Recently in life Category

There's a strange meme going round that today is the last "binary date" for a hundred years. I'm not sure where it came from but a couple of people have repeated it on Twitter over the last couple of days.

A binary date is one which is made up completely of ones and zeroes. So in order to find any we'll need to ignore the "2" in "2010" and assume that we're writing dates in the shorthand dd/mm/yy format - or your local variation thereof.

In that form we can easily agree that, yes, 11/01/10 is a binary date. And so was yesterday (10/01/10) and the 1st of January (01/01/10). But to suggest that there are no more for a hundred years is clearly nonsense. Anyone suggesting that is guilty of not giving the matter the smallest amount of thought.

There are still six more binary dates to come this year (01/10/10, 10/10/10, 11/10/10, 01/11/10, 10/11/10 and 11/11/10) and another nine to come next year (01/01/11, 10/01/11, 11/01/11, 01/10/11, 10/10/11, 11/10/11, 01/11/11, 10/11/11 and 11/11/11).

After 11th November next year, there will be no more binary dates until the year 2100.

If you're going to pass on memes, at least check them for accuracy first.

Round these parts the period between christmas and new year is a time for turning the house upside down and trying to get rid of most of the rubbish that we've accumulated over the previous twelve months. My part in that is often going through the piles of paperwork in the study, filing the stuff that needs to be filed and getting rid of the stuff that is no longer (if, indeed, it ever was) needed. If I have time I'll also engage in a spot of paperwork archaeology (do I really need all those credit card statements from 1998?)

This year I got deeper into cupboards and drawers that I have for several years. And I found some old stuff that brought back some memories. I particular, I found a green notebook that I was using in 1983.

In 1983 I was unemployed and living in Hackney. I had dropped out of my first attempt at a degree and I wouldn't start my second (ultimately successful) attempt until the following year. I had a lot of time on my hands.

So I started to draw a cartoon. About a tortoise. We actually had a pet tortoise at the time so I wrote cartoon strips based on his antics. Or, at least, the antics I thought he'd be getting up to given half a chance. These cartoons are all in the green notebook that I have just found.

I wanted an break from sorting and shredding paperwork, so I've started to scan in the cartoons in order to preserve them (notebooks don't last forever). And because the internet gives me a global audience, I've started to put them online.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Humphrey the Happy Hippy Tortoise. I'll be publishing the strips over the next few weeks. There's also a page with more background on the real Humphrey.

Randall Munroe has nothing to be worried about.

I know it's been very quiet round here, but I'm still here. I've just been off on holiday for a couple of weeks. I was cruising around the Baltic. There will be stories and photos arriving soon. I just need a couple of days to get a bit more organised.

Recently I realised that two seemingly completely different projects were, in fact, both facets of the same project. They both led me to putting more detail about my history into web sites and (once they are complete) this will mean that my life will become far better documented.

The first project started when I dug out an old box of photographs. I was relatively late into digital photography so I have huge numbers of photos which just linger in boxes and albums instead of being enjoyed on Flickr. Also in the box I found the negatives for most of the films so I decided to start getting the negatives scanned in and put on CDs (if anyone is interested, it looks like Boots are the cheapest place to get this done).

This scanning is still in progress, but when I got the first few CDs back I realised that there were lots of photos of holidays and that I only had the vaguest of ideas when some of these holidays took place. So over the last couple of weeks, I've done pretty much all I can to tie down the dates of all of the holidays I've taken in the last fifteen years. I've gone through old passports looking for stamps. I've searched for email confirmations of flight bookings. I've even gone through my invoicing records to see which days I didn't invoice clients for (an unexpected advantage of being a freelancer). As I've been going through this process, I've been adding the trips to my Dopplr account.

The project has expanded from just covering holidays. I've been to a lot of conferences in that time and I've also added those details to Dopplr. I don't think I'm very far from having a complete record of every conference and meeting that I've ever spoken at.

The other project which eventually led in the same direction was my discovery of Songkick. Songkick aims to produce a complete directory of gigs. Users can add details of gigs they attended and mark themselves as having been at gigs added by other people. Trying to track down the dates of obscure gigs you attended in the late 1980s turns out to be a surprisingly addictive pastime. I'm sure I'll never get everything into my account, but it's certainly fun trying. I don't even mind that the first gig I ever attended was supremely embarrassing.

Songkick currently has one obvious omission. It would be great if they would publish a users list of gigs (or "gigography" as they call it) as an iCal feed so that I could subscribe to it in Google Calendar. I'm sure that something like that will be added to the site soon.

There's an obvious crossover between these two projects of course. Some gigs (more usually, festivals) can also count as holidays. Every time I went to Glastonbury or the Cambridge Folk Festival, that's going to need to be listed in both Dopplr and Songkick.

Two interesting projects. Neither of them will ever be 100% complete, but it's fun trying to get as close as you can. Of course, they both appeal to the "High Fidelity" style list geek in me. If these tools had been available thirty years ago I would certainly have been using them. And that would have given me an incredibly rich set of data about how I spent my time. One that I'm now painfully trying to piece together a bit at a time.

