I’m looking forward to 1 month ahead in time, when all this will be sorted out, and I can concentrate on meeting people and maybe enjoying actually learning theoretical stuff again. Not that I didn’t learn anything while working with programming, but when you learn to solve a specific problem right in front of you, it’s more of a practical approach of getting stuff to work that I had to apply.

The irony here is that it was exactly the lack of any practical knowlegde that got me so tired of school I had to take a break from the traditional education system two years ago. I wish it were simpler to find a balance between practical appliance and theoretical understanding.

With this in the back of my mind it wasn’t exactly an easy decision to go back to school, but there are other advantages of being a student than what you learn, I’d say, so I’m hoping studying here in Lausanne will be amusing and entertaining, and if I even manage to pick up a little theory as well, then that’s just an added bonus.

As a short remark I might add that the folks on programming reddit seems to have a problem with a little light humor… But hey, programming is serious business!

A couple of features have been added for other Wordpress users, like support for gravatars, as well as tags and categories the way most blogs normally use them.

I’m taking great effort to make the theme a little more Wordpress compliant so you still can use it with your normal wordpress plugins and so forth.

As a side note, I work professionally as a php developer and have as such written the theme using a little more php than most Wordpress themes. This means that editing it might be a little difficult if you don’t know php. Don’t panic though, if you take the time to look over the code, you’ll see that it’s in fact pretty simple. It’s just broken up on small reusable pieces instead of being one long page.

I hope you will find it useful. The theme is publiced under the GPL and you can download the theme here: minimal.zip

UPDATE: (August 12th 2008)

I’ve just made a couple of important updates to the theme. First of all I’ve removed my site specific google analytics code, so I wont be spying on other people. Secondly I’ve changed the header so it will show text if no logo.png file is present in the images folder in theme dir. It’s of course much preferable to make a nice logo image, but this way the theme will work out of the box as well.

It all started last year when I by chance got a programming job in a quiet pueblo 45 minutes south of Granada in the Spanish province Andalusia. Having formerly lived in Toulouse, southern France, I longed to get back to mild climate, and relaxed lifestyle of southern Europe.

The first time I stood on my new terrace, enjoying the view over the mediteranian ocean and knowing that this was the place I was going to live for the next long time I was stunned. It was January and I had just left rainy Copenhagen some days earlier and replaced it with blooming flowers and sunshine hot enough to let me walk around in shorts and t-shirt. Sometimes life isn’t too bad, I figured.

Every Spanish person can tell you that Andalusia is a place with it’s own way of life, and Salobreña is no different in that regard. It’s only 30 years ago that donkeys and not cars were the common means of transportation. And while people here love their cars, (because they most certainly do), you can still feel that somehow this place never really caught up with the modern world. Or maybe it’s opposite. Take the tapas tradition for instance. Historically speaking it has always been seen as good custom to take something to eat while you had a beer, and bars all over Spain used to serve a little snack or sandwhich with every order, free of charge. Of course modern competitions and economic speculation has soon meant the death of this sane tradition. Except of course in Salobreña and the area around it. Of course some bar owners unfortunately tries to stay with the times, but if you know the right places to go, you can just order three beers and get food enough for a dinner.

The last 7 months I have also had the honor of living a place where mullets are high fashion. And I’m not exaggerating here, all the cool guys have them, and I would have taken plenty of pictures had all the mullet guys not looked so cool that I simply didn’t dare. It’s a sight to behold and something I would rather enjoy if it didn’t go hand in hand with the annoying habit of driving a car with oversized spoilers listening to moronic techno on full blast. These guys look so cool I’m convinced they’re not even trying. It’s just their way of life.

Another thing Salobreña has taught me is the true meaning of the word ‘mañana’. To the naïve newly arriven me, this word might seem like just another word for tomorrow, but it’s so much more than that. If I had to describe this place with just one word, ‘mañana’ would be it. Mañana is the answer your electrician gives you when he might come around next week, letting you live without electricity for days (this has happened more than once). It’s the same word you’ll hear when you didn’t receive that important package with your new hard disk. I think the spirit of the word finally dawned upon me the day I was heading out of town, finding my way blocked by the bus, who in place was blocked by somebody parking in the middle of the only road leading down from the top of the hill. While I was walking frustrated forth and back, the bus driver was sitting at a bench smoking a cigarette with a couple of the passengers, all enjoying the break from whatever they were doing.

