My childhood was pretty special, as it happens. I grew up on a small island, with close friends living nearby, opposite a beach, with plenty of opportunities for spending time outside exploring castles and inside with various musical instruments. However, I also spent a significant fraction of my time tinkering with the latest and greatest technology. The BBC Micro B, the Acorn Archimedes, the Super Nintendo, and eventually an IBM PC with the ground-breaking Intel 286 chip were all available to me to code on and play with. My friends and I experimented with networking, digital music, and ran a BBS dedicated to the Acorn Archimedes¹ from first a 2400 baud, then a 9600 baud modem. All of these things added up to a lifelong love of doodling around with technology, computers, and video games.

So it is tempting to find all of these things and introduce my ward to technology through them. I have a NES, and a Sega Genesis, and I wouldn’t mind a nostalgic trip down the Acorn lane. However, it occurred to me that this misses the point entirely: Aside from the possibility² that she turns out to not be interested in technology, what was important about my childhood was the access to the latest technology, not any particular technology. It is, of course, true that the BBC Micro and Archimedes were well suited to the experimenter and the hobby programmer, and I don’t think I would have ended up as a career programmer without my time spent filling the screens of the computer in the physics classroom with ‘DOM IS COOL’. The technology that is around today is so far removed from that if I was to start learning to program today on a BBC Micro, and then try to develop a full web application, or a mobile game, I’d be hopelessly behind the curve. By the time I’d caught up, technology would have moved on and I’d have no chance to grow and develop with it.

Instead, then, I consider it my duty to ensure my progeny has access to the latest technology and, should she show any interest towards developing games or applications, will seize that opportunity with both hands and encourage her. If this means I have to keep the latest gadgets around just in case, so be it³. Right now, this means mobile development platforms, the ubiquitous cloud, and the web. I have no idea what it will be in a few years, but whatever it is, my scion will have access to it.

Clearly, it is equally important to expose her to the latest in gaming platforms and video games, just so she experiences the cutting edge. And I’ll have to spend time with those platforms and games too, so that I’m as familiar with them as she will be.

Oh yeah, and I should work on that whole ‘spending time outside’ thing too I suppose. But first, I have a 6502 computer to build.

Firstly, I thought I’d be anxious, but I’m not particularly. I mean, I’m generally anxious in the sense that I hope everything goes smoothly and all parties end up healthy, but I’m also prepared enough to know that ‘going smoothly’ is a relative term when it comes to childbirth and everyone’s health is both all that matters, and exactly what everyone involved will be focused on. So I can, to an extent, rationalize away the anxiety.

I also feel like I should be excited, and of course I am a bit, but I don’t really have the time to focus on that excitement, to celebrate it. Instead, there are things that need to get done today, and other people who need my focus and attention, and it’s not a bad thing to not outwardly show excitement. For those involved in the day that are more anxious or focused on keeping everyone healthy, my excitement is not going to be all that helpful. Also, I’m British; excitement tends to show itself as having a hobnob instead of a digestive with my cup of tea.

How does it feel, then, to know that everything will have changed by tomorrow? And make no mistake: Everything will have changed. It feels expected. It feels normal. I’ve had nine months to feel anxious, and to worry, to be excited and dream of all the things I’ll do with my daughter¹. Her room is ready, or at least the half a room that has been prepared for her is ready, we have clothes for her no matter what size she ends up being, and washing and folding them has made it not unusual to see them around. If anything, it feel frustrating that she’s not already here. That she hasn’t been here for the last month and instead has chosen to be stubborn and stay inside when she could be out here interacting with us.

I truly cannot wait any longer to meet her.

PS – It’s also Pi Day and the anniversary of Einstein’s birthday, which is irrelevant for the purposes of this post, unless my kid ends up being born today, in which case it’s a most excellent fact.

That really isn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I know; there’s stuff all over the web with my name on. But this is the first time I get to be a part of the public face of Google, and I’m so proud to be working here that it’s a really big deal to me.

I could have written this as part of my Google+/Twitter post pointing to the Chrome blog, but that felt too much like bragging. Hopefully by posting it to my obviously personal site I can retain some appearance of humility. Only an appearance, mind you, because I’m an author on the Chrome blog and you’re not, nyer, nyer. Ahem.

My wife and I had a deal that should I start to lose my hair, she would let me know when it was time to start shaving it off to retain some dignity. About six months ago, she started to look at my hair and quirk an eyebrow. I knew it was time for one more hairstyle before never being able to support one again. So for once I went in to a hair dresser with an idea of a hair style I wanted, and left feeling really good about my hair. A couple of months later I went in again and noticed that my hair dresser was taking a lot more effort to work my hair forward. I left feeling significantly worse.

This week, I realised that the front of my hair, what I thought would be the strong peak of my hair into old age, had become fuzzy and thin. Before it could become isolated into the dreaded unicorn style, it was time to take action.

