First of all, pop over and say hello to Mary, yet another new member of the ever-expanding WBC, of which more in a bit.

In an excellent post (and only her third!) Mary makes the point that so many people don't seem to know what they want to do in life, where they're going, what they're doing. They are worried that they don't even know what they want out of life. The thing that struck me about that post is that it assumes that there are people for whom this isn't true: that there are some lucky, clever, sorted people who know exactly what they want out of life, and have a pretty good idea how to get it. Some comments by some friends even indicate that some people believe I'm one of those people.

Let's get this straight: I am not one of those people. And nor is anybody else.

I remember the last time I felt like I had it all together and knew where my life was going. I was 14. I lived with my parents, totally under the padded but nevertheless iron thumb of my mother. I was going to go to school, try my very best -- and it was implicit in that statement that my very best would be considerably better than most other people's bests -- and do well. I would get a good place at university, doing a "proper" subject: science or maths of some kind. At university, I would meet a lovely, well-bred English girl with good legs and good looks. After a few years I would settle down with her, start a family, and bring the kids back to Trinidad at Christmas to meet their doting grandparents.

At 15, I realized I was gay. D'oh! Life turned upside down, world wrecked. Now what? I didn't have any idea, and this act of pulling the rug out from under me precipated a massive depression (and an awful lot of mediocre poetry). My glittering little life plan had shattered. And at this point in the story, I'm supposed to say: but then I had an epiphany of some sort, a cliché occurred to me, and I fought hard and got my life back -- and so should you! But that's not what happened. At 16 I realized my looks were never going to make me an actor, at 17 I realized I wasn't nearly as good at maths as I thought I was, at 18 I failed to get the grades I wanted at A level, and so on. Life is full of failures and demotivating discoveries of things that you are bad at.

But the thing to remember is that it's absolutely, exactly 100% like this for everyone. One of the most useful realisations I've ever had -- that epiphany at last, it was hiding somewhere -- is that all people are the same. People are stupid, often frightened, panicky animals, powered by the most basic motivations: fucking, feeding and sleeping as much as possible, in that order. The best model for a group of frightened humans is panicking mice, and there's a reason for that. We are all uncertain, all scared. We are all just making it up as we go along. And what makes me laugh is that we are all absolutely convinced that everyone else is cooler, calmer, more confident and more knowledgeable about the world than we are.

Maybe you already have some intense desire to do something, be somewhere, sleep with someone. Whatever. If that's your dream, then lucky you, go run after it. Me, I wanted to fuck around with computers. I didn't know what I wanted to do with computers. Until I was 12 -- 1993, when the rest of the world was getting to grips with CD-ROM games -- I hadn't even seen one, or touched one. I didn't have a clear idea of what they even looked like -- I was still expecting room-sized boxes with big reel-to-reel things. I clearly remember the huge surprise when I was led into the uber-cool mysterious "computer room" to discover that they were tiny little beige boxes. That still doesn't mean I knew what I wanted to do with them. I tried all sorts of stuff -- I wrote stories, I drew pictures, I played games. Nothing very much I couldn't have done without a computer, in fact. I heard about modems -- those babies sounded interesting. But I couldn't get one. So I continued fucking around, and never really lost interest. Then, in 1996, the Internet showed up, and I fell deeply, madly in love. This was the thing! This was what I'd wanted! This was the world, in a convenient package, delivered to my doorstep! Oh fuck yes! I made the Internet in turns my plaything, my lifeline, my home, my field of study, and my job. I was lucky.

But I didn't know that when I plugged in the box the first time. Computers just seemed interesting. It wasn't because I was a better type of person. It wasn't because I tried harder than anybody else. I didn't know what I was doing, I was just doing stuff. I did lots of other stuff you never hear about, because it didn't work out. I was a competitive swimmer, I took tennis lessons, I tried to learn to play the piano, I tried painting, I was in a choir, I rowed, sailed, fished, went camping, tried carpentry (failure) and plumbing (disastrous) and had a huge cactus collection at one point. None of these things became my life's calling. I tried things, and one of them turned out to be my thing. (Incidentally, I have a feeling that's how boyfriends -- another seemingly unattainable goal that the cool people seem to have -- work as well. You just bump into them one day. All your best efforts couldn't make it come any faster, or arrive any slower. It just happens one day. In my continuing singleness, I take heart in this fact.)

