nostalgia

On This Day In 2005

Looking Back

On this day in 2005 (actually tomorrow, but I needed to publish early) I received an unusual parcel at work, which turned out to contain a pan, wooden spoon, tin of spaghetti hoops, loaf of bread… and an entire electric hob.

This turned out, as I describe in my blog post of the day, to have been the result of a conversation that the pair of us had had on IRC the previous day, in which he called me a “Philistine” for heating my lunchtime spaghetti hoops in the office microwave. This was a necessity rather than a convenience, given that we didn’t have any other mechanism for heating food (other than a toaster, and that’s a really messy way to heat up tinned food…).

It was a different time: a time when the lives of many of my friends were still centered around academic persuits (Siân was working on and handing in her dissertation, as was Liz, Claire was getting results back, Ruth was stressed out by a useless student on her team, Paul took things too far, and even JTA was suffering: struggling with his wordcount of an essay that he considered handing in late). It was a time when our evenings were being consumed watching Knightmare (my blog posts mentioning: the first series, first half of second series, second half of second series, Ruth’s commentary) or at the Ship & Castle (both, sadly, without Sian). It was a time when Andy worked at the cafe under The Flat, like we were all in some kind of sitcom or something.

It was clearly a time when we were all blogging quite regularly: apologies for the wall of links (a handful of which, I’m afraid, might be restricted). Be glad that I spared you all the posts about the 2005 General Election, which at the time occupied a lot of the Abnib blogosphere. We were young, and idealistic, and many of us were students, and most of us hadn’t yet been made so cynical by the politicians who have come since.

And, relevantly, it was a time when Paul was able to express his randomness in some particularly quirky ways. Like delivering me a food parcel at work. He’s always been the king of random events, like organising ad-hoc hilltop trips that turned out to be for the purpose of actually releasing 99 red (helium) balloons. I tried to immortalise his capacity for thinking that’s not just outside the box, but outside the known Universe, when I wrote his character into Troma Night Adventure, but I’m not sure I quite went far enough.

Looking Forward

It seems so long ago now: those Aberystwyth days, less than a year out of University myself. When I look back, I still find myself wondering how we managed to find so much time to waste on categorising all of the pages on the RockMonkey wiki. I suppose that nowadays we’ve traded the spontaneity to say “Hey: card games in the pub in 20 minutes: see you there!” on a blog and expect it to actually work, for a more-structured and planned existence. More-recently, we’ve spent about a fortnight so far discussing what day of the week we want out new monthly board games night to fall on.

There’s still just enough of the crazy random happenstances in my life, though. As I discovered recently, when I once again received an unusual and unexpected parcel in the post. This time, it wasn’t from Paul, but from Adam, who’d decided to respond in a very literal fashion to my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that he owed me tea, and a keyboard.

I got the chance to live with Paul for a couple of years, until he moved out last month. I’m not sure whether or not this will ultimately reduce the amount of quirkiness that I get in my diet, but I’m okay either way. Paul’s not far away – barely on the other side of town – so I’m probably still within a fatal distance of the meteor we always assumed would eventually kill him.

We’ve turned what was his bedroom into an office. Another case of “a little bit less random, a little bit more structure and planning”, perhaps, in a very metaphorical way? Maybe this is what it feels like to be a grown-up. Took me long enough.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2004

Looking Back

On this day in 2004 I handed in my dissertation, contributing towards my BEng in Software Engineering. The topic of my dissertation was the Three Rings project, then in its first incarnation, a web application originally designed to help university Nightlines to run their services.

An early Three Rings Directory page. If you remember when Three Rings used to look like this, then you're very old.

I’d originally started developing the project early in the previous academic year, before I’d re-arranged how I was going to finish my course: Three Rings celebrates its tenth birthday this year. This might be considered to have given me a head start over my peers, but in actual fact it just meant that I had even more to write-up at the end. Alongside my work at SmartData a few days a week (and sometimes at weekends), that meant that I’d been pretty damn busy.

A page from my dissertation, covering browser detection and HTTPS support (then, amazingly, still not-quite-universal in contemporary browsers).

I’d celebrated hitting 10,000 words – half of the amount that I estimated that I’d need – but little did I know that my work would eventually weigh in at over 30,000 words, and well over the word limit! In the final days, I scrambled to cut back on text and shunt entire chapters into the appendices (A through J), where they’d be exempt, while a team of volunteers helped to proofread everything I’d done so far.

Finally, I was done, and I could relax. Well: right up until I discovered that I was supposed to have printed and bound two copies, and I had to run around a busy and crowded campus to get another copy run off at short notice.

Looking Forward

Three Rings went from strength to strength, as I discussed in an earlier “on this day”. When Bryn came on board and offered to write programs to convert Three Rings 1 data into Three Rings 2 data, in 2006, he borrowed my dissertation as a reference. After he forgot that he still had it, he finally returned it last month.

The inside front cover of my dissertation, along with a note from Bryn.

Later still in 2009, Ruth expanded Three Rings as part of her Masters dissertation, in a monumental effort to add much-needed features at the same time as getting herself a degree. After handing it in and undergoing her defense (which went better than she expected), she got a first.

