Fun! It case you were in any doubt what it

This is an abridged view of the “Funland” sign. Any resemblance to Alcatraz is purely coincidental.

Better than the Real Elvis! Let he without irony cast the first stone.

This made me laugh quite lot. Tongue in cheek or not, you really have to laugh at the suggestion that some dodgy guy with dyed hair is better than the real Elvis. I think the appropriate phrase is “Fair play to the lad.”

Splendid Juxtaposition

Do you get the feeling that the proprietors of the establishments above and below didn’t discuss how the arrange their signs? Really? Um. Words fail me.

I always thought he was more of sandals guy...

Get all your religion and footwear needs met in a single building, what’s not to like?

As Seen on BBC TV

There is so much to admire here. Firstly, a damn good price for what I can only imagine is a great chip bitty. After all, it was featured on the BBC in March 2010. And, if you can say anything about the BBC is that they know a good chip butty when they see one. Don’t know what show it featured on. Masterchef maybe? “Oh, mate, that chip butty is like a cuddle”

Mixed Messages

Tattoos anyone? Candy Floss? Slush? Vegas this is not.

Coral Island

Ooh, an arty one. Coral Island looks more like PuggyLand to me.

Central Pier Sign

You can see in some of the signs when effort has been taken.

Madame Tussauds - Alan Carr

So, who is the headline waxwork at the Blackpool Madame Tussauds? Mohammed Ali? Gandhi? Richard Feynman? Valéry Marie René Georges Giscard d’Estaing? No. Alan Carr. Now, I’ve nothing against Alan Carr. But… well…

Alien Base

“The World’s Only” Alien Base, why is that in quotes? Who cares when you have a walk through audio visual extravaganza of knowledge and wisdom. I imagine it is much like the Natural History Museum. I’m kinda sad I didn’t go in now. This is like a Giles cartoon, can you see the pigeon?

1. Getting me to put bets on for him.
2. Getting me to put the lottery on for him.
3. Telling him his bet lost.
4. Telling him he didn’t win the lottery.
5. Settling arguments in pubs. Of which, more here.

And, even if it does come to pass that he finds out, he’ll be happy for the mention and take the joke well. Maybe. Probably not. But anyway, there is probably a rule about not starting with a long, rambling digression but hey, rules? Really? Is that what it has come to?

Above all, understand this, this is a satire. No, really.

My reader will doubtless be aware that I grew up under the tough, austere regime in the East German Brutalist landscape that was 1970′s Wester Hailes. Aside for the fact that it was actually brilliant and, relatively speaking, I was very well provided for by the aforementioned parent, it was still a very different life from the one my kids have now. Mince was a meal, not an ingredient. Everything was brown, everyone reeked of cigarettes and birthday parties were jelly, ice cream and two balloons topped and tailed by musical chairs and pass the parcel in the dinette. Ah yes, dinette, those of you who know will know. My earliest birthday memory was legging it out the house at the age of (probably) 4 when everyone sang Happy Birthday. I was a feeble, snivelling little thing in those days. >insert your own pithy reply here<. I ran out the house to the ‘balcony’. No, not the Florentine image you have in your head. The drying ‘green’ between the two flats on our floor. It was neither a balcony nor green and was mainly used for storing bikes, bricks, mattresses, keeping pigeons and, very occasionally, drying clothes.

As the years have worn on and I’ve become a parent and meandered my way from council estate to a “bought house” with a “main door” the children’s birthday party has changed a lot. Fuelled by a mini arms race, what is required of a party has escalated from a simple fun time to the need to hire Billy Smart’s Circus and all in between. Obviously, we grudge our children nothing (and, likely, teach them even less about the value of anything ) but we join in the game and everyone is happy.

So, let’s look at some basic economics. I call it economics, it’s really only arithmetic with money.

To keep the numbers simple, I’m going to say that there is a core group of 15 friends in any primary school class that have a loose reciprocal arrangement for birthday party invites. Reciprocity is, obviously, very important. First, the good news, when you host said party, your child is guaranteed 14 presents ( on top of the copious pile of plastic you have already given them that they attempt to sleep under ). All you have to do in return is to turn up at 14 other parties and provide a reciprocal lump of random, quick to be lost, plastic.

