50 People, One Question - Galway

And so, in the shadow of another day-surf-trip, and with a new job starting in just under two weeks - here is one of my favourite ever videos on the web.  50 people, one question, in Galway, Ireland.

One question, but an amazing sequence of answers.  My favourite answer?  6:00.

Thanks to Anna Oliwa for uncovering it.

Irish surf and nighttime revelations

Wednesday 28th Sept. looks like the next chance.  What I'd give for an accurate forecast for 2 or three weeks in advance right now.  But Thursday 18th August was going to be this chance.

I had flicked open Magic Seaweed, and checked Bundoran.  The forecast (which like any other forecast tends to become more accurate the closer you are to the time) says there will a very small swell - borderline, and the winds are going to be onshore - not favourable, as they will collapse the waves from behind, destroying their perfect shape and spreading turbulent whitewater everywhere. 

I check again a couple days before.  The swell is still borderline, but... the wind forecast is dropping.  Wednesday 17th, I look again.  The forecast winds for the very early morning are 2mph - almost nothing.  High tide at 09:30.  The board is brought down from it's ceiling abode, the wetsuit is dug out of the attic, everything is laid out, and the alarm is set for 03:40.

 

03:59.  The yawning silence of the city in the dead of night.  The board is strapped on the car, everything is packed.  Gates are quietly opened, the car is rolled back out of gear with no engine, the gate is closed again.  A quick turn of the key, and we are trundling out of the estate and across the West side of Dublin.  The only other road users are taxis.  Somewhere in the Atlantic, a low pressure system has been rotating, driving energy into the ocean.

There's a diversion on the edge of Dublin, so shortly after 4 I'm sent down a sideroad past a suburban shopping centre.  20 or 30 kids are milling about in the car park.  Yesterday was leaving cert day in Ireland, and these kids have been letting loose all evening and night.  Everywhere is closed now, but they aren't ready to go home quite yet.  Who passed, and who failed?  Who has the marks they need, for what they want to do?

Gone 5, I'm whistling down the motorway towards Kells.  The home of bestsellers.  The radio is on, the pressure of the sound helping the windows to hold back the immense weight of the blackness outside.  Every few minutes a lone car flies the opposite way, towards the big city.

Past Kells, I pass through Virginia.  In the middle of town the road forks, and on the apex sits a massive church.  I've glimpsed it before, on one of these night raids West - set back, deep in the fork, brooding in the dark.  One day I'm going to come back and check it out.  I wonder if the baby is still asleep back at home.  Did I wake him, sneaking the board out of the house at 4?  Leaving Virginia, I pick up the first sign for Eniskillen, 70km.  The other side of the border.  Northern Ireland.

Twenty past five, and I hit Cavan - home to problematic insurance company Quinn.  The whole story of what the Quinn family have been up to with the money is going to come out one of these days.  Still black, everything is closed - but looking straight upwards, there's the very first hint that the sky might be starting to turn.  It looks a bit more dark blue than black up there.

Half past five, and I'm in Belturbet.  The sky is definitely lightening.  It's amazing how quickly that happens, isn't it?  All the shops are locked and dark, and the town is dead.  I ghost on for Eniskillen, another 35 kilometres on.  2 or 3 minutes further on, I'm suddenly across the border, in Northern Ireland.  The road surface changes, alien after 8 years living in the Republic, and familiar from my youth.  The first village speed limits seem bigger than is sensible.  Is this just the first town speed limits, or were the ones in the UK always this size?  UK Radio 1 is on now, and a lightbulb moment suddenly strikes me: nighttime radio is so much better than daytime fare.  The variation!  There's some grinding driving hip hop track clattering out of the radio - raw in a way that wouldn't make daytime radio.  The journey is getting good - revelations are starting to flow.  There's something very interesting in the fact that this takes 90 minutes of driving to start happening - it harks back to the idea that I stumbled upon back here - that with repetition, the analytical portion of your brain that drives it while awake is slowly decommissioned, and something much more interesting starts taking place.  Maybe this really is the revelation that the whole trip offers - but for the moment, the important thing seems to be that suddenly I'm fearing the return of daytime radio, with the tyranny of the playlists and mass appeal.

