May 20 2012

Beam me up Scotty!

 

Abstract icon of Enterprise NX-01 of Star Trek...

Abstract icon of Enterprise NX-01 of Star Trek Enterprise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After the big comfy armchair that was BP, my second employer “Pentyre” was more like a roller coaster. After the comfort of a blue chip company, I was brought down to Earth with a bump when I was summoned in to an all staff meeting the week after I joined. The entire company easily fitted into a small room. I was one of 7 software developers. The MD explained that a customer had reneged on a bill and the company was in real trouble. Some of the directors were going to forego salary for a couple of months and hopefully, everything was going to be OK. Had I made the mistake of my life ?

I very nearly ended up missing out on working at Pentyre altogether. I had already accepted a job with another company, but there was a recruitment consultant who just wouldn’t take no for an answer. He insisted I visit Pentyre to see what they had to offer. So after work one evening, I turned up outside their offices for an interview. First appearances weren’t too promising – a converted factory with a tatty sign outside. I was shown up the stairs into a demonstration suite. There were various devices around the place; pagers, phones, cameras, alarms, flashing lights.

I was interviewed by the MD himself. An unassuming middle aged man called Malcolm, impeccably dressed, short with wispy white hair. He gave me the potted history of the company, which didn’t take long. After a long career in IBM, he had taken his terms and used his severance money to start up the company. He then took me through a demonstration of what their software could do. It was a dazzling display as he made the various devices do their stuff with just a click with his mouse. The inner geek in me was hooked.

He then took me on a tour of the building. At the back of the building was an area that looked a bit like Q’s workshop out of the Bond movies. There were machines everywhere in various states of assembly. On the benches there were oscilloscopes and multimeters. Propped up against one wall was something called a protocol analyser. The last time I had heard of anything like it was during an episode of Star Trek. Dominating the middle of the room was a train set. I looked at Malcolm quizzically and he nonchalantly explained that the reason it was there was to test the train radio system they were developing for the London underground.

I was mesmerised. I simply had to work for this company. As we went back up the stairs to talk turkey, it was obvious I was hooked. Malcolm asked what it would take for me to go and work there. A brief exchange later, the deal was done. I started work there a few days later.

It was an amazing place to work. The nice thing about working as part of a small company is that every single person really makes a difference. Every few months or so, there was a new assignment – usually involving some brand new technology. My first job was all about pagers. Back then, if you had a large site, the only way to keep in touch with your workforce was to give them a pager. I also developed a building management system, some modelling software for a steelworks and CCTV systems for prisons and nuclear reactors.

My time at Pentyre taught me the power of small teams working together without constraints. The productivity was amazing. There was no demarcation; you sold, designed, built, tested, installed and supported every bit of software that went out the door. Not all the technology was all it was cracked up to be. We worked on a project to detect faces in crowds. I couldn’t get the face recognition software to recognise me standing perfectly still at less than two paces. Voice recognition was similarly inaccurate being unable to determine the difference between “Chicken Tikka Massala” and “Land Rover” even when spoken slowly and deliberately.

The technology failure that has tickled me to this day was DCOM. Launched with some fanfare, DCOM (or Distributed Component Object Model) was Microsoft’s attempt at a computing model for distributed computing. In order to test it, we set up two machines. On the first, we coded a simple button with the label “Sausage” which would then send a message to the second machine which would respond with the on screen message “sizzle”. It was the simplest test imaginable and we were used to getting such things working.

Even so, after a whole morning of messing about with various different settings, we simply couldn’t get it to work. Frustrated, we went off to lunch. When we returned – there was the “sizzle” message on the second machine – we obviously hadn’t left it long enough!

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May 19 2012

A big comfy armchair

Line art drawing of an armchair

Line art drawing of an armchair (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I once asked a candidate during an interview why he had chosen to leave a company like IBM after 18 years. He told me that the company was like a big comfy armchair and that he wanted to pull himself out of it into the wide world to see what’s out there. Having worked for BP, I understood the analogy perfectly. Like most schoolchildren, I underwent a week of work experience. The teacher who was organising who was going where asked me what I would like to do. I didn’t have a clue. My aspirations varied wildly according to my whims and I had no firm idea what I would like to try.

