We're 4 months into this year, and somehow I've already got more stories to tell from this year than 2009. And 2009 was a pretty eventful year with me spending a week in London speaking at the Erlang Factory conference, five weeks in Palo Alto as part of Facebook's fbFund seed fund, and finally quitting my job in November for many different reasons, one of which to pursue a freelance career.

Right Now

I'm sitting on the ferry on my way to Athens. I've been on the island of Ios for the past 2 weeks. I'm heading back to Athens to clean and organize my apartment as I'm gonna try to sublet it during the summer while I'm working on Ios. And I also have a few meetings regarding some freelance projects which are coming close to the end.

I'm going back to Ios for the summer and work for one of my best friends fixing computers, and managing his Internet Cafés. It's the same kind of work I did the last three summers I spent on Ios before I moved to Athens a year and a half ago. I've decided to do it cause for some reason I feel like a last summer on Ios might do me good, and cause work-wise I'll be in charge of and responsible for quite a few more things than I was last time. This means more money, and opportunity to learn new things.

I'll still be freelancing part-time while I'm working in the internet cafe in the evening, as all I do is just sit on my computer working, watching movies, or playing games.

I'm not all too sure how I really feel about spending the summer on Ios though. One of the biggest reasons I moved to Athens was to get off the island. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful and peaceful little Greek island, but for me, it almost served as a prison of sorts with so little things to do and no opportunities for much of anything, that I felt like I was going crazy for the last five of the twelve years I lived there. But I'm hoping it'll be a worthwhile experience on more than just the financial level this summer.

So Far This Year

Like I mentioned earlier, a lot as happened in the past four months. Among other things, my girlfriend of three and a half years is now my ex-girlfriend as of February 13th. I've had to deal with a bunch of seriously fucked up family issues. I'm starting my own company with two friends, and it's the first time serious effort is put into a project of my own. I've had to learn to manage both my time and my money a lot better since I started freelancing in November. I've become more social and outgoing. I've made some new friends, one of which I suspect will probably be one of my best friends till the very day I die. The list goes on...

And Beyond...

Despite the fact that a breakup is never really a good or positive thing, I now believe my breakup back in February has had a positive effect on me. It forced change into my life, and I was in need of change. Not that I knew it at the time though. Since then I've set out to change a number of things in my life, and most importantly, about myself. So far, it's been moderately successful.

One of the ideas I've been toying with the past few months, is to start looking for a job abroad for next year. Like in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, or London. I have friends in all four cities, so finding work and a place to live would hopefully not be too difficult.

San Francisco is currently the most tempting the place, and the more I think about it, the more I wanna go for it. The US with their gun craziness and such has never really been that tempting. But the tech community in the bay area is simply fantastic. And San Francisco as a city is also quite amazing and unique compared to other places I've seen.

Last night a friend of mine who lives in San Francisco randomly dropped by my house on Ios while he was there for a few days. And we got talking about San Francisco the job opportunities I'd have there compared to Greece. It's a conversation that I believe has turned my loose thoughts about moving, into serious consideration.

There's not that much state of the art technology advancements going on in Greece. Most of tech-related jobs available here are generic grind work. Build another site for another client based on template X, *yawn*. Sure, there are jobs where you get to work on interesting and new technologies, but the pay is still between almost to utterly insulting.

I've been offered €850 per month for jobs which I was beyond overqualified for, and €1,100 for a lead-developer position within a highly successful digital media design and development firm. I turned both those jobs down, and others too. And just to be clear, I don't mean anything bad about these companies or people. They're awesome and great people. I just get annoyed with how low the average and even the "good" salaries are here in Greece, and have been for many many years way before the recent financial chaos started here.

For these reasons, and more personal reasons, the thought of moving to say, San Francisco, is really starting to grow on me. I want change, I wanna see a different culture, be somewhere else, do something interesting, hopefully even something which I truly love doing. If I'll go through with these thoughts though, I don't know. This summer and autumn a lot of things will be happening. I'll see how things go with the new company and project we're starting. How things go with a few other projects I'm working on. And how I feel after the summer and towards the end of the year.

