My Philosophy of Gadgets

Following on from that last post, what I really want is a gadget that's a phone, handles e-mails and file transfer and connects to anything in sight: 3G, GPRS, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2G, USB, landlines and LANs. It should let me make VoIP calls and handle Skype. It has to play nice with iSync and Outlook. Plus if I attach an external ariel, I want it to connect to satellite services. I want to be able to plug this thing into any telecomms outlet anywhere in the world, have it identify what sort of communication protocol is being used and hook me up. When I plug into a landline, it uses that and not the wireless signal. The microphone cuts out all the background noise and the speaker has hi-fi quality. When a new comms technology passes some kind of acceptance tipping point, I can get an upgrade to include it. I don't want it to be a camera and I don't want it to play music. I have dedicated gadgets for that. I know: it's going to cost. I would be willing to pay.

I was raised as an engineer. (Okay, I have an OND in Engineering and did the first year of an Electrical Engineering degree before going off to read Mathematics and Philosophy.) I regard gadgets as tools to do a job. Non-engineers coo over the champagne colour of their hi-fi separates or how nice the iPod Nano feels in their hands. Non-engineers think that Swiss Army knives are a good idea. Real Engineers would not be seen dead with one. Real Engineers want an optimised tool to do a job, not a gimmick that will break if you put any torque on it. Marketers and designers love smartphones, but Real Engineers don't.

There's another reason I want simplicity of function combined with depth of ability. I want to believe I understand and am or could be a master of my gadgets. A gazillion features are not something I can master. I get nervous around Swiss Army knives: is there a killer feature I haven't found that will make my life easier and more convenient? I still feel that way about my digital camera – there's all sorts of things it can do I haven't internalised yet. (Programming languages are only an apparent exception to that: I can master the language fairly easily and most IDE's are very similar. The libraries are separate toolkits: I don't mind whole boxes of neat stuff I can rummage around.)

A gadget with a dozen redundant features is an offence to my sense of a properly-built, elegant, efficient, simple world. The tools are there to extend my mastery of the world, not to taunt me with my ignorance of twenty-three features I haven't gotten to yet. Non-engineers don't feel that way: they think it's great that they've just discovered their phone can do horoscopes.

Phones, Cameras, iPods and Other Gadgets

My trusty iPod Mini is on its second battery and that's starting to deteriorate. Where once a charge would last four days of ordinary commuting, I'm lucky to get two days out of it now. I could take it back to the tech shop and have them swap in a new battery. Cost about £30. Or I could just upgrade.

If only it were that simple. But there are so many all-in-one options. My mobile is a Motorola V220. I like it, but it's even older than the iPod Mini. It plays nice with my Mac, which the Samsung U600 I had doesn't. I lost the phone I really liked, which was the Motorola V3 Razr. While we're on the subject, I carry a Canon A590 IS as my camera. That's staying. How many cameras have a viewfinder these days?

So why not upgrade to the iPhone? Because it's expensive and I'd still keep the Canon. At £35 a month for an 18-month contract, it costs £97 for the 8GB model. That's a contract cost of £727 or £485 a year. Sure I get all that bandwidth and minutes, but I don't need all those minutes and I won't use all that bandwidth. My life is nowhere near that interesting. Plus I have a fixed abode and a credit rating, so I can get fixed-line broadband. The iPhone is for three groups of people: Apple fanboys; people who think the Apple cool will rub off on them (it doesn't); and people who don't have credit ratings and fixed abodes. None of those groups are me. I can't deny I'm tempted, but I think I can resist it.

So then there's a Nano. The 8GB model is £115 from my nearby Regent Street Apple store or £105+p&p from Amazon. It's the closest replacement for my 4GB Mini. I doubt I'll use the camera, but maybe I will if it's there. In between is the iTouch. The 8GB model is £149 from the Apple Store. I get better software, WiFi, a bigger screen, the camera and all for an additional £34 over the Nano. Same question: do I have an exciting enough life? Plus, I'll only get e-mails if I'm on a WiFi at Starbucks or Virgin trains or like that. Okay: not the iTouch.

I think I can see where this is going. Except for the Apple devices, you know the MP3 players on regular phones aren't going to be as good as an iPod, plus there's no guarantee the phones will work with iTunes on a Mac. So the Nano it is, if I don't just get the battery changed on the Mini. So the last thing I need is an all-singing and dancing phone. Except they all are now.

My current mobile phone costs me around £180 a year on a £15 SIM-only contract. Occasionally I overrun, so call it £240. Finding a neat handset that plays nice with iSync isn't easy. The only reason I need to update is that The Sodding Bank has blocked all webmail accounts, so I have to get home to look at my mails. Or use an Internet shop at £1 a time. A phone with webmail would be useful. A Blackberry price plan from Vodafone costs £10 a month more than the SIM-only with the same amount of minutes, but that's on a 24-month contract for the Blackberry. The phone is free on £25 (or more) a month contracts. At least I could get my e-mails. The issue with the Blackberry is its lingering “Crackberry” image, but I have seen Young Folk using them recently. Looking through the forums, it seems the Blackberry can be made to play with Macs, but not easily. So when the job search starts in earnest I'll need the Blackberry or equivalent smart phone, but not until then.

