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For the past few days I’ve been sparing moments to think about personal mobility. As an individual of practically no engineering background this has unfortunately not been quite as easy a process as I had hoped. In fact as of writing it remains at the conceptual stage, as may be seen.

Yes I have set my sights upon the prospect of designing and perhaps constructing a four-wheeled personal-scale mode of transport. I remain highly skeptical of my odds of completion – but hey at least it is something worth trying for.

I’ve decided to take a bit of a systems analysis approach to the project starting from the conceptual design phase and working my way back to defining the problem. That tends to be the flow of things when you respond to what you perceive as a nagging want or need.

So the problem that I seek to solve is that of getting myself from point A to point B in as efficient, convenient, practical and economical a fashion as possible. Oh yes. And I would like the resulting vehicle to be very light, compactable and thus portable.

Yes, portable. A vehicle that can stop a driver outside a workplace, be folded up in under a minute and carried indoors in a zip-bag. At this early stage I know that a lot of design questions may need revisiting.

I would say that it doesn’t take awfully much to annoy me. As somewhat of a perfectionist I take a moody disposition towards flaws and inconveniences, particularly where the ingredient of unfairness or incompetence is tossed in.

While I would say that I am one of my own harshest critics, I would also say that collective entities such as institutions bear a significant degree of the brunt of my scathing perspective also.

It was no different this morning as I negotiated the mish-mesh of streets in the heart of Paceville. Even though I’ve done it hundreds of times before, the disappointment and eventual frustration of being unable to find a legal parking space is a special kind of feeling that often tests the boundaries of that which I would call rage.

Circling in and out and about and in again, multiple passes, varying route, extending my search area further and further outwards as the second hand ticks down the minutes to the hour of appointment. All being told it took around fifty minutes to finally settle for a parking space fifteen minutes walk away from the intended destination. The brisk walk down and up the valley slopes long choked by urbanization was, by comparison, a relief.

It turned out to be worth my while however as even though I did arrive minutes late that which followed was for the most part a positive experience. Perhaps the end of an era of (official) idleness is upon me.

This would conclude this chapter of seeking that has spanned many months. While I would have said that I am frankly surprised that the search was not concluded long earlier, I cannot truly say that I am. After all, the national unemployment figures were up 2,597 persons to a total of 7,680 persons unemployed (link).

In the weeks prior to my post two evenings ago I wasn’t exactly feeling very inspired. I feared that I had lost my touch and this is one of the reasons that it took me so long to get back in the game. I have a tiny secret that I should probably share with you all.

I have little idea exactly what I am going to be blogging about.

That did actually bother me a very short while ago, but I have decided to place some trust in my tendency ‘not’ to run out of ideas, or things to say.

A former reader did ask me whether I would be writing about politics this time around. I may write about politics but it is not my intention to let politics rule my writings.

I will take things one day at a time.

In the meantime my thoughts are drifting to a field that I last recall interesting me some nine years ago – and that field is cycle design. No, I do not speak of the gasoline or even the two wheeled types that dominate the western markets. I am more interested in working on a four wheeled variant powered by foot and volt.

Unsurprisingly I have already received a rather negative response but adversity is something that I have come to expect in fields unorthodox or novel. I have a few ideas and while it is rare that I see them run the gauntlet from fantasy to realization, you just never know.

No I won’t be placing any bets.

Sometimes it is external forces that determine how the next chapter of your life plays out. This was true for a very good friend of mine who had to leave the Islands for an indefinite period in order to help sort out some family issues. It was my privilege to be entrusted with the task of looking after his apartment, particularly his pet rabbits.

It turned out to be a very interesting period. The weeks stretched to months. It was an ideal opportunity to escape to a place of solitude, and I took advantage of this opportunity very regularly. This, combined with the availability of a Wi-Fi connection, would also have been a good opportunity to revive this web log – except that it clearly didn’t happen.

This period followed rather tightly upon the heels of the dissertation saga, the month of June slipping by and the murcury rising. As such between looking for work and tending to small fuzzy creatures I spent most of my time either watching the television or playing games while listening to the radio. Both generally helped to take my mind off my relatively idle status.

I did find some time to indulge in some self-taught skills however. While I did not really manage to get my head around coding in a more practical language than those taught in the Maltese education system I did become somewhat familiar with some aspects of computer aided design as well as rabbit care.

That pretty much sums up the period until the near year-end when this friend returned to reclaim his home, life and pets. It was certainly a more relaxed time than the preceding months had been and I do not recall waking up from half-hour power naps to slave at a deadline.

