isn't it apt that the word innuendo, is actually, a bit, like, well, you know,

a bit of an innuendo itself,

I have just finished reading the BLDG BLOG by Geoff Manaugh, named after the selfsame blog at

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/

I was really excited to get it as a Christmas present, and it was perfect reading fodder for a lazy and largely sofa bound Christmas break. It is brim full of architectural conjecture, full as only something drawn from a blog can be. The author shoots off on a myriad of conjectures, moving cities, floating cities, weather as a weapons. These are conjectures, sketching out possible futures, possible fictions.

Manaugh seems to care more for buildings than for people, but he is a warm and witty writer. This book is good company.

All in all the book is an attractive and enticing package, well illustrated throughout, episodice and endearing. Even if you are familiar with the blog, the book is a much better book than you might imagine, being much more than just a collation of blog postings. It hangs together well and reads smoothly.

Altogether recommended.

Tags: books

Just a rambling blog entry.

In a vague attempt to do something productive over the extended Christmas break, I moved all my computer passwords onto 1password, a password management software doohicky. This jinxed Rapidweaver that I use for updating my website, so that took a wee while to fix. Also it has been just unbelievably cold lately, so I have been feeling pretty lethargic. However starting to get back into a more productive routine now. Hence a quick rash of blog postings today.

Christmas now seems like an age ago, it was a fine chance to catch up with my reading, I now have four books on the go, which is really a couple too many, so I will try and slim things down to just reading the two books. Also caught up with my RSS feeds. The whole place was inches deep in ice, or on a bad day slush, so it was just the sort of time for sitting on the sofa not doing terribly much.

It does not actually feel much warmer now, but at least the inch thick layer of ice has finally gone. Getting back to work was a bit of a shock to the system, and suddenly the weekends seemed to last about a nanosecond. Finally feel like I am getting back into a bit of a routine.

Day off on Friday getting the central heating looked at, hopefully getting the central heating fixed. Being at home waiting was all the excuse I needed to watch the Apple Keynote. Steve Jobs looking skeletal explaining why the iPad is the future of computing, without full application of the reality distortion field. Part of the problem with the presentation was that the price was actually the killer, the iPad at £1000 is a duff product, at half that it is possible, at anything under that it is incredibly tempting, but a device like that really does rely on the "it just works" factor. If it does "just work" then it should sell by the shedload, if if has all sorts of glitchy annoying doohickery then it won't. Also a bit wary of the way you have to buy absolutely everything off iTunes. Might be looking at buying an iPad or two for the family when they come out.

Also rewatched the recent BBC Arena documentary about Brian Eno. He came across as a rather genial soul, incredibly smart, pottering about with his various interests. Despite being an Art School graduate I did not get the impression that he had a strong visual sense, if I had his money and time I would be living in something that looked like John Lautner's Scottish holiday home. Also more likeable in person than he might seem in the written interviews. I suspect that his interests and enthusiasms simply exhaust people, it did look like Paul Morley was stiffling a yawn at one point.

Other news, I've installed bumptop, a desktop interface thing. There was a TED talk about it years ago, and it has now finally come out on the Mac. Most people seem to think that it is pointless eye candy. I actually quite like it. It allows you to create a virtual 3D desktop, so there are various walls around your desktop. So you can pin things to the wall, or leave stuff in the middle to get done. It does seem to slow down loading, but I like it, and will probably stick with it. The various OSX interface tweaks like Expose, Spaces, etc left me cold, I never quite got my head round them, and Quicksilver is a bit too hardcore. I like simple visual metaphors, so I know where I am with Bumptop.

Back at work, getting busier and busier, but also starting to get the hang of what I am doing, so not so bothered wondering whether I am actually doing anything of any use. Enjoying the work, and getting to know and like my work colleagues even better. The extra travelling and extra hours just trying to make progress are slimming down the time that I have not at work, but I'll try and rationalise a few commitments over the year so that I find a decent balance.

Finally, been listening to the LSTN series on the Urban Outfitters websites (different UK and US versions) being particularly struck by the following which does stick in your head,

I know that big business is attempting to personalise the service that they can offer. So I get a personalised screen every time I arrive at Amazon, and a wishlist that I can publish to the world.

But micro businesses are taking this to a whole new level. We got a cheery postcard from the person we rented a holiday cottage from this year, when my wife orders from eBay retailers she gets a cheery postcard with her order, when I order shareware I can email the developer with questions or suggestions, I can comment on Redbubble and the designer of a teeshirt will amend it to reflect my comments.

The classic split used to be that a business was a commodity business or it was not. Perhaps there is a split between the micro business with micro business standards of service and the macro business with macro business standards of service. If you cannot make a compelling case that you are offering a high quality service at either the macro or the micro level, then perhaps it is time to start looking for a new business to be in.

Maybe it is just me, but for some reason when I do something digital I always feel that it is somehow less worthwhile than something that is less digital.

So an email not worth as much as a letter, reading a website is not worth as much as reading a newspaper, organising a computer's hard drive is not worth as much as tidying up a room, sorting out my webpage is not worth as much as fixing a cupboard.

There is a certain satisfaction to be had from posting a real letter, but I suppose we had better get used to living in a virtual world.

I have long disliked the term working class, it seems to hark bark to the First World War and outdated mindsets. However it clearly denotes something. There is an element of what was the working class that is now adrift. Living in sink estates, detached from employment, perhaps for generations. These people were the perfect workers and soldiers that built the British Empire, but now they seem to lack purpose, and they languish largely out of sight and out of mind.

When I went to secondary school the year was streamed at the end of second year, and suddenly half the year was lumped together into a group that had very little in the way of academic aspirations. I don't think any of them were terribly bothered by this, in a few years they would be done with school and glad of it. As long as there was a huge demand for unskilled labour, in the shipyards, on the land, in service, etc etc this arrangement worked perfectly well.

The nature of that society was that there was still a need for a huge army of general purpose infantry, with a smaller need for an officer class, and an even smaller need for a lofty general class above that. The system worked, it produced what the society needed in about the right proportions, people were generally happy with their lot. The bright, ambitious and hard working might seek to better their lot, the unfortunate or unmotivated might drop down the social scale, but an accident of birth, provided your breeding and determined which stock you belonged to.

But society has changed, the government believes that the way to a stronger economy is through a better educated workforce. If they can populate the country entirely with university graduates then the economy will thrive. Of course there are a residue of unskilled jobs, but if British people do not want them then economic migrants from overseas will relish the opportunity. Such guest workers have been common across Europe for generations.

If half the school population has no academic aspirations then suddenly you have a great many people without a place in this modern economy. There remain the traditional working class unskilled and skilled jobs, but with the loss of heavy industry and the move to a more skilled and flexible workforce, a sizable chunk of society no longer has much to offer. Having little to offer, they have little to gain. They sit detached from society, aware of aspirations and lifestyles that are as foreign to their lives as a fairy story.

I believe that this is more an issue of culture than ability, but cultures take generations to change. In the meantime there remain a considerable number of people who are largely detached from the economy and society. This cannot be right or just.

It is not that there is nothing that these people can do, it is not that they do not want to do anything. It is not that they lack value and dignity.

I would propose that the government starts to mobilise those who want, to join a peace time army. An army that can be deployed across the world to build infrastructure and social capacity. There is a proliferation of failed and failing states across the world. These need good government, decent infrastructure, society and not anarchy. In this country we have a multitude of people that are not only up for the task, but are more than capable of it. The major world powers are still to fixated on winning wars, we need to increase the peace. Increase the world supply of decency, honesty, trust, compassion. We do this by driving out corruption and inefficiency, providing adequate governance and infrastructure across the world. This need not be democracy and the first world as we understand it. Maybe these countries can leapfrog us to some better post Oil future society.

We have a vast supply of underutilised talent that we should use for good, before it is turned to ill use. The lesson across the world is that people have a huge potential, and we should be harnessing that for the good of all, before society is corrupted and degraded by a disenchanted minority.

I rather like this video that goes so badly with the song that it actually goes very well.

Well worth checking out the other songs by Withered Hand.

Anyone with an interest in investment should find this a valuable read, it is also a well written account of an interesting life.

To qualify each of those statements, although there are some broad lessons to be learnt for investors, this is not a handy book of investment tips for the novice. Buffett made some horrendous mistakes in his investments, though by and large they make for more interesting reading than his successes. There was no great secret to his investment success. It was largely down to an enormous amount of hard work. Work searching out investment opportunities, work studying investment and business both specific and general. He worked to build up his capital, from the odd business while still at school to getting investment capital from relatives. He worked hard to be honest, scrupulous and above board in all his doings. Over time his business scaled up from one finding small undervalued and unfavoured businesses, to a white knight stepping in to save troubled businesses. The abiding impression is that investment is a serious business that entails a lot of hard work.

