"Long sleeve, short sleeve?" was the question they asked you in Sierra Leone. One answer meant they cut your hands off above the wrist. The other meant above the elbows.

The use of terror against civilians as a weapon of political control seems to be the core of modern African wars. In some cases it's the government, in other cases some obscure rebel group. In almost all cases the world looks, sighs, and turns away.

A typical scene from northern Uganda: burning village, bodies lying twisted in the smoking ruins of houses, one or two small children who had hidden in the bush coming back to find their parents, aunts, uncles slaughtered, their brothers and sisters abducted or raped, their lives smashed in a conflict that has no agenda, no overt purpose, no tribal basis, no "natural" source of support...

Behind many of the most intractable civil conflicts and brutal leaders in Africa moves the hand - and money - of Gaddafi, the man who turned his own country into a personal fief and the OAU into the platform for a pan-African empire.

The leaders that Gaddafi supports include some of the most monstrous figures of current times. Men who organize child armies into vehicles of terror. Men who use genocide to clear regions of their peoples so that mineral extraction can proceed unhindered. Men who use war as a business tool, who turn blood and violence into profit margins. Men who are willing to see entire countries turned to dust if it means they can add another zero to their bank accounts.

Gaddafi has refined the art of turning quiet people into murderous armies. He has seen that young boys make the best tools: kill their families, rape their sisters, force them to murder their own uncles, and they will become compliant soldiers who will suffer any indignity without complaining, obey any order without questioning.

He found that a small investment in pure brutality is amply repaid when you apply it the right way. Then he built training camps to teach these skills to his disciples.

This is not just a man content, like the run of the mill absolute dictator, to oppress his own people by violence and terror. No, this is a man who has decided to export his vision of social engineering through blood onto an entire continent.

Here is a small and probably incomplete list of the countries where Libya has sponsored violence against a civilian population in the name of extracting mineral rights, political support, or other concessions: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Congo.

And these are the documented cases. There are others, like the LRA in Uganda, where the links are indirect, via Sudan in this case.

We are used to thinking of Africa as a violent, nasty, dangerous place filled with starving people who are as happy to attack each other with pangas as they are to plant crops.

Having lived for much of my life in Africa, I can testify that this is untrue. Africans like any peoples yearn for peace and stability, but circumstance conspires to throw up dictator after dictator, war after war, disaster after disaster. And too often the hand of external "allies" is evident. War creates chaos, and in chaos much can be stolen.

Africa is like a city that is forever being invaded by rioters so that the inhabitants can be looted and raped.

And one of the biggest organizers of this looting and rape, the man who was inspired by Leopold King of the Belgians, is Gaddafi, who pours oil money into criminal political ventures across the continent.

The USA forced Libya into pariah status after the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 in which 270 wealthy western citizens were killed.

But, hey, he's apologised for Lockerbie and promised not to seek nuclear arms. That makes him OK in the eyes of the west, a "courageous" man in the words of UK's Jack Straw. "US companies should prepare to do business with Libya," said Bush. Indeed.

This morning I heard about Libyan-style training camps in Zimbabwe. And indeed, some research shows Gaddafi supporting Robert Mugabe, and eleven-year old girls being kept as sexual slaves in "job training camps" that are producing hundreds of thousands of brainwashed youths to play a part in Zimbabwe's undeclared civil war.

I wonder, when the stories of arms being chopped off start to come out of Zimbabwe, will the world's press make more comments about another horrific civil war in Africa, or will an honest reporter somewhere start to draw the link between the Mad Colonel and the wars for profit that ravage this beautiful and proud continent?

Links:

Gaddafi in Africa

Don't Lift Sanctions Against Libya

Mugabe's Secret Torture Camps

Qadhafi Unleashes His African Ambitions

The Green Bombers

Uganda, Sudan, and Child Soldiers

Reinventing Gaddafi

The LRA in Action

Gaddafi Seeks Army

Libyan Training Camps

(c)2004 HeironymousCoward

After much consideration (see BTFTD 1), I have decided that the entire modern debate about genes vs. nurture can be brought down to a single, simple, brutal point.

