nedprod.com Virtual Diary

Monday 18th February 2013:

2013-02-18T18:00:00+00:00

Monday 18th February 2013: 6.00pm. This is the first weekend where after fixing the lack of copy & paste in my BEurtle program which has been a problem since July, my todo list has finally became empty for now. The next big ticket item is going to be buying and insuring a car, currently scheduled for April/May as we won't have the cash until then, and we're going to have to pay in cash because no one will lend to us given our lack of credit history in Canada. In fact, I had to bribe a bank to give me a credit card by handing them $5000 as a security after two prior credit card applications had failed. As much as Canada welcomes immigrants more than most countries, the lack of maturity in its financial services industry is a pain (they could after all pull your history from Europe). If we weren't earning enough to be able to save to buy a car for cash outright, I'm not sure what we'd do. Still, it's nice to be finally through that todo list and to take a break from spending every spare moment outside work crossing off todo items.

As you might have guessed from the lack of any articles here about RIM (now BlackBerry), it isn't allowed to talk about anything to do with work publicly, not even anything which is public knowledge. In fact, I can talk much more freely about what our competitors are up to than I can about us, which kinda sucks, but there you go. So, sorry about the lack of articles - I did write three of them, and they were very interesting I think. But it's a no-go.

So, what's happened these last three months? Surprisingly little. We left our BlackBerry-provided temporary accommodation at the start of December, and we now live about fifteen minutes' walk from the University of Waterloo just beyond which is RIM 1, the original BlackBerry office, where I work. So, come the summer I'll be able to walk to work quite pleasantly, though right now in the typical -15C temperatures I must admit to taking the bus to the university and walking ten minutes from there because it's slow going through all the snow and ice. I have learned that snow, when blown by a strong wind, is quite like sand at these temperatures and one can arrive at work with the tears from your eyes dripping having frozen on your cheeks. I also have to admit that I can now see the point of thermal long johns, especially for under your jeans which are relatively unprotected from the chill of a wind. Luckily, so far I've been fairly fortunate in Waterloo where usually the wind isn't more than a light breeze, and I'm actually plenty warm enough outside if the air remains still even if it's snowing heavily.

I wasn't with my family in Cork for the first time ever in my life this Christmas: instead myself and Megan drove down to her parents in Indiana with a rental, a trip taking about ten hours. I can't say I much enjoyed being away from my family, but we spoke by telephone on Christmas day and Megan's family made things better than they would have been otherwise.

Myself and Megan stopped off in Detroit for two nights on the way back to break up the trip, and as a mini-holiday. We did enjoy ourselves, but I think it was despite Detroit rather than anything else, and for the $1200 or so it cost it really wasn't worth it. The hotel, a Hilton, was really not great. The casino we visited, while upmarket, was seedy and depressing, and the $350 we dropped on the meal in the quite pretty top floor restaurant there (shown above) was too expensive for the very limited choice of menu available. It didn't help that there were several murders and rapes on the local news while we were there, and the city as a whole is very obviously deprived and its centre looks like something from those Hollywood movies you see and you think they're dramatising how run down and full of the drug addled poor US cities are - well, judging from city centre Detroit, they aren't (and my sister said very similar things about Los Angeles which she visited during her honeymoon). About the only highlight of our mini-holiday in Detroit really was Detroit Zoo which was better than expected. So, I'm afraid very much a thumbs down to Detroit for vacationing. Thankfully, next Christmas there are plenty of other US-Canada border places like Sarnia, or even Niagra Falls or Buffalo. If Detroit cut its cost of visiting by about a half, it might just be worth visiting as a once off, but otherwise that city has a long way to go in dealing with its decline. Right now it's just not attractive to be in, not helped by the expense to reward ratio.

So, in January I went back to work after the break ... I had spent December implementing a demonstration prototype of some proposed functionality for future BlackBerry phones, and I spent most of January writing a 20,000 word internal white paper on the technology. I finally upgraded my 2007 era PC which had served so well to something fairly cutting edge, and sure it is somewhat snappier than it was even when typing in this HTML, so I am pleased for the money spent, which wasn't much (about $400) as I recycled old parts from former uses. And of course, I turned thirty-five, and you'll note the lack of my usual annual reflection upon the past year of my life: Why? When I think upon this past year, it's very hard to say anything definitive about it. In Christmas 2011 a year ago I decided we were leaving Ireland for wherever in the world would give us a decent chance, which wasn't Ireland and wasn't Britain (their current anti-immigrant obsession makes it very hard for Megan to get a work visa even if she has Masters degrees out the wazoo). So I made the appropriate calls, did the appropriate interviews, made the appropriate choices and enacted the appropriate arrangements including the appropriate goodbyes. And that's 2012: I can't say much about it past that, and I certainly can't reflect upon it usefully at the present time. Maybe I will be able to in a year's time once things have settled.

At the end of January an admin position opening appeared in the Research Institute I'm attached to, namely the Institute for Complexity and Innovation in the University of Waterloo,, so we got Megan into applying for that and she got the job, so now she works for the University which is a great help in so many ways, not least that the Canadian tax system greatly rewards both people in a couple working so her modest additional income has a disproportionate effect on our after-tax income (I think our net marginal rate will actually drop). I also applied to join the executive board for a small local community grant disbursement fund who try to invest money into (currently) youth innovation and leadership (which would eventually lead to stuff like the Nanolight, a startup out of Toronto who raised $200k via Kickstarter), and to which I was accepted which is great as not only does it let me donate my usual 2.5% of charitable time and money per year, it also plugs me into Canada's tech startup community, so I'll have a line on what's going on just outside RIM (most tech startups in this innovation cluster are started by disaffected former RIM employees). Indeed, many of the fund's board members also sit on the local TTEDx Waterloo organising board, so things are looking good on that.

And I think that is about that to report. Not a lot really. The weeks pass, and everything seems on track so far. Our only real constraint now is the lack of a car, as the public transport here is effectively limited to the area surrounding the university which is fine for work and groceries, but useless if say you want to buy a bookcase because all those stores are accessible by car only. And we've also worked through all the nearby restaurants now, so as much as dining is indeed very good if somewhat pricey here, it gets much better with a car. Even simple things like going to cinema are a pain without a car: buses stop early here, so going to a cinema needs to be done in the afternoon which is tricky when you catch up on sleep at weekends, and you have certain things which need doing like chores before you can relax. Anyway, we'll get that solved soon in the next few months. Maybe I'll even post here before then? Anything could happen ... till next time, be happy!

Saturday 27th October 2012:

2012-10-27T14:50:00+00:00

Saturday 27th October 2012: 2.50pm. My first entry from our new life in Canada! Looking back over the past three months, it is striking how both expensive and stressful moving continents is, requiring about €15,000 in temporary bridging money and a good €5000 in non-retrievable costs, and that was with RIM paying directly for about half the total cost and them reimbursing us about €3,000 of expenses. Now, admittedly, we didn't need all of that €15,000 at all - perhaps about €10,000, but I deliberately added on 50% before I began to cover any unexpected surprises. Which I'll come to just shortly.

After the last entry, things of course got hectic. I went to visit about 60% of those I'm still in contact with from Cambridge, Hull, St. Andrews and beyond, and that of course involved a lot of travel and a lot of restaurant meals and drinking. Simultaneously, I had to organise the move itself which involved never ending emails between myself and various others employed by RIM to supposedly make our move easier. I have to admit, looking back, that while they made the bridging cost outlay much lower because they spent RIM's money rather than us having to fork out now for reimbursement later, they did not make things massively easier. Call me a control freak, but I didn't appreciate the extra layer of people between me and our relocation plan, especially when they point blank refused to do what they were told or in some cases, did something different to what they were supposed to without telling me. That added stress, because I had to rejig our schedule to cope with the uncertainty of people not getting back to me with necessary information for scheduling or not doing their jobs in a timely fashion. It wasn't helpful. No wonder I started smoking cigarettes again for the first time in years!

Still, it was great to see everybody and to say goodbye properly, even with the unbelievably tight scheduling constraints (after all, who moves continent and visits most of those they know in the world and starts a new job in exactly one calendar month!). I know from experience we won't see most of those from St. Andrews in particular ever again, and it was especially good to draw a solid line under the St. Andrews experience, four years after graduation. It closed things off especially well as I went to St. Andrews in 2004 at the age of 26, and those whom I knew there who were 18 are now aged exactly 26 as well, so they are now at exactly where I was at back when they first met me. And that did generate quite a lot of reflection: it came up frequently with each who I visited the loneliness and pointlessness of existence that graduates feel post-graduation, because you've had a few years post-uni to do something with your life and you find every worthy avenue closed off to you due to one overriding factor: society doesn't give a shit about you or your opinions or what you want or what is right. You get one binary, dimorphic choice: either join the capitalist machine working some unimportant, probably self-destructive job, have just enough time for acquaintances rather than friends, work till you get sick and we'll give you just enough money to have children and live an okay life, or else choose to be irrelevant and get nothing and be nothing. That realisation, one which I promulgated to 18 year olds who didn't quite believe me back during 2004-2008, is now as stark and as real and as depressing as any trauma a person can experience in a lifetime. The huge and only question remains: now that I understand this, what do I do now?

And of course, I don't have the answer there either, not like I had when they were 18 and answers were so much simpler. I returned to university aged 26 to try something different with the explicit goal of making possible a series of opportunities not normally available to those aged 26. Having mostly succeeded, I then had to pick from those opportunities, which I have done, and hopefully I haven't screwed up too badly. That's "the" answer, and I have no idea if I'm right yet. I guess we'll see. I do agree with my fellow St. Andrews graduates though that life after university isn't much fun, especially if you didn't graduate with a numerate degree. Even with a numerate degree, the drudgery, loneliness and pointlessness of the self-destructive rat race wears you down. Without a numerate degree, add to that constant worries about lack of money and lack of security and most especially, lack of self-worth because good jobs are especially hard to find when society is ambivalent to you about your value to society. There you go: that One Dimensional Man by Marcuse you studied at St. Andrews was actually true. And now it's the sole choice of life they give you. Welcome to adulthood.

So, moving on from depressing truths of our reality, Megan finished up her work at the end of August and almost straight after we went to Canada for our five day house hunting trip (paid for by RIM) and for me to meet my team for the first time, where it turned out that both my manager and his manager had left RIM and my team had been broken up and reassigned (more later on this, probably the next entry). That was obviously pretty intense, but the most useful result from my perspective was a Canadian bank account to which money to keep us alive could be sent, if we could figure out the SWIFT/IBAN to Canadian bank routing (I ended up sending multiple €100 wire transfers each using different methods, and those that got through were the "right" ones). We also sorted out our immigration and work visas during this trip, which I'd definitely recommend to anyone to sort out as soon as possible. Once back in Ireland, we did a whistle stop tour of Britain to say goodbye to Megan's friends, and went to Sweden to say goodbye to Johanna who was the only one out of everyone to get two of our days. This wasn't quite as expensive as my tour of my friends, but it was certainly as tiring. One thing which was interesting was that I took only my Android 4.1 phone with me and left my laptop at home, and other than battery life it performed surprisingly admirably as a general purpose computing device. Put another way: it let me manage the never ending email stream organising our move to Canada, and the Maps navigation saved our skins a number of times like when the taxi driver got lost in Manchester.

Back in Ireland for the last time at the end of September and with just days to go, the removers paid for by RIM came and took away all our stuff. By this stage I was quite fraught, as mistakes made here would deeply negatively impact the first two months of our time in Canada due to missing vital items (the stuff moved by removers takes about two months to get delivered, so you must separately send important stuff like clothes and cloud nodes by courier to get it there in a week). Hence racking your brain to make sure important things you'd urgently need in Canada weren't being removed. Sleep during this time came more from exhaustion than mind and body resting - not a lot of fun. I also had unexpected problems with moving a chunk of money - I had sent over our Canada living money via three separate parallel means to spread the risk of problems, and indeed the day before departing one of those means had got stuck so about half our money was in limbo. Better than all of it, sure, but also without that half I couldn't pay our deposits on accommodation, so not helpful. I remember being very tense indeed on our last day in Ireland, finding myself regularly snapping at people. Not how you ideally want to say goodbye to friends and family.

So, the day of emigration came, and in a weird way for me at least that was the day I could finally relax because from now on, nothing more could be done. Where you were at is where you are at, and what comes will come. After some difficulty locating our limo (paid for by RIM), we made it to our temporary flat in city centre Waterloo for the first two months (also paid for by RIM) in which I am currently typing this diary entry. So, basically, it had all worked out.

Having just arrived in Waterloo, I - despite being exhausted physically, mentally and spiritually - was in a strangely celebratory mood, so I wanted to go out on the town which we did despite it being extremely noisy and packed because the university term had just begun, so everywhere in the city centre was packed with drunk students (Waterloo has two of Canada's largest universities in it) and loud music. Unfortunately, I in my hazy, strange state misjudged a kerb and put a 90 degree kink in my left ankle which put an abrupt end to the festivities, and indeed even now one month later it's still painful. At the time, despite having plenty of cash, there was no obvious source of medical treatment - we weren't registered with the Canadian health system yet, and we were advised that doctors in Canada aren't allowed to privately accept cash for treatment so our only option was the hospital and spending the entire day waiting in A&E when probably it wasn't broken, and just needed time and ice packs and rest to heal. So much, in the end, of bringing plenty of spare cash for emergencies! Unfortunately, the following week involved a great deal of walking - to register for a monthly bus pass for which we had to go to Kitchener; to pick up my new BlackBerry work phone running BB10; to pick up a SIM for said phone which required twenty minutes of walking; to register for my security card and so on. My ankle, braced and compressed to hold in the swelling, and me dosed up on lots of codeine and anti-inflammatories for the pain, didn't exactly get the rest you're supposed to give a badly sprained joint. But, we make do with the hand we're dealt.

So that brings us to the past three weeks which mostly have consisted of us going on a mostly vegetarian diet to begin to shed the weight we put on during our goodbye tour, Megan spending the day at home alone or out registering for things like doctors while I'm at work, me weaning myself off cigarettes, off pain killers, off alcohol and finding and getting started at a gym again which was just this past week. On the 17th I took my OU M208 Pure Maths exam in London, Ontario for which I took the train between Kitchener and London - and the train system in Canada, which while better than in the US, is a pale shadow of even the worst and most run down train system anywhere in Europe with one of the roughest and bumpiest rides I've certainly ever endured, and in coaches which while they are clean, maintained and comfortable, clearly date from the early 1980s in terms of decor. Interestingly, trains in Canada are run by a single crown corporation (state owned company) called VIA from Quebec, and unsurprisingly the train system the Quebec side of Toronto is passably European. Unfortunately, I'm west of Toronto, and decades of underinvestment and political footballing show through - though it's far worse once you go west out of Ontario where 1940s era tracks just cannot remotely compete with air travel.

And this weekend is the first since we arrived that I wasn't passed out recovering from the week made worse by that inevitable fluey sickness you get after an extended emotional strain - indeed today I woke up at a reasonable hour feeling reasonably good. I also don't have to be going out to buy electricals (as the voltage is different here, we had to leave all our electricals behind in Ireland which has required repurchasing lots of simple things like printers) or get things we urgently needed like our own telephone line and local number (run over VoIP), or a semi-decent coffee in the morning as Canadians, like Americans, don't really do decent espresso based coffee, even in dedicated coffee shops, so I dropped $500 on a second hand bean grinder and a second hand espresso machine off eBay and now our coffee isn't sour, bland muck. It's actually amazing what you can do with average beans using good equipment - our morning coffee using some locally purchased beans is actually pretty good, though it won't be anywhere near the same league as the Jamaican Blue Mountain I dropped $55 a bag on last week. No, this is my first proper, non-busy weekend. Hence the diary entry!

Now, what's coming next to this diary is a reasonably long entry about my first month working for RIM. For the first time ever for a diary entry here, I'm going to have to get approval from RIM for that diary entry because it's going to talk about a raft of internal RIM stuff and I'm not sure how much of it they're going to be happy being made public. Still, I want to document and write down what I'm thinking at the end of this first month, because I think it'll be valuable to me personally later on but also because it'll be valuable to RIM and moreover, particularly valuable to those watching RIM as there's an awful lot of ignorance out there, and I'll be blunt in saying that RIM have done a poor job in communicating themselves recently and that's going to become a problem for the Q1 2013 BB10 launch. In particular, I would like to talk about what BB10 is and especially what it isn't, what RIM has done internally to itself this past year or two, and if I'm allowed I'd like to talk a bit about BB11 too as that's mainly what I was hired for. In short, I'd like to give my unvarnished impressions of RIM acquired during the past month and people can take them or leave them as they see fit.

Ok so, time for the rest of my weekend - oh how so valuable they are when you work non-stop all week! Until next time, be happy!

Wednesday 8th August 2012:

2012-08-08T17:40:00+00:00

Wednesday 8th August 2012: 5.40pm. I'm glad to say that every item on my summer todo list from the last entry has been completed or nearly completed - unfortunately, it is at the expense of being so very tired and not thinking properly. This morning I forgot my passport for the first time since 1997 for my flight to Belgium to say goodbye to Natasja - and this being post 9/11, they wouldn't let me fly, so that was €190 down the tube and much disappointment caused for all. The tiredness resulted from being up till 2.30am replying to essential email organising the relocation to Canada, my next trip to see people around London, booking flights for same despite various people continuing to be vague about their availability, and setting a burn in test running on my shiny new 3Tb hard drive which is going to act as a separately transited ZFS pool mirror for all our important data during the move to Canada (not helped by the Sandforce SSD in my main desktop deciding to die for the third time yesterday, once again hosing my Windows install. This morning I ordered a 256Gb Samsung 830 SSD at some expense, and vowed to never, ever again use any Sandforce based SSD).

Why didn't I start all that earlier? Well, Sarah was visiting to say goodbye for the preceding four days, and with Megan working yesterday I took them to Kinsale for the day. In short, I couldn't have started anything earlier even though I kept dipping out of activities with Megan and Sarah to grab an hour or two sitting in the car with my laptop over a 3G link to attend to essential communiqués etc. (and hard drive burn in tests take several days). All in all, outta time in almost every endeavour, and that results in Niall putting up mental resistance to adding on more stress by doing subconscious blocks like forgetting passports. Unhelpful. The truth is though that the extra two days will be exceptionally useful - I now have enough days to get in my final OU Pure Maths coursework on time, and organise the removers who of course want contacting when I'm busy and won't respond when I contact them e.g. they rang when I was grabbing some very much needed sleep this afternoon. Still, I regret deeply missing Belgium. It's always fun visiting there.

You may have noticed that I upgraded the CSS (for those non-ancient pages on nedprod which use CSS) to use some newer features. There are more rounded corners than before, particularly on the navigation pane separator; hovering over links produces a fire effect I learned from developing the Deeper Economics website; and I used some CSS3 selectors to apply box shadowing to any standalone i.e. centred images which I think works really well. I ended up doing this as part of modularising the RSS feed floating pane so it can appear on the homepage of my software libraries with a running commit feed. Good stuff.

Other changes still to come include a proper SSL certificate for nedprod, and with that I can turn on the SPDY fast HTTP extension for nedprod to improve still further page load times. I rented a verified personal identity SSL certificate from StartSSL for a fairly reasonable US$60 for two years. Basically what this does is to say that someone called Niall Douglas residing in a given locality in a given country has provided a minimal amount of proof that they do have that name and do reside at the address they supplied. You can then attach this "proof" as a digital signature to your email, your website and so on under the theory that it makes it somewhat harder for another to impersonate you. Now, I'm not bothered about anyone impersonating me, rather I bothered with renting this because recent Windows throw up a warning if you try to install unsigned programs, and this includes the v1.50 alpha 1 release of BEurtle.. Future releases of BEurtle will now be properly signed rather than self-signed, and therefore not raise a warning. Obviously I also get the advantages of signed email, my email program not complaining every time I fetch mail etc. as well.

Last bit of news: I passed that damn PGCert in Educational and Social Research with the Institute of Education in London - in fact, I think I'll get a merit if I've calculated my weighted average correctly. Glad to be away from there - it was an eye opener. And very glad that some £3,200 of my hard earned money was not wasted.

Ok, so here's kinda why I'm writing a virtual diary entry now rather than later - here's me thinking out loud about how I'm going to configure my ZFS storage pool on the basis that this may help others. What I've got is my Proxmox cloud node running a copy of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS in a KVM virtual machine. Into that I've installed the Linux kernel port of ZFS v28 by the Lawrence Livermore laboratories (who are part of the US government, and they have huge data needs which is why they ported ZFS to Linux so I definitely trust the port) which is literally as easy as just adding a PPA to Ubuntu. I have three main storage hard drives which originate from an external USB hard drive solution which was originally called an "Icy Box":

IcyBox1: A Jan 2008 1Tb 3-platter Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ drive (1,000,204,886,016 bytes, 512 byte sectors, 6.7w/19.6w idle/start). This was my first solution to a stack of DVDs several feet high which had been growing since I studied at Hull University, and I remember having much fun carrying all 25kg of them in a backpack through the Madrid metro when I left Spain for London. I remember many students at St. Andrews marvelling that so much data could fit into a single drive, and in fairness so did I at that time. I also remember being fairly appalled during the load of the DVDs onto that drive that some of the older DVDs, especially those written at Hull and some of those in Madrid, had become unreadable despite much loving care and that arduous trek through the Madrid metro among other occasions of physical data transfer. Basically, DVD±R is a bad way to store long term data.
IcyBox2: A May 2010 2Tb 3-platter Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS-00MVWB0 "load/unlock click of death" drive (2,000,398,934,016 bytes, 4096 byte sectors, 2.9w/14w idle/start). This was purchased just as the Samsung drive approached capacity, and just after the 3-platter Green design came onto the market.
In test now: A June 2012 3Tb 3-platter Western Digital Red WD30EFRX-68AX9N0 drive (3,000,592,982,016 bytes, 4096 byte sectors, 3.84w/13.71w idle/start). Unlike the earlier drives, this I bought about six months too early in order to secure our data for Canada. Once again, this is one of the very first 3-platter 3Tb drive designs on the market, and the first I've owned to contain fancy enterprise style vibration gyroscopes.

As you can tell, I really don't like more than three platters for long term storage . I have about 1.7Tb of data in total, and currently the 1Tb drive holds what I had back when I had just 1Tb of data. Apart from that, I don't have any redundancy though the 2Tb drive is only ever plugged in when it's time to back up data - thankfully, as a result, it has a low load cycle count and won't die from the infamous "load/unload click of death" bug in those Caviar Green drives. Equally, I do need to flash a new firmware for that drive as it has the original "I can't do SMART properly" firmware, but I dare not until I have a full backup. All in all, it isn't a good long term data storage solution, but it could be worse.

So, how should I configure these drives as a fully redundant ZFS storage pool? This is slightly tricky. The naive solution is a simple 1:1 mirror, so you configure the 1Tb and 2Tb drives together to mirror the 3Tb drive, making sure you account for the fact that the 3Tb drive is slightly short (3,000,592,982,016 vs. 3,000,603,820,032 bytes). However, the 1Tb drive has 512 byte sectors, and apparently ZFS won't mirror across dissimilar sector sizes, though you can override and force a 4Kb sector size during pool creation. Another problem is that I am unsure if ZFS lets you concatenate two physical units into a vdev, then form a second vdev from that vdev and another physical unit because apparently you can't nest vdevs. However, you could stripe 3x 1Tb i.e. partition the 2Tb drive into two, and stripe all three 1Tb slices into a 3Tb vdev. The only problem with this is it would bottleneck on the 2Tb drive, because it must be constantly read and written at seek locations about half a drive apart i.e. slow, and the 128Kb strip used by ZFS isn't divided by three evenly so you'd get dreadful alignment penalties. Assuming a 5% chance of individual disk failure, risk factor of data loss is 10% (RAID 0) x 5% = 0.5%, so this configuration reduces the chance of data loss by 30x.

What if you want to expand the pool later? Well, ZFS won't let you change vdevs after configuration, so the only expansion route is to add another mirror pair as a separate vdev i.e. probably 2x 3Tb drives, or replace each drive with a larger one and resolder. This is because redundancy is per vdev, so if you lose a vdev you lose the pool. As I only accumulate about 500Gb a year, having to add in chunks of 3Tb at a cost of €400 a pop seems way overkill, never mind I dislike losing the older drives. Adding expansion increases the chance of data loss to 0.75%, but slightly improves the chance of data loss over any one of the drives failing to 33x.

What about RAID-Z? For this you need a minimum of two storage units with one failure tolerated. As this blog suggests, you can partition up the three drives as follows:

2x 2Tb partitions on 2Tb and 3Tb drives
2x 1Tb partitions on 1Tb and 3Tb drives

As with the 1:1 mirroring solution, here you also get 3Tb of available space. Assuming a 5% chance of individual disk failure, risk factor of data loss is 5% x 5% = 0.25%, or half the previous solution. Because ZFS can either stripe, mirror or RAID-Z but not concatenate, you'd see the bottleneck move onto the 3Tb drive which would stripe over about 66% of the 3Tb drive's total area. It isn't anything like as bad as the earlier mirroring solution for bottlenecking though, as the 4Tb vdev would get filled in preference to the 2Tb vdev.

What about expansion? Well, all you can do is add another vdev same as with mirroring, because vdevs are immutable with ZFS. This sucks.

What about RAID-Z2? This requires at least three storage units with two failures tolerated. However, interestingly, you could deliberately and intentionally create a degraded pool i.e. one which was effectively RAID-Z but could be "improved" to RAID-Z2 by adding a device, or you could have two parity devices with a "missing" data device with a degraded read/write latency. This is, as far as I can see, the sole and only way of creating an expandable vdev in ZFS though at the cost initially of sacrificing 66% of your storage capacity i.e. you'd get 2Tb of available space now.

In short, colour me not impressed. As much as ZFS is cool and everything, it isn't really suited to three device configurations because it isn't intended as such - it's intended for a dozen or so physical devices where a 10-15% parity overhead is just right because it reduces a 60% chance of data loss (assuming 5% individual drive failure) to (assuming no failures during rebuild) just 0.25% for RAID-Z or mirroring and to just 0.0125% with RAID-Z2 (if across all drives). That's a huge win, and that's why RAID-whatever and ZFS makes sense with lots of drives. With just three drives, the parity overhead is large, the lack of ability to reconfigure is inconvenient/expensive, and in short ZFS isn't the right tool for this job.

What we really need is the ability to do "block pointer rewrite" as online vdev reconfiguration is known in the ZFS jargon. Not a lot of chance of seeing that outside Oracle's proprietary ZFS enhancements sadly which effectively means we won't see it at all in the foreseeable future seeing as ZFS v28 is already two years out of date. I had very high hopes for BTRFS, indeed my secure off-site replicated backup solution is based on BTRFS with two copies of everything stored and remotely replicated by DRBD, and BTRFS's design is much more flexible for the low drive count user than ZFS. However, as Chris Mason (lead BTRFS developer) left Oracle for greener pastures in June, any of my hopes there are gone, especially as it's not in any commercial company's interest to push either BTRFS or indeed ZFS for low drive count use cases as in the end, where's the (serious) money in solving home user long term data storage issues? In short, ZFS v28 is as good as it's going to get for the foreseeable future, especially as Oracle are highly unlikely to release any of the improvements since v28 to the public. In reality, with the loss of BTRFS momentum, ZFS is quite literally the only game in town. I guess I'm just going to have to take those 2x 3Tb expansions on the chin!

So, basically I think I've decided to do RAID-Z for the existing 1Tb + 2Tb + 3Tb configuration - it's twice as safe as mirroring without so much of the read/write bottleneck and load placed on one drive. Further expansion though would be in 2x 3Tb mirrors, because mirrors don't lose your data if you break a pool unlike RAID-Z. At 500Gb/year, even that is two and a half years away, assuming that employment at RIM doesn't slow that rate of data acquisition down - which it very likely will. [Note added three months later: I didn't go with the RAID-Z in the end, as mirroring is inherently more fault tolerant because if a unit fails, you simply replace it and resilver whereas with RAID-Z it's a full rebalance which hammers the drives. Instead I "glued" the 1Tb and 2Tb drives together using Linux LVM to make them a fake 3Tb drive, then supplied the two 3Tb drives to KVM for FreeNAS to use as two ZFS storage units. FreeNAS has no idea it's in a virtual machine working with virtual hard drives, and nor does it matter. It all "just works", even if write speeds are in the 100Mbit range, read speeds reach about 400Mbit which is good enough].

Let's just hope that something much better comes along in two years' time. For now, ZFS as the only game in town will have to do. Be happy y'all!

Sunday 24th June 2012:

2012-06-24T17:19:00+00:00

Sunday 24th June 2012: 5.19pm. I got back from my PGCert exams about ten days ago, rested for a day, then launched into my Pure Maths coursework which I posted off on Thursday. I then spent a day writing up my summer todo list before we emigrate to Canada which is as follows:

Sign up to swimming pool and substantially improve fitness before emigration.
Solve nedprod diary archival problem once and for all, and finally shrink that enormous front page!
Enable long overdue mobile view for nedprod.
Enable long overdue print view for nedprod.
Pay 2011 corporation tax for my company and catch up on its accounts.
Submit 2011 Irish and UK tax returns (yes, I must pay tax in both countries!)
Close off outstanding bills to my company, hopefully getting those owing money to pay up, and begin making the company dormant.
Write up reference implementations of stuff being submitted to POSIX and ISO and submit them.
Do annual summer release of my libraries to propagate past year's bug fixes and fix bitrot.
Finish BEXML and BEurtle.
Finish reading The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference (2nd Edition).

As you can tell by the strikethroughs, I've made a good start. I haven't actually swum - not once - in nearly twenty years, so the fitness regaining is going to be embarassing for the first two weeks or so as I flail around haplessly, but I signed myself and Megan up for two months' membership, so at least I'll provide her with no doubt much side splitting amusement .

As you may have noticed by this page being much shorter, I have finally solved the diary post archival problem once and for all and while I was at it I solved the lack of permalinks to posts too. Up until now, since 1998, I archived by copying and pasting each post from the front page into a page per month in the archive folder, then manually hand linking them into a sequence and adding them into the index page. This was so time consuming and boring I always kept putting it off, leading to as much as 250Kb of text on the front page which is plain silly. The new system uses a bit of PHP to autogenerate a page per post and another bit to autogenerate the index, and to archive I now simply have to copy and paste into a single archive file and leave the PHP figure it all out. Outstanding!

The last two completed items are that I finally got round to implementing CSS media views for nedprod, specifically for mobile/handhelds and for print. This required manually find and inserting a magic header insert into every HTML file on nedprod using varying regular expressions, and it took me the entire of Saturday to complete as something like six different versions of FrontPage/Expression Web have touched nedprod over the years, and they were all different. The new magic header insert lets me specify common contents for all pages, so I was finally able to mark all pages as being authored by me to Google and to supply @media handheld and print stylesheets for all nedprod HTML.

Now, I have to admit it is embarassing how it has taken this long to add this to nedprod - particularly the print CSS which is so basic: hide navigational and promotional elements, hide clutter, print URLs after links. The new mobile view is more interesting though: I have been checking that nedprod renders okay on mobile devices since the days of Windows Mobile but I was happy if it looked identical to the desktop view. Over time, as I have browsed nedprod from my own mobile because it's handy as a memory aid, I've begun to prefer if the page were vertically flowed for small screens. With the work done during the last few days, any time the page becomes narrower than 720px it will autoenable the vertical flow - in fact, you can try it now with your desktop browser and see for yourself. Believe it or not, this automatic switch doesn't use Javascript - it uses the new W3C CSS3 media queries extension which any recent browser will (mostly, and not always bug free) support.

Basically, this media queries extension lets you set conditions on CSS blocks, so "if device screen is less than X apply this CSS" and so on. In fact, here is the CSS I wrote for nedprod:

@media handheld, only screen and (max-width: 720px),
	only screen and (max-device-width: 720px) {

table#autolanguagetranslation {
	display: none;
}
table#autolanguagetranslation + p {
	display: none;
}
table.bodytext > tbody > tr > td {
	display: block;
}
table.navbar {
	position:relative;
	margin-left:auto;
	margin-right:auto;
	width: auto;
}
table.navbar + p, table.navbar + p + p {
	display: none;
}
td.navbardivider {
	width:100% !important;
}
* { max-width: 720px; }
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 640px),
	only screen and (max-device-width: 640px) {
* { max-width: 640px; }
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 480px),
	only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
* { max-width: 480px; }
}
@media only screen and (max-width: 320px),
	only screen and (max-device-width: 320px) {
* { max-width: 320px; }
}

Note how I additionally test for screen widths less than 640px (iPhone 4), 480px (most older smartphones) and 320px (feature phones) and override the earlier max-width setting on * i.e. all elements. This max-width setting is basically a clamp on the maximum width of any element to the screen width, thus ensuring that any single element on the page will be shrunk to fit onto the screen without panning (if that element can be sufficiently shrunk of course). If the element can't be shrunk e.g. a

section, then panning is available for that element alone. A lot of "how to do mobile stylesheet" guides recommend shrinking all images by 25%, but that buggers small images. This max-width approach constrains any image which is too big to fit, but leaves smaller images alone.

So, perhaps worth waiting for CSS3 media queries after all! The only final thing is to declare your HTML as mobile aware by adding this to your :

And voilà your HTML is mobile aware. I note that all is not perfect on mobile web browsers though. Desktop Chrome and Opera both render the vertical flow perfectly, albeit both forgetting to adjust for the fact there is a vertical scroll bar there and hence chopping off a bit of contents on the edges. My Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Android 4.0.4) seems to start off thinking it is a 480px wide device, not 720px, and renders the text accordingly (probably for compatibility with older phones) but decides about half way through the rendering to suddenly shift to a 640px page width, not 720px (perhaps for compatibility with the iPhone 4 this time?). Weird, I know. But it gets weirder: when it shifts to 640px, it doesn't bother redoing layout for inline positioned items such as almost all the text, so only block items are relaid out to have the correct width and be correctly positioned. Therefore almost all the text is offset to the left with a large empty space on the right which looks inconsistent. Megan's Samsung Galaxy S (Android 2.3.6) is both better and worse because it only observes the first screen setting it sees which is 720px and this it does render perfectly. However, inexplicably it disables your ability to zoom out and thus forces you to pan everywhere using its little 480px screen on a 720px canvas which is very irritating. Buggy browsers: what can one do? I have hope for the future though: Opera Mobile gets it right at default zooms of 100%, 150%, and 200%. Interestingly, the default default zoom in a new install is 225% at which, of course, it completely borks the page .

Anyway, it's now past 8pm so I'd better get moving as I have the final copy of the index of Economists and the Powerful to submit. So, have a great, being happy summer!

Monday 28th May 2012:

2012-05-28T19:13:00+00:00

Monday 28th May 2012: 7.13pm. You've probably noticed that I've wired in my Google Plus feed to an iframe on the right - I finally got round to configuring the very useful IFTTT to auto-replicate my Google Plus posts to Facebook and Twitter, so I figured why not have them appear here too? Yeah, I guess I'm about a decade behind everyone else there in getting my content to replicate around, but well to be honest I didn't have a need to spam people with my inanity, so I didn't bother. So why the sudden change of heart? Well, the big news is that I'll be relocating to Canada end of this summer to join Research in Motion's Native SDK team as a Senior Software Engineer in their Waterloo, Ontario HQ. They executed a nearly flawless recruitment process over 20+ hours of telephone and video interviewing, and if their business execution is anything like as excellent as their recruitment was then they're due for a huge bounce back if they can make it past running out of cash as they are forecast to do by the end of this year - when no doubt investors will start calling for them to be broken up rather than take on oodles of debt. I figured that as a result of the move and the new job I'll no doubt have a whole load more inanity to spout with no time to do longer updates to this virtual diary, plus people might be temporarily interested in shorter posts to Google Plus for a short time at least, so I went ahead and wired all my data feeds together so you all can keep up if you really, really want to.

On other news, my shiny new cloud infrastructure is up and running beautifully, including secure off-site automated data replication and automated download queuing and management all of which takes care of itself each night after we've gone to bed, and shuts itself down before we wake up while sending me emails daily with its progress so I know it's working okay. I'm still waiting for hard drive prices to drop considerably (see next paragraph) before implementing my RAID6 auto-bitrot healing solution for our very long lived data (and, indeed, I'm also waiting for RAID6 support to enter BTRFS mainline), but in fairness the six virtual machines spread across two hardware nodes which now operate both the ned Productions Limited infrastructure and everything in the house including the ADSL connection all work swimmingly. And I've cut our household baseline power consumption by another 50W despite the much improved, demand-on multi-terabyte shared data solution, so it's been a massive win all round!

So, how do you decide when to buy new hard drive and/or flash storage? A few years ago I did some primary research for Freeing Growth for a section on information storage trends and it's proved useful to keep that data up to date, so here's magnetic and hard drive storage capacities per inflation adjusted dollar from 1980 to April 2012:

I used the Generalised Logistic Function (also known as Richards' Curve) as the model with least-squares monthly average fitting which isn't a bad model for this sort of thing. I didn't go nuts on the regression, so don't expect Summer 2018 to be when flash will definitely catch up with magnetic. In fact, Freeing Growth (written in 2008) originally predicted 2013 as the crossover point, but what's happened is that magnetic has had a sudden extra growth spurt thanks to perpendicular recording while flash has slowed down its rate of improvement, so the catch up has run right out much later. In fact, if higher density flash is as unreliable as they think (Grupp et. al, 2012, The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory), the faded out logistic curve I regressed for flash storage is much more likely i.e. there will never be parity between magnetic and flash. Food for thought! If you want the raw data including its sources, I keep an Excel spreadsheet holding the full works here.

My PGCert exams start in just over a week, so my next two weeks are basically gone on finally ridding myself of the Institute of Education and the University of London. After that comes my OU Pure Maths coursework due just the week after, then I'll no doubt have to do my annual visit to Northern Ireland with my sister who is getting married next week. So, basically I'm very occupied with no freedom until the end of June, however after that I have a very exciting last summer in Europe planned. Firstly, I'm going to get my BEurtle issue tracking GUI out the door - it has the beginnings of a Redmine backend working, so I just need to add a Github backend, wire it all together and voilá, that's another major productivity improvement in my life achieved! Secondly, I'm going to make myself read all 1,100+ pages of the newly updated The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference (2nd Edition) from cover to cover - thanks to my ISO standards work, I'm fairly familiar with the language changes in C++11 but I can't admit the same for the C++11 STL where I feel myself woefully underinformed about the new facilities (even though no compiler supports more than a subset of the C++11 STL at present). Thirdly, I'm going to finish writing up and submitting my POSIX standard changes and my C language standard changes before I have to resign my SC22 convenorship. And fourthly, I'm going to go visit as many people around Europe as is practical to say goodbye. Sadly, another installment of my Freeing Growth book series looks unlikely - not enough time, unless my Canadian sponsored work visa gets delayed significantly, as we'll have to start packing up and selling off our stuff end of August.

Last item this post: my final review of Mass Effect 3. I'm going to be lazy and copy and paste my Amazon review of ME3:

I have very high standards for computer games - most of them I don't play past a few hours as they're a waste of my time. For example, I got bored with Half Life 2 (yeah, sacrilege I know). I got bored with Max Payne and especially Max Payne 2. Couldn't be arsed with Call of Duty or anything like that. Liked Portal 1 a lot though (not so much Portal 2, it was tedious). Liked Batman Arkham Asylum. Liked Chronicles of Riddick too. GTA4 wasn't bad, the beauty of Liberty City made up for a lot of other problems. Put up with Bulletstorm which was unusual by being annoying without being tedious or boring (driving the dinosaur was fantastic, but I digress, this is a ME3 review ...)

