The title of this piece is a quote from the late, great American brainy bugger Gore Vidal.  I’m not sure how seriously I actually believe it, but a little pang of…something…went through me yesterday when a friend contacted me to tell me that a novel he’d written (and that I was lucky enough to read in manuscript form) was now fully completed and ‘out there’.  So, before we go further – check out ‘The Ironlane Detective’ by Paul Witham.  Congratulations Paul – you deserve it and I wish you many sales and the beers will be on you!

Don’t get me wrong – I’m lucky to know a lot of very creative people – film makers, craftspeople, writers, musicians, software developers, radio presenters, gardeners, woodworkers, painters, actors, comedians – and I love hearing from them as to how they’re getting on.  It’s just that….well….I don’t seem to have the knack myself.  I have the odd creative splurge every now and again, but it never seems to blossom in to the creative outpourings that many people I know achieve.  Which is odd because in my 20s I turned out books by the box full and articles for the technical press by the dozen – of course, that was in those glorious, pre-Internet days when there were definitely fewer distractions for those of us with butterfly minds!

I think that that is my problem – focus!  I know that when I do set my mind to something I can get it done.  I’m often reminded of Dr Johnson’s comment “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” with regard to my way of managing myself.  I need to be prodded!

As I mentioned in a previous post about Facebook’s purchase of the Instagram mobile photo-mangling application, there is a long and proud tradition in software and Internet industries of companies buying technology and customers.  This is done for the following reasons:

1. The purchasing company can’t be arsed to write or isn’t capable of writing the software being purchased.
2. The purchasing company hasn’t time to wait to write the software or acquire the customers – it may have a pressing deadline…oh, like an IPO?
3. The purchasing company just wants to knock a possible competitor out of the game – exemplified by ‘Bill Gates’ in an episode of The Simpsons where Bill tells his henchmen to ‘buy Homer out’ by kicking his desk over…

In this particular case, Facebook score all three scales – they have an upcoming IPO which will go better if they’re seen to have a big handle on the mobile social media market, they’ll get 35 million new customers and they knock out a potential competitor, all for a billion dollars, which probably looks like a cheap price to the Facebook management right now.

While I was writing that last post, it struck me that the approach taken by Facebook is rather like the Borg in Star Trek; “We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”  Whilst Facebook and similar companies aren’t currently replacing bits of our bodies with technology and absorbing our individuality in to some sort of mindless collective, their effect on the high tech industrial sector is awfully similar.

Where’s Species 8472 when you need them?

I’d been expecting – or should that be suspecting – it for some time but we finally do appear to be in the grip of an Internet Boom to match the real world bust.  When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars – it was back to the good old days of 12 or 15 years ago when money flowed like water and barely a day passed without some new high point in purchases, sales and IPO prices.

So, here we go again.  On a professional level, this purchase doesn’t make much of a difference to the IT world that I inhabit these days.  Much of my work is IT ‘gruntsmanship’ where I’m more worried about referential integrity in a database than I am about making my picture of my cat look ‘interesting’.  Of course, Facebook’s real intention in buying Instagram is probably two-fold – get a chunk of technology that can help them leverage their way in to a more viable mobile presence, and get a potential (albeit relatively small at the moment) competitor out of the picture.  There’s nothing new with this approach – Microosft and Google have both adopted similar approaches at different times in their history.  It’s very much part of the tech playbook.  The sheer size of the deal seems a little crazy and what makes me think ‘bubble’ – a billion dollars in one form or another for a glorified set of Photoshop filters?  Come on….

I’m afraid that I just don’t ‘get’ Instagram – it reminds me too much of the very early days or Desktop Publishing, when everyone went crazy with fonts and created documents that didn’t educate, entertain or inform but simply screamed ‘The bod who wrote me has a new Desktop Publishing Package.’  Lots of photos, all looking the same…so much for creativity.

So, we’ll see what happens next.  The Facebook IPO will be the ‘market maker’ for this new boom, and will also probably flag the high water mark.  On a personal note, I’d like to make soem money out of this boom having missed out on the previous two – I’m a cheap date, have good ideas and am known to work for peanuts – anyone wanting to give me money, I also have some old rope in the garage…

The little grey cells are still going through the mill here at Pritchard Towers as I try and work out who it is I’m going to be voting for on Thursday morning.  Actually, I’ll be voting twice – local election and General Election – and it’s probably safe to say that I’ll vote for different parties in each election.

In a previous post here on Joe’s Jottings I commented that negative voting is not the way forward, and I’m still maintaining that viewpoint.  My current approach is to look at the policies that each party is offering, and the record of the parties in terms of ‘What they say against what they do’.  The policies that matter to me are going to be very different than those that matter to my friends and colleagues, and the general confusion that all of us seem to be having this time around is reflected in the closeness and volatility of the opinion polls, and the intense and occasionally bad-tempered debate and discussion that I’ve witnessed between party activists and leaders in the media and amongst people who I know who are usually pretty much apolitical.

Passion is politics is good – provided it’s positive and focused and not just a knee jerk – ‘Against x because of who they are’, as I said here.   When there is passion and nowhere to focus it, that’s often when the extremists manage to score points by creating policies designed to harvest the strong feelings from people who feel ignored and disenfranchised by the major parties.  I have no doubt that any significant gains by extremist parties within the UK in the General and Local elections will be based on the harvesting of negativity rather than on affirmative votes for the policies they offer.

The question remains for a lot of people – who to vote for, when none of the major parties seem to offer what we want in it’s entirety.  Whichever party gets in, I’m not convinced that there will be significant differences in the what happens in the UK in the next few years.  One party’s cuts may be deeper and more rapidly applied; another party may spread the pain.  Whatever happens, that pain is going to have be endured unless the Government of the day is happy to allow the IMF to influence the policy of the government as it is now doing in Greece (and is likely to soon find itself doing in other Eurozone countries).

So, what to do.  First of all, I’m going to vote for whoever will do the least long term damage, with particular relevance to the policy areas that matter most to me – civil liberties and personal freedom, sustainable and environmentally sound economic development and a reduction is state interference with people’s day to day lives.

Then, I’m going to continue to stay involved with my community ‘on the ground’ by working with community groups to make lasting, sustainable improvements to my community.  I’m not bothered about the politics of those I work with – I would just like to think that we’ll all be working for the long term benefits of our communities, rather than political parties.

Who knows – analysts have already said that whoever gets to make the decisions for the next year or so may well be out of Government for several years to come.  Perhaps we’ll see massive cowardice from whoever is elected, in that they’ll put party before country.  I hope not. 

What’s best for the UK?  A hung parliament, perhaps with some electoral reform, might be what we need to make a further long-term improvement in the political processes of the UK – the rise of ‘Independents’ in Parliament, who are loyal to know party but will vote for what’s best for their communities.