Had to update the file and the code to make this sound work again. Also refreshed the code on that page for a 1961 Brownie projector commercial from the Internet Archive..

Lots of sites change their structure over the years, notably Boing Boing. Repaired the links.

Josef Hardt gave me an audio tape that answers long-standing questions, raises new ones. Link at top of original Fantastic Theater page.

Dr. George Lemaster, former KOTV engineer, sent this photo of the giant castle float.

Emily Spivy pointed out that TTM is credited along with Dr. Demento on the 2018 Weird Al Yankovic calendar. Watch her movie of our 2013 bus tour of UHF locations in Tulsa.

There has been a lot of mud-slinging over the referendum on the Alternative Vote. The “No” campaign have been particularly bad at avoiding sensible debate and resorting to fear-mongering and smears.

The polling shows they will likely win by a significant margin. They shouldn’t. And with apparently 20%+ of people still undecided, I’d like to share some thoughts that might tip the balance in some people’s heads: please share this with anybody who is still undecided.

Here are 10 very good reasons you should vote “Yes” in the AV referendum tomorrow:

1. First Past The Post (FPTP) doesn’t work in a system with more than two parties

You might only like one of the two leading parties, but you can’t deny that we live in a society where more than two parties matter. If you live in Scotland or Wales, multi-party politics is a reality even more so.

FPTP was designed when there were only two political groups in Parliament: the Tories and the Whigs. Since the birth of Labour, the reformation of the Liberals and the rise of nationalist parties and groups like the Green Party, we live in a nation where there are multiple political voices.

You might not agree with them, but you agree under a democracy that they have a right to be heard, right? So why would you persist with a system that denies them that voice?

Right now, an MP can have support of less than 20% of the people in their constituency, and be sent to Parliament on behalf of all 100%. AV eliminates that from being possible, and forces more engaged politics.

2. AV actually weakens extremist parties

There are three parties wholly against the Alternative Vote: the Conservatives, the BNP and the Communist party.

The Tories don’t like it for a variety of reasons along with some Labour MPs (see below), but the BNP and the Communist parties don’t like it because it reduces their chances of getting a seat. How? It comes down to second preference votes.

People who are inclined to vote for extremist views typically will place them first. People who put other parties first are unlikely to offer a second preference to an extremist party. That means on the whole, parties like the BNP are likely to be eliminated quite early on.

To win, a candidate must convince at least 50% of the people who vote to give them at least a second or third preference vote. The BNP and the Communists are unlikely to achieve that whilst their views and the electorate’s are so out of kilter.

Under FPTP it’s possible to win a seat with just 20% of eligible voters agreeing with you, or around 30% of voters who actually vote - a much more achievable target for extremist parties to get.

3. AV forces consensus and a new mode of political debate

You might have noticed politicians from opposite sides don’t seem to like each other very much. Most people can’t stand watching Prime Minister’s Questions for all its Punch & Judy mechanics. FPTP requires confrontation and feeds off fear-mongering.

AV forces politicians into a very different mode. They have to talk about what they’re for, rather than what they’re against (as tactical voting disappears, see below), and they need to seek out ways to find compromise and agreement rather than just shout the other side down.

You might have strong feelings against the coalition government, but you can’t deny that the disagreements seem to have been dealt with more philosophical debate than previous disputes between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. It’s not that either side has sold out completely, but rather it’s because that’s what coalitions need to work. AV turns that progressive debate into the daily routine of politics.

4. AV doesn’t cost a penny more. The only penalty is a slightly longer election night special on the BBC

There have been some preposterous claims made about the cost of AV. One leaflet suggested it would cost us £250m, and another campaign suggested that maybe the money would be better spent on hospitals.

We could argue that democracy shouldn’t have a price put on it - particularly one so low given the size of our GDP - however that’s not the point.

AV won’t cost us anything more. The referendum will cost virtually nothing as it coincides with many local elections anyway. There are no “counting machines” that need to be bought, and the cost of explaining AV to the electorate has basically already been met by the (privately-funded) “Yes” campaign and various other groups. If you don’t currently understand how AV works, you can learn it yourself in under two minutes by reading the article on Wikipedia about it.

5. FPTP supports incompetent and lazy MPs - it provides a “job for life”, undeservedly

There are a lot of very bad MPs in Parliament. You’ve probably never heard their names, but they’ve been there for a long time, and know that they have a job for life. They are in “safe seats” where it would take a political Tsunami of epic proportions to remove them.

If you analyse which Labour members support the FPTP system over AV, you will realise they are generally unpopular figures who have held safe seats whilst resorting to “we hate the other side” politics, which would likely flounder under AV: John Prescott, Margaret Beckett, et al.

The Tory back-benches are filled with a similar breed of politician. They resent the voter, on the whole.

These MPs do not represent their constituency in Parliament. They represent their party in the constituency. With perhaps no more than 35% of the vote (and often with low turnouts, just a 10-15% approval from their constituency as a whole), they know they can do pretty much what they want. For example, on average MPs in safe seats claim more in expenses than MPs in marginals, and cost the taxpayer more.

One beauty of AV is that it pretty much eliminates the concept of a safe seat. There will be some left where there is overwhelming support for a candidate, but MPs will be more inclined to fight for the continued support of their entire constituency, and therefore act more in accordance with their wishes.

6. Under AV you can - if you wish - select just one candidate (and it’s actually easier)

At the moment under FPTP you type an X in a box. Under AV, if you only want to support one candidate and have no second preference, simply write ‘I’ instead. It’s one less line. It could be argued that under AV you’ll halve your time spent actually physically voting.

OK, I’m clearly making a small joke here, but there is nothing complicated about AV if you don’t want to think about multiple candidates, just vote for the one individual you want to see elected.

But don’t you want the option of being able to specify a second candidate if your first preference doesn’t win, just in case? Isn’t the elimination of tactical voting worth it? That brings us onto…

7. Tactical voting pretty much disappears under AV

This morning I got a “the Tories can’t win here” leaflet from the Lib Dems through my door. We’ve all seen them. Basically, if you don’t want Labour to win in this ward, there is no point in voting Conservative because of how the vote is counted.

Under AV at general elections, this would make no sense. Tory voters, instead of being told their votes are futile, would be reached out to by both parties seeking to build bridges with that community who live locally.

You would no longer need to go to the polls and vote for a party you disagree with, just to keep another party out. Campaigners would instead want to listen to views across the political spectrum in the hope of getting a second preference vote from people within those groups.

It completely changes the way we think about politics and political campaigning. For the better, and permanently.

There is a more complicated explanation of how tactical voting pretty much becomes impossible under AV in a section of the Wikipedia article.

8. We all start to count again

You might have heard the phrase “Mondeo Man”, “Windsor Woman” or the like at previous elections. These are demographic groups targeted by campaigners whose vote determines the election.

You see, at the last election, it’s thought that only 1.6% of votes actually changed the outcome. Because of the way FPTP favours jobs for life, safe seats and promotes tactical voting and negative politics, experts realised that the “swing” that would win the election would come from less than 1 voter in 50.

They identified who these people were based on where they lived. They analysed their lifestyles based on demographic information and labelled them. Experts then ran focus groups composed of this tiny demographic, and party policy and manifesto promises were crafted around what was responded to by that group.

All of those billboards, manifestos, news reports and editorials. They weren’t meant for 98.4% of the electorate - they were crafted to shape the opinion of just 1.6% of the electorate.

Does that seem a reasonable way to run a democracy to you? Under AV, we all start to count again.

9. It’s not a rubbish version of PR, and we don’t want PR anyway!

Some people have argued we should hold out for Proportional Representation because that means the number of MPs representing each party is in exact proportion to the number of votes cast for that party nationally.

We don’t want that.

Note, I said the MPs would be representing each party. They would no longer represent a constituency, and would be positioned on a list based on their loyalty to the party elders and the small Westminster clique that runs politics today.

We want and need a system that means an MP is tied to a constituency. We want and need a system that makes the MP want to represent the constituency within Parliament, rather than the other way around.

PR doesn’t do that. FPTP doesn’t do that. AV does.

10. If we vote “No”, we keep the status quo for at least a generation. 

The reality is, if we collectively vote “No” to the Alternative Vote, that’s it, we don’t get any more reform for a while - probably at least a generation. The concession prize might be a reform of the House of Lords, in order to try and keep the coalition together (it’s a very weak second prize for the Lib Dems), but I suspect if we voted “Yes”, then Lords reform would be here within no more than one more Parliament anyway - it’d be popular with voters.

We all agree that the current system is broken, but if we vote “no” we’re saying “that’s OK”. We are committing our children and possibly several generations more to the broken politics we’re so disenchanted with ourselves.