Everyone buys 14 presents. The presents cost, let’s say, £15 (probably rising ahead of RPI). The total presents budget for that group of 15 parents is…

Cost per child = 14 x £15 = £210

Total across 15 families = £3150

An amazing £3K of plastic crap is accumulated by a single group of friends in 1 primary school class in 1 year. But that’s not all. Each parent has to provide a party and, if they have any pride at all, it has to be quite something. Luckily, there is any number of providers set up to do this now, whether it be soft play, painting random lumps of clay, bowling etc etc it’s very easy to organise a party and let someone else do it all for you. This, I have to admit, is a good thing. My knees simply won’t countenance pass the parcel but, of course, this comes at a cost. I’m going to give a rough estimate of £10 per head and maybe another £50 thrown in for party bags (what? eh?) and associated sundries. So, £200 a party, another 15 times in the year – that’s another £3k.

I’m going to make this number big:

£6150

That’s the annual yearly budget associated with the oppressive regime that is children’s parties. You could get a decent car for that. Or…

Here’s a suggestion. Imagine if, at the start of the year, the set of 15 parents got together and committed their £410 each to the combined fund and collectively bought an amazing experience for all their kids to enjoy. Hell, I bet Edinburgh Zoo would let them ride the pandas for £6K. Every year, all the kids could have  truly memorable day out, their rooms wouldn’t be filled with pointless mounds of soon discarded plastic and it would all be cost neutral.

Communist Party image courtesy of purpleslog on Flickr

You can take it further, combine forces of multiple classes, multiple schools and before long  you’ve got enough money for Panda nuggets and chips for lunch. Ten classes in 1 school of kids 8 or younger and you’re playing with £60K and inviting the Red Arrows to fly past ( I have no idea how much the Red Arrows cost, this is potentially exaggeration for effect ). And amazingly, the parents themselves can still buy their children presents on their birthday at no extra cost. They buy whatever they were gonna buy on the day itself and, every single year, their child gets an amazing day out ( or multiple days, spend the money how you want , form a committee, you could maybe use Yahoo Groups to organise it, they were cool once ).

It’s a brilliant idea, isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

No, it isn’t. Why? Because it would never work. For, somewhat surprisingly, for the same reasons Communism doesn’t. Let me try to explain.

You know those people that always insist on working out their precise share of the bill at a restaurant. Yeah, them. They’ll bust it.

“My Johnny doesn’t like the Red Arrows, so I don’t see what I should contribute.“.

So, you offer them the Panda ride.

“Now you’re just being silly. I’m a member of Greenpeace and simply will not allow my child to take part in such a charade.”

Ok, how about we put on the best magic show ever?

“I object to the treatment of rabbits.”

These are, obviously, stupid examples – but I still think my Red Arrows idea is carbon-neutral when you balance it with fewer plastic toys in circulation. But the simple fact is that self-interests will always get in the way of common good. And just as Communism creates it’s own social elite driven by the dark recesses of human nature, my plans to make the world a better place for our children would simply fall apart before it started. At the first meeting of the parents I would stand at the side watching the battle rage around me, a tear would form in my eye and, like that 4 year old running away from his cake, I’d whimper “Why can’t we all just get along?“. See, I’m not a curmudgeon at all, I’m fully intent on creating a sparkling funscape for our children. But the self-interested Putins will wreck it all with what they and little Johnny think is important above the consensus of the collective good. I should point out that the parents I know are all lovely and may well humour me in this regard but, as a generalisation, you can see why it could struggle.

I would love someone to try this though, just once. And send me the picture of the Red Arrows over their school. And let me know what panda tastes like. If any of the parent’s of my kids’ friends read this, are you up for it? It’ll be awesome!

As I said, a satire, relax now.

In the past I’ve written about scale free networks in relation to the Internet and you can see how anything written by a big influencer has big sword power. Similarly, the new voice of the people via Twitter is now a massive influence driven by a bandwagonesque interest from traditional media.

Obviously, the Internet is already full of negative reviews but look across Amazon or Trip Advisor and you’ll see polarised opinions on most things. Feedback clearly has massive power on EBay already.

Does the same apply in a far smaller way to having just plain old good SEO? Let me take you through a ‘for instance’ to explain.

