From the last installment of his tech biography series:

By summer 2001, we had our business plan and our proposals and our business cards printed. We'd bought an off-the-shelf shell company, zHosting Ltd. All we needed was £600,000 and a second-hand mainframe to install in a hosting centre like SCOLocate. So we booked our first meeting with IBM to discuss leasing options, and our first session with possible angel investors ...

On September 12th, 2001.

So there you have it: the punchline to the extended shaggy dog story that is my career history in the computer industry. And now you know why I'm a novelist rather than the chief technical officer of a successful dot-com. Timing is everything - and my whole non-writing career has been one damn comic double-take after another.

That meeting was ... well, the subject of conversation was rather overshadowed by the events of the previous day. NASDAQ was closed, air travel in North America was shut down: the hammer was about to come crashing down on the tech sector for the second time in two years. We buried zHosting outside the graveyard gate only a month later, and went our respective ways; Andrew back to consultancy for a couple of years (he's now running a successful bespoke software business), and me to writing.

Well, near-future scifi anyway. From Charlie Stross' blog, on which he announces that instead of a sequel to ''Halting State'', he's working on a new ''Laundry'' book instead:

Why the switch? Well, I was just settling down to work on the "Halting State" sequel last summer when the news went nonlinear. That book is meant to be near-future SF, which means it's highly dependent on the state of the world today. It was bad enough when, as I was waiting for "Halting State" to work its way into print, bits of the plot kept turning up in the news; this time around, one of last year's major news stories ate my plot!

I think we can all be very glad that he's delayed a Halting State sequel to work on a Laundry story because the former came true in real life, rather than the other way around.

And where can I get some?

China began designing their own superhuman soon after, but didn't have the tech for Megareactor Buddha's Spine until 1990. Nominally, PRC is atheist, but the old religions never went away, and a surprising number of Chinese state scientists still think in terms of qi. The superhuman Maitreya was a subject enveloped by scanning tunnelling microscopes wired into his visual cortex, forced to meditate upon his own atomic structure until he could perceive the quantum foam of every particle of his being birthing and annihilating under the uncertainty principle. His emergence into superhumanity was heralded by the impossible light of zero point energy accessed from the spaces between virtual particles. The Chinese filled a warehouse with political prisoners and told Maitreya to kill them, to demonstrate his power over spacetime and matter. He instead fashioned them into a vast musical instrument of entrancingly beautiful tone. Then configured all the assembled soldiers and scientists into a self-supporting worm-like structure and fired them into space with/through the musical instrument, where they journeyed as a biological probe of brains linked in parallel that reported information about the solar system back to Maitreya via quantum entanglement until the structure, starting to break up, was identified as comet Shoemaker-Levy and eventually smacked into the surface of Jupiter.

That's an awful headline, sorry.

Charlie Stross has another go at predicting the future - this time, of gaming. In bullet points:

• CPU power is going to hit a brick wall pretty soon
• There's a couple of orders of magnitude of bandwidth to use up, but that'll hit the buffers too at some point ("I don't think we're likely to get much more than a terabit per second of bandwidth out of any channel, be it wireless or a fibre-optic cable, because once you get into soft X-rays your network card becomes indistinguishable from a death ray.")
• Mobile devices will continue to converge (of course)
• They'll all have picoprojectors in them
• VR glasses are actually coming along nicely
• All this leads to a lot of clever augmented reality stuff

Actually, just read Halting State.

I'm currently reading Perec's blindingly awesome Life - a User's Manual. It's um.. hard to describe. A collection of 99 short fictions, intimately crosslinked in a very complex fashion; telling many stories - four or five big ones, lots of little ones on the way; and built around an extraordinarily complex set of writing constraints, described in brief here (in French, although the Wikipedia entry tries to describe it a bit too). All in the form of descriptions of each room of an apartment block in Paris at a single moment of time in 1975. And yet, at the same time, wandering all over the world and history in the descriptions of the rooms and the people in them.

Part of the joy of it is the beauty of the writing and the fun of the stories, but there's an awful lot of fun to be had trying to figure out the systems he used...

Programmer? Manager thereof? Then read this - it's C.A.R. Hoare's acceptance speech for the 1981 Turing Award. Hoare - the guy who invented Quicksort, implemented ALGOL60 and went on to do a lot of work in the field of correctness proofs and concurrency - discusses the problems with over-complex software systems, summing up by talking about bad programming languages. ALGOL68 and PL/1 are his examples, and he uses these examples to put the knife into the then-incipient ADA standard (fun reading for anyone who went to Aber in the 80's/90's and had to learn this bastard):

...there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.

Over the last couple of years, Dan Curtis Johnson has been adding mysterious little fragments of dark epic sci-fi to his livejournal, tagged (although I didn't click at the time) lexicon. One of them I've blogged already, the lovely Old Faith of the Precursors.

