Laurie Penny Rules

Laurie Penny’s “I’m With the Banned” is the best piece of political journalism I’ve read since Hunter S Thompson died.

On Corbyn, Electability, and Compromise

The other night we watched Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film about the US president. It covers just a few months towards the end of the civil war and his life, during the time when he was trying to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution through the House of Representatives (the Senate having already passed it). That’s the amendment that outlaws slavery.

It was dramatised, of course.1But what struck me, and what held resonances with our current situation, was the sheer amount of compromising he had to do.

Then I read an article on Vox about Hillary Clinton, which included this:

politics, as Clinton never tires of reminding audiences, is about getting real things done for real people.

This is the problem that Labour is having now. Whether it’s Jeremy Corbyn’s fault or that of the MPs not backing him, in Labour’s current position it has no chance of getting into government. And if we don’t get into government we can’t do those “real things” for “real people.”

However, I’m far from being convinced that Owen Smith, even if he were to be elected as leader, would put us in any better a position. As well as being largely unknown in the country, he has what looks a slightly shady past, with his lobbying for Pfizer and speaking against the NHS. Though to be fair he rejects any talk of privatisation now.

Corbyn is constantly criticised for not building bridges, not reaching out to people within the party – even within his cabinet, as I linked to the other day. I think it’s fair at this point to say that he is at fault to some degree on the Remain campaign. And I’m certainly unhappy with his call, early on the day after the referendum, for Article 50 to be invoked immediately. That does strongly suggest that his support of the Remain campaign was only ever half-hearted at best.

But even if that’s all true, it doesn’t mean he is solely or even mainly to blame for the disastrous result of the referendum.

And the ongoing, slow-motion disaster that is besetting the Labour Party is at least as much the fault of the plotters. In particular, their behaviour at Prime Minister’s Questions the other day was disgraceful. Their point – renewing Trident was party policy, so the leader should not be speaking against it – was a valid one, but the floor of the House of Commons during the most important event of the parliamentary week, is not the place to argue about it.

The idea of Britain still being a nuclear power, and the doctrine of deterrence, are even more ludicrous now than they were during the 80s when I was a member of CND. But like I say, there’s a time and a place to have that argument, and it’s the party conference.

Maya Goodfellow has a great piece about it all in The Guardian:

The coup itself is unique in recent times, but Labour’s navel gazing is not.
…
The tribalism that grasps the Labour party is part of its problem. There’s an idea among lifelong supporters and MPs that you’re born Labour, you call the party your own and you will never leave it. This makes some sense – these are people whose families for generations have been Labour members, who spend their weekends canvassing and invest all their spare time, emotional energy and money into the party. They want to feel they have control over it.
…
But it [the tribalism] is also partly responsible for the current divisions. The people who feel entitled to call the party their own have competing viewpoints; some of them want to see a leftward shift and others range from wanting Miliband 2.0 to the rebirth of Blairism.
…
The idea too often seems to be “Vote for Labour because we aren’t the Tories”.
…
Instead of slinging insults at opponents or branding them all Blairites, Corbyn supporters would do better to focus on the task at hand – winning a future general election.

That idea of the divisions on the left go further than just the Labour party. I thought it was well summed up by this banner that I saw on the Palestine Solidarity march two years ago: March with banner showing 'CPGB-ML Communist Pary of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)'

“Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist),” it says. You can just feel the layers of splits down the years that have led it to such an unwieldy name. Splits on the left are far from new. It’s an old criticism that we spend more time fighting among ourselves than fighting the real enemies.

Or in this case, than working out how to get back into power. Because going back to Lincoln2 and his compromises, to Hillary and her desire to get things done: it’s all for nothing if we don’t get a Labour government into power.

The problem is that Corbyn is “unelectable.” Is he? I’m not sure we know that. He’s sometimes compared to Michael Foot, who famously failed to win an election. But things are very different today from how they were in the eighties. It won’t be easy, but a Labour Party that got fully behind a left-wing leader might well be in a position to win power in 2020, when the next election is due. Or sooner, if May goes to the country over Brexit or otherwise.

