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Earlier this evening, I walked out of the office after my last day as an employee in the IT industry. For now, at least, and for good if I have any control over my future. We had our “official” send-off in the pub two weeks ago, so today there was no fanfare, no send-off beyond a few handshakes, and electronic well-wishes from half-a-dozen time zones. That was how I wanted it; in most senses but the physical, I left long ago.

Tomorrow is the first day of orientation at University College Dublin, a day dedicated to we “mature students”. The main orientation starts on Monday, but I will not be involved until Thursday and Friday next week. The few days off were a welcome surprise that will come in handy. On the Monday after that, the real work starts; in the first year, my main worry is the Maths, since in my last years of school, the introduction of Calculus sent my marks in to a downward trend from A+ to B-. The same was not true of Physics and Chemistry, which I enjoyed all the way to my final A, and which forms a smaller part of my course.

The other side of the course is creative; it is a mixture of Engineering and Design, with the prospect of something more than mere numbers at the end of it. Outside the class, I’m looking for creativity in other fields too, and intend to get back in to playing music after too long away. I ordered a new Tune 4-string bass from Germany, earlier this week, a demo model at a knockdown price: I guess an amplifier is next: something portable.

I don’t expect to escape computers altogether, and I would not want to: I know they will be part of my future studies and work. If anything, not having to deal with a multitude of computer problems may rekindle some of my old enthusiasm for using them in creative ways, but I want and intend to live and work in the real world, once the studies are done. What I am leaving behind is the idea of computing for computing’s sake. Blogging is one example: it used to mean something, to me at least, but those days are over.

If a hunter shoots his gun in the forest, but there’s no-one there to hear it, did it really go off? In the real world, you can go and look at the hole in the squirrel tree, and you have the evidence that the gunshot really happened, and there were consequences. In writing this blog, I’ve been a poor hunter in a virtual forest, taking potshots at tempting targets, and never knowing if I actually hit anything. Today’s bloggers are more focused on a particular target; they know what they are doing out here, and wear better-fitting armour, but they are not much better at leaving holes in the real world.

As a hunting season ends when the majority of the hunter’s prey has migrated to warmer climes, my blogging season is now over; my reasons to be out here, in the chilly virtual evening, have flown away, so I am packing up my weapons and taking them home. There’s not much in my swag bag, but I did not go hungry. My pantry is well-stocked for the winter, and that will suffice. If a new season comes, will I step outside again, blunderbuss over my shoulder? I don’t know; that, too, must suffice.

A while ago I stated my intention to stop blogging, as soon as I started university. That eventuality is now one week away, and I still intend to go through with it. I’m viewing this move as one step in a larger set of life changes, nearly all of which have been under my control.

It’s well over 5 years since I started blogging, and I’ve seen it develop from a niche activity to a web standard. A process of commercialization is already under way, even if it is not obvious from a superficial standpoint. This is understandable in purely economic terms: anything with mass popularity will be ripe for commercial exploitation.

This blog is hosted by wordpress.com, which was set up as a host for the WordPress “content management” software developed by the same multinational team. It does not charge users for a basic account. They do charge for extras, such as extra storage space or (in my case) the use of my own top-level domain, but these are genuine extras, and I don’t know if they are big cash cows for the developers. I get the impression they are still doing this because they can, not purely for commercial gain, even though the costs of running wordpress.com must be somewhere between “stupendous” and “horrendous”.

Will we see “professional bloggers”? In some senses, we already have them. Blogs, and comments on them, are major weapons in the arsenal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) executives. We also have technology journalists and podcasters such as Robert Scoble and Adam Curry using these media to further their careers, even if stardom is not quite what they want. Me? I just enjoy writing, and found this blog a useful platform for stories about myself, my activities, and anything else that interested me.

Where I am going - for the next three years, at least - I will have plenty to write about, with little or none of it about me. In the remaining week, I may post a little more about the changes ahead of me, or I may not: they are not that exciting or unusual, and not all are guaranteed to take place. For now, I’ll resist the temptation to quote from Turn, Turn, Turn (by The Byrds), and enjoy the Debussy on the BBC Proms broadcast. This must be what old men get up to on Saturday nights.

