Attention English people: a “pot-luck” is evidently an event where participants cook a meal and share it with the the other participants. Today our workplace hosted a pot-luck and it was, from my point-of-view anyway, a spectacularly enjoyable event. There were 10 participants, but we managed to supply enough food to feed the rest of the company as well. We ate
well!
The menu today included:

• Yellow rice with chick peas, better known as Arroz con Gandures
• Venison chili
• Enchilada pies (1 vegetarian, 2 non)
• Roast pork with broccoli rabe
• Goat Vindaloo with Mutter Paneer
• Pulao with Raita
• Spanish Lasagna with plantain
• Fancy cheese with unsmoked, cured salmon
• “A sinful dessert”

M and I made a bunch of pretend Cornish Pasties which, whilst not exactly being the real deal, tasted quite the part. In case you doubt that I was actually involved, photographic evidence exists. We made enough to have a couple for our tea last night, and they were pretty close to the mark. Overall it was probably my favourite experience at work since I started there; we all ate, chatted, laughed, and appreciated each others’ food – quite a bonding experience really. I won’t describe the exact form of the “sinful dessert” because that sort of information could cause global unrest. Just believe me when I say it was shameful and yet spectacular.

Despite weakening the git, the sickness lingers on. Fortunately today was a Work From Home (WFH) day, which means I didn’t have to get up at 10 past sparrow-fart. Working from the sofa has many advantages over commuting and sitting in the office:

1. You get to hang out with the parrots – and they get to hang out with you.
2. You don’t spend three hours on public transport.
3. You don’t subject your workmates, and your workmates don’t subject you, to the latest fashionable virus from abroad.
4. Interruptions are negligible.
5. You get to control the temperature.
6. The tea, water and food supplies are fully stocked.
7. There’s only one person in the bog at a time.

A couple of weeks ago I received a text message from a thoughtful friend who wanted to know if I would like a ride home. “I’m already home, it’s wfh day!” I responded. “Cool!” he replied. It was a few days before I noticed, in my text message log, that the spell checker had “corrected” my text to: “I’m already home, it’s egg day!” When I asked my friend about this misunderstanding, it turns out he’d assumed it was some sort of alien colloquialism (“sitting still like an egg or staying home and having eggs or something”). So from that point forth, “Working From Home Day” has been officially renamed “Egg Day” in our household. Please help to adopt this globally. Finally, here is the obligatory link to
The Oatmeal on this topic

Been ill for a while so NYEH! Just for the record, here is a random list of stuff that has been stuck in my brain over the past couple of weeks.

• A brilliant micro-documentary about London’s traffic that actually manages to be funny, and interesting, and stars Beardyman’s brother.
• David Mitchell using his slot on Channel 4 to defend the BBC. Accurate, biting and necessary.
• I’ve been craving bacon sandwiches. British bacon sandwiches. Nothing gourmet either – the sort you get from any one of the thousands of greasy-spoon caffs that you are within walking distance of right now (if you live in the UK). Crusty white bread, a smidge of butter, brown sauce (preferably HP), and two to three rashers of thick bacon cooked on one of those hotplate things in some cheap oil. The other morning I was craving it so badly that I started Googling pictures of bacon sandwiches at work.
• It’s my niece Lily’s 1st birthday today! Happy birthday little girl!
• $4.30 each, with free shipping. I bought three of these amazing little things.
• Libya too? What excuse are we going to need for the next invasion.
• Noam Chomsky thinks Obama is possibly worse than Blair/W – and tragically he may be right.

We are currently the luckiest buggers in the entire history of the world thus far because we have the Internet. Like many civilisations before us, including the Romans, we can’t imagine our endeavours ever getting lost in the mists of time. The fact that I had to abandon my dictionary in favour of Google’s in-built “did you mean” lookup when I needed to correctly spell “endeavours” above is indicative of the power we take for granted every day. But we could lose it as easily as the library of Alexandria was burnt to ashes. With modern weaponry we have the technology to delete everything of intellectual importance in one go, and render our descendants utterly hopeless.

So, let’s all do our bit to remember pieces of genius, just in case the records all get burned. If you’ve ever read, or watched, an adaption of Fahrenheit 451 – think of our duty as that of the book people who each learned the entire text of a book.

Task one: watch and appreciate the genius Tony Sale describe the work his brilliant forefathers at Bletchley Park performed in cracking encryption during WW2:
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/lorenz/pods/tunytalk_3.html.

