Simon Butcher

Another busy month has passed by, and it's not long before the year has passed by completely. It does seem that 2007 is flying past and it's starting to really irritate me as I cannot find any major personal accomplishment this year. There are accomplishments there, but nothing spectacular.

Lately I've watched everyone around me fall ill as we move into Autumn and finally succumbed to a particularly nasty cold about a week and a half ago that's done a fantastic job of drowning my brain-cells in snot. I still managed to take photos of a few things however, and I thought that I should once again wrap up the month using my invented word.

Life rolls on…

When you look back into your past at the people you once new, the situations you were once in, the places you once frequented, and the things you once did, how exactly do you feel? Do you feel sad? Angry? Regretful? Revolted?

Something the Victorian education system failed to teach me is that history is important; it tells you where you've been, who you are now, and where you're going. Without history, we'd all be moronic shells, bumping into the same problems we never knew existed and never really going anywhere new.

Lately I've been in a very retrospective mood. Most people would tell me that I'm living in the past and it's time to move on and look forwards into the future, however my personal “balance philosophy” tells me that a little retrospection is a good thing. (I will write about that later, in great detail, I promise Steve!)

People don't seem to realise that computer programming is an artistic discipline rather than procedural office work. Those outside of the field would probably scoff at that remark, after they've put together a pivot table within excel. Just because you can cook doesn't make you a chef.

Your average manager fails to understand the difference between someone within an artistic job and someone with a procedural job — the difference being that to accomplish their goal one designs and constructs while the other follows list of tasks. Just because you're a mechanic doesn't make you an automotive engineer.

Sleep is one of my most favourite things.

When I don't sleep I tend to lose my ability to multi-task and eventually I get stuck in an infinite loop — like a record skipping — on singular topics that honestly never seem to reach any formal conclusion other than to recursively become ever-more circuitous than would otherwise be necessary, and ultimately the introduction of some form of interruption is usually the only thing that can put an end to my redundant cogitation, forcing my brain to return to functioning with syllogism; and in my current state of excessive verbosity would compel me to stop writing this esoteric yet amaranthine dissertation that I nonsensically continue to slowly dribble into this post painfully like a daydreaming slug slithering through a dry salt pond and onwards towards oblivion…

Several people have urged me over the past month to look at the a new web service known as Spock. I avoided doing so, partly because I'm sceptical of anything named after Star Trek characters, their little blue man logo reminded me of every horrible Web 2.0 site, but mainly because it sounded like yet another social networking site — another way for “trendy” people to justify their pathetic friendships publicly. These sites seem to be taking over the minds of once rational people as SMS speak once did, like an incurable sexually transmitted fungus that is making everyone itch but nobody is willing to openly talk about how bad the problem is.

Spock however, isn't exactly a social networking site. It looks like one, and acts like one, but it's main goal is to be a search engine for people. To this end, Spock sucks the lives out of existing sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace, FaceBook and other such CamelCased “network” sites, and carefully plucks out information to build personal profiles with complex metadata rather than just a flat index as Google would.

The world just got a little bit smaller… again.