It is the beginning of March and it is as good a time as any to get things back on track. It may as well begin on a slightly personal note, bringing readers up to speed with the past 18 months – the period this web log has been idle.

Well first a bit of context. As of around the time I logged my final post I was getting set to tackle the final academic year of the course I was reading at the University of Malta. I was also wrapping up my summer role as welfare officer and getting set to take on further work by night.

My decision to take up the offer to continue working was probably a mistake on my part and that choice did come back to haunt me later on, compounded as it were by a couple of setbacks that ultimately served to sap my will. It was just a year ago today that I respectfully resigned from my work position.

By that point things were looking rather bleak. It didn’t help that I had been working on my confirmed dissertation topic for just a few months following the scrapping of the foundation work done on earlier prospective topics.

I’ll admit that I did lose composure at times but it would have ended badly were it not for the several persons who were very supportive. Good advice, encouragement and tolerance of my repetitive (and depressing) play list at 4 o’ clock in the morning all served to grant me doses of inspiration and motivation. If it weren’t for such individuals I likely would be in much poorer shape today.

Thankfully that phase is over and done with. I’d consider returning to expand upon it, but I think that an informal note would be more palatable for the foreseeable future.

As one door closes others shall open. This is the way of life even if the doors may not immediately be clear. I do recall referring to this same phenomenon upon an older web presence of mine several years back and yet it remains just as relevant if not more so.

This web log has floundered. It has become an online fossil floating upon the cyber waters of the information ocean. It fell silent for a number of reasons and I shall not delve deeply into them, and not at all for the moment.

The pace was broken and I apologize to those readers who have been left wondering what would become of this space. Well I can finally give a proper answer to this question.

It shall be made whole…

Up until now this web log, while it operated, was one of a reactionary nature. I looked outside and observed and came back to this space with my observations. It has thus far been too political, too aloof and too impersonal.

I am not entirely certain what I would like it to become but I do have a number of ideas, most importantly of these will be the dispensing of a few myths and discarding the unnecessary and the unjustified.

It is time to take a step towards humanity and break the silence. This moment is not now – I have yet to determine how extensively things may or may not change – but things shall change.

We shall see.

During the course of any serious police investigation a key question that needs to be established is the motive for the crime concerned. The vast majority of all crimes are carried out for some reason or another. Crimes that are carried out without clear motive on the part of the perpetrators are more likely to involve a degree of insanity than not. Even in the event of a crime where no suspects have been immediately available for questioning, potential suspects may be identified through the establishment of likely potential motives.

Unfortunately it does not immediately appear that the Maltese authorities are seriously investigating the continuous flow of illegal immigrants to Malta and neighbouring landmasses. If the patterns that I perceive in the media’s reporting and lack of reporting are anything to go by then one might be forgiven for pointing out that the lion’s share of analysis ever carried out gravitating around the question of motive has typically centred around the collective motives of the illegal immigrants themselves.

Yes, we know that the vast majority of them have economic motives, in search of greener pastures, that a few are escaping famine and war; and that a few others are possibly escaping the law of their respective countries of origin. This is all well and good but such information is about as useful as health authorities asking restaurant-goers why they choose a particular fast food chain to dine at – it is of limited value in the context of determining the health impact of such a fast food chain.

More relevant questions would be levelled at the traffickers themselves and those who aid them. Why do they do it? Does any question really begin and end with the money that changes hands between trafficker and would-be immigrant? Are there no entities beyond these that bear a potential interest in aiding or perpetrating the inundation of southern members of the European Union with illegal immigrants?

After all, illegal immigrants could potentially be very useful if it were in one’s interests to destabilize the economy of a country or a region. If one were to, say, turn a blind eye to the issue, or even pay a tidy sum to others to turn a blind eye… and if one were to make it such that such illegal immigrants find it very hard to find legitimate work… and if one were to also be of a disposition to offer unofficial employment, especially if one were to have one’s hands in the pockets of key individuals to ensure that such an operation runs smoothly… then mighten one not only be an opportunist but also a criminal involved in high treason?

A fantastic hypothesis worthy of Hollywood perhaps, and perhaps also similarly lacking in concrete backing, but I would say that it is not complete hogwash and find it difficult to believe that the level of incompetence thus far exhibited by the nationalist government has been a complete coincidence, but then again I take many coincidences with a pinch of salt. Perhaps if they were to make a show and actually start up an investigation of any such avenues, then I might be able to swallow that past incompetence has, in fact, just been incompetence. Faced with a choice I would rather deal with honest incompetence than dishonest competence and I am sure that many others feel similarly.