This is a story about clean slates...

Life is like a line of dominos all perched precariously upright. People have filled massive areas - like basketball courts - with row after perfect row after perfect row of these surprisingly weighty little objects. Watching a huge 'wave' fan out as all the dominos fall over, after just the very first one looks very pretty from a distance.

Let's imagine I'm 1/10th the size of a domino, and I'm staring up at these skyscrapers. I couldn't lift them or knock them over. I'd assume it was something like stonehenge: an unnatural arrangement of things, so much bigger than human scale.

When the seismic event finally happened, and the first one was pushed so that it would fall over and cause the other one to fall, you wouldn't be able to believe your eyes and ears. That something so heavy and seemingly stable, could topple over would be amazing. It would seem to take ages to accelerate and smash into its neighbour. Then with an almighty crash, most of the energy would be transferred and the next one would fall to the ground.

Looking at the two fallen objects, they would seem now to be permanently in this collapsed heap. The idea of re-standing something up that's so big and balancing it again... unthinkable, impossible. People who never saw the objects upright, would be amazed when you told them that they were, at one time, defying gravity.

Every event can be traced back to something that started a chain reaction.

I now own the world's most expensive pencil. Well, I don't - technically it's capital expenditure on a business asset. I was having a cashflow crisis when my business insurance expired. That means that when my Macbook Air had its 3rd major hardware failure, and is completely broken, there is no policy for me to claim on.

Her Majesty's Revenue Collectors have come up with 2 ways to get businesses to invest in new assets. Firstly, I'm on a scheme where if I spend over £2k on a single invoice, I get the VAT back (£334). Secondly, I can buy assets rather than pay tax. So if my Corporation Tax bill was £2,000, I would buy assets instead of paying the bill.

This is how my company came to own an iPad Pro as well as the Apple Pencil. I don't even like drawing on it... I much prefer the feel of graphite on paper. It's good for more accurate 'white board' type stuff, where you're sketching out technical ideas, but it's still plastic slipping all over really shiny glass, with no sense of how hard you're pressing down.

So I have the Mac Pro now, instead of the Air. The main difference is that it's nearly a completely blank slate. I've decided that I'm not going to rush to fill it up with Adobe Photoshop, Windows & Microsoft Excel etc. etc.

I have a backup of old photos and things, so I'm not panicking too much about lost data yet. I can find most things somewhere in 'the cloud' but I still have a habit of creating local notes for myself, and not putting code into github.

I wrote a piece of code that basically simulates a CPU, so I could track bits through left and right shifts. Theoretically, it could be used to solve 'impenetrable' algorithms like SHA, which have such a cascade of effects from changing just one bit, leave the end result unrecognisably different from the unaltered starting data. This code is lost.

I wrote my own blockchain (e.g. Bitcoin) in Java, so I could reverse-engineer the problem, and figure out some theoretical attacks on the cryptocurrency. This code is lost.

I'm not really worried about losing code. If I had to do it again, it would improve immeasurably, and take me a fraction of the time. I might also gain a new insight, understand something a bit better, or completely restructure things, so they are elegant and simple.

There will be little notes, half-finished graphic design projects, other people's example work they gave me on a USB stick... they'll be gone. One day soon, I'm going to say to myself "I know what I can use here" and I won't have it. No biggie. I am going to start taking more regular backups from now on though.

I also have a clean slate in terms of where I go from here. A contact thinks I can get Undercover Manic Depressive published in serial form, which means I'd be a paid author... how cool is that?

Self-publishing in digital form is cool 'n' all and I did it as an experiment to see how hard it was. It took me 5 or 6 hours to write 12,000 words, sign up with Amazon, upload, create a cover... and that was it! My incomplete book with terrible formatting and zero editing is published and can be bought for $3. I don't think it's going to compare to actually seeing a book I wrote on bookshelves, if it happens.

Cashflow is a disaster... paying rent left me with £40 and my company probably can't afford to pay salaries at the moment. My salary of £676 is about 70% of my rent, but I needed a new laptop, and at least this way I can keep writing on a half-decent machine with a familiar keyboard.

Yes, it seems ridiculous to risk eviction and bankruptcy, to sit by the River Thames, writing, on a brand new laptop. Do you know how long I've been out of full-time work, in total, since my 17th birthday? It's less than 2 years. So, any of you who went to Uni or had a couple of gap yahs can get off your high horse. I genuinely did earn this. Sadly, it was my ex who nicked the profits and my parents who've had to reach into their pockets and give me just enough to do nothing except be stressed and not able to reach escape velocity.

Getting up to go to a job that feels like it conflicts with my values, ethics or has simply reached the point where I'm sick of the lack of passion and expertise, gave me a 'direct debit' life where everything got paid on time every month, and I never had to borrow any money. In fact, I had tens of thousands of savings, and spent tens of thousands more on the poison dwarf (ex) and it was killing my soul. I feel I have died a thousand deaths and I fear not one more.

Yes, it's upsetting that this disruption means missing out on time with friends, my sister, my niece and maybe my mum. People might think it's selfish, immature, irresponsible... those certainly weren't adjectives that were being applied to me when I skipped University, and missed out on all those sweet girls, drunken nights, reading books, writing and just thinking and being challenged by something different every day.

If you want to know about deferred gratification, ask me.

This is the kind of stuff there's no space or time for in Canary Wharf or The City. I needed to stop and smell the roses, and we ask so much of our children with homework and good grades to get into a good Uni to get a good job etc. etc. that there are some people who just don't know how to say "I feel I'm not getting what I need in life to stay alive, but I have never had chance to explore what that is".

Tags: #london #career #computing

This is a story about modern life...

I missed 5 blog posts. 3 people were worried on Facebook, plus my flatmate. My sofa-surfing Kiwi has gone back to NZ.

2 of those people, I met at a hackathon, back in October. When I had to go into hospital a few weeks later, one of these new friends brought me a backpack that contained a set of hand-picked items from around my room, each thoughtfully chosen as something that I would probably need during a week or two in hospital. It felt like Christmas.

When I got really sick over the Xmas/New Year period, my other new friend came and sat on my bed and gave me a hug. He also did loads of my washing, cooked for me, and generally nursed me back to health. The most important thing he did though, was to just be thoroughly lovely. It makes a difference, somebody asking how you are and giving you a hug.

I was in a pretty bad way with muscle wastage and weight loss, having stopped eating for about 2 and a half weeks. Obviously I couldn't impose on my poor friend, with additional burdens, such as extra shopping to carry home, when he was already doing so much that was well above and beyond what any flatmate and friend would do.

Another new friend had become concerned by my lack of blog posts, and had actually come over to my flat on her own initiative. She's a very active person, with a busy life, but it so happened that she was off work... although I doubt that she pictured herself nipping to the Tesco Local for protein shakes, isotonic fluids and anything that had high calorie content. It was so kind and helpful of her that she did.

So, I just received an email from my sister. Apparently she's been getting shit from my parents, because they've read my blog and being the horribly abusive people that they are, they are taking it out their frustration with semi-illiteracy and their almost total exclusion from my life, on my poor sister.