I’ve heard many people saying that the driving in Spain is crazy. That’s a myth. It’s the parking that’s crazy. The drivers are just trying as hard as they might to avoid the cars parked pretty much everywhere. Just put on the warning lights and you suddenly have rights to park pretty much anywhere around here. Not that there is no law enforcement, but it seems to me that most people around here take the parking tickets as a normal expense on line with food, electricity and water. There are also rumors that a significant amount of the town halls budget is sponsored by parking tickets. With the amount of payments going under the table around here, it seems only fair to give a little back to the community in forms of parking tickets.

Back in the days Salobreña was an old Moorish town and the castle still resides on the top of the hill, surrounded on all sides by white chalked houses. I live almost on the top, and from my terrace I can follow life down below on the beach and the frantic line of drivers trying to get home to Granada Sunday afternoon.

Having a historic center is not always an advantage though, especially when it comes to traffic. Almost all streets around here are one way streets, but the most residents have a habit of disregarding this completely, driving in whatever direction they want, whenever they want. Especially I they happen to be driving in huge trucks in slopes around corners. Of course this might sound like a hazard to everybody, but ingenuously the drivers have developed a habit of honking continuously as long as they perceive this might be an advantage. I have yet to see a car crash, but I think my ears have started bleeding. And it’s not exactly making it better that the city council decided to do a road reconstruction project in high season. I used to throw stuff at the drivers doing this, but with techno turned all the way up and the horn down, most of them never noticed.

Like all other places on the Spanish south coast, Salobreña has it’s part of English trash hanging around. Not that I mean any offense to English people in general, but I have a habit of meating this certain kind of british person when I’m out drinking. They are always hugely patriotic, slightly xenophobic and have this tendency of complaining about Paki’s in Britain opening corner stores while complaining that you can’t get any good food down here. I wonder if they’ll ever get the irony. (I’ll just have to add that I know some awesome british people down here as well, so it’s not all bad).

That said I have to admit that Spanish food hasn’t been my cup of tea so far. I’m not exactly a vegetarian, but I like my vegetables and most of my meals are without meat. On the other hand you can’t call Spanish people carnivores, but I does seem to me that most of their meals down here are without vegetables. I have a theory that after the Spanish economic boom in the 90’s, meat suddenly became a common commodity, and since it still has a classy feeling to it down here to eat meat, most people make a point out of eating really much of it. Go to a Spanish restaurant and look at the menu card, and all it will mention is meat. In the beginning you might naïvely suspect that they are just naming their dishes after the main meat ingredient, but you’ll soon learn that the name in fact derives from the sole ingredient. A part from sauce and bread of course. Except if you order paella.

If you do choose to go out, remember that because this is Andalusia, you shouldn’t expect to eat before 10. We might very well be in the same time zone as most of wester Europe, but if you want to interact with local life, it might help you to set your watch 3 hours back. Everything is just a little later down here. Take discos and late night pubs that most often wont get crowded until around 3am, or your standard electrician who most wont come before at least a day after he was supposed to show up. My best explanation is that the lifestyle of mañana simply has pushed everyone so much back so everybody is chronically some two hours late for everything.

I can’t adequately express what a blessing this has been to me, because even though I always suspected that my internal watch used a 25 hour day, I’ve found that when I have to get out of bed at 9:40pm and get in bed at around 1am, I’ve suddenly synced with my natural way of living. When I at the same time can be 20 minutes late for all appointments without anybody lifting an eyebrow, I sometimes wonder if I’m dead and went to heaven. Add a bunch of national holidays to the equation and it’s evident that these people obviously know something about living.

I tend to think now and again that Salobreña somehow got so far behind the rest of the world that they ended up being in front of everybody. Kind of like when a friend of mine complained about the fashion down here being years after Nothern europe. I explained to her that Salobreña just became retro before everybody else.

It’s going to be nice moving to somewhere a little more civilized and regulated and proper, I think. But I’ll miss this place.

I’ve been working full time as a programmer for a while now, and I’be been feeling that it’s time to broaden my theoretical background, especially because I’d love to spend more time getting familiar with artificial intelligence and functional programming. It’s all very exciting right now.

To understand the conclusion, it’s in place to think about what going to a live concert actually gets you as opposed to sitting in your comfortable home listening to a studio record.

I can’t speak for everybody but to me the most compelling reasons to go to a live concert is the connection I feel with the artists when I can see them being there and performing. The feel of the sound shaking my body, the light show glimmering before my eyes and the artists sharing their energy and passion. That’s when I know it wouldn’t be possible to stand still even if I tried.

