I would have the heartbreak of going to places to rescue an old piece of equipment they were scrapping and being shown a warehouse full of stuff that was about to be dumped. I didn’t have the transport or the storage space for it so I had to be very selective in what I could take.

The majority of my first collection was actually mostly stolen when a truck of mine was broken into. I assume all the contents were just trashed because financially, none of it was worth anything at all; people were still effectively paying to have this stuff crushed or at best, having it taken away free for the price of the gold on the circuit boards. I lost a lot of stuff that is completely irreplaceable, and just about all of the early MUD and BB history I had on various disks, tapes and paper tape.

These days of course, things have changed – Retro is in fashion and it seems to be pretty trendy to collect ancient computers – This has the advantage that I don’t need to any more, since I didn’t collect most of this junk because I liked it, I collected it because somebody had to and nobody else seemed to be stepping up to offer. Quite a lot of my stuff has gone to proper museums now but I still keep hold of my core collection though, mostly out of petulance and spite…

And so, to the subject of this post!  I read an article once that claimed that mankind lost more data in the 1970s and 1980s than at any other time in history and from my experience, this causes some unusual problems. I thought I would give two somewhat ridiculous examples that I have come across lately.

The first relates to the title of this article: “Primary Sources” – Wikipedia’s aim is to become an encyclopaedia of just about everything and because of its position of being the major encyclopaedia on the Internet it is generally a very good source for documenting the history of computing. A couple of years ago I decided to update an article about something of which I am one of the primary experts, having written it. It was an article on some obscure Multi User Game history. I made a few changes to the Wikipedia article and corrected some things. Apparently I was not meant to do this. Shortly afterwards I got into a discussion with an editor who was complaining that I hadn’t referenced any proper sources. I explained that I was the primary source on this matter, but apparently that didn’t matter. Had I ever given an interview on this, or written a book, it would have been fine, I could have referenced that; but it seems that I can’t just reference myself. Wikipedia’s rules say “Do not base articles and material entirely on primary sources. Do not add unsourced material from your personal experience, because that would make Wikipedia a primary source of that material.”

The problem is that all of this stuff happened in the late 80s and in the late 80s there was a LOT of reference material that would have been a gold-mine for Wikipedia; servers full of documentation, academic (and non-academic) papers, and the ever present and ever busy Bulletin Boards. When the World-Wide-Web came along these things didn’t migrate and as the old systems were decommissioned, the data was simply discarded and lost forever. There was no “way back machine” or Google Cache in those days and at best, some people may have their own backups on floppy disks or paper printouts. I used to have lots of these, but most are gone now. I still have some of the actual machines which probably have the data on them – but there seems little point me pulling it off if the data itself becomes an unusable Primary Source.

And so the problem is that there is a distinct lack of primary source material from the 1970s and 1980s. If Wikipedia really does want to document this era in which a lot of ground-breaking, fun and interesting history was actually made then they really should consider allowing Primary Sources to contribute. A lot of people who did a lot of good stuff back then, developing, using, and researching things that weren’t “invented” until decades later; but they simply aren’t self-publicists. They don’t give interviews (even if anybody had a clue that they should be interviewing them!) and they don’t write books or appear in them unless they accidentally happen to cross paths with the likes of Tracy Kidder or Katie Hafner at just the right moment. They are distinctly absent from history and the way things are, along with the data we have lost, the people will be lost too.

…

Another completely different problem happened a few years ago when I was trying to resurrect the first Multi User Games, Essex MUD and MIST, to run at Bletchley Park’s Computer Museum. Essex MUD ran on a DEC PDP-10 running the TOPS-10 Operating System. Being a good Systems Manager all those years ago, I backed-up everything I could think of before I finally turned the off-switch on the Essex Games. I certainly had enough so that one day, I could recover it – At least, I thought I had; and now I had to put this theory into practice.

The first challenge was to get hold of a PDP-10 – We thought we had one at Bletchley but it turned out to be an obscure (but very pretty) PDP-11. As far as I know there are no complete and working PDP-10s left anywhere in the world but this was less of a problem than it may have first seemed. One thing that was relatively easy to get hold of was a PDP-10 TOPS-10 simulator. I could run a completely realistic (if not slightly too speedy) simulator on another system, in this case a MicroVAX. I could have used something else, but I wanted to at least keep the whole thing on DEC machines. I got the simulator running, I loaded all the data from my various backups and I went to get the BCPL compiler to compile the source code for MUD; and this is where everything started to go wrong.

It seems that nobody had ever thought to keep a copy of the BCPL compiler. Why would they? It’s Systems Software. It’s not like it’s just going to vanish one day, is it? Well yes. It is, and yes. It had. I contacted Richard Bartle, who along with Roy Trubshaw originally wrote MUD1 back in the late 70s – I thought he may have a copy of the BCPL compiler somewhere and he confirmed that he may have one on an old half inch tape from 1981 ish. Half inch magnetic tape isn’t really meant to last 25 years but it was worth a try, so he sent it to me and I popped it in my tape drive to read it. And it wouldn’t. Of course, PDP-10s used a different physical 7-Track tape format than my more modern 9-Track reader could cope with. If it had been a different logical format I could have fixed that, but physical was completely out of my control.

Never being one to give up, I decided to put out a call to see if anyone, anywhere in the world, had a working old PDP-10 7-Track tape drive. To date, nobody has. If (and that is a big “if”) the BCPL compiler is on that tape, and it may be the only copy left anywhere in the world, then I can’t get it off. Without it, I can’t get anything else to work at all and never ever will be able to.

Even when I was sitting, doing a backup in 1992, knowing that one day I would probably want to recreate this stuff, I never dreamed that I would not be able to get hold of a vital compiler just 15 years later – And bear in mind that I knew more about this stuff back then than just about anybody. I was one of the only people collecting old technology and preaching the need to keep things for the future; a major part of my job was recovering data from ancient and obsolete National Health Service tapes and disks that would otherwise have been lost and I was, and still am, completely obsessive about archiving against accidental loss.