In the end I wonder if Corbyn’s biggest problem isn’t just handling the Media. Maybe he needs an Alistair Campbell figure (or hell, why not: a Malcolm Tucker one). Does he even have a press secretary or Director of Communications?

All of this leaves me not knowing how to vote in the new leadership election. My heart is with Corbyn, as most of his policies match my own principles. But if the MPs won’t get behind him again, then we’ll be right back where we are now, with the party not providing a useful opposition, and with no likelihood of electoral success.3

Owen Smith, on the other hand, seems more likely to fight for us to remain in the EU. But can we trust him?

And either way, what will it do to the party as a whole? A party divided against itself, or worse, a party split in two, has no chance of forming a government.

  1. Though I wonder whether anyone with less Hollywood power than Spielberg could have got a film made that was so much about talking and legal and political manoeuvring. ↩︎

  2. No left-winger, of course, though seeing the Republican Party today, it’s impossible to understand how he could have been one of its founders. ↩︎

  3. Because, I contend, of the split, rather then necessarily the leadership. ↩︎

Recent Events

It’s been a strange few weeks.

There was the referendum, and its immediate aftermath. That’s still ongoing, of course, and won’t be over any time soon.

Then there was my leaving do from work, as I’d reached the end of the at-risk period, and am now redundant, obsolete, out of work, etc. The do was good. We had a decent turnout of current and former colleagues. My boss’s boss’s boss, the one who told us the news that we were being made redundant, turned up (he is the only one of the hierarchy who is based in Britain, the intervening layers being in Manila) and paid off the tab at the time he left, which must have been about 7pm. We still managed to spend just over £250 after that, which was optimal, as there were five of us.

I got an Uber home, and accidentally discovered what the difference between “Pool” and “UberX” is. I found myself in a car with four strangers (including the driver). To be honest I don’t think “Pool” was an option when I last used an Uber. I assume the “X” means “Exclusive.”

Anyway, they were all going to Islington, which left me to snooze on to Hackney, so it worked out fine.

And then I was unemployed. It didn’t quite hit me at first, because my beloved and I had a weekend trip to Avebury, which was fascinating. Here’s a picture of some stones. And a sheep.

AveburyCoveAndSheep

But Monday dawned, and I set to with my new daily plan:

  • 8:00 – Get up, go for a swim.
  • 9:00-ish – Home, breakfast.
  • 9:30-12:30 – Job-hunt things.
  • 12:30-1:30 – Lunch.
  • 1:30-5:00-ish – Side projects (indie dev/writing).

As you might imagine, I haven’t exactly been sticking to that 100%. But the idea is that it’s going to be important to have some structure to my day now that I don’t have one imposed by full-time employment. And job-hunting can be very time-consuming, so treating that as my job for at least part of each day seems like the right thing to do.

The first day was strange, because I kept having this sense at the back of my mind, “I’m working from home today, so I’ll be in the office tomorrow,” which would have been true on Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons for the last few years. But then of course it would hit me: no office; no job.

I’m enjoying the experience, though, so far at least. I’ve managed to do pretty well with the schedule, and even extended the swimming to using the gym at the local leisure centre. This is the first time I’ve ever used a gym, except for a few years ago when I had physio after injuring my leg.1 The guy who did my induction managed to hide his disbelief of this fact quite well. And now that I’ve done a few sessions I’m thinking, “Why didn’t I do this years ago?” Oh well.

So all in all, a time of change and newness – which would generally be good, and some of it is. But see the first point, above, and the debris from that. An unknown new Tory government who don’t seem to be quite willing to accept that parliament is sovereign, and so it needs to decide whether or not to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty. And Labour too busy tearing itself apart to hold the government to account.

As to the Labour leadership business, I’ll have more to say about that when I’ve worked out what I think.

  1. I’m wryly amused to see that at that leg link from 2004 I’m expressing bafflement about people who would want to leave the EU. ↩︎

He is not a team player let alone a team leader

As I vacillate on the Labour leadership business, and try to decide what's best for party and country, I keep coming upon things that increase my feeling that Corbyn might not be the right one for the job.