We’re almost at the end of the day after Independence Day, and I’m finally getting the opportunity to sit down and write a little about my own Independence Day, 2007. I’m not American, but I had one, nevertheless.

July 4, 2007, was the day I started quitting my job, at a major IT company. I say “started” because I haven’t actually resigned yet: it’s too soon for that. I need to give four weeks’ notice; I gave eight weeks of actual working time, or ten weeks if you factor in holidays that I won’t be taking. What I did was inform my manager that I was leaving, with the rest of the team here being told soon afterwards.

Where am I going? Not another job, at least not yet: in early September I will start full-time study at University College Dublin (UCD). The course is Structural Engineering with Architecture, straddling two disciplines. A lot of mathematics, a lot of looking at the “designed environment”, some graphic design, even some materials and construction.

I thought it was a good all-rounder course: while I enjoy architecture and design, I have no illusions of becoming an Architect with a capital A; it would take a certain level of Arrogance that I don’t have or want (I hope). More details to follow as I get them.

That is not the only change around here: not long after the meeting where I made the announcement, a former colleague of ours came calling. He still works for the same company, but in a different area, and he needed a place to stay for a few days, possibly longer. He’s not Irish, but married an Irish lady, whom (he says) is no longer a Lady. As a result, my place is now his “halfway house” on his way to the divorce courts and out of the country. Good thing I have that spare bedroom.

The last change will take the next eight weeks to engineer: the end of this blog. The reasons are complex, and will be the subject of further entries, but the most straightforward is that this blog is out of step with the way things are done today. Blogging is no longer an end in itself, but a means to an end: an end that I have little interest in achieving.

I’m dangerous!
(Image courtesy of Mingle²’s Blog Rating Tool.)

Why? They’re doing some keyword matching, and the reason given was:

• bomb (4x)
• dangerous (2x)
• drugs (1x)

All the “bomb” references must be those in my recent post slagging off the bombers, which was about another plot to bomb London, after the July 2005 bombings. Indeed, the front page (today) has two uses of the word “dangerous”: the first examining the risks of capture that terrorists expose themselves to, in their drive to publicise their acts; the other was regarding the religious indoctrination of children.

The drugs? Well, if I’ve passed all the tests, I will be engaged in a trial of a new Multiple Sclerosis therapy, FTY720 (fingolimod). I also have some other plans in the pipeline, but (like the trial) it’s too soon to talk about them here.

The trial is an unnecessary risk, strictly speaking, as are my other plans; way to live dangerously, dude! I don’t believe I say anything here that is unsuitable for kids, but then I wasn’t brought up in the USA, where kids would grow up totally unprepared for the real world, if their parents had their way. (Not that they always do - YouTube has many examples of failures of parental control.)

No, I’m British, from a previous generation, and all is not lost there, either. This year, the winner of the prestigious Galaxy Book Of The Year Prize was The Dangerous Book for Boys; designed to get them out from behind their computer games and out in to the world, climbing trees, fighting battles, falling into streams, and generally acting like healthy boys should. The book has just been released in the USA, with some modifications: baseball instead of cricket, General Grant instead of Lord Nelson, etcetera.

Can you tie a Reef knot? I can, but that’s about all I remember about knots. A Bowline was about as far as I got, and (I recall) the Sheepshank defeated me utterly. Granny knots, on the other hand, are not a problem.

I’ve just deleted my account at Twitter, and intend to cut my participation on forums down, even further than I already have. I left The National Midday Sun (TNMS) last year, and the MythBusters fan forum a few months go - two forums that sucked up epic spans of time, but provided little real reward, only an illusory aura of “participation”.

Reboot 9.0 is kicking off, in Copenhagen, tonight: a year ago I was at Reboot 8.0, wondering if I could get a handle on all this Web 2.0 stuff. I came away with an overriding impression, backed up by explicit statements from other bloggers, that Web 2.0 is all about creating more intrusive links between a person and the Internet. This is a double-edged sword, in my opinion.

The first edge is the drive for “personalization”; they will help you get what you want, in the way that you want, so you can make better use of your time and attention. The same information, about your interests and plans, can be used to customise advertising directed at you - something that, it is hoped, advertisers will happily pay more for. It’s an illustration of a universal truth behind any new non-scientific endeavour: follow the money.