In a few years we may well realise that we have lost so much of the 70s and 80s that it is verging on the unbelievable. In other areas of history and modern archaeology we have finally understood the need to keep first-hand personal stories from sources such as the mill-workers and miners and the soldiers in the First and Second World Wars. One day maybe I should expect somebody to turn up at my house with a tape-recorder in an attempt to force me to try and remember stuff. With luck, they will bring tea and cakes and forgive the fact that as a somewhat senile Primary Source, I will probably be quite useless by then.

It’s easier to learn from history when we bother to preserve it. The arrogance of not doing so seems quite incredible to me. But what would I know? I am just another unreliable source.

Firstly there was a seemingly throwaway comment that made me smile on What The Papers Say about the fact that Obama lost thousands of his Twitter followers: “Talk about hitting the President where it will hurt him the least”.

It’s one of the 1st times I have heard somebody in the media actually admit that a whole bunch of virtual Twitter followers are utterly meaningless – it’s almost a brave statement from a journalist who relies on people reading his stuff. But does anyone really care about the drivel people post on Twitter? I’ll leave that conclusion to you.

The other thing I noticed today was that Firefox was using nearly 4GB of memory on my Laptop. That is more crap stored in my working memory than we had long term disk space for the entire University of Leeds in the 1980′s – And I don’t think it’s like we really stored much less useful data.

I wonder how much storage space, air-conditioning, manufacturing, working-electricity etc is being used simply to keep the gazillions of gigabytes of disk farms going just so the worthless opinions about Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse of a billion Internet users can be preserved for ever more.

I shall shut up now, and not add any more to it.

I have always made a point in any interviews I give about Freecycle to never talk about landfill. The carefully crafted and commercially sponsored messages we get from Freecycle-Central in the USA are always about the evils of landfill and how the ultimate purpose of Freecycle is to keep things out of landfill sites; but I don’t agree with this. Not at all.

Freecycle for me isn’t about landfill or recycling it is about reuse and it is about helping people in the local community by making sure items are reused. To me, reuse schemes like Freecycle are actually about avoiding the evils of recycling, and in this sense I will do everything damned well possible to keep yet another thing out of one of those green, purple, blue, orange or polka-dot mauve bins. If you ever ask me my opinion (and oddly, people do); I will tell you that unless the item is made of aluminium or copper then just bin it. Send it to landfill, wave it on its way and thank any gods you may have that you saved the environment just a little bit more harm.

Recycling on a domestic level is pointless. Not only is it pointless, it is harmful and for some ridiculous reason, we are being forced to pay taxes to help this nonsense perpetuate. So why does it exist and why are Governments across Europe and North America starting to require more legislation to force us to recycle? The answer is sadly quite simple, there is a hell of a lot of money in Recycling and the people who are making all this money have damned good lobbyists.

Back when the world was somewhat more sensible we had three Rs. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Why have we forgotten all the rest and got so hung up on the last one? Well lessee…

Reduce:

Reduction is the simple answer to most things but asking a modern Western family to reduce the amount of stuff it consumes is somewhat akin to teaching pigs to sing. It won’t get you anywhere and it will only annoy them. In this modern age we tend to be rather into convenience and convenience isn’t very compatible with reduction. There is a tendency to shift the blame from us to the companies who sell us stuff and in order to shift this collective guilt people will start to blame the Supermarkets and the manufacturers for their obsession with packaging. Surely, it is the packaging that is to blame and not us! We’d be just as happy with our stuff wrapped in old newspaper or in a recycled cardboard box.

Nice idea but that’s just not true. Packaging isn’t cheap. Companies don’t go out of their way to spend too much money on the stuff when they could avoid it. Packaging is there for a reason, it stops items breaking and in the case of food, it stops food going off. Studies consistently show that the gains from packaging far outweigh the losses and over the last few years advances in designs have led to a lot less of it being used.

There’s a whole other argument about “Junk food” and processed food over home cooking. Fast food chains benefit from bulk packaging and the fact that they are only running a room full of cookers to generate a whole lot of cooked food does have its plusses. As for processed foods, well contrary to what we are endlessly told there is very little waste at all from the processed food industry. The food we as humans get lasts longer and stores better and the byproducts go towards animal foods. I don’t want to make this an argument about animal welfare, that’s a completely different issue (and I really do hate to defend the modern chicken processing industry in any way at all, really I do) but it is worth noting that in reduction terms, modern commercial processing of 1,000 chickens recycles just under a metric tonne of byproducts and only uses just under 8kg of packaging.

Does a modern family need to use all the stuff it has? Do those low income people on their council estates really need two cars? Well in most places in Britain that aren’t in one of the few cities the answer to the car issue is probably yes. Cars are not cheap, buying the thing, fuelling it, taxing, MOT-ing and insuring it cost a small fortune these days. There seems to be some middle-class Daily Mail reading view that the evil working classes have multiple cars through choice – Maybe if the money we spent on recycling schemes went onto public transport instead… But I am getting ahead of myself here.

Reuse:

Reuse is obvious a biggie for me – Personally, I don’t like waste. If I can find a use for an old plastic bottle then I will use it and carry on re-using it. I have some juice jars here that I have been using for milk now for over 2 years – They are wonderful, far better than anything I could buy at a supermarket and they were free. I love car-boot sales and yard sales, I love thrift stores. I am not at all ashamed of driving down the street screaming “Oooh! Other people’s crap!” as I stop at yet another yard sale.

I picked up on Freecycle very early on for this reason; it was a near perfect scheme in that one person’s junk is another person’s gold and more to the point, the whole thing is local so there are no major logistics in transportation involved. It also made sense. I have found myself with perfectly usable things that I didn’t want any more that I know somebody else would probably love but I didn’t have a means to tell them. Freecycle answered this beautifully. It keeps useful items from being pointlessly destroyed, it saves people money because they don’t have to buy something new and it helps people who can’t afford new things enormously.