As billionaires go Buffett actually led a fairly uneventful life. He liked his home comforts, familiar food, he was loyal to his friends and through overwork tended to neglect his family, something he came to regret later in life. It was not a life of high adventure. But it was a life where commitment and principle were brought to bear, where he formed his own views and stayed true to them. In fact he is probably more likable than admirable. That is not to say there is nothing to admire, just that by the end of the book he comes across as a very decent person.

It is also worth pointing out that this is a long book, it weighs in at over 700 pages, in a small font. This is not just an account of Buffett, at times it also feels like a portrait of most of the people he met, and most of Omaha too. That said where it slowed, it was generally for a reason, setting up a context for what would later prove to be key events.

The author is to be commended, it is well written, thorough, clearly a labour of love. I would hope that most people would find it of interest, though suspect that it will appeal mainly to investors.

Tags: books

From Wikipedia

"Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.
The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[2] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well.[3] This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[4][5] Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.[6]
The law is named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who introduced the concept in a 1965 paper.[7][8][9] It has since been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long term planning and to set targets for research and development.[10]"

This is exponential growth, that could be charted with a logarithmic scale. The implications of this being, that things don't just increase by a regular amount, they increase a lot, every time. The rate of increase accelerates, it accelerates to inconceivable levels very quickly. Just do the maths, if the Romans introduced two rabbits to Britain, and the rabbit population doubles every year. After ten years there would be 1,024 rabbits, ten years later there would be 1,028,576, ten years later there would be 1,073,741,824.

There are some good talks on TED about the implications of Moore's Law by Ray Kurzweill. It is also interesting to hear engineers from the semiconductor industry talk about living with Moore's Law. No engineer wants Moore's Law to stop on their watch. In fact the underlying paradigm tends to shift to let Moore's Law continue, so vacuum tubes went out, and quantum computing appears on the horizon.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/barrett091021.mp3

Anyway, this is all great. Listening to TED talks and Moore's Law evangelists does fill you with the gee whiz desire to aww shucks let put on a show and save the orphanage and save Africa while we are at it.

[aside - while the capacity of our computers has increased, how we use them has not changed all that much, software does not change much.]

But working in public policy none of the issues I come across seem susceptible to that sort of improvement. Child Poverty rates, life expectancy, levels of morbidity, public perceptions of safety and wellbeing.

None of the systems that we work through seem to be susceptible to that sort of improvement either. Is parliament 1,024 times better than it was ten years ago? Is our legislation 1,028,576 times better than it was twenty years ago?

Why is this so? Could we improve our lives at the same rate that we could improve our technology? What would a world look like that was changing in this way?

I believe that we are potentially on the brink of a new world. Just as Bill Gates left Microsoft to run his charitable foundation, applying an engineers rather steely logic to improving our human lot as a species, we too need to learn from engineers.

[aside - just what would a multi billion dollar charitable foundation run by Steve Jobs actually look like? It would certainly be tasteful, a little exclusive and pricey, and probably end up giving people things that they did not know they needed, yet.]

Engineers are not optimists, they are pragmatists, mix in a bit of venture capitalist, and you get a pretty unsentimental logic. Decide what you are going to do, decide on metrics that really measure achievement. Deploy resources to achieve this, measured against strict milestones based on actual achievement, not just measures of resources input. Constantly reality check what you are doing. Avoid the disengagement from reality that comes from building a product that no one wants, or will not achieve what you are after.

But government policy does not work like this. Public policy generally starts with a very unclear idea of what it is setting out to achieve, and even this is fuzzy and changeable, based more on political defensibility than rigourous logic. With only an unclear idea of what is the target, it is unsurprising that there is a lack of meaningful metrics to measure achievement. The political debate around the achievement of these fuzzy objectives is also suboptimal. Those responsible for delivery often have very polarised interests. For example those closest to delivery can always argue that they are not delivering because they need more resources. In reality they are unlikely to get more resources, so this is an undefeatable excuse. Those further away from delivery can always argue that there were adequate resources but they have been used ineffectively.

There is also the elephant in the room that in effect although we all like to talk about a few major initiatives, in reality most resource is already committed to ongoing work, or lost as unproductive overhead, or lost to chaff type work. You add a new task to someone's job,
but they already had a lot of work to do, = ongoing work
they need to train up and claim for expenses = unproductive overhead
and you ask them to give you detailed reports every month and answer your questions = chaff type work.

net result is not much progress.

For a commercial business, you might deploy software engineers to your new project, but in doing so you would close down the work they were doing before.

Most of what government does is not of much interest to anyone, and certainly not to politicians, but by and large it does need to be done.

If government is to become more focussed on delivery then it needs to have a far better understanding of what it is actually doing at the moment. Then it is simply a case of deciding what to do, what not to do, what to do differently. There need to be clear objectives, and clear metrics for delivery.

The debate has to move from simply being one about how much is spent to one on what outcomes are being achieved. We should challenge any claims about money being spent, asking instead what it has achieved.

The political debate also needs to move from one of easy soundbites, the media needs to move from kneejerk criticism based on juicy quotes and not evidence, the public needs to engage more deeply, realising that government services are complicated and difficult, but still capable of improvement over time. Modern technology makes government more transparent. It makes everything more transparent. It should be easier to see potentially useful metrics and apply them.

If this system of clear objectives, clear metrics, measurement against actual delivery of outcomes can be achieved then as a systems change it will lead to exponential growth. If government were only 5% more effective each year, in sixteen years it would be twice as good, and in twenty four years it would be three times as good, and in thirty years it would be four times as good. The real gains are to be had from improving systems and not from just allocating resources. But every step in improving systems is a step away from how it used to be done, for many of us it is a step into the unknown and unknowable. But we live in a competitive world, the only businesses that continue to thrive are the ones that are nimble and adaptable. They always live on the brink of the unknown. We should distrust the overly familiar and unchallenging.

This has certainly been the year of Susan Boyle, now enjoying phenomenal success. But what will happen to her when she loses her looks?

Tags: satire

If an iPod was the size of a room and cost over £1Million then they probably would not sell all that many.

I have used laptop computers for years. However combining a laptop with unmetered, always on wifi, so that you have wire free internet connectivity, and an internet that actually has compelling content, puts all the balls in the right place. Sitting on a sofa browsing the internet suddenly adds a whole new dimension to entertainment that was not available before.

Personally I do a bit of browsing, a bit of keeping up with my RSS feeds, a bit of exploring Google suggested blog articles, a bit of watching TED talks. I don't really know what the rest of my family does, but they do manage to find content that interests and engages them.

Being able to sit on your own sofa with a laptop is a different experience from sitting at a desk, however ergonomic your chair is. You sit on a sofa when you want to relax, you might read a book, browse a magazine, chat with friends, watch TV. It is time for yourself, when you are not some corporate drone chasing deadlines.

I recently bought a second laptop, one of the new aluminium Apple Macintosh laptops from the Apple Refurb store. There is just something about the design of the unibody laptops, suddenly everyone in the house wants one. It is a pleasure to handle, it is lovely to touch and stroke, it has a pleasing heft, the trackpad is much more intuitive and easy to use, the screen is a thing of beauty. It is almost as if they set out to create a magazine sized piece of aluminium jewelery. In the past I might spend the evening sitting on the sofa with the one and only family laptop sofa surfing. Now that we have two, I can be sitting on the sofa, with my wife, while we both sofa surf. Similarly anyone else in the family, if they get onto the laptop can spend their time sofa surfing.

It is not a new observation, but I believe that increasingly tv is a background to other more engaging and personalised content that we are browsing on laptops. So the television might be on, with four people in the room, but a couple of them are also browsing the internet, while one of them is reading, and someone else is flicking through a magazine, and all the time they are engaging in low level chit chat whenever one of them comes across something the others might like, so suddenly they are all watching a Youtube video of an acapella version of poker face.

Enjoy the future!

some thoughts on designing a better society. Read More...

Ideal Christmas gift ideas,

for the older generation Vera Lynn sings well loved songs from the war, including that perennial favourite "Hitler's only got one ball"

or for the pet owner in your life, a life sized plastic bloodstained dismembered human hand, watch your friends gasp in surprise as their dog brings them a real human hand.

