This is a story about pressured speech...

A lot of my life has felt like driving with the handbrake on. When I'm finally released from the crap that's been artificially holding me back, I go off at breakneck pace, because I don't know when the next time is, that I'm going to be thwarted by somebody who is simply getting in the way and slowing things down unnecessarily.

Teachers at school need to pace their lessons so that most of the kids in the class can keep up. I'm not saying I'm the brightest, but school certainly didn't stretch and challenge me to the point where I really had to concentrate or try hard. I had plenty of spare time to draw cartoons, write rhymes and stories, and to mess around with computers. It's lucky that it worked out like that, because my computer skills have been far more marketable than any academic qualification ever would have been.

I entered the world of full time work at age 17 as an experienced computer programmer who had written games, simulations and produced websites. It was a painful transition, because now I had layers of ineffectual middle managers, incompetently pushing paper and trying to justify their pointless existence. There's one job: build the fucking software. I don't need some pleb to 'manage' me.

When you make a computer game or a website, it's a fairly creative process. You have to design the look & feel of the software, as well as actually write the computer programs that make it work. The success of a piece of software hinges on how useable it is by people. If people can't intuitively use your software or website, it's a failure.

Making games is hard. If you can make computer games, you can do anything. Honestly, having written software that guides torpedos to blow up ships, I can say that computer games are way harder.

So, I found the world of work to be extremely frustrating. I learned how to program in machine code at college. That's the very lowest level programming language there is. All other computer programming languages compile down to machine code.

Programmers try to keep themselves entertained by inventing more and more abstract programming languages... C becomes C++ and C# etc. However, it's all just instructions in machine code that are executed by the computer processor... it's all ones and zeros at the end of the day: boolean algebra.

Am I blinding you with science? Really, please don't switch off... it's easier than you think!

The whole logical thinking part is the easy bit. The hard part comes when you start thinking about how a human is going to use your software. You can guarantee that somebody will click the wrong button, or type something that you just weren't expecting them to type. Attempting to guide and constrain humans into a machine interpretable set of predefined steps, is the biggest challenge, not the logical processes that happen in code.

What happens when your whole job is to control the variables, and make software into something functional and boring... no weird and wonderful bugs... no unpredictable behaviour? In a way, once you have a few strategies for solving these problems, there is no challenge left in the job. It becomes a paint-by-numbers.

There are probably more ways of developing a website than there are atoms in the universe. I pity the poor web developers who have to know tons of User Interface frameworks, but their job is essentially always the same: what colour do we want the fucking buttons?

I could take no joy from the 'creative' side of being a web designer. There's no creativity. It's just listening to the dumb ideas of your client, who has shit taste and no idea about what good design looks like. The client always wrecks the creative process, along with everybody else in the entire world, and their mother. Everybody's got an opinion on something so subjective as the look & feel of a piece of software. You can't take any joy in creating beautiful looking apps and websites, because you'll never please everybody and the person paying the bill will always wreck things.

So, having neglected my cartoon drawing for many years, I return to writing.

I sit at my desk at my boring job, and I write. But I'm always looking over my shoulder. I'm not supposed to be writing. I'm paid an unspeakable amount of money to manage a software project, but I know that I'll basically just make the lives of my developers fucking miserable if I micromanage them, so I just let them get on with things while I write.

However, I'm always wary of who can see my screen. Is my boss going to suddenly appear at my desk and ask me what the hell I'm doing? How can I relax and write away, when I should be 'working'?

And so, I hack away as fast as I can, to produce something before I'm interrupted, or somebody asks about what's on my screen. I need my little creative outlet, or else I would go insane. I need to write.

But, it's frustrating as hell, trying to get all my creativity out in snippets of time that I grab in the dead time on the run-up to lunchtime, and before I need to prepare my evening meal and go to bed to start the whole miserable cycle all over again the next day.

You might think that writing is a luxury, but it's actually a necessity for me. It's helping me to organise my thoughts and process what just happened to me. It's helping me to deal with the fact that I have to work the most depressing boring easy job in the world, just to plump up my finances again, after a traumatic couple of years.

So, I write, and I write lots. You might think that it's self indulgent, and maybe you've got a book in you too, but you don't have the luxury of sitting around writing. Well, if you were serious, you'd do it. I could rattle off 50,000 words in a week, I reckon. The words just have to come out.

What's super frustrating right now is how the quality really suffers, the more pressured I am. When I'm at work, when somebody is trying to talk to me, when I've said I'll go out and meet somebody in the evening... it's fucking agonising to have to rush. I write as fast as I can, but I don't get the enjoyment from the creative process that I should do. I don't get the full benefit.

I've already written once today, but I'm writing again because I'm not satisfied. I'm not satisfied because I never got to consider my words. I'm not satisfied that I because got to review and refine what I wrote. I'm not satisfied because I was so rushed.

But if I don't get this stuff down, the lack of creativity and challenge in my day job is going to kill me.

Tags: #writing #career #computing

This is a story about an ambitious project...

How would you go about uploading yourself to the cloud? Have you thought about death, and what happens to your personality, your mind, once the apparatus of your body ceases to be a viable vessel for its preservation? Do you want to live forever?

I unfortunately lost my original Google Mail account - grantnick@gmail.com - which I had since 2004. I've now accrued 6.6 gigabytes of email across my new accounts - nick@manicgrant.com and h@ckte.ch - which are both managed by Google and therefore fully indexed for search.

Did you know that you can download all your data from Facebook? I've been a member of Facebook for the best part of 10 years. Facebook probably knows me better than any other piece of technology. It knows where I've been, and who I was there with. It knows who I talk to, and how regularly. It knows what I've chosen to share, as status updates, which are often quite personal and private.

If you dig around in the old parts of the Internet, you can even find me in the Usenet newsgroups, writing under my own name, back in the 1990s. The old content of newsgroups has been preserved for posterity by Google.

So much of my digital identity has been lost, as I moved off the dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) onto my first email addresses with CompuServe, America On-Line and Hotmail. I then made a bad habit of using work email addresses for personal mail. That means that when I left those companies, I left behind all my mail archives. All that content is now in the virtual trash can.

Losing my Google Mail account felt catastrophic at the time. I even leveraged my contacts and managed to get David Singleton - Engineering Director at Google - to try to resurrect my account. However, I had been caught hacking, so I wasn't shown any favours. My pleas that it was "white hat" were ignored, when I was in clear violation of the Terms of Service.

I used to write on a forum for the British Kite Surfing Association (BKSA). That forum was then decommissioned, and all those old posts were lost forever. I then moved to the kiteboarder.co.uk forum, and you can still find my old content on there. I used to be one of the top contributors.

But, would you even be able to reconstruct my personality, from all that email, and those social media contributions?

What's the difference between a film adaptation and the book it's based on? In the film, it's very hard to include much of the internal monologues of characters. Using a voiceover, a narrator, sometimes works, but often we lose the very thing that makes a book so wonderful - to know how the characters think & feel.

When I'm writing something for somebody else to read, more often than not, I'm instructing somebody to act, or passing on information. It's rare that I'm opening up and giving an insight to the inner-workings of my mind. In fact, with most interactions, there is a necessary formality. I'm sure my colleagues wouldn't appreciate it if I polluted our emails with random thoughts and updates on my state of mind.

I've always had a candid, open, style of writing and speaking. I leave little to the imagination about the way I'm thinking and feeling. However, it's still a guess though, because there is actually very little opportunity in life to really open up and let the true essence of yourself flood out.

We are always held back by that voice in our head that says: "but what will people think?". We worry how we are going to be viewed, when we write, when we speak. We are constantly self-censoring and projecting things in a certain way, saying certain things, to try to maintain an image that we deem necessary for our relationships.

"I can't tell my boss that I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, because they will think I'm unreliable" we might say to ourselves. Or we might say "I can't let this attractive person know that I have any faults, or maybe they won't fall in love with me". We might say "I can't let my family know I'm on the brink of suicide, because that will stress them out".

The version of yourself in all those emails, videos, social media posts... it's not a very true version of yourself. You've been constrained by social protocols. "How are you?" is always followed by "I'm fine thanks". Nobody expects you to reply "I'm on the verge of killing myself. My life is misery". Nobody will thank you for giving an honest answer.

So what happens is we live a lie, and there is no true version of yourself in existence, except for the one inside your head that you never let anybody see.

If we were to reconstruct you from everything you ever wrote, everything you ever said, we'd get a corrupt version of you. The version of you that would be digitally recreated would say and do all the right things, but the thoughts inside that virtual brain wouldn't be right. All those things that you wanted to say, but didn't, simply wouldn't exist.

I have to write 1,318 words in this post, and then I've hit 300,000 words. It was easy. A novel is considered to be a text that is over 40,000 words. I've written the equivalent of 7 novels, by that measure. It's taken just 10 months.

Would you find it easy, to dump the contents of your brain out, in all its gory detail? No, I'm sure you wouldn't. Even when you're writing a diary, you're probably thinking "what if somebody read this?". You even worry about what you think of you. You try to impress yourself. You try to hide your innermost feelings, even from yourself.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs. You can see a flurry of activity that normally spans a few months, and then peters out. You can see the sporadic posts, when a dead blog is resurrected, months or even years later. However, what's rare is the person who writes consistently, reliably, regularly.

