Catmachine

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea. This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!” In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here. “What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.” It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other ...

Most people would agree that supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is good practice from both DEI and accessibility viewpoints. An organisation with awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity – let alone policies in place – will undoubtedly be a positive nurturing environment for all employees; an example of the Curb Cut Effect in action.   Image by MissLunaRose12 via Wikimedia Commons In addition, neurodiverse people bring unique viewpoints and talent to the table. Many individuals have superb attention to detail and excel at both being able to see the big picture – which leads to unseen pattern recognition and problem identification – as well as being able to drill down into the minutiae of an issue, diagnosing and solving it. As an autistic person and neurodiversity advocate I’ve always been keen to highlight both the advantages and the challenges of maintaining a supportive environment for all employees whatever their neurotype. The flow and communication paradigms ...

For some reason I have been unable to blog this year aside from that one in January which was, basically, just me going on about something in the same way as I would if it came up in conversation in the pub. It's not that I haven't been trying. I have in fact started writing several entries but they all petered out before reaching a publishable state and have ended up abandoned in the drafts folder gathering virtual dust as they slowly become less and less relevant. The one about how we were all Ferengi now which led to the one about how I enjoyed Deep Space Nine the most of all the Star Trek series. The one about the brain's remarkable talent for pattern recognition which could probably explain so much about the human experience if only I could finish it. The one about how arbitrary so called "round numbers" are when you come to think of it. The one about anthropomorphising things. All these entries will be lost in time like tears in rain... if I leave the...

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve written a blog whilst miles up in the air, but it has been a while. In fact it’s been a while since I flew anywhere at all – and even then it was the same place I’m heading for now. Why the gap? I don’t know I just don’t seem to have had the time or inclination to go anywhere abroad. Plus my passport ran out a couple of years ago. But the thing is that’s just an excuse, I like travelling about and part of my MO these days is to ensure that I keep doing different things in an attempt to fool my brain into thinking time is lasting longer. Or perhaps when I do different things time is lasting longer. It’s all subjective after all. Anyway I thought it was about time I wrote another blog entry as I don’t yet have one for May 2014 and that month is nearly over. It’s a far cry from the days when I used to blog on an almost daily basis. In those days my blog was something I used to look forward to and I enjoyed uncovering fresh topics to...

After a while the novelty of there being an Amazon page for my book began to wear off. It was no longer enough for me to browse to it and look adoringly at a page on which the spaces in the dynamic web template were filled by my own creation's meta-data. So I had self-published. How was I going to promote it? Even though it was now available in paperback and ebook, the thing wasn't going to sell itself. True, I had already been bothering all my online contacts via the social networks on a regular basis. Every few days or so I'd tweet a link and a plug at the alleged optimum time of 5pm - when Europe was clocking off, New York eating lunch and Los Angeles sipping their coffee as they prepared to face the day ahead. I'd set up a Facebook page for the book on which I posted rare photos and other goodies in an attempt to engage with my audience and hopefully encourage some of them to leave reviews on Amazon. I'd taken part in a Goodreads Giveaway which incre...

Self publishing has come a long way in a very short time. In the not too distant past it still bore the stigma of Vanity Publishing , a disparaging label casting aspersions on the motives and character of the author. But now? Now it's Print-On-Demand , the unspoken implication being that there is a demand out there for what you've written. These labels make all the difference to how the process is perceived and how seriously it is taken. But the major distinction is the way that the modern process works. You no longer have to shell out for hundreds of hard copies of a book that run the risk of ending up under the bed in ten years' time - in fact you no longer have to shell out for anything . All you need to make a book available is the ability to write one and the willingness to spend some time negotiating the twists and turns of an online administration process. As some of you may know (chiefly because I haven't shut up about it for the past six months) I have r...

"rectify times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling" George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four I always found Winston Smith 's work at the Ministry of Truth one of the most fascinating parts of Orwell 's Nineteen Eighty Four (since before I worked in an office so it's not just empathy). I first read the novel at the age of thirteen; and despite what my parents might have thought, I did indeed read the whole thing in a few days, including The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism . Since its publication the book has always been a byword for the dangers of totalitarianism, and even back when I first read it many adults were doom-saying about how it was All Coming True. On closer questioning however it turned out that all they were really bothered about was the introduction of the metric system and the 24 hour clock. Never mind a boot stamping on a human face forever; the worst thing in the world was...

"I'm just a face in the crowd / Nothing to worry about Not even trying to stand out I'm getting smaller and smaller and smaller And I got nothing to say / It's all been taken away I just behave and obey I'm afraid I am starting to fade away" Nine Inch Nails, Getting Smaller I don't know what Trent Reznor thinks he has to worry about - he's the same age as me and yet made his mark years ago and chalked up an achievement that many of us would like to, that of credible songwriter rockstar. But I know what he's on about though. Given that it's been written by someone who doesn't know what it's like, the above quote is an uncannily accurate reflection of the thought processes of someone who's reached my age without achieving anything worthwhile. It's easy when you're young of course. You can entertain all sorts of notions about how you're going to be a rock star, a writer, a DJ, and it all seems quite achievable. The only p...

"If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves." Mark Twain Somehow I find myself already sitting here by the window at home with the daylight fading on the final twenty four hours of my precious time off. It doesn't seem fair somehow. It's almost as if I've hardly had any time off at all and yet simultaneously it manages to seem quite a while since I was last at work. It's always the same at this time of year. One of my main problems is that the maximum time I can take off in one chunk is around two weeks which, what with the weekends, amounts to sixteen days in total. This might sound like a lot but in reality it's only just about enough time for my mind and body to recover and for me to start feeling even remotely human again. But then of course I only get to experience this refreshed feeling for one day at most before having to restart the whole cycle of running myself into the ground again. That's the trouble with having a so-c...

"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life." William Faulkner I've spent a lot of the afternoon coding, communicating with a virtual space in the arcane languages of CSS and XHTML so as to produce the effect that a client wants. It should of course be far easier than it actually is. We invented this stuff, why is some of it so opaque? Sometimes I seriously think that these computer languages were deliberately made as unfathomable as possible by the geeks that invented them in order to give themselves a mystical, almost wizardly cachet. Have you seen Regular Expressions ? They seem permanently beyond my reach; every time I think I'm getting a handle on them they throw up something to baffle me. Other times I think it's just plain old human inefficiency. I'm getting metablogular again, but the practical upshot of this day at the code face means that I'm writing t...