Recap

In January I scribbled out a short list of writing-related things I'd like to achieve. As the last moments of 2012 trickle away, let's take a look back and see how badly I failed.

• (Self) Publish two volumes of short stories — Well, I got halfway there, even if at two stories it's only just a collection. I've got another couple of stories almost edited, so I'll see if I can't completely tick this one off next year.
• Commission a graphic novel — Didn't even come close. The script still needs writing. In typical programmer geek fashion, I think I'm going to have to code myself the ultimate storyboarding iPad app first, before I can settle down to writing the actual story.
• Complete a full-length script — I'm not sure I even started a script this year.
• Complete the novel(la) I've been planning — Yeah... Nope. Didn't happen.

So there you have it. Twelve months later and I'm no closer to achieving my writing goals. Time to start work on another list, I think.

π

I've had a Raspberry Pi for a few months now, and to be honest I still don't know what to make of — or indeed with — it. Here are a jumble of my current thoughts.

Running RISCOS is fun. Way back in the distant past when I was at school, the computing lab was populated exclusively with Archimedeses. Compared to the home computers of the day — the Atari STs and Commodore Amigas — these were nice fast machines with a lovely hi-colour GUI. Real Rolls Royce machines. Seeing RISCOS boot in a few seconds on the Pi gives me a real buzz. It's also cool to see it connecting to the internet, given that we didn't have any of that nonsense back when I was in school. It's just a shame that the default web browser doesn't support JavaScript, rendering most of the modern net unfortunately broken.

I wish I could find more to do with RISCOS. But then it's always seems to be the same with me when running a new OS for fun. Without actually needing to get work done with it I'm usually at a loss. I guess if I wanted to risk nostalgia overload I could spend more time running the Hatari ST emulator on it. I'm looking forward to giving BBC Basic a whirl. It would be nice to think that this classic language, on which a good number of the UK's bedroom coders cut their teeth, could step in to fill the Pi's remit of inspiring and empowering the next generation of programmers.

DexOS looks like a fun low-level OS. I haven't got it running yet, but I will one of these weekends. The same goes for Plan 9, which doesn't seem to like my mouse at all. And I'm really looking forward for the day when Android is usable on it, especially if someone figures out how to let it host its own development environment.

Rasbian, the Pi's de facto operating system, however, is slow. Almost unusably so, in my opinion. Maybe this is in part due to running it from an SD Card, but since this is the main configuration for the majority of people you'd think it would've been optimised. Applications are slow to launch and web pages trickle down. Sure, the Pi is "only" a 700Mhz CPU with less than 128Mb of RAM, but I can't be the only person who remembers Linux performing far better than this on much older hardware. Yes, considering you get a complete Linux distribution for free, I really shouldn't be complaining. But the aim of the Pi project is to get kids coding, and I'm not sure whether such a frustrating environment is the best place for that.

The thing with the hardware from the home computer boom of the early 80s — the hardware and the time which the Pi is seeking to hark back to — was the constraints it imposed. Constraints foster creativity, and most of the fun learning to program in those days was in finding the limits of the hardware and pushing against them. You typically only had a choice of a couple of languages (if you had any choice at all, otherwise it was just the built-in BASIC) in which to explore your environment. Learning everything about the machine was possible, and once you had a lot of the fun was in teaching it to perform new tricks. (This kind of limitation, I think, was also partly why the iPhone quickly became popular with hobbyist coders.)

The Raspberry Pi finds itself in an unfortunate position. The hardware, while undoubtedly cheap and mostly capable, is underpowered by the standards of the day. It can run Linux, but not nearly as well as you could on a standard x86 desktop system. The same goes for the available languages and programming environments. Ultimately, the Pi fails to be unique in the way which the home computer systems it tries to ape were.

First

It's only bloody November again, isn't it? This year I'm not even going to pretend to attempt NaNoWriMo, following my abject failures of the past couple of years. Not that everything's dead in the water on the wordage front. I've finally sorta ticked-off one of the items on my to do list by self-publishing some short stories. I say sorta because, rather than the half dozen or so I initially planned to include, this slim volume contains only two.

The Endless Sleep is available from Amazon here. It's a Kindle exclusive for the moment (until early next year, at least), meaning that it's available to borrow for free to Kindle-owning Amazon Prime customers. I'm doing this for the readers (and feedback) rather than the money, so I'm hoping this is a gamble which will pay off. I'm finding it almost impossible to get motivated to write at the moment, so I'm hoping that this will provide some form of a shot in the arm. Maybe a few 2-star reviews along the lines of "Not quite the worse thing I've ever read". A boy can dream.

I really have to thank my editor, Julia McKay. She can be contacted here and I'm sure can help you like she helped me. Together we fixed a lot of problems. All the remaining ones are due to my own intractable stupidity.

Clock 2

I made another clock. Much simpler this time.

Clock

Since the electricity was turned off briefly a couple of months ago, it has permanently been --:-- o'clock in my sitting room. Over the weekend I finally resolved to do something about this. Faced with a choice of either Googling the instruction manual for my ancient Philips DVP 3100V combo DVD+Video or just nipping down to Poundland to buy a cheap wall clock, I decided to go with option 3. And so I wrote a simple clock app using Corona and repurposed a 1st generation iPad to run it on.

Oh, the hours I could waste watching those little balls bounce around. It took a bit of fine tuning the trap door to stop them from clogging-up the workings but the current version has been running for a day or so now without grinding to a halt.

I've got a few other ideas I'd like to try out, so I think I'll make changing this clock a regular event.

Xerox

After seeing both the Swedish and US film versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo I felt compelled to find a copy of the book just to read the canonical version of the story. While the two movies where identical in so many respects — almost down to the framing of some shots, which I assume is a testament to the descriptive clarity of the source narrative — there were a couple of notable differences. Was Blomkvists's religious daughter invented by Fincher, or did the Swedes choose to remove her and instead give Lisbeth her pivotal revelation? The remake of Total Recall offers a similar chance to examine what is considered the soul of a story.

Most importantly, Total Recall is a remake of the 1990 film, rather than a further re-imagining of We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. PKD is listed as writer of the original inspiration in IMDb but I can't say I remember seeing his name up on the screen. All that has been kept of his story is the central premis of a spy whose suppressed memories are re-awoken after a visit to Rekall. Mars has been discarded entirely, apart from as a throw-away line.

So what's been brought forward from the Arnie version? The names have been kept the same; we get the same double-tripple-bluff plot; the "this is all a delusion and you're still at Rekall scene" (although minus the neat "So it won't matter if I shoot you then?" resolution of the original); and the pretend wife. In fact, this remake is all about the pretend wife, who is given a more prominent role than Sharon Stone's version. Which I guess makes sense, given that Kate Beckinsale is director Len Wiseman's missus. (We also get a couple of nice references to keep fans of the original happy: there's the three-breasted hooker — which, given the lack of radiation mutants doesn't make much sense here — and a woman bearing the likeness of the exploding-head Arnie decoy in the customs scene.)