There are piles and piles of blogospam out there, but can you really reconstruct a personality from any of them? There are people who blog about knitting, people who blog about their pets, people who blog about stargazing, people who blog about sports. Can I infer who you are, or who you were from any of this vast quantity of data? Do I really get a sense of the person, from your online persona?

Google has analysed my 300,000 words of content, and tried to figure out what I'm writing about. Google has tried to figure out what's significant in this body of work.

Somewhere in Google's servers, everything I've written has been indexed for search. In a way, I'm already alive in the cloud. People from all corners of the Earth can find me, when searching for topics that Google knows are significant. Those seekers can know how I feel, what I think. They can delve into a very private world that you ordinarily would never get to glimpse.

Do you want to live forever? Perhaps you already do. The recorded history of humanity survives death, even in the stories we tell about our dead friends and relatives, and influential members of a community. Somebody somewhere has seen your digital content, even if it's just the electronic eye of a machine. Who knows where your data is going to end up?

Those who educate, inform and entertain have a reach that goes beyond their family and friends. Those who put themselves out into the public domain have a reach beyond living memory.

My mother looks after the archives of those few people who we deem to be culturally important enough to preserve, for the Bodleian Library in Oxford - one of the oldest libraries in Europe. While the library has a digitisation project, aren't we looking at things the wrong way?

107 billion people have been alive, ever. That means you're part of about 7% of the human creative output that could ever be recorded. Writing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the ability to output to a digital medium with no lengthy conversion process and no loss of fidelity, is something that has only come about in the lifetime of those who are alive today.

When I write, it's not as a medieval monk, in some priceless hand-scribed tome that will be squirrelled away in some private library. Instead, I write as a citizen of the planet. My writing is captured in the public repository of the Internet, and is accessible to almost every living soul.

And, what advantage, the fact that what I have created has already been digitised? Well... my content is already in a format that's friendly for machine learning.

Speech recognition and optical character recognition can understand the spoken and printed word, but it's slow. The cloud has already greedily swallowed my 300,000 words, and processed them in order to serve them up to any consumer who cares to use them.

Is it arrogant and naïve to consider whether there is any merit in this hefty lump of text? Well, we are not going to know how Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are going to advance in the coming decades. Moore's Law predicts the exponential growth of computing horsepower that can be bought for a fixed cost. However, the game changer is when computers are no longer programmed, but are instead taught how to do things.

How would I go about teaching a computer to be like me, to think like me, to speak like me? Well, it would be like teaching a child. I'd sit down and talk to the computer. We would have a conversation.

However, how long would it take to speak to a computer, before you had provided adequate input? How long would it take the computer to process the sound into a stream of text? How long would it then take the computer to process the stream of text into a form that it can understand? How long would it take the computer to then crunch the numbers and attempt to say its first words?

If I was going about this project, I'd want to provide a body of text in a consistent format. We all speak with different voices. We all have our own unique style. Language is a somewhat crude way of expressing yourself. Human communication is full of flaws, when it comes to transmitting the contents of our brains from one being to another.

I could feed a computer with digitised books. I could feed a computer with Wikipedia. I could just let a computer loose on the open Internet. However, would it be able to cope, without context? How is the poor computer going to cope with all those different voices, different languages, different agendas, different writing styles? How is a computer going to get from the complete works of William Shakespeare, to understanding the inner-workings of the Bard's mind?

I'm sure we're already within touching distance of having a computer system write a convincing love letter. We write great volumes of soppy crap to the objects of our affection. However, while the art of seduction and the emotional patterns of those who are engaged in the courtship ritual are not hard for our mechanised chums to understand, do we really know much about a person from their attempts to get their leg over?

For me, there's so much more depth to the human mind, than what we can see through forced interactions in the context of getting along with one another.

There's so much magic in the secret diary. From Anne Frank to Adrian Mole, and agony aunt columns, we voraciously devour anything that's private and intimate. Words are normally a crude means of making any kind of emotional contact with the being that hides behind those glassy eyes.

This essay is not an instruction manual on how a machine may pass the Turing Test, but when you build a computer system, you also have to think about how you're going to prime it. What is your input data? Garbage in, garbage out.

In a way, we have already succeeded. If I died tomorrow, and you wanted to know more about who I was, how I thought, what made me tick, you could do a lot worse than perusing the pages of this particular publication. If you can't get a sense of who I am from these 300,000 words, is there really any hope that Artificial Intelligence will ever be human-like. If we can't understand ourselves, what hope do machines have of understanding us?

Now, the question is: did I write this, or did I get a computer system to do it for me?

The brilliant thing about AI, is there's no wiring diagram, no schematics. Just like a brain.

Tags: #computing #writing #immortality

This is a story about body shopping...

What's the difference between a temp, a freelancer, a self-employed person, a contractor and a consultant? What's the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur?

Last year I was working for HSBC, along with a bunch of nice folks from several different consultancies, plus a handful of permanent members of staff. The teamwork was brilliant, but the surprising thing was that we all had different agendas.

Given that I had gone back to HSBC as a contractor, having been a permanent member of staff there for over 4 years, it was somewhat of a mindset change. I was also homeless and still very much in the vice-like grip of drug addiction, which wasn't a good start.

I was exhausted, and I had somewhat induced within myself, some fairly major symptoms of mental illness, which caused me to make some rather outlandish interpretations of the reality I experienced.

Imagine being plucked from the park, where you are living and contemplating bankruptcy and the coffin nail that will drive into your career, your business. Imagine facing up to the reality that everything you're qualified and experienced to do, since you started IT contracting at age 20, is now going to go down the shitter, and you're homeless, abandoned by the state - the council have sent you a one-line email saying that you're not even worth a hostel bed to them.

Then, imagine that almost overnight, you're working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. You're so exhausted that you are sleeping in the toilet. Everything seems surreal, from the moment you put on your suit in the morning in a hostel dormitory paid for with a credit card you can't afford to pay off, to the moment you turn up in the headquarters of a prestigious Tier 1 bank that you used to work for, when you were clean, sober, young, happy, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic and respected.

The challenge was to get through 60 days of working, without running out of credit completely. I had to get to work every day and pay for my hostel bed, for a whole month before I could submit my first invoice, which would be paid 30 days later. Obviously, it also looks rather unusual to your colleagues if you can't afford to eat lunch or socialise. The pressure was immense.

What does a poker player do, if they have a weak hand? They bluff, obviously.

To compensate for my fear, and the odds that were stacked against me, I turned the dial up to 11. I tried hard. Far, far too hard. I told the team that I'd take responsibility for a critical piece of work, and deliver it in a short space of time, along with an extremely capable colleague, who actually knew that it was a monster piece of work.

I should have been laughed out of the door. I can't believe that nobody particularly picked up on the fact that I was shooting from the hip, out of a combination of fear, exhaustion, drug withdrawal, mental illness and a touch of arrogance.

How on earth was my ego not going to be stoked? I had just cheated death, bankruptcy, destitution, and now I had the CIO of the number one project in the biggest bank in Europe surprising me, by naming me in person, as the team member responsible for one of the pivotal pieces of the program, in front of the entire town hall. I looked around - "is he talking about me?" - yes, it appeared he was. How surreal.

As a drug addicted homeless person, you're kind of invisible. People would like it if you just crawled into some dark hole and died, quietly. You're nobody's problem but your own, and everybody pretends not to notice you, as you drag your bags through the street, swatting at invisible flies and talking to yourself incomprehensibly.

Suddenly, people not only seem to value you, listen to you, but also look to you for some kind of professional guidance, leadership. Is this the state that important IT projects have reached, where the hobo junkie is the one calling the shots? I realise that I wasn't actually calling the shots, but that's what it feels like when you've been scraped up from the pavement, stuffed into a suit and now you're working in a fancy office full of glass, steel and granite.

It embarrasses me, but also pleases me that I'm still on good terms with a few respected colleagues, and they can tease me about "the time when you said you were going to deliver X by Y". However, not everything I said was worthless tosh.

This is where the difference in mindsets comes in.

As a permanent member of staff, your best shot of getting pay rises and promotions is to raise your profile. Given an hour to do some work, you might as well spend 50 minutes writing an email about what a brilliant person you are and how clever you are, and 10 minutes actually doing some work, rather than the other way around. People who just knuckle down and get on with the work they're supposed to be doing, tend to be overlooked when it comes to the end of year review.

As a contractor, you're all about contract renewals. When your contract is coming up towards its end, you're on best behaviour. You try to shine and make yourself a key-man dependency, so that you can demand a big rate increase, because you're indispensable. Personally though, I hate making myself a key-man dependency. It's unprofessional, however you are economically incentivised to do it, so many contractors dig themselves into little fiefdoms.

As a consultant however, you have the worst of both worlds. You have to kiss the arse of both the client and your consultancy. There's a huge conflict of interests. The consultancy want you to stay on your placement, and for as many headcount as possible to be working with you on the client project, if you're working time & materials. What exactly is consulting about being a disguised employee? Where is the value-add from the consultancy, when the client wants you to be embedded in their organisation, like a permanent member of staff?

The reasons for using consultancy staff, contractors, temps, freelancers, is that you can get rid of them when the project is done. However, the other reason is that you don't have all the headache of having to performance manage underperforming and difficult staff members out of your organisation. In theory, it's a lot easier to hire & fire... with the firing being the desirable bit.

