The northlondonhippy

I’ve been a big fan of Post Secret (postsecret.com) for years. I even included a pos­i­tive men­tion of it on my web­site nearly four years ago.

Its prob­a­bly one of the most pop­u­lar “blogs” on the inter­net, though call­ing it a “blog” doesn’t really fit as far as I can tell. It is much more than that.

Post Secret started out with a very sim­ple idea. The cre­ator, Frank War­ren, asked peo­ple to anony­mously send him pic­ture post­cards con­tain­ing their secrets. Many peo­ple have and many con­tinue to send him their deep­est and dark­est on a reg­u­lar basis. New secrets are posted on Sun­days and remain on the web­site for a week.

I’ve been a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor, mak­ing sure to vir­tu­ally swing by to read the lat­est every Sun­day, faith­fully for as long as I’ve known about it. Each visit always evokes some emo­tional response from me, whether its sym­pa­thy, or under­stand­ing or amuse­ment, I am always moved in some way, some­times to tears.

It’s good to feel.

I’ve learned a lot about peo­ple and the human con­di­tion too. It amazes me how cre­ative peo­ple are, how expres­sive an art form a sim­ple post card can be, but most of all, how will­ing the con­trib­u­tors are to share their inner most hopes, fears and long held secrets.

Not only has Frank has turned his web­site into a thriv­ing online com­mu­nity, but he has pub­lished many books and seems to be on tour, giv­ing lec­tures and shows across Amer­ica all the time. I own a few of his books and they include many post cards that haven’t appeared on the web­site. He really does get tons.

Early this morn­ing, Lon­don time, the long awaited Post Secret app (iTunes Link here) was finally made avail­able in the iTunes Store. It’s £1.49 ($1.99) and well worth adding to your col­lec­tion. It’s expected to be avail­able for Android soon, if that’s your plat­form of choice.

Frank and his design­ers have taken the con­cept of shar­ing secrets and built upon it, using the capa­bil­i­ties of your iPhone to make it so much more.

Of course, you can see other people’s secrets and there’s var­i­ous ways to do that. You can view the most pop­u­lar secrets, or the lat­est posted, but coolest of all, you can search them geo­graph­i­cally. Don’t worry, the app won’t show your home address, just your city or town, though it appears its pos­si­ble to tag it to a spe­cific pub­lic loca­tion, like a school or busi­ness. That is very cool.

How do the secrets get loca­tion tagged? Sim­ple, the app allows you to cre­ate your own secret post card, by tak­ing a photo, then adding some text on top, then decid­ing if you want to include a gen­eral loca­tion. I haven’t shared any secrets so far, so I haven’t tested it yet…but I might some­day and if I do, you won’t know it’s me, even if it’s tagged with Lon­don. I’m always anony­mous online, so you can see the obvi­ous appeal for me.

You can also “like” secrets, share them on Twit­ter and Face­book too.

I can’t rec­om­mend this app enough and I highly sug­gest you buy it right now. What are you wait­ing for??

Dis­claimer: I have no con­nec­tion to Post Secret what­so­ever, and I am not prof­it­ing from this endorse­ment in any way.

I love Twit­ter, but I fear my love for it remains unrequited.

I’ve been prop­erly on Twit­ter for about two and a half years. To be more pre­cise, as of this writ­ing, I have been using Twit­ter since the 31st of Jan­u­ary 2009, which works out to 931 days. I used howlongontwitter.com to cal­cu­late that, I didn’t count it up myself.

In that time, I’ve found Twit­ter to be indis­pens­able and addic­tive and while I am not the most pro­lific tweeter you will meet, I con­stantly read my time­line. I must dip in and out of it a thou­sand times a day.

What I don’t do is tweet or inter­act with other peo­ple enough. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

My tweets tend towards fee­ble and offen­sive (but orig­i­nal) jokes that prob­a­bly make peo­ple laugh uncom­fort­ably, if at all.

I also tweet, or rather retweet stuff about legal­is­ing cannabis and other drugs, because that is my pet cause.

Occa­sion­ally I may tweet some­thing that I feel strongly about, like the recent riots in London.

I tweet about what I’m watch­ing on TV some­times and the weather occa­sion­ally and even the odd food-related tweet too.

In other words, I’m not unpleas­ant or rude, just prob­a­bly not that inter­est­ing. That’s why I suck at Twitter.

I’m anony­mous online, by choice, mainly because I am so open about my own cannabis use and as its sta­tus is cur­rently ille­gal, anonymity allows me the lux­ury of hon­esty. I like to pre­tend this stance fur­thers the cause of legal­i­sa­tion, but I’m not always con­vinced it does and that’s a sub­ject best explored another day. This post is about Twitter.

The other rea­son I remain anony­mous is I pre­fer to be unknown. I am not seek­ing atten­tion for myself. If you Googled my real name, you wouldn’t find me any­where online; I’m not on Face­book, Linked-In, noth­ing. And while I have worked in the media for more than two decades, I’ve man­aged to avoid hav­ing a byline, screen credit, nor any men­tion of my real name and that has been intentional.

What it means on Twit­ter is I don’t use my real name or a pho­to­graph of myself as my avatar. That is why I suck at Twit­ter too.

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I suck at Twit­ter for the rather silly rea­son that I have been sucked into think­ing about fol­lower num­bers, some­thing I have man­aged to avoid until now.

I’ve never really been both­ered by how many peo­ple are fol­low­ing me, I haven’t done any­thing ever to inten­tion­ally gain them, never asked for them, begged for them, noth­ing like that. I’ve just tweeted when I felt like it, fol­lowed peo­ple (and accounts) that have inter­ested me and that’s about it.

I’ve always found it a bit dis­taste­ful when peo­ple tweet about the num­ber of fol­low­ers they have, in what­ever context.

“I need 27 more fol­low­ers to reach 500, help!”

“Please RT this [insert celebrity here] I really need more fol­low­ers urgently!”

“I gained 57 fol­low­ers today, all because [insert celebrity here] retweeted me.”

Worse, is see­ing celebri­ties tweet­ing each other and exag­ger­at­ing their worth by brag­ging they have the most fol­low­ers. I find this rather tragic.

Wor­ry­ing about fol­lower num­bers is a mug’s game and sadly in the last week or so, I have become that mug. Here’s why: I’ve recently noticed a few peo­ple I know online, who started on Twit­ter when I did, now have dou­ble or tre­ble the fol­low­ers I have. I am a vic­tim of com­par­a­tive maths.

I know its silly, I know its mean­ing­less, but its been on my mind recently

This is not meant to be a moan or a com­plaint, every­thing I’m telling you is obser­va­tional and self-critical, but not a whinge or back­handed plea for more peo­ple to fol­low me. I’m just try­ing to under­stand what I am doing wrong on Twitter.

What am I doing wrong on Twit­ter? Loads, it would seem.

There are quite a few peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter, who don’t fol­low me back. I don’t mean celebri­ties, but nor­mal peo­ple, like you and me. Well, more like you prob­a­bly as I don’t come any­where near being normal.

The lack of follow-backs from peo­ple I like per­plexes me.

