Welcome to ned Productions

Monday 5th September 2011: 11.15am. Just finished one of my periodic upgrades of nedprod.com's implementation technologies to include the latest state-of-the-art improvements - as you may have noticed, commenting has finally been added to most but not all of the website (in particular, I haven't bothered upgrading pre-2000 bits of the website as much of it is basically tag soup). This accomplishes something that I have meant to get around to since, well, oh about ten years ago. I guess my internet hate group - who are happy to say horrible things about me and my loved ones on anonymous forums, but never to me personally by email - will be happy, because now they can anonymously say horrible things via the new commenting infrastructure. Joy for them I guess.

I won't bore you too much with the gruesome details of the technologies upgraded, but briefly I did a lot of work on the internals, cleaning up almost all the non validating XHTML by having everything run through an XML validator as a pre-flight check before uploading is permitted. I also added HTML5 semantic microdata markup from the vocabulary blessed by all the major search engines at schema.org by splicing the HTML5 microdata spec into the XHTML 1.0 one, and if you want to know a whole load more about how to do this yourself I've made my efforts available for public use here. The semantic data markup is pretty cool, for example this page contains eight diary postings and two product reviews. Now search engines know that too.

On other news, I failed the MRes module about which I was distinctly unhappy seeing as I studied and prepared well for it. I've decided to drop the MRes down to a PGCert and get out next summer - the course material is great, the assessment structure average, but the admin and customer service end of things is as awful as you'll experience anywhere in the world. For example, I sent two emails to exams and fees last week - both pretty important to reply to I'd say seeing as I'm worth over seven grand to them - and yet again, no replies whatsoever. I'm out of patience with them, so I'm taking my money elsewhere. Probably to take an undergraduate diploma in Pure Mathematics with the Open University actually, starting with this module in Pure Maths from this February onwards. Specifically I want to complete a course in Topology sometime in the next few years - I think it would do me good.

There have been a few other bits and pieces. An updated 2011 edition of my Freeing Growth Manifesto is nearly published - I got the print sample from the printers about a week ago, and even with the print and registration errors it was wonderful to see an actual, real-life, book written by me in my hands. I also have been doing some more stuff with the World Economics Association. And my sister's graduation from university is tomorrow, so congrats to her on achieving that. As for Oxyderkeia, it's been sitting on hold for about three weeks - Megan needed help with her final thesis for her Masters, and the weeks leading up to September is always busy with life maintenance stuff anyway. And I like to finish what I start where possible, so when I started upgrading nedprod I felt I ought to finish it before moving onto the next thing.

I guess that's that. Back to copy editing a book manuscript on Economics by a well known author I know. Be happy!

Thursday 11th August 2011: 6.05pm. Plenty of progress once again in my life since the last update, though still not much of it is yielding tangible results which is becoming a little disheartening. In May I received news that the two memory allocation academic articles I wrote last year had been rejected, so I fired them onto arxiv.org and one can find both of them either here on arXiv or via Google Scholar along with my other academic writing. In June I took my summer exams for my MRes degree in London, and while I haven't got back my grades yet I would assume that I received a C grade much as with all the coursework I have undertaken to date (I am unusually consistent in this MRes course - in Hull, St. Andrews and U.C.C. I had a huge variance in grades received ranging from bare passes up to firsts. Not so with this MRes, it's a C grade every time!). If you're interested in reading the coursework I submitted, it is - as always - here with all the other coursework I have ever written.

Weirdly, considering how I was moaning last entry about not being valued by tech recruiters in the middle of another IT bubble, I was separately approached by both Google and Amazon to join teams in their main office locations in Mountain View and Seattle respectively. In order to find out if they wanted to hire me specifically or just wanted a body to fill a slot, I opened the negotiations with Google by asking for their "20 percent time" to be cast-iron written into my contract, figuring that if every engineer gets it anyway it wouldn't be much to ask. It turns out that Google doesn't give its recruiters any scope to negotiate anything other than pay, and much worse there is no clear line of management authority for recruiters to refer contractual negotiations onto. The poor recruiter was basically left dangling by her line manager, much to her evident frustration. Highly unimpressive.

Google is a bit different from most IT companies in having roomfuls of professional recruiters find talent and then match them to departments according to a generic needs analysis. This contrasts with the other approach which is where team leaders specifically find talent to add to their personal team. The former has advantages in preventing team leaders from being distracted by needing to do recruitment and preventing leaders from hiring their friends and (theoretically) creating political factions which distract from organisational goals. The latter has advantages in that a team leader knows specifically what kinds of person (rather than vacant roles) can be added to their team where a HR bod simply cannot, it allows the leader to form a personal relationship with the candidate which makes getting actual talent past HR (which is remarkably good at filtering out extremes leaving just average to pass through) much easier, and of course a personal relationship enables much better team culture, work ethos and morale to be maintained over time. That last point, in particular, will keep an employee from being head hunted even when the competition are throwing money at team members (up to 30% over their existing salary according to surveys - after that even the most loyal team member will tend to get fidgety).

In short, I'd reckon that for most cases in a knowledge industry, having team leaders do their own recruitment is on balance superior for long term organisational success. It does come with much added pressure for middle-upper and upper management to contain empire building among the ranks. But I do understand where Google is coming from, even if in my opinion on average it will wreak havoc with employee morale and retention over time - after all, they designed this system having watched the latter system cause IBM and many other giants get into big trouble in the early 1990s by failing to reign in factionisation and politics-playing in their ranks.

Anyway, the Amazon approach fell into the latter category where a specific team leader approached me directly. And they were not only able to negotiate on contract, but were willing to do so. Unfortunately, we fell just short of a meeting of minds this time round so it didn't happen for this year's H1B visa intake. But in short, I was impressed. Impressed enough that I could easily see myself working for them in the near future. It's human relationships that make a knowledge industry work sustainably - Google don't seem to get this. They think it's about the technology and engineering great technology, and for that you need highly capable individuals. In truth, mediocre technology will sell just fine, it's actually about building, maintaining and retaining a superior implementation team none of whom need to be rockstar talent (though that helps). In this, Microsoft back when it was still not entirely dysfunctional, it truly proved the truth of team before technology, and interestingly it was when it began to believe it could do sweeping technology building in the form of WinFS et al it became managerially so dysfunctional that progress ceased. To be honest, big technology can't be sustainably achieved outside a team of six rockstars in my opinion. Our culture isn't mature enough to scale higher yet.

That brings me onto the third potential employer I could have had since May. Out of all those PhD applications I put in since Christmas, just one turned into an interview which was with a University of Wales joint venture with Tinopolis funded by UK government money researching business deployment of new e-Learning platforms i.e. right up my street, and one for which I ought to have been uniquely qualified to the exclusion of any other candidate given how few would be qualified in CompSci, Economics, Management and Education. Unfortunately, they autocratically set the interview date twice without consulting the applicants as to its suitability (both dates were bad for me) - already a bad sign, because in academic employment circles that's a strong hint that a role has been preselected by an internal candidate and when you see a university do that it's a strong hint to not waste your money and time attending the interview. Still, I really liked the role, and I really wanted it despite knowing it was almost certainly a waste of time. So I attended despite the murderous car + ferry + train journey to get there, and after spending €400 of my own money I knew within two minutes of the interview starting that I was wasting my time. I was spending my money as a formality to let them demonstrate they had performed due diligence in finding the "best" candidate. If they paid for the interview I'd just be annoyed, but when it's my money they're wasting I feel angry about it.

