A great deal has happened over the last 10 months, and very little of it was blogable; not because it was naughty or libelous, but because I needed a source of income and so I couldn’t risk upsetting my employers any more than I had already.
Things have now changed, lessons have been learned (on all sides), and the company feels like it’s together enough to produce what it promised: a genuinely good suite of products that all work together. That they’re also flying me and a colleague out to WWDC tomorrow also helps immeasurably; it’s exciting for too many reasons to articulate in my current state of mind.
Obviously I’ll try to bore you, dear reader, as much as I can about WWDC and San Francisco – but be warned that there’s a strong possibility of meeting up with My Dear Dirty Tom while I’m there so it may turn out to be ever so slightly interesting.
San Francisco alone is an exciting prospect, but the WWDC schedule makes it look like a geeks paradise.
Happy.

When I was a kid my dad used to run a record wholesale business from our house. As a modern business in the 1970’s it really needed some way to ensure valuable orders weren’t lost simply because we were out at the time. So we became the lucky users of a piece of futuristic technology that we could show off to anyone and everyone that visited: a telephone answering machine.
It was a huge brown console full of moving parts, big clunky knobs that really did “clunk” when you moved them, a GPO logo, and a “display” consisting of a little window which revealed a section of a spinning disc underneath while a recording was taking place; just like the glassy blue barbers’ pole in OS-X…sort of. It obediently recorded callers messages whilst applying bizarre audio effects supplied by the perpetually degrading, non-replaceable tape mechanism. It didn’t take long before everyone had one in their house.

BUT THOSE DAYS ARE GONE!

Voicemail is the modern-day equivalent, but it too is already an anachronism, existing solely for those people who need to cling on to the past.

Here is a generic voicemail message that captures the essence of 99.9% of voicemail messages you’re likely to receive:

“Oh…hi…it’s X here. It’s…er…Tuesday…no, wait…Wednesday…no Tuesday at around…er…7…7:20…7:25. I was just calling to…er…see if you were up to anything over the weekend. So give me a call back when you get this…or actually I may try to call you again later. See you.”

Back in the olden days, this tedious message still held some potentially valuable information for the recipient:

• X called.
• The call was placed at 7:25 on Tuesday.

The rest of the message is pretty much free from information and can be inferred from the existence of the call: “call me back, or I’ll try again”.

But today all of the valuable information there is automatically handled by your phone! You know you got a call and you know when the call was placed! Yet people still leave these tedious messages on voicemail systems. Please stop doing that! It’s costing you time and money for absolutely no reward. And it’s costing me irritation that I have to check my voicemail (even though I already know you called) just to get rid of that bloody little tape-spool icon.

If you want to tell the callee something of consequence then why not use an SMS message (ie a “text message”), an email, or something similar like Facebook? That way the recipient can read and digest your message at a time convenient for *them*, rather than a time convenient for you.

Read the planet’s most wanky blog title:
Cloud is a corporate strategy, not a tactical solution.
Until this post inevitably disappears, the world will remain broken.

Oi! Mac users! Tell me what you think:

Interruptions are the enemy of working effectively, especially in my accidental career as software developer. A while ago I tried to come up with a solution to this problem which *didn’t* involve working in a well designed office environment; the world is too fucked to cope with such radicalism at this point. No, we must plod on in our bollocks open-plan, cheap as crap, every fucker in one big room mess.

So in an attempt to make it better for myself I thought of a simple program that would let you keep track of your own work and remind you where you were *before* the current interruption. So, being a geek, I came up with the idea of a stack for your brain: before you start a task, or when you are interrupted while working on a task, you *push* the current job onto a stack. When the interruption finishes, or when the task is complete, you *pop* it from the stack…leaving you facing the job you were working on beforehand at the top of the stack.

It took me a while to get anything concrete down, but there is now a prototype! ATM it’s only for Mac users (sorry) but you can download it here.

Run it and it should appear on your status bar as a little stack of stuff on a head. Whenever you are about to start or finish a task you just hit the global hotkey:

Control-Command-0

(that’s a zero, not an “O”).

Then you hit a down arrow to push a task, at which point you may optionally describe it. Press escape to get rid of the window.

If the phone rings, or some fucker in your office comes over to talk to you, push a new task.

