Category Archives: Narrative

Everything is good in moderation; except moderation…

I thought it was about time to write an article on how I was recently fired from my job with one of the Internet’s leading moderation companies. It’s been a couple of months now, so I am confident that I can write this in a non-reactionary way since I am trying to be informational rather than adversarial; I am not even going to mention their name and I am confident that very few people will actually know for sure which company I am referring to. I am not worried about libel; I am well covered by the new UK whistle-blower laws – But pending the result of a couple of potential criminal investigations against the company I think I will keep names out if for now.

I’d worked for them for a few years – I am a Brit in Canada and they are headquartered in the UK with a shell-office in the USA. The contract I signed when I joined was oddly written and didn’t look like it had ever seen the inside of lawyer’s office – There were clauses in there which were obviously in reaction to previous issues they’d had such as “You agree that while working for us you will be engaged on a freelance independent contractor basis and will not be our employee.” – A clause which any employment lawyer would tell them is pretty much worthless. There is also no geographical basis to the contract nor any acknowledgement that other national laws may take precedence. This company is also quite proud of the fact that they make all staff go through police checks – There was a problem with mine since I’d moved around a while earlier so I was told on the phone to lie on the form so that it would pass. I should probably have known there was something amiss at this point.

Are you bored yet? Sorry – I will get back to the story!

On the day I was fired I had been working solidly every day for blocks of about 10 hours for 465 days, without a break – That’s no weekends, no Christmas … Nothing. 465 days earlier, I had been at a work meeting in the USA, and the day before I flew home was my “day off”. I had 1 day off in 2010, 9 days off in 2011, 4 days off in 2012 and that was it. I was considered a good employee, I was told so on numerous occasions and just prior to leaving they had jiggled a number of clients so that I could be the person to moderate them. I had zero idea or warning that they were gunning for me.

So why was I fired? Well – I don’t know! I wasn’t told. I woke up one morning and my phone was complaining it couldn’t get the work calendar. I tried to login and I wasn’t able to. I had an email on my personal account to call the big-boss and she told me on the phone that I “obviously wasn’t happy at the company, and we had incompatibilities and I wasn’t following the correct procedures”. That was it – Nothing more was explained, no emails followed – Just a final payment from them a few weeks later that was sent without me invoicing them (so much for freelancers!). In respect to the correct procedures, I had had a meeting with my line manager two weeks earlier where I had explained that I often didn’t and this was why people wanted me on their projects and he said he knew this and promised to back me up with people in case there were issues (which there never had been). Ironically the two things quoted at me (not using the company enforced browser and not using their timekeeping system) were both false since I used both.

And so, it is for me to speculate the real reasons…

I had been openly worried about changes to the company – I had expressed grave concerns that not only were we double billing clients, I was also put into the position of having to moderate two competing companies at the same time (that unless there were changes I knew nothing about, were paying for my exclusive time). This meant that if there was a rush on one company, the other would essentially have to be ignored and this happened often. I didn’t like this and I didn’t want to work on projects where this was the case; so I had arranged to be removed from them, even though I had worked on them for years and in one case, co-managed. When I asked the scheduling manager if we were double billing, I was told yes, and that the money was being used to “do up the house” of the Managing Director. This wasn’t exactly very reassuring.

I had also mailed the week earlier to express concern that I was working illegally. An accountant had told me that I could not work 70 hours a week, every single day for nearly two years and claim to be freelance – Having read the Canadian regulations this was indeed the case and they were also liable for years of back holiday pay, overtime etc. I asked them to work out a way of making me a “proper employee” like they had done to the US staff and were about to do to the UK staff and was told quite rudely that I was talking nonsense and to shut up and carry on. I probably shouldn’t have expected much else; when I pointed out that most of the UK staff were also working illegally and they should fix it before they were found out and liable to millions of pounds in fines and ten years of back payments, I was also told I was wrong, and to shut up. This is an area of law I know a lot about. I was not wrong – But I did shut up.

The last email I got before I left was one from a colleague expressing concern about a moderator in Ireland who was working on one of the major projects that weekend… He had apparently been complaining about being tired but still had the whole weekend to work with only a 5 hour sleeping gap. Occasionally I’d worked 60 hour days – But thankfully not too often. They claim that they don’t allow this – But it’s their schedulers who allocate the hours.  They claim a lot of things about staff-welfare that are complete fiction though. I remember reading an article about them in a British newspaper about how the rotas are planned sensitively to give staff a chance to recover from stressful projects. I am pretty sure they interviewed the wrong company.