A similar thing happened at a recent interview for the Ignite business incubator programme for which I had the interview two weeks ago. This is a local initiative to try and better support early stage venture businesses because due to the recession, Ireland is losing a lot of its talent to overseas right now. In that it is highly laudable. However, within thirty seconds of the interview starting I realised that they thought I wasn't a local because I had been educated overseas, and god forbid I had worked in other places past Dublin and London - and despite having lived here since I was two, I quickly realised that I didn't stand a chance because only one person on the panel was even remotely interested and only one other bothered to try asking "bad cop" questions, and even then barely. A shame, not least because welfare have cut my dole by 20% because I started my own business (yeah they took two years to arrive at that decision) and had I entered the incubator programme it would have moved me onto dole plus €20 per week non-means tested which would be a big bump to my income. However, seeing as this waste of my time didn't cost me €400 I'm not complaining. You win some and you lose many.

What else have I been up to? Despite the interview with the University of Wales getting in the way, I managed to tele-present over the internet at the Institute of Education's Summer Doctoral Research Conference and you can see its slides here. The presentation was about the work I was about to do on Luxubrations Oxydrkeia , my super-secret R&D project, and which is making good progress since so I can now afford to be much less secret about it. Most of the hard stuff is nearly done, with the hard stuff being the interface layers with all major web browsers and with Microsoft Word. I've more or less finished the browser plugins for the web browsers - they were painful enough, even with modern web browsers being remarkably standards compliant nowadays so much so that the per-browser coding was actually quite minimal outside the specific browser plugin support code. The BIG problem is that browsers are extremely slow doing some operations at which other browsers are much faster, so for example capturing AJAX induced web page updates will kill one browser using one technique but will fly on another. I haven't gone nuts on the optimisation here - browsers change too quickly - but it's a very different problem from even two years ago when writing that Web 2.0 FIXatdl editor where browser bugs makes Web 2.0 programming very painful. Good!

As for the Microsoft Word plugin, well actually capturing change in the browsers was far easier because they expose what has changed. Believe it or not, there is no way of capturing change in Microsoft Word without hooking key and mouse presses and reading the entire document as XML, then running a diff routine over the last XML dump you had i.e. Word won't tell you what has exactly changed. In other words, it absolutely destroys performance for any substantial document, even on a beefy computer. I can get away with it for student-length essays, but I'm unhappy with the solution. I need to think of something more sane, perhaps by limiting the XML dumping to what's currently on the screen or something, or perhaps I could configure a fake change tracker and watch what it stores. Not ideal mind you, and it's annoying because obviously Word itself knows what was changed as it needs to determine what to repaint on the screen. It just doesn't expose that to the outside world (as far as I can tell).

Anyway, all changes get captured as XML diffs and fired via a JSON-RPC RESTful HTTP interface to a Python program which then pushes them into a local NoSQL database which is XML native. It then will at some near future point construct graphs linking changes into an audit trail. I had to substantially improve a JSON-RPC library for Javascript which I found on the internet to get this to work at a satisfactory speed, and I also had to do some .NET 4.0 surgery on Jayrock (the JSON library for .NET) to add dynamic RPC method invocation as amazingly Jayrock wants you to set up and tear down invocations as if one were programming in C rather than the dynamic object environment that .NET is. All these things obviously are not working on new Oxyderkeia features, hence being rather behind schedule, but hey this always happens in any cutting edge software development.

In fact, I took a major detour from Oxyderkeia last week by spending six days writing and releasing BEurtle, an issue tracking GUI plugin for the TortoiseXXX series of VCS GUI interfaces. It wasn't supposed to be six days - in fact, BEurtle took just three days to write and polish to (in my opinion) a high standard considering it is the first real program I have ever written in either C# or .NET ever. No, fully half the time writing BEurtle was spent slamming my head repeatedly against Windows Installer and WiX, a thin sanity wrapper around the mess which is Windows Installer. Windows Installer should never have been released to the public in the state it is in - it's unfinished quite frankly. It's not even at an alpha release stage it's so unfinished. I don't disagree it isn't capable, nor that it isn't a valid solution to the historical problem of doing Windows installers right, it's just that it's less than a quarter completed. It also - for some unfathomable reason - has its own (highly inferior) GUI system and it's own (highly incapable) scripting system, when as far as I can tell they should have used .NET as the GUI and perhaps a reduced subset of VBScript as the sandboxed scripting language (I'm no fan of VB, but it was already there and easily repurposed). That would have been a vastly superior - and quite frankly, much easier to implement for everybody involved - solution. While you're at it, clone the RPM or APT package system used by Linux. Hell, even Python's package system beats the pants off this mess on Windows.

Anyway, I put myself through that agony because believe it or not, WiX is the only sane, non-obscenely expensive way of generating MSI files which are in any way more complex than installing a few files into a folder - and while WiX is tough to work with, it's far more sane than the alternative. I figured I'd need to master the technology anyway for Oxyderkeia's release because I want to deploy Oxyderkeia as a self-deploying, self-updating, delta-driven, web based installer with modular parts using ClickOnce, DDay or preferably WiX ClickThrough if they ever get around to releasing a working implementation. And for that, on Windows at least, there isn't a massive amount of choice without paying obscene fees - even the venerable NSIS isn't quite up to self-healing delta-driven self-updating, though it's still much superior to Windows Installer in terms of ease of writing against it.

So, so far so good. The native XML NoSQL database is quite fun - as a little exercise, I hacked together a python script which takes this website which is a collection of technologies and HTML standards from 1998 onwards, sanitises them into XHTML, and stuffs them into the native XML database. You can then execute XQuery operations against them - XQuery is to a native XML database as SQL is to a traditional database. For example:

xquery declare namespace xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";
db:open('database')//xhtml:div[@class='diaryentry']

This looks rather like good old XPath, and indeed XPath is a subset of XQuery. Here one asks for all <div> elements with a class attribute of "diaryentry" from all documents i.e. the same thing as the Atom syndication feed supplied by this site. This returns 412Kb of XHTML and some 54 items in about 200ms on a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom - hugely slower than a traditional database, and far too slow to backend a website for example, but plenty fast enough for Oxyderkeia where I think even three seconds would be okay for many operations. Most of Oxyderkeia is asynchronous, mainly for scalability across millions of simultaneous users, so you shouldn't notice your web browsing ever slowing down even if it's pushing megabytes of data around databases in the background - well, rather it's as fast as it can be made, and it can't be improved except by moving less data around. And we won't know what to thin out until we know what isn't important!

So there we go. Not a bad three months, and a good summer so far. Next entry I almost certainly will talk about M2M clothing because itailor.com very kindly offered me a substantial discount on a M2M suit from them after my favourable review of their shirts below. So, till next time, be happy!

Wednesday 18th May 2011: 9.50pm. Last entry I mentioned that I was going to review some "custom" or "bespoke" clothing which really is "Made to Measure", or "MTM" clothing because custom/bespoke is when the tailor performs multiple fittings on you personally (and of course charges for it). I actually got into the idea because of the lack of affordable quality shirts for potential work/interviews, and because the great trouble with my body shape is that I'm still fairly slim and all the reasonably priced shirts you see in the stores are way, way too baggy for me. Now, if you're willing to go past €50 a shirt you can get a "Euro Slim Fit", and if you're willing to enter the €80 price range you can get a decent fitting shirt made from quality material that looks good. Anything less has shoddy quality, or doesn't fit with folds of excess material, or more usually is both. Another thing which you can never find is a shirt with a decent length, they're too short so they keep coming out of your trousers during the day which makes you look like you're a teenager still in school or something.

