Welcome to ned Productions

Monday 22nd June 2009: 12pm exactly. It is strange to think that three weeks or so have passed since the last entry yet it feels like I have still accomplished nothing. We ended up winning the Export Capability Award of that Student Enterprise Award which earned me €1500 and therefore the means to keep myself and Megan alive above near-destitution levels until welfare hopefully finally pays out in October/November - speaking of which, I have heard nothing from them in a month now so I must remember to ring them up and ask what the hell is going on?!?

The paid PhD programme also rejected me though the guy said I made it to the final final listing and that of those he had to give it to someone he knew (i.e. someone from within the department). Such is academia and indeed life - he implied that I was the insurance choice were the main fellow to choose something else, so had a recession not been on I'd have got it - which was probably the same for my application to the University of Limerick. I get this - in times of economic uncertainty one heads for state employment in jobs which are fairly hard to eliminate no matter how bad things may become, and every second fucker nowadays is pulling every favour they can to get their foot in the door. I simply can't compete.

Seeing as I am now fairly properly unemployed, a fair chunk of the last three weeks has been spent drafting the Memoranda of Association for a "ned Productions" profit making company (so the title of this website kinda becomes tax registered) and a "Freeing Growth Foundation" non-profit charity. I had to draft these legal documents on my own because there's no way I can afford the legal fees and I managed to successfully find a kind solicitor who will notarise them. They should be submitted by the end of this week, so I can hopefully begin trading by the end of August. In order to save anyone in a similar position from the equivalent amount of hassle, I have placed my Memoranda online for anyone else to use.

The other big time consuming event of the last three weeks was the outage of VAServ who are one of the larger provider of Virtual Private Servers in the world and who provided the VPS which handled my email and freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org. Some 100,000 sites were felled by this hacker attack - amazingly my own VPS actually survived completely intact and it was only when I rebooted it in order to test some changes to my mail server that it died. It was resurrected by VAServ staff, but it hasn't remained up for any length of time since then which has played havoc with my email delivery - so much so that I had to switch email back onto nedprod.com despite the mountains of spam that I now receive again.

Now much as this is annoying, inconvenient and wastes my time, I'm not that bothered - my 256Mb VPS only cost me £60 for the year and there's only four months to go, and the VPS very much served its purpose by letting me teach myself server admin. I was going to be switching away anyway at the end of contract as I got that Xen based VPS for half price, and besides the poor thing really needs a minimum of 512Mb of RAM and better would be 1Gb. Looking around what options are open to me, I'm obviously not wanting anything HyperVM based given what happened to VAServ but any non-HyperVM 1Gb Xen based VPS is costing like €30/month (I see very little point in using an OpenVZ VPS because of the almost guaranteed likelihood of them being oversold).

So what to do? Researching this has cost a LOT of time last few weeks because I'm also trying to factor in expandability with regard to my business - I may need to upscale my server hardware rapidly and VPSs let you do that, yet I currently can't afford €30/month. Probably I'm going to give the French-based OVH's "Real Private Server III" platform a go - these are dedicated boxes so you get exactly what the box has with no surges in CPU load caused by other users (though equally you don't get the burst of a ~3Ghz Intel Xeon CPU either), however their disk space is provided by a network SAN i.e. the hard drives live in a network attached box so the dedicated boxes are disc drive less. For €20/month you can get a dual core 1.9Ghz AMD Athlon 64, 2Gb of RAM, a 100Mbit network port (mostly unmetered) and 20Gb of iSCSI networked storage. One can upgrade or downgrade as easily as a VPS as you simply reboot the the iSCSI based disc image from new hardware - however one is also sharing that SAN with everyone else, so disc i/o is appallingly slow with just 1Mb/sec guaranteed though with 2Gb of RAM there is a LOT I can do to avoid ever touching disc storage (especially by employing compcache which does on-the-fly memory page compression - see explanatory article here). OVH also do cheap fully dedicated servers under their Kimsufi brand - however something with equivalent specs to the RPS is about €40/month (which is still ridiculously cheap for dedicated server, most of which cost hundreds of euro a month as a minimum).

So that's where I'm currently at - hopefully I'll get onto my usual summer release of TnFOX soon, and my Masters results come out on Wednesday, so if they attempt to give me a 2.2 you'll almost certainly be hearing a rant about it here! Till next time be happy!

Wednesday 27th May 2009: 7.23pm. Tempus fugit and as of yesterday, I am supposedly finished my Masters apart from the submission of one of those stupid learning journals. Exams finished a week ago - with a bit of God's grace I will never again have to sit in a lecture or take another exam. This very much pleases me as I have hated the "waste" of this past academic year which was not dead time, but certainly felt that way in terms of lack of productivity in anything what I'd consider useful. It did however open many doors previously closed to me, and for that it has been worth it: I previously could not possibly have applied for teaching positions nor paid PhD study and now I can. However by God I could not do much more of this without seriously freaking out.

I finally passed my driving test last week so I am now legal to drive alone - I switched the insurance over to cover Megan and she immediately applied for her test, so hopefully she'll have a European driving licence by the end of the summer. I tried to sign on for welfare last week as with the coming costs for immigration and visa applications et al we will probably run out of money by the end of July, and welfare are currently taking three months to process new applicants. I waited in a queue for two and something hours just to get an appointment for tomorrow for signing on - even that has a backlog of a week.