I have been reading The Snowball about Warren Buffett the investor. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snowball-Warren-Buffett-Business-Life/dp/0747596492/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258270555&sr=8-1 The book is nearly a thousand pages long, and these are not small pages filled with large print! I'll allow myself to make a few observations even although I have not yet finished the book. The first thing that impresses about Buffett is just how single minded he is, just how hard he has worked. As the title alludes to, he works on the basis that compound interest means that a little money today, can become a lot of money in the future. However to make this work you need to make a lot of good decisions, and the more money you can add to the pot the greater the reward will be. It also becomes clear that although awkward and eccentric he is a fundamentally decent person, in fact he does not seem to be motivated by material wealth or particularly by status. He is motivated by being intellectually engaged and challenged, with the accumulation of capital simply a means of keeping score in some personal challenge. The second thing that comes across is that Buffett largely chose to live his life on the stage of professional work. That is what drove his vast fortune. And although clearly family were important to him, for much of his life he put career first and this had adverse effects that he came to regret greatly. Although I would like to be as successful at investing as Warren Buffett, I will never have access to the capital that he does. In order to make serious money investing, you need serious capital. But I am learning all the time, and the little snowball of my own stock of capital is growing steadily so I would hope to be able to make increasing returns on my capital over the years, though enough to retire on seems unlikely! And although I admire his single minded devotion to what he did, I am too much of a family person to ever want to make those sacrifices. At the end of the day it is for each of us to recognise where our priorities lie and try our best to reflect those in how we live our lives.

by way of explanation as to why my website vanished for a week or two and has now reappeared. Read More...

Sometimes a job is like climbing mountains, you are never quite sure if you will reach the summit, or what you will find when you get there, but you just set off any try anyway.

With my new promotion, and new job, things are a bit like that. I have a rough idea what to do, who to ask, and how to go about things. But overall it all unfamiliar territory, so I am falling back on techniques that have worked well elsewhere, and I hope that they will work here.

But all in all, I am enjoying it, there is a real challenge about what I am doing, and how to do it. I just have to remind myself that when you are climbing new mountains you don't know what you will find and you have to rely on your wits.

For some time now the main focus of my website has been my blog. However the advice on the forums seems to be that a Rapidweaver blog will fall over eventually, and I am best to use some other approach.

That is why I switched to Rapidblog, which works with a blogger account and basically seems to paste in content from the blogger account into your page as displayed on a browser. Creating a page on the fly for you.

However this did not work. After some checking with the application support and my internet provider support, the issue seems to be that to use Rapidblog and php I need to have my website enable for php, which it is not. I would need to upgrade my website to allow this at an additional monthly cost.

I'll have a hum and a haw on whether it is worth paying monthly for webpages with php enabled, or whether I will just use blogger for my blogging, Flickr for photos, and my website for anything else.

I have no interest in crosswords for example, but trying to get a webpage working is something that I quite enjoy the challenge of, in an aggravating sort of way.

On the other hand, I have plenty of useful stuff to do, and the website is not really a major issue in the scheme of things. It is at risk of becoming a time sink, swallowing a lot of my time in doing technical support work. Watch this space, or not, as the case may be,

In the meantime, my blogger account is
http://tallmanbaby.blogspot.com/

Zen and the art of organic rice farming

The One-Straw Revolution is not really written as an book, but as a collection of short discursions. These cover the author's life, his farming methods, his conversations with the students that visited his farm, and his philosophy on the impossibility of understanding nature. For me the book got a bit repetitive by the end, but it was never less than readable and thought provoking. With hindsight I would have simply launched straight into reading the book, and left the rather wordy introductions by other authors till later.

If you are interested in the Japanese approach to life, then you might find "Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use" by Toshio Odate, of interest too.

I suspect that often we are striving to find a technical solution to the wrong questions, when books like this can make us wonder if maybe we should be asking a better question. File next to Thoreau's Walden.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3E5TLC4J10OBL/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Tags: books

Friday was my last day in my old job, on Monday I start my new job, a promotion to a different part of the organisation.

It is so weird rushing to try and tidy up all the loose ends, write up handover notes, file everything useful electronically, get anything contentious agreed, get anything difficult done, let everyone know, say bye and thanks to everyone, and then it is done.

It was a rush right up to the end, I paid out over £6m on my last day, and writing handover notes till I was the last person in the office, and headed home at 6.

After being so much of my life, the page has been turned, and on Monday I have to start getting to know about something completely different, getting out to know a new bunch of of people, figuring out how to do a whole load of new things.

You should always quit when you are ahead, so I suppose I left at a good time, I was enjoying my work, I really liked the people, and found them great to work with. I suppose I was spinning my wheels a bit, I was wanting more to get my teeth into, not more work, but more challenge.

a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson Read More...

Tags: books

This book is not something that I would usually have read, but a friend who is a keen cyclist loaned me his copy, and I have been steadily reading away at it for a few months. Despite the cover, this is not really a book about Chris Hoy, it is about the renaissence within Scottish cycling. For non-cycling fanatics it is a bit dense, and the human interest is sparse. But it is not really that sort of book. Where it does excel, for me, is in showing the sheer doggedness and determination required to succeed. By any reasonable standards Chris Hoy faced obstacles that must have seemed insurmountable. His physical achievements are remarkable but it was through mastering his own psychology that he laid the foundations for what he achieved. He was advised to go away and devise a training programme that excited him, and that is what he did. He visualised all the myriad possibilities for a competition, so that he could cope calmly with any of the anticipated setbacks.

Well worth reading even if you are not a cycling buff, though maybe less of a page turner for non buffs.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heroes-Villains-Velodromes-Britains-Revolution/dp/000726531X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254069129&sr=8-1

Tags: books

How do you translate what you see around you into strategies to achieve your goals? Read More...

Tags: paradigms

Just some further observations on Snow Leopard after a week.

Additional glitches - Mail ceased to send emails via my ISP, this has now sorted itself with no intervention on my part. It does rather confirm my view that the way to go, is to use googlemail for my default mail address. I know some people get paranoid about cloud computing by in my experience it is more reliable.

Rapidweaver would not run, installed an updated beta version, subsequently fully released. Also had to update all my plugins. Just downloaded and installed all the plugins that I have bought. They all seemed to behave and recognised that I had already paid for them.

Various other applications are providing free updates, nothing too troubling.

The mobile me sync option seems to run for a loooonnnnggg time, and the update dates looks odd, but suspect it is a teething thing. Nothing actually worrying, just general oddness.

My ipod needed a reinstall, no one else has had this problem, so it is probably unrelated.

The newly installed printer driver now lacks the heading cleaning option, it is just a generic driver lacking the full functionality of the original driver (ink status, head cleaning, test page), but it does seem to printer sharper copies and now sorts them into the correct order, which it did not do before. I can just press a button on the printer for three seconds to get it to do the head cleaning, so this is not too worrying.

My laptop hard drive makes a small noise, I don't recall from before.

Good but odd changes, computers will now run a screensaver even when they are not logged in. iTunes offering sharing in a more transparent manner, albeit sharing between different accounts logged in to the same wifi hub, rather than sharing between different accounts on the same machine. The iTunes wishlists is a nice add-on, though I simply dragged tracks to a wishlist playlist, and it served the same purpose, with less eye candy.

The new iTunes store is a thing of rare ugliness, but I am starting to get used to it. iUniversity still looks old style.

Spore has frozen once, but that seems to be the first time it has done it, so I am not too worried.

Otherwise, nice to all be operating on the same system, and flakiness seems reduced, there are a few nice tweaks, and everything is faster, but not much that you would notice. The iLife and iWork apps are similarly nicer in a suble sort of way.

Tags: Apple

My Mac Box Set (family edition) arrived during the week, so I have now upgraded all three of our domestic computers to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to iWork 09 and iLife 09. Two of the computers were on OS 10.5 Leopard and one on OS 10.4 Tiger. [There is also an Acorn and dead bondi blue iMac up the loft, obviously I did not upgrade them!]

It will be good to have everything on the same OS again. Things progressively seem to gather complexity, so I need to take the opportunity to simplify when it arises.

Impressions ?

Doing three computers takes ages, particularly if you add in things like backing up, and checking over the drives with Disk Utility. However working through them systematically, getting one computer pretty much sorted before I started on the next one, it was possible to do them all in about a day.

By way of explanation for the incredible time taken, a back up can take an hour, creating a timemachine vault for the first time takes several hours, each Snow Leopard install took just under an hour. iWork was around twenty minutes, iLife around forty minutes.

It is worth keeping an eye on the process, just in case of snags. Interestingly the Leopard-Snow Leopard upgrades rebooted part way through while the Tiger-Snow Leopard upgrades rebooted almost immediately. Presumably the reboot is to allow the computer to run off the OS on the DVD rather than the one on the Hard drive.

The most noticeable feature is the faces recognition in iPhoto, which similarly takes half an hour to process all your photos.

The Garageband tutorials don't seem to have caught anyone's imagination.

It is now possible to customise the date and time setting to include the full date in your menubar- yayyy !

Full screen capability in Pages - yayyy !

It shutsdown just incredibly quickly, like it crashed! everything else seems quicker too

General reduction of flakiness about ejecting disks, deleting trash etc.