He came up with a few options which didn’t sound particularly exciting before offering “How about office work?” I gave in more out of boredom than conviction and before I knew it, as a tender 15 year old, I found myself in the reception of one of the world’s biggest oil companies. I quickly learned I was going to work in the mailing room. Because it was all new to me, I was fascinated. I enjoyed working with people and felt mightily important when the telex alarm went off and I had to run up to the third floor and deliver an urgent message.

When it came to the choice between staying on at school to study A levels or to go out into the big wide world, I was again stumped as to the right thing to do. So almost by default I found myself staying on. After a few weeks, it didn’t really feel like I had made the right choice and I found it harder and harder to find motivation. My mum could sense what I was thinking and suggested to me that I look for a job. I knew exactly where I wanted to work. I had enjoyed BP so much, I wrote an unsolicited letter to them, citing my recent work experience and expressing a strong desire to go back and work there.

When I was invited in for an interview, I was cock a hoop. When the letter came through offering me the job, I was at school. Someone passed on the message to ring my mum at home. When she told me about the job offer, I literally danced down the corridor. A passing teacher admonished me but it did nothing to dampen my fervour.

I have a lot to thank BP for. During the 8 years I was there, I progressed from the mail room through a brief stretch in a clerical role before moving into Information Technology. Not many employers would have sent someone to college for 6 years, let alone given them a day off each week to do so. I was well trained in every respect having attended residential courses on everything from creativity to interaction skills. The meals at BP were legendary. Every lunchtime, we were treated to a 3 course meal of restaurant quality food for the princely sum of 5p. There was even a bar on premises. A heavily subsidised sports and social club offered regular trips to the theatre as well as excursions overseas.

So if it was all so good – why did I leave? I can certainly relate to the big comfy sofa analogy. To a certain extent, when you work for a company like BP or IBM, you become a little bit institutionalised. But it was more than that. When I joined BP, there were about 300 people in the systems division. When I left, there were just over a tenth of that figure after all the outsourcing, not great if you wanted a career in information technology. But if I’m really honest – the main reason for my departure was boredom. If you are writing software, oil is not the most exciting subject you could choose.

Some aspects of it interested me, like the exploration side and the huge structures at refineries and oil terminals. If you are a sci-fi fan like me, it’s very hard to stop yourself imagining them covered in stormtroopers. But when it comes down to it, it’s all about pumping around petrochemicals, storing them and changing them into other petrochemicals. Accountants joke about actuaries being boring, but I would imagine that even actuaries are quite exciting compared to the project that finally finished me.

Statuary reports.

If those two words sound boring, I really haven’t managed to convey the sheer mind numbing, soul sucking mundanity of them. When my boos told me my next project was producing statuary reports, I asked him what they were. “No idea” he said, but the government says we have to have them. And there were a lot of them. I was going to spend the next year of my life writing them. After a couple of months, I decided I just couldn’t take any more. I began to look for another job.

Those were the heady days when you put your CV out one Friday morning and by the afternoon, you would have 5 interviews lined up. By the following Friday, you would have at least two job offers. When I handed in my letter of resignation, my boss told me not to be so hasty and that he would see what he could sort out. A few days later, he called me in and offered me a big pile of cash. But only if I finished the statuary reports.

My head hit the desk with a thump.

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May 15 2012

Information overload

Big Data: water wordscape

Big Data: water wordscape (Photo credit: Marius B)

Information is the most valuable tool we have. Without reliable information, decisions can only be made on hunches. One of the main benefits of computers was that they were supposed to help us deal with information, but there are some unfortunate side effects. Partly because of our hunger for ever more power and partly because of progress in making bigger and better computers, they have steadily grown ever since they were invented in a phenomenon is widely referred to as Moore’s law.

Not only that, but devices have become cheaper and cheaper. The Sinclair Spectrum was priced at £179 at launch 30 years ago, a sum probably equivalent to double that now. That was a machine with no screen, 48K of memory and no storage. Nowadays you could have a tablet, or a phone or even a couple of netbooks all with power that would completely dwarf the humble spectrum. As computers have become more affordable, they have proliferated.