UL have replied to say that they are rejecting my application for teaching assistant as well as lecturer without even an interview - I assume it is officially my lack of a PhD, but more probably because I don't have a friend or relation on the inside. I am currently in the process of applying for a paid PhD researching constrained programming and although it is just €18k a year (after taxes maybe €14k), it's better than welfare which pays €10k (though for most people the advantages of free health care and rent allowances etc don't make it worth getting a job earning less than €20-24k, especially if you can work a few hours cash in hand). I should hopefully acquire some money earning position for the coming year which doesn't leave me too exhausted to write the Freeing Growth series of books.

Megan isn't doing so well - the Irish government much like the UK government have enacted draconian changes to immigration policy such that anyone non-European is deeply unwelcome. She'll lose her work visa by Christmas at the latest after which she will neither be allowed to work nor to stay. We can get married to ensure she can get a permit to stay here, but the work visa can't be applied for until three years of marriage have elapsed. There is a loophole: I can apply for "de facto relationship" status which lets her both stay and work (though without European citizen benefits like social insurance, even though she still has to pay the taxes) but this requires proof of at least a two year relationship. "Proof" means legal documents like contracts and bills and I can barely think of a normal young couple who would have such things because most couples, especially middle-class ones, deliberately keep their finances out of their relationship and often live in separate residences whilst attending university. She could take another full-time course but the government charge nearly €4k as a capitation fee to dissuade immigrants and for that money she could get herself a Masters degree from the Open University which would be far more valuable to her career. Needless to say, after spending €14k or so on fees for her teaching qualifications, she is more than mildly annoyed.

So what happens now? Well BIS and university are supposedly utterly done as of this Friday, though we won entry to the 2009 Student Enterprise Awards which means that they will continue hold their death grip upon me till the 10th of June now. I have a very long list of things which have been delayed or put off until I regained my freedom and so I shall start to execute them one by one until they are done - not least the starting of companies and the Freeing Growth Foundation, upgrade and consolidation of my server space, I have been asked to quote for some consulting work and more mundanely, my TnFOX library needs porting and testing on Windows 7 for its annual product release cycle and the gutters on the house need fixing as they're are completely wankered. I don't doubt that I'll be very busy indeed reasserting my freedom and leveraging those aforementioned opened doors. It's about time I got on with my life. Till next time, be happy!

Friday 17th April 2009: 6.05pm. It's sure been a busy few weeks - I have been making very good use of my free time now that lectures are done. I have added a "feed of feeds", the "All Things Niall Feed" which uses Yahoo Pipes to draw together all the feeds from all my websites into one giant feed. In fact, last entry the feed ripper for this website didn't work very well - it didn't pass Atom 1.0 validation but now it does. Indeed, in the process I even wrote an Atom format RSS output for Plone which was my first publicly published piece of Zope DTML programming. It's strange really ... after all the years of refusing to touch web programming because it's too toy, I must admit that it's finally powerful enough to merit my bother (though Tn still makes XML data services, ASPX .NET and even Zope look extremely toy)

The Freeing Growth plan continues apace - I won't bother repeating here my post about my plans on the Freeing Growth website - and my activity since I got back from Scotland has been mostly preparing for my PhD application and also my job application to the University of Limerick for a position as a Junior Lecturer. Scotland was busy but good, saw a fair chunk of people from St. Andrews just before their term ends, and my next journey outside of Ireland will be one of a visit to Johanna in Sweden, Nat in Belgium or Northern England (via Hull). To be honest, it depends entirely on how the next few months pan out, not least the current likely exhaustion of cash in September after which myself and Megan will starve. If welfare let me sign on during the summer months, all will be well so long as they pay most of the full amount. I'm hoping to set up a grind school company in addition to the publishing company aiming to begin trading in September - this should provide much needed cash flow which is going to be a very serious problem if welfare drag their heels or refuse to pay (this is quite possible as I have no social insurance stamps).

My head is pretty spongey so I shall conclude for now - I think it is a combination of not being used to concentrating for long periods thanks to falling out of practice due to the previous ten days of holiday, and also because those ten days were fairly exhausting and I haven't recovered yet fully. But soon I will - and then shall come the exams starting early May. Be happy!

Saturday 14th March 2009: 9.48pm. Just a little entry to let everyone know that I'm not dead (yet) or anything, just as always very, very busy and not a huge amount to report of much interest. Astute readers may have noticed the magic appearance of a next to the latest entry and indeed in the address bar of most web browsers. So what's one of those then?

Well, that's a syndicated feed which lets people "subscribe" to this virtual diary and be notified whenever a new entry is posted. I say this like it's the newest most magical thing you've ever heard of, but I'm making myself sound foolish - this is ancient technology and the only reason I haven't had it on here before is that nedprod.com is an entirely static HTML website which makes generating an automated feed somewhat tricky. Any modern "blogging" software is database driven and can churn out feeds easily, whereas static HTML need to be scraped by a server-side PHP script.

Now for my group project for the BIS Masters I had to teach myself a lot of XML based technology - which to be honest I had mostly avoided until now because XML is a fairly stupid idea given what SGML could have enabled. Nevertheless, despite XML's many, many flaws and failings, it is a major improvement on what came before - HTML in particular is an arse due to be inconsistent. Long time readers will remember me upgrading the site to use UTF-8 based XHTML back in April 2007 and at the time I retrospectively applied the XHTML conversion back to October 2006, so the feed consists of all diary entries since October 2006. I wrote a PHP script which loads in each of the XHTML files as an XML DOM tree, extracts the diary entries, patches up any CSS styles, images and hyperlinks to point at absolute URLs and spits it out as an Atom feed though because processing is expensive (and repeating it unnecessary), it maintains a cache of the output and it optionally gzips the output too to save on bandwidth. I then set up a Feedburner account and that's what you have linked in above.

