write.as/jonbeckett

I decided yesterday lunchtime that having the blog name appear in comments in place of my name was ever so slightly ridiculous, so have changed my name in all the relevant places that I could think of to my first name. Of course, having done that it sort of made sense to have a photo of me too – I briefly considered drawing a doodle of myself, but didn’t have enough time, so just went with a photo saved on my work computer. Late last night I found myself looking through blog themes. I wanted something that looked good with text posts, but always seemed to find fault in some aspect of the design. I think perhaps the closest was the “Scrawl” theme, only it had funky drop-caps on the first character of each post. I ended up returning to a theme I’ve used for perhaps the last year, but that only really works with photos.

Guess who spent his lunchtime today trawling through free stock photos to attach to recent posts? Yes – this idiot.

Attaching my name to the blog – even if only my first name – feels odd. As the title suggests, it’s kind of like lifting the periscope above water. I’m not sure if I’m “tempting fate” or “worrying about nothing”.

In early 1992 I saw Windows 3.0 for the first time. I had asked to use the laser printer of the IT department at West Oxfordshire College to print out a poem by Marilyn Monroe for an art project I was working on (yes, I studied art at college as well as computer science). The computer science lecturer I had come to know over previous two years ushered me excitedly into a supply room to show off the thing he and the other engineering lecturers had been playing with on the quiet. Sitting on an untidy desk with it’s innards exposed was a large beige metal box – an IBM PC clone. Illuminating the room on it’s hulking monitor was a brightly coloured screen with a number of icons listed across the bottom. One of them opened a word processor called “Write”, which I used to type my poem.

Within weeks I would be leaving college forever to begin my journey in the world of “work”, but I would soon find myself wandering back to find my lecturer for some advice. We were about to buy a PC at home – our first PC – and after reading everything we could get our hands on via the trade press, had an endless list of questions. Until this point, away from the network of 286s at college, I had been using an Atari ST at home – and had completed my computer science coursework on a hardware PC emulator called a “SuperCharger” that plugged into the Atari. I spent an entire summer’s earnings on it. It was meagre, but it allowed me to run MS-DOS 3.3, and Borland Turbo Pascal 4the language I had learned at college.

A few days after that visit to my old lecturer, myself and my father stood in Evesham Micros putting an order down on a 486DX 33. At the time, it was one step down from the fastest PC money could buy. It had a seemingly limitless 200Mb hard drive, a colossal 4Mb RAM, a seemingly ridiculously powerful “Diamond Stealth” graphics card, a rather grandly titled “Soundblaster Pro” soundcard, and came pre-loaded with not only MS-DOS 5, but also Windows 3.1.

It’s difficult to describe in today’s terms the magnitude of what we had bought. It cost nearly three thousand pounds (5k dollars). The same amount as a small car. It was one of the first generation of computer’s to be sold with a CD-ROM drive – a strange contraption involving a caddy that you put CDs in before inserting into the computer.

Back in those days computers and software still came with books. The book for MS-DOS 5 ran to about 400 pages, and almost unbelievably, I read it all. I spent nights and weekends teaching myself the intricacies of interrupts, addresses, memory managers, and the black art of placing device drivers into “high memory”. I became a kind of nerd god among everybody I knew that owned a PC – I was “the guy that can get the games to work”, and lost count of the number of evenings I spent at acquaintances houses writing AUTOEXEC and CONFIG files for them.

As ever, when people asked “how the hell did you do that?” when the game they had bought two weeks previosly appeared on the monitor, I would reply “I read the book”.

A year or so after buying the PC, the internet finally became a consumer service – first through the likes of Compuserve and AOL, and then through the first “Internet Service Providers”. I remember buying my first modem, and listening intently to the metallic screeching noises it made while handshaking with another computer at the end of the telephone line. I learned about discussion forums, bulletin boards, chat rooms, and file downloads.

Suddenly my world got a LOT bigger. Through the beige box in the back room at home I could communicate with people all over the world about any subject imaginable (and quite a few you might never imagine).

I can still remember the upgrade to Compuserve that added a mysterious application called “NCSA Mosaic”. It was slow, and clunky, but connected you to something called the “World Wide Web”. One of the first pages you were encouraged to visit was a hand curated directory of cool “web sites” to visit, called “Yahoo”. It was fascinating, but incredibly slow, primitive, and fragile that it remained a curiosity for the next year or two. Who could possibly have guessed the future back then?