Now all is revealed - he's been playing an enormous game of Lexicon with his mates - and the result is a wodge of incredible writing, in the form of an encyclopaedia with commentary, describing the futile attempts of a far future 'convocation' of religious leaders to create a single unified faith. There's a fascinating narrative - a set of narratives, really - to be teased out, by the looks of it.

He really needs to write a cookbook. Seriously:

Open a bottle of beer. Not fucking Budweiser or Labatts - a proper beer, damnit. During this experiment, I used the outstanding Black Adder ale from Mauldons. A good bitter, an ale, an IPA - a proper fucking beer, you know what I mean. Pour some down your throat. Now pour some in the tinfoil. A mouthful or so. Spit your mouthful out into the pocket if you'd like. I mean, it'd be disgusting, but the person you're cooking for will never know, right? Close up the pocket, so you now have a sealed tinfoil bag full of a head of garlic and (possibly regurgitated) beer.

Sling it in the oven. Your oven is set to 190 degrees C, which is 375F or Gas mark 5. It's going to be in there for an hour. Have some more beer. Swallow it this time, you freak.

American author, dead. Now, he's not big over here - he's one of those American novelists who write great, sprawling works that we tend not to get into over here. His most famous work, Infinite Jest, sounds interesting (though quite a lot like Vonnegut). However, what really got me was this, a commencement address he gave in 2005 that someone posted to Metafilter, probably because of its prescient (but ultimately irrelevant) reference to suicide. The whole thing is well worth a read. Here's another excerpt:

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

This story's got legs, hasn't it? If you haven't heard it, the Welsh Assembly Culture Minister announced the wrong winner at the Wales Book of the Year awards ceremony on Tuesday night, despite reading it off a piece of paper - Tom Bullough, who thought he'd won, got as far as the stage before he was told it was actually Dannie Abse. Mind you, Bullough's blog has now exceeded its bandwidth, so maybe he's got some useful publicity out of this. Probably not enough to make up for the public humiliation, mind.

I was at this ceremony last year, as our friend Robin was one of the contenders, and I remember thinking it was unusual in being one of the few awards left where the winners didn't know in advance. I had no idea that not even the presenter knew either - I'm sure that'll change now.

But what on earth did that card say? "The winner isn't TOM BULLOUGH! He's one of the runners-up along with Nia Wyn. The actual winner is Dannie Abse."

Because of a computer problem, Warren Ellis hasn't been able to update his (excellent) free weekly webcomic, Freakangels, this week. So instead he wrote a little note explaining this, and tacked on the end as a bonus was this answer to an old FAQ:

I still get asked with appalling regularity "where my ideas come from."

Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you've got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you've got what's called "an idea".

And for that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It's what keeps you going. It's the wild rush of "shit, did I think of that?" with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It's ten past two in the morning, and I'm completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it's the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That's how it works.

It's just a little bit of twittering from a mobile phone, but this is why we love Warren Ellis:

Unerring Pub Sense brings me to the platz at the top end of Karl Johans Gate, where I now have an outside table, cigarettes, and a glass of the local energy muck, Batteri. Cloudy and cool - a lot of people acting like it's early summer. Folkie-hipster dude in an unfortunate hat is trying to sell a plastic-wrapped magazine to passersby. Quite a few tourists: Germans with insane moustaches, Danes in waterproofs, a shivering Japanese couple, an enormous black man in pink shirt and powder-blue tanktop photographing everything in the square. A plalanx of six women working the square with flowers, crooning "Romani. Please give. Romani." They have hard eyes, years past the point where you just resent people for having coins in their pocket. A lone military officer strides past, wearing one of those peculiar caps with the tassel hanging in front. The back of his shaven head prickles with the chill wind now driving into the square.

That is just a perfect vignette.

A pattern language for personal websites. Possibly useful, I don't know, I don't have time to read it just yet. Possibly a bit out of date :)

Formulary for a New Urbanism by is the Situationist work by Ivan Chtcheglov in which Tony Wilson found the phrase which inspired his choice of name for Factory's famous nightclub. Both beautiful and beard-strokingly pretentious.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That's all over. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.

The hacienda must be built.

Lovely weekend in Shrewsbury, staying in the charmingly slightly shambolic Lion Hotel. Then again they were under a lot of strain with Christmas parties - particularly the Friday night when some character called Luke, dressed like Austin Powers, kept staggering around shedding vomit and electronic gadgets with alarming regularity. He had to be ejected from the place several times.

Lovely place though, with a pleasantly seasonal Dickensian vibe, and a very good place to just unwind and have a quiet read in the lounge - in this case, the slightly over-hyped Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. It really is worth the hype, though. Marvellous, clever, thoughtful, rollicking roller-coaster of a story. Jorge Luis Borges meets John Buchan.

