Because it’s a Friday and I’m in an absurdly good mood for some reason, I thought I’d show you this, the birthday invitation to my 20th birthday party. I painstakingly recreated the front page of The Dominion, which was Wellington’s morning newspaper way back when there were two daily broadsheets covering a city of just 300,000 people.

Click the image to make it, you know, bigger.

Things of note:

• At the time, I had only ever heard the phrase “Armed Offenders Squad”, and had taken it to be “Armed Defenders Squad”. As in, these people are out to defend us. Hence the reference to the AOS in my invite was actually supposed to be a joke.
• In the bottom right you can see my brother, Jeff, standing in for Bill Clinton and brokering peace in the Middle East. I went on to repurpose that image into a campaign poster for Jeff when he ran for school council at Wellington College – the strapline was “VOTE HAIGH. You know it makes sense”. He won.
• Meena’s Dairy (under “Coca Cola Sold”) was a popular place for students at Victoria University to pick up junk food and cigarettes. As I recall it, their sign was defaced by a disgruntled customer to read “Meeny’s Dairy” – a move that I heartily endorsed at the time.
• I printed these out at my workplace (The Bromide Express), carefully cut them out with a scalpel, and hand delivered them all on my scooter. My scooter ran on an electric toothbrush motor, so it took hours. Evidently a couple of people just thought this was a clipping from the newspaper, such was the quality of my forgery, and didn’t actually come to my birthday party.

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

It’s just over ten years to the day that the writer – and personal hero of mine – Douglas Adams, passed away.

I discovered Life, the Universe, and Everything (the book, I hasten to point out) when I was on a summer holiday with my family in Patons Rock, a little seaside town in the South Island of New Zealand. The cover intrigued me: a crumpled ring pull, floating in space. What I didn’t know was that this was the third book in the trilogy, so I really didn’t stand a lot of chance of understanding what was going on. The fact that I was about nine just made matters worse. However I ploughed ahead, understanding perhaps five percent of what I was reading, thrilled by the adultness of it all, and vaguely aware that this was funny.

The BBC television series was the next installment in the story for me, and it blew my then-ten-year-old mind. Spaceships powered by improbability, deliciously weird names (Zaphod! Slartibartfast! Vogon Prostetnic Jeltz!), and throughout the whole story this idea that our planet was, in fact, a supercomputer designed by a race of hyper-intelligent mice to calculate the Ultimate Answer to … well, everything. The universe was, evidently, a lot weirder than I’d been led to believe.

Cut to London, many, many years later. I was booked to fly out to San Francisco on Boxing Day, and was – like any aspiring Mac nerd that had the opportunity – planning on attending the MacWorld expo. I was a big fan of the computer programming environment Userland Frontier, created by Dave Winer. So, from my cold little flat in Arsenal, I emailed Dave to ask if Userland planned on having a stand at MacWorld that year. He answered the next day, and said no – but while he had me, was I interested in working with Douglas Adams doing some programming in Frontier?

Here my memory gets a bit fuzzy. The current version of me, some 15 years later, would seize the opportunity with both hands, giving it a genuine fright (if not throttling it altogether). However, no such meeting took place. I’m sure I emailed Dave back, but as I was off to the US the next day (and getting access to email back then wasn’t easy, kids) I think the whole thing must’ve just fizzled out. Due, in no small part, to a youthful misunderstanding of time on my part: I didn’t appreciate that these kinds of opportunities can be, literally, once-in-a-lifetime.

So: please join me in raising your Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in memory of the great DNA, and if you ever have the opportunity to meet a personal hero, tackle it to the ground and read it poetry till you leave it no choice. I wish I had.