And not just consumer devices. It now makes perfect sense to use computational devices in almost every setting thanks to the cheapness and the ingenuity of the Chinese. IBM told me at impact that there are 9.5Bn connected devices in the world today growing to 20Bn in 2015. All of these devices are producing data at an alarming rate. Storage companies fall over themselves to tell you how fast this data is growing, but take it from me – it’s exponential.

The other side effect of computers is that the average human being now has the attention span of a hyperactive goldfish. Because the answer is available from Google in 0.2 nanoseconds, why would you want to read a report or a book? Twitter delivers a constant stream of news in 140 character long chunks. This means that we are no longer happy to do lots of analysis to get our answers, we want to know instantly.

So how do we make sense of this muddle?

I have always been a fan of infographics as a mechanism for presenting complex information. Ingeniously through pictures, infographics helps the reader to understand the big picture. Spatial and relative relationships are easily picked out, but detail is not. Newspapers use info graphics to great effect – especially when trying to explain concepts like exactly how much money we all owe thanks to the financial meltdown. This is a great site to see some really good examples; http://www.coolinfographics.com/

Big Data was a much vaunted concept at IBM Impact too. If you want to process the huge amount of data available today, then traditional methods are just not going to work. Reading all the data into a relational database and then running a query will mean you need a huge building to house the storage, a power station to feed the computers and half a century to wait for the result. The only way to process this data is as a stream – a bit like the water coming out of a firehose. Then you need to use something called complex events processing to look for relationships between the data.

One of the most interesting concepts in dealing with the information overload is the semantic web. The idea is that computers need to make sense of all this data themselves and answer any questions we have. This is the technology behind the Siri voice response software in the latest iPhone. There is even a search engine. It’s not perfect by any means – try searching for “Who is the richest man in France” or my personal favourite “Who is the sexiest woman” 🙂 But what is interesting is how often it does get it right.

One day – the characters in Star Trek the next generation talking to their computers will look positively antiquated – and I for one can’t wait.

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May 13 2012

I hate my job!

"Hate" cartoon, "Comics Rock!&q...

“Hate” cartoon, “Comics Rock!” Fantagraphics Bookstore, Seattle, 12/16/06 (Photo credit: photophonic)

Most people spend around about a quarter of their entire lives working, so it always piques my interest when I hear someone say “I hate my job!” The reasons for such vitriol are legion but for many people, they simply say they’re bored. Working usually involves people, so it’s no surprise that some people say they don’t get on with their boss or their colleagues. For some, they are unhappy with their remuneration or their commute. In a lot of cases, the lack of prospects is enough to turn people off their employment.

When I hear that people hate their jobs, I am intrigued to know what action they have taken. After all, I wouldn’t want to be spending that much of my life doing something I didn’t enjoy. The question catches some people off guard which suggests to me that they don’t really hate what they do (or certainly not enough). At the very least, I would expect them to be actively looking for an alternative.

Maybe they have their hearts set on a role, but there are barriers to entry. In which case, I would have expected them to have started looking into what’s involved in overcoming those barriers. If qualifications are needed for the role, then have they looked into what would be involved in studying for those qualifications. We are lucky in this country to have lots of options for part time study into all sorts of subjects at almost every level.

A requirement for experience often feels like catch 22. How can you gain experience if you can’t get on the ladder in the first place? There are often ways to gain similar experience in tangential roles or volunteer work. If you can show that you have made an effort to acquire the right experience, particularly if it’s on your own time, it is bound to strike a chord with a sympathetic employer.

Speaking of sympathetic employers, it’s well worth talking to your current employer about the reasons for your itchy feet. Most employers don’t particularly want to go through the pain of recruiting a replacement, so most will at least listen. It may be that something can be changed about your current role to make it less onerous or maybe they have a role that’s more in line with your aspirations.

Having worked for only three employers, there have been thankfully few times I have hated my job. The first company I worked for was a blue chip establishment. I stayed there for a total of 8 years, so it can’t have been all bad. I have a lot to be grateful for. They paid for me to study part time for 6 years. So why did I leave? Firstly, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was such a small cog in such a big machine, I began to wonder if it made a difference whether I turned up or not. In addition, I wanted a career in software development. When I joined the company, they had hundreds of people in such roles. When I left, there were less than 3 dozen.