Yeah, as you might be able to tell, getting decent white work shirts have irritated me for years ...

Here's another thing which irritates me: ties, especially when made of silk, have the annoying tendency of working themselves loose over the day unless you do up the knot so tight that you crush and wrinkle the material which does not bode well for its longevity and kinda wastes the money you spend on them. Thankfully, this is a well known problem - what you do is to get a collar with a tie hold ("tab collar"). This consists of a fold of material (sometimes a pin) which you clip under the tie and which holds it in place right throughout a full day of movement which is great and solves the problem nicely. Unfortunately, getting a shirt with a euro slim fit, decent manufacturing AND a tie holding collar, well best I could find at that time was Savile Row and they charge £60 a shirt (though in fairness, this includes delivery) [That was last October/November. Typically, now they are charging £20, and I see all their competitors have similarly halved their prices too. Maybe the factory direct MTM websites are forcing them to compete?]

iTailor Made to Measure (MTM) shirts

Anyway, in trying to find a more affordable alternative I found itailor.com which is one of many places on the internet which delivers straight from the factory i.e. cuts out the importer, distributor and the shop you buy it in. This reduces the price to just over £20 as they do charge delivery in addition to the front quoted price. Moreover, you get to choose exactly what you want including precise dimensions, thread and material colouring, detail, collars, cuffs and so on. If you want a longer shirt, no problem. If you want a monogram on the shirt, also no problem. itailor.com I believe are based in Thailand where a lot of the clothes sold by places like Savile Row are made to order anyway.

So far so good! So I get Megan to take my measurements according to the pretty good instructions on their site and order a single test shirt. They usefully send emails telling you when it's being made, when it's dispatched and so on - good! About six weeks after dispatch it arrives, and it looks as you can see on the right. That was literally straight out of the packet, as you can surely tell as it hasn't been ironed.

So what do I think of the result? Below are how the shirt looks from the front, side and back. As you can see, I took french cuffs and pleats along the back.

So, big difference then - the shirt actually fits me around the middle. It's unfortunate it isn't ironed and I'm not wearing a proper pair of pants because it definitely looks pretty good too - and considerably better than your typical white dress shirt.

And what about the quality? If you click on the profile of the cuff on the left you should see the material up close. It's a sort of denim like weave, except that the lines are much finer than with denim. Certainly feels strong, if a little on the thick side, and appears to me like it ought to wear well. Wrinkle-wise, it comes out real nice from a hot iron, but it certainly wrinkles around the arm and elbows during the day.

As you can see, the embroidered initials are rather an ostentatious size which apparently is the norm for the domestic market in Thailand. I'd strongly recommend you use the mildest colour for the thread that they offer - on the left I used lightly grey, and that isn't too obvious. With the second batch I used dark blue, and they're very obvious - and I'd say too much so for Western tastes where we'd be thinking two millimetres high or so rather than the best part of a centimetre.

In terms of the cuff and collar material, the first shirt I got appeared to have no bonding at (i.e. it wasn't stiffer around the cuffs and collar, it was just two unglued bits of cloth). Being pleased with the first shirt, I ordered another four to make up a full week of work shirts. The second batch were identical to the first apart from some minor changes to the dimensions and the blue threaded initials - however, these were bonded at the cuffs and collar. Whether the bonding makes much difference to the look I don't know - it certainly helps when tying the tie anyway, and for that alone when you're half asleep in the morning it's worth it.

So, me personally, I'm pleased with them. Definitely the best shirt I've ever owned at any price, and I'd recommend itailor.com to others. However, considering that Savile Row will now do you one of theirs for the same price, and the six week wait for delivery from itailor.com, it's a much tougher choice. On balance, especially given the superb glove-like fit, I'd actually plump for itailor.com over Savile Row, though if I thought that I might gain weight in the next few years I would choose differently.

The next thing I tried was a MTM suit, this time from India. That didn't go so well, but I'll leave that to the next entry. Be happy!

Wednesday 27th April 2011: 1.26am. My, my, twas five months since the previous entry last time and this time it's like ... is it nearly seven months? Doesn't time just fly! What on earth could I have been up to for seven months? Didn't even bother with my traditional January birthday review of the past year ... I did think of it at the time, but I couldn't really think of much to say about 2010. It was the year that wasn't, and I can't say much more about it than that other than it was exactly what the Doctor ordered as far as my health and internal well being is concerned. If my life was fairly boring before I went to St. Andrews, and St. Andrews was like hyper activity on steroids with a whole load of amphetamines and cocaine thrown on top for extra speed, it certainly is only right and proper that life should be pretty deadly boring right now so equilibrium can become restored. But time just keeps passing, so much so that one is just getting older and older and one increasingly worries about going nowhere ... one cannot save human civilisation when no one knows you exist and certainly takes absolutely no notice of oneself whatsoever.

I can't think of much to report between October and Christmas 2010 - I mainly tipped away on my third Masters degree with the IoE which was consistently great all the way through until the UoL silently booted me out after the first module (I have since got myself readmitted, god damn it are the admin in UoL more useless than a waterproof teabag). Unfortunately, I also got booted out of the PGCert teaching qualification due to insufficient teaching hours, so instead I quickly signed up for a distance online UK NQF Level 5 Cert in the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) which I'm about half way through. That certificate has been surprisingly tough to do - not just that the assignments are hard enough, but also that it's very hard to make oneself sit down and just do it, so it's a bit like having teeth pulled. Still, I'll get there eventually, and it's definitely been worth the money so far (see my guide on choosing a distance TESOL provider!)

Just after Christmas myself and Megan took a very short break abroad - we did a whistle stop visit to Brussels to see Natasja also seeing Ghent and Antwerp, and got a day or so just the two of us in Bruges where we had a surprising amount of fun especially with the triple Belgian beer. We then whisked through Madrid staying with Ruth in her very impressive new flat and before one would know it one was back in Ireland and our holiday was over. Despite sleeping in friends' houses rather than hotels, it cost us €1400 which is some holiday considering how incredibly short it was. Still, I saw a whole load of people I haven't seen in many years. It was interesting to see how they had aged, how some had become bitter and some had not, and where they had ended up - or rather - found themselves to be in the majority of cases.

Coming back from this holiday myself and Megan suddenly found our boring little life here in Cork not so half bad. Here we might be too poor to do much, but we do have free time, we choose what we do for the most part and we have actively chosen to be doing what we're doing. Most of the people we met have had none of those luxuries - generally, but not universally, one had to choose between income and happiness. In that, certainly, we fit the trend precisely - we have not found that rare elixir of wealth and happiness as yet either. Still working on that one!

At the end of January I started teaching French undergraduate Business students from IDRAC Lyon on their semester abroad to learn English, and for the next three months that "part time" job consumed pretty much my life. Because of the necessities of squeezing parts of a critical (i.e. Masters level) Business syllabus into fifteen hour weeks, and with the language limitation problem especially at the start, I found I had to wake at 4am to prepare the teaching materials as I was plainly just too zonked after teaching four hours each day (I have placed these teaching materials online here). Certainly at the start it was tough going, but after a while I figured out a handle on the class and I began to experiment by performing some action research on teaching the first half of Carol Springer's experimental Critical Thinking Business Scenario syllabus and see what happened. I have to admit, I was rather surprised with myself on how well I did actually - certainly the students seemed pleased, and they did an awful lot better on Springer's syllabus than the students she reported on in her 2004 study. I'm aiming to write the results of this mini-research up into an academic paper actually.

