Ciarán's free software notes

Walking from the communal kitchen back to my apartment, I glanced out a window and saw a couple that I recognised out on the street. I'll call them John and Jane here. I hadn't seen them in a year and nine months. They were looking up at the window where I was standing.

When I first moved to Brussels, I went into a bar and asked for work. I was told that one of the barmen was going home to Ireland in a week's time and I could replace him. That was John.

As well as getting a job in the bar, I got a room above the bar. 15 square metres. I decided I'd take it for the first two or three weeks until I found something better. A year and nine months later, as I write this, I'm still in that same room.

In my first week, there were a lot of parties to celebrate it being John's last week in Brussels, so I got to know a lot of people.

With no income, I had exaggerated my bar experience when I was looking for work. Two weeks after I started the job, I was let go. I had made a few mistakes which were trivial, but they exposed that I was new to some of this. A barman friend had advised me to exagerate my experience. He said that's how people become barmen. Being let go after two weeks was ok. I had gained two weeks wages, two weeks experience, an apartment, and I had gotten to know some people.

I had brought my savings with me when I moved to Brussels, but that wasn't much, so I had to keep my living costs very low because I didn't know how long I would be without income. This meant that I had to stop drinking in the bars, so I mostly lost contact with the people I had gotten to know. My diet was based on sardines and mixed nuts. Some days I also had fruit juice, some days I got a kebab.

When I finally got another income, doing some work as a painter, I never wanted to eat sardines ever again.

My apartment contained a bed, a fridge, a shower, a sink, and it had a balcony. There was no table, so at dinner time I would put a plank of wood on the bed. When I had a guest, we would sit either side of the corner of the bed.

Eventually I found a table. Later, I acquired a microwave that someone was throwing out.

Living cheaply doesn't bother me. It gives me more control over my life.

During this period, I was campaigning in my spare time to prevent a European Union directive from making software ideas patentable. I had no computer, so I did this work in Internet cafes.

There's one main wall inside my apartment, the planning of which makes me laugh. On one side is the bed, the window, and the only light. On the other is the sink, the mirror, and the shower - all in constant darkness.

My third job was in another bar. My two weeks experience was enough to keep me from making silly mistakes, so this job was pretty secure.

Seeing John and Jane out the window was weird. I would have liked to say hi and tell them about what happened to everyone they knew - where they moved on to, who replaced them, etc. But, I was in the middle of doing something and at that moment, and I couldn't remember Jane's name. That would have been embarrassing since she left Brussels after John and I had known her well. While I tried to remember her name, they finished looking at the building and walked on. I remembered her name later.

They had been looking directly up at the window where I was standing. By the look on their faces, I think they saw my figure behind the window, but they didn't recognise that it was me.

I now wish I'd gone down and said hi anyway, but I didn't, and that's life.

I should be moving to a new apartment quite soon and I'll miss this place. The window wall is 1.9 arm-spans long, and the other wall is 2.4 arm-spans, which I calculate to make the apartment 15 square metres in total.

I work at least 70 hours per week and weekends are an important time for getting stuff done without the usual amount of phone calls and emails, so I felt pretty inconvenienced when someone locked the office door on Friday evening and forgot to leave the key in the agreed place.

I was returning from my second food break and I found that I could not get to the office where I have Internet access, and my laptop and all my notes and todo lists were imprisoned until Monday.

On Friday night I started reading Tariq Ali's Rough Music, and caught up on some sleep. It's a short book and I I finished it on Saturday. It was mostly about the bias of the mass media. Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions was better, but Rough Music used the UK as it's example, which is a bit closer to home for me than Chomsky's book. I also studied a bit of Brazilian Portuguese over the weekend.

I spent Saturday evening finally fixing the door frame and putting a lock on my appartment. I had to get the door burst in with a crowbar about a year ago when I lost the only key.

Saturday night was spent in Celtica - an Irish bar in Brussels city centre where pints are 2 euro until midnight. Some friends were over visiting Brussels and Pete O'Malley was doing the music. I left there some time after 5am.

I got up at 11h30 on Sunday to get a potted plant at the huge market which is at South Station on Sunday mornings and then went hunting for an appartment. My current place is cheap, bright, is only a 35 minute walk from the city centre, and is well-located for public transport but there's no Internet access and it's so small that I can't even offer visitors some floor space to sleep on.

On Sunday night I made my next day's todo list and wrote this blog entry on paper. The 2-day typing break was surely good for my fingers, and my girlfriend certainly didn't mind me being locked out of the office. I have one appointment to see a new appartment, and one place that I have to phone, but I'm glad I got that job started at least. But now, time to catch up on all the non-home stuff I didn't get done...