Nobody forces anybody to use Freecycle; there is no government legislation in fact there is no government or commercial backing at all in the UK. It is, in fact, very hard to get anyone in government interested at all since they are obsessed with Recycling schemes.

Of course, not everybody is on Freecycle; very few people have ever heard of Freecycle but it doesn’t stop people reusing things. Some families still recycle clothes and pass larger items around but this doesn’t seem to happen as much these days which are where local schemes can be wonderfully useful when they exist. In the past it could well be argued that certainly in Britain, Charity Shops filled this niche. People would donate stuff they no longer wanted to one of the local shops and they would sell them cheaply to the local community and make a small profit at the same time. Unfortunately it seems to be the case with what a few exceptions (thank you Salvation Army, for example for letting me have at least ONE exception), charity shops have changed. These days the used goods they sell are generally more expensive than new items you get a Primark, TK-Maxx or Poundland and their book prices are becoming astronomical. Clothing that is deigned “unfit for sale” is sent off to be pulped and that tends to be anything without a designer-label that won’t sell for their increasingly large prices. Something has gone horribly wrong in the world of the Charity Shop so I guess now, we need to praise the fact that Freecycle and Car Boot Sales exist to feed local reuse needs.

Recycling:

And now… The biggie. Third on the list for a reason and that is because it is the least important by far and yet it is the one that is given extraordinary amounts of attention and obsession and huge amounts of state funding wherever you look.

Why? Simple. Recycling is easy!

When our Daily Mail readers pack the kids to school with the bottles of pop, their packaged snacks and the like, they are safe in the knowledge that this is ok because all the packaging will be recycled. It’s far easier to buy a bottle of pop than it is to mix some squash in a reusable bottle. Who has time for that? By the same notion, it is far easier to throw those items away into a recycling bin than to maybe think that they could be used again, or given to somebody else who may use them. After all, they’ll be recycled and made into a new ones just like the TV ads say! It’s not like it’s really going to waste is it. By recycling things, people are safely protected from having to think about reduction and reuse. They are doing their bit still.

Sadly, it is true that recycling is both easy and guilt free. It is positively encouraged and indeed, legislated for now. Houses have an increasing number of different bins that they sort their rubbish into and off it all goes, saved from landfill and everybody is happy.

Not only that – We can buy more and more recycled stuff too! Notepads made of recycled paper, recycled Christmas Cards, hell there is even recycled toilet paper. This stuff is all made out of pulped clothing and recycled paper so there was no waste, no damage to the rainforests and we can feel great.

It’s a shame it’s not true.

There is very little good in recycling on a domestic level. I don’t want to go into enormous amounts of facts and figures, search the Internet for something like the Eight Great Myths of Recycling (or just look at http://www.perc.org/articles/article179.php ) if you want them. The point is, we are not running out of sand and we are certainly not running out of paper. When sand shortages start to become an issue then yes, maybe we should worry about recycling bottles but until then, why bother? As for paper that’s a whole big hornet’s nest.

Recycling paper has a big negative effect on the environment. Think about that for a moment, it’s important. It is bad on so many levels – Let’s take a simplistic look.

• The amount of fuel being used to pick up used paper on a local level is enormous. Those trucks give out pollution you know. That’s CO2.

• Once the paper is at a depots, it needs to be sorted. This involves machines, which again give out pollution and use electricity. Oh yea… More CO2.

• The paper is dirty, and needs cleaning. Sure you may not mind your recycled papers being a bit brown but the old dyes still need to be washed out and most large users still want white paper so there is going to be an industrial sized bleaching operation going on here. Waste… More waste, and more and more CO2 being pumped into the environment.

You know what helps CO2? Trees. And you know what paper is made out of? Trees. Not slow growing, unreplenishable rainforest trees, the cost of getting those trees would be enormous and those are far more often used in furniture (which can be reused remember, paper generally can’t!). The trees used for making paper come from large areas of concentrated fast growing sustainable forest. Forest that helps enormously with the whole global warming deal that people are so concerned about. The process of turning these trees into paper is large-scale but localised, and whilst it does obvious use some resources to harvest and process, it is a small tiny fraction of the ones used in the recycling process. The more we recycle paper, the more CO2 we are putting into the environment that isn’t being replenished and the more trees are not being planted in sustainable forests. You know what that means? Recycling paper is polluting the earth with its by-products, killing us slowly with its CO2 emissions and it is actually reducing the amount of forest we have on the planet.

So what about glass? Again the resources used in localised transport of glass from houses, sorting it, crushing is and reusing it far far outweigh the resources in making new glass from sand. Sand isn’t something we are running out of in a hurry; really, it’s not.

Plastics are a contentious issue in this. There is no argument that making new plastic uses oil and there is a positive effect to recycling some plastics; the problem again is in the selection and sorting process which tends to still use more resources overall than not recycling. I remember a scheme a few years ago that was looking into basically melting down every sort of plastic and re-processing it to re-produce oil. This would almost certainly be a good thing but we haven’t got there yet and the folks who understand the economics of this claim that burying all the plastics we have in landfill for now, and mining it later would be far more efficient than the picky and mostly wasteful recycling we do now.

In doing a little bit of research for this post I did read quite a few opinions on everything and a lot of the anti-recycling articles I have seen state things like: “Recycling things like paper, aluminium cans, etc. are among the most harmful ways to pollute the environment and use fossil fuels.” – This is a shame because the person who wrote this is talking nonsense. Actually, aluminium cans are one of the few things that are very much viable to recycle, along with copper and other large metal items in general. It is easy to take the negative effect of paper and bottles and stretch this to everything and if you do bother to read “Eight Great Myths”, for example, you should pick up the fact that the big evil is the small scale house to house recycling and not much larger selective schemes which can sometimes, be positive. Scrap metals, tyres and fast-food company cooking oils are all good examples of positive recycling.

Landfill is often cited as the main great evils of our green age. Freecycle almost has this whole thing about keeping things out of landfill as a mantra. Companies make a LOT of money out of recycling and there are a hell of a lot of commercial pressures to keep up these myths. There isn’t a lot of money in landfill so it tends to lose the PR battle. But is landfill really so evil?