Let's recap what wonderful parents they are, because apparently I've forgotten all the great stuff they did for me:

• Born to a couple of junkies. My mum was a student and my dad was failing to make enough money to support a family by buying and selling junk.
• Grandparents took pity on 3-year-old grandchild and bought them a house. Dad still doesn't have a proper job... too busy taking drugs.
• I spend all my time when I'm not at school in the pub, because my parents still can't afford to support a family, a drug addiction and alcoholism. Alcohol comes first.
• My Dad decides to scale up the junk buying/selling that didn't work before, so I have to leave all my playgroup and primary school friends to move to Oxford
• Between eye patches that I don't need and a yet another girl's bike with a fucking basket on it, I pretty much become the most bullied kid at school. I remember picking gravel out of my back whenever I was 'clotheslined' on the hard play area.
• My mum did take me to London a bunch of times, which was nice. We went to the Science Museum, which got me interested in science.
• Move to a school with a uniform. Turnups and the school blazer (optional) plus carry-over from previous school means the bullying continues. My mum sympathises with the bullies.
• I get a goldfish. He's called Fred. You can't stroke a goldfish. It's a shit pet, but I cry when he dies and make a little gravestone for him.
• Finally get a home computer. Not the Apple Mac like Julian and Joe have, or the PC like Barnaby, Ben, Marcus etc. etc. No... this is the last of the ZX Spectrums ever made
• Have to move school again. Great school. Bullying not quite so bad as there is an unpopular Russian boy and I'm in all the top sets and a good form group... so my parents decide we should move to France
• Some accountant friend of the family takes pity on me and gives me the oldest PC you've ever seen in your life. No software works on it, but that doesn't matter because the monitor is black and white anyway. This is my parents main gift to me: giving me something that's so unbelievably unfit for purpose that I try and try in desperation to make things work.
• Learn to speak French in France. Also didn't make any friends in the UK, and was away from all my other friends. Given the choice, I'd rather have friends than be able to speak French.
• Another new school. Bullying atrocious. Teachers are nice though. One of them takes me sailing after school... like a dad.
• Rather than leave me in a town where I can cycle everywhere and remain with my friends during puberty, we move to the middle of fucking nowhere. I write letters to my friends on floppy disks and post them to them. One friend comes to visit. One. That's it. One.
• Sailing club is good... thanks again to that teacher
• Another start at a new school ruined by the only bike that was capable of tackling the steep hills being a proper mountain bike. One that my dad stole. It was a girls bike. I had to ride past over 1,000 children all congregating on a big long pavement, before going up the steps to the school. My few sailing club friends disowned me.
• I was supposed to be saving up for another new computer, but £10 a week from a paper round doesn't leave a lot of spare money to buy replacement parts for my mountain bike, which gets used at least twice a day on very steep hills
• With a small contribution from me in cash, but absolutely huge in terms of the number of miles I cycled every day on my paper round, my Dad got me my new computer, well after its processor became obsolete. It doesn't have a co-processor or enough memory, but I figure I can upgrade those parts when I get a better job than a paper round.
• My dad bought the shittest, most rotten, neglected boat that looked totally not water-worthy. I restored it, then sold it for a big profit. Can't remember if I paid him back.
• I had a small financial contribution when I bought my 4th and 7th cars. The 7th car was brilliant, but I could have paid for it myself. I think I was only short a few hundred quid, and I was IT contracting so I was raking it in. I can't believe how my parents still say they "bought" me that car. I shall have to dig out the bank statements.
• That's it!

Oh, here are a few things that my parents like to misremember:

• They gave me one of their cars. My mum had crashed it and it had been repaired by a blind man. The thing is, it wasn't a gift. My granny had been saving money since I was really little so that I could get a car and insurance, and I would have easily been able to buy a small engined petrol car, in a low insurance group, with cheap parts... like everybody else my age. Instead, ALL the money had to go on insurance, and the shitty car broke down all the time, and because it was a complicated diesel with expensive parts, it was the world's shittest car for a broke 17 year old.
• Holidays: well, actually these were conferences for my mum, or the shitty dilapidated house in France where I was away from all my friends in the UK. My parents were always pulling me out of school, and sure it was an education and experience, but it was just what my parents wanted to do, with me along in tow. If you were going to do it anyway, it doesn't count as something you did for your kid. The fact we drove past Alton Towers so many times but never went illustrates their mindset perfectly.
• I've cost them a lot of money. Horseshit. I read books from the library or was playing round at friend's houses or somewhere I shouldn't have been. My parents never bought me the correct shoes to not get beaten up. Once I saved up the money from my granny and bought a pair of Nikes. I remember everybody commenting at school for days. I remember wanting to fall asleep just looking at them.
• They lent me money when I was in London. Nope. What they did was not lend me money when I was in London. I needed it in October 2013. Two years late is too late.

Ok, so there are myriad little things, mainly to do with cooking with my mum. My mum is really great. She did try her very best to give me a nice life. She worked hard, paid the mortgage and bankrolled my dad.

I'm trying to think of a nice memory with my dad, but it's all so practical. I was always watching him do DIY or cook but the only thing I think we learned together was when he taught me to read & write. Later, we would change the oil on a car and suchandsuch, but we never did something together, although I was allowed to come along to car boot sales, for example.

My only memory of him really taking an interest in something in my life was when I wanted to do a sponsored mountain bike ride, and I hadn't been doing the big hills for long enough to really travel all the way to the town where the event was being held, and then have much remaining energy to race.

It wasn't much more than a completely lumpy field, with a savagely steep climb, long traverse, descent and then back on the flat to the bottom of the climb again. I had no bottle cage on my bike and I was dressed in jeans, and it was a pretty hot day. People were laughing at this kid in jeans with a touring helmet, no other safety gear, on a girls bike.

When the race started, I left everybody who had "all the gear but no idea" behind. The traverse was quite tricky, especially without toeclips. The descent was suicidal on a fully rigid bike, but I started to lap quite fast.

The more the laps went by, the more of the skilled but unfit riders fell away. The ascent really was a killer in that heat. Anyway, I decided I'd better stop after quite a few laps, because I was feeling really badly dehydrated, and I was sick of getting flies in my eyes.

My dad was gobsmacked. I can't remember where I finished, but from his point of view, I was just lapping everybody over and over and over again. He took me to the bike shop in the nearby town and bought me a pair of clear cycling glasses for the flies, mud and stones, plus a bottle cage and bottle so I could carry a drink with me.

Perhaps if I racked my brains I could think of something else, but getting complemented on my riding, and then him making a further investment - unprompted - to allow me to take my hobby further, was a special moment.

So, my sister's pretty pissed off with me, but I can't understand why. My dad conspired with my wife and my GP to drag me away from my home, my life was dismantled, and the one time in my adult life when I did actually need and want their help - and it had been offered - they reneged on their promise in October 2013, and bang went my best chance to put my life back together in London, thanks to their lies.

I've not really altered the formula, and it's really quite simple:

• Place to live (not a hostel, tent, or shop doorway)
• Job (I'm an IT contractor. Thanks for your offer of [insert low wage job] but it would be uneconomical of me to not focus my search on highly paid contracts)
• Enough money for any cashflow shortfall until the 60+ days it takes before I get paid are done, plus I've absorbed the hit of the 6 weeks deposit, 1 month rent & agent fees
• I'm afraid that I'm so profligate that I replace my suit every 5 years, and my overcoat every 12 yeas. Shoes, I'm afraid I throw away when the shoe repair man laughs in my face. Shirts, I replace when the collar is worn through and it's horribly yellow under the arms.

