Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Marketing? Really? No.
I might be disillusioned with some parts of the consumer electronics industry, but my passion is still technology. That is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Things are a little crazy here at the moment, we’re in the process of packing for taking everything back to England before heading off travelling around Europe. Its turning into rather a monster of a plan but I’m still hoping it will come together.
Things should start picking up around this journal sometime early next month when the carousel stops turning at quite the current rate. Until then, though, the plan contains around 7000km of driving across 8 countries.
This is how it ends
As you know my time in Sweden is coming to an end – I finished working on Tuesday and now its time to move back to England.
This time a change of job will bring with it a change of lifestyle too, since it is now clear to me that consumer electronics, and technology in general, is deluding itself as to its place in this world. We cannot keep on making the same things smaller, faster and with less quality than last years model.
So I have decided to seek some a career path, the current potential directions are:
– carpenter
– marketing
– lorry driver
…but I’m seeking your opinions on other possibilities that you think I should consider?
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
I don’t know if this is what I am looking for, I don’t think it is really. There is something to it, but I kinda see things the other way around. Not with harnessing gamers to save the world, but rather giving people who play games better educations to be able to improve their world.
I love solving problems, thats why I do the jobs I do, they are full of problems that need solving and there isn’t enough time to solve them all. Games feed that problem solving desire too, giving you a safe environment to try out risky options. Properly used these could give people much better understanding of risk management and problem solving.
Its a shame, then, that most people don’t actually want to solve most of the problems they have in their lives, or are too risk averse to try.
Where does all the hubris go when its not needed?
“…Come evangelists of the Grand New Age proclaiming the future that they stole.”
Time to steal it back. Ten years since the height of the tech bubble? A lost decade?
I was still coding security protocols for an embedded OS stack a decade ago, getting itchy feet when they put us on sanitising somebody elses second rate browser code. No surprise that 60% of the team left within weeks of each other.
The hubris took me too, moving to a ‘startup’ in Oxford where I was to head up the hockey-stick graphed crossplatform mobile strategy. Which was mostly a game of applying hysteresis filters to anything my boss said and making sure we didn’t accidentally hire anyone who was going to leave a good job to come and join us.
What has changed since then? Well, I guess JWZ said it: “Even though we’ve run out of Future, it’s important that we continue to strive to make Gibson’s visions come true.”
What happened to our future? When did we lose it? Can I blame it on Facebook? I’m not sure if I can, but it does seem like livejournal has a much better understanding of how to be a good citizen in the web world, providing some sensible technical tools to allow developers to wire together services with those from other sites (you know you’ve got a FOAF link? not that I’ve seen anyone do anything useful with FOAF, but tahts not the point).
More importantly how do I get my future back?
Here be dragons (caution: javascript contained within may not be optimal…no, what am I saying, it *IS NOT* optimal). Sadly not real dragons, they’re a Japanese baseball team. So disappointing. Oh well, heres some other things. Be gentle with it, I’m just experimenting at the moment.
This currently feeds from the few geotagged RSS feeds I’ve found so far – does anyone have any suggestions for other feeds containing geotags?
In other news, I was still pulling the ice out of my beard halfway through this mornings meeting. I’m so Nordic.
Unsafe at any bitrate
While packing for moving to a new desk (a somewhat redundant exercise as I shall explain shortly) I found a pile of my old code review papers. With “UNSAFE” written in big red letters against around 50% of the functions. I’m gonna miss this place when its time to move on…”this isn’t the funniest job I’ve ever had, but nearly”.
We got back to Sweden to find a foot of snow, congratulations to the 9000 for starting first time despite being left for a month in temperatures down to -20C.
…of course theres more catching up to do.
The cold shock is still with us. Returning from 32C in Bangkok to find a foot of snow burying the car in Sweden leaves you feeling a little…cold.
And the jetlag. Thats still here too. And the catching up with everything. Only 257 mails awaiting my return at the office, I think I got off lightly. I’m guessing they’ve saved the major panics until next week. I hope I’m awake by then.
Next is going through the pictures from our travels.
When I said I’d try to update more often this isn’t quite what I had in mind. We’re now 35 minutes into a 10 minute journey across Bangkok to a cabaret show. This is an experience we call living like the locals.
(written in a minibus last night but not sent since my Catalina isn’t talking to DTAC. As it turned out the total journey time was just over an hour and they gave us seats for the next show after the one we had booked)