So, there I was in Tenerife.
A few days away is no bad thing. I’ve seen people talk about burnout — hell, I’ve seen people burn out — and I could feel myself wandering close to that line. It’s been a stressful couple of months.
So I came to Tenerife. Sun, sea, sand.
It’s surprising, here. Although perhaps only for me. Hands up if you’ve read the Inspector Morse books? One of the things that you’ll notice is that book Morse is not TV Morse. Book Morse, in addition to his superhuman Mary Sue ability to attract women, is explicitly a mixture of the cultured and the coarse. That’s a pretty good description of how my head works.
I mentioned to a few people that I was going to Tenerife. And there was scorn on the responses. Not always obvious, but it was there. The idea of sun all day and then dreadful clubs full of chavs all night aroused feelings of hatred in some.
Well, you know what? Fuck those people. I like the idea of reading in a hot beachside bar all day and then continuing to drink all evening. And that’s precisely what I’ve been up to. Today my entire day was eating a full English breakfast and then re-reading the first two Dresden Files books. Stand there and tell me that you think that that’s a bad thing to do.
Well, I thought about Rachel too. But I’ll talk more about her later. She’s wonderful. But later.
Anyway, it put in perspective the idea that suffering is noble. That if you fought hard to get your 90% solution that it must have been worth the effort. That deliberately rejecting the world in order to do something free but useless should in itself deserve applause.
This place is freewheeling. It’s happy. That’s not a bad thing.
There are people who would say that easy happiness is a bad thing. That suffering is needed to prove a point. That using software that doesn’t do what you want is virtuous if that software is Free. That it’s more important to do things the right way than to actually do what you wanted.
Like me. I used to think that. Then I bought an iPhone. And I learned that a reasonable subset of my audience believes that I should be deprived of niceness and instead substitute the righteous feeling I get from using Free software instead. As if it doesn’t matter whether I have a thing that does what I want: if I had a thing that involved free software instead then I could ignore that I can’t do what I care about and instead feel happy that at least I wasn’t doing what I wanted in a Free way.
Suffering earns no points. That you made your own life miserable because of your beliefs is not a way that you score points over people who didn’t. You are not somehow more virtuous because you suffered for your ability to connect to wifi or create documents. You aren’t a better person because you did that. Your opponents are not morally inferior. All you’ve done is make your own life hard because you think that there are landmines on the easy path. Maybe you’re right. But that you suffered is not in itself a reason why we should listen to you.
I’m sure there are tensions under the surface here in Tenerife that I’m unaware of. But I never see them. Take a tip from the Canarians. Being easy is not a crime. Being deliberately difficult is not virtuous. And if you think differently, maybe you should go on holiday.
I can recommend O’Neills in Playa de las Americas. Two pints for five euros.
I hear you.
I’m a week a way starting a month+ long holiday myself to a sunny southern locale…
Sunny all day long, H2O all around me, reasonable priced alcohol, secluded and nearly off the grid.
You get Tenerife, I get the South Pole…I need a new travel agent.
Though I’ve never really been able to bring myself to rereading books. I know people do it, but ever time I’ve tried it I get bored part way through. Since I’m up2date on the Dresden books, I’m taking along a couple of installments of the Matthew Swift novels by Kate Griffin. Similar in genre to the Dresden setup, but different enough to not be repetitive or derivative. Where one oozes the feel of present day Chicago the other bleeds a bit of modern day London.
-jef
I wish I’d had heard such advice too long ago by someone who cared.
I like the link you make between open source software and the catholic joy of suffering.
I lived and worked on the Canary Islands (Lanzarote, to be precise) for a while and let me tell you that there -are- things under the sunny surface that you don’t want to know about and that are very ugly in their nature. You will see the islands through different eyes when you are not just spending a vacation but actually LIVE there. But that’s always the same wherever you go and you just have to find your own way to deal with the things that are not so great.
Just for the record, I still love the Canaries nonetheless. It’s an awesome place to be and I had a wonderful time there that was very important for me.
About the iPhone: I owned three iOS gadgets, the first generation iPod Touch, an iPhone 3G and the first generation iPad. The iPad went back to Apple after only four days because it was the most useless piece of equipment that I had ever bought. I also owned almost a dozen different Macs. A few weeks ago, I sold my last stuff from Apple and I’m glad that it’s all gone. Apple’s iOS is –THE– incarnation of a digital prison. It’s sole purpose is to restrict the user wherever possible and only serve Apple’s own purposes. iOS is the worst and most restricted platform in existence and I cannot for the life of me figure out why people say that they love it. The problem with OS X for me was that it become more broken with every new release; compatibility issues with non-Apple equipment became worse with each upgrade and each OS X upgrade also required me to upgrade my third party software as well. Until I decided to no longer drop my money into this black hole.
I used to be a Microsoft guy back in the day until their licensing craziness and the ever increasing license fees got on my nerve and I thought it might be a good idea to try Apple. Now I’m using Xubuntu Linux on my private machines. Just like Windows and OS X, it’s far from being perfect and has its individual weaknesses and strengths. But unlike the other two platforms, Linux is not getting into my way. It lets me have my cake and eat it, too.
My current smartphone is a first generation Galaxy Note, and I can say the same thing about Android: It’s not getting in my way. It treats me like an adult and lets me do what –I– want to do. No restrictions. Just how it is supposed to be.
Ohh good for you and well deserved, I do love a sun beach holiday, lots of reading and some sunny cocktails! Enjoy!
I’ve had that sort of epiphany a few times in my life — last but not least, when I invested in this MBP-Retina. HOWEVER it’s important never to forget that everything in life (like in security) is a trade-off. It’s like working for Goldman Sachs or a Big Four accountancy: you know you’ve sold out, you know that your precious spreadsheets do absolutely nothing to improve the human condition, they’re just a tool to make even more money for already-obscenely-rich people — but the money is good and you can buy a little house, go on holiday, start a family and enjoy your limited time on the planet, certainly more than you would have had while trying to foster a revolution in Bolivia. You make your trade-offs, your compromises, and you live your contradictions; after all nobody is perfect nor pure, so it’s just about you and your beliefs and how well you can sleep at night.
Have a fantastic holiday and enjoy the rest of your days there, you deserve it!
Free software is not about the suffering. If Stallman had his way, and people invested as much into free software as they currently do in proprietary software, then we’d have the best of both worlds: Beautiful, usable software that’s free.
I think the bigger issue is about trust. Proprietary software vendors don’t trust me with the source code to their programs, and I don’t really trust proprietary software vendors to keep my best interests in mind. Eventually, I fully expect the proprietary software vendors to leak my information to hostile parties, whether hackers, corporations, or governments.
If free software is currently less useful than proprietary software, it’s hopefully just a temporary condition while we work on making things better. After all, studies show that people who delay gratification for future rewards tend to be the most successful.