There are certain things that people in London don't do either:

• They don't walk for 2 or 3 hours. They get the tube. That costs over £5 a day
• They don't bring a thermos flask of coffee into the office. Coffee is a £6 a day habit, but a necessary social visit
• They don't bring a picnic basket, get the blanket out, lay it down on the office floor, sit down and start getting foil-wrapped cucumber sandwiches out. Lunch is a £5 a day habit
• They don't drink much water. Sometimes they drink fizzy drinks. Sometimes they drink a kale, ginger and apple smoothie. Drinks are a £3 a day habit
• They don't have home-brew kegs hidden under their desks. When a Londoner goes for an after work drink, which is pretty much a social necessity, they will spend £5 a pint or more
• They don't work the longest hours in Europe and travel on a packed tube train to then get home, travel back in time, and start making fresh pasta and picking basil leaves in the garden they don't have. Your economy Londoners will buy fresh pasta and pesto, and will even push the boat out for a bit of parmesan: cost £7. Some days, you're at work so late that you might even get a luxury stonebaked pizza sent to the office, or failing that, you'll probably pick up a takeaway on the way home, because you're just going to fall asleep as soon as you've eaten: cost £15.
• They don't live in Zone 99. The zones go 1-2-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-99-100. Yes, it's true that you can save 50p a year on rent by living in Zone 99, but it will cost you over a million pounds for a travel card that goes out that far. It would also be quicker to just get a jet or a helicopter to City Airport if you're that far out.
• They don't all take loads of coke. Yes, it's true that there is some drug taking in the capital, but I bet there are good statistics to show that a far greater percentage of people are on drugs in the provinces, because it's so fucking dull out there.
• They don't fret about saving 7 pence on a loaf of mouldy bread, or consider it profligate to buy popcorn at the cinema, because wages are so much higher and you'll be working too hard to do all the stuff that you have to do to entertain yourself in the provinces on your meagre wage

So, anyway, I've shown my magic formula works. I know what I need to get back into work, routine, friendships and get on an even keel financially, so that I never ever have to explain to a dimwitted out-of-towner why the cost of living initially looks quite high.

However, my sister has a shit job, got pregnant with kid they couldn't afford, went through a divorce, lives in midlands suburbia and generally acts with incredulity that I could maybe have found it a bit stressful trying to re-enter London life on a credit card, living in a hostel.

I had said that my sister & niece were the only thing keeping me alive when I was in hospital. My life is fucked, the cashflow doesn't work, I'm not very well, I still haven't got a contract and there are now further delays. I know what'll happen... I'll get a nice big money contract, but after a month I'll be bankrupt, and my money will still be 30 days away at least. If I take it all out as soon as I can, then it means I'm not maximising my dividends, and it means I have to live on 33% of my income, instead of 100%. That means the stress carries on, month after month after month. But, apparently everybody's an expert in accountancy and cashflow forecasting now.

Apparently one of my sister's friends has it so much harder than me or something. Anyway, they're dead now. I'm just being a martyr or something. According to my sister and parents it's really easy to blag your way into a mental hospital, and slicing lengthways down my forearms with a razor blade was some kind of emotional blackmail, or maybe it was melodramatic... I don't give a shit anymore.

I literally think that you are a grade-A douchecanoe if you have no idea just how hard it has been to survive in London with no parental or state support, when I was completely fucked.

A big part of me says "fuck it". I was a homeless bankrupt drug addict in a park one day, and then you expect it to be all fixed in 5 months because I managed to get a flat, and a job. Then you only choose to help me when I'm hospitalised, suicidal. And then after it's already too late you say it's blackmail.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

You have absolutely no idea how hard it's been to work my way back from the brink and just how carefully I've had to budget, and how cleverly I've done my accounting.

I really didn't want to write another thing about my parents. They're dead to me. But to hear my sister echoing their lies is heartbreaking, and to receive a lengthy message telling me things that are just total bullshit, and saying "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be anywhere near you".

That's just fucking awful. OK, so I've poured out my anger at my parents for forcefully removing me from my own home so my ex could cheat on me, generally backing her up, and then totally fucking me over when they had their chance to make good on something helpful. It's something I have been trying forgive and forget but they're never going to re-enter my life. They have no interest in it anyway. My dad didn't even want to come in my London house and meet my London friends, despite being parked right outside.

My sister says I should ask if I need help. My parents don't do anything until it's too late: I'll either be dead or in hospital.

That's not emotional blackmail. That's getting rid of some worthless cunts from your life.

I'm absolutely heartbroken that my sister has been taken in by their bullshit. We had been talking about her visiting London and her getting a matching semicolon tattoo.

Fuck life

Tags: #parents #childhood #sister #career #london #suicide #depression

This is a story about selling eyeballs...

You ever wonder why your email is free, Facebook is free, YouTube is free, most of the stuff you can find on the internet is free?

Most companies need to have either a freemium or an ad-supported business model now. Most businesses must endure an army of freetards, who demand the highest possible product standards, but aren't prepared to pay a penny. They will spend their precious time criticising you and your product, but they won't spend a single cent.

In the fierce race to capitalise a market, to monopolise, to acquire the biggest number of users, companies must invest so much in their products, and not hamper growth by introducing advertising too intrusively, or by making people pay.

There's really only one place that things can end up: the biggest players dominate everything, and have to fight over a finite amount of ad revenue and market insight data. Eventually, one tech company can do it all, own it all, dominate the entire market.

At the moment Facebook is the clear favourite for me. I spend far more time looking at curated content on Facebook, than I do searching for new content via Google or on YouTube. I'm interested in what my friends are interested in. My Facebook feed contains far more things that I'm interested in than I can possibly read and watch during my waking hours. There simply isn't enough time left for me to do my own content discovery.

Facebook has also started to take over from my use of email and instant messaging services. It's a kinda convenient one-stop-shop for staying in touch with my network of friends and family. It's all nicely bundled together in one place. You can cancel your account any time you want, but you can never leave.

Google's arse is being well and truly kicked at the moment, in terms of growth. Facebook knows so much about us, the advertising can be super targeted. Facebook knows where I've been, who I've been there with, when I went there, how often I go there. It knows where I went to school, what I studied. It knows who my family are. It knows who I stay most in contact with. It knows what I 'like' and what links I click on. It knows what videos I watch, and what content I scroll right past.

Ok, so I'm an early adopter. I sometimes queue up to get Apple products on the day they launch. Apple are presently the world's biggest company, by market capitalisation (number of shares in issue, multiplied by the share price) but they're far more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever were. Safari comes pre-installed on my Macbook and I never get asked if I would like a different browser.

Apple are trying to dominate the ad space by forcing app developers to go through their iAds platform and blocking any other advertising. They're trying to leverage their strong position as a software and hardware platform, to gain the biggest share of the lucrative advertising revenue. Eventually, they're going to land up in legal hot water.

Facebook is far better placed to become the dominant platform for advertisers and companies looking to gain market insight. It's entirely fair that when I use a free website, that the terms and conditions state that they can show me adverts and use my data. It's not fair that when I buy a £600 smartphone, it somehow limits what I can see on the internet. It's not fair if Apple start selling my private location data, my phone usage habits etc.

In the bizarre world of the battles between the world's largest tech companies, you might be surprised to learn that for every Google Android phone sold, Microsoft make the most profit. That's because Google have to pay patent royalties to Microsoft. The important silicon chips inside your smartphone, make a healthy profit for a company that didn't even manufacture them. That company is ARM, who license the chip designs to manufacturers, and take a royalty payment for every chip that gets made.

The legal battles that are brewing will eclipse everything ever seen before. The amount of money that is at stake is unprecedented.

But what happens if you extrapolate? Well, basically, you will probably get given a free phone, the whole concept of paying for software or subscription services will completely disappear, but your privacy, your data will be completely up for grabs to the highest bidder, along with your eyeballs, which will be continually bombarded by targeted ads.

Ancillary industries, like music and film production, and writing, will be consumed into this dominant giant, and high quality content will only exist as the bait for your eyeballs. You won't be able to read another book without there being some kind of product placement having been woven into the plot. Authors have to eat too.