My next employer was akin to a start up. With less than 20 employees and only 7 software developers, there were no concerns about making a difference. There was a very tangible link between your actions and the success of the company. The assignments were varied and a huge amount of fun. Why did I leave them? Unfortunately, the work ran out and I could see the writing on the wall.

So that leaves my current employer. I have been with them for over 12 years. It’s fair to say, it’s my most challenging role so far and I love the variety and the people. It’s also small enough to feel like you make a difference. Is it a perfect employer ?-Not in the slightest! I think I have had a handful of pay rises in the whole time I have been there. The hours are long and I have to travel a lot. The thing that keeps me is that anything is possible and that’s an intoxicating feeling.

The only thing that might tear me away is if a writing career opened up…

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May 10 2012

The commute

Sample British crossword grid

Sample British crossword grid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Alfred was a precise man and a regular commuter. As he walked up the platform that morning, his head moved with sudden, angular movements not unlike a pigeon. As if to mock him, one of those very creatures had taken the opportunity to defecate on the collar of his otherwise pristine waxed jacket. He arrived at the exact same spot on which he always stood and glanced at his watch. He noted with inward satisfaction as the second hand ticked over at the usual time.

He was of an age whereby his chin had begun its slow retreat inwards and his jowls had loosened their grip on the sides of his face. His wire rimed silver spectacles looped around oversized ears and on his crown was a thick mop of pure white hair. He glanced at the boards showing the status of the next train and gave an almost imperceptible smile as he saw that it was on time. His broadsheet newspaper was folded into quarters and tucked beneath his arm.

After precisely three minutes, the train loomed into view and slowly came to a halt. Unusually, the doors did not line up exactly with Alfred’s position and to his annoyance, he had to shuffle half a step to bring himself level with the door. The doors swished open and because few commuters made the journey this early, he easily found a seat inside the carriage. He reached inside his pocket and pulled out an expensive looking pen and turned the newspaper over to show the cryptic crossword.

He prided himself on completion of the crossword every morning before the end of his half hour train ride. Before long, he had filled out a quarter of the answers. As he looked up in deep thought about his next clue, he noted the young lady who boarded behind him was sat nearby. Coincidentally, she was attempting the very same puzzle. At first, he was pleased to see that the hobby was being taken up by the younger generation and was not about to die out. Then he noticed with unintentional annoyance that the young lady had completed half of the crossword already.

He managed to crack the next few clues and before too long, he had caught up with the young lady. He couldn’t help but glance across again. She had completed nearly three quarters of the puzzle now. She caught his gaze and smiled. He awkwardly flashed an embarrassed  smile back to her before returning his attention to the crossword.

With five minutes to go before they arrived at his stop, Alfred had completed every answer except one. As he sucked on his pen in deep thought – he saw that the young lady had completely filled her crossword in and was gazing out of the window. Even as the train arrived at the terminus, Alfred had still not cracked the final clue. He could not remember the last time he had failed to finish the crossword before the end of his journey.

Once again, his gaze caught the completed crossword on the chair opposite, abandoned now as the girl was gathering her things in preparation to leave the train. She turned towards him and as their eyes locked, she gave him another smile and a cheeky wink. Alfred’s face flushed and he immediately looked away.

He waited for her to step down on to the platform before gathering his things. He almost walked past the completed crossword before curiosity got the better of him. He simply had to know what that last answer was. With a furtive look around him to make sure no-one was looking, he picked up the newspaper. Within moments, he rolled his eyes as he realised that the girl had simply filled in random words rather than working out the answers. He smiled as he stepped from the train shaking his head.

May 9 2012

Heavy weather

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have found Steve Jobs biography to be tough going. It’s not the writing, it’s the subject. Before I started reading the book, I had no real image of Steve Jobs in my head other than his public persona. The more I read of his life story, the less I find myself liking him. I try to persevere – but it’s hard work.

So I was interested to see Walter Isaacson, the author presenting at IBM’s Impact conference last week. I didn’t really know much about him either, but it turns out that Steve Jobs is not the only subject of his biographies. He has also written the life stories of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Apparently, Steve Jobs approached him and asked why not do his biography next. Walter joked about Jobs thinking his name being the next name in the sequence after Einstein & Franklin showing a distinct lack of humility.