The second edge is the drive to put oneself out there, to create the “brand of me”. If you search the Internet for “brand of me”, you can find many examples of how to do this well, but you’ll also note that the practitioners of this are those with something to sell. The most vocal proponent of this approach, that I know of, is Sally Hogshead, blogger and author of Radical Careering, a book which appears to be about careers in general, but seems to me to be focused on “public-facing sales” careers, such as marketing and advertising.

To hear these “brand of me” proponents speak, you would think that everyone needs to be a marketeer, because everyone has something to sell: yourself. This reminds me of something I heard an employer say: “everyone is a salesperson”. (That one got a good laugh at the time.)

I understand there are occasions when such measures are necessary - when looking for a job, for example - but once you are done with that, why keep selling yourself? The stock answer that I’ve heard goes something like “you never stop looking for new work and new challenges, and you need to push your brand message at every possible opportunity”.

This, allegedly, is the way of the future. To reach out to anyone in this attention-starved, noise-saturated world, to survive in a hyper-economy, you need to be faster, louder, and more aggressive, in your drive to make your name known and sell your services. To effectively reap the benefits of personalization, or effectively market yourself, you sacrifice privacy and anonymity, because everyone can see you.

If I look at the steps I have already taken without close examination, and those I plan to take in the next few months, I realise that I have already decided how much personalization I want, and how important the “brand of me” is.

I’m not “dropping off” the Internet. but I am giving up any illusions I may have had about active participation in the “web 2.0 revolution”. My plans are moving from the virtual world back in to the real world. More details will follow in the next few months; not that anyone will notice, since I have not effectively marketed myself or this site. Never mind Second Life; I have a First Life to live.

It’s always easier to destroy than create. This is true of culture in all its forms, starting with the purely physical. A sculptor can always chisel off a little too much stone. An editor can edit a piece of writing to the point where the meaning is lost. When you use heavy JPEG compression on a picture, you lose detail that you can never get back.

On the Internet today we have a disturbing new development; prominent bloggers are being subjected to death threats, for no apparent reason. It’s not because anything they’re saying or doing; it’s purely because of their visibility. I was honestly disturbed to read a report from Kathy Sierra, software developer and author of Creating Passionate Users, about death threats that have led her to cancel speaking engagements and stay at home. These were accompanied by images of Kathy modified to horrifying effect.

I know how easy it is to ’shop an image in Photoshop, because I’ve done it myself, with the difference that I do it for comic effect. Now, however, it’s being done to threaten, to frighten, to terrorize. We bloggers pride ourselves on our constructive use of language, which makes it doubly upsetting to see it used in such a destructive way.

The important question is “why?”, and the answer is simply “because they can”. Too many slasher movies, too few opportunities to do something rewarding, or just boredom? I know I’m talking in the abstract here, because I’m not in Kathy’s shoes, and can’t claim to know how she feels. What I do know is that, as a creative person, she will overcome this setback, with the support of her family, friends, and her fellow bloggers.

Constructive work will always triumph over the destructive, because you always have something real to show for your efforts when the day is through.

I have a cellphone account, and a shiny new phone, the HTC S620 Smartphone I wrote about earlier. OK, it looks a little dorky when held up to my face, but work it does. It’s good enough for that, since it’s rare that I need to make long personal calls, and I work in an office (I’m not a “road warrior”).

So, after all the communication going on at work, and through email, most months I don’t make much of a dent in the free minutes and SMS messages supplied with my contract. I have considered changing cellphone plan to give me fewer minutes and more SMSes, but a new plan means a new contract, according to O2 Ireland, and I don’t know which country I will be living in in six months, never mind twelve.

What is a boy to do? How can I use up all those free SMS messages? I think I’ve found a way: it’s called Twitter, and I’ve added its RSS feed in the sidebar here. I don’t know if this type of application has a name, but I’m calling it microblogging. It does sounds like a fad - are there really people blogging every detail of their lives? Well, I won’t be doing that, and after the test messages, I’ll do it if I have the means, motive and opportunity. (Which reminds me: I should try the Flick + blog updating method again.)