Let me put my standards another way: I haven't played a game through more than once since Duke Nukem 3D back in 1996. No, I am not kidding, no game since 1996 was good enough. Until, that is, Mass Effect 2 which I played through no less than THREE times. It wasn't that ME2 excelled at anything in particular, rather it was just really well executed across the board with a terrifically balanced insanity mode. Lots of attention to detail, lots of variety in destinations, conversations and adversaries. ME2 felt like my own personal movie. Its only real shortcomings were lack of ability to fight with the ship in the suicide mission, and the ending was a bit underwhelming.

That made me want to play ME1. Yeah, ME1. ME1 was really rough around the edges. Got very bored in the Mako with its stupidly slow cannon and stupidly slow shield recharge. Got very annoyed by constant bugs, many of them showstopper bad, and *particularly* the jerky animation when talking to people. Disliked the stupid level designs and constant darkness. Got very bored having to run around or drive around the maps for like forever. Also found the graphics crude and ugly compared to ME2. In fact, ME1 was just crude in general - but, what it really had going for it was *moments* of spectacularness such as first contact with the Prothean beacon, meeting the Prothean VI, or indeed everything from meeting that VI onwards when ME1 suddenly became very ME2-like including nice bright, pretty level design. ME1 had a cracking ending though, best of the series by far. All in all, you got the feeling that they were really *trying* in ME1, successfully learned from their mistakes in ME2 and especially with truly superb ME2 DLC like "Lair of the Shadow Broker", ME3 was surely going to be great.

And then, you get to play ME3. It's not that ME3 is a bad game - it's like 70% of a great game. It's just that missing 30% is so terribly important. ME3 has most of the polish of ME2 and the best weapon loadout system of the series. I also don't mind the in-your-face urgency in ME3, that's appropriate. It also successfully ties up most of the loose ends from the previous two in a satisfactory fashion. It has, like ME1, some spectacularly good moments - the whole level leading up to the mother of thresher maws on Tuchanka I thought very well executed. But there's a huge difference in ME3 over ME1 - ME1 was trying its best. ME3 is just unfinished at best, lazy at worst.

ME3 is what happens when people do cost-benefit analyses to art.

I could go on at some length on exactly what's wrong with ME3, but there's no point. What ME3 looks and feels like and surely is is a game where EA management told them to deliver in six months and drew a hard line under that date while pulling off staff to other games. Some parts of ME3 are finished e.g. the random conversations in the crowd. Others are woefully unfinished e.g. there is a huge gap between the end of ME2 and start of ME3, and don't get me started on the fob off crap that is everything after you defeat Kai Leng. Another thing which really bugs me is that some of the conversations have proper film style camera angled conversation trees a la ME1 and ME2, but most are literally just pressing play on a random non sequiter one of three recorded speech options with zero interaction. That was just very lazy of Bioware/EA, and it destroys any personal relationship you have with any of the characters. In combat, your foes are all almost identical, either Cerberus or husks which gets boring quick. Romance was also much shallower in ME3 than ME2 and ME1, in fact just about everything was shallow.

Bioware/EA ought to have finished the camera angling properly and done out conversation trees. They ought to have continued the game after Kai Leng instead of cobbling together some half baked nonsense and passing it off as an ending. I don't mind how they ended it, I DO mind how they implemented the ending. I want to feel my choices in 100+ hours of play led uncontroversially to one of their three possible endings. I don't mind just three options - though the sixteen completely different endings they promised would be much better - but you need another six hours of gameplay in there to take us from defeating Kai Leng to where Shepard has tried everything he/she could to avoid that final ending based on the choices he/she made throughout the series, but he/she accepts their fate when NO OTHER OPTION REMAINS. Preferably after you've killed all your friends (paragon) or after you've murdered millions (renegade) trying to avoid your fate.

Unfortunately, because EA can only see profit, we won't get a finished ME3 with this summer's improved ending patch. We'll just get some cinematics. A real shame. Mass Effect could have been an outstanding trilogy. As it stands, I'd suffer ME1 again before I'd play ME3 again. In short: I can't tell you not to buy ME3 because I know you'll have to. But be prepared to feel empty and cheated after you've finished it, just like when the Sopranos faded to black rather than giving us a decent ending like The Shield did. And remember that feeling next time you think of EA, or when you next hear of a soon-to-be-formerly-great studio like Bioware getting bought by EA. I'm not angry any more. Just sad at the opportunity wasted.

Yeah, pretty bitter I know. That said, the Facebook campaign page is now above 66,000 likes up from 40,000 or so last entry. A lot of very annoyed customers - indeed, they got EA voted "worst company in the US" for 2012 which is quite something when US banks are so reviled, and EA were obviously a bit pissy about the accolade in their official response. However, as I said in my Amazon review, until it affects their profits their management couldn't give a sod. Customers are there to be squeezed for every penny possible, and that's all EA understands.

Well, I think that's about it for the time being. Last three months were so boring there is nothing to report from them - it was nothing but study, coursework, job interviews, applying to jobs and migrating to the new cloud infrastructure. Quite literally that was the past three months. Amazing how time can pass when none of it is free! Until next time, be happy!

Monday 19th March 2012:

2012-03-19T17:00:00+00:00

Monday 19th March 2012: 5.00pm. Wow, a full six months between diary entries! Unfortunately it's been a combination of both being incredibly busy and not having a massive amount of anything interesting to say which has been the cause of my tardiness. Much of September went on getting the World Economics Association launched, in particular upon writing lengthy email replies, and getting all editions of the Freeing Growth manifesto into print. In October I was appointed as ISO SC22 mirror committee convenor for Ireland by the NSAI's ICTSCC committee which is the mirror of ISO JTC1. In November I was contracted by the WEA to write a virus scanning plugin for the PKP Open Journal Systems framework they use for their journal management (and which meant I had to touch PHP again, which is always unpleasant), and my copy editing of that book manuscript on Economics I mentioned last entry turned into a co-authorship of a book with Handelsblatt correspondent Norbert Häring called Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards. That book manuscript then sucked up pretty much all my free time until it was delivered to the publisher mid-February. In between came an avalanche of IT contract work, so much so that for the first time in a long time I had to actually turn paying work down which always sucks royally.

Since mid-February, I have finally begun to get around to a major systems upgrade of our computer systems. Before the end of its tax and accounting year in January, as normal my company had ordered its annual hardware parts which this time included a bottom end Sandy Bridge server which was amazingly cheap for what it is, despite having an 80 PLUS Gold power supply (>=90% efficiency) and therefore sips just 28W which isn't much more than my old Intel Atom 220 internet gateway despite being umpteen times more powerful. My plan is to solve a long-running headache in my server deployment: right now, there are three hand configured servers on the public internet which use a manual rsync for backup onto what is effectively Megan's television as it switches itself on when used, and off after a timeout. As time has gone along, that television has ended up storing not just backups, but all the shared stuff between my computers, all the GIT repos, all my company stuff etc. Yet it runs pretty much without backup - every now and then I dump copies of things onto an external 2Tb USB hard drive, but overall this setup - while somewhat secure and flexible - is extremely manual, and very time consuming. I also have the current problem that only my main workstation has a copy of VirtualBox on it for temporary OS deployments for testing, and that gets hand configured each time too. If I want to do a quick server config change, right now I have to chance my arm, take down my services or do a lengthy rsync to VirtualBox, distill a set of upgrade steps and repeat those on the live server as my ADSL outbound is too slow to upload images. All in all, none of this is ideal. For example, some months ago I had a major outage of all my websites and email due to a late night misspelling in /etc/network/interfaces which required a technican intervention as the server was no longer able to boot. That's expensive, never mind inconvenient. The fact that email, web and everything else is all the same server is particularly unhelpful.

What I really want is a cloud platform with virtualised OS instances, so to test you simply clone a running instance and employ a whole instance per service so each service stands alone and independent from the others. I also want to be able to deploy temporary OS installs much more quickly, so instead of always having to run test suites on my workstation using a fake localised config in VirtualBox, I can instead run them against a real server which could at any moment be deployed onto the real internet. A cloud platform lets you run a proper automated backup solution which auto-syncs parts of itself with the other servers as an off-site backup of the really important stuff, plus runs anti-bitrotting sweeps on the really long-lived data. That means that the public servers automatically are backed up locally, and the local servers are automatically backed up remotely. Furthermore, instead of almost all my big and important data living on an external USB hard drive which needs to be plugged in for me to use it (I don't leave it permanently plugged in, lest it get deleted or damaged), I could have all that data on demand secured with RAID redundancy and a snapshotting filing system like ZFS or BTRFS so no one can delete anything whether accidentally or otherwise. That alone would be extremely useful.

Anyway, I've got that cloud infrastructure working and here are the instructions on how to do it, but I haven't finished data replication yet. The slow pace is once again due to lack of free time, but also because the cloud stuff isn't a priority until Ubuntu 12.04 LTS has gone gold as most of my deployments are Ubuntu Server LTS, so with the imminent release of 12.04 there seems little reason to rush. In the meantime, I have been investing a lot of effort into a once and for all distributed bug tracking solution which lets you coalesce multiple sources of issue tracking into your GIT repo via both a RESTful HTTP API as well as a programmatic API. This subproject is called BEXML, and it's an extension of my BEurtle issue tracking GUI though it's also a fully standalone library. Getting this working - and I'm not far from finished - would be a major boon to not just myself personally who has to handle issues arriving via email, public bug trackers as well as privately when I spot a problem and need to remember to fix it some day, but also to several major open source software projects and those who run and coordinate those projects as they face exactly the same management problem as me.

Adding to the demands on my time are taking two university distance courses at the same time: the PGCert, which please God will be over this summer, as myself and the University of London/The Institute of Education have definitely parted ways after their never ending dreadful customer service (they simply don't care about the student experience [they go through the motions, but it's all hot air promises and nothing ever changes], and every staff member always says "it's not MY fault/responsibility". So if no one will ever take ownership of any problem not strictly within their personal remit, no wonder there's such appalling customer service!). I'm also taking that OU Pure Maths course which is surprisingly fun with all sorts of abstract puzzle solving, and as much as Open University courses are pure spoon feeding and regurgitation I am certainly not complaining in Pure Maths where spoon feeding is just fine by me! What irks me in courses such as Education is that I don't see why my well argued, supported and referenced opinion isn't as worthwhile as most of exactly the same within the Educational literature. I'm paying for the course, so my academic arguments ought to have equal initial standing with other non-peer reviewed arguments (they may well, and indeed probably will falter after analysis, but the point is that argument is argument). What happens instead is a NIH response, so if it's Not Invented Here then it's obviously no good, especially if the so called "educational expert" has never heard of anything outside their field and are too bloody lazy or ignorant to bother doing a god damn Google search before deciding that if they haven't seen it before, it must be lies. This is not what one would expect from the Institute of Education, one of the premier educational research institutions in the the world, but there you go. I, as the paying customer, am not paying £64 per ECTS credit (about €75 per ECTS, expensive by European standards) to be told my arguments are worthless relative to the course material - especially when the course material is constantly banging on about how student's sociocultural understandings are to be treated as valid-in-themselves and not to be dismissed out of hand just they they're doing with my arguments. I dislike hypocracy at the best of times, but I especially dislike being discrimated against for pointing their hypocracy out when I'm the one paying their wages. So definitely, the sooner I can get away from those robbing bastards the better, because what they advertised for their course has little to do with its practice and if UK consumer law applied to universities I'd submit a product mislabelling complaint (it doesn't, so you have no redress except via the quality regulator). Caveat emptor I guess. I just wish it hadn't cost me two thousand pounds to find out I've been conned.

So that's basically what I've been up to during the past six months. I had to can the Oxydérkeia project sadly - without a set of students to test it upon, and now it won't be part of my Masters in Research thesis with the IoE, rationally speaking it had to get chopped. It's a real shame though - that technology would have been extremely useful in a multitude of tasks, in everything from evaluating prospective new employees down to time and motion studies of computer using employees. However, the Institute of Education won't play ball and seem mired in their own navel gazing and ivory tower as their precious government funding gets cut (they have very little experience gaining research funding from industry), and I can't see recruitment agencies paying for its development given how unbelievably technologically backward recruitment is (it's because, of course, technology will eventually make much of their utility obsolete and they know it). Better then that I focus on other more productive-to-me uses of my time - hence my focus on solving that issue tracking problem as even if nobody else uses it, it would be bloody handy for me personally.

What as to the near future? In the immediate future, finishing what I started above is the plan. In the slightly longer term, chances are good that me and Megan are leaving Ireland for economically greener pastures. As much as I'm busy and doing things like turning down paying work much to my chagrin, Megan won't see a salaried job that has anything to do with teaching any time in the next five years. If we're going to have kids, we need a stable income. Ireland can't provide that for both of us, nor will she anytime soon and neither can most of Europe in its present state. So since the start of the US H1B visa season (March) I've started applying for jobs in the US and to a much lesser extent, Canada. So far interest has been very good - to date more than eight out of ten applications I've made have resulted in telephone interviews, and it makes last year when I was applying within the UK and Europe look dreadful in comparison. Surely one of these ought to result in a visa sponsorship, and off to (probably) Silicon Valley it'll be for us. If I get a window of at least a month this summer before we emigrate, I'd like to start a second Freeing Growth mini-book this time on the natures of growth, so asking things like What is growth? What forms does it take and how can these be measured using today's tools? Very 19th century, I know, but amazingly I can't find such open ended questioning since Jevons in the 19th century believe it or not. We're well overdue an update given oh, the rise of computer analysis, the development of new statistical mathematics and such. It's about knowing what we don't know.

Almost certainly it won't be another six months till the next entry! I'm playing Mass Effect 3 in the rare occasion I have the time, and I understand from the internet that the endings are shockingly bad with over 60,000 votes in a poll on the Bioware forums and over 40,000 votes in a Facebook campaign page calling for the endings to be fixed to something like what had been repeatedly promised by Bioware since the start of the trilogy. From my own perspective, so far into the game ME3 looks rushed: there are as many graphical, camera and gameplay glitches as there were in ME1, they stupidly made a core team member into a paid first day DLC because they clearly had nothing else to hand, they haven't bothered with most of the interactive person-to-person conversations they had in ME2, and I'm struggling to understand how they came up with this storyline given the events in ME2 as there appears to be a missing bit in between the two. I know that many of the lead storywriters quit Bioware about a year ago, and there has been a general talent exodus since Bioware were bought out by EA, never mind some dreadful ME book releases since that talent exodus one of which had to be recalled it was so bad. ME3 looks just as you would expect if the core talent left or stopped trying half way through development. The endings, I understand, appear to have been bolted onto the end of an unfinished story arc, so basically you're nearly there storywise and suddenly you get some long cutscene, get given three choices each of which chooses pretty much the same ending and supposedly that's the trilogy into which one has invested a hundred hours of your free time over four years done?

So expect, once I'm finished, to express my bitter disappointment here. Mass Effect 2 is the only game I've bothered to play more than once through since the 1990s, and I can count on one hand those games which I have ever played through more than once. The fact that all those decisions I took would have absolutely zero effect on the final outcome is a travesty, and even a company well known to hate customers such as EA must surely realise that these sorts of asshole move will impact profitability (which is the sole thing that EA management understand, let alone perceive). It's real unfortunate - what a lost opportunity so close to the finish line! Hardly the first time in human history to happen due to dreadful management though. So, till that next entry, be happy!

Wednesday 27th April 2011:

2011-04-27T01:26:00+00:00

Wednesday 27th April 2011: 1.26am. My, my, twas five months since the previous entry last time and this time it's like ... is it nearly seven months? Doesn't time just fly! What on earth could I have been up to for seven months? Didn't even bother with my traditional January birthday review of the past year ... I did think of it at the time, but I couldn't really think of much to say about 2010. It was the year that wasn't, and I can't say much more about it than that other than it was exactly what the Doctor ordered as far as my health and internal well being is concerned. If my life was fairly boring before I went to St. Andrews, and St. Andrews was like hyper activity on steroids with a whole load of amphetamines and cocaine thrown on top for extra speed, it certainly is only right and proper that life should be pretty deadly boring right now so equilibrium can become restored. But time just keeps passing, so much so that one is just getting older and older and one increasingly worries about going nowhere ... one cannot save human civilisation when no one knows you exist and certainly takes absolutely no notice of oneself whatsoever.

I can't think of much to report between October and Christmas 2010 - I mainly tipped away on my third Masters degree with the IoE which was consistently great all the way through until the UoL silently booted me out after the first module (I have since got myself readmitted, god damn it are the admin in UoL more useless than a waterproof teabag). Unfortunately, I also got booted out of the PGCert teaching qualification due to insufficient teaching hours, so instead I quickly signed up for a distance online UK NQF Level 5 Cert in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) which I'm about half way through. That certificate has been surprisingly tough to do - not just that the assignments are hard enough, but also that it's very hard to make oneself sit down and just do it, so it's a bit like having teeth pulled. Still, I'll get there eventually, and it's definitely been worth the money so far (see my guide on choosing a distance TESOL provider!)

Just after Christmas myself and Megan took a very short break abroad - we did a whistle stop visit to Brussels to see Natasja also seeing Ghent and Antwerp, and got a day or so just the two of us in Bruges where we had a surprising amount of fun especially with the triple Belgian beer. We then whisked through Madrid staying with Ruth in her very impressive new flat and before one would know it one was back in Ireland and our holiday was over. Despite sleeping in friends' houses rather than hotels, it cost us €1400 which is some holiday considering how incredibly short it was. Still, I saw a whole load of people I haven't seen in many years. It was interesting to see how they had aged, how some had become bitter and some had not, and where they had ended up - or rather - found themselves to be in the majority of cases.

Coming back from this holiday myself and Megan suddenly found our boring little life here in Cork not so half bad. Here we might be too poor to do much, but we do have free time, we choose what we do for the most part and we have actively chosen to be doing what we're doing. Most of the people we met have had none of those luxuries - generally, but not universally, one had to choose between income and happiness. In that, certainly, we fit the trend precisely - we have not found that rare elixir of wealth and happiness as yet either. Still working on that one!

At the end of January I started teaching French undergraduate Business students from IDRAC Lyon on their semester abroad to learn English, and for the next three months that "part time" job consumed pretty much my life. Because of the necessities of squeezing parts of a critical (i.e. Masters level) Business syllabus into fifteen hour weeks, and with the language limitation problem especially at the start, I found I had to wake at 4am to prepare the teaching materials as I was plainly just too zonked after teaching four hours each day (I have placed these teaching materials online here). Certainly at the start it was tough going, but after a while I figured out a handle on the class and I began to experiment by performing some action research on teaching the first half of Carol Springer's experimental Critical Thinking Business Scenario syllabus and see what happened. I have to admit, I was rather surprised with myself on how well I did actually - certainly the students seemed pleased, and they did an awful lot better on Springer's syllabus than the students she reported on in her 2004 study. I'm aiming to write the results of this mini-research up into an academic paper actually.

So that brings us up to two weeks ago now, much of the time since when I have spent doing all the miscellany I shelved during the teaching (I am not a good multitasker!). During the teaching I did manage to get in an attendance to the ISO C1X committee meeting in London in March to argue for my N1527 latency reducing malloc proposal, and while there I combined it with having dinner with two friends I hadn't seen since Hull days along with doing some market research on a new business idea I have had which is (for now) a secret R&D project provisionally entitled Luxubrations Oxyderkés (really a classic Latin-Greek combo Lucubrations Οξυδερκές) which I hope will be worth US$1bn a year within five years.

This is yet another idea from my book Freeing Growth actually. I originally tried a Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP) analysis of organisational behaviour with Prof. Anilla of Helsinki University as supervisor, but that failed to get any interest and therefore funding so since around August I had been pushing a different idea from my book around various Economics PhD programmes since October - one developing non-conventional monetary instruments as a superior and long term sustainable method of valuing capital - but none have bit unfortunately with universal rejections all round due to the supervisors claiming themselves insufficiently competent to supervise such a thesis (sigh! There are no risk takers left in academia nowadays!). So having tried my best with that one, by mid-March I reluctantly decided to give up on attempting to obtain doctoral funding altogether. Which is a real shame in my opinion, I'm a great researcher with grades in applied research to prove it, but the academic system doesn't encourage game changers at all, especially so since the 1970s - indeed here's yet another very recent article by someone eminent about how the PhD system is going to implode sooner rather than later, this time published in Nature of all things and that follows on from a recent article in The Economist and several books from eminent academics which blast what the doctoral model has become in Western academia.

On top of the PhD applications, I have been applying furiously for any kind of teaching or research post for which I think I might make it past shortlisting - perhaps a hundred and fifty job applications in total, and each of these require their own separate forms to be filled in and their statements written specially for them which can easily consume entire working days. To date, I have obtained not even a single interview which clearly shows I am wasting my time, so, for the past month or so, I tried applying to various multinational companies and once again, to date not even a reply.

One kinds wonders if my email system is working, but every test I've run on it works fine and additionally I receive plenty of email each day, not least concerning the high end Android phones I am currently selling at a loss (which is an arse!). That suggests email is indeed working, so basically neither the universities nor the multinationals are at all interested - even at an international level - which rather leaves one in a bind. After all, I do have several years of industry experience as well as two undergraduate degrees and one and a half postgraduate degrees. You would have thought me rather desirable as a highly skilled and experienced employee with a very ample set of easily googleable evidence proving it so, especially given the repeated articles recently in The Economist about the bidding war going on in the IT industry for "talent" which apparently is scarcer than hen's teeth, but apparently I am no longer rated as talent. Strange how things can change - I used to have to fend IT recruiters off with sticks, most recently Google itself in 2008, but I guess as the IT bubble reinflates I look old and past it nowadays ...

Yet in fact that couldn't be further from the truth. Thanks to plenty of rest, I feel more on my game this past year than at any stage since my second year of St. Andrews in 2005/2006. Additionally I have recently massively expanded and modernised my technological skill set as is very obvious from recent additions to my CV, so in addition to a whole load of business and research skills and I have a whole load of technological capability too. I guess they dislike none of this experience being in a paid context, but I think it's more likely that I'm looking a bit too old and too diversely educated to fit easily into some recruiter's mental map of what they're looking for. And besides, after all I could either be making it all up or be no good at putting any of this into practice, and even one alarm bell does drive away HR types much like plague ...

Anyway, I'd like to get having kiddies and getting married sooner rather than later, and with a sufficient amount of money to give them half a chance in a world most of which shortly is going to be starving, so I had been looking for a new business idea for the past year - something to tip away at which could generate billions of euro per year and appear so essential to the future of human civilisation that I and my family will be protected when the inevitable culling begins, or even better that I might finally be able to resource the development and deployment of Tn into its fullest form - as a new human written and spoken language which enables orders of productivity improvement, thus saving human civilisation from itself. And hence, after much thought, reflection and market research, I formulated Luxubrations Oxyderkés as my billion dollar ticket to getting "started" with my life. Much more on that with hopefully working software coming around September 2011 ... I'm going to need me a whole load of alpha testers anyway as this software needs to scale with data quantity very rapidly, so right now I'm teaching myself cloud deployment technologies. It should scale happily across Amazon's and Google's clouds anyway, in fact I'll be using a python library which is agnostic about the cloud provider used so it makes little difference.

So, all in all so far so good. I ain't dead nor suicidally depressed from lack of life purpose quite yet anyway, and Megan is too busy with her MEd which finishes this summer to complain or even think about her lot too much. I'd daresay after the summer she'll get right fidgety though, and who'd blame her - we've been here in Cork now for nearly three years, hardly an insubstantial time, and we're getting so over qualified that why we aren't "top talent" yet is beyond both of us.

Anyway, it's nearly 4am, so I really ought to be off to bed. In May the thirteenth birthday of this virtual diary will occur, I might post some photos of some "Made to Measure" clothes I had made for myself recently - they may be cheap for what they are, but results can be a little hit and miss trust me. Anyway more on that hopefully in a few weeks time. Until then, be happy!

Wednesday 18th May 2011:

2011-05-18T21:50:00+00:00

Wednesday 18th May 2011: 9.50pm. Last entry I mentioned that I was going to review some "custom" or "bespoke" clothing which really is "Made to Measure", or "MTM" clothing because custom/bespoke is when the tailor performs multiple fittings on you personally (and of course charges for it). I actually got into the idea because of the lack of affordable quality shirts for potential work/interviews, and because the great trouble with my body shape is that I'm still fairly slim and all the reasonably priced shirts you see in the stores are way, way too baggy for me. Now, if you're willing to go past €50 a shirt you can get a "Euro Slim Fit", and if you're willing to enter the €80 price range you can get a decent fitting shirt made from quality material that looks good. Anything less has shoddy quality, or doesn't fit with folds of excess material, or more usually is both. Another thing which you can never find is a shirt with a decent length, they're too short so they keep coming out of your trousers during the day which makes you look like you're a teenager still in school or something.

Yeah, as you might be able to tell, getting decent white work shirts have irritated me for years ...

Here's another thing which irritates me: ties, especially when made of silk, have the annoying tendency of working themselves loose over the day unless you do up the knot so tight that you crush and wrinkle the material which does not bode well for its longevity and kinda wastes the money you spend on them. Thankfully, this is a well known problem - what you do is to get a collar with a tie hold ("tab collar"). This consists of a fold of material (sometimes a pin) which you clip under the tie and which holds it in place right throughout a full day of movement which is great and solves the problem nicely. Unfortunately, getting a shirt with a euro slim fit, decent manufacturing AND a tie holding collar, well best I could find at that time was Savile Row and they charge £60 a shirt (though in fairness, this includes delivery) [That was last October/November. Typically, now they are charging £20, and I see all their competitors have similarly halved their prices too. Maybe the factory direct MTM websites are forcing them to compete?]

iTailor Made to Measure (MTM) shirts

Anyway, in trying to find a more affordable alternative I found itailor.com which is one of many places on the internet which delivers straight from the factory i.e. cuts out the importer, distributor and the shop you buy it in. This reduces the price to just over £20 as they do charge delivery in addition to the front quoted price. Moreover, you get to choose exactly what you want including precise dimensions, thread and material colouring, detail, collars, cuffs and so on. If you want a longer shirt, no problem. If you want a monogram on the shirt, also no problem. itailor.com I believe are based in Thailand where a lot of the clothes sold by places like Savile Row are made to order anyway.

So far so good! So I get Megan to take my measurements according to the pretty good instructions on their site and order a single test shirt. They usefully send emails telling you when it's being made, when it's dispatched and so on - good! About six weeks after dispatch it arrives, and it looks as you can see on the right. That was literally straight out of the packet, as you can surely tell as it hasn't been ironed.

So what do I think of the result? Below are how the shirt looks from the front, side and back. As you can see, I took french cuffs and pleats along the back.

So, big difference then - the shirt actually fits me around the middle. It's unfortunate it isn't ironed and I'm not wearing a proper pair of pants because it definitely looks pretty good too - and considerably better than your typical white dress shirt.

And what about the quality? If you click on the profile of the cuff on the left you should see the material up close. It's a sort of denim like weave, except that the lines are much finer than with denim. Certainly feels strong, if a little on the thick side, and appears to me like it ought to wear well. Wrinkle-wise, it comes out real nice from a hot iron, but it certainly wrinkles around the arm and elbows during the day.

As you can see, the embroidered initials are rather an ostentatious size which apparently is the norm for the domestic market in Thailand. I'd strongly recommend you use the mildest colour for the thread that they offer - on the left I used lightly grey, and that isn't too obvious. With the second batch I used dark blue, and they're very obvious - and I'd say too much so for Western tastes where we'd be thinking two millimetres high or so rather than the best part of a centimetre.

In terms of the cuff and collar material, the first shirt I got appeared to have no bonding at (i.e. it wasn't stiffer around the cuffs and collar, it was just two unglued bits of cloth). Being pleased with the first shirt, I ordered another four to make up a full week of work shirts. The second batch were identical to the first apart from some minor changes to the dimensions and the blue threaded initials - however, these were bonded at the cuffs and collar. Whether the bonding makes much difference to the look I don't know - it certainly helps when tying the tie anyway, and for that alone when you're half asleep in the morning it's worth it.

So, me personally, I'm pleased with them. Definitely the best shirt I've ever owned at any price, and I'd recommend itailor.com to others. However, considering that Savile Row will now do you one of theirs for the same price, and the six week wait for delivery from itailor.com, it's a much tougher choice. On balance, especially given the superb glove-like fit, I'd actually plump for itailor.com over Savile Row, though if I thought that I might gain weight in the next few years I would choose differently.

The next thing I tried was a MTM suit, this time from India. That didn't go so well, but I'll leave that to the next entry. Be happy!

Thursday 11th August 2011:

2011-08-11T18:05:00+00:00

Thursday 11th August 2011: 6.05pm. Plenty of progress once again in my life since the last update, though still not much of it is yielding tangible results which is becoming a little disheartening. In May I received news that the two memory allocation academic articles I wrote last year had been rejected, so I fired them onto arxiv.org and one can find both of them either here on arXiv or via Google Scholar along with my other academic writing. In June I took my summer exams for my MRes degree in London, and while I haven't got back my grades yet I would assume that I received a C grade much as with all the coursework I have undertaken to date (I am unusually consistent in this MRes course - in Hull, St. Andrews and U.C.C. I had a huge variance in grades received ranging from bare passes up to firsts. Not so with this MRes, it's a C grade every time!). If you're interested in reading the coursework I submitted, it is - as always - here with all the other coursework I have ever written.

Weirdly, considering how I was moaning last entry about not being valued by tech recruiters in the middle of another IT bubble, I was separately approached by both Google and Amazon to join teams in their main office locations in Mountain View and Seattle respectively. In order to find out if they wanted to hire me specifically or just wanted a body to fill a slot, I opened the negotiations with Google by asking for their "20 percent time" to be cast-iron written into my contract, figuring that if every engineer gets it anyway it wouldn't be much to ask. It turns out that Google doesn't give its recruiters any scope to negotiate anything other than pay, and much worse there is no clear line of management authority for recruiters to refer contractual negotiations onto. The poor recruiter was basically left dangling by her line manager, much to her evident frustration. Highly unimpressive.

Google is a bit different from most IT companies in having roomfuls of professional recruiters find talent and then match them to departments according to a generic needs analysis. This contrasts with the other approach which is where team leaders specifically find talent to add to their personal team. The former has advantages in preventing team leaders from being distracted by needing to do recruitment and preventing leaders from hiring their friends and (theoretically) creating political factions which distract from organisational goals. The latter has advantages in that a team leader knows specifically what kinds of person (rather than vacant roles) can be added to their team where a HR bod simply cannot, it allows the leader to form a personal relationship with the candidate which makes getting actual talent past HR (which is remarkably good at filtering out extremes leaving just average to pass through) much easier, and of course a personal relationship enables much better team culture, work ethos and morale to be maintained over time. That last point, in particular, will keep an employee from being head hunted even when the competition are throwing money at team members (up to 30% over their existing salary according to surveys - after that even the most loyal team member will tend to get fidgety).

In short, I'd reckon that for most cases in a knowledge industry, having team leaders do their own recruitment is on balance superior for long term organisational success. It does come with much added pressure for middle-upper and upper management to contain empire building among the ranks. But I do understand where Google is coming from, even if in my opinion on average it will wreak havoc with employee morale and retention over time - after all, they designed this system having watched the latter system cause IBM and many other giants get into big trouble in the early 1990s by failing to reign in factionisation and politics-playing in their ranks.

Anyway, the Amazon approach fell into the latter category where a specific team leader approached me directly. And they were not only able to negotiate on contract, but were willing to do so. Unfortunately, we fell just short of a meeting of minds this time round so it didn't happen for this year's H1B visa intake. But in short, I was impressed. Impressed enough that I could easily see myself working for them in the near future. It's human relationships that make a knowledge industry work sustainably - Google don't seem to get this. They think it's about the technology and engineering great technology, and for that you need highly capable individuals. In truth, mediocre technology will sell just fine, it's actually about building, maintaining and retaining a superior implementation team none of whom need to be rockstar talent (though that helps). In this, Microsoft back when it was still not entirely dysfunctional, it truly proved the truth of team before technology, and interestingly it was when it began to believe it could do sweeping technology building in the form of WinFS et al it became managerially so dysfunctional that progress ceased. To be honest, big technology can't be sustainably achieved outside a team of six rockstars in my opinion. Our culture isn't mature enough to scale higher yet.

That brings me onto the third potential employer I could have had since May. Out of all those PhD applications I put in since Christmas, just one turned into an interview which was with a University of Wales joint venture with Tinopolis funded by UK government money researching business deployment of new e-Learning platforms i.e. right up my street, and one for which I ought to have been uniquely qualified to the exclusion of any other candidate given how few would be qualified in CompSci, Economics, Management and Education. Unfortunately, they autocratically set the interview date twice without consulting the applicants as to its suitability (both dates were bad for me) - already a bad sign, because in academic employment circles that's a strong hint that a role has been preselected by an internal candidate and when you see a university do that it's a strong hint to not waste your money and time attending the interview. Still, I really liked the role, and I really wanted it despite knowing it was almost certainly a waste of time. So I attended despite the murderous car + ferry + train journey to get there, and after spending €400 of my own money I knew within two minutes of the interview starting that I was wasting my time. I was spending my money as a formality to let them demonstrate they had performed due diligence in finding the "best" candidate. If they paid for the interview I'd just be annoyed, but when it's my money they're wasting I feel angry about it.

A similar thing happened at a recent interview for the Ignite business incubator programme for which I had the interview two weeks ago. This is a local initiative to try and better support early stage venture businesses because due to the recession, Ireland is losing a lot of its talent to overseas right now. In that it is highly laudable. However, within thirty seconds of the interview starting I realised that they thought I wasn't a local because I had been educated overseas, and god forbid I had worked in other places past Dublin and London - and despite having lived here since I was two, I quickly realised that I didn't stand a chance because only one person on the panel was even remotely interested and only one other bothered to try asking "bad cop" questions, and even then barely. A shame, not least because welfare have cut my dole by 20% because I started my own business (yeah they took two years to arrive at that decision) and had I entered the incubator programme it would have moved me onto dole plus €20 per week non-means tested which would be a big bump to my income. However, seeing as this waste of my time didn't cost me €400 I'm not complaining. You win some and you lose many.

What else have I been up to? Despite the interview with the University of Wales getting in the way, I managed to tele-present over the internet at the Institute of Education's Summer Doctoral Research Conference and you can see its slides here. The presentation was about the work I was about to do on Luxubrations Oxydérkeia, my super-secret R&D project, and which is making good progress since so I can now afford to be much less secret about it. Most of the hard stuff is nearly done, with the hard stuff being the interface layers with all major web browsers and with Microsoft Word. I've more or less finished the browser plugins for the web browsers - they were painful enough, even with modern web browsers being remarkably standards compliant nowadays so much so that the per-browser coding was actually quite minimal outside the specific browser plugin support code. The BIG problem is that browsers are extremely slow doing some operations at which other browsers are much faster, so for example capturing AJAX induced web page updates will kill one browser using one technique but will fly on another. I haven't gone nuts on the optimisation here - browsers change too quickly - but it's a very different problem from even two years ago when writing that Web 2.0 FIXatdl editor where browser bugs makes Web 2.0 programming very painful. Good!

As for the Microsoft Word plugin, well actually capturing change in the browsers was far easier because they expose what has changed. Believe it or not, there is no way of capturing change in Microsoft Word without hooking key and mouse presses and reading the entire document as XML, then running a diff routine over the last XML dump you had i.e. Word won't tell you what has exactly changed. In other words, it absolutely destroys performance for any substantial document, even on a beefy computer. I can get away with it for student-length essays, but I'm unhappy with the solution. I need to think of something more sane, perhaps by limiting the XML dumping to what's currently on the screen or something, or perhaps I could configure a fake change tracker and watch what it stores. Not ideal mind you, and it's annoying because obviously Word itself knows what was changed as it needs to determine what to repaint on the screen. It just doesn't expose that to the outside world (as far as I can tell).

Anyway, all changes get captured as XML diffs and fired via a JSON-RPC RESTful HTTP interface to a Python program which then pushes them into a local NoSQL database which is XML native. It then will at some near future point construct graphs linking changes into an audit trail. I had to substantially improve a JSON-RPC library for Javascript which I found on the internet to get this to work at a satisfactory speed, and I also had to do some .NET 4.0 surgery on Jayrock (the JSON library for .NET) to add dynamic RPC method invocation as amazingly Jayrock wants you to set up and tear down invocations as if one were programming in C rather than the dynamic object environment that .NET is. All these things obviously are not working on new Oxyderkeia features, hence being rather behind schedule, but hey this always happens in any cutting edge software development.

In fact, I took a major detour from Oxyderkeia last week by spending six days writing and releasing BEurtle, an issue tracking GUI plugin for the TortoiseXXX series of VCS GUI interfaces. It wasn't supposed to be six days - in fact, BEurtle took just three days to write and polish to (in my opinion) a high standard considering it is the first real program I have ever written in either C# or .NET ever. No, fully half the time writing BEurtle was spent slamming my head repeatedly against Windows Installer and WiX, a thin sanity wrapper around the mess which is Windows Installer. Windows Installer should never have been released to the public in the state it is in - it's unfinished quite frankly. It's not even at an alpha release stage it's so unfinished. I don't disagree it isn't capable, nor that it isn't a valid solution to the historical problem of doing Windows installers right, it's just that it's less than a quarter completed. It also - for some unfathomable reason - has its own (highly inferior) GUI system and it's own (highly incapable) scripting system, when as far as I can tell they should have used .NET as the GUI and perhaps a reduced subset of VBScript as the sandboxed scripting language (I'm no fan of VB, but it was already there and easily repurposed). That would have been a vastly superior - and quite frankly, much easier to implement for everybody involved - solution. While you're at it, clone the RPM or APT package system used by Linux. Hell, even Python's package system beats the pants off this mess on Windows.

Anyway, I put myself through that agony because believe it or not, WiX is the only sane, non-obscenely expensive way of generating MSI files which are in any way more complex than installing a few files into a folder - and while WiX is tough to work with, it's far more sane than the alternative. I figured I'd need to master the technology anyway for Oxyderkeia's release because I want to deploy Oxyderkeia as a self-deploying, self-updating, delta-driven, web based installer with modular parts using ClickOnce, DDay or preferably WiX ClickThrough if they ever get around to releasing a working implementation. And for that, on Windows at least, there isn't a massive amount of choice without paying obscene fees - even the venerable NSIS isn't quite up to self-healing delta-driven self-updating, though it's still much superior to Windows Installer in terms of ease of writing against it.

So, so far so good. The native XML NoSQL database is quite fun - as a little exercise, I hacked together a python script which takes this website which is a collection of technologies and HTML standards from 1998 onwards, sanitises them into XHTML, and stuffs them into the native XML database. You can then execute XQuery operations against them - XQuery is to a native XML database as SQL is to a traditional database. For example:

xquery declare namespace xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";
db:open('database')//xhtml:div[@class='diaryentry']

This looks rather like good old XPath, and indeed XPath is a subset of XQuery. Here one asks for all

elements with a class attribute of "diaryentry" from all documents i.e. the same thing as the Atom syndication feed supplied by this site. This returns 412Kb of XHTML and some 54 items in about 200ms on a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom - hugely slower than a traditional database, and far too slow to backend a website for example, but plenty fast enough for Oxyderkeia where I think even three seconds would be okay for many operations. Most of Oxyderkeia is asynchronous, mainly for scalability across millions of simultaneous users, so you shouldn't notice your web browsing ever slowing down even if it's pushing megabytes of data around databases in the background - well, rather it's as fast as it can be made, and it can't be improved except by moving less data around. And we won't know what to thin out until we know what isn't important!