The fact is, that the era of the busker or the indie musician is over. People think that the number of Facebook fans that you have or the number of Twitter followers is somehow directly monetisable, so the idea of chucking 50 pence into a hat or paying for music is unthinkable to the freetard army.

Naturally, with all the advertising money washing around, people who are creating content, simply because they are creative individuals with time and talent on their hands, are simply drowned out in a sea of noise created by the paid content creators. You have no money to market your content, so nobody will even find it or consume it. There's no reason for it to exist, if it's not pushing some product or service.

In fact, traditional goods & services are having their revenues squeezed. Why would you buy a travel guidebook when you have TripAdvisor and a load of ad-supported websites that you can browse on your smartphone, virtually anywhere in the world? The fact that the travel guidebook at least maintains a degree of commercial impartiality is missed by many people, who will end up eating in restaurants or staying in hotels that have paid to be written about.

We don't tend to pay at all, or pay very little, for our news sources. That means that those news outlets are getting the lions share of their revenue from advertising, which exercises at least a kind of censorship over unfavourable news coverage, if not outright direction over how real life events are reported. How can you trust news sources with such commercial interests behind them?

You might think that because I've hacked away at some bit of software, making an app or a website, in some trendy co-working space in the heart of Tech City, that's the reason why it's trending on Twitter, that's the reason it's 'going viral'. Actually, most social media campaigns - even the viral ones - are planned and executed by a sophisticated service industry that caters to those who wish to market themselves using the modern mediums.

I often wonder what the point of Twitter is. I have a bot that follows somebody, and their bot messages me back to say thanks for following them. Are there any real people on Twitter, or is it all bots, releasing content at strategically timed intervals, and doing their robotic interactions in a way that's been designed to appear humanlike?

We have loads of stats & data that tell us about content engagement. How much do we mould ourselves, and how we act, in order to increase that engagement? How often do we think about how many 'likes' we're going to get on a Facebook comment, just before we hit the 'post' button.

Frankly, I've tried to detach myself. I'm just writing relatively blindly. I can see how many Facebook likes I get and I can see how many link clicks I get on Twitter, but broadly speaking, I have no idea how many people read what I write, when they read it, where they're based in the world. If I did have those stats, that data, it could start to corrupt the integrity of what I'm trying to do.

That's the most interesting thing of all to me. That I've been able to write the equivalent of two novels of content, and publish it into the public domain, with barely anybody noticing. That shows just how much noise there is out there. That shows just how much content everybody is churning out, into the ether. I could have whispered all my secrets into the hollow of an ancient tree that was about to be felled, for all the difference it would have made to the world.

It felt daring at first, churning this stuff out. But now there's just this dawning realisation that everybody's doing the same thing. There's so many "me too!" folks and wannabe authors, musicians and filmmakers out there in the big wide world, that you can really say or do anything you want, safe in the anonymity of noise.

Welcome to the global silent disco. Headphones on, zoned out

Tags: #computing #privacy #frankie #socialmedia

This is a story about being a scapegoat...

There's one simple rule to follow in life: don't be an arsehole. If you're bully, criticising, undermining and generally destroying somebody's character, you're an arsehole. People are basically good. Billion dollar companies like eBay have been built on positive not negative stereotypes.

If you assume that everybody is out to rob you, hurt you. If you assume that everybody is bad and you're the only good person on the planet, and treat people according to this negative worldview, then you're going to be isolated and lonely.

It's important to listen to somebody's story, and consider all things with an open mind. There is no shorthand for somebody's life. You can't just hear one negative label and think "yeah yeah yeah, I know the rest". You know absolutely nothing about a person.

I've been advised by mental health professionals, psychologists and amateur psychologists to avoid labelling myself. However, creativity loves constraints, so I have labelled myself and I'm owning that label while I tell that story, knowing that it will be strongly emotive.

My dad joked that we should name our black & white cat "Ginger" because it would challenge people. It would literally blow people's minds. People would fly into an irrational rage, just because a black & white cat was named "Ginger". Yes, some people are so brainwashed, that they feel pure terror and anxiety at the smallest thing that doesn't meet their expectations of conformity.

We are very programmed to conform. We are groomed, massaged, browbeaten, into a kind of group conformity. Kids in school and adults at work are a lot easier to deal with as one homogenous blob, a sea of blank grey faces, rather than a bunch of individual humans. It's much easier to command & control if there is groupthink and uniformity.

Bizarrely, I hankered after some conformity in my life. I wished that my parents were married, I wished that my Dad was into football like the other Dads, I wanted to wear the right trainers and tie my school tie in the 'correct' way, rather than the way that an adult would wear a tie.

Subcultural phenomena are immensely important as a means of indicating to people that you belong to their tribe. Wearing the right clothes and having an interest in the right things makes the difference between an easy life, or a life as a weirdo, an outsider, a spare part, an alien.

You might not understand why something's so important to somebody, but they do. They understand the difference it makes to their daily life, being singled out as 'different'. They have to deal with the daily consequences of being marked out as not belonging to the clan. Not wearing the right tartan, so to speak.

If you are forced to be trapped into a place where you don't belong, or you're not accepted into the group, to the community. If there is constant friction, resistance, then you have to find survival strategies.

I'm very good at zoning out, putting myself into a trance-like state. I can transport myself to another time, another place. I can transcend my body and just wait it out. If you think I'm impatient you couldn't be more wrong. I'm probably one of the most patient people you'll ever meet.

I had such a good grasp of time at school that one of my party tricks - that gained me a little oddball popularity - was being able to count down 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... and then the school bell would ring. I had a natural sense of good timing, given how important the end of school was in my life.

My entire soul yearned for the brief freedom from the bullies that came after school, at weekends and during holidays. The entire structure of my personality was reshaped by time, the clock, the timetable.

I would be down all termtime, and then I would go absolutely bezerk during holidays, trying to pack all that missing fun into those short periods. I would be very tired and lethargic and not enjoy very much of anything during termtime. I would be sad and crying about the bullying. Then, when the holidays arrived, I would hardly sleep, get ridiculously overexcited to have been released from the chains of relentless bullying, and I would launch myself at things with unbelievable enthusiasm and energy, because I knew that the holidays were short.

You might say that I'd be depressed for 6 or 7 weeks at a time, and then hypomanic for 1 or 2 weeks. Yeah, you could say that there were two extremes in my life. You could say that for 13 years there were two poles in my daily existence. You might say that my entire time at school, I had to be very bi-polar, because of the enforced structure of my life. It was the only way I could survive.

When I started work, I was 3 or 4 years younger than everybody else in the company. I was 17 years old and doing a graduate job for BAe Systems. The graduates tolerated me, but I was just a schoolkid to them. I hadn't yet been to University or done much growing up, so I was immature and obviously, I was a bit weird.

Sure, I made friends, but I was always a bit of an oddball. I was always doing something embarrassing or stupid, because I was going through the transition from childhood to adulthood. I was doing the growing up that my peers all did together at University. I made the mistake of accepting every drink that was bought for me, including the 'dirty pint' that I was tricked into drinking and throwing up in front of my colleagues, for example.

Time is the only thing that can change things. There is no short cut to growing up. Yes I was mature for my age in some ways, and I had to fight against ageism, but I also made mistakes that were purely down to immaturity. The best thing I could do was to sit tight and wait until my face matched my experience. I was never taken seriously when I was younger.