I also remember bumping into an old friend from college on the bus a year or two later, and talking to him about the CD-ROM on the cover of the magazine I had just bought. The magazine had a photo of an American guy with long hair, and a student from Helsinki on the cover. They had built this thing called “GNU-Linux”, and apparently it was going to change everything.

I just spent the last four hours pouring over the programming I have been working on recently, after an “all up” test late yesterday went disastrously wrong. What started with me hunched over the keyboard muttering unintelligible nonsense turned into a small group of developers crouched around my screen, also muttering unintelligible nonsense. There was no bug. I had written one word wrong in the data I supplied to the programming, and the programming – being stupid – didn’t pick up on it. Neither did any of us that were picking the code to pieces.

I wonder how many years we will have to wait before computers can respond to our requests with “I see what you’re doing there, and I know what you meant – here, let me fix that for you”.

I guess half the problem is that I’m so used to making bone-headed mistakes while writing code that I almost expect the fault to lie in the programming. In this case I had written a perfect program – but instead of giving it a nice list of files to work on, I essentially just murmured “custard” in it’s general direction. Unfortunately, computers don’t know “custard” isn’t a sensible suggestion, so run with it.

I don’t own a car. I cycle to work each day, and travel by train when visiting far-flung client offices. The cycle route to work is only three miles each way, and can be done in anything from ten to fifteen minutes, depending on how energetic I’m feeling, and if the wind is favorable. I have been cycling pretty much the same route for fifteen years. The only variation occurred during the “foot and mouth” scare during the first year – which coincided with getting married. It sticks in my mind because part of my route was diverted for a couple of months – taking me over a sizeable hill twice a day. Those couple of months put an inch of muscle on each thigh and calf – so you can imagine how the fitting of my morning suit went for the wedding. I vaguely remember being a 34” waist, but wearing 38” trousers, folded hilariously under the waistcoat in order to get them over my legs.

A part of the journey involves turning across a busy road. A smaller road joins on the opposite side, so I invariably pull off the road into the road end, and wait for traffic to pass rather than stopping in the middle and being passed on both sides by cars doing forty miles an hour or more. I have sat on my bike in that road end for some minutes in the past – long enough to get bored and start counting the cars passing me. It doesn’t help that the road approaching town sweeps down the hill mentioned earlier, causing many drivers to treat it like turns two and three at Spa Francorchamps.

After fifteen years of sitting in that road end, counting sometimes twenty or thirty cars snaking down the hill and past me, tonight – for the first time – a car in the train slowed and flashed his headlights. I almost fell over in surprise, before scrabbling onto my pedals, and launching off across the road.

The first car to let me cross in fifteen years. That says something about the general thoughtlessness of drivers on the road, doesn’t it. I’ve read several times that car accidents invariably happen within a mile of home, on your way home. I can completely understand that – I’ve often thought about buying a helmet mounted camera to record the idiocy I often see around me. I imagine some people will react by stating that cyclists are a menace too – crossing red lights, cycling on the pavement, and so on – and yes – you are right too – there are assholes everywhere. The difference is though that those asshole cyclists aren’t in control of three tons of metal that could kill somebody in a few thoughtless seconds.

It’s horrible in some ways – that I naturally ride incredibly defensively in traffic. I expect drivers not only to not see me, but to actively ignore my existence. I am regularly cut up, or have drivers pull out in front of me – even though I wear a reflective coat and crash helmet. While approaching a line of cars rolling slowly towards a junction, if room allows I will sometimes pass in the center of the road – it never ceases to amaze me how many cars pull out on my approach, doing everything they can to stop me making any more progress than them.

Anyway – kudos to the driver that slowed for a few seconds this evening to let me pass – you were the first in fifteen years.

My phone has been sitting on the corner of my desk at work all day, quietly having a nervous breakdown. I installed the Flickr app on it, and told it to start automatically backing up every photo I’ve ever taken with the phone. I’ve also moved all of my old Instagram photos – a selection of which are now available to view. Years ago I used to curate all of the photos I uploaded to the internet. After a day out with the camera I would arrive home, upload the photos, caption them, tag them, and put them into albums. Ever since Google Photos arrived, I’ve let the machinery in the cloud do all that for me – resulting in not remembering what on earth I’ve taken, or how I might find it again.

I’m going to carry on using Instagram, but much more as a scrapbook that makes it easy to light up Twitter and Tumblr with photos – because who would have guessed that Instagram would be more reliable at posting photos than the Tumblr app ? Expect far more candid, idiotic, disposable photos of random moments throughout each day.

Oh, and just for the record, I’m not bothering with Snapchat, on account of it being the worst designed app in the known universe.