So there we go. Not a bad three months, and a good summer so far. Next entry I almost certainly will talk about M2M clothing because itailor.com very kindly offered me a substantial discount on a M2M suit from them after my favourable review of their shirts below. So, till next time, be happy!

Monday 5th September 2011:

2011-09-05T11:15:00+00:00

Monday 5th September 2011: 11.15am. Just finished one of my periodic upgrades of nedprod.com's implementation technologies to include the latest state-of-the-art improvements - as you may have noticed, commenting has finally been added to most but not all of the website (in particular, I haven't bothered upgrading pre-2000 bits of the website as much of it is basically tag soup). This accomplishes something that I have meant to get around to since, well, oh about ten years ago. I guess my internet hate group - who are happy to say horrible things about me and my loved ones on anonymous forums, but never to me personally by email - will be happy, because now they can anonymously say horrible things via the new commenting infrastructure. Joy for them I guess.

I won't bore you too much with the gruesome details of the technologies upgraded, but briefly I did a lot of work on the internals, cleaning up almost all the non validating XHTML by having everything run through an XML validator as a pre-flight check before uploading is permitted. I also added HTML5 semantic microdata markup from the vocabulary blessed by all the major search engines at schema.org by splicing the HTML5 microdata spec into the XHTML 1.0 one, and if you want to know a whole load more about how to do this yourself I've made my efforts available for public use here. The semantic data markup is pretty cool, for example this page contains eight diary postings and two product reviews. Now search engines know that too.

On other news, I failed the MRes module about which I was distinctly unhappy seeing as I studied and prepared well for it. I've decided to drop the MRes down to a PGCert and get out next summer - the course material is great, the assessment structure average, but the admin and customer service end of things is as awful as you'll experience anywhere in the world. For example, I sent two emails to exams and fees last week - both pretty important to reply to I'd say seeing as I'm worth over seven grand to them - and yet again, no replies whatsoever. I'm out of patience with them, so I'm taking my money elsewhere. Probably to take an undergraduate diploma in Pure Mathematics with the Open University actually, starting with this module in Pure Maths from this February onwards. Specifically I want to complete a course in Topology sometime in the next few years - I think it would do me good.

There have been a few other bits and pieces. An updated 2011 edition of my Freeing Growth Manifesto is nearly published - I got the print sample from the printers about a week ago, and even with the print and registration errors it was wonderful to see an actual, real-life, book written by me in my hands. I also have been doing some more stuff with the World Economics Association. And my sister's graduation from university is tomorrow, so congrats to her on achieving that. As for Oxyderkeia, it's been sitting on hold for about three weeks - Megan needed help with her final thesis for her Masters, and the weeks leading up to September is always busy with life maintenance stuff anyway. And I like to finish what I start where possible, so when I started upgrading nedprod I felt I ought to finish it before moving onto the next thing.

I guess that's that. Back to copy editing a book manuscript on Economics by a well known author I know. Be happy!

Sunday 3rd January 2010:

2010-01-03T16:28:00+00:00

Sunday 3rd January 2010: 4.28pm. Wow, some three months have passed and it's suddenly 2010! Has this been the longest break in virtual diary entries in twelve years? I think so. And yet again when I consider what I have done since the last entry, I know that I did loads of stuff but I can't quite think of any of it. What I have done recently is fix the "All Things Niall" Feed which had broken itself because Yahoo Pipes simply isn't working properly anymore and apparently they aren't going to fix it, so I wrote up some PHP which munges together all the feeds and outputs a combined feed which works nicely: this "blog" (I prefer "virtual diary") as it appears on Facebook and LinkedIn and many other sites, is now working again.

I went to the US for Thanksgiving in late November with Megan's family, then went travelling around Europe visiting people I'm still in contact with (and my apologies to those of you who weren't close enough to my line of travel this time round) which lasted until just before Christmas. My travels were hardly boring: I managed to fall severely out with Johanna over a matter of ideology, and we are no longer in regular contact at my insistence. Most sad. I am very upset about it.

The Christmas break seemed longer than usual this year in the sense that I haven't done any useful work since returning home until yesterday - partially the fault of how the weekends fell this year, but also a determined attempt to have a proper holiday break this year considering that the prior two Christmases were spent writing essays or other coursework which did not aid the holiday spirits! I suppose also that I am hoping for 2010 to be the start of a whole raft of new endeavours now that the company is established and trading with a hopefully viable business model, Megan has permission to stay and work in Ireland indefinitely and now we just need to kick off the next round. I finally went ahead and purchased an exercise bike - the outdoors proved too cold and inconvenient to incorporate into my daily schedule, and the PhD I was invited to apply for at UCC researching Federated Autonomic Trust Management did not come through for me which was a surprise given my superb background experience in that area - I had been anticipating walking in each day from a remote car park and that way gaining the needed exercise. Either way I recognise that my cardiovascular system isn't maintaining itself with zero effort any more - as I age it appears to need increasing maintenance much as with my gums where flossing has become very necessary as otherwise they recede (i.e. gum disease!).

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I finally got around to erecting a proper company website for ned Productions Limited which is now listed on the navigation bar on the left and I also did some purchasing of stock and setting up of a shopping cart system such that internet users can buy stuff - probably Untangle boxes rather like this guy who beat me to it but thankfully he's US and dollar centric. During the latter end of October and the start of November I wrote a series of economic policy articles for the Irish progressive think-tank TASC copies of which I have placed on the neo-capitalism website as the last one was too radical for them to publish so they silently dropped me. I do remember doing some more work on nedmalloc for ARA and indeed I still have some loose ends to tie up there during the next few weeks, and hopefully before the end of January I'll release a beta of nedmalloc as it has so many new features. Social welfare still hasn't paid out which at six months now is breathtaking, but at least they owe me at least five grand now which is good since once again I will run out of money at the end of January. I also have the end of year tax and accounts filing for the company which must be lodged very shortly in a tax efficient manner i.e. cue me trudging through the Irish tax code.

Lastly, this year I will either get a PhD started or get that summaries of Economics papers book written. One or the other: failure to accomplish either is unacceptable now that the company is generating money though it will take some time before I can leave welfare support given the current economic climate. For the PhD, it all depends on obtaining research funding for which I firstly need a willing PhD supervisor - and that alone I have thus far failed to accomplish, but I am slowly getting closer.

Next entry will be in just a few weeks time: my annual "summary of the past year" post which I do around my birthday when I will turn thirty-two! Until then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Wednesday 3rd February 2010:

2010-02-03T17:42:00+00:00

Wednesday 3rd February 2010: 5.42pm. So much for my birthday entry being anywhere near my birthday! Still, being two weeks late is not that bad considering the three month gap before the last entry I guess ... and I have been oh so busy since the last entry. Firstly we had that great freeze in Ireland (and indeed Europe) which effectively extended everyone's Christmas holidays by quite a bit, and because everyone was marooned in their houses not a lot happened for anyone at all really. Our water got cut off because the mains water pipe froze, but we weren't as badly off as a lot of people who had been cut off due to pipes bursting - for a long time now Ireland has had some of the leakiest water pipes in Europe with more than half our water going into the soil. No one's that bothered - we're blessed with lots of fresh water, indeed often too much fresh water due to us cutting down all the trees surrounding the upstreams of our rivers such that our rivers and towns get frequently flooded much as happened very severely before Christmas when most of Cork city and western Ireland got submerged. Anyway, by the time we got to my birthday everyone had just about got back to work and stuff started moving. My main preoccupation at that time was putting together my company's first annual return, and thanks to the assholes at Microsoft we first had to find a replacement for Microsoft Accounting 2009 which they had suddenly retired without warning. That meant evaluating a series of ERP and accounting packages which sucked up a week or so. I eventually plumped for the almost unknown but very highly respected VT Transaction+ which has garnered rave reviews from small business in the UK for years now, but it was not an easy choice at all.

Most UK and Irish small business uses Sage which royally sucks as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use it will tell you. Sage is extremely expensive for what it does, it has an appallingly bad user interface, it is extremely unintuitive, it causes anyone using it to mostly spend their time ripping out their hair and cursing it - and best of all, its more recent SME editions have dropped multi-currency support which is jaw dropping in the European context. There are others such as MYOB, but Sage bought them not too long ago so I don't have high hopes for its future. The other big contender is QuickBooks, but they suffer from an idiotic business plan where they lure you in with time-bombed features in cheaper editions which suddenly expire and then it demands a paid upgrade to start working again. Before you know it, you're handing over two thousand euro a year for a package which does what you need and moreover, they basically did a Mafia extortion on you.

Those are the two big boys, and both are rubbish options. Both vendors deserve to go out of business for their ethics and the shoddy quality of their products. If you do any internet research at all, you will quickly wonder how the hell they ever get any new customers - but then again I guess most new business owners never bother researching the internet before they buy because you can do one hell of a lot better than either Sage or QuickBooks AND for a lot less money.

This leaves a SME ERP solution - ERP systems are basically an operating system for a company, so they tell each worker what to do and when to do it and the ERP system (is supposed to) manages everything else such as the accounts and stock levels. I evaluated two options for an ERP solution: (i) Adempiere, probably the most featured open source ERP currently available and (ii) Interprise Suite, because they offer a free one user licence. These two were chosen for evaluation because they both supported European VAT and multi-currency - both are absolute necessities for an Irish company as we tend to do a lot of importing and exporting - which almost every other solution I could find on the internet doesn't do. Boy do I miss Microsoft Accounting! They had such a great product for its price .

Both of these solutions were very good - both had all the right features and both were well implemented. Interprise had a much better user interface as it runs as a native application on Windows whereas Adempiere has a nasty Java/Web interface. Adempiere, like so many open source applications of its kind, required an awful lot of setting up and lengthy configuration - so much so it got discounted because of it. Interprise had pre-written templates which did almost all of the config for you, thereafter it was just lots of tweaking. What put me off Interprise was that the demo/single user edition they supplied was last updated in 2007 - hardly boding well given the extensive changes to VAT rules since 1st Jan 2010 (and precisely why everyone had to drop Microsoft Accounting so quickly), and I got the feeling that they'd hardly be bending over to support a single-user licence like myself. And besides, I had a natural aversion to getting into bed with another company who wasn't 110% committed to the product - I didn't want to have to do another Microsoft Accounting style migration as trust me, migrating between accounting systems is painful.

So in the end I went with VT Transaction+ which is not an ERP solution, it's just a simple accounting program. However it costs just £200 a year as compared to £1700 or so for Sage/QuickBooks or £1000 or so a year for Interprise, plus it has full support for VAT, multi-currency and it has really good Excel export so it spits out a very nice properly formatted set of accounts in Excel ready for submission. Having purchased the software, I then fully migrated the accounts, hacked at the templates to fudge the UK accounting format into the Irish standards (thankfully the regulatory standards are similar, it's just that all the laws have different names for obvious reasons) and finally submitted my annual return today!

Meanwhile, throughout all these fun and games I also finished the contract with ARA which took another twenty-three hours this past month, though I only had the NTE for twenty hours but I like to finish a job properly. And lastly, mainly because I've had a VPS sitting in Los Angeles doing nothing since November, I finally rented a VPS in Atlanta and implemented a geo-directing DNS server such that nedproductions.biz and other hosted sites now use their local server rather than having to go to Europe all the time which is really very neat. Who knows, soon I might even be in a position to start selling Plone webspace at long last (I need to finish configuring the shopping cart first)!!!

So, I am now thirty-two years old, and as always in the birthday post it's time to look back on another year of life. This is what I have done this past year:

Escaped the BIS Masters in UCC
Looking back on it now I can't believe how much I hated that course or indeed that entire academic year. I disliked academia enough in St. Andrews, but at least they generally weren't as pig ignorant of their own field, and moreover my time in St. Andrews was made worth it by all the non-academic stuff going on which, much like in Hull, was the real education. That real education was non-existent during my time in UCC, and so it was nothing but bad all the way through, not helped by the chip on the shoulder which most Cork people have anyway towards anyone with talent.

I am extremely glad to not be doing that anymore. It didn't help that I was mentally and physically absolutely exhausted after St. Andrews and simply no longer in the mood for any of that bullshit. I have been deliberately taking ten to twelve hour sleeps each night since last summer and my overall health and wellbeing has massively improved. When I look into the mirror I no longer see anything like the lines on my face or dark bags under my eyes and I no longer wonder to myself if I might have cancer. When I compare me now to photos from the end of St. Andrews, I literally look five years younger. I feel about ten years younger though, and it's great!

Now all that said I did meet some good people during my time in UCC, and the prize money from the Enterprise Ireland competition kept both myself and Megan alive for nearly four months. For the prize money alone I think the BIS Masters was probably worth it overall, and I suppose it's an extra arrow to my bow for the foreseeable future. Winning the prize certainly sounds good - in the interviews I've done since you can see them being noticeably impressed. It's funny how people value such things. So overall, I think that I will remember the 2008/2009 academic year as being rather like my year at Trinity College Dublin: not a lot of fun at all, but an edifying experience which stands to you in the long run even though it shouldn't if there were any justice in the world.
Set up my own company
I have dreamed of setting up my own company and working for myself ever since my experiences working in EuroFighter where I saw that the contractors were the guys on top of the pile, and while I was working sixty hour plus weeks, I was being paid for thirty-five and therefore getting an equivalent of €7/hour after tax. Meanwhile they were being paid €50/hour upwards with time and quarter overtime when management fucked up and made you work late. Had I been an IT contractor at that time I would have been earning €80/hour given it was pre-IT bubble burst. I suppose it helps a lot that the lads I grew up with all started their own businesses, plus my mother's family were entrepreneurial, but I really have to admit that I particularly value the ability to work on what I want when I want, and if one day I wake up and I don't feel like working then I don't have to.

Moreover, let's face it: I have a personality which many people find disagreeable, and I also find working with many people stressful because they don't give a toss about doing their best. Not having to work with such people, or when I do they are paying me for their screwups, well I find that very pleasant indeed. I don't mind at all someone wasting my time if €100 is going into my hand .

I guess what I mean to say is that I have a value inside my head of what my time is worth to me, and I strongly object to working any job where my time is not similarly valued by my employer. Because I value my liberty so much, I have a fairly high valuation of my time - sufficiently high that most ordinary jobs won't pay such a figure to someone as young as myself. Therefore, for someone of my age, the only route to such high marginal earnings has to be self-employment.

Anyway, I last tried to form my own company after returning from Spain back when I was trying to commercialise Tn with venture capital funding. Without the backing I decided not to proceed, but had I not gone to St. Andrews then I definitely would have formed my own company. Well now I have, and while I haven't made much money yet I am hoping to report large profits this time next year!
We survived!
For much of this past year I fretted about how I was going to feed myself and Megan - indeed, for much of the last eighteen months we had between two and four months worth of money to go before we were destitute. It is truly a horrible feeling because you never truly relax - and no, social welfare has still not paid out though I am glad to report that my dole application has left the Dublin processing queue and has entered the Cork processing queue, so the welfare office currently think it'll probably be a full year from application to payout. Hopefully they will backpay me in full because I am now about €4000 in debt!

We have been immensely lucky in hindsight. Firstly things like the car haven't spectacularly broken down or anything bad and unexpected happen like an accident or sickness. Even in the positive sense things have gone well when they might have not, such as us both passing our driving tests okay which was great as hitherto we were driving illegally, and it was a great relief to be finally actually covered by our €1000/year insurance. Secondly on every occasion when the bank balance started to enter the "fumes remaining only" level something unexpected has magically appeared in the nick of time e.g. the Enterprise Ireland prize money, the ARA contract or indeed Megan's work permit to name but a few.

Between all of these we have finally become financially okay for these last three months, and I no longer fret about everything suddenly crashing down. In fact if things continue well we may even take a small holiday this summer, nothing fancy but nevertheless a major step up.

I think that those three things are the most significant accomplishments of my past year from my present perspective. I do wish that I had got my PhD rolling, but it was not for a lack of applications made or effort invested. I haven't done much on rolling my own PhD in the past few weeks given my busyness, but now that the ARA contract is cleared, the accounting systems migrated, the Annual Return filed and the geo-targeting DNS server implemented, I am hoping to dedicate two days per week into it and writing my Economics study book. For the other four days per week I need to get a shopping cart implemented, then I can start selling my content filtering boxes of which I have three already built and in stock below as well as selling general Plone web hosting and services.

So, so far so good! Let us once again hope that 2010 is our best year yet! Be happy!

Wednesday 5th May 2010:

2010-05-05T17:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 5th May 2010: 5.00pm. Rather like in the last entry, the last three months feel more like six! Which I suppose is probably a good thing in a way, but I do feel quite tired-in-a-way-sleep-can't-cure sort of way. Right now I am on a three day break from working on the extended Applied Research Associates contract in order to catch up on all the many, many things that need doing (writing this entry being one of them), and I must admit to looking forward to contract completion at the end of May. With me being as busy this past three months as I have been, I haven't progressed much with the website shop and the content filtering boxes are still lying in stock untouched. At this rate of progress I may just have to sell them on eBay at a loss seeing as I start my next Masters in Autumn (but more on that shortly).

After the last entry I knew that I had a few weeks before I'd have to really start digging in again during the PhD funding applications, so having seen the outstanding metascore on Metacritic giving an average of all reviews rating of 94% for a game called Mass Effect 2 (you can see the list of top games on the PC of all time according to average review score here where Mass Effect 2 is currently the eighth best game ever) I ummed and awed for a while, and then made the purchase mainly because Amazon were doing a deal for £15 and I figured it was worth the punt. I ummed and awed mainly because I wasn't sure if it would be my kind of game - for example, Half Life 2 is at the top of that list of best games of all time and I got bored of that game after about three levels of it and I never played it again - too much running around through padded out eternities between the good bits for me. I worried that as a mostly story driven game with strong role playing elements that it really wouldn't be my cup of tea, but then I thought Grand Theft Auto IV outstanding even if it had tedious boring sections (like too much driving around), and indeed just last night I purchased its extended missions off Amazon because they'll be way better than most of the gaming dross out there (e.g. Prototype, a real waste of a great concept). Just as so you know, I am a 1990s style gamer who gets bored very quickly unless I am repeatedly and very frequently wowed - my idea of the greatest game ever is Duke Nukem 3D which is so good that I play it on impossible difficulty without cheating. That's how much I like Duke Nukem - I don't cheat. And there hasn't been a game since Half Life 1 which I have played through without cheating (I cheated heavily in GTA IV, because I couldn't be arsed driving around in anything less than ultra fast and I couldn't be arsed worrying about guns and ammo or money).

Anyway, I am very glad that I did buy Mass Effect 2. It's an outstanding game, though it does suffer from major failings such as a stupid boring resource collection system which made me immediately go find a cheat to bypass it, and it's riddled with boring repetitive puzzle minigames which I just skip entirely when it's possible. There is also a major omission of ship fighting, so you're in this ship in which you can physically wander around talking to people and for which you're constantly buying upgrades but you never get to pilot it in a full on space battle which left me feeling quite underwhelmed. However what it's good at it definitely is very good at, and at times it really does feel like a sweeping, epic and cinematic movie experience but it's interactive because you choose the dialogue, direction and story. Even though the graphics are for ancient 2006 hardware (thank the consoles for that!), you still get that prettiness and wow factor when the camera pans round onto some sweeping vista because the graphic designers have cleverly combined low quality textures (e.g. the clothes) with high quality ones (e.g. the faces), and I suppose at least old computers can play this game just fine. The story and settings sometimes reminds you of being in the old Star Wars movies or Babylon 5 in its galactic sweep and breadth, especially the way you can just hop off your ship arbitrarily onto any one of dozens of planets and space stations. In short, I am impressed!

Here's the first ten minutes of the game in 720p HD, complete with your old ship getting attacked and your character walking through a hatch and suddenly finding themselves in a blown out part of the ship looking into space with debris floating around - I went like, wow!, isn't it amazing what you can still do with what is very obviously four year old graphics technology? And yes, it is Martin Sheen who voices the guy who is smoking - they have an all star voice cast, including lots of famous actors.

One of the more interesting features in the game is the ability to design what you look like at the start (male or female too), so needless to say I went with the cutest and hottest girl I could cook up in the face designer and whom you can see in her informal wear on the right and in her uniform on the left (you can change clothes any time you like in the game). It took quite some time to get her right, but I'm fairly proud of her look and she's definitely easy on the eye during playing the game where she'll be in each and every scene. I will apologise right now for the general darkness of the photos and the way she looks waxy - I grabbed them by literally finding an illuminated place in the game, taking a screenshot and cutting her out.

I will also say now that I am appalled at how it is still impossible in 2010 to contour flow text on a webpage around two side by side images on the same page. Even by using the old "CSS position absolute and use invisible divs to block out the space" trick! It works with one image, but not more than one where it will cause the second image to go too high and get overwritten by text because the browser calculates absolute default coordinates for absolute things before adjusting them for floats. In other words, the top image's divs consume space which pushes the text lower than it ought to be, and it doesn't shove the second absolutely positioned image down along with everything else because the second set of floats interfere with the first set thanks to the block elements in between. And you can't just add an offset because the amount of shove required varies according to screen width, so you'd need some javascript to calculate it for you. Gee, isn't that just great!

So I fell back how you'd do it in the 1990s by manually splitting the images into horizontal sections and then floating them to the side. Slicing images sucks, but at least we don't get text being overwritten. Even then the stupid CSS box model shows itself, because the source HTML specifies that they ought to be side by side. Are they side by side on YOUR web browser right now? No! CSS can only float things of equal height to both left and right at once, so above you can see it drops the left hand image so it's just above the bottom of the right hand image, so where the HTML says side by side you're getting the left one next to this paragraph instead. It's a shame really - with HTML5's new canvas element we finally can programmatically access arbitrary images from javascript within the browser, and then reflow the text on the fly - as indeed the jQSlickWrap jQuery plugin does. But javascript is just as hamstrung as anything else by the broken CSS box model and to avoid the same problem above it would still have to manually offset it whenever the page was resized.

Why they don't just add the CSS "float contour" property already is beyond me as it's been a proposal since 1996, then this VERY common problem of wrapping text around non-rectangular images would be finally fixed. But hey there's standards for you .

So, that was much of my month of February. Around the start of March I got a phone call from social welfare who informed me that I had reached the end of yet another processing queue, and that very shortly I would be processed and finally I'd get my dole including nine months of backpay. Could I supply him with a letter from UCC indicating when my studies finished? Sure I said. He then asked if I'd had any work in the past nine months. I said a few hours here or there, not much. He asked me to send him a list of what hours and when, so I did.

Well seeing as it is now May and coming up to the one year anniversary of when I applied for the dole, I guess me being honest was a bad move because obviously I have got myself stuck into yet another processing queue and who knows when I now might exit that. It's actually become a non sequitur now because you no longer make any assumptions as to when you might get it, so I have stopped borrowing money off anyone other than Megan for the simple reason that I no longer have a clue as to when I will be able to repay. I even managed to repay my sister her amount actually, though God knows how I'm going to raise the tuition fees for the Masters in Research I intend to start in September.

Ah yes, the MRes! I spent a large chunk of March and April preparing various formulations of this online funding inquiry for the John Templeton Foundation and other grant making bodies in which I (or rather my proposed supervisor) requests approx. €50k to fund the research part of my intended PhD which is entitled A study of the strategic and policy implications of modelling organisations using the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP). The hope is to reach the second stage of funding application which we'll find out at the end of this month - the IFQ stage has a 90% rejection rate on its own, so if we get to second stage we have a 50/50 chance thereafter of moving forward. The research component is scheduled to start from Sept 2011, and yes it would be in Helsinki in Finland as there is an expert in the topic there called Arto Annila who has gone far beyond the pale in helping me out so far.

So what happens between now and then? Well, I got me some research methods to get yet another bit of paper in, and it's currently looking like the Masters in Social Research Methods with the University of London External system which is the original distance degree programme having started all the way back in 1858 under Royal Charter. Their system is quite unlike the Open University's in that they hand you a reading list and then you turn up for the exams in May in which you sit exactly the same exams as their normal full time students, and the entire lot are marked together so there is no chance of being treated more favourably. Unlike the OU which very much spoon feeds you, with the London External system you're on your own. Their failure rate, needless to say, is rather high but the lack of spoon feeding appeals greatly to me.

So the theory goes as follows: if I get the PhD funding, then I complete the training examinations of the MRes but stop short of the thesis, thus earning me a Postgrad Diploma and then I finish next summer and am ready to go to Helsinki. If I don't get the PhD funding, then I carry on with the MRes thesis and I get me my third Masters degree which, as the MRes is ESRC recognised, will allow me to jump straight into the OU's PhD programme without having to take their research methods training which sucks down three years on its own. Either way, Niall gets his PhD by 2013 whereupon he will be the sombre age of thirty-five! And, weirdly enough, I'd actually be one year younger than if I'd got that paid PhD studentship at UCC last Christmas!

So, so far so good for my primary resolution of 2010! All that PhD stuff took me up to the middle of April as the submission deadline was the 16th. This schedule was not helped by needing to visit the North with my sister as we annually do at Easter whereupon we discovered that Grandpa's house needs quite a bit of maintenance doing which is hardly surprising considering, so I'll need to zip up there for a few days this summer. Furthermore, ARA came back with a further contract at the start of April which at the time, to be honest, surprised me because I thought they were going to let it slide. Given my other time pressures at that time, I had no choice but to politely ask that they wait until the end of April, so after the 16th I took a day or two to do things like mow the lawn and other necessities, and then I launched into a fairly gruelling seven day week to try and get a first alpha to them by the end of April - which I succeeded in doing. Weirdly, when I submitted my invoice to them last Monday I realised that I had only worked a cumulative total of just seventy hours (i.e. 8.75 days) over fourteen days, which at the time felt impossible as I was utterly exhausted.

I guess that's because in a normal job in the Anglo-Saxon world most workers only work half the time unless there is something like a conveyor belt forcing their pace. This is why in France they have such high marginal work productivity, because if you only spend thirty hours at work then you still work more or less the same as you do in the Anglo-Saxon sixty hour week. The difference of course is that in France you pay them much less as they spend much less time at work, so you get fuller employment and a population who isn't too knackered to kick up fusses and get upset about stuff which is both a good and bad thing. Much of Management theory is all about finding supposedly new ways of getting people to sustainably work even 1-2% harder, and whoever finds even a statistically significant sustained productivity improvement will become the next management guru earning millions in consulting and speaking fees.

In my mind, in the knowledge industry at least, there are very, very few workers who can indefinitely sustain more than four hours of actual work a day each and every day. I have noticed a huge amount of people faffing around, or browsing the internet, or simply walking around the office in a slow moving but giant loop talking to anyone who will listen, or doing anything to look like they are being productive when they're not. Even in high end finance, a lot of what is presented as work - a very good example is client meetings where you're all dressed up in fancy suits - is in fact faffing around and yet another way of marking down time. I bet that if you added up the time which actually contributes to the bottom line, you'd find a fairly universal ceiling of an average of four hours per day in any knowledge industry.

I have noted that I am hardly alone in making this observation. It appears to be particularly noted in computer programming, and it is also well known that the number of hours you can sustain drops as you age up to the point where there isn't much point being a computer programmer anymore. Still, the management ethos of the Western world has no formalised conceptualisation of any of this yet, and it still treats knowledge workers as some kind of atypical factory worker which must be specially mollycoddled, but otherwise driven to schedule and treated as a readily substitutable unit just the same. My PhD research topic is intended to begin the development of "an Econophysics of Organisation", so perhaps using such modelling tools as MEPP we might enable managers to some day be a bit more sophisticated in their approach to knowledge based organisations?

Well we can but hope I suppose. Anyway, I have a raft of academic papers to wade through next, so I shall be off. I hope that this entry finds you all well and happy! Be happy!

Monday 4th October 2010:

2010-10-04T15:30:00+00:00

Monday 4th October 2010: 3.30pm. A simply stunning five month hiatus later, here's a new entry! It has to be admitted I never thought I'd see the day in the past twelve years that I'd leave more than two months pass between entries, but there you go. Looking back, I don't think it was deliberate per se, more that I just didn't think of it at all until late August - already an unprecedented three month gap - which must mean that the intervening months must have been both busy and boring. Then September passed rather quicker than I thought it would, and suddenly it's already now. My, at this rate I'll be an old man soon!

So, going back five months, well what happened after the last entry was that the user mode page allocator I was writing of course turned out to be far trickier and harder than I had originally estimated. I built in something like a 50% margin for overruns during the quote, but I ended up overrunning by I think it was 115% or something. Either way, I pulled some serious hours towards the end of May and I just scraped home with project delivery three days late unfortunately. Still, better slightly delayed than late.

Such were the impressive benchmarks coming back from the wee beastie though that it seemed a good idea that I ought to write up the method as an academic research paper and submit it for publication. Firstly though during June I packaged up the bitwise tries library which I had developed for the contract and published it as its own library called - unoriginally - nedtries. nedtries provides a traditional C macro interface, but when used as C in C++ it silently uses a C++ implementation instead which is far easier to debug. I also added a nasty STL interfaced nedtries psuedo-container which gives std::unordered_map<> a good run for its money, and in general nedtries kicks red-black trees hard and is little worse than hash tables. nedtries, much to my amazement, has proved very popular with copies flying off the virtual shelf as it were. And, rather more suspiciously, no bug reports or emails of complaint yet.

Moving into July I did lots of various mundane but time consuming things like paperwork and gardening, but beginning the academic research paper from about mid-July onwards. Knowing very little indeed about the literature in computer science, I embarked on a pretty steep learning curve for the next six weeks with much time spent reading academic papers on esoteric compsci theory and after several complete rewrites I ended up with a draft paper I'm fairly pleased with and hopefully should pass peer review muster when the call for papers goes out for the International Symposium on Memory Management 2011. It was also the first time I'd used LaTeX believe it or not, and I was glad to have finally got round to learning - and I'd even say mastering - that.

So, suddenly it was now September, and I knew that in just one month I'd be starting two distance courses. Oh yeah that's right, last time I mentioned any of this it was the case that I might be taking an MRes with the University of London. Well, to that I added a PGCert in Developing Professional Practice in Higher Education with the University of Wales - this being the non-mandatory teaching qualification for third level educators and being very similar to the PGDE which secondary school teachers must obtain before being allowed to teach in Britain and Ireland, so in terms of credits I'd be taking a full time Masters course though thankfully distance education means no boring lectures and being able to avoid having to deal with ignorant muppets who love wasting everyone else's time talking crap in tutorials. Anyway, I wanted to try launching an improvement to the standard malloc(), realloc() and free() et al API in the ISO C language standard, solicit public feedback and submit the proposal to the C1X standards committee before my courses began - this I achieved, and you can find the single-purpose site at http://mallocv2.wordpress.com/.

During September myself and Megan had the wedding of a childhood friend of mine in the South of France - which was lovely, but extremely stressful and expensive and I still haven't healed up my "stress indicator" mouth ulcer which reopened itself at that time. The following weekend we headed to Edinburgh to visit people and I stayed in St. Andrews on the first Sunday night of their Fresher's week. Returning to St. Andrews was an oddly pleasant experience - my prior visit in May 2009 had been while I was in U.C.C., and my hatred of that place had left me cold to any university at that point I think. This time round St. Andrews, and its crazy inhibition-altering perception-bending bubble, felt refreshing and inspiring. The streets thronged with non-Europeans as their non-EU intake has been clearly seen double digit growth, and there were far fewer very young faces which suggests that many more postgraduates attend than before. Where I slept the night used to be undergraduate accommodation while I was there, now it is entirely postgraduate. And judging by the accents and patterns of speech, there were, if it can believed possible, a greater preponderance of the children of the world's ruling elites than even when I studied there - it's just that the children now come from both further to the West and to the East than before.

I certainly enjoyed having conversations with total random strangers and learning things about them - you can do that with ease in the bubble of St. Andrews, and you can't in most of the industrialised world including here in Cork because people are scared of strangers and are too busy to talk anyway. I miss it to be honest. I miss it a lot.

So, for the past week or so as the MRes has got started I have begun to delve into my fourth academic specialisation: Education. So far, there is much to like about the distance Masters in Social Research Methods with the University of London International system. Unlike its equivalent in the Open University, this course does NOT spoon feed you which I very much like. You get the latest edition of the famous textbook by Cohen & Manion for all Research Methods in Education courses rather than the OU's proprietary spoon feeding workbooks and readers, a set of dense detailed notes per unit (which would normally correspond to a lecture) and a couple of DVDs containing videos of lectures given at the UoL's Institute of Education, which is by far the leading place for Educational Research in Britain and is one of the top in Europe. They hold online tutorials via Elluminate which is pretty standard nowadays, and there are a sequence of ungraded group activities held on discussion forums which are intended to set the pacing for the study and provide a certain amount of social networking and interaction. The students are very international - in fact, judging by the distribution of home countries of those in my class it seems to me like the British Empire is still very much in place today. Also, the students are definitely from the professional elites of their home countries - I guess given the cost of fees relative to average developing world income this would be unavoidable.

While my experiences with the IoE have been great so far, what was seriously not good is the Admissions section of the University of London. Not only did they supply me with my stuff ten days late, they also failed to ever answer emails asking what the hell is going on, they failed to provide payment receipts despite being asked on several occasions (and I think it's a legal requirement) and when they did send me my stuff it was missing half its items. I however have come off well compared to some of the other students on the course, and it makes one wonder if we still don't have more students still to arrive who didn't get their login info sent to them but they did get everything else. Given that the course costs a cool £7000, I find such a shoddy level of customer service for a quantity of money with which you could buy a really nice second hand car appalling. In short, the IoE are great but Admissions over there at UoL is incompetent at best and negligent at worst. Once you're in you can generally forget about them, though I shudder to think of when I next have to pay fees or follow up on my missing stuff .

Next week I'll be starting with the University of Wales. Admissions with them has been an absolute dream ... not only did they speedily process my application despite being several days after the closing date, they have continuously kept me up to date with what has been going on and they have never taken longer than a day to reply to emails. Indeed, just a few hours ago I received a phone call telling me about starting next week - they rang because apparently they didn't have my email on record (despite that I know they definitely have it). But what a difference!

So, all in all so far so good! It has, as I said at the start, been a busy but entirely uneventful five months. And it has been a five months which I very easily summarised almost completely in this relatively short diary entry, so I guess my excuse for not writing an entry sooner kinda holds fast. Anyway, no matter, time to go do other stuff given that it is nearly 5pm now. Be happy!

Sunday 27th September 2009:

2009-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 27th September 2009: 12pm. Heh, what can I write about this entry which is any different from the last entry? A good question to be sure! I've accomplished a few small things: the first is that I have finally, finally, finally finished converting my CV into XML and it is available online here. I have wanted to get that done for oh about five years now because maintaining the Word edition was becoming increasingly annoying over time: any time you applied for a job you'd have to manually cut & paste the bits relevant to the job, and the Gantt chart had to be separately maintained from the main listings. What I really needed was a programmatically controllable CV and that really means a custom XML format with a parametrised XSL transformation to make it present itself as you need for some given purpose. The output also has hResume microformatting so technically speaking the search engines should be able to pick it up.

I wasted a fair few hours trying to get that CV to work right on Internet Explorer - unlike Safari or Chrome, IE actually does spit out "the right thing" but unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to make jQuery accept XHTML in a way which worked (on IE) which oddly enough was an identical problem with my MBS BIS final project. Anyway in the end I gave up - all browsers will happily translate the XML into XHTML, it's just only Opera and Firefox will let the user mess around with the conversion settings. And in the end it is currently only Firefox with the support for CSS3 rotated text, so Firefox alone works perfectly which is a bit sad though all too common.

The other major thing that I have been doing during the last month is a contract with Applied Research Associates for work on my memory allocator nedmalloc which now is pretty much complete and is worth a good few bob to my company which is great as it's seriously in debt - as indeed am I. The RoIP contract came through too which will no doubt occupy much of next week, and I have also been working on a critical pedagogy for numerate social science subjects which currently looks like this:

The theory goes that students completing the above would be much better placed to not repeat the mistakes made during the recent credit crunch and indeed before that, the Enron and other accounting/consulting related lapses in morality. My hope is that we might be able to collaboratively develop this into something serious though of course it would be highly unlikely to go anywhere without a serious bandwagon effect. Anyway, we'll see.

The plan still holds to make a start on that "synopses of Nobel prize winning papers" book after the RoIP contract is done using all my work on deepereconomics.org to good effect, and then after that to start my PhD thesis. Meanwhile Megan has begun her OU Masters in Education course, and she has her next driving test this coming Friday. I also must start getting more exercise - I have exceeded eleven stone and I am definitely becoming fat which needs to be fixed, not least that fluid keeps building in my lungs due to lack of breathing fresh air - however, after these two contracts and hopefully the imminent payout of welfare after oh, like four months now, we should be financially secure until 2010 so I can finally relax. Be happy!

Monday 31st August 2009:

2009-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 31st August 2009: 10.25pm. Well the summer is almost over - Dad comes back from his holidays on Thursday which is the usual signifier of being back to work, and the weather is definitely becoming much cooler - I had to turn on the heating a few days ago because it was getting too nippy even under a blanket.

This month, much like last month and the month before it, has once again very little evidence to show for its passing. I have my ZEO cluster running as you can see if you like on deepereconomics.org or lowenddedi.net though in fact at the present time it actually consists of just one lonely and very puny Celeron D processor until the tax office return from their holidays and give me my VAT number. I have finally got the latter site up and running despite having languished for such a long time - I bought the domain itself maybe two months ago, but it needed some custom Zope datatype programming and teaching myself how to do that swallowed a week just on its own. Meanwhile, very, very, very slowly, deepereconomics.org is finally at a point where I can start adding some content as I have nailed one pernicious bug after another.

Once again I wonder where the hell all the time went - how can one invest ten to twelve hours a day every day and get almost nowhere after two months? I was even getting up early as Megan got herself a summer job teaching English to foreign kids so I was dropping her in early and collecting her fairly late. I haven't had the time to release TnFOX as I usually do each summer, and the Radio over IP work I did in July was done before even the last entry. Furthermore I didn't need to drive Megan to and from Mallow daily anymore as she failed her test so that yielded even more free time. I am also very sure that I have been pushing myself hard because my mouth ulcer opened itself up again, and that only happens when I'm getting very run down - moreover, I do feel knackered and I do know I keep forcing myself to work just that extra hour or two per day. I almost wonder if I should start keeping a time and motion study!

At this present time it seems unlikely that Megan has obtained a teaching job, and the TEFL one has ended so she has a lot of free time on her hands. She has a her visa application to make, and I suppose she needs to start thinking of non-teaching jobs and activities which make her the network of contacts requisite for getting a teaching job such as voluntary work and interacting with the teaching unions. She also needs a slew of further qualifications unfortunately, but it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and even a Masters is fairly worthless nowadays. You just gotta have that PhD.

Speaking of which, I will almost certainly write that crib book for Economics students first and after begin writing my PhD with an intent to submit it for PhD by Publication which a few of the UK universities nowadays offer. I am hoping to have it done by Summer 2010 though if I keep up this low level of accomplishment then it'll probably be Summer 2011 at this rate. Once I have the PhD, many opportunities open themselves not least the possibility of a US work visa.