Some­times, I scroll through my own tweets and read them back, to see if there’s some­thing in them that makes peo­ple not want to fol­low me. Noth­ing leaps out.

I think I’m fairly pleas­ant, thought­ful and I’m true to myself. So what could it be?

The lack of a photo and a name is off-putting, but my anonymity pol­icy is not going to change until weed is legal. End of, as the kids today say. Its a rea­son, but that alone can’t be the only reason.

I don’t inter­act or tweet enough, but guess what? I’m prob­a­bly the same in real life, being mostly a loner and mis­an­thropic with it.

If you’re shit at life, you are going to be shit at Twit­ter. This shouldn’t come as a sur­prise to me, but it does.

How can I be more socially suc­cess­ful on Twit­ter than I am in real life? Answer: I can’t.

Quite oddly, I think I am prob­a­bly more shy on Twit­ter than I am in real life.

Often I do think about respond­ing to other people’s tweets, then I think bet­ter of it and don’t. I don’t like tweet­ing neg­a­tively, if I dis­agree with some­one, how­ever strongly, I tend not to say any­thing. And if I do agree with some­one, I don’t want to seem syco­phan­tic, so I don’t tweet.

On the rare occa­sion when I do tweet some­one and they don’t respond, even with the sim­plest of acknowl­edge­ment, then I am crest­fallen and I think the fear of that often pre­vents me from inter­act­ing with peo­ple too. Maybe you know what I mean, maybe you think that’s a lame rea­son, but its true.

When­ever any­one tweets me and they are polite, I always make a point of respond­ing. I always try to thank peo­ple for RTs too, as long as I’ve noticed they’ve done so. I guess I just try to treat peo­ple on Twit­ter as I would like to be treated.

I suck at Twit­ter because I suck at life. I’m start­ing to believe I’m not par­tic­u­larly good with either pur­suit. That’s not a happy conclusion.

Or, I could take the tack that I’m not unpop­u­lar on Twit­ter, I’m just undiscovered.

The best lies I tell, are the ones I tell myself.

If you do fol­low me, well done you for find­ing Twitter’s best kept secret!

You are truly a per­son of excel­lent taste! You have keen, dis­cern­ing eye for the hippest and coolest, that your aver­age nobody tends to pass on by with­out a sec­ond thought! You’re a trend spot­ter and a trend setter!

Ah-hem.

I’ve pretty much accepted that I will con­tinue to exist in Twit­ter obscu­rity, while oth­ers around me zoom ever higher. I’m ok with that.

I take a lot from Twit­ter, I’m quite greedy in my quest for knowl­edge, I just feel guilty some­times that I don’t put enough back into it. I’d like to enter­tain and inform more peo­ple, but that’s not who I am, not in real life, not online. So it goes.

These truths should be self-evident, but its taken me nearly 1,300 words to get here.

So now you know why I suck at Twit­ter, and now I do too.

I’ve always had a very unhealthy obses­sion with death, mainly my own.

I’ve imag­ined my own death count­less times, in count­less ways.

I’ve pic­tured myself pass­ing qui­etly in a ster­ile white hos­pi­tal room, alone, at a very old age, in the dark.

I’ve seen myself col­lapse in the street, clutch­ing my chest, sud­denly and with­out warning.

I’ve thought about all man­ner of vio­lent death too, from a hor­ri­ble car crash, to being bru­tally beaten sense­less by a gang of teenage thugs.

I’ve thought about this a lot, too much, to the point of it being eas­ily labelled a decades’ old obsession.

Its not really death that I fear, its the process of dying and my mor­bid curios­ity at how I will go, when­ever that time comes.

Will it be painful?

Will I suffer?

Will I linger?

Will it take long?

Is it going to hap­pen soon?

The roots of my fear of death were planted by my father. He was an older dad, I was the child of a sec­ond mar­riage who came late in his life. He talked about dying all the time and how he just wanted to live long enough to see me and my brother right in the world.

As a child, hear­ing this mantra of his fre­quently, I wor­ried about his death a lot. I was close with my father when I was a child, his talk of death scared me and dug deep into my sub-conscious, where it remains to this day.

As it turned out, he lived a pretty long life, but had an unpleas­antly long and drawn out death. From his diag­no­sis to his pass­ing, it took about a year, with his health declin­ing steadily in between. The last cou­ple of months were par­tic­u­larly bad, with his decline ever more steep and his hopes dashed with each treat­ment option fail­ing. His final days were spent heav­ily med­icated, but he was at home, in his own bed when he drew his last breath.

As deaths go, I’d give it a 6, he loses points for the dura­tion of suf­fer­ing, but gains some for being able to choose to be at home. Also, he scores well on the life to death ratio, he lived to be 84 and was sick for only a year.

You can’t really do a score­card for death, each one is unique.

There’s an old joke about a guy who, when asked how he’d like to die, said “when I’m 100 years old I’d like to be shot by a jeal­ous hus­band”. That sounds like an OK way to go, as long as you’re a sprightly 100.

My mother’s death, unlike my father’s, was rel­a­tively quick, hap­pen­ing over about 48 hour period, from becom­ing ill to slip­ping qui­etly away.

Where my mother loses out is in the qual­ity of life stakes, she had a mas­sive stroke about 7 years before, which left her severely impaired.

She couldn’t walk, had a lot of trou­ble talk­ing too, and her coor­di­na­tion was par­tic­u­larly poor. For the 7 years she sur­vived after the stroke, she was depen­dent upon help for absolutely every­thing, like dress­ing, wash­ing, eat­ing and going to the toi­let. Its no way for any­one to live, or rather exist.

When my mother had the stroke and was being treated in the hos­pi­tal, my father was given a choice of whether or not to put her on life support.

He had been told it was a very bad stroke and her recov­ery would be prob­lem­atic and never com­plete. He was also aware my mother had a liv­ing will, which pretty much said, if she was ever in this posi­tion, not to take dras­tic mea­sures to keep her alive if the prog­no­sis for recov­ery was grim.

My father ignored my mother’s wishes and said yes to the life sup­port. He couldn’t bare to think of life with­out my her nor could he imag­ine her not mak­ing a full recov­ery. Nature would have killed my mother off then and there, peace­fully, in her sleep, but instead my father chose to use every mir­a­cle machine known to mod­ern med­i­cine to sus­tain my mother’s life.

His mantra to all hos­pi­tal staff became this: “She walked into this hos­pi­tal on her own and she’s damn well going to walk back out”.

How wrong he was.

My father could have spared my mother seven years of a hor­ri­ble exis­tence, but he was self­ish. He paid for this deci­sion him­self as his life got much harder when my mother was finally allowed to go home after sev­eral months in the hos­pi­tal and a rehab facility.

My mother could only get around in a wheel­chair and had sev­eral med­ical appoint­ments a week that my father had to trans­port her to, unaided. He was in his 80s.

He refused all assis­tance at first, and not until he was over­whelmed, did he relent and hire some home help.

My father’s own death obses­sion kicked into over­drive and his new catch­phrase became this: “What would hap­pen to my wife if some­thing hap­pened to me?” This thought ran through his head con­stantly, it kept him up at night, he men­tioned it every time he spoke to me. His fear of his own death now had a tan­gi­ble focus, my mother’s fate.

