Lawrence Job

It’s rare that somebody has an event big enough to shake them from the inside out. I was naive enough to think, to believe, that I’d already had this epiphany. There’s a fragment of irony that it took a season finale of Ashes To Ashes to trigger it. I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs of late, and this has been enough to knock me from my path.

When I was younger, I set out a path for myself with a few criteria. Events of late (the past year or two) have been big, and personality-changing, but do not deserve the right to steer me from my path. Things have slowed, and it’s time to get back on the horse.

Time to step it up a notch.

One thing to note about myself – if you give me a goal, I achieve it — and with perfection. I’ve (as of the past few days) set myself some short(ish)-term objectives that are going to be hard to achieve, but never impossible.

• Of late, I’ve seen people lose faith in me. I’ve cost myself relationships with people out of ignorance and stupidity. I want every one of these people to understand exactly what they mean to me, and how little I am without them. I want them back, and I want them to think well of me.
• My career’s been bombarded with distractions. I founded GridFusions years ago with a sole objective – to make something of nothing. I promised myself that I wouldn’t lose track of this goal. This was, and always will be, essential to me. I was internationally recognised as game-changing and invited to travel from London to Sweden to Chicago and back. I put stupidity in front of this.
• My education is myself. I, again, am nothing without it. I started from a young age – a small child in Hove educated by a small school in Hove. At the age of 5, I earned scholarships at outstanding schools but could not afford to take them. I’ve moved strength to strength, with thanks to my wonderful mother and a (frankly useless) school in Durrington. Over the years I’ve learned to teach myself, and accelerated beyond expectations. I’m not sure when I lost sight of this, but I need to catch up with my aspirations.
• I’m going to change the world. It’s been woven into every one of my aspirations, and I lost sight of this. I do everything I challenge myself to do.

• I’m going to find old friends, old family members and current friends. They’ve been confused and misled by nothing other than my own drama. They’re about to find out who I really am.
• I’m going to travel the world. Starting with the next year. At minimum, I will to fly to California before university. That’s just the beginning.
• GridFusions is back. With a revised model, it’s going to be big. Think really big. Over the Summer, things are going to change. Over the next few years, I will be partnering with national and international businesses to achieve ‘our’ goals.
• I’ve lost focus on my education. My next year is going to see an enormous change. I will not be held back by money, resources or time. Education comes first.
• Everything else can wait. I’m Lawrence Job. You’ll be hearing from me shortly.

In short, I’m back.

I invite you, yes you, to join me on this journey.

Sometimes I have to stop and reflect just to understand how lucky I am, and how many wonderful people I have in my life. Follows is everything that is good about college and my friends in and around Brighton. Thank you all.

You’ll want to watch it in HQ if possible.

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The Happiness Initiative

Just figured I should share this brilliance with the non-Facebook world.

I watch this video whenever I feel down. It gets funnier when you imagine 30 people in stunned silence behind the camera, glowstick-holding and MGMT-dancing (we’re retro) put on temporary hold. Sorry about the quality.

Andrew’s Trumpet Solo

It gets better at one minute in. Think it’s good so far? Prepare to get your mind blown.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since my friend – one that I’ve met just months ago – pointed out that she shared what was once my dream. Ever since the age of 6, and I learned about commercial air travel (I didn’t call it that), I’ve been looking forward to being old enough to travel. As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to fly to and live in America. However, it was only about a year ago that I began to question this. More to the point of this article:

Over time I’ve accumulated a list of ideals; ideals I wish to share with you in the following article.

Represent my town playing Hockey

Just field hockey. I used to be, well, I won’t kid myself: I used to be ever-slightly-above-average. Always told that if I took it seriously – invested time – I could join and train with a Worthing hockey team and play for my town. Since attending BHASVIC, my college, I’ve let this slip further – I don’t want to lose hockey, one of many important parts to my century so far.

Own a train

I decided (since founding the business) that I needed a measure of success. I wanted something to aim for with my life, and I’ve finally found it. I want a train. Not being a train-spotter, I don’t want an old-fashioned steam train to reminisce with; I just want to own an electric commuter train. I’d write ‘best not to ask’ but I realise quite how severely that defeats the object of documenting it; and I may want to save that line ’til the end.

Learn to ice-skate

Now, ice skating is something that’s astounded me since I was introduced to it at a very young age. I just can’t comprehend balancing on two thin treads with almost no control over speed or direction. I couldn’t understand why anyone’d want to do it, and didn’t question that until a Twitter follower (I feel terrible, but I have no idea who this was) questioned me on why I haven’t touched ice hockey. At the time I was broadcasting tweets regarding the results of our team’s matches. It was then that I realised: there’s no ice rink for miles and every time somebody even mentioned skating, it’d result in an excuse for their painful limp (“I know I can’t walk; I’m not weird; I tried skating, that’s all. Honest”) or bruised arms.

