Tax returns

Many years ago, around 2000, I formed a limited company. A bunch of us wanted to rent a rack in a data centre and host our servers there, and it seemed wise to have a separate legal entity to sign the contract with the ISP for the rack.

This cost me some money here and there in fees, and I had to take the time to keep books and file annual reports and accounts, but it was bearable.

Then a few years later, I became a freelance software engineer, and as the company already existed, it made sense to operate through that. Making a profit rather than being propped up by cash loans from me meant the company's tax returns became more complex, so I paid an accountant to do those, and that was fine as the saved money in using the company paid for his fees.

So all was fine until 2007, when a flood destroyed our home (and my placed of work).

I had to keep working to support my family, so I went to London to borrow space to work and sleep in, and did what I could to keep cash flowing. But this meant I wasn't spending much time at home where my paperwork was, and had little time to deal with book keeping, and my post was arriving into a building site back home.

A year later we were able to move back in, to try and pick up the pieces. But life was harder than it had been, and Sarah was sicker, and it's taken me until 2012 to catch up.

But last week I submitted my last personal tax returns. Towards the end of last year, my last corporation tax returns. Earlier that year, my last VAT returns. And the good news is, I seem to be eligible for some tax back. I'm happy about that as a friend leant me a thousand pounds in 2007, and I've still yet to pay him back; my tax repayment will cover that, plus some interest and a little left over... I'll pop it into the savings account and wait a few months in case HMRC change their mind, however.

But having all this done is a huge weight off my mind, one that had hung over me for about for years. Right now I seem to be in a phase of shedding burdens and finishing things; the only big thing I have left hanging over me now is migrating my servers, then I can start relaxing a bit and get on with my projects for the year!

Moving house

I hate moving house. It's a lot of work, for a start. It's a period during which all your stuff is packed away so you have to make do continually. And you have to tear apart the home you spent years building, while remembering all the fun times you had in the cold, empty, rooms you are carrying boxes out of. It feels a bit like burning your own wedding photos...

...but soon, it will be over, leaving just the mild frustration of living in a home where many of your possessions are still "in a box somewhere", but at least then you're on the upward path of things continually getting better as you unpack things and find them new homes, slowly customising your new space.

I'm looking forward to sorting out my workshop. It's currently just full of things all over the floor. I'm taking a week off of work to recuperate from the moving, and to sort it out. I'm going to pile everything at one end so I can paint the floor and finish painting the wall, then move everything to the nice end so I can finish the floor and walls in the other end. I'm going to set up my desk, my electronics workbench, and my welding bench. I'm going to run Ethernet into the house so I can get network connectivity. I'm going to set up a 12v power distribution system for fun stuff, such as a Raspberry Pi in a box driving an LED matrix display and a USB hard disk (as a Ugarit distributed storage node) and crazy future home automation experiments and LED lighting in the nearby shed (it's hard finding stuff in there in the dark). I'm going to fix the leaky roof and the draughty eaves so it's warmer and dryer in there. I'm going to rebuild my furnace and experiment with casting aluminium bronze. I'm going to build my wife a radio telescope. I'm going to build my wearable computer and continue my project to bring about my own technological singularity. I'm going to make time for myself to turn some of my unrealised ideas into beautiful things.

Alaric’s projects for this year

This year's going to be pretty busy with settling into the new home, but I have a few projects.

1. Finish the ring casting I nearly finished before the move. That's a priority.
2. Resurrect my aluminium foundry. In particular, it's our bronze wedding anniversary, so Sarah's going to design a pattern for a sundial, which I will cast in Aluminium bronze, a nice alloy that I can make myself from my scrap aluminium and bits of old plumbing...
3. Continue with minor stuff on Ugarit, but as a milestone, build the distributed storage backend, which will rock.
4. Work on my wearable computer project. No specific milestone for this, as it's currently a long drawn out research/prototyping phase as I sort out many details.

Wish me luck... I usually suffer from "all my weekends getting eaten up", but as my New Year's Resolution has been to spend at least one day every two weeks doing something fun with my children, I'm going to be booking weekend days in my calendar in advance through the year for that and my own projects. Before they get filled up!

Parallel Worlds Collide

Sometimes I do find myself wondering what would have happened if Alaric hadn't given up the syntherziser and focused on just programming or had taken it back up instead of metal work - as it is he is talking about maybe getting one for the music room when we have more money/one comes up on Freecycle.

Well a few days ago a friend posted a link on my face book saying doesn't this guy look alot like Al. And I got a glimpse of that other world - well if Alaric was Australian and had stolen Phil Collins voice but still liked all the types of music he does and had me make the videos (in this parallel world I'd have done my back-up career and ended up as an animator/special effects bod).

The guy is called Goyte and it is very surreal for me to watch this - its a spot the difference puzzel! Watch this video

As it is I feel very tempted to make a parody of a bits of this guys songs including my little Wiggly Pets sitting in tripods holding passport photos of Alaric out in front of them. What this video to see what I'm talking about.

Motivation

When I was a child, I had a lot of technical books lying around. My grandmother was a science teacher and my grandfather was an engineer, and lots of their old books lined my shelves. And alongside them, I had a lot of science fiction, too. And from all this, I learnt that technology could be used to extend the abilities of our frail bodies, to do amazing things...