In all the film was pretty good. It was played straight, but not in the po-faced way The Dark Knight Rises was. (They bungle the single almost funny line: In response to "That's your wife?" I would have gone with "We're having problems".) Sure, there were some major logical flaws (not least, how about they start by building some robots to build all those other robots?) but on the other hand I could happily watch Kate Beckinsale kick/shoot/jump over things for hours. And once again we see Bill Nighy demonstrating that he's happy to spout any old tosh for cash.

Also, it's fun to imagine that in the original script the only two parts of the world left inhabitable were the UK and France, and that The Fall was originally the Chunnel.

Nexus 7

In a moment of giddiness following the Android coding introduction I took at iOSDevUK, I ordered a Google Nexus 7. I've had it for a few weeks now (and, no, still haven't written any code for it), so here are a few of my current thoughts regarding it.

The bottom line is that I like it. I like the 7" form factor and I like the Jelly Bean system software. I don't think that, as a whole, it is better than the iPad, but it is definitely better in some ways and overall getting closer. It has replaced the iPad for most of my second-screen needs, and in particular I find it much better for reading eBooks. The screen isn't quite iPad 3 quality, but the difference isn't so great as to be noticeable, and the difference in weight more than makes up for it. (I chiefly use the Kindle app rather than iBooks, meaning that all my purchased books are synced between both devices.)

So... First impressions. Which were terrible. I was greeted by the screen you see below.

Would you look at that? A Michael Bay film (which doesn't actually exist — as all right-thinking people know, there was only ever one Transformers movie made and that stared Orson Welles and Eric Idle) and a Jeffrey Archer book. Seriously, Google, what the hell are you trying to do to me?

Joking aside, the real first impression of the Nexus 7 came from the screen which offered to set up the device with all my Google accounts. I thought I had unchecked this option when I ordered, but there on the first screen was my Google username and a prompt for my password. (Perhaps that was the difference — by unchecking that option, I had to manually start the setup process myself.)

For a lot of people, their first interaction with Jelly Bean will be entering their wifi password. This is the bit where you discover the default keyboard is disappointing compared to the iPad's and that the beep it makes on every key press is incredibly annoying. You can, of course, replace it with a third party keyboard. And here you have both the advantage and disadvantage of Android in a nutshell: the power to configure the system to your liking traded off against a less than optimal default setup.

There is a lot to prefer in Android over iOS. In many places it feels far more of an integrated whole. There are also times when it can be downright baffling. The behaviour of the system-wide back button is one such place. These two are related, as they're to do with the way individual parts of apps can be chained together and called from one another. So for instance, the Facebook app may open a page in Chrome which instantly pulls up the YouTube app to display a video. Hitting the back button will let you work backwards through this stack to return to the Facebook app. Unless you stop to interact with, say, Chrome on your way through, at which point the back button will start working back through Chrome's history. Or something. Like I said: confusing.

I can't really say what the Nexus 7 is like as a tablet, because so many of the apps I've tried are basically the phone version displayed on a large screen — or larger screen, since Android phone screens are already creeping up into the far end of big. The lack of polish is also noticeable, even in big name apps. IMDB is one of the most professional-looking I've tried, and even there the rough edges are evident, such as in the image gallery view, where you swipe the screen to flick between photos. There's no smooth page-to-page scrolling, no smooth transitions, no inertial scrolling through lists — none of the little features which are so easy for iOS developers to implement and which make such a difference to the user experience. In fact, it's sad to say that most of the apps with the best UX are direct un-Android copies of their iOS equivalents.

But in all, and for its price, the Nexus 7 is a great device. Hopefully it will inspire developers to create some great tablet apps to make best use of its features. (And since I would argue that Android tablets are a distinct market to Android phones I hope we will see it becoming worth those developers' time to do so.) I wouldn't recommend anyone get it instead of an iPad, unless they're on a very tight budget, but I'd certainly suggest you take a look at it if you were, for instance, considering a Kindle (or have given up waiting for the Kindle Fire to appear in the UK).

Untranslatable

This list of untranslatable words collected by Fuchsia Macaree — tweeted by Polly — lead me to see whether I could fit them all into a single narrative. I wonder how much sense it makes before you read the definitions. (And, yes, I know I missed one.)

For a little while she let the craic of the foka enfolder her. The renao company of friends, the swapping of istories me arkoudes. And Steven. The mamihlapinatapai across the table, the yuanfen almost tangible.

But the conversation turned to politics, as was its inevitable want. A magazine was passed around, its cover extolling the man's imagined virtues. He was a snorker, she thought. She could tell from his eyes. He had a backpfeifengesich and a bad case of age-tori. She knew his type. Incapable of xinku, a stranger to gigil, it was the poshlost of men like him which had bred the qualunquismo so prevalent in her generation back home. Which had ultimately caused her to flee the janteloven of that same homeland. To abandon it, and with it the dozywocie.

All at once she no longer felt herself among friends. The desire for uitwaaien forced her to her feet. She left the cafe and wandered into the nearby park. Under the komorebi she closed her eyes and let the waldeinsamkeit wash over her, a feeling as refreshing as oppholdsvœr, as pleasurable as hanyauku.

At the edge of the park was a neidbau, bedecked in neon, casting a chill finger of shadow across the neighbouring buildings. She climbed to its roof and stood looking out across the tops of the trees. It had been a mistake to come to this city. She would never learn its ways, no matter how long she stayed. She wondered what changes she needed to make to herself, what alterations she would have to adopt, to fit in. She imagined that somewhere there was an alternative her, a her who had once, long ago, chosen to walk a slightly different path, who would be at home amongst this strangeness. L'appel du vide took hold of her, pulling her inexorably towards the edge of the roof, feet shuffling slowly closer to the drop.

A noise from behind broke the spell. She turned and tartled, then bit down hard against the zhargzharg as from out of the shadows stepped her eidolon.

Batman Ends

Back in the early 90s, around the time I was at college, Radio 1 — rather randomly — broadcast an adaptation of the Batman storyline Knightfall. While I didn't expect The Dark Knight Rises to be a faithful retelling of this, I felt that the similarities meant it would provide at least a good point of comparison. I came out the other side rather disappointed.

Knightfall represents what I think is one of the major strengths of long-running comic book series: namely, the massive cast of supporting characters the writer has to play with. Batman is faced with a rogue's gallery of villans, and has to call — however reluctantly — on his allies to aide him. The Dark Knight Rises took a different route, in large parts being about Bruce Wayne battling his inner demons. Taking on the Big Bad is left to the secondary characters — mostly Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who thankfully is starting to not look like a teenager — with Batman only reappearing deus ex machina at the last moment.

Is The Dark Knight Rises a good film in the context of Nolan's Batman trilogy? I'm not sure. It's cluttered and confused, and suffers from the Doctor Who problem of thinking that you need to set the stakes really high — OMG they're going to nuke Gotham! — to build dramatic tension. Bane's Occupy Gotham plan doesn't really make much sense, feeling like an attempt to crowbar in some clumsy social commentary, and the Nolan boys seemingly couldn't resist throwing in a couple of random twist endings.