On Soho Cafes

The best cafe in Soho used to be Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. It had communal tables at the front and two long bench tables at the back. You might sit next to anyone and strike up a conversation. The staff were extravert Italians and the cakes as good as it got in London. In the mid-Oughties they took out the long communal tables at the back, installed some stairs and opened upstairs. The Italian staff went down the road to Amato. The current Pat Val's décor is drab and lifeless, which can be a description of the staff, who are not Italian anymore. I went down the road to Amato, following a lot of the people from Pat Val's. A year or so ago, Amato changed hands and badly re-furbished: the atmosphere vanished. I went there twice and gave up. It was replaced by a Richoux that is almost empty all the time. Running cafes is in a nation's blood: the Dutch can do it, so can the Italians, Spanish, Austrians and French. Caffee Nero gets it right because it models itself on Italian cafes; a good Starbucks is okay, a poor one is dismal. You don't need armchairs and piped music, but you do need atmosphere, the sound of cheerful activity, good coffee and sweet things to nibble on. Look for the university lecturer in the corner, her papers spread around her, marking or making notes as if she's been there for an hour. Then you've found a good one.

I like the Milkbar on Bateman Street to read after work;

the venerable Bar Italia on Frith Street for a quick espresso;

and Number 34B on Old Compton Street for pancakes.

There's A Place for Me, Somewhere A Place For Me...

For reasons that don't matter but weren't indicative of my ability to work and play well with others, I didn't have a good first year at The Bank. As a result, I got “Partially Met” in my appraisals. Since the grades are given out on a distribution, someone has to get one. Once you've got one, you get all the others. Added to which, I am not of a temperament to be a “manager” as that role is understood at The Bank. Middle managers in The Bank are bag carriers and messengers: when senior management wants their opinion, it tells them what it wants them to say, often in farcical sermons passed off as interviews in the house magazine. That is not me and never will be. You've gathered by now that I don't drink the Kool Aid either. By their standards, I will never meet the criteria for my grade. I accept that, where we differ is that I know their standards suck and they spend more energy in denial than an apprentice cocaine addict.

So when the re-organisation came along this summer, I was given a choice: I could be made redundant after the inevitable failed effort of finding a job in another section (my appraisals would guarantee I wouldn't even get an interview) or I could take a role a grade below mine. I took the money. Under the rules, my salary is protected for two years starting on my date of appointment, after which they can review it and my role, and adjust accordingly. Salaries in the next grade down are thirty percent lower.

So when I accepted that role, both the company and I knew that I would have to leave sometime in the next two years or take a whopping pay cut. Knowing and believing, believing and accepting, and accepting and being unaffected by, are utterly different states of mind. I've been working through them over the last few weeks and it's been painful. I'm almost there. It's only when I am there I can draft a CV and a campaign that will sound positive rather than just help-get-me-out-of-here.

I've been doing this working shit for thirty years. I don't have a pension worth a damn, so I can't take early retirement and get a lower-paid but more manageable job to keep going. Anyway, I'm not sure there are lower-stress, manageable jobs around. Teaching sure ain't it. No public sector job is.

I've worked at a string of companies with busted morale and broken organisations, and some of them are household names. It's left me wondering if all small companies are run by chancers and all large ones have outsourced all the real work and retained the politics. The Bank's Head Office is like one of those mythical castles, with servants, courtiers, knights and nobles. Servants excepted, no-one actually does a real job in those castles: it's all about making alliances, sabotaging your competitors and getting preferment. Am I just going from one frying-pan to another?

The answer to that question does matter because it will affect the way I interview. If I believe it's all bullshit, I'm scuppered, because I can't fool myself anymore. I have to believe that The Bank is dysfunctional – more accurately, that the whole financial services sector is dysfunctional (of course it is: they trained all those people to mis-sell pensions and savings plans and no-one said “no, stop, this is wrong” - not and kept their job anyway) – and that there are decent companies out there with useful products and a right relation with their customers and staff. And that I'll find one. Just like the song.

I Can't Live Without... Caffe Nero, Seven Dials

They know me here, as they know a lot of the people who come in through the doors before about half-past nine each weekday morning. I get a single espresso in the morning and a small tea in the afternoon.

Every now and then I confuse them by changing the order. Sometimes I get croissant in the morning and maybe something in the afternoon. If get either, I have to pay respects to the god of diet and recognise it means I'm feeling upset about something. The afternoon tea is a break from the office. In the summer, I and a colleague would get tea and sit and watch all the pretty girls go by. Then the winter came and all the pretty girls went back to Spain and Italy and France.