A few days before I was fired, a friend of mine at the company was also fired. She’d been working for another company and she acknowledges that they had grounds to fire her – It probably should have been a written warning, but that’s not how they operate. In actual fact they actually hacked a competitor to get this information (I wish I was making this up!); a matter of which I was quite open about how I felt having worked in security and policing for most of my life. Over the course of the next few days they read all her emails and chat-logs to essentially go on a witch hunt.

As Wilde said – “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” – Hummmm.

We’re the Sweeney, son, and we haven’t had any dinner…

In the last few months, I have read an awful lot of articles and watched far too many YouTube videos about gun ownership and the British gun ban. I didn’t set out to do this at all; it’s just that I sometimes read articles about guns and they link to other things – And somehow 2 or 3 links down they always seem to turn into a rabid political mess.

One of the things I notice is there appears to be an enormous chasm between the two sides. More often than not the two sides don’t even seem to be talking about the same things. There is no consistency of terms, no attempt to understand what each other is saying and the whole thing is so emotive that it is all essentially gibberish.

I was curious whether I could say anything new or present a middle-of-the-chasm view of all of this. I don’t have an agenda and I certainly don’t expect to change anybody on either side’s minds but I may be able to at least say something to the people who don’t have an opinion already. There is no conclusion to this, no tied up loose ends and no solutions. I have no political agenda and I am not a miracle worker. It also ended up too long – Sorry!

First off – I am a gun owner. I have a lot of guns of all shapes and sizes and I know some of the mentality of other gun owners. That being said, I am also a Brit and although I am an unusual one in that I grew up with guns and don’t find them particularly alien things; at the same time, I don’t have any of this North American mindset about them. I had air guns from a young age, I have shot various weird things over my youth and from university age onwards I shot handguns at a range and owned a number of legal compressed-air handguns that didn’t require a range. I am well trained in the use of handguns and passable with rifles and shotguns.

After the two big modern gun-bans in the UK following the Hungerford and Dunblaine massacres (1988 and 1997 respectively) there was a change in the law and then a huge police recall of guns that were now illegal to own. People who owned guns that had been banned were forced to take them to police stations and there were triumphant press photographs and videos of the guns being crushed or melted down by their thousands … And here we hit the first problem of understanding between gun and none gun people – Guns are expensive. I would estimate that the average price of my handguns is about $1,000 each and when you see a million guns being crushed, that means a billion dollars of people’s hard earned money has just been removed from them with no compensation or right to refuse. The vast majority of these people were completely law abiding people; members of clubs who shot at pieces of paper and whether you approve of the sport or not it’s hard to approve of the way this was handled – And this is obviously one thing that North American gun owners are scared of happening.

In January 2004 there was actually a third gun ban in the UK covering “Air guns chambered for self-contained gas cartridges” – This was the first time I had been directly hit by one of the laws. Since the 1988 and 1997 acts, European law had decreed that the UK government couldn’t actually take my guns off me and crush them because this was illegal – The government wasn’t going to buy them off me so they made a law that said I could licence them under a section-5 firearms certificate with the added restriction that I could not use the guns, sell the guns (not even to somebody else with a section 5 FAC), lend the guns, let anybody see the guns or in fact, do anything at all with them except keep them locked in a safe that had to be inspected every year or so by the police. I could simply keep them until the administrative hassle and cost of keeping them became so annoying that I simply sent them to be crushed. Because I am belligerent and we are talking a few thousand dollars worth of guns here, I kept them and eventually I just took them to another country where they are now perfectly legal.

I don’t know what the answer to this problem is – I don’t pretend to know but I do know there is a huge hypocrisy here and it is useful to paint gun owners as demons so that people won’t want to defend some pretty basic human rights that stops a government just stealing people’s formerly legal possessions. The hypocrisy comes in the fact that the UK is the sixth biggest arms exporter in the world – So logic could just say that maybe they should have sold the guns they confiscated and used the money to compensate people. It’s hard to defend crushing billions of dollars worth of guns by a government that makes a fortune selling the exact same items around the world. And this matter would be even more hypocritical in the USA.

