Journal tags: birthday

Today is my birthday. I am one twentieth of a millenium old. I am eighteen and a quarter kilo-days old. I am six hundred months old. I am somewhere in the order of 26.28 mega-minutes old. I am fifty years old.

The reflected light of the sun that left Earth when I was born has passed Alpha Cephei and will soon reach Delta Aquilae. In that time, our solar system has completed 0.00002% of its orbit around the centre of our galaxy.

I was born into a world with the Berlin Wall. That world ended when I turned eighteen.

Fifty years before I was born, the Irish war of independence was fought while the world was recovering from an influenza pandemic.

Fifty years after I was born, the UK is beginning its post-Brexit splintering while the world is in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.

In the past few years, I started to speculate about what I might do for the big Five Oh. Should I travel somewhere nice? Or should I throw a big party and invite everyone I know?

Neither of those are options now. The decision has been made for me. I will have a birthday (and subsequent weekend) filled with the pleasures of home. I plan to over-indulge with all my favourite foods, lovingly prepared by Jessica. And I want the finest wines available to humanity—I want them here and I want them now.

I will also, inevitably, be contemplating the passage of time. I’m definitely of an age now where I’ve shifted from “explore” to “exploit.” In other words, I’ve pretty much figured out what I like doing. That is in contrast to the many years spent trying to figure out how I should be spending my time. Now my plans are more about maximising what I know I like and minimising everything else. What I like mostly involves Irish traditional music and good food.

So that’s what I’ll be doubling down on for my birthday weekend.

It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the day.

Last year I spent the summer solstice visiting a telescope in the woods outside Riga:

we were inside the observatory getting a tour of the telescope at the precise moment that the astronomical summer began.

Later that evening, when I was back in my hotel room, I fired off a quick DM to Chloe, simply saying “Happy Birthday!” (it’s an easy date to remember).

She responded the next day with a curiously distant message. “Thanks Jeremy. Hope you’re well.”

And that was the last DM I ever got from Chloe.

The travelling time is underway. I’m in Denmark right now, leading an HTML5 workshop at NoMA, the Nordic Multimedia Academy, and thanks to some excellent questions from the students, it’s all going smoothly.

Last week I was in Belgium for the Phare conference, which also went smoothly. I enjoyed giving my presentation and I really enjoyed the excellent hospitality of the Ghentians.

While I was in Belgium, the occasion of my fortieth birthday arrived with a sense of long-foreseen inevitability. I spent it in Bruges.

Four zero. The big four oh. Two squared times ten. The answer to life, the universe and everything minus two.

The photons that were reflected from Earth at the time of my birth are arriving at GJ 1214 b. Or, to put in another way, the light that left GJ 1214 at the moment of my birth is entering our solar system, perhaps even reaching the retinas of human beings somewhere on this planet who happen to be looking into just the right part of the sky at just the right time.

Day two of Refresh Orlando kicked off with a talk by yours truly on microformats. I think it went pretty well. I made sure to allow time for some questions and some great questions were asked. I hope I managed to answer them okay.

I put together a list of resources that gathers together a lot of the tools and implementations that I talked about. The whole thing has been recorded (touch wood) so I’ll be sure to create a transcript of the audio once it becomes available. Then you’ll be able to hear how I managed to squeeze in the word “crunk” at the behest of Jina.

I don’t know why I should be accommodating to her. She’s the one responsible for my ritual humiliation last night.

A very large crowd of us descended on a Japanese restaurant. At one point, Andy turned to me and said, “By the way, if anything happens to you tonight, it’s not my fault.” My suspicions were immediately aroused but after a while, I forgot about the strange remark.

Sushi was consumed. Conversations were had. Then the drumming started, the costumes appeared and the singing started. “Oh”, I thought, “it’s somebody’s birthda… waitaminute!”

Needless to say, it wasn’t actually my birthday but Jina thought it would be amusing to watch me endure the birthday ritual. I spent the rest of the evening — at Howl At The Moon — trying to get revenge but she remains resolutely impervious to shame or humiliation. All I ended up doing was staying out too late in a noisy bar the night before giving a presentation first thing in the morning.

On the plus side, I got a nice card out of the whole thing.