So, for me, and bear in mind the blood alcohol level is probably the highest it’s been for several months at the moment…

So for me, the piano has always been a kind of altruistic instrument.  A way of expressing ones outward feelings towards others in the sense that feelings towards those in the past can be expressed only within ones own abilities, and feelings towards those in the theoretical future of ones own life are limited by the current abilities of the player.

That is to say, I have noticed that expressing myself when I relate to the past is limited by my playing ability in much the same way that my past relationships were limited by my ability to handle them at the time.  Future relationships are again hampered by both my current ability to comprehend them and by the negative aspects of previous relationships.

I guess like anything, we grow with time and the negative as much as the positive grows us as human beings.

Can life be wasted?

I wondered did I waste two years of my life?  Or, more efficiently, what value did I gain from spending two years of my life following a routine?  Holistically did I gain more than I might scientifically value as worthwhile?

I think overall we discount the part of relationships which grow us emotionally.  We look at a time-line of our life and how we might wish a future to play out and we think, I probably wasted some time because if I did it all over again, I would do things differently.  I think It’s a factor of how humans process both risk and emotional decisions.  In hindsight you would do things differently but in reality, you can’t.  You made the choices that you made at the time and you made them in your best interest at the time.  That’s that.  If you were back in the same position, you’d make the same choices again.

No one takes a decision knowing it’s a bad decision.  Forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself.

Relationships sometimes don’t work out.  I don’t consider them a waste of time because I think they grow us emotionally and teach us things which can only be learned the hard way.  We think we can learn them the easy way but sometimes we have to be hurt to truly understand.  It makes us a better person, at our own expense, but then, it makes us a better person for the world.  Try to be more selfless – if we can leave this world a better place than we found it, are we not more worthwhile as a human being?

What of the other party?  The one who goes through life destroying the lives of others, the one who hasn’t reached the level of enlightenment as ourselves?  Is it big-headed?  Can I say that because someone doesn’t share my views on relationships or that they don’t have the level of comprehension of destruction they can cause to others they should somehow be forlorn in their progression of life?  No.  Alas it is a fact that for the majority mistakes will be repeated and the cycle will run again with different actors on the same stage.  You shouldn’t feel bad to see the same play run its course.  You owe these people nothing despite your enduring love and friendship.  You can’t teach the secrets to a lasting relationship, it can only be learned with time.

So you think, “where am I now?” and “am I in a better place now than I was before the relationship?”  I think  the latter is un-answerable.  You can’t know for sure or with any degree of certainty that your position in life now is better or worse for a given event.  You can make a guess but guesses are bullshit.  Ask me if I ever thought I would be flying a plane at age 25 with my childhood best friend and I’m pretty sure I’d have said no.  Ask me if I ever thought I’d have a job which entailed playing a guitar for an hour and generally being happy every day and I’d have laughed.  You don’t know.  You make decisions and you plan your future based on the information you have available at the time.

For fuck’s sake, forgive yourself.

So what is it to make a decision which affects the rest of your relationships for life?  Can I relate?  How can I relate to my friends in a way which doesn’t alienate them?

I break down here.  I don’t know how to explain it, I have some way to go on a personal level before I can answer.  It’s weird for me because I can usually be meta enough to analyse my own problems, relate them to a general context and help others.  I think sometimes it’s useful to have an external input when you’re so personally involved.  When you are, things become difficult.  It’s a shame.  You might find if I help you, I’m helping myself.  Sometimes I worry that I’m getting more from helping someone than they are.  I’ve always been careful not to take advantage, it’s a fine line – isn’t all advice autobiographical?

I think advice is you telling a younger version of yourself what you wish you’d known.

Piano has a barrier to entry to new songs.  You want to play something new but you can’t, you play it and your fingers play the same old arrangements automatically.  It takes a conscious effort to retrain them.  If you work hard you can succeed and then you’ll become a maestro.  If you took away the training and started from scratch you might think it would be easier to play that new melody but in fact you’d play nothing at all, just a jumble of notes from untrained hands.