Actually no. Not at all – And this is one of the reason I refuse to go on about keeping things out of landfill. Modern landfills have moved on in technology; if you don’t believe me look some up! They tend to be huge centralised places that are landscaped over when they are finished; they don’t cause pollution, they are well managed and the more modern ones are re-using the methane produced by organic waste to generate electricity. Landfill sites are certainly not the great open fly infested visions of hell that recycling evangelists would have us believe – Quite the opposite in fact. A lot of them are also being designed now with the prospects of future recycling being taken into consideration. One day we may come up with a much more efficient use of plastics and when we do, we know exactly where they are in the landfill sites and we can easily get at them in bulk. When you stop and think about it, that’s actually pretty cool.

Ultimately there are people on both sides of this debate and it’s one I try not to get too involved with. I am forced (legally!) to recycle things and it grates at me every time I have to put used paper into a recycling bin. I hate it, but it’s happening anyway. I can’t stop people doing this, I can only hope that at some point governments will stop listening to the companies who make billions from recycling schemes that are both pointless and damaging and will come up with some other schemes. Meanwhile, I will carry on pushing for local reuse schemes like Freecycle and its offshoots and supporting yard sales and car boot sales. I will also carry on supporting the Salvation Army shops who have so far refused to forget their purpose as cheap local-community charity shops and companies like Frenchys in Atlantic Canada who keep millions of tonnes of clothing from otherwise being pulped to make recycled bloody paper!

So should you.

Now the Internet Gnomes are mostly teenagers who have very little concept of what Doctor Who used to be so I can forgive them for expecting low standards. They’ll acknowledge that there was a show before the 2005 pantomime remake but they probably haven’t actually watched any episoses. I mean hell it’s been going nearly 50 years now, that’s a lot to watch and fuck man! Some of them are in Black and White; didn’t people know how to encode AVIs properly in those days? Having said that, even the most die-hard fans of the new drivel will have trouble justifying a reason to look forward to the Christmas episode except maybe in the vague hope that the Doctor will finally die. We have hope yet! Remember Lynda Day? That’s all I have to say!

It’s not even that I don’t like Matt Smith as The Doctor; I do. I would go as far as saying that he’s pretty similar to Tom Baker in many ways and I’d class that as a compliment. With some good writing, he’d be great. For one single moment in Big Bang I had hope. He said something like “Do you really think the life of one girl is more important than the future of everything?” – Hell no! That’s the Doctor we know and love! Welcome back Hartnell and Troughton. Halleluiah! Finally us humans are back to being nothing much better than shaved apes. Unfortunately, it seems he was only joking; a brief moment of teasing taunting fantasy for those of us who remember a proper Doctor. Obviously the life of one human girl is more important than the whole of … Well whatever the fuck was going on.

It’s a terrible ending to a terrible show. Russell T. “If you can’t write it Camp, it’s not worth writing” Davies started it by dragging in his old mate David Tennant. Now Tennant isn’t a bad actor as such but he’s no Doctor Who. The whole thing is akin to getting Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe to play James Bond. Talking of Harry Potter, what’s with all the new gadgets? Time travelling wristbands, notepads that show magical identity badges, every flavour jelly-beans, telephones that cross time and space and a Sonic Screwdriver that doubles as a magic wand when it is waved and the spell “deus ex machina” is muttered. One of the major plot-devices about Doctor Who was that a lot was unexplained but the pantomime version seems obsessive about explaining everything. There was an amusing part in the Matt Smith series when one of the ever-present C-List British TV celebrities they roll in said “Oh you are that Doctor”. Yep, he is indeed just that Doctor.

Back in the olden days of Doctor Who the format was pretty solid. Each story was 4 or 5 parts, with a cliff-hanger between the middle episodes and with the exception of John Pertwee’s exile years, they were very rarely set on Earth. It’s tempting to use this entry to have a dig at Americans and say that the new one hour neatly wrapped shows are made for export to the US where attention spans are shorter but this doesn’t really fly. American television is getting a lot more sophisticated than this these days and it seems to be the British who are falling well behind by adopting this somewhat tedious format. As for the writing – Well yea, all I can say is that even the old Tannith Lee episodes were better than any since Tennant became The Doctor. There were a few good Eccleston episodes but then we had false hopes once, for a short time.

Another thing I am curious about is why, when there is the whole of time and space to zip around in; does The Doctor insist on coming back to Earth. More specifically, Britain – In fact more specifically again, London or Wales in the early 21^st Century. It’s not like the BBC is short of money for this series; each episode must cost more to make than than one of the older whole seasons. The whole thing seems kind of akin to Star Trek or Blakes 7 spending their entire time travelling back in time to 20^th Century Earth.  And what’s with his obsession with Human assistants? I don’t want weedy and somewhat useless British girls, I want half naked primitive girls, in skimpy leather loincloths who carry big knives and gut the baddies when nobody is watching. I’d say I want metal dogs with guns in their nose too; but I don’t. I can live without that. The show has two spinoffs; Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures – Let them deal with Earth in the 20^th Century since that’s where they are set. It’s boring… Ok! I want Robots of Death, I want Yetis in space, I want Daleks on Sarko, I want The Doctor shagging green aliens. On second thoughts no; I have seen Casanova, I am not sure I want to see any more Russell T Davis sex-scenes.

I WANT SPACEMEN – IN SPACE AND IN THE FUTURE – DAMMIT!

(Oh, and I want Lynda Day back please.)

Firstly I must say that if I am being completely truthful I was only actually fired once, and this is about that event. The other two times I left it was a mutually agreed situation – In the first one, I told my managers that I flat out refused to lie for them any more and apparently in a company who’s whole culture is based on lying to customers that is a bad thing – In the second case, I left because accounting every half  hour I worked to a customer cost-centre (when it often made no sense at all) was just ludicrous and often downright dishonest. In both cases, as soon as I left my contract was immediately picked up by another part of BT  with promises of various changes and a decent pay rise.  I actually ended up with what was effectively a long unbroken lump of employment for BT, even though I worked for a few different divisions.

