I’ve just on a whim gone searching for information about Hugh Laurie, and discovered [sadly] that there doesn’t seem to be an official home page, or even a vaguely useful site with decent information about him. Not in the top 20 google results anyway. I find it mildly depressing when a talented writer/performer doesn’t even get an "unauthorized" page keeping track of their achievements. I mean the internet has, like, a trillion pages out there, and I can’t even find a single decent one about a guy who has performed in several highly acclaimed UK TV shows, as well as a fabulous adaptation of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster. It’s just so crappy that IMDB’s tiny bio on him [and they don’t even have a headshot!] is about as good as it seems to get! It’s not as though I’m a raving fan boy, but it just seems stupid that someone as talented and humorous as he doesn’t have a web site, while a bunch of other unremarkables [like me] do.

I think I’d just like it if more celebrities got into the idea of talking about their lives and careers like Wil Wheaton does so honestly. If they did it would make the internet feel less like the most boring room at a party.

Maybe the reason I’m saddened is that I grew up assuming that famous people became famous because of their burning desire to share themselves and their talents with the rest of the world… but the relative scarcity of their voices on the internet contradicts this view, demonstrating that by and large they really don’t have anything to say to ‘us’, other than "please see my next movie". And to be fair, why should Hugh Laurie want to tell me what kind of day he’s had anyway?

As I write this the tally stands at 1577, which isn’t too bad considering that a month ago it was 1000. It means that the slow trickle has been steadily building into a slightly less slow trickle, based almost entirely on search engine indexing. My most popular downloaded file is currently the self extracting version of Tom Sawyer [available at the page], followed closely by .

I think I’d better actually finish [and release] some software pretty darn soon, otherwise I might as well forget this whole enterprise. I am having a tremendous amount of trouble motivating myself on any of my projects at the moment, even though there are loads of things I could be improving, features adding etcetera. The problem comes with the fact that I find it harder and harder to believe that I will actually see through any of these projects, and so I wonder what’s the point in pretending? Experience show that I have NEVER satisfactorily finished a single one of my software projects… and so it becomes ever harder to convince myself that I will… and thus I find myself in a vicious cycle. It kills me to see how much I can achieve in a good week, only to see the next month wasted half-heartedly doing god knows what. This is one of the real perils of working solo… you have no one to kick your ass when you lose the drive.

But then…

Competition is always a good way to get the blood pumping again, so thank goodness I have someone who sends me links to things like this:

• http://drawswf.sourceforge.net/index.html - a simple drawing app, utilizing SVG as an internal storage format, and writing SWF files directly.
• - a book reader, the closest thing I’ve seen to what I’m trying to do, with a fair degree of control over fonts as well as basic HTML formatting support.

Of course, both of these things are free, so the logic of competing with them is undercut by the harsh reality of my financial situation. What I really need to concentrate on is a product that people will be most willing to spend money on, and that product is… erm…

I could really use one of those smart software agents which were first predicted many years ago. A digital PA full of peppy AI to keep me focused and on track with my plans. So incredibly lacking in focus right now. So ambivalent about this technology I seem to be spending my whole life on. I just don’t respect the computer like I used to. Blech!

And very little indeed has been achieved this last week, thanks to a lot of pointless reinstalling of operating systems and very old developer environments.

Interested to see whether a simple message at the top of the page can encourage more people to try downloading sample stuff (mainly books). Basically when you hit the page via a search engine a bit of Javascript will work that out and add a text banner with a link directing you to the page. Should be interesting to see if I get any extra downloads that way.