We are a sum of our past experiences and they makes us who we are now.  Don’t wish your past away.

So I found myself reading the Cosmo website for about an hour earlier.  I followed a link to some article and then to a related article and ended up at “30 Things to Do with a Naked Man“.  While I won’t try any of them out for myself, I did feel the need to procrastinate a bit, putting off the mountain of work I have due tomorrow (wait, I’m writing a blog post now too?  Aaargh!) and read through the list of 30 from a man’s perspective, seeing whether they’re bullshit or not.

Actually, they’re very good.  They’re a little bit naughty though – the first thing I’d do if a naked man turned up is get him clothes and call the police…  It’s not even on the list!

Their list got me thinking so I’ve compiled my top five ways for a girl to drive their slightly autistic computer geek boyfriend wild.

1.  Leave him alone

Tell him you’re going out for the evening but not where or when you’ll be back.  Turn off Google Latitude.  This will drive his protective side mad and he’ll worry about you getting murdered all night.  He’ll think about drinking but decide against it in case he needs to drive during the manhunt to find you.  Eventually he’ll settle into computer gaming, programming or researching new things on the Internet.

When you return, arrive with a big box of iced fairy cakes.  He’ll be so glad that not only are you still alive, you’ve bought him cakes.  He’ll be all over your body.

Feed each other cakes – this can be incredibly sensual.  Make sure that you ice them in the same colour, or in pairs of colours and always bake an even number.  The only exception to the icing scheme is if the cakes can be assembled into a pixel-artwork.

2.  Brighten up his workday

Create some 1080p HD video of yourself masturbating.  Make sure to use a camera with a microphone input and be vocal.  Use some creative commons music in his favourite genre as your backing track and remember to attribute it.  Create a TrueCrypt file-based volume containing the video and upload it somewhere – you might want to spawn your own VPS for this.

Send him a link to the volume directly to his work e-mail using PGP.  Tell him it’s “NSFW”, to turn his sound on and that you were thinking of him while you made it, and you can’t wait to see him later.

Your knowledge of common encryption methods, modern video production and content delivery will set his geekmeter to overdrive.  The video will tease him all day and he’ll be all over you in the evening.

For bonus points, use his favourite encryption and hashing algorithm when creating the TreuCrypt volume.

3.  Leave notes for him

Start posting sexy notes to him in public places – in his wallet, on the fridge, by e-mail, on his Facebook wall…  Perhaps grant him permission to do something particularly naughty, or play out one of his fantasies.  For privacy, encrypt these notes using a one time pad but keep the pad secret and don’t tell him the encryption scheme.

This will engage his puzzle solving abilities and he’ll direct his focus into the task you’ve set him.  This will make you feel good as it’s a display of how much he’s into you (his time is precious and he’s devoting it all to you).  He will soon decide that you’ve used a one time pad and will ask you for it.  I suggest you give him the pad in blocks which he wins each time he makes you cum.  Your attentive and focussed lover just got even more determined to satisfy you.

He’ll be overjoyed that you used an unbreakable form of cryptography to grant him a sexy prize and turned on that you did it so publicly.

4.  “Halt!  What’s the password?”

All men love girl on top, it lets them be lazy, relax and enjoy the sight of your body.  When you’re on top, stop suddenly and say “Halt!  What’s the password?”  Keep him inside but try not to move.  Start tracing zeros and ones on his body with your tongue, sending him a password in 8-bit binary-coded ASCII.  Keep this short because the expansion is quite long (for example ‘go’ is ’01100111 01101111′).  It will drive him mad trying to focus on powers of two, your body and your tongue.

This is moderately difficult, so you might wish to offer clues or a forfeit if he gets it wrong.  Do not use a 128 byte hex string.  This is one of the cases where you don’t want your security to be impenetrable (hehheh).