It used to be the case that you could get a job as an IT contractor with just a 20 minute phone interview and start the next day. If you were shit, you'd just be terminated on the spot. Never happened to me, but that was the deal you struck... you'd be on immediate notice for the first week. Then you'd be on a week's notice. Then you'd be on 4 weeks notice, just like a permie. However, I always used to get my contract renewed, because I know how to play the game, kiss ass and keep my lip buttoned at the right time.

So, what happened? Well, stress, money, recovery from addiction, relapse, housing stresses and everything in-between conspired in my private life to mean that I was living life by the seat of my pants. I was running for my life.

After only a week in the new job, I decided that it was an impossible mountain to climb, and that there was no way that I could live in a large hostel dormitory and work on a stressful project, plus get myself clean from drugs, plus dig myself out of near-certain bankruptcy. There were just too many problems to face, working full-time in a crisply laundered shirt and a nice suit, while hiding the crippling problems in my private life.

You can't just go to your boss and say "I'm sorry I didn't mention this before, but I'm a homeless recovering drug addict, who suffers mental health problems at times of extreme stress and exhaustion, and I'm practically bankrupt as well as barely able to keep myself clean, sane, out of hospital and off the streets". Contracting doesn't work like that. Your personal life is nobody's problem but your own... you've signed that deal with the devil. You get paid more, but you're also expected to not get sick and not bring your personal problems with you to the office.

I disappeared on my second week in the job, getting mixed up with the police, thrown out of the hostel where I was living, and ending up in hospital, as the pressure was simply too much to bear, I thought that my lifeline was pretty much spent. The odds of being able to get off the streets were too slim anyway. It couldn't be done. I gave up, and relapsed.

Do you think you can just pick up the phone and say "errr, yeah, I need two weeks off to sleep, an advance of several thousand pounds, and I'd like to come back to work part-time for a little while until I'm up to full strength, because I've been dragging bags all over London, living in parks and on heathland, in and out of hospitals, rehabs and crisis houses, addicted to some deadly shit and battling mental health problems. It seems silly that I didn't mention this at the interview, as I'm sure you would have been just fine with giving me an opportunity to get myself off the street and back into the land of the living"?

You know what though? I did get a second chance. There's no denying that certain allowances were made for me. A blind eye was turned to the fact that I was basically either shouting at people or nodding off in meetings for the first week. I went AWOL twice. Once for a whole week where I basically decided that everything was f**ked and there was no way I could ever make things work, and once for nearly a whole day, when I was swept up in the euphoria of working with nice people and got paralytically drunk with my colleagues and couldn't face telling my boss that I was sick again.

Through my divorce, I lost heaps of friends who were shared with me and the ex. I decided to move back to London, because I knew I could find lots of work. However most of my London friends had moved out of town, in order to start a family. Also, you don't make many friends when you're living in a park sniffing supercrack, and getting hospitalised for 14 weeks a year. I can tell you more about the private life of a friendly police officer that I know, than I can tell you about some other acquaintances from that turbulent period.

Anyway, I was desperately trying to cement things - get my own flat, get some money in the bank, get into a working pattern that was sustainable - but it was too much to ask. 'Friends' sensed that I was recovering, and decided to come asking for favours : lend me some money, let me live with you, give me a job etc. etc.

When you're desperately lonely, because you've split up with the two loves of your life - your wife, and supercrack - you're vulnerable to wanting to people-please. I risked my reputation, when I got a so-called friend an interview, because he pressured me. I overstretched myself, renting a flat that swallowed up all my money, which was my safety net. I didn't even pick my flat... my friend did, and he thought he was going to get to live there rent free. I put up with a lot of shit, because I was desperate for friends, for acceptance, to be liked.

If you think all this can be boiled down to a 'drug problem' you're wrong. In order for a person to feel whole, they need friends, they need a job, they need a place to live, they need to feel that they're living independently : paying the rent, earning their money, able to pay for the essentials of life, and not always just hustling, on the run.

There are quite a lot of pieces to the puzzle that is a complete life that's worth living. Do you really think I just want to be kept alive, in a straightjacket in a padded cell. Is it unreasonable to want to work, to want to feel like I'm making a contribution, to want to feel like I'm liked, loved, to want to feel like I exist, and that I'm valued somewhere, by somebody?

I loved the instant social connection I had with the "winners" who were a group of fellow consultants at HSBC. There was good camaraderie, and they were young and enthusiastic, not bitter and jaded like me. Their enthusiasm for their job and inclusive social circle was exactly what I needed, along with cold, hard cash, and a place to go every day that wasn't a bush in a park, with a wrap of supercrack.

Somewhat unwittingly - although I don't know how much people were able to guess or find out behind my back - the Winners bootstrapped my life. Even though there were the usual commercial rules of the game, about being a disposable contractor who's supposed to keep their mouth shut and not rock the boat, there was still bucketloads of humanity there. People were kind to me. They invited me into their lives, and in doing so, they saved mine.

When a colleague texted me while I was in California, to say that we had to go back to work doing the shittiest possible work for a scrum manager we didn't have a whole heap of respect for, it was pretty clear that it wasn't sustainable. I busted my balls to get cleaned up, off the streets, into a flat of my own and to restabilise my finances. However, I've never been the best at buttoning my lip and allowing myself to be 'managed' by somebody I have barely concealed contempt for.

I knew that all I had to do to get my contract terminated was to send one or two fairly outspoken emails to the project's management team who were insecure and relatively incompetent. They'd actually started to listen and change things though, so there was no purpose to the emails I sent, other than to try and elicit an email saying "don't bother coming back to work" so that I could spend some more time with my friends in San Francisco.

The pressure of having to try and cement the gains that I had made, while still carrying some of the burdens that had been accumulated, was too much. I was in no position to be the responsible guy, picking up the phone every time things went wrong and having to mop up messes. I was in no position to be paying 100% of my rent, with a lazy flatmate who shared none of the risk and none of the financial burden or responsibility for making sure the bills got paid and the household ran smoothly. I was in no position to face months and months more, working at the kind of breakneck pace that was inevitable on a project that I had been forced to take out of desperation.

I had done far too many 12 or 14 hour days. I was on email around the clock. I never switched off. I had driven myself insane, pressurising myself to fix all the broken things in my life, and shore up the gains that I had made. Insecurity and fear had given way to delusions of grandeur. I wanted to do everything, for everybody, immediately. I was very, very sick, because of the enormity of the task of not only the project, but the problems I was overcoming in my personal life. A breakdown was inevitable.

Managing things elegantly was unlikely to happen. I dropped hints about needing a holiday, but I needed to be firm, to assert myself. People expected me to manage my own personal needs, but what they didn't realise was that my needs were conflicted: I needed a financial safety cushion just as much as I needed some time off. When the offer of overtime was wafted under my nose, and the management team wouldn't stop phoning me up at weekends, they didn't have to twist my arm very hard to get me to work Saturdays, Sundays, nights. I needed the money, and I needed to feel like I was important and valued again, having only just escaped being an invisible homeless bum, tossed out of civilised society, never to return.

My experience as an IT contractor, my seniority as somebody who's run large teams, as a Development Manager, an IT Director, a CEO... I'm no fool. I knew that I was working at an unsustainable pace, making myself sick, but what choice did I have? I had so much to fix, and money and hard work can fix most problems. I knew that I needed a holiday, but I was vulnerable to being pressured into doing things that I would never do, under normal circumstances, due to the fragility of my situation.

My colleagues were kind enough to drop hints, and to tell me the tricks that they were employing to avoid management pressures and the general panic that was endemic on the project. They could see I was tired, and going slightly mad. They were worried, and it was kind of them to think of me, on a personal level. However, they didn't really know just how bad things were in my private life. They didn't know just what a journey I had been on. They didn't know what I was running away from.

When I snapped, I didn't know where to run for safety. I thought the safest place would be hospital. I was desperate. I could easily have run for drugged-up oblivion again, even though I was 5 months clean at that point, and one month sober. I could easily have run for the kitchen knife, and slit my wrists in the bath. I was desperate. So close to recovery, and yet so far.

I needed to chuck my freeloader flatmate out of my apartment. I needed to quit my contract and get something easier. I needed to not have the expectation, the weight of responsibility I had unnecessarily brought upon myself, in my desperate insecurity and desire to feel wanted, needed, useful, important, after my entire sense of self had been smashed to a pulp by the dehumanising experience of destitution.

Hospital was a safe place to do it.

Then, unable to grasp the nettle of what needed to be done, which could have been as simple as saying "I need another two weeks off work, to go on holiday, because I'm fucked", I decided to just run away. I booked a flight to San Francisco, leaving myself just a few hours to pack my bags and get to the airport. What was my plan? I had no idea. Even suicide seemed preferable to continuing to live with such crushing pressure, fear and hopeless odds stacked against me.

After a few days amongst friends, I decided that I wanted my contract terminated, immediately. I fired off a provocative email to the CIO. Jackpot! The guy who was responsible for us consultants emails me to say that he wants to see me... in Wimbledon, miles away from HSBC headquarters. I mail back to ask why, but he deftly avoids telling me my contract is terminated via email, despite me pressing him on the matter. Does nobody get the hint?