Meet:

• Stephen Fry
  Stephen Fry, as a person, is one of the few that have always fascinated me, though on a far deeper level than his apparent omniscience. His back-story, his biography, is fascinating and explains a huge amount of his traits. My urge to meet him is to simply to see him in person, how he is beyond the camera. A sick curiosity, if you will. Either way, I’ll never stop admiring him.
• Michael Palin
  Having met him only a few weeks ago, I intend to meet him again one day – I found myself so awestruck at his wisdom that I lost words and watched Georgina make a (I’m sorry) terrible joke about missing trains.
• David Tennant
  Many awards support my argument that Tennant (naturally, a stage name) is the single best actor to grace the century. Another aim of mine is to see a live performance of his; since he is one of the few people whose performance I’m proud to admit shedding a tear to.
• Anthony Horowitz
  The inspiration for a majority of comments I Tweet, document or share aloud – I’d be nothing without his creativity and talent. He inspired me to start writing, to focus my energy in linguistics (in particular phonetics). To be fair, I’ll give him ‘loose credit’ – at no point did he suggest this, but it was his writing that inspired that very thought path.
• Derren Brown
  Doesn’t he just fascinate you? As a result of his hit TV appearance and reading his biography, I’ve long wanted to meet him. The field of Mentalism will never cease to fascinate me, especially when people like Brown prove films like Sherlock Holmes and TV series like Mentalist to be true.
• My Father
  Having contributed roughly half of my DNA, I’ve always thought it to be my responsibility to find and meet my father with an open mind. I owe him dismissal of my preconceptions for at least a day – I haven’t seen him for over a decade, and I look forward to the day I finally discover what he looks like.

See the northern lights

I’m a geek, yes. I’m a geek that appreciates a beautiful sight, yes. Anyone to catch a glimpse of the Sun’s electrons bombarding the Earth’s outer atmosphere, resulting in marvellous glows of any colour you could so much as attempt to imagine, is captured. They become bound to evangelise the sight for the rest of their lives.

Explore Sweden

Sweden (perhaps an odd choice, you may think) has long fascinated me. Not for the gorgeous snow-ridden landscapes (though, that is an attraction) but for the creativity at the heart of the country. Many of the most fascinating people the invention of the internet has given me the pleasure of conversing with were born in (and a fair majority remain in) Sweden. The socialist, clean, contemporary environment has been slowly edging into my focus for the last few years. I want to see this for myself; albeit for a few days or weeks.

Live in America, Travel the UK, and otherwise disappear.

This used to be my biggest priority. Always having wanted to live in America, I’d never really given the time to question this. Is ‘the land of the free’ really a step up from the thriving country I’ve been brought up in? I intend to document my thoughts on this question in a different article.

Either way, I don’t intend to move anywhere permanently until I’ve given the U.K. a chance. This is a mistake of my friend’s that I hope to rectify: I’d hate to see her leaving for the U.S.A. without having experienced the wealth of diversity that England, Wales and the rest of the U.K can offer. If it means I have to drop everything, drag her onto a train to be taken around the country, I’ll do it. For myself, if for no other reason.

It means a lot that I’ve got someone with similar dreams, similar thoughts and exceptionally similar views that I can rely on; and I hope that my open mind is gift enough for us to remain friends for a long time to come. If you’re reading this, know that you’re inspiration for this article, among potential others to come.

GridFusions DMD

It’s coming. The GridFusions “New Wave” is almost here now. The first step is our new record label, GridFusions DMD. I’d also like to welcome a valuable new member, Jack Spencer, to the team as a Director.

We’re beginning to talk to artists, venues and recording studios, and everything’s looking good for the big 2010 launch. Naturally, since we are GridFusions, we’re not going public until everything is perfect, but we’ll keep you posted informally from the Twitter feed, and the blogs. You can also sign up for notifications as a consumer on the GridFusions DMD website.

Remember, this is just the beginning. Watch this space.

You may’ve noticed me at Young Rewired State last weekend. I’ve spent a lot of time at different London-based events over the last summer – and enjoyed every day of it. This one had, by far, the best venue I’ve attended in the last year or two. Still doesn’t out-do The Brewery, the venue of Adobe’s OnAIR event a few years ago.

The event was hosted at the Google UK Headquarters, a brilliantly stylish office located in London’s Victoria – a stone’s throw away from London’s biggest station, and a few stones’ throws from the Microsoft offices, conveniently down the road.

Now, back to the actual event. We were given roughly 24 hours to build the project, plus a few hours to plan and present on either side. The tag-line was a slightly misleading ‘hack the government’ – the idea is that we were to use government data from APIs, and screenscraping to build projects. In some cases, the data isn’t available yet – in these cases we were to generate our own data to demonstrate our concept and demonstrate the need for the data. We’d take the proof-of-concept to the relevant authorities and try to make the data more available to projects like our own.

Since every one of us was late to the event, and we all have fairly ironic senses of humour, we decided to work on a transport-related product – TFHell. The name was a ‘satirical jab’ at the acronym TfL (Transport for London), but we’re looking into a new (and less offensive) name for when we make contact with TfL.

We all highly enjoyed participating, and we’re now looking to take our own project to the next level. Our project‘s Twitter.

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