So that's the plan. If we're ever going to make any sort of progress in life like getting married or having children then we gotta get some money from somewhere. Money sucks and the system stinks, but time is running out before oil and food starts to seriously rise in price - hence all those governments buying up agricultural land recently. And then the shit will really hit the fan. Be happy!

Thursday 23rd July 2009:

2009-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday 23rd July 2009: 9.04am. Another month passes, yet once again I sit here wondering what the hell have I actually accomplished? Where does the time go? I have especially been wishing for forty hours in day of late because there is such a long list of things to do which never seems to shrink no matter how hard I work nor how many hours I invest. With such thoughts, I would be the first to counsel others to instigate a re-evaluation of one's efficiency: where is one wasting the hours? Can a reorganisation of sequencing one's actions better improve the rate of accomplishment?

Megan's brother visited for a week which had us drive around much of West Cork and Kerry - very pretty, but it cost a lot in time and petrol. It took many more bounces of the Memoranda between me and the Companies Registration Office, but eventually they incorporated the firms which allowed me to get started on drafting the bank account mandates and the tax registration forms - I haven't even begun yet on the central accounts server because the only spare computer I have available running 24/7 is the mediacentre, and its 1.6Ghz Atom isn't really up to running SQL Server 2005 (it actually works surprisingly well, but if and only if no one is watching TV or it is recording something at the same time). I also need a business phone line which really means a VoIP system - for this I have acquired a second hand Utstarcom F1000 which is a Wifi SIP VoIP phone, so it works very nicely as a cordless phone. Of course this means I need a full VoIP PBX also running on the mediacentre in order to avoid NAT routing issues and to provide an answering machine or call rerouting - preferably in Linux rather than the Windows that the fast h.264 hidef decoders prefer - which suggested that the time had come for an upgrade of the mediacentre.

Hence despite our extremely restricted budget I spent €200 on higher end but very low power parts (the special energy efficient AMD ones which cost slightly more but draw only half the wattage) which I only found time to assemble yesterday. It'll run Windows 7 with a virtualised Linux, and I may even make use of Microsoft's upcoming customised Linux kernel which just goes to show how much Microsoft has changed now that Bill has retired. Ultimately the techies in Microsoft are just as ardent open source types as anywhere else, and of course in recent years MS has made a big point of hiring top Linux guys simply because good programmers are good at whatever system. After I have this system installed and running, I'll get the accounting software onto it and we'll finally be operational.

Meanwhile, and in parallel, I have been sending any spare hours that I have at working on designing a really cheap ZEO cluster (based on the OVH servers I mentioned last entry) which operates a fairly high end Plone installation and I have been writing up my experiences here. The idea is to move my VPS install over to this and to add a new site called deepereconomics.org which is going to host the collaborative development of a new pedagogy for Neo-Classical Economics, and upon which I'll be writing a one hundred page cheat sheet book for Economics students writing essays which will probably have to be a FSF venture given that the Irish government probably won't approve such a book as a creative work (and hence exempt from income tax). I'll also be renting out space on that Plone ZEO cluster to small businesses around Ireland as currently there is no one in Ireland who provides Plone services. I have never understood receiving a once off €250 for a fairly copy & paste Drupal or Joomla based website which is so common - both, or indeed anything PHP based, require constant maintenance which everyone always forgets about until their site gets hacked or they lose data or even their site simply fails. Lots of SME's pay the once off and ignore the consequences - equally, there are plenty of eager undergraduates or graduates too quick to take the money and run despite knowing better. I reckon that there might be a market opportunity here.

So, with a bit of luck, I'll be able to support us financially by 2010 if everything goes to plan, plus lay great foundation stones for enabling both of our careers in the future by making a nice big splash by upsetting important people internationally . Megan has her driving test in about fifteen minutes - I have been writing this while she takes her pre-test lesson, and another significant time and money destroyer has been the very frequent drives to Mallow for her to practice driving and take lessons - an opportunity my cunning sister took to have me complete various things for her like a wipe & reinstall of her computer, though in fairness her hubby also replaced our braking pads last night which was long overdue - one of the pads was quite literally falling apart from heat damage caused by mismatched wear. And lastly UCC's BIS have been dicks and gave me a very high 2.2 just short of the 2.1 - it was fascinating reading the comments that the spiteful fuckers wrote on the exam scripts, they are astonishingly ignorant of their own disciplines, and their arrogance that this is not so is breathtaking. I guess that's another big distinction between the elite universities and the average ones: the elite universities are better at recognising what they don't know or might not know.

So far so good! I hope that everyone reading is keeping well, and that all remains good in kin and kith. Be happy everybody!

Monday 22nd June 2009:

2009-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 22nd June 2009: 12pm exactly. It is strange to think that three weeks or so have passed since the last entry yet it feels like I have still accomplished nothing. We ended up winning the Export Capability Award of that Student Enterprise Award which earned me €1500 and therefore the means to keep myself and Megan alive above near-destitution levels until welfare hopefully finally pays out in October/November - speaking of which, I have heard nothing from them in a month now so I must remember to ring them up and ask what the hell is going on?!?

The paid PhD programme also rejected me though the guy said I made it to the final final listing and that of those he had to give it to someone he knew (i.e. someone from within the department). Such is academia and indeed life - he implied that I was the insurance choice were the main fellow to choose something else, so had a recession not been on I'd have got it - which was probably the same for my application to the University of Limerick. I get this - in times of economic uncertainty one heads for state employment in jobs which are fairly hard to eliminate no matter how bad things may become, and every second fucker nowadays is pulling every favour they can to get their foot in the door. I simply can't compete.

Seeing as I am now fairly properly unemployed, a fair chunk of the last three weeks has been spent drafting the Memoranda of Association for a "ned Productions" profit making company (so the title of this website kinda becomes tax registered) and a "Freeing Growth Foundation" non-profit charity. I had to draft these legal documents on my own because there's no way I can afford the legal fees and I managed to successfully find a kind solicitor who will notarise them. They should be submitted by the end of this week, so I can hopefully begin trading by the end of August. In order to save anyone in a similar position from the equivalent amount of hassle, I have placed my Memoranda online for anyone else to use.

The other big time consuming event of the last three weeks was the outage of VAServ who are one of the larger provider of Virtual Private Servers in the world and who provided the VPS which handled my email and freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org. Some 100,000 sites were felled by this hacker attack - amazingly my own VPS actually survived completely intact and it was only when I rebooted it in order to test some changes to my mail server that it died. It was resurrected by VAServ staff, but it hasn't remained up for any length of time since then which has played havoc with my email delivery - so much so that I had to switch email back onto nedprod.com despite the mountains of spam that I now receive again.

Now much as this is annoying, inconvenient and wastes my time, I'm not that bothered - my 256Mb VPS only cost me £60 for the year and there's only four months to go, and the VPS very much served its purpose by letting me teach myself server admin. I was going to be switching away anyway at the end of contract as I got that Xen based VPS for half price, and besides the poor thing really needs a minimum of 512Mb of RAM and better would be 1Gb. Looking around what options are open to me, I'm obviously not wanting anything HyperVM based given what happened to VAServ but any non-HyperVM 1Gb Xen based VPS is costing like €30/month (I see very little point in using an OpenVZ VPS because of the almost guaranteed likelihood of them being oversold).

So what to do? Researching this has cost a LOT of time last few weeks because I'm also trying to factor in expandability with regard to my business - I may need to upscale my server hardware rapidly and VPSs let you do that, yet I currently can't afford €30/month. Probably I'm going to give the French-based OVH's "Real Private Server III" platform a go - these are dedicated boxes so you get exactly what the box has with no surges in CPU load caused by other users (though equally you don't get the burst of a ~3Ghz Intel Xeon CPU either), however their disk space is provided by a network SAN i.e. the hard drives live in a network attached box so the dedicated boxes are disc drive less. For €20/month you can get a dual core 1.9Ghz AMD Athlon 64, 2Gb of RAM, a 100Mbit network port (mostly unmetered) and 20Gb of iSCSI networked storage. One can upgrade or downgrade as easily as a VPS as you simply reboot the the iSCSI based disc image from new hardware - however one is also sharing that SAN with everyone else, so disc i/o is appallingly slow with just 1Mb/sec guaranteed though with 2Gb of RAM there is a LOT I can do to avoid ever touching disc storage (especially by employing compcache which does on-the-fly memory page compression - see explanatory article here). OVH also do cheap fully dedicated servers under their Kimsufi brand - however something with equivalent specs to the RPS is about €40/month (which is still ridiculously cheap for dedicated server, most of which cost hundreds of euro a month as a minimum).

So that's where I'm currently at - hopefully I'll get onto my usual summer release of TnFOX soon, and my Masters results come out on Wednesday, so if they attempt to give me a 2.2 you'll almost certainly be hearing a rant about it here! Till next time be happy!

Wednesday 27th May 2009:

2009-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 27th May 2009: 7.23pm. Tempus fugit and as of yesterday, I am supposedly finished my Masters apart from the submission of one of those stupid learning journals. Exams finished a week ago - with a bit of God's grace I will never again have to sit in a lecture or take another exam. This very much pleases me as I have hated the "waste" of this past academic year which was not dead time, but certainly felt that way in terms of lack of productivity in anything what I'd consider useful. It did however open many doors previously closed to me, and for that it has been worth it: I previously could not possibly have applied for teaching positions nor paid PhD study and now I can. However by God I could not do much more of this without seriously freaking out.

I finally passed my driving test last week so I am now legal to drive alone - I switched the insurance over to cover Megan and she immediately applied for her test, so hopefully she'll have a European driving licence by the end of the summer. I tried to sign on for welfare last week as with the coming costs for immigration and visa applications et al we will probably run out of money by the end of July, and welfare are currently taking three months to process new applicants. I waited in a queue for two and something hours just to get an appointment for tomorrow for signing on - even that has a backlog of a week.

UL have replied to say that they are rejecting my application for teaching assistant as well as lecturer without even an interview - I assume it is officially my lack of a PhD, but more probably because I don't have a friend or relation on the inside. I am currently in the process of applying for a paid PhD researching constrained programming and although it is just €18k a year (after taxes maybe €14k), it's better than welfare which pays €10k (though for most people the advantages of free health care and rent allowances etc don't make it worth getting a job earning less than €20-24k, especially if you can work a few hours cash in hand). I should hopefully acquire some money earning position for the coming year which doesn't leave me too exhausted to write the Freeing Growth series of books.

Megan isn't doing so well - the Irish government much like the UK government have enacted draconian changes to immigration policy such that anyone non-European is deeply unwelcome. She'll lose her work visa by Christmas at the latest after which she will neither be allowed to work nor to stay. We can get married to ensure she can get a permit to stay here, but the work visa can't be applied for until three years of marriage have elapsed. There is a loophole: I can apply for "de facto relationship" status which lets her both stay and work (though without European citizen benefits like social insurance, even though she still has to pay the taxes) but this requires proof of at least a two year relationship. "Proof" means legal documents like contracts and bills and I can barely think of a normal young couple who would have such things because most couples, especially middle-class ones, deliberately keep their finances out of their relationship and often live in separate residences whilst attending university. She could take another full-time course but the government charge nearly €4k as a capitation fee to dissuade immigrants and for that money she could get herself a Masters degree from the Open University which would be far more valuable to her career. Needless to say, after spending €14k or so on fees for her teaching qualifications, she is more than mildly annoyed.

So what happens now? Well BIS and university are supposedly utterly done as of this Friday, though we won entry to the 2009 Student Enterprise Awards which means that they will continue hold their death grip upon me till the 10th of June now. I have a very long list of things which have been delayed or put off until I regained my freedom and so I shall start to execute them one by one until they are done - not least the starting of companies and the Freeing Growth Foundation, upgrade and consolidation of my server space, I have been asked to quote for some consulting work and more mundanely, my TnFOX library needs porting and testing on Windows 7 for its annual product release cycle and the gutters on the house need fixing as they're are completely wankered. I don't doubt that I'll be very busy indeed reasserting my freedom and leveraging those aforementioned opened doors. It's about time I got on with my life. Till next time, be happy!

Friday 17th April 2009:

2009-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Friday 17th April 2009: 6.05pm. It's sure been a busy few weeks - I have been making very good use of my free time now that lectures are done. I have added a "feed of feeds", the "All Things Niall Feed" which uses Yahoo Pipes to draw together all the feeds from all my websites into one giant feed. In fact, last entry the feed ripper for this website didn't work very well - it didn't pass Atom 1.0 validation but now it does. Indeed, in the process I even wrote an Atom format RSS output for Plone which was my first publicly published piece of Zope DTML programming. It's strange really ... after all the years of refusing to touch web programming because it's too toy, I must admit that it's finally powerful enough to merit my bother (though Tn still makes XML data services, ASPX .NET and even Zope look extremely toy)

The Freeing Growth plan continues apace - I won't bother repeating here my post about my plans on the Freeing Growth website - and my activity since I got back from Scotland has been mostly preparing for my PhD application and also my job application to the University of Limerick for a position as a Junior Lecturer. Scotland was busy but good, saw a fair chunk of people from St. Andrews just before their term ends, and my next journey outside of Ireland will be one of a visit to Johanna in Sweden, Nat in Belgium or Northern England (via Hull). To be honest, it depends entirely on how the next few months pan out, not least the current likely exhaustion of cash in September after which myself and Megan will starve. If welfare let me sign on during the summer months, all will be well so long as they pay most of the full amount. I'm hoping to set up a grind school company in addition to the publishing company aiming to begin trading in September - this should provide much needed cash flow which is going to be a very serious problem if welfare drag their heels or refuse to pay (this is quite possible as I have no social insurance stamps).

My head is pretty spongey so I shall conclude for now - I think it is a combination of not being used to concentrating for long periods thanks to falling out of practice due to the previous ten days of holiday, and also because those ten days were fairly exhausting and I haven't recovered yet fully. But soon I will - and then shall come the exams starting early May. Be happy!

Saturday 14th March 2009:

2009-03-14T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday 14th March 2009: 9.48pm. Just a little entry to let everyone know that I'm not dead (yet) or anything, just as always very, very busy and not a huge amount to report of much interest. Astute readers may have noticed the magic appearance of a next to the latest entry and indeed in the address bar of most web browsers. So what's one of those then?

Well, that's a syndicated feed which lets people "subscribe" to this virtual diary and be notified whenever a new entry is posted. I say this like it's the newest most magical thing you've ever heard of, but I'm making myself sound foolish - this is ancient technology and the only reason I haven't had it on here before is that nedprod.com is an entirely static HTML website which makes generating an automated feed somewhat tricky. Any modern "blogging" software is database driven and can churn out feeds easily, whereas static HTML need to be scraped by a server-side PHP script.

Now for my group project for the BIS Masters I had to teach myself a lot of XML based technology - which to be honest I had mostly avoided until now because XML is a fairly stupid idea given what SGML could have enabled. Nevertheless, despite XML's many, many flaws and failings, it is a major improvement on what came before - HTML in particular is an arse due to be inconsistent. Long time readers will remember me upgrading the site to use UTF-8 based XHTML back in April 2007 and at the time I retrospectively applied the XHTML conversion back to October 2006, so the feed consists of all diary entries since October 2006. I wrote a PHP script which loads in each of the XHTML files as an XML DOM tree, extracts the diary entries, patches up any CSS styles, images and hyperlinks to point at absolute URLs and spits it out as an Atom feed though because processing is expensive (and repeating it unnecessary), it maintains a cache of the output and it optionally gzips the output too to save on bandwidth. I then set up a Feedburner account and that's what you have linked in above.

So, Niall's virtual diary is now in the 21st century! Other news that I have is that it proved impossible to find a literary agent nor publisher interested in any of my books - without peer reviewed academic publications I sound like a crank to them, so they dismiss me out of hand. My plan currently is to set up my own publishing company to publish my own books and indeed anyone else's too using the Print On Demand technology which Ingram offers.

All that has to wait for another two weeks though when I can finally get the albatross of academic indoctrination off my back. Just two short weeks, and I'll just have exams to go and then I'll be finally, at long, long, last, free! I have so many plans for my freedom - it's literally like getting out of prison. It'll take a while to turn them into money, maybe a year, but to be honest given the current economic climate I have little to lose - every one of us fresh graduates has no better a choice than between the dole and a near-minimum wage job during unsociable hours (like Megan has just obtained for her weekend mornings). So, all in all, life is okay - and we'll be visiting Edinburgh to say goodbye to the St. Andrews lot in early April which should be fun - be happy!

Sunday 18th January 2009:

2009-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 18th January 2009: 7.39pm, and it's my annual birthday entry - yes, I have become thirty-one years old now. Thirty-one is a silly age in my mind: it's not thirty, and it's not thirty two. Thirty-one is somehow in between everything else - even thirty-one's Wikipedia page is significantly shorter than thirty's or thirty-two's!

It's been a long year, and much to my surprise I can once again say for the third year in a row that I did not feel any depression at the lack of things accomplished in the past year. Unlike in last year's entry where the successes were fairly metaphysical, this year my accomplishments are definitely more material:

Graduated from St. Andrews
Much as a degree is irrelevant, graduation did definitively mark the end of the St. Andrews movement: what we all began some four years beforehand passed a point of inflexion, and for the next few years we will all reap the consequences of what we sowed plus of course begin new movements which sweep us away from the St. Andrews experience. In three years or so, few if none of us will still be in contact, and even if we were we will no longer have much resonance with one another's lives and therefore the connection will have passed. Those of us who are lucky will find new connections to propel them on into the future, however most of us will be consigned to quite a few years of loneliness and self-suffocation, surrounded by people we know but with whom we do not resonate.

Depressing? Maybe. However, had I not reacted to that they way I did, St. Andrews would not have been what it was for so many of us. And I certainly wouldn't be dating Megan right now!
Wrote a book
A lot of people dream of writing a book someday, many start a book but few finish one. Of those, most won't find a publisher and even of those who do, very few will have any success.

Now, I know from the accruing feedback from the first draft that the entire damn thing is going to have to be rewritten from scratch this summer break - which is pretty painful, but at least I can publish the existing thing online for those masochistic enough to read it with perhaps advertising support as the revenue stream. I knew that it would be unlikely I would hit the button on the first attempt, and the feedback does suggest that I have attempted too much for one book to have any realistic expectation that anyone will invest the requisite effort to read it. I mean, if even my close friends won't invest the time to understand it, then I certainly can't expect the average time pressed member of the public to do so.

However, at least I now have a starting point from which to base a set of much more honed & focused books. Perhaps a set of rapid fire quick release eighty page books like a machine gun? Certainly improves the revenue stream and keeps an author in the limelight. I need a publisher first of course - that's the next step.
Moved with Megan to Ireland
Prosaic as it may seem, "I got me a girl to come be with me" and she's a super girl at that. And despite the long hours and the pointless hoop jumping willy waving courses we are both on, life is comfortable enough even if we still don't have a clue what we're going to do next. We certainly could do with some more money given the fairly ridiculous number of hours we work doing other people's shite. Both myself and Megan are getting sick & tired of being cash poor & time poor, but I suppose we have just ten weeks until lectures end and hence, some freedom to choose our days!

Regarding the book, we have an improved book cover whose blurb shall be theoretically tantalising the publishers:

As you can see from the watermarks, the first back cover is for European markets and the second is for the US - and my thanks to the ClearScale utility from Harvard for generating such lovely & clear thumbnails which use LCD RGB interpolation. So far so good - we'll see how things go!

All in all, not a bad thirty-first year of life: stuff has wrapped up fairly nicely for some of us. Much as with last year, my thoughts are with those for whom it did not wrap up nicely and is rather like a weeping canker. And my especial thoughts for those who think that they are very happy, but are utterly deluded and have a horrible year of returning to ground to come in 2009.

Happy 2009 to you, and may you and yours be happy!

Sunday 21st December 2008:

2008-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 21st December 2008: 2.21pm. Whoah, such a long time since the last update and unlike normally when I am too busy to make more than a monthly entry, these past two months have been arduous indeed - as you might imagine considering the last entry, but even more was added to the mix again:

Firstly, I got a part-time lecturing position in Economics for UCC's Adult Education, and me being me I fed them a post-structuralist modernised interpretation of Economics rather than the standard dry & boring Neo-Classical stuff, despite how much extra time it cost me in prep. I think it went down well, though we'll see when I get their essays back. I get paid €200 for each three hour lecture I give which as wonderful as it sounds, prepping the lecture slides & readings eats around twelve hours of my week so it works out at around €16 an hour. That's still double minimum wage, though unfortunately the Irish government have enacted emergency taxation on me and so are eating up 20% of my income (and it rises to 40% next month) because I didn't realise you have to fill in some form or other to gain your tax credits. I'll get it back eventually though.

On top of the twelve hours in lecturing, my tutoring load increased as the exams and class tests approached all of which was good as it earns thirty euro an hour. Of course, it left precious little time for anything but work as my own coursework & class tests were also due which chomped whatever quality time remained. For much of the month preceding end of term (which was last week), basically Megan saw me when I collapsed into bed at night and otherwise I was locked in my room working. No quality of life there anyway, and nothing at all was done on the book since early November apart from printing, binding and posting to various reviewers.

Was it worth it? I reckon that I earned €2000 before tax last semester, so between September and December and it swallowed about a hundred and twenty hours. Of course, that's outstanding and most people would give their right arm to be earning so well. But me being me, I loaded that on top of what I would normally be doing if completely free to choose my time, so the end result was me being shattered almost all of the time - indeed, I collapsed from exhaustion sometime in late November which caused no end of difficulties because I missed an assessed tutorial. I was also in a pretty foul mood throughout, and I certainly haven't seen much socialising time or indeed, doing anything other than work each & every moment of every day. No wonder that I have a mouth ulcer which will not heal (I have had this since last June when we graduated!).

Next semester, that being really till April, has a much higher ongoing coursework requirement than last semester. Despite its high regard in the UK & US, the Masters in Business Information Systems here at UCC isn't in my mind at a particularly high academic level - in fact, to be very blunt, in academic level it sits at somewhere between first and second year in Management at St. Andrews. Much like sub-honours Management at St. Andrews, a huge amount of the BIS course is pointless hoop jumping whereby you go through a set of irrelevant motions and output what you know is the garbage that the particular lecturer wants. Forget actual learning or understanding, or God forbid deviations from the catechism, because the average staff member of BIS is fairly shockingly out of date and in general (though there are exceptions), most of them stop bothering to keep their learning fresh after they get tenure so much of what they think is the case is most demonstrably usually not so - which requires you to keep your trap shut and humour them (which I have always found difficult to do in any situation!). This, in a technology-focused subject, makes the staff appear quite ignorant at times as they pretend to appear to know what they are talking about but to anyone who knows better, they just sound silly. I used to think that St. Andrews was bad, but now I realise that with hindsight, they actually are the elite university that everyone says that they are when compared to the competition. It doesn't make the education provided by St. Andrews any more relevant or useful than I have previously stated in this virtual diary, but at least the staff there from my experience did make more effort to teach at a higher and better level, especially in the quality consistency between modules regard (UCC has much more variance). In this respect, St. Andrews I miss you!

Anyway, it hardly matters too much in many ways: Ireland is in the grip of the worst recession it has seen probably since the 1980s and as for the rest of the world, probably since the 1970s. I certainly have never seen such widespread denial in the face of such bad economic indicators which is usually an excellent sign that it's going to get a lot more worse indeed, because it is the day when people accept how bad things are is when economic recoveries begin and the longer that that takes (and/or is cushioned from acceptance by government policy), the longer that economic malaise persists much as it has in Japan until very recently. As a result of the severe downturn in Ireland (of something like 4-6% of GDP officially, but I think 8-10% is more likely given Ireland's unique exposure to the US and UK), civil servants are going to get chopped and by God is it overdue in the universities of Ireland. Anyone in there who hasn't either a good teaching or research record should be fired in my opinion and that's at least an average of a third of the faculty (though easily half in some faculties but much less in others). While you're at it, half the admin staff are unnecessary and as poor Megan has found out, much of the international office should simply be closed because the misinformation they give out actually wastes more time than if students simply started from scratch on their own (they have repeatedly told her lies, failed to provide required forms and misled her visa application. They are, quite frankly, a waste of space). Of course, if I had my way I'd have the student's union run the entire university as a consumer governed cooperative, but that's another matter.

What is bad for the goose is pretty terrible for the gander, so such economic woes are not good for either mine nor Megan's future employment. Britain is going down the tubes - her currency is nearly at parity with the Euro, so that's real inflation of about a third for her imports which must make energy and manufactured goods a lot pricier. Apparently her risk of credit default is now rated higher than some multinational corporations which must be a first since the 1970s. I can't see myself nor Megan having much employment success over there in six months time anyway - the worst is yet to come for Britain. Neither too in Ireland where teachers are being laid off - all anyone expects over the next year is lay offs at best. I am much more employable now than during the last recession - in 2001/2002 I discovered that you needed a first class honours from a "Tier One" university (basically the ancient and old universities, not the red bricks apart from Warwick) and/or a postgraduate qualification in order to get past the first rung of the recruitment agencies. If like me then you had a pass degree from Hull and nothing else, then you had zero chance - they don't give a crap about your CV in a recession because in the end, they're lazy fuckers who like most people will do the absolute minimum that they can get away with. And in a recession, there's loads of candidates so you can just sit back and skim the easiest cream.

I now have the "Tier One" undergraduate degree and shortly will have the postgraduate qualification too, and I will then have three qualifications in the historically most sought after disciplines available that don't require medical training. Surely that would be enough? I don't know yet of course, but I guess that I will be finding out. Regarding my book, so far reaction to it from its test readers has been fairly uniformly negative (e.g. "nasty fascist claptrap" or "lots of dangerous rhetoric suggesting a Mein Kampf of the 21st century") and even close friends are talking a lot about "lots of careful copy editing". I think that its point is getting lost in its text because the book deliberately is all over the place, but I am gathering that the desired effect of creating a synergy after a few reads of it may not be working. Or, more likely, everyone I know is so incredibly time pressed that no one can do much more than skim the top of it which implicitly will fail my original intent. I guess that might be an advantage of a hefty recession - lots of people gain plenty more free time.

I have to admit that I don't see the fascist connection personally - ok, I advocate electrocution as a replacement for wasteful prison incarcerations (in my opinion, therefore replacing long, slow & expensive torture with quick, sharp & cheap torture), much increased use of social & moral pressures rather than legal & financial (i.e. public humiliation instead of fines which just reward wealthiness), the complete disestablishment of the welfare, pension and education systems in favour of "edufare" whereby welfare and pensions become equal to being paid for maintaining skill ability and so on. Some seem to view my view that no one should get anything for free (particularly liberty) without earning it as the most dangerous & virulent form of fascism possible.

Obviously enough, I don't see freedom that way - I see everyone born into the chains of ignorance & inability and that it is acquiring and maintaining skills which frees them. Some commentators have equivocated that notion as a new form of ecclesiasticism whereby much as with Catholicism, one is born with original sin which one must then spend the rest of one's life cleansing. Some might accept such a notion as having merit, but become most galled when I go further to say that people should not be allowed a freedom until they have earned the right to it which is the fundamental thesis of the book. For example, I propose that you aren't allowed to buy a McDonalds until you have earned an "unhealthy food consumption licence" (you can consume, but not purchase) and that licence must be renewed on a regular basis. That whole concept upsets people greatly and for some reason they seem to think it is most like fascism because their freedom of choice is being dictated to them.

My problem with their problem is that their freedom of choice isn't being dictated to them. Their ignorance of choice is being denied to them definitely because in my opinion, you cannot freely make a choice when you don't know what you are choosing. If you don't realise that eating a McDonalds every day will do you harm in certain specific ways, then you don't know what you are doing when you choose to purchase a McDonalds. Most people would say now that "everyone knows that McDonalds are bad for you" but then I would ask you this: write down the top five most important specific ways it is bad for you. I guarantee that almost no one can do that. Why? Because despite the fact that all of us eat food, we are generally profoundly ignorant about what food is, how it works and therefore whether a choice regarding food is a good one. Considering in my opinion such a calamitous choice where a blind, deaf, dumb and disabled person must somehow navigate a tripwire that no one has told them about and the concept of which they do not understand, surely the only right, moral, ethical and humane choice is to restrict freedom until the freedom of choice is possible? Remember, someone else suitably qualified can always buy you a McDonalds in the meantime (and you can always make your own at home) - this helps bind a society together on the basis of expertness and knowledge rather than superstition, fashion and fear as at present.

Additionally, in parallel, under my proposals for those most educated there would be an unparalleled freedom. If suitably qualified, you can drive on the wrong side of the road, modify anything you feel like, even enter & manipulate other people's property (what would currently be called stealing): you can do what you like with no (legal) bounds whatsoever - the most true, complete freedom possible. In this, I have assumed that with deep education & understanding comes responsibility which I suppose is a leap of faith. I would assume of course that a legislature would change the law if my faith turns out to be misplaced - and do remember that becoming so educated would require considerable time, so such freed people would be mostly old. It would be the reward at the end of a life long journey spent upon improving oneself and the world: true power.

I personally felt that I was being very restrained & conservative in my book - I personally would go much further and legalise murder (including genocide) for those people who reach the maximum pinnacle of skills-based educational achievement on the basis that such people don't need laws to restrain them because if they decided that genocide was a good idea, then it probably would be (I left this out because too many people would say that any genocide at all is automatically wrong - we as a society aren't ready for greys in this black & white viewpoint, despite that we all unknowingly commit genocide several times a year if one considers non-human lifeforms). Another thing which I left out of the book was my far more radical proposals for utterly replacing democratic government in its entirety because I felt these to be too unacceptable to current society in its present state. There's loads of stuff in there where I could have been much less conservative and far more radical, and I am intending to at least review such proposals in later editions.

Moving to a related topic, I have finally got the basics of the Freeing Growth website going. Given the dire economic situation, I had been looking to substantially freshen my marketable skills portfolio and of course I also wished to implement a site not using 1990s web technology like this one (good ol' nedprod still works on the original CERN web browser though it kills the original Mozilla - not my fault, actually a bug in original Mozilla and it was Apache which broke it). FreeingGrowth.org now looks (roughly) like this:

You'll note the heavy use of CSS3 features such as rounded corners and drop shadows, plus there is heavy CSS2.1 selector usage and I'm sure you'll see the white transparency used so some of the backdrop bleeds through in most areas. I deliberately left the navigation elements without transparency as the adverts overly stand out otherwise. The layout is literally unchanged from Plone's default except for the addition of the CSS3 features because after messing around with third-party Plone themes, I realised that all the ones which look good break lots of Plone features - to be quite blunt, Plone's default theme "just works" so I'm sticking with my overrides of their theme for both freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org. BTW, if you want to know all about installing Plone onto a low-end VPS, see my writeup here. If you want to see why I went for Plone instead of Drupal, Joomla or the usual suspects, see my other writeup here.

The above screenshot is how Google's Chrome browser views the site - it's Webkit based so it looks almost identical to Apple's Safari except that there's a bug in the rounded corners using drop shadows. Firefox v3 does a reasonable job too, getting all the rounded corners but no drop shadowing until v3.1, whereas Opera v9.6 keeps the square corners because it supports almost no CSS3. All the browsers work fine except for good ol' Internet Explorer v7 whose display glitches are legendary - I am assuming that IE8 will fix my problems because I really couldn't be arsed to code specially for IE. I'll get around to adding a special message for pre-IE8 users soon enough.

NeoCapitalism.org is still the default installation but I have set up the workflow and functionality for it to behave as a Wiki and after Megan has left for the US, I'll get started with putting in all the book's theory as content so it can act as a user-editable theory portal. Then at least I'll have some basic stuff in place for both websites which will not just get me some web presence, but also act as examples of my skills which I can pitch if necessary to prospective employers. Hopefully this will earn some cash in the long run should worst come to worst.

So that's roughly me over the last two months. I'll do a birthday entry next month as is traditional where I shall review my past year and make my prognosis. I think, rather surprisingly, that for a second year running I actually achieved something rather than the usual wasted year full of failed opportunities & disappointment that would be the traditional fare - we'll see. Until next month, be happy!

Sunday 12th October 2008:

2008-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 12th October 2008: 5.31pm. Gee, what a few months. This weekend I "finished" the book in the sense that every chapter has been written and contains more or less what will end up in the final book. Of course, some chapters are missing small sections, plus I definitely need some extra graphs and pictures to illustrate myself - then comes the weeks of copy editing when you run through lots of other people's notes on where you're not making sense. However, we are on course for a Christmas dissemination to people from St. Andrews - maybe by the time the printers get back to me with sample copies it may be early 2009. Shortly thereafter it goes to agents for publishing.

On that note, I have finally got round to investing in my own server - though it'll be a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for the time being because dedicated ones are horrifyingly out of my budget for the time being. You can get a European based quality one from a quality provider if you search around - I got a deal on a UK based one with 256Mb of RAM, 20Gb of disc space and 300Gb of bandwidth a month for just £5/month. Unlike the cheap & unpredictable OpenVZ VPS's, this is a proper Xen based one where you get total control over absolutely everything. I shall be putting http://www.freeinggrowth.org/ onto it as well as http://www.neocapitalism.org/ and redirecting all email sent to nedprod.com through it. The current hoster for nedprod is lchost.co.uk and they finally told me I could no longer do spam processing on their box as I was shafting everyone elses website from the load. That was fair enough - they have been more than tolerant - but it does mean that I didn't get any email for a week so I now have a nice backlog awaiting me.

Having my own server makes a tremendous difference to what I can do. Freeing Growth will need a collaborative cooperative system which allows multiple people to contribute and work upon ideas, code and other stuff. Think of it rather like Wikipedia except that there is a sort of 'peer review' process which occurs before new ideas get incorporated into the whole: one can submit comments & musings a bit like a scratch pad using your mobile phone which you then can coalesce together into suggestions for amendments and/or proposals. In fact, the book proposes precisely the same system except for all creative content & ideas in an entire economy - and from who scratched what & when can it be derived who is most responsible for the genesis of the new idea, and therefore who gets the royalty payments. I can glue together bits of other open source software to achieve this - though it is a shame as it would be an ideal project for my MBS in BIS in UCC, but I would strongly doubt if I could sell it as a viable tool for business. For them, if it can't generate revenue in cold hard immediate cash, it's not a venture.

I bought my first car and I am learning how to drive it. It is a one litre purple 1998 Nissan Micra GX with all the fancy trimmings such as alloy wheels, power steering, central locking and super stereo system. Most of the fancy facilities still work - windscreen wipers can't do intermittent properly and the booming stereo has a loose connection for the left speaker which is annoying. It runs off almost nothing: €10 will take you the ninety miles we do in and out of Cork each week (which works out at about 45mpg). It cost only €1100, though its insurance nearly cost as much as I am a provisional driver.

Other than all that, life is okay. I am very tired and very run down, not least because myself & Megan have been arguing fairly heavily since we got here. She is not happy here - and I am sure we can move away back to Britain or further afield after the course is done. As I said to her, she can always leave much sooner than that if she wishes - she hasn't paid her fees yet, so not much money is lost. In the end, I do not know how to do more than I am - I agree that there are too many things tugging on my time such that she feels lonely, but money to feed us has to come from somewhere especially as the stockmarkets are doing so badly. Anyway, time to ring Johanna and talk to her for the first time in many, many weeks - I never have time to talk to anyone much anymore. Be happy!

Thursday 30th October 2008:

2008-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday 30th October 2008: 12.53pm. I have taken today off seeing as Megan is away in Scotland and I don't have to drive her in and besides, I was becoming very exhausted again. I don't know what it is about me but for some reason I just don't handle sixty hour plus weeks well despite that plenty of other people seem to - I am at the edge of my capacity at present, and this is despite that my load is far less than it was in St. Andrews, especially second year there. I am quite sure that it has something to do with freedom of choice - in St. Andrews, I could choose my day to a much greater extent than at present even if I couldn't choose the hours. Here, one is basically stuck inside a prison of a sort for a set of given hours per day, and worst of all much of it is deadly boring.

Now I disliked the set hours badly enough when working for EuroFighter - I was never on time in the mornings, and some mornings I rolled in very late indeed of which they were very tolerant (it's not like I was out partying, it's rather that I wake up at random times and if I must always rise at the same hour then I get irritated). However, I find it very interesting that I could handle the stress in that environment well enough but found when we moved the work to Britain insufferable - almost certainly because now my hours were being dictated to me and I no longer had the choice. My blood pressure rose, I became fat and the doctors started to warn strongly that my bloodwork and systolic pressure were pointing at the early signs of heart disease.

Six months after quitting the job I returned to the same doctor and he was quite literally astonished to find the same bloodwork and indicators now showing me in the peak of physical health - considerably better than good. All those heart disease issues had utterly disappeared. I took that as an extremely valuable lesson for the future.

I very much enjoyed that year after EuroFighter - I had enough money to not work and I made it eleven months before I had to leave Spain. I worked upon what I wanted to when I wanted to, my health vastly improved and I produced a great deal of output indeed. Thanks to the generosity of my father, a much slimmer variant of that lifestyle persisted for the eighteen months preceding going to St. Andrews which allowed me to plan for what I wanted to achieve there all of which came out pretty well actually (I hardly did it alone, but equally what happened there was irrevocably coloured by my actions, approach and presence there). And now I have a book summarising the entire lot of it - whether it is readable or intelligible or not is of course another matter.

It feels now very much like the end of EuroFighter - just like the point when I said that I would quit in six months and no later. I now had a clock to watch counting down ... just like this course whose main portion basically ends in April. Just six months to go. And I see myself watching that clock ticking down and praying it would speed up. I want to be free, not couped up by all this bullshit. It is making me ill - last Tuesday I was in the hospital so they could examine a mouth ulcer which won't heal and their urgings that I must stop soon reminded me of those doctors during EuroFighter. As I said on Tuesday just like I did almost exactly six years ago, it's not like I plan to keep doing this for much longer. To be honest, I don't think that I could because I hate & despise this lifestyle. It sickens me in every way possible and I only do it because I have to.

Just like most people I guess - how many people want to work dead end jobs? Few if none. They do it because they have to do it because they have little choice. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have had a realistic choice, though relative to my peers I have nothing like the material wealth so in a sort of sense I have been punished for my refusal to play ball. Of course, I am standing so close to the top of the mountain relative to everyone else on the planet that it's a bit silly for me to consider myself relatively poor, but well we compare ourselves to that which we perceive relative to us. And even if we ourselves don't, then our peers certainly do so for us.

The book is as done as it could be - I currently sneak in copy editing whenever a free hour pops up and at some stage soon it will reach final draft, whereupon I will run off lots of copies and post them to lots of various people. I will be travelling to the US during Christmas break (only my third time outside Western Europe) to meet Megan's family and hopefully get a lead into the New York publishing scene - apparently John Brockman is the literary agent to get, and of course he is next to impossible to access. More hoops & hurdles to come, but by God if all this expensive education has been worth anything at all then I will find some route to him via some method. Failing that, surely there is a parallel movement based around Europe though God only knows how to find them - that said, the US is where you make money if you write in English, and it makes sense to go straight to the top if you can.

My VPS is working - though I had to wipe it and completely reinstall it from scratch two days ago, and I'm still working on reinstalling everything plus choosing a suitable CMS given that we are now in the 21st century and nedprod's technique of still using semi-static content is very 1990s (there is no database backend on this site, I copy around everything manually and munge the lot through a Python script before uploading). I have learned a very great deal indeed about setting up and configuring your own server and I have written up my experiences here.