5.  Let the Cat out of the bag

Most geeks have their own box of Cat5 networking cable.  This can be of great use in the bedroom either by turning it into a whip or in our case, using it to tie him up.  When you cut his cable, take it in even metre lengths because he will have his own way of accounting for it and you don’t want to upset the balance.

Tie your boyfriend up with cable – tie each leg to a separate corner of the bed and then secure his chest to the mattress – he will need his hands.  Now it’s your turn to drive him wild, kissing him all over, massaging him, pay attention to the perineum and give him the best blowjob of his life.  Your job is to get him begging to cum.  When he’s on the edge, give him a scrambled Rubik’s cube to solve and keep going.  Tell him he’s not allowed to cum until he completes the cube.  Double your efforts for an extra thrill.

Rubik’s cubes to the uninitiated are very difficult so depending on his experience you can tell him to make a cross on one side (easy) or make a whole side (moderate), make two layers (difficult) or complete the cube (I can do this in a few minutes but it is a skill you have to learn and practice).  If you know he can complete the cube, set him a time limit.  His mental frustration and sexual frustration will battle each other, putting his senses into overdrive.

You can invent your own forfeit if he fails but he’ll be so passionate from the torture that you’ll want to have wild sex with him anyway.  The forfeit the next morning is to set his ringtone, message tone and new e-mail sound to Jar Jar Binks quotes for a month.

6.  Because autistic computer geeks love even numbers

This is a bonus tip and takes some planning but it’s actually my favourite of all of them.

Scout out a private clearing, somewhere safe that you can camp the night.  If you live in a city, you might choose to incorporate this into a holiday.  Make sure light pollution is at a minimum and it’s not frequented by through-traffic or doggers.  Note down the GPS location of this spot.

In the morning, pack some camping stuff, something soft to lie on and a blanket to cuddle under.  Then download this picture (I took it myself and it’s licensed under creative commons) or make your own.

JPEG photos often have data stored inside them called EXIF data which stores information about the camera that took the picture, the focal point, aperture etc.  More recently cameras and mobile phones (for example Android and iPhones) also embed the GPS location where the photo was taken – this is called Geotagging.  We’re going to manually edit the EXIF data for the photo you made or downloaded and set it to the GPS coordinates of your camping spot.  Use a tool like Pro Photo Tools or Picasa to do this.

E-Mail your boyfriend this photo in the morning and give him some time to figure it out, then set off to your spot and set up your campsite.  Again his problem solving and technical skills will peak, as will his excitement for location-based games.  With any luck he’ll arrive on time with the spirit of an explorer going on an adventure.  He’ll be overjoyed to find you there waiting for him with his favourite food, and a nice warm place to snuggle.  Look to the heavens together and talk about the effect of gravity on space-time.  Make passionate love under the stars.

Tell him it’s his turn.

If you try any of these or have your own suggestions, please leave me a comment!

The problem so many new business owners and freelancers have is one of pricing, they either don’t have high enough self-worth to believe that their work has any value or perhaps they believe through the lies and stories of failure that this is how business is supposed to be, that you’re supposed to lose money or make a pittance when you start and that when an idea gains traction you’ll eventually make enough money to live.

Fuck that.

You can make money from day one, in fact you should make money from day one otherwise you have your company set up wrong.  If you’re not making money then you must be spending money.  It’s very easy to spend money.  If you got a loan or VC funding you’re even more fucked because it’s even easier to spend someone else’s money.  Spending more money than you earn is bad, being in debt clouds your judgement, it can stop you taking risks (which is a bad thing) and will focus you in areas which might not be the most profitable.

So what do you do?

1. Stop spending money you don’t have
2. Set an above market price for your work
3. Do better than market, useful work
4. Profit

It really is that simple.

I’ll classify my post here as applying to the service industry.  Retail is a little different and although I’ve toyed with running a shop for ‘a bit of fun’, it’s not where I’m going to make the most of my money.