So, Niall's virtual diary is now in the 21st century! Other news that I have is that it proved impossible to find a literary agent nor publisher interested in any of my books - without peer reviewed academic publications I sound like a crank to them, so they dismiss me out of hand. My plan currently is to set up my own publishing company to publish my own books and indeed anyone else's too using the Print On Demand technology which Ingram offers.

All that has to wait for another two weeks though when I can finally get the albatross of academic indoctrination off my back. Just two short weeks, and I'll just have exams to go and then I'll be finally, at long, long, last, free! I have so many plans for my freedom - it's literally like getting out of prison. It'll take a while to turn them into money, maybe a year, but to be honest given the current economic climate I have little to lose - every one of us fresh graduates has no better a choice than between the dole and a near-minimum wage job during unsociable hours (like Megan has just obtained for her weekend mornings). So, all in all, life is okay - and we'll be visiting Edinburgh to say goodbye to the St. Andrews lot in early April which should be fun - be happy!

Sunday 18th January 2009: 7.39pm, and it's my annual birthday entry - yes, I have become thirty-one years old now. Thirty-one is a silly age in my mind: it's not thirty, and it's not thirty two. Thirty-one is somehow in between everything else - even thirty-one's Wikipedia page is significantly shorter than thirty's or thirty-two's!

It's been a long year, and much to my surprise I can once again say for the third year in a row that I did not feel any depression at the lack of things accomplished in the past year. Unlike in last year's entry where the successes were fairly metaphysical, this year my accomplishments are definitely more material:

1. Graduated from St. Andrews
   Much as a degree is irrelevant, graduation did definitively mark the end of the St. Andrews movement: what we all began some four years beforehand passed a point of inflexion, and for the next few years we will all reap the consequences of what we sowed plus of course begin new movements which sweep us away from the St. Andrews experience. In three years or so, few if none of us will still be in contact, and even if we were we will no longer have much resonance with one another's lives and therefore the connection will have passed. Those of us who are lucky will find new connections to propel them on into the future, however most of us will be consigned to quite a few years of loneliness and self-suffocation, surrounded by people we know but with whom we do not resonate.
   
   Depressing? Maybe. However, had I not reacted to that they way I did, St. Andrews would not have been what it was for so many of us. And I certainly wouldn't be dating Megan right now!
   
2. Wrote a book
   A lot of people dream of writing a book someday, many start a book but few finish one. Of those, most won't find a publisher and even of those who do, very few will have any success.
   
   Now, I know from the accruing feedback from the first draft that the entire damn thing is going to have to be rewritten from scratch this summer break - which is pretty painful, but at least I can publish the existing thing online for those masochistic enough to read it with perhaps advertising support as the revenue stream. I knew that it would be unlikely I would hit the button on the first attempt, and the feedback does suggest that I have attempted too much for one book to have any realistic expectation that anyone will invest the requisite effort to read it. I mean, if even my close friends won't invest the time to understand it, then I certainly can't expect the average time pressed member of the public to do so.
   
   However, at least I now have a starting point from which to base a set of much more honed & focused books. Perhaps a set of rapid fire quick release eighty page books like a machine gun? Certainly improves the revenue stream and keeps an author in the limelight. I need a publisher first of course - that's the next step.
   
3. Moved with Megan to Ireland
   Prosaic as it may seem, "I got me a girl to come be with me" and she's a super girl at that. And despite the long hours and the pointless hoop jumping willy waving courses we are both on, life is comfortable enough even if we still don't have a clue what we're going to do next. We certainly could do with some more money given the fairly ridiculous number of hours we work doing other people's shite. Both myself and Megan are getting sick & tired of being cash poor & time poor, but I suppose we have just ten weeks until lectures end and hence, some freedom to choose our days!

Regarding the book, we have an improved book cover whose blurb shall be theoretically tantalising the publishers:

As you can see from the watermarks, the first back cover is for European markets and the second is for the US - and my thanks to the ClearScale utility from Harvard for generating such lovely & clear thumbnails which use LCD RGB interpolation. So far so good - we'll see how things go!

All in all, not a bad thirty-first year of life: stuff has wrapped up fairly nicely for some of us. Much as with last year, my thoughts are with those for whom it did not wrap up nicely and is rather like a weeping canker. And my especial thoughts for those who think that they are very happy, but are utterly deluded and have a horrible year of returning to ground to come in 2009.

Happy 2009 to you, and may you and yours be happy!

Sunday 21st December 2008: 2.21pm. Whoah, such a long time since the last update and unlike normally when I am too busy to make more than a monthly entry, these past two months have been arduous indeed - as you might imagine considering the last entry, but even more was added to the mix again:

Firstly, I got a part-time lecturing position in Economics for UCC's Adult Education, and me being me I fed them a post-structuralist modernised interpretation of Economics rather than the standard dry & boring Neo-Classical stuff, despite how much extra time it cost me in prep. I think it went down well, though we'll see when I get their essays back. I get paid €200 for each three hour lecture I give which as wonderful as it sounds, prepping the lecture slides & readings eats around twelve hours of my week so it works out at around €16 an hour. That's still double minimum wage, though unfortunately the Irish government have enacted emergency taxation on me and so are eating up 20% of my income (and it rises to 40% next month) because I didn't realise you have to fill in some form or other to gain your tax credits. I'll get it back eventually though.