So that brings us up to two weeks ago now, much of the time since when I have spent doing all the miscellany I shelved during the teaching (I am not a good multitasker!). During the teaching I did manage to get in an attendance to the ISO C1X committee meeting in London in March to argue for my N1527 latency reducing malloc proposal, and while there I combined it with having dinner with two friends I hadn't seen since Hull days along with doing some market research on a new business idea I have had which is (for now) a secret R&D project provisionally entitled Luxubrations Oxyderkés (really a classic Latin-Greek combo Lucubrations Οξυδερκές) which I hope will be worth US$1bn a year within five years.

This is yet another idea from my book Freeing Growth actually. I originally tried a Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP) analysis of organisational behaviour with Prof. Anilla of Helsinki University as supervisor, but that failed to get any interest and therefore funding so since around August I had been pushing a different idea from my book around various Economics PhD programmes since October - one developing non-conventional monetary instruments as a superior and long term sustainable method of valuing capital - but none have bit unfortunately with universal rejections all round due to the supervisors claiming themselves insufficiently competent to supervise such a thesis (sigh! There are no risk takers left in academia nowadays!). So having tried my best with that one, by mid-March I reluctantly decided to give up on attempting to obtain doctoral funding altogether. Which is a real shame in my opinion, I'm a great researcher with grades in applied research to prove it, but the academic system doesn't encourage game changers at all, especially so since the 1970s - indeed here's yet another very recent article by someone eminent about how the PhD system is going to implode sooner rather than later, this time published in Nature of all things and that follows on from a recent article in The Economist and several books from eminent academics which blast what the doctoral model has become in Western academia.

On top of the PhD applications, I have been applying furiously for any kind of teaching or research post for which I think I might make it past shortlisting - perhaps a hundred and fifty job applications in total, and each of these require their own separate forms to be filled in and their statements written specially for them which can easily consume entire working days. To date, I have obtained not even a single interview which clearly shows I am wasting my time, so, for the past month or so, I tried applying to various multinational companies and once again, to date not even a reply.

One kinds wonders if my email system is working, but every test I've run on it works fine and additionally I receive plenty of email each day, not least concerning the high end Android phones I am currently selling at a loss (which is an arse!). That suggests email is indeed working, so basically neither the universities nor the multinationals are at all interested - even at an international level - which rather leaves one in a bind. After all, I do have several years of industry experience as well as two undergraduate degrees and one and a half postgraduate degrees. You would have thought me rather desirable as a highly skilled and experienced employee with a very ample set of easily googleable evidence proving it so, especially given the repeated articles recently in The Economist about the bidding war going on in the IT industry for "talent" which apparently is scarcer than hen's teeth,  but apparently I am no longer rated as talent. Strange how things can change - I used to have to fend IT recruiters off with sticks, most recently Google itself in 2008, but I guess as the IT bubble reinflates I look old and past it nowadays ...

Yet in fact that couldn't be further from the truth. Thanks to plenty of rest, I feel more on my game this past year than at any stage since my second year of St. Andrews in 2005/2006. Additionally I have recently massively expanded and modernised my technological skill set as is very obvious from recent additions to my CV, so in addition to a whole load of business and research skills and I have a whole load of technological capability too. I guess they dislike none of this experience being in a paid context, but I think it's more likely that I'm looking a bit too old and too diversely educated to fit easily into some recruiter's mental map of what they're looking for. And besides, after all I could either be making it all up or be no good at putting any of this into practice, and even one alarm bell does drive away HR types much like plague ...

Anyway, I'd like to get having kiddies and getting married sooner rather than later, and with a sufficient amount of money to give them half a chance in a world most of which shortly is going to be starving, so I had been looking for a new business idea for the past year - something to tip away at which could generate billions of euro per year and appear so essential to the future of human civilisation that I and my family will be protected when the inevitable culling begins, or even better that I might finally be able to resource the development and deployment of Tn into its fullest form - as a new human written and spoken language which enables orders of productivity improvement, thus saving human civilisation from itself. And hence, after much thought, reflection and market research, I formulated Luxubrations Oxyderkés as my billion dollar ticket to getting "started" with my life. Much more on that with hopefully working software coming around September 2011 ... I'm going to need me a whole load of alpha testers anyway as this software needs to scale with data quantity very rapidly, so right now I'm teaching myself cloud deployment technologies. It should scale happily across Amazon's and Google's clouds anyway, in fact I'll be using a python library which is agnostic about the cloud provider used so it makes little difference.

So, all in all so far so good. I ain't dead nor suicidally depressed from lack of life purpose quite yet anyway, and Megan is too busy with her MEd which finishes this summer to complain or even think about her lot too much. I'd daresay after the summer she'll get right fidgety though, and who'd blame her - we've been here in Cork now for nearly three years, hardly an insubstantial time, and we're getting so over qualified that why we aren't "top talent" yet is beyond both of us.

Anyway, it's nearly 4am, so I really ought to be off to bed. In May the thirteenth birthday of this virtual diary will occur, I might post some photos of some "Made to Measure" clothes I had made for myself recently - they may be cheap for what they are, but results can be a little hit and miss trust me. Anyway more on that hopefully in a few weeks time. Until then, be happy!

Monday 4th October 2010: 3.30pm. A simply stunning five month hiatus later, here's a new entry! It has to be admitted I never thought I'd see the day in the past twelve years that I'd leave more than two months pass between entries, but there you go. Looking back, I don't think it was deliberate per se, more that I just didn't think of it at all until late August - already an unprecedented three month gap - which must mean that the intervening months must have been both busy and boring. Then September passed rather quicker than I thought it would, and suddenly it's already now. My, at this rate I'll be an old man soon!

So, going back five months, well what happened after the last entry was that the user mode page allocator I was writing of course turned out to be far trickier and harder than I had originally estimated. I built in something like a 50% margin for overruns during the quote, but I ended up overrunning by I think it was 115% or something. Either way, I pulled some serious hours towards the end of May and I just scraped home with project delivery three days late unfortunately. Still, better slightly delayed than late.

Such were the impressive benchmarks coming back from the wee beastie though that it seemed a good idea that I ought to write up the method as an academic research paper and submit it for publication. Firstly though during June I packaged up the bitwise tries library which I had developed for the contract and published it as its own library called - unoriginally - nedtries. nedtries provides a traditional C macro interface, but when used as C in C++ it silently uses a C++ implementation instead which is far easier to debug. I also added a nasty STL interfaced nedtries psuedo-container which gives std::unordered_map<> a good run for its money, and in general nedtries kicks red-black trees hard and is little worse than hash tables. nedtries, much to my amazement, has proved very popular with copies flying off the virtual shelf as it were. And, rather more suspiciously, no bug reports or emails of complaint yet.

Moving into July I did lots of various mundane but time consuming things like paperwork and gardening, but beginning the academic research paper from about mid-July onwards. Knowing very little indeed about the literature in computer science, I embarked on a pretty steep learning curve for the next six weeks with much time spent reading academic papers on esoteric compsci theory and after several complete rewrites I ended up with a draft paper I'm fairly pleased with and hopefully should pass peer review muster when the call for papers goes out for the International Symposium on Memory Management 2011. It was also the first time I'd used LaTeX believe it or not, and I was glad to have finally got round to learning - and I'd even say mastering - that.