Specifically today, two posts by MPs suggesting he is poor at communicating and building bridges with people.

First, Lilian Greenwood of Nottingham on how he undermined her on transport policy and the referendum.

And then Bristol MP Thangam Debbonaire’s Facebook post about the chaos around her being appointed to, and/or sacked from, a shadow-cabinet post.

And yet there’s also this article claiming that those two posts are part of a “scheme to knock Corbyn.”

What’s a person meant to believe?

Pamela Constable on her parents' WASP values

Great piece in the Washington Post by one of their correspondents whose Republican parents would have hated what the party has become:

it occurred to me that our cerebral and courtly African American president, struggling against the tide of an angry, visceral age, had more in common with this elderly WASP gentleman than did many white Republican leaders of the moment.

Source: I rejected my parents’ WASP values. Now I see we need them more than ever. - The Washington Post

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Good advice from The Intercept:

After Nice, Don’t Give ISIS What It’s Asking For

Putting the "Mental" into Governmental

This is beyond insanity: Government axes climate department - BBC News

Pokémon Gone

I am so not a gamer.

Oh, I loved Asteroids back in the day. I solved Monument Valley, and I got on fine with Alto’s Adventure. But I’ve never got more sophisticated modern games. There’s a whole big post about that that I’ll maybe write one day.

But Pokémon Go has lit up the internet for the last week or so, and it sounded kind of fun. So I thought I’d give it a try. Probably more healthy than arguing about the Labour leadership crisis on Facebook, anyway.

I was just out at the shops, and I remembered I had it, and sure enough, there was a wild Golbat outside the local supermarket. You’ve got to throw the pokéball to catch them, right? I’ve seen enough of the TV series with my kids to get that.

A hovering Golbat superimposed on a shop called 'Local Supermarket'.

But could I catch it? Could I buggery. No matter how many times I flicked up on the screen to send the ball towards it, it just would not connect. I must have tried like fifty times, standing outside the shop like an idiot.

This is why I never get into games. I soon hit upon something frustrating and get bored with them. No doubt I was doing something wrong. I’ll try again, I suppose, but it’s very discouraging.

Oh, and I couldn’t get the name I wanted. “Devilgate” was taken, but so was it along with just about every suffix I could think of, including just random strings of numbers.

Kind of cool to see the pokéball rolling off under the vegetable racks, though.

How in the World are they Making that Sound?

OK, so why did no-one tell me that Jonathan Richman -- of whom I am, or used to be, a fan -- released a song back in 1992 or so, called “Velvet Underground”? I’ve been a fan of them since long before it was cool, as you know.[^fn1]

OK, so though Jonathan wrote the mighty “Roadrunner” (and apparently was called by some, “The Godfather of Punk”, though I thought that was Iggy), he later moved to a much more mellow, quieter sound. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t always want to to be listening to the loudest stuff.1

But anyway, it turns out that there’s this song about the Velvet Underground, which is cool as fuck, as you might expect. Jonathan, of course, has been associated with the Velvets since the early days, roadieing for them and whatnot. So who better to write a song that tries to evoke the startling, shocking effect they had on people, on the music scene, back in 1966 or so?

Here’s his description of John Cale in action:

A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kinda shy
Kinda far away, kinda dignified

They were “America at its best,” he says, and who could disagree? If you haven’t heard it, it’s on Apple Music, Spotify and even YouTube, where I understand the younglings like to go.

Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer's standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind

After one of the choruses where he sings, “How in the world were they making that sound?/Velvet Underground,” he says, “Like this,” and launches into a verse of “Sister Ray.” It’s all very, very cool.

  1. Though let’s face it, we mostly do. If there was a god, and it didn’t want us to listen to loud music, then why would it have invented amplification? ↩︎

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Books 2016, 9) 

This is an infuriatingly brilliant book. Or brilliantly infuriating. It’s about the tensions between magic and science in a world where both exist. The characters are great and annoying (which only adds to their greatness). The scientists don’t think of investigating magic scientifically, even when a witch helps them rescue someone from an experiment gone wrong, which is annoying. But not very, because it’s so lovely. I predict it will win awards.

