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It may sound strange, but it’s a well known fact around my house that I’m not a big fan of going to the theatre. Amongst other traits I have a habit of falling asleep about 20 minutes into the show. Which may all sound a little surprising when you consider a) I spent the first 15 years of my professional life working in the performing arts (the last three managing a performing arts centre); and b) I’m the co-founder and co-owner of the most widely read industry media outlet in the arts.

My normal comeback is I’m tainted by old habits – sitting at a production desk plotting lighting with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other. Well, ok, it was only one show we drank brandy throughout bump-in week. But it was a darn good brandy, and a darn good show moreover. Which of course means making me sit up straight and quiet for a couple of hours in front of a stage is a considerable challenge. I still can’t help myself, I still check the lighting rig, the audio, despite it being years since my heyday as a theatre tech.

After years working countless shows and endless performances, it takes a lot to capture my attention. Yet, most often, come an evening out, we settle the kids, brief the babysitter, and head out with me having almost no idea what we’re about to see (the social director of the household having made the necessary arrangements). It’s only when we’re seated I have a moment to scan the program and discover what joys the evening holds. Sometimes I recognise the names, sometimes not.

I do read the newspapers – one of the perks at Arts Hub is we have a big bunch of newspapers delivered through the week, including the interstaters, so there’s no shortage of exposure to arts event promotion. Oh, and did I mention I own a chunk of the country’s only arts news service? I’m supposed to know what’s going on, who’s doing what where, and when.

The problem is I hardly pay any attention at all these days to what I read in the newspaper. It’s not because I’m resistant – like most I like nothing better than settling in with the weekend magazine and a coffee in the garden on the weekend. The reason is the newspapers are no longer my sole source of information. Forget broadcast media. The only time I ever listen to the radio is in the car – which is usually with the children, which means Kylie Minogue on the stereo. The only TV news I see is Sky, BBC and CNN on cable late at night.

So where do I get my daily dose of world happenings? Well, let’s start with the half a dozen online newsletters I receive each day. Several are specific to my interests – web development, technology, subscription content. I get my gossip fix from Crikey. Plus I watch several web sites, use Google News to monitor specific issues – the list goes on.

The ‘traditional’ media, eg the non-online media, has taken a back seat. It’s only part of my daily dose, and it’s not the first thing I read each morning. In fact, I’ve now relegated the newspapers to lunch time reading – if I have time for lunch.

And what’s the big difference between the traditional and the online media I’m reading now – apart from the obvious difference between delivery methods? Might sound obvious, but after ten years of the growing and now widespread use by the population of the Internet, I’m still amazed at how many people in the arts don’t see the blinding light in front of their noses.

Traditional media is a one way pipe. Digital media is a two way pipe – it’s BIDIRECTIONAL. Virtually every source of online information I subscribe to has information traversing in two directions. The media source sends it out, the audience talks back. To take the concept a logical and inevitable step further, some digital media sources send out content which was created by the audience to start with – an easy example is Slashdot.org, the legendary site amongst web programmers and tech heads. They have something like 800,000 registered users, millions of readers, and are known for the famous Slashdot effect – when a web site is linked from Slashdot the resultant traffic is sometimes so heavy the promoted web site’s server crashes. Slashdot, at the end of a day, is a digest of news online. There’s even a digest of the digest – http://www.alterslash.org/. So how many writers does Slashdot employ? None. The content on Slashdot is entirely written by the readers.

And there’s the crux – it’s written by the readers.

Try this for size:

“In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003 , the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults or 44% of adult Internet users have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites. 13% of Internet users maintain their own Web sites. Around 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.”

As web site owners and operators – and through those digital windows, as promoters and distributors of our products and services – we’ve got to stop assuming that internet users are passive receptors. They are active participants in the creation of the content on the Internet. Content which they in turn consume.

Heard of ‘blogs’, of ‘blogging’? You haven’t? Stop reading this article, open a browser window and Google the word ‘blog’.

Blogs are probably the biggest thing to hit the Net in recent times. For the uninitiated blogs are online journals, generally run by an individual, or small group. They’re the digital media’s equivalent of a diary. Sometimes they are simply the catalogue of a person’s everyday life, others focus on particular topics or themes. Most blogs allow the reader to contribute via a range of interactions such as submitting comments, votes etc.