He argued that smart people are relatively common, but what set his subjects apart was imagination. He told the story about Steve Jobs painting a fence with his father. Confounded by his suggestion to apply as much care and attention to the back of the fence as to the front, Steve Jobs asked why – who will know? His father told Jobs that he would know. That notion of caring obsessively about every facet of his products extended throughout his career.

Walter went on to say that innovation requires passion and curiosity. Einstein’s father gave him a childhood gift of a compass. He became fascinated with the idea of magnetic fields and Maxwell’s equations They state that the speed of the magnetic field remains constant regardless of your speed or direction. Einstein couldn’t understand why this would be the case until he fathomed out the theory of relativity.

As a young man, Benjamin Franklin spent a lot of time on ships going to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean. He couldn’t understand why the journey was shorter going one way than the other. So he began experimenting by pulling buckets behind the ship and sampling the water as the ship travelled. Through experimentation, he discovered that the water in one direction was warmer than the other which accounted for the ease of passage.

Benjamin Franklin was also very open and collaborative, which Walter argued was also important to innovation. He told a story about the declaration of independence which because of my lack of familiarity with the document didn’t mean that much to me, but I assume it illustrated his point. Paradoxically – Apple is not what you would describe as an open and collaborative company but there you go.

The slogan from Apple’s famous Orwellian advertising campaign was “Think Different” which all of Isaacson’s subjects live up to.

So, will my Steve Jobs biography become easier having seen the author himself. Unfortunately – probably not. But I am tempted to try another of Walter’s books. He is currently working on a history of computing which sounds like it would be right up my street.

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May 8 2012

Shrinking the world

Long-journey

Long-journey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used to think that the world was absolutely enormous. As a child, whenever we went anywhere as a family, it was usually by bus or car. Buses are not the fastest mode of transport on Earth and neither of my parents were speed freaks, so even when travelling by car, every journey took an absolute age. It didn’t help that cars back then were particularly unreliable and that dad used to buy cars from that twilight zone between bangerdom and scrapyard. Inevitably, on any lengthy journey, the chances were that we would break down extending the journey even further.

Like most children, I was given a globe for Christmas one year. As I looked at the tiny pink specks that made up the British Isles, I used to find it incredible that it took us such a long time just to traverse our tiny island. I used to look at other places on the globe and wonder how long it would take to get there.

Easyjet and Ryanair had yet to turn the airline industry upside down, so air travel remained the pursuit of the wealthy or business travellers. Our regular trips to Ireland involved getting to Holyhead, which meant an extremely long train journey or an even longer car journey. Once you got to the ferry terminal, you had another six hour trip across the sea. It didn’t stop there – we had to then get from the port to where we were supposed to be. It felt to me like an epic voyage every time.

Back in those days, if you wanted to get a message to someone, you had two choices – by telephone (a landline naturally) or by post. I was amazed when I visited a friend at Durham University when I saw email for the first time. My friend asked me to hang on for a moment because he was in the middle of a conversation with someone in Japan. Intrigued – I watched him as he typed away on his keyboard and sent a message. Moments later – he got a response – from Japan! I was astonished.

Things have sped up so so much. How far do you think that Amazon would have come if they quoted “please allow 28 days for delivery”. Everything is pretty much instantaneous. With the power of the Internet and Google, the instant after you ask yourself a question – you can find the answer to almost anything. I can’t help thinking that all this near instant gratification comes at a price. We have ever shorter attention spans. Will people actually manage to finish reading books in the future ?

Once upon a time, when you were at a loss for things to do, you would tend to daydream. Nowadays, most people reach for the smartphone and log into Facebook.

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May 5 2012

Do you speak my language?

basic coding

basic coding (Photo credit: Terry Freedman)

When I started programming computers in the 1980s, life was really simple. Networking was in its infancy and the Internet was just a twinkle in Tim Berners Lee‘s eye. So you didn’t have to worry about communicating with other machines. There was no windowing concept, so the screen was only two dimensional. Computers tended to just be running your program so you were in complete control. All you had to worry about was lighting up the right bits of the screen and dealing with what the user did to the keyboard.

As time went on and computers became more advanced, the complexity increased. Computers started to talk to each other through something called a database. People will always argue about who invented the idea, but windows arrived along with icons and a mouse. Suddenly, the user could do exactly what they wanted and you had to share everything with other computer programs.

