I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.
It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.
This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.
Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.
She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.
Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.
Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.
The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio
And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"
Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were. No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.
During the boom I hired everyone I knew and Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?
I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees. Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".
I've never been a fan of ICANN. They're a ludicrously costly organsisation whose "authority" stems from administrative stewardship for some of the internet's universal namespaces. As I used to point out: ICANN costs millions to run every year and their job is to make very occasional changes to small text files - a job I'd happily do for a fraction of the cost.
As someone with some background in net-ops I've always understood that the most elegant bootstrap for a distributed, de-centralized, system is a conservative and tightly controlled hierarchical namespace with a minimally small root. Authority for the DNS namespace isn't granted by governments (with the exception of the US Dept of Commerce) or international treaty. There's no real "root" to the authority ICANN that claims, it's “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions” (to use a phrase that others have borrowed from William Gibson).
The authority for management of the DNS namespace is granted by whoever runs the root servers. The root servers are determined by whatever resolvers think they are. The resolvers are usually informed by "root.hints" (a file distributed with Bind) that bootstraps the chain of authority when a nameserver is started.
Who's the kingmaker here? It's just as much the ISC (makers of Bind), as it is the ops staff configuring the nameservers, as it is the company determining their policy of which root to use, as it is the customer complaining he can't send email.
The prevailing attitude is, for the sake of operational sanity, keep using the ICANN root.
Limited experiments in increasing the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains, as opposed to country-based domains) have been shown to benefit two groups - name registrars and international trademark lawyers - an insignificant number of people as a percentage of Internet users, but whose interests are hugely over-represented at ICANN. I'd argue that, at best, new gTLDs such as .biz have provided no benefit to the public - and are dominated by registrations by either spammers and scammers (hopping from one blacklisted domain to the next) to purely trademark protection registrations. And each new gTLD pulls us further from de-centralization, which (in theory) impacts internet stability.
The theory of "bigger root = less stability" is one I personally subscribe to. Others point to the successful management of ".com", a huge flat namespace, as proof that DNS is robust enough to have a root namespace of millions. They may well be right, but increasing the root of an authoritative namespace like DNS isn't something we can retract. If they're wrong, we're screwed - simple technical clarity that only years of being a grumpy sysadmin can provide.
I've been online on two occasions when the .com servers have failed. My observations at the time were that this did have some knock-on effect to .uk domains - but largely .uk stuff was working fine. Smart hostmasters have authoritative nameservers under at least two different TLDs precisely for this reason. Localization of failure is the benefit of distribution and de-centralization.
With the recent decision by ICANN to flatten the namespace they've shown themselves (in my eyes) to be unsuitable stewards of the root. In my mind (and perhaps others) they're shifting from "de facto root" to merely the "dominant alt-root" - no more legitimate than any other. It's clear that if any authority is going to be claimed, it's going to come from somewhere like the ITU or UN. International bodies like this are, by their nature, slow moving and conservative - exactly what namespace management needs.
And for alt-roots - now is your time. Set up new alt-root servers, grandfather the ICANN root as of this date, then charge hefty administrative fees to include any of the new ICANN-approved domains (registrants can clearly afford it). If you're a large ISP already running a good few resolvers this is a potential new revenue stream - it's practically free money.
In fact I've always suspected it was the secret business plan for OpenDNS.
This not improving my mood
We must burn all copies of this before it infects others.
OH GOD, it's spreading. We're too late! Oh the humanity!
I honestly cannot decide which of these is worse - all involved must be killed. It is a moral imperative.
via Billy and this BBC News article about the worst cover songs ever.
It's the kind of cold, overcast day here that Mark Twain wrote about and which, for someone already in an oddly bad mood, seems to be pregnant with brooding menace - which isn't really helping.
What's also not helping is the continuing stupidity of my Government. For those not playing along at home they appear to be dancing merrily down the political yellow brick road to Fascism City - stopping briefly along the way for misc. songs, dancing and the introduction of Orwellian laws against thought crimes. At best, and this would be a remarkably charitable interpretation, it's a is a misguided populist attempt to appear "strong". Otherwise it's a entirely more worrying scheme to continue the rebranding of Labour from "New" Labour and it's much vaunted doublespeak slogan of a "Third Way" to a more Godwin's Law invoking other Third slogan.
But, hey, just because local councils have already been using Anti-terrorism legislation such as warrantless wiretaps and email sniffing to surveil people whose dogs crap in public that doesn't mean we need to worry to about more far reaching laws about detention, censorship and thought crimes. Not to mention CCTV, ID cards, stop and search policies, the DNA database ...
*sigh*
So, brooding menace and political dissent then
Reasons I've been told not to take photographs since work moved to the edge of the City of London three weeks ago:
- They were of the back of a police station
- There were children (five to ten metres away, in a nursery just south of Christ Church, which is what I was actually interested in)
- I was standing on the art
- I was on private property
However, in each of these cases, I wasn't asked to delete any photographs (which is, I know, something you can work around, but not if you only have one card). Be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.
