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.

We’re literally only seconds away from 1325397599 and the excitement is palpable. So to usher in the new dawn of 1325397600, may I present the ancient lost classic story of Caudexus of Neucrox.

Caudexus was an uninspiring man with a very tangled, disordered mind; he also denied the existence of the Gods, which angered them greatly. Despite being Gods, and therefore all powerful, the idea of a human denying their existence made them uncontrollably angry. Even with their infinite powers, they were unable to ignore him and therefore had to punish him for eternity.

Caudexus’ tangled mind caused him great impatience, and hindered his abilities to concentrate on any one activity at a time. Sometimes this would lead to great accomplishments (by his own estimation) but more often than not it would lead to him being unable to do anything even vaguely practical.

The Gods took advantage of this weakness (despite being infinitely strong themselves) and condemned him to forever live out his days in the same wretched task: making a cup of tea.

He would sit on the sofa, fancying a nice cup of tea, and plugged away at his laptop. He spent his time flipping between pointless programming projects, reading blogs, and sending lame messages to his on-line friends on whatever social network was en-vogue at the time. On occasion, the desire for a nice cup of tea overwhelmed him to the extent that he had to abandon the sofa, laptop, and foot cushion, to head to the kitchen.

He simply filled the electric kettle with water, turned it on, placed a tea-bag in a mug, and waited for it to boil. As he waited his tangled mind would soon begin feeding him ideas that he had to investigate further, and so he would temporarily go back to the living room and resume his place on the sofa with the laptop, and maybe a small bird.

A cup of tea was always in preparation from his last visit to the kitchen; the Gods’ evil plan was so cunning that it ensured he would never finalise his cup of tea.

On his next visit to the kitchen he would discover that the kettle boiled some time ago and needed to be boiled from scratch. He would inevitably become impatient and return to the other room to continue pursuing the new ideas that his tangled mind had suggested to him. This cycle continued.

Very occasionally he would concentrate on actually waiting in the kitchen until the kettle had boiled, at which point he would pour the boiling water into the cup and onto the tea bag. But the Gods’ had planned for this by ensuring the tea would be revolting until it had brewed properly. The brewing process was even more tedious and led to even more tangle-minded thoughts, which in turn led to forgetting the tea until it was too cold to be considered potable, and the process would have to be restarted from scratch.

Very occasionally, of the order of several months, he would eventually manage to make a drinkable cup of tea, at which point he would approach the fridge to get some milk…but the Gods’ plan ensured that by this time, the milk would have gone off.

Caudexus was thus condemned for eternity to engage in this perpetual battle which would never yield a nice cup of tea.

There’s a lesson for us all there probably. Happy New Year.

Update – Caudexus eventually moved to the USA where the problem was further exacerbated by the 110V kettles which took twice as long to boil.

Two work-funded piss-ups in one week outside of Christmastide is unusual and welcome, but it was made up for by the demands of the deadlines. Altogether, recent work experiences have increased my determination to produce the desired goods, whilst making it seem more achievable. When plans are mapped out in great detail and with concrete dates, life looks different, especially to people like me who don’t deal with planning their own lives very well. Ask me what I’m doing for Christmas and I’ll shrug. Ask me where the project at work will be on that day and I can tell you precisely where we hope it’ll be. Consequently, as that date approaches, if we’re behind I’m going to end up working stupidly long hours just to get back on track. It’s a very clever way to keep us all on our toes. But also quite reassuring in a not very reassuring way.

The latest weekend is all but over and now Leo is preening himself on my left arm. Meanwhile the latest addition to the family, Bertie the foster cockatiel, is running around the bottom of his cage desperate to come out. We have to re-home him but until then we just have to make sure he’s content. Fortunately he is like all cockatiels I’ve ever met: entirely adorable. He will make someone an extraordinarily good companion.

Yesterday Michele and I went to Fort Washington State Park with the intention of watching the hawks migrate. It turns out we were late for the migration season and so we had to make do with the more quotidian bird spotting. We got chatting to another fellow bird watcher who turned out to be a German radio Ham (his handheld radio was singing morse code melodies through his jacket pocket). We had a long chat during which we discovered he lives a few streets away from us and was delighted at the prospect of mentoring a new, young (hah!), Ham. The experience rekindled my excitement about getting a Ham licence.

The rest of the weekend was pretty mellow: comedy TV, a great curry, a bit of garden maintenance, cracking some Mac software (gdb and hexedit were the only tools required btw), and fixing “The Meanness”. At least it feels like something has been achieved.

Halloween was as joyfully uneventful as usual this year.
Brits probably won’t understand this: but the hype and marketing bullshit surrounding Halloween in Britain is not regarded with so much cynicism here; having fun on Halloween is so deeply ingrained, that people tend to see it as “the fun celebration” of the year; much like Christmas in Britain, but without all of the days off. People genuinely want to have fun and do so, with all of the other crap as an aside.
Christmas here is much like Christmas over there too, but without the days off. Same with Thanksgiving. All of the other stuff about spending shitloads of money you don’t own, to buy presents for people you don’t like, who won’t enjoy what you’ve bought them anyway, is exactly the same. But Halloween is not like that – it’s about enjoying yourself.

Outside of Halloween and the fun stuff, days off work are generally frowned upon. If you get sick, obviously you shouldn’t come into work to spread your germs around; but frankly why should your company, or your country, pay for you to be ill?
Thankfully, most companies have dealt with this by combining all holidays/vacation together with sick-days to form the simple, easy-to-understand, concept of “Personal Time Off”. Rather than getting 26 days per year of holiday and around 6 months of paid sick benefit (like I had in the UK), we now have a convenient 20 days of combined holiday and sick-pay entitlement. It’s so much simpler!
As a result of this, whenever a national holiday occurs here, people lose their minds with joy! AN EXTRA DAY! So different from the tragic Bank Holidays that we all know and love.

But let’s not forget that all of the lovely benefits and paid holidays we take for granted are as a direct result of generations of people fighting; fighting though poverty, pain and suffering. That we have weekends, 8-hour work days, and paid holidays, is something we tend to take for granted. Moving to the US also made me notice other things I had previously taken for granted back in Britain: a spectacular national healthcare system, some serious rights for workers and plentiful paid holidays.

It’s not that working people don’t deserve these things – it’s that we need to remember why we have them and keep fighting the motherfuckers who want to take them away.

Yet again this wasn’t what I intended to say. Arses.