So, there we have it. 10 reasons. If you need any more, feel free to email me and I’ll try and answer your questions and answer any lingering doubts before polls open tomorrow.

In the time between me publishing my list of 10 reasons for supporting the Alternative Vote and polling closing the next evening, it was read over 1,000 times. I still stand by every word of it, even though - as you no doubt have heard - the “No” campaign won it.

Annoyingly, it seems the majority of people who voted “No”, did so because of one of the following reasons:

Their favourite media outlet told them to

We have a major problem with media influence and the popular vote in most democracies, but in the UK its reached new levels. If the media was unbiased, or people sought a balance of opinion in their media consumption, I’m not sure that the vote would have gone the way it did. People seem to be reluctant to think for themselves any more.

They held strong allegiance to the way things are right now

In gambling parlance there is a phrase to dismiss somebody who has a bet on and is trying to justify their logic: talking through their pocket.

There were very, very many people on the “No” campaign who would stand to lose a lot if the vote had gone to “Yes”, not least the Prime Minister himself. I think the “Yes” campaign didn’t do enough to highlight that this was about long-term change within how politics is done and is perceived. 

What amazed me is just how many people have a vested interest in politics as they are done today. With thousands of people hoping one day to have a chance running for MP in a safe seat, able to leverage hundreds of campaigners each… we just didn’t see it coming!

They were “holding out” for PR

Possibly the most stupid reason: we don’t want PR (which the electoral commission found out without the need for a referendum), which is why it wasn’t offered. But plenty of people do want it, and so voted “No” using the warped logic this would in the long run give them more progressive politics. What they hadn’t spotted was that voting “Yes” would have led to a more progressive politics with a possibility of PR being offered within 3-4 Parliaments, maximum. Now? Even the Lib Dems are talking about a “losing a generation” before it gets brought up again.

So there we are, the vote was lost, I’m talking through my own pocket it seems, and the result is thoroughly depressing for progressives. C’est la vie…

I’m starting to get a little bored of telling the story every time I pick up the phone or run into somebody, so I’ll just post it here, and then we can all move along from it.

Headline synopsis: I had a tooth abscess, it was really bad, I got hospitalised, and because I suffer from sleep apnea ended up on a high-dependency unit for a night (because sleep apnea and general anaesthetics don’t mix).

Longer version:

About six weeks ago I got a chest infection. Pretty nasty stuff, and I was coughing quite badly a lot of the time. I took a day off work at one point - which I rarely do for illness - so, you know, horrible.

As that was clearing, I started to develop toothache. I’ll be frank: I hate dentists, and have pretty much avoided them for my entire adult life. The pain was coming from near my wisdom teeth on the right side of my face, which have played up now and again a few times. I self-medicated with paracetamol and ibuprofen after a couple of days. I was unable to eat solids from around the 8th May.

I then travelled to London for business and stayed overnight. At my boss’ wife’s birthday party, I discovered that my jaw was so sore and unable to move, I could barely eat non-solids, and was struggling to swallow even fluids.

Buoyed by medication, the next morning (11th May), I was able to take on about 2 litres of water and a small amount of food, but I was quickly realising I was in pain that needed professional help. Leaving London early that day, I recognised that the following day I would need to seek emergency treatment.

Manchester has the University Dental Hospital. It’s often a struggle to get seen there, but casualties can walk up for 8.30am and get seen - for free - by a student dentist, supervised by some of the best qualified dentists in the country. I made my way out on the Thursday morning expecting to be seen, prescribed some antibiotics and to make my way home.

They took a look, X-Rayed my jaw to be sure, took another look, and referred me to Accident & Emergency. The abscess was large enough that they had become concerned I was going to be unable to breath within the next 24 hours.

The SHO from Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery (“Max Fax” as it’s known), had been told to expect me in A&E within the hour. Off I trudged.

On being booked in at A&E, they took my blood pressure and pulse. They were off the charts. They took my temperature, and it was high. My body was fighting a raging infection, and losing. I was hooked up to an ECG, and they took some bloods. My glucose was off the charts - I hadn’t eaten properly in days, and my body was starting to pull down the fat reserves (of which I have ample supply) and eat itself.

The clincher though was the fact I was no longer able to really comfortably swallow without pain and discomfort. Not even fluids. Barely my own saliva. I was admitted, cannulated (a drip line being put into my hand), and put on saline within about 30 minutes.

Rebecca duly packed a bag of things for me, and being the angel she is, cancelled work and made her way to be my bedside, if for nothing else than to give me a bit of love, support and sympathy.

Things then got weird. They put some antibiotics on my IV, and there was a thought that maybe - strong as they were - I would be able to avoid emergency surgery. However, to give them a hand, the registrar and the SHO wanted to know more about what was in that abscess. They pondered a CT scan. They then realised that my mouth would open just enough to get a syringe in there… they asked to “drain it a bit”.

The local anaesthetic sprayed into the mouth to “aspirate” an oral abscess is meant to taste like bananas. If your banana crop grows in a bath of dilute acid, maybe you would recognise the taste, but it was pretty horrid. My mouth numbed a bit, and then I grabbed onto my chair whilst they did what they had to do - twice - and removed a sizeable amount of horrid stuff.

I won’t lie, if you ever need this doing, you need to prepare yourself. You need to breathe through the nose, and know that it will be over in 30 seconds. It is not at all comfortable. But you’ll live, and you’ll feel better within minutes.

Within 4 minutes, I could move my jaw more, and suffered less pain. I could swallow again. Alas, because they might want to do surgery in the morning, I was kept on “Nil By Mouth” (NBM), for the evening.

I was now on a regular rotation of saline to hydrate me, paracetamol on IV to take the pain away, and extraordinarily strong (and expensive) antibiotics to help fight the infection. My temperature remained high, my pulse remained high, and my blood pressure was high. I think at this point I was around 38-39C, 120bpm (resting), and blood pressure of about 170/100. Despite not having eaten in several days, my glucose levels were high and on one chart I saw the phrase “needs fasting”.

I awoke the next morning to some confusion. Some doctors thought I would go to surgery. Others thought the antibiotics hadn’t had a chance yet. I just wanted it all to be over.

The consultant anaesthetist at this point called around to have a chat. He asked me the usual questions about allergies etc, and all was fine. He asked me whether I had any questions. “What are the risks of general anaesthetic given my size and that I have sleep apnea?”. He froze. “You didn’t mention sleep apnea”. It was important.

To be honest, I have never been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Rebecca noticed it some months ago, when she was awake and I was very much asleep. I would stop breathing for 10, 20, maybe 30 seconds. I would then suddenly start breathing oddly. I phoned Rebecca and asked her to describe this to the consultant and for him to decide if this was important.

He decided it was very important. I was told that the night after my surgery, I would need to be closely monitored, and that meant I would need a bed on the High-Dependency Unit (HDU), which is a sister unit to Intensive Care. This was starting to get a bit scary.

For various reasons, over the rest of the Friday I deteriorated. My canular became very painful in use, suggesting it needed to come out and a new one put in. Because I have “collapsing veins”, this caused some problems. It meant I was effectively off all medication, painkillers and saline for several hours, and I got to the point I could barely talk.

At 5pm, I was taken off NBM and told I could eat/drink what I could manage until midnight. I ordered a meal, and struggled to down a jug of water. 45 minutes later, I was called for surgery - surgery I clearly couldn’t have, given I’d just drank so much water. The meal arrived, and I couldn’t eat it. I was now very low. I had missed the chance of getting to leave on the Saturday, and I felt awful.

The SHO who admitted me was back on shift, and did an amazing job of making sure I was looked after. He attempted to recannulate me himself (and failed), and then tracked down an amazing nurse who “felt” her way around my veins and gave me the most comfortable canular (albeit at a strange angle), I’d had all weekend.

At around midnight I was moved from Ward 1 (full of people with broken arms, legs and skulls and the like), to Ward 55 (in the eye hospital), where I had a private room. It was in here that a nurse - whilst moving me over to another batch of antibiotics as I slept -noticed that I had stopped breathing for a little while and woke myself up. She had witnessed the sleep apnea. By that point I was already booked for HDU after the operation, but good job she saw it either way.

Saturday morning I felt good. I had slept for 4 hours (the most I had managed in over a week), and it was FA Cup Final day.

I then received a visit from an Ear, Nose & Throat specialist. There was concern the chest infection I had prior to the toothache had triggered tonsillitis and that I had a quinsy that would need treatment - that this wasn’t dental at all.