A while back we had some work done on the house. In general, it wasn’t a disaster but there was much about it that could have been a lot better, like finishing the work as per the plans, almost setting the house on fire, a small flood, that kind of thing. Fairly recently, the person responsible for the work pinged me on Facebook, by email and twice by SMS asking me to write a review on some listing site or other. Here’s the thing. I’m all for giving praise where it is due* but, as I considered a review and re-listed all the issues I’d forgotten in my head, it ended up fairly negative. Not wholly so, as I said, it wasn’t a total disaster, but certainly enough to put a prospective customer off. So, I chose to ignore the requests and do nothing. Live and let live, can’t be bothered with the hassle, whatever. Whether or not I owe it the world to provide any kind of warning.

Caution : May Get Grumpy When Disappointed

It then started to think about what would happen if I posted the review on this blog. Thing is, the SEO seems to be working here ( search for who invented angry birds and you’ll see ) so if I did a genuinely factual and honest review of the work done by the company, I’d very likely win the race to position 1 on Google for the company and thereby, very likely, kill online as a marketing vehicle for them. I may be overstating that slightly but it is certainly possible. And, since it’s a franchise, would have some impact nationally to others.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that but I’d love to hear what other people think. Would you ever do that? Would you ever use your SEO power as a threat? In any situation where your online presence trumps the supplier, does it even cross your mind? Have I just given you an idea? Would the number of Google link removal requests increase and what would they do?

Apropos of nothing, if my accountant is reading this, you’d better get it sorted soon, the stories I could tell!

* if you’re needing some work done on your car, J.B. Cleland in Davidsons Mains come highly recommended!

Here’s the thing, it happened to us to. There are so many things I know how to do that are of no use whatsoever to today’s generation. In fact, they may not even have the faintest clue what any of these things mean. This renders me, at least in part, entirely obsolete. Which is a harsh, yet important, sign of progress.

I bet you can think of many more of these. Would love to hear them…

Without further ado, things I can do that I no longer have to, the lost skills of this ancient…

Turning over an LP without touching it

It just a flick of the wrist… You get your hand inside the sleeve so you only touch the middle, thumb on the rim, then between two hands. You can spin it flamboyantly, choose a side and thread it delicately onto the turntable. It’s an elegant and precise skill, beautiful if done well. Destructive if done with too much gusto. I’ve never dropped one.

Beautiful, beautiful vinyl

Balancing a penny on a stylus to make it play

Sticking with the vinyl theme, every know and then you’d get a record that would skip and jump for Scotland (or whichever 70′s tobacco stained biege  hovel you lived in). This was, frankly, a pain. The good news was, that with a little bit of patience and a steady hand. You could make it play with a little bit of weight on the stylus. Pre-Blu Tac this was a mega-delicate procedure. Obviously, with the new fangled voodoo science of Blu-Tac this was reduced to something even the amateurs could do.

Rewinding a C90 with a pen

No one could afford spare batteries. And even if you did, carrying them was, well, daft. So, much like starting up the Apollo 13 Command Module for reentry (sorry), you had to manage the available power well if you had a long day out. That meant that if you didn’t fancy the side of music you were listening to,  you couldn’t afford the battery required to rattle your way forward to the other side (notwithstanding the serious chat that went on about the horrors of tape stretching). All was not lost, grab a biro and you have a perfectly good tape rewinder. Again, it’s all in the wrist but with a simple spinning movement, you could be back at the end of the tape and turning it over in no time. Try getting a youth of today to do that. Someone will lose an eye.

Using bellows

Confession time, I’ve never used bellows. I only mention them as during a failed attempt to get my daughter to enjoy Camberwick Green, Windy Miller appeared with some bellows to get his fire going. My daughter was very confused. Not a skill that I lost, but gone, nonetheless.

Changing channel on a portable TV using turn dial tuning and knowing the order of the channels by their frequency

A long title for a vital skill. I had a black and white portable in my room. This was massive. It had single dial on the front to allow you to hunt for channels that may or not be there, depending on how well you had the aerial pointed. After a while, you know where the channels are, you know where BBC1 is in relation to BBC2 etc and, if you need to get it very quickly turned over for The Young Ones, a simple twist of the wrist (is this a theme?) and there  you are. Once in every lifetime, you need a skill like this. Years later, we got a colour telly with a remote. It had a single big button that clunked reassuringly, it moved the channel on one. The TV had 8 channels. There were only 3 to watch. To get from STV to BBC1 you had to go round the clock, clicking furiously.