Conclusion
- is snow leopard worth it - yes, it seems robust, frees up hard drive space, speeds up processes and reduces general flakiness - having said that it is not noticeable in a whizzy eye candy sort of way
- is iWork worth it - probably not on its own, but if you are doing the whole bundle then probably worthwhile. Some nice new things, but new templates are really just eye candy, you never use them do you?
- is iLife worth it - probably, faces recognition is a cool and useful add on. Without GPS on my camera, I'm not so much of an anorak that I want to manually insert geographic information.
- would I recommend my mum upgrade - yes, but on the grounds that it will just make everything run smoother, not on the grounds that it will look any different.

It is really cool that Apple have managed to sell an upgrade that really does not look any different. However the under the hood stuff is impressive.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

As I noted above, things do seem to get more complicated, you do have to be brutal every now and again to make them simpler. The review above is very good on how Apple have made decisions, including difficult ones,

[such as leaving a relatively open door to pirate copies, abandonning support for old stuff, not filling your hard drive with unnecessary printer drivers - assuming you are connected to the internet to download the ones you require instead]

on the basis that they improve the user experience, even if it does mean alienating people running twenty year old scuzzy (SCSI) printers.

Perhaps the real genius has been to release an update with no new features and have the marketting chutzpah to convince people that it is a good thing that they want to pay for.

Technical savvy + marketting savvy = apple savvy


Annex A
My suggested approach
1 run software update
2 back up system
3 dismount external hard drive
4 install AppTrap - to cleanly delete applications
5 check AppTrap is running
6 review all applications, and delete anything that is really old or does not get used - goodbye Quicksilver
7 where applicable, delete podcasts to get enough free space on the hard drive for installing everything - only really an issue with the laptop
8 run disk utility
9 run onyx and do maintenance scripts
10 run Snow Leopard update
11 run iLife update
12 run iWork update
13 run through applications to get updates if required
14 delete superceded applications from Dock
15 after light usage back up again

Annex B
snagging issues
Bento 1 - does not run under Snow Leopard - need to upgrade to Bento version 2 to run under leopard
Onyx will not run under Snow Leopard - simply wait for an update version
Mail reports issues with Omnifocus script - presumably the script that lets you send an item to your email and have it appear in your omnifocus task list.
Mail once again will not send mail - I'll need to speak to tech support for my ISP about this, but I have pretty much switched to using Googlemail and Mailplane so this is not a pressing issue.

Annex C
observations - Spore does work, pretty much everything else still seems to work, with the exceptions noted above no problems encountered.

Tags: Apple

After being focussed on getting a promotion, for what seems like forever, I have finally cracked it. I had an interview on Tuesday morning, before I went in I picked up a message on my Blackberry saying that I had been unsuccessful at interview for a post the previous week. This week's interview seemed to go okay, but there were vast areas where I did not have relevant experience, balanced with other areas where I was possibly overqualified or exceedingly impressive. Later that evening a message popped up on my Blackberry offering me the post.

So now I have moved from thinking long term strategic thoughts about my current post, to trying to figure out how to get it tidied up before I move on in a few weeks.

Similarly a lot of my emotional energy has been tied up in applying for posts, and moving over to not filling in endless application forms and heading along to regular interviews seems so odd all of a sudden.

This weekend I have been,
walking the dog - still waiting for my pedometer from Amazon, so the walking seems a bit pointless if I am not amassing some enormous stepcount

one afternoon tidying the garden - to the extent that the brown bin the council take away is full, and my compost bin is full

ordered the new Mac Box Set, with iLife 09, iWork 09 and Snow Leopard - I'll upgrade the whole housefull of computers at the same time so they are all on the same OS etc.

reading a Chris Hoy biography that I borrowed from a colleague/friend, so that I can give it back to him before I finish up.

starting to worry if I really have got the post, I don't suppose I will quite believe it until I sit down at my new desk.

morning out gathering brambles with the family, so that my wife can do a batch of bramble jam. I like to get at least one batch of bramble jam made each year.

So, I am waiting for my pedometer, snow leopard, new post, the council to empty my bins so I can fill them up again, ....

and I am happy, after an awful lot of hard work things are all falling into place.

Tags: foraging

This weekend seems to have flown by, most pleasantly by and large.

Decent weather yesterday, a little warm for walking my dog, he was pecht getting back, I was too. Then worked on my garden in the afternoon, with number two daughter assisting.

Part of the joy of gardening is that it is all a bit of a playground. It really doesn't matter all that much what you do, it will all pretty much grow back anyway. So I just play about with what I think might be interesting or fun. In that spirit, I just gave number two daughter a quick tour of the garden, explaining what I thought needed done, and asked her to choose what to do. For some reason they always seem to want to trim the hedge, until they actually start wielding the shears and realise that it is hard work.

She concentrated on weeding out a little flower bed, and then transfered in a couple of box plants that I would like to shape into something geometric when they get big enough. I also got her to trim a box plant that I'm just trimming into a globe shape, it is surprisingly difficult trimming something to be round in three dimensions. I weeded the veg patch and lifted the red onions that I have been growing, they are now sitting in the cold frame to dry off. There is a certain quiet glory in harvested food. My damson tree, which clearly suffers vertigo as it is striving to avoid any great height, tying itself in bushy knots, has maybe a dozen gorgeous purple damsons growing. Not enough for jam, but good to see.

Otherwise, I've been playing around with a pedometer. There was a free pedometer in the house, so I gave that a go. And found out that :
I actually do more than 10,000 steps most days, without any particular effort.
I do less steps at the weekend, because I don't have to walk to catch public transport and everything in my house is closer to hand, obviously.
the most annoying thing about a cheap pedometer is when it resets itself, losing my awesome daily stepcount!!!

I've ordered one on Amazon, and once it arrives, I will try and develop some sort of exercise regime based on tracking my steps. Also ordered Cousin Basilio (book), which I seem to remember was good, and Coup de Torchon, the Bertrand Tavernier film, which I remember enjoying.

I'll try and build up a little stock of arty filmhouse type films that I remember being good. I've recently got State of Things (Wim Wenders) and the Saragossa Manuscript (Jan Potocki book, Wojciech Has film) and enjoyed watching them both.

I have been patiently adding the odd book or DVD onto my Amazon wishlist, but last time I looked half of them were unavailable, so clearly I need to go that extra step and actually buy some of these things, rather than leaving them skulking on my wishlist.

Otherwise, being playing about with Kuler, got a couple of awesome teeshirts from RedBubble. All is relatively quiet at work, so finding productive and sensible things to do with this largesse of time.

Autumn is here, keen to get out and get brambles, went out a few weeks ago and they were not yet ripe, but the back road where I usually do my brambling should be about ready now, so I'll need to get out.

Watched Benefits Busters, then chatted about it when getting my hair cut. All amazed at how much single mums can get in benefits and how well they seem to do without doing any work whatsoever. I suppose for society it makes more sense for a single mum with four children to bring her children up full time, rather than going out to earn the minimum wage. However being detached from the job market while the children grow up is not a great long term option. It is incredible just how unscientific getting jobs is. You can study all you like, getting a job still seems to be pot luck at the end of the day. In China the state decides what you are going to do before you even go to university, a system that does have something to recommend it!

There is a bit of a difference in how people think about work.

There is the view that work is basically unpleasant, and you only do it if you really have to, and get paid. And even then you are duty bound to do as little as you can possibly get away with. Doing more than that is breaking solidarity with other workers and is encouraging employers to take liberties, or raise the bar unacceptably on the level of effort they deem sufficient and appropriate.

Alternatively there is the view that work is part of who you are, how you define yourself and how the world sees you. Therefore you strive to work to the best of your abilities and take a pride in your work.

I was initially tempted to say that this was a class difference, but I don't think that it is so much to do with the person doing the work, as the type of work. A craftsman would always take a pride in his craft, someone bashing out widgets probably won't. I suppose that a lot of people have been stuck with a bad experience of work where there is no merit in working hard, where the culture is to do as little as possible. That attitude does not transfer well into more modern jobs where the worker is expected to constantly innovate and challenge themselves.

There is a third catagory beyond these two. It is not so much what you do, as what you say you do. If you can say with conviction that your job is critical to your employer, then if your job is unique, and it is vaguely plausible then people will probably believe you. So in differentiated, skills based roles, the ability to sell yourself arguably becomes more important than ability. This is because it is difficult to put any useful metric on a unique job. So the outward perception becomes reality. Part of this mentality is that every job is a stepping stone to another job.

For an employer the risk is that people move shamelessly into the third catagory.

Finally some more musings. China and India seem to be pursuing very different economic models. India is going for a service based economy, whereas China is going for a manufacturing based economy. On this basis, I suspect that India has made the better choice for the long term. Just a thought.