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that you can't ever have enough data about your life. I'm now looking for new data sets that I could add to my life history.

The people at uSwitch saw yesterday's blog post and were rather pleased that I was so happy with their service. To show their thanks, they've written to me with an offer for my readers.

If you use this link to visit their site and change energy supplier before the end of June 2009, they will send you an Amazon voucher for £10. You'll also (obviously) need to give them a valid email address so they have somewhere to send the voucher.

I don't yet have a policy for promoting products on this site. Perhaps I should think about that if offers like this become more common. I should, however, point out firstly that I have no connection to uSwitch (I'm just a satisified customer) and secondly that I'm getting no payment for mentioning them again - the offer is just for my readers.

So, once again, here's the link to use. The offer is valid until the end of this month. Which gives you about two weeks to make use of it.

How do you buy your power? Or, more specifically, how do you decide which company to buy your power from?

Here's how I do it. Ever six months or so I go to uSwitch and spend five minutes researching who does the cheapest gas and electricity for our usage. If I find something that is much cheaper than our existing supplier then I'll change. Most of the time I can make the change over the internet by simply following a link from the uSwitch site. Most of the time the differences are so small that it's not worth changing.

One thing that I will never do is to sign on for a new power supplier from people who knock on my door and try to tell me a new supplier without giving me time to investigate their offers. Firstly, I think it's incredibly rude to disturb people whilst they are at home, but mostly it's the hard-sell tactics that I object to.

We had one last week. He was from npower, but they are all as bad. I noticed him as I was walking home, but realised that he was walking away from my house. When I got in, my wife said that he had knocked at the door but she had ignored him. But an hour or so later he came back. I answered the door and he immediately launched into his nonsense. Apparently, most of my neighbours had realised that he could save them money so they had all signed up. He didn't have price data for my current supplier but he knew that he could save me money. I tried to explain to him how uSwitch works, but it seemed to just confuse him.

In the end I told him that I refused to do business with any company who called on me uninvited as I considered it rude. He started to argue that it wasn't rude, but realised that he was wasting his time and retreated.

Ususally I just let these things go, but on this occasion I decided to take it further. Firstly I checked with Uswitch and, as I suspected, my supplier (Scottish Power in case you're interested) we still the cheaper than npower by about a tenner a year. Then I emailed npower customer services to complain about them sending out uninformed and unethical sales people.

Today I got a reply from them. They were sorry to hear that I felt their sales representative was attempting to mislead me. They were also sure that normally "the standard of service offered by our Sales Team is professional and of the highest standard". They also pointed out that if I sent them my address they would pass my details to their "Marketing Supression Team" which would stop me getting further visits.

That last item got me thinking. Of course, it'll be an improvement if I get no more sales visits from npower. But there are many other power companies who delight in trying to mis-sell their services in this way. The absense of the npower team will scarely be noticed. Wouldn't it be good if there was a industry-wide "Marketing Supression" list that all of the power companies signed up to. I can't be the only person who gets annoyed by this.

I have no idea how effective these sales calls are. It must work to some extent as it's a relatively sales method. I know those people won't be paid much (and most of it will be commission), but there are a lot of them. I'm surprised that people listen to their nonsense, and I worry that they are preying on people who don't have the presence of mind to think about what they are being told and therefore take it at face value. I suppose that if you're told that "most of your neighbours are switching" and you're not given a chance to check that out before signing, then some people will just accept it.

Until we can get an industry-wide marketing suppression list (or, better, banning this kind of selling) can any one recommend any good tactics for annoying these people?

And please, make use of uSwitch.

I know I'm about five years later than everyone else in discovering the joys of a GPS receiver, but I'm really enjoying having one in my G1.

Here's our Boxing Day afternoon stroll around Tooting Common. More details on the InstaMapper web site.

We saw parakeets. I've known there are wild parakeets on the common for years, but this is the first time I've seen them for myself.

Update: PJ points out that  the maximum speed is quite possibly inaccurate.

It's been a bit quiet round here for the last week or so. Sorry about that. I was busy in other areas.

I spent the last week in Copenhagen, speaking at YAPC::Europe. Over four days I gave three short talks and a full day training session. It good to catch up with a number of old friends. I'd never been to Copenhagen before, so there will be some photos appearing on Flickr before too long.

As always at these conferences, I get fired up about interesting projects in the Perl world. I think there were three things I really want to get involved in this year. The first is my Proud To Use Perl blog which is already up and running. The other two I'll talk more about as they become more concrete.

Like a number of the conference attendees I was staying in a cheap hotel near the central railway station. There are a number of similar hotels in that area. But it turns out that it's also a slightly dodgy area to stay in. There were a few sex shops on the same street as my hotel and usually as I was returning to the hotel there was someone on the street who was happy to offer me either sex or drugs.