When I moved to London eight and a half years ago, it was to start work at a dotcom/consultancy called Oven Digital, based in the old Truman Brewery at Brick Lane. The first time I visited was in late January, and as I walked from the Norwich train out of Liverpool Street there was a clear point where you passed from the City, which clung to Bishopsgate, into a completely different area.
Unlike the glass and steel, it wasn't incredibly well lit, except for Christ Church, spotlit at the end of Brushfield Street. Instead, the low brick buildings on either side concealed a ragtag collection of shops and restaurants, all of which felt like they had a history. The Brewery itself was quiet, off the beaten track, and surprisingly insecure - it was pretty easy to wander around huge parts of the buildings, even when you weren't really meant to. There were vague rumblings about Spitalfields being under threat, but I didn't really bear it much mind. Development happens, right?
Unfortunately, Oven ran into the typical financial difficulties of a dotcom circa 2001, and the London office closed. As I'm not a great follower of fashion, my trips back to the market and Brick Lane have been infrequent and fleeting, so when the employers finally moved into their new office at the beginning of the month, I got to rediscover the area anew, after over seven years.
What have those years wrought? Well, everything is so much more... middle class now. Sure, it's a bohemian middle class, a trendy one, but nonetheless, there's a distinctly different crowd there these days. Of course, where the City's bled east, demolishing half of the old market buildings, that's even more obvious; the business suits give it away. It's also busy; incredibly busy, most days, whereas it used to be that Saturdays were deserted and Sundays the only time it was hard to find space.
More than the people, though, the spaces have changed. As I've said, half the market's gone, although the shell of it around the edges has been retained. The businesses there haven't, though; the family-run pizzerias replaced by SF-based chain makeup stores and expensive Soho bakeries. The worst, though, is that even inside the old market, the character has been almost entirely sterilised away. Bubba's BBQ, which had both supporters and detractors, is gone; Square Pie survived, though. So much for those "free-thinking independents", although I must admit a few (who can, somehow, afford the rent) are holding on. Even the stalwart caff I went to back then, Rosa's, is gone. At least Rossi hangs on, providing a reasonably-priced fry-up.
I think the best single example of this is the Spitz, which moved into the market in 1996, when nobody even heard of it, and which was forced out in 2007 as the final redevelopment of the "saved" market was completed. It's due to be replaced by The Luxe, run by the chef who heads up Smiths of Smithfield. It's hardly going to be the same, is it?
In fact, that's a pretty good epitaph for the entire area. Sure, there's still a Sunday market, and there are retro clothes to be had. The market traders do their best in the scrubbed interior of the retained buildings. To me, though, it'll always be a pale remnant of the place I found when I moved to the city, and the fact it's far from alone - just ask someone who liked the South Bank before the chains moved in - doesn't make it any easier to bear.
It's a cold overcast day in SF - just the sort of weather I wanted to show off to the guests who arrived on Friday. Still, there's always MUSIC TO CHEER US UP
[ CUE elaborate dance routine. ENTER gayly coloured CLOWNS and ACROBATS also DOGS in AMUSING HATS ]
or, lacking that, watch this
Did you realise that this song is written from the perspective of a night light plugged into the wall of a child's room? (And that there's a poster of a lighthouse on the opposite wall - "My primitive ancestry, Which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free"?)
Today is panning out to be made of EPIC TECHNOLOGY FAIL
- I still don't have the Internets at home.
- Lightning seems to have stopped working for no good reason.
- I can't log into the work HR web site for some reason.
- My MP3 player went from 2 battery bars to blinky, wah-wah-wah-no-mo-music-fo-you during the walk to work.
- Also fwd and back seem to pick random tracks rather than the one I've just listened to or the one that was there before I hit back, realised it'd picked some random tune and decided to go back to the one that had just started.
- Every traffic light turned red just as I walked up to it. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.
- My phone has decided that receiving calls and text messages in a timely fashion is an optional extra[*] and that frankly I should be lucky that it doesn't just give me an electric shock at random intervals.
- Test failures, test failures and all the boards did shrink
Also, since the universe tends towards maximal irony - the external HD I was backing up on my shiny new Robot Minion failed midway through said backup and has taken to making plaintive emo mewlings of the "O tempora, o mores! I feel death's frigid hand 'pon my shoulder! The light! She is so bright! Life is pain &cetera &cetera ..." unhealthy clicking type. It is currently sitting, double bagged, in the naughty freezer thinking about what it's done. Woe betide I come home to find that it's painted its room black or something.
That plus insomnia plus the early warning signs of an imminent immune system collapse has made for grumpy Simon. In musical terms this feels like a good fit
On the other hand someone had TPd one of the street lamps at the corner of Beale and Harrison and a single, 20ft long ribbon was undulating gently in the breeze.
Set against the cornflower blue of the sky it was quite indescribably lovely.
[*] In the same manner as those DVDs that put "menus" in the special features list.