So let’s travel across the Atlantic to the northernmost country of North America, Canada. Canadian gun laws are somewhat odd and have changed recently so I will summarise them. There are essentially three types of guns (we are just talking about guns you can carry here, I am ignoring canons, howitzers and the like until we start talking about the USA): Long-guns (rifles, shotguns etc), Restricted weapons (most modern general-purpose handguns) and Prohibited weapons which is everything else – Prohibited weapon licences generally exist just for people who owned these guns before the laws changed (Canada didn’t generally just crush things) but people are allowed to use them, sell them to other people with prohibited licences and sometimes even will them to direct descendants. A lot of these guns are war souvenirs and historical collectors’ weapons so it makes sense.

Until last year, all of these guns had to be registered but Harper’s Conservative government, realising there was a huge division between country people and city people in Canada, decided that abolishing the registry for long-guns was a big vote grabber and so they got rid of it. As I am writing this, Quebec just lost their final appeal to keep their data of long-gun ownership so as of now, all the former data has been destroyed. This does NOT affect registration and restrictions on other types of guns, just most hunting rifles and shotguns.

Now there really does seem to be quite a gap of understanding and experience between Canadians who live in cities and Canadians who live in the country about long-guns. I fall very much into the country camp myself I think – A long gun is about as much of a dangerous weapon as an axe or a chainsaw and they are just there as tools to be mostly ignored until they are useful. Country folks can’t see why you would want or need to register a shotgun any more than you’d need to register anything else. The most illegal thing they are likely to use it for is taking a pot-shot at the 4-wheeler drivers using their fields as race-tracks (which isn’t going to kill anyone). City folks only ever see guns on TV and the TV has a very odd relationship with reality at the best of times.

Handguns are a different matter. There is still a registry for handguns, you need paperwork whenever you transport one and you can only transport them very locked up, with ammo completely separate and you can only transport them on a direct route to and from the destination (which is nearly always either a government approved range, or a gun-shop). Nobody complains about this, there is no real history of a handgun being a tool in Canada and there seems to be no will or perceived need to use handguns for self-defence. The only people who have handguns other than the police are people who target shoot and those people have very little to do with the general population of long-gun owners really.

There is a problem that I come across sometimes, in that the Canadian laws make no sense at all on some issues. Legend tells than when they decided to classify some guns as Restricted and some guns as Prohibited, somebody from the government went through that year’s “Gun Digest” and picked out all the dangerous looking photos and prohibited them. The laws also haven’t kept in any way up to date to the point where you can look at two functionally identical guns by two different manufacturers and one will be a long gun, and one will be prohibited. My AR-15 in .22 is prohibited whereas identical ones in both .22 and .223 fall comfortably into the long-gun category. I have NO idea why and that can often be a problem. There is also a magazine capacity issue (the number of bullets a gun can hold) which often makes no logical sense at all either. Also any handgun shooter of any skill simply won’t understand magazine capacity laws in general at all anyway.

Again in Canada, gun ownership seems to have been politicised to the point where gun owners are now considered to be Conservatives and non gun owners generally Liberals. For what it’s worth, in North American terms I would probably be considered a Socialist/Communist so this doesn’t always work; and frankly it is painful to speak to a lot of people I meet in the gun community here. The problem is that the Conservatives are seen as the party who understand guns and the views of gun owners, and the Liberals are the people who want to take them off us. As a side note, I wonder why Canada doesn’t have a Socialist party and how a Liberal can be “middle of the road” if there is no party on the left, but that’s another topic altogether.

Speaking as a handgun shooter I find another thing rather odd – I have noticed that when I put up photos of myself using a bow and arrow, people tend to like it and ask actual questions; and yet if I put up a photograph of myself with a gun I get generally negative and pre-assumptive comments. I can’t find any actual figures to back this up but my educated-guess is that historically, handguns have killed very few people; bows and arrows have killed a lot more, swords, axes, stones, lumps of wood will have killed more again. Even looking at long guns, “assault rifles” and automatic weapons we are probably not adding huge numbers to the amounts killed – Artillery and bombs kill a hell of a lot more people in wars than guns.

And now let’s finally wander into the United States of America – A country in which I have never lived so I can only go on what I have seen. But I have seen a lot and heard a lot on both sides, so I am going to at least pretend I can attempt an overview. I can’t claim to be unbiased about the USA because there is a lot of stuff I don’t understand at all – But I will try to discuss some possible misunderstandings.

