Monthly archives: October 2006


Paper bridges

Ickle and I are sitting in urbis, waiting for the manchester blogger awards to start and pondering the possibility of paper bridges. Blue Peter sent paper huts to Africa, so it’s possible to build structures from it. Links to follow if/when I find any.

(sent to loofahs and spinneyhead simultaneously, because I can.)

Update Ickle sent me this link to Inhabitat, about a flat pack all-cardboard house.


HELP, and advice, on energy efficiency in Manchester

HELP is the Home Energy Loan Plan, administered by Manchester Care & Repair, from which home owners can get money for energy saving improvements to their homes.

Also of use and interest will be the council’s energy efficiency page, which has links to information about grants and energy advice.

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Microserfs

It’s been nearly ten years since I first read Microserfs, and it is the only book I’ve ever re-read three times. Despite the changes and technological advances of the intervening decade the setting still rings true. Insert Web 2.0 over multimedia and throw Google into the mix and you’re halfway to bringing it up to date.

The heart of the story, what really keeps it from dating, are the relationships of Dan- the narrator- and his family and friends. Trapped in Microsoft shipping hell at the start of the story Dan and his housemates slowly develop lives, escape the corporate comfort that is stunting their growth, find love and mature. The diary entry structure is shot through with emails, musings on the human-machine interface and word games (entries re-imagined without vowels or remixed by file corruption). The ending, mimicking life, is totally unexpected but somehow manages to draw on several of the themes running through the book. And it can still make me cry with its downbeat optimism.

In 1996 the BBC gave us This Life, a TV series allegedly about people my age. I could see no-one I knew and quickly grew tired of it (Attachments, an attempt by the same people to do a geek program, was even worse). Microserfs, despite being set in the, to a geek, exotic locales of Redmond and Silicon Valley, was full of characters I recognised.

Ten years on I’m still feeling some of Dan’s malaise, a fear that I haven’t managed to grow up and get a proper life. Coupland himself remixed/covered the story earlier this year with Jpod, a dark pastiche that he wrote himself into.

I want to write a story like Microserfs, optimistic but honest, about a lost geek’s travails. Yes, I know it would end up being a little biographical. After the current novel’s finished (first draft being typed up when I finish this) I’m returning to Post & Publish, my tales of a blogger from a few years ago.

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The wrong type of terrorist

When is the discovery of two men with “the largest amount of chemical explosives of this type ever found in this country”, a rocket launcher and a nuclear biological protection suit in their houses not treated as front page news? When they’re not muslim, but BNP members with “some kind of masterplan”. The sad part is that I’m not surprised that coverage of “terrorism” is biased like this.

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Mixed Messages

On the one hand, the Government is telling us that we’re all living too long and that we won’t be able to get our pensions. This would obviously cease to be a problem if either there was a mass injection of money into the system, or if people had the decency to die younger, allowing the survivors to cash in.

On the other hand, when approximately 1 in 4 Britons are helpfully eating themselves into an early grave and several million others are doing their bit by smoking, the Government is doing all it can to persuade them not to.

Am I the only person to spot the irony?