This was the only point I refused treatment. She wanted to aspirate the abscess again. I refused consent on a couple of grounds:

1. Whilst using the tongue depressor to look in my mouth, when I gagged slightly (I have a terrible gag reflex), she thought I was being childish. What she thought I’d do when draining an abscess, I don’t know
2. She said it would be like my previous aspiration “but further back, near the tonsils”, which frankly scared the crap out of me
3. I was going to be in surgery in less than 3 hours. There was no clinical need for me to have this aspiration right there and then. If my surgery had been cancelled, it would make sense, but right now? No.

She was annoyed. She wanted to aspirate (I suspect she wanted to do it for clinical experience reasons as much as anything else), and I didn’t want her to. She went away and spoke to some other doctors on the phone, including the Max Fax team, and they - apparently - sided with me. It was an unpleasant, traumatic and painful procedure that was not needed right now. Phew.

Another anaesthetist turned up, and talked me through what he was going to do when I got to surgery. They wanted to shove a camera through my nose and down my throat. Normally they would have done this whilst I was asleep, but on this occasion they needed to do it whilst I was conscious. I still don’t know why. He remarked it would be “uncomfortable, but not painful”. Hmmm.

As 3pm approached, I settled down to watch the FA Cup Final - the first one my team Manchester City had reached in my entire life. I knew I would probably not see the whole game.

Sure enough, 30 minutes in, the phone call came. Time to get into the gown.

It’s odd when you’ve been sat waiting for days for surgery, and finally its time. I can’t deny that given the procedure to knock me out was going to involve pipes through my nose and throat, and I was going to end up on HDU, and one doctor had already suggested my chances of dying whilst under were “only about 1%”, fear was starting to take hold.

Rebecca didn’t know where she was meant to be going, and so the stress of making sure she was going to be OK built slightly. The move into surgery was not how it should have gone.

In the anaesthetics room, things generally went to plan. More of the banana-tasting anaesthetic to numb the naval cavity and throat. I wasn’t getting groggy quickly enough, so he gave me “a couple of beers” - a small dose of something uber-powerful through my canular. Then the pipe came out. Huge. Closed my eyes. Barely felt anything. Then, a rush of fluid in my chest and I started to cough. Then choke. Then he said it was time for sleep. My last thoughts: “I’m choking, I might die here…”

Waking up in recovery is horrid. You’re disorientated, confused, groggy and feeling miserable. Except now I felt something different. No pain at all in my mouth. I could swallow, pain free. Something worked.

To be honest, what happened next is all a bit unclear. A surgeon told me that the abscess had been taken out, along with my upper right and lower right wisdom teeth. I looked at the clock, and realised I had been under for probably near 2 hours.

The porter who took me down appeared with another patient. He knew I was upset about missing the game. He pointed at me and mouthed “one nil”. Nice afternoon for me then - we’d even won.

I asked for Rebecca to be called. Actually, I couldn’t remember her number off the top of my head, so it was my Mum who was called, who called her. Unusually they allowed her into recovery to see me. We were now just waiting for HDU. I realised then that I was in a HDU bed. Some poor bastards had had to lift me into it whilst I was asleep. Poor them. I hope their backs are OK.

I then got admitted into HDU. HDU is an odd place. They just want to watch you, watch everything you do, all of the time. They measure how much urine you produce. They write down every cough, every movement, and you are kept with a blood pressure cuff and pulse monitor on constantly to check your vitals all the time. I was also on humidified oxygen.

I slept little. You don’t really want to go to sleep if you know you have sleep apnea and you’ve come out from general anaesthetic - you’re worried you might die. During the night my oxygen levels went down to 70%. The nurses woke me a couple of times. In the morning, I was told it was serious enough that I should seek advice about it from my GP, but I was never at any point in any real danger - thankfully.

Then it was a waiting game to be discharged. Patients never get discharged from HDU, and so I was a freak occurrence. To one nurse’s mind, I was the first patient to get up, dress myself, and walk out of the doors of HDU she could remember. I’m glad I was able to.

Since then, I’ve only had to take two paracetamol all week. I am banned from smoking or drinking “fizzy drinks” for another week. The fizzy drink thing is to do with CO2 - bacteria near the site of the abscess and surgery will thrive on it, so no soda, lager or tonic water for me for a while.

On the whole, I’m fine. It was horrific, and I would never want to do it again, but that’s the story - scary as it was at the time - of how a toothache got out of hand, and I ended up on a high-dependency unit.

The role of heroes has been occupying my mind this week. 

On Monday night I attended Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge at the Royal Exchange. It’s a marvellous production, and despite the few moments where forced American accents inevitably slipped it, is a performance I would recommend to anybody.

In Miller’s play, he tries to present to us about a rather unconventional type of hero and the fate his character dictates. 

A hard-working man, with a strong moral and ethical code, suddenly finds his authority challenged. In his mind his authority is his essence, the totality of his identity. He lies out of self-interest, which reduces his heroic quality in the eyes of others, but he only care about his “name” and his “respect”. It’s not a nice heroism, it’s not the kind of heroism we were taught as children when hearing stories of princes and dragons, but there is something definitely heroic here: being true to your sense of right and wrong against all odds.

Whilst I was watching this play - a play I think might be the best I’ve seen at the Royal Exchange in many years - Adam Curtis’ newest creation was being beamed into homes across the land. I caught up with it on getting home and was surprised to discover the subject of heroes being discussed once more.

In the first episode of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Curtis introduces us to the idea that the dominant force behind the rise of both highly speculative financial markets and Silicon Valley in the latter half of the 20th century, were the ideas of Ayn Rand.

Rand was without doubt a fascinating writer. In fact, she might be better described as a philosopher who uses the rhetorical form of novels to present her ideas, more than “just” a writer. A rare kind of thinker, indeed.

Her novels are about heroes. Her style of hero is very distinct: there is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to discussing them.

Rand’s heroes, like Miller’s, are heroic because they act out of self-interest. They believe themselves to be entirely rational and base their morality on that rationality. I think morality of pure self-interest is by definition subjective and selfish, however Rand’s arguments have something to them.

I’m still thinking about these philosophies. I love the idea of any individual choosing to become a hero - a Randian hero - and to do as the early winners in Silicon Valley and did. At the same time, Miller’s presentation of such a character who is unable to climb out of the economic constraints he finds himself imprisoned by, left me feeling such men are selfish, proud and contemptible characters.

I share these thoughts to hopefully make you do two things:

1. If you can, go and watch A View From A Bridge at the Royal Exchange. It’s wonderful theatre. If you’re not nearby, at least go and read the script. Some say a reading of the script is better than seeing the play, but I really think the production at the Royal Exchange is worth seeing.
2. If you can, go and watch Adam Curtis’ documentary (at the time of writing, it’s still on iPlayer if you’re in the UK). It’s wonderful, thoughtful, and at points quite witty. 

Both will make you think, if nothing else.

As I write this, outside the sun is burning lazily down on a quiet, sleepy and green corner of Manchester as the day draws to a close. Fine weather, often makes me think about an alternate career I considered about a decade ago. I thought I’d share the story.

In 2002, the dot.com crash was in full effect. The internet era looked like it might be over for a while. As a software developer specialising in internet technologies, I was in a little bit of trouble. Whilst contracts appeared occasionally, I realised I was looking at 6-7 months of unemployment.

Not having any savings, and as yet mentally unprepared for the path of entrepreneurship I have now followed for half a decade, I was a little stumped as to how to actually pay my food bills, etc. I applied for barwork, but there was none forthcoming. I looked at minimum wage jobs, perhaps as a cleaner, but was “over qualified”. One CTO of an ISP I interviewed with thought I was too bright for the role he had in his firm, and that I would quickly become bored.

One contract I acquired however, led to an interesting discovery. I was hired by a small startup in Eccles to help “fix” a betting platform. It was a clone of Betfair.com, which was still relatively young at the time. I was hired for three reasons:

1. I knew how to fix the problem - their Bulgarian programmer was an idiot who didn’t understand what he was doing
2. I knew quite a bit about horse racing and gambling, and therefore had “domain expertise”
3. I was cheap

Since the age I’ve been legally allowed to gamble, I’ve been interested in it as a maths problem. Books on technical analysis in FOREX trading - one of which I’ve been reading recently - fascinate me. I had developed quite an eye for reading form, had become a better than “good” poker player, and enjoyed “the game” and all that came with it. I still have an impressive collection of books on sports betting and horse racing. Gambling, quite simply, is something I have always found a little bit fun.

