Sums up my life better than anything else could right now, I feel.

I became nonsexual and my body felt inside-out - covered with ice and carbon and plywood like the abandoned mini-malls, flour mills, and oil refineries of Tonawanda and Niagara Falls. Sexual signals became omnipresent and remained repulsive. Accidental eye contact with 7-Eleven grocery clerks became charged with vile meaning. All looks with strangers became the unspoken question, ‘Are you the stranger who will rescue me?’ Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes.”

- Generation X, Douglas Coupland

I’m looking forward to being able to work on my own code again. Working has given me a bit of an appreciation for programming in .NET, I’ve got a lot of PHP I’d still like to learn, and it’s on the cards to start picking up Ruby On Rails fairly soon. Fitting so many languages around learning new ones at university will be a challenge, but hopefully I’ll have a little more time to fit personal projects around university than I have around full-time work. The only things I’ve really had time to do are to get my own VPS (loving being with Slicehost) and setup a landing page for Spen Valley Securities - but I’ve got a list a mile long of things I’d like to do… bits of code, proof-of-concepts, sorting out all my photos, etc.

I’ve got a week off before I start university. I head to Trevelyan College at Durham University a week tomorrow, and barring the inevitable drinking/meeting people/getting lost that will take place, the lectures (and fun, hopefully) will start the week after. According to various colleagues at work it’s possible to have a great time and get a first - although strangely no-one seems to be able to offer up any examples of people who’ve done it!

I’m going to find some time to blog this week in between packing and tying up the loose ends - but I’m a week away from a fairly major change, so if I’m ever going to blog now will be the time.

I got AAB in Computing, Law and Music Technology respectively in my A Levels. I’m heading off to Durham University, which was my first choice, to study Software Engineering at Trevelyan College. I’ve been chatting to people who are going and I’m really looking forward to it. We’re one of the later universities to start, many people seem to have gone or be leaving already.

My life has settled into a hub of rotating around my job, planning for university, and music. It comes at the expense of some things I’m missing right now - I haven’t read a book in weeks, or touched my piano much, but I’m caught up in the middle of a fast-paced job in a fast-paced industry that’s my main hobby too.

Work has been one of the most intense and rewarding things I’ve done in a long time. I’ve learnt a lot and made some great friends, and honestly worked on projects where I’m proud of the outcome. It’s the motivation that’s been missing from education - not a monetary gain, but the realisation that something you’ve done is being used, that whatever the bugs and issues with a piece of code it actually has a raison d’être… which in turn seems to give development itself a purpose.

It’s going to be a pretty crazy few weeks (not like the last few haven’t been akin to some sort of rollercoaster) getting ready to leave, but this is the next challenge. It’s been a long seven years, and for the first time in memory I’m starting to think I’m making something of myself. This is a temporary position; a stepping stone, but the main purpose is to reach the “end goal”. That’s quite a while away.

For now, the purpose is getting as much out of this as I can, and getting ready for the next adventure.

In short, it feels like something removed from a Douglas Coupland novel.

First and foremost, I’ve never really been one to shirk work… I can procrastinate a little, but if there’s something I’m vaguely interested in, I’ll leap in with both feet. Most people I was at school with seem to be able to make the summer disappear perfectly well - with going on holiday, seeing people, and just passing time - which would probably allow me to be consumed by jealousy for my 6am mornings and rolling back in at 6-30pm that working full-time entails.

It’s so completely different to school it will probably only make sense to someone who left very recently. With all the will in the world, eventually you give up putting the 100% effort in at school; after 7 years of compulsary education, with everything winding down, there’s just really no point. With work, you just don’t get the option - there’s no “down-time”, no saying you’ve had enough, and, if you’re stupid like me, no breaks between 9 hours staring at a screen either.

The reason this is such a big deal at the moment is because the complete contrast is shocking - and will be again, I feel, after university (which I get the impression gives you even more free time than school to fill) - but that’s not what makes work difficult.

School was pretty hellish for a lot of the time I was there. Personally, the end-game has always been trying to get out of there in the best state possible, and my internal motivator is now pushing me harder than I’ve ever done before… simply because I’ve got to prove that without the backup of being in a closeted environment, I can survive. After all, if something goes wrong, I’m only there a few months, right?

At school, my dyspraxia was something which most teachers and all of my friends, by the end of school, were aware of. Allowances were made for me - most people could recognise when I was out of my depth and would forcibly stop me. People would make me take breaks so I didn’t sit for hours staring at the same screen - besides, the environment was never conducive to it.