The Pew survey noted above also found 2% of internet users maintained a blog. Another Pew survey in 2004 put that proportion at between 2% and 7%. Doesn’t sound a lot. But as with all statistics you need to know the raw numbers.

Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com

Just in case you’re curious about Australia :

2% of 800 million is a heck of a lot of bloggers (people who write blogs). The founder of a business set up to specifically create tools for the blogsphere (the world of blogs) reckons “about 12,000 new blogs pop up online worldwide each day. On about 10 million blogs today, writers are posting about 400,000 new items per day. That’s more than 16,000 per hour“. He says:

“This reminds me of the Web in 1994. It’s an ecosystem that’s evolving and just being built”.

Here’s some specific perspective:

“Super-popular blogger Glen Reynolds, of Instapundit.com, leaves his traffic logs open, where we can see that he averages around 100,000 visitors a day and more than 2 million uniques a month. Considering that he’s only one guy, that’s astounding. By comparison, HoustonChronicle.com reports 1.5 million unique monthly readers. Granted, Instapundit is one of the most widely read bloggers out there, but it puts the phenomenon in perspective.”

One guy’s online journal attracts more readers than a leading online US newspaper? How wild is that?

The other day I read a great article online, an interview with Jeff Jarvis – amongst other things the creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. He’s also a well-known blogger. I was completely struck by Jeff’s forceful explanation of this world of self-published digital content:

“So now anyone can control, create, market, distribute, find, and interact with anything they want. The barrier to entry to media is demolished. Media, always a one-way pipe, now becomes an open pool. And, most important, the centralization of media — the marketplace, the network, the monopoly — is replaced by a decentralized universe. This changes everything. It changes the relationships. It changes the economics. It changes the power.

Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will. Today they are challenging and changing media — where bloggers now fact-check Dan Rather’s ass — but tomorrow they will challenge and change politics, government, marketing, and education as well. This isn’t just a media revolution, though that’s where we are seeing the impact first. This is a chain-reaction of revolutions. It has just begun.”

I immediately emailed the article link off to our company’s chairman Terry Cutler, who soon emailed back a one line note: ‘remember cluetrain.com’.

I haven’t actually confessed to the boss yet, but I had completely forgotten. I have a bad memory at the best of times, but the crunch is Clue Train was written in 1999, years before we even invented the word ‘blog’, and before many people were even talking about the phenomenon of self-published digital content. At the time I didn’t get it either.

Clue Train is a book, and you can read it for free on the web site http://www.cluetrain.com/. At the heart is the Clue Train Manifesto:

The front of the web site says:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

Scroll down the home page and you can read the 95 Theses. Yeah, it’s a few pages to print out, but all you arts managers must print it, and read it. Try number 27:

“By speaking in language that is distant, uninviting, arrogant, they build walls to keep markets at bay.” Sound familiar? I’ve worked in and around the arts for 20 years, and I still marvel at some of the arts crap spewed out at an unsuspecting public – a public which, in the main, didn’t study Brecht and Voltaire for three years at NIDA . Some read like a PhD dissertation.

I’ll let you read the other 94. It’s the best darn half an hour you’ll spend this month, if you truly want to understand how an arts organisation – indeed any business – needs to think, act and react in today’s digital online world. A world where 13,359,821 of your own countypeople are online, where 812,931,592 of your global compatriots access the internet. Where nearly 60% don’t just sit passively in front of a computer screen, but actively contribute their words, thoughts, photos, experiences, opinions, their lives.

I think the days of me turning up like a passive blob, sitting up straight, in a theatre, indeed any arts event, are over. My days of relying on the guff you arts publicists send out to me via the newspaper, direct mail, press release, poster and flyer are over. The days where the only insight I have into the performance is the one page of Director’s Notes in the program are over.

Because I feel a responsibility to actually research my Click to Start columns I conducted an extensive poll of my findings. Oh, alright, I had a chat to one of the Arts Hub staff over a smoke in the backgarden. She’s an experienced theatre director and performer, she immediately had two ideas – a web cam live to the Net during rehearsal, and writing a blog when her new show hits the road in a few months.

Goodness, a director willing to let the great unwashed randomly access the development of the art without a filter or editing; and then willing to write about taking the art to the masses across the country. Heresy – for a non-digital world. Natural – in a networked digital marketplace.