When the most recent interruption/task is finished, hit the hot key again (Control-Command-0) and hit the up arrow to pop the most recent task.

That’s it!

You can push different types of activity onto the stack – at the moment you use the down arrow for a normal task, the left arrow for a distraction and the right arrow for a sidetrack. These are, obviously, arbitrary and ideally they’ll be editable. Either way, it all gets logged in a little database.

Ultimately headstak will contain tools for analysing how much time you spend on each type of task in some sort of nice graph or something.

I’ve been using it in earnest recently and have found it as useful as I’d initially imagined! That sort of thing cheers me up.

Please let me know what you think even if it’s “you’re shit, and your program is shit.” I’d rather know.

After a blissful four year distance between me and the British tax system it was a very unpleasant surprise to be reunited with the knotted stomach and desperate gloom that comes free with an unsolicited letter from HMRC. It was addressed to me at my mother-in-law’s house, where we lived for a while after landing ashore, and informed me that I owed them several hundred pounds as a fine for not filing my tax return on time. Now, four years is a tad late I agree but why did it take them so long to tell me? And what are they going to do if I tell them to shove it up their collective arses? Extradite me?

So I called them. There are cheaper ways of spending three quarters of an hour in the company of officious inflexible cretins, and so I advise you not to try this course of action if you find yourself in a similar predicament. The upshot of the call was:
* I had to fill in tax returns for the previous three years, because I had never told them I was leaving the country.
* They can’t deal with this over the phone.

The second point is extremely annoying, while the first is as wrong as it is stupid.

So, I filled in the back of the form with a short note explaining the situation and sent it off. Once they realised I wasn’t eligible they would surely recognise that they had bigger fish to fry…cough…Vodaphone… and leave me alone.

A month later, a big bumper package arrived at not my house and my mother in law was kind enough to bring it round. It contained three photo-copied tax assessment forms for previous years together with a curt letter telling me to fill the fucking forms in because it was the fucking law (or words to that effect).

At this point, perhaps I should have spotted the familiar signs and recognised that this was me trying to argue with a faceless bureaucratic leviathan; just fill the forms in and send them back – it wouldn’t take more than an hour.

But what I actually thought was fuck that! I’m not wasting my time trying just to appease a gormless jobsworth who can’t wrap her head around their software. So I looked at the HMRC website and tried to find a way to talk to someone with a clue. It became apparent that the only real possibility would be to write a complaint.

So I wrote a frank, and honest, letter of complaint. OK it’s a bit sarcastic in places, and the tone isn’t exactly respectful but again, what are they going to do? If they grabbed me at the airport the next time I flew in I’d just fill the bloody paper work in and they’d have to let me go.

Today, a few weeks later, my mother in law delivered a very thin envelope from HMRC. The letter contained the wonderful paragraph:

I have accepted your appeal, which is determined under Section 54 Taxes Management Act 1970. I have cancelled the penalty.

It’s the little victories that make me happy. The next time they contact me I’ll fax a copy of that letter on the page before the photo of my arse.

You may well have heard of this already, because it has been immensely popular, but I’ve now read her interviews and heard her talking on the subject many times and it still strikes a chord: Susan Cain on Introverts.
Despite what you may think of her and her current mission, she is saying something very important: wanting to spend time alone to think and ponder is not necessarily a bad thing.
She goes on to explain why group-thinking and group-working may not therefore be universally beneficial, despite being lauded as the “proper” way to work nowadays.
Suddenly I understand why many of the jobs I’ve had didn’t/don’t feel right: I do better working on problems alone. Obviously there are times when I need to ask for help from knowledgeable people, but that’s always an option. Working at Goldsmiths was particularly good in that regard as a trip to the local boozer allowed relaxed discourse with artists, mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers etc.
Just don’t force us to work in a group. Please?

NPR fund-drives often contain numerous allusions to “driveway moments”; times when whatever is playing on the car-radio is interesting enough to keep the occupants confined for several minutes after the car has reached the driveway. Together with Radio 4, NPR pulls this trick off on a regular basis – for example this evening: a segment on the peerless Fresh Air that reviewed The Singing Detective, 25 years after it was first broadcast on UK TV. The reviewer is palpably thrilled by this series, as he should be. If you’ve never heard of Dennis Potter or The Singing Detective then please seek it out. If you like it then you may want to watch this: perhaps the most profound, moving and inspirational piece of television I’ve ever seen. It’s the last TV interview given by Dennis Potter soon before he died.
In a nutshell – Dennis Potter was the man. He named his cancer “Rupert” after Rupert Murdoch, and he made some extraordinarily good films.
Hearing an American film reviewer acknowledging Potter as the genius he was makes me very happy.