The Internet changed the way we think about computing completely. Suddenly computers talked to each other. No longer could you be prescriptive about what was on the other end of the conversation. Smartphones changed the game yet again. Suddenly, there were a multiplicity of devices all with different operating systems and different limitations.

Having been in IT for a quarter of a century, as you would imagine, I have worked with a large number of different software development technologies and computer languages during my time. My first exposure to programming was at home using BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). As the name suggests, it is a great starting point for anyone. The language reads almost like plain English. Contrast that with the other computer language I used at home which was Z80 assembler which is akin to programming in hieroglyphics or runes.

When I first started programming for a living, I used something called ADABAS Natural from Software AG. This was not programming per se, but more like writing down what you wanted to happen and then handing it to your butler who took it away to some real programmers who turned it into a program. You never felt close enough to the machine to really feel like you were programming.

At college, I learned Pascal, which I took to like a duck to water. Pascal is like an extremely fastidious bachelor who lives alone in a penthouse apartment. Everything has a place. Don’t even think about trying to use something before you have told me exactly what it is or where it lives. The nice thing about Pascal was that you ended up with a very nicely structured (albeit wordy) program. It was also nice to use Turbo Pascal from Borland. In their heyday, Borland provided some of the most excellent programming environments around.

Later, I started to use DBASE from Ashton-Tate which was my first exposure to database based programming. As a language, DBASE was powerful but interpreted one instruction at a time, which meant it was tediously slow. It was a natural progression to use Clipper which retained the power, but it was compiled and so comfortably faster.

I never really liked C which was like a simpleton backstreet bruiser with extremely poor hygiene. You had to be really careful what you asked him to do, because he would take it completely literally. It was very easy to machine gun yourself in the foot.

My favourite language was Visual Basic which was like a man with a van – pretty handy for just about anything. You could knock up a program in no time and copy it to another machine using a floppy disk. Because of progress, Visual Basic became more like a man with a fleet of articulated trucks all filled to the brim with specialist tools for just about any task. You could do a lot more – but the simplicity had disappeared.

I would like to teach my nephew and niece about the joys of programming, but the barriers to entry are high. I was delighted when I heard about the Raspberry Pi. This Cambridge based initiative is all about providing a simple computer at an affordable entry point. I registered my interest straight away, but unfortunately I was not alone and stocks are hard to come by.

So I settled on the Cubox instead which is a similar concept, but a bit more expensive and a bit more polished. It includes things like a case and a power supply. Maybe my nephew or niece will grow up to develop the next great leap forward to make programming even more complicated!

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May 4 2012

The big day

 

Wedding cake

Wedding cake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As she looked in the mirror, she realised with a deep sigh that it was still not good enough. Reaching for a wipe to remove the make up from her face, Alison tutted under her breath and told herself that today of all days – it had to be perfect. She glanced at the clock and gasped as the lateness of the hour dawned on her.

She tossed the used wipe into the bin where it joined several others and she reached for another. She stared disbelieving as she realised that it was her last one. This was her last chance in more ways than one. It would help if she wasn’t so damned nervous. There was a definite tremor in her hands and her stomach felt like a washing machine.

Removing the last of her make up, her thoughts drifted to the night before. Over and over, people had asked her if she was sure she was doing the right thing. It was a big step after all. As if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t been through it in her head a thousand times before. Why were they trying to put doubts in her mind?

As she started applying her foundation, tendrils of uncertainty crept up on her. What if she was making a mistake. Was this the real thing? Were they going to be together forever? What if it all went wrong? She had felt so certain before, but sitting in her bridal lingerie with her make up half applied had made it all so terrifyingly real.

She looked at the clock again and nervousness started maturing into panic. She reached for her blusher and fumbled sending cosmetics flying in every direction. There was a knock at the door. “Are you OK in there?”. It was Sarah, her bridesmaid. “I’m fine – just clumsy”. She heard a giggle from the other side of the door and with a deep breath, Alison composed herself.

The rest of her make-up went on without incident and she surveyed the finished product in the mirror. It certainly wasn’t perfection but it would have to do. She had no more wipes and no more time. She pulled on her bridal gown as best she could, and called out for Sarah to come and zip her up. As she walked in, Sarah gasped and told her she looked beautiful.