If you do something that’s good and useful to someone, they will happily pay you for it.  This started the barter system where goods or services were traded and eventually evolved into a monetary economy that’s existed for thousands of years and the rules are so simple it pains me to write them as 1-4 above.  The problem is, people don’t seem to realise how simple it can be, they under value or completely ignore the worth of their work.  Stop it.

This is the point my customer was hoping to exploit.  He asked me to work for free, on the promise of future work.  Where does it stop?  Hey, yeah you can have this work free, but all future work is paid?  What would I do if he asked again?  Wouldn’t it make it even harder for me to justify costs to him?  “No.”  The reason you want my product is because it’s good and it’s of value to you.  Why shouldn’t you pay me for that?

I said earlier you could make money from day one.  Sometimes it’s necessary to spend money, time and effort for a business to have something to sell.  You basically have two options:  Take a loan, VC funding, or your life savings, or, bootstrap that shit.  The first option is bad and I could fill several blog posts with my reasons.  The second option is the way to go.  Bootstrapping involves setting aside a [small] pot of money and being cautious with your expenses, it’s just enough to get the simplest saleable version of your product ready and then you sell it to a customer and fund growth from the profit.

I want to take this idea a bit further and say that you should bootstrap off the back of someone else’s business.  If you don’t have a job, get one.  I have started every one of my companies while working for someone else.  I used my salary to fund them and the Companies House registration certificate came out of their office printer.  I know for a fact my old bosses did the same.

There is nothing better than knowing that you’re starting a company while employed with a steady wage.  It takes the issue of rent and bills off the table and funds your bootstrap pot quite nicely.  If your company fails then you still get paid.  If your company succeeds then you get paid twice.  At some stage you will be earning enough and working enough that you will have to leave.  No managing director will ever be sad to see you go to create your own business, in fact most of them will offer you their own advice and experience.  You see, it’s lonely at the top.

It takes guts and determination and a strong resolve to start a company, to build a worthwhile product, to sell that product, to quit your job and follow that product and to devote your life’s work to it.  That’s why I’m proud to say I work for myself and why I’m proud to say I work for profit.

I work for profit.  You should too.

I’ve just come back from Kung Fu and feel amazing, if not a little achey.  It’s funny how something you think will make you tired actually gives you more energy.  It’s like when I lived in Colchester and went swimming twice a week I could come home at 10 and still have time to cook, manage my business and watch Lost.  Now, I’m on prescription meds which make me extremely tired and I find myself sleeping through the alarm and getting up at about midday.  It’s not the dream lifestyle it sounds like ;)

Become hardcore.

I need to become hardcore.  A doctor once told me that at around 26 it becomes increasingly harder to stay in shape, so best to get the routines in place now right?

• Join the gym now, try and get a discount
• Change the daily format, go to the gym with MO before tea, every day
• Consider swimming in the mornings to wake the fuck up
• Have my company buy me a MacBook Air, work in the library
• Make Saturday Kung Fu a ritual, cane grading in February
• Increase striking power
• Get rid of the belly, I can’t see my feet

I’ll join the gym tomorrow, then driven by my need to not get ripped off I’ll start going from Monday.

Fucking finish what you start.

I have some loose ends to tie up.

• Set weekends aside for flying study
• Get back into flying, get PPL in the first half of 2011
• Kung Fu grading in February
• Intermediate radio March to May
• Start piano again only after everything else is done
• Unicycle in summer

Things like these often snowball.  Becoming hardcore leads to becoming more hardcore, completing things leads to drive to complete things, all lead to satisfaction.  It’s a process I first brought into my last company through the Gong of Progress.  Alas they were not ready for it.  I am.

She has stolen from me, treated me like she doesn’t even know me and left me with a legacy of self hate.  It’s partly her fault that I’m hurt like this.  Is that why I can’t let go?

I want her back.  More than anything, I want to sail through life with her, experiencing everything there is.  I built my life to be free.  I spent three years oppressed, working myself out of a hole.  Now I can be free only now it seems too late.