Anne Hathaway is by far the best thing in the film, but then — Halle Berry aside — you can't really go wrong with the character of Catwoman. And there, I think, lies the problem with the film. It doesn't have enough superheroes and supervillans in it. The gradual darkening and grittyfication of Batman over the years shows that it's perfectly possible to keep all that is great and escapist about the genre while ditching the childish campness, but what Christopher Nolan has attempted to do here is make a superhero flick without the superhero. And it's all turned out a bit of a disappointment.

Spider-Man Starts

As someone once pointed out — probably over at IO9 — the main problem with comic book adaptations is that they usually end up being origin stories. Despite having decades of plot lines and a pantheon of supporting characters to draw upon, the movie studios seem compeled by the need to introduce the superhero to their audience. These tales are seldom the most interesting there are to tell.

So here we are again, ten short years after Toby Maguire first donned the red and blue spandex, introducing a new generation to a new Spider-Man. I guess it gives Andrew Garfield something to do until the inevitable Andy Murray biopic (which has been posponed for another year due to the dour Scot's inability yet again to provide the requisite happy ending). This new Spider-Man is less emo than Maguire's — which isn't hard: there are suicides in eyeliner factories which are less emo than Maguire's Spider-Man — and more of a sk8r boi.

And, well, that's about it. Martin Sheen at least made the character of Uncle Ben memorable, Denis Leary is alright as Commissioner Gordon, and Rhys Ifans, you feel, is always tottering on the edge of suddenly being hilarious and Welsh, but never is. To my eternal embarrassment, my lack of comic book knowledge meant I spent most of the film thinking that the main bad guy was Killer Croc. (But given he was actually "The Lizard", an 'it's Friday afternoon so let's just think of something anything doesn't matter what and then go down the pub' kind of character name if ever I heard one, you can perhaps excuse me that.)

The mechanical web shooters were a nice touch — although probably one motivated by a desire to connect to the kids in the audience who haven't woken up one morning and suddenly found themselves able to shoot spider silk from their wrists — but it was never made clear whether it was the spider bite which kicked off Peter Parker's other super powers or whether they just coincidentally manifested themselves at that convenient point in the plot. Still, I guess if we want answers to this, and to the mysterious disappearance of Peter's parents, we'll just have to wait for the sequels.

iOSDevUK 2012

I spent last week in Aberystwyth, in the company of other iOS developers, for the second annual iOSDevUK meetup. I had a great time, meeting up with some old friends, making some new contacts, and attending some fascinating talks. A few quick thoughts:

• I understand that it's difficult to gauge the collective abilities of such a large group of attendees, but I found the technical level of most of the presentations pitched lower this year than last. The exceptions from the talks I attended included Chris Ross on 3D/OpenGL — which was probably just a basic introduction to a very difficult subject — and Chris Greening on multi-player games with GamesKit. Which isn't to say that the overall quality of speakers wasn't incredibly high.
• The lack of a barcamp this year was a pity. The meal on the first night could have used something to get everyone up and mixing about more.
• The game hack was a great idea, and I hope they run it again next year. I think I've learnt enough about team sizes to make it more fun next time, too.
• Offering an introduction to Android programming was a nice idea, and I think I learnt enough from it to get me over the initial conceptual barrier. It would have been nice if the instructors had known a little more about iOS development, since in this case that was where their students were coming from. A lot of confusion could have been cleared up by providing direct comparisons between platforms (eg. contrasting Activities with View Controllers).
• The stand-out surprise speaker (or at least surprise to me, but then I really should read the programme before attending next year) was Oscar winner Jan Pinkava, writer and co-director of "Ratatouille". He had apparently studied computer graphics and robotics as a postgrad student at the university with conference organiser Chris Price. A natural storyteller, Jan is a captivating speaker, and I'm sure that no one minded that he overran his allotted time slot by about an hour.

I look forward to attending again next year.

Write

You don't need to have been published to call yourself a writer. You don't need to have ever earned a penny from your words. You don't even need to have been read (although believe you me, being an unread writer is a soul-destroying pastime). But to be a writer you must, definitely, without fail, this isn't negotiable, write. The accreditation is fairly painless. As soon as you write that's it, you're a writer. And as soon as you stop, you aren't. So start writing and keep writing. Finish what you start. Plug away, even when you hate every word you write. You'll hate those words even more if you don't write them. That thing they say about writing being rewriting? It's true. Despite the similarities, you mustn't confuse writing with calligraphy. Don't expect a period of silent zen meditation, contemplating the perfect whiteness of the page, followed by a sudden burst of activity, a few deft strokes resulting in a perfect word or phrase. Writing is more like sculpting with clay. Take the words and pile them up, squish them together, squeeze them into the shape of the idea, the rough form of the story. Take a step back. Look at them from every angle. Now dive back in. Gouge out the unneeded words, push them around, work in the fine detail. Mould and scrape and shape. Get your hands dirty. Write.

Shop

There is a shop, somewhere. One day, quite by accident, you will find it. It will be in a city you've never visited before, down a small side street you won't ever be able to locate again. Maybe it's a book shop or an art gallery. Maybe it's a record store. You will feel yourself drawn to it. And on its shelves you will find copies of every book you never wrote. Hanging on its walls will be all the pictures you never painted. In its racks will be every song you never composed, played by every band you never formed. They will let you browse for a little while, the keepers of this shop. And then they will laugh you back outside. Don't try to buy anything. They won't let you. They'll tell you that you missed your chance, and then slam the door in your face, twisting the sign in the window over to CLOSED. So what can you do about it? You can act now to put them out of business. Leave no book unwritten, no picture unpainted, no song uncomposed. And then on that day, you will find the shop, and it will be shut up, nothing but dust in its windows, and you can pass by without giving it a second thought.

Prometheus

In the tradition of those who can, do; those who can't, teach; and those who can't even teach, review, here are a few thoughts on Prometheus.

I think the main point we can take away from both Prometheus and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel is that Ridley Scott's pension pot obviously wasn't performing as well as he would have liked, and needed a bit of topping up. There's nothing really wrong with this film. Scott is a great director, and it shows. The action is fast-paced and the performances are good. You can see and hear what's going on at all times. You never get a stray boom mike bobbing into view or catch a glimpse of the film crew in one of the many reflective surfaces. I'm sure if I'd seen it in 3D — instead of 2D, as god intended — things would have flown out of the screen at me in a very satisfying manner. It was all very competent.

There is a problem with prequels that they can borrow too heavily from the films which came before (after)(this could get confusing) them. In his encyclopaedic analysis of the Star Wars prequels — which as I'm sure you're aware were never made and so do not actually exist — Mr Plinkett points out that Luke and Obi Wan (and Uncle Owen and the bartender at the Mos Eisley cantina) dress the way they do because they live on a hick desert planet. Yet, come the prequels, these desert rags have been adopted as the official uniform of the Jedi. So it is with Prometheus. Maybe David playing basketball has nothing to do with the court scene from Resurrection, but we get the muster scene and the head-mounted cameras from Aliens, the sexually-threatening Android and the flamethrowers. Yet there's one notable absence...