Also, MSI released a v1.09 BIOS for my mini-laptop which reenables overclocking which has made a tremendous difference in the one single area which really annoyed me: using Microsoft Expression Web to type into this website. Expression Web is horrendously slow and typing used to lag significantly behind my keypresses, sometimes so much so it was unusable on some pages so I had to type into an empty page and copy & paste into my destination, often waiting up to a minute for the paste to complete. When overclocked by 24%, the entire system (memory, northbridge, CPU, the lot) just leaps ahead and now Expression Web is quite usable. I don't need the extra horsepower for any other application though I daresay compiling C++ is likely to be much improved too, rare though it is that I do that on this laptop (just for Apple Mac OS X actually). BTW, if you also have a MSI Wind PC, if you upgraded the memory then you need the 667Mhz stuff rather than 533Mhz - a lot of people have found the overclock won't work and it's because they bought the 533Mhz RAM. MSI's 24% overclock actually just sets your system to run at its proper 667Mhz spec rather than underclocked as is default.

So I guess that's about it for now. It's the first time in a very, very long time that I have had the freedom to just sit down and potter out a diary entry - normally, I am so harried by everyone & everything that having this break of today and maybe tomorrow is just plain fantastic. I actually have the freedom to think and take my time ... ah, if only it could last! Next I am going to cook myself a decent hot lunch - nice as sandwiches are, one of the things I really hate about being imprisoned in UCC is how by the time the 6-8pm lectures start I am too weak from hunger to make much sense of what is going on. Getting old I guess. Anyway, be happy everyone!

Tuesday 12th August 2008:

2008-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 12th August 2008: 11.08pm. It's taken a while, but I have finally transferred most of my day to day work stuff like email to my mini-laptop as I prepare for moving back to Ireland. It's an excellent wee laptop, everything I always wanted one to be: light as a feather, quiet, small, cool (doesn't burn you) and powerful enough to not be annoyingly slow. In fact editing this page in Microsoft Expression is the very first time its speed has been a problem as there is a definite lag between me typing and it drawing it on the screen - but at least it is keeping up, and it is after all my own fault for having such a ginormous page!

I have tried editing my book in Microsoft Word 2007 on this laptop and it will, just about, fit two of its pages on screen readably at once. I wouldn't type into that for extended periods, but it's good enough for getting a sense of layout. It's surprising what a 1024x600 screen can actually do - it's tiny compared to my 24" 1920x1200 screen above (that can fit eight pages without breaking a sweat but I normally type into six pages onscreen at once) but obviously enough this mini laptop is rather more portable. I also have Mac OS X installed onto it which runs an absolute treat though it was a royal pain in the ass to install because I had to clone the hacked Mac install disc onto a USB flash disc and boot off that - the mini laptop, obviously enough, has no optical drive. So all in all, I am very pleased with it - upon my recommendations, my sister has bought one too for college. Unlike most mini-laptops, this MSI model has a very decent keyboard - I type quickly enough, and even the reduced width punctuation keys haven't caused me issue.

UCC finally accepted me yesterday which is really about time: I am now doing a Masters in Business Information Systems. Who knows what might come thereafter, just the next few months are still very opaque most especially with how much money we'll have spare after buying (hopefully) a car and running it for as long as the money lasts, and hopefully get a job before impending doom! I think I have everything on track for our move to Ireland even though we don't pack for another eleven days - can't think of anything else I can do as sooner than is possible. The book currently stands at nine chapters in varying degrees of readability, spanning some 220 pages and nearly 90,000 words which isn't at all bad for two months of writing from what I understand - though of course it won't be finished by the end of August, though before classes start is still doable. We'll see. Anyway, be happy!

Wednesday 27th August 2008:

2008-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 27th August 2008: 8.31pm. Do you know that the more I use this mini-laptop (the MSI Wind clone) the more I like it? I don't think I have ever bought a consumer appliance that just keeps on growing upon me day after day and I keep finding new and even more convenient uses for it! This little thing really is worth its weight in gold.

Furthermore, it's fairly shocking how powerful computers have become. This little laptop has taken over from my 3Ghz Core 2 Quad desktop surprisingly well - apart from typing into this crappy Microsoft Expression Web which only just about keeps up with my typing, a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom is more than fast enough for almost every purpose I have thrown at it (I did try reencoding video to h.264 - I wouldn't recommend that, though encoding to MPEG4 works okay). And its keyboard is surprisingly easy to use for extended periods - book writing is pretty easy on this, not as nice as on my 1920x1200 24" supermonitor, but equally it's more comfortable because I can write anywhere I like eg; my bed or a sofa. All in all, me likes this 'toy' supposedly for web browsing alone (and as I mentioned before, it doesn't burn my crotch with heat no matter how long I use it)!

Today, actually specifically this afternoon, is the first in many, many weeks that I have felt relaxed. This is because at long last, after weeks of preparation, the pallet transport guys came to pick up the second pallet of stuff for transport to Ireland. And just like that, all the anxiety, stress, worry etc. which have become the norm of oh, maybe the last two months or so evaporated. In fact, I wandered - actually wandered, not power walked - into town in order to shred all my bills & financial info accumulated during the last four years and to pay some money into my poor, ailing bank account. Feeding the shredder in the student's association office was lots of fun even though it kept jamming, and I felt strangely like a prawn cocktail sandwich which I couldn't find anywhere so I settled for a three combo pack with one prawn cocktail in it. I then bought a small cafetière so I would regain coffee making ability sadly lost with the departing of my expresso machine. I actually had fun wandering around town - for the first time I think in at least six, maybe nine months. It felt quite unnatural to be honest - I even stopped to watch the ducks at the Burn, there were six little chicks jumping into the river and crawling unsteadily back onto the bank.

So all is good. Actually, all is not good in the slightest - there are lots & lots of other sources of stress eg; I somehow stupidly packed my train tickets & passport into the stuff sent to Ireland so I will have to repurchase tickets plus there is a fair chance that Ryanair, being dickheads, won't let me travel without a passport which will necessitate a journey via ferry which really sucks monkey balls. But hey, I'm not feeling it right now. I am feeling rather hungry though and Johanna is busy upstairs pulling stuff around her room noisily - I deep cleaned my room last night, so apart from the rest of the house there are no worries. And I really do feel genuinely relaxed unlike during the last few weeks - still a lot of muscle pain from all the lifting, but I bet I'll sleep well tonight for the first time in ages!

You may have noticed that I have changed the advertising again - I have moved from Direct Right Media to the Rubicon Project taking a two thirds hit in revenue by doing so. However, they pay me by unified transfer without minimum payouts so to be honest, it's better to get some money quickly than three times more in about a year. Advertisers suck - they're like banks, they're basically there to screw you over and suck you dry. Such is life!

Anyway, it's long overdue for filing all the entries in this one page into the archives and thus to massively speed up the loading times for this front page - pertinent too as the next chapter opens in my life. What fun! Hope you are all being very happy!

Friday 25th July 2008:

2008-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

Friday 25th July 2008: 7.47pm. One month of summer break down, one month to go before I move back to Ireland with Megan! I was rejected from my PhD application today so it'll definitely be a Masters next year, still not sure which because most of UCC is on holiday so there is no progress. I suppose admittedly the closing date for Masters applications isn't until the 1st August.

I was ill for one week of this month so I lost valuable writing time, on the other hand it broke 50,000 words about a week ago which is over 150 (book) pages. Writing speed has sped right up now I'm no longer talking in terms of science, on good days I even generate about ten pages though usually I need to refine them for an hour or two next morning. It may actually be mostly done by September.

I got pissed off with that NAS box, those cheap boxes are too CPU underpowered so I sold it on eBay and just took the hit of £30. To replace it, I bought a dumb USB enclosure but got one with two bays (it's a Raidsonic Icy Box) with hot swap so you could theoretically just swap between lots of hard drives containing all your stuff. I got round to copying stuff onto the 1Tb hard drive - amazingly, everything I have ever burned to CD and DVD throughout my entire life of downloading amounted to just 660Gb with a further 200Gb on the Tivo and my desktop's hard drive. The Icy Box now has about 350Gb used - it'll last years before it's full, then I'll just slap in a second 2Tb or even 4Tb drive. It's a very nice enclosure actually, the hot swap really adds value, but then it should be given it cost £45.

I also upgraded the Tivo (which I originally built for Johanna about a year ago out of spare parts off eBay). It had originally been a year 2000 1Ghz Pentium III Compaq Deskpro EN Small Form Factor which to be honest did very well for such ancient technology, especially with an added PCI video card and USB2 expansion card though the IcyBox USB controller wouldn't play nice with the USB2 expansion card so we were stuck with shitty (but useable) USB1 speeds. In particular, that Compaq was very quiet and used very little juice, only 40W. However, I wanted something which could play hidef 720p h264 format video so we could watch Planet Earth in hires and surround sound, and finally the Intel Atom based D945GCLF uber-cheap motherboard became cheaply available in the UK at only £37. Coupled with a 2Gb RAM stick for £20 and a cheap slimline Foxconn desktop case + quiet PSU for £30, I had me a much improved Tivo box & central server for £100 delivered. I literally transplanted the Linux installation as-is by moving the hard drive over - Linux just booted and worked, except much faster - something which would have been impossible with the previous model, the D201GLY2 which really wasn't Intel based at all (it had a SiS chipset which doesn't play video well on Linux). I've put the old Compaq and video card on ebay, I should get £50-60 for them so it's only £40 spent for a significant upgrade.

I've also ordered a mini-laptop which is called an Advent 4211. In reality, it's actually a rebadged MSI Wind PC, also with Atom processor and with 2Gb of RAM it cost just £270 delivered. I'll probably hack a copy of Apple Mac OS X onto it. Chances are that next year I'll be spending an awful lot of time stuck in UCC in between lectures as we currently can't afford to run a car, so I might as well have something useful to keep me semi-occupied and maybe write some more stuff hopefully for money.

So that's about that roughly. One month of St. Andrews left to go. How interesting! Be happy!

Monday 30th June 2008:

2008-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 30th June 2008: 6.51pm. Graduation was last week, the Leaving Ball last Friday and as of today, the last of my close friends departs for good with the exception of Johanna who will depart in August. In a soundbite, it's definitely finally all over. What a four years it has been ...

I spent about two weeks after the last entry releasing TnFOX which I try to do once a year as a minimum - this keeps it up to date and fixes any bugs which updated software components might introduce (especially on Linux). The subsequent week I added just 5,000 words to the book, but then much of that was research and crunching various maths. The entire of the last week went on graduation - I didn't even turn on the computer in five days because I was so busy going to various people's graduation dinners and meeting up with all sorts of friends I'm not going to see again for a long while. Even yesterday, I got up at 8.30am so go see off a friend despite having been awake with another friend till 4am Saturday night - so really it has only been this morning that I got a proper lie in and feel up to writing something. And the first thing then was replying to emails and ordering final degree letters etc. for Masters applications - these have taken up most of today.

I've also got through quite a few mini-projects so apart from my NAS box project (looks like I'll have to do my own custom ARM Linux build), I have a clear run for book writing next few months. And other than that, there is not a lot to report.

So it's a short entry then. I had thought I'd have plenty more to say, but to be honest, it's all water under the bridge now - what has happened is done & gone, what matters now is what comes next. Hey, I am released from my St. Andrews obligation! I feel free & relieved! Be happy!

Saturday 31st May 2008:

2008-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday 31st May 2008: 2.37am. Nuttily enough, I finished exams five days ago now - not that it quite seems that way despite that quite a lot has happened since then - and well, now there is definitely & absolutely no doubt that I'm done! It's been an interesting month - little bits done here & there, even was in the Student's Association last night for the last night of term which was lacklustre - a lot of people just seemed to not be there probably having already gone home.

As it's the 1st of June tomorrow (today now really), a LOT of people's contracts are up and so many students are spending this weekend cleaning, scrubbing and packing. Megan's house kicks out on Monday so she'll be moving in with me and Johanna for the summer and of course halls of residence closed today. This year due to how the weekdays have fallen there has been much less time than usual between end of exams and contracts running out - many people have spoken of feeling very rushed this year. Many others have spoken of their disappointment with how St. Andrews wound down.

I must echo those sentiments too. I had had high hopes only one month ago that people would put aside their bullshit and petty grudges and would just relax these last few weeks, enjoying the company of the people they have spent four long years with before the inevitable moving on. This is what happened end of Hull - we spent two lovely weeks basking in sunshine with our wider friend group - indeed, the Lawns didn't even kick us out of halls for was it three or four days after we were supposed to leave. We spent it relaxing, chatting, throwing frisbee, going for long walks and smoking a lot of weed. It was absolutely wonderful.

St. Andrews too has had the gorgeous weather these last two weeks. But I certainly wouldn't say most have been relishing one another's time together as water was put under the bridge and hatchets buried. No, if anything, people have been far more ugly & petty than I have ever seen them - it's like now they don't have to worry about repercussions, so they can be truly horrible to people. Rather than give up their grudges, they have given up on holding them back out of politeness' sake - I even had I- snarling spitefully at me a few days ago as she spat out about how little I must obviously know and understand her. She really is utterly miserable.

S- is somewhat better of late. She has a much improved attitude - less bombast, much more humble. She's much more pleasant to be around though terribly lonely as she has pretty much alienated everyone who knows her during the past two years. Both of the two of them have come off very badly from the events of precisely one year ago - the only participant who definitely has benefited is Megan. I probably have benefited too - it's been a solitary year for me, I have barely seen anyone outside the very immediate circle, but I have never felt lonely and I feel pretty happy with life.

The other thing I have noticed is that people seem really glad to be leaving here - their displays of loss & grief are far more out of fear of what is to come than any anticipation of missing people here. Is it just a delayed reaction perhaps out of denial or perhaps because no one bothers with particularly deep emotional connections here? Perhaps it's a mix. But I still get a sense that most here don't really have any deep connections with anyone else at all. Megan's lot have it good in this respect at least - they have suffered greatly together, and it has forged deep emotional connections despite themselves. Most of those in my class or friends of friends just don't seem to be too bothered really - they make a good show, but it's obviously surface deep. Just like most of St. Andrews - it's all about how it looks, not what it is.

It's all very silly really. I often laugh at it. However, my book (of which I have already written about 15,000 words) will be quite serious about the matter indeed because human beings shouldn't treat one another so. And the university will be most upset with what I say, most upset with me indeed. At least they'll come off better than Trinity College Dublin - I'll need to be careful there lest I get sued

Anyway, I'm tired so I'm going to go to bed. Oh HAPPY BIRTHDAY to this virtual diary which is now ten whole years old - yes, me and Kathryn broke up just over ten years ago now. That's some thought isn't it - I started this virtual diary back before the term 'blog' had been invented and here I am still at it - and reading my entries of May 1998 I am struck simultaneously by both how identical and how utterly improved & different I am today. The odd thing is that I am a more refined form of a more extreme version of my 1998 self - which is just plain weird, but I think fairly accurate. Despite that I was just banging on in this entry about precisely the same topics of this month ten years ago, I may occasionally even still have something interesting to say if not particularly fresh nor original! Ha! Anyway, good night everyone, and be happy!

Wednesday 30th April 2008:

2008-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 30th April 2008: 1pm exactly. I am, as of yesterday, now done with university at St. Andrews as I handed in my dissertation yay! It's quite a thought to think that I am now coming to the end of what I began well over five years ago now - I just got a book to spit out, and this cycle will have been completed. My dissertation is on modelling the costs of climate change - unlike most Economic treatises on the matter, mine is actually based on scientific evidence which makes it rather different - and I have an awful lot of good stuff in there (having once again leached most of it off my notes for my book).

It's been so busy since the last entry. Myself and Megan went to Ireland which was great as she secured a teaching practice place in a school - now that she's completely sorted, it comes down to myself finding somewhere. Dad wants us to finish renovating the last of the house in exchange for us living there rent free which Megan seems very happy about. All in all, things to do with what we're going to do next are looking very good at present - only a month ago, the total lack of security was really beginning to annoy. Oh, and while we were very busy in Ireland (up early, bed late), we did get to eat very well whilst there - it was expensive, but that seafood lasagne we ate in that restaurant off McCurtain Street will definitely stick in our memories for a while.

Since we got back, I immediately had to dive into a four thousand worder on Risk in the Creative Industries - as with all the coursework I have handed in for that module, for the first time since first year I am free to write what I want as it makes no difference to my degree grade, so I wrote a thermodynamic treatise on the matter which is probably unintelligible to almost everyone . I managed to write that in three days which is very good going - I wrote the dissertation which stands at nearly 17,000 words in precisely eight days, with no starting research despite the sixty or so referenced peer reviewed research papers (all of which I actually read fully this time), which has got to be some sort of record. Unfortunately, the word count was supposed to by 8,000 so I more than doubled it and I'll probably get penalised for that - but no matter, once again I wasn't doing it for the grade.

And to be honest, those two have eaten up most of the last three weeks. Of course, there was added drama - I was trying to frobnicate the hard drive settings on this computer that Saturday and through the simple changing of a BIOS setting managed to hose my entire partition table plus the first partition - a problem not least that my dissertation was stored there. That took an entire day to fix. There also have been various people freaking out and getting themselves into sticky situations as they wont to do this time of year, but I was flexible, and I bent with changing events though I must admit that the end of that dissertation is more rushed than I would have preferred.

So what happens now? Well, I got a nice long list of things to tick off which I've been keeping for now (one of which was to write this entry). I have another long list of stuff for when I get money in as once again I am at my overdraft limit thanks to going to Ireland yanking £180 off my monthly income - but Virgin have very nicely given me a credit card at 6.7% APR for life which is far better than a bank loan, so even though it's only got a £500 limit, that's gold dust to me right now (you'll never find such a cheap rate normally - use google, there's a magic link to follow which activates the drop from 16.7% to 6.7%). Obviously, I'd really rather like to get my book going - I have very much enjoyed writing these essays even though the time pressure sucks monkey balls as you have to submit them "good enough" instead of perfect.

I think Johanna has nearly finished cooking fish for our lunch, so time to go! I feel bloody elated that this degree is over, now come the fun times until the end of summer. Of course, it will be sad to say goodbye to so many - and for most, it will be forever, and even most of the remainder you'll never hear from them again after three years as I learned from Hull. But we still have a summer left - and St. Andrews is very pretty in the summer - as I'm sure you'll be hearing about on here. Be happy everyone!

Tuesday 18th March 2008:

2008-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 18th March 2008: 4.17am. As you have probably barely noticed, I have been busy "monetising" my website during the past month - the summary of which you can find on a new page "How to Monetise your Website". Lest you think me in terribly bad form given that nedprod hasn't had adverts previously, in fact back in 1998 when this site was first launched it had adverts almost from the start. Do you fancy seeing nedprod back then? Here's nedprod.com back on the 2nd December 1998! - as you'll see, not a great deal has changed - the site still looks quite similar, maybe not quite so polished, and yes there is the adverts at the top.

Back then in fact it was dead easy to have ActiveX controls run in Internet Explorer, and it was trivial to write a control which loaded on every nedprod page one visited. This control then went off and pretended to click on banners for a whole host of advertisers which obviously enough earned a person some cash. I never got much out of it - too few people visited the site back then - and also US dollar cheques were an absolute pain to work with. Nowadays the situation has at least improved that Paypal don't fuck non-US citizens over quite so quickly as they used to - I remember some ignorant Paypal fuck wit telling me that European banking systems were highly insecure and therefore they were going to impound my Paypal bank balance - I forget precisely why, but this guy was absolutely adamant that European banks were so unsafe that drastic treatment of myself was absolutely necessary. I pointed out that Switzerland was world renowned for strict banking laws, to which Paypal knob jockey actually claimed that Switzerland wasn't part of the practically "third world" European banking system. They're a lot nicer now to non-US citizens, but that's only because still competition from the likes of Moneybookers scared them. They still charge twice the fees for foreign currency conversions than anyone else - and far more than if your own bank did it for you despite that most banks would torture their own mothers to gain an extra penny (witness the recent subprime fiasco - and yet more taxpayers money bailing out the banking system - again!). I have absolutely no love for that company - they are just evil, even more so than banks.

Things have trundled along fairly okay last month or so. I've had two major fights with Megan, which is about par for the course, and all is currently generally well. I got one of the lads' stags in Budapest next weekend which has been very, very expensive but the recent sharp rise of the Euro against Sterling has made me well over £100 richer a month which is a rise of 40% in my disposable income - which literally feels like I have become vastly richer, as I only had about £250 a month left over after rent and bills. A lot of money has gone out recently - I bought a cheap Chinese knock off Holox BT-541 Bluetooth GPS receiver for £25 inc P&P and have been having much fun watching myself walking in real time on a hires satellite photo on my mobile phone which I stole from Google Maps using a perl script. It's actually a much better GPS receiver than its price suggests - it's a cheap implementation of the SkyTraq Venus 6 chipset which is very highly regarded by professionals and it happily keeps a eight satellite signal lock whilst in my pocket inside my house on the ground floor! That, quite simply, wasn't possible even three years ago with a GPS receiver costing thousands even military spec - and I contracted on missile guidance systems back in the 90's. I bet my father would be annoyed given all the money he's sunk on those fancy receivers he has. It's also very accurate, pretty close to 0.5m and it certainly knows when I cross the road on the tracking software. My only annoyance is that there's about a four second lag between me changing direction and it noticing - and of course its altitude tracking isn't reliably much better than a 300m resolution. The new European GPS replacement will fix these issues and then some - I hear it'll do 1cm accuracy!

My other big expense apart from the GPS receiver and the stag was finally acquiring a copy of the extremely rare The Self Organising Universe by Eric Jantsch. It cost me over £50, but that was a bargain given they usually go for over £100. I sadly haven't had time to read it yet - spent much of last week writing a PI generator using the ingenious Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm which was for my Masters application in High Performance Computing to Edinburgh University - the BBP formula lets you calculate any digit in PI you like without having to calculate any of the preceding ones. This week it's mostly been course readings for Creative Industries - you can see my latest coursework submissions here - and I have also been reading the highly depressing and famous Limits to Growth - the 30 year update for my dissertation which is on the topic of modelling the costs of climate change. Speaking of which, I have changed the subtitle of my upcoming book to Freeing Growth: A Neo-Capitalist Solution to Environmental Degradation and Social Ills as climate change is an inductive conclusion, whereas absolutely no one can pretend we aren't causing the next mass extinction of life on this planet as I type this. Here are the big (>20%) mass extinctions during the last billion years of planetary history that we know of:

? @ 850m-630m	49% @ 488m	49% @ 447m-444m	70% @ 380m-360m	70%-96% @ 251.4m	20% @ 200m	55% @ 65m
Glaciated Earth?	Cambrian-Ordovician	Ordovician-Silurian	Late Devonian	Permian–Triassic	Triassic-Jurassic	Cretaceous–Tertiary

We're now into our eighth mass extinction in the sense that we have already passed 20% extinct - what they like to call the Holocene mass extinction. If we're sensible, it would be a good idea to try to avoid the worst of it while we still can. BTW, when I say that say "70% of all life died out", I more mean species not numbers of incarnations of those species - the latter fluctuates rapidly over time with little effect for the planet.

Anyway, it's now 6am so I'm going to go to bed as I gotta get up early and get the next creative industries seminar done ...

Later that morning at 12.42pm ... God I feel like a pig has shat in my brain - despite no alcohol consumption last night! I've worked hard last few days, trying to clear stuff for the stag this weekend and while I'm drinking this wonderful Honduran coffee, I'll finish what I began last night before I got distracted reading about mass extinctions, because I was going somewhere with it.

We know that glaciation (ice ages) are actually times of great vitality for the planet - though due to lack of hard evidence, it's very tough to know whether the 850m-630m very long glaciation was as severe as the rock evidence suggests - we do know that life in the seas was pretty good at least around the equator, so I'm going to assume that as with all ice ages, it was pretty fantastic to be alive even all that time ago. I know that's not common wisdom, but as I have mentioned in this diary before that has far more to do with our cultural preconceptions about cold than scientific reality. After all, it's not by accident that most extinctions happen right after an ice age when the planet is warming - and not before - because the amount of life on the planet shoots up massively the colder it gets, so it has to die off the warmer it gets. There are about 40% less in quantity now since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago! - but as just mentioned, it's the number of extinct species not incarnations of those species that matters.

If all that quantity dies off, then that means there is a lot of stress inside the system - certainly the most evolutionary change happens right after a great loss of quantity, so you tend to get explosions of new forms of life after glaciations for whom life is very easy because all the competition got killed off (eg; the post-glaciation Cambrian explosion at around 588m when something other than complex slime first evolved). One sits on the exponentially rising early part of the sigmoid curve and things are good - after all, that's how homo sapiens evolved. Interestingly, as my upcoming book shows, that exponentially rising part is also the beginning of falling in love - and even more interestingly, continually finding new curves to rise up is how one stays in love, with a single failure quite sufficient to break the system. Having realised this, and to some extent mastered it, is why I have been so blessed with being in love with quite a few women here in St. Andrews who, feeling the same in return, have looked after me and made my life very much worth living these last few months. I am extremely grateful!

If I get time next entry, I'd like to talk about how cooling = usually good and warming = usually bad translates into financial systems, specifically how we arrived at our current sub-prime liquidity problems. I'd like especially to talk about how money doesn't actually exist and never has done.

It's 1.30pm ... ok .... stupid seminar time, this time on Intellectual Property which I am looking forward to proposing a complete replacement thereof in my upcoming book. Y'all be happy!

Monday 24th March 2008:

2008-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 24th March 2008: 6.53pm. Got back from the stag in Budapest yesterday and am slowly recovering today. I was so tired yesterday after the previous week so lacking in sleep that I was hallucinating quite profoundly - which certainly made the trip rather interesting!

I promised myself I wouldn't do any coursework today in order to give myself some rest. However, I wanted to continue the previous entry especially with the collapse of Bear Stearns last week - a classic, and very typical, example of how evil banks truly are - though, I must strongly add that Bear Stearns itself was hardly that evil and if anything, the fact it collapsed was precisely because it wasn't being evil enough. Before I begin, I use the term "bank" in a far wider sense than just the ones on the high street - I include investment houses, insurance companies, pension funds and private equity firms, and I even include the extremely wealthy (both individuals and corporations) who have always behaved a little like a bank by lending out money and investing in new enterprises. While I could use the term "investor" here, there is a huge difference between an investor off the street and these institutional investors.

Banks, since through their greed they partially caused the Great Depression in 1929 which let loose both Fascism and Socialism in the West, have ever since become partially protected entities by government - and thus in some ways, they have become a semi-official arm of government at the same time as governments have become semi-official arms of banks. I should explain that, because it's hardly a conventional viewpoint:- since well before the Roman empire, banks have bailed out governments with loans for wars and when the economy turns sour instead of raising taxes. However, since certainly the late 1970's, and many would say since colonial times, they have also told governments what to do and if governments don't comply, they are punished for it. Traditionally, governments were able to prevent banks having too much power by restricting capital movements, but with the advent of globalisation and instantaneous capital transfers, banks can both invest and withdraw vast amounts of capital in a very short time for almost no cost. Should a government be judged to not be behaving "well", its currency can be devalued, its industry starved of investment AND revenues and mass protest on the streets invoked.

However, there is a flip side. Banks compete with one another for profit, so when there is a boom they have a very nasty tendency of making ever increasingly unwise investments (this is called a "speculative bubble"). These seem wise at the time because when your colleagues do something, it becomes "normal" and more importantly, financial markets have always worked on a herd principle - and you can make a LOT of money by anticipating a herd movement and making an early investment. The problem is when the "correction" happens - when markets return to fundamentals, those last to react by yanking their money fail much like musical chairs.

Two banks who were very highly regarded in the last few years were Bear Stearns in the US and Northern Rock in the UK. They were so highly regarded because they were at the vanguard of the use of "structured investment" which is a variation by the way of the thing that caused Enron to collapse. Everyone you see had decided that Enron's managers were corrupt because "they had used structured investment to hide massive operating losses" - however, as is becoming severely clear of late, it is structured investment itself that is the cause of this problem. But I'll come back to that in a minute.

As with Bear Stearns and Northern Rock in Britain, taxpayers money to the tune of billions has been used to bail out failure in banks - that means less schools, hospitals and public services or higher taxes in return for keeping them afloat. This is a problem economics calls "moral hazard" because unlike in most industries, failure for any large bank in the financial industry since 1929 costs the taxpayer and not the bank itself - which therefore means that investors using banks (NOT the investors in the banks themselves) can happily egg on their bank to take obscene risks for obscene profits knowing that taxpayers will bail out failure.

In fairness, the industry itself tends to absorb its aborted own using government finance to prop itself up, and the government debt eventually gets repaid during the next obscene profits stage - not that, might I add, government sees any of that at all, they just get back their bonds (the loan) with interest repaid rather than getting a slice of the total profits made from their investment. Therefore, what is really happening here is that government (ie; taxpayers) insures banks against failure - government takes on the risk, while investors get all the profits. Thus the whole affair becomes a virtuous circle - government needs banks to prop up budget deficits through loans, while banks need government to bail them out every time they become too exuberant & greedy. Hence they effectively become convenient arms of one another - and each can "blame" the other to the taxpayers for when taxpayers lose out.

One can clearly see here that effectively the financial industry receives a massive public subsidy from the taxpayer, because these failures happen fairly frequently (roughly every seven years on average) and when they do, they are very expensive. How expensive might you ask? Well, you have to remember something very important - money doesn't exist ie; the value of money changes very rapidly indeed, especially in the modern world - and it changes FAR QUICKER than the book keeping shows because the accountants, working in retrospect, average it all out.

What do I mean by that? Well, why do these banks fail? The share price of Bear Stearns was trading at $93 a share only last month - it was swallowed by JP Morgan this month for just $2 a share. That in itself didn't wreck the company - almost all companies (and individuals actually!) fail for one reason alone - it's not the lack of money, it's the lack of cash flow ie; the lack of timely money. For example, if you want to move house, you need some extra money to pay for legal fees, time off work to look for new houses etc. - in other words, to effect change requires spending some money. Even if the house you're buying costs 25% of the house you're selling (so you'd have 75% of your current house's value in cash after the sale), if you have no money right now for those transaction fees then you are absolutely stuck. The nice, big, expensive house you currently own is worth nothing to you right now because you can't "liquidate" its value.

This is what is called "liquidity" in economics - the ability to convert some holding to cash. When the government bails out financial markets it is technically referred to as "pumping in liquidity" which simply means that government makes up some extra money and loans it to others, thus giving those others enough cash flow that they have time to sell off their big assets. Some of you might be exclaiming "the government 'makes up' some extra money"? Well yes - because governments at any time can literally print off as much money as they like, or gather in & burn as much of it as they like. At any stage they literally can decide "I had £100m. Now I have £200m" by literally pressing a few buttons on a computer keyboard.

So why doesn't the government just print off £1000 and give it to each of us? Unfortunately, if governments print too much money, inflation goes up ie; prices start rising, and your shiny new £1000 becomes rapidly worthless. That's what happened in the 1970's - a series of socialist governments tried just printing new money and giving it to poor people, and promptly money lost its value leading to all those riots and strikes. As the government currently bails out banks, we risk exactly the same problem - which is why just recently inflation has been rapidly shooting up with it well exceeding 4% in the US when bailouts have been running the highest.

Now we can see just how expensive bank failure is to the public - when banks fail, liquidity becomes very severely constrained indeed - in fact, it's why government has to step in with freshly printed liquidity because none of the other banks will loan any of its colleagues money. Why? Because of those unwise investments I mentioned earlier - when it becomes clear to everyone just how unwise those investments were, all the banks (quite correctly) lose trust in one another. One gets a vicious circle because cash flows become so constrained that failure sets in, then there is even more distrust that your banks are lying to you about how badly damaged their cash flow is by their unwise investments.

You have to bear in mind that in a large & complex organisation that no one can tell what the current cash flow is actually like. You can get some idea of what it was in the past - this is precisely what accountants are for - but it's next to impossible to know right this minute. Thus when sentiment turns bad, there is a suspicion of distrust that is very tough to break. Hence breaking it is very costly, because when the government loans that money, it is worth vastly more at the time than its face value - because put simply, you couldn't get that extra liquidity from anyone else at any price. Of course, none of this ever factors into balance sheets or official reports - but failure to inject liquidity in 1929 cost tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars at today's prices given the whole world war that resulted.

I should quickly add here that inflation is actually the transfer of wealth from everyone in society to the government - it's literally a tax on everything. So therefore a 2% inflation rate means the transfer of 2% of ALL money's value to the government. Of course, the government sees almost none of that since the 1970's - most goes to the banks actually as they are the largest borrowers of freshly printed money, which is one of the reasons that the financial sector has been booming the last thirty years - and the rest goes to commodity producers, of which during the last thirty years it's mostly been to oil producers like Saudi Arabia. Even better, inflation is payback for past taxation ie; if you print extra money now you don't have to pay for it via inflation at least till a year later - equally if you stop printing extra money now, it takes at least a year for inflation to stop. As you can probably imagine, this is a horrendous temptation for governments especially running up to an election - which is why in the late 1970's, control over liquidity was given away by governments to central banks eg; the Federal Reserve in the US. They you see being bankers have simply handed out the inflation tax to their colleagues in payment for keeping inflation low.

So far so good? Banks make obscene profits during boom, some collapse during busts, the bigger of these get bailed out by government who steal off the entire of society by increasing later inflation in order to bail them out. That is literally a massive hidden tax - the US economy is worth $16 trillion in 2007, so when inflation rises from 1.8% to 4% in one year as it has in the US you can see that an additional $350 billion dollars has been reallocated from society to banks and commodity producers, and that was between a year to two years ago - we won't see the effects of the most recent bailouts for another year to eighteen months. Not all of that went to bailing out banks or to oil producers - quite a lot went to other commodity producers as we are running out of water, grain, meat, metals, gas and indeed all forms of energy or materials.

Ok, enough for tonight as I gotta go see Megan. I'll continue tomorrow - be happy!

Tuesday 25th March 2008:

2008-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 25th March 2008: 1.51pm. Bleh I feel groggy! After coming back from a lovely time at Megan's where she cooked me lobster, I sat up smoking sheesha and reading the Economist which had just arrived. I was really rather glad to see they were writing about exactly what I had been writing about here, except that they were also calling for severe & swift disciplinary measures to be taken with implications of dealing with bank CEO's much as Enron's were - by hauling them out in handcuffs.

That I think unfair - they, like Enron's top brass, had very little choice in their behaviour. They are also being scapegoated because every single fucker in the entire community is guilty as sin of doing exactly the same, and they want sacrificial lambs quickly executed to deflect any possibility that the entire edifice may be called into question. And that, oddly enough, is exactly what I want to talk about next - why and how the hell all this came to be in the first place, and what should replace it? And what the hell does any of this have to do with biosphere warming and cooling with regard to biodiversity as mentioned in the entry before the last one?

I went through last entry about how the financial system works, how there are booms & busts and how both governments and banks form a virtuous circle which bails the other out of trouble by basically sucking wealth out of society. These are all very powerful people, and what I have just written about is rare to find printed - I hear that books by George Soros cover very similar ground. However don't get me wrong - all hierarchies involve a transfer of wealth from poor to rich, that's the privilege of leading one's populace, and it has been a consistent feature of all civilisations - so I have no moral problem per se that governments and banks conspire together to vampire off society. What I do have a problem with is the extent to which they try to hide their behaviour - see Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins - which they only let him publish well after the events in question.

I should also add that I have no problem per se either with important institutions being bailed out and the costs of their failure being taken on by society - in fact, as my upcoming book Freeing Growth shows, the single most important character of Western civilisation which has enabled its greatness is how well it handles failure. In most societies eg; eastern ones, failure is shameful and it is covered up, denied and not accepted - which in large part has led to the malaise in Japan in the past decade as bad loans haven't been written off. A similar problem currently faces China which has been financing much of its recent growth with negative real interest rate loans, which should they go bad, the Chinese mentality will try to hide rather than expose. A similar affliction has made Africa as bad as it is today - as I point out in my book, Winston Churchill was incompetent in his stint at the Admiralty in the first world war and directly killed tens of thousands of British servicemen with his ineptitude - yet he learned his weakness, so during World War Two he knew to delegate as much as possible to more competent others and had the lowest workload of any prime minister in nearly two hundred years. He was much better at being a charismatic leader than managing - yet had he been permanently blacklisted, Britain may well have lost WW2 without him. As I strongly reiterate in my book, failure and failing well is FAR more important than succeeding - and this is exactly opposite the logical positivist tradition of the West which tends to only see what happens rather than what was avoided.

This brings me to the topic of avoiding risk - and this one single topic has more than anything defined the modern world. Ignoring the vast realms of protective legislation (safety laws and such), financial economics in essence simplifies investment into "how best to externalise risk" ie; to shift risk to oneself onto someone else. I won't go into the mechanics of it - read about the CAPM if you'd like to know. In essence, you spread your investments between risky ones and less risky ones in order to maximise your total return for the least amount of risk - and one of the major assumptions of financial economics (like all economics) is that the market is infinitely large relative to any single investor, and therefore can receive infinite amounts of risk.

That works fine when a majority of investors aren't actively also trying to externalise their risk which until the 1980's was probably true. Thus the majority of investors were risk sinks and the risk sources could happily dump as much risk into them as they liked. Let me explain by an example: say you're a farmer who needs a minimum income next harvest of £10,000 otherwise you'll go bust. Now the weather is variable, sometimes you get a bumper harvest (say worth £20,000) but other times you might not (say £5,000). If you absolutely need that £10,000 as an absolute minimum, you can take out an insurance policy costing £5,000 which will guarantee that you'll get £15,000 no matter whether there is a bumper harvest or not. If there is a bumper harvest, the insurer gets £10,000 in profit, if not he loses £10,000.

What's just happened is that the farmer has externalised his risk. He, the risk source, has sold on his risk to another. We all do this every day with home insurance, and absolutely can one take out insurance on stock price movements. This can all get very complicated - one can take out an insurance contract (called a derivative, or future) on say if the price of X exceeds Y for longer than time Z but not if the price of A is lower than B at some other time C. This is what is called structured finance and the theory behind it is that you can plan for worst contingencies with the least loss in profits. This ability became fully legal in the 1980's, and has boomed since. Why?

It all has to do with balance sheets prepared by accountants to show profit & losses you see. There is a very thorny topic in accounting called "cost accounting" which is simply "how do you estimate the value of something" - believe it or not, many, if not most, costs are unknowable because their value is unknowable. As I showed last entry, the value of money oscillates vastly over very short periods of time and no one even realises it - which presents a horrendous problem for trying to present a realistic picture of how well a company is doing. Remember, if cash flow drops too low, all those buildings and factories become unsellable and thus become worthless overnight. Think of the example of that farm - he needs a minimum of £10,000 to keep operating, if he falls below that his entire farm becomes worthless overnight. I am exaggerating and over-simplifying to make my point, but in essence this is how it works. This is why firms try to externalise their risk as much as possible, because accountants when faced with a risky investment will apply a discount rate which means they hack off a percentage to reflect the chances of the investment going bad. For example, if you know that 5% of all your loans are currently going bad, it makes sense to write down the "true" value of your loans as being 5% less than what you lent out.