Enniskillen is reached at ten to six.  A tiny bit of traffic, but not much.  I was out of Dublin so early that everything is still closed so no breakfast roll here, which may complicate my eating an hour before water rule.  How can you surf without a breakfast roll?  I'm thinking of bacon (this is very distracting) hesitate for a millisecond, and get owned by a Micra at stoplights.  I'm supposed to be in relaxed surf mode, so I let them go, mentally wishing them well on the way.  I'm hungry.  It's very light now, I could almost switch off the headlights.  There are still some Union Jack flags flying defiantly, a reminder of how strange things have been in the past in the North.  Left for Belleek.

Reaching Eniskillen escape velocity.  By five past six I'm racing down the side of Lough Erne.  I've raced down the side of Lough Erne before, but this time, it's very different.  The sun is coming up behind it, making the whole body of water seemingly glow with early-morning radiance.  There isn't a single ripple on the water, dead calm, a hugely promising portent.  Jaw dropping beauty that I couldn't quite capture with the camera.

By six twenty-five I'm back in the Republic, and 13 miles to run to Bundoran.  I'm a huge fan of the beach at Rossnowlagh, so I go there first.  Unfortunately, the swell is too small to be causing anything more than a shoreline ripple there, so after hanging about for five minutes, it's back in the car, and down to Bundoran to have a look at Tullan Strand.

Tullan is reached around seven, and it's beyond perfect for me.  A really small swell running, not a single person there, and amazingly, not even the tiniest puff of wind. Dead calm.

The swell is so well behaved, I spend four hours in the water.  Some amazing waves (for me) caught, I even manage to weave my way through some people at a beginners surf school on a couple of waves later on, and due to the small size I'm able to manoeuvre myself all the way outside the breaking waves (still something of a novelty for me).  This means I end up sitting, bobbing in the sea, watching in amazement as 3 dolphins appear a few hundred yards out to sea, leaping completely clear of the water, arching, stretching and diving back in, slowly leaping across Donegal Bay in the sun as I sit on the board and bob up and down on top of the water.

Now, if that's not worth getting up at half three for, I have no idea what is.

Music, Waves, and Jack Russell terriers

Having not written anything for some time, there was a bundle of small stuff circulating trying to find a weak point in my brain and escape.  Normally I'd separate them into some sort of structure and blog separately about each, but seeing as they were all in there mixed up together, they can all come out mixed up together.  It's a more accurate representation, and it's been that kind of fortnight.

Frankfurt.  Musikmesse.  It's hard to believe that it's my 15th consecutive Musikmesse, but that appears to be the case.  Juggling a huge list of companies to go visit with a sudden-onset migraine on Thursday morning was no mean feat, especially given the cloud of pulsating colours occluding part of my vision - but luckily some guy in a tiny tradeshow-shop-cum-barber outlet hidden in the Starwars-like Torhaus was able to help me out by fetching from some hidden (no doubt gimp-holding) cupboard a packet of horse choking paracetamol.  They were of a mg size that I didn't previously know existed, let alone legal, and the packet and instructions were strangely all in Spanish.  The barber assured me that 1 tablet twice a day would be unlikely to kill me, so I risked swallowing one and got on with business.

There were some cool things at the show - like Club of the Knobs (an impressive beast for sure, but where might sales come from for such a monster?), and Elektron, who are now bringing out a knob upgrade kit for the Machinedrum.  This is particularly good news, as I find the knobs a bit hard and untactile - the new rubberised ones they were showing are a vast improvement.  On the downside, us existing hardware owners have to pay to get the new knobs - bah!  It should have been right in the first place, guys.  Anyway.  Nord have the Stage Piano 2 out which is rocking, and the Electro 3 HP (which stands for 'hammer action portable', obviously).  Both units look absolutely stunning, play brilliantly and sound amazing, as is typical for Nord.  I also found Innerclock Systems, who make a range of boxes for pushing and pulling MIDI Clock, MTC and Din Sync around the place.  It's for lining up old hardware with new sequencers, but it's also solved (possibly) one of my longstanding problems with how I want to play out live... more on that in the long distant future.

 A new company called Smithson Martin have a system out for DJing on a huge transparent touchscreen.  It's called "Emulator", and is basically a MIDI controller software that sits on top of Traktor.  It's as expensive as you'd expect a transparent multi-touch touchscreen to be though, and I can't see it getting bought by many normal DJs - it'll probably find a home in huge clubs full of questionable clientele, who will appreciate the DJ show.  Less lights, deeper bass cabs if you ask me.
 