I come back to London, pissed off that nobody has had the guts to actually call me out to my face, or even by email, and that I've not been able to extend my stay in California. Out of spite, I decide to embarrass the consultancy and the management team, by going into HSBC HQ, blagging my way in even though my security pass has already been deactivated. I march up to the program director and ask him if he's happy with my work, is there a problem? In front of the whole team, he says he's happy with my work and there's no problem, he's pleased to have me back at work.

I milk a few hello-goodbyes with colleagues who I like and respect, while watching the people who want me gone squirm with discomfort. I'm loving every second of watching who's got integrity, humanity, and who's decided that I'm no longer flavour of the month. It's a masterclass in office politics, even though we're all contractors, all consultants. I'm committing every exquisite detail of my final minutes in the office to memory, as I deliberately waste time having my breakfast, before making my way to Wimbledon to wind up the poor messenger whose job it is to try and help the consultancy and the management team save face, by terminating my contract.

By this time, my access to email has been revoked, even though a colleague who accompanies me out of the building, pretends like everything is normal and like we're just having a friendly chat - as opposed to being escorted off the premises by a security guard. I know. Do they know I know? Surely they must.

Unable to send a goodbye email, I ask a colleague who is also called Nick Grant, but who works in Leeds, to send an email on my behalf to a mailing group that contains everybody on the project. It's naughty as hell, but I'm enjoying twisting the knife. What is it that I've really done wrong, other than getting sick and having to go to hospital? What is it that I said, other than what needed to be said, the truth? But I know the game. I know that nobody wants a loose cannon. Nobody wants anybody rocking the boat. I didn't play by the rules. Does anybody realise that this is my way of quitting with immediate effect, and without having to work my notice period?

It might seem like sour grapes. I needed that job. I liked my colleagues. I loved that social scene. That contract saved my life.

However, how do you reconcile your social life, your personal difficulties, your needs, with the role you've been forced into?

What's the difference between a contractor and a consultant? A contractor knows they're a mercenary. They're there to earn as much cash as quickly as they possibly can, and they accept that they can be terminated at the drop of a hat. A consultant just doesn't realise they're getting a bum deal. There's no such thing as an IT consultant. It's just a made-up thing now that software houses and long-term IT contractors have fallen out of favour, with the dreadful rise and rise of outsourcing and this stupid idea that software is ever going to be cheap and easy.

So, to the Winners. Thank you for saving my life. Thank you for putting up with my rocky start, my dreadful ego, my shouting. Thank you for putting up with my arrogance, and for laughing at my over-ambitious ideas. Thank you for trying to keep me humble, and remind me of the rules of the game. Thank you for taking me into your lovely social world. Thank you for the emotional support. Thank you for treating me like a human being, not a software robot. Thank you for dealing with the fallout that I inevitably caused, when implosion happened. Thank you for not hating me, as I wandered into the territory of delusions of grandeur and heroics, and self-important jumped-up craziness.

You might not realise this, but you saw a rather twisted, weird, screwed up version of me, as I clawed my way up a cliff face of recovery, from the bankrupt, homeless, junkie, friendless, single, lonely, unhappy, insane husk of a man that I was, in mid-June last year.

It's been quite a year. God knows what happened with the Customer Due Diligence project, but I'm glad the due diligence on me didn't work, because the Winners and HSBC ended up unwittingly saving my life and getting me back on my feet. I don't think I would have ever had that opportunity if my dark private life was known in advance.

I'm sorry if it feels like I used you. Hopefully, it feels like a good thing happened. Hopefully you feel happy to have played a role in bringing a person back from the brink, even if I was a sneaky bastard, and somewhat underhand about the whole thing, as well as going a bit bonkers at times.

Silver linings, eh?

The photos I've put up include some rather unflattering images of a rather battered and bruised body, that just about hung together with sticky tape to somehow carry me through some brutal times. My private life wasn't exactly 'healthy' leading up to last June.

Tags: #career #banking #hsbc #computing #london #suicide #addiction #homeless

This is a story about imitation and flattery...

What's through that door? Well, probably my entire career and every golden opportunity that will ever be presented to me, throughout my adult life.

That North Oxford house, if I've identified it correctly, used to be the headquarters of Daily Information. It was here that on one midweek night, computer games ceased to be a solitary bedroom activity, and instead became an opportunity to socialise.

So important was this place in my childhood, that I can still remember the code for the door behind the front door, that would lead up to my friend's parents' office, which was above the offices of Daily Info.

The main office itself was a fascinating place. There were zillions of flyers and posters pinned up on the wall, as examples of the desktop publishing and reprographics business, which also produces a popular "What's On?" guide for the Oxford area. There were also instructions on how to operate the many pieces of equipment and notices for the staff who worked there. It was a complex ecosystem, so unlike a home stuffed full of static ornaments and pictures.

There were piles of photocopier paper, and cardboard sheets in all colours and sizes. Printer cartridges, ink ribbons, toner, and daisy-wheel heads were piled up on shelves, or stacked nearby the cream-plastic machines that they served. Half-finished print jobs lay on the tops of every available flat surface.

But, the main event, and the thing that a group of geeky and otherwise introverted kids, had gathered there for, were the many computers. There seemed to be screens and keyboards everywhere. There were PCs and there were Macs, and they all had mice and colour screens, which was a big deal back in the 1990's, when people still used to do word processing on green-screen terminals that couldn't play games.

Yes, it was the computer games that we were there for, and between my friend, his mum, and a few willing staff members, they had always managed to coerce all the computers into playing amazing computer games. It was like the most fantastic treasure trove of an amusement arcade, with unlimited tokens to play again and again.

There were single-player games, like Shufflepuck, where you had to play air-hockey against a whole host of fascinating characters of increasing difficulty and deviousness. This was an interesting use of the computer mouse, which mirrored your hand's movements with the on-screen mallet, to try and send an air-hockey puck sliding into your opponent's goal.

However, the thing that I enjoyed the most, was co-operating with other kids to try to solve puzzle games. These were mainly of the point-and-click variety, where you guided an animated character through a world that you could interact with, using a number of verbs, like "push", "pull", "open", "close", "pick up", "walk to" and "use". These delightful creations included such titles as The Secret of Money Island and several Indiana Jones inspired games.

We would would pair up, with one of us operating the mouse, while the other pressed keyboard shortcuts to choose the different operations, while you tried to figure out how to solve the puzzles, which generally involved walking around, opening doors and boxes, picking up items, and then figuring out what to use the items on, or how to combine them together to make some new kind of object.

I idolised this friend who ran the event on a midweek evening, and tried desperately to imitate all the things he seemed to do so effortlessly. I read the same books. I tried to write and contribute articles to a school magazine that he had founded. I tried to learn how to become a programmer, and to create music using a MIDI keyboard, plugged into a computer. I wanted to play all the computer games he liked, which were often the Lucasarts point-and-click adventures, rather than 'shoot-em-ups'.

The bitterness that is so evident at times in my writing, could have ended up repressed and perhaps revealing itself in even more ugly forms, had computing not become a social experience for me, as well as a creative outlet.

Writing has never been my strong suit. When I was about 13 years old, I wrote an article about a computer game that I'd never played, in a desktop publishing program that I was learning to get to grips with. It got horribly mangled as paragraphs got moved around. "Were you on drugs when you wrote that?" my friend asked me, having reviewed it with another friend of his who I never met, on account of him going to a different school. I was put in my place, although not maliciously.

Everything I ever did was a pale imitation of what my childhood friend did, however, it was still immensely fortuitous that I had this role model in my life.

By writing computer programs nearly every day throughout my teens, I gained enough experienced to get a job as a junior programmer, some 3 years ahead of my peers. A few years later, there was a skills shortage because of the Y2K millennium bug, and I was able to get a very lucrative contract. Having held a graduate position for a prestigious corporation, and also been an IT contractor before the age of 21, I was then able to break into financial services and banking, which is normally off-limits to anybody without a good degree from one of the top Universities.

It should be remembered that there are many talented geeks, plugging away at code in their bedrooms. The difference between those who are 'tame' and able to play nice with others, is whether they have had adequate social contact. I was certainly rather removed from healthy social bonds by too much screen time, spent in isolation in a darkened bedroom, hunched over a keyboard.

Through people like the friend I idolise, the joy of computing became a joy of using technology to have a shared experience, to use computers as a mechanism for social bonding. Even though I had to move away from Oxford because my parents relocated the family, I was able to reproduce a little of the magic I learned at Daily Information and the social group that clustered around this one charismatic friend.

I learned how to connect computers together using coaxial cable, and I used to have groups of friends get driven over to the family home, with their PCs. We used our paper rounds and washing-up jobs, in order to buy the equipment necessary to allow our computers to 'speak' to each other, and so we were able to play co-operative games, with each of us operating our own computer.

As a bunch of 14/15 year old spotty nerds, having these early "LAN" (network) parties was amazing, even if we were cooped up indoors for whole weekends, waging virtual warfare against each other. Games like Doom were popular with us, where we just attempted to kill each other, but the pecking order was soon established, and the one-on-one combat soon grew tiresome.