After getting in from work this evening, eating dinner, washing up, and clearing up the kitchen, I went searching on the internet to find out how much it might be to extend the stuff we can get on our TV to include “Game of Thrones”. I had been studiously avoiding spoilers all day at work – it began to seem like a famous episode of “The Likely Lads”, where they hid in the church to avoid learning the results of a football match. We finally sat down to watch it at 10pm – but not before watching a ten minute YouTube video doing a re-cap of the six seasons that precluded the latest goings-on. Here’s the thing – when you distill sixty-odd episodes of Game of Thrones down to ten minutes, the madness of the incestuous, twisting, bizarre storylines unfold like some kind of fractal madness.

Suddenly the ridiculous stories of the Old Testament make sense – “Robert, who begat Joffrey, who begat Tommen, who begat Cersei, who will be begotten by Mother of Dragons, First of Her Name, and the rest of her twenty eight titles that have to be read out whenever she enters a room. Daenerys Targaryen. Let’s call her Blondie. While all that is going on, somebody’s bastard son is going to be fighting zombies in scenes not unlike Shaun of the Dead. I’m guessing the Night’s Watch will be heading to The Winchester to decide their next course of action.

It’s better than any episode of Jerry Springer, or Jeremy Kyle, because quite often everybody’s clothes fall off, somebody gets burned alive, or somebody’s head gets squeezed so hard their eyes pop out.

Having waxed lyrical about Game of Thrones, this is where I admit to not having read it. I’m wondering about the value of reading it now though, because the little reading I have done about the books tells me that the stories in the TV show and books have diverged quite spectacularly. I’m having enough trouble admitting to myself that “Ready Player One” will be nothing like the book, without ruining Game of Thrones for myself.

Besides – I have “His Dark Materials” to read before “The Book of Dust” arrives.

It struck me this afternoon that my attempts to drive a wedge between the “professional” me that wanders around the country pretending to be clever, and the “real” me that reads comic books, watches cult movies, and eats far too much rubbish are essentially the same as buiding an online Bat Cave. Unfortunately I don’t have the seemingly infinite resources available to Bruce Wayne, so my Bat Cave requires a little imagination. This afternoon’s project involved deactivating my old Tumblr account. You might think this relatively easy – until you discover that between them, Yahoo and Tumblr have spectacularly broken the deactivation process. I lucked into finding a blog post informing me that they had accidentally left the old password reset page in place, even though it wasn’t used any more – which was enough for me to kill the account. Ten minutes later I had a new account – because some asshole has taken the account name I wanted.

Postscript – two weeks later, all of this is consigned to history. I signed up for Squarespace. Judge me all you like.

My body performed the miraculous trick of opening my eyes five minutes before the alarm this morning – at 5:55am. It was a good job it did, because I forgot the alarm is configured not to go off on the weekend. I wandered downstairs, knocking on Miss 16’s door en-route to the shower. We had a very long day ahead of us. Three quarters of an hour later we found ourselves walking through the deserted back streets of town towards the railway station, still rubbing sleep from our eyes, and wondering what we might find at HyperJapan. My other half had bought the tickets some time ago, and somehow arranged for me to go with Miss 16 instead of her. I still don’t quite know how that happened.

After a long, quiet train journey into Paddington we descended into the Underground, and ticked off the stations as we did half a lap of the circle line towards the Tower of London. Along the way one of the passengers a little way further down the car started to lose the plot – obviously on drugs of some kind – talking to himself about Leyton Orient being full of pedophiles and necrophiles. Thankfully he got off the train before anything untoward happened.

After climbing back into the London morning air at Tower Hill station, I checked Google Maps, and we set off on foot for the Tobacco Docks, and Hyper Japan. Until this point we had seen no sign at all that anything was going on, but finally started to see some of the most unusual people you might ever imagine walking in the same direction as us. Men in billowing cloaks with crazy hair, girls in fishnet tights and platform running shoes, and some of the most unlikely props imaginable. As we turned the corner towards the venue, we spotted a huge bearded guy in his mid 40s waiting to cross the road – dressed in full female cosplay attire. I looked at Miss 16 a little wide eyed, and we both grinned. So this was going to be for everybody – no matter who you are, what you believe, your sexual orientation, your age, your size, or anything else.

We had arrived at HyperJapan.

It’s hard to describe the labyrinthine building that took most of the day to learn the layout of. It was like a rabbit warren, stuffed with stores selling everything from Japanese food, to drink, dresses, cult toys, music, art, books, movies, and everything in-between. While wandering aimlessly from store to store, we became aware that something very loud was going on upstairs (there were two levels) – we went to investigate.