I was an avid reader. I read all the books I could lay my hands on, and used to raid the libraries for more whenever I could. The fact that correctly arranged bits of various materials could, given the right inputs, enable you to fly, or communicate over long distances, entranced me... I designed everything from computers to deep-space colonisation programmes. But all I did was design them; I had a few tools, but not enough to build anything interesting. Most of my building efforts went into building further tools to try and bootstrap myself to greater things. I made a simple CMOS bus analyzer, and some power supplies and things like that, but even the cost of components was prohibitive. How could I build a robot if I couldn't afford motors, large enough batteries, and all the chips required to get a working computer?

And so, my initial enthusiasm with the wonders of technology was dulled, and replaced by a kind of cynical weariness. I could design something awesome, and imagine all the steps required to build it in arbitrary detail, but I couldn't see a way to make it anything more than a dream. My room filled with books, and notepads packed with diagrams, but no awesome pinnacles of technology.

The one area I could press on with, of course, was software. Once you've got a computer, you don't really need to spend more on it to make as much software as you have time for. I found that writing applications was rather tedious, though. Software engineering is a new, immature, field; it is still at the stage where extensive manual effort is required to make the simplest thing - and the situation was even worse programming in Pascal for MS-DOS in the early 1990s. To write an application you needed to write your own user interface and data storage and memory management and all that stuff. I set off to write a spreadsheet in the hope of making money, but quickly found that redesigning the operating system was much more fun - applications, to be honest, weren't all that interesting when I realised that the very foundations I had to build them on (programming languages, standard libraries, operating systems, the lot) were unbelievably shoddy; perhaps once I'd fixed them, application development might be less tedious...

So I disappeared off down a rabbit hole of researching computer science. I still wrote software, but it was mainly prototypes and experiments, never anything that would be useful in its own right. I wrote applications as coursework for my A-level in computing, of course; and I ended up writing a library of low-level hardware drivers for DJGPP that I released into the public domain in the mid 1990s, as a spin-off from some other project, but my main output, again, wasn't useful finished software, but designs.

I was worried that this meant I was lazy. The effort required to do the "boring bits" of finishing something just didn't appeal to me; when presented with a problem, I could design an awesome, exciting, solution in half an hour, but implementing that design would take weeks, during which several interesting new problems to solve would turn up. Was this some personal failing, that I lacked the stamina to finish anything? I loved designing things, but it also weighed heavily on me that I was all talk and no action.

When I first got a job writing software, I was worried that I would be afflicted by the same laziness, and have trouble motivating myself. As it turned out, I was OK; I found that writing software for other people was easy, as I'd get to see them looking all happy when I presented them with a finished solution to their problem. This provided all the motivation I needed to keep my nose to the grindstone.

But when I was spending my time writing lots of pointless code to work around the deficiencies of POSIX or SQL or something, I couldn't help myself from thinking about how I'd build these underlying bits of infrastructure if I could. I'd already accumulated a fair amount of ideas in the past; I'd been collecting them together under the umbrella of ARGON, an integrated design for an operating system, clustered fault-tolerant virtual machine, programming language, distributed database, and other related bits of infrastructure that I feel would make a much better basis on which to build applications than the current big ball of mud.

And yet I wonder why I waste my time designing something that would cost millions to implement, and which would be doomed to fail in an operating system market dominated by well-entrenched existing players. I feel I'm doomed to design things that can never be built, going all the way back to designing spacecraft as a child. And yet, it's the one thing I'm really passionate about. Whenever I have a spare moment to think, I'm usually designing something.

I've tried to make a career of this by focussing on "software architecture", as the activity of designing software is currently known. And I've managed to move away from being paid to design and build apps, towards the infrastructure projects I crave (such as databases). That's not always been a great thing; at GenieDB, I had to avoid thinking about the one big vague area in the ARGON design, the distributed database TUNGSTEN, in case of conflicts of interest with my employer. Now I work for an analytical/retention database company, and analytics is an area that I don't feel compelled to make part of ARGON (but I need to be a bit careful about the retention side, as I think that support for archival storage is woefully inadequate in modern software systems).

Not that I've been entirely unproductive in terms of working software, mind - there's a few tools I've built to solve my own problems; Tangle is a tool for documenting cabling and networks, that I wrote to help myself with some contract work I had looking after a moderately complicated hosting setup. The Eye of Horus is a monitoring system I built for keeping an eye on my own servers. I wrote banterpixra to help myself learn Lojban. I'm working on Ugarit, a backup/archival system based on content-addressed storage, to improve that woeful support for archival storage on my own servers. But none of them are anything like the kinds of grand ideas I conjure up on a daily basis, despite being the result of many days' work.

As the title of this blog post suggests, though, I struggle with motivation. My dreams are so far beyond my own ability to execute them that even building things like Ugarit can depress me as the slow pace at which software is built shows just how unreachable my goals are. It's even worse these days, as I have to fit looking after two children and a disabled wife around being the sole wage earner; there are sufficient tasks that only I can do that my "free time" boils down to Thursday evenings (except lately, as I've been having to spend those house and mortgage hunting) and the odd hour or so in the evenings once the kids are all in bed (as I am writing this now, an hour and a half after I'd have ideally liked to be in bed). I really wish I had more time to myself, but when I do get time, do I spend it designing wonderful things that nobody will ever build, or actually making trivial things that those with more time and energy could do much better?