On top of the twelve hours in lecturing, my tutoring load increased as the exams and class tests approached all of which was good as it earns thirty euro an hour. Of course, it left precious little time for anything but work as my own coursework & class tests were also due which chomped whatever quality time remained. For much of the month preceding end of term (which was last week), basically Megan saw me when I collapsed into bed at night and otherwise I was locked in my room working. No quality of life there anyway, and nothing at all was done on the book since early November apart from printing, binding and posting to various reviewers.

Was it worth it? I reckon that I earned €2000 before tax last semester, so between September and December and it swallowed about a hundred and twenty hours. Of course, that's outstanding and most people would give their right arm to be earning so well. But me being me, I loaded that on top of what I would normally be doing if completely free to choose my time, so the end result was me being shattered almost all of the time - indeed, I collapsed from exhaustion sometime in late November which caused no end of difficulties because I missed an assessed tutorial. I was also in a pretty foul mood throughout, and I certainly haven't seen much socialising time or indeed, doing anything other than work each & every moment of every day. No wonder that I have a mouth ulcer which will not heal (I have had this since last June when we graduated!).

Next semester, that being really till April, has a much higher ongoing coursework requirement than last semester. Despite its high regard in the UK & US, the Masters in Business Information Systems here at UCC isn't in my mind at a particularly high academic level - in fact, to be very blunt, in academic level it sits at somewhere between first and second year in Management at St. Andrews. Much like sub-honours Management at St. Andrews, a huge amount of the BIS course is pointless hoop jumping whereby you go through a set of irrelevant motions and output what you know is the garbage that the particular lecturer wants. Forget actual learning or understanding, or God forbid deviations from the catechism, because the average staff member of BIS is fairly shockingly out of date and in general (though there are exceptions), most of them stop bothering to keep their learning fresh after they get tenure so much of what they think is the case is most demonstrably usually not so - which requires you to keep your trap shut and humour them (which I have always found difficult to do in any situation!). This, in a technology-focused subject, makes the staff appear quite ignorant at times as they pretend to appear to know what they are talking about but to anyone who knows better, they just sound silly. I used to think that St. Andrews was bad, but now I realise that with hindsight, they actually are the elite university that everyone says that they are when compared to the competition. It doesn't make the education provided by St. Andrews any more relevant or useful than I have previously stated in this virtual diary, but at least the staff there from my experience did make more effort to teach at a higher and better level, especially in the quality consistency between modules regard (UCC has much more variance). In this respect, St. Andrews I miss you!

Anyway, it hardly matters too much in many ways: Ireland is in the grip of the worst recession it has seen probably since the 1980s and as for the rest of the world, probably since the 1970s. I certainly have never seen such widespread denial in the face of such bad economic indicators which is usually an excellent sign that it's going to get a lot more worse indeed, because it is the day when people accept how bad things are is when economic recoveries begin and the longer that that takes (and/or is cushioned from acceptance by government policy), the longer that economic malaise persists much as it has in Japan until very recently. As a result of the severe downturn in Ireland (of something like 4-6% of GDP officially, but I think 8-10% is more likely given Ireland's unique exposure to the US and UK), civil servants are going to get chopped and by God is it overdue in the universities of Ireland. Anyone in there who hasn't either a good teaching or research record should be fired in my opinion and that's at least an average of a third of the faculty (though easily half in some faculties but much less in others). While you're at it, half the admin staff are unnecessary and as poor Megan has found out, much of the international office should simply be closed because the misinformation they give out actually wastes more time than if students simply started from scratch on their own (they have repeatedly told her lies, failed to provide required forms and misled her visa application. They are, quite frankly, a waste of space). Of course, if I had my way I'd have the student's union run the entire university as a consumer governed cooperative, but that's another matter.

What is bad for the goose is pretty terrible for the gander, so such economic woes are not good for either mine nor Megan's future employment. Britain is going down the tubes - her currency is nearly at parity with the Euro, so that's real inflation of about a third for her imports which must make energy and manufactured goods a lot pricier. Apparently her risk of credit default is now rated higher than some multinational corporations which must be a first since the 1970s. I can't see myself nor Megan having much employment success over there in six months time anyway - the worst is yet to come for Britain. Neither too in Ireland where teachers are being laid off - all anyone expects over the next year is lay offs at best. I am much more employable now than during the last recession - in 2001/2002 I discovered that you needed a first class honours from a "Tier One" university (basically the ancient and old universities, not the red bricks apart from Warwick) and/or a postgraduate qualification in order to get past the first rung of the recruitment agencies. If like me then you had a pass degree from Hull and nothing else, then you had zero chance - they don't give a crap about your CV in a recession because in the end, they're lazy fuckers who like most people will do the absolute minimum that they can get away with. And in a recession, there's loads of candidates so you can just sit back and skim the easiest cream.