So let us go back to a time just before the last Millennium. I had just returned from a few months secondment building a new Internet Service Provider for BT’s new mobile company (Genie, now O2) and I had in my hand a glowing letter from the Chairman of Cellnet saying how wonderful me and my team were for delivering the impossible in such a short timescale. We did good on that job, even though I didn’t want to do it. Back at the office I was finally at the point of being part of the sign-off process for any solutions that BT sold to customers. In theory, before any solution was sold I got to security evaluate it first and could refuse to sign it off and send it back for design corrections if it failed. I was also working with internal security and in all I should have been happy; but I wasn’t. In the past I had been able to do what I wanted and what was best for BT and its customers as a whole – To be proactive and to look for problems that needed solving. Now I wasn’t allowed to breath without it being charged to a customer. Any autonomy I once had was gone and I was fixing things on my own time and not being paid for them which was getting somewhat ridiculous. I told my managers I was really not renewing my contract when it came up and I thought that was that.

A week before I was due to leave I got a call from BT Operations begging me to come and work for them. They piled on the sweeteners; a nice big pay rise, all my billing to a single cost centre, just two months and no more and I could move back to my favourite office. I agreed to this, I decided not to go ahead with another job I’d planned to move to and I made sure the paperwork was all sorted out.

The following Monday, I turned up at my new job and had a tea. The office was basically a football-pitch sized machine room that took up a whole floor of a building with just me and 2 operators in it. There were a few offices in there from the days that this was the major PSS centre for the UK but they had basically been abandoned Marie-Celeste like in the 80′s. I had worked here before when I worked on Genie and had made a little cubby-hole in a long since abandoned conference room, the two Operators had also moved in there.

At mid-day both the Ops got a call and vanished. I never saw them again. Nobody had told me what they wanted me to do so I just sat around drinking tea and watched machines humming. At 3pm I got a call from my new boss saying he was coming around at 4pm for a meeting. At about this point I attempted to login to the Operations Systems and it wouldn’t let me so I got a little suspicious and phoned some people. Nobody was saying much but somebody said they had heard that word from the board said they were about to fire me, but nobody knew why. I couldn’t find out any more so I sat and waited. My boss arrived at 4pm, and curtly told me I had been fired and he had to escort me out of the building. I asked why, he said he didn’t know, he’d just been told to do it. He asked for my security card which I didn’t have on me that day and that was that – I was standing outside the heavily armoured and razor-wired front gate and very confused.

The next day I expected to hear more. I didn’t – At least, I didn’t hear anything from my bosses but I did hear a lot from other parts of BT. I received mails asking me to review secure networks, I had calls from customers asking me how to repair things and I had calls from various people within BT wanting advice. I made excuses when I had to and just waited to hear something official.

A week went by. I heard nothing. No letter, not even an email. Nothing to tell me formally I had been sacked and nothing to tell me why. I contacted S-Com, my agency who were cagey (rightly so since they owed me a month’s salary in notice period). I am assuming they knew nothing and were keeping quiet hoping I wouldn’t notice that I was out of a job. I decided to contact a few people in BT and had a few shady meetings in pubs and BT canteens but the upshot was that nobody knew a thing. Nobody had been told I had been sacked, most people were astonished and assumed I was still working ther,  I still had my fixed network connection into BT from my house and I could still access all of their systems except for one I had been deleted from and my mail addresses all still worked.

I decided to arrange a meeting with BT Internal Security, I was curious to know if they knew anything so I popped to Milton Keynes for dinner and we had a chat. They’d not heard a thing and even when they dug around they could find nothing. As far as they were concerned I was still working for BT. I asked them if I could see how much access I still had without them arresting me and they said sure as long as I wasn’t silly or naughty.

Over the next month I tested various networks. I could access all of the customers I ever worked on which included governments, law enforcement, most of the major banks, various ISPs and a whole load of internal things. I tested my card and my ability to just walk into a building – Nobody ever challenged me, I had a nice cup of tea in the room that housed the central Bank Clearing System and the national salary payment systems (CHAPS) and yes, I could still login to them. I could also wander into Telehouse and the like at any time I wanted. I was still getting many calls from customers and internal BT people and in the end I just pointed them at somebody else and didn’t explain why.

At this point, I was thoroughly pissed off. BT owed me nearly £10,000 and my agency S-Com (who had sent me a crate of champagne just 2 months earlier) claimed they knew nothing about it. I sent them a copy of the purchase order and the reference numbers but they just refused to reply after that. Nobody seemed to have a clue why I was fired they just know I was. There were various rumours but none of them really seemed right. It had just been ordered from on-high.

So we have one exceptionally disgruntled ex-security manager, who was owed money, who was being constantly ignored and treated like shit by BT and who still had access to every customer, internal system and building of importance. I had to change my phone number after six months, people were still calling me about things. It took them two years to disconnect my lines from my house into BT and to this day there may still be personal  machines of mine housed on the internal networks that I can access. As far as I know, my card was never disabled and as far as I know, nobody in BT and certainly no customers were ever told I had stopped working there. My email address eventually stopped working in about 2004 when they changed systems.

To my credit, I never did anything to them – But that’s not really the point, I could have caused untold amounts of hugely embarrassing damage. I am not sure if relying on the continuing ethics of somebody you treat dismally is really a good policy but apparently in this instance it worked for them.

It’s at times like this I remember the old mantra:

“WE ARE THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. WE DON’T GIVE A FUCK”.

Of all the people in the world unlikely to lose faith in Britain I would have put myself pretty high on the list; somewhere between Churchill and Thatcher maybe. So why do I want to leave? People keep asking me this so I started thinking of the reasons myself.

