Neil Hopcroft

“Neil, I’m in Shibuya”

After a few weeks of running on hectic I’ve finally had a day to myself to sort out some of the things that have been somewhat neglected.
We’re behaving like…tourists

Some more questions from mindygoth:

1) I often think you look slightly bewildered… are you?
Do I? Probably, yes, but I’ve never really thought about it that much…social interaction was never really that much of a strong point for me, I don’t (think) I take on that kind of look unless there are other people about.

2) I’m assuming you don’t drive when in Japan? Do you miss it?
Hell yes! I look forward to getting back to Europe and a chance to drive again – everything is too complicated and different here that I wouldn’t be confident about driving unless I had a competant Japanese driver (and good English speaker) as a passenger. I miss the freedom to just jump in the car and go to the countryside, or go to another town.

3) The Internet – Valuable addition, or damaging detraction from social interaction?
Right now – lifeline. But more generally somewhere between the two, its a beautiful, complex machine, but we haven’t figured out how to use it properly yet.

4) If there was one hobby you could take up that you don’t already have, what would it be (assuming money was no restriction etc.)?
Clockmaking. Not your usual fiddly little clocks, big clocks. But I need to learn to weld first, which always looked like fun in itself.

5) What is usually your favourite thing about Whitby Goth Weekend?
Watching people extract peas from their nose! The social interactions during the day times, the chance to spend time with people I don’t spend much time with. The evenings are a bit too much for me, but I wouldn’t go to the town without going to the evenings.

It would seem we are entering a new age of global communication. Today is the first day I have considered giving up on email as a useful communication mechanism, I had expected the MyDoom storm to calm and everything to return to normal. This has yet to happen. September just got worse [0].

Email is dead.

This couldn’t happen at a worse time for me. I know I’ve not been very good at responding lately (busy busy busy, more information later) but it has been one of my two main lifelines to civilisation. Without it I will feel isolated, distant.

What next?

Livejournal is an interesting community, but it gives very much a us-and-them divide, where those of us who are members communicate easily with each other while those who are not [1] can read but not really interact, voyuers. This leads to two tiers of friendship – something I’m uncomfortable with.

Orkut is another nice concept, but, as yet, is still too immature to really be that much use. Once they have implemented a sensible aggregation for community posts, the concept of communities as friends, better categorisation of communities, and a whole bunch of other tweaks and nicities it has potential to be a thriving community.

Merging these two, somehow, could make an extremely valuable resource. Perhaps with a Wiki connection too. Maybe this could be structured as a meta-site which connects an LJ profile with an Orkut profile and lays the two out into a single, simple page.

Beyond that, though, where do we go next? Am I the only one who is considering abandoning email? Or does everyone else already live without it and its just that I never noticed because I was too busy deleting copies of MyDoom? Does anyone have any ideas about other community sites, either real or not-yet-real?

[0] The year September never ended – 1994 or something, iirc, I wasn’t there at the time
[1] Why not?

My first LiveJournal spam! What joy. Its a chain letter for a Christian movie. Yeah, that’ll go down well. On so many levels.

If this becomes the norm I will be closing down anonymous posting to this journal….

Most of the posts will still be publically readable, as they are now, though.

Hugs to venta for making my day. Thank you!

Gah, someone on Oxford NTL has just filled my mailbox with MyDoom…

Some contact details

…and there are days when you meet someone you feel you were destined to meet, sooner or later [0]

Which got me remembering one of the projects I ‘ran’ while I was in Oxford. This project was a collaboration between four companies. This project taught me a lot about how to work with people.

I was working for one of the technology companies (there was one other tech company and a couple of big brands who were willing to put their name to the project as long as they didn’t have to actually commit any resource). My boss had spent a lot of effort bringing together the group and enthusing them about the possibilities of the project – rather too much enthusing and not enough actuality, in my view.

There was a deadline set for a demo in three months, with a beta trial in six and public launch in nine months, a challenging schedule but achievable. In order to meet this schedule we needed to get the technology rolling pretty damned quickly, so, having been given authority by my boss to run the technical side of the project I set up a mailing list for the developers to communicate, inviting anyone to pass it on to whoever I’d missed.

Oops, I missed the (non-technical) director from the other tech company. Mainly because I didn’t have his email address, or phone number, or indeed full name.

He was spitting blood when it came to the next meeting, ‘what the hell do you think youre doing?’ ‘we havent finished the negotiations yet’ ‘youre making me feel unimportant’.

Given that its six weeks until we’re supposed to have a trial running and we haven’t started coding yet I don’t feel I’ve done anything wrong by trying to encourage some communication. However, after his outburst (firstly on email copied to the whole project, then in one of the main project meetings) I suddenly lost interest in the project – I felt it was going to fail if anyone was adopting that attitude and the sooner I got myself out of it the better.

Sadly, since my boss had spent a year setting up the deal in the first place he wasn’t prepared to just drop it, so we carried on making appearances at the meetings, while we were off developing some interesting back end engine technology to go behind the sexy UI we were trying to sell, leaving the UI to rot badly – it was hack on hack, untested, breaking all the rules in the name of speed, just an excuse for laziness.

There came a point where somebody had had enough and decided to rewrite the whole thing in Java, whereupon it came out three times faster and much easier to maintain, and our input was no longer required.

And today, I found some potential for the technology behind the engine.

[0] No gossip here, this is strictly business.

…was a real film? I thought I’d accidentally managed to get inside the mind of simonsatori and couldn’t find the way out.

Kinda appropriate…(given I run Powermagic Ltd Edit: it helps considerably if its pointing at the right powermagic, doesn’t it?)…

I Am

Which tarot card are you?

…now all I need to do is start making magic happen.