Prometheus also borrows heavily from elsewhere, which is a shame given the strong, unique world which the original films created. As Kim Newman points out, the whole "ancient astronaut" plot has been done to death in SF over the decades since Alien. For my money, 2001 had already presented the definitive version of the story ten years before Alien was released. It also did the boredom of space travel far better. It's sad to see a franchise which originated so many quotable scenes resort to quoting other movies (David's obsession with Lawrence of Arabia). The SF props which make up its background have been drawn from far and wide. The autodoc practically asks you to please state the nature of the medical emergency. (And I'm going to come down on the side of, yes, a caesarian was what she meant to ask for.)

Since Wayland-Yutani-branded crates turn up in Firefly I guess it's only fair that the Prometheus herself should look like Serenity. There is plenty of random shiny gadgetry for the actors to stare at and poke whenever they need to do anything exciting. It makes you wonder exactly how old and backwards the Nostromo was. I wish they'd kitted the ship out with old clackety keyboards and green-screen monitors which clucked as the letters appeared. They could at least have edited out the "Where are you?"s as the character asking stands looking at a 3D map showing with flashing yellow diamonds exactly where everyone was. Also, it was a shame that Chekhov's Iron Man suits didn't get an outing, despite the number of time they were ran past.

(I also wonder about the choice of name "Prometheus" for the ship. (And as a quick aside, Mr Wayland, Prometheus wasn't so much "cast down" by the gods for bringing man fire as "chained to a rock and had his liver torn out on an infinite loop". Subtle difference there.) Something about the metaphor doesn't quite sit right. Personally, I would have kept the Prometheus theme for the aliens and called the ship "Pandora", after the wife the gods fashioned for him. It would be a little more apposite, given what we know about her tendency to open up cans of face-hugging chest-bursting worms.)

The film gets extra points for kicking off the main action on my 118th birthday. (Nice one, Ridders. I do appreciate little touches like that. Cheers.) Unfortunately, about ten minutes in, I'd convinced myself that "Elizabeth Shaw" was the name of Keira Knightley's character in those Pirate movies, and was composing a far more interesting film in my head. One where the feisty heroine swashbuckled her way past Space Jockeys and slime monsters.

Alien was a B-movie horror flick made a thing of beauty by brilliant design and direction. Prometheus... well, I'm not sure what it is, and I'm not sure if it knows, either. It's disappointing in the same way that 3 or Resurrection were when you learnt of the (limited) involvement of William Gibson or Joss Whedon, respectively. It could have been so much more than it was, but it ended up lacking something. And I don't just mean the Alien.

Soon

I GIMPed this up a few weeks back. I get very demotivated very quickly and needed something to keep my enthusiasm up.

This will be a micro-collection. I've already chosen the four stories it will contain (three of which are currently available over on my writing site), and these are with my editor for making readable. Once ready, I'll release it as a Kindle e-book, with a dead tree version (primarily for forcing copied on unwitting friends) to follow soon afterwards.

Of course, if this cover offends any of my Creative friends to the point that they'd like to step in and make me something better...

RIP The Book?

Among the many fascinating events which made up this year's Stoke Newington Literary Festival, "RIP The Book?" was one of the most interesting, not least because it intersected in a couple of places with my current interests.

China Miéville spoke first to reassure us that the linear narrative isn't going anywhere, which came as something of a relief. He went on to discuss the ways in which how those narratives are produces may evolve, touching on the idea of music-like remixes. This is something which we at Opuss have been working on for a while now. It will be interesting to see whether China — or his People — will allow his work to be available for treatment in this way.

There was some interesting musing on the subject of what form exactly a "book" would take, with the floor passing to Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital, and a tech gnome from a company called Liquid something, whose name I didn't catch. This was the first time I'd been to any literary events, but I've attended lots of tech gatherings and there is something very striking in the differences between the approaches taken by speakers from the two worlds. Literary speakers seem to talk with an authority and directness which is missing in their tech counterparts, who seem to favour vague, hand-waving statements and almost-motivational promises. Unfortunately this was evident from these two panel members, as they asked us to imagine a future where children's imaginations were fired not by boring old books but by future wonders which incorporated interactive storytelling and what we used to call Multi Media. When the gnome declared that he "wasn't really interested in the words", China's arched eyebrow was a thing of evil beauty. (It also didn't help that, as another audience member observed on the way out, "he wasn't bloody using the microphone properly".)

(This kind of attitude is nothing new. I've witnessed it firsthand myself, when working on a poetry app at a former employer. Faced with some of the greatest, most powerful writing in the English language, Creatives and managers started flailing around for animated gewgaws to make the content "interesting".)

Some of the properties of these future books — such as the ability to look up the definition of words while reading — are already available in current e-readers. Others — such as interactivity, with stories taking different paths depending on user choice — are describing things which have existed for a long time and aren't actually books. Many of the examples were directed at children's books, where there has always been this kind of innovation (think pop-up books and fuzzy felt).

Between China and the tech people came Mark Billingham, who seems like a really nice bloke with a bee in his bonnet about self publishing, particularly in its digital form. This is something which I'm slowly creeping towards (sometime this year, definitely...) so was particularly interested in. Taking a deep breath to quell the initial wave of annoyance his comments provoked, I found myself agreeing with many of his points. Digital self publishing is easy, and as a result there are a great many books released which were written in weeks, with a cover knocked-up by the author's neighbour. Mark also has a problem with the low price these are sold at, and how they are clogging up the best seller lists (and presumably keeping his Professional books down). This raises two issues which weren't really touched on.

Firstly there's the question of who should be allowed to publish. China made a comment about Jeffry Archer, to make the point that the standards of professional publishing aren't necessarily that high. (I think the swath of celebrity "auto"-biographies may have been a better example of this.) If I had a chance, I would have liked to ask Mark who he thought the gatekeepers to being published should be. There are many stories of classic novels being rescued at the last minute from publishers' rejection piles. Is it right that a small number of individuals working for (in the majority of cases) primarily commercially-driven publishing companies should decide what makes it into print? (And here I'll admit that I'm going down the self-publishing route because I don't have the confidence that my writing would be accepted by a publisher. I've tried in the past and been rejected after months or years of waiting for a response. Now I'm going to take a chance and go directly to the readers and let them decide whether what I've written is any good.)

Secondly is the simple matter of taking pride in your work. There is no excuse for releasing work full of copy errors with a badly-designed cover. At the "How Soon is Now?" event, one of the pop-up panelists — whose name I think was Alex something but he was a late addition and isn't in the programme and I didn't quite catch it at the time and oh god am I going senile already? — described how he wasn't allowed a copy editor for the indie project he was working on, on the grounds that someone's wife had found a spelling mistake in one of the Harry Potter books. Anyone who doesn't put in the minimum effort of hiring professionals to fill in the gaps in their skills deserves a thousand one-star reviews. Hiring an editor isn't expensive (in the great scheme of things, especially compared to the amount of your own time you've put into writing) and should be the least you do. (Here I'm following the wonderful advice of David Gaughran in his book Let's Get Digital — if you're considering self publishing you really should read it.) To do otherwise is to devalue your own work, and to give naysayers like Mark extra ammunition.

(Mark also appeared to be showing the signs of advanced Stockholm syndrome when it came to his views on the agency pricing model, but I won't go into that. I think I need to refresh my understanding of the issue, because it seems strange for his views to be at such great odds with how I perceive the economics of the situation.)