Sixty-Three Percent

Future

Yesterday was the strangest day.

Anger, of course. Sadness. And confusion: how could this happen? Why did it happen?

What the hell is wrong with people?

But above all an overwhelming sense of change. Of everything having changed, and not in a good way.

I went out for a walk at lunchtime, and it all felt so strange. What it felt like was that the future had changed.

I know that sounds odd: how can the future change when it hasn’t happened yet? But that’s exactly how it felt. Like some time-meddler had taken the future and given it a twist, so that it was off by forty-five degrees or so.

It’s not like I’m constantly thinking about the future normally, but I guess we just have a kind of background-hum sense of where things are going, and that hum stopped in the early hours of Friday, or changed frequency.

Sums

Enough of the metaphors and similes. I did some basic arithmetic. On a turnout of 72%, 52% voted to have the UK leave the EU. That means 37% of the electorate voted to leave the EU.

Which means 63% of the electorate did not choose to leave.

It’s true that you can’t really assume the desires of the non-voters. But my thinking is that the decision to leave the EU is tantamount to a constitutional change. I don’t know what rules countries with written constitutions have regarding amendments, but my guess is that they will have a higher bar than a simple majority of the turnout. A two-thirds majority, or a majority of the electorate at least, I would expect and hope.

I had this conversation on The Guardian site yesterday, wherein the people I was discussing with were saying in effect, “You knew the rules when you went in.” Which is true enough, but unhelpful. My real point is that the rules should have been different. Now we, the voting public, obviously were not paying close enough attention back in 2015 when the legislation for the referendum was passed. But we have representative democracy, and our representatives – our MPs – should have been on top of this. The referendum should never have been brought with such a low threshold allowed for leave.

I’m surprised that Cameron himself didn’t ensure that it was hard to leave. Maybe he was a secret Brexiteer.

Or maybe he just didn’t believe that the public would ever actually vote to leave. I think with hindsight that that’s where I was: in my heart of hearts I couldn’t believe that this would happen. And that is probably the root of the cognitive dissonance I felt yesterday.

It’s too late now, of course. There’s not much we can do (though there is this petition, which has enough signatures already for parliament to consider it). I wonder if someone could mount some sort of legal challenge, maybe get a judicial review.

Because from where I’m sitting 63% of the UK electorate are about to be dragged out of the European Union without asking for it (or having actively stated their opposition). And that’s not even to mention the people who aren’t in the electorate, who will be most affected of all. My fifteen-year old daughter came home fuming yesterday; her whole school was in turmoil over this.

We’re failing a whole generation if they see possibilities being closed off before they’re even old enough to to vote.

The Reinvigorated Programmer on the Referendum

The Reinvigorated Programmer has some good thoughts, including blaming Star Wars:

Folks: turn on your targeting computers. Use the facts.

Source: Let’s Take Back Control! We Want Our Country Back! | The Reinvigorated Programmer

His followup posts, about bedfellows and fear, are also well worth a look.

More Referendum Thoughts

A few more thoughts to follow on from last night's post:

Turnout

Turnout is crucial. If the majority is narrow, and especially if the turnout is low, the losing side will have a very hard time accepting the result.

For example, imagine if the vote goes 55% for Leave, and the turnout is only 60%. That means that only 33% of the electorate has said they want to leave. 27% would have expressly said they don’t want to leave, and 40% abstained.

But abstention can – and in my view should – be considered as being happy with the status quo. Yes, you can argue that it means that the abstainers are happy to go with the will of the majority of voters, but for such a major change – effectively a constitutional change – I don’t think that’s a safe assumption

So there ought to have been a requirement for a minimum turnout, and/or a majority of the electorate. In fact, for something this major, I’m inclined to think that a mandate to leave should require something like a two-thirds majority – of the electorate, not just of the turnout.

Something like that was the case in the original Scottish independence referendum – approval had to be by 40% of the electorate, not just a simple majority – though not in he 2014 one. I have criticised that fact in the past, but thinking about it now it seems right.

Parliament

Of course, this referendum will not be binding on parliament. If it goes to Leave, it’s possible that a majority of MPs could vote against the legislation that would have to be enacted to start the actual departure. That would have interesting results.

