1 << 5

Today's the day when my life duration has doubled for the fifth time, relative to the last such event, (counting my first birthday as the 0th). (With bit of a luck, I'm in for yet another such event down the road.)

For those less math nerd folks out there: I turned 32 today.

I don't usually care too much about arbitrary milestones in the flow of time, my own birthday not really being an exception, yet last night I couldn't help thinking about it (not being able to fall asleep for about two hours after going to bed - I turned from good sleeper to quite erratic sleeper lately). When trying to assess what happened since the last birthday, it always seems life only brings gradual changes (the previous year carries a rather big exception, hopefully I'll be able to write about it sometime soon). However, on such a round number occasion (both %100000 and 0x20), it made me wonder about everything that happened or changed since I was half this age.

And I have to say, it's a hell of a lots of things. My 16-year old self was a quite blissfully unaware gymnasium student in Croatia whose biggest problem was how to skip history classes to go hack on the Apple-II machines in the school computer lab, as well as to write games and fractal generators for Commodore 64 or later for Atari ST. And girls. Were a problem too, that is.

Shortly thereafter, I endured one war and one exodus that completely uprooted me and my family, had to settle in a new country. A bit later found true love, then attended university, and over the passing years grew into several different roles, including that of a husband (for more than eight years now), of a father (for more than seven years now when my son Ákos was born, redoubled the role two years later with Zsuzsi), and of a (well, what at least feels like) reasonably respected IT industry professional. I'd really like to elaborate a bit on all of this here and now, but there are two big driving forces against it: (a) not wanting to bore you to death, and (b) the aforementioned three roles unfortunately don't leave me with much time at present to write sentimental weblog entries about myself.

All in all, the previous 16 years were probably the most dynamic period of my life, past and future. Regardless, I'm looking forward to the next 32 years; stay tuned for the "1 << 6"