An example of how confident I was: A few years before the events below unfolded, my mother was very concerned about my “gambling problem”. I did not have a gambling problem, beyond the fact I gambled, and this alone was enough to scare her. Sat in a small cafe in the town I grew up in, she decided to try and prove a point. She handed me £10 of her own money - money she could scarecely afford to fritter away at the time - and told me to go and bet on a horse with it there and then. If it lost, I would agree to repay her the £10 and to stop gambling. I didn’t quite understand her logic, but I agreed. I walked to the bookmakers around the corner, backed £5 each way a 4/1 chance in a jumps race, and then sat and watched as it won by 3 lengths. I returned to the cafe with my mother’s winnings, and she became silent as I handed her the cash.

So when I turned up at a rather dingy office in Eccles and discovered Betfair, I was transfixed. The major appeal to me was simple:

It allowed you to take the position of a bookmaker.

Bookmakers say that the moment somebody has to make a choice about which competitor will win a challenge, they are at a disadvantge. That means the bookmakers put themselves in a position where they don’t have to make a choice, they just balance the odds with the bets coming in.

The bookmakers generally don’t care who wins - they will “lay a book” at odds that mean whoever wins, they make a guaranteed profit. Some of them - especially on big prize handicaps - will often “lay to a common liability” which means they might lose some money if a favourite wins, but make a much larger profit if an outsider wins. A few don’t bother risk managing and just hope it all balances out. There are some truly horrifying scare stories about the last group.

The advantage they have however - encompassed in a mathematical measure of odds we call “the over-round” is that they are pretty much guaranteed to make money in the long run.

I opened a Betfair account, deposited £20, and laid a book on a race. I made 27p. It might not sound significant, but the important thing is, because of how I had done this, my risk was effectively zero by the time the race started. It was a “free” 27p that had magically been produced out of thin air.

I dived into the subject, buying whatever I could about bookmaking. I spent a lot of time - and frankly money - understanding the different conditions different laying approaches were best in. Like most geeks, once I choose to learn a subject, I go deep - I try and completely understand the whole domain. This was no different. I read up on the history of bookmaking, the backgrounds to important bookmakers, the maths, the probabilities, the strategies, and spoke to whoever I could about it that understood “the game”.

With my work done at the company, I now had an abundance of free time to put some of this learning to effect.

I was able to lay - and sometimes back using a method called “Dutching” on “under-round” books - over that summer out of Internet cafes (I had no connection to the Internet at home at the time), and cover my living expenses. I ate and drank well, I had a comfortable apartment in Manchester city centre, and was learning about being a bookmaker on a razor thin margin of 102% over-round.

About this time, I thought about becoming a professional bookmaker. The lifestyle of being on-course appealed to me almost as much as the 130% over-round (i.e the roughly 30% profit on capital staked pretty much guaranteed to a bookmaker), and I started to enquire about how to make it happen. I would need £100,000-£150,000 to get started at the courses I wanted to get started at which meant it would have to be a long-term plan. I contemplated assisting established names in the meantime, but without a driving license or a car, I was going to have a problem there as well.

And then the dream was interrupted, and all hell broke lose. 

When you’re trading all day on Betfair, you’re moving money around in order to make just a little tiny bit more money. You are not improving the planet, or people’s lives. It’s boring, and frankly, it’s selfish. Your ego takes a hit, even when you’re winning.

I didn’t have the equipment available to automate the process (despite being a software developer), so for me it was about just grinding it out, hour after hour, day after day. I would get up at 10am, buy and read a copy of the Racing Post, head to an Internet cafe for midday, and lay books on around 20 races until at least 5pm, and during the Summer as late as evening racing allowed. Sometimes I even laid books on US races in the evening, or started earlier and managed to catch races in timezones some hours to the East of us.

It was soul-destroying and boring work. I lost discipline. I stopped managing my risks, and suddenly started to gamble a little to make things more “interesting”. I rode out a lucky streak for a few weeks.

And then I took some losses. I don’t like losing. Nobody does. The original plan said losses were impossible, but I was now being reckless. It was more exciting. But stupid. But the losses hurt.

I started to chase the losses. Any experienced gambler will tell you that this is the beginning of madness.

When you lose, walk away, and accept it. It’s as a good a lesson for life as it is for gambling: don’t take it personally. Right then though, the “red mist” gamblers talk about descended, and it stuck with me for days.

The numbers accumulated as loss after loss built up. Three days later, as an unemployed - perhaps unemployable - software developer, I had lost just over £5,200. Given my goal was to make just £3 per race, this was a rather large sum.

I stopped, stood back, and took a deep breath. I went and decorated a friend’s bathroom for some spare cash to live on and to get away from the screen for a day or two.

I thankfully got a job, and recouped my losses in a more traditional manner, and until the mist that had enveloped me had left, stayed away from Betfair.

Betfair now has an API - a means for a software developer to automate trading strategies. I’ve put off coding anything against it for years for a few reasons. Principally, the environment is now very different as a trading arena to what it was (the liquidity makes the markets zero-sum games, in essence, and that means profitability is harder to come by), and frankly I have other more interesting things to spend my time working on that are likely to make me more money, sooner. I still ponder it though - an automated solution can be developed calmly and unemotionally. It should work quite well.

That said, on evenings like this, when the weather is fine, and a great Derby will be with us at 4pm tomorrow, I think back to those dreams of becoming a bookmaker. Being in the ring at Epsom tomorrow - or even better, on the rails - would not be a terrible way to make a living. Providing you manage your risk properly, of course…

… but then I remember, as with most things, my Mum was probably right.

Long Term Life Tips: Top 5 Regrets People Make on their Deathbed:

An astonishing “top 5 list” blog comes to us via longtermtips and I’m pleased to say I’m pretty sure I won’t have any of these regrets when my time inevitably comes.

By Bronnie Ware (who worked for years nursing the dying)

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they…

Go read. It’s worth it. Then think on it.

I’m a member of the Amazon “Vine Program”. If you’re unaware of it, this is a cool little channel Amazon run where top reviewers on Amazon’s website get to choose a couple of items from a pre-defined list every month, to receive for free. In return, you must review on the Amazon website at least three out of every four items you receive.

It’s a good programme, I’ve received a couple of dozen books from it over the years and it has this quality of both being free and serendipitous that book lovers should - and seemingly do - love. Publishers get lots of reviews on their product’s page, Amazon get UGC and the people who love to read and review books get free stuff. Win-win for everybody.

I’ve just received a very odd email from Amazon about it though. First, can I just say to whoever sent this out, that putting at the end:

Please note: This e-mail was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message

has made an error. They’ve sent it from order-update@amazon.co.uk which the above implies is you know, a fake, non-read email account. So why then is the email itself cc’ed to that address? I think somebody does read mail at that address. Smart anti-spam skills Amazon! Alas, the game is up!

Anyway, that’s not the really weird bit. It goes on:

We are contacting you to let you know that there have been some changes to the Amazon Vine Voice Participation agreement. 

Do we all get a free pony? Really, I love Amazon Vine, that’s the only way it could get better… Somehow when I get an email informing me of changes to T&Cs though, I always feel the rest of the email is going to be me being told off for something I didn’t do. It goes on:

Please note the following changes: 

1) The ownership status of Vine products and the circumstances in which you may dispose of Vine products has been clarified. Ownership of Vine products supplied by Amazon or one of its subsidiaries (such as AmazonEncore books, AmazonCrossings books and Amazon Basics) transfers immediately to you upon receipt of the item and you can dispose of them at your convenience, but you may not transfer ownership to another person at any time. In the case of products provided by other suppliers, the product supplier retains ownership for six months from the date of your review, after which you may keep or destroy the product, but again you may not transfer ownership to anyone else. 

Wait, what now? Amazon: do you know you’re dealing with people who know how to read? From http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ownership:

ownership: the relation of an owner to the thing possessed; possession with the right to transfer possession to others

So, if they transfer ownership, they are transferring the right to transfer possession to others. That’s what the word means.

I can understand publishers and Amazon getting sniffy if review copies are flooding the market before release dates, but the answer to that is simple: make it policy that selling pre-release copies (and it’s obvious when you get a review reader copy), before the release of the actual book will result in you being evicted from the Amazon Vine programme.

I’ve never sold any of the items I’ve received on Vine. I love books, I collect books, and I’m happy that my collection grows at 2 books/month beyond what I buy at no cost to myself in return for a review on the website for the majority of them. I’ve had books I’ve loved, books I’ve hated, and books I’ve simply just not seen the point of and been indifferent to. But I have always considered those books mine on receipt, and without logging into the Amazon Vine site, I wouldn’t even be able to identify which books came from the programme any more. They do not sit on a special shelf, so when the time comes to start selling copies off, I’m not sure I can definitely state that in 10 years time I will not sell off an edition I received via Vine.

