Protocols and Names
Part 1
One of the side effects of having a mathematical mind, and above all if you happen to be a mathematician, is the fact that you spend most of your time outside the standard space-time framework, and by "you" I mean the focus of your mind, not your body (of course). You navigate mentally within universes which to be mastered need as much of your attention as possible, leaving only a small percentage of you mind connected to the real world, the real people and the real objects around you.
When I was 17 years old I moved by myself from a small island to Paris; to start some math studies. I have been under pressure to find a solution to the following problem: how could I ensure that my personal effects are correctly protected in the alien environment (which would later on become 'home') that Paris was, while spending most of my mental time away from reality. Paris is a very nice place, but alike all big cities in the world it has some predators, and being alone would make any attack from them more harmful than if all my family were around.
A simple example being that if I ever lost my apartment keys I would be in what English people call "a very deep shit".
The solution was to establish protocols. Protocols are very powerful instruments. They are somehow restrictive and cannot adapt themselves easily to new events (I mean without upgrade), but they ensure perfect execution of repetitive tasks.
In the case of my bag for instance, which is a very important part of my life as it contains everything I need from keys to text books going to personal papers etc. I decided to establish very important protocols around it. I decided, for a start, that rather than spreading my keys, mobile phone etc. in various pockets (trousers, coats etc.), everything should go to the bag. Another rule was, that everything should stay in the bag, meaning that when I arrive home, the natural place for my keys are the bag, not some random space on tables or shelves.
Digression: I am known to go every where with my laptop, this is not because I love my laptop so much, than the effect of the laptop is small enough (even the 15 inch) to fit in the bag. Would I have a laptop which would not fit in my bag, I would leave the laptop at home most of the time. Instead, it is not rare to see me opening my laptop sitting on the floor of some corner of a night club and get some more work done while waiting for some friends to finish dancing (with most of the time half drunk people coming to me asking how on Earth I can concentrate in such a noise...).
Very early in the history of the bag protocol a problem arose: accessing my travel card took to much time and required me to move the bag away from my back and open some pockets. After a bit of thinking, I wrote an amendment to the protocol to allow my travel card (and possibly my credit card) to go to the right back pocket of my jeans. This was fine, but the parisian tube can be so crowded and full of pick pockets that something needed to be done.
The idea was that I needed the most engineered piece to step by step procedure to ensure that retrieving the cards from the pockets, use them and putting them back, could be done not only without visual confirmation but with 100% accuracy and 100% security. I have actually thought of it very hard and I have literally taught to my fingers a perfect retrieval-putting-back procedure, with double, even triple confirmations of every step needed before proceeding to the next one. All this stable and accurate enough to be performed while I am taking advanced algebra with a class mate and therefore without really paying attention to what my (right) hand is doing.
I also have a rather complex protocol to open the front pocket of my bag in a crowded (and possibly dangerous) place without moving it away from my back, meaning without using my eyes. I do not apply it very often though because unlike the other protocols this one requires me to focus my attention to what I try and do.
I think that the computing analogy for this kind of background automatic process are deamons.
Another rule of the bag protocol was that my mental surveillance of the bag should be total and accurate 24/7. In this respect I always know where it is, in which position it is, and very often mentally scan the space around it and elaborate scenarios to ensure that it cannot be stolen. This is also done by what are now automatic background processes in my mind.
About one month ago Aubrey and I went to Oxford Street to by new Levis Jeans for me (my previous ones were dying...). I decided to leave my bag and my laptop to her while trying the Jeans in the dressing room. This has been the first time in 10 years that I have voluntarily, over about 5 minutes, shut down my bag+laptop mental tracking procedures. Aubrey would not be my all trusted wife, I would never do that, and in particular no girl friend ever would be trusted enough by me to a point that I could leave my bag and laptop to her.
Part 2
The idea of protocols has been so successful in helping me having a perfect 100% accurate control of the situation of extremely specific objects while using only a few percentage of my mind, that I have extended the use of protocol to a new concept (at that time): my calendar + todolist pair.
I have perfectly documented protocols to think of my calendar and todolist. The differece with Part 1 being that I have an umbrella term to think of all the objects, devices and protocols involved in this: "Lucille".
If you don't know this already, Lucille was the name of the System Expert (and not yet Artificial Intelligence), which was in charge of maintenance and pilotage of the space ship MARS-1 in the movie Red Planet. I have three devices called Lucille.v1 to Lucille.v3 (my current powerbook being .v3), but the term covers everything from a single piece of paper to a super-computer, going through all kind of note books.
"Galaxy" as a concept was born when I got my first laptop. I needed a name to refer to static almost encyclopedic data which I was accumulating at that time. The procotol by which the folder Galaxy may be split over several machines is still in draft version even if I have made major improvements almost every months over the past four years. The structure of the folder, has been stable over the past year though, which is an exploit in itself. The definitions of the Galaxy protocols are so hard-wired in my mind that I claim being able to find a randomly chosen file on my hard drive much faster that Spotlight. Galaxy is 24.09 Gb on Lucille.v3 at this moment.
"Alseyn" is the name under which I refer to Aubrey and Myself as a unit. I have not many rules about it. It has become our domain name for the website, but I have not made other used of it.
"Stuart" (latest in my family of names) is the name that I use to refer to a family of programs that I wrote to replace the single ascii text file which has been the level-1 cache of Lucille for a very long time. This has been a revolution because I have always found all those high level too colorful programs like iCal, GoogleCal etc. totally unable to implement preexisting mental protocols.
There is another name that I use, but I cannot write it down (and has never written it down) because my strongest passwords, including my GnuPG passphrase are built on it. I use it to refer to some parts of my personality, few general principles and a very small part of my memory. I would say that it is the name of the private and probably most powerful part of my me. It can be seen as my "core", but I would rather call it a "shell". If one day my mind was under attack with the possibility of destruction or subversion. This core/shell is what I would mentally try and protect as a matter of absolute priority, because after its fall I would not be able to be me again (whatever mental abilities would remain would not be able to reconstruct a person that I would recognize as myself).