Yet again we’re all pathetically grateful for an extra day tacked on to the weekend. Not everyone of course, there are a bunch of brothers and sisters who aren’t given this particular holiday – in the same way that my fellow workmates and I weren’t given the last couple of holidays. The entire notion of national holidays being optional is still weird to me.

Today M and I geeked out to the extreme: we went down to the canal to spot birds for the GBBC and while she was checking-off Herons, Cormorants, Cardinals and Mockingbirds I managed my first QSO with a stranger. This was using my cheap-arse “Baofeng” HT, via our local repeater. We chatted for around half an hour covering the usual HAM topics of traffic and HAM-hardware, but it got me really pumped to try and mess around with HF radio. He also gave me some advice about kit. Thanks Jim!

I make no apologies for being a nerd here 🙂

Reasons to be cheerful

• Work is mellowing out
• My dad is out of the hospital
• Lots of time to play with the TI launchpad
• Good birds in the house (our guys have been really nice companions over the past few days)
• Morse practice is coming along
• Still pumped about the impending Movie release
• Days off

“how would you like to be in the pictahs?” asked Brother B via email one evening last week. He told me that he was making a short film which he hoped to enter into a small competition organized by a local brewery: Dogfish Head. The only requirements were that it was to be western-themed, feature some Dogfish Head beer and be less than 5 minutes long. Cool! “What do you need me for?”
“To play a horse. Called Tutu.”
He sent me the script and it was short, weird, and funny enough to make me sign-up there and then. Tutu only had three lines and that didn’t seem like too much of a challenge, even to someone who hasn’t acted since he played Mr Pickles in the school play when he was 11 years old. Actually, that was a pretty challenging role; I had to sing a solo, the lyrics of which included the line “I’m a merry fish merchant, on Fridays I’m gay”. Mental scar tissue had kept that memory safely repressed until now…
But this was just a bit of fun, and B is a top chap, and it meant going down to Maryland for the weekend, which would provide a timely break from the normal routine. We agreed to meet up on the Friday night for a short read-through in preparation.
Riding home on the Friday evening bus, I re-read the script and started to wonder whether any of it was possible. For a start, we were going to be filming in a wild-west theme park…had they arranged this with the park owners? There was a lot of gun play; firearms in movies is a tricky business at the best of times, but in a theme park? Have they thought this through? Then there was a Matrixesque scene with a slowed-down bullet that the hero gets trapped in his teeth. This was surely fantasy…
It didn’t take long for Michele and I to realize that this wasn’t just going to be a handful of people messing about with a camera-phone; there were four of five people in B’s room, all disturbingly professional, and prepared. There was a shooting script, an inventory of terrifyingly professional equipment and personnel that would be joining us the next day and enough industry jargon thrown about to make James Cameron get itchy. The park was out of season and therefore closed, but we not only had permission to film, we had the offer of real cowboys on real horses for background shots, and real firearms with blanks that they use in their re-enactments.
The next morning at five-to sparrow-fart, B and I headed off to Maryland.
The weekend was spectacular fun and over time the details will come out together, hopefully, with the film. For now all I’ll say is:

• I got to be the clapperboard guy in a few scenes and it was every bit as brilliant as I thought it would be; I’ve found my new dream career!
• The sentence “Let’s not get any more spaghetti on the Cow” was used in earnest during filming.

After a particularly stressful day at work today I met up with my geek compadre, General Dan. We had arranged an excursion to a ham radio test center so that we could attempt to obtain our first Technician licences and thus be granted entry to an exclusive club of old fat blokes with beards.
In a nutshell we both passed; not only the “Technician” test but also the “General” which, for the benefit of the uninitiated, is a bit like being given a diplomatic passport into the world of talking bollocks to people over radio.
We celebrated in the traditional manner: steak and ale at a local Irish Inn, with a traditional Irish Frank Sinatra tribute act bellowing at some old people.
And there was much rejoicing.