Look at the rest of Tony Sale’s site for more astounding descriptions of WW2 code-breaking.

Pride is generally a bad thing, and so forgive me for feeling proud to have met Tony Sale. But reading his work is a genuinely humbling experience.

The last year has seen some seriously interesting stories that have been either totally missed or totally misunderstood by the mainstream media. The first time I read an article discussing ‘the “Anonymous” Internet group’ attacking some site or other I was highly amused; it was obvious that they missed the point about what Anonymous is. Since then a lot has changed, and a complex set of intertwined stories concerning espionage, sabotage and corruption has emerged into the public domain that not only highlights some very dirty business within the Secret Service, but also how powerless they really are. It’s extremely difficult to summarise all of this stuff so I’ll have to leave that for another time.

Regardless, the latest press-release from Anonymous is absolutely wonderful:
http://anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=585

The Koch brothers (odious, rich, corrupt bastards that they appear to be) have been hacked by Anonymous, just like the hopeless HBGary and ACS Law cretins were previously. Shed no tears btw – these people are real scum.

The best bit is that Anonymous are still at large, totally unstoppable and no-one outside of Anonymous seems to understand why!

There’s a reason why they wear V masks.

Following the success of The Social Network, it has been all to easy to overlook the other Internet success stories. So in the interests of fairness I present…The Twitter Story!

It’s 2006; the Internet has already become a significant part of life for the majority of the planet. Publishing is as simple as setting up a blog on a free blogging site; multiple generations of people were communicating on a regular basis with each other on Facebook; it really seemed like all the good ideas had been thought of.

But to some imagineers, this saturation was nothing more than a challenge! One imagineer in particular was permanently engaged in a mental challenge: to come up with the idea, the one that would make him rich. One lunchtime, as he sat with his two friends eating mexican food on a childrens’ slide (wacky motherfuckers three), he started asking himself questions about the Internet and the people that used it.

It was obvious to him that anyone with an idea, a modicum of inspiration and the ability to string a sentence together was already catered for by the plethora of existing successful services. How could anyone possibly compete with the existing tools. It was then that he had the flash of genius that changed the world. He reasoned this way:

Tools exist for anyone with even the most meagre level of skill and articulation to become a successful published blogger…but what about everyone else? What about the armies of vapid, illiterate dullards who are too vacuous to construct a rudimentary sentence, let alone the mental capacity to actually fill it with some basic semantic content which may be of interest to anyone else.

Realising he had struck a vast seam of untapped revenue, he set about thinking of ways to take advantage of (or “monetize” as these sort of scumbags would say) this concept.

One area of technology that had already successfully saturated the lives of the stupidest mouth-breathers was the mobile phone: you only have to get on a bus, anywhere in the world, to realise this. So, what if any twat could start a blog by sending a text message? Obviously, you’d have to limit the length of each “post” to 140 characters but for this particular demographic that limit was rather generous if anything.

And so the revolution began, and within a matter of 5 years, the “micro-blogging” site for the common man had cornered the market in globally accessible inane drivel!

As testament to this brilliance, I would like to end on a quote from one of the world’s top rappers, “50 cent”, who recently observed:
My album gonna smack da sh*t out a hater watch lol

Much like the snow, power-cuts have a significant neighbourhood impact, and I can’t help but like it. Maybe it has something to do with enjoying the entropy, or maybe it’s because it causes neighbours to talk. We’ve had a couple of power-cuts recently; the first, a few months ago lasted around an hour and a half, and it allowed us to chat to our neighbour Denise before the juice came back on, and a cheer went up over the entire valley; the second was tonight, just as Helen was arriving for some e-book surgery.
A few houses down from us is the only house to survive the power outages (they are powered from a different circuit, on a cross-street) – the house of J and M. Despite being close neighbours, we rarely get a chance to talk properly, and so when they asked if we wanted to come over for drinks and Shepherds’ Pie we nearly broke bones to get in there. It was not only an awesome Shepherds Pie (complete with a sublime mushroom and onion gravy), the whole evening was a laugh from start to finish.
Thanks guys.