 SPL (always the home of high-quality hardware) have a new desk out, the Neos.  This thing is an analogue summing mixer, so no EQs, no aux busses, no bells and whistles - just straight line in and mixing on to a stereo bus.  The difference - it runs internally on 120 Volts, which means it can generate astonishing amounts of headroom.  I tried it, and it's really amazing - even with all the faders maxed and everything at Spinal Tap settings, you just cannot get the desk to overload.  Even more important, with everything set to stun and nothing playing through it, you can't hear anything from the outputs - no hum, no hiss, no noise whatsoever.  Incredible quality stuff, and highly recommended for anyone looking for an external analogue summing solution.

I also stopped by the Apogee stand, where they have two pretty well judged new pieces - the Duet 2 soundcard, which is a gorgeous piece of 2-in, 2-out industrial design, and the Jam, which is a brilliantly thought out Hi-Z input for iPad etc, so you can jack your guitar in with really good quality for only $99.  Very nice stuff.  This is where the Frankfurt show got really interesting, as I met by chance Sophie Kipner from Apogee, who was able to wax lyrical about the new stuff.  I'm always a fan of finding out who is who when I get home, so running through doing the job on all the business cards from the show, I find that Sophie not only works for Apogee, she runs her own blog publishing strange and interesting illustrations and verse.  Well that's more interesting than the geek dead ends that most of the business cards lead to.  Following the rabbit through the net leads to Forth Magazine, some extended reading of which leads me to the most disturbing conclusion:  there is interesting, kooky art in LA.  To think that until now all I thought of LA was a great airport, NAMM, and some character-forming experiences at Sunset.  When randomness leads you somewhere, follow it - there might be something interesting at the end.

So back from Frankfurt and just the dog in the house for a few days plus a promising swell forecast, means a one-day return dash to the West coast chasing waves.  I've tried Tullan and never really got on with it - last time I was across, it was Rossnowlagh for the first time.

 I loved the waves, although the water quality wasn't the best.  I've tasted worse - the aforementioned Sunset being a prime example.  This time there looks like a good bit of swell, 14 feet @ 12 seconds straight out of the North West, which in my amateur judgment may be a bit beefy for Rossnowlagh, and will certainly render Tullan a train wreck.  Combined with a wind which is starting onshore, but likely to swing around from the South later, the die is cast - the South wind will be crossshore in Tullan and Rossnowlagh, but close to offshore at Streedagh, which will also be a bit more sheltered from the guts of the swell.  3 hours chase across Ireland later, I walk over the dunes at Streedagh to find that I've been spot on interpreting the forecast - there are waves heaving on to the beach, and spray ripping off the top of them in a near-offshore - beautiful!  The only thing is that instead of peeling neatly one way or another, they are closing out and slamming shut in huge sections - one of the hazards of Streedagh.

Still, first surf of the year, so into the gloriously cold water of an Irish spring, followed by 50 minutes of battling with the elements.  It would have been longer, but I started to get a strange sensation after a while - dog guilt.  I didn't know that such a thing existed.  With the rest of the family humans in Cork, and the dog home alone in Dublin, it started to feel wrong to be out there.  I'm not sure if the dog needed me home, or if I needed to be home with the dog - but it suddenly felt very far away.  Something karmic was not right, and I couldn't fight the feeling - so five minutes later I was heading back up the beach, packing up and roasting off in the car.  When I made it back to Dublin, the dog, of course, was fine (if slightly desperate to get out to the toilet) - but things were definitely better just being there.  Nearly 6 hours driving and 300 miles for only 50 minutes surfing might be considered a poor return - that's how I felt at the time - but in retrospect, it was worth it.  I even attempted (just for my own personal amusement) to pop up on the board the wrong way around on one wave - right foot forward - and didn't fall in.  Not for the first second anyway.  Something I might pursue, as being able to pop up either way around would be a huge bonus if I ever get even half good.

Being prepared to be bad at stuff seems to be a skill that we lose as we get older, which is a shame, as it's so often a prerequisite for becoming good at stuff.

Buy buy sell sell!

I've recently been having a gander at stockmarkets and the like. There's something that I find utterly fascinating about it - it's clearly a casino and a place to lose a stack of money.

But more and more I can't help but wonder, is there any way that you could take a little slice of money out of it, if you were prepared to trade really quickly, pay huge amounts of attention, and weren't hungry for big profits?