We moved onto games like Command and Conquer where we could have two teams, each in their own "war room" connected by an extra-long cable that I had bought for the specific purpose of separating us, so that we couldn't hear each other's tactical discussions. A game would last over 12 hours, with us playing right through the night.

Because of the inspiration to write and to publish, plus the few social skills I had developed and the exposure to the reprographics and 'typesetting' industry, as a teenager I was confidently able to get a Saturday job for a little company that was like a smaller version of Daily Information, in Lyme Regis, called Lymteligence (yes, it had one 'l' missing, which wasn't very intelligent).

I had used money from my washing-up job at a local hotel to purchase my first modem and get connected to the World Wide Web (Internet) after a rather crappy old modem had completely failed to give a connection to my friend back in Oxford, who I was desperate to stay in contact with. For hours, my friend had patiently allowed his phone line to be tied up, while I tried to coerce some antique piece of hardware that I had bought at a car boot sale, into connecting with my distant friend's computer, but alas, he finally convinced me to give up.

At Lymteligence I learned how to author websites, writing the code by hand. I created a website for The United Kingdom Men's Movement. I remember feeling ethically challenged, as I typed up some of the bitter words of men who had suffered painful divorces. Thinking about it now, I feel that I myself could have been driven into the arms of this movement, had I not had a healthy social outlet for my technological skills.

Although it's shameful to admit, and a little creepy, I would try to keep tabs on my friends I had left behind in Oxford, by being a bit of a lurker on the rapidly developing Internet. However, by doing this, in a way I was able to stay abreast of advancements and trends that would otherwise have passed me by.

"Social media" means Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, today, and perhaps Snapchat and Vine. In fact, there is probably a movement that's already begun that's going to kill these technology giants, that I'm not even aware of yet. I've always been a bit behind the curve.

However, back in the day, social media meant bulletin boards, forums and websites like Friends Reunited. I have no idea how I managed to maintain a toe-hold of social connection with old friends, throughout the disruption of moving away and then our adult lives, but the Internet always provided a way.

It used to be the case that the search engines, of which Google didn't feature prominently until surprisingly recently, used to be very good at digging out which particular corner of the Internet your friends were hiding in, provided they were using their real name, and that name is quite uncommon... and my role model friend is blessed with quite a unique name.

Now that we tend to do most of our Internet social activities on Facebook, you'd be surprised to learn that your privacy is actually very well protected, and you have a reasonable level of control over what people can and can not find out about what's going on in your world.

In 1999/2000 I was living in Winchester in Hampshire, UK. Things were going well with my career, but I was struggling socially. Through a housemate, we ended up in the NUS (student) bar at Winchester University. I was leaning up against the table football table, when somebody behind me challenged me to a game. I turned around and realised that it was one of my fellow Daily Information computer club friends, and a guy who I went to school with since about the age of 5.

Reconnecting with an old schoolfriend was great. I had been back to Oxford, in order to show off my company car and boast about how well my career was going, but it was crushing inadequacy and a sense of loneliness that had driven me to go back there. I had even been quite evil and immature, and had wanted to exclude certain friends and monopolise other friends' time, in order to try to salve my insecurity. I was still a deeply troubled, lonely person, expressing that in very unhealthy ways.

Shortly after that chance meeting, I picked up a local newspaper and read that somebody had been electrocuted, while trying to take a short-cut underneath some parked railroad carriages, in order to get back to his University halls of residence. It was our childhood friend. Killed, through a momentary lapse of judgement, while under the influence of alcohol and the excitement of a fun night out in town. Tragic.

This put me - the lurker - in a really strange position, in terms of grieving. I later discovered through the Internet that my friends were attending the funeral, but because of the sense of distance and the shame of admitting that I had been somewhat jealously following our old social group from afar, like a stalker, I didn't know what to do. I procrastinated until it was too late, and the funeral was over.

There used to be so much stigma associated with using the Internet as a means of human connection. Admitting that you met your partner through Internet dating was likely to instigate stifled sniggers and snide remarks about axe-murderers and weirdos. I guess I am a weirdo though.

I don't know whether it's a British thing, or perhaps a function of a lonely childhood and being a needy, oversensitive person, but I'm kinda always struggling to articulate my needs and ask for what I want. I don't even admit to myself, what my fears and unmet needs are.

Writing this blog has been a journey for me, but it's taken me further than I would have ever expected. One leg of the journey was 5,351 miles, and took me to the hometown of a bunch of my idols and role models.

Is it creepy, is it weird, is it an unpleasant amount of pressure, knowing that in some sense, a friend is looking to you for guidance and direction? It must be, a little. Why the hell do I never seem to have grown up and gotten over childhood infatuations?

For me and at least one other friend, our mutual friend has provided at least some of the inspiration for our careers. In a way, I at least owe this friend a debt of gratitude for my financial security and the fact that a lot of doors are open to me, for career opportunities. I know that he shared with me at least a twinge of regret for having perhaps nudged one of our friends down one particular technology path.

Who knows what are going to be the knock-on effects of the connections we make with one another. Who could have foreseen that I would have taken the wealth that I generated so effortlessly in the highly paid tech sector, and use it to implode so spectacularly in my mid-thirties.

Of course this is not about blame, but instead, I feel this great sense of responsibility. I feel that there are certain individuals who I am crippled with shame, to imagine reading my sorry tale and thinking "what kind of monster has this guy turned into". I imagine their disappointment, and it slays me.

Where do we look for guidance and inspiration from in the world? Our parents? Well what if your parents don't provide it? In fact, what if your parents provide a cautionary tale for how not to live your life? I don't want to go into the details again, of why I don't want to follow in the footsteps of either of my parents, but suffice to say, I've always been looking to people outside of my family, to provide feedback and inspiration in my life.

So, I'm fessing up. That's what this whole blog has been about. I'm playing up like a kid and wanting to test my boundaries. When is some parent-like figure going to stand up and say "stop that!" so that I know I've gone too far? When is some authority figure going to step in, and tell me that I'm out of line, and give me some guidance on how I should think, act, speak?

Being given stacks of cash, relatively few responsibilities and no social structure around you, to tell you when you're taking things too far, when you're getting yourself into trouble, when you're wandering too far from the flock, when your ideas are getting too outlandish, when unpleasantness is rearing its ugly head. You probably take it for granted, the checks and balances that exist around you.

So, I'm making an appeal, to people from every period in my life, from every stage in my development: from childhood to adulthood, from Oxford, to Dorset, to London, to Cambridge, to San Francisco, to Prague, to France, to Brazil, to New Zealand. I'll travel round the world a million times, if somebody can just reach out and give me some kind of reality check.

I'm pouring my heart and soul out into the chasm of the Internet, hoping to make a connection with people, hoping to trigger some kind of response. I have no idea how I'm received. I have no idea how I'm perceived.

Yes, it's needy and yes, it's kinda pressuring people to say something where it seems impolite to even ask for feedback. We have lots of phrases that kinda shame people into keeping their mouths shut, like "emotional blackmail" and "attention seeking". If somebody even came out and accused me of such things, at least I'd have something to reflect on.

Everytime I ask somebody a direct question, they seem to think that the kindest thing to do is to spare my blushes, but I don't know whether to trust my own instincts, or actual concrete feedback that I've received.

For example, I was living with some friends, and it was only over dinner one night, when I had moved out of their house, that my friend finally let me know what he really thought and felt. The fact that the truth was suddenly unleashed was brutal. There was real pent-up frustration and having it all released all at once was too much to bear.

I just contradicted myself, didn't I? What an awful, needy, demanding person. I want honest feedback, but I want it little and often. I'm asking for people to give me a reality check, but I'm also admitting that the last time that a close friend fired both barrels at me, I nearly committed suicide. Who wants that kind of responsibility?

But, you know, the takeaway from this is that I didn't commit suicide, and even though that friendship was really badly damaged, at least it moved things along. I was in limbo before... really unsure of what was real, what I'd overheard, what was being said behind my back. It's an impossible way to live, like that.

I'm adrift in a vast ocean, with no tether to any fixed objects. I have no point of reference. I couldn't tell you which direction is which, and where I'm travelling from or to. I'm rather lost.

A friend got in contact earlier in the week, and offered their impression of something I wrote - noting that I had become bitter again - as well as some advice. I can't stress enough how this was like gold dust to me.

I'm not sure you realise how disconnected from the world I've become. I don't have any normal healthy friendships anymore, or regularly see people who I've had a long-term relationship with, knowing me for years, so they can comment on how I've changed. So many people have become just another 'like' on Facebook.

As a friend who I chatted to via Facebook messenger today said, we know what all our Facebook friends position on Britain leaving the EU is, but we don't know what's going on in the lives of those who are not sharing anything personal, except political opinions. There's a vast difference between the occasional reminder that somebody is still alive, because they're active on social media, and actually looking somebody in the eye, when they give you the British knee-jerk reaction of "I'm fine" when you ask how they are.

I appreciate I've written a lot, and huge amounts of it is virtually unreadable. Also, long bitter rants are not exactly pleasant reading, nor do they paint myself in a particularly favourable light. Who wants to know that angry venomous twisted person, hunched over their keyboard, blindly firing resentful and blame-filled missives into the void.

If you've persevered this far, I'm ashamed of myself. I think about all the stuff you must've read, and what you must think about me, but of course this is conjecture. I admit, I am trying to cajole you into giving me some feedback.