First off I am going to set some premises:

I am going to take the stance that the USA has a very odd gun culture which is driven by politics, fear, a complete unwillingness to compromise, history and probably most importantly, capitalism and advertising. It’s like the tobacco industry gone completely wild. Arms companies in the USA make a phenomenal amount of guns of all shapes and sizes and they sell them both abroad and domestically. It is a huge business.

Americans, unlike Canadians and Europeans have a culture of being able carry guns. I would conjecture that this is mostly due to over a century of gun-advertising as opposed to any actual need to do so but I may be straying from my neutrality by doing so.

The Second Amendment (which allows the general populace to bear arms and if necessary to form militias to overthrow a tyrannical government) is terribly written and hasn’t been changed for centuries; and this is in a country where some people would be more than happy to follow Leviticus to the letter if legislation didn’t stop them from doing so. Apparently laws that people like are set in stone, and laws that people don’t like are nonsense to be fought over tooth-and-claw. Of course, it is illegal to form militias to overthrow the government in the USA now and it is illegal for states to secede, but that doesn’t seem to stop people trying to uphold the first part as absolute gospel.

Human life seems (to us folks looking in) to be pretty cheap in the USA – The country as a whole seems somewhat obsessed with bombing foreigners into the dark-ages, States execute criminals that include kids and the mentally ill and people who own guns for self-defence seem to think that it is perfectly fine to kill somebody who is committing a crime. And boy, does Hollywood loves guns! On the flip side, the reasons given for invading counties like Iraq tend to include comments about protecting the freedoms not to be executed without trial and such; and I am all too aware of the obsession with labelling people as “illegals” to both dehumanise them and justify actions against them.  The police carry (and often use) guns, Criminals carry and often use guns. It seems an odd mess over there and gun sales keep on going up. It could be suggested that all of this is in the interest of the companies that sell guns, and all of this is essentially advertising that is creating a self-feeding situation in which the only winners are the people who sell guns to the domestic market – Be they blue-chip gun companies, Mexican drug lords or street gangs.

And now for some balance – Even with all this said – A lot of people own guns because they want to own guns; not because they want to create a militia to round up all the Mexicans in their town and gun them down over open graves – In fact, I have never personally met an American who would want to do that (though sadly, I have read a lot of crap from ones who do).

Guns are fun – This seems to be something that the anti-gun lobby just can’t get into their brains. Guns ARE fun, they are beautiful pieces of engineering and to many, beautiful historic art – and they are wonderful to shoot. You point them at cans on a fence and there is a rush of satisfaction in blowing them up from a distance. I don’t care what images the anti-gun people will try and associate with this but when I am blowing up milk cartons of water with a .44 Magnum I am never thinking “Wow that could be a shoplifter’s head!” – I am just not and I very much doubt are most American gun owners. When you let off or watch a firework display and the carefully timed explosions create an explosive Son et lumière in the night sky are you thinking that you could be pointing these at a village in Afghanistan, or that the same technology and timing is what makes sabot and cluster bombs so effective? I doubt it.

A lot of handgun owners (and long-gun ones too) like to plink at things – This is non-specific target shooting, cans, golf-balls, water filled milk-cartons… It’s just fun shooting. It’s better to have a gun that holds a lot of bullets for this because it’s a pain in the arse to keep reloading. This is why I like bigger magazine capacities and it’s why most recreational shooters do too. Bullets are quite heavy and bulky and if you are carrying a gun hidden in your belt all day it’s probably best not to have 30 bullets in there. A Glock with a 30 round magazine may look cool in the movies but it’s not exactly very practical. Those things are generally for people who don’t have a clue how to shoot a gun and very doubtfully own it legally anyway. It’s very much a case of advertising over practicality.

On this same issue, I was watching a Youtube video that professed that a young girl had “OWNED” an anti-gun protestor by explaining why she needed a high-capacity magazine on her AR15 rifle that she kept for home defence. She cockily explained that because of the danger of all the people breaking into her house, to both rob and rape her, she needed at least 30 rounds in case she missed with the standard 5 or 10. As a gun owner and shooter, I was probably more appalled by this than the non-shooters who may think that she indeed has a point. If she is missing with 29 rounds, then where are these missing bullets with a range of a mile, in her built up area of wooden houses going? Why is this girl (who quite obviously can’t shoot) even allowed to have a gun and why isn’t she learning to shoot it?

