Clique Space and A Lucky Country.

I am Australian. It's good to be Australian.

I grew up in Wollongong, and consider this urban offshoot from Sydney (separated by an escarpment that runs between Stanwell Park and Helensburgh) my home.

People that have been in leadership positions to me (employers and politicians) have conspired (either with intent or through ignorance) to get me to live in Sydney. I have tried more than once to please the forces that cajole me in to a foreign urbanity, but each time I have tried, the same result has eventuated: I have become a scared, cowering shadow, haggered from intense social interaction and chronic displacement.

I got interested in software development when I was 12 because I could see it as a great way to do something interesting, whilst keeping away from others, and the intense demands of having to interact socially. On the other hand, I often feel lonely. This is not because of my preference for solitude, but because others appear to find my preference for solitude as hard to understand as I find their preference for chronic socialisation hard to understand.

Never have I warmed to the thought of living the life of a corporate nomad that proponents of the software development industry would currently advocate is necessary to produce good software. I want to work from home, and I won't take a job that does not allow me to do this. So, I came up with Clique Space before I named it Clique Space, in about July or August 2004 on a rainy day while I was jogging north along the cycleway between Bellambi and Bulli. I don't yet know whether or not it is good or crap, but it seems that no one's tried it before either, so no one knows.

By January 2008, I'd kept an eye open, but hadn't seen anything that might approach what I had conceived nearly three and a half years before. Armed with a part-time 30 hours/week software developer's job in Wollongong, I decided to register it, and claimed January 15 2008 as my priority date.

My patent is now a PCT which will be published in six days time. It is my best attempt at claiming this concept as my own. I think I have spent not less than 10,000 dollars to get it to this stage. I left my part-time position in Wollongong, because this employer started to dicate the terms of my employment. I have no more money to move my concept further than this, but I believe I might have just enough time to convince people who do have money and contacts (better people than me) of this concept's efficacy. I'm currently developing a proof of this concept in Java on my laptop.

We'll see...