The extremist point of view in the nurture camp says that all behaviour can be modified by social control. We are in control of our behaviour both collectively and individually. "Bad" behaviour is due to poor moral decisions. "Good" behaviour, due to good moral decisions. We can improve ourselves, create a homo superior, eliminate poverty, theft, racism, and possibly even middle management.

The extremist genetic point of view says that all behaviour has genetic origins that we do not control. We are the products of a long and complex evolutionary past that has shaped us into delicate instruments of reproductive success. Everything we do and are is a function of the quest to breed and replicate. Period.

The debate is intense and huge. The very existence of a moral society hangs (or appears to hang) in the balance. If the evolutionary psychologists win with their logic and science, we risk the end of individual responsibility, the collapse of law and order, the end of the world.

After much thought on this, I've decided that in fact the discussion hinges on the role of the conscious mind in conducting our lives. A curious but little discussed fact is that we tend to act before we think. Pick up a coffee and your conscious mind "decides" around half a second after your hand starts moving. Step off the curb, and you are moving almost fully on autopilot. Drink too much and have unprotected sex with a stranger, and your conscious mind has been bound and gagged and only escapes the next day to say "what the fuck happened there?"

It's what I call the "What The Fuck?" theory of mind.

The entire "environment" argument is based on the easy assumption that the conscious mind drives the rest. It is the Freudian model of the mind: the subconscious occasionally rebelling, but generally dominated by an intellectual and clear-headed conscious identity. Moral right and wrong are not only possible but essential poles within which we can orient our decisions.

The WTF theory of mind places the conscious mind in the role of a spin doctor working for a PR department. The spin doctor gets news of what's going on, then puts on a great charade and play trying to justify and explain it. "I picked up the coffee because I decided to!" "I slept with that... shudder... person because I felt weak." Occasionally the spin doctor gets totally confused and can just utter a "WTF?" before changing the topic as fast as possible.

If the WTF theory is true, it demolishes the moral compass as we know it. Decisions we make are based on intellectual reasoning only when they are intellectual decisions. Everything that is visceral - whether to buy or delay, whether to drive or ride, whether to say yes or no, whether to cheat or lie or pass... these are decided subconsciously, well out of reach of any conscious "moral" influence, and only after it is too late to turn back does the PR department get the news and a chance to explain to the world, and to itself, what is going on.

The WTF theory explains drug use: these are tools used by the Management to disable and cripple the PR department when it gets too arrogant. The WTF theory explains why people still have unprotected sex with strangers: reproduction is worth the risk. It explains why so many people are so confused about their lives: because they have been told that they are in control when they are in fact not.

As a friend observed, the WTF theory is intensely liberating. If we are not, after all, consciously responsible for our acts, we can spend less time asking unanswerable questions, and more time enjoying ourselves. Perhaps a moral compass still exists, since antisocial acts are rapidly punished by other people in ways that have nothing to do with our own views of right and wrong. And at the least, we can stop thinking that salvation is a matter of appropriate effort.

Achieving happiness is perhaps a simple matter of relaxing and accepting that our bodies and minds are generally damn good at what they do, they occasionally mess up, and we can't do a damn thing to change any of that. We are not management, just public relations. And the worst thing a PR department can do is believe its own publicity.

(c) 2004 HeironymousCoward Publicity Department

10. Never mod up posts that attempt to shift the topic at hand into a classic flame war. Take an article about Microsoft improving a product. A post of this type would sayg that MS is only making this improvement to drive their competitors out of business. This post will only lead to a bitch session about Microsoft's unethical business tactics and nothing about the original topic. While there are exceptions to this rule, try to mod up posts that you find novel or funny and not just well stated versions of arguments that appear in every other discussion.