I've been taking a look at the trading options offered by GFC Markets (you've probably seen the banner adverts all over the internet - profit from the falling Euro!). Ignoring the gold, oil, and normal stocks that you can do through them, one of the main things they offer is trading in currency pairs (i.e. buying euros against dollars, or selling Swiss Francs against the Yen - whatever). Just to clarify, crowds like GFC offer you 'leverage' - i.e. for $10 of your own money, you might be able to place a buy or sell order of up to $2000. This has an upside and a downside - the upside is that those microscopic swings in the market that are happening constantly, might therefore be exploited to actually make a measurable amount of money. The major downside of leverage is, if you get stung, you get really stung. Luckily with GFC (and I'm not trying to advertise them), it appears that you are never risking more than the money you put in - so you can't end up owing what you didn't decide to risk in the first place. You can of course, lose everything that you do put in - never gamble with what you cannot afford to lose!

One other thing you need to watch out for, is the spread. The price you can buy at is 3 points higher than the price you can sell at. What this means is, if you place a buy order, the price needs to increase by 3 points before you can break even by selling at the same price you bought at. This is the spread, as as I've found out, it's a killer.

So I've come to look at this like a sort of quasi-maths/stats problem: if you work from a presumption that the rate/price of the currency pair you are purchasing is *totally* unpredictable, is there a way that you could intelligently place buy and sell orders, in such a way that you could be in-profit, on average?

The orders you place are effectively 'positions' that you are taking, which remain open until you decide to close them. When you close them, then you either recoup the profit if the change has been to your benefit, or you are due for the loss! There are two major tools when you have placed a buy (expecting a rise) or a sell (expecting a fall) order. They are the 'limit' (a profitable price at which your order will auto-close), and a stop-loss (a loss-making price at which your order will auto-close).

So if goats are $10, and you place a 'buy' order on 10 goats with a stoploss of $7 and a limit of $12, then if the price rises to $12/goat, then your limit orders execute, closing the position and you get 10 x $2 as profit. If however the price falls to $7/goat, then your stop loss kicks in, your position is closed, and you lose 10 x $3. Easy right?

Well, I've been trying for a little while on the GFC practice account, and I'll put my hands up - I've given up.

I tried a couple of different strategies...

Chasing Momentum
This strategy was to "chase the momentum" on a tiny scale - place buy orders as the price was rising, and try to sell to cover those orders when the price had risen far enough to be profitable (and the reverse on the selling side - sell during little collapses, and then try to buy back and cover at a lower price). Great in theory, the problem being that sometimes the price reverses and never returns. So, it's going up, you stick on 2 or 3 buy orders, then it reverses before your positions are profitable, and keeps going down. You're then left with a choice - do you liquidate the unprofitable 'buy' positions for a small loss - or keep them open as the price plunges, and hope that it comes back up again?

Adjacent Hedging
This was an attempt to basically simultaneously place a buy and a sell order, both with limits and stop losses, and therefore make a tiny profit slice no matter which way the market moved. So if for example, you bought at 1.3000, then you were simultaneously selling at 1.2997. The issue here was that a limit order needed a minimum of 8 points distance, so on the 1.3000 'buy', the lowest limit you could have would be to sell and cover at 1.3008. As a result, the stop loss you needed on the 'sell' order had to be 1.3007, but as that equates to a 10 point loss, you need to make at least 11 points on the 'buy' order to be profitable. Which means the buy at 1.3000 needs a stop at 1.3011. And the reverse on the sell side. Ultimately, what it means is that the buying price going up, is going to bump the stop-loss on the 'sell' at 1.3008, but won't hit the limit to take profit on the 'buy' until the selling price gets to 1.3011 which is 6 points later. Or to put it simply, your stop-losses on both orders are several points closer to your current price than your limit orders, so the statistical likelyhood is that all the micro-volatility in the price will mean the price just drunkenly wandering about, nudging your stop-losses and accumulating you losses, and only rarely getting a limit that will make you tiny amounts. A good way to lose money.