Of course it depends on the music and my relationship to it too. If I can’t dance to it, and if the artists doesn’t manage to capture my interest in the music, the concert is not going to work for me. Not even when the music is really good, because if the concert doesn’t give me that live feeling, I might just as well listen to the cd at home, enjoying the superior production quality.

The big problem large concerts have here, is that it’s pretty damn difficult to get any connection at all to the artist while there is 40000 other people standing around you and the artist is some remote figure you barely even notice on the big monitors besides the scene. Hey, they might be the coolest band out there, but when you are standing 100 meters away, the end result is usually crap anyway.

Granted this is only true if you like me are too lazy to stand in line for the front pit, but what I’m wondering about is what the rest of the crowd standing in the back with me actually get out of the whole ordeal.

On the other hand, when people hear I went to Roskilde Festival but didn’t really care to see Radiohead, they just look at me confused. It seems that big names have some kind of “don’t miss” status, so even if the concert might not be too exciting it self, there is still a certain social pressure to be there.

That said if people prefer going to a ginormeous concert either because of social stigma or more rational reasons, then I’m not going to hold them back. I’m just wondering what they are getting out of it. A part from bragging rights.

So what could I expect, watching a kids movie and all? not much I guess, but still… Just let me ask this question out loud:

Why does the good guy in kids movies so often have to be helpless and naïve?

Yeah I know, there are lot’s of movies out there with rebel kids doing good stuff and so far and yadda yadda yadda, but it’s still a damn annoying reoccuring theme that the good fellows in almost any movie production has these asinine righteous qualities to them.

Why are we trying so hard to impose these values on kids?

The poor kids susceptible enough to follow these standards through are doomed to be labeled as losers by the rest of society. Imagine somebody in middle grade school walking around believing that ‘to be good to others’ is an important value to adhere to. If that poor little kid happen to be a boy, I’ll bet half your mortgage that he’ll end up being picked on by bullies because of his weird behavior.

Every time I see one of these kids honestly believing in the bullshit they are being fed from child friendly pop culture, I hang my head. They are heading for a tough lesson. The more innocent they are, the tougher it’s going to be.

It’s the very same boys who later in life complain about why girls don’t like the nice boys. The truth is that people too eager to please freaks me out. They probably freak most people out. And I wonder when I see them, what happened to them. How they managed never to shake the bullshit of their shoulders while growing up. I guess they somehow managed to become so righteously engulfed in their childish moral values that they perceive their helpfulness as superiority.

This serves no one any good. So why do we keep exposing kids to this kind of stuff?

My guess is as good as anyones, but I think it’s a selfish wish to keep them staying innocent for longer. People out there wants kids to be helpless and naïve enough to believe in goodness and doing the right thing, even when it in the long run will make their youth miserable.

I know that young minds are impressionable and I agree that some efforts should be made to protect and nurture them, but impressionable goes both ways. If we keep on feeding them bullshit to protect them from the world, then bullshit is very likely all they are going to believe.

By now, 2 months later I’m fairly certain that the reason I keep listening to this album, enjoying it more and more for each time is the straightforward honesty in it’s expression.

Rid of Me is filled to the brim with anger, regret and misery, so beautiful it goes straight to the heart. Not that this kind of stuff hasn’t been heard before. There’s a lot of angry regretful and miserable artists out there, but never have I heard anybody with the same sincerity in her expression.

Her shouts seem true and full of emotion she wants to let out. This doesn’t feel like an act; some character she has to play to live up to some reputation. Instead the shear force of the emotions she is expressing lets the music talk with a loudness and aggression coming from the expression itself, not as an afterthought.

This is important. A lot of angry yelling bands come off as ridiculous to me, because their anger seems to be their brand. Korn springs to mind as the obvious example, but even while listen to System of a Down (whom I admire) or Mastodon (whom I respect for their technical skills), I can’t help but questioning the honesty of the shouts and anger. It sure is anger, that’s true, but the emotional background for that anger doesn’t seem to be there.

Just imagine standing there on the scene for the 12th time that month trying hard to be really mad so you can play a kick-ass concert. Must suck. I’d had to pay somebody to piss me off.

But somehow I don’t think PJ Harvey would have that problem. When she shouts, she does it with such a conviction that I can’t help but feeling her pain and connecting with her music. It feels real every time.