11. Know the difference between informative, interesting, and insightful. Informative means that the poster is giving facts about the topic, typically from referenced, outside sources. Informative posts should not contain opinions. Interesting posts contain personal anecdotes about the topic or suggestions for other uses of the ideas described. Insightful posts present well-reasoned opinions about the topic at hand.

12. Don't waste time modding down posts that are below +3. Most people won't see the posts so you're not substantially helping editorially which is the purpose of the moderation system. If you think a post urgently needs downward moderation, relax, some one else will certainly do it.

13. Finally, if it made you laugh, it's funny. If it makes fun of chinese/black/jewish/french/christian/islamic/hindu/whatever people, who cares-- if you're easily offended, internet message boards are not the place for you. If it's funny and offensive, it's still funny. Don't be like this asshole.

I've decided that about 80% of Slashdot articles can be answered with just a few standard comments and although trying to get a perfect 24/24* is fun, it's not going to get me any more money, sex, or vacation.

Therefore in the interests of saving time and effort that can better be spent on discovering new ways of flossing the cat, I present the first International Slashdot FAArt.

Article: "So and so has a new anti-spam solution"
Answer: so long as there are viruses and trojans there will be zombied PCs that can send spam. The only way to eliminate spam is to eliminate all security loopholes in the OS. Feasibility: 0%, approximately.

Article: "Such and such has released a new product XYZ".
Answer: Boring. Who cares? This is not news, it'd be news if for six months nothing new was released. "End of Technology? Have we reached the top of the curve?"

Article: "More job losses as XYZ corp outsources its complaints department".
Answer: Read up on basic economics. Moving work to where it's done cheaper is always better for all concerned. Every IT job lost in the US creates several new jobs in non-IT sectors in the US thanks to cheaper technology. Besides, job churn in the US simply dwarfs any job migrations.

Article: RIAA/Napster/iTunes
Answer: (a) the physical CD is long redundant. Audio DVDs? Sure. (b) the firms making the most money from iTunes, as from the rest of Net commerce, are the credit card companies. (c) Apple has the legit digital music sewn up.

Article: Microsoft/anything
Answer: Microsoft, despite having more money than they seem to know what to do with, is tied to a dead business model. Read up on technology curves, and the estimable Heironymous' Law. It does not matter how powerful you are, you cannot force the world to buy your products when working equivalents are free and freely available. Tick tock.

I'll leave it here for now. Feel free to add your suggestions to the Slashdot FAArt.

(*)24/24 is the mystical state in which your last 24 comments have all rated 5. When this happens, your Slashdot account turns into a mysterious spaceship and transports you to Venus. My high score is 14. Note to self: stop taking the blue pills.

Today, the thing that needs a name is what happens when two women (or men that think like women, let's get the PC crap over with immediately) get together to exchange data.

A naive observer might imagine that women simply like talking. This is confusing the means with the goals.

When two women talk, they don't just discuss random subjects. They exchange information, in a structured and organized fashion. The exchange is highly personalised, and follows rules of economics: information has value and is exchanged on that basis. I'll tell you about such-and-such if you tell me about so-and-so.

I've remarked that there are many women who form long-lasting networks with other women, almost always based on who knows what, about whom. (Men, in contrast, form networks based on who can do what, for whom). There are many women who never do this, they tend to prefer the company of men and feel isolated in the company of other women. Similarly there are men who hate team sports and discussion of car engines. It takes all kinds.

Back to the two women talking. After observing this in many cases, and over years, I've come to the conclusion that the closest parallel is the synchronization of two devices, say my Palm with my Nokia. It's a peer-to-peer process - never three or more. It starts with protocol negotiation. Then the data transmissions start, and can last for hours, even days. Finally there is confirmation and error checking, followed by a signing-off and plan for future updates.

So, the term I coin is: "bluetoothing".

Observe your female relations and colleagues, and you will see that they inevitably pair off in spare moments of the day to bluetooth.