The trouble is that we live in a risky world, and the market is NOT infinite and can NOT take on infinite amounts of risk. It HAS to go somewhere, and when that somewhere overflows, it collapses. Banks take on risk from firms and individuals and try and diversify that risk onto others, but all they really can do is spread the risk around in the hope that if one part collapses, the others will support it. At some point though, too much risk accumulates in too many parts all at once, then the entire thing bombs and some other risk sink sucks in the risk. In the case of banks, it is government who takes on the risk - and as government IS the people, they just hand the risk right back to the people who sold it on in the first place - but in the new form of higher taxes, fewer schools and higher inflation.

So far so good? This stuff is NEVER taught at university level. You will NEVER hear any of that explained in any finance or economics course. The only way you'll ever hear of it is to read the Nobel prize winning authors who invented CAPM and such, and they mince their words so finely that it is extremely difficult to see what they are really truly saying. Yet the very brightest do understand this, and furthermore they understand that no one wants to hear that our entire civilisation is dooming itself - sadly they only tend to be explicit after they have retired and no longer need to attract research money.

Time for a little more detail on how exactly too much risk accumulates in one place and the whole thing dives. What I'm about to explain is a gross over-simplification, and it's a little inaccurate, but it's close enough to be good enough.

Remember our structured finance? Remember how it's basically a set of insurance contracts against some future eventuality? Well, after you've taken out the contract, you can sell it at any stage for what it's currently worth - so, our farmer may learn that the upcoming summer is almost certainly going to be a bumper harvest and therefore will sell his insurance early so he can reap all of the bumper harvest rather than the insurer getting it. Obviously, as more & more people realise that a bumper harvest is likely, such insurance contracts rapidly lower in price to whatever the average consensus is that the contract is worth - so obviously enough, if a bumper harvest is a near guarantee, then insuring against failure is very cheap. You thus get a zooming in to something's true value the closer it comes in time as more accurate information about the future becomes available.

This is both good and bad. When it works, it works well. Sadly, in the case of a speculative bubble, expected future values can vastly exceed something's true worth, and unlike investment shares in companies (on a stockmarket) which are legally protected so you can only lose what you invest and not a penny more, you can lose many hundreds of times your investment in these insurance contracts (also called derivatives, or futures). This is because, effectively, derivatives are basically gambling on the future, so if you take very good odds on the expected near guarantee that there will be a good harvest, if there is a highly unexpected very bad harvest you suddenly lose the inverse which is many hundreds (and sometimes thousands of times) your initial investment.

In the case of Bear Stearns and Northern Rock, they combined all of what I have just explained. So let's take Northern Rock - it is a high street bank which gives out mortgages to people. This debt comes with some risk, so Northern Rock takes out insurance against people not paying it back fully with Bear Stearns (this is called securitisation) and other banks because that removes the discount rate the accountants apply to account for potential bad debts - thus its mortgages become worth more, and thus so does the company. Bear Stearns then spreads around that risk still further with yet other banks. Then say the mortgage market very unexpectedly goes bad as it did in the US - suddenly you have a massive payout of the insurance polices, each chaining from one to the next to the next - but because each banks has externalised its risk to all the others, they ALL get it in the neck and they ALL lose a fantastic amount of money - currently quite a few trillion dollars at best estimates.

However that alone isn't what kills the banks - they're not that stupid, and there are regulations preventing really stupid behaviour since 1929. No, oddly enough what kills banks - or indeed any large organisation, including entire governments - is the very human emotion of loss of trust, just as it did in 1929. I mentioned this last entry in connection with the problem that no one knows what a firm's current cash flow looks like, and therefore no one knows whether the firm has any liquidity.

The problem becomes that when those banks are off making unwise investment choices as previously described, they are constantly upping what an unwise investment is worth at the time - it's why it seems wise, because the apparent high return appears to be worth the risk. That means that on the book accounts, their net worth sky rockets due to an accounting principle called Mark to Market which simply means that something is worth whatever you can currently sell it for, not what it might actually be worth say sometime later on. Sounds sensible right? But remember our house example - which becomes worthless if cash flow is too low to sell the property - under Mark to Market, because cash flow drops so severely from paying out all those insurance contracts, suddenly lots of other assets in the bank become very worthless very quickly. That means that when a correction happens, one's accounts suddenly go from being extremely healthy to being extremely poor in a matter of hours. So, generalising the example, when liquidity dries up as you can't sell anything due to lack of liquidity (a vicious circle), then via Mark to Market accounting your company becomes worthless very quickly. Do you understand now why Bear Stearn's share price dropped from $93 to $2 so quickly? It literally became worthless. Why? Because money's value changed so quickly & drastically! This is why I say that money doesn't exist!

Generalising still further, you can now see why failing to inject liquidity in 1929 made the entire world economy worth a fraction of its value very quickly indeed. Injecting too much liquidity causes inflation and once again the entire world economy gets ill very quickly. It's a constant balancing act - a fine line between recession and boom.

And do you now understand what structured investment actually does? It hides risk by getting it off your own balance sheet and into someone else's, it probably even reduces it somewhat, but does NOT eliminate it. By getting it off individual firm's balance sheets and onto some other firm's, it simply makes the entire edifice extremely complicated and highly delicate. This is what caused Enron to fail - I have investigated Enron in some detail, and I really doubt anyone in there actually knew they weren't making a profit because how it had structured its debt was so incredibly complicated that even with five years for accountants to study the books after its collapse, they still don't know how much of a profit or a loss Enron was making at any one time. To think Enron themselves knew as it was happening is wishful thinking - and as it's just happened again in the entire financial sector starting with US mortgages, I'm pretty sure they have been making paper profits for the last decade or so. They have probably actually been running at a massive loss for years - it's just the accounts didn't show it, but now they are beginning to do so.

And now you see we get onto the meaning of recessions and booms. Markets, as it is often said, mostly work via greed and fear - not two of the best human emotions. However before fear and greed can come into play, they require trust - that the accounts say something close to what is correct and that when a firm says it is healthy, that it really is healthy. When the accounts and annual reports suggest that most of the risk has been diversified off into securities (insurance contracts), and thus its balance sheet looks much healthier due to a much lower discount rate, a firm looks much less risky than it really is because the market cannot absorb infinite risk and thus feeds risk back onto all firms but just in a different fashion.

Next entry I'll tackle how precisely we developed such a ham-fisted, stupid, inefficient and counter-productive way of handling risk. We didn't use to just pass risk around like some ticking bomb, in fact America and Britain became world empires precisely through embracing often incredible risks and trying (& failing) repeatedly until they succeeded, often with terrible costs in lives. Be happy everyone!

Sunday 30th March 2008:

2008-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 30th March 2008: 4.04pm. Phew, it's end of term at long, long last! Well, it was two days ago, but I have been catching up on my sleep as with the MSc in High Performance Computing interview on Friday, I didn't get much of it this past week. They accepted me BTW, but without help for the fees of £5,600 - which basically means I can't go as such a high fee would cripple me. So it's increasingly looking like it'll have to be Ireland for at least the coming year - it could be much worse I suppose. Let's hope that Megan can both get in and afford to go given what the dollar has been doing recently.

Some people weren't entirely agreeing with my entry two entries ago about ice ages being when the planet is at its healthiest and warm periods (like currently) are when it's most sick. Firstly, I should really have included known ice ages in that last table of mass extinctions:

30m-present	55% @ 65m	20% @ 200m	70%-96% @ 251.4m	350m-260m	70% @ 380m-360m	49% @ 447m-444m	460m-430m	49% @ 488m	? @ 850m-630m
Quaternary Glaciation	Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction	Triassic-Jurassic Extinction	Permian–Triassic Extinction	Karoo Ice Age	Late Devonian Extinction	Ordovician-Silurian Extinction	Andean-Saharan Ice Age	Cambrian-Ordovician Extinction	Glaciated Earth?

I didn't think that made the relationship clear, so here's a graph of temperature changes up 500m years ago. BTW I swapped the horizontal order above to match this graph:

Not hugely conclusive in either direction is it? But then the 18 isotope of Oxygen is only loosely correlated with temperature. Next I thought that this graph might be useful - it's the atmospheric levels of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), Temperature, Methane (CH₄) and sun output during the last 400k years from the Vostok ice core:

This is much better - there is a clear link between CO₂ levels and temperature. As the temperature falls, more plants consume more CO₂ than is being produced by rock weathering and such and thus its level drops - this is opposite to our intuition of heat being good as we associate plants growing profusely in summer when it's hot. As you can see, between the punctuated rises in temperature, the drop in CO₂ is more gradual than the drop in temperature indicating improving evolution of plant photosynthesis capability - mostly by improved location and shaping of the environment, but also somewhat due to genetic improvement. Methane also tracks temperature because methane is produced by decaying organic matter, and when it's cold those little bacteria work extremely slowly - hence why your fridge keeps food fresh for longer. The most interesting part is how it suddenly shifts to high temperatures and high CO₂ and then takes some time to become colder and less CO₂ relatively gradually - and I'll posit a cause later. Note also how rising sunlight levels do increase CO₂ but always leave it lower next cycle. Finally, note how temperatures on this planet normally are 4C lower than at present!

Of course one might now say "well how do you know it isn't the CO₂ and the methane which raises the temperature and not the other way round?". After all, both are potent greenhouse gases and man-made emissions of both are currently being strongly blamed for climate change? I think that this, more than any other point, is what confused people about me linking cooler temperatures with health.

And you'd be absolutely right - more greenhouse gases mean hotter planet, less greenhouse gases mean cooler planet. From that perspective, lots of gases and heat are good for plants so they grow lots and lower the gases, making it colder. This is the traditional viewpoint - but consider things from a biodiversity view:- more and more plants are required to keep those gases low, therefore there are a LOT more plants (and thus animals) around in total at the coldest point - if there weren't, greenhouse gas levels wouldn't become so low.

When you consider this angle, it becomes clear that it doesn't matter which causes the other, because they are one and the same thing. If you take a Gaia perspective ie; that the entire planet is one organism, then it simply becomes a case of whether Gaia has a fever or not (just like animals who also get hotter - not colder - when they get ill ie; lose structural cohesion, which I'll explain shortly). Oxygen and Methane are highly reactive chemically at our atmospheric pressure and temperature and simply do not persist in any environment for very long without reacting with something - so therefore the fact that a whole 21% of our atmosphere is pure Oxygen and has stayed that way for 2bn years (despite the 96% mass extinction at 250m!) is because an awful lot of very resilient photosynthetic organisms have kept it that way by extracting the carbon out of any CO₂ they could find via sunlight and leaving lots of O₂ around for more complex organisms to use (despite it being the most abundant & potent carcinogen in our environment by far). It's a cycle - plants can't grow without CO₂ yet perversely, historically there are the most plants when CO₂ levels are lowest precisely because of that fact - which has been amply proven via the fossil record:

One must remember that oxygen is a very powerful oxidiser - so much so that carbon, when reacting with oxygen, releases so much energy it turns air into an ionised plasma (also called a flame). That very same chemical reaction, the same that burns entire forests down in an inferno, is what drives you and me. That natural thing for that reaction to do is burn very hard, and very brightly - yet none of us burst into flames unless we are heated up sufficiently after which we do burn extremely well (try burning dried out meat some time - it has an energy density approaching that of crude oil, some 37MJ/kg). Why? Because, when healthy, our biochemical regulation system paces the reaction using a water solution and membranes to keep the chemicals apart and it only pumps the amount of energy required for combustion via ion transfer over the membranes. When we die, those membranes break down and anaerobic bacteria start eating us thus producing the familiar stench of decay. Just in case readers are still not absolutely convinced, I did a very crude merge of the two graphs:

There is so much going on in the graph that it's hard to describe, but one can see that the 96% extinction at 250m came at a time when Gaia was pretty unhealthy anyway - probably the reason it was the worst mass extinction that we know of, and also it took the longest to recover from. Sometimes biodiversity precedes temperature change, other times it's the opposite. I agree that from this evidence my opinion is still not proven - but equally, the more common association of "warm = good" is no more proven. A very good piece of news is that Gaia was at her healthiest point in 500m years before we started amplifying the minor mass extinction after the end of the last ice age 15,000 years ago.

Thermodynamically speaking, the point to take from all this is when things are at their most ordered, most cohesive, most healthy is when there is the greatest difference between energy source and final energy sink. For the biosphere, the temperature of the sun is pretty fixed at 6000K so it's at its healthiest when it is extracting the maximum possible amount of entropy from sunlight - which implies the coldest possible ambient temperature. See my diary entries during my summer of research for a lot more on this.

Now onto how this relates to financial markets. It recently occurred to me that a graph from my group Econometrics project on historical house prices in the UK last semester might be useful:

The red solid line (left axis) is the average house price divided by the average annual income per person in the UK - as you can see, it tended to stay around twenty times for much of British history and it still tends to return to that multiple. The green is the interest rate the bank sets and the purple is the rate of inflation. The blue dotted line is real interest rates, which is what the banks charge minus inflation. Traditionally, a sudden jump in this house price multiple indicated that large inflation was about to come within a year - what economists call "overheating" in an economy. As you can see, from about 1983 onwards, house price multiples have started to ignore the interest AND inflation rates quite noticeably - despite what monetary economics or the government thinks about it being a form of economic stabilisation control. Nevertheless, we must ask: why should this house price multiple move so independently of the underlying interest rate?

Here's what I think: a lot of talking heads on TV and newspapers are blathering about cheap credit being the cause of the recent financial crunch (because hedge funds, banks, big investors et al routinely borrow short-term money to cover their temporary massive losses on the derivatives market). This is simply untrue - in fact, the real interest rate sat around zero for much of recent British history and since the early 1980's it has returned to a few percent which is still about half its average during the boom times of the British empire. No I think it's far more a case of too much capital floating around - after the great boom of the 1990's, we simply have too much excess capital for the stockmarkets to absorb and as a result it has tried to find elsewhere to go eg; emerging markets or real estate. Too much of something does imply that it becomes cheaper - but I don't think that means cheaper in cost per se (after all, it can't go below the real interest rate in cost), but rather cheaper due to more of it being around and thus less work is needed to get it. China certainly has far more easy capital than it knows what to do with - in fact, it like other developing countries has actively turned capital away.

Too much capital is a rather unique situation in history - I can't think of another case apart from perhaps in Britain at the height of empire when foreign direct investment mushroomed. My instinct suggests that inflation will rise to wipe off the value of that excess capital, but I must agree that it should have already happened by now. Who knows what this means - I would personally guess that the national accounts are simply wrong and inflation has got lost off the balance sheet somewhere - but I do know that that house price multiple is going to drop back to at least 25 times and probably more - which means either that house prices fall or wages rise (which equals inflation). Just for reference, this is British empire foreign investment as taken from a 2nd year Economics essay I wrote:

As one can see, the empire saw a handsome average return of around 50% for its risky investments overseas. Furthermore, as the British economy wobbled (as you can see from the wildly oscillating outflows), the foreign income was a welcome source of stability during the recessions of 1839-1842, 1866-1870, 1877-1879, and the long recession 1890-1906.

Now money is a sort of energy - or rather, the movement of money is kinda like energy moving in that it has an effect on its surroundings and tends to lose some of its value during transit. For example, if you move money from A to B you pay a charge - you might not think you do of course because it's hidden via the clearing system, so when you transfer money or pay in a cheque it goes into clearing ie; takes a few days before it arrives. This is one of the greatest scams of modern finance because money moves in milliseconds, so all the banks really do is take your money and leave it in their own bank account for three or four days before sending it on. While there it earns interest you see which the bank takes as commission - meanwhile of course, you lose that interest.

This is why GDP growth, ie; the growth of the money value of how many final goods and services were produced, has some relation to actual economic growth. It's basically a measure of how much money has changed hands and is a very good indicator of how much effect our economy has had in total on everything. Unfortunately, it has much of its effect on our mental state rather than anything physical - after all, many wars have been fought over perceived wealth advantages which may or may not turn out to be warranted.

Financial markets are supposed to discover those goods & services which people will want next or want cheaper and funnel capital into those for an expected return beyond the bank interest rate corresponding to the amount of risk. As covered in recent entries, when markets believe the information they receive about upcoming goods & services, greed sets in, all is well and the money flows (ie; a boom). When it becomes apparent that that information is not to be trusted ie; because firms and analysts have started lying about the worth of these proposed investments, fear sets in and financing dries up (ie; a recession). Thus one can see that what drives the boom & bust cycle is trust in information:- when trust is high, interconnection & interaction is high and when trust is low, everyone hoards and boards up the windows.

I covered this before in previous entries, but now we need to relate this to the biosphere which undergoes a ~100,000 year ice age cycle and thus a ~100,000 year cycle of minor mass extinctions (of around 5-10%). Can you see yet how both processes are thermodynamically identical? If not, here's my best attempt to explain ...

What causes the loss of trust which causes a recession? It's the boom itself. Why? Because as the economy booms, there is a mad scrabble to get your money in there and the most sound investments will get oversubscribed first, leaving only the less sound ones for the excess (often borrowed) money to enter. There is an ever increasing incentive for investees to lie about the soundness of their proposed investment and likewise for the investor who wants to find superior returns for their capital, but being afraid of "losing out" they throw more & more caution to the wind. When reality sets in, trust gets lost - but note something really interesting: what causes a recession is too much capital available too easily.

This exactly mirrors how ice ages break down. At their coldest, total planetary biomass is at its peak - there is more abundant food available than at any other time as the biosphere wrings every last bit of entropy out of sunlight. In fact, there is too much food available too easily. You're probably thinking I'm mad here, but thermodynamically speaking, the more entropy you dissipate in a smaller space and time period, the exponentially higher the effects on the environment it causes. One effectively gets a compression of space and time from the entropy's viewpoint - which is also correct as in Physics we tend to hold light as the constant and relativise everything else around that. Time, in the sense of the rate of change caused to the environment, speeds up.

The problem is that all those numerous plants & animals being so diverse, interlocking & complicated that they cannot adapt to such increasing rates of change, caused by their own success, without losing structural cohesion (ie; a rising fever), and thus one gets a collapse. We do know however that total diversity exponentially rises over time, so after each iteration things are always better on average than before by some compounded percentage.

This is exactly the same process that drives the rise and falls of civilisations. It also is the same process that drives people going mad and recovering as I did. This notion of structural inflexibility - that the success of a system's structure generates so much change in its environment that it fails to adapt to changing conditions, so it collapses which forces adaptation - that is THE central thesis of my book, that we must deliberately & consciously deconstruct our society to make it vastly more flexible - that means eliminating most of our laws, social & legal structures, and in the process keeping what is absolutely required for our civilisation to continue - and not one iota more.

Hence the main points of my book: improve speed & breadth of transmission & quality of information in all areas so trust is not only kept higher, but over-simplifying complex issues avoided. Simplify laws to most essential guidelines instead of tombs of books no human could possibly know in their entirety. Move economy's focus from increasing physical output to increasing cognitive improvement. Remove as many incentives to lie or falsify as possible. Tax what people do NOT what they earn - this unifies social, moral & legal societal controls in one, coherent direction rather than the current mess where taxes punish good behaviour (eg; earning more money) and bad behaviour is untaxed (eg; crime).

Well I hope you all enjoyed my four part series on economics and biology - as you might be able to tell, a lot of this is being synthesised for my book though I'll be a lot more rigorous (and hopefully clearer) there. Ok, time for food and cleaning the house before Megan and Johanna get back. Be happy everyone!

Saturday 16th February 2008:

2008-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday 16th February 2008: 3.52pm. Just woken up, and I do feel pretty damn knackered but then for once it's entirely & very much my own fault! I was going to get an early night last night because I had been extremely tired yesterday after staying up till 7am trying to get my new printer to work - actually, to be more specific, it was to fix Johanna's computer because I accidentally broke its ability to print anything at all during the process of testing the new printer. Then last night I began reading a little Flash Gordon in the 22nd Century which arrived yesterday after me ordering it two months ago - these are six vintage 1980's sci-fi books telling one big long story, and I ended up reading two whole books back to back and so got to sleep after 8am. Heh!

Now those Flash Gordon books have absolutely do with the normal Flash Gordon whatsoever, in fact few people have ever heard of them or know anything about them and a full complete set is EXTREMELY rare. Don't get me wrong - the narrative is awful, the plotlines weak, the descriptions lurid and in every single way technically The Da Vinci Code would exceed it (and that's saying something!). However, I read the third book when I was about nine, I always wanted to know what happened before and especially after, and that was worth quite a bit of money to me (£30 inc postage from Canada of all places, I found the seller via www.abebooks.co.uk which is the Amazon for rare books). It's interesting you know - I hadn't realised how these books totally lack any emotional depth at all until now, yet when nine years old they certainly did invoke emotional states within me. I guess I've matured a little

As for the new printer, well I'm really very proud of my new acquisition. I got it off eBay for £38 inc delivery and it's an old ancient year 2000 HP Laserjet 2200d which you can see on the right. I bought it because I lost my temper with my purloined Epson inkjet which ran out of ink yet again when I was just about to print a letter I needed to send - you see, in common with most budget printers, it requires ink in the colour cartridge to print in black & white because the ink is where the manufacturers make their money. Even with buying generic cartridges at quarter the cost, a full set costs about £30 and I can get a new printer for that. In fact, I can get a whole new ter for that as my new eBay acquisition proves!

This printer back in its day was state-of-the-art and cost near enough to a full grand. It can print double-sided on its own which is a major boon, it also understands Postscript which makes it Linux friendly, and best of all because it's a corporate model, its toner cartridges will do about 5k sheets for only £45 (proper HP cartridges, not the generic at half the cost). Including paper @ 0.6p a sheet, that's 1.5p a single sided sheet or 2.4p a double sided sheet my friends, a BIG difference from the 4p a single sided sheet the inkjet used to cost. Ok, the savings won't pay for the printer anytime soon, but on the other hand the quality of output is VASTLY better especially as this particular model can do true 1200 dots per inch which is four times the resolution of modern personal laser printers (that means much sharper pictures and much smoother greys).

It's currently hooked up via USB1 to the Linux TiVO box I built Johanna last September so all the computers in the house can share it. I still have some permission & driver problems ... but I'll fix em!

Anyway, all that has come after ten days of busyness. I lingered & prevaricated for about four days after I got back from Amsterdam, then decided I had to get on with things and so made a long list, and started making myself tick off items which I've been doing ever since. Megan has reacted by feeling a bit neglected which very much reminds me of the last nine months of going out with Johanna. I'm really not sure what to do about that - I don't want to repeat my mistake of last time when I basically said "You can't be the centre of my Universe every single day for the rest of time", which as I've since determined caused Johanna to find ever increasingly drastic ways of regaining my attention (in her mind). I appreciate what it's like for Megan - she's definitely been the focus for the last six months, but now that I want to write the book it's become my focus and she feels like she's losing out - and then of course feels guilty about feeling like that.

It's not that we don't still spend significant amounts of time together, but it does mean that any time we do have together we both have our minds elsewhere which I suppose creates a feeling of loss of intimacy, which in our modern age manifests itself as heightened physical desire as a means of proxy or even substitute. To me, that's a necessary sacrifice of time moving ahead - and I always try to make sure that around once a week (but sometimes up to ten days if busy) I focus exclusively on the girlfriend eg; do something romantic. That wasn't enough for Johanna, she never appreciated that I was doing my absolute damned best to balance all the various pressures second half of second year because she only got my exclusive attention (and admittedly, I was usually exhausted) sporadically (ie; when I found the time and wasn't so exhausted I was a zombie). Actually, in fairness, she did appreciate it at the time, it's just it simply wasn't enough and she wanted what she could not have without me giving up getting good grades, the nascent Future Society and my coffee dates. I suppose there is a point that if I loved her enough, I'd have done that - equally, if she loved me enough, she could have waited just until the end of semester - it's hardly a lifetime, though the St. Andrews bubble makes it seem that way.

And now Megan and I are standing at a somewhat similar cross road. The honeymoon of the relationship is over, what comes next is both easier and harder at the same time. I took off almost all the pressure to move onward by last December - it had been necessary prior to that given our history, but I'm not fond of one person always driving the relationship, I think both should take it in turns. Unfortunately, that can seem like I don't care, or that my attention is elsewhere, and Johanna has repeatedly pointed out that I'm very bad at communication at this point because I'm not good at indicating that I'm watching without doing. So that's my aim this coming semester - to keep reminding Megan that I am focusing on her and our relationship, but that I'm two or three steps away from the rudder as it were.

Some of you might think I'm theorising too much again! And you're right, I do worry that I'm bucking too much social norms for what I want to be feasible - at least, for a woman under the age of thirty. Women are taught to be emotionally dependent on their man - it's why they permit a boyfriend to do many things they wouldn't a male friend no matter how close. I've deliberately challenged & broken that whenever possible during my time in St. Andrews, most obviously by sleeping with most of my female friends, but less obviously by saying, doing, and behaving in ways utterly inappropriate for a male friend to behave. My point in all this was to illuminate how men are boxed in, so for example they're not allowed sleep with women who are not their (potential) girlfriends unless both parties are drunk. However, if they become a boyfriend, suddenly they're allowed too much leeway, so they can dominate the woman, or be unreasonable, or order her around - and the woman happily accepts because that's her accorded role in society - or rather, that's what she thinks is her accorded role because in my opinion, this can all too easily become a convenient self-destructive excuse for getting out of making one's own decisions and thus taking responsibility for growing up and dealing with one's own mistakes. In other words, for most women under the age of twenty five or so, being in a relationship is an emotional "get out of jail free" card from taking personal responsibility by shelving that onto the man - because it's much easier to be told what to do and to do it than think for oneself¹. And cos I'm just plain difficult, I want my girlfriend to do better - much better - which in itself is me dominating the woman into behaving in a way she wouldn't ordinarily, thus completing the contradiction!

What I'd really like is that boyfriends and close male friends are treated the same way - they get permitted sex when both parties want it for the right reasons, but NOT due to a "we're going out" on/off switch. Equally, boyfriends shouldn't be allowed to abuse, belittle, dominate or intimidate except when both parties want it for the right reasons, and again NOT due to a "we're going out" on/off switch. And just to be complete, women shouldn't be allowed to nag, pout, be jealous, moody, pointlessly demanding or stroppy just because the "we're going out" on/off switch says they can!

God damn it, all I want is for people to think about what they want and will make them happy rather than blindly inheriting the simplistic binary precepts of our society. FAR too many people go around saying "I have X, Y, Z and Q. Because I have these I should be happy, and as I'm not happy then I'm being ungrateful, and therefore I am a bad person, and therefore I should go do something bad to let out steam so I definitely have cause to hate myself because that's the only way any of what I'm feeling makes any sense at all". Yeah, I guess you're seeing the fundamental message of my upcoming book which will be entitled Freeing Growth: A Neo-Capitalist Solution to Climate Change and Social Ills except of course I'll be explaining my reasoning in a far more subtle, and hopefully therefore far more persuasive, fashion.

Now I would just love to go and bang on about that book and how its template is progressing so far, but really I should be working on it rather than spending loads of time writing in here - and besides, I'm pretty hungry now at it's 5.41pm and I've been writing this for nearly two hours. So I'll be off, though it'll be tomorrow before this gets published as Megan and Johanna should probably check it over first given the detail I've put in and both of them are out together at a birthday party right now. So y'all be happy, see you again soon!

[1]: Megan, quite correctly, says I'm being strongly biased against women here and also that what I said isn't a purely under-25 phenomenon like I make it seem. Absolutely correct - but then I'm currently surrounded by under-25 women and I am alluding strongly to various events currently happening around me like I always do in this virtual diary, and besides, I'm also a man and am not even remotely attempting to be impartial! I might add that there is plenty more bias and assumptions in there eg; I just strongly advocated that men & women should be true friends first lovers second - an agreed myth for the European middle classes, but an assumed impossibility for the European working classes where a man's only possible female friend can be his sisters and maybe first cousins (and vice versa). Thing is, the latter are being truthful - most middle class couples secretly don't trust their partners and lie to themselves about being friends. Don't believe me? Ok, how would you react if your partner cheats on you? If they are really truly your friend, then so what to be honest? So long as they don't lie to you, they haven't betrayed your friendship - just an agreement between you to be physically and/or mentally exclusive with you, and that's something any friend should be able to get over. Another example: most relationships long outlive their natural life, and a true friend would let their partner go instead of trying to keep them because they fear being alone. I could keep going, but no time for food!

Friday 25th January 2008:

2008-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Friday 25th January 2008: 9pm. My last exam was last Monday and since then it's been mainly catching up on various chores and pottering around doing random stuff as part of recuperating from last semester. A good week of my Christmas break was spent doing essays, so really I only had one week off and that week was spent meeting up with various people eg; Kev's memorial football match. It's been good last few days, been sitting up till 6am watching a lot of Doctor Who (the new series) in particular. Certainly, this past exam session was one of the worst I've had - had the most difficulty maintaining concentration of any revision period yet by far with my mind constantly thinking of anything other than what it should have been studying. However, the grades should be 2.1 or higher, and tomorrow I head back to Hull for the first time in two years as the beginning of a week long holiday (my first in eighteen months!).

This is the traditional birthday entry - yes, I am some thirty years old now. And ten days ago for the second birthday in a row I did not feel much depression - last year, S- took me out which was wonderful. This year it was very much lower key, in fact most people didn't even realise it was my birthday and I had some ringing up or texting many days after when they remembered.

But despite that it was just Megan and myself, I had to admit that the usual birthday blues were not manifesting themselves. Megan did note this on the day and asked why. I replied "Because I think this is the first birthday in many years that I can truly say I achieved a very great deal in the preceding year". And on that, I still think that's true - I can really place hand on heart and say, without hesitation, that I definitely achieved a lot this past year:

Everyone, and everything, which surrounds me & gives forth to me grew substantially during 2007
Johanna and I have overcome a great deal of trickiness during the past year - no couple I have ever known has healthily continued to live together after they broke up, even more so when one gets a new partner. Not just that, but mine & Johanna's relationship is far deeper and better than it has ever been - it has grown into something better than it ever was when we were dating. I know that Johanna has had troubles seeing it quite this way, she finds it all very frustrating & confusing. But I am incredibly proud of her, she's being more mature than I would be if the roles were reversed for sure.

Megan has decided to stop her errant & destructive ways and is better than I have ever known her, and her family and friends from before St. Andrews seem to think I am some sort of wonder worker when the crazy part is that I was the lynch pin of much of her deep unhappiness these past two years. I think that's she been like she was in part for many more years preceding.

V- recently made a full apology, so she's no longer cut off. I made a full apology to my academic daughter given my recent discovery that I can't trust my memory, so that's mostly fixed. N- and I have had a most eventful semester, had a few tricky spots in there too but thankfully Megan knows & understands only too well. I- has had a horrendous semester, not that she's doing much positive about it, and S- is now dating a good friend of mine and I approve. So, in no uncertain terms, everyone I care about who hasn't been kicked out of the university yet has grown greatly as a person.
I have grown substantially during 2007
What can I say? I understand better now than I have ever done, and a quantum leap more so than when I was typing here this time last year. I am ready to write my book applying Tn to the world. In fact, I begin in about two weeks - I have generated a shit load of notes this past semester. I have come to realise that my memory accuracy problems are tied strongly to changes which have occurred within me - I am no longer seeing time nor change quite like I used to, and that has caused memory accuracy problems during the transition. Funny really.
Succeeded in shrinking successfully
All our lives go through cycles of growth and shrinkage. As I mentioned in last year's entry, most people have difficulty in shrinking successfully - they tend to feel themselves losing what they have and try to cling on to too much to possibly keep. It ain't easy, but I think I've done it, and I've successfully brought the maximum possible with me into this new phase of growth.

The only sadness I have is that many I care about have been left behind along the way. Not a lot I can do about that, the connection has become broken and as Megan has been finding recently in trying to make it up to those she has been unkind to in the past, once the connection is gone there isn't a huge amount that one can do - that window of opportunity has closed in order to make space for new windows of opportunity to generate change. And I, and those around me, we have suffered greatly this past year - but I think we can all agree that we have all become better for it. And it's not often one can be so upbeat about great change, so I think all is pretty damn good!

Well, I suppose time for the next thing on the todo list - washing up, packing and putting away clothes are all still to come! Be happy everyone, and happy 2008!

Saturday 22nd December 2007:

2007-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday 22nd December 2007: 2.17pm. It's nuts that it's only three days till Christmas even though today is the official end of term in St. Andrews! Johanna has just left and Megan left last Wednesday, and I handed in my last group coursework assignment on Thursday. To achieve that I had to defer one of my essays via Student Support, so it along with another essay hangs over my Christmas. I had a deliberate lie in yesterday morning for the first time since reading week - yes folks, this has truly been the hardest semester work-wise since semester two of second year (which left me so shattered I took two weeks to recover from the nervous eye twitch among other psychosomatic illnesses I developed).

It didn't help that I lost my reading week - two days after the previous entry I came down with some viral & bacteriological infection and became more sick than I have been in years (think shaking for hours sweating profusely in a bed for day after day). It took me ten days to fully recover which seriously shafted my plans to get ahead in my personal coursework as so to leave space for the group stuff (whose timing you cannot plan as it depends on the group). Then as of the 2nd of December when the Irish post-graduate applications opened I began my postgraduate applications to University College Cork, Edinburgh and Hull for a variety of PhD (research) and MSc (taught) courses in both Economics/Management and Computer Science - which are two separate faculties, each with two separate application procedures for research and taught. To make it even more complicated, some MSc's are subsidised depending on the year, some can be promoted to a PhD, some have quota scholarships and others applied, and so on so forth. This sucked up two weeks of my free time between the researching of options, dialoguing via email, and the filling in of endless forms, and given the never ending nagging from my father it often seemed like choosing between a rock and a hard place

This all left me constantly behind in my studies, and no matter how hard I tried I never managed to recoup the losses. I was also very mindful that the reason I became ill in the first place was because I had pushed myself too hard before reading week and my body simply said "stop now" and made me ill - and that I couldn't afford to happen again. All that said, I haven't done worse than a high 2.1 all semester which surely will do wonders for me getting a first given the travesty of last semester.

Speaking of exhaustion, I made a full apology to my academic daughter last Wednesday after six months of having cut her off when I felt she had made up a conversation between us. It recently came to my attention through incontrovertible testimony from both Megan and Johanna independently that this semester I invented memories that were an incorrect fusion with make-believe of what actually happened. To say this bothers me would be putting it mildly - it clearly only happens when I get very, very exhausted - not necessarily physically tired mind, but rather depleted of all remaining stocks of effort. It's just like old people do - and I clearly have found myself getting confused like an old person during the last two weeks, and hell I'm only just about to turn thirty. But one can feel the bell beginning to toll - I'm pretty sure I didn't used to get so befuddled in second year. On the other hand, I had two years to build up health and effort reserves before arriving here, and the fun & games leading up to the most recent summer most certainly depleted any backup reserves that I had left. I have been running on empty and feeling it to be so recently more than at any time in the previous six years - it probably doesn't help either that I started smoking again this past week having successfully not done so all semester, but I think the real reason I started smoking again is because I had to cut back the two bottles of whiskey I was drinking per week because my kidneys were beginning to ache.

And why might you ask would I be drinking two bottles of whiskey per week mostly on my own (sometimes with Megan who rather likes the stuff too)? It's probably about fifty units of alcohol per week just on the whiskey, so add another ten on for the occasional beer and we're looking at about sixty per week. Bear in mind you're only supposed to drink about half that at most, so well, not good really. Well, much like my father, when you give up smoking your drinking correspondingly increases, and also like my father, I find work stressful which makes me anxious which means I can't sleep. So I try to knock myself out with drinking and a smoke if needed before bed, otherwise I just lie there and don't sleep which quickly cascades after a few days into insomnia which is really shit for studying.

If you think I might just be weak or highly-strung, consider this: I now know of five students here on beta-blockers, some eight on tranquilisers and no less than fifteen on anti-depressants (mostly SSRIs, but some with mirtazapine) - and those are just the ones I know of, many here still view it as something to be ashamed of. Admittedly, there is probably a fair bit of bias off the general population given the type of person I'm likely to know, but nevertheless I still think it's pretty shocking that so many under-22's are so heavily stressed that that level of medication is being issued. Imagine what's to come for them working in some soulless corporation who sucks you dry before disposing of you in your late 20's - and best of all, like studying here, they'll all convince themselves at the time that they are really enjoying their jobs and their reward for their hard work will arrive soon!

Interestingly, all of them don't want medication, they'd actually far prefer counselling because the real problem behind all this is loneliness even when you're surrounded by friends, all of whom are just as lonely & isolated as you are - and thus each pursuing their own self-interest destroys their own self-interest. Student Support Services in St. Andrews is not there for you, it is there for your studies which is quite, quite different - as people quickly realise after visiting them, they also do the minimum necessary to get you maximising your academic results even if your happiness must be sacrificed to do so. Thus Student Support becomes part of the game, part of the system to be deceived and manipulated to gain more marks for less effort in the never-ending profit-maximising optimisation, and thus even more isolation, loneliness and despair sets in - a never-ending, vicious circle. It's not like I haven't been bleating to anyone who will listen about this since I arrived here, and if I do say so myself, this past semester has vindicated my warnings like none other because many students have started "making friends" for after graduation - by which I mean, they've started sucking up to those who they think will best propel them forward after graduation, sometimes through fancy invite-only dinner parties, sometimes through literally opening your legs or mouth to gain special attention or favour eg; getting a new boyfriend or girlfriend who looks like a good platform or conduit, and usually all combined with disregarding, ignoring or belittling old friends who are an embarrassment to the new cause. In the process, many good solid ordinary friends have been left estranged, and many people have realised just how few (if any) friends they ever really actually had to begin with. Those who have listened to me feel their loneliness and despair every day, the least worst scenario - while those who have not deceive themselves of the truth, and spend all their time convincing themselves of their happiness and popularity while secretly engaged in ever more self-destructive behaviours because deep down they know how desperately unhappy they really are.

You know, it's not until I watched Megan these past four months that for all my fancy theories as to why people are self-destructive, I have fully accepted that her simple explanation was the most correct. Happy people don't tend to be self-destructive, or rather with time they become less self-destructive. Unhappy people over time become ever increasingly more self-destructive. Now I knew that as a theory, and I definitely applied that theory to Megan over the last two years - but watching her make quantum leaps in self-esteem over the last four months really has cemented how powerfully true that simplistic explanation really truly is. With the self-esteem has come mountains of self-confidence, and it's true self-confidence. With that comes vastly improved treatment of other human beings such that she of late has been so consistently a good friend not just to me, but to everyone who knows her, that it's like she has become reborn. The biggest, clearest change has been in consistency - I and others are beginning to actually rely on her and not keep expecting to get let down like we used to.

And thus therein lies the key to my book - our world is being destroyed by the most self-destructive human population that has ever lived (and I refer to only the top 20% in consumption terms of us). Looking at the happiness indicators trailing ever downwards since the 1970's, I think there's a lot of credence in Megan's simple explanation applying across the widest swathes of today's society. Put most clearly: Discover people's happiness, Save the world.

This interestingly is an applied case of one of the fundamental laws in my upcoming book: that healthy systems embed themselves and become ever more stable over time (eg; like a monopoly). Unhealthy systems destabilise themselves, forcing themselves to evolve by ever increasingly generating chaos and degeneration in their surroundings. In case you're wondering, exactly the same process underpins (and this is a very, very small subset of the total list): genetic step-change evolution, idea generation, political winds, computer programs & programming techniques, solar systems & planets, heroin junkies, putting too many rats into a box, why matter is solid, one of the reasons that time moves forwards and lastly why God makes mistakes (relatively, but he/she/it never makes mistakes absolutely).

