Status-Q

My dear friend Martin King passed away last week. He was perhaps the most remarkable, intelligent, tall, good-hearted, inventive, generous, and thoroughly frustrating person I have ever known.

Our lives were closely intertwined for many years, despite the fact that we lived thousands of miles apart. He and I filed dozens of patents and started three companies together. Amongst other things not normally associated with business relationships, we also explored antique stores in Amsterdam, flew to Hong Kong for a long weekend, and took long road trips through the deserts of Oregon, discussing pixel-encoding algorithms and the meaning of life between loud bursts of Leonard Cohen.

Martin was always full of surprises. I remember him casually mentioning once that he had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic. I remember his descriptions of tree-level helicopter flights in Vietnam. And even amongst those familiar with the technology which brought him financial success – the T9 predictive-text software for mobile phones – few know it was a direct development of his early work on a low-cost eye-tracking system for those with paraplegia.

Both T9, and the company Tegic which created it, were significant achievements. T9 saved you having to tap the ‘2’ key three times to get the letter ‘C’, for example, because it used a dictionary to establish that a limited number of words – often only one – could be represented by the sequence of keys you had typed. Some disliked or were confused by the system, but for many it was the only way to perform text input at a reasonable speed on the phones of yesteryear.

In these days of iPhone app stores it seems primitive, but there were some serious challenges back then. Memory on mobile devices was expensive stuff, so they had to pack a decent-sized dictionary – 64,000 words – into 64Kbytes. That’s a good problem for a Computer Science project. (And don’t make it too dependent on the structure of English words, because when you need to show it to Samsung you’ll want to throw together a demo in Korean.) But there was a business hurdle to overcome, too: at that time all the software on a phone was written by the manufacturer, and T9 was, I believe, the first third-party software to be licensed and incorporated by all the major vendors. Others can tell the Tegic story better than me, since it happened several years before I knew Martin. But I hope that somebody will, because I suspect in the hands of the right author it would make a cracking good yarn.

Martin could become intensely focussed on a project or topic, to an extent that was sometimes uncomfortable. He became obsessed with things that frustrated him, including, sometimes, people, who usually through no fault of their own would suddenly fall out of favour, and some found themselves encouraged to pursue their careers elsewhere. He was always fair, often very generous, in compensating those affected, but it can’t have been easy to be on the receiving end, wondering where it had all gone wrong…

Yet it was this focus on his frustrations that also made him so incredibly inventive. Things would bug him, and he would ask why they had to be that way. Some of our most enjoyable discussions – and quite a few patents – would come when one of us, usually he, posed a question like “Why do you have to reset your watch manually every time you fly to another country?” And then the notebooks would come out and all plans of getting any sleep on the plane would be cast aside.

When Martin was diagnosed with multiple myeloma five years ago, there were times when we thought he might only be around for a few more months, and times when the prognosis seemed much more hopeful. We’d always discussed life and death pretty openly, so it was easy to talk about the latter now. By way of expressing my gratitude for this, I once told him, rather inelegantly, “Well, Martin, if I had to have a friend who was dying, I’d want it to be you.” He laughed out loud, and quoted this back to me on many an occasion.

Martin, you were an inspiration.

The US edition of Rose’s third novel, The Mistaken Wife, is published today.

Rose is in the midst of a flurry of talks, interviews and other events, some of which you can find out about on her site. We had a launch and signing party here in Michigan a few days ago, but today is the official date when it hits the shelves.

Available from Amazon.com and all other good booksellers.

And if you’re a Kindle or an iBooks fan, remember that eBooks are never out of stock!

There was a watershed moment for me a couple of weeks ago.

I was re-reading a book I bought many years ago: Melvyn Bragg’s ‘Credo’. Actually, I bought it just after it was published, and so it’s one of those really large-format paperbacks designed to make you feel that you’ve bought something substantial worth the substantial early-adopter price!

But I don’t really like big, heavy books. I do most of my reading in bed late at night, and in that situation I’m primarily after mental rather than muscular stimulation. So I looked – in vain, as it happens – on both Apple’s and Amazon’s stores to see if I could get it in e-book format.

And then it struck me what I had just done.

I’ve really started to value the fact that my e-books are with me all the time on a variety of devices. But here, in addition, I was willing to pay more money to replace a paper book, which I already owned, with an electronic copy, because I thought I would enjoy the reading experience more on my devices than on paper.

That, I felt, was pretty significant…

I heard today that Sir Frank Kermode, whom I was privileged to call a friend, died yesterday. With his passing, I fear that the pleasing aroma of pipe tobacco has finally vanished from my life.

John Naughton has written an excellent tribute. I too have nothing but good memories of the time spent in Frank’s company.

I remember his surprised embarrassment when I discovered, after dismantling his computer, that the reason he could no longer push a CD into the CD-drive was that on some distant past occasion he had pushed a 5.25″ floppy disk into the same slot.

I remember discussing Tolkien with him after seeing the first Lord of the Rings film, and he said that W.H. Auden had once asked him, “Don’t you think Tolkien is a wonderful writer?” To which he replied that no, he didn’t really think so. “I respect you for saying that”, said Auden, “but I’ll never trust your opinion again.”

Many did trust his opinion, though. Frank was one of the world’s foremost Shakespearean scholars. Yet, as John once remarked, he wore his eminence very lightly. His autobiography, “Not Entitled”, is a delight, and somewhat self-referential: part-way through he drifts off into discussing the whole concept of autobiography, and, if memory serves, doesn’t really come back to his own story much after that, as if to say that we’d probably heard enough about him and the literary concept was probably more interesting anyway; that he wasn’t even really entitled to a full autobiography.

The last time I saw him was when I rounded a corner in Waitrose and our trolleys almost collided. His smile when he saw me lit up my day, as it always did. I shall miss him.

Update: here’s his obituary in the Telegraph