Ever sat at your desk tapping your fingers waiting for another staff member to finish their call, so you could dial a number? How would you like a telephone system with unlimited incoming lines? And unlimited outgoing lines?

Indeed, how about a small business telephone system which:

Last week I was proud to deliver the Occasional Address to the graduating students from the arts and technology faculties at the University of Ballarat. In preparing my speech I spent some time pondering the intersection of arts and technology, and building the case supporting their critical role in our future world.

Returning home I realised that Arts Hub members might be interested in the sentiment, and so below is the text of my speech.

Deputy Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Members of University Council, distinguished guests, ladies and gentleman. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to be with you.

When I first received an invitation to speak to you today, I had visions of standing here uttering witty anecdotes of life as the owner of a business which has as its core the melding of the arts world with the technology world.

On reflection I discounted this idea. Firstly because as a stand up comedian I make a much better dishwasher, and secondly, and most importantly, because I realized there were some issues important to me which I wanted to address.

I’m particularly pleased to be speaking today because all of you here represent the people I believe are the chosen ones as our planet moves forward into the 21st century.

We live in a world dominated by political systems, and a media, that make much of economic circumstances. Which openly promotes the division between the haves and the have nots. We are deep in a global economic cycle which has led to unbelievable growth in personal wealth, often at the expense of many of the people who do the actual work which results in extraordinary prosperity for a select few.

Many people of this world live in countries whose political masters deliberately isolate a minority in order to promote an socio-economic agenda to the majority.

Their tactics are exclusionary, short sighted, and use fear of the new and unknown to encourage people to look backwards instead of forwards.

Why do I think this is important to you? Because I think you are the people who have the greatest chance of effecting change, of changing the world.

So today I’d like to touch on a couple of the issues close to my heart. For starters how art and technology are in fact two sides of the same coin; how the arts creates clever people; and then how the intellectual property created by arts and technology have the power to achieve incredible economic and social change.

Art and Technology Hand in Hand

Art and technology go hand in hand. There’s a magazine article from 10 years ago I refer back to once in a while. The author was commenting on the use of technology in the arts, and explained that sometimes technology was ahead of the artists, sometimes behind. Sometimes artists use technology in ways the technologists never envisaged. Sometimes the technologists equip the artists to achieve an artistic vision previously unattainable. The magazine article concludes that

“The relationship between the artist and the technologist needs to be seen less as a two side topology, rather, with a not so simple half twist we can turn it into a Moebius Strip, which only has one side.”

It’s how I see arts and technology – two sides of the same coin.

Arts Creates Clever People

A research project in the United States, which analysed a database of 25,000 school students, found that students with high levels of arts participation outperform “arts-poor” students by virtually every measure. Now if you think about it, that’s not particularly surprising. Children of wealthier families very often have greater opportunity to engage with the Arts. But the researchers were genuinely surprised when they crunched the numbers some more.

What they found was a statistical significance in comparisons of high and low arts participants in the lowest socioeconomic segments.

The research showed that high arts participation makes a more significant difference to students from low-income backgrounds than for high-income students.

They also found clear evidence that sustained involvement in particular art forms—music and theatre —are highly correlated with success in mathematics and reading.

Intellectual Property and Copyright

While I was researching some thoughts for today, I came across some both sobering and exciting information on the web site of the World Bank.

According to a recent World Bank report, the countries that became richer over the last 30 years were those that mostly export intellectual property. Their incomes grew faster. The incomes of poor countries that mostly export raw materials didn’t grow at all. It’s a stark contrast for an Australian economy that continues, to a large degree, to be underpinned by stuff dug out of the ground, instead of stuff dug out of our brains. An argument I know needs no explaining in this forum.

Intellectual property has helped the rich countries’ economies grow. An easy example is the insidious spread of Hollywood movies and television. I use the word insidious carefully, programs like Joe Millionaire, Survivor and Sex and the City have a lot to answer for. Yet my four year old son is entranced by Blues Clues. He watches Sesame Street with the same sense of excitement as I did when I was watching 30 years ago.

Our son is contributing, in his own small way, to a massive growth in the export of intellectual property by the United States. For example:

The release of Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class has sparked a new wave of public and government awareness of the value of creatives to the broader economy. Florida’s argument is pretty simple: cities which encourage and promote a positive and nurturing atmosphere for creative industries workers reap economic rewards. His latest book, The Flight of the Creative Class, takes America to task for not doing enough, and warns that the creatives will seek a home elsewhere in the world instead, thereby depriving the United States even further.