Alison blushed, but she was so happy to hear the compliment and it helped to dispel a few of the butterflies in her stomach. As Sarah struggled with the zip, Alison looked in the mirror once more. Maybe she did look OK. From outside there was the sound of a car horn. “That’ll be the driver” Sarah said.

“Could we just have a quick drink Sarah? You know – to settle my nerves.” Disappearing with a wink, Sarah returned in an instant with a mini bottle of champagne and two glasses. The champagne was quickly poured and bride and bridesmaid chinked glasses before sinking a long mouthful.

The car horn sounded again, more urgently this time. “We’d better go!” Sarah said as she gave Alison’s arm a reassuring squeeze. Alison nodded and they headed out to the car. Alison didn’t know much about cars, but this one was very impressive – paid for by her father. As the doors shut behind them, they settled into the luxurious seats.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Sarah asked. Alison nodded and stuttered that she was nervous. Sarah grabbed her hand and held it tightly. “It’s only natural – you’ll be fine”.

All too soon, they pulled up outside the registry office. Once out on the pavement, Sarah pulled Alison’s veil down into place and gave her a reassuring smile. “Let’s get you hitched!” she said. Alison moved robotically as she was led by the hand into the building. As she walked through the office towards the front, she glanced around her at all her guests furtively through the protection of her veil.

Although she had jelly legs, she managed to reach the front of the room without incident. She turned to face her partner for the first time that day as per the bridal tradition. Rebecca was resplendent in an identical gown to Alison and as they exchanged smiles through their veils, the last hints of nervousness melted away. Everything was going to be just perfect.

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May 3 2012

The games people play

 

Game designer and author Jane McGonigal at Mee...

Game designer and author Jane McGonigal at Meet the Media Guru in Milan, Italy, May 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Picture the scene. You see 3 children sat on a sofa. Each of them is playing on some sort of electronic device. What thoughts come into your head? The chances are that the words “waste of time” are uppermost in your mind. Up until 24 hours ago, I would have agreed with you, but I was lucky enough to see Jane McGonigal’s presentation at IBM Impact in Las Vegas.

Jane is a self professed future forecaster and author of Reality is Broken. She has a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. An enthralling speaker, she rattles off facts and figures about gaming and the effect on society in convincing fashion. According to her figures, there are a billion gamers in the world today. Angry Birds alone is played for a total of 300 million minutes a day by the human race.

Wikipedia has become an exhaustive knowledge source for just about everything. At the time of writing, the site consists of approximately 4 million articles. Encyclopaedia Britannica contains about 85,000. If all the gamers playing Angry Birds stopped, and turned their attention to recreating Wikipedia (assuming they had the knowledge), it would take them just three weeks.

Interesting – but why does that make gaming anything more than a frivolous waste of time? Apparently, gamers regularly experience 10 distinct positive emotions ranging from curiosity to joy. They are more innovative. More creative. They are more resilient (chiefly because they spend 80% of the time during games failing). Gamers are also more likely to help other people.

There are medical benefits too. According to a Nature Reviews study, gamers with ADHD find that their symptoms are massively diminished or even disappear whilst playing games. Gamers with autism show increased social intelligence. In clinical trials, games give more positive results than pharmaceuticals in patients with depression.

She gave the example of a game called Remission. The hero in the game fights against the agents that cause cancer. Patients suffering from the disease who play the game have better outcomes than patients who just watch the game being played. Observation or brain activity whilst playing the game shows increased activity in the Thalamus (responsible for not giving up) and the Hippocampus (responsible for long term memory and habits). If you play the game, you are less likely to give up  and much more likely to continue treatment.

During her presentation, she told us that we were going to play Massively Multiplayer thumb wrestling. As I was surrounded by 9,000 other people, I decided in an instant that I was far too British to take part in any such nonsense. When the time came, I became wrapped up in the moment and I was thumb wrestling with the best of them and I won with one thumb, which apparently makes me a grand champion of thumb wrestling! Jane asserted that we would all feel a number of positive emotions afterwards, and I did, once I had composed myself and straightened my tie.

I can’t wait to read the book.

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