What you think about can become real, as it wasn’t too long after this that they found a large, malig­nant and inop­er­a­ble tumour in his blad­der. Thus began his one year decline into death.

The “what to do about my mother” ques­tion became inter­twined with the “beat­ing this can­cer” goal. “If I can just beat this can­cer,” thought my father. “then I can con­tinue to care for my wife.” It took him a few months to realise he couldn’t and the part time home help turned into a full time, live in carer for both of them.

When my father died, my mother con­tin­ued to live in their house, with the live in carer. As it turned out, she would have had enough money to con­tinue liv­ing this way, which was what I wanted for her, but her fear helped her decide to move into a care home. It was a good one, but expen­sive, more expen­sive than stay­ing in her home, but it was my mother’s choice.

My mother spent the last five plus years of her life in that care home, before slip­ping into a coma and dying in a hos­pi­tal bed, alone and uncon­scious. She should have died many years before, her life was no richer for those last, post-stroke years of hard­ship and suffering.

We all have to face death in all its var­ied forms and per­mu­ta­tions. Death and dying come in many assorted flavours.

I lost four friends and many more col­leagues, who all died while doing what we do, cov­er­ing the news. I’ve been a jour­nal­ist for over 20 years and when I was younger and more fool­ish, put myself in harm’s way too.

I’ve spent time in war zones and other dan­ger­ous places and the peo­ple I work with still do, every day, to tell you about peo­ple and places many peo­ple don’t give a shit about. Hey ho.

My four friends who all per­ished while work­ing abroad, had quick, yet vio­lent deaths. I’m not going get into any great detail here, Three of them were chased by armed men or rebels before being gunned down, one was killed by a stray, unex­pected mor­tar shell. Each death effected me per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally in quite pro­found ways.

All four of them were rel­a­tively young, some left behind part­ners and chil­dren. Each one was a decent, thought­ful and respected col­league and journalist.

One of these deaths was par­tic­u­larly hard on me because I was on duty when the news broke. I was work­ing on a news desk, the cen­tral point of con­tact for every­one in my organ­i­sa­tion. A lot of the tele­phone calls I received were from dis­traught peo­ple all over the world, wak­ing up to the news of the death of a close friend. Many were in tears, many wanted me to tell them that the news got it wrong.

I wish I could have.

When death comes to the young and good, its par­tic­u­larly hard on those left behind, try­ing to make sense of out it, try­ing to under­stand it.

I’ll tell you some­thing right now, there is no sense in any sense­less death, there is no under­stand­ing. Shit hap­pens, you just deal with it as best you can.

After that spate of deaths, my indus­try tried to improve on safety. More hos­tile envi­ron­ment train­ing was brought in, safety advi­sors in dan­ger­ous places are deployed reg­u­larly now, but jour­nal­ists still con­tinue to be killed in the line of duty.

Los­ing friends makes you think about your own mor­tal­ity, not that I needed any help.

There are two other friends I lost, both of their deaths remark­ably similar.

They were both about the same age, both had sim­i­lar inter­ests and lifestyles. One was a musi­cian, the other a journalist.

Both of my friends were 50 years old when they died, both had mas­sive heart attacks. One was found in his flat, sit­ting in his favourite chair, the other was at home with his part­ner and fell over dead as he got up from the sofa. Both died fairly instantly and may not have had much time to work out what was happening.

Both used via­gra and cocaine reg­u­larly and drank heav­ily too. You don’t need to be a doc­tor to work out that’s a bad combination.

As I get older, my death obses­sion seems to have more things to fuel it.

Peo­ple my age (I’m push­ing 50) die from all sorts of things, nat­ural and oth­er­wise. I think about my health more often. I don’t actu­ally do much about it, but I think about it…does that count for anything?

I get my cho­les­terol and glu­cose checked reg­u­larly, along with my blood pres­sure. All are good, espe­cially my cho­les­terol, which was 3.1 at my most recent test. I don’t look like I should have low cho­les­terol, but I do. Go figure.

None of that means I’m immune from whatever’s lurk­ing out there, wait­ing to pounce on me. I don’t drink at all, but I do smoke, cig­a­rettes and weed. I don’t exer­cise, I don’t watch my diet and I work only nights. Not exactly the regime you’d pay a thou­sand quid a day for at a health farm.

If you would pay a grand a day to live my lifestyle, get in touch, I’d be happy to sort you out, as long as you are happy always being high and mas­tur­bat­ing sev­eral times a day, but not in pub­lic, because that’s just gross.

Will it be a heart attack that gets me? My father had one of those.

How about a stroke? My mother’s got that covered.

Can­cer? It got most of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side.

Car acci­dent? I think about it every time I get behind the wheel. Will this be my last jour­ney? Is there a drunk dri­ver or over­tired lorry dri­ver out there with with me in his sights?

How about some freak acci­dent, like a plum­met­ing jet engine a’la Donny Darko? A stray bul­let from some silly gang related shoot­ing on my north Lon­don ghetto street? That could hap­pen too.

Ter­ror­ism, viral pan­demic, earth­quake, tor­nado, take your pick, the news is full of so many lethal things.

There are so many ways I could die and not know­ing how its going to turn out for me is a gen­uine obsession.

But would I really want to know how I’m going to die?

Wouldn’t it be the ulti­mate spoiler?

If there was a box I could click online that would reveal the details of my death, would I click it?

Would I really want to know the big three facts about my inevitable death; when? where? how?

Hell, yes! I would def­i­nitely click that box. And then I am sure I would regret it.

What would I do if I did knew the details of my death?

I’d try to cheat it, if I could. If I knew a bus was going to hit me on the high street next Fri­day, I’d damn make sure I was some­place else.

But what if I couldn’t cheat it, some hor­ri­ble dis­ease or med­ical cat­a­stro­phe that couldn’t be avoided. What would I do with that knowl­edge, that my own body was a tick­ing time bomb, wait­ing to go off on a cer­tain date?

Would I get my affairs in order, what­ever that means?

Would I make a bucket list and try to cram what­ever time I had left on doing things I sud­denly felt were important?

Or would I just sit qui­etly, await­ing des­tiny, safe with the knowl­edge that my fate was well and truly sealed?

Who knows? I’ll never find out.

There is no real way to know when you’re going to die. Some peo­ple do find out the “how” from their doc­tors, along with a rough timescale, but I think that’s about as close as it gets. In that sit­u­a­tion, I’d have no choice but to know.

Whether or not know­ing would be help­ful, well, who’s to say?

What­ever does get me, is out there some­where right now, in the world or inside my body. Whether its today, tomor­row, next week, next year or next cen­tury is anybody’s guess. Who knows what mir­a­cles sci­ence might pro­vide in the next decades?

There are two things I’ve always thought would hap­pen to help peo­ple cheat death.

One is my view that age­ing is sim­ply a genetic dis­or­der that even­tu­ally will be cor­rected with gene ther­apy. I think they are close to this dis­cov­ery, iso­lat­ing what it is in our DNA that makes our bod­ies age and then fig­ur­ing out how to manip­u­late it and switch it off. It may sound like sci-fi, but its not and it will have all sorts of eth­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions for the future of our planet.