And if the majority is very slim in either direction, there will be calls for another referendum. Whatever happens on Thursday, we won’t have heard the last of this for a long, long time.

Referendum Thoughts

I have, of course, been meaning to write about the referendum almost since it was called. And let’s go right back to that point: of it being called, and why it was, and whether it should have been.

It was called, as anyone can tell, because David Cameron wanted to finally end the feuding in his party over Europe. The Tory party has been at loggerheads about it for decades. I have never known a time when they weren’t fighting about it.

So Cameron promised a referendum, thinking that if they were elected he could lance the boil, as they say. In fact what has happened in the end is that the boil has grown alarmingly, become infected, and is poisoning its host.

But we shouldn’t gloat. The Tory party in its death throes could take a lot of good things down with it.

I read one piece recently that suggested that he didn’t actually want to do this. That he made the promise fully expecting a hung parliament in 2015, and then he’d be able to say that coalition partners had insisted on no referendum.

Which may well be true, but it doesn’t help us where we are now.

The poison has spread into the body politic of the whole nation, and we are all in danger of becoming infected.

Or am I stretching this metaphor too far?

So much for that. The decision we make on Thursday matters, probably more than any visit to the polls in my lifetime. A decision to leave will be irreversible.1

Not that I think we would be utterly unable to survive and thrive outside the EU. We’d get by. But we wouldn’t be the best we could be, nor in the best position we could be in.

The EU is far from perfect, but so is the Westminster parliament, the Scottish one, and every other democracy.2 But above all, if we’re inside it, we are able to influence it – specifically, our democratically-elected representatives can – but if we’re outside, all we can do is look in.

While having to abide by its oh-so-terribly-onerous regulations if we want to trade with it.3

The Guardian’s editorial today advises us to “keep connected and inclusive, not angry and isolated,” and I think we can all get behind that, surely?

Oh, and don’t let me hear any of that “both sides as bad as each other” nonsense. The Remain4 campaign has been lucklustre, certainly, and I’d have liked to see more dynamism from Jeremy Corbyn and the rest of the Labour leadership – if only to reduce the impression that it was all about Tory infighting, or that anyone should vote Leave because Cameron wants the opposite. But lacklustre does not equate to vicious, poisonous, and lying.

“Project Fear,” they called it. I even heard one of my colleagues accuse the Remain campaign of fearmongering. But fear is not being “mongered” when we have a genuinely scary situation.

To end on a more cheerful note, if you only watch one video about the matter, make it this one from John Oliver:

  1. Well, Conceivably we could, at some time in the future, petition to rejoin; but if we did do that, it would be on quite different terms from those that we’re on at present. For one thing, we’d have to join the Euro, as all accession states do. For another, we wouldn’t get the rebate that we currently get. Loath her or despise her, Thatcher did renegotiate our country’s position into a more advantageous one. We won’t need that if we’re out, of course, but we won’t get it back if we ever have to crawl back. ↩︎

  2. And the EU is democratic, despite all the lies of the Leave campaign. ↩︎

  3. Not that onerous, and if they are they’re mostly for good reasons. ↩︎

  4. And shouldn’t the opposite of “Leave” be “Stay,” anyway? ↩︎

The Apocalypse Codex by Charles Stross (Books 2016, 8)

The latest of Charlie's Laundry Files series, and Bob Howard is being considered for promotion. To management. He has to go on a course.

As you can imagine, he doesn’t stay on it for long. And soon things are looking pretty bleak.

It’s the usual Laundry fare: magic manipulated by technology, horrors from beyond the stars, intrigue, form-filling.

It’s great stuff, as always.

A Day of Infamy

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.
From The Spectator. Something terrible did, of course, happen. I hadn't heard of Jo Cox before today, but she seems to have been a thoroughly decent person.

Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? by Paul Cornell (Books 2016, 7

Some books take weeks or even months to read. Others slip down in just a few days. This was the latter kind.

Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police series is part of a thriving subgenre now. He and Ben Aaronovitch started out at a similar time, I guess, and they’re friends, so I don’t know if they came up with the idea together, or what. Maybe it was just steam-train time. But London cops who deal with the magical, occult side of the city’s problems are very much of today.1

This latest volume picks up not long after The Severed Streets finished, and our characters are in some dark places personally and professionally. But then the ghost of Sherlock Holmes is found murdered at the Holmes museum, and a serial killer starts murdering people in ways inspired by the Holmes stories. The game is afoot, obviously, and our heroes must take part.

This is really, really, good, and highly recommended. Though if you haven’t read them yet, start at the beginning with London Falling.

  1. Though I can’t help but wonder if Charlie Stross started it all. His Laundry Files series is about secret agents with occult dealings, rather than police, but there are obvious similarities. ↩︎

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (Books 2016, 6)

I enjoyed it, but I didn't really understand it.

I’m sure I should have more to say about it than that, but really, that sums it up quite neatly.

But to try to go a bit deeper… The solar system is populated by various species or clans of posthumans, transhumans, AIs, uploaded minds, whatever. Earth is unrecognisable, though some people – seemingly fairly close to basic-human, though it’s hard to judge, with so many strangenesses – still live there.

In some ways the biggest problems with this book, and its predecessor The Quantum Thief, which I read a few years ago, is the sheer number of new or repurposed words. None of these is ever explained: you have to gain an understanding of them from context, working it out as you go along. This is a perfectly fine and valid method of storytelling, but here it all just gets a bit too much.

Maybe it’s my fault for the way I read the book: in disjointed fragments and sections, over weeks. Perhaps if I had read it in a more concentrated fashion, its meanings would have unwrapped themselves for me more easily, more thoroughly.

But at the same time, it’s the storyteller’s job to tell their story in a way that allows the reader to grasp it, to understand it. If he reader has difficulty with that, then it’s not the reader’s fault. It’s the storyteller’s.

And yet, and yet, I enjoyed it, I finished it, I think I’ll probably read the third in the trilogy, which I believe is a thing. Eventually, after some time has passed on this one,

And I’ll probably have just as much trouble with that one when the time comes.

Relaunch

If you pay attention to URLs and such -- and if you're reading this at all -- you'll be aware that my blog is not sited at the root or home page of the devilgate.org site, but at devilgate.org/blog/. For a long time the home page has been a very basic one, with just a few links to the other places you can find me online.

As of today, it still contains those links, but is a slightly more modern, sophisticated page, and has a new focus.

That new focus is job-hunting. I’ve been working at Misys for more years than I care to think about – well, Misys and one of its precursor companies, BIS, that it bought up in the 90s. And this is the first time I’ve named it in public on the internet.

The reasons I never named it before are to do with keeping work and the rest of my life separate; and more to do with the fact that, as quite an elderly tech company, it didn’t really have any concept of its staff having an online life outside of it – or even inside of it. At least until the last couple of years, when it launched a Twitter account and a YouTube channel… and the less said about them the better.

The same agedness is part of the reason why I have never contributed significantly to any open-source projects: my contract effectively disallowed it.1

And I’m making it public now – and I’m relaunching my front page – because I’m not going to be working there much longer.

Even in the teen years of the 21st century, we are not past the time of jobs being moved offshore, it seems. Well some jobs, at least; and Misys have been moving development jobs to our – to their, as I should learn to say – offices in Manila and Bangalore for years. It was only a matter of time, really.

So about three weeks ago, me and the four other remaining developers in the team were told that we would be leaving at the end of June.2 It wasn’t a shock, or even a surprise. In fact, I think we were all fairly pleased, in the end.

I’ve been expecting it for at least a year, since the last of the developers in another team were sent on their way. To the extent that I’ve been looking around, have been for a couple of interviews; because I didn’t want to be just hanging on there for the redundancy money. That would be a terrible reason for staying. And while the work was still OK, I didn’t have to find a job, so I felt I was in a position of strength.

Now, of course, I’m quite pleased that none of those opportunities came to anything, because I do get the redundancy money. And my CV is up to date, and my LinkedIn and more importantly Stack Overflow profiles are looking reasonably good.