You know, I often think about how immature and childish I am. I often think that everybody is in the same boat, and we're always going to be left wondering how other people perceive us, and what people really think about us, to some extent.

It's easy to dismiss a lot of what I'm wrestling with, as just a standard part of the human condition. I'm also reflexively programmed to offer up neutralising statements, as standard, such as "I don't think I'm special and different" and "I know that my life is no more stressful and turbulent than yours".

The engine that drives this verbal diarrhoea is the fact that I do feel insignificant and worthless. I'm driven to try to anchor myself back into the world of the living, given that I have been hospitalised so many times with suicidal and self-harming behaviour. In a lot of ways, I feel justified in telling people who want to guilt-trip me into suffering in silence to shove their "you're not special, shut up" statements up their arses.

How does one go about fixing the very real and practical things, such as figuring out how to live amongst your friends once again? Sure, I can reconnect with people, but if they don't like who I am and what I say, what hope is there of there being any lasting relationship?

Anyway, this stuff is always cringeworthy and difficult to read, so I'm going to leave it there, as an open letter to my friends and acquaintances. An appeal to human connection, and the feedback that is essential for social bonds.

It's mighty cold when you're out in the thin atmosphere of the outsider, frozen and clinging onto life.

Tags: #friends #childhood #oxford #career #computing #socialmedia #suicide #depression

This is a story about getting out of practice...

My friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were kids. I floundered on my own for a while when our family moved away from Oxford, to Dorset, but eventually I had managed to write a couple of computer games before I even had any proper lessons at school and college.

I've been a professional programmer for the best part of 20 years, but my recent ups and downs really hurt my confidence, and also meant that my skills got a bit rusty. It is a little bit like riding a bike, but the jargon changes and the syntax of what you have to type looks subtly different, but it's all still the same binary ones and zeros underneath the covers.

I nearly had a meltdown today, when I was set a programming test that's the sort of thing that you'd give to a first year Computer Science student. I feel a little insulted that I'm being asked to do things like that, when I've got such a strong CV. However, IT is riddled with managers, architects and other people who haven't touched code for years and years. I guess it's a test to see if you can roll your sleeves up and get hands on or not.

I'm getting really worried that there's a tech bubble that's going to burst, and bring down the whole economy. When I think that there are so many jobs that are centred around social media marketing, digital campaigns and mining the vast amounts of data that are gathered about website users and their browsing habits... it's all a lot of bullshit. At the end of the day, people have lost sight of the fundamental principle of creating products and services that add value to the real economy.

Why is it that a company can have a massive valuation and raise loads of money, just because the number of people using their website is growing exponentially? Why is it that a bank, or other financial services company, can be one of the most profitable enterprises in the world, when they don't actually produce anything of tangible value? The markets are just supposed to route money efficiently around the real economy, to grease the wheels of commerce.

I started to get panicky all of a sudden, and worry that I won't be able to get myself into a position to weather the storm before it hits. But then, when you think about it, it doesn't matter unless you're just coming up to retirement and hoping to cash in your casino chips and sit on your arse for the rest of your days until you die.

I don't begrudge people their retirement, but considering the huge population growth, the massively extended life expectancy, plus the low birth rates, retiring at the same age as the previous generation is just not feasible.

It is really sad when somebody retires, and they're so burnt out that they hardly get to enjoy it. It seems that life is very much lived backwards. When we are young, fit, healthy, energetic and full of life, we are also heavily indebted and have to work as many hours as we can just to pay the rent and try to keep a car on the road so we can get to work. Then, when we retire, we have heaps of time and money (hopefully) but our health is failing and death is stalking us.

But I'm only talking in abstract terms, because something different happened to me. I didn't quite catch the ultimate wave, but I caught the tail end of a pretty wild ride. For those lucky enough to get into IT at some point from the 1960s to the 1990s, we have enjoyed boom times that seem to have kept rolling.

Perversely, I was a little disappointed when the millenium bug didn't cause every computer in the entire world to explode, as the clock struck midnight and we rolled into Y2K. By the year 2000, I was already bored and disillusioned with programming, and I had even applied to University to retrain as a Clinical Psychologist.

It seems churlish, to be dissatisfied in my position. At the age of 20 I was an IT contractor, taking advantage of the fact that there was a huge brain drain, as most of the best programmers were working on fixing the millenium bug. I had a 20 minute phone interview, and then started work a few days later... doubling my salary in the blink of an eye.

In a way though, you have to consider the bigger picture. How many years of my life were spent locked away indoors, hunched over a keyboard, because I was unpopular and ostracised at school? The bullying I endured was pretty relentless until I finally got to college, so in a way, I have always felt some entitlement to the wealth that compensated those miserable years.

Money doesn't buy you maturity though, and it doesn't repair low self-esteem. It does, however, broaden your horizons. As the year 2000 rolled into 2001, I was taking 5-star luxury holidays around the world. I didn't rub people's noses in it, but I hadn't yet begun to feel that the debt of karma that the Universe owed me had started to balance out.

I bought a yacht and moored it in an expensive marina in Hampshire, age 21, but this still didn't seem exceptional to me. I still felt that I had somehow missed out on a lot of what other people had done: to feel popular, to feel fashionable, to feel loved, and have girlfriends that you really fancied. I still had crushing inadequacies and a poor self-image.

Getting into kitesurfing gave me work:life balance and brought me a social group that finally meant I started to feel like I had friends I'd chosen, rather than just the group of geeks, thrust together for strength in numbers, against a world hostile to us outcasts.

The dead time at work, when I had previously just been struggling with boredom, was now filled with planning kitesurfing trips and chatting with my friends on the kiteboarder forum. My bosses were still happy that the work was getting done, but I was spending 80% of my time and energy looking at wind and tide forecasts, reading and writing forum posts.

Moving to the coast meant access to the beach every day, and eliminated the need to experience kitesurfing vicariously midweek, through an internet discussion forum. However, it also meant I no longer had anything entertaining during the boredom.

Eventually, the boredom led to me obsessing about my job, and pushing hard for promotion, and then to burnout. Work:life balance is important.

I've been trying to piece everything back together again in a way that's not simply hopelessly nostalgic for bygone years. If I can get on an even keel again financially, of course I can start going on kitesurfing trips again, but the really important thing that I lost was the social aspect, and having another passion as well as work, that could keep me busy midweek.

A lot of my fear of getting back into the working routine is that I know that simply living to work is not healthy or sustainable, and I really have very little passion for IT anymore... it's just a job, and a job that I can do blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back.

I am sorry if I come across as ungrateful for my opportunities, but there's more to life than a well paid job, and I have so few of the other elements that make up a happy little life.

Would you believe that some of my happiest times in recent years have been when living in the park or the hostel? There was at least a group of other no-fixed-abode bums like me, and we formed strong social bonds. Having a group of friends turns out to be a lot more important than a healthy bank balance.

So, getting back to work is a necessary evil, but it won't stabilise me and give me any quality of life, you might be surprised to learn.

I overcame that fear, and did that technical test, and I impressed myself that I can still apply myself when I need to. However, it seems a shame that our modern lives drive us to live to work, rather than work to live. I feel certain that this must be behind the mental health epidemic that is sadly getting worse and worse.

I'm going to grow carrots, come the revolution

Tags: #computing #career #bullying #childhood

This is a story about returning to normality...

One week from today I'm going to start circulating my CV and generally getting back in touch with my network to try and find some work. It's been a surprisingly long road, getting back on my feet.

I've picked an arbitrary date to try and get back into the swing of the working world. I certainly don't feel very well. I'm tired all the time. I still need help and support to deal with things, which are otherwise overwhelming to me.

However, I seem to have an on/off switch inside me. When I'm powered down in the 'off' position, you would barely believe how dysfunctional I am. Just getting out of bed and getting some food is considered a highly productive day. Pathetic, I know.

Something triggers me to switch gears from neutral, to top speed. The 'on' switch gets thrown and then the only problem is slowing me down enough to try and stop me from burning out. Next week is going to be a blur of activity, and if things go right, then there will be at least 3 or 4 months of frenetic activity before the circuitboards melt.

There are lots of bits of data that are graphable to see these two poles in my behaviour. Whether it's my bank balance or my activity data, collected by the movement sensors in my watch & phone, they all show the same thing: peaks and troughs.

Sadly, I would say that the peaks and troughs are getting more and more extreme though. I was certainly having some very odd thoughts and ideas when I was getting really tired last year, but I was in the middle of a highly productive phase. I had great difficulty biting my tongue, and thinking about the medium to long term benefits that would selfishly suit me best.

It's quite possible that I've totally busted my brain by just asking way too much of it. I've tried to be really kind to it for long periods, to see what difference that makes, but it's a bit like a tube of toothpaste that's open at both ends... you can put the cap on one end, but the toothpaste still oozes out of the other end when you squeeze it.

There's so much pressure in modern life. There's no opportunity to stop and catch your breath. Just as soon as I'm physically able to drag myself into an office for 8 hours a day, and not fall asleep in every meeting, I have to get back in the saddle and earn another load of cash, knowing that my episodes of stability are increasingly rare.