But, I hear you cry, some people are unemployed! Some people stay single all their lives! What if I'm one of those hard-luck bastards who will never know what their true calling is, never know true love? Dear god you're depressing me! Fuck off! (I hear you say)

And it's true. The world is full of people who haven't stumbled into glory yet. But the point is, it's not worth getting upset about. It's not under your control whether you'll find these amazingly great, lucky things. The best you can possibly hope to do is try things that might work. Plug in the box. Write the first chapter. Go to the party. Get in the boat. Take the low-paying job that seems interesting, or the high-paying boring job that will fund what you really want to do. There's no right way and no wrong way and the only mistake you can make is to not make a decision. If you just hang around in limbo, doing nothing, nothing will happen. You have to try it out, you have to fuck it up. Make a mess, clean it up.

Nobody knows where they're going, but you have to start walking to find out where you'll end up.

Listening to: Cat's in the Cradle by Ugly Kid Joe. A true classic (and oddly apropos for a post about wasted opportunities).

Computing (depending how you define the term) was invented mainly in English-speaking countries (although France, Germany and Hungary all have credible claims). The contenders for the construction of the "first modern computer" are England and the USA, and which actually came first depends on an even finer distinction in how you define a computer. The details of that debate are quite interesting, but irrelevant, since the result was the same: computers are English-speaking devices, right down to the core.

This created problems when computers spread over the entire world. Microsoft Windows performs the same function whether it is in London or in Bangladesh, but it is useless if its users cannot understand what it is saying. So programmers began having to translate programs from English to other languages. This turned out to be a huge pain, since programs have millions and millions of lines of code of which many tens of thousands can contain English, from the instructions in the settings menu down to every single little "OK" button (which is the "oui" button to a french user). And if your software is available in 50 languages, you have to do all that work 50 times. And many programs release updates, new versions or upgrades several times a year -- 3x50x10000 is hundreds of thousands of man-hours, spent just getting the same piece of software to do the same thing in a different language.

So programmers got together and sorted out a system that would simplify this process. Instead of the actual translation, they decided to invent a system which would allow you to build any program "translation-ready" so that later translation would be much easier. They called this process "internationalization" (although it took them a few tries to pronounce it).

Now, it's important to note that the people who made up this system were programmers, and not bureaucrats. Programmers are very methodical, logical and above all extremely lazy. If you're a good programmer, you want to convey the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of time (my habitual verbosity indicates that I am not a naturally good programmer). So stuck in a committee, forced to discuss internationalization, they soon realised that the word "internationalization" was extremely long and unwieldy, even though it only conveyed a single concept. So they searched for a shortcut.

Some of the people on that committee worked for DEC, a major computer manufacturer at that time, or had in the past. Once upon a time at DEC, an employee named Jan Scherpenhuizen was given an email account of S12n by a system administrator, since his name was too long to be an account name. This ridiculous method of abbreviation spread like wildfire in the geeky confines of a computer company, and became convention, essentially because geeks find it amusing to give things obscure names.

Thus was the term "I18n" born: that's "internationalization" with the middle 18 letters replaced by the number 18. A pain to pronounce (eye-one-ate-en? eye-ate-een-en?), but a four-syllable saving over in-ter-nat-shun-al-eye-zay-shun and a full 16-keystroke saving -- and that's important, since you have to type it probably thousands of times. But most importantly, completely impenetrable to an outsider who doesn't know the history of the term.

Because geeks find it funny.

(Since then, this form of abbreviation, know as a "numeronym", has been extended to a variety of related terms: Localization (l10n), Europeanization (e13n), Japanization (j10n), and Globalization (g11n), as well as unrelated but similarly unwieldy words (related to database technology) like canonicalization (c14n) and normalization (n11n).)

• Memeing around the world at mach 7, I give you Rock Paper Saddam, in case you haven't seen it already.
• More than 30 years late they're still sexist; can you imagine how racist and homophobic they must be? This reaffirms my long-standing desire to never, ever work for Investment Wankers.
• BBC News Online's photographer of the year competition could get very big indeed.
• Homophobia? What homophobia? In response to a gay couple being denied a room at a bed and breakfast, the Guardian surveys B&Bs across the nation and discovers even Tunbridge Wells likes homos these days.
• I quite like the infinite cat project.
• Omigod, this is, like, *so* funny. I give you Britney Spears' mission statement:

  Ohmigod, I'm gonna make a difference for the better too! I'm gonna be sexy again! I am! I'm gonna get my knee fixed - no, I'm gonna buy a new one - no, I'll buy a new leg and never have to let my fans, my ever-lovin' fans, down again. Then I'm gonna start going to the gym again for 18 hours a day, and find that body I had that looked like it sprang straight from the thigh of Jean-Claude Van Damme, and for the other six hours I'm gonna get me down to that special clinic in Arizona and have sexiness pumped into me like Botox into an ageing pop queen's forehead. "Fore you know it, I'm gonna be THE No1, worldwide wet dream again. I'm gonna sing like nobody's listening, dance like everybody's watching and love like I've never been married in an alcoholic stupor before. Oh yeah - and my momma and my manager say that through it all I'm going to cling like a limpet to the rock of my Baptist faith, which has always taught me that the best way to a place in God's heart is to make billions of dollars for them, preferably by tapping into the lucrative latent paedophile market. I sure do love you, guys! I just wanna fellate each and every one of you, and God willing we'll make it happen if my next album makes No1.

• Turn your iPod into a wireless jukebox with Pocketster. Hurrah!

Via eDan

• Wackiness: 20/100
• Rationality: 56/100
• Constructiveness: 80/100
• Leadership: 52/100

You are an SRCF -- Sober Rational Constructive Follower. This makes you a White House Staffer. You are a tremendous asset to any employer, cool under pressure, productive, and a great communicator. You feel the need to right wrongs, take up slack, mediate disputes and keep the peace. This comes from a secret fear that business can't go on without you--or worse, that it can.

If you have a weakness, it is your inability to say "no." While your peers respect you, they find it difficult to resist taking advantage of your positive attitude and eagerness to take on work. You depend on a good manager to keep you from sinking under the weight and burning out.

---

Unfortunately, complete bullshit. Anyone who was with me in my final year knows that cool under pressure is the last thing to describe me, and my eagerness to take on work is only my matched by my ability to prodcrastinate from ever doing them. I do require a good manager though; pity there are none of them. And the first paragraph is mainly right. Feel free to take it yourself.

I had a great weekend. Went on a boat with 450 gay men as part of OUT's Element 2 party, and followed by a 4am breakfast at Balan's cafe... met loads of cool new people, lots of fun. Am way too tired to blog properly, so here are two cut-and-pasted quiz results, which I thought were amusingly accurate:

How to make a Laurie Ingredients: 1 part pride 3 parts self-sufficiency 1 part energy Method: Add to a cocktail shaker and mix vigorously. Add a little emotion if desired!	How to make a Seldo Ingredients: 5 parts pride 5 parts silliness 3 parts instinct Method: Stir together in a glass tumbler with a salted rim. Serve with a slice of wisdom and a pinch of salt. Yum!
Username: Personality cocktail From Go-Quiz.com

If you happen to be a customer of freedom2surf, a reasonably priced, medium-sized broadband ISP in the UK, then you may, upon trying to set up your connection, encountered some difficulties. Two important things they don't tell you are:

1. You need to set up a dial-up connection, not any kind of broad-band connection. Yes, I know it's broadband, but that's not how it works. Don't spend 30 minutes working this out.
2. Once you've worked out that it's a dial-up connection, it will ask you for a number. "But it's broadband!" I hear you cry, "there is no number to dial!"
   Yes there is. That number is 0,38 including the bloody comma. Don't spend 2 and 1/2 hours working that out. Wasting that much time finding out something that should be fucking written down somewhere on their fucking website might get you seriously fucking annoyed if that were the case.

Much thanks to the good people of freedom2support.net (why can't companies ever make help sites worth half a damn? Why are community sites so much better?) And in particular this thread which, over torturously slow dial-up, eventually answered my question.

(How did I get the dial-up number? By Googling for it from my mobile phone, of course. Honestly, it was like firing an arrow with a thread to lift a rope to lift a chain. Nightmare.)

Dammit! All my various instances of MT have been attacked by comment-spammers. If you have a blog with me, check your comments: if you have several thousand, get in touch and I'll let you know where the anti-spam tools are.

Grrrrrr....

So, the US election is on Tuesday, November 2nd. With all the furore over postponing the elections in the event of a terrorist attack, I heard mention (on the BBC) that the rule for the date of the election is the first Tuesday of November. Then I read in the Economist, as a passing mention, that the rule is actually the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November -- an additional stipulation which excludes only the 1st of November. So why no election on the 1st of November? According to the Federal Election Commision (and they ought to know):

Why the first Tuesday after the first Monday? Lawmakers wanted to prevent election day from falling on the first of November for two reasons. November 1st is All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation for Roman Catholics. In addition, most merchants were in the habit of doing their books from the preceding month on the 1st. Congress was apparently worried that the economic success or failure of the previous month might influence the vote of the merchants.

