
Night London
I was meaning to write another blog post a bit sooner; in fact I did kind of write it. But then I did not like the topic…
This time it will be a bit chaotic, I did not have a lot of time to sort out my thoughts so I am doing it here.

Real time slow conversations are weird
Lately I have been busier than usual, and I had a lot of conversation over messenger that spanned days. Usually somebody messages me, I read the message, think about what to reply, work for a few hours, sleep, and then next day I have a casual feeling that I was in some conversation, but I can’t say for sure what was it about, so I read it again, this time reply and forget about it once again.
Sometimes it feels like hangover — you sort of remember talking to your friends but not really. Not sure if there is some solution to this. Maybe having email conversations would be better; it would certainly remove the illusion that the conversation is happening in real time.

London is small. Or big. Certainly one of those.
For the last three months I lived in Islington, that is North London. Its pretty central, two stations away from Bank station (essentially the most overcrowded station ever), but the area around Angel feels calm and during the weekends its more of a town than city.
And that’s the thing, London is basically a lot of towns connected by a bunch of double-deckers. And since I live 13 minutes by walk from the office I don’t really have a lot of reasons to venture to those other towns. (I can wake up at 09:30, leave the house at 09:47 and be on time for 10am stand-up)

My job is (almost) done
I was hired on a fixed contract and its almost finished. I am super happy about how it all turned out. When I was looking for contracts I was a bit afraid where I will end up. There was a big risk of working for a bank or some crypto-bullshit startup.

Thankfully I ended up at OpenSignal, where I really could not exaggerate enough how good it all went. The work was very intensive with focus on getting prototypes as fast as possible. Thankfully its almost finished, getting ready to ship to customers.

Dave
One of the reasons I accepted this contract was that it was fixed-length with no possibility of extension. This was good as I wanted to try to live in London. All the best paying jobs in SW are around London so I wanted to see if I could live here permanently.
What is the verdict? I wish I could tell you. Everyone here seems to be here for one reason only: making money. Take Dave. He is my flatmate here in London, his room is next to mine, I can hear all aspects of his life, that is none, he goes to sleep around 11, wakes up at six and goes to gym and office.

His name is Dave and he works in Deutsche Bank. That is all I know about him. And I have discovered that today because LinkedIn suggested him as connection (I don’t have him on Facebook or email or phone. It was most likely based on the fast we log-in to LinkedIn with the same IP address). Without seeing his picture I would not know his name was Dave.
That is the level of interaction people have with flatmates in London. (I asked my friends and was told that this is pretty usual situation. The solution is to live with your friends. Which can be sometimes complicated as the housing market here is shit at best.)

New lens
Ever-since buying my Fujifilm X-T20 I had a dilemma what lens to buy. For now I have been using the kit lens 16–50, which is so shit that even the official product list does not mention it. So getting a different lens was just matter of time. After watching a lot of reviews and thinking a lot about what type of shots I am mostly interested in I went for the 23mm F1.4, which is equivalent to 35mm with my sensor. One of the best videos that help me choose was this one, most of the others focused too much on technical aspects that were a bit hard for me to grasp.
I bought a second-hand model, and after two weeks I am quite happy with the results. Because its prime lens it really forces me to think about framing even before looking through the viewfinder.
Lately I have been thinking about reading some book about photography. I still don’t know much about it but if I ever want to have “Martin’s Photography” page on Facebook I have to try harder. So if you have any tips please send them to me.

Change-log v19.9.06
I became an uncle. The baby is still quite ugly so I am not all that excited. According to the latest models its projected to move from ugly to cute in about five months so I should check it later.
I am working on making myself more of an uncle. Its probably based a lot on Hollywood movies — uncle is usually portrayed as mysterious character not present in the main hero’s life until he becomes teenager. Then he suddenly emerges as the main vehicle of the story-line guiding in the main character.

There are advantages for this setup: its easy to explain why some weird old dude who was fuck-where for the last fifteen years is suddenly interested in some random young teenager. (The uncle has to be away, so that the main character can be explained the background story.)
Anyway so I bought couple of flannel shirts, started to grow a beard and I am already fat so there is that. I am not sure if I have to start smoking pipe but I definitely have to either join an army, police or a gang. Joining a gang is probably easiest and it involves a lot of cool tattoos so I might go with that.
So that’s me becoming Level 1 uncle. I hope to level up to 2 or 3 soon but people involved in this decision don’t seem all that keen on making that happen.
Thanks for reading
I have not really done any proof-reading this time so I am sorry if this reads like a mental diarrhea but that is pretty much what this is.

