at their postgraduate qualification lists them all on a single page and shows whether they are full or part time or both. This is useful. DIT allows you to browse on either part time or full time. This is useful too although I prefer the DCU option of listening everything. So far, on UCD’s page and Trinity’s page, I have had some difficulty identifying what courses are full and what courses are part time. This is particularly difficult because having looked at the maths stuff, UCD appears to have the nicer courses but they are all full time.

In truth, I rather think we need to look at how we approach education in this country. In some respects, it is overly regimented, and it’s quite reactionary. I live near DCU and I work quite near there at the moment too. In an ideal world, their timetabling structure would enable me to pick up some of their daytime degree courses on a part time basis by agreement with my employer for example – certainly to complete them over a slightly longer time frame or shorter as required.

Most of the universities and colleges in Ireland now have a credits based system. While I recognise that it’s hardly economically beneficial to have school leavers (particularly if they are government grant aided in any shape or form) languishing around the system if they cannot acquire a sufficient number of credits in a given time space, it might be long term beneficial to make it possible to acquire the benefits on an ad hoc basis if you are otherwise working.

I have no doubt that the colleges – already facing cuts and reconsideration – would scream at the cost of implementing such a system. On the other hand, for a country that’s desperately looking at ways of spinning out of an economic crisis, some fresh thinking is going to be needed and some hard thinking.

Of course, if it happens, it won’t happen in time for me. But in the future, if we can do a better job of selling education and making it possible to buy education particularly for people in full time employment – not, for example, rely on the Open University to fill gaps – it might go a long way towards contributing to ongoing economic development.

Today I was supposed to go motor racing in Mondella for the Japfest prize except when I woke this morning at 5am, it was bucketing down. It wasn’t a huge surprise to me at around 10 when Mondello rang and said “we are cancelling”. I wouldn’t want to drive in that kind of weather anyway. So it cleared up a little later…that’s fine. I went climbing instead and it was a giant #fail. Didn’t go according to plan at all, nothing like the joy of re-doing the route I finished during the week, fell once, didn’t get any further the second time around and walked. There’s no point in ignoring it when parts of your body are whinging at you the way mine was today. As I know don’t feel too healthy at all and not in a tired/over exerted way I suspect the weakness was more than the usual weakness. I’m freezing cold as well. It’s probably just as well I didn’t go learning to drive racing cars.

Stream of consciousness post this one. I’m listenign to the iPod again because the radio is letting me down. In answer to the question “what did you for Halloween”, the answer is “nothing much.” Answered the doorbell once to four tiny little fairies and started working on the broomstick lace scarf which I may or may not give to someone. Don’t know yet. It’s working up fast. And I like it. It looks really pretty. Today then, not much. Failed climbing, went to see a friend in Clontarf and kept up with twitter. Scored 150,000 plus on Bejewelled on FaceBook which is in the top 3% of scores, apparently which tells me I am spending too much time playing it.

I also had a look at the newspapers and decided that not buying them was still the best course of action. I only saw one article on the latest lot of apparitions in Knock and I am still wondering why this is news. Or, more to the point, the wrong questions are being asked. Why is it, that apparently, Mary wants us to say the rosary more? Oh wait. Possibly I’m not supposed to question. However, about 10,000 people turned up there yesterday which is, admittedly, fewer than went to see Def Leppard in the O2 last June.

What did catch my interest was this piece on Guardianonline about the Spanish Civil War. The comments are interesting to some extent. The impression I get from the piece is that the country needs closure; from the comments are voices who seem to equate closure with, I don’t know, revenge and vanquishment. I don’t think it’s that simple, if only because it never is anyway.

This is a brain dump.

I was talking to a friend last week about the possibility of working as a photographer. Full time. Make money out of the hobby. I know one person who did it. He does stuff that I personally could not hack. I had to consider how you might make a career out of being a photographer that in Ireland, did not include being a wedding photographer. I couldn’t face being a wedding photographer, you see. I’ve done some family photographs – you have to be really, really special for me to say yes to any request of this nature – but in truth, it’s not where my talent lies and it’s not in me to charge 3000E for a wedding shot weekend. But to get me to do it, you’d have to pay me that much.

I was also talking to a friend about the possibility of a career change. This is something that might, in fact, be shoved on me at some point in the next few years, given the economic reality in this country, so there have been discussions of the nature that go “but I don’t really know what I’d want to do.”

It was much easier when I was 22 years old, you know. There were all these things I wanted to try, and try them all I did. None of them are the career I now practice, which is IT related. I never thought I’d work with computers, although ironically, if the world swung around and I was 18 years old again, facing into CAO and college applications, it is probably at computers I’d be directed. The opinion has been voiced that I should perhaps have done that up front. I am not sure. I have this languages degree and fluency in a few languages that I probably would never acquire had I done computers at the time.

So I was talking to another friend because I voiced an interest in maths at some point lately and she asked if I’d looked into it and I had and was somewhat disheartened by the lack of part time options. I also added that I found that doing stuff for the future rarely turned out as planned. In fact, I couldn’t think of one thing I had planned that had worked out as planned. Ever.

Then, bad things happened. Then I started reading blogs by photographers who did stuff that interested me. National Geographic staffers, for example. And I started thinking, well, you know, there are photographers out there who make a living from photography without actually having to deal with psycho-brides. The local term here is Bridezilla, as it happens.

Anyway. I have started thinking about the fact that I got to this stage in my life and absolutely nothing has turned out the way I expected. Admittedly, it is not my fault we had a property bubble for the past 10 years or so thus ruling out nesting in a house. But I didn’t plan on discovering that I had a weird attraction to people with alcohol issues either. Or that I had a tendency to get dumped by people who wanted to go back to their ex-girlfriends. No, I’ll rephrase that – it’s not that I planned beign attractive to the wrong people – ie – people with whom “happy ever after” was not going to happen. I certainly didn’t plan to be still living in Dublin and I’m sure I didn’t intend to own all the junk I’ve accumulated. Do you know how many dictionaries I own now?

No, I was going to be living in Brittany with a very attractive fisherman type, teaching English at the local secondary school and no longer speaking French with a slight German accent. As I say, life did not go quite according to plan.

But then, I may have this opportunity to career change at some point in the next two years and although the idea terrifies me – like I said, all this was supposed to be sorted out 10 years ago -  but it might also be an opportunity.

The thing is I’m not absolutely sure where I’d go with that opportunity. Put simply, I don’t know what my dreams are any more and that makes working out a way to live them kinda difficult. Mostly I get by on earning enough money to pay for the crazy hobbies I have.

There’s a part of me wondering about making it possible to move back to Cork or Brittany. Or possibly Fuerteventura in Spain. The absolute fact of the matter is that if I change jobs from what I do now, I will be changing careers again. Unlikely to wind up back in system administration anyway. So I am sort of thinking that one of the key points would be to not think about the job I want to do [this time] but where I want to live. And then see what options are there.

Obviously the one fly that could appear in the ointment is if I find someone who doesn’t turn out to be a bad choice as significant other. But then, that will change the dream.

I’d like to be free to do stuff and then I wonder what’s giving me the feeling that I get stopped doing stuff. Apart from the wind getting in the way for kitesurfing, that is.

Someone asked me lately if I were having a midlife crisis. I pointed out I’d been through this at the age of 22 and that just because I was going through this at the age of 36 didn’t make it a midlife crisis.

The only decision I have made lately is that any opportunities coming my way to work in media, freelance writing, photography etc should be exploited and see where that takes me. If planning takes me down a road with no signposts, then maybe worth not planning either.