My dissertation (left) back on my bookshelf, where it belongs.

Today, Three Rings continues to eat a lot of my time, and now supports tens of thousands of volunteers at hundreds of different helplines and other charities, including virtually every Nightline and the majority of all Samaritans branches.

It’s grown even larger than I ever imagined, back in those early days. I often tell people that it started as a dissertation project, because it’s simpler than the truth: that it started a year or two before that, and provided a lot of benefit to a few Nightlines, and it was just convenient that I was able to use it as a part of my degree because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have had time to make it into what it became. Just like I’m fortunate now to have the input of such talented people as I have, over the last few years, because I couldn’t alone make it into the world-class service that it’s becoming.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

One Hundred And Sixty

When I first went to university, in 1999, I got my first mobile phone. Back then, messaging features on mobiles were a bit more simplistic than they are today.

For example, phones were only just starting to appear that could handle multi-SMS messages. For those without this feature there was a new skill to be learned.

With practice, we got to be particularly good at cutting out messages down to the requisite number of characters to fit into a single SMS: just 160 characters.

We even learned how to meaningfully split messages in our heads, with indicators (ellipses, or numbers showing message parts), to carry longer concepts. (4/19)

Even when multi-message capable phones came out (I got one in 2000), these skills were still useful. At 10p or 12p per message, you soon learned to be concise.

Nowadays, this skill has lost its value. With more and more people having “unlimited SMS” plans or enormous quantities of credits, there’s no need to be brief.

If you’ve got an iPhone, you don’t even get told how long your message is, I hear. You just keep typing. And that’s not uncommon on other kinds of handset too.

Your phone’s still splitting your message up, in the background. Putting markers in, so that other phones can understand. And these markers are human-readable.

Just in case your message is going to a phone that’s over about 12 years old, your smartphone makes sure that the markers would be understood by humans. (9/19)

So now we’ve got smartphones talking to each other in a language that humans designed to talk to one another in. Does that feel really strange to anybody else?

I looked at my phone while I wrote a message, today. I noticed that number in the corner, that indicated that my message would span 3 texts. And I didn’t care.

Why would I? It’s a vestige of an older form of communication. Someday, it’ll look as primitive as the paintings on the walls of caves, daubed by early humans.

But for now, I remember. And, somehow, the skill I learned all those years ago – a trick that’s alien to almost anybody younger than me – has a new, fresh use.

Twitter. 140 character messages. A little bit less than a text, which seems strange. Are they really trying to make us even more brief than those early phones?

The skill is still the same. Think ahead. Prune. Plan. Snip. And, if you absolutely must span several messages, make it clear to your reader so that they know.

I see a whole new generation of people learning this skill that I once learned. It’s not the same (it never will be): they don’t pay 10p every time they tweet.

But you know what? It’s just as pointless now as it was the first time around. If you want to say something, say it. If 36p is too much, risk a 10-second call!

And in the case of the Twitter generation: if your message doesn’t fit on Twitter, then it probably doesn’t belong on Twitter. I’m a 160-character-or-more man.

I’m not sure I’m cut out for the Twitterverse with its 140-character limits. But it’s nice to remember how to think in 160, just like I have in this blog post.

Remembering December 2003

For the first time in over seven years, I’ve recovered a handful more of my “lost” blog posts: articles that were written prior to the great server fuck-up of July 2004.

scatmania.org in August 2003, showing off the simplistic look it had before it was deleted.

Since then, I’ve kept regular backups. A lot of the old stuff is sometimes cringeworthy (in a “did I really used to be such a dick?” way), and I’m sure that someday I’ll look back at my blog posts from today, too, and find them shockingly un-representative of me in the future. That’s the nature of getting older.

A young Dan with his parents on a hilltop. — Nostalgia’s awesome, which I choose to represent with this photo of me and my parents on a hilltop somewhere. You have permission to “aww”.

But it’s still important to me to keep all of this stuff. My blog is an extension to my diary: the public-facing side of what’s going on in my life. I back-link furiously, especially in the nostalgia-ridden “On This Day” series of blog posts I throw out once in a while.

Castle of the Four Winds in early 1999. — If you remember my blog when it used to look like this, back in the late 1990s, then you’ve been following me than longer than most folks have been on the Web at all.

The blog posts I’ve newly recovered are:

Parcel of Goodies (1st December 2003), in which I get some new jeans and announce an upcoming Chez Geek Night (the predecessor to what eventually became Geek Night) at the Ship & Castle
AbNib & Str8Up (2nd December 2003), in which I apologise for Abnib being down and perv over hot young queer people
Orange Gives Me 80p For No Apparent Reason (2nd December 2003) and Justification Of What You All Already Thought About My Sanity, And About Orange’s Competence (5th December 2003), primarily about a very petty dispute I had with my mobile phone provider
The Software Engineers Behind My Alarm Clock (3rd December 2003), containing my complaints about the engineering decisions behind my clock, which woke me up too early in the morning
Troma Night (7th December 2003), about the most-recent Troma Night, at which we watched the tragically-awful A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
Something In The Water (10th December 2003), talking about several of the new romantic releationships that have appeared amongst my friends – of these, the one that had surprised me the most is the one that lasts to this day

Andy & Sian, the adorable couple who I declared “most surprising” of the new relationships to get underway late in 2003. The pair married in 2010.