When gun-owners talk to one another in forums devoted to self defence they NEVER talk about stuff like this – They want stopping power with just a very few accurately placed rounds from a concealed weapon that won’t hurt bystanders at all – They may be nutters, but they are generally pretty responsible nutters. It is a big mistake to lump these two groups together.

Stockpiling of ammunition can make people look somewhat deranged to the outside world and this is something I have been thinking about quite a lot lately too. A lot of the traditional view of stockpilers are the militias and the preppers who seem to think that they need 100,000 rounds of ammo for the end of the world or the day the government invades their stockade. I don’t think that is why most people stockpile.

There’s a few things about ammo I should explain to non-gun people. Firstly it’s not cheap. It’s made of brass, and powder and lead and manufactured to very exacting engineering specifications and what’s more; modern guns are demanding more and more exacting ammo. A round of 9mm was about 30 cents a couple of years ago, a round of .45 maybe 50 cents, and when you are looking at things like .44 Magnum rounds then you are talking a dollar or two per shot. Over this last year, ammo prices have gone somewhat mad and ammo is a surprisingly good investment – If you’d bought 100,000 rounds of ammo a couple of years ago, you could probably make 50-100% return on your investment if you had shopped and sold well – And that’s maybe a $50,000 profit in a couple of years. There IS a financial sense in stockpiling for investment.

At the moment in the US there seems to also be an issue with availability – Whether this is a deliberate shortage or an effect of the stockpiling I don’t know but it’s creating a situation where if people can get ammo then it’s well worth them buying more than they usually would simply because they may not find it available or cheap again for a while. Of course this all compounds and it’s creating more and more shortage and stockpiling. What will probably happen next year is that people will sell off their surpluses and things will calm down again. But yes.. Ammo isn’t cheap and it’s worth buying it when you find it cheaper than usual – Often at gun shows you can get a good deal on 1,000 to 10,000 rounds which seems a lot, but when you bear in mind that to keep quick and accurate with a handgun you should be shooting well over 1,000 rounds a year at paper targets – It’s not that strange at all.

Oddly I found myself accidentally stockpiling a while back – As the US prices started to go up I decided it was a good time to buy much more ammo at the lower prices than I usually would, and even cheap .22 plinking ammo I would find myself over-buying because the big stores were saying that they may have problems getting much more in the summer season. I would have hated to be out of plinking ammo so I bought much more than I usually would. I guess it can happen to anyone and it doesn’t mean that that somebody is stockpiling it for the end of the world or the next Russian Zombie invasion.

One little aside is that because of the price of ammo I have noticed that people at the places I shoot are shooting a lot less – I sometimes go to the range and don’t even bother getting any guns out at all if there is somebody there to chat to and drink tea with and I think this happens a lot in the shooting world (especially in Canada) – Even when I was at University I used to go the range for peace and quiet and to get away from the world – It’s a calm disciplined environment and a lot of shooting is rather like Yoga with a hefty recoil. But, as ever.. I digress.

The subject of “assault weapons” is one that only seems to come up in the USA – And it is one that I can see would annoy gun owners. I don’t know what an assault weapon is, and the only people who seem to know, in their own heads what an assault weapon is, are the anti-gun lobbyists. This really seems to be a big case where neither side understands the other side and neither side wants to do so. My assumption was that an assault weapon was a fully automatic rifle (a sub machine gun in other words) but this isn’t the case – Those are banned by law in most places in the USA anyway. As far as I can see, an assault rifle is just something that looks like it’s a military weapon. I may be missing something here but I have read a lot to find out.. And that seems to be it. Now Canada has a LOT of surplus military weapons – The most popular long-gun here may be the SKS which is a Russian post WW2 military rifle with a built in fold-away bayonet. It looks similar to the AK47 but without the big banana magazine and it’s not fully automatic. Nobody in their right mind in Canada would consider an SKS to be an “assault weapon” but by US anti-gun standards, it probably fits the bill perfectly.

Whilst the argument’s language and imagery is all about these mystical “assault weapons”, the meat of the argument is simply about magazine capacity and nothing at all to do with the gun that takes the magazines. A Canadian SKS can only hold 5 shots but it would be trivial for anybody with any gun skills and a few everyday tools (as in most gun owners) to modify it to take more. The anti-gun lobby doesn’t seem to understand guns and gun-owners enough to have a clue what they are really arguing about and the gun owners simply think that the other side are stupid.