So, suddenly it was now September, and I knew that in just one month I'd be starting two distance courses. Oh yeah that's right, last time I mentioned any of this it was the case that I might be taking an MRes with the University of London. Well, to that I added a PGCert in Developing Professional Practice in Higher Education with the University of Wales - this being the non-mandatory teaching qualification for third level educators and being very similar to the PGDE which secondary school teachers must obtain before being allowed to teach in Britain and Ireland, so in terms of credits I'd be taking a full time Masters course though thankfully distance education means no boring lectures and being able to avoid having to deal with ignorant muppets who love wasting everyone else's time talking crap in tutorials. Anyway, I wanted to try launching an improvement to the standard malloc(), realloc() and free() et al API in the ISO C language standard, solicit public feedback and submit the proposal to the C1X standards committee before my courses began - this I achieved, and you can find the single-purpose site at http://mallocv2.wordpress.com/.

During September myself and Megan had the wedding of a childhood friend of mine in the South of France - which was lovely, but extremely stressful and expensive and I still haven't healed up my "stress indicator" mouth ulcer which reopened itself at that time. The following weekend we headed to Edinburgh to visit people and I stayed in St. Andrews on the first Sunday night of their Fresher's week. Returning to St. Andrews was an oddly pleasant experience - my prior visit in May 2009 had been while I was in U.C.C., and my hatred of that place had left me cold to any university at that point I think. This time round St. Andrews, and its crazy inhibition-altering perception-bending bubble, felt refreshing and inspiring. The streets thronged with non-Europeans as their non-EU intake has been clearly seen double digit growth, and there were far fewer very young faces which suggests that many more postgraduates attend than before. Where I slept the night used to be undergraduate accommodation while I was there, now it is entirely postgraduate. And judging by the accents and patterns of speech, there were, if it can believed possible, a greater preponderance of the children of the world's ruling elites than even when I studied there - it's just that the children now come from both further to the West and to the East than before.

I certainly enjoyed having conversations with total random strangers and learning things about them - you can do that with ease in the bubble of St. Andrews, and you can't in most of the industrialised world including here in Cork because people are scared of strangers and are too busy to talk anyway. I miss it to be honest. I miss it a lot.

So, for the past week or so as the MRes has got started I have begun to delve into my fourth academic specialisation: Education. So far, there is much to like about the distance Masters in Social Research Methods with the University of London International system. Unlike its equivalent in the Open University, this course does NOT spoon feed you which I very much like. You get the latest edition of the famous textbook by Cohen & Manion for all Research Methods in Education courses rather than the OU's proprietary spoon feeding workbooks and readers, a set of dense detailed notes per unit (which would normally correspond to a lecture) and a couple of DVDs containing videos of lectures given at the UoL's Institute of Education, which is by far the leading place for Educational Research in Britain and is one of the top in Europe. They hold online tutorials via Elluminate which is pretty standard nowadays, and there are a sequence of ungraded group activities held on discussion forums which are intended to set the pacing for the study and provide a certain amount of social networking and interaction. The students are very international - in fact, judging by the distribution of home countries of those in my class it seems to me like the British Empire is still very much in place today. Also, the students are definitely from the professional elites of their home countries - I guess given the cost of fees relative to average developing world income this would be unavoidable.

While my experiences with the IoE have been great so far, what was seriously not good is the Admissions section of the University of London. Not only did they supply me with my stuff ten days late, they also failed to ever answer emails asking what the hell is going on, they failed to provide payment receipts despite being asked on several occasions (and I think it's a legal requirement) and when they did send me my stuff it was missing half its items. I however have come off well compared to some of the other students on the course, and it makes one wonder if we still don't have more students still to arrive who didn't get their login info sent to them but they did get everything else. Given that the course costs a cool £7000, I find such a shoddy level of customer service for a quantity of money with which you could buy a really nice second hand car appalling. In short, the IoE are great but Admissions over there at UoL is incompetent at best and negligent at worst. Once you're in you can generally forget about them, though I shudder to think of when I next have to pay fees or follow up on my missing stuff .

Next week I'll be starting with the University of Wales. Admissions with them has been an absolute dream ... not only did they speedily process my application despite being several days after the closing date, they have continuously kept me up to date with what has been going on and they have never taken longer than a day to reply to emails. Indeed, just a few hours ago I received a phone call telling me about starting next week - they rang because apparently they didn't have my email on record (despite that I know they definitely have it). But what a difference!

So, all in all so far so good! It has, as I said at the start, been a busy but entirely uneventful five months. And it has been a five months which I very easily summarised almost completely in this relatively short diary entry, so I guess my excuse for not writing an entry sooner kinda holds fast. Anyway, no matter, time to go do other stuff given that it is nearly 5pm now. Be happy!

Wednesday 5th May 2010: 5.00pm. Rather like in the last entry, the last three months feel more like six! Which I suppose is probably a good thing in a way, but I do feel quite tired-in-a-way-sleep-can't-cure sort of way. Right now I am on a three day break from working on the extended Applied Research Associates contract in order to catch up on all the many, many things that need doing (writing this entry being one of them), and I must admit to looking forward to contract completion at the end of May. With me being as busy this past three months as I have been, I haven't progressed much with the website shop and the content filtering boxes are still lying in stock untouched. At this rate of progress I may just have to sell them on eBay at a loss seeing as I start my next Masters in Autumn (but more on that shortly).

After the last entry I knew that I had a few weeks before I'd have to really start digging in again during the PhD funding applications, so having seen the outstanding metascore on Metacritic giving an average of all reviews rating of 94% for a game called Mass Effect 2 (you can see the list of top games on the PC of all time according to average review score here where Mass Effect 2 is currently the eighth best game ever) I ummed and awed for a while, and then made the purchase mainly because Amazon were doing a deal for £15 and I figured it was worth the punt. I ummed and awed mainly because I wasn't sure if it would be my kind of game - for example, Half Life 2 is at the top of that list of best games of all time and I got bored of that game after about three levels of it and I never played it again - too much running around through padded out eternities between the good bits for me. I worried that as a mostly story driven game with strong role playing elements that it really wouldn't be my cup of tea, but then I thought Grand Theft Auto IV outstanding even if it had tedious boring sections (like too much driving around), and indeed just last night I purchased its extended missions off Amazon because they'll be way better than most of the gaming dross out there (e.g. Prototype, a real waste of a great concept). Just as so you know, I am a 1990s style gamer who gets bored very quickly unless I am repeatedly and very frequently wowed - my idea of the greatest game ever is Duke Nukem 3D which is so good that I play it on impossible difficulty without cheating. That's how much I like Duke Nukem - I don't cheat. And there hasn't been a game since Half Life 1 which I have played through without cheating (I cheated heavily in GTA IV, because I couldn't be arsed driving around in anything less than ultra fast and I couldn't be arsed worrying about guns and ammo or money).

Anyway, I am very glad that I did buy Mass Effect 2. It's an outstanding game, though it does suffer from major failings such as a stupid boring resource collection system which made me immediately go find a cheat to bypass it, and it's riddled with boring repetitive puzzle minigames which I just skip entirely when it's possible. There is also a major omission of ship fighting, so you're in this ship in which you can physically wander around talking to people and for which you're constantly buying upgrades but you never get to pilot it in a full on space battle which left me feeling quite underwhelmed. However what it's good at it definitely is very good at, and at times it really does feel like a sweeping, epic and cinematic movie experience but it's interactive because you choose the dialogue, direction and story. Even though the graphics are for ancient 2006 hardware (thank the consoles for that!), you still get that prettiness and wow factor when the camera pans round onto some sweeping vista because the graphic designers have cleverly combined low quality textures (e.g. the clothes) with high quality ones (e.g. the faces), and I suppose at least old computers can play this game just fine. The story and settings sometimes reminds you of being in the old Star Wars movies or Babylon 5 in its galactic sweep and breadth, especially the way you can just hop off your ship arbitrarily onto any one of dozens of planets and space stations. In short, I am impressed!