Per­haps only the super rich will ben­e­fit from this dis­cov­ery, maybe it will be avail­able to any­one and every­one. Maybe it will be manda­tory. Maybe it will be kept a secret.

While not deliv­er­ing real immor­tal­ity, it cer­tainly would be a mas­sive step in that direc­tion, as long as you’re not hit by that bus on the high street.

The sec­ond sci­en­tific inno­va­tion that I think will even­tu­ally come, will be the abil­ity to import (ingest? upload? scan? pick a verb) the entire con­tents of a human brain into a com­puter. Once you can do that, you could effec­tively recre­ate a person’s con­scious­ness and con­struct a vir­tual world for them to exist inside. As long as you had a sus­tain­able power source, this the­o­ret­i­cally could deliver immor­tal­ity for all.

Imag­ine being able to con­tinue your exis­tence in a per­fect dig­i­tal world, freed of the con­straints of your flesh. For all inten­sive pur­poses, this dig­i­tal world would be as real as our world and your sense of self, your iden­tity, who you are, would be the same too. You would be reunited with your friends, your rel­a­tives, your loved ones, to spend eter­nity together in the most won­der­ful place imaginable.

That sounds a lot like heaven in the tra­di­tional sense, with one key dif­fer­ence. The heaven of our ances­tors was an imag­i­nary idea, this heaven I pro­pose would be built by man and could one day really exist.

Do I think I’ll see these inno­va­tions in my life­time? That’s the tril­lion dol­lar question.

I think the genetic dis­cov­ery is not that far off, but its use in prac­tise much fur­ther. Its unlikely in my socio-economic class that I will have access to it, if it is in my time.

The dig­i­tal after­life is harder to pre­dict, as guess­ing at the future capa­bil­i­ties of com­puter equip­ment and the rate of change is slightly more com­plex than Moore’s Law would have you believe. Advances in quan­tum com­put­ing are mak­ing the news and once the real break­through hap­pens, we very well may end up with more afford­able com­puter power than any­one can cur­rently imagine.

The sin­gu­lar­ity, anyone?

Once the con­tents of a human brain can be uploaded into a com­puter of unimag­in­able power, a mul­ti­verse of pos­si­bil­i­ties awaits. If I can live long enough to see that hap­pen, I will be very lucky indeed.

I don’t hold out much hope.

I’ve always thought these amaz­ing inno­va­tions would come the day after I die.

So it goes, as Von­negut used to say.

That leaves me with a death obses­sion that won’t be resolved until its my time to shake off this mor­tal coil.

At least I have a pas­time. They say hav­ing a hobby adds years to your life.

(The fol­low­ing is not an April Fools spoof post. That sort of child­ish behav­iour is well behind me)

Like hello and what­not. And ting. See, I’m down with the kids, innit.

For a change, I have a legit­i­mate excuse for not post­ing any­thing here, my iMac died, twice.

I’ll spare you the tech bull­shit and briefly sum up; the hard drive died, it went off to be repaired, it came back, the hard drive died again 8 hours later. It went back for a 2nd repair, this time the drive was wiped, but still work­ing. It came back, the restore process was a mess, it took 3 days of fix­ing to get it back work­ing properly.

Deal­ing with Apple and their autho­rised repair cen­tre was straight­for­ward and easy, and here’s a help­ful tip: Always get the Apple Care on your Macs. Always. One seri­ous prob­lem or repair, it will more than pay for itself. With the prob­lems I’ve had, it has saved me a fortune.

My cur­rent iMac is my third in the last 6 years, an 18 month old, 27” quad core LED screened beast and hadn’t given me any trou­ble till now, but when it died, it really died, while I was using it. I watched as icons dropped off my desk­top, ques­tion marks appeared on the appli­ca­tion icons in the dock, and run­ning apps froze. I tried to restart my machine and when I did, the boot up screen showed noth­ing but a file folder icon with a ques­tion mark on it.

This is a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

I hope you never, ever see the dreaded, hor­ri­ble, ques­tion mark-file folder boot screen icon and may god have mercy on your soul if you don’t have Apple Care.

I phoned Apple, who con­firmed what I sus­pected, most likely the inter­nal drive had failed. They asked if I had a back-up. I did, but it was 2 weeks old.

My bad, I only con­nected my Time Machine drive when the reminder came up, every 10 days — I had ignored it a few days before. Very stu­pid and les­son learned, my Time Machine drive is now always on and always connected.

This all hap­pened on a Sat­ur­day and I had to wait until Mon­day for the repair shop to phone to arrange col­lec­tion. They could have done it on the same day, ie the Mon­day, but it wasn’t pos­si­ble on my part.

Long story short, they swapped out the dead drive for a new one, rein­stalled the OS and tested every­thing. It was deliv­ered back to me early the next week.

I was very happy to have it back and set about restor­ing every­thing from my Time Machine drive, which I was able to do, and I then began to fill in the gaps between my last back-up and the day of the crash, ie about a 2 week period of loss.

I was able to retrieve some recently pur­chased music via iTunes Home Share from another Mac of mine and I emailed myself all of the pho­tos I last imported from my iPhone, then reim­ported them into iPhoto. I keep a lot of my cur­rent doc­u­ments on iDisk, so they were eas­ily obtained as well. I didn’t lose any impor­tant data, I was lucky.

I pur­chased two appli­ca­tions from the Mac App Store that I had to rein­stall, though tech­ni­cally one of them was being installed at the time of the first hard drive crash. Can you guess where this is going?

When my hard drive died the first time, I was installing Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. Its a hefty 4.5gb down­load and it was tak­ing ages. The first thing I noticed as my sys­tem came apart at the seams was that the instal­la­tion appeared to stall.

I was only installing it so I could acti­vate the new mul­ti­touch ges­tures on my iPad, which requires Xcode 4 to put the device into devel­oper mode. That’s it, a very lame reason.

I started to rein­stall Xcode 4 on my repaired iMac, only this time, instead of doing the Mac App Store magic, it down­loaded the installer pack­age to my Appli­ca­tions Folder. I ran the installer and watched as it froze at about the same point it did before…and then my fold­ers and icons started van­ish­ing from my desktop.

Every­thing stopped work­ing, I restarted the machine and low and behold, I was star­ing at the ques­tion mark-file folder boot icon again.

Apple arranged to have it col­lected again the fol­low­ing day, as a pri­or­ity repair. Once the engi­neer had an ini­tial look, he phoned me and said he was able to rein­stall the OS and could see that the user data was gone. He said he would test the hard­ware and let me know the results, but on ini­tial inspec­tion, every­thing seemed fine.

Indeed it was, and after full and exten­sive test­ing, the machine was returned to me and this is where the real fun began.

I restored from my backup and this time it wasn’t as smooth. There must have been rem­nants of the pre­vi­ous restora­tion, because my Home Folder and login name changed, with a num­ber ”1” added to them, the sys­tem cre­ated a new iden­tity for me, con­structed from all my old files. I didn’t lose any data, what I lost were per­mis­sions and privileges.