Yeah ... that's only one of the fundamental laws and all ... and my upcoming book even explains the processes that underpin how that law works through a lay man's explanation of thermal physics. It'll almost certainly barely sell a copy

Ok, time to go start cleaning the house - it has become the dirtiest & most untidy it's ever been during the past semester, and the last time I properly cleaned it was reading week (Johanna's been too busy to do anything other than cooking and washing dishes). Johanna's away till February as she has no exams, so as of tomorrow I'll have a nice clean, tidy house for about six weeks yay!!! Be happy everyone, and Merry Christmas!

Tuesday 13th November 2007:

2007-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 13th November 2007: 4.16pm. Here we are in Reading Week at long last! To think that a month and a half has passed ... gee, it felt a lot longer. There's been lots of drama in everyone else's life, but mine, well mine is pleasantly dull. And I'm very glad for it!

I basically spend most of my time with Megan which continues to go well. I squeeze a few hours in per week to work on Brook and as of yesterday, its CPU backend is about forty times faster than it used to be and is stable and working well. It's nearly finished actually in terms of how I wanted to upgrade it - if only they'd fix the bugs I submitted to AMD about their very crappy OpenGL support in their drivers for both Windows and Linux (neither can drive more than one graphics card at once, even though their DX9 drivers can, and this is more than shit). The only real thing left to do with it is a regression suite for the new features, and stuff it through Glowcode and Valgrind to clean up any bad code and resource leaks. I then might merge it into TnFOX I think as a non-core add-on module - this then lines me up perfectly for my new Economic modelling software which I'll be needing for next semester.

Yeah I am probably going to have a go at that book on Neo-Capitalism next semester. I have only one class and my dissertation happens to fit one part of one chapter so I even get to get marks for writing some of it. The book will be a trilogy with the first book being the Conclusions, second book being the Maths & Science (and computer modelling) and third book being the Moral & Spiritual. Yes it is supposed to be backwards - I figure almost all readers won't want to wade through hefty theory, and furthermore hefty theory will put them off before they get to the conclusions. So I'll go for the conclusions first, then ever increasing amount of detailed explanation culminating finally at the end of Book 3 with God which seems spot on as God resides as the contradiction (a paradox) in the infinite. One gets some especially exciting maths modelling that kind of stuff, never mind moral theory. And if I can even get half the first book done by the end of next summer, I'll be happy.

However before that comes a very great deal of coursework unfortunately. I have lots & lots due between now and Christmas - all sorts of group presentations, group essays, group this and group that. It's very slow moving because it's all group work, and there are endless problems of interpersonal relations and coordination - the key is to keep tipping away and start as early as the group will let you. Interestingly I think I only have two bits of coursework I do on my own this semester, probably less than 20% of all my coursework which is the first time it's been in a minority.

Johanna went through her usual annual difficult patch about two weeks ago, and after as usual coming close to breaking point, made some changes in her life and is now much better. She's had a lot happen to her last six months, no shortage of trials & tribulations usually imposed on her by external forces, and despite all that she seems to be bearing up well. I still don't see much of her, but have seen more of her this past week due to her own coursework commitments than I have before that. She seems to have been enjoying relaxing slightly this reading week which is very good.

Ok, next step I think is some food. I'm supposed to be going with Megan + father to Anstruther's famous fish & chip shop, but I'm getting too hungry! Be happy everyone!

Tuesday 2nd October 2007:

2007-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 2nd October 2007: 1.16pm. Lectures began for my last & final year of undergraduate study (hopefully) yesterday. I am finding myself grumpier this year than any previous year with the shite they pass off as knowledge in this place, and on at least two occasions yesterday I loudly corrected the lecturer who had made a factual error - one of many I might add, but I was too tired to bother correcting them any further. I phased one who made a factual error about Cisco networking products and who was blowing "the Cisco model" way out of proportion - making it out to be some wonderful new & fantastic era of business upon which the entire course would be based (problem was his understanding of the technicalities of the hardware was simply wrong, and he was making a domain error in likening computer networking to human networking). The other knows me though has never taught me and indeed thanked me after the lecture for not correcting him more often as he knows is my wont to do

Megan and I are now six and a half weeks in and it's going very, very well indeed - vastly better than either I or she had thought it would, and umpteen times better than anyone else thought it would - when everyone came back from summer break last week, their reactions varied between disbelief, flabbergastedness and outright sheer denial. No one was particularly supportive, that's for sure. And while it has been far smoother sailing than might be expected, it has had its bumps along the way - her friends S- and I- are not taking this new reality at all well, and of course I have removed myself completely from social situations which involve anyone who even regularly associates with Megan et al so when she goes out, I'm not there - a fact painfully obvious to just about everyone. This also has led to complications regarding simple lack of time - the weekends we don't really see each other until usually Sunday when she comes round exhausted after me having gotten annoyed with her for being emotionally not present during the preceding few days, which is due to her concentrating on socialising and the weekend from about Wednesday onwards. We then make up, it's very very good for about four days and then the cycle begins again.

This has come to a head last weekend and obviously this cycle isn't particularly good. We also have issues with the plannedness of our relationship whereby we see each other exactly once every two days which isn't very spontaneous at all. Sex, while becoming ever increasingly excellent all the time, loses something when it's consigned to such formal planning - it's not tremendously natural or spontaneous for sure. There are still some of the old issues, such as that we both really really like talking to each other but I react with wanting even more like a drug but she reacts by becoming overwhelmed & defensive, which then leads to feelings of being oppressed. All that said, these old issues are vastly less problematic than they have ever been in the past - and furthermore, I have never seen her work so hard at something before: I bring up a problem, and she just jumps right in and really tries her best to tackle it, often getting pretty frustrated herself at how wide from the mark she sometimes lands through simple lack of relationship experience. But that said, she hasn't repeated a single mistake twice yet - and she is like a different person from the one I have known for three years. Just the simple, plain difference of a "can do" attitude makes such an incredible difference - this Megan is fun to be around, an inspiration to others, looks sexier, is supportive and is just a vastly better human being. And this isn't me saying that, everyone has noticed the massive change which I think has garnered much more support for our relationship than might otherwise given a consideration of our past interactions.

I raised some of my problems with how things are going last Sunday, Megan responded last night with a whole pile of problems with how things are going from her end (again, just brilliant, she's really engaging like I've never seen her do before), so this morning just before writing this I rang her up and suggested I back off if she wants because I am her partner in all things and whatever she thinks or feels that she needs to make things easier for her from her perspective, then I will try my very best given my own inabilities to go down a middle ground rather than extremes all the time. I really, really like this girl - I like her more than any girlfriend I've ever had before - and I know that's pretty damn intimidating for her, and she really is doing fantastically - in fact, she's doing better than any girlfriend I've ever had before six weeks in, even Johanna who was a saint in the face of how difficult I am. Looking back now on my relationship with Johanna, I realise just how much she has improved me and how much better I behave in relationships now, and Megan was saying last night how grateful she was to Johanna because Megan & I would have been impossible without Johanna and me dating beforehand. I unequivocally concur!

Johanna is relatively okay - I haven't seen much of her recently, though we have spent quite a lot of time together oddly enough. It's like we've been in the same room plenty of times but haven't particularly communicated, and I think she's handling me and Megan going out fairly well though the lack of sexual interaction frustrates both of us (though her a lot more than I obviously enough). She's struggling with the return to uni as she does every year, and she's very busy getting involved in plays and orchestras and stuff. Rather her than I - I am looking forward to my first semester of total non-participation in student life. Some rest at long last! Hopefully I might even get a chance to finish off my summer work which has been sadly languishing.

Ok time for some lunch as it's past 2pm now and I have a lecture at 4pm. Be happy!

Sunday 5th August 2007:

2007-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 5th August 2007: 1 1.54pm. Things are definitely better this past week. I have given up smoking, having had restarted it since Easter break due to stress, and I am feeling much the better for it. I still can't quite believe we're into August already - I have my resit in Economics in just under a month when I'll also be ending all contact with the girls permanently now M- has made her choice.

Late last night at 4am I achieved a major milestone for the work I intend to complete this summer, and the first fruits of all that money I spent on new computer hardware. You will all surely recognise this:

Yes, it's a Mandelbrot set. However, it's no ordinary Mandelbrot set - the one above is the output from a streaming maths computation program and it was the testcase for the functionality I have been implementing this summer.

Are you still thinking "so what?". Well, the above is a vastly shrunk form of the original - it's about 144 times smaller. Here is something closer to the original - note you'll need to scroll around a lot with the scrollbars in your web browser to see it. Now get this - that massive original is still shrunk from the original: it's actually four times larger again!

In case you can't quite get your head around it yet, the original is 7168 x 7168 which means there are 51,380,224 points or pixels in total. Each one of those requires up to one hundred iterations ie; repeating the same calculation and the average is about fifty, so that gives us around 2,569,011,200 iterations.

Each iteration of the Mandelbrot formula requires a minimum of six multiplies and four additions (that's the only operations you need to do for the Mandelbrot set: additions and multiplies, nothing more complicated - it's amazing you can get such beauty from such simple mathematics). To get the colours, I added another six additions, so that gives us six multiplies and ten additions, or sixteen floating-point operations per iteration. Thus, to get our picture above, it requires about 41,104,179,200 calculations!

To perform 41 billion calculations takes a while, even on a modern PC. Each processor core of mine can do about 10 billion a second, so that's just over four seconds at best. Fractal calculations are an example of an embarrassingly parallel calculation whereby each of those 51,380,224 points can be calculated totally independently from one another, and thus entirely in parallel. Here's where the streaming maths computation comes in! A modern graphics card is precisely just such a parallel maths computation device whereby it will compute as much of the problem in parallel as possible - unlike normal CPU's which do everything serially (ie; one thing at once). The current top-end graphics hardware (a NVidia GeForce 8800 GTX currently costing some £350) can process 350 billion ops a second and thus render the entire Mandelbrot set in less than a fifth of a second, but unfortunately I can't afford such high-end hardware. Instead, I have a bottom end ATI Radeon x1300 Pro which can at best do about 9.5-14 billion ops/sec, so it's about as fast as my CPU. The next generation of cards should exceed a trillion ops per second and they are expect to double that every year from now on (normal CPU's only double about once every eighteen months).

Such cheap & massive computational power is precisely why I am developing a framework for utilising graphics cards for my proposed Economic model. I have taken Brook, an aging research project from Stanford University's GPGPU group, which had extremely outdated OpenGL support and upgraded that to the most modern available (ie; v2.0). Previously, the above Mandelbrot wouldn't even compile under the ancient ARB OpenGL support within Brook, but with the new GLSL backend support I have added it runs just fine.

Here are some figures for my ATI Radeon x1300 Pro graphics card for a 7168 x 7168 Mandelbrot (51,380,224 points):

Brook Computation Backend	Time Taken	Operations per second
DirectX 9 + PS30 (SM3.0)	4.55 secs	9 billion a second
OpenGL + GLSL	7.08 secs	5.8 billion a second

And for a 4096 x 4096 Mandelbrot (16,777,216 points):

Brook Computation Backend	Time Taken	Operations per second
DirectX 9 + PS30 (SM3.0)	3.86 secs	3.47 billion a second
OpenGL + GLSL	2.10 secs	6.4 billion a second

Yeah, I notice the ops per sec increasing as the problem size decreases with OpenGL too! That's the opposite of what it should be. Interestingly, the actual calculation itself is 8.9 billion ops/sec and that's pretty fixed - not too much below the DirectX SM3.0 implementation. The BIG problem is that the ATI drivers are being braindead when it comes to moving data from the graphics card back into the computer memory. It's a driver bug, pure and simple.

The really good news about the new OpenGL + GLSL support is that Brook now has equivalent functionality on Linux and Apple Mac OS X as it does on Windows. Just for your interest, Brook is used to perform protein folding among other things, so with a bit of luck my efforts this summer will contribute to disease breakthroughs. I know a lot of people think I am crazy to "waste" my summers not having a paid job, but hey, I may just have cured your cancer in years to come! And it may well yet pan out that I save your job and your entire future family from starving to death during a massive Economic downturn!

Ok, time for breakfast! Be happy!

Sunday 12th August 2007:

2007-08-12T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 12th August 2007: 12.18pm. Well, what an interesting week! Last Friday plus one week I gave M- the first part of her goodbye letter. Now that's probably one of the harshest pieces of writing I have ever put on paper and furthermore I wrote and finished it mid-June, but it all needed to be said. It was on how she has treated me and others during the last two years, and on the processes and mechanisms within her (in my opinion) that lead to such malevolent behaviour.

She handled it as she always does - by erecting barriers to distance herself from the offending object and not genuinely engaging with it at all. She had been suggesting a picnic together all summer, and last Wednesday the weather was really, really gorgeous so I sent a sarcastic text message about how she never seems free on the sunny days but always can moan about how we keep missing those nice days when it's raining. She suggested the following afternoon, which annoyed me still further because yet again she had made it look like I was making her do this when she didn't really want to.

By then though, my mind was set. As part of transforming myself into someone I think deserves to be dated, I had decided that if she couldn't stop treating me abusively, then she had to get cut off sooner than early September. So during a most gorgeous picnic, I pointed out how she was disrespecting me yet again, how she was still doing the things the first part of the goodbye letter said and she really obviously wasn't taking me or the letter seriously despite the effort I had put into the 12,000 words or so. Therefore, we were done I said. I gave her the second part of her goodbye letter, on the processes which surround us, walked her home and as far as I was concerned, that was that.

Now that it was being brought home to her by this that this was serious, and as she actually started to engage, she became most upset that night. The following day when rereading the two parts, she became profoundly upset and resolved to go do something about it. Unfortunately by Saturday afternoon, despite (as usual) making all the right sounds, she obviously was pathologically lying yet again because she wasn't backing up all the fine words with actions. Yet again, she was only acting because of the fear of losing me, not because she actually genuinely wanted to out of love (fine line I know, but it's all about the purity of thought that precedes purity of action).

As for the effect upon myself, I really didn't expect what happened next. Thursday night I began to physically hurt, as in my muscles started to ache, my joints began to grind and I began to feel really quite physically sick. This abated slightly yesterday morning when she seemed maybe to finally be going somewhere better, but after a text last night saying that she was just doing all the same old pathologies and she gave up, I got considerably worse. Right now as I type this, my hip joints are burning (especially my left), my shoulders and back just hurt all over and my knees, elbows and hands ache noticeably even if I move them very slightly.

I'm not used to this! I am not used to my body disobeying so gratuitously! My mind is set on its purpose, I am resolute god damn it! My mind can do this, it's just my body appears it cannot! I know all this is psychosomatic, that I'm fighting myself, and I am feeling more than a bit silly because I'm not used to being so out of control of myself. This physical manifestation of mental pain I have only had with three people: Ruth, Johanna and M-. M- now owns the top spot, even Ruth has never affected me quite so strongly over so many days in this particular kind of way.

Now I could force my body to comply - my mind is definite. However, I know that my body is my mind, so if I force one part through against the other, I am creating many more problems down the line. I know that coming off M- is like coming off heroin, and there are many similarities, but in the end she's far more than an addictive drug: she's a person. So, much as I am loathe to admit it, the signs indicate that I don't think I should cut this girl off.

She's going to ring me on her work break next fifteen minutes or so ... where I'm going to admit that I am a weak, pathetic fool who has put her and me through all this for no avail except to learn that it's probably not a good idea for my health. God knows what I'm supposed to do next semester now ... and her friends are SO going to think this was some sort of manipulation to punish her. I'm really going to be hated for this ...

Later that day ... 5.15pm. Just up from yet another attempted nap. God I feel like crap, I feel like I have been beaten all over with a baseball bat. We spoke, it was really lovely, and I'm going around to hers for lunch tomorrow. Yes, I am rather pathetically happy I'll be seeing her again so soon. I hate lovesickness, the whole idea behind lovesickness, it very seriously annoys me.

Still, I really did try my best. She was also suffering physically much worse than I and had lots of mental suffering on top of that too, so after that phone call she's much better for it too. Seems ecstatic she'll be seeing me tomorrow. Aren't we quite the couple?

I hate to admit it, but I am actually smiling and I can't help it! Be happy everyone!

Wednesday 22nd August 2007:

2007-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 22nd August 2007: 2.10pm. I've just upgraded the website's PHP to considerably improve the speed of accessing this website. Due to the web counter at the top of each page, hitherto each and every HTML page fetched from nedprod wasn't cacheable which meant it was being refetched each and every time, plus because the web browser didn't know how long the page was, it had to assume it was very long (and thus it can hold back on showing it to you early). This rather increased bandwidth usage, such that over two thirds of the bandwidth used is purely from HTML. This simple fix (which I should have done ages ago) also adds compression for pages of any reasonable size (eg; this front page) and it makes using nedprod via a dialup modem very significantly easier indeed. It also means various caching systems which ISP's etc use now work as they should.

Things moved rather quickly after the last entry, but well what else did you possibly expect given it's me? The following Monday I did indeed go for lunch at hers and we ate a fine hand-made lasagne she had prepared - which was the first time she's ever prepared anything for me alone. We sat outside her house on the grass in Fife Park afterwards for a dessert of grapes, and while there she was talking about how she kept wanting to just go out with me already, that she woke up some mornings and had decided to definitely go do it, and within a few hours fear & doubt would set in and her will would evaporate. She had been just as physically affected by my attempts to end things as I had, and I pointed out that surely given the ever-increasing mountains of evidence that she had to finally accept that she actually was in love with me, had been for well over a year, and furthermore was more in love with me than anyone she had ever been in love with. As loathe as she is to admit it, it was because she was so much in love with me that she has done all the fucked up things she has done - and she started those fucked up things exactly at the same time she fell in love with me. I had been trying to get her to accept this for oh about fourteen months now, but she has major difficulty in accepting that it is possible to so maltreat someone you are so in love with.

Indeed, she had hitherto just assumed that I had been trying to convince her that she really felt this way out of my own sense of ego, to create some sort of dependency and to use or take advantage of her in some kind of way. And I can see (and did see) her point, that sure I was making this all me-orientated and absolutely, I'm really not "all that" or some sort of God's gift to women. However, all that said, there is a definite correlation between relations between us and her reacting at a deep subconscious level by performing some horrendous self-destructive act upon herself. Even within seven days of me asking her out, she had gone off and done several pretty stupid things and she hadn't done any stupid things at all since Easter break when she and I had become reconciled after six months of ostracisation. As a gross over-simplification, when she and I were okay, she was nice to herself. When something that she perceived as bad happened between us, she harmed herself. And that had been a predictable constant for eighteen months now - indeed it was even a constant last October because I deliberately delayed cutting her off fully till the start of December because I knew she would go do something especially bad to herself in response (which indeed she did).

It also helped that her best friend had told her that of course she was obviously in love with me and had been for over a year. So, despite her disgust at the idea, she decided especially after her profound physical & mental reaction the previous weekend to stop denying reality. I joked at her "So go on then, you ask me out!" and to my very great surprise, that's exactly what she did.

That rather floored me, because she actually seemed genuine. I decided not to answer immediately, but told her that if she still asked the same question next time I saw her (which would be in a few days as she was going to Edinburgh), then I would say yes - but not to worry if she retracted, because there would be no point in us going out unless she really wanted to across many days - she had to commit.

Unbeknownst to me, she spent the next few days in Edinburgh meeting up with ex-boyfriends and prospective boyfriends and putting her house in order to go into a long-term relationship. I had no idea at the time and heard nothing from her. Thus came Thursday night when I had still heard nothing, so I figured fine she's going to retract the question, I was very horny, so arse to being celibate & waiting for her and so I shagged a close friend of mine. I sent her a text the following morning saying simply "So?" and was expecting the usual crap & excuses - not that I was proud of myself mind, but I had considered my weakness as merely preemptive.

Yeah ... well ... that didn't quite happen. We met up in Aikman's Friday night, and I firstly humbly told her about my bad behaviour the previous night and said that I fully understood if she told me to go fuck myself because as her friend I had to say that my behaviour was appalling and I recommended that she dump my ass before she even began. She then told me that she had shagged two people for not the right reasons within a week of me asking her out after a long period of celibacy (which I suggested was not helped by my nasty text on the Friday after asking her out), so she was no one to speak either. And so she asked me to go out with her again, to which I said "Yes please!". Yay!

Which means I can finally dispense with the M- and call her by her real name, which is Megan (yeah, she's American)! Now, I know that pretty much everyone I take advice from seriously has strongly advised me to never, ever, ever, go near Megan with a bargepole. This diary entry almost certainly will prompt vast numbers of concerned emails along the lines of "I told you to not do this, and when it goes tits up, I am going to say I told you so". Indeed, those I have already told have so far uniformly reacted from negatively to in the case of my dear sister, extremely negatively. I don't think one single person so far is on balance positive, and I'm not expecting one single mostly positive viewpoint to be truthful.

Yes, I know she pathologically lies to me and herself and indeed anyone else she cares about. Yes, she has hurt me more than anyone in this world except Ruth and yes just her and Ruth are in a league of their own far, far exceeding anyone else alive. Yes, only three months ago she with her compadres tried to destroy me and they came close to succeeding. Until very very recently, she has been consistently the worst friend I have ever had, to a fault she has continually failed to ever be there for me, to do anything for me, or even to defend me when others were spreading maliciousness about me - indeed, she herself has repeatedly unfairly painted me in the worst possible light to her friends and others - and I only caught her doing it again only last Friday. She has repeatedly gone out of her way to be as backstabbing & unsupportive to me as possible for at least eighteen months, ever since I confronted her outside Andrew Melville about how she was letting down her friends some two weeks before Easter break 2006 (in response to which I wrote this article for her on how I stopped being mad).

I do know all this! It is me after all who has taking all this shit for all this time. And yes, I know this looks like a case of Stockholm Syndrome, that both she and I are engaging in an unhealthy limerence not love, and that this is a classic case of Capture-Bonding where two people who have abused each other severely over an extended period develop an unhealthy & obsessive emotional bond which is just guaranteed to end in disaster. I am well aware that it could be that she has only been giving out "small kindnesses" during this summer solely through panic at the idea of losing her abuser/abusee (this is a really depressing article on the topic) because she was about to get cut off. I am more than fully aware that all of the bad things she still does to me are likely to continue, that especially once her friends start digging into her about her treachery that she'll probably go off and do all sorts of wicked things which will hurt me (and herself) severely, and that this (rationally speaking) is probably the single worst decision I have ever taken - even exceeding my decision to move to Spain to be with Ruth.

And maybe it will end in total disaster. In which case all of you can happily tell me that you told me so, though I'll probably be in too severe a mess to handle it. However I think it won't end in disaster, though I agree that it could end in disaster. I know I'm the only person I know to think so positively with the possible exception of Megan herself who has been unusually positive recently - I think it's genuine rather than repression or denial, I think she likes the feeling of having taken control of her life and done something positive for once - I am the first person she has ever asked out (who she hadn't just broken up with), and given her typical behaviour of running away from everything than means anything positive to her, that's a really big thing for her. I personally am very proud of her - even a month ago she reacted to me asking her out by trying to begin a relationship with someone else, but in as little as a month has undone that act of avoidance - so that's another major step forwards. As I have said ad nauseum in previous entries here, she keeps making an incremental improvement: each week, she is better than the previous week. Furthermore, her rate of self-improvement is clearly compound increasing, so her incremental improvement is speeding up exponentially. As she herself says, she's really not quite sure how or why this is happening, but she thinks she likes it. I know I can't live without her, so hell, let's try the opposite of cutting her off completely and see what happens!

For sure, it's fun & easy & comfortable until people start arriving back - and certainly things have gone vastly better last five days than I or she had been expecting, especially in the bed department - only a matter of weeks ago, me getting too physically close filled her with disgust. She heads home around the 6th September, so we basically have it easy until then. Once she comes back, then it gets rapidly more tricky as the semester progresses. How do I stay over at her house when it is filled with people who want me destroyed? How can I socialise around her friends without causing major upset and ruining the atmosphere? How will she cope with the unyielding wall of lies & misinformation that will be spread around to try and break us up, or at best to cause massive arguments and infidelity? How do I combine having no part to play in what is to come for that group with loving & supporting Megan? There are even simpler issues: I am uncomfortable with the idea of shagging Megan with Johanna next door. You might think that a bit stupid or something, but remember I am just as in love with Johanna as I've ever been and the same goes in return (in my opinion). I'm sure Johanna has absolutely no problem with it - I would have no issue with her shagging her boyfriend next door - but I do have an issue when it's me. So even these very simple issues are immensely complicated - so where does one even begin?

Well, I have no idea. It's going to be horrendously difficult with absolutely no clear answers to anything. It seems like a tremendous amount of hassle & pain - it will certainly make for lurid diary entries! But I'll tell you something - going out with Megan makes me very happy indeed - I've wanted it for well over a year, I've invested a tremendous amount of effort to get it, and now I've got it. And seeing her last few days, well she looks happier than I have seen her since first year - she's just ecstatically happy despite knowing all the problems I've just outlined (and many far more serious I can't mention here in public). Both of us are just tickled pink. And I have faith that things are going to pan out - it's totally, 100% irrational. There is no basis whatsoever to have even the remotest optimism at a rational level - the entire situation is completely & totally fubared.

So okay, if you'd like to send your emails telling me how terrible an idea this is, or sit & fume quietly at how I'm not listening to your advice, well I can certainly understand. If any of you ignored my advice like this, I'd go ballistic. Yes, this is me being totally & utterly hypocritical once again - yet again, it's all "do as I say not as I do". I am actually really sorry about that - I know how much I've upset certain people with this decision, I have obviously caused them pain. I do appreciate your advice, and I am listening - it's just I am following my instincts and doing the opposite this one time only. You've got to follow your heart in the end, even if it leads straight to hell. Hey, I've been there, done that with Ruth - I survived, so even if it goes completely tits up with Megan, I should hopefully survive it.

I'll get back to you - in the meantime, be happy!

Thursday 5th July 2007:

2007-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday 5th July 2007: 6.28pm. Once again here I am feeling groggy drinking a cup of tea after rather a lack of sleep last night! I have been back here from being home in Ireland for a week and a half now, and there is no let up in substantial change occurring within.

This has caused problems. Last night myself and Johanna had one of the biggest bust ups since we broke up, and we both haven't had much sleep since then. I suppose the best way to approach this is from my side and then her side, and I'll ask her to check everything before I publish. Why on earth would I stick a fight into an online journal? Well, you'll see.

From my perspective, a very great deal has happened to me, especially inside my own head, since even the last entry shortly before which Johanna left to go home. My friends at home are either oblivious to the details of what's been happening here for me, or found when I began to detail things that there is just so much stuff, and it's also hard to wrap your head around, that it's impossible to begin to even touch where I'm at within a reasonable timespan.

So that rather unfortunately leaves only the people here in St. Andrews. M- is continuing to throw away the opportunity of all that could be done during our last few weeks - when I came back, she said it was too hard to see me so things waited till last Friday when in all due fairness, we had an absolutely excellent day together. I haven't had such a prolonged period of actually feeling welcome around her in two months, though for some odd reason there are occasional single random days like last Friday when she and I get on so well that it's like the Universe has lurched into some alternate reality momentarily. I treasure those good days.

Now I don't have anyone else from St. Andrews left apart from M- and Johanna. My academic daughter let me down severely just before I left for home by reinventing a conversation we had whereby it became my fault, not hers, for her letting me down, which is the sixth time she's done that since Christmas - and I have had enough of such abuse, whether it's from her or anyone else. So she's gone too - which was one of the hardest decisions I have made during my time in St. Andrews, because unlike the others, she really doesn't have a clue that she makes up fantasy make-believe to explain to herself why she hurts her friends. She actually, literally, has no idea.

M- did do quite a bit for me last Friday. Maybe unbeknownst to her at the time (but I'll come back to that), I did slip in many of the topics I've been thinking about recently. We did spend something like eight hours together (highly unusual given she normally gets too exhausted after three, but there was a break of a few hours half way through), half of those at her work, and it really was very useful to me.

You see, I have no one to talk to about what's going on in my head. I don't have any friends left who are sufficiently up to speed and are easily contactable apart from M- and Johanna. This means I have felt very lonely in recent weeks, with so much to talk about, and only myself to do so with. It also meant that I had been very much looking forward to Johanna returning, because I really need a friend right now.

Of course, this put tremendous pressure on Johanna. I had thought given how well she had handled the time around the end of May, which was far more serious, that now would be a relative cinch. After all, all she needs to do is sit & chat with me and also read the 16,000 words or so of stuff I have written to various people. Obviously she isn't expected to provide me with any answers, as I sure don't know them myself, just to ask questions and basically hold my hand while I talk to myself through her. Surely not hard?

Reading this description now kinda makes me laugh. OF COURSE it would be hard. In fact, what I ask now is FAR HARDER than the end of May, though it took us shouting at one another last night for me to get that. End of May I was in a situation where she could take definite action, which she did. These past six days, from her perspective, are vastly worse because she feels absolutely & totally powerless - ALL she can do is sit & chat, which seems to her a complete and total failure. She hadn't realised till last night that that is the BEST one can do in these situations - she had thought she was failing me by not providing a definite solution.

Because of being so overwhelmed, she had been subconsciously avoiding me much as M- does. Avoiding engaging with me, avoiding deep conversations, staying away from home as much as possible, and avoiding even beginning to tackle the 16,000 words of assorted emails, essays & letters I have output in the last three weeks. She felt that unlike before, it all fell onto her and her alone, because I had no one else. And because she wouldn't admit to herself that she couldn't cope, subconsciously she began to treat me like M-.

Of course, being treated like M- treats me got me seriously worked up. I began thinking that I was turning everyone who had been my friend into an M-, which means there is something seriously fucked up with me. That started a spiral downwards for me as I desperately searched for someone to talk to, not least that I stupidly leaked recent events in Johanna's life which are private to her to others, which then spread, which then caused certain parties who want to punish me for hurting M-, S- and I- to use that information to punish Johanna, and thereby hurt me. I would even go so far as to say that they hoped that by doing this they hoped it would blow back onto M- and perhaps get me to hurt her again even after I promised her I would never do so ever again (in response to her ten dislikes in the previous entry). I'm sure what I'm about to say will generate emails suggesting I may be suffering from paranoia again, but this is but a taste of what is to come for me & Johanna next semester anyway when all the students get back - we've all been expecting it, and have discussed what forms it might take for some time now. I hadn't expected it to happen with so few students around though - there isn't enough critical mass to make it very effective. Put in a nutshell - the conversation I had with I- and S- outside Aikman's, which M- enabled, I knew would come with a hefty price to be paid by Johanna, not me, because the payback would be unfairly dumped on her as I have no other friends left for them to utilise in order to get at me. They feel a need to strike back, and they shall, and Johanna will bear the brunt.

I really do demand far too much from Johanna. Not only am I very high maintenance, even just as a friend as M- can surely testify, I keep dumping stuff on her through my actions. It is very selfish of me. I could have played things differently - not made such a point of it, and thus not have invited such retribution. I certainly could have been far more subtle, but then I could say that about myself ever since I was born. Despite my best efforts to try otherwise, I have found that I am simply not effective if I am not a sledgehammer.

I am also demanding more emotional support from Johanna right now than I ever did when we were going out. This is partially because I have no one else to talk to, but also because she is the most capable of talking about these topics out of anyone I know in this world. These topics are hard, very hard, and as Johanna says, it's like I am ripping out a piece of her soul. She is only twenty-three years old, and this stuff she shouldn't have to think about for many years yet, so I am forcing her through these conversations to perceive the Universe at a level which scares the living shit out of her. Hey, it scares me enough as it is, especially what it all must mean, so for her who had been looking forward to a fun & carefree summer now she had finally extricated herself from a series of long-term relationships, well, I can't imagine anything more horrible for her right now really.

I really am a right bastard. I just keep shitting on her. And I am genuinely so sorry that I treat her like this. But I am very, very sure that by Christmas I shall be treating her vastly better indeed - the shit-storm I invoked end of term should have passed by mid-November, and I should have worked through most of this stuff in my head within a month, so all this crap I dump on her will stop. And she will get next semester her space, and her fun, and her freedom from me at long, long last. It's well overdue - and she more than deserves it.

I mentioned above about M- knowing or not knowing what's going on in my head. For the second time in six weeks, she recently enabled me to solve a riddle which I partially had posed to her last Friday. This riddle had been causing me a great deal of worry & concern, mainly as it affected the future happiness of Johanna, and for the second time she created a solution for me (the first time being when she enabled that confrontation with I- and S-).

Now much as with the first time, one can take this recent action in two ways. M- read the last entry, and strongly disagreed with my suggestion that she enabled that based on partially wanting to use me as an instrument for revenge. She said it came from within, from a higher place somehow. I at the time took an "even stevens" approach - I felt it was probably something of many motives.

However, this recent action also could be viewed as her having bad motives. Yet it enabled a major solution for me - again - and in the long run, the information garnered will prove very useful. In effect, she created a lesson for me which while painful now, is FAR better experienced now than experienced later when cold, harsh reality would make things vastly worse. Put in a nutshell, she did to me what I've done to her since October: taught me a painful lesson now to save me much future pain.

Now she didn't intend it, and certainly didn't plan it. But nevertheless, she did me and Johanna a great favour indeed and I am very grateful. And furthermore, now she's done it twice, I am far more inclined to now believe that revenge had NO part to play in the earlier action. Lightning doesn't strike twice. She has tapped herself into something, and somehow or other given the extremely scant details I gave her last Friday, she was on exactly the same page as myself. I find that pretty damn amazing, too amazing for coincidence.

II always found that I- had a remarkable knack for spotting & opening opportunities ie; spotting & opening doors - she & I have made a great team. S- has a remarkable knack for kicking over ant hills in exactly the right way to maximally enable creation & growth. M- now it would appear is beginning to have a remarkable knack for creating opportunities which generally speaking is the hardest skill of them all, because it contains all the other skills.

There is a very great deal more I could now write about growth creation, but it's now 8pm and I want to stop typing soon. The greatest among us are those who competently manipulate the flows of energies throughout the Universe for betterment of all. They are very few indeed, and they are universally despised & hated, but this is God's work at its purest. As energy interacts with matter it exudes an effect, thereafter increasingly conveying more information (entropy), and subsequently loses its effect on matter. Energy thus is converted into information, and structure is maintained, built and evolved into higher states.

Many can use this ability for personal gain, or even to enable mass genocide. These people are respected and feared. Only a few are selfless enough to serve. These people are disrespected and feared. This situation needs to be reversed in my new Economic model. This is a "Sponsoring Thought" which if changed, changes the world.

Be happy!

Sunday 29th July 2007:

2007-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 29th July 2007: 11.30am. A lot of students spending their summers in St. Andrews are finding it boring here - a lack of people means a lack of things to do, and they find themselves yearning for the excitement of term time. I can't say I have found that myself, nor has Johanna for that matter. People like us seem to create drama out of nothing. It certainly has not been boring!

Now the last three weeks have seemed like about five to me. In fact, when I started this diary entry and was figuring out the dates, I was genuinely surprised to realise that only three weeks have elapsed since the last entry. But there's a good reason for that, and it's because I asked M- out (as in, to become boyfriend & girlfriend) on the Sunday following the last entry.

To this she did not react well. She proceeded to completely ignore me until I sent her a nasty text the following Friday, then she ignored me some more till I sent a text asking "What are you doing? Are you really sure you want to be doing this?" the following Tuesday. On that Tuesday when she met up with me for an hour, I gave her the following poem (which is more of a song):

It's hardly all my own work - I have near zero lyrical ability, Johanna did most of it - nevertheless, the words are mine. And I probably shouldn't put that online as many will think highly ill of me as a result - it will seem like I am bullying her - but then I am rather proud of it, and I got her permission to do so beforehand. At the end of May, M- plus compadres very nearly destroyed me, and I have worked my ass off to forgive them for it - so for me, to have moved in less than two months from that state to one where I could ask her out, I think a very great achievement indeed. I know that will sound like I am bragging and "proving" myself in public, but well arse to it - this diary has never been about about me coming off well or looking good, it's about what I am currently thinking & feeling, warts & all.

The following Thursday she got real emotional and had a panic attack down the phone at me because she hadn't been able to think of anything else other than that I had asked her out since I had asked her out - hence her avoiding me like the plague. Last Monday, she finally consented to a date - so I laid on the full spread with flowers, a roast duck meal prepared entirely by my own hand, and copious amounts of alcohol.

This did actually go very well. But I got nothing out of it, not even a kiss - which isn't important in itself, but rather as an underlying signifier of intent & emotion. And during this past week I haven't been able to shake the feeling that I was being messed around and being taken advantage of, which I told her last night, after which she promptly appeared quite by surprise at my door.

Thereupon she admitted that she was not ready - she really wanted to be ready, so much so she was trying to delude herself that she was, but in reality she wasn't. And hence the answer is no, which is why I can finally write a diary entry about it.

Now I'm sure I'm going to get emails etc. pointing out that women can't be rushed, that just because I can bounce from having been nearly destroyed to forgiveness in such a short period doesn't mean that the destroyer can so easily do the same. Some may even suggest that precisely because of this transition that I wanted to date her to facilitate my own forgiveness of her, and that therefore my motivations were impure. And of course, I am sure the majority will take the view that this is some form of unhealthy obsession, that I best be rid of her from my life, and well to that I can tell you that it's back to the old plan of permanently saying goodbye early next September.

Nevertheless, I have been in love with the girl for some time, and I'm pretty sure the same is in return, and despite all the drama, hurt & heartache, we do bring a great deal of joy to one another. Rather like me and Ruth, though M- is very considerably more reasonable than Ruth (M- actually listens to me!). But I do agree with those who have strongly advised against a repeat of me & Ruth with M- that unless M- really, really, truly & genuinely wants a relationship with me, and furthermore is willing to do everything necessary to create one, then it is doomed to repeat the Ruth episode. I may not seem like I learn from my past mistakes sometimes, but I'm not stupid - any woman I've ever gone out with has to really, really badly, want to date me if it's going to work at all. After all, look at the shit I put Johanna through (eg; last entry) - I'm a very difficult person, very demanding, and unless the woman really wants it, I am intolerable.

Which raises the question of why don't I make myself considerably less demanding and intolerable? After all, who am I to feel sorry for myself when I am like this? Do I not deserve total loneliness with such a problematic attitude problem?

My attitude problem most definitely stems from insecurity. I demand bravery in the face of adversity from my friends - as anyone who has spent any time around me can testify, I am rather intense and overwhelming and that's just to my friends. To girlfriends, the problem is magnified tenfold. I keep taking the view that they have to be able to handle such intensity if they're going to go out with me, so I keep being even more intense at the beginning as so to dissuade them from getting involved with me if they can't handle it (hence giving M- that poem above, or bringing her flowers at her workplace - that's heavy & intense). Normal people would just chill out and let things evolve gradually on their own, so it's definitely my own insecurities of letting someone become close and trusting them.

I fear being let down. That fear has led me to being let down by almost everyone I am close to in St. Andrews this past year - if you expect it, you will receive it. I'm going to have to do something about that - friends & girlfriends aren't soldiers or a combat unit where you have each other's back or you're all dead. Such an extreme view of love & relationships eliminates almost all of reality.

But I will have plenty of spare time next academic year - I only have two friends I'll be able to see left here, so I'll see what I can do about myself. Be happy everyone!