It’s not been a sudden decision although the last 10 years has hurried it a lot. So let’s think of some utterly random and disordered thoughts. This will be long, it will ramble, it will be rather typical of my weblog postings. As ever, you don’t have to read it. I am not forcing you to.

I remember cameras being one of the first things that pissed me off. When I was being trained in Surveillance one of the things we had to do was to start to be aware of who was watching us. I learned to look for cameras; this was a mistake. In 2006 there were over 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain, that was one for every 14 people. There are no statistics for the current number, but it has certainly increased. A report by Privacy International says that Britain is the worst Western Democracy at protecting individual privacy, in fact, in the world the only two countries worse than Britain are Malaysia and China. The cameras and other means of surveillance are there for various reasons including the often overlooked “US Security Operations”- Yup, the US is monitoring Britain on our own soil. Of course, whilst we are at this I was stopped and searched under the prevention of terrorism act a couple of years ago for taking photographs of Menwith Hill, a US surveillance station in the North of England which used to be a Cold War listening post and now spies on Europe for US commercial means. I should point out that taking photos of this place is not hard, it is visible from miles away, it is enormous and has been growing at a vast rate since the end of the Cold War when everybody assumed it would simply be closed.

They are not the only cameras I have issues with. Speed cameras are now a growing parasite on our roads. These things are operated by local police forces ostensibly as a safety measure but that myth has been debunked so many times that everybody knows it’s not true at all. They don’t add any safety, research shows that they actually have a tendency to make people speed more anyway and all they do is to make the police a fortune in fines. I have heard a theory that the Speed Camera is the single largest thing which has put a barrier between the police and the people in modern Britian. They make everybody a criminal, they make a majority of people hate and distrust the police and they make people subconsciously less willing to co-operate with a police force that seems to concentrate more on getting money from motorists than actually dealing with any crime at all. Of course, the modern British police force seems to be able to get away with shooting an unarmed man 8 times with no comeback on them so maybe it is good that we don’t trust them any more.

So I don’t trust the police… What about the rest of the authorities who run these surveillance operations. New legislation launched under the umbrella of making us safer from terrorists (of which much more later) is now being used by local authorities to spy on the general public for absolutely non terrorist activities. This came to light when Dorset Council admitted to spending more than 2 weeks spying on a family they suspected of lying on a school application form. The new surveillance powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 give local authorities access to things such as phone records, email information and monitor what web sites somebody is visiting as well as the right to mount on-the-ground physical surveillance against them. Needless to say, this act wasn’t ever created to allow this but what the hell, hey?

All of this makes the fact I do actually trust the British Security Services somewhat a moot point. I just thought since I was ranting about the misuse of such powers I’d actually carry on my fairly consistent defence of that lot. I also still have some respect for the higher judges, unfortunately this isn’t true of the lower court rabble.

Of course, the 2-type legal system is something else that annoys me although this has always been a problem so I can’t claim it to be any particular reason that I am leaving. We have, however, embraced the EU human rights convention and part of this is the right to a fair trial and the assumption that you are innocent until proven guilty. The British Criminal court system does operate on this assumption but the Civil Courts certainly don’t. Anybody can take somebody to Civil Court and it’s up to you to prove that you are innocent. In any case, the chances are you will end up paying a fortune in costs, win or lose.

The monarchy is one of the things often cited as a reason that Britain is so great. The relationship between the Crown and Government is a complicated one and much of it is governed by convention rather than actual laws. Maybe I am made more naive because I have more knowledge of how these conventions work than most but one of the things I always thought would happen when the government started to behave tyrannically and went against the will of the people in an overwhelming way (such as entering into an illegal war) was that the Crown would step in and do something about it. I would think that this is not only the right, but the very raison d’etre of the Queen. This is why we pay for them to live a life of opulence and luxury. When Blair invaded Iraq in 2003 (an act which we now know was based on lies to Parliament) an overwhelming majority of the British people opposed this blatantly illegal act and yet the Queen still allowed her seal to be used to send her armed forces to invade another country. This shouldn’t happen, this shouldn’t happen on so many levels. Of course, to add insult to injury on this matter, Tony Blair has never been taken to account for his various lies and his various crimes. He’s happily swanning around the world making a fortune on the lecture circuit without a care in the world. There are lots of groups trying to have him called to account but frankly, they seem to be pathetic and somewhat shit. If that’s all there is then he doesn’t have much to worry about at all.

Do I even need to talk about the fact that Parliament has now allowed the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, without charge. The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? May as well just sell them all to Americans as pretty things to go into picture frames. Oh sorry, I forgot we already did that. Talking of the Magna Carta I note that the government is still trying to push ahead with its id card scheme. Europeans and Americans don’t really understand my objection to this but it’s quite important in that it does remove a very basic right given to us in the Magna Carta all those hundreds of years ago. We still have a presumption of innocence, we still have the right to be nameless and identyless in general life. If the police want to know who we are, they have to show good reason. An identity card will lose our right to anonymity, it will shift the power slightly further towards a state where we have to show our right to be here rather than the state assuming that right by default. I am ignoring the fact that as soon as we do get an identity card, the security will be cracked, the Russian Mafia will be selling fake ones for a few thousand a piece and the government will lose all the details on a train to Waterloo or post them on a DVD to somebody. We know this will happen, it’s just how these things go. I would start talking about this all being more steps towards Corpus Juris at this point but I don’t want to sound like a nutter from the UK Independence Party, I love Europe still though I am still not sure Britain should be part of it. I just have very different reasons for my beliefs than they do.

And now, we couldn’t avoid it could we. The climate of fear.

I don’t kid myself that I am much more clever than the average Brit and the only advantage I can think of is that my post graduation background was in social psychology with my PhD being in controlling people. Don’t get me wrong, I am as susceptible to control as anybody, I go out and buy Fox’s biscuits every time that damned panda on my TV tells me to. I am an advertisers dream; I fall for all the tricks and it’s made worse by the fact that I know it too. The thing is, I think that deep down most people know they are being manipulated and like me they don’t much care as long as it doesn’t play too much havock with their lives. Unfortunately, the latest big lies seem to be playing havock with mine, and everybody elses.