In all, the "RIP The Book?" session provided tremendous food for thought and reflected the high quality of the Festival as a whole. I can't wait for next year. (And if the organisers are planning another similar event and are looking for a panelist with experience in both self publishing and the brave new tech world of words...)

Assemblers

This week I saw The Marvellous Avengers or Assembly of the Avengers or Go! Go! Team Avengebots or whatever it's called. As I quipped on the Twitters, it is now officially my all-time no.2 favourite Joss Whedon film. Serenity remains unassailably in the no.1 spot, of course. Apart from having the funnier script and the less-identikit blockbuster set piece what-the-hell-is-going-on? battle sequence, I was simply more invested in the characters. (Although I still totally want to be Tony Stark when I grow up.) And Serenity never had the impact on popular Olde English usage that The New New Avengers is likely to (cut to a playground where school kids are calling each other mewling quims). Hat-tip to Joss for Coulson's almost forth wall breaking final words. But I do wish he'd stop sticking pointy things through the chests of everyone's least-offensive favourite characters.

Empty

Some mornings you wake up to find yourself lying at the bottom of a deep dark pit and you have to claw your way up towards the weak grey light before you can begin another empty day. It isn't like feeling sad, although that's in there somewhere. It can hit you in a crowd on a bright sunny day. Being alone is a symptom. There's a hollowness at the centre of your being, a vacum which sucks the energy from your limbs and the thoughts from your mind. A cold aching void, a yearning nothingness. That's when the voices start, telling you that you're nothing, cataloguing all your failings, the things you've never done, the things you'll never do, the tests that you've failed and can never hope to pass. Telling you that all those people who want nothing to do with you have the right idea. When it strikes all you can do is curl up into a tight little ball and wait for it to get bored and move on. Which it does. Eventually.

Amsterdam

I was in Amsterdam last week. I went to see the Manic Street Preachers play the Paradiso (an amazing gig in a beautiful, intimate venue), but thought I might as well make a weekend of it, especially in light of the whole Appsterdam thing. So here's another one of those bullet point lists I do.

• The Dutch are tall buggers. You really don't want to be stood at the back of a crowd of them.
• They are also all — as far as I can tell — as nice as hell. While the Japanese were universally polite, the Dutch are genuinely friendly.
• They also all appear to speak perfect English. Which is so kind of them that I won't even make a joke about their silly accents.
• The prevalence of cannabis can't be understated. Coffeeshops (note the important distinction between these and cafes) are everywhere, and pot smoke wafts through the streets like smooth jazz.
• The best time to see the red light district is probably on a drizzly grey morning, where you can experience the full effect of its tawdriness. The famous windows are generally just common or garden glazed doors packed closely together, for some reason making me think of vending machines.
• I'd describe the city as some kind of hookers and weed theme park, but that would be to ignore how incredibly beautiful it is. Parts of it are tacky in a British seaside kind of way, but the rest is simply adorable.
• The museums were great. Those that were open. Stuff closing for renovation is an effect I seem to have on anywhere I visit.
• I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason that "xxx" is emblazoned everywhere, including on the city's coat of arms. I should really get round to Wikipediaing it.

"Anniversary"

Read it here. There are spoilers below.

I dashed this off in a day for the Big Think SF short story competition on the theme of "future food". It didn't get anywhere, and if you read it you'll see why: it's a confused mess. It has far too much exposition and at the same time doesn't manage to get across clearly what it's trying to explain. It's a failure in world building. I was trying to build up the revulsion / horror of the main theme — that people routinely eat their own flesh, which is produced by the same machines and processes which create the tailored artificial organs which keep them alive and extend their lifespans — and then cap that with the introduction and breaking of a final taboo — the eating of other people's flesh (in this case as a gesture of commitment / devotion).

I may come back to this one day, just because I don't think the idea itself is too bad, and I'd like another shot at doing it right. I also kinda like the term "Geneva Chicken". That may be the future version's title.

"Tokyo Song"

Read it here.

Did I mention I went to Tokyo?

I'm not good at travelling. I've hardly been anywhere — opportunity and money never managed to coincide until just recently — and I've never really got the hang of holidays. Telling myself that I'd use these trips as research is my way of justifying the time and expense to myself.

I had the idea of writing something about Great Alex (the band who have been appearing as fragments — an oblique mention here, a sly reference there — in some of my writing for a while now) touring Tokyo even before I got on the plane and shared economy with a genuine touring group. Seeing them convinced me I was right. I do like it when fate gives me a clear sign like that. I also wanted to try out the voice of Matt, their drummer, in preparation for a longer story which I have planned (and which one day I may get to). Meanwhile, this gives me a chance to explore some of the themes which that will cover, while reusing my observations of the otherness of Japan — the surprisingly slight differences — pretty much all of which have been recorded elsewhere here in my travel notes. It also let me begin to flesh out the band's back catalogue of songs (or at least their titles), which is a part of the world building which I really enjoy.

Doing further research for this also gave me an excuse to trawl YouTube for 80s pop. The Graham Parker reference was added after I posted the first version of the story, after Brett Easton Ellis mentioned the song "Discovering Japan" in a tweet.

Mistake

I'll admit that I made a mistake leaving my last job. Not because of the pay — although I had got used to having a regular income and, yes, finding contract work seems to be far more of a chore than I had expected — but because of the people. I miss working with other people in general, and with the good friends I'd made there in particular. And while I try to keep in touch, it's proving hard — as hard as I've always found it to keep in touch with people, to stop them drifting away out of my life. And the thing is that I knew this would happen. It was the reason I always gave for not wanting to go contracting, no matter how good the money. I should have stuck with the job, no matter how soul-destroying the frustration became.

Hosting

Working on the principal that life is far too short to waste time administering a dedicated server, I've begun moving the couple of web sites I still run — Bounded by Infinity and Just About Managing — over to SquareSpace. While I'll lose a lot of the flexibility of the VPS I currently use, I won't have to worry about keeping the software stack up to date. I'll also get a few extras — like analytics, which I've never got round to setting up — into the bargin. It should even work out a little bit cheaper. Selling SimCap through the Mac App Store has meant that I no longer need to run my own system to dole out licence keys, which had been my mine reason for sticking with self-hosting. And if I ever find myself needing to do anything webapp-ish there's always Google App Engine.

"Muse"

The muse
  Does not choose
The artist she obsesses.

If my muse
  Were allowed to choose
She would choose one who possesses

A calling more in line with hers,
An aesthetic that's as fine as hers,
A talent as divine as hers,
And not this hopeless hack.

But my muse
  Did not choose
The artist she obsesses.

Bricks

Send to Print / Print to Send is an exhibition of 3D-printed design prototypes at the Aram Gallery (which is on the 3rd floor of the Aram store, on the corner of Drury Lane and Kean Street, just in case, like me, you're easily confused). (HT Polly for being the first of many to tweet about it.) The exhibition itself is a little on the meh side, but that's probably because as a geek I've been exposed to 3D printers and the stupidly cool things they can do for quite a while now. For the muggles I'm sure it's an eye-opener.