Worst 100 Films Of All Time(10th December 2003): my observation about how many Police Academy movies made it into the IMDb’s “bottom 100”
Christmas Is Coming, The Exams Are Getting Written(12th December 2003), which is, as its title suggests, about Christmas getting closer, and exams upcoming
Banned From Driving For Life, Before He’d Even Passed His Test(12th December 2003): a reflection upon a recent news story
Gatecrashing(13th December 2003), in which I drop in uninvited on a stranger’s house party, and everything goes better than expected
Final Troma Night Of The Year(14th December 2003); a short review of 2003’s final Troma Night – at this point, we probably had no idea that we’d have still been having Troma Nights for seven more years
Christians Should Be Banned From The Internet(15th December 2003): a tongue-in-cheek critique on how awful contemporary web design for Christian-centric websites were
Frustrating(16th December 2003), about things not going right at work, but things going very right in the bedroom
The Right To Read(17th December 2003), an anti-DRM rant
Out Of Place (18th December 2003), again stressed about work, but looking forward to some retro-gaming

So there you go: especially for you stalkers or those of you looking for a trip down memory lane – some links to what I was up to in December 2003.

For those of you who are really on a roll, here’s some further reading from the period: Kit, on the last Troma Night of the year; a religious argument that Alec kicked off (thanks, archive.org); Liz starting her first blog; Paul applies for a hardship loan;

Northern Radio

As I mentioned earlier, I spent some of the period between Christmas and New Year in Preston. And there, while taking a shower at my mother’s house, I had a strange experience.

My mother's shower is one of the new style of high-tech ones, with a dozen different washing functions as well as a built in light and radio. I gather that there are ones with built in phones, now, too. — My mother’s shower is one of the new style of high-tech ones, with a dozen different washing functions as well as a built in light and radio. I gather that there are ones with built in phones, now, too.

One of the funky features of my mother’s shower cubicle is that it includes a fully working FM radio. Its controls are pretty limited and there’s no user interface to provide feedback about what frequency you’re tuned to already, so it’s hard to deliberately tune in to a specific station. Instead, the house policy seems to be that if you don’t like what you’re listening to, you press the “cycle to the next station” button until you hear something you like.

Listening to music is about the third or second most-enjoyable thing that one can possibly do in a shower, in my experience, so I gave it a go. Local station Radio Wave came on, and they were playing some fun tunes, so I sang along as I washed myself under the hot steamy “drench” setting on the shower.

Radio Wave (96.5FM), Blackpool, Lancashire

At the end of a couple of songs, there were some commercials and the show’s presenter shared a few words. And it occurred to me quite how very Northern he sounded.

Living and working in Oxford, I don’t in my day to day life come across people with that broad lanky dialect. Growing up in Preston, and going to school there, I came across it on a daily basis, but didn’t notice it. Now, in its absence, it’s starkly noticeable, with its traditional short gutteral “t” instead of “the”, use of the archaic second-person “tha” (related to “thou”), and the ever-present pronunciation of words like “right” and “light” as “reet” and “leet”, and “cold” and “old” as “cowd” and “owd”.

It’s unfamiliar, but still “homely”. Like that smell that reminds you of where you grew up, this sound to my ears filled me with a strange nostalgia.

It’s funny, because I’m sure I carry a little bit of that accent with me. To the folks in my life around Oxford way, I perhaps sound as foreign as those people in Preston sound to me, now. I spoke on the phone the other week to a couple of people I used to hang out with, back in the day, and my immediate thought was that they’d become more Lanky than I remembered – as if they’d somehow overdosed on butter pie and barm cakes in the years since I last saw them.

But that’s clearly not the case: it’s not their voices that have changed, but my ears. Untouched by the North-Western tongue for so long, it sounds very strange to me now to hear it over the phone, on the radio, or even in person.

It’s a strange side-effect of moving around the country. I wonder what it’s like for my American friends, who have an even bigger gap (both geographically and linguistically) between their homes in the UK and their families in the US, to “phone home”.

The Old Asylum

I’ve always been enamoured with the concept of urban exploration: that is, the infiltration and examination of abandoned human structures. I was reminded of this recently, when Ruth, JTA and I got the chance to go on an (organised) tour of long-abandoned Aldwych Tube Station in London.

I think for me the appeal comes from the same place as it does when I’m looking around, for example, the ruin of a castle or the wreck of a ship. As opposed to the exploration of the natural world, looking around a man-made thing really gives you the feeling that you’re uncovering the long-lost purpose of the place. This place you are was designed and built to fill a particular need and, for whatever reason, it’s now left to rot and decay. And you – the amateur urban archaeologist, are the link that connects this abandoned world with the present.