So there you have it: big business and the religious right have been influencing politics in the US right from the very start.

This is fucking amazing. From his new album titled, excellently, Has Been. (Produced by Ben Folds!)

If you are ever on the London Underground and you hear a strange, obviously pre-recorded voice saying something along the lines of "Inspector Sands, please go to the operations room immediately", then be aware: what you are actually hearing is a coded message indicating to station staff that a fire alarm has been set off in one part of the station, but without panicking the stupid, sheep-like passengers. Many large public buildings such as stadia and theatres have similar messages, although the precise meaning of this one seems to depend on who you listen to.

Tom Coates has a great post up about what will be the next big functionality in musical devices. He talks about ever-growing bandwidth, and practically unlimited storage, but then fails to make a vital connection, which given the enormous popularity of on-network P2P seems obvious to me: real world P2P.

One of the really big selling points of the venerable cassette tape was that it allowed people to copy and shares tapes: record companies didn't like this functionality, but there was nothing they could do about it. The Next Big Thing(TM) as well as the Next Big Fight(RIAA) will be when somebody invents a device that not only stores loads of music/video/data and lets you carry it around, but lets you share it with other people, wirelessly and easily. They might be sharing it by a common wireless network, but much more interesting would be if they didn't require any external infrastructure to work: if two wiPods meet in the desert, they can share songs.

The possibilities of such a device are giddying. If your friend hears a song they like, they can beam it over from their player to yours, and you to your friends. It would be sharing between real-world peers rather than merely anonymous strangers. A new song in San Francisco would spread from person to person and be in New York by lunchtime, without a record company needing to get involved at all. These devices would be enormously popular because each user would not have to build their own music collection from scratch: the more of your friends have wiPods, the more songs are available to you the instant you get one. In such a situation finding 10,000 songs to fill your wiPod would become extremely easy, and 100,000 not too much of a stretch. Music would cease being a collection, and becomes a sort of shared universal resource.

Of course record companies would hate this, so the manufacturer would have to be one with no allegiance to the record industry: i.e. not Sony and not Apple. But I don't care who makes it: somebody will. I'm by no means the first to speculate about such a device (the infamous Mr. Orlowski for one).

So given that your music/media portable player is going to have enormous short-distance bandwidth, it's not difficult to imagine somebody implementing a mesh network on top of those capabilities: and suddenly you have massive ever-shifting data network wherever you have people with these devices -- a lot could be done with that, too, especially if you hooked them into the global 'net through gateways at the edges.

And once you have a device with huge storage, huge bandwidth, and networking capability, you only have to cram a little more processing power in it... and you have a portable, wireless PC. And it could be a VoIP phone, too. And the argument comes back to the already-ongoing convergence argument: it's not "how much functionality can we cram into one device" it's "what form factor do people want this functionality in?". You could have a combined camera/mp3 player/phone/PDA/pocketPC -- but the user interface would have to be either unusably deep or bewilderingly wide to support all that functionality in a single device.

So will the music player fold into the mobile phone, or will we always find it convenient to have them as a separate device? I'd probably get one -- I can't listen to music when I'm on the phone, or vice versa, so it seems a pretty nice combination. The other combinations seem less obvious: I often want to listen to music while I'm working on my portable PC, and I don't want to have to switch between tasks on the same device to skip to the next song while I'm typing. I don't want my audio-only music/phone lumbered down with an unnecessarily large display by building a video player into it either -- but fitting that video player into the already-large screen of my portable PC seems quite natural.

Even more of a pipe-dream is that of a totally modular system: you'd have a core device with storage and networking, extremely small, and then you'd have a variety of peripheral devices that would provide various external capabilities: wireless headphones and maybe a small remote-control to handle audio playback. A nice-sized fold-out screen for watching video, and a fold-out keyboard for when you want it to be a PC instead.

Would such a device ever happen? It certainly sounds great, but there's lots of reasons it might not happen: such a complicated device might be prohibitively expensive. It might always be cheaper to have separate devices for these functions. And no single vendor might be good enough at all that diverse functionality to produce all those peripherals: but that could be solved by producing an open standard, so any vendor's screen/keyboard/headphones could talk to any other vendor's core unit. There will always be restrictions on how much bandwidth it's feasible or cost-effective to implement into a portable device -- but the tablet PC is proving that full video, by far the most bandwidth-intensive application, is already amenable to wireless transmission to a portable device.

None of those objections sound fatal. Can you guys think of any other reason this might not happen? If not, will somebody build one already?