But the exhibition — along with this article — reminded me of a thought which struck me the other day (while I was in the shower, if you must know). The pirating of physical objects is inevitable — although we're still a way off from All Tomorrow's Parties — but I think we can already guess at the name of its first victim. The patent on LEGO bricks — and notice, please, the lack of an 's', just like 'maths' doesn't — expired over 20 years ago, and yet the company has hung in there. I'm sure much of this is due to a combination of nostalgia, brand recognition, and geek loyalty. But what about when you can download the CAD files for a complete set of bricks? (I haven't checked, but I'd be really surprised if such a file wasn't available right now.) LEGO is a much-loved company, but then so was Kodak.

Dare

"Get beyond being embarrassed by your dreams, and start putting them down on paper. Then, share them. That’s the only way, I know of, to make them happen." So says Chuck Palahniuk in the postscript to one of his short essays of writing tips over at LitReactor. Well, he's right about the embarrassment part, anyway, so let's see how this works out. This year I will:

• (Self) Publish two volumes of short stories — one SF, the other straight fiction.
• Commission a graphic novel based on an idea I'm currently fleshing out and (self) publish that.
• Complete a full-length script for Script Frenzy in April, and also work up another idea I have for a short film into something shootable.
• Complete the novel(la) I've been planning for NaNoWriMo in November.

I may even keep score this time — although it's always hard when there's no one around to take an interest in your work. Let's see how I do.

Social

Social networks are the social acts of a typically un-social group — programmers. They seek to reduce the messy, complicated business of inter-personal relationships to the logical predictability of database management. But in reducing friendship to a binary state they create their own further problems. It's something which Google+ addresses by not showing you who another user is following. Because there's nothing more painful than an unanswered friend request.

Mobile

During the summer I discovered something new which really annoyed me — even more than all the other things which really annoyed me, such as people who walk too slowly — and that was flaky or absent internet connections. In the years since I first got on the internet — via 14.4K modem, in case you were wondering — I seem to have become rather attached to it. An absence of connectivity — or worse, the taunting, tantalising, frustrating promise of an almost connection — suddenly became the most frustrating thing in the world. I wouldn't say I was addicted... but then again, I did stop halfway through writing that last sentence to check Twitter, so maybe...

During the week I was away, I burnt through 28Mb of data. And this wasn't your average, everyday data. This was premium, first class, solid platinum, diamond encrusted roaming data. I know it was stupid, but I really couldn't help myself. Most of it went on Google Maps, helping a rather tired and stupid novice traveller during his first stumblings about Japanese streets find his way to his hotel. (One observation I'll make is that the caching of map data by the Map app in iOS 5 seems greatly improved over previous versions. Despite infrequent use ours or days apart it was very rare to find it having to re-download tiles.)

The rest of my roaming usage went on Foursquare. Okay, I'll admit I seem to have become rather fond of racking up check-in points, but in my defence these also served as a handy log of where I'd been. I also found the lists of near by points of interest to be useful. I somehow managed to resist heroically the urge to check Twitter every few minutes — it probably helped that the timezone difference meant that most of the people I like to follow weren't active while I was out and about.

But the thing is, in this day and age, we shouldn't have to live like this, furtively nipping into Settings to turn data roaming on for the length of a download or check in and then quickly turning it off again. Smartphones are wonderful devices, but under these conditions we discover exactly how reliant on a network connection the majority of the really useful apps we use are. (And as a quick aside, can I just wonder aloud how the hell Words with Friends is allowed into the App Store when it blatantly quits if you try to run it without a connection.) I've observed before that the current Mobile trend is just an intermediate stage towards an eventual world of ubiquitous computing. To help us get there, we need to make sure that reliable data connections are always available wherever you are in the world, and that it doesn't cost an unreasonable sum to tap into them.

Coin-Op

Growing up in the pre-internet world, where media consumption pretty much meant taking whatever you were served, my exposure to Japanese culture was limited. On TV there were a few children's shows — such as Star Fleet and Battle of the Planets — but by far my greatest contact came through arcade machines. I wasted many a happy hour down the amusements, shovelling coins into games by Taito and Namco. Which I'm sure has absolutely nothing to do with my recently-developed obsession with Japanese vending machines, but makes for a nice little segue none the less.

It's probably not too much of an overstatement to say that vending machines are everywhere in Tokyo. You can't walk more than 50 meters in any direction with coming across a small cluster of them. At one point, wandering around what I'm sure were residential backstreets, I found one stood at the bottom of someone's drive. In fact, about the only place they were missing was along the posh shopping streets of glitzy Ginza — but even here they weren't far off, tucked away inside lobbies and around the corner in side streets.

You really can't argue with that

So what do these machines vend? Well, drinks, mainly. I became particularly partial to Suntory Boss cafe au lait. This comes out of the machine hot, and is a sweet, milky coffee — imagine instant coffee made with evaporated milk. It makes for both a great drink and a handy handwarmer. And, well... who could argue with the endorsement?

Your savoury options seem to be limited to a choice of the yellow and pink cans shown below. The yellow is a sweetcorn soup, served hot, which was actually quite nice. I would definitely try it again. The pink one — which I had hoped would be some kind of chilled pudding — was warm and labelled "Sweet Red Bean Broth". No. Very much no.

Left to right: Yes; No

Machines vending food were rare. I think I only ever saw three of them. One sold a kind of cake bar like a dry brownie called vegestick which tasted of orange chocolate and was absolutely delicious. I wish I could remeber where I found it — a Metro station platform somewhere, I think. Another sold boxes of nibbles with a lumberjack theme and absolutely no English anywhere on the packaging. I took a chance — there was always the possibility that they were dishwasher tablets or plant food — and they turned out to be little biscuit and chocolate concoctions and, again, utterly lovely. (In my extensive testing, I can safely say that chocolate in Japan seems far more like its British equivalents than European or US chocy does.) The final snack I tried was from a vending machine in the airport departure lounge. It was called soyjoy and was heavy on the former with no evidence of the latter. Best to avoid.

The exception to the no food rule were the restaurants where you paid for your meal via vending machine. This is another example of the strange over-staffing which I noted in an earlier post. The major domo of the establishment would hover near the machine, offering advice as you inserted your money and pressed the button showing what you wanted to each. The machine would then vend a tiny slip of paper, which you would hand (two handed), to said major domo. The slip went to the kitchen staff, and a few minutes later your freshly microwaved meal would be brought to you at your table. It's like it was designed for gaijin who couldn't be bothered to learn any of the language before visiting.

(Of course, you could always fall back to buying dinner from convenience stores, where the age-old language of choosing stuff from shelves according to what it looks like is spoken. For what it's worth, I would probably rate Seven-Eleven > FamilyMart > Lawson's, particularly when it comes to baked goods. I was kicking myself for not trying a Japanese sandwich, but then we got served one — of the same brand and in the same packaging as I'd seen on the store shelves — on the plane home. A valiant effort, all things considered, but only white bread was offered and that was a little on the spongy side, and they really need to work on adding more filling.)

Finally, no discussion of Japanese vending machines would be complete without mention of the apocryphal panties vending machine. All I can say is, if they exist, I never saw them.