Tags: gardens

I had posted a while back on why I would not be buying Spore.

My youngest daughter threw a mega huff when her tamagochi died, it was seventh generation or something, so I relented and got her Spore. I figured that anyone who got get that vexed about a tiny pixilated virtual something, would probably find Spore engaging.

I saw a copy in the AppleStore, but it looked awfully expensive, so checking out Amazon on the free internet that they provide I figured out I could certainly shave a tenner off the cost with some judicious shopping.

I've installed it onto my newest computer, running on an administrator account. All a bit odd, but the reviews seems to be that it really does not like having to scrape by on an older machine.

Feedback? Well the target audience, youngest daughter loves it. She has been happily lost in it for a few weeks now. Oldest daughter had a brief go or two, only to quickly find youngest daughter a bit over eager with the assisting when it got difficult.

I've not tried it myself, so I don't really know much about it. It does look to be relatively linear, but that probably is no bad thing, just exploring might get a bit dull. The final stage universes do seem absolutely vast. There was even a wormhole! The use of user created creatures looks to be a really neat touch, there is even one species that looks like giant bananas.

In a nutshell, if you are into this sort of thing, then it is a really amazing game, but it is not going to engage everyone. If you want to see how quickly you can get to the end of the game, then you missing the point.

Tags: spore

Latest news from the Sun Read More...

Tags: satire

Click on more for a short story about a possible dystopia I would not want to live in, but is not too far from where we are today.

It seems to me that there is no reason to assume that when the economy does recover it will lead to full employment and a more equal and cohesive society. If we want a better society, then we need to work positively towards that, and not just expect an economic recovery to somehow make everything right.

Read More...

Tags: fiction

My blogging has been much depleted of late. Of course this just means that I been off doing something more interesting.

There was the annual family holiday, which really was excellent. What with the tunnel vision to study for my paralegal qualification, everything else rather got shoved to one side, so there has also been catching up, with the garden and community work. At the same time work has shifted from mad deadlines, to a more measured pace, which is letting me get in about some of the more strategic thinking and longer term work.

I have also been ramping up the number of applications for promotion that I have been putting in. I suspect that my fate is forever to be a very creditable second choice, always getting pipped by someone who's experience is just a bit more relevant. Fortunately there is no danger of me ever running out of ideas for things to do, but it would be nice to rake in a bit more money doing it!

I have recently been enjoying MyTexts which is another bare bones word processor type thing, pretty much like WriteRoom, Voodoopad, Devonthink, all of which I have bought and use. I guess that having a whole stack of different word processors is like my vast pen collection. Not really about functionality. Anyway MyTexts is clean simple and elegant. Recommended.

Also been admiring the Kuler website which means you can tap into a zillion colour schemes, or create your own, and Mondrianum which allows these to be incorporated into the Mac colour picker.

There was an article recently about someone's house, an incedibly colourful house, mainly white, with splodges of fantastic bright colours. And the person said that colours gave them energy, and it made me think that I am sort of like that. Bright colours and attractive shapes, eye candy if you will, do give me energy. I like forming ideas into simple venn diagrams that explain how things are related to each other, I like using my lamy four colour pen to organise my notes into different types of stuff. I love the anglepoise lamp I recently got from Habitat because it is red and a nice shape.

Of course different things motivate different people, but if I like colour then I should use it to organise my world, and help me to engage with things. So for me, eye candy is tax deductible, eye candy works!!!

Tags: geekdad

What I love most about the architecture of John Lautner is the way that he sets his buildings within their surroundings, sometimes a building is designed to blend in or stand out, from its environs, but Lautner designed his buildings so that when you were inside one, looking out, it was hard to tell where the inside ended and the outside began.

The curves of the Mar Brisas house mimic the curve of the bay beyond,


The Elrod Residence encapsulates the boulders that surround it


The Pearlman Cabin uses pine trunks to frame the windows, so the frames merge into the surrounding woods when viewed from inside


These look to be splendidly livable houses for people who like to look out at the world. Perhaps in a perfect world we could all live in John Lautner designed houses, or our houses could encapsulate some of the technical chutzpah and site specificity that make them so special.

As a child Lautner's parents brought him up with substantial and rich time in the great outdoors. It is inspiring to hear about parents making such a conscious effort to offer opportunities to their children that are thoughtful and unique, rather than the more generic aspirations that seem to come without thinking.

Tags: Architecture

Thankfully things have quietened down a little recently, and I have been distractedly tinkering with my website.

Running a website is one of those things that seems to be entirely resistant to methodical project planning. Rather than setting out with a clear objective, it seems to be a process of tinkering, fixing the problems you created, finding new things you want to do, getting fed up with the time it is taking, leaving it alone, coming back to it with a better idea. Probably an iterative process in the jargon.

Specifically I have returned to trying to put a search function onto my website, I had tried before with the Google Search option that you could insert using code that Google supplied. However this never seemed to pick up on material deeper within my site, so I ended up removing it.

Lately a new RapidWeaver plugin has appeared. [RapidWeaver is the Macintosh application that I use for coding the website, but it is supported with a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes.] So I have tried RapidSearch, it seemed to encounter similar problems, the developer advises that no one else has reported anything similar, so I am wondering if it might be how the pages are nested within each other that is offending the Google sitecrawlers somehow.

Anyway, I have installed a sitemap, courtesy of Sitemap by Loghound, and tried to simplify my website so that there is less nesting of folders, page elements, and the main blog page is now the home page, rather than deeper within the structure.

I will just have to put the whole issue to one side for a while and wait and see if once the Google sitecrawlers have passed over the site again it is all tickety boo.

I have also been doing a little additional tinkering. Yesterday I put in a favicon. No I didn't know what it was either, it is the wee icon in the address bar that some sites have.

I really will need to get the RapidWeaver manual and read through it properly, my site is getting to be complicated enough that it is probably worth me having a rough idea what I am actually doing.

I might even get round to enabling comments on my blog!

All in all it is just a gradual process of getting the hang of a certain level of complexity, tinkering away around the limits of my capability, and thereby gradually expanding them. There is probably a lot else in life that is much the same.

Tags: Rapidweaver

Within the western world we have always taken our particular society to be the model to which other, less developed societies should aspire. With the current economic depression, and building climate change, it is increasingly impractical that other countries should aspire to exactly our model of consumerist democratic capitalism.

The sacred cow amongst all the features of our society has always been democracy. It is difficult to defend consumerism or capitalism as something that starving people should aspire to, but democracy is surely all that is right about our society.

Democracy is invaluable in a post conflict society, unfortunately those are not that rare. It is useful in polarised debates.

However democracy is ridiculously clunky. You are allowed to vote a few times each decade. Is that really the best we can do.

It creates all sorts of distorting behaviour.
It encourages ridiculous and polarised arguments.
It encourages careerist politicians to align themselves with political parties, rather than their own ideals.
It places undue reliance on the small number of people who can combine popular support with the technical ability to govern to an adequate standard.

For a long time we have been defending democracy as a least bad system, rather than one that was actually good in itself.

But the bulk of the world is not run through democracy. I live within a small family, it is not democratic, nor is my wider family. My working environment is not democratic, nor is the community organisation that I am involved in.

That is not to say that people's concerns are ignored, or that things are never put to the vote.

All of these systems operate on a common sense sort of approach, where clear roles are ascribed, people have the opportunity to raise concerns, if you want something done, you will probably have to do a fair chunk of it yourself, and finally people have broadly similar abilities to do something.

These are not situations where there is a lot of telling other people to do something. There is a lot of asking people, influencing people, supporting people, being given permission to do things, etc etc.

Practical experience even supports this. If you are in a group that is forever putting things to the vote, then you are in a group that is frankly disfunctional. If you are in a group then there should be sufficient common ground on what you as a group are actually about, that issues that are so divisive and binary that they require a vote, should be remarkably rare.

The answer to a post democracy society is not that we should all be voting more often. Within America where they vote on propositions it is worse than anarchy. Democracy makes appalling decisions all the time, Hitler was democratically elected.

The people who make decisions should be the ones who have invested the time and effort to gain some understanding of the issue, and have some investment in the outcome. Clearly this has to be wider than just a particular interest group, demonstrating their venality. Recently British MPs seem to have been demonstrating far more venality than public interest.

There is a good supply of people willing to represent the public interest, probably never enough. These people are like gold dust within our modern super complex society. They are not motivated by greed or power, but the simple human desire to make things better, to leave things somehow better than they found them, or look after things that they know to be valuable.

These people are the capacity within our society, and they need to be nurtured and supported. They need to be offered opportunities, and development, given confidence and validation.

We want to live in a society that is more finely tuned to us. We do not all want to wear standard Mao jackets, whether they fit or not, all drive Model T Ford's in black, whether we like the colour or not.