In contrast, I’ve told no-one at work. It’s a much more adult atmosphere, male-dominated as most of the technology industry is, and I think the reactions from a lot of people would be… “well, what’s your problem?” I sometimes say it’s more unfortunate to have dyspraxia than dyslexia (which my Dad has, rather badly), simply because everyone and their dog understands dyslexia now. Sure, it’s still more complicated than everyone makes out (I’d love to see how my Dad’s inability to remember anyone’s name he hasn’t met about 50 times equates to “not being able to spell”), but the basic premise is acknowledged by most people.

Most people don’t understand dyspraxia. The best way I have of describing it in passing (this is owed a long blog entry at some point in the future) is that it causes co-ordination difficulties, but you still can’t encapsulate the loss of short-term memory, the difficulty in picking concepts up unless they’re explained to you over and over again, and the need to just sometimes “escape” from an environment.

Today, in a loud well-lit office, the flourescent light over my head was flashing. This makes my head go absolutely crazy. The best way I’ve got, in a sentence, to describe day-to-day life at the moment, is “trying to do my absolute best, in an environment full of people more intelligent and more confident than me, while struggling with co-ordination difficulties and trying not to reject the environment entirely.”

I’ve grown out of the feeling that this is something that will improve as I grow up - it’ll just stay as it is now, and I will find ways to deal with it. The hardest thing about adapting to work, though, is that you can’t just explain this to colleagues and managers (perhaps I’d be surprised about my thoughts on the male-dominated industry being uncaring, but then again, perhaps not), and so…

I never knew trying to do the best work you could, and trying to make yourself better, would be the difficult route. I’m hoping in the long run, this will be worth more to me, and be more rewarding in terms of what I learn and the experience I gain, than just doing nothing all summer would have been.

I’m not sure I believe it yet.

Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.

- Gustavo Duarte

When someone mentions a technology “startup”, I’m drawn to thinking of two guys slaving away over lines of code, ending up with something pretty and usable that just catches on. I think this seems to be the basis for many of the recent - and not so recent - success stories: Twitter, last.fm, Facebook - going back to LiveJournal and even Google. There’s a difference from the old companies - Apple and Microsoft, for example - because all the ‘new’ companies seem to be moving with the changing times, and are providing web services; a realisation that simply wasn’t available ten years ago (okay, Google were and will be ahead of the times, but it was a long time before they started moving away from just search).

The difference seems to be that the so-called ‘new’ companies don’t appear to be started by people who have a particular fundamental element of business sense, but rather those who see something that can be done - and then just do it. Paul Graham, who runs a VC firm for startups, says:

There’s nothing wrong with being unsure. If you’re a hacker thinking about starting a startup and hesitating before taking the leap, you’re part of a grand tradition. Larry and Sergey seem to have felt the same before they started Google, and so did Jerry and Filo before they started Yahoo. In fact, I’d guess the most successful startups are the ones started by uncertain hackers rather than gung-ho business guys.

All the startup companies these days, with the focus on “web 2.0″, are interested in user-centric services, and they’re all social networking focused. I went to an IT conference last year and asked one of the speakers (from iCrossing) if he felt “web 2.0″ would ever… fade out. After clarifying that I meant social networking in general, he commented that while he felt the current websites would fade out (and I agree, longlevity of a website takes a lot to be established) the entire idea of social networking was user-centric, to do with people interacting and talking to each other - which they would always continue doing.

The technology industry, especially anything to do with the web, seems to be focused on getting people to interact. That, for me, is the only real difference between the “web” and “web 2.0″ (although I’m starting to dislike the usage of the terms, there needs to be a divide) - is that the original web provided content, the “new” web allows people to interact.

And all that takes for a new company (and, to be realistic, the potential to create something that catches on very quickly) is a little idea. The technical expertise isn’t a barrier anymore - many people I know would have the ability to make something at the level of Facebook, or Twitter, (or lest I say more reliable than MySpace, as it’s written in ColdFusion…) All it takes is an idea, and to be in the right place at the right time.

If that’s all that’s standing between me and you and being the next big thing, then something’s changed. You don’t need to know how big companies work anymore to run a business. You need to know what users - what people just like you - want, and then you need to do it.

Jack’s Mannequin’s new album, The Glass Passenger, will be released in September 2009.

'The Glass Passenger' album art

Track Listing
Crashin’
Spinning
Swim
American Love
What Gets You Off
Suicide Blond
Annie Use Your Telescope
Bloodshot
Hammers and Strings (A lullaby)
Drop Out – The So Unknown
Orphans
The Resolution
Caves