Moving Soon And Leaving The Internet

In my last blog post I asked for help with moving me and my girlfriend to our new place in Almere. The number of responses to it wasn't high enough to make it possible, thus we decided to enlist a moving company. Turns out that they'll do it for about the same price as we could have done with volunteers and rented vans. And this way we're insured as well. Moving day will be the 23rd, with the carpet being put in on the 22nd.

One outstanding issue is that of internet. At this point I have been unable to arrange internet. Fiber isn't available in this particular apartment because it hasn't been put in yet despite being in the coverage area, meaning that we'll have to harass an ISP to look into having it pulled. As for ADSL, apparently we're just enough out of range to make higher speeds possible. This means that we'll be on an 8/1 Mbit connection at best. Hopefully they can pull fiber soon so that we can get that 100/100 connection. Slight difference and for about the same bloody price.

It's interesting in how far internet has become a part of our lives. I have taken to working on my laptop in the train while I travel to my work these days since they have WiFi in the Dutch intercity trains. This blog post I'm typing and posting from my place in the train for example. The thought of being in our new apartment without any form of internet connection beyond that on our phones is frightening. We'd not be able to communicate with most of our friends and acquaintances, I'd not be able to work and chat with Trevor while we finish up the current game project. And so on. I'll have to call this one ISP, XS4All, tomorrow when I'm not working to hopefully get things arranged for next week. It's going to be a squeeze.

At my job I'm adjusting quite well, I think. We just started on the migration of the Typo3 CMS we use for the websites from version 4.4 (old) to current (4.7.4). It's quite an undertaking, especially with all of the extensions installed for each site. There's also the usual issues with the development server's copy of the site being horribly broken, making it hard to ascertain whether or not something broke due to an extension or other update, or that it was broken before already. It's heaps of fun, albeit stressful. So far my colleagues are really pretty cool, though I have to hold myself back a bit from taking direct charge. I'm just the newbie at this point after all :P

It's fun to see all of my experience I have built up since the 1990s with regards to web development coming to use here, though. I have also provided support to others at the VARA with another CMS they use: Wordpress. Being a support person like this, as a kind of second line support person, really isn't bad at all. People come to you when they have issues which aren't easy to solve and they are grateful when you figure it out for them. Plus you get to meet more people this way inside the organization.

This all not to say that I am not looking forward to getting the moving over with. Traveling four hours a day by train like this is just too crazy. Of a 24 hour day you lose 8 hours due to sleep, leaving 16 hours of which you spend 8 hours on your work, leaving 8 hours of which I am spending 4 traveling. Take off time to eat, drink and such and I'll maybe have 2 hours left to do my relaxation and other stuff in. That's not much, and I can't wait for me to get back two and a half hours of those four hours of traveling after moving.

Hopefully everything will go smoothly now. There's still enough to arrange after moving as well, including a new beauty salon since the one in Deventer is really too far away at that point. Any tips on a good beauty salon in or near Almere where they do electrolysis therapy ('electrisch ontharen') are more than welcome :)


Maya