Note finally that the presence of a male disrupts two bluetoothing females. It's fun - try it sometime.

Consider this: antibiotics reduce your resistance to alcohol.

Somewhere in your gut there are bacteria that help you digest booze. These bacteria are probably part of your genetic heritage, passed from mother to child like most of our symbiotic bugs, over... thousands of generations. These bugs aren't just having a great time by drinking your booze. They are actively protecting you by digesting the alcohol before it can damage your body too much.

WTF? This is bizarre.

Well, maybe not so bizarre. I figure that a good 80% of adult humans regularly consume alcohol. Maybe more. And often in large quantities. Have these bugs evolved in the last 50 years, since industrialisation made drink cheap enough to be a staple? Nah. These bugs are old.

So, here's my guess. Humans have been boozing themselves sane for millions of years. Our culture is juicily dependent on alcohol, and it's driven some of our greatest inventions, much like porn drives technology. The first grains... for brewing stronger beers. Fire: for distillation. The wheel: to carry barrels of neolithic booze up the hill. Music: to create atmosphere. Money: to sell beer for. Sex: what booze makes easier. Our species has operated in a semi-sober/semi-drunken state since we climbed down from the trees, and possibly even before (ripe fruit can be rich in ethanol). This would explain much of history, including WW1, The Hindenburgh, and West Virginia.

It all makes so much sense that I have to have another drink.

"All reality is based on a solid kernel of fiction."

- HeironymousCoward, 2004

Or, what they got right.

I'll make it brief - it's 6.45 here in Brussels and I really want to go into town to get an Orval at the Metekko.

First, Xandros installs sweetly. Rapid, efficient, etc. When I first tried Lindows I was impressed that it could format and install the hard disk in under 7 minutes. Xandros does this trick too.

Caveat: there are some boxes that Xandros does not work on. You might want to try Knoppix on your box first (not quite the same hardware detection layer, but close).

Second, the Xandros user interface is perfect. I mean this literally: there is not one thing I could do to improve it. It's KDE with a clean set of applications, well organized, with no junk and no flashing lights.

Third, the Xandros File Manager is by itself worth the $40. It automatically mounts every partition and device in sight. It handles USB sticks, CDs, network drives, everything. It includes CD burning that my mother could use. This is proprietary software, written from scratch by Xandros, and it is 100% quality. This is the biggest visible difference between Xandros and other Linux distros: on a fresh Xandros install you can click on almost every interesting file, and something useful happens. packages install, zip files open, documents launch, images view, etc. It Just Works.

Fourth, Xandros is Debian. apt-get works. You can install the many Debian packages, or build from source (which is safest if it's not a Xandros-prepared package), and I've customized my system nicely.

Fiftly, Xandros (the Delux edition) has Windows support that actually works well. Crossover Office is built in, so clicking a Windows executable runs it (if Crossover/Wine supports it) transparently. I use this to run MSIE.

Overall I'd say that Xandros is somewhat conservative but impeccably finished. It is the BMW of Linux distributions: you can take this anywhere and give it to anyone, and they will never wonder 'what the heck?' In my company I've pushed a number of people to use Xandros in place of Windows, and it's always been a smooth ride.

There are some things missing. A built-in firewall would be useful. More applications. Gnome as an alternative to KDE. But this is a product with a good future: already the differences between Xandros/1.0 and 2.0 show a determined and focussed attitude to delivering the goods.

I give it 9/10 (the missing point is for the missing applications I had to get myself from the Net: k3b, kate, etc.), and I expect Xandros/3.0 to be 10/10.

Last year I predicted that the End was Nigh for the naive Internet based on trust and hope. The weak spot is the Windows DNA, the monoculture that exposes the majority of Internet users to a seething mass of hostile parasitic software programs.

This was my original analysis.

