Right – this is a soppy post. Look away now if you have a weak stomach. (The TL;DR version is
Reasons to be Cheerful
.) As I’ve learned, sometimes it’s a good idea to spend time appreciating a pleasant moment, and reminding oneself of how lucky and comfortable things are. This is a note to myself of how nice things are at this point in my life. It’s 2011 and we’ve made it this far. As a kid I used to try and work out how old I would be in the year 2000 and the calculated age of 29 seemed tragic; I’d be too old to enjoy it! We don’t have jet-packs, colonies on the moon or hover-cars, but we do have some pretty impressive stuff.
There have been times
when I have been subjected to what my friend Alex called “a worry track”: a perpetual set of worries that pervade all other thoughts, all of the time, like a kind of existential tinnitus. It’s not nice. Not as bad as hunger maybe, but not good. And it goes on for years. But at this moment in time, I’m not suffering. Sitting on a comfy sofa, in a warm house, with a powerful laptop, on which I can summon up just about anything I can think of, is a nice feeling. On my right moob is a small beautiful bird who is preening my beard. In front of me is a
FMT
that is currently playing music from a collection of stuff that a computer somewhere on the planet thinks I will like. The collection could be titled “music to love Leo by”. With a few clicks of a little remote control I can watch any of thousands of TV programmes, films or music videos. That’s a pretty cool thing. In the next room, my wife is pottering around. She has found her true calling in life: dealing with wild animals. Now she is sitting next to me on the sofa, typing on her laptop. Tomorrow I have to go to work; but apart from the commute it’s a stimulating and entertaining job. I sit down in an Aeron chair and write code all day – hardly
The Jungle
is it? And frankly the commute provides a perfect opportunity for reading. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just finished reading a book about life in
the year 1000
that I’m not only appreciating life as it is now, but also glad to observe the improvements in the lives of many people since then. All of this is better summed up by an article a friend sent me today:
Reasons to be Cheerful
. There are too many people currently being blown up, irradiated, tortured, starved and drowned in the world for us not to start appreciating how luxurious our lives really are.

Right. Now I’m pissed off. I just composed a post that is probably the most eloquent and heartfelt outpouring of enthusiasm I’ve ever been able to produce – and then I hit CTRL-W. GRRRRRRRR! So here is the compressed version in yet another list:

• The Dandy Lion
  provided a boozy brunch for me and a couple of friends on Sunday. Full English including Black Pudding and an egg/stout/rum/nutmeg-based drink called a “Beer Flip”. Nuff said.
• After that we popped over the road to
  Tria
  and had South African Mead and cheese. I cannot begin to describe how wonderful this experience was. As someone who has never had a religious experience I would guess it would feel a bit like that.
• After a little kip, Michele and I went over to see Helen, Ralph and Dot; we not only devoured a delicious home-made Chicken Pie, but followed it up with an astonishing lemon-meringue pie.

In one day!

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.