There’s a rel­a­tively easy fix for this, via Disk Util­ity and the Repair Per­mis­sions com­mand, but that can only get you so far if you are booted up from the inter­nal drive. To really fix it, plus run the Repair Disk com­mand, you need to boot from the OS X instal­la­tion DVD. Boot­ing from that DVD is a very basic part of trou­bleshoot­ing and guess what, I couldn’t do it.

I tried every pos­si­ble way to boot from the DVD, I even spent nearly an hour on the phone with Apple try­ing to trou­bleshoot it. I just wasn’t able to get it to work. I could read the DVD, have the sys­tem recog­nise it as a bootable drive, I could even start the soft­ware on it to the point where it needs to restart and then zip, noth­ing, the DVD would spin for a bit, then stop, while I got no fur­ther than the Apple Logo boot screen.

I cloned the install disk to a flash drive, that didn’t work either. With help from Apple, I booted the iMac into tar­get disk mode, con­nected it to my lap­top via FireWire, but Repair Per­mis­sions was greyed out. I was able to run Repair Disk though.

The Apple guy (who was great, patient and very help­ful) said that I had 2 choices, send it off for another repair or he could send me a replace­ment installer DVD. His view was that if my install DVD was cor­rupted, that could be why it kept hang­ing when try­ing to boot and he also spec­u­lated that the same cor­rupt nugget of data was stop­ping the flash drive in the same place in the process. It made sense, was I decided to try the new DVD option, even though it would take a week to receive it in the post. Bet­ter that than box­ing it up again and hav­ing it gone for another week.

I thanked the Apple guy and felt dejected. And then I had another idea, I used SuperDuper to clone my entire inter­nal drive to an exter­nal, bootable, FireWire drive. It took 4 hours to copy over nearly 400gb of data, but in the end I was able to boot up my iMac using the FireWIre drive.

So my iMac is work­ing, my inter­nal drive is not mounted, I dove straight for Disk Util­ity. Repair Per­mis­sions was not greyed out, so I clicked on it and let it do its magic. This time, it ran for lit­er­ally ages and I could see it repair­ing count­less files and fold­ers. At the end of the process, I rebooted back to the inter­nal drive and waited to see if I could access every­thing with admin­is­tra­tor privileges.

I could. It worked. Happy days.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t boot from the DVD, but could read the DVD oth­er­wise and won’t know until the replace­ment DVD appears. If I can’t boot from it, it will have to go off for a 3rd repair, but if I can boot from it, I’m laughing.

But what about the ini­tial prob­lem and the sub­se­quent sec­ond prob­lem, both iden­ti­cal from my point of view?

I think in the first instance, they might have replaced my hard drive for no rea­son, on the basis that the paper­work instructed them to do so, rather than test­ing it to see if it would work again with a rein­stall. I don’t know this for sure, but I think its likely that the drive was only wiped.

The more thor­ough test­ing dur­ing the sec­ond repair revealed the drive was wiped and since the symp­toms of both crashes were the same, I am guess­ing every­thing else was the same too, but again its only a guess.

So what caused both problems?

The only com­mon vari­able in both sce­nar­ios is the instal­la­tion of Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store. It can’t be a coin­ci­dence that it was being installed both times the hard drive went ka-blooey.

I men­tioned this to the help­ful Apple guy, who said he’d never heard of such a thing. I’ve searched on Google, I can’t find any­one else who has had a sim­i­lar prob­lem, but some­times things con­flict, soft­ware anom­alies hap­pen and they are not widespread.

Could I repro­duce this a third time? I don’t know and I’m not going to find out by try­ing to install Xcode 4 again. I don’t even want a 3 quid refund from Apple.

I just want my com­puter back…and I think I have it back now, but I’m not con­vinced just yet.

My iMac is the cen­tre of my life. That may seem like an over­state­ment, but actu­ally its not.

To say I have been a bit depressed by all this, now that would be an under­state­ment. I’ve lost sleep, hon­est to god, lost sleep from the stress of all of this.

If you don’t relate to tech and a dig­i­tal lifestyle, I’ll try to put it in a per­spec­tive you might appreciate:

The most expen­sive thing I own is my house.

The sec­ond most expen­sive thing I own is my car.

The third most expen­sive thing I own is my iMac.

The third most expen­sive thing I own died.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was put in a box and taken away by a stranger, twice.

The third most expen­sive thing I own spent the bet­ter part of 2 and 1/2 weeks, away from me.

The third most expen­sive thing I own was my only access to a life time’s worth of pho­tos, all irreplaceable.

You get the idea.

My iMac is my work­sta­tion, my pow­er­house for dig­i­tal heavy lift­ing, the cen­tre­piece of all my high tech kit and it was out of the pic­ture for nearly 3 weeks.

No joke, I had the same sick in the pit of my stom­ach feel­ing I’ve had when some­one close to me has died.

Now that I have solved the major issues with my iMac, I’m try­ing to con­vince myself its back for good. Its a trust issue thing and clearly my toys and I enjoy an unnat­u­rally close relationship.

And I said I wasn’t get too tech­ni­cal. Oooops

Update: Found THIS THREAD on the Apple Sup­port Dis­cus­sion Board, with many peo­ple who had exactly the same prob­lems with Xcode 4 instal­la­tion wip­ing their drive.

(If you’ve found this page because you sus­pect you’ve had prob­lems result­ing from try­ing to install Xcode 4 via the Mac App Store, I really want to hear from you. Please email me, my address is northlondonhippy@gmail.com)

Like hello and whatnot.

Another year has flown by and I’m already cel­e­brat­ing my anniver­sary of being the northlon­don­hippy, again.

And by cel­e­brat­ing, of course I mean writ­ing this.

Whoopeeee…

Seven years ago today I started my orig­i­nal web­site on Blog­ger. Its still there, though I moved every­thing to this, my own hosted web­site a few years ago.

Go me!

Back at the begin­ning, I posted quite fre­quently, mainly because I had noth­ing bet­ter to do.

Blog­ging sprouted from a rel­a­tively brief period of unem­ploy­ment , it gave me some­thing to do with my time, when I wasn’t get­ting high or gob­bling magic mush­rooms, which were legal at the time.

You didn’t think I was going to get through this with­out a men­tion of shrooms, did you? Shrooms played an impor­tant part in the early days and I was a reg­u­lar con­sumer of them. Since the gov­ern­ment tight­ened up the reg­u­la­tions, I’ve been with­out them. I miss them, a lot. Shroom ref­er­ence ends.

Flash for­ward to seven years into the future, to this very day and you’ll see that I hardly post any­thing, any more. There’s prob­a­bly more posts about my lack of posts, than any other subject.

I don’t even attempt to make excuses any more, I’ve just accepted that my par­tic­i­pa­tion here is spo­radic and ran­dom. I pop up when­ever I feel like it, I just don’t feel like it very often.

That’s not strictly true, as I seem to con­tinue to main­tain a run­ning list of top­ics I want to cover, I just don’t seem to get around to doing it. Then, what­ever the topic might be, becomes less inter­est­ing to me, or less rel­e­vant and I delete it from my list and it just never gets written.

I’m back to mak­ing excuses again. Sorry, I’ll stop now.

