The one criticism I used to have of George Orwell’s 1984 was that it put forward the idea of a society based on an inherent imbalance of power as being stable.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

Whenever there is inequality, I thought, there is the possibility of insurrection. Orwell answered this in the book by using techniques that seemed unworkable: keeping a watch on every single member of the middle class [outer-party], and keeping the workers [proles] happy and content enough not to rebel, even if they are deprived of basic necessities.
The shock for me came quite recently when it became apparent that not only was this feasible, it had already happened. Obviously I can only comment using my limited experience of the US and the UK, but in both countries there are sections of society prepared to fight to keep things the way they are regardless of how badly-off they may be: the rich fight to keep themselves rich; and the poor fight to keep the rich rich, presumably so that they have something to aspire to.
The poor will then even fight to reduce taxes as if it is only the taxes that are keeping them from the world of yachts and personal islands. Some of them will even then stand up and defend their right to be paid less by their employers in the pathetic hope that the riches will “trickle down” to them.
There is a thought in their minds that one-day they will be able to break away from the rest of the mugs and live the high life. While they are waiting, they can relax by watching ordinary people trying to achieve greatness through celebrity, on X-Factor and friends. With the rest of the mugs.
It’s really bastard difficult not to be cynical. Advice welcomed.

A while ago Mr Fritz informed me that I was really into Post-Rock. I wasn’t aware of this then for many reasons, especially as I hadn’t got a bloody clue what “Post Rock” meant; and it sounded way too much like Prog Rock. Well, time has passed and now that I know what it means I can at last come out as a fan of Post Rock…and a big chunk of Prog Rock too in all honesty.
The past few days/weeks have been obnoxiously hot – frequently in the high 90s (F) and a couple of days with the temperature well over 100 (F again). Alighting the bus this evening did not result in the usual shock of the plunge from a cool, air-conditioned, 73 into the humid hellish 90s on the street; it was still hot, but at a reasonable 80-something temperature and with a solid breeze.
The walk from the bus stop at the top of Ridge Ave to our house is not only good exercise, it can actually be pretty pleasurable at times; it affords some lovely views of Gorgas Park, the Manayunk valley, and a great deal of avian activity. Tonight as I marched towards home I was listening to music on my phone – in particular a track called “Grace Descending”. With the volume turned up way too high, the lovely scenery, the cool breeze complimenting the hot sun, and the swirling impassioned tornado of sound in my ears, I started feeling almost high. There were goose bumps, an inexorable grin and a feeling of overwhelming pleasure as the music came to its ultimate climax. It really felt like I was floating.
The experience obviously demanded a repeat; I hadn’t even reached the half way point on the road home and so I restarted the track.
As the feelings started to rekindle, a car pulled up driven by a friendly neighbour. It was lovely of her to stop and offer me a ride to the door, and it would have been churlish to decline the offer. Nonetheless there was something really sad in taking out my headphones and getting into the air-conditioned car.
Sorry for this particularly poncy post – but it’s rare to feel such powerful emotions from such a seemingly innocuous experience.

Today we launched the new version of our software. A year’s worth of work unleashed on the world for the first time. Maybe that’s why I was so susceptible to strong emotions on the way home.

Noam Chomsky explains why American Libertarians don’t understand that “Anarcho-Capitalist” is an oxymoron. It also explains why American “conservatives” are the least conservative people on the planet.

So I’m Back from a week of San Francisco and WWDC, and almost at the end of another week of work. But what can we learn from this experience?

1. Virgin, the airline, is not the blissful airline I remember. Bulkhead seats now cost an extra $130 and provide the stuff that was always free before. Everyone else has to pay. Worse still, the mandatory Safety Video is tail-ended with three commercials that are also mandatory; you can’t turn the little TV off while it bombards you with coca-cola flavoured shite. It was one of the worst TV experiences I’ve ever had: the power button doesn’t work! It was like 1984!
2. According to the WWDC keynote video, us Apple developers don’t just help ourselves and Apple to get rich, we also help blind men see and beggars to become doctors! That made me feel special.
3. San Francisco reminds me a lot of Brighton – not just in appearance but also because the improbably wealthy mingle with the homeless while the acidic odour of piss permeates every street.
4. Mountain Lion, Xcode 4.5, “modern” Objective C, Instruments and LLDB all look like essential keystones in a utopian world.
5. The weather in San Francisco is genuinely excellent, even for a heat hater like me.
6. Philadelphia is a nice place to come home to.
7. The Philly Police are dimmer than a 1mW energy-efficient bulb during a power-cut.
8. Tom, thankfully, hasn’t changed.
9. America now has higher quality beer than Britain. If you disagree then get on a plane and let me educate you.
10. The area of SF that intersects Nob Hill and Tenderloin is known colloquially as “Tender-nob”

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?