A neat idea from Sean of voisin.org: since joining the 9rules community is bringing in a group of new readers, why not provide links to some previous posts that I think they might like? OK, oldest first:

• terminal half
• 34 Eek!
• auto-alanisation
• refer unto others as you wish others to refer unto you
• the february of technology
• that friday feeling
• a new hope?
• cheesed off
• a grey day
• i know the feeling
• eternal sunburn of the witless mind
• re-progressive
• sonification
• many scars
• a common search
• how many webs do we weave?
• weblarney
• going south
• rebooted
• notebirthday
• schmap flap
• how fair the realm
• think agnostic - act atheist

I also have another blog I try to keep updating, one with a specific theme: found poetry.

Well, this is a turnip for the books. I’ve just got word that this blog has been accepted for membership in the 9rules network. I have more reading to do about it, to figure out just what’s involved and what I can contribute.

To the folks hopping over and taking a look, after the announcement on the 9rules blog - Hi There. There’s not much more to be said at this time: it’s 2am and I’m wilting slightly, having had about three hours of poor sleep in the last 36. I’m in Dubai at a friend’s place, stopping off for a couple of days on the way to Bangalore. I have a poor track record at sleeping on overnight flights, and this Aer Lingus jaunt from Dublin, landing at 5am local time, was no exception.

I don’t yet have a post about my spanking new Digital SLR camera, since I haven’t bought it yet, and only intend to do so if I can find a decent price in the Duty Free section of Dubai International Airport on Sunday. I’m a confirmed Pentax user, and have the lenses to show for it, so I have my eye on a K10D.

I’d better post this and hit the sack: the resident kitten is giving me strange looks and threatening to jump on the keyboard. Night all.

Though I’m based in Dublin, Ireland, I’m not an “Irish Blogger”. The fact that I’m not Irish is only the half of it: I seem to have a completely different attitude to the “local” bloggers, starting with the concept of “local”.

For starters, I place very little importance on location and/or nationality. Of course these factors will be relevant to what I write, because they’re interesting details, but I could be in the UK, Europe, USA or Canada, for all the fundamental difference it makes to me. There are countries where location is a major influence - countries with reduced internet or press freedom - but Ireland is not one of those.

This is partly why I find the upcoming Web2Ireland conference amusing, but not terribly interesting. It’s got an Irish slant to it. It’s organised by an Irish government body, Enterprise Ireland. I’m not in the target market, as the blurb says:

Web2Ireland is for entrepreneurs, investors, software developers and for those in academia, politics and public policy.

Finally, and most importantly, my views on Web 2.0 would be completely out of place. I wrote a bit about this last week, but I would summarize my position as seeing Web 2.0 as an attitude that informs what you do and how you do it. It’s not a product, or a technology, or a standard, or anything else that can be neatly packaged in a form fit for sale to anyone.

While government is all about centralisation of power and resources, the web is about decentralisation, disintermediation, the removal of barriers between people and information. I see no need for any national government, Irish or otherwise, to try to “shape the agenda” or “help our country catch up”. It’s already here, because it’s already everywhere, it does not respect borders any more than Web 1.0 does.

Besides, how Web 2.0 is it to have a registration process that involves downloading and filling in a Microsoft Word document? Web 2.0 is as Web 2.0 does, people. This sends the message that your parochial little conference will be all talk, and no action. No thanks; I can wait for reboot at the beginning of June, my flights and hotel are already booked.

A while ago I admitted being slightly bemused by the current Tagging fad floating round the Internet. A classic case of “can’t see the forest for the trees”: the wider question of “why” gets a good explanation under the following Wikipedia article: Folksonomy.

I started seeing links to pages on my site from del.icio.us, but visiting that site didn’t shed much light on what was actually happening. The answer is actually fairly simple in concept: it’s a “social bookmarks manager”; when someone creates a del.icio.us entry they are creating a bookmark, like you can do in your browser, but extended to be (a) public, and (b) tagged with your choice of keyword.