Respecting your elders is a mistake in technology, computing, IT, software. If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got. Technology is disruptive, it's innovative, it's fast-paced and ever-changing. You can learn as much from the 'script kiddies' as you can from the key-man-dependency 'oracle' type character who think's he or she is the font of all knowledge.

Technology is truly meritocratic. I really don't care how many years you've worked in software. How many websites and apps have you made? How many users have used your software? How many trillions of dollars has your software processed? Those are the objective measures, obviously.

The grass roots are taking hold. The pyramid is starting to look like it's built on shaky foundations. The bullied kids, who spent all their time on computers as a form of escapism, are now running your company. You might think that because you did an MBA at some business school and were generally academically bright, that you command & control your company from the boardroom, where you puff out your chest and feel terribly important. You're wrong.

The thing about old companies is that they do things in old fashioned ways. They are not modernising fast enough, because of all the gatekeepers and people who have an over-inflated view of their self importance. Customers pretty much care about only two things: price and quality. Brand recognition is a function of consistent quality over many years of using a product or service. People won't stay loyal to a company forever, if they're getting inferior quality or paying over the market rate.

Challengers are offering innovative products, higher quality at a cheaper price. When it comes to technology, the challengers are offering a delightful user experience, rather than just the bare minimum for an older company to remain competitive. Old companies are all about cost cutting and keeping costs low. New companies are all about investment and offering something that puts them head & shoulders above the competition. New companies can't rely on a monopoly, so they have to try harder.

We live in a highly regulated world, so there's no risk associated with switching to a different product or service. They all have to adhere to the same standards, and they're all underwritten by the same guarantees. You have the same consumer rights, whether you've bought a product from an old company or a new company. You have the same rights as a consumer of a service from an old company or a new company.

The difference with the challengers is that they're hungry. They're enthusiastic, passionate and energetic. They're not sitting back, farming their monopoly and expecting the good times to roll forever. They're trying to nip and bite the ankles of the big players, and take a slice of the big market share pie, by delivering superior products and services.

My watch wasn't made by some amazingly skilled craftsman in Switzerland, who had to spend many many years learning the art of horology. No, it was 'assembled' in China after it was designed in California. It cost a fraction of what a Patek Philippe would have cost and it does a lot more stuff. I can pay for stuff with it, travel on busses and the underground, monitor my heart rate, receive directions when I'm driving or cycling, ask it questions, get reminders of stuff I need to do, check my diary, see who's phoning me before I get my phone out of my pocket, and read my messages and emails. It has seamlessly blended into my everyday life.

Monopolies don't last forever, and if you dig in and refuse to listen to what the disruptive young whippersnappers are saying then you will find yourself stuck out on a limb. You'll be sat there in your boardroom in your massive headquarters, wondering where all your customers and your profits went. The challengers are no longer coming. They have already arrived and they're disrupting your industry, and word is spreading amongst customers that there's a better way.

The geek will inherit the earth. The meek geeks are taking over everything. Chances are, you don't run a product or service company anymore. You run a software house that happens to specialise in a certain product or service. It's the software and systems that run your organisation, not your people and processes. You're mistaken if you think your best sales rep or most amazing manager are your most important assets. Those individuals just won't scale up like a software system can.

Automation and mechanisation is changing the whole world. There are still plenty of examples where we can industrialise. Where we can get the benefits of higher production and lower cost. We can eliminate human error and the limitations of workers ability to work fast and concentrate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The more that we allow machines to do, the more efficient industries become, and the more delightful the customer experience.

Have you ever noticed how it feels as if you're getting to your destination faster, if you see a queue of traffic and decide to nip down a back alley, to take a rat run? You might not actually be moving any faster, but at least if feels like you're travelling rather than standing still. You might take this analogy with supermarket kiosks. Now that you scan and process the payment for your own groceries, it feels faster, because you're not stood in line waiting for the cashier. Really, you're just saving the grocery store the cost of having to have extra checkout cashiers to cope with the demand, but the cost saving means they can deliver higher quality groceries for the same retail price.

Economies of scale do work, and retailers are very good at scaling things up, because their margins are very aggressive. In the marketplace with price comparison technology, consumers will vote with their feet if your prices are not competitive. Banking hasn't really got its head around that yet. Many people still bank with their original current account, because they haven't seen the benefits of being a 'rate tart' or finding a higher quality online or mobile app experience yet. However, as Apple Pay becomes more and more prevalent, your bank is becoming less and less relevant. Having access to a branch is irrelevant if you live in a cashless society and you have a good mobile app.

We are witnessing a changing of the guard. Out with the old, in with the new. Long live the Queen, cash is not king.

Robots are going to pick out your Christmas presents and despatch them to you. One day, a drone helicopter will deliver your packages. Change is coming. Don't fight it. Geeks don't like fighting (June 2008)

Tags: #bipolar #bullying #childhood #career #banking #capitalism #computing

This is a story about piggy in the middle...

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the police have a very difficult job to do. I have nothing but admiration and respect for front line officers. I have found the police to be the nicest, kindest and most amazing people I have ever dealt with.

Maintaining the status quo by upholding the laws that you effectively voted for, when you elected your member of parliament, is very challenging. This is because you probably didn't get the MP that you voted for, because the majority of people either don't vote or don't get the person they voted for.

Yes, that's right. Here's the simple maths that proves it:

Turnout: 66%

Conservative vote share: 36.9%

Percentage of people who voted for current government: 24%

So, less than a quarter of the UK population want a Conservative government.

Some strange things start happening when so few of the population are politically represented. People can be criminalised by laws that are only in the interests of the minority rather than the majority.

It happened to me, and the police had to use their judgement to save my life, rather than the letter of the law. Yes, I nearly died in police custody, but that was just part of the story. The whole fiasco is far too complex to go into in a single blog post, and your presumption gland is already throbbing and swollen, so I'm just going to leave this hanging for now. You can start guessing. I bet you'll be wrong. Maybe suspend your prejudice, just for a minute?

Our front line police officers see first hand, on a daily basis, the result of the laws that are passed in Westminster. Things like Care in the Community for example, which was a Tory policy, which pushed vulnerable people, who are a potential danger to themselves and/or others, out into the cities, towns and suburbs.

Changes in the law are rarely made with enough safeguards in place for the impact. Care in the Community made everybody assume that their neighbour was an axe weilding maniac, discharged from an insane asylum, and made everybody put extra locks on their doors, not talk to strangers and ring the police to deal with issues that they used to resolve themselves between one another.

So, I'm that axe weilding manic [N.B. I don't own an axe, nor would I wield one]. I was clearly sick enough to be locked up in one of the few remaining Psychiatric Hospitals. So what the hell am I doing, being allowed to wander the streets wearing a nice suit and working for the biggest bank in Europe on the #1 project? I don't even take my medication. Perhaps I should be sectioned and forced to take it, in the interests of public safety?

But that can't be right, can it? Surely, there's a contradiction there? How can somebody who should be locked up in an institution be the guy that the CIO of the number one project in HSBC put in charge of the top priority item on the number one project, at the Town Hall meeting, in front of the entire department? How does that work?

Well, if you think it was lies, deception, fraud, that got me that position, you'll be very disappointed to know that isn't true at all. The programme director actually said to me that he was really happy with all my work, just before I left. He was also happy to phone me every weekend, until I said I couldn't handle that kind of pressure any more.

Yes, fundamentally, I'm only human. If you prick me, I bleed, and I bleed red. If you pile pressure on me and work me very hard, I eventually need some time off.

But everything is too highly leveraged. The cracks are showing, but nobody has allowed any contingency for stopping and fixing things, or even slowing down a little bit, in the interests of long-term sustainability. All our targets are so short term.

