For the first time since 1998, I’m unemployed and looking for work! (by alaric)

I'm really quite happy about this. We have enough money to live off of for several months, so I can afford to look around for a good job, and take a long-wished-for break to relax and work on my projects.

I'm going to:

1. Clear out a load of domestic TODOs that have been hanging over me. I've axed my "urgent" TODO list in just a few days.
2. Sort out my workshop/home office: fixing up the nasty power cabling, finishing my workbench, putting up shelves so everything's not all over the floor, that sort of thing.
3. Finish the home mainframe (no family should be without one!) off and get everything migrated to run on it.
4. Put out the next release of Ugarit, with performance improvements, replicated storage, and an improved archive mode interface.
5. Finish and publish a pencil-and-paper role playing game I started writing in 1994. Deary me, has it been that long? It's a wonder that I still have it, as it was on a FAT16 filesystem under MS-DOS when it was first written.
6. Do some work on that MMORPG I designed in the late 1990s and never got around to implementing more than basic proofs-of-concept of. I don't think I'll have a fully working game any time soon, but I think that if I have some uninterrupted time, I could get it to a level that I can then hack on in odd bits of time thereafter. I've just found getting started daunting when I've only had the odd half-day here and there to work on it; other projects have offered more immediate rewards...

However, I am looking for a job, to start around the end of March / start of April - two months' break should be enough fun for me! So if you know of anything I (CV here) might be interested in, given that I'm based in Gloucester (UK), please do drop me a message!

Society 2 (by alaric)

Six years ago, I wrote up some opinions on how people complain about society, and how I'd like to improve matters. Since then, I've been thinking about the problem on and off, and two different models for human societies that, I hope, might be more fair, productive, and downright pleasant to live in than our own.

So what do we want out of a society? This is largely a matter of personal taste to many. Some want a worl d in which total human happiness is maximised; some want a world in which their own happiness is maximised (these are not nice people); some want a world in which people have the most freedom rather than happiness; and so on.

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