Alain M. Lafon

This week I have written my first Excel sheet ever – and I think I don’t lie when I say “ever ever”. As a person dedicated to computers, there’s always a guy who will come up to me and ask some question concerning Office – and my answer has throughout been: “I’m into computer science, I don’t do Office.”

Well, now that my career has changed and I’m not working for Sun anymore(where I already had to change my opinion a little since I had to publicise OpenOffice), but am into programming business applications – dealing with Office(MS Office in particular*choke*) has become day-to-day action.

Working only 70%, I am the only employee who is allowed to write down hours. My choice was to use a fancy Web2.0 tool which most certainly would make my life more productive while at the same time easier, but ultimately I chose to use Excel for practice. And even though I could fall back upon my large repertoire of Excel functions(i.e. SUM and ROUND), I also had to get help finding a way on how to count lines that are already used.

Luckily my improvisation skills were great enough to do the perfect job: I can write down my hours and my breaks and it automagically calculates how many days I have left in overtime. I even agreed with my inner conscience that Microsoft Office was lame – so I chose to not only use a proprietary application, but also a personality(and therefore life-)threatening tool called Google-Docs for the sake of ubiquitous information. No One can hold me responsible for not being able to remember my current overtime whilst I have the need to know it each and every second of my life. Well, I could have used OpenOffice and my FTP server, but who really wants to be a good and intelligent person in this messy world, anyway? It would have taken me like what.. minutes.. to do the same job with free tools – never mind, I’m a busy man now.

And now comes the funny part. I realized I had to improve on my work-reward-expectations that I had grown into begin a lowly student(I’m talking of things like having to work all day without ever[ever] getting a reward whatsoever) – in my first 15 days, I already worked enough to earn me over 7 free days in overtime.

Yesterday my life finally made a turn – even if in silence, but I want to stay focused on what matters right now. I received the first paycheck working as application programmer. It looked pretty neat, but just didn’t feel how I wanted the experience to feel.

I began raising my own money with 15 – whilst being completely abandoned from my parents before I even was born since the age of 18. And even though I didn’t get any nameable help from any social institution and had few to back me up, I always had my own apartment, but lived far below what Germany considers minimal standard of living. In the struggle, I didn’t miss too many opportunities to screw things up – my CV looks kinda awkward, which lead to a few unpleasant incidents, while my social life has been so screwed, I can’t even tell without writing a series of novels about it.

Now, there I am, finally earning 4k CHF a month net. Still a student, still trying to do his best, still having to deal with my screwed history. I thought yesterday could finally be a turning point, but the punch in the stomach I received just a couple of minutes ago proved otherwise. I won’t write about it, because it hurts too much – if I could instantly forget it, I wouldn’t hesitate. Putting it into text would certainly prove to be a stupid idea.

I have to change my way of living, of dealing with my needs and those of others. I have to stick to top priorities and stop taking big chances; history showed me they don’t pay off – and it really doesn’t matter how much I want them to do just that. There is only one life I can live at the moment; it is precious and fragile – I want it to be good, it will be good I say.

Finally I have the ressources to impose change and if I don’t do it now, I will some time die an old and inwardly discontent man like so many before me.

What is this post about? Switzerland of course! The country of love, peace and infinite possibilities! I am glad that I can be here, I am thankful and I want to make this time worthwhile. Thanks for reading, visitor. I appreciate it.

while I should be getting up at somewhere around 6am – or even better right now. At least if I wanted to nurse my morning workouts, which I probably should – thinking of my carelessness of the past month.

It’s been a couple of days since I gave myself the chance to post; merely because I’m running in a range of three and four hours a day concerning sleep this deathlike stone-mode, already. Fortunately so much has happened in the past days alone that I can forgo my unwillingness of not writing any non-dedicated posts whatsoever, but consolidate at least a few impressions.

Yesterday I was talking with a dear friend of mine about a magazine she would love to publish, but felt herself in no condition to do so. Since I liked her ideas very much I instantly bought her the domain bella-nonna.com while installing WordPress 2.7 in a new apache2 virtual host. This makes three Drupal and two WP installations on my Fire 280R/Solaris 10 machine already – of course my version of WP is the most archaic of them all. Well, now I’m looking forward to see her style the page and successively generate content.

The day before yesterday was pretty uneventful – until a co-worker and I decided to have some Pizza after our project marathon. Driving to the pizzeria we came to be spectators of a burning car; without any trace for a crash. And I’m not talking about a car emitting fumes; it was completely and utterly encapsulated in flames! Until this moment I didn’t realize how well a car is suited not only to combust fuel, but to also serve as such. Even more so I was impressed, because it(the petrol tank) simply didn’t blow up. Afterwards I learned that modern petrol tanks are built from plastic which melts early on – pouring out petrol nice and slow without giving it a chance to built up pressure and explode.

Considering the already advanced time, I should probably skip any more details great experiences like my weeks favourite: my second trip to Weimar or my new found love for audiobooks(see librivox.org for books that are in the public domain), the lost and re-found ring, the first excel sheet I’ve ever done(“I won’t ever need office – I’m in computer science”..) or the fact that I have accumulated over 7 days overtime in only 14 days of work..