Now, MyDoom seems to be doing what I predicted. OK, chance are that this attack will fail. A bunch of new tools will be developed to root out and kills the worms that sneak in while the virus has opened the doors. A section of the Internet will be marked "infected" and eventually cordoned off.

It's a sign of our total lack of an answer that we blame the users.

"Don't open attachments!" sounds great advice. But it's like "Don't click the wrong button!" What attachments? What the fuck is an attachment? Everything is windows, popups, how can we tell what's hostile, what's normal, what's friendly, what's deadly?

I'm getting emails now with attachments sent as zip files. Inside the zip file is a binary disguised as an html file, a large number of spaces hiding the '.exe' extension. A WinZip exploit...

There is no end to this, no way to educate users to "work correctly". Blaming the user is a standard technique for misdirecting blame, but it's no help in this case.

In my company the difference between the remaining few Windows PCs and the Xandros workstations is striking. On the one hand we have systems infested with spyware, trojans, worms, and occasional viruses. Regular Windows patches, virus scans, elimination of 'easy' email tools like Outlook, spyware cleaners,... all necessary to keep the machines working. On the other hand we have perfectly functional Linux boxes that do what we need and have no issues. None. Zero.

One of my team, using a Windows PC at home, has lost her collection of photos and music at least twice now. Each time she takes her PC back to the shop, where they reinstall XP. (I do not do tech support for Windows boxes. Nope.) This time I will install her Xandros.

I'm impressed how hard-core Windows users can maintain the illusion of survivability, and I'm curious to see how long this lasts for.

Such illusions have a nasty tendency to collapse all at once. It takes only one prominent person, institution, or company to declare that it is replacing all its Windows workstations with Linux. Not because of cost or performance, but because of security. Security. That one word spoken often enough will send millions of people scrabbling for something, anything, to save them from the hell that the Internet has become for them.

I believe that this - more than any banal comparison of price and features, more than any marketing or advocacy, more than any critical mass or industry support - will be the reason that Windows gets wiped off the desktop ("flushed", I call it). I also believe that we are not far from this time. This year, or early next year. Two more serious attacks like MyDoom and the bubble will burst.

Of all the Linux distros I've tried, Xandros is by far and away the best. Definitely a worthy contender for "desktop Linux for 2005". But I suspect that RedHat and SuSE will be more successful, simply because they have been around longer.

Microsoft must be aware of this issue and apart from patches and publicity, they are surely working to find a longer-term solution. But to be honest, I can't think of one that would work except to deprecate the Windows DNA and port their applications and platforms to Linux or *BSD. For their sake and the sake of their clients, I hope this project is well-advanced. The alternative is going to be ghastly.

Around the age of five, I asked my mum: "Mummy, I'm bored, what can I do...?" She gave me a cardboard box, glue, pair of scissors, and I became a cardboard box nerd.

I think that was the last time I was bored, except for a brief 8-year spell at school that my brain has consigned to the "incompatible disk partition, any attempt to fseek may cause physical harm" section of life.

The problem - familiar to many - is the total lack of time to do even a few of the zillions of interesting things I'd like to try.

So, this section of my journal will describe things that I'd like to make or do, but don't have time. It's a bit like MDPA except that I won't restrict myself to brilliant inventions.

What I want to make today (but I can't find the glue) is a new kind of multimedia. The physical format is a DVD, capable of storing 4.something GB of high-quality compressed music, say 70 hours' worth. Poor people can use the CDR format, with 12 hours of music. The magic comes, as usual, from the software, which is probably a media player plugin. What it does is to play selections, in sequence or randomly, and pull up web pages that describe the music being played.

I'm proud of my CD collection, mainly because it's filled with artists I never heard of, music that comes from random corners of human culture I never visited before and never could visit except through the magic of voice and instrument. Like right now I'm playing "DFA - The Dreamtime Remixes", a bizarre electronic album of half-trance/dance, half-stoned, completely eclectic stuff.