That odd chap Joseph Goebbels once wrote:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And so we come to The War On Terror. My government tells me that we are living in very dangerous times and that my personal rights and liberties should be forfeit little by little to help them fight it.

Bollocks.

My government tells me that this is the most dangerous time ever and my very life and existence and freedom is at stake through the threat of Terrorism.

Bollocks to the first bit. I will concede to the last bit – But the threat is not from Terrorists.

My government tells me that invading Afghanistan and Iraq is something they had to do because we are at war with Terrorists.

What the fuck?

I started to come of political awareness in the early 80′s. I am product of that time. At that time and for the next decade or so, there were lots of bombs all over Britain, planted by the IRA and paid for by the Americans. Do Americans know that as short a time ago as 1996, the IRA bombed England’s biggest skyscrapers? Do most people outside this country know that almost every day in London there were bomb scares, train, bus and tube disruptions and general upheaval because of bombs or the threat of bombs. I don’t know how many people lost their lives through IRA bombs, I don’t know how many bombs there were. The reported numbers almost certainly don’t match the reality because the government and the press rather sensibly co-operated to keep a lot of the incidents quiet so as not to give publicity to terrorists. That is how a country with a lot of experience of terrorists works, they realise that terrorism feeds off publicity and taking that away from them helps to damage its impact. Our new enemy (which apparently now has a name, it is militant Islam) has, in the last few years made what amounts to a pathetically small impact on the country in terms of actual bombs and lives lost and yet we never hear anything else! Liberties are lost every month as we do more and more to fight this new thing, Terrorism. Have I missed something here? New thing? Terrorists in Britain? Get real!

In the early 80′s I didn’t think we’d make it to the year 2000 and I very much doubt I was alone. We were having leaflets posted through the door of every house in the country telling us how to survive in the aftermath of a Nuclear War and it was a time when films like When The Wind Blows and Threads were able to change British public opinion on the whole nuclear warfare issue. We slowly started to realise that we probably wouldn’t survive global nuclear war but these still seemed to be a greater than 50% chance that it would happen. My government tell me that I am at greater risk now from a bunch of disorganised terrorists?

HA FUCKING HA!

The weird thing is that like Goebbels great lies, it doesn’t seem to be global. It seems to be rather restricted to Britain and the USA. Its an excuse to go to war to further commercial interests abroad, it’s an excuse to step closer to that Governmental Holy Grail, a total and legal control of the people.  The two are Hand in hand, this is a dangerous situation for us to be in and I don’t like it. This “war” is costing us hundreds of billions of pounds and although I realise it’s cliche to count this in how many hospitals we could have built with the money it is worth pointing out that Britain’s filthy hospitals and the superbug epidemic are causing far far more deaths in this country than any terrorist activity ever will.

The other great lie is to do with Global Warming. Don’t switch off, don’t sneer at me. I am not saying that Global Warming is a lie, it’s not. There are differences of opinion as to what is causing Global Warming and I doubt you agree with me but even so, Global Warming has become a bandwagon to impose even more taxes and controls on the people and as I have ranted about in the past; the people it is hurting most are the poor. I foresee more and more happening in the name of global warming; I foresee more and more silly laws and restrictions and less and less useful action. Global warming will be used as an excuse to sell more and more protected land to companies to exploit and sell more and more overpriced houses to people. The poor will stay in the lowland floodable areas and will end up uninsurable and like New Orleans but on a grander scale we’ll probably end up with refugees in Mainland Britain in a decade or two. Adding more and more tax to plane travel and fuel isn’t going to help this. Putting some of those billions of pounds we are spending to protect our freedom is. Global Warming is inevitable. Taxes aren’t going to stop it. Preventing it isn’t going to work. We should be doing something about it, and doing something about it now, not later. It’s a big lie. We all know this why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Leigh visited England from Canada a few weeks ago and said that one of the things she noticed most about this country was the press. I have to admit I had barely noticed this but now it’s been pointed out to me I see the point. I am not sure what has happened to it, it’s not a press any more it is just popularist celebrity drivel interspersed with bigoted opinion. I don’t read newspapers any more so I hadn’t really noticed. and whilst I can’t use this as a reason for leaving I can still mourn its passing.

The BBC still sits on the sidelines as the only party of opposition; uncomfortably though it relies on the government for funding so its subversion is probably rather less than one would hope. I view it as some sort of ineffectual superhero that still tries hard. By day, it broadcasts endless mind numbing gobshite devoted to cookery, decorating, selling all your crap to buy new crap and buying new houses – All the things we as new-age sheep seem to like. By night, it allows platform to some quite cutting satire and the occasional excellent documentary that says much the same as I am saying here only in a less self-obsessed way. The other channels generally broadcast cheap and easy to make crap and reality TV. It’s depressing really and if this is the opium of my nation then I demand a new pusher.

And now for the punchline. None of this is why I want to leave…

The country has had messes before, England and Britain have a long history and throughout it, lots of shit has happened. But as I said at the start of this post; I have always felt that behind the scenes there were competent people working to mend things. Of course, the English have a history of being quite pathetic and resistant to change, our history of revolution is pitiful; from the rather pathetic Peasants Revolt which ended with a single blow to the Civil War which simply annoyed a bunch of people before sending everything back to how it was before as soon as the leaders realised they didn’t have anything to do once they’d won. There’s no spirit left in this country any more. Nobody cares; the people aren’t stupid, they know what is happening as well as I do but they don’t seem to care any more. Even the few who do can’t do much. Armed revolution is conveniently illegal and political revolution is, as I see it, impossible. Maybe it has always been that way, maybe this is something I have missed.

The only useful things that the Brits have ever really done to create change is to leave. For the first couple of centuries at least I don’t think we did so badly in America. Australia looks pretty to me and I think we have done pretty well in Canada, all things considered. Maybe it will be interesting to see how the Colonies have fared instead of constantly whining about what the Motherland has become.