Oh. My. God. For me, the band we walked in on mid-set in the “Live” area were the highlight of the day. A J-Pop punk band from Tokyo with their own fashion line called “Broken Doll”. They oozed confidence and swagger, sounded like they had been speeded up, and had chip-tune backing added to speaker busting electric guitars. Floating above the cacophony of sound was the prettiest Japanese girl I had seen in quite some time – immaculately made up as a living breathing Anime character. They were loud, they were fast, they were talented, and they were awesome. Later in the day we crossed paths with them again, and bought a CD. The lead guitarist leapt up and shook my hand, saying “Arigato” repeatedly, with the biggest toothy smile.

We left the Broken Doll show kind of shell-shocked, and decided we really needed to get something to eat. It was now mid-morning, we had been up for over four hours, and we hadn’t eaten. Ten minutes later we lucked into a free table in the food hall, and sat down to eat some sushi, and try out “Bubble Tea”, which neither of us had tried before. It’s kind of hard to describe if you’ve never seen it – two fruit juices mixed together in the same container – one trapped in bubbles that you suck up a giant straw while drinking the surrounding liquid. As you chew them they burst in your mouth. We threw half of the drinks away after finishing the sushi, and continued exploring.

The next musical discovery was a singer song-writer performing solo in the middle of the hall on a small stage. We watched her from a balcony above, and joined in with her animated attempts to involve the crowd with various gestures as she belted out original J-Pop songs. While listening to her, Miss 16 spotted a Manga artist doing commissions in the background.

“Can I have a Manga drawing done of me?”

“I suppose so”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so happy. After ten minutes walking round in circles we eventually managed to get back downstairs to the same place where the artist was working, and enquired. A mobile phone photo was taken, money changed hands, and we were invited to return in an hour. We amused ourselves for that hour with window shopping, listening to even more “original” music, and taking photos of the various people attending the event in Cosplay costumes.

I was bowled over by the cosplayers – not so much by how wonderful they all looked, but by the amount of work that must have gone into some of the costumes. Only it wasn’t just the costumes – it was hair, makeup, and in some cases an obvious campaign for perhaps months to change their body shape to suit a character, much as movie actors do. Miss 16 was too bashful to ask about photos (even though she had her SLR camera with her), so I stepped in and asked all sorts of people if they would mind us taking their photo – and without exception received huge smiles, and agreement. The result? A camera full of photos of stunning girls, costumes, makeup, hair, shoes, and whatever else that will almost certainly form the basis for a return to HyperJapan for Miss 16 next time in full costume. Yes, I said next time. She’s already making plans.

We returned to the manga artist an hour later, just in time to see the finishing touches being put to our commission. I saw it first, and exclaimed “Oh my GOD!” – then Miss 16 saw the picture and was lost for words. She had asked for a “Chibi” style drawing – a children’s character (I learned all sorts of new words today), and the resulting drawing had captured her perfectly. We also realised pretty quickly (having seen others) that we had lucked into choosing the best artist in the place.

After more window shopping, and more agonising over what to spend money on, we ended up back in the live music performance area, watching a J-Pop girl band called “Moso Calibration”. Normally I would have covered my ears and run from the place screaming, but there was something about their high speed, optimistic “in your face” music that was hard to dislike. While they smashed their way through perhaps the most ear-worm-worthy track of the day, we took hundreds of photos of their antics on-stage. I’m not sure I can draw a parallel between them and any western bands, because we really have nothing like them. I looked across at Miss 16 in the middle of their set, and her face said it all – I imagine we’ll be buying their albums too at some point.

The last couple of hours of our stay at HyperJapan were spent spending money – or rather, I walked around behind Miss 16 while she tried to figure out what to spend the money I gave her on. Who knew it would be so hard? I guess we had no idea that we would be visiting essentially a pop-up shopping mall full of all things Japan.

Before leaving we lucked into walking through the lecture theatre as a presentation about “Hatsune Miku” was starting. If you’ve not heard of her, she is an animated character that performs live shows – much as Gorillaz did in the UK some years ago. I guess where it gets interesting is the accompanying instruments are Japanese taiko drums – not the usual thing you might hear in a hybrid J-Pop fusion. I had seen her on YouTube a year or so ago, so already knew about her – but it was interesting to find out more about the musicians and artists behind it all.