I live in a small country, but I keep on getting told that all manner of things need to be administered on a regional basis, and even a region is far too big an area in which to make generalisations. Just as consumers of goods we demand near infinite variety and customisation, from houses to tee-shirts, as consumers of public goods, we demand a highly nuanced product. One that reflects where we live, our asprirations, how we see ourselves.

And between the public good and the private goods, there is a third area. The times when we are not delivering a public or a private service. Do we stop and offer advice to a traveller with a map, do we smile at our neighbours, do we tidy up the spilt rubbish, do we volunteer within our community. We increasingly need to operate within all these different realms if we are to create the kind of society that we want to live in.

That is not to say that these changes are onerous. We instinctively want to live in a village with a common village green, where we know everyone, and everyone knows our name, we want to know what is going on, and have people take an interest in our well-being.

Strangely the public sector seems to be falling behind the private in providing this sort of nuanced neighbourhood. Look at Amazon, RedBubble, LiveJournal. We want to create little online neighbourhoods, to look out for each other, insult each other from time to time, disagree certainly, but we keep on coming back to the honeypot of human interaction. That is why media is dead. How slow to watch a film, or tv programme. We want to be there with our friends, real or virtual. We want to stop to get a cup of tea, then make jokes as they occur to us. The interactivty with people you enjoy is now the killer product.

I have long argued that any meetings that are not enjoyable are unsustainable, any job that is not enjoyable is unsustainable. If you have to bully people into doing something you can only do it until they find another option.

While the private sector is increasingly offering this sort of nuanced, interactive, fun, engagement, the public sector is stuck with old models. The public sector still works on democracy, struggles with the idea of focus groups and qualitative evidence gathering, what do they tell us, are they undemocratic, why not stick a user group/board on top, would that fix it.

What is required is truly decentralised decision making. The centre has a function, but it is not the top of the hierarchy. It is merely one node within the structure. A node with more connections than most, granted, but merely a node that specialises in facilitating and co-ordinating other nodes within a network.

Through my life I have always thought that the real decision making power lay somewhere just outside my direct experience, whenever I accessed one source of power, I realised just how limited and constrained it was. They were able to influence, and make decisions granted, but not on a whim, and only within certain parameters. Where ever you go to, the real power seemed to lie somewhere just out of reach, just beyond the horizon.

That is because all the nodes just have different types of power and influence. None are absolute. The accounting department is no more or less important than the chief executive's office.

We need to change the narrative, away from the cynical red-top and Private Eye narrative that those who make decisions are venal and self serving. The people who make decisions are ourselves. The barrier to entry is not money or who you know. It is the patience and diligence of getting involved and accepting you have power but like a cyclist that power is only proportionate to how much effort you put in, how much you actually do yourself.

A world of cyclists is always safer than a world of motorists. Because the effort and energy and decisions are decentralised and spread out. It is more difficult for cyclists to make bad decisions, they make bad decisions more slowly, and suffer the consequences more directly.

We need to re-engineer our world where we are not cynics but participants. Where it is our time and energy that drive decisions. Where we know things could be better, and we work towards that. There is a role for government in this, for the private sector, but the real motor needs to be the people asking for more power, not politicians trying to find someone to take it.

[attached video by Bruce Sterling is on a vaguely similar theme, and is incredibly worth listening to.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/video-from-reboot-11/

]

Tags: democracy

when is something too big?

Yesterday we struggled to get to where we were going in the car because a major attraction was so large that all the local roads were backed up with cars trying to get there.

Then we struggled to find a parking space in a nearby village/town where we were going to eat lunch. Despite all the available parking spaces being taken, it was not at all obvious where all the people associated with these cars were, the shops certainly were not busy, we had the restaurant virtually to ourselves.

The maths are not that complicated, any business will need customers, but the number of customers is dependent on the number that will or can get to you. For a bricks and mortar business, they need to be able to get parked or be able to get to you via some other mode of transport, or even just live within walking distance.

For those trying to encourage economic growth, perhaps the best idea is not to focus on supporting businesses, but investing in the infrastructure that lets people access a bricks and mortar business. Putting on more trains, or better buses, or more parking, lets more people get there, let the business focus its efforts on making them want to come.

Too often the problem is a pinch point, the businesses are fine, but there is no way that enough customers could actually visit to sustain them. The importance of modal shift in traffic usage is key. Old fashioned town centres just cannot function if they rely on individual people each driving there, then seeking a parking space. The logistics of the space required to park all the cars driven by enough people to sustain all the shops is absurd. Whereas a few extra train carriages come at relatively little cost in terms of space and infrastructure, but bring in hundreds of extra customers.

Tags: transport

Often the only approach that is going to be successful is just sheer hard graft.

We recently had a temporary member of staff, who was also finishing off studying for a legal qualification, and I have never seen anyone work so hard. Everything she was given she just got on with it, when she had a spare minute she pulled out her text books and worked through them.

At the same time I was studying a criminal paralegal course, and I tried to adopt the same attitude, just putting in the hours studying. Applying an element of critical thought, always asking if I was studying the right thing, in the most appropriate way. By the end I had put a lot of hours into the course, and got a result that was much better than I had hoped for.

By stripping out ideas of talent or aptitude, just seeing the issue as one of graft, applying the hours of effort required, constantly making decisions on how best to use your time resource, the emotions get drawn out of the process. It just becomes a more straightforward transaction. There is not a sense of entitlement, or that life is not fair, just a sense that you need to get on with it.

There is a similar lesson in Geoff Colvin's work on Talent is Overrated
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/talent-is-overrated

Although media coverage has focussed on Malcolm Gladwell's book on Outliers, the Geoff Colvin book actually looks to be the better of the two. It stresses the value of deliberative practice, where you deliberately focus on the areas outwith your comfort zone and practice those, all the time getting feedback on how you are doing, until you finally get better at them. It even puts a figure of 10,000 hours on the time commitment required to be really remarkably talented.

Of course it is always possible to identify people that just seem to have a natural aptitude, but once you start to look into it, by and large their aptitude has been obtained via a huge amount of prior application. I overheard a conversation on the train, some architects chatting, and they mentioned the notebook that one of their number kept, it was packed with hugely detailed and wonderful drawings of architectural features that he had seen, they all kept such notebooks, but his stood out as incredibly impressive. Yet he kept the notebook to himself, never showed it to anyone. It was not a product in itself, it was just part of his creative process.

The designer's notebooks at the ECA were one of the most impressive things there. The endless iteration of ideas.

But what is talent? If we follow the definition that we are talking about a remarkable ability in something, then by definition that is all we are talking about. Media functions to bring to our attention people who can do remarkably well things that we can only do badly.

But what intrinsic merit is there in such talent. Does it benefit the individual? Does it benefit society?

We are not failures because we are not remarkable, we have made other choices, those hours went into something else. Often caring for others. But we can learn from people who just put in the hours of study, who did not just get lucky. People who jot down things, and organise their lives.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about remarkable people is that underneath they are actually not so much different from ourselves, they just put their time into different priorities. The question we should be asking is how wisely we did spend those hours, and how wisely we will use the hours before us.

Tags: lifehack

Just a quick shoutout for some recent finds on that interweb thingy.



First off, it is a well, you know, a sort of, its like a, well why not just give it a try, play around a bit, play around a bit more,

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

Secondly, getting bored with your desktop and want to put a clock on it. This works just peachy on my Mac, and there are plenty of templates to choose from, and if you are so minded you can even create your own.

http://vladstudio.com/wallpaperclock/

Thirdly, check out some arty tee shirts. Probably a little pricey, but then when you consider just how much of a part of your visual identify a good tee shirt can be, then paying a bit extra for something that is exactly right seems a small price. There is a myriad of other community stuff that I have not explored too.

http://www.redbubble.com/t-shirts/featured

Finally, Just a cool tune, give it a whirl.

http://www.myspace.com/deadplantstheband

Tags: internet, shoutout

I thought I'd go to a physiopherapist to help with an old ankle injury, but they were just pulling my leg.

Tags: satire

I really must go to more student shows ! Yesterday I spend the morning going round the Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2009.

Often with exhibitions they are a bit of a one trick pony, all very good, but quickly turning into variations on a theme. With a student show there are hundreds of students doing their thing, pushing the boundaries out in all sorts of directions, without much regard for practicality or sense.

For me, the stand out sections were the product design - in particular some stackable mugs by Thomas Payne, some twirly jewelry by Sarah Milligan and some superb furniture for children by Emily Greenberg. There was also the entire performance costume department, where not only were the costumes fantastic, but there were notebooks full of sketches and ideas which show just how much hard work and imagination goes into the work. I was also impressed with the architecture work, it is depressing that there is so much unimaginative architecture out there, when there is such creativity and imagination on tap.