For example, I have several pages on this site relating to the Akai MPC1000 hardware sequencer/sampler, which I own, so I added a link to my main mpc1000 page on del.icio.us with the “mpc1000″ tag. Others are free to do the same, and you can see the results at http://del.icio.us/tag/mpc1000 - a page generated “on-the-fly” from their database. The URI format is sensible - just replace the “mpc1000″ tag with any other to bring up the relevant page. You can also get a RSS feed to add to your newsreader,

Since the “folksonomy” is ad-hoc and arbritrary, there is a lot of misplaced tagging, but the major tags are generally agreed on. Since I’m learning the Japanese language, can I pick out a del.icio.us page without searching, just by editing the URI? Let’s try a few:

• http://del.icio.us/tag/japaneselanguage - didn’t think so;
• http://del.icio.us/tag/japanese - not bad at all;
• http://del.icio.us/tag/nihongo - surprisingly useful.

Make too many queries in a short period, and they don’t like it - you get banned for 30 minutes!

Other strange referers I’ve seen include some sites that appear to “wrap” this site for some reason - I have no idea what a legitimate use for this might be. Examples include ime.st and httpme.com. I’m not going to link to them; my banner blocker goes into overtime on ime.st, and the one that got through was some soft porn commercial. Bloody bottomfeeders.

Or: how my experience of information, including this site, has been influenced by recent trends in web interaction. I’ve been using buzzwords without a proper explanation what they do, so here goes:

RSS
If you follow the “rss” link in the right-hand sidebar of this page, you will be presented with a page full of hairy XML code. This is not designed to be read directly by humans like you (assuming), but if you insert the link to that XML into a program called an RSS Aggregator, it is converted into a readable “feed”. There are various RSS Aggregators out there, including some web-based ones, so you don’t have to install software on your computer if that’s a problem: see the following blogspace page for some background and lists of readers.

The advantages of this approach are many, but the main one to me is attention conservation: if I change something on this page (like this new blog entry), or another feed changes, it is flagged as new, so you can read it in your Aggregator. Until that happens you don’t need to visit the site hosting the feed to check for updates. So, when I do this with multiple feeds - and I have dozens set up in FeedReader myself - I have access to updated information from many website sources, as it arrives, neatly categorized.

Depending on how you use RSS, you may find you prefer a “full text” feed, like this site provides: I let WordPress include the full text of each Blog entry. This works well if you read content offline, as I sometimes do on the iPaq (a process I’m currently re-examining). Other sites assume you have an internet connection available as you read, so they include only a headline, perhaps a short summary, and a link to a live site where you can read the rest. This is a choice made by the website owner, you have no control over it, but I find it affects what I read, or not. I always want a full-text feed - why not, for the little extra bandwidth involved?

Podcasting
For the last couple of months I’ve been enjoying Podcasts from various sources: but what is a Podcast? It is simply an audio file created by someone, and made available for download, usually in MP3 format.

What’s new about that? Hasn’t that been done for years? Yes, but what is new is the delivery mechanism: it piggybacks on to a RSS feed, as described above, with all the same advantages. It means that, if you want it, the MP3 file will be automatically downloaded and saved to your local disk, using an “enclosure” extension to the RSS standard.

Note that none of this actually requires an Apple iPod: Podcasting’s current popularity can be attributed to the success of the iPod, but it’s not required. I listen to Podcasts on my iPaq when commuting, and on my laptop at home, as I would with any MP3 file. iPods apparently have a mechanism by which MP3s dropped in a specified directory are automatically copied to the iPod: I just include the Podcast MP3s in the data I back up to take to and from work, and the iPaq reads them straight from the card. My PC Podcast client of choice is iPodder v2, which also comes in a Mac version, and the main Podcast directory is iPodder.org. That site also has a an explanation of the process: “what is podcasting?”.

The latest Podcasts are logged at audio.weblogs.com, but a nice place to start is with Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, a semi-professional Podcast by a former radio DJ and MTV VJ, who produces an almost-daily show that comes close to radio, but with a more human side - bloopers, hardware problems, swearwords, his daughter wandering in and out - great fun. Because of the time-sensitive nature of RSS and Podcasting - new Podcasts are brought to your attention like RSS feed entries - there is a motivation for Podcasters to produce fresh new content regularly - which is part of the fun.

Since Podcasting uses RSS, why do we have separate RSS Aggregators and Podcast clients? Simplicity, probably: I tried out Egress for the iPaq, which did both at the same time, so we know it’s possible. I can see more such convergence coming in the future.

Next time I will talk a little about Tagging: a subject I am barely getting my head around. I know how it works, but the why is still a little unclear at this point. Later.