A quote from the Russian writer/critic Viktor Shklovsky, found in this post about Zamyatin:

You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours - ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands.

If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed.

There's an interview with the Wizard of Northampton in (of all places) the Telegraph, about (of all things) Lost Girls, his pornographic magnum opus with Melinda Gebbie. The interviewer is Susannah "Norrell and Strange" Clarke, although her style is fairly transparent in this piece (thank heaven), and there's even a helpful list of Moore quotes at the end, and this isn't from that section:

I did Voice of the Fire, which was set in the county of Northamptonshire. But with Jerusalem, I thought that that was probably far too cosmopolitan and far-reaching and that I ought to concentrate upon a couple of square blocks of Northampton, where I actually grew up. This is a half-million words, so the next book is obviously just going to be a couple of million words long; it's just all going to be about one end of my living-room. I suppose it's having started out with fantasies about the farthest reaches of space and time and the human world, I suppose it's a gradual realisation that the actual place where I'm sitting is about the most fantastic spot in my universe.

From Dan Crisper, posted on Tuesday:

Sometimes, I still wake up in the middle of the night with that horrible image replaying over and over in my mind, of the second plane crashing into the Archduke, and the immediate realization that the Continent would never be the same.

Dan Crisper has done it again, with a wonderfully inventive cultural archeology of the next thousand years or so, viewed from an unimaginably far future:

Originally worshippers of simple Nature, protohumans recognized the existence of, and divided their Universe into, four primal Elements: Energy, Gas, Liquid, and Solid. It was their belief that these "elemental states" represented a progression or procession of "refinement", from lowest Solid to highest Energy, to which all materios should aspire - and through which, if left to its own devices, all existence would invariably descend. It is important for the reader to understand that this was not merely a metaphorical model for personal self-improvement, as it so clearly appears at first glance. No, the Ancients actually believed this was how molecules worked. To be fair, they recognized the existence of shades and nuances within this simple structure, and they did apply fairly sophisticated rituals to its philosophical exploration. And before one dismisses this proto-belief out of hand, be aware that application of this simple model was sufficient to get them to the culminating revelation of Elementalism, the fission reaction, that process by which (in their eyes) crude, banal, degraded Solid could be transmuted instantly into bright, enlightened, perfected Energy. This direct experience of the divine as they understood it was so profound that, in their first wave of interplanetary transit (so far as we can determine) they predominantly relied on atomic drives, forgoing any number of obviously superior alternatives, carrying their precious Transmutative Process with them like a superstitiously-held good-luck charm.

And after that it gets really strange, culminating with the fantastic pantheon of Old Precursor Paganism:

Vortosk - God of Time, Inventions, and Absence. Patron of Scientists and all who have lost something. According to myth, entirely lacked outward-facing senses of any sort. Followers typically practiced potlatch-charity and self-amputation.

Things to read later: How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later by Philip K. Dick. Lovely essay on the man over at Suicide Girls (I only go there for the articles) by Warren Ellis.

Good news for the world of fantasy literature! David Eddings has accidentally burned down his office. He threw a lit paper onto a puddle of what he thought might be petrol, to see if, in fact, it was. It was. Take a look at the picture of him, too. Blimey.

Famous Welsh poem: Rhyfel ("War") by Hedd Wyn. This poem, written on the Western Front in 1917, won him the Eisteddfod chair. By the time of the competition he had been killed at Passchendaele. Born and raised near Trawsfynydd, he was a young farmer, one of two brothers and a committed pacifist. When he found out that either he or his younger brother would have to fight, though, he immediately volunteered to save his brother. A film's been made about him.

Gwae fi fy myw mewn oes mor ddreng,
A Duw ar drai ar orwel pell;
O'i ol mae dyn, yn deyrn a gwreng,
Yn codi ei awdurdod hell.
Pan deimlodd fyned ymaith Dduw
Cyfododd gledd i ladd ei frawd;
Mae swn yr ymladd ar ein clyw,
A'i gysgod ar fythynnod tlawd.
Mae'r hen delynau genid gynt
Ynghrog ar gangau'r helyg draw,
A gwaedd y bechgyn lond y gwynt,
A'u gwaed yn cymysg efo'r glaw.

My translation:

Woeful I am to live in such a harsh age,
With God ebbing on the far horizon;
Behind Him is man, both lord and commoner,
Raising up his brutal authority.
When he felt God disappear
He lifted up his sword to kill his brother;
The sound of battle is in our ears,
And its shadow on the poor cottages.
The harps that once were played
Are hanging on the branches of those willows.
The wind is full of the screams of the boys
And their blood mixes with the rain.