Wednesday 13th June 2007:

2007-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Wednesday 13th June 2007: 10pm. I have just woken up after a two and a half hour nap and until this cup of tea I am drinking takes effect, I am feeling really rather groggy! But I was absolutely exhausted, mostly due to lack of sleep - I went to bed last night at 11pm because I was so tired, but couldn't sleep until at least 5am and I am refusing to let myself sleep in past 12pm. But then I suppose I have a lot to think about - even more substantial change continues.

I got back my exam results - I received a third for the Corporate Finance, which was very, very disappointing as I had been due for a high first. It's one of my strongest subjects, and it should have been a breeze, but I had had about two hours of sleep the night before due to the collective failings of M-, S- and I- so well, shit happens. Straight after that exam the three of them arrived at my house and all five of us (Johanna was there too as she lives with me) spent the afternoon thrashing things out - I remember Johanna cooking us all sausages for lunch. The most productive conversation myself and M- began that afternoon continued for the next two days which led to us co-writing that Socratic dialogue on subconscious self-destructivity I mentioned in the previous entry. That night, being very exhausted, I took a very early night and slept through to my Sustainable Development exam the following morning and despite the total lack of study, I somehow managed a reasonably high first. Sadly, due to the S-coding, very high and very low marks (as compared to your average across your entire time here) get discounted.

I wrote the last entry on Monday 28th May. That was an interesting point of time. The previous Friday (officially the last night of term) was a moment of transition in my life, when old things definitely ended and new things began. To be specific, I had been walking home at about 12.45am as Johanna was wanting to go out and get trashed with her friends as she wouldn't be seeing them again for a while, and I didn't think it a good idea for me to get any more drunk seeing as she wouldn't be coming home that night. M- had seen me walk past from the door of Aikman's, and ran after me. This led to quite a discussion on South Street, in which I made my position & views of her recent behaviour extremely clear, and I remember feeling at the time so proud of how well she handled me because I was being very difficult indeed.

M- then enabled me to have a discussion with S- and I- with whom she had been drinking in Aikman's. Well, when I say discussion, I would more say that I brought home to them in a very, very clear way just what they had done. The previous Wednesday when we thrashed things out, I had made it extremely clear that the destructive behaviour stop immediately, or else I walk for good - the previous night I had set up a situation where each of the three had a series of choices to make, and had just one of them chosen to act selflessly just once, the whole issue would have dissipated. Ok, that was real nasty & manipulating of me, but I had spent the previous two years trying to tell them with words about how poisonous their selfishness is, and they wouldn't listen, so I created an artificial situation where a series of their own selfish choices would lead to a cascade reaction of things spiralling rapidly downwards. Hence you see my lack of sleep, because I knew f from their absolute silence (ie; no text messages and no phone calls) that they had behaved exactly as I had hoped they wouldn't - but had expected they would.

M-, realising her role in the previous night, had actually done something about it in response to my ultimatum ie; co-write the dialogue with me. S- and I- and indeed every other person M- socialises with punished her severely for doing that because they chose to see it as betrayal, her stirring things up needlessly and her moving to the dark side (ie; to me). That led me to another bad episode the following Saturday night, which led me to cut off I- and S- completely forever with a simple & short text message. I think though they hadn't quite realised how serious I was being - it was all a game to them eg; Niall being silly - so M- enabled that confrontation, partially out of wanting revenge for how they had treated her, partially because they were living in a bubble which needed bursting, and partially because it was about time that they got a dose of my suffering back at them - which is something M- understands intimately given all the pain I have caused her since she failed me last October.

According to M-, the effects were devastating. Johanna thinks what I said to S- and I- in those twenty minutes was vindictive, but I really don't think it was. It was truthful, very very truthful - I remember opening up my full abilities to the max, and in those twenty minutes I delivered a message to their subconsciousnesses about the reality of their true nature which they will never forget - without being unnecessarily hurtful, without lying, and without malice. It's a testament to how well M- handled me only ten minutes or so before, because S- and I- did exactly the wrong thing by trying the same old excuse making shit on me instead of listening and trying to understand and being respectful. So I delivered my message to them, brutally for sure, breaking past all the normal psychological illusions people use to make sense of the world. But this was a message that I nearly died to deliver, and I knew I'd never see either ever again anyway so I could afford to burn some bridges.

So all that happened the Friday previous to the last entry. What happened next unfortunately ticked predictably like clockwork. I had pleaded with M- to help me that Friday night, begged her to do something, to be a friend to me. I had some texts from her on the following Saturday, then the following Wednesday she sent me an email to say she wasn't comfortable meeting my sister after that Friday night. I replied quite lengthily to that email detailing my current state of mind at the time, and the following Saturday I had a text from her to say she would need time to process such a lengthy email which was a week and a half ago. She was being afraid again.

I spoke last entry of the confusion I felt about what to do about her. That confusion had lasted throughout that time period. She kept stringing me along, performing a holding action, but not actually doing anything about it as I had begged her to do. For me these last few weeks have proceeded incredibly slowly - days seemed like weeks. But I knew that for her time would be proceeding rapidly, characterised by trying to not think about things, so I gave it a while. This time last week it dawned to me that she was going to do nothing - fail me yet again - and after that the way forward became clear. I told her by text last Friday (the two week anniversary of that night in Aikman's) that as of next September, we would not see one another again. As she told me yesterday, her immediate reaction was "Niall is breaking up with me!" and she has had a difficult weekend since.

However, it cannot really be any other way. I know I said I'd give her a chance, but if you think about it, it's unworkable after the summer. The girls really have trashed my reputation here in St. Andrews to the extent that I am no longer welcome in any of the social groups we both have. That leaves me with virtually no social opportunities at all. I feel somewhat upset by this, but I also think it rather a good thing in a way - these people should have known better. I have behaved impeccably since I arrived here, it's just that it doesn't look that way if you don't know the backstory. And these mutual social groups should have wondered about why I have done the things I have done instead of just assuming I was being nasty & vindictive because the girls have painted me that way - when in fact, I was really being precisely the opposite.

I think this all works out very well indeed. Sure, I have come out pretty badly from this, lost my reputation and a lot of friends but then none were actually really friends to begin with as has become extremely obvious of late. I could be angry, point to all that I have done for each and all of them over the years, but I'm not angry anymore. Just hurt & disappointed. Since last Wednesday, I accept my fate - this all can become very good for me indeed.

I explained all this to M- yesterday, and I think she agrees that there is no longer any choice. Were we to remain in contact during fourth year, it would be very messy and difficult indeed. I have decided that I am to play absolutely no further part in their, or their social groups, lives whatsoever after early September. So I have suggested to her that we make this summer the most fun possible, perhaps to try and make up to one another all the pain & hurt we've caused each other over the past year.

We were already heading in that direction anyway as I suggested to her the day after that Friday in Aikman's that she try to figure out why she won't be a friend to me. She did say that Friday night that it's because she doesn't like me, so I suggested that we write out the top ten things we like & dislike most about one another. Here's what I wrote about M-:

Likes:		Dislikes:
1. She is one of the cutest girls I have ever known, especially naked.		1. Being always afraid when there is usually no reason.
2. Her smile and her eyes.		2. Being paralysed by fear when fear should mean cause for action.
3. Her mournfulness & seriousness.		3. The constant negativity when positivity would be far more useful.
4. I really like being around her and spending time with her.		4. She won't be a friend to me. She won't look after me.
5. She tries to listen to me and keeps trying to understand even though I have hurt her so much.		5. Her mournfulness & seriousness.
6. She is really interesting and intelligent.		6. The constant lying and breaking of promises.
7. She is the most lovely, caring person to people. She has a very pleasant nature about her.		7. She keeps hurting me.
8. She tries to improve herself.		8. She is the most lovely, caring person to people until she gets to know them or care about them.
9. She treats me with respect & dignity even though I have hurt her so much.		9. She keeps isolating herself & disconnecting herself from others.
10. She puts up with my eccentricities & quirks.		110. She often doesn't realise the difference between when I am just being eccentric/quirky or when I am being very, very serious.

In case you're wondering, yes I do have her permission to publish that. I also have her permission to publish her list which she wrote after reading mine. I scanned it in because I am framing it with a picture of her to sit next to my bed from September on:

I'm not exactly sure why it's so important that I stick those four lists on to the internet for how many billion people to see for all eternity. Especially as her real name will probably never be published here, so no one will ever know who she is. But I guess that she's someone that I have loved as much as any girlfriend, and I'm pretty sure that she loves me just as much in return, so when she says that I'm breaking up with her, she is sort of right. We've had all the shit from a bad relationship, just none of the fun, sex or good times really. Despite how awful it's been for both of us from the beginning, our love for one another has strengthened and grown despite the odds, and I think that's why I want this published here. This is a perfect example of the essence of human nature at work - what is the true source of hope in a world gone mad. As I wrote at the start of our Socratic dialogue to I-:

Niall: This dialogue is a composite of conversations that M- and I have had since yesterday afternoon when I set you that ultimatum. If two people, who have hurt one another as much as we have this past year, can come together and jointly write something like this, then I think it really demonstrates something important. It really has been most insightful.

It's hard to convey how I feel right now, reading her list and that quote. I would best describe it as a sense of awe, gratefulness and humility. I feel so proud - of her, of humanity itself, and of the world. And I just wanted to say that in this diary, conclude with how I am feeling, and my thanks to her for letting me publish that.

Anyway, it's after midnight now, and because of my nap I'm not that tired, but I think I might go for a walk somewhere. Be happy everyone!

Later that day ... It is now 3.13am and I have just returned from my walk. At this time of year, the sun never really sets in St. Andrews - you get this twilight, and I decided to walk to the Northern beach past the golf course so I could properly witness it next to the sea. Curiously enough, just as I was walking past Aikman's, M- rang me as I had wanted voice confirmation that I could print the above rather than just a text. So I decided to join her for a pint, then I walked her and A- back to their home before continuing to the beach.

I had wanted M- to come with me, I think she even knew that without me having to say it. But I knew I was intruding, I had been around her when she hadn't prepared for it beforehand, and as always she reacts to that by becoming defensive & trivial. And besides I had watched her during the night so obviously shrouded in fear - marinated in it - that she could not have seen what I saw as I watched the waves wash across the shore as the tide came in, under a sun which never sets. A pity. But I knew she was there with me as she lay in her bed at home, probably wondering if she should send me a text message but too afraid to do so [NOTE: stop the press, just received an email from her sent at 3.08am in reply to my promises I made to never again do half of the bad points she listed!].

It's a funny world we live in. I don't laugh at the oddity of life enough. But I sure did chuckle as I walked home! Be very happy everyone!

Monday 28th May 2007:

2007-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Monday 28th May 2007: 5.37pm. This diary is now NINE years old - how nuts! It's not been a fun month of May for me at all sadly. It started out very well, but within just a few days it became very bad indeed and it has stayed pretty bad since then. I missed my Economics exam completely and have totally screwed up Corporate Finance and Sustainable Development, so I have had the entire semester S-coded which means it is partially eliminated from the final degree classification process. This is very unfortunate, because I should have achieved three firsts this semester.

Since last October when S- and M- failed to be there for me after Johanna broke up with me, I have been undergoing bouts of depression the most recent of which I mentioned in here was two entries ago in the March entry. I said at the time that S- and I- had lifted my spirits by visiting me each Friday, and indeed then it was true. But as I realise now, it was the difference between prettiness and beauty - they were lifting my spirits sure, but by quite fake means. I now realise that they were not being genuine, and in fact only were bothering with me at all because they had more fun that way - in other words, I gave them my house to drink in and cook in. They were using me.

The extent to which S- and I- have been taking advantage of me has only become clear in the last two weeks. They in fact couldn't give a toss about me, and indeed never have given a damn about me past what they could extract from me - or when I kicked up a fuss, they did some reactive action to keep me compliant, but it was never genuine, never for me - only ever for them. I hereby apologise to all those who had been warning me about this and telling me quite strongly to drop them for many months now (indeed, since October) - but all I can say is that I do listen, it's just I needed to see it for sure myself. They are very, very good at lying - faking being a friend to someone - and the best part is that consciously they don't even know they are doing it. Yet when you look at their actions, ignoring all their fine & fancy words, their motives become clear and in these they have been very consistent in their selfishness for a long time - it's all just a game for them, just a game to be played so they win. Focus on the actions, not the words. The actions don't lie.

Anyway, they're gone for good now. I don't like betrayal, and I really don't like people pretending to be a friend to me, and saying all these things which are what they think I want to hear. I place a great emphasis on trust and honesty, and whether you intentionally were doing it or not is irrelevant to what you actually did do. Not knowing why you act as you do is an excuse - it works for the first time you do something, but if you keep doing it again and again then it becomes a justification for bad behaviour and then one is simply being pathetic, especially if you couldn't be bothered finding out why you do such things. I have little time for deliberate helplessness - plenty of patience for those who try their best, but if you aren't even arsed trying, then you can fuck off in my opinion because you deserve no sympathy whatsoever.

Now had S- and I- been honest in never having been my friend, and admitting that they couldn't give a damn about me, everyone's lives would have been much easier. I wouldn't have had to cut them off, or hurt them, or create all these problems for everyone like manipulating them into a situation where they had several choices to make, and their individual selfishness became very obvious through their choices for everyone to see. Life would be so much simpler and easier, and I like simplicity and easiness.

S- and I- are easy decisions though. They lied to me, betrayed me, and kept on doing it even after I gave them an absolute last chance ultimatum last Wednesday week, so they're gone for good. A painful decision but very clear cut, though I will still always love them anyway. My big problem recently is M-. Now unlike S- or I-, she has never pretended to be anything better than a crappy friend to me - since October at least anyway. She has freely admitted just how useless she is to me, how she goes out to hurt me and annoy me, and generally does her best to push me away. The obvious solution is to be no better back to her, but well I have problems doing that. Either I am someone's friend or I am not. Either they are my friend or they are not. Either we are on good terms or we are not. It's unfortunately how I work - with relationships, on certain fundamentals, I am very black & white. This is not to say that with many other things I have no problems with shades of gray - for example, my relationship with many ex-girlfriends is considerably more intimate than many would consider healthy. For me at least, I have no problems with fuzziness there - so long as I trust them, and know they will be there for me should I need them, well that's all that matters - these are very much black & white issues for me, because I consider them the core fundamentals of ANY relationship and they are inviolate.

Now with M-, I can't trust her as she has failed me umpteen times. She has never been there for me even once - indeed, until three weeks ago, she had never even bought me a drink in over two years despite that I have often bought her a drink. In fact, she has been SO crap it would seem like she actively has been trying to be so crap, because if she were really indifferent then she'd just be mildly crap, but with M- she actively goes out to be as bad as possible.

Nevertheless, she has been making an actual effort since Easter for the first time ever. We've actually been having fun together. We co-wrote an excellent Socratic dialogue after that Wednesday ultimatum upon the nature of subconscious self-destructivity. I find it all very, very confusing. On the one hand she obviously fails the black & white really important core fundamental requirements of a friend. On the other, she hasn't lied about it, pretended otherwise and apparently at least is making an attempt to become better.

So, I am giving her a chance as I have told her. I am finding the ambiguity very difficult indeed - given the recent betrayal of people I love and will always love, it is very tempting to cut out all the cancer - if you're doing nothing for me, then good bye. But that seems unfair to me - not Christian - and she has moved from lying constantly to me (ie; betrayal through telling me what she thought I wanted to hear) before October to just being crap in neither a positive nor a negative way by never doing anything at all. That's an improvement of a sort, and Rome wasn't built in a day, but I do find the deliberate helplessness, the constant "can't do" attitude and the never ending excuse making rather than DOING SOMETHING, anything at all, pathetic and weak. I find it intolerable, and it gets me very frustrated indeed because I have no sympathy for time wasters. So I guess I'm just going to have to somehow get over myself, suck it all down and get on with the summer.

Why the hell do people have to be so fucking lame? It's really as easy as saying "I want this to be different", choosing to believe it to be so, and creating & maintaining that world view thereafter until you choose to see the world differently (and hopefully better) again. Such is growth. Is it really so bloody hard to grow when the one DEFINING characteristic of all life is that it grows? You'd think it would be second nature, but for these people, growth is to be prevented & perverted at all costs. What sad, pathetic fuckers! But that's being self-destructive for you - poison in motion. It leeches into everything around it, subverting it, turning everything bad like a miasma. It must be so very lonely for them.

Ok, time to take my sister to look around St. Andrews - she has been sent here by my father to determine if I am mental or not. Be happy!

Sunday 22nd April 2007:

2007-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 22nd April 2007: 5.10pm. After some amount of mucking around, I now have this front page on nedprod fully compliant with XHTML v1.0 Transitional and nearly fully compliant with XHTML v1.1 - the only three problems are the use of the HTML instead of XHTML MIME type, and all of which I have to keep in order to maintain compatibility with older HTML browsers. I'm going to keep all the older pages on nedprod in HTML v4.0, but new pages will also be in XHTML v1.1. I have to admit that I have no interest in ever upgrading past v1.1 as it looks like XHTML v2.x will fully break backward compatibility with older browsers - and let's face it, none of the current browsers can even fully do XHTML v1.0 yet!

This change has been made possible by my moving from Microsoft Frontpage to Microsoft Expression Web which occurred as part of installing stuff onto the new computer. Expression Web produces leaner code than Frontpage and it's also entirely standards conformant - the validation tool inside Expression Web actually matches exactly the official W3 one, and Expression Web handles UTF-8 files perfectly despite putting the non-standard BOM at the start. Even better, despite having nothing in common with Frontpage, it's still backwards compatible with Frontpage extensions so my navigation bar on the left which Frontpage automatically keeps updated as an insert in every page on nedprod still works. In fact, I really have to say that my experience with Expression Web so far has been almost perfect - my only issue has been the lack of a tool to fully automate upgrading old HTML into XHTML (it does a lot automatically, but it could do more) and it also annoyingly lacks showing what you type as you type by a few centiseconds, but that's still better than Frontpage which used up 100% of your CPU as your web page got longer. Oh - there is one other niggle - like Internet Explorer, it doesn't understand the .xhtml file extension which is required to get Apache to give the correct MIME type to web browsers.

One of the advantages of this web format upgrade is that I can now do this:

ِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَٟنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ	The beginning of the Quran in Arabic
अग्नमीळे पुरोतं यज्ञस्य दवं त्वीजम	The beginning of the Rig Veda in Sanskrit
‏בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃	The beginning of the Torah in Hebrew (note it goes right to left)
Βίβλος γενέσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριτοῦ υἱοῦ Δαυὶδ υἱοῦ Ἀβραάμ	The beginning of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament in Greek

Sadly not all of the above will show correctly on all web browsers - you'll likely see some of the characters missing with boxes in their place. As web browser and operating system support for Unicode improve, those boxes will vanish.

Ok, so what's been happening in my life recently? Well as it always is after Easter in St. Andrews, things have been changing very quickly indeed. Obviously I now have my new computer, I ended up overclocking it from 1.8Ghz to 3.4Ghz by a straight increase of the FSB and memory from their default of 800/400 to 1512/756 which only required a modest increase in voltage to maintain stability. I also managed to reduce memory timings at that speed from 5-5-5-18-23-2T to 4-4-4-12-16-1T which is amazing for the cheapest & nastiest 800Mhz memory I could find. I was able to take the system to a stable 3.6Ghz with the memory at its proper 800Mhz but this required a hefty voltage increase, an extra 90W of power consumption and therefore much increased heat output so I have settled for 3.4Ghz. At this speed, the system only consumes 115W when idle and 225W when busy - almost exactly the same as the old machine did when idle. I am therefore expecting to save nearly half my electricity bill as the old computer made up a large part of the total bill. The new computer also has a wide variety of operating systems installed on it - apart from the lack of SATA support in Apple Mac OS X, they all work very well indeed. It should make an excellent & powerful development workstation this summer break which is only a few weeks away now. Now if only I could sell the old motherboard and parts for a reasonable price ...

My personal life has been difficult recently. I did something very bad to a close friend during the Easter break which was three weeks ago now, and while we are currently estranged I'd doubt we shall be in a week's time. The last few weeks I have been very much questioning my ethics and motives, most especially as everything else running parallel to it has continued without pause (as is usual this time of year). I have begun to spend much more time with the friend that failed me last October with a view to burying the hatchet and moving on, and despite that so far we have had much fun, there can be little doubt that I and she will get hurt once again - nevertheless, the lesson in all of this is what you do about it when it happens - friends embrace the bad as well as the good, and without both one has a lopsided and ultimately doomed friendship.

On the work front, as is also usual this time of year, I have not been able to invest as much effort as is possible earlier in the year, and the marks do show it. As is also normal, I have about one major piece of coursework due each week and I have been juggling that with the interpersonal demands required of me this time of year. This is not to say that I don't willingly do this - I find this time of year to be very alive, as everyone grows so much and so quickly and I certainly am enjoying myself as well as growing myself a lot too. This is worth a few percentage points drop in coursework, and I don't think I'll regret this choice if it caused the difference between a first and 2.1 in a year's time.

One thing of particular concern recently has been my finances. I have had a surplus of money for most of my time here, but I went £380 over budget in January and February and I have been trying to restrain myself since then. So far despite trying to pay back £100 a month I have actually only broken even - so at least I am no worse off. But I do feel worse off - constantly having to not spend money unnecessarily means you lose a lot of spontaneity and feel guilt when others buy you drinks. With the purchase of the new computer at £515 I should be sitting at -£990 in my bank account at the end of this month when the rent comes out - so I am relying on lean summer spending to reduce that by £750 by summer's end. It should be possible to save £250 per month - that's the amount which goes on non-food and credit card expenditures after all ordinary costs - but we shall see.

Shortly we'll be having the Sir Crispin Tickell lecture - I'll be able to move on this this coming Wednesday when we get the funding situation confirmed. I have an essay due for Wednesday I'll be starting shortly, then another for the following Wednesday. No doubt I have plenty more coming for me on the personal front as well - it's all going to be very, very busy - what fun! Be happy!

Thursday 8th March 2007:

2007-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday 8th March 2007: 6.05pm. Things have been noticeably brighter last two weeks - I think entirely helped by weekly Friday visits to my home here by S- and I- where despite being very, very tired (especially last Friday), I did have a lot of fun. Additionally, I quite fancy this girl I've met though rather unfortunately she's a fourth year and of course will be leaving for good within three months. It's quite a thought that we all have just over a year to go. Nevertheless, I must admit that for the last week this girl I fancy has quite illuminated my life, and much of the world feels right again.

Also now I've started handing bits of coursework in and getting back (so far) very high grades it's taken off a lot of the pressure and that guilt if you do your own stuff when you think you should be studying. That gets better as the term progresses of course, and already last weekend was very definitely a nexus point as we have had every year around this time. Such weekends are highly emotional, and set in train a great deal of consequence later on this semester. So far, this semester looks like it'll be even more fucked up than previous semesters .... it's going to get interesting.

I still don't have my new computer, much to my chagrin! I am waiting on just one part, but sadly the most important: the motherboard. I specifically want the MSI P6N Platinum rather than its cheaper cousin the MSI P6N SLI-FI, but the Platinum edition is on sale in every part of the world except Britain!!!

Now the reason I specifically want this one is the heatpiping (the copper piping stuff you can see above). Heatpipes are like little refrigeration units - they use latent heat of fusion (ie; the energy it takes to turn water into stream) to rapidly shift heat from one place to another. Not only are they cool (and look cool), they seriously improve motherboard cooling which is rather important as I'll be converting the cheapest processor Intel sell into something faster than the most expensive one they sell. This fiddling with the electronics can generate a lot of extra heat, hence the desire for heatpiping.

Speaking of heat, I have bought a power monitor for £15 which is basically a socket with a LCD display telling you how much power the plugged in item consumes. I bought this for my MN4238 essay which requires me to enact an action plan to improve sustainability, so I was thinking I could do with reducing our electricity bill which has always been unusually high.

Now I had been pretty sure it was me leaving my ancient dual 1700 Athlon desktop computer turned on 24/7 where it acts as a server, but of course I never had any idea just how much power it actually consumes. Well now I know, and it's disturbing: it consumes 4W when turned off (it never is, so that doesn't matter), 228W when turned on but doing nothing and 221W when fully occupied (eg; encoding video).

Anyone familiar with computers will know why that result is disturbing! Computers for the last ten years plus are supposed to have an idle state which saves power so when it's idle it uses less power. My desktop actually uses more power when idle, the opposite of what it's supposed to do! As a comparison, Johanna's laptop uses 8W when off, 38W when on but idle and 83W when fully occupied.

Modern computers are far more energy aware than older ones, and the new one should be able to significantly reduce the power consumption at least when idle, not least due to the far more efficient power supply unit I have purchased. This directly impacts our bills of course ... electricity currently costs about 10p per kWh, so my desktop currently chews up 60p/day or £220 a year! If I could halve that, I'd be much happier. Some might suggest why don't you turn it off when you're not using it? Well, for two reasons: (i) it's always in use over the internet and (ii) hard disc drives fail vastly more rapidly when you cool them down and heat them up regularly. Right now, I don't have the ability to risk losing data on them due to them being in a RAID 0 configuration (this means that if one drive fails, it takes all the data on the other drive with it). I'll be rectifying this problem with my new hard drive which is big enough to temporarily hold all the data on the old drives while I remove the RAID 0 config. So thus in future I will be able to turn it off far more frequently - or even better, get it to turn itself off and back on automatically.

Okay, time to hunt through the freezer for food! Be happy everyone!

Sunday 18th February 2007:

2007-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Sunday 18th February 2007: 1.39pm. God, it feels like two months since my last entry - hardly one! I suppose that that's good - it does mean I've been doing plenty of living during the last month. Went to Liverpool, then Barcelona not long after the last entry - both went very well. Once back here, studies began again in earnest - a lot more coursework this semester than last, I feel like second semester in second year (ie; this time last year) where you have this mountain of work to do, and no matter how often you attend to it, you are always feeling like the mountain is growing faster than you can get through it. It's not a pleasant feeling - it's rather like being in a room filling with water.

I think this was part of the feeling of being depressed much of this past week. I was in quite a negative frame of mind, seeing how people are constantly retreading old pointless patterns of behaviour and not doing anything about it except to winge - due to this, I have ceased the coffee date system completely as people had grown complacent. Rather like myself I suppose. I also think that it's been quite some time since I have had a clear 'win' - that article I mentioned last entry for Resurgence ended up getting heavily diluted down from the many thousands to something far lighter which I've put onto my website here. While that was a form of accomplishment, it's nowhere near the original article which is easily heading towards tens of thousands of pages. The rather annoying thing is that like Tn, I know I can write it, it's just I need this coursework off my back to do it. That feeling is so reminiscent of first year - the feeling of doing pointless, worthless crap to get this bit of paper and of all the vastly more productive things I could be doing. I had thought in first year that it would have improved by third & fourth year, but now I realise I was being hopelessly optimistic. For example, in third year we are still learning exactly the same Economics as first year - almost down to the same topic each week - but now with extra "added maths". In Management, they have caught up with my contemporary knowledge so now at least they are teaching at a basic level what at least I am interested in, but it's soooo basic - I find it frustrating to read papers claiming things about the carbon cycle which last summer's research proved to be totally specious. And I won't even begin on the thermoeconomics (Buddhist Economics) papers (supposedly state-of-the-art ... what crap!) ...

My mood did improve noticeably yesterday though. In October, as part of that shit storm, my laptop suddenly died and after a great deal of testing I discovered that it was the electrical interface connecting the hard drive. I recently bought a USB enclosure, stuck the hard drive into it and after Friday and yesterday spent playing with the internals of Windows, got my existing Windows installation to boot unmodified from the USB hard drive. If I do say so myself, I am rather proud of myself as according to Microsoft this is impossible. I have written up how I did it here.

So, today is entirely coursework. Most of next week looks like entirely coursework. Nothing other than coursework. Hmm, now I'm feeling depressed again. Time to make a start I guess ... be happy!

Saturday 20th January 2007:

2007-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Saturday 20th January 2007: 11.32am. Johanna's friends have just left, so now I finally have time to sit down and write up my traditional birthday entry. I finished my exams a long time ago now, well over a week and half and they went reasonably well - I should get a 2.2 overall, maybe a 2.1 which isn't bad given the crappy semester and poor coursework grades I received.

As we limber up to the next semester, I have plenty on my plate. Lots of Future Society lectures, some thermal physics to study, shall be off to Barcelona next week to visit a friend N- who has been having a rough semester. Got a new computer to build whose parts I shall be ordering from Barcelona so they are here when I get back. No shortage of things to be doing ...

Usually this time of year I review my year, and decide the ups and downs. I will say that one particular up of this year was that S- organised the best birthday I have had in at least three years, and unlike the usual depression I feel on my birthday at being one year closer to death and another year of not getting enough accomplished, I actually had a good time. S- let me down badly last semester, but she's made up for it with that birthday - a little effort at the right time can mean a great deal, and she got it spot on - even if as she says herself, it was rather an easy steal. No matter I feel, my initial problem with her was not her intentions but rather her timing, and this time round she greatly improved her timing.

Ok, so major events in my mind of 2006:

Johanna and I broke up
... and thus ending the longest relationship I have ever had. It wasn't much fun, as it never is, but it was less awful than ever before which is mostly due to Johanna being far more sensible than previous girlfriends. But it also had something to do with me having learned to let go rather than trying to assert control of a failing relationship because I didn't want to lose it. I've finally at the age of twenty-nine learned to let things which are dying to die gracefully, which is about time. And here's the surprising jist - her and I are doing better than ever before since we broke up. We appreciate one another far more, and there is no longer that sense that we were in perpetual decline. Now, being broken up, she is far more of a positive thing than she was before, and while I logically expected that that would be the case, I didn't actually expect it as I've rarely (actually, no, I've never) seen that in anyone else I've personally known.
Started on implementing Tn on The World
Now I know everyone thought I was nuts at the time I was starting Tn and saying it could be applied to everything, but hopefully last summer those reading this diary got to see that indeed yes it can. Right now I am finishing up an article on my approach which is somewhat like thermodynamics but also somewhat less Physics-based - after all, we are talking about social phenomena here where intersubjectivisation rules. I learned during the research for this article that I am not the first to think of economic entropy flows, indeed this fringe idea is called thermoeconomics and I just ordered about the only book on it from Amazon with next semester's course books. Interestingly, I have learned that the great Economist Jevons actually pioneered the approach in the 19th century during his discussion of coal!
Reset my relationships with close friends
This past semester has been one (yet again) of having become over-invested in close friends. I am a lonely, fragile person and I find it very easy to get caught up in the lives of (usually dysfunctional so they need me) others. It gets too intense for them, so they hurt me. That took out much of last semester in depression, but then even at the start of that semester one had a sense of impending shrinkage and thankfully I'm old and wise enough by now to realise that the end of one cycle means the birth of a new cycle which appears to have begun just before the Christmas break.

Should I have the Future Society in there? No, I don't think so - while it could be a major achievement of 2006, it was very much seed planting for enabling the PhD funding I want ie; it hasn't yielded much yet except introducing us to quite a few important people (with a lot more very important people to come this semester). In other words, when/if I see the pan-out, then it'll get onto this list though I'd doubt that would even be the 2008 birthday entry.

Right so, back to my article! I hope you all had a great Christmas break, have fun!

Tuesday 19th December 2006:

2006-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 19th December 2006: 12.38pm. Tis the night before I go home for Christmas, and despite the coming 6am start I am not in bed yet despite being very tired given I was up till 5am last night and was up since about 10am this morning. At least I will sleep well!

I am more or less back on form after the worst semester I have been at St. Andrews - these would be my academic daughter's words, but I generally agree. After a good number of weeks of reflection and asking myself if I understand the world correctly, I have moved from self-doubt to creating change. While it is good to deeply question one's motives & interpretation of the world, it is rather incompatible with not getting kicked out because you failed a class test.

The future is what we make it, and I've let that slip the last few months. I will be making up for that during the coming semester when my workload also increases by 50%. It's all good. And it's also time I got moving with the long term vision - I had intended to network for the first two years, now it's time to prune that network of deadweight down to the core nexus points and start leveraging it.

A thought which occurred to me a few nights ago is still speaking to me. Somewhere far off, at the edge of the macro-Universe, energy coalesces into hydrogen gas and in doing so releases massive amounts of high energy gamma radiation (this is not the Big Bang cosmology, it's my own which is the simplest extrapolation of the rule "what goes on Earth goes everywhere"). These high energy gamma rays are immense and make up much of what we call cosmic rays (orthodoxy holds they come from the poles of black holes, but I disagree). That hydrogen is heavily ionised by that radiation, and so organises itself into all the sorts of structures that plasma does (ie; plasma cosmology). As the plasma coalesces, partly through magnetic fields, partly through electric fields and partly through gravity, you get galaxies and stars.

What is a star? A star consists of hydrogen at a high enough pressure that it coalesces into helium and emits yet more gamma radiation (sunlight). That helium may coalesce with other elements to yield all the heavier elements which make our planet up, once again with every step yielding more gamma radiation.

What I find so amazing is the pattern of it all. Energy clumps itself together into denser and denser forms (atoms). Every time it does, it releases the gamma radiation that in turn causes the reorganisation of those atoms - primarily through plasma effects, but also things like gaseous motion which we see as wind. That continual clumping together of energy moves the same energy around! Not just that, but it also organises that energy - much like the far from equilibrium effects you see in plasma, you also get chemical clocks, mimicry and of course DNA and therefore life. You therefore have the process of clumping generating structure!

There is something in this. I feel there is - in there somewhere lies the answer to my puzzle with my Economic model - how precisely does the expending of energy entropy convert into structure entropy? I know I'm seeing it too linearly - we tend to see the degradation of entropy as the "consumption" of energy, but all input energy gets reemitted as heat. Could it be that gravitons are really photons? Is perhaps gravity created by the fact that all macro-matter is continually outputting as many photons as it receives, just at a much higher entropy (lower frequency)? I wonder if the deformation of space-time is really the concentration of photon exchange.

Somehow, in my mind's eye imagining a large lump of cold matter, if you shine a light on it it converts it to heat - it converts the entropy to being internally excited. The matter expands, becomes less dense by an amount proportionate to the amount of energy entropy being consumed by the mass. It also organises itself, building structure - yet that structure increases in complexity forever so long as the same amount of entropy is consumed - which implies that each part of that structure must become more entropy efficient over time. Note that only mass can consume entropy - that is the purpose of mass, to get excited by the clumping together of mass. There is some relation here between space, entropy and time I am still missing - and in it lies my answer.

Anyway, I am off to bed - it is now well past one, and I get up in just over four hours. Be happy!

Friday 17th November 2006:

2006-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Friday 17th November 2006: 4pm. Things are slowly turning upward. Last two weeks or so have also not been good, but they do feel stabilised at least. And with stability, things can move forward.

Johanna and I have stabilised into some sort of quasi-relationship - we are broken up, and we're partially behaving as though we're single. But we're also partially behaving as though we're still going out which is to be expected as we're both still very much in love with one another - that has never come into question - and of course we still live together. So we still have cuddles, which we probably shouldn't, but then if I'm honest I'd happily have cuddles with anyone (female) I'm close to except they don't tend to allow it unless they're drunk. There is still quite a bit of conflict in my head regarding her - on the one hand I'm happy with her to be off with other men, but on the other hand I worry that I'm not deep down and so I spend a fair bit of time questioning my feelings on the matter. I will get surely hurt, but then I was hurting her while we were going out which is why she ended it (partially) because I was imposing my world view on her.

I have been however continuing to impose my worldview on others with much pain being caused to them as a result. The close friends I ended regular contact with are not happy bunnies and are hurting themselves and me in protest. But again some stability has arisen there - I was being too forgiving, I wasn't liking myself for it and I was deluding myself into thinking they would be there for me when as recent events have shown they would not. Now my mental construction of my relationships with them have been reset, I do feel much happier even if they don't.

I don't feel much like socialising at present - I don't mean with one or two people, but rather in the sense of going to parties or being around larger groups. I don't see that changing any time soon - I never particularly liked it anyway, but I do have a major itch to do something really productive and now seems like the right time. From my recovery after Ruth, I have defined myself through my computer programming works which is a rather lonely affair. Half way through first year, my loneliness caused me to direct more effort into people and I have been burned by that, though less so than on previous occasions. Having been burned, loneliness is looking more palatable again for the time being and I might as well make use of it.

Hence I have decided to upgrade my computer for Christmas as my current one is neither powerful enough nor equipped enough for writing the economic model I plan. I want to make use of graphic processor (GPU) programming in order to massively increase the horsepower available for my economic model and for that I need a newer graphics card, one which nowadays requires PCI Express. My current computer is a dual Athlon 1700 built in 2001 and for less than five hundred quid I can upgrade to an overclocked dual core Intel Core 2 system with an ATI X1950 GPU with commensurate upgrades in hard drive, RAM etc. A nice feature of this upgrade is that I will be able to run Apple Mac OS X on the desktop as well as finally having native Linux and FreeBSD installations as currently I must run these in VMWare on the desktop. The Apple Mac OS X is particularly handy for building and testing PowerPC editions of my software so I can ensure I've got the endian support implemented correctly.This new Intel chip has virtualisation support, so I should be able to run a copy of Linux in parallel with Windows thus making good use of the 2Gb of RAM this new machine will have. Another major advantage is that sometime in the future, I can stuff a quad core processor into the same system and finally get the quad processor system I've always wanted to test Tn upon.

So things are looking up. If nothing else, I very much enjoy building a new computer and seeing just how far I can overclock it and that in itself will do a lot for my happiness. Even better when I get to tune Tn and see what speed increase I get . Be happy everyone!

Tuesday 31st October 2006:

2006-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Tuesday 31st October 2006: 8.42pm. It's not been a fun few weeks recently. There has been a run of bad events, and I'm hoping it will stop soon and things turn around.

Chronological is good. The Future Society events have not seen much attendance which is not good, and it was very small at the last lecture on the 12th with about six people. On Friday the 13th a bifurcation point occurred in St. Andrews for almost everyone we know, whereby the system shifted from an old pattern into a new and it was really from this point onwards that things changed. Shortly thereafter my laptop blew up which sucked up much of my free time as I retrieved the contents of its hard drive. Johanna broke off our relationship on the night of Monday the 23rd which then led to a whole pile of ripple - in addition to me entering a depression, some close friends failed to be there for me, one for the second time, so last Sunday the 29th I told them I was breaking off regular contact (ie; regular coffee dates) as I was done giving and not getting gratitude, appreciation nor them being there for me when I needed them for once. This caused one of them to self-destruct last night, and I got mad that Johanna was not suffering in my then opinion as much as I was and so I hurt her, and hurt her bad.

Which leads to today. Needless to say things are not going well for me currently, and I'd rather like it to end soon. But end it sooner than it requires will only cause things to reappear worse later on, so I'm going to just have to maintain as best I can. I have a great deal of reflection to do about why our relationship broke up, what I did to cause it and what's going to come next - how to resurrect this situation from the ashes (not that I mean getting us back together, that's done for sure, but rather how to turn all this to something good). Mercifully, we have reading week next week so I have breathing space. I am intending to stay here alone in my home and try to contain the splash of my current bad mood.

I will of course do a little coding - I always find that helps, and as my development system was the laptop I need to migrate everything back to the desktop when I get time. I'll also do a fair bit of study as I have major catch up to do in Management and there's a class test after the break. Hopefully, if I soldier on, the answers will come.

Be happy everyone!