So an entrepreneur is somebody who throws themself off a cliff and builds an aeroplane on the way down. However, when managers try and imitate the entrepreneurial mindset, they will fail to be able to build the vehicle while travelling along without the wheels falling off and the thing crashing horribly. Never ask people to work harder than you're prepared to do yourself.

Our politicians are asking the police to protect them from an angry electorate. They are asking the police to uphold laws that hurt people, rather than protecting the most vulnerable members of society. They are asking the police to suspend their better judgement, and see people who are the wrong side of the law as 'evil' rather than 'good'.

Being human is not about good vs. evil. We are built for survival. If you starve a man and take away his means to earn money, deny him any way to get food in legitimate ways, why do you call him a "thief" when he steals an apple? [N.B. I'm not a thief... guess again, sucker].

We make the rules for the game of life. Why do we punish people who play by the rules, but there is literally no way for them to survive, beyond what would be categorised by Eton-educated idiots in Westminster, as 'criminal' behaviour? These public [private] school toffs have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a British citizen. They have probably never met an ordinary person in their insulated existence, so far removed from reality.

I actually quite liked Thatcher and Major. They came from humble backgrounds. They were actually ordinary decent people. Unfortunately, the party they led is full of the old-boys network who think they're masters of the Universe. Those disgustingly spoiled brats think that the world was made for them to scorch. They'd hunt peasants on horseback if they thought they could sneak the laws through parliament.

I'm disruptive but I'm not a criminal. The thing about disruption is that it's actually a good thing. Whenever the status quo is overturned, the ordinary people are normally the biggest benefactors. People are held beneath glass ceilings, they are oppressed for far too long. The trickle down effect is just a lie. The fat cats are not sharing their wealth.

White collar criminals are the very worst. Do you think Stuart Gulliver the CEO of HSBC keeps his wealth in the bank that he runs? Do you think he pays tax in the UK, where he works in the HSBC headquarters, at 8 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London? Nope... he keeps his wealth in a Swiss bank account and pays his tax in Hong Kong. What a crook.

How can you defend such actions? How can these hypocrites be so influential in UK politics? It stinks.

Please sue me. I look forward to battling it out with you in court. A fair fight, in the full view of the public is all I ask.

That is all.

You don't normally get to see stuff like this. Privacy laws protect us, to make sure that prejudice doesn't destroy people who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Guilty by association... is that really guilty at all? Aren't we all connected by no more than 7 degrees of separation? (no date supplied... keep guessing, sucker)

Tags: #politics #notanonymous #civildisobedience #mentalhealth

This is a story about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons...

I had 3 options: hospital, suicide, support network. Thankfully, I still have the latter.

I really didn't fancy another inpatient hospital admission. I probably would have had to accept stronger psychiatric medication, as it's pretty clear that my life hangs by a thread. One rash, hot-headed decision and it could be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. Think that sounds melodramatic? Screw you.

If you think that people say that they're depressed and suicidal because they're attention seeking, you're wrong. If you want to understand suicide a little more, you should watch The Bridge, by Eric Steel. It will cost you £2.49 and 90 minutes of your life.

I watched The Bridge as an inpatient. My suicidal plans to take Potassium Cyanide, changed. I decided that jumping off the Golden Gate bridge would have much deeper personal meaning, seeing as I had to cancel a San Francisco trip because of my horrible divorce. If you're going to die, do it quick & clean, or do it in some meaningful way, right?

Does it seem irresponsible? Well, actually I took out life insurance that covers suicide, that will leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I'm sure they'd rather have their brother/uncle, but suicide isn't really a choice but instead it's a reaction to unmanageable factors out of the control of that suffering individual.

So, instead of going back to hospital and being put in a chemical straightjacket, I made a video explaining what I was going to do and why. Then I booked a flight to San Francisco, packed a bag and headed to the airport. I was a man on a mission, but also a man on fire.

My friends have been scattered fairly far & wide. My friend John came back from Australia relatively recently, but we have been out of contact for years & years, and I struggled to support him - paying his rent and wages - when my need was very much vice-versa. We fell out when I grew impatient with his adoration of TV rather than job-hunting.

My friend Dave lives near Bristol. I would love to spend more time with him, but it's away from my work in London. That was one of the problems that was a coffin nail in our startup: Hubflow. I'm super grateful that Dave is such a great guy that he forgave me for becoming a complete sociopathic a**ehole as the pressure and stress of it all became too much, when I was CEO, and that we still seem to have a good friendship.

My friend Tim lives in Bournemouth. I really want to avoid that place. Bad memories linked to my divorce and startup failure. London is home. I like London.

My parents and a few old friends live in Oxford. I was dragged there against my will, and then my ex cheated on me, while I was temporarily evicted from my home. Bad memories. It's not my life... I live in London, not Oxford.

My sister and my friend MG live in Nottingham. I'd like to give it a go, but I haven't let London run its course yet. I will probably try and have a little pied-à-terre up there soon, so I have a base nearby my sister at a way lower cost than London. It's good to have an escape plan in case sh1t goes bad. Don't have one at the moment... hence suicidal thoughts.

I really want to get up to the North-East of England to see my friends Andy and Jim. It's a strange land for me though... I've been to the USA more times than I have been in the North of England, in my adult life.

So, when I booked my flights to California, USA, I knew that I was at least going somewhere with relative familiarity, even if that familiarity comes only from the movies I have watched and technology companies (Apple, Google, Oracle, Facebook etc. etc.) that I worship.

Also, I knew that there might be a chance to see long-lost friends, Ben & Jakub, who are business founders in Silicon Valley. Now, I feel very very embarrassed about the way I have conducted myself while things have not been going very well. I feel most embarrassed of all in front of these role models of mine, who have handled the same pressure and stresses. They have done it without vindictively and publicly blaming their shortcomings on their ex and/or parents.

Embarrassment drove me into my shell, made me withdraw. I didn't want the London Kitesurfers and my Cambridge peers from the Springboard Program to see me - an enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, extroverted, capable and entertaining guy - so subdued by unhappiness in a destructive relationship. 

I stopped talking to my friends.

That was nearly fatal. Social media is the reason why I have maintained a toe-hold in life. Friends have reached out to me, when I'm clearly fumbling around without a bloody clue as to what the heck is happening to me, except that I'm loosing my grip on my will to live. That's made the difference. That's why I didn't chuck myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Thanks.

Jakub lent me the Apiry.io bike so I could cycle to Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Another thing ticked off the bucket list (Friday 30th October, 24 hours after making the video)

Tags: #suicide #depression #bipolar #startup #entrepreneur #parents #childhood #oxford #london #media #mentalhealth #friends

This is a story of imitation...

I pitched the Cambridge Angels in flip flops. They didn't like this very much. It was a hot day in June though, so I thought it was appropriate. Perhaps I was a little over-inspired by The Social Network, but at least I wasn't wearing my dressing gown.

I also structured my company, so that my shares would be less diluted when the company received investment.

I was even so paranoid about anybody wrestling control of my company away from me, that when I wrote and signed a vesting agreement for my co-founder in a pub, on a napkin, during the first weeks of the Springboard Accelerator Program, in Cambridge, I deliberately held the pen upside down for the photo. Plausible deniability.

Anyway, so Hubflow is winding down operations, and that means I failed as CEO, despite the fact I stepped down a few years ago. Of course I wanted to give all my investors a big payday, so put a black mark against my name.

People should remember that I always had one eye on the sales pipeline and another eye on the bills, taxes, and wages. I would never bankrupt a company. However, it's all credit to my co-founder for getting things in order when I became unwell.