As mentioned before the big problem with any of this is that criminals tend not to be law-abiding citizens. If you take a gun magazine that holds 30 rounds and you put a rivet into it to limit it to 10 – Then a law abiding shooter will probably not remove the rivet. Even if the legal shooter DOES remove the rivet (which anyone in Canada will tell you does happen, despite protestations that it is completely impossible), they are certainly not doing it for any dodgy reasons – They just want more shots at their tin-cans before they have to reload. The spirit of the law has gone wrong here because everybody knows that if somebody is going to go and commit a crime with a gun then they are not going to think twice about using illegally sized magazines or unregistered weapons. Of course thinking like this then encourages an imbalance between the newly restricted pro-gun-carry brigade and the unrestricted criminals and people who wouldn’t have dreamed of putting more than 10 shots in a gun before suddenly start wanting 30 “just because someone is trying to stop me”. Personally, I don’t think it’s even a real issue at all – A street kid who needs a 30 round magazine isn’t going to hit me with a well aimed shot; in fact testimony shows that they miss with all of them from very close ranges simply because they have never practiced and will be probably be shocked from being deafened with the first round too. Handguns are a lot harder to shoot than most people think. I, on the other hand, can hit them with a single shot.

There are many more issues that I haven’t covered – The ownership and popularity of companies in places like Nevada where you can go and shoot machine guns or bigger for fun – and as I said before, it is fun, and you can see that by the popularity of these places; despite the price. Should those be legal?

Then there is the “antique gun” issue where in places like the UK, a 100 year old gun is considered an antique and not a weapon – This means that the handgun I shoot every week, the Colt .45 (or just 1911 if we are being informal), has been technically legal in the UK for 2 years now – The M1911 Government Colt .45 Auto was, as the name suggests, first made in 1911. Even if I am not nitpicking (I think they have specifically legislated these types of weapons as illegal regardless of age now in response to this), then one of the other guns I shoot a lot, the Colt Navy revolver, which I find to be a devastatingly accurate and very powerful weapon is perfectly legal in the UK as an antique and is legal to shoot modern-reproductions on ranges too. Whilst the UK government may think that a black powder Colt revolver can’t kill people, I would imagine a whole Hollywood Western industry and one hell of a lot of dead Indigenous people and soldiers would beg to differ on that matter. Whilst a 6-shot Colt may not be the weapon of choice to hold up a bank, it still works pretty well (much better than a converted gas-revolver in fact, which was what I had that they banned). This all being said of course, If you don’t want to go that legal, expensive and quirky route to commit your criminal acts; then you could always just go and buy an illegal gun from half the pubs in Manchester for a few hundred quid and use that instead. It has the advantage that it’s cheaper that way too.

I decided this needed a photo, partly because I haven’t put a picture up in ages and partly because this was so long that you probably need a break!

 

Will there be shooters?

 

(*) I am using the phrase “guns” because generally lay-people on both sides will understand this term. In a lot of circles a gun is more about artillery than something you carry (that is a firearm) – But I don’t want to confuse things using alien terminologies because that’s part of the problem. The same with bullets…

(**) For the last 13 years this has had the note “(This is mostly complete, it just needs a tidy edit)” at the top. I think at this point, I should accept that it is never goint to get one. I came back to this because I finally wrote a post on Trudeau’s gun ban in Canada.

Primary Source: Not Found

As many of you may know, I have a somewhat large and extensive computer museum, a lot of which can be seen on http://old.technology. I didn’t start collecting these because it was trendy; in fact it was the complete opposite of trendy when I started. Back in the late 80s and early 90s I seemed to be on a one-man mission to try and convince people NOT to throw this stuff away. I would try and convince universities and companies that we needed to keep machines, peripherals, data and manuals for their historical importance and that pretty soon; we’d end up regretting chucking it all away.

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 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 primary source.

** Update: It seems that a BCPL compiler was finally found in 2020!

The Emperor’s New Currency

Two seemingly unrelated events decided to correlate themselves in my head today and I thought I would ponder out loud just for the irony value.

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.

Let’s Face it…

I was going to be nice to Google today. Really, I was – I started out thinking “Wow, for the first time ever, I will have to write a weblog entry and be 100% nice about Google” – As the 5 people who read my weblog will know, this isn’t normal. I don’t like Google, I make no secret of it generally but sometimes, there is the rare good thing.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

We are no longer safe!
(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)