Oblomovka

2002-08-03»

A random mail from a random someone asking for advice.

Dear Sir, Imlooking for advice, & i went onto the net to seek it, please can you help me? my son had an accident, & i was put in touch with a solicitor...

I don't know jack about what to do about this, so I told this man what I would do. I'd find the local Citizens Advice Bureau, and ask them. I googled for a bureau near him, and sent him the URL and phone number.

Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He'd run away to Britain and she hadn't heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her - again not much, but something.

Cory talks about using spare brain-cycles across the planet to solve problems. I think this is the closest I get. Not that my brain-cycles are that precious anyway. I'm wasting them right now, thinking too much about the strangeness of one word: bureau. We don't start bureaux enough these days. We need to start the Distributed Bureau of Investigation.

2002-08-01»

The best trick in blogging: wait a while, and someone else will write your entry for you. Dave Winer said yesterday:

Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems obvious that that's slavery.

I'm surprised by each of these sentiments: that we're not writing usable software, that we're not making money, and that it's coercion (and thus slavery).

2002-07-30»

Jorn's just linked to the very funny Verity Stob journals, so I guess I can now. Verity was my first boss, actually - we both worked on or near a magazine called .EXE in the early Nineties. One of my proudest claims is that I'm the annoying new office boy who sets fire to a UNIX box in one of the earlier columns. The girl Adrian Mole should have married, if life were kinder to him, and even crueller to Verity.