It's tough at the top, and I have nothing but respect for anybody who is in a CxO position. I'm not after anybody's job... I know how much of a kicking the executives get from investors, customers, and the sleepless nights thinking about everybody who is depending on them.

I'm also not so naïve as to believe that I should be telling anybody how to build a successful startup yet. I learned loads on the Springboard program, but those lessons have yet to express themselves in a useful and productive way for everybody who invested time & energy in me.

I'm wrestling with an unquenchable desire to research and develop stuff, to innovate, to explore ideas. I know that I can deliver a project as a solo founder, or build something from day one with the right co-founder(s). Bringing people in later in the life of a startup, is very difficult.

I also know that I can be a developer, or I can be a startup founder...  not both. Sure, I can write code, I can fix bugs, but the demands on a founder are so great that it's impossible to do the development as well. I was writing and maintaining code for the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, web application, maintaining the database, doing sysadmin, operational support... it was too much, on top of raising money, meeting customers, pitching and meeting mentors.

On the Springboard Program, Jon and Jess did a great job of supporting the founders. I know that Jon also went by far the extra mile for the teams that were dealing with issues, and the safety net that was there for me could not be faulted. I had bitten off more than I could chew.

I was always torn between raising any kind of investment round (friends & family, seed) or bootstrapping. I also was conflicted about bringing anybody into my startup, except hired help. I didn't trust anybody. I also couldn't let go of control and empower anybody to help me.

When you are bootstrapping, you don't have any money. For anything. Making rent payments, wages, expenses... everything comes down to one thing and one thing only: how much runway have you got left for your burn rate? You run lean, but you also run stressed. That's not an excuse for me not being a team player though. Hubflow probably could have been a bigger success if I had learned the importance of Team, as well as Traction and Technology.

You live, you learn.

Photographic evidence that I did make people laugh as well as cry. I think we had great times in Cambridge. I know I did (May 2011)

Tags: #startup #entrepreneur #university #career #leadership #computing #apple

This is a story of a culture that is destroying people's mental health and lives...

Management by balance-sheet, bean counters, spreadsheet jockeys and "yes" men and women are joining a set of executives who do everything in their power to abstain from any of the hard work and responsibility that is necessary in the world.

We have all heard horror stories of people being sacked by text message. In fact, skilled workers, professionals, have been steadily robbed of their worth and self-esteem since powerful rich men, behind closed doors in gentleman's clubs were allowed to asset strip British industry. The practice continues today, as companies are allowed to be headquartered in the UK, but are offshoring all the jobs for cost reasons, and are draining the wealth of the nation.

Europe is fast becoming little more than a tax haven for global businesses, with billions, if not trillions of dollars of profits being pushed through legal entities that have little reason for existence other than to evade the taxes that these companies rightfully should pay to the countries that they have extracted the profits from.

Luxembourg is the most obvious example, but Ireland has recently jumped on the bandwagon. The amount of tax that is paid by Vodafone (group HQ is Luxembourg... funny that, considering that Newbury, UK is where I thought they were founded?) or Apple and Amazon (taxed via Irish legal entity... I know Apple Maps is rubbish but it's a long way from Silicon Valley?) is a pittance. The amount of profits that these companies make is disgusting, versus what they pay as percentage of their gross profits.

However, maybe there is a good reason for all of this?

When I became unwell, and asked good old UK government for support - as somebody who has always paid my full taxes, has no offshore bank accounts, has never tried to evade or avoid taxes - I found that there was worryingly little of a safety net there.

I went to my doctor (General Practitioner, or GP for short, here in the UK) and had a 30 second conversation about what was going on in my life.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

Well, yes, I have heard of Fluoxetine. It's the generic name for Prozac, which is an antidepressant from the 1980s. What the hell is my doctor doing dishing out 25 year old pills to somebody who they have taken 30 seconds to get to know? Well, we know that the NHS is extremely cost pressured, given that we have to give such large tax breaks to profitable billion dollar companies and make sure that we don't take too much inheritance tax from dead multi-millionaires. Oh, and we need nuclear atomic bombs too. Yes, we need to make sure we can always annihilate every person on earth at the flick of a switch.

Luckily for me, I walked away from a course of powerful psychoactive medication, that has been proven in long-term studies to be less effective than placebo. It also takes 6 weeks to take effect. My episodes of depression tend to be about this long anyway. Also, SSRIs make you fat and destroy your sex life, as well as blunting your emotions and generally making your sh1t life even more sh1t, but you'll be too doped up to even realise, unless you ever emerge from the chemical haze.

I'm pretty upset about this, if you hadn't picked up on that.

Another thing that is very annoying is that, as anybody who takes a few more minutes to get to know me will tell you, I'm certainly not what you might term unipolar. My life is littered with examples of radical mood swings. Catch me at a certain time, and you will see my racing thoughts, pressured speech, lack of sleep, intolerance of dimwitted twits, and evidence of my wacky projects.

One day I whimsically decided to knock down my shed, order a load of wood from a sawmill and build a giant beach hut summer house thing in my back garden. Somebody suffering from unipolar depression does not normally do such a thing, according to the DSM-IV/V.

I had to learn all about Google Sketchup, so that I could design the thing, learn about different types of timber, wooden building construction techniques, roofing techniques, planning laws governing outbuildings, estimate how much I would need in terms of materials, locate a sawmill, find a roofing supplier, get a chop saw, nail gun and roofing blow torch (the most fun tool of all).

At no point did any of this seems slightly strange or beyond my capabilities, as a spotty IT nerd who did little more than turn coffee into software for a living, by pressing buttons on a computer, in a comfortable air-conditioned office.

Working around-the-clock seemed perfectly normal too. I remember one neighbour pointed out that the sound of nails being hammered at 9pm was not helping him to study for an English exam... but how are you supposed to hammer quietly? I did try and hammer more considerately, but it seemed more considerate to simply get the project done as fast as possible (I think I took 3 days to complete the structure) given that I didn't know the sleep patterns of everybody within earshot.

So "Mega Shed" as she was affectionately known, appeared at the bottom of my garden in under a week, at a cost of £700. An ordinary week in anybody's life? Well it's hard to judge from an internal point of view, as you can't step out of your own mind and view yourself as others would.

Naturally, friends, colleagues and family are always impressed by a person's industriousness and ingenuity, so I saw no real reason to back off the gas. When the world rewards you for efforts, this reinforces your belief that what you are doing is sustainable.

I then decided to sit in my garden and read a huge stack of books on Quantum Mechanics. This then progressed to me reading every paper that looked interesting in Cornell University's online archives. Naturally, I then started emailling a bunch of the authors, and getting engaged in particularly interesting email based discussions with people around the world about De Broglie's Matter Waves (Pilot Wave theory) which looked a hell of a lot more elegant than all that Standard Model crap that couldn't be unified with General Relativity.

Instead of being discouraged, I found academics to be kind, indulgent and generous with their time. I took things too far, of course, and wrote a paper on the measurement of collapsing Quantum States in an entangled system, spread over a physical space larger than the light-cones of the particles being measured. Standard Quantum Eraser type stuff. I even tried to get it published. Lolz.

At no point did anybody actually directly say to me "you seem to be as mad as a box of frogs on acid with lasers coming out of their nostrils" so I kept digging myself into a deeper and deeper thought hole until I sank into another depression, with no idea what had just happened to me.

The thing is, it's fairly entertaining, enthralling, to watch somebody who is hypomanic. In our age of Big Brother and myriad reality TV shows, we seem to think that it's OK to be a spectator in somebody's spectacular life.