I’ve been thinking about some of the places I’ve explored – sewer tunnels underneath what is now Deepdale Retail Park, waterlogged WWII bunkers occupied by squatters, disused railway lines and railyards, roofs of semi-accessible castles, and the (then-disused) wreck that was Aberystwyth’s Alexandra Hall, back when tragically-empty buildings was part of the quirky charm of the place, before they transformed into being a symptom of its downfall. I wanted to share with you a story or two. But instead of any of these, I’ve picked a place that none of you are likely to have heard about:

Wittingham Hospital

In the mid-19th century, the lunatic asylums of Lancashire and Merseyside were overflowing, and Wittingham Mental Hospital was built to replace them. Originally built to hold 1000 patients, it held over 3,500 by the outbreak of the second world war, making it the largest mental hospital in the country. The mental health reforms of the 1960s (and an inquiry into patient abuse), and new drugs and treatments in the 1970s and 1980s, led to it being gradually emptied and, in 1995, closing for good.

I was still at school when word got around about the closure and a couple of friends and I decided to cycle up to the old hospital and explore it, because there’s nothing like schoolboys egging one another on to give you the courage to “break into the old asylum”. Apparently when I was a kid, I didn’t watch enough horror films about haunted old buildings or about murderous psychopaths, because it seemed like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me. The council have since put up secure fences and begun demolition, but back then it didn’t take more than a little bit of climbing to gain access to the abandoned complex.

A contemporary (2010) photo from inside the hospital by urban explorer "Infiltrator". Click on the photo for his full report and more photos. It's degraded a lot since I visited.

There was a deathly quiet inside the buildings. The distance from the nearest road and the surrounding woodlands muffled the distant sounds of the outside world to less than a whisper, and as the three of us split up and spread out, it was very easy to feel completely alone. The silence was more comforting, though, than eerie: on the hard tile floors and in the big, empty rooms, it’d be impossible to catch anybody unawares, no matter how fleet of foot you might be.

I was surprised to see quite how much furniture and equipment had been simply left: it was almost as if the buildings had been evacuated in a panic, rather than undergoing a controlled, phased closure. Filing cabinets remained, stuffed with papers, in a room with net curtains and a carpet. An upright piano, only slightly out-of-tune, remained in an otherwise empty ward. Beds, operating tables, and cupboards stood exactly as they had when the hospital was still alive.

An old leaflet, discovered on a 2009 expedition by urban explorer "BA". Click on the image for his full story. Apart from looking a little more weathered for the 13 years between my visit and his, this looks exactly like the kinds of things I saw.

I couldn’t understand how a place could be abandoned in this way. It’s as if the place itself had died and, instead of being buried, had just been left to decompose in the open air. It seemed – at the least – irresponsible: a friend of mine even came across surgical supplies and syringes, simply left in a cupboard… but more than that, it seemed disrespectful to the building to leave it responsible for looking after these memories of its old self: things which no longer have any purpose, of which it was the custodian, unwilling and unthanked.

We didn’t take any photos – I’m not sure that any of us owned a camera, back then – and we didn’t liberate any of the paperwork (tempting though it was). I’m pretty sure that not one of the three felt that our parents would have approved of us illicitly gaining access to a disused medical facility, so any evidence of our presence was to be avoided! But there was more than that at stake: spending an hour or two wandering around these forgotten corridors, I felt more like a ghost than like a person. We crept about in silence, not saying a word to one another until we’d all reached perimeter once more. It wasn’t our place to interact with this building: all we were there to do was to observe, impotently: to see the beginning of its long decay, that’s since been documented by so many others. That was enough.

I’ll tell you what, though: that early experience? I totally hold it responsible for my subsequent interest in abandoned places.

Making Time

The last few months, and especially the last few weeks, have been incredibly hectic. The giveaway, I suppose, should have been how little I’ve blogged recently: it’s a dead giveaway that I’m really busy when I’m able to neglect writing about how busy I am. I’m not complaining, of course, just apologising to the Internet at large.

Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by Three Rings. We launched Milestone: Iridium, the latest new version of the helpline management software, at the weekend, after an extended testing period and a long-extended development cycle. There’s a metric fuckton of new features in this release, including the massive Rota Autopopulation feature, which uses some incredibly complicated mathematics and fine-tuneable weighting preferences to find the best people for each shift, with minimal human interaction. Oh, and we got a new server. And launched a documentation website. I’ve no doubt that this is our biggest release to-date.

It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. It still boggles my mind every time I look at the statistics, and see that we’re now helping over ten thousand volunteers. When I started, we were supporting about ten. Sometimes it scares me. Mostly it thrills me. It’s a great project to be involved with, even when it does consume all of my free time for weeks on end.

This evening, I found myself momentarily at a loose end. I felt like there were things I ought be be doing, urgently, but there weren’t. There’s a backlog of personal email to catch up on, and a stack of little jobs to be doing, but there’s nothing critical.

It took a few minutes to reassure myself that I really had nothing that needed doing immediately. Then I poured myself a glass of wine, popped my feet up, and played some video games. My Steam catalogue has gotten bloated, full of games that I’ve bought over the last few months to play “when I get the time”. Time to cut that list down.