I don’t disagree with the fundamental propositions offered by Florida. I enjoy living in Melbourne. I enjoy walking down Acland Street, near my home in St Kilda with my children exclaiming in delight at the massive artworks perched atop the hairdresser. I always encourage the kids to give money to the buskers. On Sundays we browse along the  St Kilda Sunday Market stalls, tasting and testing all manner of home produced goods and artworks.

And it’s when I’m wandering the markets I realise what I’m seeing – an arts business economy hard at work. Last time I looked, the Australia Council doesn’t hand out grants to run an arts market stall. Or offer a free download on their web site of publications to help an artist research, plan and operate a market stall. Yet the markets are a microcosm of a massive arts economy.

I’m not going to bother to quote the statistics. We can elocute to the fact Australia’s cultural economy is worth billions of dollars. That it employs hundreds of thousands of people. And that it exports all over the world – even if our imports of cultural product outstrip the exports by two to one.

The market stalls remind me that an economy which cannot stand on its own two feet is not an economy. No-one in their right mind is going to take the trouble to book and pay for their stall; muster up stock; set the alarm for an ungodly hour on a Sunday morning; and stand in the winter chill on a cold pavement all day while hordes of only sometimes interested people tramp past, touching, prodding and poking the stall holder’s wares – unless it makes economic sense. This isn’t a government funded art-fest. It isn’t art for arts sake. It’s business. It’s a way for the stall holder to earn money to help feed themselves and often their families.

You cannot bypass business fundamentals. A market stall costs x amount to rent. The goods you sell on the stall cost y in materials to produce. The customers hand over z to purchase the goods. If z is greater than x plus y, then you made a profit. If less, you made a loss. And what on earth would possess someone to continue if it made a loss? Richard Pratt, the cardboard box making, showbiz supporting billionaire was once asked his secret to successful business. His response: earn more than you spend.

Back in the early 1980s when I finished school I had no idea in the world what I wanted to do. I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, majoring in English, English, English, oh and more English. Which means I can spell. I got kicked out after first year – probably something to do with a complete lack of work in the last part of the year. Albeit following a promising start, with plenty of distinctions and credits in the first couple of terms.

Problem is, I was bored shitless. I was in a holding pattern. I was completely uninformed about the world, and uninformed about my choices in the world. I became involved in student theatre, wound up with a job in the campus theatre, and that led to a 12 year career in technical and operations management in theatre and entertainment facilities around the country.

If I could have my university application all over again, I would apply for an economics course. In retrospect, it’s quite clear to me I would have been a far better arts manager had I completed an economics degree, rather than one in arts management. Today, with nearly ten years under my belt running my own company, it frightens me to look back, and realise how naïve, uninformed and generally ignorant of business I was in my arts management days. Clearly I stumbled through and didn’t fall completely on my face but, I suspect, there are plenty of arts managers out there stumbling along today.

If I had had an economics degree under my belt, I might have started to ask the questions 20 years ago that I ponder today. Because despite my acceptance of the general Florida mantra, I’m now coming to the conclusion that government grants for the arts – grants given to arts companies and individuals, are a bad thing.

Grants breed a welfare mentality, of living with the expectation of funding. Long term unemployed, those who have been the recipients of government handouts, are considered amongst the most disadvantaged in our community. Great amounts of time and money is deployed in the quest to return them to the workplace and employment. Yet arts companies, and some artists, have been effectively living on government welfare for decades. Oh, sure, from time to time there are murmurs of ‘reducing their reliance on recurrent funding’, but nobody takes it really seriously. There is a presumption inherent in arts managers that whatever the ebb and flow of trendy management theory amongst government arts agencies, at the end of the day the triennial funding agreement will still come through.

Grant funding is a vicious, non- productive circle – just like long term reliance on the dole. It ties people into a pre-determined model, instead of exploring alternatives. It’s a bureaucratic, unimaginative way to do business. Each year the Australia Council and sundry state government arts ministries publish their glossy grant round booklets. Each year arts managers and artists pore over the colourful pages, considering how they can manipulate and massage their current visions into the frameworks compiled by a bunch of government employees sitting in their ergonomically designed cubicles.