My final attempt was based on something I noticed about the way the price behaved during a day of trading. The exchange prices wobble around set levels for a good while, not doing too much, and then at certain points, they 'break out' of the range they have been wobbling in, and take a quite visible 'step' upwards or downwards, where they then recommence their small volatile wobbles at a different level. So I came up with a new idea:

Capturing Breakouts
The idea here was to wait for the pattern of wobbling to emerge over time - look for a price that had been within a fairly obvious range for half an hour, or longer. Then, set a significantly large buy order several points above this range, and a similar sized sell order several points below - both with limit orders a few points away. The idea was that upon the market price undergoing a 'breakout' upwards or downwards, these automatically placed orders would 'capture' the breakout (while I cancelled the order in the opposite direction) and then as the breakout in price proceeded, the limit would kick in, and I would automatically collect the money. The big orders were a way to limit the need for trading - so that I would only have to capture 2 or 3 breakouts in a day to make the money I wanted. Safe concept, right? No. What I actually learned, is that there is no way to accurately estimate the 'wobble range' that a price will exhibit, so there is no way to safely set the order levels for the buy and sell. Similarly, there is no way to know how big a breakout will be, which means that often what happens is you get a little bust out of the normal range, which triggers the buy or sell order (depending on the direction of the bust out) - and then the price settles back into the range before it reaches your limit, leaving you with a very big bet that may be about to go badly south, taking a stack of your money with it.

In short, I've been unable to come up with a way of securing your positions, without the risk of leaving positions behind as the market price moves. The only guard against leaving positions behind is to always use stop losses, but my experience has been that stop-losses combined with the 3-point spread, effectively mean that you will, on average, lose.

I'd love to know if there is a way to exploit the random movements, but I can't help but feel that the spread between the buy and sell prices is the thing that tilts the odds fatally away from you.

All under control?

One thing I've been trying to work out for a good long time, is how to track all the little tasks I have at work. User Interface is a huge issue for me (maybe I should have made that my line of work), so bear with me.

I find computers painfully slow to use - there's generally just too much clutter between you and what you're trying to do, and (for me) anything that slows down the process just makes it frustrating, which generally ends up in poorer results. So one thing I've been looking for is a kind of task-organiser.

The problem is, I want to have my cake and eat it - effectively, I want several things. I want to be able to have a sort of top-level overview of the tasks I have on, where everything is very clean and very simple. And I want to be able to change and reorder the tasks at will, without 'editing' the tasks in a computer, changing a value field, or anything. Effectively, I want to be able to physically change the order they appear in, just by dragging and dropping.

If that was all it was, and I was less worried about interface, then my ideal thing to use would be the old-school air traffic control strips system - an actual physical 'to do' list. These strips seem to me like the ultimate quick and dirty, always-visible, immediately-resortable list system, and whatever bright ideas I have, I keep coming back to thinking about some physical variant on this system.

However, it would be great if I could somehow harness the power of the computer (seeing as I have to use the infernal things all day anyway), and make it a bit more powerful and flexible. In other words, could I have a top-level list in a flight-strip format, that was draggable and droppable in any order I wanted, but also let me 'explode' a task, to show a much more complex table of tasks beneath?

One program that I am perpetually in love with, is Filemaker Pro. Not being technically a database programmer, this is probably the greatest software aid to everything that I do at work. I keep customer lists on it, personal contact lists, a stock database system for spare parts (that shows stuff like monthly run rates, estimated time in weeks to part number depletion at current rates of consumption), all sorts of stuff. FMP is really databases for dummies, and anyone with the slightest computer competence can learn the basics on it really fast. Plus, it's extremely visual, and extraordinarily fast to use, two of my big bugbears. The problem with it is, despite the fact it's visual, I can't just drag and drop records around the screen willy-nilly (as you could with physical flight progress strips). I still need to predetermine the layout, and then stick with that when I'm using it. I can change the layout whenever I want, but I don't want to have to redesign the layout, just to drag some tasks around the screen - so it's missing that final top-level near-freeform physical interaction that I'm looking for - in the version that I currently have, at least.

So I went on a search about a month ago, to see if anyone else has solved this problem. I found a few things.

Firstly, I found RIPT. This is basically a digital scrapbook, and it really does answer the very top-level of my problem - being able to engage in freeform dragging around of notes, and organising things in that way. Unfortunately, it's not cut out for the other end of my organisational problems - that is, expanding much beyond a 'heading' on the scrap of paper, and there's no way to link records, because all you're collecting is scraps of text or pictures. So good on the top-level UI, but no guts underneath it all - effectively, RIPT is the 'missing piece' for me in Filemaker, but there's no way to marry them together.