I now have the "Tier One" undergraduate degree and shortly will have the postgraduate qualification too, and I will then have three qualifications in the historically most sought after disciplines available that don't require medical training. Surely that would be enough? I don't know yet of course, but I guess that I will be finding out. Regarding my book, so far reaction to it from its test readers has been fairly uniformly negative (e.g. "nasty fascist claptrap" or "lots of dangerous rhetoric suggesting a Mein Kampf of the 21st century") and even close friends are talking a lot about "lots of careful copy editing". I think that its point is getting lost in its text because the book deliberately is all over the place, but I am gathering that the desired effect of creating a synergy after a few reads of it may not be working. Or, more likely, everyone I know is so incredibly time pressed that no one can do much more than skim the top of it which implicitly will fail my original intent. I guess that might be an advantage of a hefty recession - lots of people gain plenty more free time.

I have to admit that I don't see the fascist connection personally - ok, I advocate electrocution as a replacement for wasteful prison incarcerations (in my opinion, therefore replacing long, slow & expensive torture with quick, sharp & cheap torture), much increased use of social & moral pressures rather than legal & financial (i.e. public humiliation instead of fines which just reward wealthiness), the complete disestablishment of the welfare, pension and education systems in favour of "edufare" whereby welfare and pensions become equal to being paid for maintaining skill ability and so on. Some seem to view my view that no one should get anything for free (particularly liberty) without earning it as the most dangerous & virulent form of fascism possible.

Obviously enough, I don't see freedom that way - I see everyone born into the chains of ignorance & inability and that it is acquiring and maintaining skills which frees them. Some commentators have equivocated that notion as a new form of ecclesiasticism whereby much as with Catholicism, one is born with original sin which one must then spend the rest of one's life cleansing. Some might accept such a notion as having merit, but become most galled when I go further to say that people should not be allowed a freedom until they have earned the right to it which is the fundamental thesis of the book. For example, I propose that you aren't allowed to buy a McDonalds until you have earned an "unhealthy food consumption licence" (you can consume, but not purchase) and that licence must be renewed on a regular basis. That whole concept upsets people greatly and for some reason they seem to think it is most like fascism because their freedom of choice is being dictated to them.

My problem with their problem is that their freedom of choice isn't being dictated to them. Their ignorance of choice is being denied to them definitely because in my opinion, you cannot freely make a choice when you don't know what you are choosing. If you don't realise that eating a McDonalds every day will do you harm in certain specific ways, then you don't know what you are doing when you choose to purchase a McDonalds. Most people would say now that "everyone knows that McDonalds are bad for you" but then I would ask you this: write down the top five most important specific ways it is bad for you. I guarantee that almost no one can do that. Why? Because despite the fact that all of us eat food, we are generally profoundly ignorant about what food is, how it works and therefore whether a choice regarding food is a good one. Considering in my opinion such a calamitous choice where a blind, deaf, dumb and disabled person must somehow navigate a tripwire that no one has told them about and the concept of which they do not understand, surely the only right, moral, ethical and humane choice is to restrict freedom until the freedom of choice is possible? Remember, someone else suitably qualified can always buy you a McDonalds in the meantime (and you can always make your own at home) - this helps bind a society together on the basis of expertness and knowledge rather than superstition, fashion and fear as at present.

Additionally, in parallel, under my proposals for those most educated there would be an unparalleled freedom. If suitably qualified, you can drive on the wrong side of the road, modify anything you feel like, even enter & manipulate other people's property (what would currently be called stealing): you can do what you like with no (legal) bounds whatsoever - the most true, complete freedom possible. In this, I have assumed that with deep education & understanding comes responsibility which I suppose is a leap of faith. I would assume of course that a legislature would change the law if my faith turns out to be misplaced - and do remember that becoming so educated would require considerable time, so such freed people would be mostly old. It would be the reward at the end of a life long journey spent upon improving oneself and the world: true power.

I personally felt that I was being very restrained & conservative in my book - I personally would go much further and legalise murder (including genocide) for those people who reach the maximum pinnacle of skills-based educational achievement on the basis that such people don't need laws to restrain them because if they decided that genocide was a good idea, then it probably would be (I left this out because too many people would say that any genocide at all is automatically wrong - we as a society aren't ready for greys in this black & white viewpoint, despite that we all unknowingly commit genocide several times a year if one considers non-human lifeforms). Another thing which I left out of the book was my far more radical proposals for utterly replacing democratic government in its entirety because I felt these to be too unacceptable to current society in its present state. There's loads of stuff in there where I could have been much less conservative and far more radical, and I am intending to at least review such proposals in later editions.

Moving to a related topic, I have finally got the basics of the Freeing Growth website going. Given the dire economic situation, I had been looking to substantially freshen my marketable skills portfolio and of course I also wished to implement a site not using 1990s web technology like this one (good ol' nedprod still works on the original CERN web browser though it kills the original Mozilla - not my fault, actually a bug in original Mozilla and it was Apache which broke it). FreeingGrowth.org now looks (roughly) like this:

You'll note the heavy use of CSS3 features such as rounded corners and drop shadows, plus there is heavy CSS2.1 selector usage and I'm sure you'll see the white transparency used so some of the backdrop bleeds through in most areas. I deliberately left the navigation elements without transparency as the adverts overly stand out otherwise. The layout is literally unchanged from Plone's default except for the addition of the CSS3 features because after messing around with third-party Plone themes, I realised that all the ones which look good break lots of Plone features - to be quite blunt, Plone's default theme "just works" so I'm sticking with my overrides of their theme for both freeinggrowth.org and neocapitalism.org. BTW, if you want to know all about installing Plone onto a low-end VPS, see my writeup here. If you want to see why I went for Plone instead of Drupal, Joomla or the usual suspects, see my other writeup here.