Grants cost the applicant time and money. You take time to apply, to wait for a response, to report and acquit. Yet you can’t claim that time and labour as part of the grant application. In many cases, if you perform an ROI (Return on Investment), the cost to service the grant could be larger than the grant itself. It’s a poor economic decision.

It’s easy to blame a lack of artistic output on a lack of funding support. Yet the funding levels will never substantially change. The arts has been arguing it is under-funded for decades. Apparently the first Australian arts grant was given in the early 1880s – a poet named Michael Robinson was given a couple of government cows for his services as Poet Laureate. Inevitably one can presume two things: Robinson didn’t think two cows was enough, and all his fellow poets thought he had compromised his artistic integrity for taking the cows in the first place. 

Grants avoid ruthless feedback. Yet acceptance of feedback is a critical skill to survive in life and business. And to improve an artist’s work. Instead the feedback is couched in jargon and comfort words aimed at avoiding confrontation.

I want to be clear here – I’m talking specifically about application based grant funding. For example, conversely to grants, I believe sponsorship and philanthropic support are outstandingly positive elements. They promote business and community interaction, they are, generally speaking, based on realistic business objectives and ideals, whether it be a major telecommunications company sponsoring the Australian Opera, or the local printer supporting a local theatre company by printing the show’s posters for free.

Every election, every budget, the arts makes yet more submissions to government. Occasionally incremental increases are found. Some major arts sectors have been on the bust boom cycle for years – the latest are the symphony orchestras, before that the visual arts, before that performing arts companies. Of course it requires an expensive public enquiry conducted by a high profile person (notice how the enquiry heads are invariably high profile BUSINESS people: Helen Nugent, Rupert Myer, James Strong) to find that the enquired-upon arts sector is economically unviable in its present shape/form/composition/funding level/audience size.

In my more extreme moments I conceive of dumping arts grants altogether. Maybe arts organisations should be made to endure the same economic realities as the Sunday Market stall holders. Perhaps we’re giving the money to the wrong people? Lets instead give it to the audiences – the general public – in the form of rebates for attendance. Instead of ‘Medicare’, why not have ‘Artscare’? Each time a person pays to go to an arts event, they tootle down to the ‘Artscare’ office, fill out a form, and receive a portion of their attendance cost back. We can even have bulk billing for children and seniors.

A long time ago a well respected arts manager told me mine would be the last generation of arts administrators without university degrees. She was quite right. My problem is whether the training institutions of today are pumping out bright-eyed graduates with the right skills sets? 

I’ve had reason of late to delve into the world of Cooperative Research Centres, a major Federal government program to support centres of research excellence in conjunction with universities and industry. The quick summary of the CRCs is:

“The programme emphasises the importance of collaborative arrangements to maximise the benefits of research through an enhanced process of utilisation, commercialisation and technology transfer. It also has a strong education component with a focus on producing graduates with skills relevant to industry needs.

The CRC Programme was established in 1990 to improve the effectiveness of Australia’s research and development effort. It links researchers with industry to focus R&D efforts on progress towards utilisation and commercialisation. The close interaction between researchers and the users of research is a key feature of the programme. Another feature is industry contribution to CRC education programmes to produce industry-ready graduates.”

If I had my way, this would be a pretty good philosophy for the universities when turning out arts graduates – of all flavours and disciplines. The tertiary institutions are seen as centres of excellence, producing industry-ready graduates. The institutions’ efforts are focussed on projects and activities which have commercialisation potential, and thus economic potential – entirely consistent with the Florida thesis of using cultural activity to stimulate a community’s economic vitality with creative endeavours and personnel.

The graduates are encouraged to take the lead, to do it for themselves, to act independently and in a way which is productive to themselves and others through making a cultural contribution to their local economy. Just like a Sunday Market stall holder. Instead of waiting around for a grant application to be approved.

Click to Start was a column I wrote for a while on artshub.com.au a few years ago.