Normally I would just link to images, rather than copying and pasting them into my website, but I do suspect that the links might vanish over time, and this stuff is just to good for me to talk about, without some images to look at. I've done my best to provide appropriate links and credits for the designers. If any of the creators have any problem with me including images, or would like me to provide additional links, just drop me an email.



stackable mugs by Thomas Payne


twirly jewelry by Sarah Milligan


the most fund children’s table ever


Performance costume by Eleanor Welch


the Leith Mile by Colin Davidson

Tags: shoutout

I bought this book alongside Depression Economics by Paul Krugman, and rather left it to one side. I've only just got round to reading it, and I have been very pleasantly surprised. Knowing that it was a classic text on the subject, I rather expected it to be dry and worthy. It is completely the opposite. After the first few pages, it quickly picks up pace and is an absolute page turner. There are not many books that I find I cannot put down, but this was one of them. I won't pretend to understand everything, and there are many out of date references that go over my head, but the big message is loud and clear. Largely based on newspaper reports, often tracing the story over individual days, people thought they could not lose, and borrowed money to invest. Confidence slipped, and then crashed catastrophically.

It is easy now to imagine you would be immune to such folly, but by the end I could easily envisage myself getting caught up in the mood of the time.

On the minus side, the quality of the printing is poor, with smudgy text. This is not an economics text book, you might learn about the psychology of the time, and think about the economics, but it does not provide glib answers. However, the mark of a good book, it leaves you wanting to know more.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1QOFFE84M9N52/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Tags: books

Difficult Decisions - people often talk about having to make difficult decisions. Should I leave the security of this job for something more satisfying, should leave an unsatisfying relationships.

However when you start to think about it, in technical terms these decisions are generally not actually that difficult. The information is probably more qualitative than quantitative, but it is well established, you generally have time to gather more information if it would be helpful. Generally it is a case of deciding between a very small number options, options which are disimilar enough to make it difficult to make meaningful comparisons.

However we make these sorts of decisions all the time, every day. Often what characterises Difficult Decisions is that they seem to be optional decisions, there is the default option to continue as you are, and the decision to do something different. Accordingly the decision is not a fork in the road, it is a choice of carrying on along the well established motorway that you are on, or to consider the little known and poorly signposted alternative route, that sounds like it may be appealing, but you cannot see far down that road, it twists and turns, and although it sounds appealing, you really have no way of knowing where it will lead.

What makes these decisions difficult is not that they are technically difficult. They are not actually that technically complicated.
They are assymetrical - you understand one option far better than you understand the other.
They are not time pressured - you can continue as you are, in effect make no decision.
They involve you in doing things you are uncomfortable with.

That is at the root of the issue, when we are talking about Difficult Decisions we are instead talking about unpalatable choices. There is always the default, the do nothing option.

But we are decision making creatures. When we are too lazy, or scared, or complacent to make decisions then, in a way we cease to be. We become part of the generalised mass, neither good nor bad, just drifting along.

Life is too short to drift by failing to make any decisions. There are worse things than failing, there is failing to try.

Part of what I like about investing in shares is that it forces you to make decisions, it keeps you in the habit of making decisions. You have to decide on a strategy, to refine and review your strategy, every month I decide on what to invest my money in. Investing in shares you just have to accept that you cannot have perfect knowledge. You are balancing risk and reward, the greater the uncertainty the higher the potential reward, you can consider other's expertise, but in the end you have to follow you own judgement. You need to accept that you will never make the optimal decisions all the time. Share investing just does not work like that. If you had perfect knowledge then you would just invest all your money in the most profitable share for the next year, and sell it all when it reached its peak. No one does that, no one can. Almost by definition every investing decision is less than optimal. You are accepting failing, accepting that you will lose money, others will have done better than you. I suspect that Game Theory has something sage to say on this sort of thing.

It is good for the soul engaging in the challenge of investing, teaching yourself through your results, the expertise of others, introspection. What has gone well, what has gone badly, what should I do more of, what should I do less of.

We are born to learn, to try and fail, pick ourselves up again. That is to be alive.

Tags: lifehack

My broadband connection has been upgraded at ADSL 2, no I don't know what that means either, but my broadband supplier (Demon) offered me an upto date router which was ADSL 2 friendly. They rather generously offered a wireless option, so I have bitten the bullet and gone wireless.

I seem to remember when I first signed up for broadband, I had to pay for the router, and it was around fifty pounds. My Broadband provider encouraged people to buy one of a small number of routers, no doubt on the grounds that anything that makes technical support a little less painful must be a good thing. The wireless one cost a bit more, and I did not see the need at the time.

However over the years I have taken to using my laptop a lot more, and my wife borrows a laptop from college for coursework, so, having the shift the dog off the sofa, and plug in an ethernet cable for accessing the internet was getting to be a bit of a pain. And lets face it, these days, if you cannot access the internet, your computer is about as much use as a brick. (slight exaggeration)

So, it all arrived earlier this week, the router had been pre-configured, but running a macintosh I'm always a little sceptical of such things. I had a bit of free time yesterday, so I shouted at the rest of the family to shut up, read through, and set the whole thing up. It really was just a case of plugging it in, except for setting up the wireless, which was slightly more involved, but only because I had mistyped my password first time round.

And now - I so love having wireless broadband. It works throughout the house. I can dip into the internet from wherever I am sitting with my laptop. The connection does seem quicker, though it can drop now and again.

Best of all, I was making a case for going wireless and buying an airport extreme, at over £100, and through doing nothing a wireless router has in effect fallen into my lap!

Result !!

Further to my earlier blog posting on this session for training staff on meeting skills,

you won't remember, so click on the link to find out what I'm talking about, it won't hurt, honest.

After a long delay, I finally managed to run this session.

The idea was actually the easiest part of the whole process, it took maybe an hour to work up, then I had to convince a colleague that it was a good idea to run, then it was cancelled, so I had to push for another date, then no one was signing up for it, so I had to advertise it again, then there were still too few people attending, so I had to wander round the office bullying people into attending.

But in the end, I did get half a dozen people to attend. We just handed out the name plates and agreed amongst ourselves who would be who, which worked pretty well as an ice breaker. People stuck with the agenda, and were starting to get engaged, when I introduced the whole Alien scenario. It worked exactly as anticipated, it was just so daft, and off the wall that everyone could contribute, and no one could take it too seriously. The discussion did start to wind up quite naturally after about 30/40 minutes, and I just moved into an informal washup. Everyone enjoyed the session and felt it was worthwhile, that they had contributed effectively and been well chaired. Our chair was a new member of staff, totally new to chairing meetings. I gave out a few silly alien themed gifts to everyone, and it was all done inside one hour. You can always tell after these things if they have worked, people talk excitedly and have smiles on their faces, on that metric it was a success. I also got a couple of emails later in they day from folk saying how much they had enjoyed it.

Take away lessons - it is virtually impossible to market the event, it relies on surprise, so as much as I promise people that it will be fun, they quite sensibly are difficult to convince. It might be appropriate to go via line managers, or have the event incorporated into a training series. One hour is plenty for the event, but give yourself ten/fifteen minutes for the washup, as much of the learning can be reinforced then. Simply praising the positive behaviour is worthwhile if you are dealing with people who are less confident in meetings.

Would I run it again ? - definitely, next series of events across our organisation I'll offer to run a couple more, though I might need to change the scenario just to keep people on their toes.

Final point - original insight/idea took an hour, making it happen probably took a day, all told. Creative ideas don't just happen because you have great ideas, they happen because you really work to make them happen.

Design modular furniture.

When we were young, we all loved lego and mecanno, and used to build endless toys and fantasy contructions from it.

Wouldn't it be great to have modular furniture, you buy a small variety of standard components and you assemble them together to build pretty much any item of furniture you could want. As with my proposal for stencils, the art in the design would be to come up with the minimum number of pieces, that can offer sufficient functionality.

I did tinker with this idea a while ago myself, and the Shigura Ban 10 unit system does something along the same lines, if you prefer a podcast to a web page, it is about 1.50 in to the attached Monocle podcast, but it is worth watching the whole thing.

It really is not a desperately new idea, so the interesting question is probably why it has never really been implemented. It is probably because it is design athema. Once you get your lego bricks, there is no further design input. While this might be bad for designers, it is great for empowering users. With the growing culture of IKEA hacks, it might be a good fit for IKEA, who to my mind are actually a really innovative and progressive company when it comes to design. Although somewhere like HABITAT is renowned for its design, I would actually rate IKEA as the more innovative.

http://www.monocle.com/sections/design/Web-Articles/Milan-2009/
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/6065/shigeru-ban-10-unit-system-for-artek.html

UPDATE
nice little video podcast on Shigeru Ban - does not say anything about modular furniture, but might be of interest, from the ever excellent Gestalten
http://www.gestalten.com/news/detail?id=2754

Tags: future

Design an economy stencil font. Read More...