I’m treating this as an opportunity: I’m keen to learn new things, have new experiences, and hopefully work in a development environment with releases more than twice a year, and with end-users I actually get to talk to.

So things are OK, but I am looking for a new job. So if you happen to know of anyone who’s looking for a Senior Software Engineer, or Lead Programmer, or similar, with a lot of experience in Java and various other languages (and who is currently learning Swift), then send them my way.

And I don’t mind being public about all this now, because I fully expect any company I work for in the future to have a more open, progressive attitude to its employees being citizens of the net.

Well, unless Apple are recruiting.3

  1. And, to be fair, I never bothered to seriously investigate changing that. ↩︎

  2. Unless we find other jobs within the company, which is extremely unlikely. ↩︎

  3. They are, as it happens, but their “London” site is in Uxbridge, a kazillion miles on the wrong side of town. ↩︎

I Upgraded my MacBook

And it's like having a new machine.

I have a 13-inch MacBook Pro, mid 2010 model. I bought it in about September or October 2010. Which means it’s getting quite long in the tooth. The MacBooks have come on a long way in what they offer since then. Mine had 4GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive. Nowadays they have solid-state drives by default and start from 16GB of memory, I think.

Thing is, it was still fine in most ways, but it was getting very, very slow. It wasn’t too bad once everything was up and running, but waking it from sleep meant I’d be seeing what Ginger out of The Wildhearts called the “spinning fucking rainbow” (and everyone else calls the beachball) for a long time.

Even when it was up, just switching apps could trigger the slowness. So I was thinking about upgrading. But I figured there was life in the old beast yet. I took inspiration from Jason Snell who writes of upgrading a 2009 model.

According to Apple, the most memory this model can support is 8GB. But according to Other World Computing, this particular model, though no others from around then, can actually take more – up to 16GB.

I went to Crucial, which is noted as the best site for Mac upgrades in the UK (OWC is only in the US). Its tool said it could only take 8GB. But I looked around various forums and decided that there was enough evidence that OWC were right. Plus memory is so cheap these days that the difference in price between 8 and 16 was very small.

So I took a chance and ordered 16GB, plus a 500GB SSD.

Installing the memory was trivially easy. You don’t need more than a small Phillips screwdriver to open the case, and the memory modules themselves pop out and slot in very easily.

But with the two 8GB modules in, it wouldn’t boot up. I just got series of three beeps, repeated every few seconds.

A bit of googling told me that means “bad memory,” essentially.

I tried taking it out an putting it back in, swapping round which module was in which slot, and so on, but to no avail. I put the old memory back just to check that I hadn’t damaged something, and it started up like before.

So it looked like OWC were wrong, and I was restricted to 8GB. I was considering sending the memory back to Crucial and hoping I could get I refund. But then I tried one more thing. One of the new 8GB sticks along with one of the old 2GB ones.

And it booted up, smooth as a cliche.

Of course I tried swapping out one 8GB stick for the other, to check for the possibility that one of them actually was bad. But both of them worked. So it seems that this MacBook can take more than 8GB, but not as much as 16. Which is strange, but never mind.

I’d have to say, though, that the difference in performance wasn’t obvious. But I didn’t spend lot of time with it like that, because I still had the SSD to install. That’s very slightly more involved, needing as it does a Torx screwdriver. But it’s very easy.

Before all that I had made sure my old hard drive was thoroughly backed up, you won’t be surprised to hear.

I booted up in the new configuration and told the Mac to set itself up as a new installation. It downloaded El Capitan over the air and installed away.

There was one slight glitch in this process. Something went wrong with the installation and I started getting a kernel panic on bootup. I don’t quite recall the details now, but I just reformatted the SSD and installed again, and it all went fine.

And the difference… The difference is astonishing. Even with many apps open (I currently have twelve), and a whole stack of tabs in Safari, using it is effortless. Apps switch without the slightest lag. I can start anything up with only a few bounces. I’ve hardly even seen the rainbow.

Even Lightroom, which is the heaviest-weight app I use on here, starts in under ten seconds.

In short, this is the way a computer should be.