The above screenshot is how Google's Chrome browser views the site - it's Webkit based so it looks almost identical to Apple's Safari except that there's a bug in the rounded corners using drop shadows. Firefox v3 does a reasonable job too, getting all the rounded corners but no drop shadowing until v3.1, whereas Opera v9.6 keeps the square corners because it supports almost no CSS3. All the browsers work fine except for good ol' Internet Explorer v7 whose display glitches are legendary - I am assuming that IE8 will fix my problems because I really couldn't be arsed to code specially for IE. I'll get around to adding a special message for pre-IE8 users soon enough.

NeoCapitalism.org is still the default installation but I have set up the workflow and functionality for it to behave as a Wiki and after Megan has left for the US, I'll get started with putting in all the book's theory as content so it can act as a user-editable theory portal. Then at least I'll have some basic stuff in place for both websites which will not just get me some web presence, but also act as examples of my skills which I can pitch if necessary to prospective employers. Hopefully this will earn some cash in the long run should worst come to worst.

So that's roughly me over the last two months. I'll do a birthday entry next month as is traditional where I shall review my past year and make my prognosis. I think, rather surprisingly, that for a second year running I actually achieved something rather than the usual wasted year full of failed opportunities & disappointment that would be the traditional fare - we'll see. Until next month, be happy!

Thursday 30th October 2008: 12.53pm. I have taken today off seeing as Megan is away in Scotland and I don't have to drive her in and besides, I was becoming very exhausted again. I don't know what it is about me but for some reason I just don't handle sixty hour plus weeks well despite that plenty of other people seem to - I am at the edge of my capacity at present, and this is despite that my load is far less than it was in St. Andrews, especially second year there. I am quite sure that it has something to do with freedom of choice - in St. Andrews, I could choose my day to a much greater extent than at present even if I couldn't choose the hours. Here, one is basically stuck inside a prison of a sort for a set of given hours per day, and worst of all much of it is deadly boring.

Now I disliked the set hours badly enough when working for EuroFighter - I was never on time in the mornings, and some mornings I rolled in very late indeed of which they were very tolerant (it's not like I was out partying, it's rather that I wake up at random times and if I must always rise at the same hour then I get irritated). However, I find it very interesting that I could handle the stress in that environment well enough but found when we moved the work to Britain insufferable - almost certainly because now my hours were being dictated to me and I no longer had the choice. My blood pressure rose, I became fat and the doctors started to warn strongly that my bloodwork and systolic pressure were pointing at the early signs of heart disease.

Six months after quitting the job I returned to the same doctor and he was quite literally astonished to find the same bloodwork and indicators now showing me in the peak of physical health - considerably better than good. All those heart disease issues had utterly disappeared. I took that as an extremely valuable lesson for the future.

I very much enjoyed that year after EuroFighter - I had enough money to not work and I made it eleven months before I had to leave Spain. I worked upon what I wanted to when I wanted to, my health vastly improved and I produced a great deal of output indeed. Thanks to the generosity of my father, a much slimmer variant of that lifestyle persisted for the eighteen months preceding going to St. Andrews which allowed me to plan for what I wanted to achieve there all of which came out pretty well actually (I hardly did it alone, but equally what happened there was irrevocably coloured by my actions, approach and presence there). And now I have a book summarising the entire lot of it - whether it is readable or intelligible or not is of course another matter.

It feels now very much like the end of EuroFighter - just like the point when I said that I would quit in six months and no later. I now had a clock to watch counting down ... just like this course whose main portion basically ends in April. Just six months to go. And I see myself watching that clock ticking down and praying it would speed up. I want to be free, not couped up by all this bullshit. It is making me ill - last Tuesday I was in the hospital so they could examine a mouth ulcer which won't heal and their urgings that I must stop soon reminded me of those doctors during EuroFighter. As I said on Tuesday just like I did almost exactly six years ago, it's not like I plan to keep doing this for much longer. To be honest, I don't think that I could because I hate & despise this lifestyle. It sickens me in every way possible and I only do it because I have to.

Just like most people I guess - how many people want to work dead end jobs? Few if none. They do it because they have to do it because they have little choice. I have been extraordinarily lucky to have had a realistic choice, though relative to my peers I have nothing like the material wealth so in a sort of sense I have been punished for my refusal to play ball. Of course, I am standing so close to the top of the mountain relative to everyone else on the planet that it's a bit silly for me to consider myself relatively poor, but well we compare ourselves to that which we perceive relative to us. And even if we ourselves don't, then our peers certainly do so for us.

The book is as done as it could be - I currently sneak in copy editing whenever a free hour pops up and at some stage soon it will reach final draft, whereupon I will run off lots of copies and post them to lots of various people. I will be travelling to the US during Christmas break (only my third time outside Western Europe) to meet Megan's family and hopefully get a lead into the New York publishing scene - apparently John Brockman is the literary agent to get, and of course he is next to impossible to access. More hoops & hurdles to come, but by God if all this expensive education has been worth anything at all then I will find some route to him via some method. Failing that, surely there is a parallel movement based around Europe though God only knows how to find them - that said, the US is where you make money if you write in English, and it makes sense to go straight to the top if you can.