Gaijin

The word means "outsider". Its use is often derogatory. It applies to me wherever I am.

I used to think that the distance I felt between myself and the rest of the world, the layers of numbness that separated us, lent me a degree of objectivity, that it made me a disinterested observer, and that this in turn would one day help me become the writer I wanted to be. And then there were the bad days... Of course, I had considered that maybe I was suffering from depression. Considered and dismissed it. Depressions was a serious condition and what I had was the occasional case of the blues. To even contemplate the two together was to denigrate the more serious condition. But then the bad days became more frequent, they lasted longer and the gaps between them grew shorter... And yet I continued ignoring it, year after year, until I finally had to admit — after ticking almost all the boxes on a couple of different "spot the signs" checklists — that maybe my problem had a name after all.

Travelling alone was probably a mistake, but I didn't really have much choice. I've always wanted to travel, but it wasn't until very recently that the opportunity — the confluence of money and spare time — presented itself. And of course I was alone, so if I wanted to travel I would have to do it — as I have to do everything — alone. But you're never really alone with depression, and so I found myself walking the streets of one of the greatest cities in the world, a black dog slinking along at my heels, close to tears at how wretched I felt.

I'm sure that there's an aphorism about travelling in order to discover yourself. I discovered that on the streets of Tokyo I was the same pathetic individual as I am in London. I shied away from so many of the new experiences there were to sample. I should have learnt more of the language before I went. I should have pressed harder against the boundaries of my comfort zones. Instead I cowered, ran away, hid. Every evening I was tucked up in my hotel room nice and early, telling myself that watching local TV was more in keeping with my goal of immersing myself in the culture of the place than would be sitting ignored in the corner of some bar. I never go out alone in London, either.

The worse thing is the lack of memories. I have copious photographs — which in due course I will sort through and post online — but that's not the same. They mean something only to me. I can share snapshots, but the original moments were shared with no one. I always carry a notebook with me — I hope it will help me become the writer I want to be — and I note down observations, thoughts and snippets I hope share in my writing someday, but that's not the same, either. There was no pointing out things to a companion; there will be no "do you remember...?"s in the years to come. But again, this is no different from London, either. Being alone is shit wherever you are.

Otaku

I'll probably have my geek card confiscated — or rather, my membership record deleted from the database because, c'mon, membership cards are kinda low-tech — but I really wasn't that impressed with Akihabara. I went looking for a nerd nirvana and all I found were Curry's-esque chain stores and the kind of little junk PC shops which I used to run, full of faded boxed software (physical media? please) and cartons of dirty used keyboards. I don't know what I expected — maybe Case buying some no-name Chinese copy of a Russian military console. (Which reminds me, I never got to visit a capsule hotel. Next visit.)

Of course, there's a very good chance that I took a wrong turning on my way out of the station and missed the really exciting stuff, but I guess the real problem is that modern technology is, basically, boring. Barring the occasional disruption — think touch screen phones, and that was almost five years ago this week — the trajectories of all the major technologies are known about and blogged to death months in advance of their rolling off the fabs, so the chances of stumbling across anything genuinely exciting among the minor speed bumps and storage hikes is next to zero.

Or maybe I'm just bitter about the way that the girls outside the maid cafes studiously ignored me as I walked past.

Sumimasen

Sumimasen means roughly "excuse me", in both the "get out of my way!" and "can I be of help?" senses. It's a word you should take note of, even if you're unlikely to ever use it yourself. As you walk around one of the many large department stores in Tokyo you'll be followed by a polite chorus of simimasens from the many attentive sales persons as you wander into the area of floor for which they are responsible.

Ginza, in all its neon magnificence

A final set of random thoughts:

• I was struck by the number of staff employed seemingly everywhere. Sales staff seemed more prevalent on the floors of department stores; each Metro platform was permanently manned; wherever you went, the number of people on hand to server seemed greater than I'm used to in the UK. How this related to the widespread use of technology was also interesting. For instance, many museums and other attractions used vending machines to sell their entrance tickets, but there would typically be three or four members of staff on hand to welcome you, point you in the direction of the machines, and show you how to use them. Technology is employed in addition to — rather than as a replacement for — human staff.
• They drive on the correct (left) side of the road, but stand on the wrong (left) side of escalators.
• There are lots of bicycles, most of them being ridden on the pavements. And I don't think I saw one helmet the whole time. Tut-tut, Tokyo.
• When you pay for something, I think that you're meant to place the money in the little tray on the counter, rather than handing it over to the salesperson. At least, that's the impression I got the first time I tried paying in the normal way and was corrected. Of course, sometimes there isn't a little tray, so I guess in that case it's okay to thrust cash at them.
• There was surprisingly little sushi on offer, the preferred food being ramen-style noodle bowls. The sushi I did try wasn't a patch on the stuff from the Rice Wine Shop in Brewer Street.
• Restaurants go in for displaying pictures of the food they serve, at least out on the shop front. (But not on the menus. Oh no, that would make things too easy...) Some even go so far as to display plastic replicas of the dishes they offer. Unfortunately, plastic being rather shiny, this has the effect of making them glisten rather unappetisingly.
• There is a really nice small sized paperback format, which is used for both prose books as well as manga. It's about 3" by 4" and is surprisingly nice and light to hold. I wonder if this format only works because kanji text is more dense than languages written in roman characters. And slip-on covers for your books seem popular, too.
• You wouldn't think it was possible to make Santa any more exciting than he already is, but somehow they've found a way:

"Captain Santa: For the Future"

Arigato

View from the Sky Deck atop the Mori Tower

Sitting here, watching the early morning sun washing the towers rose-pink, an almost-full moon still bright in the sky, Mount Fuji clear in the distance and wreathed in a thin band of cloud, I really wish I own and had brought a proper camera, something with an adjustable lens. And that I had some photographic talent.
A few more random thoughts:

• Face masks are big here. I'm trying not to let on that I'm currently nursing a minor case of the man-snuffles. I don't want to cause a panic or get quarantined or anything.
• For such a large city, it's not very noisy. What it is, though, is musical. Maybe it's because they're employing a different tonal system, but all the usual chirps and beeps — like the sound zebra crossings make — seem just that little more exciting. I particularly love the "hurry up and get on the train" tune they play on the Metro. It reminds me on what used to happen when you were almost out of time in something like New Zealand Story or Rainbow Islands. I'm sure you used to be able to get a set of Tokyo Metro sound effects for the Mac. I'll have to look them up when I get home.
• I also love the little fanfare which Seven-Eleven ATMs play as they present you with your cash. It makes you feel like you've just leveled-up. (But we won't mention the slight ATM-related mishap I had — there are so many zeroes here...)
• I'm not sure whether I'd be able to recognise a police officer if I saw one — everyone from the garbage collectors upwards dress like South American generals.
• There's something old fashioned which I can't put my finger on it about the touchscreen tech in the subway. It's like how people envisioned the sci-fi tech would look back in the day — a mash-up of CRTs and physical brushed-aluminium buttons surrounded by a chaos of labels and slots. But I guess, back in the day, while we were only envisioning it, the Japanese were actually building it.
• There is a lot of random English everywhere. Most shops, even the smallest ones, appear to be named in English, and random phrases — sadly, more often than not, actually in context and making sense — appear most everywhere else, such as in advertising copy. (Also sadly, I haven't seen anything like this yet.) In fact, the only place that English doesn't seem very popular is on menus.
• A surprising amount of hawking goes on. Along the busier streets there will be people, often with megaphones, stood outside even the largest chain stores, trying to get people to come in and buy.
• Someone needs to introduce this country to proper sausages. Even in a faux-English breakfast, Frankfurters are not right. (And what is a traditional Japanese breakfast, anyway?)