It would be eas­ier if I could just beam my thoughts directly to the inter­net, I think that’s com­ing as a fea­ture this sum­mer in the iPhone 5, but don’t quote me on that. I wouldn’t want to be start­ing that sort of a rumour.

I know I bang on about Twit­ter a lot, but I do spend a lot more time there than I do on my own web­site. If you did want to bathe in the weird thoughts flow­ing through my head on a daily basis, that remains the best place to do it. Though again, my par­tic­i­pa­tion is ran­dom and spo­radic. I con­sume far more than I con­tribute to Twit­ter, but I do suf­fer from infor­ma­tion glut­tony and tech addiction.

That’s prob­a­bly one of the biggest changes to my life in the last seven years, the amount of tech­nol­ogy in it. I’ve always liked tech and toys, but here in the future, they are more per­va­sive and use­ful than ever before and I find that I am always con­nected, always con­sum­ing media.

A typ­i­cal day starts with me pick­ing my iPhone up from the bed­side table, switch­ing off air­plane mode and let­ting it check my email. I put it in air­plane mode when I go to bed, so it doesn’t ding or buzz with new mes­sages, but I leave it on because it is also my back up alarm clock.

I come down­stairs and fire up my iMac, which is the hub of my tech­no­log­i­cal exis­tence. The hard drive in it died last week and its being repaired this very sec­ond. Don’t worry, I have a TimeMa­chine back up, so I don’t think I’ve lost very much at all, but I am miss­ing my 27” beast very much.

I’ve been using my lifeboat com­puter in the mean­time, an orig­i­nal black Mac­Book that I think is nearly 5 years old. While I’m thank­ful that I’ve got it to use now, its painfully slow, its got about 25% of the screen space of my iMac and the view­ing angle of the LCD screen is not very good. Five years is a very long time in tech termss and my Mac­Book is def­i­nitely show­ing its age. Its bet­ter than noth­ing, loads better!

Any­way, my nor­mal rou­tine with the iMac is to switch it on as soon as I wake up, read the papers online, along with a few other web­sites, check my RSS feed reader, keep an eye on Twit­ter, do some work on some other web­sites I work on, deal with pro­fes­sional and per­sonal emails, sync and charge my iPhone and con­trol my Mac Mini.

My Mac Mini is around 4 and a 1/2 years old and is also show­ing its age. I use it as my media hub, its con­nected to my flatscreen tv and my A/V amp. I use it to play music (streamed around my house to two Air­Port Express units, one in the kitchen, one in my bed­room), I also stream online radio sta­tions the same way. I use the BBC’s iPlayer ser­vice, I down­load and play­back videos from Bit Tor­rent, I use it to screen XVID films friends give me, or even just to play­back videos I’ve shot myself. It gets used a lot. I mostly con­trol the Mac Mini with a remote con­trol, or I use OS X Screen Shar­ing to remotely use con­trol it from the iMac.

My iMac is a pow­er­ful com­puter, I use it to edit video and I mainly use iMovie. I also record my own music, using Logic Pro and a host of exter­nal toys and musi­cal instru­ments that con­nect to my iMac with ease

Once I’ve done every­thing I have to do on the iMac, I might move over to the sofa with my iPad. I surf, use Twit­ter, keep up with my RSS feed, all in a relaxed, com­fort­able way, but that’s not all I’ve done with it. I’ve also used it to edit video, write blog posts and record music. Some of the music pro­duc­tion apps I have are truly amaz­ing, espe­cially Apple’s new Garage­Band app. Its easy to lose hours of your day just play­ing around with it. I’m also a secret Angry Birds HD addict, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.

My iPhone is always with me and I use it for so many things, its really a Swiss Army Knife of a gad­get. Its my cal­en­dar, my con­tact book, my mobile Twit­ter machine, RSS reader, inter­net browser, still cam­era, video cam­era, music player, film and video player, nav­i­ga­tion device, com­pass, photo edi­tor, video edi­tor, news por­tal, note taker, audio recorder, gam­ing device, clock, weather cen­tre, torch, hand­held track­pad for my Macs, email client, ref­er­ence library, text mes­sage device, oh and its a tele­phone and video­phone too! It does even more than that, I’m just run­ning out of steam think­ing of it all.

My point to all this tech his­tory is that none of this was pos­si­ble 7 years ago, 2 of the devices I just men­tioned couldn’t have even been imag­ined then.

In 2005, I had a run­ning joke here about my brand new all dig­i­tal lifestyle, right around the time I bought my first iMac. Its no joke today, my life truly is all dig­i­tal. So’s yours. So is everyone’s.

They like to describe all this as “dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy” and that’s a pretty accu­rate term, as long as you don’t see dis­rup­tion as a nec­es­sar­ily bad thing. I don’t buy CDs any more, I don’t go to record stores any more, because that indus­try has been dis­rupted by the ease and avail­abil­ity of music down­loads. If you own a chain of music stores, you’re not going to like this sort of dis­rup­tion, but if you are a keen media con­sumer, you’re prob­a­bly pretty happy about it.

Tech­nol­ogy isn’t the only thing that’s dis­rupted my life in the last seven years, there’s also been some ill­ness and some death. When it comes to dis­rup­tion, noth­ing else comes close.

Both of my par­ents passed away since I started this web­site. My father was already ill when I started it, and his can­cer fea­tured fre­quently back in the day. Some­where, in the archive, is a post called “Dad’s piss­ing blood again” and I’m sur­prised it didn’t win any awards. He died before this blog was a year old.

My mother crossed over to the great beyond at Christ­mas, two years ago. Noth­ing fills you with the hol­i­day spirit like a bereave­ment on Xmas eve, and that applies to the future too, Xmas will now and for­ever be a reminder of her death.

While my mother had health prob­lems for years, her sud­den death was unex­pected. My father died slowly over the course of a year and we pretty much knew when his death was com­ing to the day. I last spoke to him two days before he died and I got to say good­bye. I didn’t have that chance with my mother.

I’ve become old in the last seven years, at least in my head I have. In my head I’m not 48, I’m “push­ing 50”. One of those posts I haven’t writ­ten is enti­tled “My unhealthy obses­sion with death” and I will get around to writ­ing it, mainly because I’m hop­ing that spit­ting out a life time of death obses­sion might help me move past it. Or not. Who knows.

Blog­ging is like ther­apy for me some­times, its a good way to try to work shit out.

I don’t really think I will ever work out my weird obses­sion with death, specif­i­cally my own. I’ve imag­ined my moment of death so many times, in so many ways, yet I know that none of it has prob­a­bly come close to what­ever hor­ri­ble fate awaits me, as it awaits us all.

Keep an eye out for my death post, it will be a cheery lit­tle num­ber, guar­an­teed to lift your spir­its and make you want to do a happy dance down the street.

The truth is that I feel expend­able, dis­pos­able and irrel­e­vant because I am get­ting old. Maybe that’s nor­mal. Maybe there’s no such thing as normal.

I can feel my body break­ing down, I dis­cover some new ache or pain on a daily basis. My joints creak, my mus­cles throb, my bones ache and I’ve been diag­nosed with a long term health prob­lem that requires daily med­ica­tion for the rest of my life.

Mid­dle age is a joy.