On This Day In 1999

Looking Back

On this day in 1999 I sent out the twelfth of my Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth e-mails. I wasn’t blogging at the time, although I did have a blog previously, but I felt that it would be nice to do something to help keep in touch with my friends and family “back home”, so I came up with Cool Thing Of The Day To Do In Aberystwyth. I’ve written about it a little in a previous On This Day post.

On this particular day, I’d just finished downloading a copy of The Matrix, that fantastic cyber/action movie that spawned a huge string of memes and won the love and praise of geeks and action-flick junkies everywhere. The movie remains a pinnacle of great filmmaking, with its’ adventurous direction (remember when bullet time was still new and exciting?), funky soundtrack, and cleverer-than-average twists… for a film full of guns.

I’d not been at the University long, and I was making the most of the huge amount of bandwidth that seemed to be available: for the first time ever, I was able to download music (of a appreciable bitrate) faster than I could listen to it (the boundary at which “streaming” becomes feasible). Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet splashed out on new hardware, so downloading a 1.4GB film quickly became a drain on my hard drive, which will have probably been in the region of about 20GB total. But it didn’t matter, because it was cool. “Look at me, I’m a l33t haxxor like Neo!” I never actually uttered those words, but I might as well have.

I soon went and bought a copy of The Matrix – one of the first DVDs I owned – if only to save on hard drive space. I also burned my second ever student loan cheque on a beefy new computer of a specification so high that nobody I knew had even seen such a thing before: including a massive 500MHz processor (or as we’d call it nowadays, a “half-gigahertz”).

Later, friends and coursemates Rory, Huw, John, Dom would join me in producing a 15-minute spoof of The Matrix as part of our entry for the University of Wales, Aberystwyth’s Student Skills Competition. We won best presentation. This in gave me the opportunity to help out with the Student Skills Competition and networked me to the person who eventually introduced me to the guy who would eventually become my boss at SmartData. It’s amazing how these little things link together, isn’t it?

Looking Forward

Later still, no sequels were made to The Matrix, thankfully. You heard me: no sequels were made. Especially not Reloaded. Okay, okay: they made The Animatrix. But they certainly didn’t make any video games.

Nowadays, I keep a little over 2TB of storage space in my primary computer, but I still manage to fill it somehow – one of my drives ended up with only 5GB of free space just the other month, and needed a big tidy-up. Or, as they’ll call it in another twelve years: 0.00005PB.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2003

Looking Back

On this day in 2003 I first juggled with flaming clubs! But first, let’s back up to when I very first learned to juggle. One night, back in about 1998, I had a dream. And in that dream, I could juggle.

I’d always been a big believer in following my dreams, sometimes in a quite literal sense: once I dreamed that I’d been writing a Perl computer program to calculate the frequency pattern of consecutive months which both have a Friday 13th in them. Upon waking, I quickly typed out what I could remember of the code, and it worked, so it turns out that I really can claim to be able to program in my sleep.

In this case, though, I got up and tried to juggle… and couldn’t! So, in order that nobody could ever accuse me of not “following my dreams,” I opted to learn!

About three hours later, my mother received a phone call from me.

“Help!” I said, “I think I’m going to die of vitamin C poisoning! How much do I have to have before it becomes fatal?”

“What?” she asked, “What’s happened?”

“Well: you know how I’m a big believer in following my dreams.”

“Yeah,” she said, sighing.

“Well… I dreamed that I could juggle, so I’ve spent all morning trying to learn how to. But I’m not very good at it.”

“Okay… but what’s that got to do with vitamin C?”

“Well: I don’t own any juggling balls, so I tried to find something to use as a substitute. The only thing I could find was this sack of oranges.”

“I think I can see where you’re going wrong,” she said, sarcastically, “You’re supposed to juggle with your hands, Dan… not with your mouth.”

“I am juggling with my hands! Well; trying to, anyway. But I’m not very good. So I keep dropping the oranges. And after a few drops they start to rupture and burst, and I can’t stand to waste them, so I eat them. I’ve eaten quite a lot of oranges, now, and I’m starting to feel sick.”

I wasn’t overdosing on vitamin C, it turns out – that takes a quite monumental dose; perhaps more than can be orally ingested in naturally-occuring forms – but was simply suffering from indigestion brought on as a result of eating lots and lots of oranges, and bending over repeatedly to pick up dropped balls. My mother, who had herself learned to juggle when she was young, was able to give me two valuable tips to get me started:

Balled-up thick socks make for great getting-started juggling balls. They bounce, don’t leak juice, and are of a sensible size (if a little light) for a beginning juggler.
Standing with your knees against the side of a bed means that you don’t have to bend over so far to pick up your balls when you inevitably drop them.

I became a perfectly competent juggler quite quickly, and made a pest of myself in many a supermarket, juggling the produce.