I miss her smile, I miss the time we had.  I miss the theatre.

Every drink I have reminds me.  Every free moment reminds me.  Every fucking day reminds me.  This house, these walls, my camera.

Haven’t I paid a thousand times over for what we had?  I was so fucking stupid.  Why did I believe her.

I’m going to be a millionaire.

Something caught my eye a few minutes ago: Meet the New Young Millionaires.  These “young” millionaires have an average age of 31.  I’m 24 which is seven years younger.  There’s still plenty of fucking time!  Seven years ago I was in college, a quiet kind of guy, studious but not to the extreme.  I’d had a year at sixth-form to make friends and experience some more of the outside world than my ‘boys only’ high schooling allowed.  It was exciting, fresh and fun.  But lets not romanticise.  It was also fucking scary and a risky move.  I gave up a school which I didn’t like and didn’t like me, but would guarantee me high grades at A-Level for a more down-market college which allowed me to take a subject like Media Studies and ultimately didn’t care if I failed or not.  So what?

Ok, so 7 years ago I was in a risky situation and I didn’t know where my life would lead.  Look at me now ma.  I have a first-class honours degree, I own property, I have a business, I fly aeroplanes, I have a job, I even held down a relationship.  I’m also becoming less skilled as time passes, have huge depreciation on my property, have to survive in a broken economy, balance time and weather to fly, battle politics at work, and am recently single with a very slim chance at love Mk. II.

How obvious does it have to be?  Risk is always there, bad things are always there, good things are also always there.

So how do I become a millionaire?

The same way I became comparatively rich.  I do what I did in the previous seven years.  Just fucking do something.  Anything good, anything that might work out.  It really doesn’t matter what because the balance is always there.  There will always be shit, there will always be good and you simply can’t plan for the future.  Any plan you make will be wildly wrong.  Do you think in 2003 that kid sitting in McDonalds with his friends teaching him how to pick locks because the lecturer didn’t turn up again could really have predicted where he is now?  Do you think that he could even tell you how his life would turn out in a month’s time with any degree of certainty?

Your answers should be ‘No’ and ‘Yes’.  I’ll leave you to figure out why.

I’m going to become a millionaire because I can.  There is absolutely no reason why I can’t and there’s absolutely no way that I can predict that I will succeed.  I will do it because there’s plenty of time.  I will do it because I believe I can and there is opportunity.  I will do it because it’s simple:

1. Make something people want
2. Set a price
3. Profit

Am I likely to have a million (or billion dollar idea) like the people in that article?  No.  Am I likely to have a £40 idea?  Probably.  Can I sell that idea at £40/mo to 2000 people?  Maybe.  That’s a million.  Seven years to make something worth £40 and sell it to 2000 people?  Doesn’t seem too hard when you look at it like that now does it.

It’s time for something completely different and this is it.  I’m becoming my own boss and I’m going to make a million.  Then maybe I’ll do it again.  Or maybe I’ll fail but that’s half the fun; you just have to try.

The first few days of my holiday have been pretty crazy and as a result I’m starting to get ill for Christmas.  No matter, there’s time off to recover and if I can just relax a bit, maybe I’ll get better.

So last year I wrote “For the new year: 2009 roadmap” and I guess a similar one for 2010 is due soon.  Looking back on things makes me a little sad, and from the crap I’ve had to endure recently, I’m somewhere between wanting to punch something and curl up in a ball.  While there is much to be said for the curl-into-a-ball approach, I don’t have the necessary support (if you want to come hug me and tell me it’s all fine, then I’ll gladly retract) to foster such an apathetic cry for attention.

Alas then, I must consider how to proceed in 2010 and the Christmas break will be an opportunity to do that.

I now realise that the choices you make now affect the rest of your life.  A lesson learned for 2009.  Choose wisely, for good or bad, make the best of what you have.