Here's the first ten minutes of the game in 720p HD, complete with your old ship getting attacked and your character walking through a hatch and suddenly finding themselves in a blown out part of the ship looking into space with debris floating around - I went like, wow!, isn't it amazing what you can still do with what is very obviously four year old graphics technology? And yes, it is Martin Sheen who voices the guy who is smoking - they have an all star voice cast, including lots of famous actors.

One of the more interesting features in the game is the ability to design what you look like at the start (male or female too), so needless to say I went with the cutest and hottest girl I could cook up in the face designer and whom you can see in her informal wear on the right and in her uniform on the left (you can change clothes any time you like in the game). It took quite some time to get her right, but I'm fairly proud of her look and she's definitely easy on the eye during playing the game where she'll be in each and every scene. I will apologise right now for the general darkness of the photos and the way she looks waxy - I grabbed them by literally finding an illuminated place in the game, taking a screenshot and cutting her out.

<rant mode on>

I will also say now that I am appalled at how it is still impossible in 2010 to contour flow text on a webpage around two side by side images on the same page. Even by using the old "CSS position absolute and use invisible divs to block out the space" trick! It works with one image, but not more than one where it will cause the second image to go too high and get overwritten by text because the browser calculates absolute default coordinates for absolute things before adjusting them for floats. In other words, the top image's divs consume space which pushes the text lower than it ought to be, and it doesn't shove the second absolutely positioned image down along with everything else because the second set of floats interfere with the first set thanks to the block elements in between. And you can't just add an offset because the amount of shove required varies according to screen width, so you'd need some javascript to calculate it for you. Gee, isn't that just great!

So I fell back how you'd do it in the 1990s by manually splitting the images into horizontal sections and then floating them to the side. Slicing images sucks, but at least we don't get text being overwritten. Even then the stupid CSS box model shows itself, because the source HTML specifies that they ought to be side by side. Are they side by side on YOUR web browser right now? No! CSS can only float things of equal height to both left and right at once, so above you can see it drops the left hand image so it's just above the bottom of the right hand image, so where the HTML says side by side you're getting the left one next to this paragraph instead. It's a shame really - with HTML5's new canvas element we finally can programmatically access arbitrary images from javascript within the browser, and then reflow the text on the fly - as indeed the jQSlickWrap jQuery plugin does. But javascript is just as hamstrung as anything else by the broken CSS box model and to avoid the same problem above it would still have to manually offset it whenever the page was resized.

Why they don't just add the CSS "float contour" property already is beyond me as it's been a proposal since 1996, then this VERY common problem of wrapping text around non-rectangular images would be finally fixed. But hey there's standards for you .

</rant mode off>

So, that was much of my month of February. Around the start of March I got a phone call from social welfare who informed me that I had reached the end of yet another processing queue, and that very shortly I would be processed and finally I'd get my dole including nine months of backpay. Could I supply him with a letter from UCC indicating when my studies finished? Sure I said. He then asked if I'd had any work in the past nine months. I said a few hours here or there, not much. He asked me to send him a list of what hours and when, so I did.

Well seeing as it is now May and coming up to the one year anniversary of when I applied for the dole, I guess me being honest was a bad move because obviously I have got myself stuck into yet another processing queue and who knows when I now might exit that. It's actually become a non sequitur now because you no longer make any assumptions as to when you might get it, so I have stopped borrowing money off anyone other than Megan for the simple reason that I no longer have a clue as to when I will be able to repay. I even managed to repay my sister her amount actually, though God knows how I'm going to raise the tuition fees for the Masters in Research I intend to start in September.

Ah yes, the MRes! I spent a large chunk of March and April preparing various formulations of this online funding inquiry for the John Templeton Foundation and other grant making bodies in which I (or rather my proposed supervisor) requests approx. €50k to fund the research part of my intended PhD which is entitled A study of the strategic and policy implications of modelling organisations using the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP). The hope is to reach the second stage of funding application which we'll find out at the end of this month - the IFQ stage has a 90% rejection rate on its own, so if we get to second stage we have a 50/50 chance thereafter of moving forward. The research component is scheduled to start from Sept 2011, and yes it would be in Helsinki in Finland as there is an expert in the topic there called Arto Annila who has gone far beyond the pale in helping me out so far.

So what happens between now and then? Well, I got me some research methods to get yet another bit of paper in, and it's currently looking like the Masters in Social Research Methods with the University of London External system which is the original distance degree programme having started all the way back in 1858 under Royal Charter. Their system is quite unlike the Open University's in that they hand you a reading list and then you turn up for the exams in May in which you sit exactly the same exams as their normal full time students, and the entire lot are marked together so there is no chance of being treated more favourably. Unlike the OU which very much spoon feeds you, with the London External system you're on your own. Their failure rate, needless to say, is rather high but the lack of spoon feeding appeals greatly to me.

So the theory goes as follows: if I get the PhD funding, then I complete the training examinations of the MRes but stop short of the thesis, thus earning me a Postgrad Diploma and then I finish next summer and am ready to go to Helsinki. If I don't get the PhD funding, then I carry on with the MRes thesis and I get me my third Masters degree which, as the MRes is ESRC recognised, will allow me to jump straight into the OU's PhD programme without having to take their research methods training which sucks down three years on its own. Either way, Niall gets his PhD by 2013 whereupon he will be the sombre age of thirty-five! And, weirdly enough, I'd actually be one year younger than if I'd got that paid PhD studentship at UCC last Christmas!

So, so far so good for my primary resolution of 2010! All that PhD stuff took me up to the middle of April as the submission deadline was the 16th. This schedule was not helped by needing to visit the North with my sister as we annually do at Easter whereupon we discovered that Grandpa's house needs quite a bit of maintenance doing which is hardly surprising considering, so I'll need to zip up there for a few days this summer. Furthermore, ARA came back with a further contract at the start of April which at the time, to be honest, surprised me because I thought they were going to let it slide. Given my other time pressures at that time, I had no choice but to politely ask that they wait until the end of April, so after the 16th I took a day or two to do things like mow the lawn and other necessities, and then I launched into a fairly gruelling seven day week to try and get a first alpha to them by the end of April - which I succeeded in doing. Weirdly, when I submitted my invoice to them last Monday I realised that I had only worked a cumulative total of just seventy hours (i.e. 8.75 days) over fourteen days, which at the time felt impossible as I was utterly exhausted.

I guess that's because in a normal job in the Anglo-Saxon world most workers only work half the time unless there is something like a conveyor belt forcing their pace. This is why in France they have such high marginal work productivity, because if you only spend thirty hours at work then you still work more or less the same as you do in the Anglo-Saxon sixty hour week. The difference of course is that in France you pay them much less as they spend much less time at work, so you get fuller employment and a population who isn't too knackered to kick up fusses and get upset about stuff which is both a good and bad thing. Much of Management theory is all about finding supposedly new ways of getting people to sustainably work even 1-2% harder, and whoever finds even a statistically significant sustained productivity improvement will become the next management guru earning millions in consulting and speaking fees.