We seem to think it's OK to sit back and watch somebody go absolutely bezerk. It's that person's fault, right? Or maybe it's not their fault, but it's not your responsibility... that would be somebody else? Maybe doctors? Maybe the police? Maybe the council? I don't know... I'm just going to watch - because this is just too horrible to miss a minute of - and I can't tear my eyes away this is just so awful, somebody should do something about it, but not me, and not yet because I'm really getting into this. Brilliant. Who needs TV anyway?

I don't think that I'm not personally responsible for getting unwell, but I don't think that people know how to help, really. I don't think that people are particularly incentivised to help either. We have a very isolated existence. We don't know our neighbours, we don't trust strangers, we ring the police to deal with things that we used to work out between ourselves, we expect our doctors to give us magic beans to cure all society's ills.

So, today is World Mental Health day and World Homeless Day. I can tell you, from personal experience, that mental health issues can lead to homelessness. When I was discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, I was given 2 weeks accommodation, and I was expected to use that time to arrange my own accommodation. I went to the council offices with a letter from my doctors, explaining that I was extremely vulnerable and that I should receive urgent assistance. The person I spoke to then went on holiday and that was the last I heard of it.

I don't blame the system or the people. People are trying to do the best that they can, but there are so many people in need of assistance, and so little money, because we are fixated on helping the rich to get richer, rather than supporting the most vulnerable members of society. I'm not even angry about it. Living in the Royal Parks and on Hampstead Heath was an eye-opening education for an extremely highly qualified and well educated guy who fell on hard times. If you think I chose to become homeless, then f**k you, you ignoramus.

Yes, I could have sold my camera, but I wanted to document what happened to me and I already sold all my other possessions to support myself. When will you be satisfied? Sell my clothes? Locking me up for being naked will be expensive (June 2014)

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #homeless #sex #banking #career #london #culture

This is a story of a red flag that gets raised before disaster strikes...

Why does a person sink? Why do they get swamped? Why do they collapse inwards, under the gravity of their own infinite stress, sadness, blackness? Why do they implode in a spectacular supernova? Can we ever understand and relate to depression so deep that it would drive a person to take their own life? Can we make a difference? Can we empathise, help and ever rehabilitate somebody who has the clinical diagnosis of depression, without pills and a padded cell?

From my personal point of view, I have always felt that making a mistake leaves a dark stain on me, a black mark. People seem to have a very long memory for the mistakes I have made, and enjoy bringing up things that embarrass and upset me. In my career, the people who I need to impress and to promote me are always very keen to know about my weaknesses and flaws, seemingly as an excuse that I should "know my place" and not challenge the status quo.

The world has organised itself into a Pyramid Scheme, where there are a handful of unbelievably filthy rich oligarchs, sheikhs, kings, queens and emperors and other scum, who sit in their palaces, while their people starve in squalor. The trickle-down effect is a lie, spun by the courtiers, the sycophants in the entourage of the super-rich.

This wealth-worship has created a totally fake society, where newspapers, TV and the media, exists only to tell the proletariat that they are 'special' and 'unique' while at the same time, getting them to buy mass produced products from factories in China.

The best example of which is Apple and Beats by Dr Dre. There is a standard line amongst the creative community, that only a MacBook will suffice, as a the workhorse for the output of recording artists, graphic designers, web developers and startup founders. This is backed with the celebrity endorsement of footballers, who are seen arriving at matches wearing their 'individual' choice of a pair of overpriced Beats headphones.

I have always said that it's the software packages that are important, not the Operating System (OS) or the hardware, provided that both of those things are adequately up to specification to run the software. It's true that Apple stuff "just works" but anybody who foolishly accepts a new software release too early also finds that Apple do a lot of their testing by relying totally on the loyalty of their Fanboys.

I have mixed feelings about the largest consumer electronics company in the world. I think they are more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was in their heyday. When IBM's BIOS (Basic Input-Output System) was reverse engineered, which started the boom of IBM Personal Computer Compatible grey clones. This, along with Microsoft Disk Operating System (DOS) launched the home computer from the realm of labcoat wearing boffins, into the ubiquitous Internet-of-Things existance, where my car and my washing machine have an Application Programming Interface (API). This has been Bill Gates' vision for as long as I can remember.

I have always been fairly platform agnostic. I tend to go with whatever works, and ignore the marketing rhetoric and hyperbole.

That takes a lot of work and bravery, because at some point, people start to have vested interests. There are billions of dollars at stake in the tech industry. Apple majicked (sic.) a billion dollar App industry into existence more or less overnight. Who would have thought that paying 59 British pence for stupid little time-filling games (the developer used to keep 36 pence of that) would be so lucrative?

It also seems to take a lot of bravery to stick around and re-invest your cash in something worthy or pay the tax, because Apple seem to have precipitated a brain drain in the developed nations. I know far too many wealthy people who are hiding in tax havens, due to fear and greed. Why run away to South East Asia, taking your cash pile with you? What was wrong with paying tax or investing in somebody or something? What are you afraid of?

Perhaps I have little appreciation of risk? What's the worst that's going to happen to me though? The Conservative government will support me as a successful entrepreneur who invests in people, ideas, research & development. The Labour government will support me as a socialist who pays his taxes and does not try to evade them, recognising that the National Health Service, high quality schools and colleges, roads, libraries, street lighting, policing, fire service, trash collection, civic ameneties, community events, social services and the broad and rich spectrum of life in the United Kingdom is truly a model that every nation should aspire to emulate.

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Y2K)

Tags: #apple #computing #career #NHS #politics

This is a story of the darkness that drives away the light...

I once wrote my own obituary, believing I wanted to die. When a kind and loving person told me that they supported an accurate portrayal of my life, and I felt I no longer had to plead and beg to be given a chance to not have my history rewritten by my perceived persecutors, I had a reason for living again.

During my descent to this point, I realised that there must be other people, going through what I was going through. I decided to try and found a startup to try and help them.

Did you know that the Apple Watch has a feature where you can send your pulse to another person's watch, and they can feel your heart beating too? This is essentially the idea I had, while I was dying. I don't claim that it is an original idea, nor that I had prior art, but only that I think it's a brilliant use case for modern technology.

One of my best friends, who had taken me in, during my descent into melancholy and infinite sadness, confessed to me that he was kept awake at night, and was stressed at work, not knowing whether he was going to come home to a corpse. Secretly I had resolved to try and end my life away from his house, as I wouldn't leave that legacy in somebody's home.

That was how I arrived at the idea. The idea that you could just touch base with somebody... to see if their pulse still beats. And if that person knew that somebody cared whether blood still coursed through their veins, they would feel a little bit less alone in the world, feel a little reminder that people still care whether they live or die.

You think this sounds melodramatic? F**k you.

I have just registered the domain name areyougone.org and the Twitter handle @RUg0ne ("Are You Gone?" with a zero for an 'o') which will tweet the name of the person and a message, when you email. For example: email nickgrant@areyougone.org with the subject line "answer your bloody phone, we love you" then message and the name as a hashtag (which would be #nickgrant in this example) will get Tweeted out to the world.

I have also registered the Twitter handle @NotGone1, and any information relating to that missing person can be tweeted back with the relevant person's hashtag (e.g. #nickgrant) and this will be emailed back to those people who emailed the address.

At the moment, it's only in Beta testing, but I have started to link together the software that can fully automate this. If it's a useful application, I will automate more and more of it, so that it can stay on top of demand. If there is no demand, that's good, because it means that nobody else feels like I did on that day.

People sometimes push loved ones away. We need to understand why (April 2015)

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #startup #friends