Centenary Camp, and coats of many pockets (by alaric)

We've had a busy weekend running the Cranham contingent at the district Centenary Camp.

One highlight for me was finding the Cubs all scrabbling about searching their pockets for small change and whispering conspiratorially. "Akela, Akela!" they said when I approached. "You've got to buy this badge we found in the camp shop! It says Akela and it has a wolf and it'd look really good on you!"

So I let them excitedly drag me to the shop tent, where they pointed out this badge and looked me expectantly. I presume (from the conversation I walked into) they'd been trying to see if they could buy it for me between themselves, but had failed to raise the pound required, so I bought it myself, much to their delight.

I've surmised that having it sewn on in time for our next meeting (Wednesday) might mean a lot to them, so I've stayed up tonight attaching it to my coat-of-many-pockets 🙂

Now, I used to be famous for wearing coats of many pockets, stuffed with first aid equipment, compass, and the like. I gave up the practice due to fears that the weight distribution wasn't doing my back any good, and moved to a belt of many pouches instead, but that finally died a death, so after a terrifying period of wandering around not equipped for an unexpected nuclear strike, my brother in law and his girlfriend bought me a new coat of many pockets for my birthday. So I'm back to wearing coats of many pockets, except this time I'm not going to load it up so far!

Government Bureaucracy (by alaric)

I created a limited company in... 2000 or so, for various reasons. At the time, I was advised that a director and shareholder would probably be expected to fill in self-assessment tax returns, but that I needn't worry, HMRC would send me one when they wanted me to do it.

Anyway, apart from a latter in 2004 or so saying that they might be sending me one, I've never been sent one yet.

But last week I got a letter saying I'd not sent in my 2005/2006 one (due in by the end of Jan 2007), all demanding it and threatening fines, so I went to the local tax enquiry office to enquire. The nice lady there said I'd need to ring the order line to get the tax return form to send in, and pointed me at a phone in the corner.

So I rang up, and the person at the far end said they couldn't send out return forms for previous years, so I'd have to ask at my local tax office for one. I explained I was already there and that they'd asked me to ring her. "Well, I can't. Talk to them," she said. So I went back to the lady I'd been talking to and explained. "Oh, OK, I'll get you one," she says, and produces a tax return form and gives it to me.

If she could have done that in the first place, why send me to the phone?!?

Is There A God? (by alaric)

When I filled in the application forms to be a cub scout leader, I was faced with a problem. There was a little box, long enough for one or two words, called something like "Religion".

The notes explained that having some kind of idea of spirituality was a prerequisite for involvement, which I agreed with; I think that many people these days, rejecting the interesting creation Christianity has evolved into over the past couple of thousand years, have gone rather too far to the opposite extreme, adopting materialism and nihilism.

But I'm afraid I don't have any simple "religion" that I can write a name for in that short a space. If I had to summarise my philosophy of life, I think I'd have to write "Fundamentalist Taoism with influences from Chaos Magick and Fight Club". Which (a) wouldn't fit in that space and (b) might lead people to ask if I'm trying to be funny.

So I panicked and wrote "Methodist", because that's what my wife had put on hers...

But it got me thinking: "What is the most concise description of my philosophy of the world I can write, that won't still require further explanation?". So here's a stab at it.

Read more »

Career (by alaric)

It's not just on technical matters that I find myself liking Paul Graham, he's also pretty much followed the kind of career path I want: start own company, become wealthy enough to no longer need to work, then mess around designing programming languages. Ok, I'm a bit more daring: I want to design a programming language, a virtual machine, operating system kernel, network protocol suite, database, and set of standard libraries.

Read more »

Paul Graham (by alaric)

I like this guy's thinking on programming language design. It aligns pretty closely with my own ideas, and has some good ideas on syntax that I might borrow for CHROME...

And the way he implemented Viaweb is pretty similar to how I might have.

I think I'm more a fan of object orientation than he is, but this might just be a matter of terminology. I'm more of a fan of generic functions and Haskell-style classes than Java's OO.