Update

Just a brief update on the situation of this hugely unpopular blog. I intend to discontinue posting new material on Ages of Man (or whatever it eventually gets called) as I believe the project is viable and do not want to have any more material in the public domain. I will continue using this blog to post about the process of writing itself. I will also use it for writing exercises - I have acquired books on good writing technique, and while I'm delighted that there were a number of chapters which taught me nothing new, there are areas which would benefit from working through given exercises, which I will do in due course. I intend to work on a detailed plot for the novel next.

I've also been pretty busy with Real Life lately and haven't had any time to write, but this will hopefully cease to be the case soon.

One little, two little, three little Endian?

The date and time are now, roughly, 13:08, 23rd Jun 2008. Seems correct to you?

It makes no sense.

Why do we habitually mix endian-ness? This is a term used to denote whether the most significant digit (in this case the year) is placed on the left, with successively smaller digits on its right, or on the right, with successively smaller digits on its left. You read 1,234 as 'one thousand, two hundred and thirty-four' (big-endian), not as 'four thousand, three hundred and twenty-one' (little endian). (The name, incidentally, comes from Gulliver's Travels, where two rival factions were at war over which end of a boiled egg should be eaten first).

Big-endian and little-endian make an equal amount of sense - either is an arbitrary choice. Mixed endian-ness, however, makes no sense. No-one these days would say 'one thousand, two hundred, four-and-thirty', because that would be reading the digits out of order. Yet we are happy to do this with dates! Hour:minute:second, day/month/year is small:smaller:smallest, big/bigger/biggest (The US system even more so - 07/11/08 is the 11th July, so the numbers are ordered: bigger/big/biggest!). I, for one, would write the current time as 2008/06/23 13:16:23, which maintains a consistent endian-ness throughout. This blogging software, alas, does not support this option (neither does Microsoft Excel!), even though it is one of only two possible formats which makes logical sense (the other being 23:16:13 07/11/08, which few people would use!).

The same concept applies to domain names, which start little endian (news.bbc.co.uk) up to the first slash, when they magically become big-endian (/sport1/hi/cricket/default.stm). Tim Berners-Lee himself says that he wishes he'd made web-addresses consistently big-endian (e.g. uk.co.bbc.news/sport/) .

It is too late now...

In the beginning was the word

...and the word was 'stagnation'. This is what is happening to my mind, and to my creativity. My work as a software engineer is challenging and, to an extent, interesting, but one thing it certainly isn't is stimulating. Large portions of my mind, which I have gone to some considerable length to cultivate, are running to seed. I don't like this. This blog is an attempt to reinvigorate various otherwise-dormant parts of my mind.

Primary among these is creativity. I wrote the libretto for a successful musical comedy Guilds at the 2008 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which took 9 months of hard work and eventually opened some six years after its inception (this blog takes its name from within this show) and proved to be a truly memorable and cherished event for all ~40 people involved. Since then my creative output has consisted of little more than a few limericks. This blog is an attempt to start writing again; I have a number of ideas and half-ideas kicking around for my next major writing project (which may be anything from a novel to an opera libretto), all of which need further exploration; I will use this blog to explore these ideas in small pieces, in whatever form occurs. If you're really lucky, I may also write other short essays on whatever subject takes my fancy. I am, by nature, a polymath (or 'jack-of-all-trades' if you prefer a more pejorative term) with a wide range of interests, and intend to spout words on any subject which captures my fancy.

I don't seriously expect that a lot of people will read this blog. I hope they do, and I hope they find it as stimulating to read as I hope it will be to write, but ultimately, I write this blog because I need to write something, and that is that. This post is the dullest I intend to write...