You can download and read a sample chapter of Fragile Technology. It is in PDF format:

> Download FragileTechnologySampleChapter.pdf

1. To Err is Human

2. How it got this way

3. Reformat That Hard Drive

4. Not The End of the World – The
Scary Effects

5. Going Cheap – The Silly Effects

6. Upgrades Doomed to Failure

7. Pushing the Wrong Button –
Human Error

8. I Failed Maths at School

9. Code Crunchers Take a Lunch
Break

10. The Stupid and Strange

11. Try Hard Government

12. Great Business Blunders

13. Crashing Satellites – Science and Space

14. Virtual Money – the world of Finance

15. Fragile Technology

Fragile Technology is a book about how
technology, and particularly computerised systems, is made fragile by humans.
It is not an academic dissertation, but takes a mostly light-hearted look at
the ways in ways in which technology pervades our lives, our dependency on
technology, and catalogues some of the consequent susceptibility of our world
to its failure.

Fragile Technology takes a somewhat
fatalistic approach, in part suggesting the pursuit of technological utopia is
pointless, because the technology was created by a 24 year old computer science
graduate who had a fight with his girlfriend on the weekend and is nursing a
hangover from the resulting consoling drinks with his mates.

Fragile Technology includes many examples
ranging from the sublime to the frightening. From prisoners in Florida jail
mistakenly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, to the quick thinking Russian
military officer who is credited with averting a nuclear war after identifying
an incoming American missile attack as being caused by a software glitch.

Fragile Technology does not set out to
provide a definitive solution to the woes of our technologically-enhanced
world. But it does highlight the areas of failure and most common causes.

Is it any wonder:

“A startling 52 per cent of us admit to
having committed a Digital Blunder in our lives, with email the most common
cause of tech-related embarrassment.”

Or in more formal terms:

“The systems humans create are like nature — they’re complex, unstable and
unpredictable. Add to that the fact that they’re susceptible to human error and
malicious actions.”

“The brittleness of increasingly complex, interconnected systems, leading
some to question their near-total dependence on them.”

Or in short:

“Any technology indistinguishable from
magic is insufficiently advanced”

Fragile Technology is about the inherent
weaknesses in today’s technology – and the technology of tomorrow. Our society,
and our world, rely on a complex environment of inter-connecting systems, the
chaos theory to the ultimate degree. A action in one country, leads to failure
in another otherwise unrelated location. One person’s screw-up can bring down a
company or a government. And presiding over the decisions which crucially
affect how technology works is inevitably someone who has absolutely no idea
how it works, or understanding of how their choices will impact the future.

Self-interest, ignorance, corruption and
incompetence dominate decisions; and systems fail and people die as a result. A
programmer takes a lunchbreak and half the

United States

is without
electricity. A computer glitch freezes trading on one of the busiest days for
the London Stock Exchange. A Philipino woman wins a million dollars on a television
game show because a technician plugs the wrong cable into the wrong computer
screen.

An electricity
supply dip to a pharmacutical company’s datacentre results in 4,700 patients
being given either the wrong medicine or incorrect dosage instructions. A
ambulance dispatch management system which ‘appeared
to ignore the basic tenets for software’ fails for 36 hours and is blamed
for ten to twenty deaths.

From the sublime, to the ridiculous, to
the gut wrenchingly terrifying calamity of accidental nuclear annihilation, our
entire lives are controlled, managed, serviced and supplied by technology which
99.999% of the population has absolutely no understanding of. We blindly
subvert ourselves to electronic systems, which, literally in some cases, keep
us alive. Yet how many people know how to turn on call waiting? The old joke of
asking an eight year old to program the video recorder has worn thin – because
we were making it 30 years ago, and still are today.

Our collective community comprehension of
the technology which governs our lives has not advanced one iota. Yet the
technology has become more pervasive, more endemic – and more in control.

Clearly I fall into the category of a complete slacker. I blogged for a year or two, then lost the plot and gave it away.

I’ve re-invigorated the blog as a starting point for a broader web
site covering a number of areas of interest to me, including Fragile
Technology, some of my more geeky programming work, and as a place in
general for ideas, writing, bits and pieces. We’ll see how long it
lasts.

Fragile Technology was an idea of mine a year or two ago, mostly around a book proposal I worked up one holidays. I wrote a sample chapter and a chapter outline, and talked to a couple of publishers who expressed interest – but with re-writes. And that’s when everything ground to a halt because as is so often the case a) I was incredibly busy and had no time; b) I probably had moved on to some other pet project.

> Introduction to the Fragile Technology Idea

> Chapter Outline

> Sample Chapter