So: fast forward five years to 2003, when Kit, Claire, Paul, Bryn and I decided to have a fire on the beach, at Aberystwyth. We’d… acquired… a large solid wooden desk and some pallets, and we set them up and ignited them and lounged around drinking beer. After a little while, a young couple came along: she was swinging flaming poi around, and he was juggling flaming clubs!

I asked if I could have a go with his flaming clubs. “Have you ever juggled flaming clubs before?” he asked. “I’ve never even juggled clubs before,” I replied. He offered to extinguish them for me, first, but I insisted on the “full experience.” I’d learn faster if there existed the threat of excruciating pain every time I fucked up, surely. Right?

Juggling clubs, it turns out, is a little harder than juggling balls. Flaming clubs, even more so, because you really can’t get away with touching the “wrong” end. Flaming clubs at night, after a few drinks, is particularly foolhardy, because all you can see is the flaming end, and you have to work backwards in your mind to interpret where the “catching end” of the stick must be, based on the movement of the burning bit. In short: I got a few minor singes.

But I went home that night with the fire still burning in my eyes, like a spark in my mind. I couldn’t stop talking about it: I’d been bitten by the flaming-clubs-bug.

Looking Forward

I ordered myself a set of flaming clubs as soon as I could justify the cost, and, after a couple of unlit attempts in the street outside my house, took them to our next beach party a few days later. That’s when I learned what really makes flaming clubs dangerous: it’s not the bit that’s on fire, but the aluminium rod that connects the wick to the handle. Touching the flaming wick; well – that’ll singe a little, but it won’t leave a burn so long as you pull away quickly. But after they’ve been lit for a while – even if they’ve since been put out – touching the alumium pole will easily leave a nasty blister.

Still: I learned quickly, and was still regularly flinging them around (and teaching others) at barbecues many years later.

Once, a Nightline training ended up being held at an unusual location, and the other trainers and I were concerned that the trainees might not be able to find it. So we advertised on the email with the directions to the training room that trainees who can’t find it should “introduce themselves to the man juggling fire outside the students union”, who would point them in the right direction: and so I stood there, throwing clubs around, looking for lost people all morning. Which would have worked fine if it weren’t for the fact that I got an audience, and it became quite hard to discreetly pick out the Nightline trainees from the students who were just being amused by my juggling antics.

Nowadays, I don’t find much time for juggling. I keep my balls to-hand (so to speak) and sometimes toss them about while I’m waiting for my computer to catch up with me, but it’s been a long while since I got my clubs out and lit them up. Maybe I’ll find an excuse sometime soon.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

Hash Abnib

When I relaunched Abnib the other week (which I swear I didn’t expect to have to do, until people started complaining that I was going to let it die – this genuinely wasn’t some “marketing” stunt!), I simultaneously brought back Abnib Chat (#abnib), the IRC channel.

I blame Jen for this. She told me that she missed the long-dead #rockmonkey chat room, and wanted it (or something similar) back, so I decided to provide one. Hell; if Jen wanted it, maybe other people wanted it to? And it’s an easy thing to set up, I thought.

Personally, I thought that the chat room would be a flop. I’d give it a go, of course, but I didn’t hold up much hope for its survival. When Abnib first launched, back in 2003, the Abnibbers were all students first and foremost. Now, they’ve all got jobs, and many of those jobs aren’t of a variety compatible with sitting on an IRC channel all day. And at night? We’ve got money, nowadays, and homes, and spice, and all kinds of activities that consume our lives on an evening. Many of us get what our younger student selves would call an “early night” every day of the week, and there’s always so much to do that shooting the breeze over a laborious IRC channel simply isn’t compatible with our lives any more.

Looks like I was right. Here’s the channel activity for the first fortnight of the new Abnib Chat:

Sure, the 1st of the month was busy, but not very busy: in actual fact, many of the people who were “around” were only around briefly, and one of those – Guest1332 – didn’t even identify themselves.

We’ve all got new ways of communicating now. Some folks are using Twitter (I occasionally read the feeds of those who write in a way that I’m permitted to see, but I don’t “tweet” myself). Others use Facebook (for a given definition of “use”, anyway). Others still continue to blog (that’s the medium for me: I think I’m just a little too wordy for anything less). In any case; we’re like Abnib: The Next Generation, and we’ve got reliable transporters and replicators and all kinds of cool shit, and hanging around in an IRC channel just feels kind of… backwards.

Perhaps I’ve been watching too much Star Trek recently.

Anyway – unless people object to that, too (seriously?), I’ll be turning off Iggy later this month: so if you’ve got something important to say to him, say it soon! I’ll leave the “Chat” button on Abnib because it’s lazier than removing it, and you never know if somebody might find a use for it, but I think it’s time to declare the channel “dead”.