Legalising Drugs

I usually steer clear of the detritus of passing political arguments but the drug advice board thing happened just as I'd finished reading Misha Glenny's McMafia: Serious Organised Crime and my brain was in that mode. This is about legalisation, not about whether the Government were right to sack their advisor.

Any product which costs almost nothing to make, has a high consumer value and requires almost no start-up capital and expertise to make is going to be interesting to organised crime. Especially if there are significant excises, customs and sales taxes – which allow criminals to undercut the legal price and still make super-profits. Criminals don't (at least in Europe) make cigarettes, because although a pack of twenty costs almost nothing to produce, you need a lot of money and expertise to set up the factories to make the things. Plus you have to haul a lot of tobacco leaf around. By contrast, the largest LSD factory in Europe in the 1980's was a small house in a sleepy south-west London suburb (Operation Julie). Nobody saw a thing for years.

Any product where there is a significant difference in the taxation imposed by nearby countries with leaky borders or bribable customs officials will also attract the criminals. Tax arbitrage is an easy source of super-profits for the bad guys as well as Barclays Capital Markets. Cigarette smuggling is still a popular sport along the Italian coastline.

Criminals love drugs because the margins are phenomenal and the production and set-up costs are minimal. They like diamonds, illegal immigrants, small electronics, CD's and DVD's for the same reason. Luxury goods – Louis Voitton and Rolex knock-offs – are not much more difficult once you have found your Chinese manufacturer. The work is all about logistics and security: that's why a gang can switch from drugs to people to counterfeit so quickly. Once you have the logistics in place and the guards bribed, you can move almost anything.

Legalising the substance will not remove the criminals from the trade. In fact, it will start a round of violence the like of which we have only seen at the movies, as gangs fight for control of the sale of something that is just too profitable to ignore. Worse, enforcing any licensing regime (for quality, manufacture or distribution) simply turns the British Government into another drug dealer enforcing its right to be in sole control of the trade and making sure it gets its cut. The accompanying corruption of public servants and the Police would make the 1960's pornography scandals look like your maiden Aunt's tea-party.

The debate is often about the absolute or relative harms caused by the drugs, but that's not the real issue. The real issue is about the damage to society caused by the organised crime that will follow legalisation.

(If there are genuine medical benefits for some people from marijuana, then let's confirm it and prescribe if it makes sense. What on earth the medicinal benefits from speed, crack, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ketamine or skunk could be I have no idea.)

Maybe we de-criminalise use but criminalise manufacture and supply as the Dutch do. I suspect the liberalisers would be happy with this. But wait, drivers of taxis, private cars, buses, trains, lorries and cranes have got to be clean and sober. So have doctors, policemen, nurses, teachers, judges and Court officers, customs and excise staff, air traffic controllers, airline pilots, the guys who run power stations, oil refineries and the various power grids, anyone who works power tools or on a construction site... I'd rather like to believe that the guys who designed the buildings I work in and the lifts I use weren't stoned at the time, and triple that for any crucial software that runs anything... The legislation making drugs illegal would be replaced by legislation making it illegal or sackable for various employees to be caught under the influence.

You see where this is going? Given how long drugs stay in the system, the only people who will be able to take drugs without fear of losing their jobs will be the unskilled, unemployed and low-paid. Which is not what the skilled, employed, high-paid liberalisers want: they want to get high as well. But most of them won't be able to because of the jobs they do and because their employers don't want them coming in wasted. And so we get back more or less to the same frustrations we had at the start, except the entire underclass is now wasted all the time and their children go into school smelling of last night's skunk. Legally.

And no, this is England, land of the binge-drinker and exporter of drunken louts to the world. The English are not going to do drugs like the self-respecting middle-class Dutch do: they are going to do drugs like they do booze. Which is going to be a really pretty sight. 

The first draft of anything is… in dire need of improvement

So said Papa Hemingway. Actually he said: "the first draft of anything is shit". You don’t really know what you need to say until you have tried to say it. You may know what you want to say, but if that's all you say, it's just self-indulgence. You say what you need to say. You check the facts you are stating and the assumptions you are making. You search and delete clichés, urban myths, lazy short-cuts, waffle and boilerplate… and replace them with clear, simple ideas well-expressed. Mutatis mutandis if you are working in the visual arts.

Actors, dancers and musicians rehearse, soldiers, sportsmen and athletes train. Drafting is what writers, programmers, designers and artists do – or should do. Fashion photographers used to take hundreds of shots to get the magic for the cover of Vogue (now they take any old thing and Photoshop it to death). Painters scrape off the oil and start over, musicians stop the tape and record it again, movie directors do take after take of a scene. Because that’s the way you get the little flashes of magic that make it something to be proud of.