Because these books are typically first prints of first editions, if the book should become very popular, this of course means I might profit greatly from the transaction. Publishers don’t want that to happen. All I can say is, the great success of the book to get it to that point is in part thanks to us reviewers talking it up in its earliest days. Stop being so silly.

Whilst I also understand the need of publishers to make sure the hundreds of review copies they give away don’t reduce initial sales because the reviewers are all flogging them on Amazon or eBay, I think this is a little silly. Just ask reviewers to play fair, and we will. We’re not bad people.

In fact, make it a condition that selling anything within six months is a no-no. I don’t think we’d have a problem with that. But trying to redefine the meaning of the word “ownership”? That’s crazy talk.

It gets better though:

2) You may submit Vine reviews on other websites, but not to any online or offline channel that advertises or offers the Vine product for sale except in the form of a link to a website operated by Amazon or its affiliates. 

So if you get a free copy of a book from Vine, you love it, you tell all your friends about it, and you go onto forums that happen to be affiliated with Waterstone’s (or B&N in the states) rather than Amazon, you’re in breach of T&Cs.

Amazon are - I suspect - paid by the publisher to distribute their books via Vine. I can’t imagine they make a loss on it. Therefore, I can’t quite understand how it’s in the publisher’s interest for a reviewer to talk less about a book that they love. I also have no idea how Amazon intend to police this.

If I recommend a book to a friend whilst in a bookshop, do I also have to “subtly hint” in the conversation that the book is available on Amazon.co.uk don’t you know and that Amazon is really good, or is discussion of the book whilst in a bookshop to be met with a mute indifference by me? If not, it possibly means I am submitting a review in an “offline channel” in a context that “advertises or offers” the book for sale in a form that isn’t a link to Amazon.

My friend might actually buy the book on my recommendation right there and then. How is it in the publisher’s interest that I refuse to discuss it. What if I forget that I originally got my copy on Vine and the Amazon police are around the corner and get to hear of it? Will I be punished?

These two combined make the Vine programme a little more crazy than I thought, when you try and stick to the letter of the T&Cs as opposed to perhaps the spirit.

On receiving a book, I can only discuss it on Amazon or Amazon-affiliated websites and nowhere else and I must keep the book for ever more and not sell it, give it away, donate it, or let anybody else consider it theirs until the end of time.

I am permitted however, to set fire to it. Book-burning: the kind of party Amazon Vine approves! Just you know, don’t talk about the books unless you have a laptop open nearby with Amazon.co.uk up…

I ordered up two books last night on Vine I am looking forward to receiving. I suspect they may be my last. I simply can’t see how I can commit to complying with those two conditions in a sensible way until the end of time, and I’m not somebody who likes to know he might be breaching an agreement unintentionally.

Maybe one day somebody will see sense at Amazon or at the publishers and they’ll make this all a lot simpler: don’t sell the books within six months, and whilst you’re free to talk about them wherever you want, your first and primary review should be submitted on Amazon. Simple.

bookoasis:

The World In A Bookshop by infra-leve.

My living room is starting to look like this actually…

In a couple of weeks time, it will be the first anniversary of a 35-year old intellectual killing himself on the steps of a church on the Harvard campus.

I discovered Mitchell Heisman’s “Suicide Note” via a concise article on responses to the story.

I’ve been reading “Suicide Note” since I found the article, on and off. Mitchell might have benefitted from an editor, but there is no doubt the work is philosophically an opus par excellence.

Nihilism is not my thing - I do not agree with his core philosophy that life is entirely without meaning - but the way he gets there, and some of the ideas he presents are wonderful. There are things to take away from it all that will likely resonate with me for the rest of my life - as works by all good philosophers have.

To this day, Wikipedia have repressed information about him based on a subjective rules that don’t recognise that the guy’s work is actually worth reading. I expect in due course academics will start to cite him, and that situation will change.

Out there is a growing movement to recognise him. There have already been calls from some - perhaps over-excited - individuals for him to be award a Nobel Prize in literature posthumously. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would encourage those who can deal with it to consider his work. 

The moment Steve Jobs’ and Apple’s work first came into my life was back in 2002. That first brush, I hated it. 

In time, I came to see him for the genius and pioneer that he was, and the work that Apple did - and does - as amongst the most extraordinary in the World today.

First some context:

In 2002, I was at the European BSD conference and Jordan Hubbard, founder of FreeBSD and then newly-employed release engineer at Apple, had secured for the “terminal room” a sponsorship from Apple which meant the room was full of the 2002 iMacs. The 2002 iMac was a little “alien” in that each machine was a dome with a flexible protruding screen. Installed on them was OS X, an operating system I had beta tested before its first release on an ancient iBook, and I had very mixed feelings about.

It was pretty. But was it really a Unix? The other developers of BSD Unix in the room needed very little convincing. The command line was Unix, but the desktop and applications on there were beautiful. It was what they dreamed a Unix should be. Many of them left that conference committed to buying Apple equipment and moving to OS X within the year.

I resented this “attack” on the community, but could see where they were coming from. It was - and remains - a key part of Apple’s renaissance: build great tools for developers and alpha-geeks, and in turn the developers will build an ecosystem that users crave. Instill in the developers an aesthetic and teach them a way to do the things they struggle with (human interface guidelines, for example), and they will reward you with loyalty.

In short: empower your customers, and they’ll empower you.

No technology firm had done this as successfully before as Apple were doing between 2002 and 2004.

By 2004, I had just about had it with the drain away from the community Apple had “caused”. On one mailing list I wrote a very angry email in response to somebody else’s request for configuration advice on their latest Apple laptop:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2004-October/002684.html

“Yes, of course. My advice is that you sell your over-priced fashion-victim toy with it’s Fisher Price Unix installed, and use the money instead to buy yourself a top of the range Thinkpad. It will outperform it, run FreeBSD, not look out of fashion next season, has been built by a company that is truly committed to the open source movement and whose execs don’t patronise you by assuming you travel to work on a skateboard in cargo pants or worse, pander to your girlfriend’s idea of what a computer should be.”

Ashamed by my petulant anger, about six month later I decided to reconsider, step back and think about what they were doing in a wider scheme of the industry I was in. This was when I started to “get it”. It was when I could see what others lauded about Apple and its founders.

Within 14 months of writing that email I had acquired a 12” iBook. It was all I could afford at the time, and even then it was subsidised by the fact that I was working in a University faculty and so got a discount.

I immediately loved the fact I had a Unix machine with WiFi and Bluetooth that I didn’t need to spend a week configuring. I loved the software I could buy, and that all the open source tools I loved would work too. I loved the thought that had gone into developing that code underlying OS X. I loved the developer tools and Safari. I found myself thinking more and more about aesthetics and craftsmanship as part of what I do as a developer. Suddenly programming wasn’t just a dry science of mathematics and engineering: Steve’s ideas were getting to me through the product of his and Apple’s work.

Two things then happened like thunderbolts. 

First, I had found a copy of Steve’s commencement speech to Stanford in 2005.

Steve’s speech stuck with me. I had studied rhetoric, and was pleased by the simple construct he had used - a structure I would begin to notice he used in product announcements - but the content had hit me somewhere deep.

In it he talked about three things:

• Follow your intuition, because in hindsight the dots will join up. You can’t plan to be great, you just have to let the intuition guide you.
• Do what you love, and change things if you find yourself not enjoying life
• Death is inevitable. It’s coming. Deal with it as an agent of change, and don’t waste your life.

The second thing that happened around then, was that I discovered the Ruby programming language, a language that was designed to be beautiful and enjoyable for programmers to work with.

It astonished me.

I don’t think it would have done if by that point I had not started to “get” aestheticism in software, the Apple way. It’s no secret that the Ruby on Rails framework is developed almost entirely on Apple OS X machines. A Ruby conference is basically a hang-out of Apple fans. The two seem to go hand-in-hand together, just like how in 2002 it was Apple and the BSD guys.

Last night as I watched the speech again on YouTube (on my iPhone, natch), I realised I was connecting dots back, and in hindsight the impact this speech and this discovery had on me was immense.

Coupled with the discovery of Ruby, what happened next was perhaps inevitable, but still surprised me.

I went and started my own business.

I had always wanted to, but right there and then, something clicked, and I got rid of all the fear and doubt and realised that when I looked back on my life I wanted to be able to say that for a while at least I had been an “entrepreneur”.

I made the decision that I would not work on projects in that business I did not enjoy. I would only work on things that brought me joy: that is to say, I would only write code in Ruby. A brave choice in early 2006 when Rails had yet to reach v1.0 and Ruby was still considered a “toy” language by many.

I had no money, no client roster, and survived the first six months coding away on that tiny, slow little 12” iBook for friends who had piece work for me. I had never been happier.