So... next - a little app called Goal Enforcer. I wasn't so keen on the name - it sounds a little bit domineering for my liking, but I tried it anyway. Goal Enforcer is more of a "linked bubbles" type of task manager, and while it is visual (you put your tasks in bubbles), it's a bit to rigid for my liking. Plus, you have to have links between bubbles (what if I just want to have a free floating bubble I drag around some place?), and even worse - it's very much deadline-oriented. I don't need my deadlines enforced, I just need to be able to see what is going on thanks.

So, on to the last of my current search - the Brain. (You wouldn't be the first to suggest that this is the software I've always needed). The Brain is more of a kind of loose relationship-based idea management software, where you generate bubbles of sorts (like goal-enforcer), that are then linked to other bubbles. The nice thing about the Brain is that the links can be in multiple directions, there's no obligation to have deadlines (woohoo!), and even nicer, there's a kind of visual 'radar' function which allows you to see only on the next couple of levels up and down from where you are. This means as you click on bubbles to take you further into a task as it's broken up, the stuff back up at the top level disappears from the screen. So you only see the stuff around the level you are on - either top level tasks when you're up at the top, or stuff 'inside' a task when you delve in. It's a neat way of doing it, and it looks very much like it is based on the old Visual Thesaurus, which had an even nicer UI.

Overall, the Brain is the best top-level "task manager" program I've come by so far. However it's got drawbacks too. For one thing, despite the really friendly UI, you lose all that power that you get from a database engine like Filemaker when you want to really get inside a task. Secondly, you can't have free-floating ideas, like the air traffic control strips. What if I just want to rip out a bubble and put it to the side for a day - in sight, but not in a list? What if I want a bubble that's not linked to anything, but just hanging around?

In other words, I've yet to find the solution for organising that I need. But someone out there, surely, has done something which marries powerful organised database functions to a chaotic, freeform drag-and-drop UI. That's possible. Isn't it?

Nationalise the banks!

It's pretty obvious at this point that the banking system worldwide is in a vast mess, and (despite what they may tell you), it's not looking any rosier for the near future.

The "green shoots" in the US seem to constitute a speculative stock market run due to the massive multiple stimulus actions (paid for by the taxpayer), which have underpinned a bounce (of the dead cat variety?) in the market which isn't based on any fundamental health in the economy. In other words, when this stock market bounce runs out of steam and investors (realising that there are no sound fundamentals) run for the exits again, hold on tight.

We've heard many times that the banks are "too big to fail" - that they are of such systematic importance to society as a whole, that they simply cannot be allowed to go bankrupt - and that this systematic importance is the reason that we (the taxpayers) have to underpin the banks balance sheet when push comes to shove. Now, I can accept the premise that the banks are so important that they cannot be allowed to fail, and therefore, that we as a society may have to support them, financially if necessary.

What I cannot understand is - if we as taxpayers accept there is a need to support a crucial industry such as banking with our own money when the going is tough for them, then why would we allow our interest in the banks to be sold for a moderate profit when the banks return to health, and leave the serious money to be made by corporate interests when the banks are back to printing money off our backs as we struggle to repay our own private debts to them?

In other words - if the banks are of such societal importance, why are they not permanently nationalised? This way, when times are tough, we back the banks. When times are good, the profits from banking would benefit all of society, not just shareholders and vastly overpaid board members. I guess the answer is in the italics.

If we are going to socialise the risk, can we at least socialise the profit too?

--

The other thought that occurred to me recently was that it is very odd that when there is a balance-sheet crisis in the health industry (the industry that keeps us alive), it requires either new work practices, more efficiencies, less/more management, or best of all, more privatisation.

Contrast this with when there is a balance-sheet crisis in the banking industry (the industry that keeps us in debt), - this type of crisis requires a eye-bogglingly vast bailout with your own money (and your children, and your grand children's money) to ensure its continued survival in its present form.

Regina Brett's 45 life lessons

I got this as a circular email recently. I usually bin them, but this one ties in with a lot of stuff I think about life too. It reminded me in places of Walter Payton (if you haven't got his book yet, get it) - and some of the ways that he talked about life.

Anyway, here it is - 50 pieces of life advice from Regina Brett, columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio.

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.

16. Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

17. You can get through anything if you stay put in today.

18. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Overprepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: "In five years, will this matter?"

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive everyone everything.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

36. Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.

38. Read the Psalms. They cover every human emotion.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

41. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

42. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.

43. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

44. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

45. The best is yet to come.

46. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

47. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

48. If you don't ask, you don't get.

49. Yield.

50. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

Speaking in Code

There's been a little bit of chat recently about upcoming electronic music film "Speaking in Code". Revolving around a group involved in the techno scene, it looks (from the trailer) like an attempt to do some contextualising of techno - almost like an attempt to answer the "what is the point" question.

Pipecock over at ISM takes issue with the selection of artists in the film as shown on Philip Sherburne's blog, on the basis that the film appears hugely Eurocentric and misses out most of the American forefathers of the modern techno sound. He (Pipecock) singles out Mad Mike Banks, but I'm presuming that the criticism extends to the rest of the first couple waves of Detroit artists such as Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Eddie 'flashin' Fowlkes and so on, who also look very much like they are not included in a major way.

Pipecock is right in one sense - if the film is meant to be a definitive history of techno, then the Detroit guys should for sure be in it - and that's not counting Chicago house or the NYC/Jersey Garage thing, which were (I think) as critical to the future of dance music as anywhere else. However, I'm not sure I completely agree with the point - while the film does look massively skewed in a Euro direction (most of the artists mentioned seem to rotate around the central European scene), I don't think it's the case that every film that aims to give a glimpse inside the world of electronic dance music has to be an exhaustive history of its roots. The story of Detroit has been told so many times that it's a matter of record at this point, and there's nothing wrong with moving on a bit and giving a snapshot of people's experience of the scene as it is at the moment. That's not withstanding the fact that a lot of the German/minimal stuff that is all the rage at the moment completely does my box in - but that's another rant for another day. The point is, every film about techno doesn't have to be reverentially focused on the original Detroit artists.

One interesting thing that I did notice on Sherburne's blog is the quote from Akufen, where he alludes to techno as a means of "speaking in code", referring to the feeling of the electronic scene being one which is very marginal to mainstream life, and in effect a semi-secret subculture. While I understand what Akufen means, to me the idea of techno as some sort of secret code is a major can of worms. Taking pride in the secrecy of an experience smacks of elitism for one thing - it's almost like saying, "the great masses don't deserve to have this experience", which is an unspoken contradiction of the "come one, come all" ethos that makes the best dance nights so special.

The other factor is that the experience that a great night engenders is one which breaks down the barriers that society puts between people, breaks down the barriers inside your head, and quietens the analytical mind which would prevent us from directly experiencing the world without constantly trying to analyse what we are experiencing. Mankind has long understood the power of rhythm in transcending the basic analytical state we need to survive the hazards of daily life - modern culture has simply obscured this understanding with layers of possession, debt, occupation, and "must have" physical artifacts.

Akufen's analogy is actually back to front: modern life is the abstract and unbreakable code, and music and rhythm is the open door to what is really real.

Northern Exposure

There are some things that are not particularly enviable about being in the Northwest of Europe at this time of the year. Having lived in both Scotland and Ireland, I’m used to all of the problems - it’s damp, it’s nastily cold without ever being spectacularly cold, and it’s a bit depressing in that it’s dark until gone 8 in the morning, and dark again by 4 or 5 in the afternoon (or earlier, the further North you go in Scotland).

Another downer in Ireland is, you tend to hardly get any snow, which is something I do miss about not being in Scotland. Then again, in Ireland it almost never hits -10 C even at night, which is something you can look forward to a few times a year in Scotland. As for the wind out of the East (which means Siberia via Scandinavia) that you get on the East coast of Scotland, don’t start – it makes me scared to go outside just thinking about it.

One thing that really is great about this time of year though, is the sunlight.

Between the long hours of darkness, you do get a few hours of daylight, and the light at this time of year is pretty special. I guess it must be because the sun is so low on the horizon for most of the time, because I notice it a bit in Ireland, and even more so in Scotland, which is another few hundred miles north. You really notice how low the sun is in Scotland, because driving during any daylight hours apart from around noon means you are getting flat sun straight in your eyes the whole time.

Whatever the reason, the light at this time of year seems to alter the colours of everything you see. Everything from the most spectacular landscapes to the most seemingly unremarkable cityscapes are suddenly sprayed sideways with multicolour gradients of oranges, reds and dark yellows.

The most humdrum industrial estates and wastelands are suddenly caught in a permanent half-sunset, and it's worth the passage through this dark corner of the year just to see the magic of everything glowing deep orange for half the morning and half the afternoon.