Mid­dle age is stu­pidly named. Either you are young or you’re old. I’m old. Phys­i­cally I am, but in my head I’m still 18 years old and full of all the hopes, ideas and dreams I had at that age. Sad, eh?

I’m the same per­son I was back then, I might move a bit slower and have loads more knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, but I’m still me.

And I still smoke weed.

That was one of my goals when I started blog­ging, to fur­ther the cannabis cause. I’ve been smok­ing weed every day, for a cou­ple of months shy of 30 years. I would qual­ify my use as a com­bi­na­tion of recre­ational and med­i­c­i­nal, though its cer­tainly more med­i­c­i­nal these days.

Weed should be legal and the fact that its not shows just how mixed up our cur­rent drug pol­icy has become. Cannabis can be so ben­e­fi­cial in so many ways.

Right now, in these dif­fi­cult and depress­ing eco­nomic times, cannabis is a cash crop our lead­ers should not be ignor­ing. A licensed, reg­u­lated and more impor­tantly taxed cannabis mar­ket would be a much needed boon to the econ­omy. Instead they would rather close schools, hos­pi­tals and libraries and let crim­i­nals con­trol the mar­ket. Its as fool­ish and short­sighted as it sounds.

I’m not going to bang on about it too much now, my posi­tion is clear.

I may not be as pro­lific as I once was, but there’s a giant archive of nearly 750 posts to explore. You might learn to love me, you might come to hate me, but I’m sure you can waste plenty of time here, if you desire.

So that’s it, my weird and ram­bling reflec­tion of the last seven years of liv­ing my life online, just for you. I’m always here, just a few mouse clicks away. Come hang out with me, any time.

If the first seven years are any­thing to go by, the next seven ought to be a real gas, man! Groovy!

There are many big prob­lems in our lit­tle world here that could all be solved with some sim­ple, ratio­nal think­ing and com­mon sense.

Let’s start with a big one, admit­ting to our­selves just how prim­i­tive a species we are, even though we have iPods and Microwave Ovens and other mod­ern won­ders of tech­nol­ogy. We still remain quite prim­i­tive and rel­a­tively igno­rant of so very much regard­ing the uni­verse and our place in it.

We are extra­or­di­nar­ily prim­i­tive, more so than any­one would ever like to think. We are still a tribal race, unable to take a long term or global view of the true nature of our exis­tence or the context.

We still cling to an “us ver­sus them” men­tal­ity, we view peo­ple like us, liv­ing in the same place as more impor­tant than oth­ers, we fos­ter rival­ries and dis­sent between races and nations, rather than encour­ag­ing stronger ties based upon our similarities.

We are all the same, we are all earth­lings first and fore­most, every indi­vid­ual on this planet should have an equal worth, with the oper­a­tive word being “should”, because the real­ity is noth­ing like that.

We value dif­fer­ent peo­ple, dif­fer­ent races, dif­fer­ent classes, dif­fer­ent nation­al­i­ties as all hav­ing dif­fer­ent and unequal worth in our so called mod­ern soci­ety. We remain incred­i­bly self­ish when only self­less­ness will redeem the human race.

Imag­ine some space aliens arrived, imag­ine them any way you like, as long as they seem real and some­what ordi­nary, because chances are intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse would be both of those things, ordi­nary and most likely real.

Imag­ine they didn’t read the fine print in their Travel Guide to the Uni­verse which car­ried the caveat to our small blue planet, advis­ing against any direct con­tact when vis­it­ing, because of our unevolved and prim­i­tive nature. They missed that bit and landed their space craft in the cen­tre of a big city, expect­ing to be warmly wel­comed by the friendly res­i­dents of our world.

Imag­ine the many sur­prises in store for these space vis­i­tors as they dis­cov­ered our planet was not uni­fied, we still believed we were the only species in the uni­verse, cre­ated by an invis­i­ble, yet all see­ing, all know­ing space god, fight­ing each other for land and oil and reli­gious dif­fer­ences. Oh, how they would laugh and mock us, see­ing us as no more than insects scur­ry­ing around in the dirt.

They wouldn’t be too far off in their brief assess­ment of our world.

I keep com­ing back to the word “prim­i­tive”, because it truly applies. Our knowl­edge of the uni­verse, of our world and our­selves is so blink­ered, nar­row and incom­plete and yet we exist in a giant state of total denial. We have no col­lec­tive self aware­ness of this fact and most would scorn me for me sug­gest­ing it.

Some­times the bit­ter truth hurts.

If we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing what lies ahead for us as a species, the start­ing point needs to be a giant col­lec­tive real­i­sa­tion of just how imma­ture we are as race, and that we con­tinue to evolve both bio­log­i­cally and socially.

Fol­low­ing that first real­i­sa­tion, must come another big real­i­sa­tion, that our knowl­edge of uni­verse is minus­cule and we know next to noth­ing about the true nature of mat­ter, space and time.

If we ever did truly under­stand the true nature of mat­ter, space and time, then most likely we could manip­u­late all three and make them bend to our will with ease.

We are eons from that point, but that doesn’t make it out of the realm of pos­si­bil­ity, it just depends upon how long we last as a species.

I’ll give you an easy exam­ple of what I am talk­ing about; the Large Hadron Col­lider (LHC) in Switzer­land, which cost a gazil­lion dol­lars (or pounds or euros, or what­ever cur­rency you pre­fer) and is the largest sci­en­tific exper­i­ment ever con­structed, is try­ing to find an invis­i­ble par­ti­cle which the­o­ret­i­cally gives mass to matter.

If that’s gob­bly­gook, I’ll try to explain it, though many of these ideas often feel unex­plain­able to our tiny, meat com­puter brains.

Our under­stand­ing of sub­atomic the­ory is so (and here’s that word again), prim­i­tive, that we can’t see what gives mass to mat­ter, because at the micro­scopic lev­els we can phys­i­cally observe, most of the struc­ture of an atom con­sists of empty space. Sci­en­tists the­o­rise that there must be addi­tional, invis­i­ble par­ti­cles that are part of the sub­atomic archi­tec­ture which give mat­ter mass. I hope I am get­ting this right, I am not an actual physi­cist, but I do play the home game a lot.

To me, this seems like quite fun­da­men­tal stuff that we are only guess­ing at, schol­arly straws at which we can only merely gen­tly grasp.

We are a long way away from any deep, mean­ing­ful under­stand­ing of any­thing big or important.

We still have no idea of the true ori­gin of our uni­verse. Again, we can and do only guess and then only to a point. Most the­o­ries start at some incom­pre­hen­si­ble sin­gu­lar­ity that some­how erupted into the Big Bang and many only start one sec­ond after the Big Bang happened.

I’m not deny­ing the Big Bang, on the con­trary, there is plenty of evi­dence to sup­port it as a the­ory, but many the­o­ries are incom­plete, or depend upon things like cos­mic infla­tion and expand­ing the­ory to fill in their quite con­sid­er­able gaps.

The term “sin­gu­lar­ity” is thrown around quite a bit in sci­ence and yet to me, it seems to mean some­thing that can’t be explained, or under­stood, so let’s just set it aside and take it as read that it exists and is a point on which we can build spec­u­la­tive theories.