My VPS is working - though I had to wipe it and completely reinstall it from scratch two days ago, and I'm still working on reinstalling everything plus choosing a suitable CMS given that we are now in the 21st century and nedprod's technique of still using semi-static content is very 1990s (there is no database backend on this site, I copy around everything manually and munge the lot through a Python script before uploading). I have learned a very great deal indeed about setting up and configuring your own server and I have written up my experiences here.

Also, MSI released a v1.09 BIOS for my mini-laptop which reenables overclocking which has made a tremendous difference in the one single area which really annoyed me: using Microsoft Expression Web to type into this website. Expression Web is horrendously slow and typing used to lag significantly behind my keypresses, sometimes so much so it was unusable on some pages so I had to type into an empty page and copy & paste into my destination, often waiting up to a minute for the paste to complete. When overclocked by 24%, the entire system (memory, northbridge, CPU, the lot) just leaps ahead and now Expression Web is quite usable. I don't need the extra horsepower for any other application though I daresay compiling C++ is likely to be much improved too, rare though it is that I do that on this laptop (just for Apple Mac OS X actually). BTW, if you also have a MSI Wind PC, if you upgraded the memory then you need the 667Mhz stuff rather than 533Mhz - a lot of people have found the overclock won't work and it's because they bought the 533Mhz RAM. MSI's 24% overclock actually just sets your system to run at its proper 667Mhz spec rather than underclocked as is default.

So I guess that's about it for now. It's the first time in a very, very long time that I have had the freedom to just sit down and potter out a diary entry - normally, I am so harried by everyone & everything that having this break of today and maybe tomorrow is just plain fantastic. I actually have the freedom to think and take my time ... ah, if only it could last! Next I am going to cook myself a decent hot lunch - nice as sandwiches are, one of the things I really hate about being imprisoned in UCC is how by the time the 6-8pm lectures start I am too weak from hunger to make much sense of what is going on. Getting old I guess. Anyway, be happy everyone!

Sunday 12th October 2008: 5.31pm. Gee, what a few months. This weekend I "finished" the book in the sense that every chapter has been written and contains more or less what will end up in the final book. Of course, some chapters are missing small sections, plus I definitely need some extra graphs and pictures to illustrate myself - then comes the weeks of copy editing when you run through lots of other people's notes on where you're not making sense. However, we are on course for a Christmas dissemination to people from St. Andrews - maybe by the time the printers get back to me with sample copies it may be early 2009. Shortly thereafter it goes to agents for publishing.

On that note, I have finally got round to investing in my own server - though it'll be a VPS (Virtual Private Server) for the time being because dedicated ones are horrifyingly out of my budget for the time being. You can get a European based quality one from a quality provider if you search around - I got a deal on a UK based one with 256Mb of RAM, 20Gb of disc space and 300Gb of bandwidth a month for just £5/month. Unlike the cheap & unpredictable OpenVZ VPS's, this is a proper Xen based one where you get total control over absolutely everything. I shall be putting http://www.freeinggrowth.org/ onto it as well as http://www.neocapitalism.org/ and redirecting all email sent to nedprod.com through it. The current hoster for nedprod is lchost.co.uk and they finally told me I could no longer do spam processing on their box as I was shafting everyone elses website from the load. That was fair enough - they have been more than tolerant - but it does mean that I didn't get any email for a week so I now have a nice backlog awaiting me.

Having my own server makes a tremendous difference to what I can do. Freeing Growth will need a collaborative cooperative system which allows multiple people to contribute and work upon ideas, code and other stuff. Think of it rather like Wikipedia except that there is a sort of 'peer review' process which occurs before new ideas get incorporated into the whole: one can submit comments & musings a bit like a scratch pad using your mobile phone which you then can coalesce together into suggestions for amendments and/or proposals. In fact, the book proposes precisely the same system except for all creative content & ideas in an entire economy - and from who scratched what & when can it be derived who is most responsible for the genesis of the new idea, and therefore who gets the royalty payments. I can glue together bits of other open source software to achieve this - though it is a shame as it would be an ideal project for my MBS in BIS in UCC, but I would strongly doubt if I could sell it as a viable tool for business. For them, if it can't generate revenue in cold hard immediate cash, it's not a venture.

I bought my first car and I am learning how to drive it. It is a one litre purple 1998 Nissan Micra GX with all the fancy trimmings such as alloy wheels, power steering, central locking and super stereo system. Most of the fancy facilities still work - windscreen wipers can't do intermittent properly and the booming stereo has a loose connection for the left speaker which is annoying. It runs off almost nothing: €10 will take you the ninety miles we do in and out of Cork each week (which works out at about 45mpg). It cost only €1100, though its insurance nearly cost as much as I am a provisional driver.

Other than all that, life is okay. I am very tired and very run down, not least because myself & Megan have been arguing fairly heavily since we got here. She is not happy here - and I am sure we can move away back to Britain or further afield after the course is done. As I said to her, she can always leave much sooner than that if she wishes - she hasn't paid her fees yet, so not much money is lost. In the end, I do not know how to do more than I am - I agree that there are too many things tugging on my time such that she feels lonely, but money to feed us has to come from somewhere especially as the stockmarkets are doing so badly. Anyway, time to ring Johanna and talk to her for the first time in many, many weeks - I never have time to talk to anyone much anymore. Be happy!