Music makes much more sense when you can pull up a web page that discusses the album, where people explain which tracks they like, and why.

So, my little XMMS plugin (which I repeat, exists only in the space between my ears) pulls up various web pages discussing and reviewing the music being played, overlaying the screen with the current artist and title being played.

I don't want to get this functionality from a commercial vendor because I don't want to see marketing material and ads.

For use at home, I guess, where it will put a definite end to the "what the HECK is that music?" questions, or for wifi-enabled plasti-flat-screened MP3 players of the future.

I have this sneaking suspicion that Slashdot is inhabited by a small army of zealots who, lurking for years and now armed with moderator points, proceed to diminish comments that they don't like.

It's easy to spot these guys, they are the ones moderating down my insightful posts and calling me a zealot. The insult!

I also suspect that certain well-funded interest groups have tried to thus infiltrate Slashdot so that they can manipulate 'geek opinion' in their favour. The simpler explanation perhaps is just that some people truly believe what they say.

The particular discussion I enjoyed was about Linux vs. Windows. This always brings the worms out of the woodwork.

In the last 20 years, I've worked on a bunch of operating systems. TOPS-10, Unix, TSO, VM/CMS, Wang/VS, VMS, MS-DOS, a zillion Unix variants, OS/400, Windows, DOS-VSE, BS2000, etc. etc. ad nauseam. A long career writing tools for development teams has exposed me to more innards of operating systems, compilers, database systems, transaction processors, terminal front-ends, batch processing systems, etc. than I actually wanted to see when I started this game.

As I told my friend Fabio, I have opinions and I have theories. They often conflict, but my theories are inevitably more accurate than my opinions.

I have this theory about software costs, which I call "Heironymous' Law". Actually it's a general theory about technology which states that as technology becomes part of the status quo, its cost invariably tends to zero.

The Windows vs. Linux battle is not really a battle at all, it's more of a dance in which the players' roles are well-defined, and the outcome is already known. Still, the music plays and we get pleasure from watching the dance.

Much of the struggle with operating systems of the past has been with details that today seem banal. Compilers that don't work or are not standard. Systems that try to cram a hundred, five hundred realtime users into 32Mb of RAM. Terminals that are limited to 24 lines of 80 characters. Keyboard with no function keys.

Much of the work I did as a technical programmer was building layers to get around these problems. Portability libraries to eliminate compiler differences. Transaction managers to save memory. Virtual keyboard handlers to simulate full keyboards. I once wrote a full transaction processing platform for OpenVMS/ACMS that was the basis for a tour operating system still used today. Chained multithreading on a Digital? It hurts like having your nipples stapled to the desk.

In 1998 my company developed a large web order processing system, and per the client's requirement, we made it on Windows. Sigh. This was the most painful project of my career. No tricky technical challenges, just the grunt and grind of managing a platform that was fundamentally unsound for serious work. Running your IIS for more than two days? It'd crash. Running SQLServer for more than a week? It'd crash. Register your COM+ components outside MTS on a dual-processor system? It'd crash. Register your COM+ components inside MTS on a single-processor system? It'd crash.

And so on. The story of application development on Windows is the story of working around one OS limitation after another, each one a special case that no-one else on the planet has ever come across, each solution a compromise that further weakened the whole. Reboot every night. Install components manually, depending on the system. Bleh.

Flash back to 1996. To demonstrate what I believed would be a coming trend - web applications - I built a web transaction manager and some tools that let us construct web forms and applications. Nice and simple. We sold one or two licenses, but in 1996 people were not hot on the concept. And by 1998, it was "Microsoft or nothing".

Flash forwards to 2003. We're building a new web platform. It has to be fast and stable. Well, everything that we'd expect from a professional application. Pull out tools from 1996, make a couple of demos. Hey, it works!

Now, what does an application like this need from its operating platform? Not much. A dependable operating system that is secure and stable. A C compiler, a database manager, and that's it. We have our own web server (also built in 1996-98) that handles the front-end.

