Progressive Metal on Dawnstar

Wrapping Up 2022

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 14:24:22 +1100

Hello, folks! It’s been a while since my last post. Those who know me in real life should know that our family grew from 2 to 3 in July 2022. Getting a baby boy has changed many things in our lives, and routines now revolve around the little one.

This hasn’t stopped us from going out every now and then, but we’re usually heading home relatively early. Babies must be in bed around 8 pm, and public places like restaurants become uncomfortably noisy very quickly when people have had a couple of drinks.

We also took one short road trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and another longer one to Brisbane, driving 2,200 km within six days. For Christmas, we flew to Adelaide to see the in-laws. Travelling with our baby has been easy. He’s a good traveller and falls asleep as soon as the car starts moving, or the plane takes off. So I’m pretty confident about taking him on an intercontinental flight to introduce him to the other side of the family and friends in Europe.

Let’s talk about work a little bit

In work news, it’s been a frustrating and exhausting ride. I’m in my third job within one year, as the previous ones have not been great fits. Finding a job hasn’t been that hard but finding a job that would offer me an excellent foundation to maintain and grow my skills has been quite hard. The working culture in Australia is somewhat similar to the UK, but the management style seems more top-down than I’m comfortable with. I appreciate leading by example and building things together as a team, not being told what to do and then getting blamed for doing it wrong after the manager changed their mind. Micromanagement should have no place in modern software engineering.

The pay is good, though, and it’s been somewhat easy to find the same salary level I had in the UK. Senior software engineers are paid well in Australia, so if you’re looking for a change of scenery, why not consider moving Down Under?

The pandemic killed all the meet-ups, and some have slowly revived during the last six months. However, the offering is still way quieter than in London or Berlin. Sydney is a city of 5.25 million people, and I had assumed the tech communities would be more active.

Twitter has been the primary platform for keeping in touch with my tech buddies for years. It’s been my main source of information, the coolest new libraries, technologies and the general direction of web development. Now it’s been destroyed, and the communities have escaped to greener pastures elsewhere. Some fled to Mastodon, and some have put more effort into their personal websites and newsletters. Some have decided to stay in their bubbles. A considerable amount of information is also buried in Discord servers, out of reach of public search engines.

Sometimes I think I could do something entirely different for a living. I just haven’t yet figured out what that would possibly be. In my dreams, I want to write a book. I have already drafted a rough plot line, although it needs more work. With this pace, it might take years before I’m happy with the outcome. On the other hand, many famous authors wrote their first books in their 40s or even 50s, and I think it’s never really too late.

Projection to 2023

I have no idea what 2023 will bring. The Russian invasion in Ukraine is still ongoing. China is constantly testing the defence capabilities of its neighbours, increasing its influence in the Pacific, and its military is becoming stronger. Climate change has not been stopped, and to be honest, I don’t believe our generation can stop it. So things don’t look too promising, but that’s how it’s always been. When I was a child, Chernobyl blew up, the Cold War was at its peak, and the threat of nuclear war was always imminent.

We’ve been somewhat happy in Sydney, but the housing crisis with ever-increasing rents makes this city a very expensive place to live. Moving further away from the city is tempting, but we also want to live a social life and go to pubs, cafes, museums, concerts and festivals, which only happen in the city.

Three years of La Niña is ending, which reduces the amount of rain, but the opposite effect of El Niño is likely to take over. That means hotter and dryer weather, more drought and bushfires. Not exactly better. We already knew that when we decided to move to Australia, and we’re okay with it. I like the sunshine and the mild winters.

We’ll see what the future brings to us.

Welcome to the Land Down Under

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 12:06:38 +1100

A decent amount of water has flown through river Thames since my last update. Actually, it doesn’t matter that much what’s flowing in Thames right now because I left the UK for good. I am now living in Sydney, Australia so that’s quite a jump to the other side of the world!

It’s been a long process and the thought of leaving the UK started brewing in our heads straight away when I was made redundant from my job in July 2020. Why leave the UK? Well, mostly because of the effects of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s government and the way how they’ve dealt with the pandemic.

After considering our options we came to a conclusion that an English speaking country is probably the best option for both of us, so we decided to go with Australia. My wife is Australian so that seemed logical and I’ve always wanted to live in a hot climate. Many twists and turns and tons of paperwork later, we lodged a visa application in December 2020. A little bit more paperwork and a health inspection was required before I finally received my visa grant letter in April 2021, after only 4 months of waiting.

6 months later, we were fully engaged in packing mode and getting the last things sorted out in the UK, including a big farewell party. It went much better than we had hoped for. It was so lovely to see so many friends attending!

I’ve moved between countries 3 times previously so it’s not that big deal, but the pandemic and the distance makes things more complicated. You can’t just drive in a van over the border and fly back later to pick up the things you forgot. In late November, we said “Farewell!” to some of our belongings in London and “See you next year!” to the rest before a moving company carried them away to wait for a shipping container in a warehouse somewhere. On this day, they are still stuck there, waiting for a free container so I’m not expecting to get reunited with my vinyl records before Easter.

After emptying the flat, we spent a long weekend at an airport hotel, just chilling out before boarding a Cathay Pacific flight from London Heathrow to Hong Kong. After a quick shower and a lunch in the lounge, we continued the journey to Sydney. Pandemic makes intercontinental travel very challenging. It is more expensive and there’s a lot of mandatory Covid testing and temperature measurements involved with the risk of ending up in a 3-week quarantine in Hong Kong at your own expense. I’m glad everything went fine without any problems! After nearly 24 hours of travelling we finally arrived in Australia, where a Border Force officer greeted me with “Hah! Kimi Räikkönen!” when he saw my Finnish passport.

When you move to a new country, there’s usually a lot of bureaucracy involved when you try to learn how the local system works and get access to a local phone number, bank account and so on. I only have experience from 3 countries but Australia has definitely been easier than the UK or Germany. We already got phone numbers and a bank account on the day after arriving in the country! Getting jobs and finding a flat took a bit longer, but we were very lucky with those as well.

Sometimes things just click without any effort!

Best of 2010s - Vector

Sat, 23 May 2020 11:40:23 +0000

I had totally missed Haken until very recently. I remember having an opportunity to see them live in 2019 but I was busy with something else and didn’t want to squeeze another gig in my diary.

Haken are sounding quite a lot like Between the Buried And Me but without the growl vocals and their songs are shorter. It’s a mix and match of different styles but stays pretty well in the progressive metal territory. If you’d put Dream Theater, Karnivool and Between the Buried And Me in a mixer, you would possibly get the base ingredients of Haken out.

Some of the toppings they add are influences from electronic music and computer games, especially in the middle of the song Puzzle Box. It’s a musical perfection like so many others in this genre. Progressive metal just like it should be.

I’m listening to this album over and over again and that’s why it deserves a spot on this list.