Playing a game after typing in the source code from a magazine

It hardly seems credible now to suggest that you could get a game as text from a magazine. I see people complain about having to set for a few moments as they get a PS3 update. Pah! How about sitting for hours TYPING IN THE GAME WHICH WAS SHIT AND HARDLY EVER WORKED BUT YOU DIDN’T FIND THAT OUT UNTIL THE YOU’D BEEN TYOING FOR HOURS AND IT USUALLY TOOK YOU A FEW GOES UNLESS YOU WERE GOOD AT…

Securing the RAM pack on a ZX81

Everyone had a technique. Books, walls, tape, string, animal sacrifice. You’d do pretty much anything to keep it on. I used books and a lot of sitting very still. Didn’t help that the keyboard was a hard plastic surface so typing was effectively uncushioned impact. This was almost as hard as…

My ZX81 ( sans RAM pack )

Loading a ZX81 Game from Tape

I had a technique. I piled books on top of the tape recorder. It thought it worked. It was only many years later that I finally conceded to myself that the books likely made absolutely no difference whatsoever. But still, I’m sure the ancients of yore did lots of things that they thought made a difference to the outcome of their lives. Like praying. Oh.

Starting a car with a manual choke and not flooding it

A much loved and respected colleague read my book The Beatle Man and had one main complaint. In the assumed era of the book, the car Danny drove wouldn’t have had a manual choke, he opined. Even Shakespeare had anachronisms. Does suggest that the particular problem of starting a car with a manual choke was something that burnt itself into my consciousness. Starting a car was never really a given. There was coaxing, a caress even and then a brutal right foot buried deep into a rain soaked footwell, vrrrrrroooooommmmmmm…

Installing OS from floppy

Ok, hands up who had installed Windows 3.11 from floppy? Ok, I admit, this isn’t really a skill unless you consider extreme patience as something that has been lost to time. Which, I think it probably has.

No cash machines

Like, how? How? Really? I suppose it didn’t make too much difference if you had no cash, but still. Beggars belief that life worked at all. Much like with…

Meeting people without mobiles

Somehow, we just knew where to be and at what time. We just turned up. It worked. Now we use phones mainly to say how late we’re going to be. Back in the day, if you were late, you were left. And we only vaguely used landlines, what with them costing actual money to use then.

And I’m sure there are many, many more, but if I’ve got you down this far I’ve done well. Go on, let me hear yours…

We had a long drive ahead of us that day. We were due to Budapest that night and, with an ailing car, we had to go the long way via Brno. That meant we didn’t have time to do the second half of the visit to Birkenau. This was a sensible choice. We eventually made it to a dark yet glorious Budapest just after 10pm that night. I don’t think you get the full impact without also seeing Birkenau.

It has taken me quite a while to process what I saw, what I heard and what I felt. I obviously knew quite a bit about what happened but nothing you know in advance prepares you for what you feel when you are there. It’s not the easiest thing to blog about. Many thousands of people far wiser than I have written on the subject and I don’t intend to attempt any kind of commentary like that. I write this for one simple purpose. Forget what you think you know and what you think your reaction to the events are. If you ever get the chance to go to Auschwitz (or any other of the camps) then you really must go. I’m not claiming it to be anything other than deeply sobering and extremely unsettling. But it is something that everyone should experience. Perspective is hard to come by. At Auschwitz, it hits you like one of the trains that transported the poor souls there.

We arrived around lunchtime on a very wet summer day. We were worried about taking a decorated charity car into the car park but an enthusiastic attendant in a hi-vis vest waved us in with whirling arms. Bright rain ponchos lit up the car park with colour. People huddled under brollies as they shuffled quietly towards the door.

Inside, people dried off as they buzzed about the busy foyer, reading signs and working out what to do. Entrance is free, but you need to get a guide – so we found the queue to pay for the guide. As is my way, I ran to the loo. A man outside the loo didn’t have a zloty to get in, he was in a debate with the toilet attendant. I gave him a zloty; perhaps fueled by the need for a decent human spirit that fills the place.