It's really strange, but I think that I used to know what was best for my health, and be really strict with employers, way before I got sick. The idea of working weekends was really offensive to me, and having to do on-call work, or late nights was something I'd only do very occasionally, and there had to be the bait of a big bonus or promotion on the table if I was going to do it.

I used to be really good at managing my long-term health. I made sure I took all my holiday allowance every year, and I made sure I always had something to look forward to. I was also really strict about maintaining a good work:life balance. I was fit and active, spending most weekends at the beach, kitesurfing. I was sociable and had all the right elements to create a fulfilling healthy life.

Nowadays, if I can work, I work. I live for work. When I'm not working, I'm just eating and sleeping. My existence is isolated, unhealthy. I dare not spend any money. I dare not take a holiday. I don't feel like a whole, functional person... and I don't see my friends. I feel worthless.

Frankly, when I am working, I'm way too intense at the moment. It doesn't take me very long to get a handle on an organisation and its objectives, and to understand the team and technology. From there, I seem to fall into my old pitfalls of becoming cynical and overly outspoken. Plus, I'm always in such a rush to get everything done... there isn't an IT project in the world that isn't late or overbudget.

It's hard when you've worked at a particularly demanding level, managing your own team or department, or even running your own company... and then you've got to slot into a massive corporate environment. It's hard to get back into the mindset of the wage-slave. It's hard to remember how to achieve the difficult balance between getting stuff done, and just terrifying the hell out of senior management, because things are happening at breakneck pace.

There was one particular piece of work that I was doing, and I knew there was a really important deadline to hit. There was a TV screen setup, which would light up green when we had succeeded and hit our deadline. I was working away in one of the meeting rooms, away from distractions on the open office floor. I knew that there was going to be a really tricky period to navigate with some of the senior management, who didn't understand what I was doing.

My very worst fears were confirmed when the senior management came rushing into the meeting room to say that there had been cheering in the office, because I'd made the screen go green. I then had to tell them that it was only because I had done some contingency work in preparation for the proper work. The pained and stressed look on their faces was unbearable, but I knew I only had 10 or 15 minutes to wait until the real 'green light' popped up, hopefully.

There then followed a very strained 10 minutes where I attempted to explain that I had done something to give us a retreat route, in case there were problems further down the line. The senior managers felt that I had done something cavalier, they felt misled, they were confused, they were disappointed, they didn't understand... this continued for 12 or so minutes.

Then the screens went green again, much to my relief. There we go. Job done, that was the event that they should be cheering. I had just been killing time explaining what I'd done, because I had a great deal of confidence that everything was going to be OK.

Such is the way with IT. The explaining takes the time. The work is normally trivial.

It takes time to get used to working with me. I tend to work on the principle that it's easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission. I just put a great deal of pressure on myself to make sure that I get things right when I'm sticking my neck out.

I'm pretty unencumbered by fear, especially now I've been to hell and back a few times. This could be part of the general broken brain problem I've got. I have absolutely no fear of being reprimanded... I stick to my guns when I know I'm right, and my hunches are normally right too. There are so many times when there is enormous pressure to say or do the wrong thing, and the middle ground is to simply button your lip, say nothing, go along with some madness.

I'm not very good at going along with amateur hour.

I was working such long hours that I was staying in a hotel just minutes away from the office. I even had to take my washing to work with me

Tags: #career #banking #computing #london #bipolar

This is a story about getting things in perspective...

When you're climbing a mountain, you can't think about the summit too much. You have to take things one step at a time. If you are much too fixated on reaching the top, you will feel disappointed every time you reach a false summit. You will feel disheartened when you see how far there is left to climb.

I'm quite familiar with mountainous tasks. I started my full-time career at age 17, and I had my challenges with immaturity, but also with age prejudice. I sacrificed a huge portion of my teens to learning programming, so I was pretty ready to start work, unlike some of my peers who had done non-computing degrees at University. However, my youth held me back for many years.

Around the time I turned 30, I built a couple of cashflow positive businesses. Taking something from the idea stage to the point where you're taking customers' money is not something that should be underestimated. It's easy to do one deal, and just keep dealing in that same way, but it's quite something else to put together an established business, with multiple customers, suppliers, and create a trusted brand.

Then, as I've written about at length, my mental health started to be the mountainous task in front of me. Or rather, I was at the bottom of a deep dark pit and had to climb my way out. Facing a collapse in your sense of wellbeing, your ability to cope... that's a fairly big thing to tackle, when you've had nearly 30 years of steady stability.

Most recently, dealing with drug addiction is probably one of the hardest challenges a person is ever likely to face in their life. Addiction can consume a person so quickly. It's like a fire. If you don't put it out fast it will spread, and if you leave it to develop into a raging inferno, it will be virtually impossible to extinguish and it will just consume everything with its flames until there's nothing but charred remains.

It seems really stupid to me, how long we let people flounder and struggle for. We just turn our backs and pretend stuff isn't happening. We just hope for the best, hope that the person doesn't bother us, hope that some miracle happens, hope that the person who's in trouble sorts themself out, hope that somebody else will deal with it so we don't have to.

There's a really nasty streak of "look out for number one" going around more and more. People live their lives in an increasingly isolationist manner, critical of other people's choices, and only thinking about their own wellbeing. We are encouraged to trample on each other in order to get ahead. We hoard and do not share.

People can't see the wood for the trees. They fail to recognise that pushing their kids to get good grades at school just creates an arms race. Pushing your teen to think about 3 or 4 years University education when they're just a child. Pushing your young adult kids to get a good career, a profession, when they're just developing their own identity, deciding what they want to do with the next 40 or 50 years of their life. Can't people see that at every stage of this funnel, things are getting more pressured, more competitive?

I received an email today from somebody who is already struggling with the pressure of University. Think how much pressure that person already endured to get the exam grades to get that University place. Think about how many exams they have had to sit, in order to stay in the system, and be allowed to continue with some hope of getting a well paid job at the end of it all.

We're tested, and then we're tested some more, and then we're tested again and again until the end of our days, nowadays. Now that we have established this over-competitive bullshit arms race of a life. There are too many lawyers, too many doctors... too many of all the professions that are desirable. An exam might look like an ordered, disciplined, academic thing, but we might as well have our kids duking it out with pointy sticks in the middle of a jeering snarling crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers.

In the zero-sum game that we have invented, for every winner there's a loser. That means that whenever a kid gets a bunch of "A" grades and a place at an Oxbridge University, some other kid has to leave school without any qualifications and be considered unemployable. There are only a limited number of places for the elite: both in academia and professional life.

We're not building a longer table, we're building higher fences. The pressure on kids to not make a single slip up, from the moment we start pressuring them to beat their peers throughout a gruelling school, college, and University life. One black mark can derail your entire future. Screw up one set of exams, and you'll be tossed into the 'undesirable' bucket, and find it very hard to rise above your peers ever again. You'll be trampled underfoot.

Schools can only give out the same limited percentage of "A" grades each year. Universities can only give out the same limited percentage of firsts and 2:1 degrees each year. Companies can only afford to hire a small number of entry-level people - the very best - each year. We drive huge amounts of people into a funnel that's just way too narrow.

Opportunities just suck right now for young people. It was pretty sucky when I was a kid, and there was always hell to pay whenever my teachers spoke to my parents, even though I was always in the top sets and getting good grades. There were plenty of sharp-elbowed pushy parents who ruined plenty of childhoods back then... today it must be bloody miserable and awful. No wonder we are seeing a spike in teen suicides and self harm.

And for what? Do you think your kid is going to get a good job after they finish jumping through those academic hoops... doing all those exams and essays and dissertations? Do you think your kid is going to happily couple off with some lovely partner, buy a house and start raising a family of their own? How the hell could they afford to? Have you seen the disgracefully low wages and the sky-high house prices?

You can do a 180 degree turn and still take a step forward. You don't have to feel like it's a backwards step to admit you're wrong and start going the other way up the dead-end alleyway that you led your kids and grandkids down. OK, so school and work was OK for you growing up, but that doesn't mean it's working for your kids and grandkids.

What worked for a world of 2 or 3 billion people doesn't work for a world of over 7 billion. There are just too many people competing for a finite amount of bullshit qualifications and jobs. We've set our young people up to fail, and it's not because they're stupid or lazy. It must be incredibly stressful and hopeless, being young today, with so few prospects and such a hard struggle to get ahead of your peers.

At the moment, the human condition is not being advanced. The ship is being steered by a rudderless drunk of a captain, in selecting our political and commercial elite from the greying middle-aged nostalgic fools who've had it way too good for way too long.

The current set of elitists kowtow to the pensioners, because everything is owned by institutional funds: every company is majority owned by pension funds. The grey pound is the only pound. The kids don't have any money. The corporations worship those who are in God's waiting room, just hanging around for their time to die. It's a system that's leading the whole world to its death.

We should be looking down, to those little kids and their energy and optimism, and thinking about their future, not looking up to the heavens and thinking about our death. You might have a comfortable retirement, but you'll be riddled with disease and old age. Would you not be more comfortable knowing you left the world a better place for your kids and grandchildren?

Build no store of wealth on this Earth.

I feel sorry for working class people who have worked hard their entire life, and they've still been cheated out of a living pension, but their health is failing. Their voice is silenced by the deafening boom of the ones who've had a cushy life with a golden parachute final-salary pension at the end of it all. We can't see the wood for the trees

Tags: #politics #childhood #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about baby's ruin...