I ate noodles and beans on toast, drank donated Guinness and chose to love my work. Working from home I would love waking late on a Monday morning, but I could never lie-in: I always wanted to just get started.

I spent the next few years helping other businesses, talking about development as a craft, not just a science.

I went into schools and told kids that learning how to write beautiful software was the most powerful skill you could cheaply acquire in this generation. Like me, they could come up with an idea and with a laptop and internet connection share it with the World in a weekend.

In the years since, I have helped dozens of start-ups, spoken to thousands of teenage children (and hopefully inspired a few to give programming with an artistic flair a go), and changed my life substantially.

I am not the same man I was in 2005. The depression and anxiety I had suffered prior to then have more or less gone. I have a brilliant relationship with an amazing girl who I consider to be my best friend, and I do work that makes me excited almost every day.

The decisions I made in those few months in 2005 and early 2006, looking back, are what made me who I am today.

I had to call time on my main business in 2010 partly because I was finding myself looking in the mirror and not looking forward to the day ahead any more - just like Steve had said, I decided I needed to change something. As sales had dried up I realised I was doing something I no longer enjoyed.

I then turned down one job offer for another on a quarter of the salary because it felt right, it felt like more interesting work and ultimately I knew it might lead to an exciting adventure I had dreamed about.

Today I work on an amazing product with brilliant people and finding myself learning new things every day.

Looking back I realise I have developed a new sense of intense curiosity. I will wander in my work, inquisitively poking whole areas I know little about. I read more, listen more and learn more. I teach where I can, I play, and I explore.

I realise that my time on this little rock is limited, and I try and make sure every day I do something that makes me smile.

In hindsight then, Steve’s words and work have had a substantial impact on who I am today professionally. Because that impact made my work more joyful, pleasant and fulfilling, in turn, his words and work have made my life better than it would have been without his impact.

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.”

It’s all the more impressive because according to “the rules” society is meant to work by, he should have been another liberal arts wash-up. As I said on Facebook earlier:

“I don’t think the economically right-wing anywhere - US, UK, Eurozone, China, anywhere - would be able to deal with the idea that the largest company on the planet was founded by a Buddhist counter-culturalist of complex family origins who made decisions based on intuition, aestheticism, love and curiosity.

Yet, it makes perfect sense to me.”

I never met him, never got close to knowing him the way that his friends and family did, or even his colleagues, but in my own way I learned to love him. His impact will be with me for the rest of my life, and late last night as the news broke here in the UK, despite it being on the cards for a while, the news came as a shock and I had to hold back the tears.

His critics’ words (and there are many!), sound very much like my own before I “got it”. Right now - today - though, it is petulant, angry, juvenile scribbling, and unworthy of any mature grown-up, given it is less than 24 hours since his dying.

Some call him a fascist, others a megalomaniac. In essence all he was trying to do was produce the best - and most human-friendly - technological products humanity was capable of producing right now. He did so within the rules shareholders gave him along with their money, because after being fired once, he didn’t want to mess up and be fired again. As ever, he exceeded their expectations and produced a company larger than any other on earth in terms of market capitalisation.

When you have a vision, as long as nobody gets hurt along the way, there’s no harm in following it ruthlessly. That’s what he did.

Some point to the fact that he didn’t donate much to charity in his life time, but I’m quietly confident that is because he didn’t want the ego stroking whilst he was still alive, and in coming years and months his wealth will quietly reach parts of the World that need it. He felt that shareholders’ money was their, and he shouldn’t give it away. He felt the best way he could help the World was by empowering as many people as possible. There’s no real shame in that. And in that, he was immensely successful.

He was also a subversive, and this is a point that his critics miss - or point to - the most. Biologically he was a half-Syrian Muslim, which when acknowledged in the last decade caused the conservative right in the US a huge problem: was the leader of the hottest thing on Wall Street one of them? They needn’t have worried - he’d discovered Buddhism many years ago. Adoptively he grew up to be a counter-culture Bay Area “hippie” and counter-culture type that worried some in the establishment even more.

His critics point to the consumerist message of Apple, without realising its founding principle was to go against the grain and to help people push further than the establishment wanted them to. The fact that he was able to make a living - a good living - as reward for that vision should not be seen as a fault or flaw.

Those unfamiliar with this background with questions to ask might want to start here. It might change your mind about him.

He wasn’t perfect. Nobody is. But regardless, he was an inspiration to millions who right now are working at building the next generation of technology. He showed us what we were capable of when we tried, and his death some 20-30 years “before his time” shows what a great leveller pancreatic cancer can be. So, if you are a critic: please shut the hell up and let us deal with paying tribute to him in our own way. You’ll reap the benefits as we march forward, inspired by his vision, into giving you the technology you deserve to make the World a better place.

I genuinely believe those who hate him haven’t given him - specifically what lay beneath his vision - a chance, in the same way I hadn’t.

The moment I did though and started to use the tools he and his company produced the way they were designed, my life got better and my attitude to what I wanted to do with my life improved.

I can’t think of another businessman I could say that about. I can’t think of another businessman anybody will be able to say that about when they die.

As I watched that commencement speech another time, the words were as fresh and as poignant as ever. His final few words seem particularly appropriate to me today, and so I will leave you with them. You may love him, you may hate him, but you can’t disagree that his vision was sharp, and worth sharing.

My thoughts and condolences today are of course with his family, his friends and colleagues, and all who were impacted by Steve from a distance the way I was. Steve was an amazing man, who inspired so many and has changed the World for the better, forever.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Presuming I do not choke on a pretzel, drown in a gin and tonic or get run over by a minicab driver hurtling around the streets of Manchester in order to maximise his double fare revenues, I should see out 2011 in the next few hours.

Thank the invisible big man in the sky who probably isn’t there for that.

This year, I was hospitalised, my girlfriend broke her arm and spent 2 weeks waiting for surgery in hospital, and I missed almost every single deadline and objective I set for myself.

To say it has been an emotional, miserable year would be an understatement. Given the year before it we lost my grandmother to cancer and my business went under, it would be hard to call it my “worst year ever” but it’s dialled quite high on that scale.

Some silver linings though: I now have a job at a startup I love working with people whose company I enjoy and my probable financial situation 5 years from now looks very good indeed. Having more time at home with the girlfriend has been great, and it seems I’ve given up smoking again (I’ll consider myself truly a non-smoker sometime in February if I get there without another cig).

I don’t do “resolutions” normally, but I do have a few objectives:

• I need to get my weight down. I’m finally prepared to do something about it.
• I want to create more, so will aim to not go more than two or three consecutive days without working on something creative in 2012. It could be writing (here, for example), it could be code for a personal project, or it could be something I’ve never really tried before (music? art? Don’t know yet). I basically want to spend less time reading/consuming and more time doing stuff. David Tate provides excellent inspiration if you want to consider doing the same. I’ll try to document as much of that as possible here.
• I’m going to try and shift from always being behind/late for almost everything going on in my life, to being early. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I suspect if I can pull it off, I’ll be calmer and happier as a result.

And that’s all I’m aiming for in 2012: get healthier, lose some weight, create more, stop being late. They’re objectives, not resolutions, so can’t be broken. If I slip up, I’ll just crack on.

I really hope it’s enough to make 2012 better than 2011 and 2010. I’m overdue for a good year.

Philosophers ask questions.

Artists interpret questions.

Theologians ignore questions.

Scientists and engineers answer questions.

Geeks do some or all the above.

Everybody else is just a spectator.

Dream about what you would wish for. It might come true.

… but it seems like what one reader described as “Britain’s patchiest blog”, which you are now reading, is about to be resurrected.

140 characters isn’t enough, and there is plenty I want to say that seems odd in the confines of a closed social network like Facebook or Google+

Interestingly today I was reminded how little importance the “What?” I write and “How?” I write is compared to the “Why?”

This is not an exciting story, despite the title. But it’s true. And it happens to dozens of people every day, and is the reason why getting to work in London can sometimes take so long.

First, let me explain that this is not a story of me causing a fire alarm to go off, for anti-terrorist police to close a station for half an hour, or some dramatic incident that has left TfL seeking an ASBO against me.

This is a story that starts with a strap of a backpack. This strap, in fact:

This morning I caught a tube from Baron’s Court on the District Line heading East. Normally I change at South Kensington for a Circle Line to Moorgate, or hop off at Mansion House and walk up to the office through the City. This morning I had decided to stay on the District line until Blackfriars, and change there for a Circle line. It’s a man’s perogative, etc.