Wednesday 27th August 2008: 8.31pm. Do you know that the more I use this mini-laptop (the MSI Wind clone) the more I like it? I don't think I have ever bought a consumer appliance that just keeps on growing upon me day after day and I keep finding new and even more convenient uses for it! This little thing really is worth its weight in gold.

Furthermore, it's fairly shocking how powerful computers have become. This little laptop has taken over from my 3Ghz Core 2 Quad desktop surprisingly well - apart from typing into this crappy Microsoft Expression Web which only just about keeps up with my typing, a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom is more than fast enough for almost every purpose I have thrown at it (I did try reencoding video to h.264 - I wouldn't recommend that, though encoding to MPEG4 works okay). And its keyboard is surprisingly easy to use for extended periods - book writing is pretty easy on this, not as nice as on my 1920x1200 24" supermonitor, but equally it's more comfortable because I can write anywhere I like eg; my bed or a sofa. All in all, me likes this 'toy' supposedly for web browsing alone (and as I mentioned before, it doesn't burn my crotch with heat no matter how long I use it)!

Today, actually specifically this afternoon, is the first in many, many weeks that I have felt relaxed. This is because at long last, after weeks of preparation, the pallet transport guys came to pick up the second pallet of stuff for transport to Ireland. And just like that, all the anxiety, stress, worry etc. which have become the norm of oh, maybe the last two months or so evaporated. In fact, I wandered - actually wandered, not power walked - into town in order to shred all my bills & financial info accumulated during the last four years and to pay some money into my poor, ailing bank account. Feeding the shredder in the student's association office was lots of fun even though it kept jamming, and I felt strangely like a prawn cocktail sandwich which I couldn't find anywhere so I settled for a three combo pack with one prawn cocktail in it. I then bought a small cafetière so I would regain coffee making ability sadly lost with the departing of my expresso machine. I actually had fun wandering around town - for the first time I think in at least six, maybe nine months. It felt quite unnatural to be honest - I even stopped to watch the ducks at the Burn, there were six little chicks jumping into the river and crawling unsteadily back onto the bank.

So all is good. Actually, all is not good in the slightest - there are lots & lots of other sources of stress eg; I somehow stupidly packed my train tickets & passport into the stuff sent to Ireland so I will have to repurchase tickets plus there is a fair chance that Ryanair, being dickheads, won't let me travel without a passport which will necessitate a journey via ferry which really sucks monkey balls. But hey, I'm not feeling it right now. I am feeling rather hungry though and Johanna is busy upstairs pulling stuff around her room noisily - I deep cleaned my room last night, so apart from the rest of the house there are no worries. And I really do feel genuinely relaxed unlike during the last few weeks - still a lot of muscle pain from all the lifting, but I bet I'll sleep well tonight for the first time in ages!

You may have noticed that I have changed the advertising again - I have moved from Direct Right Media to the Rubicon Project taking a two thirds hit in revenue by doing so. However, they pay me by unified transfer without minimum payouts so to be honest, it's better to get some money quickly than three times more in about a year. Advertisers suck - they're like banks, they're basically there to screw you over and suck you dry. Such is life!

Anyway, it's long overdue for filing all the entries in this one page into the archives and thus to massively speed up the loading times for this front page - pertinent too as the next chapter opens in my life. What fun! Hope you are all being very happy!

Tuesday 12th August 2008: 11.08pm. It's taken a while, but I have finally transferred most of my day to day work stuff like email to my mini-laptop as I prepare for moving back to Ireland. It's an excellent wee laptop, everything I always wanted one to be: light as a feather, quiet, small, cool (doesn't burn you) and powerful enough to not be annoyingly slow. In fact editing this page in Microsoft Expression is the very first time its speed has been a problem as there is a definite lag between me typing and it drawing it on the screen - but at least it is keeping up, and it is after all my own fault for having such a ginormous page!

I have tried editing my book in Microsoft Word 2007 on this laptop and it will, just about, fit two of its pages on screen readably at once. I wouldn't type into that for extended periods, but it's good enough for getting a sense of layout. It's surprising what a 1024x600 screen can actually do - it's tiny compared to my 24" 1920x1200 screen above (that can fit eight pages without breaking a sweat but I normally type into six pages onscreen at once) but obviously enough this mini laptop is rather more portable. I also have Mac OS X installed onto it which runs an absolute treat though it was a royal pain in the ass to install because I had to clone the hacked Mac install disc onto a USB flash disc and boot off that - the mini laptop, obviously enough, has no optical drive. So all in all, I am very pleased with it - upon my recommendations, my sister has bought one too for college. Unlike most mini-laptops, this MSI model has a very decent keyboard - I type quickly enough, and even the reduced width punctuation keys haven't caused me issue.

UCC finally accepted me yesterday which is really about time: I am now doing a Masters in Business Information Systems. Who knows what might come thereafter, just the next few months are still very opaque most especially with how much money we'll have spare after buying (hopefully) a car and running it for as long as the money lasts, and hopefully get a job before impending doom! I think I have everything on track for our move to Ireland even though we don't pack for another eleven days - can't think of anything else I can do as sooner than is possible. The book currently stands at nine chapters in varying degrees of readability, spanning some 220 pages and nearly 90,000 words which isn't at all bad for two months of writing from what I understand - though of course it won't be finished by the end of August, though before classes start is still doable. We'll see. Anyway, be happy!