In my mind, in the knowledge industry at least, there are very, very few workers who can indefinitely sustain more than four hours of actual work a day each and every day. I have noticed a huge amount of people faffing around, or browsing the internet, or simply walking around the office in a slow moving but giant loop talking to anyone who will listen, or doing anything to look like they are being productive when they're not. Even in high end finance, a lot of what is presented as work - a very good example is client meetings where you're all dressed up in fancy suits - is in fact faffing around and yet another way of marking down time. I bet that if you added up the time which actually contributes to the bottom line, you'd find a fairly universal ceiling of an average of four hours per day in any knowledge industry.

I have noted that I am hardly alone in making this observation. It appears to be particularly noted in computer programming, and it is also well known that the number of hours you can sustain drops as you age up to the point where there isn't much point being a computer programmer anymore. Still, the management ethos of the Western world has no formalised conceptualisation of any of this yet, and it still treats knowledge workers as some kind of atypical factory worker which must be specially mollycoddled, but otherwise driven to schedule and treated as a readily substitutable unit just the same. My PhD research topic is intended to begin the development of "an Econophysics of Organisation", so perhaps using such modelling tools as MEPP we might enable managers to some day be a bit more sophisticated in their approach to knowledge based organisations?

Well we can but hope I suppose. Anyway, I have a raft of academic papers to wade through next, so I shall be off. I hope that this entry finds you all well and happy! Be happy!

Wednesday 3rd February 2010: 5.42pm. So much for my birthday entry being anywhere near my birthday! Still, being two weeks late is not that bad considering the three month gap before the last entry I guess ... and I have been oh so busy since the last entry. Firstly we had that great freeze in Ireland (and indeed Europe) which effectively extended everyone's Christmas holidays by quite a bit, and because everyone was marooned in their houses not a lot happened for anyone at all really. Our water got cut off because the mains water pipe froze, but we weren't as badly off as a lot of people who had been cut off due to pipes bursting - for a long time now Ireland has had some of the leakiest water pipes in Europe with more than half our water going into the soil. No one's that bothered - we're blessed with lots of fresh water, indeed often too much fresh water due to us cutting down all the trees surrounding the upstreams of our rivers such that our rivers and towns get frequently flooded much as happened very severely before Christmas when most of Cork city and western Ireland got submerged. Anyway, by the time we got to my birthday everyone had just about got back to work and stuff started moving. My main preoccupation at that time was putting together my company's first annual return, and thanks to the assholes at Microsoft we first had to find a replacement for Microsoft Accounting 2009 which they had suddenly retired without warning. That meant evaluating a series of ERP and accounting packages which sucked up a week or so. I eventually plumped for the almost unknown but very highly respected VT Transaction+ which has garnered rave reviews from small business in the UK for years now, but it was not an easy choice at all.

Most UK and Irish small business uses Sage which royally sucks as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use it will tell you. Sage is extremely expensive for what it does, it has an appallingly bad user interface, it is extremely unintuitive, it causes anyone using it to mostly spend their time ripping out their hair and cursing it - and best of all, its more recent SME editions have dropped multi-currency support which is jaw dropping in the European context. There are others such as MYOB, but Sage bought them not too long ago so I don't have high hopes for its future. The other big contender is QuickBooks, but they suffer from an idiotic business plan where they lure you in with time-bombed features in cheaper editions which suddenly expire and then it demands a paid upgrade to start working again. Before you know it, you're handing over two thousand euro a year for a package which does what you need and moreover, they basically did a Mafia extortion on you.

Those are the two big boys, and both are rubbish options. Both vendors deserve to go out of business for their ethics and the shoddy quality of their products. If you do any internet research at all, you will quickly wonder how the hell they ever get any new customers - but then again I guess most new business owners never bother researching the internet before they buy because you can do one hell of a lot better than either Sage or QuickBooks AND for a lot less money.

This leaves a SME ERP solution - ERP systems are basically an operating system for a company, so they tell each worker what to do and when to do it and the ERP system (is supposed to) manages everything else such as the accounts and stock levels. I evaluated two options for an ERP solution: (i) Adempiere, probably the most featured open source ERP currently available and (ii) Interprise Suite, because they offer a free one user licence. These two were chosen for evaluation because they both supported European VAT and multi-currency - both are absolute necessities for an Irish company as we tend to do a lot of importing and exporting - which almost every other solution I could find on the internet doesn't do. Boy do I miss Microsoft Accounting! They had such a great product for its price .

Both of these solutions were very good - both had all the right features and both were well implemented. Interprise had a much better user interface as it runs as a native application on Windows whereas Adempiere has a nasty Java/Web interface. Adempiere, like so many open source applications of its kind, required an awful lot of setting up and lengthy configuration - so much so it got discounted because of it. Interprise had pre-written templates which did almost all of the config for you, thereafter it was just lots of tweaking. What put me off Interprise was that the demo/single user edition they supplied was last updated in 2007 - hardly boding well given the extensive changes to VAT rules since 1st Jan 2010 (and precisely why everyone had to drop Microsoft Accounting so quickly), and I got the feeling that they'd hardly be bending over to support a single-user licence like myself. And besides, I had a natural aversion to getting into bed with another company who wasn't 110% committed to the product - I didn't want to have to do another Microsoft Accounting style migration as trust me, migrating between accounting systems is painful.

So in the end I went with VT Transaction+ which is not an ERP solution, it's just a simple accounting program. However it costs just £200 a year as compared to £1700 or so for Sage/QuickBooks or £1000 or so a year for Interprise, plus it has full support for VAT, multi-currency and it has really good Excel export so it spits out a very nice properly formatted set of accounts in Excel ready for submission. Having purchased the software, I then fully migrated the accounts, hacked at the templates to fudge the UK accounting format into the Irish standards (thankfully the regulatory standards are similar, it's just that all the laws have different names for obvious reasons) and finally submitted my annual return today!

Meanwhile, throughout all these fun and games I also finished the contract with ARA which took another twenty-three hours this past month, though I only had the NTE for twenty hours but I like to finish a job properly. And lastly, mainly because I've had a VPS sitting in Los Angeles doing nothing since November, I finally rented a VPS in Atlanta and implemented a geo-directing DNS server such that nedproductions.biz and other hosted sites now use their local server rather than having to go to Europe all the time which is really very neat. Who knows, soon I might even be in a position to start selling Plone webspace at long last (I need to finish configuring the shopping cart first)!!!

So, I am now thirty-two years old, and as always in the birthday post it's time to look back on another year of life. This is what I have done this past year:

• Escaped the BIS Masters in UCC
  Looking back on it now I can't believe how much I hated that course or indeed that entire academic year. I disliked academia enough in St. Andrews, but at least they generally weren't as pig ignorant of their own field, and moreover my time in St. Andrews was made worth it by all the non-academic stuff going on which, much like in Hull, was the real education. That real education was non-existent during my time in UCC, and so it was nothing but bad all the way through, not helped by the chip on the shoulder which most Cork people have anyway towards anyone with talent.
  
  I am extremely glad to not be doing that anymore. It didn't help that I was mentally and physically absolutely exhausted after St. Andrews and simply no longer in the mood for any of that bullshit. I have been deliberately taking ten to twelve hour sleeps each night since last summer and my overall health and wellbeing has massively improved. When I look into the mirror I no longer see anything like the lines on my face or dark bags under my eyes and I no longer wonder to myself if I might have cancer. When I compare me now to photos from the end of St. Andrews, I literally look five years younger. I feel about ten years younger though, and it's great!
  