The tube this morning was very busy. During the Olympics it has on the whole been very quiet, but this morning it was the normal 8:15-8:45am peak time crush. I was stood right next to the door at the very front of the train, crushed in by about 20 other souls attempting to share the exact same square foot I was stood on.

At Victoria, as is often the way for the District Line, a lot of hustling and bustling went on as people fought their way out to the platform, and others tried to struggle onto the train. After around a minute, the doors closed.

Except for the one next to me. Looking down, it was jammed on my bag strap.

Swearing, I attempted to free it. It was jammed solid because the hydraulic pressure of the door was pushing against it, but not with sufficient force for the door to close. The guy next to me tried to help. The guy on the platform waiting for the next train also tried to help. Neither of us could free it. Moving it simply led to the door moving along a bit, keeping the strap jammed.

Then the sound of hydraulics releasing was heard, all the doors on the train went to open, and the driver climbed out of the cab. The release of pressure had allowed me to unjam the strap, and recover it into the train. The driver confirmed we were all fine, climbed back into the cab, closed the doors, and off we went.

I apologised to those around me for delaying their journey, even though the total delay was perhaps 60-90 seconds.

Then realised everybody else on the train was delayed, too.

Then a thought about queuing theory and a little knowledge about how loaded that line is with train traffic at that time of the morning hit me: I had delayed tens of thousands of people.

Let me explain how I worked this out.

The District Line is composed of rather large gauge trains. I estimate that conservatively, each train is capable of shifting 2,000 people during peak times. There were certainly at least 2,000 people on my train this morning. Yes, they are only 6 carriages each, but each is certainly capable of holding nearly 350 people, and frequently does. I’m prepared to revise my numbers down if shown evidence.

In addition, the District Line platforms are not just used by the District Line. They’re also used by the Circle line between Gloucester Road and Tower Hill.

A glance at any “passenger information display” on a platform along this part of the network during rush hour will tell you the mean time between trains is 1 minute. There are close to 60 trains an hour going along that piece of track during rush hour.

Because my train was delayed for over a minute, this must have caused the train behind it to be given a red signal. This in turn would have caused the train behind that to be given a red signal, and so on. This buffer effect would be dampened beyond Gloucester Road going West, because the Circle and District lines diverge, giving more time for the red signals to switch to green, meaning scheduled trains would not have to stop in an unscheduled manner.

However, there would have been at least - I think - 5 trains affected by this delay in addition to my own. So we’re now up to 12,000 people in total delayed by my bag strap jamming a door.

It gets worse.

I changed at Blackfriars to a Circle line train. I got off the train I had delayed, waited 60 seconds on the platform and got on the Circle line train immediately following it, obviously now delayed. Cautiously making sure my bag was far from any doors, I boarded aware this train was now at least 2 minutes late against schedule.

Satisfied at the figure I had come up with of around 12,000 delayed passengers, I had assumed I had done no more damage, until we got to Aldgate.

The tube system has a tendency to expect passengers always want to be moving all of the time. Any delay of more than a minute or two at a station is always explained via an announcement. As we sat at Aldgate, the driver announced we were being “regulated” by a red signal. Looking out of the window, I could see an East-bound Metropolitan line train crossing our tracks to head across to East London.

That’s when it hit me. We were “out of position”. The train was a couple of minutes late, and so the guys running the switching had decided to give priority to the Metropolitan Line train, and we were held for approximately 4-5 minutes.

Whilst this part of the Circle line between Aldgate and Tower Hill was not as busy as the District/Circle line Tower Hill back West, a 4 minute delay was enough to ensure that the train behind us was going to be red signalled waiting for us to clear the platform.

That would be enough for the train behind that to be stopped.

And that would be enough for the train behind that to be stopped, which would probably be on the shared part of the network. That would be enough to cascade across the whole part of that line back to Gloucester Road, causing delays to perhaps 12 trains in total.

By now the numbers per carriage were down a little as we were close to the end of peak, but there was probably at least 1,000 people per train out there. Rounding up for the few more probably still around the Victoria area, and we’re up to 25,000 people.

There’s obviously some fudging here - people boarding trains at the “correct time” for them, did not realise the train they were getting was in fact the one after the one they had expected, and they did not suffer any delay. But I also suspect that this effect wasn’t dampened until after the peak ended at around 9:30am, and there were people who boarded their trains at 8:30am or before still out there (it can take 60 minutes easily to get from the “end” of a line into central London), whose journey had taken at least a few minutes longer than normal.

I doubt many noticed. I doubt anybody cares.

But it did make me think about how queueing theory applies to real world problems, and how when TfL moan about people keeping coats, bags and belongings clear of the doors, or jamming the doors to squeeze on rather than wait 6 more minutes for the next train, that they might have a point.

If you cause a train to be delayed, you are not simply inconveniencing the dozen or so people glaring at you in your vicinity. Or the people on the rest of the train who would glare at you if they could. But in fact, you have a cascade effect down the rest of the network. Tens of thousands of people delayed, because you didn’t want to wait 5 minutes. Or because you didn’t keep an eye on your belongings near the door.

I’ll certainly be more careful in future.

The next time I’m sat waiting for a signal to clear or am told that we are “being regulated”, I’ll wonder about whose bag or foot was to blame, and how the numbers of people flowing through London make butterflies flapping their wings on the network capable of huge cascading effects on transport infrastructure.

In South Kensington they take their fashion so seriously, that if you find yourself on the District/Circle line platform wearing something untrendy, TfL have got you covered. 

Gap are a bit mainstream though. Surely a jumper from somewhere more boutique would have been more fitting?

I love knowing what my friends and family are up to. I love finding out about the latest thoughts going on within my peer groups. I enjoy reading many blogs, newsletter and emails. I used to regularly get over 400 emails a day including group/mailing list traffic, followed over a thousand people on Twitter and was friends with more than 250 people on Facebook. I subscribed to over 200 blogs. I read all of it, all the time.

Mix in LinkedIn, reddit, Hacker News and a few other corners of the web, and we’re suddenly talking about a lot of data flowing into my head.

I’m led to believe that some even value the contributions I make myself from time to time.

However, I’m about to start dialling all that down. I’ve made a start in some places, but over time I’m going to stop reading anywhere near as much short-form (twitter, Facebook, etc.), a little less medium-long form (blogs), and use the time to start reading longer form work again (books) and creating more.

The reason is not because of burn-out, cynicism or some other excuse: I’m not arguing that it’s all pointless, and I’m not being a Luddite. I just want to create more, and there are only so many hours in the day.

This was prompted by going back over my resolutions posted here in December, and realising I’ve made little progress:

• I need to get my weight down. I’m finally prepared to do something about it.

• I want to create more, so will aim to not go more than two or three consecutive days without working on something creative in 2012. It could be writing (here, for example), it could be code for a personal project, or it could be something I’ve never really tried before (music? art? Don’t know yet). I basically want to spend less time reading/consuming and more time doing stuff. David Tate provides excellent inspirationif you want to consider doing the same. I’ll try to document as much of that as possible here.

• I’m going to try and shift from always being behind/late for almost everything going on in my life, to being early. I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I suspect if I can pull it off, I’ll be calmer and happier as a result.

This, I am happy to report, seems to have actually happened for the most part. Public transport not withstanding - including my own self-sabotage - I tend to be where I need to be on-time (or early), far more than I was last year.

Back to the main point: by reading what’s going on out there, by trying out new apps, by listening to all these voices, I am feeling engaged and plugged in, but only as a consumer. The purpose of the Internet is not to simply consume but to create, amend, edit, destroy, vandalise and promote. Ideas, content, products, whatever.

Also, am I the only one who has noticed how exhausting this hosepipe of information can be on a daily - even hourly - basis? I’m tired of consuming. It’s worse than television - at least with television an editor or commissioner has attempted to do some curation.

So I’m not departing, I’m not shutting down accounts, I’m just going to read a great deal less online, to the point the relevant apps might disappear off my phone. In return, I should be able to produce a few new things to share. Watch this space!

A couple of lovely people I know have suggested that some of the Olympic disciplines are not “proper sports”. This sentiment is one frequently echoed by compatriots of losers, stand-up comedians and miserable bastards the World over.

It has now seeped into the social consciousness and zeitgeist to the extent that many people mistakenly think “sports” are one thing - typified by physical endurance, stamina, or skill - and “games” are things anybody can do really, probably whilst having a pint at the same time.

Let’s put to one side that “the Olympics” are actually called “the Olympic Games” (or in French, “Jeux olympiques”), and just assume the “point” of the Olympics is to promote “sporting disciplines”.

Why do I feel certain that every single one of the Olympic disciplines is worthy of the name “sport”?