This is the last hair style I will ever have, and I’m ok with that.

As a failed foster parent of a Muttville rescue ¹ I can’t recommend or praise Muttville highly enough for the work they do with senior dogs who have been abandoned by their families.

Rescuing a senior dog can be fraught with difficulty as they often come with problems, but it can also be extremely rewarding as all they really want is warmth, love, and food ². Muttville recognises this and works hard with their volunteers and foster families to find homes for these forgotten old pooches.

It is wonderful that the City of San Francisco has chosen to celebrate and recognise their hard work, and I’m proud to be a part of the Muttville community.

I like everything. I mean, I don’t love everything, but I get enjoyment out of almost everything I experience, whether it’s a book, comic, album, or movie. Of course, I enjoy some more than others, and I revisit some of them again and again, but I find it really hard to name something that I actively dislike.

The same is true of video games: If I spend a couple of days at a weekend engrossed in a game, as I used to, I enjoy it at the time but feel like I missed out on an opportunity to do something else once I’m back at work. I have therefore started to focus on playing demos of games or Arcade titles (and I’m not the only one); bite-size chunks of video games that give me the enjoyment of playing a game without the commitment that sucks away my evermore precious free time. I had a conversation the other day with someone else of about my age who does a job similar to me, and we bemoaned the hours we put into building and upgrading PCs just to play the latest game. Both of us have forsaken that world for one of simplicity and ease — that of consoles and downloadable titles — and I think this is a common trend.

The time that I spend listening to music and reading books has not changed significantly, however. I think this is because listening to music is something that I can, and will, do while doing other things. Walking the dogs, exercising, traveling to work, even while I’m at work, are all opportunities to listen to music. But rarely new music. New music demands respect from me and a focus of attention that I can’t give when multitasking. I still like to read album notes when exploring an album for the first time, and I will never ever put it into shuffle rotation until I’ve listened all the way through it at least once. I am trying Pandora as a way to find new music, but I get frustrated when there’s a song that I really like and I can’t easily click through to the whole album and listen start-to-finish.

Books, of course, demand attention. The difference there is that reading a book is my ground state. When I have nothing else to do, I will turn to a book first. For a while this wasn’t true: I would open my email, check Twitter, check my news aggregator, check Twitter again… But I’m back on the books again mostly thanks to the convenience of owning a nook with a sizable chunk of my book library installed on it. I have even started to use the nook to find new books. It’s very easy to grab a free sample of a book and download it, and on finding that it’s a good read, to buy it with a single click. It still feels very clinical to me though and I find myself going to my local book store to find new books instead, but just buying them on the nook. And then I feel guilty for not patronizing the local book store. At least I’m finding new things again.

But even when I’m reading something to review it rather than having picked it myself, no matter what it is, I enjoy it. I can tell when something isn’t to my taste, but I have a positive experience reading or listening. When I come to write the review, I will find things to like about it much easier than I find things to dislike. Perhaps I’m just not critical enough to be a good reviewer, or maybe those that are more critical have to try hard to find things to criticize too. I do think that my opinions are skewed by the sheer joy I get from devouring media.

I haven’t decided yet if it’s a problem that I’m not more critical of things and that I seem to enjoy everything. It makes my life a happy place to be even if it makes me an ineffectual reviewer. Just don’t expect many ratings below three stars in my reviews.

Last week I was in Sweden. Ostensibly for a family thing, but also to take a break and spend some time with Mirto‘s family. I’ve been there once before, about nine years ago, and both times I’ve felt oddly at home there. I say oddly as I have no connection to Sweden other than my wife having been born there. Given that I’m blonde with blue eyes, and have familial connections to both Yorkshire and Normandy, there’s a good chance that far back in my genealogy someone in my family tree encountered a Viking in a, you know, biblical manner. However it’s unlikely that my genes felt the connection.

On the subject of having the appearance of a Swede¹, there were a few tense moments during the week where a native would speak to me in Swedish expecting me to understand, but speak to my wife in English assuming she was a tourist. An arctic wind blew through the room during those moments.

There are some similarities in the environment of Stockholm to where I grew up in Jersey. It too had granite cliffs and was surrounded by water and the constant crying of seagulls was a regular sound throughout the year. Of course, it was a little warmer where I grew up, and I spent more time on the beach than I would be comfortable doing in Sweden. The population of Stockholm is approximately the same as my home, though that population is focused in an urban centre rather than spread over a rural island.

Don’t get me wrong, I love living in San Francisco and cannot see a time when I’ve done everything there is to do here or get bored with the city. And if I ever do, well there’s a big ol’ country out there to explore. However there is something about Sweden that just feels more like home. Maybe it was the rain and sense of gentle irony.