However, I do believe I'm gonna start asking around for work. Even if it's for next year, I'm hoping to get enough feedback (and maybe even job offers) so I can get a good idea of what I'd be looking at if I decide to go for it.

Here I am, on a small little island in the middle of nowhere, a 9 hour ferry trip from Athens. There are no ferries for another 24 hours, and I've got an eye exam in 12 hours, which I've waited for the past two months.

I was supposed to travel back to Athens this afternoon, but yesterday morning the communist party in Greece initiated a ferry strike, stopping all ferries in and out of Piraeus as far as I've understood. And only for two days, the second day being the one I was supposed to travel on.

To top it off, I was calling the hospital repeatedly this morning for about 3 hours to try to reschedule my appointment, and all I got was either a busy tone, or no answer at all, on all their phone numbers. If I ever do get hold of anyone there, I'll probably need to wait six months this time instead of two considering how my luck is going.

As I was writing the previous paragraph my sister called me, with news of a rumor that there's no ferries scheduled to the island till June. Not so sure I believe it, but I doubt it'd surprise me that much at this point... lol

FML :D

*** Initializing analytics system.
*** Initializing health check sub-system.
*** Booting health check sensors.
*** Running physical health checks.
[Warning] Optical subsystem initialized with errors:
[Error] Focal systems out of optimal range.
*** Running psychological health checks.
[Error] Corrupt system file: human-to-human-communication.dylib
[Warning] H2H protocol daemon is reporting malformed I/O.
*** Running humor health checks.
[Error] Syntax error in humor.conf.
*** Running spiritual health checks.
[Error] Spirit is corrupt or missing, attempting to use system default.
[Error] Default system spirit is missing.
[Error] No usable spirit found, system entering zombie mode.
*** Finalizing health checks.
*** System status: CRITICAL
*** Status summary: Visually impaired anti-social Zombie with
                    corrupt sense of humor.

This was originally a response I wrote to some chick I don't know who messaged me out of the blue asking "how are you?". After sending it, I thought it was funny enough to post here... lol

I used to be a caffeine junkie. My caffeinated poison of choice was Coke, the legal kind, not the illegal one.

When I say I was a junkie, I don't use those words lightly. At most, I was drinking about 3-4 liters per day. I kid you not. On average though it was around 1.5 liters per day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The recommended liquid intake per day for adults is 2 liters (of water). This had been going on roughly since I was 16 or 17 years old, or 7-8 years ago.

Why Caffeinate?

I drank Coke for two reasons. Firstly cause I loved the taste of it. Secondly, and most importantly, cause the caffeine and sugar gave me energy. Being a developer, I spend all my time on the computer thinking a gazillion different thoughts at the same time all day long. Thanks to this, my brain eats up enormous amounts of glucose (sugar), and Coke is the perfect counter agent for this, as it contains both sugar and caffeine.

Also, I never really sleep a full night's sleep, so I'm always tired throughout the day. If I didn't have any Coke in the morning though, or there was a too long gap between one glass and the next, I'd get extremely tired, to the point of almost dosing off and not being able to get much work done. So I'd have another glass of Coke to counter these deep swings in my alertness.

Going Cold Turkey

So let's jump to last spring, April 16th 2009 to be exact. While on a road trip, I decided to stop drinking Coke, cold turkey style. Originally I wanted to do it over the weekend just to see how I'd feel without any caffeine in my system. Which was something I hadn't experienced for years. I was honestly a little surprised that after being a bit more tired than normal the first day, I was fine the second day.

The Withdrawal

After the weekend ended, I kept away from caffeine, and around day three or four, I started getting light headaches multiple times per day, everyday. And I never have headaches, except for when I'm dead sick with some flu so I can hardly stand on my own two feet. So I figured that the headaches were from caffeine withdrawal. According to Wikipedia, withdrawal symptoms can last for one to five days. My headaches didn't let up for about two weeks.