On This Day In 2003

Looking Back

On this day in 2003, I first launched this weblog! That means it’s eight years old today! I’d bought the scatmania.org domain name some time earlier with the intention of setting up a vanity site separately from my sub-site on the avangel.com domain, during a rush on cheap domain names perpetrated by some of the friends I’d lived with in Penbryn, but never found a significant use for it until this day. It was at about the same time that I first set up (the long-defunct) penbryn-hall.co.uk, a parody of Penbryn’s website launched as an April Fools joke against the hall, which eventually got me into some trouble with the management committee of the halls. Some friends and I had made it a tradition of ours to play pranks around the residence: our most famous one was probably 2003’s joke, in which we made a legitimate room inspection out to be an April Fools joke, with significant success.

scatmania.org in August 2003. The theme is simplistic, and the blog itself is powered by a custom-built PHP engine back-ending onto a stack of flat files. It worked, just about, but it wasn’t great.

In my initial blog post, I took care to point out that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination my first foray into blogging. In actual fact, I’d run a weblog, The Åvatar Diary, for a few years back in college: a few fragments of this still exist and are archived here, too. I suppose that this means that, ignoring the occasional gap, I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years. The Åvatar Diary died after an incident with a rather creepy stalker: remember that this was in 1999, back in the day when Creepy Internet Stalkers were still new and exciting, and I panicked slightly and shut the Diary down after my stalker turned up in person somewhere that I’d hinted that I might be in a post.

I didn’t mention the new site launch, to begin with, hoping that folks might just “pick up on it” having re-appeared (I’d been promising to launch something at that domain for ages). Later, I launched Abnib, in an attempt to unite the LiveJournal users with whom I associated with those of us who hosted our own blogs. Abnib still runs, after a fashion, although I’m likely to let it die a natural death as soon as it wants to.

Looking Forward

So here I am, eight years later, still blogging on the same domain. The frequency with which I write has waxed and waned over the years, but I still find that it’s just about the best way for me to keep in touch with my friends and to keep them posted about what’s going on in my life: it’s unintrusive and can be dipped in and out of, it’s accessible to everybody, and – because I host it on my own domain – it’s under my control. That’s a million points in its favour over, say, Facebook, and it’s nice to know that it’ll exist for exactly as long as I want it to.

It also provides a great “starting point” by which people find me. Google for me by name or by many of the aliases I go by and you’ll find this site, which I think is just great: if people are trying to find me online I’m happiest knowing that the first pages they’ll get to are pages that I control, and on which I write what I want to: I’ll bet U.S. Senator Rick Santorum wishes that he had that.

I enjoy blogging about geeky stuff that interests me, things that are going on in my life, and my occasional and random thoughts about life, the universe, and everything (with a particular focus on technology and relationships). It’s put me in contact with some strange people – from pizza delivery guys who used to bring me food on Troma Nights back in Aber to crazy Internet stalkers and confused Indian programmers – and it’s helped me keep in touch with the people closest to me. And because I’m a nostalgic beast, as this and similar posts show, it’s a great excuse to back-link my way down memory lane from time to time, too.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day in 2002 (New Job!)

This will be the first time I’ve ever written an On This Day post where I haven’t been able to link back to a blog post that I actually wrote in the year in question. That’s because, in 2002, I was “between blogs”: the only thing I wrote about online that I still have a copy of was the imminent re-launch of AvAngel.com, my vanity site at the time. In that post, however, I did mention that I’d re-written my CV, which was relevant to what was going on in my life in March 2002…

Looking Back

On this day in 2002, I first began working for SmartData, my primary employer for the last nine years. A few months earlier, Reb – my girlfriend whom I’d moved in with in 2001 – and I had broken up, and I’d recently found the opportunity to visit Aberystwyth and visit friends there (the trip during which I first met Claire, although we didn’t get together until a little later). On that same trip to Aber, I also met Simon, who at that point had recently accepted a voluntary redundancy from the Rural Studies department of the University and was getting started with the launch of his software company, SmartData. He’d recently landed a contract with the National Dairy Farm Assured Scheme and needed an extra pair of hands on board to help out with it.

Sorting out premises was coming along somewhat slower than he’d planned, though. As part of the SpinOut Wales scheme, SmartData had been offered cheap accommodation in a University-owned building, but they were dragging their feet with the paperwork. On our first day working together, Simon and I crammed into his tiny home office, shoulder-to-shoulder, to hack code together. The arrangement didn’t last long before we got sick of it, and we “moved in” to the room (that would eventually be legitimately ours) at Peithyll, a former farmhouse in the village of Capel Dewi, near Aberystwyth.

Over the last nine years since, as the company has grown, I’ve always felt like a core part of it, shaping it’s direction. As we transitioned from developing primarily desktop applications to primarily web-based applications, and as we switched from mostly proprietary technologies to mostly open-source technologies, I was pointing the way. By working with a wide variety of different clients, I’ve learned a great deal about a number of different sectors that I’d never dreamed I’d come into contact with: farm assurance schemes, legal processes, genetic testing, human resource allocation, cinema and theatre, and more. It’s been a wonderfully broad and interesting experience.

Looking Forward

When I began making plans to move to Oxford, I initially anticipated that I’d need to find work over here. But Simon stressed that my presence was important to SmartData, and offered to allow me to work remotely, from home, which is most of what I’ve been doing for the last year or so. Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, this has worked reasonably well: VoIP phones keep us in touch, tunneling and virtual networks allow us to work as if we were all in the same location, and webcams help us feel like we’re not quite so far from one another.