Even archery, which I reckon I could have a good bash at it with the right kit despite being a perfect example of how bad Guinness can be for your waistline, or boxing which is standing around and punching people when they didn’t even borrow that DVD off you in the first place.

Yes, I’d even include dressage where the horse is the one actually doing the moving about, whilst the “competitor” sits atop in a fine hat looking more English than a teapot in a red phone box (even when the competitor is French, which must be embarrassing for them).

All of these can be - and in the context of the Olympics, most definitely are - sports.

To explain, let’s just focus on what makes something nothing more than “a game”.

Any activity can be made into a game. All you need is a way to keep score and some rules to make sure the scores actually mean something. Staring at a wall: how long for without looking away? Making a cup of tea: judges could taste-test quality, or there could be speed trials. Having a nice sit down and a biscuit: how few crumbs can be counted on your lap afterwards?

Most games are obviously a bit more involved and preferably prefer people either getting naked or putting things onto a spring-loaded donkey (or both!), but the point is I could make a game out of writing this very post if I wanted. Or even this sentence. (4 words, 0.6 seconds, 100 words/minute, if you’re interested).

“Gamification” is a major social force in the web application industry right now, to the point where sitting in your office and pressing a button in an app on your phone can make you “Mayor”, which is why I don’t use FourSquare: I might become an annoying prat who asks for a third of a Londoner’s council tax to spend on bicycles and zip lines or whatever.

Games are obviously more fun when there is a degree of competition, and therefore the scores must be fairly comparable. You and I might decide to play pooh-sticks for example, and we will have a grand old time as I crush you and claim glorious victory and then we’ll go and get an ice cream or something. The fun is in me beating you without “cheating”. Or you usurping me and claiming a surprise victory, perhaps (like that’s ever going to happen, you fool), all whilst not kicking me in the head as I sing “We are the Champions”, etc.

This is a game: any activity at which there are some established rules allowing the participants to keep score, and where the point of the rules is to make different participants scores comparable with each other.

Cheating isn’t just “naughty” - it stops it becoming a game, because the scores are no longer comparable. If I turned up to pooh-sticks with laser-guided remote-controlled precision sticks with outboard motors on them, I can’t claim a fair victory when you’ve just picked up that stick with a leaf on it next to that weird moss on that rock, no not that one, that one over there, no, there you moron… yes, the bent one! 

Providing the game is fair then, I would argue that any game can become a sport. How? Other people caring about the outcome.

If whilst I am thrashing you at pooh-sticks, a small crowd appears and starts cheering one or the other of us on (hint: I’m very charismatic, they’ll be cheering for me mostly), then we have a sport. The number of people who care about the outcome or who want to have a go themselves determines how “sporting” it is. Once we start keeping World Records, or we meet regularly to do contest on a schedule we share with non-participants, and arrange ourselves into leagues, and perhaps start making money from the gullible fools who fawn in my pooh-stick abilities, then we have a moderately successful sport.

Sport is, I think, simply any game, where non-participants care about or are interested in the scores and who wins.

If the dressage, archery or boxing events at the Olympics, it’s pretty clear there were non-participants who cared about the outcome. In some cases, they really cared to the point where they flocked to Twitter, barely able to type through their blubbering tears about how wonderful and marvellous it is that somebody they’ve never met who happens to be considered by International Law to be a citizen of the same part of the World as them despite living 3,000 miles away, beat somebody who lives 300 miles away who they do not share such a close bond with due to them suffering the genetic disadvantage of being French.

So, here’s my cut-out-and-keep guide:

1. In both games and sports, people keep score somehow
2. In both games and sports, rules ensure the scores of different participants are fairly comparable
3. In games only the participants care about the comparison, in sports there are non-participants who also care

If this still doesn’t make sense to you, think about what sports would become if nobody cared? Or even if the outcome wasn’t scored or measured? What exactly would those footballers be doing if nobody nobody cared about the score? What would the by doing if they didn’t bother keeping score? Just what is it that Usain Bolt would be proving by running really quickly if nobody was watching? Or some people were watching, but were not measuring how fast he was running?

So the next time you hear somebody say “that’s not a real sport”, despite there being a clear loyal following of non-participants, maybe point out that it might be an activity whose outcome they don’t care about, so that can mean it’s not a sport to them.

But to the participants and to their followers, and to the people around them, it is very much a sport. And what they’re saying is a smidge hurtful to all of them, even if it’s just pooh-sticks. So, you know, try not to say that. It makes you sound a little bit mean.

… somebody told me this last week that replies here were pretty poor. So I’m moving this blog onto its own server in the next 7 days, along with http://p7r.io

If you’re following via RSS, I’ll shout out again when the move is complete with a new feed URL.

In the meantime, any recommendations on getting some cheap infrastructure? I have a couple of ideas, but it’s so long since I last did this, I feel as though I might be out of the loop these days. Due to the nature of poor replies here, feel free to tweet me @p7r or you can find my inbox via paul with an at symbol and then this domain.

In recent weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about this site, and it’s sister blog p7r.io and deciding what to do next with one or both of them.

The problem with blogs is that it is so easy for them to die. A few weeks of negligence, and they lose their vibe. Also, I’ve struggled to identify what content is most suitable in both places, because whatever content I think of requires a slightly different format.

Last week as I sketched out various ideas, a phrase hit me out of the blue: “Projects not Posts”.

I don’t want to write posts. I want to work on projects. I am a developer, data miner, machine learning scripter, meta-programming type of guy with a deep interest in writing fiction, public policy, politics, technology, teaching coding, entrepreneurship, agile and lean methods and a whole load of other stuff besides.

I frequently think “I should do something around ‘x’” only to realise it doesn’t fit into a blog narrative, nor does it really suit a blog of its own, and so it gets dropped.

Why? Why not just drop the blog structure entirely? Why not go back to a traditional “personal website” structure? It might sound ridiculous to go back to some Geocities-era concept, but I’ve come to realise short-form writing doesn’t allow me to do what I actually want, and I spend more time thinking about what a blog “should” be rather than just sharing cool stuff.

Also - and here’s the killer - I want to work on much bigger projects than any blog can reasonably accomodate. I want to roll out applications, publish long-form writing, and other forms that don’t “fit” the blog format. That leads me to thinking that in this renaissance age of self-publishing I should be looking at playing with structure, and other forms of output (possibly even, dare I say it, books…)

You know what makes blogging work? RSS. However I can still maintain an RSS feed, and most people now “subscribe” to content via Twitter or Facebook if they’re interested. And everything else? For me it’s a block.

So, some 11 years after the original incarnation of iconoplex and 6 months after the first incarnation of p7r.io, I’ve decided that they will “merge” (both domains will point to the same content), and the content they hold will be… different.

I’m going to spend the next month starting a few projects and getting some content ready for “launch”, but for now it seems, blogging is over for me. Something much more exciting will follow.

Site News and Recent Additions - 12/01 - We have been informed of complaints of cross sales and cancellation problems with Incredible Pass. In response, we have chosen to remove our review of Incredible Pass. I'm not going to stand for companies that are trying to scam or screw over our visitors. If you have any serious complaints of any other sites, please email me and I will look into the issue. 12/13 - Porn Pros, Real Ex-Girlfriends, 18 Years Old, Cock Competition and 40oz Bounce have worked out a deal with MrPinks.com to offer discount pricing. Their monthly membership prices have dropped from $24.95 per month to $17.95 per month. The $1 trial still offers limited access.

Archive of Radio Heritage News - From David's Desk RSS feed

We continue our celebrations of 50 years of Hawaii statehood with another great retro radio competition open worldwide. It is easy to enter...

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The Mosquito Network - American Military Radio in the Solomon Islands During WWII by Martin Hadlow. "Once ashore, Captain Spencer Allen was relieved to find that Army engineers and Signal Corpsmen had constructed a studio building for the radio station, 'the first made of clapboard in the camp,' he recalls, and a smaller transmitter shack about 200 yards away."

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Station 2MG, Mudgee, "The Voice of the Tablelands," owned and operated by the Mudgee Broadcasting Company Pty. Limited, is situated a mile from the chief commercial town of a very rich inner-western district of New South Wales...

3ZM 1400 AM in Christchurch, New Zealand promoted it's all night New Year's Eve Party for December 31 1976 with this cool ad in the local newspaper the day before. A one-off promotion.

When Wellington, New Zealand, was battered by storms in December 1976, local Radio Windy 1080 AM provided superb coverage...

Over the Christmas - New Year period of 1976-77, Radio Rhema broadcast an experimental 10 day short-term AM program from Ferrymead Historic Park, Christchurch, New Zealand...

Here you'll find a very interesting entry regarding the American usage of a radio broadcasting station in Australia....