Konnichiwa

I'd have to be a much better photographer — and have a much better camera than this iPhone — to do justice to the view from my room, here on the 35th floor of the Century Southern Tower in Shinjuku. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. I've lived high up in London, and even a view which includes the Swiss Re and the half-complete Shard (like the background to my about.me page) pales against this sea of lights spreading far away to the horizon. The black void in the picture below is the Yoyogi Park surrounding the Meji Shrine.

By day the view is equally impressive. The annotated cityscape next to the window here tells me that that's Mount Fuji hidden behind the clouds in the distance there.

Since I'm being kept awake by jetlag — which sounds way cooler than my usual annoying insomnia — I'm going to note down my initial impressions of Tokyo while they're still fresh.

• Everything you've heard about how courteous and polite the Japanese are is absolutely true. I've turned up here, unable to speak a word of their language — well, I guess I can manage three or four, but I always seem to forget them when the time comes — and so far everyone I've met has been extremely helpful. I was worried about how to get from Narita to my hotel, having a vague notion of which train to take and which type of ticket to buy, but a few moments in the JP Rail ticket office and problem solved. Also, the amount of signage and the number of announcements which are in English is unbelievably generous.
• The thing where you hand over things — tickets, passports, cards — with both hands will take some getting used to.
• As will the toilets. I swear the one in my hotel room has more functions than my phone.
• Hats seem to be big over here.
• If those guys in the Economy cabin with me weren't a small-time rock group hoping to make it big in Japan, I'd be very disappointed, even if it is an almighty cliche. They certainly had all the stereotypes covered — long-haired and goateed prog-rock guy; large, curly-haired metal dude; goth girl who wouldn't take off her kitten-eared hat even inside the plane; trendy-haired too-cool-for-school in his skinny jeans. I should've asked them where they were playing. But it's annoying, because now the thing I was planning to write is going to look even less original.
• I took ages for my ears to pop. They didn't really clear until I started yawning. And every time I did, the city got a little bit louder.
• Shinjuku station makes the Bank-Monument complex look like an underpass. I have already spent a confused hour 'exploring' it.
• The "JP DOCOMO" carrier ident is so long that it forces the network activity spinner across onto the righthand side. Ugh.

Comfort Zones

The New Year is, I guess, as good a time as any to try something new — unoriginal, but at least everyone's doing it — so I'm about to step outside of my comfort zone.

Maybe somebody could alert our Embassy over there. Thanks.

codeyear.com

A link to codeyear.com has been doing the rounds on Twitter over the last couple of days. The idea is that you sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter containing an interactive lesson which, over the course of the next year, will teach you how to code. (Before you ask: yes, I have signed up. It's all about the life-long learning, and the constant nagging feeling that I'm doing something wrong.) This prompted pieces from Brent Simmons — who quotes Douglas Rushkoff's "program or be programmed" from off the site (showing he has more restraint than me, who would instead have pointed out Paul Graham's rather unfortunate "invest two years ... to learn how to hack") — and Daniel Jalkut — who wonders whether aggregate programming ability could be used in a similar manner to literacy rates to measure a society's level of intellectual advancement.

While yesterday I was hesitant to endorse the idea of making programming a part of the national curriculum, studied by all school children, I should point out that I don't have a problem with people learning to code. (Just as long as they aren't better than me. Or learn HTML+CSS mark-up and call it coding.) The more coders the better, I say. So if you want to program — if you've ever felt even the tiniest urge to create something in code — then you should give it a go, and this seems like the perfect way to get your feet wet.

The JavaScript Turtle

The state of computing and IT education in the nation's schools was a subject which came up several times at the couple of developers' conferences I attended this summer. At Update Conf, Anna Debenham's talk The Digital Native was a survey of current practices in teaching IT. I can't say I was particularly surprised that things haven't moved on much in the 20-or-so years since I was at secondary school. The roomful of Archimedes have been replaced with Windows PCs, but otherwise the curriculum, with its emphasis on doing pointless things in the name of learning to use a few productivity applications, seems the same.

(Anna's talk was probably the most thought-provoking of those given at Update, if only because its unevenness meant it wasn't as polarising as those by certain other speakers. There was a lot there which I agreed with, along with too much I found ill-informed and irritating for whatever reasons. All of which is, I guess, the mark of an excellent conference speaker.)

The basic preoccupation for attendees — a good number of whom were developers, even though Update itself had a far broader mix of professions represented — was whether the teaching of IT in schools should include programming. Later that week, at iOS Dev UK in Aberystwyth, Fraser Spears, during the Q&A portion of his talk on the deployment of iPads to school kids he's been overseeing, was asked this specific question. His reply — which I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with — was that general IT education should engender an interest in computing such that a child may be inspired to take up programming, but programming itself should only be an optional part of the curriculum.

My agreement is probably due to the fact that I came to programming on my own, without ever meeting it at school. There was a myth among my year — which may have been true, I have no real way of checking — that up until only a couple of years previously, programming had been generally taught, and that we had only just missed out. I don't know what affect being taught programming would have had on me. Maybe it would have crushed any enthusiasm I felt for the subject. Apart from at A-Level, I have no academic programming experience, but I like to think that, more important that teaching myself how to program, was teaching myself how to teach myself to program.

Anyway, all of this talk of education got me to thinking about those old stalwarts of teaching kids about computers: Logo and the turtle. I can't remember for sure whether I ever met these two (I have vague memories of a BBC Micro and a primary school classroom, but I may be inventing those...), but I've never really got on with Lisp. Whatever its educational benefits, its hardly a mainstream language these days, and if we're going to introduce school children to programming it may as well be in a language they can conceivably take forward into a career. So without further ado, I present the JavaScript Turtle.

The JavaScript Turtle is my first attempt at implementing a turtle in javascript (hence the deceptive name). As will become apparent by examining the source, I'm really not a web guy. Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for javascript, and I think that web technologies are an ideal playground for introducing the next generation of hackers to the wonders of code. The more perceptive among you will realise that what we're giving the young user here is a environment which allows them to execute arbitrary javascript — not just turtle control code — within the page. It's a massive, but basically safe, new world for the more inquisitive to explore.

My intention was to have the whole thing — markup, styles and code — encapsulated in a single file, so even if your school network is locked down, you can still distribute it the old fashioned way (which in my mind means floppies, although I've no idea if even our decrepid UK schools still support them). I intend to continue working at this — in particular, I need to add the ability to parse and handle control statements in a smart way — so if this is of any use to anyone, let me know.