We were also very close to the Tivoli Gardens. So on Friday evening, after the conference was over, After a couple of hours I found myself in the middle of a free rock concert (Fredag Rocks! apparently). There was a huge crowd watching an incredibly dodgy Danish band. They sounded to me a bit like a Danish version of INXS - which is, in my opinion, a really terrible thing to sound like. I left after a few numbers. Later investigation revealed that they were called Gnags and that they are "frequently referred to as one of the best live band in Danish rock history". I couldn't see it myself.

p.s. Oh, and I've upgraded the software running this blog to the latest version of Movable Type. There seem to be a few glitches. Please bear with me as I try to sort them out.

It's been a week of anniversaries. Wednesday was the tenth anniversary of the first London.pm meeting. And last night we had our tenth anniversary meeting. But for me personally, today is an even bigger anniversary. It was twenty years ago today that I started my first "real" job. I hope you won't be too bored if I spend a few paragraphs reflecting on my career so far.

My degree from South Bank Poly (remember polys?) was in computer studies. This was very much aimed at people who were going to work in large data processing departments. We studied COBOL and CODASYL databases. SQL and C were seen as the cutting edge technologies. Interestingly I spent my sandwich year working on PC product releases for IBM. The documentation for these was in an obscure format called SGML - the weirdest things turn out to be useful in the future.

So I left South Bank with my degree in computer studies and got a job working for a company called Learmonth and Burcheet Management Systems (LBMS). LBMS were big on structured development methodologies. They apparently had a big hand in the design of SSADM. They did consultancy and training, but they also had a CASE tool. That was where I came in. I was part of a team who was reimplementing their CASE tool. It was to be a Windows application (which in 1988 was a rather brave step to take). Over the next four years I became pretty proficient at Windows programming in C (Visual C++ wasn't around in those days). I also, probably more usefully, learnt a lot about data modelling and databases as that was the part of the tool which I worked on. LBMS not longer exists. They went out of business soon after structure methodologies and CASE tools went out of fashion.

I left them before that though. In 1992 I decided to move to pastures new. I got a job working for a company called Comtext. They specialised in communications tools like telex. I was there to give their tools a nice Windows front-end. I was only there for six months. By then I had a CompuServe account and I could tell that email was going to kill off their business. I don't know what happened to them. There's no evidence of them on the internet now.

Early in 1993 I got a job working with Walt Disney. Actually it was with Buena Vista Home Video - their home video group. We were building a system to report on European video sales. I got the job on the basis of my Windows and SQL experience, but whilst I was there I moved to working exclusively on Unix. We implemented our system in a number of European offices and as part of the project I spent a few months working in Madrid.

Unfortunately for Disney, the technologies they were using (Sybase, C, Unix) were exactly the set of skills that were becoming popular in the City of London. And the City was crying out for contractors with that skillset. So in April 1995 I set up Magnum Solutions and went off to start contracting in the City.

For four years I worked for various banks in the City doing Bank-type stuff. I was during this time that I picked up my knowledge of Perl. In fact, by 1999 I was getting work purely on the basis of my Perl expertise. I was getting a little bored by banking though so I decided to try working for dotcoms for a while. Actually, it took a while for the change to take place and I spent eighteen months alternating companies like QXL and Sportal with financial work.

2002 started badly. I spent all of 2001 working for a single client but the contract finished at the start of 2002 and the jobs market had collapsed. I spent five months out of work before taking a permanent job with Bibliotech (now known as Spider Networks). That didn't last long though. In November they went through a bit of a cash crisis and made a lot of staff redundant. Including me. Luckily the market seemed to have picked up a bit and I found a new contract within a week or so.

Following that contract, at the end of 2003 I made one of best connections that I've ever made when I spend a few months working on the Guardian web site. I've been able to return there a couple of times since.

2004 was another bad year. I was unable to find a contract to follow the Guardian so I ended up designing and building a new web site for Karma Download - a site for musicians to sell MP3s of their music. They didn't make any money and closed down a couple of years later. In May of that year I took another permanent job, working for Outcome Technologies. I lasted until the end of the year before the call of freelancing became too strong and I left them.

Since then, things have been going pretty well. I've bounced between three different clients. Two of them are media organisations and the other is a bank. So I'm getting plenty of variety in my work.

It's been an interesting twenty years. It hasn't gone in the way I planned it at all. I was a Windows programmer. And now I'm a reasonably well-known expert in a language that I hadn't even heard of when I started out.

I wonder what the next twenty years will bring. Retirement, with any luck.

We were at our usual weekly pub quiz last night. One of the questions was this:

Who is the current captain of the Starship Enterprise?

I have to confess being rather confused by this question. Given that Star Trek is set two hundred (or so - I'm not a big fan, I don't know the details) years in the future, how can the word "current" possibly have any meaning?

The answer that the questionmaster accepted as correct was Jean-Luc Picard. Is there any way that answer makes sense?

As I understand it, he was last seen as captain in Star Trek Nemesis in 2002. But Jonathan Archer was seen as captain (of a far earlier Enterprise) until 2005.

I hate it when quiz questions are illogical.