Laying down money for recorded music has been increasingly difficult for me to do in the last ten years; it’s such a blatant rip-off for everyone concerned, except the record companies. Shelling out a tenner for a piece of plastic that cost around ten bob to make, combined with the knowledge that the artist will receive even less than that makes it difficult to swallow.
But finally, the pillars of free-market capitalism (who caused this hideous situation in the first place) are crumbling away exposing the bottom of the pyramid to the fresh air.
For decades, the Dinosaurs have pumped disgraceful amounts of their artists money into fighting away easy access to music. Publicity campaigns, threats of ludicrously OTT litigation, lobbying for draconian legal protection, investment in countless scams which purport to offer copy protection…and all it did was harm consumers and artists – the affect on pirates was negligible. The pirates will always win, and the fascists are bound to lose – but what about the artists?

At long last, people are starting to understand how the Internet works and how it can benefit musicians. Bands and labels with a clue have started to realise that they can bypass the crooked upper echelons of the business and go direct to the fans – who also benefit because they can be closer to the music.

Together with the vinyl revival, this has been happening for a while now but I’ve only just encountered it directly.

Several jobs ago, someone dumped a bunch of music on our music server (this is de rigeur in most tech companies these days by the way – you may not like it but that’s how it is). One band in the deposit was Mogwai. I didn’t really know anything about them, and wasn’t too excited by what I heard at the time. But over the years they grew on me until now I spend a large proportion of my working life with them in my ears as I write my code. Those “pirated” tracks took me from ignorance to fully fledged fanhood. Did they ever get any money out of me – well…and hears the sad part…no. I love what they do, and I want them to be successful, but I never went the extra mile and shelled-out.

In the last year I’ve had to acknowledge that I owe the band, but paying full price for a fucking CD really still goes against the grain. I’d rather buy some t-shirts direct from them, or see them at a concert. A friend told me that they had a new album on the cards, and so excitedly I checked out their website. Their label, SubPop, were offering a free sample track from the new album in exchange for joining the Mogwai mailing list. They really did a good job – the process was quick and simple, the track was excellent, the list is very low-traffic and it just made me feel more connected to the band, and excited about the prospect of the new album.

A posting on the list announced a special deal on pre-orders of the album. I have to confess that by this time I’d managed to obtain a rip of a pre-release copy and had been playing it constantly – but the nagging guilt that I wasn’t giving anything back had already persuaded me to buy a copy. This was perfect. So, a few clicks and a credit card transaction later I’d spent over double what I would normally have spent in a shop, but for a special edition vinyl release of the album.

Now, I spent more than I needed to, but in the distant past I have spent more on a single CD purchase in a retail store than this. Not only that, but this time I was dealing directly with SubPop/Mogwai which felt a great deal better than dealing with some horrible retail outlet; real or virtual. In fact, considering how rare vinyl now is, this is a bit of a bargain.

The package arrived today and it’s truly a beautiful thing. A luxuriously pressed double album with a big, thick, heavy, blue-note-style cover. It included some silly novelty things like stickers and even some Mogwai earplugs, but you know what, even approaching 40 I still love that sort of tat.

But the most excellent bit was a small card inside the sleeve on which was printed a magic number and a URL. In return for visiting the URL and typing the magic number you receive a ZIP file containing 320K MP3s of the whole album, a PDF booklet, and a 23minute long extra track which I’m now greatly enjoying as I type this.

SubPop get it! They know what they’re doing! They know what we want. Will I buy more stuff from them or Mogwai in the future? Damn right I will! I love them even more. I almost feel connected now.

Look and learn Sony.

“What do you do?”
“I’m a computer programmer.”

The conversation usually ends there, thankfully. Sometimes it will continue along esoteric technical paths, but mostly it won’t. And that’s the desired effect. Responding “I’m [insert bullshit job title] in IT” will frequently encourage further conversation, but who wants to talk about IT? It’s going to end up in a discussion about a recent Windows problem some poor cunt or other has experienced and needs help with. Apart from not knowing the answer, I just feel depressed that the wonders of technology have become as bollocksed-up as they are now…primarily thanks to Microsoft’s terrible lack of vision. The word “developer” is another way to extend these moribund conversations – avoid it.

But this is all rendered irrelevant by the fact I spend all of my free time writing crap code for my own amusement. If someone were to ask “what would you do with eleventy-squillion dollars?” I would have to say that it would be doing exactly what I already do on the weekends…writing stupid code.

In terms of dayjob, we “developers” spend our entire lives gaining further experience and honing our skills. Tragically there is a “developer culture” that involves reading the same blogs, books, and then discussing how our interpretations are better than yours. In reality we’re actually just getting more experienced, older and sadder.