  Now all that said I did meet some good people during my time in UCC, and the prize money from the Enterprise Ireland competition kept both myself and Megan alive for nearly four months. For the prize money alone I think the BIS Masters was probably worth it overall, and I suppose it's an extra arrow to my bow for the foreseeable future. Winning the prize certainly sounds good - in the interviews I've done since you can see them being noticeably impressed. It's funny how people value such things. So overall, I think that I will remember the 2008/2009 academic year as being rather like my year at Trinity College Dublin: not a lot of fun at all, but an edifying experience which stands to you in the long run even though it shouldn't if there were any justice in the world.
  
  
• Set up my own company
  I have dreamed of setting up my own company and working for myself ever since my experiences working in EuroFighter where I saw that the contractors were the guys on top of the pile, and while I was working sixty hour plus weeks, I was being paid for thirty-five and therefore getting an equivalent of €7/hour after tax. Meanwhile they were being paid €50/hour upwards with time and quarter overtime when management fucked up and made you work late. Had I been an IT contractor at that time I would have been earning €80/hour given it was pre-IT bubble burst. I suppose it helps a lot that the lads I grew up with all started their own businesses, plus my mother's family were entrepreneurial, but I really have to admit that I particularly value the ability to work on what I want when I want, and if one day I wake up and I don't feel like working then I don't have to.
  
  Moreover, let's face it: I have a personality which many people find disagreeable, and I also find working with many people stressful because they don't give a toss about doing their best. Not having to work with such people, or when I do they are paying me for their screwups, well I find that very pleasant indeed. I don't mind at all someone wasting my time if €100 is going into my hand .
  
  I guess what I mean to say is that I have a value inside my head of what my time is worth to me, and I strongly object to working any job where my time is not similarly valued by my employer. Because I value my liberty so much, I have a fairly high valuation of my time - sufficiently high that most ordinary jobs won't pay such a figure to someone as young as myself. Therefore, for someone of my age, the only route to such high marginal earnings has to be self-employment.
  
  Anyway, I last tried to form my own company after returning from Spain back when I was trying to commercialise Tn with venture capital funding. Without the backing I decided not to proceed, but had I not gone to St. Andrews then I definitely would have formed my own company. Well now I have, and while I haven't made much money yet I am hoping to report large profits this time next year!
  
  
• We survived!
  For much of this past year I fretted about how I was going to feed myself and Megan - indeed, for much of the last eighteen months we had between two and four months worth of money to go before we were destitute. It is truly a horrible feeling because you never truly relax - and no, social welfare has still not paid out though I am glad to report that my dole application has left the Dublin processing queue and has entered the Cork processing queue, so the welfare office currently think it'll probably be a full year from application to payout. Hopefully they will backpay me in full because I am now about €4000 in debt!
  
  We have been immensely lucky in hindsight. Firstly things like the car haven't spectacularly broken down or anything bad and unexpected happen like an accident or sickness. Even in the positive sense things have gone well when they might have not, such as us both passing our driving tests okay which was great as hitherto we were driving illegally, and it was a great relief to be finally actually covered by our €1000/year insurance. Secondly on every occasion when the bank balance started to enter the "fumes remaining only" level something unexpected has magically appeared in the nick of time e.g. the Enterprise Ireland prize money, the ARA contract or indeed Megan's work permit to name but a few.
  
  Between all of these we have finally become financially okay for these last three months, and I no longer fret about everything suddenly crashing down. In fact if things continue well we may even take a small holiday this summer, nothing fancy but nevertheless a major step up.

I think that those three things are the most significant accomplishments of my past year from my present perspective. I do wish that I had got my PhD rolling, but it was not for a lack of applications made or effort invested. I haven't done much on rolling my own PhD in the past few weeks given my busyness, but now that the ARA contract is cleared, the accounting systems migrated, the Annual Return filed and the geo-targeting DNS server implemented, I am hoping to dedicate two days per week into it and writing my Economics study book. For the other four days per week I need to get a shopping cart implemented, then I can start selling my content filtering boxes of which I have three already built and in stock below as well as selling general Plone web hosting and services.

So, so far so good! Let us once again hope that 2010 is our best year yet! Be happy!

Sunday 3rd January 2010: 4.28pm. Wow, some three months have passed and it's suddenly 2010! Has this been the longest break in virtual diary entries in twelve years? I think so. And yet again when I consider what I have done since the last entry, I know that I did loads of stuff but I can't quite think of any of it. What I have done recently is fix the "All Things Niall" Feed which had broken itself because Yahoo Pipes simply isn't working properly anymore and apparently they aren't going to fix it, so I wrote up some PHP which munges together all the feeds and outputs a combined feed which works nicely: this "blog" (I prefer "virtual diary") as it appears on Facebook and LinkedIn and many other sites, is now working again.

I went to the US for Thanksgiving in late November with Megan's family, then went travelling around Europe visiting people I'm still in contact with (and my apologies to those of you who weren't close enough to my line of travel this time round) which lasted until just before Christmas. My travels were hardly boring: I managed to fall severely out with Johanna over a matter of ideology, and we are no longer in regular contact at my insistence. Most sad. I am very upset about it.

The Christmas break seemed longer than usual this year in the sense that I haven't done any useful work since returning home until yesterday - partially the fault of how the weekends fell this year, but also a determined attempt to have a proper holiday break this year considering that the prior two Christmases were spent writing essays or other coursework which did not aid the holiday spirits! I suppose also that I am hoping for 2010 to be the start of a whole raft of new endeavours now that the company is established and trading with a hopefully viable business model, Megan has permission to stay and work in Ireland indefinitely and now we just need to kick off the next round. I finally went ahead and purchased an exercise bike - the outdoors proved too cold and inconvenient to incorporate into my daily schedule, and the PhD I was invited to apply for at UCC researching Federated Autonomic Trust Management did not come through for me which was a surprise given my superb background experience in that area - I had been anticipating walking in each day from a remote car park and that way gaining the needed exercise. Either way I recognise that my cardiovascular system isn't maintaining itself with zero effort any more - as I age it appears to need increasing maintenance much as with my gums where flossing has become very necessary as otherwise they recede (i.e. gum disease!).

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I finally got around to erecting a proper company website for ned Productions Limited which is now listed on the navigation bar on the left and I also did some purchasing of stock and setting up of a shopping cart system such that internet users can buy stuff - probably Untangle boxes rather like this guy who beat me to it but thankfully he's US and dollar centric. During the latter end of October and the start of November I wrote a series of economic policy articles for the Irish progressive think-tank TASC copies of which I have placed on the neo-capitalism website as the last one was too radical for them to publish so they silently dropped me. I do remember doing some more work on nedmalloc for ARA and indeed I still have some loose ends to tie up there during the next few weeks, and hopefully before the end of January I'll release a beta of nedmalloc as it has so many new features. Social welfare still hasn't paid out which at six months now is breathtaking, but at least they owe me at least five grand now which is good since once again I will run out of money at the end of January. I also have the end of year tax and accounts filing for the company which must be lodged very shortly in a tax efficient manner i.e. cue me trudging through the Irish tax code.

Lastly, this year I will either get a PhD started or get that summaries of Economics papers book written. One or the other: failure to accomplish either is unacceptable now that the company is generating money though it will take some time before I can leave welfare support given the current economic climate. For the PhD, it all depends on obtaining research funding for which I firstly need a willing PhD supervisor - and that alone I have thus far failed to accomplish, but I am slowly getting closer.

Next entry will be in just a few weeks time: my annual "summary of the past year" post which I do around my birthday when I will turn thirty-two! Until then, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!