OK, now I have to get this running on a production server. A nice beast, big and fast.

Here is the thing. Can anyone imagine that I'd now go out and buy a Windows Server license, install this on my server, and then load up my (fully portable) application? .... WTF?

Take away the gloss, and look at the naked operating systems. Drop the ".NET Server" junk (just as happily as dropping the "J2EE" crap) and look at the underlying truth.

If you remove all the unstable layers off Windows you come down to a workable, though insecure, operating system. Honestly, I've seen worse. But if you compare the basic Win32 platform with the basic Linux platform, who in their right mind would choose the former?

Microsoft are totally stuck. Their added value comes from layers like SQLServer and .NET which capture users. But this is also their biggest problem, because these layers are so complex and opaque that they eventually drive users away.

It's not hard to program to the "metal", so to speak. It took me perhaps 3 months to build a full application platform that is admittedly based on lots of experience with mainframe transaction processing systems, but I'm not a genius.

I am entirely convinced that Linux has solved the OS problem and that the OS as a product has moved along the curve to the point where it is effectively free. Microsoft can add layers to their platform to try to escape this fact, but unless they add layers that enough people want, and can't get elsewhere, it is a doomed cause.

Despite the huge profits that Microsoft makes, it seems clear that we are watching the dance of death, in which the Windows whale moves in ever-diminishing circles until it releases its last gasp. Microsoft's only way out is to move their applications wholesale to Linux, and I guess they will start doing this publicly within 1-2 years.

OK, zealots, come and get me. I'm all yours.

As I work through my CDs, I'm finding one or two that aren't registered in FreeDB. They're all pretty good, but I suspect you won't find them on Kazaa. Here is the list:

  - The Jazz Butcher Conspiracy - Illuminate (1995)
  - Throneberry - Trot Out The Encores (1996)
  - The Miracle Mile - Bicycle Thieves (1995?)
  - Detty Kurnia - Dari Sunda (Indonesia, 1995)
  - Sali Sadibe - Wassoulou Foli (Mali, 1995)
  - The Painted Word - Universal (1995?)
  - Kanda Bongo Man - The Best Of (Congo, 1999)

I went and did it. Joined the only club that would have me, despite Groucho's warnings. To be honest, sitting in that dim room, surrounded by malformed faces, unkempt and badly dressed, I felt truly at home. Yes, despite many attempts to be on the side of testosterone and rubgy, I came out of the closet and joined my local Mensa group. The psychologists doing the tests said I was smarter than 99.7% of my fellow humans. I apologised and told him I'd had a bad day, which was true. Little baby crying all night does not make for the sharpest of wit.

So, now I'm wondering what I'm going to do with that Mensa card. First, it's always useful when someone calls me stupid (this happens surprisingly often, just like my Slashdot comments get marked -1 Troll more than I'd like). I can pull out my piece of paper and say "unless you are one of those three per thousand, technically you are the stupid one".

It was that kind of answer that made me popular at boarding school. Only after some years did I discover that "popular" meant one was allowed to have a girlfriend and generally enjoy life, rather than being playfully beaten up all the time. I was seriously shocked and disillusioned when I found that spitting is not a sign of affection.

The funniest part of the Mensa package was a survey asking about whether my high intelligence had caused problems when I was younger, and still did. "Did you find other people were slow and stupid?" Well, duh!! Education is good, but it tends to force a single speed on the whole group. My brain shut down for the most part, so much that I almost dropped out of university. In one famous CompSci course (database design, I guess) I got 7 out of 100. In numerical analysis, a fantastic 30%. I was saved by the arrival of the microcomputer, which gave me an open canvas on which to learn how to think again. After a year of doing nothing else than writing 6502 assembler and teaching myself to sell games on cassette, I went back to CompSci and finished my degree, getting near-perfect results in every subject without even trying. My tutor was, how can I put it, somewhat stunned.