Will the last one to leave the country please turn out the lights? Global Warming, don’t you know.

Some links – I didn’t want them in the main text because I am odd that way:

• Britain is ‘surveillance society’
• Police shot Brazilian eight times
• Council Spy Cases hit 1000 a month
• The Magna Carta
• The Bill of Rights
• 42 Days later…
• UKIP on Corpus Juris
• The BBC’s The Power of Nightmares – You really should watch it here.

For those of you who haven’t experienced Twitter I ask you to stop reading now. I offer no definitions, no useful information and no links. You don’t need to read this posting, get on with your life and ignore it. A life without Twitter is a richer life indeed.

A few days ago, Leigh explained Twitter to me and made it all a little more clear to me. Some of what she said made sense, I could see some small merit in micro-blogging and as a 55-word story writer, I obviously have a sense that small can often be a lot more beautiful. I don’t object to the concept of Twitter per-se, I object to how people seem to use it. Twitter originally came into my field of annoyance because of its interface to Facebook; now unfortunately it seems to be infecting everything. Twitter updates the Facebook statuses of people so I would get a feed somewhat like this.

• “Pillock is waiting for a train.”

• “Pillock has been waiting for 5 minutes, the train is now late.”

• “Pillock wonders where the train is, and goes to get coffee.”

• “Pillock thinks the coffee is horrible but at least the train is coming soon.”

• “Pillock finally sees the train.”

• “Pillock is getting on the train now.”

• “Pillock doesn’t seem to be able to get a seat, damn train company.”

I will stop now… Unfortunately, this endless microglimpse into somebody’s tedious existence won’t. So why do people do it? I could probably come up with all sorts of theories; some of which would be pretty sound but ultimately it all boils down to the fact they do it because they are obviously quite deranged. Is anybody interested in this? Isn’t there enough quality literature in the world for people to read without them sitting there all day reading this constant stream of dirge? Apparently you can get people’s Twitter feeds sent to your mobile phone – What the fuck? WHY?

Maybe part of the problem is that it seems to be acceptable in the modern work place to be connected to garbage like this. When I was at BT, it used to be a particular bugbear of one of our security people that if people got into work and sat down and read the newspaper for the first 4 hours, they’d probably be sacked but that people seemed to think it was quite acceptable to sit reading random stuff on the Interwebs all day, playing on Facebook and the like. Is it a way that office people can escape work that is more acceptable than sitting in the garden reading Treasure Island? I pity what society will become if it is. On that matter, I find it somewhat ironic that I used to effectively twitter for a living. People used to have to pay $3.00 for each of my 140 word messages but then they were sad wankers, with no other friends than the imaginary people at the other end of their phone. Oh… Wait a minute… Ummm.

Maybe it is part of the new instant news society. As news consumers we seem to expect second by second updates but they aren’t useful, they aren’t healthy and they often do nothing more than confuse the whole situation. The average person isn’t trained as an intelligence analyst and the average person’s mind isn’t quite that fucked up enough to want to be. Nicholas Taleb writes quite well on the subject of the psychological effect of constant streams of updated information in his book “Fooled by randomness” – If you can ever drag yourself away from reading inane twitter messages, weblog postings and RSS feeds full of online comics; I suggest you give it a read.

A few of the armies of the world still employ War Artists; Australia and Britian being two of the key ones. The theory is that a painting can take in all the events of a day, of a battle, of a campaign and merge them all into one single, well thought out visual statement. It can do this far better than a single photograph, a single video clip, a single report. Whilst I don’t argue that very occasionally a potographer or film cameraman does capture an iconic image of war; I do agree with history that the painting does it far better. What’s wrong with people noting their thoughts down in a little notepad, a camera or an electronic organiser and summarising their day later? They could even use Twitter to do it and write something like “Late Trian, Crap Coffee, No Seat – But Long John Silver whisked me away and saved me. Thanks Robert.”

I quite like Giolla’s Livejournal. He occasionally posts a small Haiku that summarises his week which seems like a perfect use for Twitter – Maybe people could learn a lesson from that but they won’t will they. They will continue to think that people are interested in every breath they take. Sting was wrong. We aren’t.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 – It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot – Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

The problem is, I know it is the Twenty-First Century; I know this because I am not, as far as I know, insane and have a fairly firm grounding in the real world (some of the time anyway). I just wonder if the same can be said for the Church of England’s Bishops.

As I am sure most people reading this know, England has been suffering from some very major flooding lately. Today’s long term weather forecast indicates that we won’t get a summer this year; in fact the one single day we had with no rain last month was probably our summer. Lots of England is still under water and they are being told to expect more rain, and more flooding.

Obviously, the people who think that the world is just starting another climate change that really has very little to do with carbon emissions (that would be me) are looking rather smug at the moment. If this is Global Warming then Tony Blair is an honest man.

But back to the Bishops. They have another explanation for this unending rainfall and flooding. God is punishing us. I kid you not, in the year 2007, the bosses of one of the most liberal Christian churches in the world have suddenly started to preach Hellflood and Damnation upon these damp isles of ours. God is pissed off with us, and is apparently pissing down on us in bucketloads in His revenge.

I have a few questions.

• If God is annoyed with us, why is he only taking it out in the poor? The people who live on cheaper housing in the flood plains, and the people who cannot afford good insurance or defences for their homes. Why is he denying summer holidays to people who can’t afford to just get onto a plane and have a few weeks abroad.

• If God is annoyed with us, what have I done for it to be nice and sunny where I live, when the rest of the country is being flooded – Why have you spared me, the grouchy farmers, and rich-townie-wankers who want to live in the country; Mister God?

• If God is taking his wrath out on Great Britain, and only on Great Britain, then doesn’t that mean that the Islamic Jihadists who have their own little Holy War raging over here have God fully, and completely on their side? That is what you are saying, right? If this is the case, then I am converting. Just in case. If you want my help Allah, just give me the raisins and I am yours!

I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is His servant and messenger.

Amen!