It’s the second time I’ve been back here lately. The first time was a couple of weeks back where a nightmarish deadline made it altogether too much like old times. Today is better.

I never lived in London, and the stress of the work and the cost of the commute took the pleasure out of being here. Ultimately it made it impossible.

On days like this it seems a shame – many of my old colleagues still work at Cleveland Street, and I have a lot of good memories of the time.

They say you shouldn’t go back, but as a freelancer, coming here a couple of times a month, it feels weirdly like I shouldn’t have gone away.

Although I went part-time in March, I was still missing deadlines, and still working too many weekend days. That either meant I was over-committed, or just plain shit at managing my time.

So deciding to quit and do nothing other than work under my own management was scary.

Self-organisational skills aside, there’s a surprising number of unknowns when you take the leap:

- Will friends come through on promises to pass work my way?
- How much time should I schedule for each job?
- How many jobs will it take to see me through the month?
- If I’m charging for my time, how much is it worth?
- How many days do I set aside for contingency, planning and admin?

It’s gone surprisingly well so far. Here’s what I’ve found:

- Yes. Without fail. Thanks.
- Be conservative.
- Do the sums. Don’t forget to save money for tax.
- Pick what you can earn on a good day of being paid by the word.
- A day a week seems wise.

I’m wary of giving out freelance advice because, as mentioned above, I suspect I might be a bit shit.

That said, if I’m late with copy now I’ve got no-one else to blame. I’d better start listening to myself.

The other part of it is that I enjoy freelance and I don’t like feeling that I’m doing it badly. The extra time should allow me to catch up with existing commitments before seeking out a few new ones.

The prospect seems to have given me a boost, even extending to some renewed enthusiasm for blogging. And today, my first day ‘off’, was good. I learned:

-I can see stereograms, but the ones with dots are shit.
-Pigeons actually bob their head so they can create motion parallax, and thus judge the distance of objects.
-A dog’s head with a man’s hands is inherently funny.

The problem for me is that I’m trying not to let Hackbash become just another self-absorbed personal blog, and I’m fresh out of ideas and inspiration when it comes to writing, journalism, the internet and (dear God did I ever have any) marketing.

Meanwhile times are hard, I’ve still got a job and I’m trying to keep it.

So, possibly a post soon on freelancing in a recession, but I need to get my own house in order before I’d have the nerve to offer advice to others.

I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a joy. Like smells, old songs can evoke the strongest memories. I can tell you exactly where I was the first time I heard Nick Drake’s Cello Song, or Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You (sung by my brother), or Japan’s Visions of China, for example.

Music evokes emotions, or conjures up vivid imaginings in me: listen to Anouar Brahem’s Le Voyage de Sahar and try not to be bouncing along a sun-bleached, dusty desert road. Play Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name without getting angry. Don’t even think about listening to Guillemot’s Redwings after a break up – but stick on Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days are Over and find yourself lifted.

I like music when I travel and when I unwind, and often while I work – although I’m normally forced into listening anyway to drown out all the noise in the office.

Which is why it sucks that, every few months, it stops working.

I’ve got boxes full of CDs and hard drives full of songs, and I don’t want to listen to them. I can’t be bothered with the albums I like, and hearing an album I love is like so much lift music. The lyrics go over my head, the tune doesn’t get under my skin, the orchestration won’t lift – or sink – my heart. It’s like I’ve suddenly lost my capacity to understand a passionate language: I hear the sounds, but not their meaning.

So that’s where I am. It shouldn’t last more than a few days. On Monday, perhaps an album will come out that snaps me out of it. Perhaps I’ll watch and enjoy more of these (thanks Jason).

Perhaps, good residents of Hove permitting, I’ll just enjoy some quiet for a bit while I tap away at some freelance.

Anyway, getting a break at Christmas this year. I’ve no idea what I’m doing, but it won’t involve Lapland, and it probably will involve Google Earth’s Santa Tracker*.

Sadly, freelance is going to come into it at some point, but them’s the breaks.

A couple of weeks back I wrote a post about the state of the economy, but when I re-read it I realised I really didn’t know what I was talking about. It was easy not to worry about it back when it was the credit crunch. It sounded like breakfast.

I’ve been having something of an involuntary holiday from journalism of late. My mojo’s fucked off again for a start, but I’m less comfortable than I have been with work. An ex-colleague’s leaving do at the Dennis local stirred up a host of memories: I’ve come a long way in the last couple of years. It hasn’t all been the right direction.

So, normal Hackbashing will be resumed at some point. In the meantime, talking of Dennis, the man himself is in Brighton tomorrow night to read from his latest book of poetry. I’ll be there if I can get a ticket.

This month, the ‘it’ in question is handwriting recognition, and it’s proved a particularly hard bastard. Most of it is, in fact, pretty simple – comparing potential matches to possibilities contained within a dictionary, a bit like predictive text – but nobody seems to know or want to talk about how the actual recognition bit works.

By way of an illustration of how tricky things can get for the technical writer, I found myself asking Wikipedia about the stochastic finite state automata model.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In the simplest possible case (‘discrete time’), a stochastic process amounts to a sequence of random variables known as a time series (for example, see Markov chain). Another basic type of a stochastic process is a random field, whose domain is a region of space, in other words, a random function whose arguments are drawn from a range of continuously changing values. One approach to stochastic processes treats them as functions of one or several deterministic arguments (‘inputs’, in most cases regarded as ‘time’) whose values (‘outputs’) are random variables: non-deterministic (single) quantities which have certain probability distributions. Random variables corresponding to various times (or points, in the case of random fields) may be completely different. The main requirement is that these different random quantities all have the same ‘type’. Although the random values of a stochastic process at different times may be independent random variables, in most commonly considered situations they exhibit complicated statistical correlations.

It’s late Saturday night, are the pubs still open? I understand beer.

Not the sort of ‘consumed’ where an awkward genius with a shock of white hair locks himself up in an attic to emerge seven months later with the answer to the universe, alas, but the kind where an arseload of freelance descends to snuff out every weekend and most evenings for a month, at the same time as your regular job remains entertainingly busy.

It’s been a tough juggling act. I should have remembered the first rule of large product comparison tests, which is that writing up the final article is the work of moments compared to the damn research. They’re an iceberg of commitment.

And I’ve learnt the first rule of software testing, which is that once somebody hits on a good idea for an anti-virus, security or backup service, they’ll white-label it to any tinpot outfit who can knock up a GIF to skin the application with, and it’s your job to spot it.

Still, as Red Leader once said, almost there.

Only thing is, he followed it up with “I just lost my starboard engine”, shortly after which, the script notes, “He screams and is destroyed”.