But this wasn’t to be a permanent solution: just a way to allow me to keep contributing to SmartData for as long as possible. Last week, I was offered and accepted a new job with a new employer, here in Oxford. Starting in April, I’ll be managing the administration and the ongoing development of the website of the Bodleian Libraries, the deposit library associated with Oxford University.

It’s a huge change, going from working as part of a tiny team in a West Wales town to working with hundreds of people at one of the largest employers in Oxford. I’ve no doubt that it’ll take some getting used to: for a start, I’m going to have to get into the habit of getting dressed before I go to work – something I could get away with while working from home and that might even have been tolerated in the office at SmartData, as long as I threw on a towel or something (in fact, I have on more than one occasion taken a shower in the SmartData offices, then sat at my desk, wrapped in towels, until I’d dried off a little).

This feels like a huge turning point in my life: a whole new chapter – or, perhaps the completion of the “turning a page” that moving to Oxford began. My new job is a brand new position, which provides an exciting opportunity to carve a Dan-shaped hole, and I’ll be working with some moderately-exciting technologies on some very exciting projects. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once I’m settled in, but for now I’ll just say “Squeee!” and be done with it.

Oh: and for those of you who follow such things, you’ll note that Matt P has just announced his new job, too. Although he’s a sloppy blogger: he’s actually been working there for a little while already.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2004

A little bit tongue-in-cheek, this one.

Looking Back

On this day in 2004, I’d just finished my first marathon session of playing Half-Life 2, a spectacular new video game that quickly became one of the best-selling computer games ever. Despite New Year celebrations and other distractions, I managed to sit and play the game for a couple of days and finished it very soon after.

The launch of the game was delayed – I’d pre-ordered it 17 months before it eventually got released – after being plagued with development difficulties. One of the many delays to it’s launch was blamed on the theft of part of the source code: I remember joking, after the thief had been caught, that now that they’d got the code back they’d be able to release the game, right?

Meanwhile, Paul swore that he would have nothing to do with the digital distribution platform – Steam – that remains the only way to get a legitimate copy of Half-Life 2. On his blog – then on LiveJournal – he listed all of the many problems that he saw with Steam, and I countered a few of them in an argument in the comments. For years to come, he’d go on to refuse to play some of the most fantastic computer games to be released on principle.

Looking Forward

Things change. I can’t remember the last time I saw Paul playing a video game that he didn’t buy on Steam, for one (except for a handful that he bought from Good Old Games – which is well worth visiting, if you haven’t already).

Some things stay the same: Half-Life 2 remains one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and has been followed by two spectacular sequels (Episode 1 and Episode 2) and a number of spin-offs (including the mind-blowingly awesome Portal, which stole my life for a while, although not for long enough to make my 2007 list of life-stealing games). We’re still all waiting on the much-delayed Episode 3, though…

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

On This Day In 2009

Looking Back

On this day in 2009 I’d just announced that Claire and I had broken up after our seven year relationship. I attacked Virgil‘s omnia vincit amor (love conquers all), countering that our love for one another was not sufficient to prevent the difficulties we’d been having. That the breakup was among the most structured, carefully-negotiated, and amicable of I’ve ever heard detracted only a little from the pain of the ending of the romantic part of our relationship.

You’ll note that I’ve always been careful not to say that our relationship ended, because it didn’t. It changed: we transitioned (bumpily, and with difficulty) from a romantic relationship to a friendly relationship. You’ll also notice that I don’t use the term “just” friends unless that clarification is absolutely necessary (after all, why are friends “just” friends: what’s wrong with friends? – I’ve another blog post on this very topic under construction).

Looking Forward

It’s gotten easier, over this last year, to deal with the breakup: but it’s still hard. We had a huge place in one another’s lives, and that doesn’t simply evaporate. From my perspective, at least, I still feel at least a little bit “derailed”: like, if you asked me 18 months ago about where I’d be living now, or what I’d be doing, then I wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty that it would be this life I now have. That’s not to say I’m not happy: I’m enjoying what I’m doing now (although a little more free time wouldn’t go amiss!). It’s merely that I haven’t yet fully got used to the fact that I’m not quite living in accordance with the same plans that I used to have.

There are folks who’ve criticised our breakup, saying that we’d both have recovered from it better had we tried harder not to keep in contact, not to remain friendly, etc. I don’t know whether I agree or not – but I dispute that it would have necessarily been better. One thing that’s actually been really helpful over the last year (for me, at least, and I’d guess for Claire too) is that we’ve been able to get support from one another. That’s a remarkable and unusual thing: but then, we were a remarkable and unusual couple.

And isn’t supporting one another what friends do?

Getting better all the time. Sorry to mope.

This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.

It is Windy in Aberystwyth

We don’t get wind in Oxford: not wind like this, anyway. The air is passionate and angry, full of bitter sea salt and wild energy. It smells like Aberystwyth… and still a little like “home”.

But this time I’m here as a visitor, of course. Just another tourist: and that’s a very strange and alien feeling, to me.