Take Black Holes, which are pretty much the­o­ret­i­cal mind­fucks anyway.

There is a phys­i­cal point to a Black Hole that sci­en­tists refer to as the sin­gu­lar­ity, where all that is known about time, space and mat­ter doesn’t apply. Its just an easy way to admit our igno­rance in a schol­arly way.

The same is true for the the­ory sur­round­ing the day when our com­put­ers become smarter than we are and can autonomously design and con­struct ever smarter and bet­ter machines than them­selves. The­o­rists refer to this as the sin­gu­lar­ity as well because they don’t know what the impact will be on our world. Unless you’re James Cameron and you can envis­age a Skynet like com­puter decid­ing we are bad for the planet and seek­ing to wipe us off the face of the earth.

Wouldn’t it be pru­dent to bet­ter our­selves as a species and a race, so when that day arrives, the machines see us more of a ben­e­fit wor­thy of keep­ing around and allow­ing to flourish?

I’m just sayin’…

Per­haps we need to label more things that we don’t get with the word “sin­gu­lar­ity” and increase its com­mon usage and under­stand­ing. For exam­ple, when men col­lec­tively com­plain that they don’t under­stand a woman’s mind, instead of labelling it a mys­tery, you could say its a singularity.

Or these kids today, they are a total sin­gu­lar­ity to me. You get the idea.

Let’s take reli­gion. No, seri­ously, let’s take it some­where and dump it and leave it in the past, where it belongs.

Reli­gion is a prime exam­ple of our prim­i­tive nature that we des­per­ately cling to like a com­fort blan­ket. Reli­gion is a prim­i­tive way of deal­ing with sin­gu­lar­i­ties, by fill­ing in the blanks in our rudi­men­tary knowl­edge of the uni­verse by con­sign­ing every­thing we don’t under­stand to a benevolent/vengeful space god.

Reli­gion is the epit­ome of our prim­i­tive­ness, it is the best exam­ple of how unde­vel­oped we are, because we still allow it to colour how we treat each other and dic­tate our moral code.

When we finally tran­scend reli­gion, as we need to do if we want any hope for a bet­ter future for our species, we will need to base our moral code on more human­ist ideals.

I try to be a good per­son, not because I want or hope for a bet­ter place in the after­life, but because being good and doing good is some­thing that mat­ters to me. I care about my fel­low man and woman. We all need to find that spirit of kind­ness in our own hearts, from a gen­uine belief in the bet­ter­ment of our world.

What we don’t need to do is base our moral­ity on the fear of a non-existent god who will pun­ish us for our bad deeds.

Mur­der is wrong, not because it is in the Ten Com­mand­ments, but because it is immoral to unjustly take another’s life. We should under­stand that at an innate level, in our bones we should all know that killing is wrong.

And we do all know that, but we find ever more cre­ative ways to jus­tify killing on an indus­trial scale, all over the place. We kill with weapons just as much as we kill with our own self­ish­ness and greed. There should be enough of every­thing to go around for every­one, no one should starve or lack fresh, clean drink­ing water, yet we all know that is not the case.

We don’t view the world as one big extended fam­ily, we high­light our dif­fer­ences, rather than stress­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties. Its actu­ally amaz­ing if you think of what we all on this planet have in com­mon, yet you never hear any­one talk about it.

We all want a bet­ter world, the dif­fer­ences lie in how we all think we get there.

We need to move to a post-tribal mind­set, we need to view things glob­ally, rather than locally.

We need to care more about what’s hap­pen­ing to every­one, not just the peo­ple who are exactly like us.

We need to move to a point beyond reli­gion, where sci­ence explains as much as it can, while actively pur­su­ing answers to the things that remain unknown.

We need to put indi­vid­u­als first and agree at every level that we are all truly equal on this earth.

We need to act respon­si­bly and think in terms, not of years or decades, but mil­len­nia, because if we want to have any hope of sur­viv­ing, we need to be that for­ward thinking.

I know I’ve been knock­ing us for being prim­i­tive, but I don’t want to take away any of our already con­sid­er­able achieve­ments. We’ve worked out some impres­sive things, but we’ve only really scratched the sur­face of what there is to be known in the uni­verse. I’m glad I have a microwave oven and flat screen tv, but we can go so much fur­ther and at an expo­nen­tial rate.

I dream of a time in a time in a few thou­sand years, where we are the mas­ters of all time, space and mat­ter, where all the mys­ter­ies of the uni­verse are finally revealed and under­stood by one and all.

I like to think of the many devel­op­ments I’ve seen in my short lifes­pan, and how many more I will see in my remain­ing years.

I’ve joked before that they will dis­cover the key to eter­nal youth and longevity the day after I die. But in the back of my mind is the tiny hope that I will find a way to cheat death, even if it is only in machine form, so my con­scious­ness can carry on learn­ing about and observ­ing the human con­di­tion. Our best days still lie ahead of us and it dri­ves me nuts that I won’t be here to see it all.

Some­one reminded me recently that I used to be the northlondonhippy.

Tech­ni­cally, I am still the northlon­don­hippy, I just don’t seem to prac­tise much or preach, not like I used to anyway.

I logged into my own web­site to do a bit of main­te­nance and thought I should just say “hey”.

Hey.

Blah blah lame excuse for not post­ing, sar­cas­tic, self-deprecating joke about being use­less here. (attn subs: you think of a gag this time, you think its so fuck­ing easy.)

I haven’t even been on Twit­ter much, well not post­ing those tweet-things anyway.

I feel like I am fad­ing away, drift­ing ever fur­ther into irrel­e­vance and obscurity.

Was I any­thing other than irrel­e­vant? Did I ever actu­ally exit obscurity?

I think we both know the answer to both of those questions.

That’s how I think of my posts, in terms of the two of us; you and me.

Yes, you.

Peo­ple rarely read together any more, so I know you’re read­ing this alone. There may be some­one else in the room, many some­ones per­haps, but you are the only one read­ing this.

You’re prob­a­bly the only one read­ing this in your town, city or pos­si­bly even your coun­try, if you live out­side of the UK or the USA.

Think about that, I’m your lit­tle secret, that no one in any rea­son­able prox­im­ity shares with you.

If you think I came home from a drain­ing night­shift, or rather a cou­ple of weeks of drain­ing night­shifts and had a big, fat spliff, you would be cor­rect. If you think my deep self-loathing and abject fear are reach­ing a crescendo at this very moment, you would right again.

See, you know me as well I as know you. We’re like BFF’s, only you don’t have to buy me a card with a pic­ture of a cute kit­ten and a cap­tion that says “hang in there, baby!”

If you did, I would prob­a­bly have to dis­em­bowel you and that might put a damp­ener on the whole BFF thing.

Let’s just be BFF’s that know each other on the inter­net. They’re the best kind anyway.

You could always just fol­low me on Twit­ter and get this sort of ram­bling non­sense and dark bull­shit in smaller doses. Go on, I don’t charge much, its @nthlondonhippy — because there wasn’t space for all the vowels.

PS
Birth­day last month, blah blah blah, age­ing, get­ting closer to death, blah blah blah. Now aren’t you glad I didn’t post much in January?