Jesus Christ on a one-wheeled bicycle, I’m thirty-nine.
Next year I’ll be forty. But that’s pretty cool. People congratulate you for that. Thirty-nine? My parents are thirty-nine.
Well, no, obviously they aren’t. But they are in my head.
Whining about age aside, this has been a fab year. I’ve been writing these little birthday summaries for some time now, and one of the things I like most about that is that not only have I been writing them but that I’ve reinvented the website they’ve been written on about half a dozen times in that period and, you know what? Someone sitting at a crappy PC in St Aidan’s computer room in Durham, telnetted in to one of the servers, reading webpages with Lynx because that’s what we had in 1994…he1 can read all those posts. Dave Winer, after he invented blogs and RSS, can read all those posts. We add things to the web, but the core rolls on, from TBL in the early nineties to my site today. Hooray.
You might be thinking, who cares about yesterday’s software working today? Which I’m sure is baked into you if you’re a rich Mac user who upgrades all the time. I’m sure you have a bunch of reasons why it’s critical that you preach openness but your laptop is different, or that people who only have IE9 should be denied the web. Well, screw you. You are making things worse. Pack it in.
All that out the way, this is gonna be a good year. Last year on the web was basically everyone realising that the web really should be able to provide an “app-like” experience to people who think that that’s important, and that it’s capable of doing whatever “native” apps do without having all their stupid restrictions. The trailblazers even started showing how. This year will be everyone else learning how from those trailblazers. Last year in Ubuntu was what the American football people call a “building” year, I think; getting a whole bunch of dominoes in play for a big push. This year (this month, in fact) the first Ubuntu phone comes out.2 Big times ahead. It’s going to be fun. The tech scene in Birmingham is really quite lively now, and that’ll keep growing too.
And of course I’ll be thirty nine for all of it, which is apparently when my brain works best. Bring it on. Birthdays rule, even if they start really early with a delightful phone call from your daughter. Will see her this evening, anyway.