The process for paying for the guide seemed a little painful but, as ever, Tom Hagen sorted it. But that feeling you get when things appears to be needlessly complex was emerging. Then we had to, sort of, queue again to get our headsets. This was a general melee of people pushing towards the headset desk and a small funnel through a barrier, behind which guides stuck up signs indicated their language. It was unnecessary and poorly organised and, in that standard British way I was inclined to start tutting and forcing out loud exhalations. As I got squeezed towards the barrier, the pressure from the crowd around me increased. And then I felt very unsettled. There was I about to start moaning about a poor entrance process in a place where it was all too easy to imagine people getting forced off crowded trains at gunpoint, cold, terrified, hungry. I was disturbed and angry at myself. Perspective. A little bit of a guddle and a squeeze getting in didn’t matter.

We emerged back into the rain and waiting for everyone to get their headsets working and tuned to the right channel for our guide. I was being considerably more patient at this point and was even happier that I had bought a rain jacket while in a drookit Berlin.

All set and listening, we headed across a puddled path towards the famous gates. I had decided not to take my DSLR in with me. I wasn’t sure if I’d take any photos at all.

Our guide told us the history of the camp, a former Polish Army site and how the brick buildings we could see were from that original use. I was already feeling sombre. Could see the same in the eyes of my friends.

We entered one of the first buildings. The building itself was unremarkable. It could have been any old school building. Steps led up to a corridor from which rooms branched out on either side. The large empty spaces had been converted into exhibition areas. Photos on Walls, display cabinets. Like any other museum. But unlike any other museum.

We were told and shown the history of the site from the early use by the Germans. Exhibits showed the photographic evidence that remained and artefacts that survived the destruction ahead of liberation. Some of these I had seen before on TV and in books but up close they have more impact that I was ready for.

The large display of hair is hard to take it. There is just so much of it and, you are told by the guide, that this is just a small amount. It’s hard to get to grips with quite how many people died in that place. When you see the visual evidence of such a small percentage of the lives lost it is staggering. You get exactly the same feeling from the display of shoes and the suitcases taken from people after the came off the trains. The suitcases are very poignant. Names and addresses are written on them indicating how there was originally only a worry about losing possessions rather than life.

In the early days of the camp, the Germans took photos of everyone who arrived so the could be identified if they escaped. This got too expensive and they changed to the tattooing of numbers. Down one long corridor, hundreds of these photos hung on both sides. Under each photo you could read their name, occupation, the day the entered the camp and the date of their death. Some of them survived as much as 6 months, many only a few days. After a short while I began to notice that the more terrified the person looked, the shorter time they survived. It was sadly easy to see real terror in some eyes and then see that they died only a couple of days after the picture was taken. Many faces had a more stoic determination, they often lasted a few months. The guide told us a story of how someone came to the site and asked for a copy of one of the photos from the archive. It was the only surviving photo of his mother. It gets more haunting when you realise that it all remains living history, it’s not just some of medieval tale of barbarity. Other people in the pictures on the walls, we were told,  are still alive today.

One of the things that I hadn’t fully realised before my visit is that, aside from the basic evil of the Nazis and everything they were doing, they were also massively cynical. Probably the most obvious example of this is the ‘swimming pool‘ pictured above. I was stunned to hear that the Germans had Auschwitz insured and, one of the conditions that was imposed by the insurers was fire protection/prevention. This required a nearby source of water to put out fires. This was provided by a large pool of water which the Germans made look like swimming pool by adding pretend ladders suggesting they offered prisoners the chance to swim. There was much, much more to the cynicism, from the lies they told to people to get them peacefully on the trains to leaving toys with the young children to keep them quiet as they walked to their death.

One unexpected and unsavoury aspect of the visit was the behaviour of some of the other visitors. One room in the exhibition areas focuses on the children in the camp. A large picture on the wall shows 4 emaciated, naked children not far from death. One of the people in the group took a picture of this picture. I just can’t conceive of why anyone would do this. There may be some vague justification based on being able to show people when you return home but, honestly, I don’t get it. You need to still be thinking like a tourist to do that. By that stage, I didn’t feel like a tourist, I wasn’t there idly exploring my curiosity, I was getting kicked in the gut. How you can stop, pause and take a photo of something so harrowing? I didn’t get it.