By mid afternoon our feet (and my wallet) were shouting “enough” at us – so we made our way back to the railway station, a quick meal at Wagamama, and then home. We both struggled to stay awake, and spent the journey looking at photos taken during the day. I can’t remember seeing Miss 16 so happy for quite some time. It would be unfair to put the whole day on her though – although I was obviously chaperoning her for the day, I will admit to loving the music and cosplayers more than anticipated. The food was pretty spectacular too. If money had been no object, I imagine we might have bought an awful lot more things home with us than photographs and memories.

I’ve written somewhere in the region of 1,700 lines of code this week for a client project. I’m doing it single-handed – responsible for design, coding, testing, and eventually deployment. It looked like a vertical cliff face yawning over me at the start of the week – now it feels like I’m a few feet from the top. I have no idea what’s up there of course – probably somebody waiting in a deck chair with a scruffy piece of paper detailing a change to the design in their hand. While this is all going on, I keep getting hassled with support calls for a project that was originally built by somebody that left. The entire thing is a colossal mess. I also have a conference call in a little over an hour to talk to a client about a project I wrote the design for so long ago that I’ve forgotten everything about it.

Anyway. What else has been going on?

After arriving home from work last night, I got informed that I was taking Miss 13 to the trophy evening for her local football club. We nearly didn’t make it, on account of Miss 13 doing that thing that teenage girls do, where she exploded violently and volubly in response to me asking her to “stop shouting” at the dinner table. What followed was a fifteen minute shouted rant that ran from room to room as my other half tried to defuse her. Peace was brokered on condition that she came back into the room, nobody said anything to her, and nobody laughed about what had just happened.

It was pretty funny though. From memory, the escalation went something like this:

“Can you turn it down a bit? You’re shouting again.”

“YOU’RE ALWAYS HAVING A GO AT ME! I HATE THIS FAMILY! I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANY OF YOU! AT ALL! AND PARTICULARLY YOU DAD! I WISH YOU WEREN’T MY DAD! I HATE YOU” (etc, etc, etc)

I imagine this is going to be the pattern for the next few years in our house, because we have a younger version of Miss Angry Pants coming along after that is potentially even more fiery.

Fifteen minutes later we all pretended nothing had happened, and I walked to the football club trophy evening with Miss 13 in absolute silence. I thought silence might be the safest option, seeing as any words from my mouth might cause another explosion.

The football club was interesting. We were among the last to arrive, and joined everybody else in the bar. A lady I had never seen before that was buying a round of drinks for everybody except me offered to buy me one. I politely declined, and waited my turn while making forgettable conversation about exploding children with the one or two parents I have come to know.

The format of the evening was pretty informal – one of the senior coaches stood at the front of the room, pulling trophies from a box for each team member, introducing each of them with a pre-amble that kept everybody guessing and laughing at the various stories he told about their exploits on the pitch over the past year.

You should have seen Miss 13’s face when she realised she was being introduced for the next trophy. “This girl arrived with us at the start of this season, and was perhaps the most important new member of the year. We had just lost our goalie, and she is a natural. She’s brave, always happy, and never misses a game”. The applause and cheering from the rest of the squad was thunderous – suddenly a little girl that didn’t think she had any friends in the team was having the roof lifted off by them.

I’ve only seen it happen once before – we went to an away match where I got enrolled as a linesman. The opposition team must have put seven goals past them – it was like a shooting gallery. As they all came off at full time I could see Miss 13 was close to tears, and so could the rest of the team – who did something quite unexpected and wonderful – they all ran to her and almost carried her off the pitch. I’ve never seen her smile like it before or since – at least, until last night.

Oh – and the lady buying drinks? Turns out she was also buying the entire team new kit and hoodies for next year. As it was announced she sat smiling to herself.

I have a very early start in the morning – heading into London on the train with Miss 16 to visit “Hyper Japan” – a festival of all things Japan at the Tobacco Dock in London. Until half an hour ago I had no idea where the Tobacco Dock was – we’ll be getting the underground as far as the Tower of London, and then walking the last half a mile. I have a feeling it’s going to be a ridiculously expensive day (unless the swag is free), but am hoping there will be lots of free activites to do – it sounds like there will be a huge number of live acts on the main stage. I’ve never seen a J-Pop band live before, so that’s going to be interesting, to say the least. I hear Nintendo will be there in force.

I’m guessing we’ll be eating sushi for lunch, and coming home with painted masks, J-Pop albums, Manga books, Anime movies, and a camera full of photos of cosplayers. Expect a *very *long post from me tomorrow evening.