The Aftermath

I didn't drink a single drop of caffeine of any form for the next two months. And since then, it's a rare event which generally only happens when I go to the cinema and buy popcorn and Coke for the movie. I generally feel better, I think. I'm still generally tired throughout the day cause I don't get enough sleep, but I never get the deep end energy swings I used to get if I didn't have any Coke for a while.

My wallet is also feeling healthier. I used to spend between 50 to 100 EUR on Coke every month, now that money is going to paying my cell phone bill instead.

Conclusion

I don't need caffeine. I wanted to quit drinking caffeine cause I was curious. I knew it couldn't be that good for me to keep drinking as much Coke as I was, and it was kinda expensive as well.

If you do consume a lot of caffeine, I'd suggest you try quitting cold turkey style for a week – or even just a weekend – to see how you feel without it. Cause chances are, that you can at the very least save a decent pile of cash over the course of a year or so, without feeling any worse than we all naturally do in our fragile human condition.

P.S.

I bought a bottle of Coke the other day, cause I felt like having some. After half a glass, I realized that I don't really like the taste of it anymore. So this bottle will probably sit in my fridge indefinitely, and might be the last bottle I ever buy for myself.

Ten months after quitting Coca Cola, I don't like the taste anymore. It's lame, but for me it's a pretty big event, as I used to consider Coke the best tasting thing on the planet in liquid form.

As some of you might have noticed the last couple of days, I haven't been online much on IM networks. I'm not sure what originally kept me from launching Adium the other day, but along the way I've come to a realization.

The Problem

I realized that IM has been taking up way too much of my time, and constantly distracting me from both work and personal matters. You just can't hide from the tsunami of Growl notifications, bouncing and flashing Dock icons, plinging sounds, and more that almost all IM clients spew out in one form or another whenever you receive a message.

A friend of mine gave up on IM networks almost a year ago, for pretty much same reasons. — Yes, I'm linking to Sugarenia again. She always seems to have the same opinions as me, just days/months before me. Dammit!

The Solution

Unfortunately I couldn't bring myself to completely disconnect from IM networks, so I took a slightly different approach than Sugarenia. I've gone out of my way to make sure my IM client — Adium of course — doesn't notify me via Growl, Dock icon, sound, telepathy, or even alien abduction. This means, I'm online, I can chat, but unless I manually switch to the space/virtual-desktop where my IM client sets up camp, I don't even know if I have any new messages.

After a couple of days, I have to say it's a quite nice change. I only get distracted when I choose to check if there are any IM messages to respond to.

So now you know why it might take me 8 hours to respond to a chat message. I simply didn't want to check for new messages, or I completely forgot cause I was hopefully working along all excited on my next attempt at building an awesome online service which will hopefully pay my rent, and maybe even food.

Today marks the day I update my online avatar/profile picture. I've had the same sepia colored half-face avatar for 4 or 5 years now. So it was about time for a change. However, the biggest reason I changed it, was cause I cut my hair short in November, after having long hair for about 10 years.

But why the heck am I blogging about it? Cause I wanted to have an excuse to add Fancybox to my newly redesigned site. And the previous post was looking lonely after two days in solitary here.

So without further ado, I present my old and my new avatar in complete Fancybox glory with fading animations and all. If you're reading this in a feed reader, click here (if you're really bored).

Because I'm a perfectionist and decent bit insane, here's the 50x50 pixel versions too, so you can see how they both look in really small sizes, which is the most common size they appear in on different sites anyway.

And incase you're wondering, I'm 18 or 19 in the old photo, and 24 in the new one. If I shave though I can easily fool people into believing that I'm 17. In fact, some people think I am 17 :P... I guess I'll appreciate it more when I'm 30-40 and people think I'm 26, hehe.