One of other buildings we were shown was the jail/punishment building. In the basement there were many cells were people were held in solitary confinement ahead of execution in the courtyard outside. Some of the cells were ‘standing’ cells, only big enough to stand in to deprive the prisoner of sleep. One of these had been knocked out/cut away so you could see the size of the area. I didn’t see it but the same guy stood in the standing cell and got his photo taken. Seen by my friends, they muttered displeasure as we left the building. Astonishing. Really astonishing. But probably not wholly surprising.

I really struggled with the pile of children’s shoes on display. I stood looking at them for several minutes. If you think too hard you can end up in tears pretty quickly. So many small feet. I’m trying very hard not to sound trite. And it is perhaps beyond me to describe this. And maybe that, more than anything, is why I say that everyone must go if they get the chance.

On leaving the area with the main blocks, we headed out to the perimeter and towards the gas chamber. The very words are unsettling so we shuffled through the heavier rain even quieter than before. Signs urge respect at the door. An entrance room leads to a door to the chamber itself. Myself and WDG approached the door together and, with an obvious pause, we helped each other through. I’m not over-dramatising. It is NOT a nice feeling going in there. There were fingernail scratches on the wall. As soon as I saw these I started feeling very claustrophobic. What else can I say? Horrific.

We left the chamber and passed by the furnaces. I shuffled by, not really able to make any sense of what I was seeing. As I write this several weeks later, I’m still not sure I can. Bad things happen to people. Everyone has their sadness and their misfortune. You can accept that as part of living. But you can’t make any sense of being systematically wiped out but other humans. We had come from Berlin a couple of nights before. I had eaten schnitzel and drank beer from a large glass. I complained about the rain. The German people were all lovely. I still don’t understand how any of that could happen.

Please show your appreciation of my bravery in the face of cold water by donating here.

Here are a few pictures of me receiving some soggy face treatment from my lovely colleagues. Many thanks to Dave Wright for the photos.

Before the Storm - Still Dry

A Glancing Blow Taken Bravely

I find my 'brave' face a little worrying

Should say, the mankini was no help whatsoever

Just another Manic Monday

Only the Coolest Can Catch the Sponge

They Got Their Eyes In Quickly

After The Storm - Wet But Still Smiling

Here are a selection of the photos taken from the dryness of the bank.

At The Start - All Still Dry

Prepaing To Do A 'Wheelie'

After The Wheelie Went Wrong

More post-wheelie recovery efforts - I went in - it was cold

Water Getting Bigger Now

Using Paddles As Sails

Getting Intrepid, huh?

Big Water

Who Needs A Boat?

Breaching

Seasoned Rafters Now

Big Smiles - does look fun!

More Sploosh

Running Out of Ideas for Captions Now

Check the Boiling Water!

Quite a Hoot

Great fun, well done all!

My keen eyed reader will have noticed that I started work precisely 5 days after my graduation. Not exactly a relaxing summer of sun and exploration. Thing was, I had to start work. Couldn’t afford to do anything else, we didn’t have the money for me to go a-wandering or ponce about doing a PhD.

It wasn’t all bad news. I got precisely the job I wanted. Working BT’s software centre in Glasgow that was, at the time, called GSSEC. And the news got better. I arrived on my first day, thin, gorgeous with luxuriant hair and piercing blue eyes and, I suspect, a fairly horrible tie, and was sent immediately on a UNIX course. Unlike the girl in Jurassic Park, it was UNIX and I didn’t know it. If I remember correctly, if was HP-UX. And I loved it. You never really forget the first time you pipe something into grep.

My first desktop was a DECStation 2100 that connected to a VAX. It took about 10 minutes to start up – much like the Windows machines of today. I could do lots on it. I could email other people in the company (no one else I knew had email), I could edit documents using LaTeX (look it up kids, it rocks) and I could write C code and, wait for it, connect to an Oracle 5 database.

Tell kids toay to dealloc their own memory and they simply won't believe you

It was a great place to start work. People did things right and there was a lot of talent. Many, many of the people I worked with then have gone on to great things. Some of them are still stuck working with me now. I have a lot to thank that individual for but he wouldn’t thank me for naming him, despite the fact that the chances of him reading this are precisely zip.