I measured my IQ when I was about 20, getting 125. This is good, but not extraordinary. I guess it's about average for students in a good university. Mensa scored me at 140, which is still less than Descartes, but OK for a middle-aged man with a headful of worries.

For me this is pretty good evidence that the education systems we have constructed are seriously flawed, and not just for us "clever" people. I've been lucky to find ways to define my life so that I can live and work in fifth gear... this means running my own business, doing the things I want to, living where I like, and so on. It would be surprising if such a regime was not good for one's IQ.

But what about the millions of people who suffered through regulated traumas at school, who found themselves in cubicles and boxes at work, and who may well be running in third gear for most of their lives?

Even a small difference in mental health - and this is what I'm talking about - must have very serious consequences over time.

I'd like to get more case studies on this subject, so if you have a minute to tell your experiences, that'd be great. And perhaps an entry in your journal so that others can come here and add their thoughts too.

I've decided to rescan my entire CD collection. This is a monstrous task: I spent much of 1996-9 ruthlessly spending the excessive amounts I earnt as an IT consultant on quality CDs, using the simple approach of reading the wonderfully sharp reviews of Q magazine and buying every CD that got 4 or 5 stars. There were a few duds - even Q magazine has its parochial tastes - but an incredible number of bullseye hits as well. Each month I listed about 15-20 CDs that I wanted to buy. It was hard at first, the local Belgian record shops did a good job but I was not satisfied with an 70% score. The Web was just starting and I ordered CDs from cdnow.com using (incredibly) their telnet ordering interface. The Belgian customs men, bless their black hearts, decided that those little packs of 4-5 CDs were subject to import duties, which doubled their price. Thus ended my first period as a sponsor of Internet commerce. Finally, I found, in the back pages of Q, a small record shop in Birmingham that was happy to scour the catalogues for the bizarre and eclectic CDs I was ordering. Q magazine reviewed everything that was released on the UK market except classical music. And so I have ended up with a large and varied collection that covers everything from Indonesian bop-rock to country-western to heavy metal. There are some truly curious things released on CD. And some of them are truly fantastic. And if they were released between 1996-1999, chances are I have them.

In 1999 I was saved from eventual bankruptcy by the Y2K and Internet booms which pushed me to start my business and invest in people rather than music (big, big mistake :-) !). My supplier decided he could not compete with the new online vendors and folded. And I was left with something like 2.500 individually excellent CDs and the feeling of hard disk inadequacy.

I always knew exactly how much hard disk space I needed: 120 Gb. This in the days when 1 Gb cost $1000 (and I still have a couple of those SCSI disks, and they still work).

My new Xandros/2.0 box has two of those 120Gb disks, and I've been tweaking things so that now when I insert an audio CD, Linux starts a perl script that rips the data, gets track information from freedb.org, compresses the audio data to mp3 with something called variable bit rate. Watching Linux do something "intelligent" with my audio CDs, where "intelligent" meant more than just opening the CD player... that was when I knew that I never, ever, ever wanted to go back to Windows.

So, I'm at about CD number 400 and counting.

In the meantime... I've discovered di.fm. It's better than streaming porn: this is something you can play while the colleagues are in the office. Highly recommended.

In the great /. tradition here is a dupe, only with different content. Different day, different selection of random classic music.

• Paul Oakenfold Essential Mix from Sydney
• DAD - Helpyourselfish
• Detty Kurnia - Dari Sunda
• Elliot Goldenthal - Alien 3, soundtrack
• John Trudell - Johnny Damas and Me
• Leftism - Leftism
• Marillion - Afraid Of Sunlight
• Marta Sebestyen - Kismet
• Plastikman - Musik
• Scott Walker - Tilt
• Traffic - Far From Home
• William Orbit - Strange Cargo Hinterland

Good music, like good wine, is best bought in volume when one is rich, and consumed in moderation, when one is poor again.