"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.