Again, I’m not going to meander through 20 years of self-indulgent, uninteresting career ‘highlights’. Instead I’ll be equally boring about something else.

You’d think after 20 years in IT I’d have some sagely advice about something or other; “always do this”, “never do that”, “don’t employ him”. Well, afraid not – instead I’ll go with two very simple things.

There is nothing new

Or to put it another way, I could achieve just as good results with the tech I had available 20 years ago as I could today. Doing it well isn’t related to what you use – it is always how you use it. Be very careful of anyone who is an evangelist for a single technology. They almost never matter. After all, the two most important steps in any development work are 1) knowing what it is you are supposed to do and 2) making sure it does that. What comes between can pretty much be done any way you like.

Oh, and, XML is a bloated waste of space…

People are the most important thing

Sounds a little trite doesn’t it? Well, tough. Thing is, in whatever you are doing, your ability to interact with people will govern your success far more than how clever you are or what tech you are good at. The technology simply doesn’t matter as much as relationships between people. I am lucky enough to work with a lot of people who know me quite well. After observing me for a while at work, one of them bought be a T-Shirt that simply said “Chunter, chunter, chunter, charm, charm, charm”. There you go, that’s my advice after 20 years of professional life, learn to chunter and charm. Obviously, it’s not something that everyone is capable of learning, so, for some of you, you just need to get REALLY clever at something or other and hope that people can put up with you gently rocking in your chair muttering to yourself.

I’ve chuntered on about this kind of thing before so my insistence that people are the most important thing is at least consistent.

And, finally, in those 20 years – the people have been the most important thing to me. I’ve met some wonderful people to go with the hundreds of total idiots. But the wonderful ones have made it very enjoyable, have been a constant source of support and entertainment and this post is specifically to thank them. Thank you one and all. You know who you are.

No, not you. Idiot.

20 years. Bloody hell. Here’s to the next 20, looking forward to it, have a great job, work with some great people and, I think, haven’t lost too much of the enthusiasm I had on 16th July 1991.

cat mylife.txt | grep “good bits” > blog.txt

I went to Glasgow as a young, startled 17 year old. Startled, mainly, by the rain but also by the need to feed myself and share a flat with a gang who were a lot older me. In those days, Edinburgh folk lived too near to Glasgow to get any student accommodation so I paid £15 a week to stay in a room in a dingy basement flat in the south side of Glasgow. I’m pretty sure someone else in the flat was getting housing benefit to pay for the same room. Tut tut.  The geographically aware will realise that this isn’t an ideal location for going to Glasgow University. For my 9 o’clock maths lecture every morning I had to trudge out to get a bus on Pollokshaws Road, get off at Bridge Street underground and buzz round to Hillhead. If you’ve read The Beatle Man ( you haven’t? pshaw! ) this is where the scene with Danny in the underground comes from. I would then nip into the bakers and buy a buttered roll and a yum-yum. I can’t say that my diet was initially ideal. Most nights I had a tin of tuna, a tin of sweetcorn and half an onion mixed together with mayonnaise. Not entirely disastrous, still a fine delicacy I enjoy today.

Some days in first year we had back-to-back lectures in a very old lecture room with hard wooden benches. Being a practical sort, I would carry an extra rucksack with a cushion or two in it with me. This seems fairly ridiculous to me now but I’d hope that the people who would grab the extra cushion I had may still be appreciative of the madness of it all.

Perhaps I’ll drivel on through some autobiographical university days chat one day – but I’m not convinced it gets much better than a buttered roll and a yum-yum. I’m more inclined to drivel on about how I feel about the process of education now. I had a great time overall and met lots of lovely people, many of whom I’m lucky enough to still have as friends now. But what did my degree do for me? Do I routinely generate 8-point fast fourier transforms every day, do Maxwell’s equations get me to work? Does it matter that they don’t?

As people look back on their education and the system that governed it, I often hear two very opposing views. A lot of people embraced it and many others filed it all under a bit of a waste of time – usually driven by never using the knowledge they gained again. I don’t think it is ever entirely a waste of time. If it gives you a few more years to grow up and get a better idea of what you really want to do, then why not? I’m somewhere in between. For me, it was simply a practical means to an end. I can some this up with a fairly simple model.