I don't really believe in 'addictive personalities'. Sure there are people who go through periods of sensation seeking or hedonism, but all our brains have the same reward mechanisms that can be short-circuited by all manner of things, not all of which are psychoactive chemicals.

One of the first things that I became addicted to was sugar. Now, I have all kinds of problems with this statement. Glucose is one of the 3 things that every cell in your body requires to function, along with oxygen and water. Sure, as an organism, you're going to require all kinds of amino acids, proteins, salt etc. etc., but you're not going anywhere without sugar.

Sure, we can gorge ourselves on sugar. We can have too much of a good thing. Soda containing high fructose corn syrup contains ridiculous amounts of sugar, and we can slurp at huge paper cups containing many fluid ounces, with little difficulty. Our bodies have a seemingly insatiable appetite for sugar.

It rots our teeth and makes us fat and gives us diabetes, but still, we can't get enough of it, especially when we're young. Show me the child who doesn't have a sweet tooth and I'll show you a lying parent, or a parent who has been a particularly mean and brutal disciplinarian in training their child to lie.

The faster a child can grow to full adult size, the less chance there is of it being eaten by a predator or succumbing to a survivable disease. Of course children are going to be programmed to seek out sugar. They're the easiest calories for the body to convert straight to energy, to power those restless limbs.

Our ability as a species to provide fruit, honey, cane sugar and sugar beet refined into pure sugar granules, at all times of the year and in virtually limitless quantities, has resulted in huge numbers of overweight blubbery children, probably with rotted teeth. However, that's not to say that nature would exactly deem them unhealthy. The first set of teeth that a child gets are deciduous and a good thick coat of blubber will keep them warm in winter, meaning less chance of catching cold.

So it was, that I came to become addicted to lemon Polos. You know, the mints with the hole in them that come in the distinctive green wrappers with silver foil. Yeah, at one time they made some sweet lemon alternatives to the mints, and I used to buy them using some lunch money that I set aside, so I could feed my daily sugar habit.

To use the parlance of ignorant idiots, I was a sugar addict. I used to love the refined sugar of sweets. Lemon Polos were my drug of choice, and I used to get some of the daily calories required by my body, by eating these sweet drugs. My teeth are fine, my pancreas is fine, my weight is fine... I don't seem to have come off badly from this addiction, but maybe lemon Polos were a gateway drug for later addictions. We may never know.

Just like the infamous Lemmon 714 Quaalude from The Wolf of Wall Street these lemon Polos are so rare that Google Image Search doesn't even have a decent resolution picture for me to plagiarise.

But that wasn't my only childhood addiction.

Dark Castle on my friend Joe's Dad's Macintosh, was probably the beginning of a love affair with computer games, that was to last my entire childhood, and only tail off in my late teens. Some would probably say that computer games were an addiction, but I couldn't get my fix whenever I wanted until I had my own computer.

To begin with, Joe used to make the character in Dark Castle run and jump and climb up and down. I used to control the character's aim and make him throw rocks to take out the bats that would wake up and fly at you to try and bite you and kill you. It was the first example of a co-operative computer game, that I know of.

And that was how it began, the relationship with computer games. It was always a social affair. You need somebody else to play Pong against or else it's no fun. It's more fun when you're taking turns to play a computer game, and you're competing with one another to beat the same obstacles and each other's scores.

I remember enjoying watching other children play arcade games immensely, although I don't recall having any coins of my own to be able to play them. I used to like just hanging out by these machines, watching the demo sequence, seeing the high score table, listening to the music. I can even kind of hum the little melodies for some kind of helicopter shoot 'em up and a driving game that seem to have gotten stuck in my head for the best part of 30 years.

I loved the demos. When I eventually had my own computer - The ZX Spectrum +2 128k - and I could fully indulge my addiction, I seemed to prefer the demo games that you got 'free' with a copy of a computer games magazine, to the full games. These little bitesize tasters were always just hard enough to hold your intrigue, and you could amass a huge collection of different minigames very quickly.

QAOP and space bar were the controls for everything from Olympic Games 'simulations' where you had to bash alternating keys as fast as you could to make your character sprint or row or cycle, to flight simulators and racing games, and of course the many shoot 'em up variants.

Ok, so there were violent undertones to nearly every game that there was out there. Whether you were shooting aliens or people, or doing Kung Fu or whatever, there was usually some kind of baddie that was getting shot or bashed or otherwise killed.

Seeing as I haven't carried these murderous, violent tendencies over into adult life, I'd say that being brought up on a diet of computer games hasn't reprogrammed me as some kind of killing machine, but I'm just one data point.

I do sometimes worry that with the rise and rise in popularity of the Call of Duty franchise as well as its incorporation of drone control, and general glorification of warfare and combat, that there are a generation out there who would love nothing more than to be killing real people at the push of a button.

Lots of unimaginative kids have got the idea that being a computer games tester must be the ultimate job, from the incorrect conclusion that all it must entail is sitting around playing your favourite computer games but getting paid to do it. However, being a drone controller must be a bit like playing Call of Duty, blowing people up using a joystick. Only those people are real.

Anyway, computer games were a very real addiction for me, for a while, with me having cravings to play them, and staying awake for far to long in order to 'binge' play a new game. Good computer games have been designed in such a way that they are just hard enough to keep you coming back again and again to try and beat an obstacle that was just out of reach on your previous go. They are engineered to be addictive. The more addictive, the more a game is considered to be a classic or of high quality.

But it's from this addiction to computer games that I fumbled my way into programming, and into a lucrative career. I started to become disinterested in games when I started work as a full-time programmer, and I was doing real life battlefield simulations for the Ministry of Defence. Perhaps the lemon Polos and the computer games had set me up though, to turn into the 32 year old drug addict that I later became.

Or perhaps we all have the same weaknesses, the same hardware, the same software. Perhaps we can all become reprogrammed by things that press our buttons.

If you're geeky like me you'll be able to see that "O" and "P" have been coded as buttons you can press. Presumably "Q" and "A" appear later in the program. I have no idea what this code does except print a score.

Tags: #computing #childhood #addiction

This is a story about grinding to a halt...

I have been enjoying writing immensely, and continuing this blog is certainly no chore. Words still flow effortlessly, but I am floundering a little, as I try to avoid repetition and decide what direction to go in next.

I really need to get another job/contract, and the easiest work to find would be as a programmer. I hate programming other people's systems. They usually haven't stopped to answer the simple question: are we solving the problem in the right way?

Most computer systems that ever get created for a company are CRUD systems. That means they can Create, Read, Update and Delete data. Think about it... how many companies know your name and address? They all want that exact same data. Think how hard it is when you move house, change address, to update all those companies to send their correspondance to the right place.

The thing about creating CRUD software, is that if you've done it once, you've done it the same as you're going to do a million times after that. They're all the same. Garbage in, garbage out. Ok, user interfaces have gotten prettier, and we now employ people specifically to work on User Experience (UX) but it's solving the same old problem in the same old way.

I specialised in something called Straight-Through Processing (STP). The idea that the processing of transactions should be fully automated, wherever possible. This at least means that you're not doing yet another CRUD user interface, and you're building elegant pure software solutions, not just trying to stop a halfwit user from doing something they're not supposed to in the system.

Software still gets boring and repetitive. Most of the software challenge is change management. If you can control the change so that the software is well versioned and releases are well managed, then everything gets much more stable. The amount of time actually spent programming is minimal. It's actually kicking arses and taking names that takes the time. Most corporate systems have been over-complexified by the cowboys and the have-a-go heros.

If I had an hour to spend writing an extra feature, or an hour to analyse some rats nest of a mess that nobody's owning, I'll go for the mess every time. Still, it's all thankless work though, and there is no novelty, no sense of achievement in doing something you've done a zillion times before.

Bitcoin and Blockchain really fascinated me, since 2011, when I read the famous paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Bitcoin has everything the frustrated programmer could possibly wish for. The original source code is in C++ for a start, which is just a joy to behold... the seemingly impenetrable world of templatised code, where the templates are a complete black art, developed into a style completely unique to each developer.

Algorithms are enticing little puzzles. The one-way hash is particularly interesting to anybody who likes the idea of being a codebreaker or hacker. Trying to find the weaknesses in encryption and hashing is a mathematical, formal logic and computer science challenge. I love thinking about how to reverse engineer a problem like that.

But it's brain-exhausting stuff, having to think about bit shifts, and the endian-ness of your numbers, and all the myriad complexities of a hardcore problem. I can't spend too long thinking about things before I start to worry I'm going to need to take a drill to my skull to try and relieve some pressure.

Using statistical analysis to reduce an important algorithm to an equation with known co-efficients, could make you rich and famous, at least amongst geeks. However, it's the challenge for your mind that's the reason why you'd tackle such a problem. The intellectual stimulation, the incurable curiosity.

Once you start thinking about Bitcoin though, it's hard to stop. It's hard to leave a problem that hasn't completely defeated you. When you know there are still things that you want to try, approaches that might work, it's like an addiction... you keep going back to the hard problem, again and again. Pandora's Box is open and you can't unsee the things you've seen.

Mining never really made me much money, but speculating on the cryptocurrency brought substantial rewards

Tags: #computing #career

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