…

I have a problem with the approach outlined in this post. I understand the issues, and am frustrated that media ownership has become media leasing across the board from music, to movies, and now books. I want to own something when I pay money for it unless it is explicit that I am entering into a rental agreement. Electronic books, digital copies of movies bundled with Blu-Ray copies, and music from online retailers, are not advertised as rentals but as purchases. Of course there is the small print, the EULA, the Terms and Conditions, that to varying degrees specify the rights of the purchaser in regards to use of the product, but I am not aware of any that are explicitly rental agreements and that is exactly what they are becoming.

So on to books.

Let’s be clear: Traditional books suffer from the same copyright issues as digital media. There is nothing stopping me from buying a book, reading it, copying huge chunks of it, and publishing my own book plagiarizing the work. Similarly, I can, should I have the time and patience, copy the pages, bind them, and sell them myself. Or is there? Of course there is. There are existing legal processes in place for dealing with copyright infringement outside of the digital realm. It is important that we work to make publishers and distributors see that there is no difference between the traditional and digital spaces. It may be harder to track the perpetrator of copyright infringement, and it may be easier for the crime to be perpetrated, when dealing with digital media but the legal framework is already there. Changing the relationship between the publisher and the purchaser by setting limits on lending or sharing, or limiting how I can store and access the media I have purchased is equivalent to, and as ridiculous as, replacing bookshops with libraries and printing books using ink or paper that deteriorates on each read or after a fixed amount of time.

If any publisher tried to do this to traditional books they would be faced with an almighty uproar from the public and laughed out of business.

So on to the eBook User’s Bill of Rights.

I applaud Sarah Houghton-Jan’s efforts to raise the volume of protest regarding this issue. I applaud all bloggers and writers who are trying to raise awareness of this issue. But I do not think this is the right way to go about it for one simple reason:

Traditional media consumers do not require a Bill of Rights.

By setting up a Bill of Rights we are strengthening the belief that digital media consumption is different to traditional media consumption and requires special treatment. This is one of the foundations for the argument for Digital Rights Management and is a false premise. The right way to push back on this issue is to show that digital media and traditional media are equivalent and the users’ rights are equivalent. We do not have or need a Bill of Rights for traditional media and should not need one for digital media.

I agree with the central tenet of Houghton-Jan’s Bill of Rights, and I am also sympathetic to those who suffer copyright infringement, but it is important to find the similarities between traditional and digital media rather than highlighting the differences. We need to show how ridiculous a concept DRM is and encourage the legal system to find ways to protect ownership of copyright that make sense for all media irregardless of delivery system.

That, or maybe it’s time to question the notion of copyright as a fundamental truth.

This is why I currently have a problem at work. I work with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I’ve thought that before at previous jobs but, no offense to those of you I’ve worked with in the past, they had nothing on the people I interact with every day. Around my offices are whiteboards, presumably meant for collaborative discussions or maybe just for janitors to solve our problems for us, I don’t know. The one nearest me, however, is being used by someone to spread The Word. Missives such as “God is love” and “Jesus loves you” have been appearing daily ¹.

So what can I do? I don’t know who’s doing it so I can’t have a chat with them, and even if I did I don’t expect them to understand my offense. I could belittle the comments by adding my own snarky comments, but that’s likely to just create contention rather than making the author understand anything. I could erase them, but it’s not my place to censor others, and in previous days when the board has been erased the author has just re-written them. I have been trying to ignore it but it really gets to me every day that I walk past and see it.

This has come to a head today because the people I sat next to at breakfast said grace before eating. I know, I know, it’s not like they said or did anything deeply offensive in the grand scheme of things, but seeing and hearing that ritual today, in a workplace built on science and rationality, when I’m already on edge thanks to the writings, seemed more than anachronistic; it seemed illicit, even subversive.

It’s entirely possible that I’m massively over-reacting and just need to shake my head and walk on by. However, I wonder what the reaction from others would be if instead of “God” or “Jesus” it said “Allah” or “Mohammed”.

I also realize in writing this that I am somewhat hypocritical, though I can reason my way out of it to protect my ego. A couple of months ago some Buddhist monks were in the building creating and destroying a mandala. I took no offense to their presence and certainly enjoyed the beauty of their creation. Why should I be more offended by Christian messages on a white-board than by a more visible presence of monks performing a multi-day ritual? My reasoning is that what the monks were doing was spiritual to them, but could be seen in non-religious tones by me. The messages on the white-board, however, are clearly an effort to force religion into peoples’ lives.

I think I’m going to continue to do nothing but rant quietly in my corner of the internet. Besides, if I can’t write about this stuff on my blog, where can I write about it?

Fast forward five years and we’re living in Vancouver and getting married, in the front room of our apartment, in our socks.

Fast forward another two years and we’re living in San Francisco, having been in Singapore for most of the intervening time, pursuing new careers and sharing an apartment with two dogs.

It has been a crazy adventure but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much, or even gone on it, without my best friend, who happens to be my wife, to share it with.

Happy anniversary doesn’t even come close.