Photo courtesy of skynet_04 - click image to view original on Flickr

The Two Summers Model

There is an unfortunate truth about the way our education and graduate systems are setup. It is best described in what I will call the Two Summers Model. I’ll admit that this doesn’t apply in all industries and with more vocational education being introduced the situation is less stark, but I’m going to leave it very stark, just to make the point.

There are two key summers in your early life. The summer between school and university and the one between university and getting a job (if you’re lucky you can stretch either of these out by travelling or whatever, but go with me for the sake of the discussion).

Each of these summers is a competition either for a place at University of for a job. How well you do in that competition is at least in part governed by the qualifications you take into battle with you. Whatever exams marks you have leaving school or whatever degree you attained will automatically decide your initial place in the queue alongside everyone else at that time. I got to do the degree I wanted because of my results at Higher. I, eventually, got the job I wanted because my degree result was above the arbitrary line that was drawn below which people weren’t even considered.

So, in summer one you go into bat with a set of Higher Results. If you did, say, five Highers than you spent around 15 or so hours sitting them in an exam hall on an uncomfortable chair. What you do in those 15 hours, with the exception of appeal situations, decides what results you get. You head off to your University applications with your certificate in hand and join your place in line that that summer’s assessment. You get a place and off to University you go. At that point, what you achieved at Higher becomes largely irrelevant (unless you have a ‘mare at Uni). I only once needed to make reference to Higher marks once I started at University and that was for one peculiar job where the interviewer put more credence on school results than University ones ( the theory was it was a better view of real talent). Anyway, the point is, you spend 12/13 years at school which culminates in a 15 hour exam frenzy, the results of which become irrelevant after a few weeks of summer. It’s almost like the life of a Cicada, sleeping underground waiting on one frenzied summer of love. Is that too brutal? Sure, you gain more from the process, it can almost keep occupied and out of trouble as you progress through the angsty Breakfast Club phase.

The 13 year Cicada is an excellent analogue for a school career

Guess what? Summer two is the same. You do, in my case, 4 years at University. Someone hits you on the head, hands you a scroll and you’re cast out into the graduate job market to compete against everyone else’s scrolls for the available jobs. Again, maybe 20-25 hours of actual exam time decides what is written on that scroll. Some degrees may have more practical elements, mine sort of did, but not really.

And then you have your job and your degree result doesn’t matter any more (apart from winding up friends who won’t be named who only got a poxy 2-1, sheesh). Not once did it ever matter after I started work. Just in those few weeks of competition for the jobs and then it ends up in a cupboard. Another dead Cicada.

Two summers, two period of intense competition in which you starting position is decided by a relatively small number of hours at the exam desk.

Conclusion? Get really good at exams. I mean REALLY good. Note use of bold and caps. Sure, other things help, your personality, other experience, your terribly nice, yet ill-fitting, new suit – but why rely on those things to get you out of trouble. You have about 40 hours of exam work that decide where on the career ladder you start. Nail it.

By the time we approached ‘M’ in the alphabet we realised there was much fun to be had from guessing what was going to play next. If you guessed it right, you got a point, if you got it wrong you quite often handed the answer to the next one over. It had a certain evil all of its own. You could only score ‘on serve’.

It all went badly wrong for both of us from the S’s and T’s. Especially the S’s where there are quite a few singles that throw you. For the record, I lost ( 13-10 ) but at least I didn’t have to suffer the indignity of forgetting “This Charming Man” whilst, at the same time, giving away “This Night Has Opened My Eyes” in a falsetto squeal. By last minute scream of “The Queen Is Dead” was also a highlight.

All in all, a surprisingly brilliant game that, sadly, you can only really play once.

Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty

The trouble is it’s not a game that can have automatic universal appeal. You need to have fairly extensive knowledge of the entire back catalogue of an artist. And so does your compatriot. We thought about which other bands we could do this with next and, well, there weren’t many. But if you happen to drive to work with someone who has the same good knowledge of a band as you and you have their entire back catalogue on an MP3 player that can play tracks in alphabetical order then I thoroughly recommend it. It’s a hoot.

define:niche

* no it isn’t