Tags: fonts

How do you define what you are doing ?

is it in terms of inputs, outputs or outcomes ?
Read More...

Tags: lifehack

After months of study, I took my exam in criminal paralegal studies earlier this week. It will be a couple of weeks before I know my result. The exam date, 20 May, has been effectively tatooed on my brain, one of those dates after which everything could be safely postponed, and before which my panic would rise like a tide. Truly, my thoughts about an impending exam are akin to those of Edgar Allan Poe, on premature burial, except maybe more mournful and morbid.
Read More...

Tags: Academia, criminology

This is my first blog post in quite a while. I have been studying for a criminal paralegal course this year, so that tiny element of time, that is laughingly called my "free time" has been spent on studying criminal law. Read More...

Tags: gardens

I just heard yesterday that JG Ballard had died after a long illness.

As is the way nowadays, his reputation is based on the two books that were made into films. Namely Empire of the Sun, and Crash. Although his fame proper probably began with the publication of Empire of the Sun, which sold very respectably when it came out. It told a slightly fictionalised story of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp during the second world war. Read More...

Tags: fiction, shoutout

It is pretty much a cliche of measuring performance, that by setting indicators you end up distorting activity to produce the desired results in your chosen indicators, with the associated risks. For example there are perverse incentives, if you are paid to complete tasks, then you are encouraging people to complete the straightforward tasks that they know they can do quickly.

Inevitably it is very difficult to choose good indicators, or metrics.

You might measure Inputs - that is the amount that you are putting into the system, the amount of spending, work, effort. But there is no guarantee that measuring Inputs will actually tell you anything about how effective any of these inputs actually are. There is no merit in being busy if none of it is achieving anything.

Alternatively you might measure Outputs - that is the amount of things that you are generating. This sounds better, if you are producing lots of widgets, then that must be a good thing. But if they are defective widgets, or widgets that no one wants to buy. But what about services, are you answering lots of phone calls, but doing it very badly. Is it really better to be sending out lots and lots of emails. Should my boss pay me more because I am actually sending him millions of emails?

Alternatively you might measure Outcomes - that is some sort of measure of the change that you are seeking to effect. In business terms it is easy enough, it is profit or market share. In government or a service within a business it is less easy. Obviously the Ministry of Defence wants to win battles, but how can you disaggregate that down to individual contributions. Perhaps there are underlying trends that mean that you will never achieve the high level outcomes, but you still need to direct energy towards them.

Intuitively we can tell when people are working well, it is about commitment, innovation, quality of service, reliability, adaptability, resilience. It is just that a simple set of indicators are very bad at capturing this. They make us think that we can understand something without really understanding it, a shortcut avoiding the effort of doing some thinking and research.

The economy has changed a lot recently. Perhaps part of the problem was that we did not really understand it, but we thought that a few indicators would tell us all we needed to know. But the nature of indicators is that they skew activity.

So we thought that rising house prices were good, and sure enough they went up. We thought that low inflation/interest rates were good, and they stayed low. We thought that low unemployment was good, and it stayed low.

But we were not really thinking about more structural issues like the balance of payments, like the affordability of credit, like the resilience of the economy.

Economics is unscientific in that it tends to assume that all other things being equal doing X will lead to Y. When in real life all other things do not remain equal.

Although we are entering a new era, economic policy has not. It still seems to be fixed on making things go back to the way they used to be, but perhaps we might learn a few lessons, so we don't need to change much, just iron out a few wrinkles and things can just go back to the way that they were.

Why not look at some different indicators, our streets are full of litter, generations of families are disengaged from work, most people have minimal engagement with nature or a wider society, we are slowing killing off other species, and ultimately our planet, we are re-enacting the tragedy of the commons on a global scale.

When we are tackling these issues with all our strength, then perhaps we should worry about house prices and dinner parties. Common sense tells us that the economic progress was destroying our planet. We need to adopt some better perspective, and let that inform what we do.

Tags: future

I got this book cheap as part of a promotion that The Times was running. It is a thriller set in London, featuring a former mercenary and a policeman. They take turns providing the narrative, and their stories cross over and come together by the end.

If you are looking for something diverting then you won't go far wrong with this. It is certainly not the best written book I have ever read, the prose is unremarkable, but generally it goes along at a fair pace, and though never terribly wonderful, it is never terribly dull either.

I am sure that there are better thrillers out there, but this is a decent enough potboiler, that manages to feel reasonably fresh and convincing, despite covering what could be very cliched territory.

Tags: books

I have just bought and installed MacHeist 3 Read More...

Tags: geekdad, shoutout

We all know how capitalism works. If demand increases prices go up, if supply increases then prices go down, supply and demand are the real things, while the prices float up and down in response.

Read More...

Tags: shares

I’ve fixed my RSS feed now, a quick search on the RapidWeaver Forums, and I seem to have got it figured out and sorted now. So if you tried it before and it wasn’t working please give it another try.

If it is still not working let me know, and I’ll have another go at fixing it, similarly any other glitches on the website, happy to have a look at and have a go at fixing.


Read More...

Tags: Rapidweaver

some random stuff Read More...

Tags: shoutout

Do you have problems setting custom icons under OS10.4 Tiger?

Read More...

Tags: Apple

Should you read The Return of Depression Economics by Paul Krugman? Read More...

Tags: books, shares

From the lyrics of the Mountain Goats, to the state of the world, with updates on what I have been reading, and planting in my garden. This blog posting has it all. Read More...

Tags: gardens, mountain goats, shares

In plasticene related news this week, the sad news that Morph died, it is thought that someone left him next to the radiator. Also University Challenge team disqualified after it was found out that a team member was made out of plasticene.

Tags: satire

Tags: satire

What are the implications for Kondratiev Waves for the small investor, or are they bunkum and we should just continue to invest in exactly the same way as we always have? Read More...

Tags: shares

These are difficult times, we are arguably on the brink of world economic depression, on a personal scale our jobs and day to decisions have never been more pressured. We all need to hone our abilities to make good decisions in difficult times, ... Read More...

Tags: lifehack, shares, Academia

I have been doing a little reading up on Kondratiev Waves and Joseph Schumpeter.

If you are willing to accept that our current economic situation is more akin to the 1929 Wall Street crash, than more recent booms and busts, or bulls and bears, then the theory of Kondratiev Waves, and the work of Joseph Schumpeter will be of interest. Read More...

Tags: shares

The internet means that our attention is swamped with the views of pundits. A pundit being someone who has little real depth of expertise in a subject.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to remember to seek out pundits that challenge our thinking, and introduce us to new ideas, rather than sticking to pundits who just tell us what we want to hear. The difference between a pundit and an expert, is that the pundit has never had to study the whole of a subject, just the bits that interested them.

An expert at least knows what he is not telling you, often a pundit only knows what he is telling you.

Tags: blogging, future, internet

I have lately been enjoying listening to No Safety, a tribute album to one of my favourite bands, the Mountain Goats.

The full story is available within a thread on the Mountain Goats' website, most of the tracks are on a single file for download, although there were a couple that missed the compilation that are appended to postings, and are well worth seeking out. Read More...

Tags: mountain goats, internet, future, shoutout

What have I been doing, what have I not been doing, just how reading productivity blogs might ruin your life! Read More...

Tags: blogging

Pottering is a greatly undervalued activity.

I suppose that the common expectation is that all life is about bashing out widgets, a task requiring neither imagination nor creativity, and so we do no need to potter, or to reflect, we merely get on with bashing out more widgets. We might periodically take time to sharpen our widget bashing tools, or plan our critical path for most effective bashing of widgets. Read More...

Tags: lifehack

Tags: satire, tv

The toughest things to plan for the ones that you really don't have much control over, especially when they are difficult. Read More...

Tags: blogging

A while back, I posted a blog entry about why work should be more fun, but did not actually say anything terribly useful about how to make work more fun. I have been doing a little work on an idea for a short lunchtime seminar/ workshop that lets staff practice the essential skills for meetings, in a light and entertaining way. If possible, I’ll try running it at my workplace, and see how it goes. Details below, you might need to customise to suit your workplace but the basic idea should work. Read More...

Tags: voodoopad

This is just a very good thriller. It is well written, thoughtful, well paced and has a wealth of interesting characters. Throughout it maintains your interest and although you want to know what happens, you are more than content to wait and see how things unfold. I am sure that the author might be capable of writing dull or uninteresting text, but he does not do it in this book. Read More...

Tags: books

Consider the evidence;

• you cannot find a photo of a Google server farm on Google images

Read More...

Tags: internet, satire

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/28/useless-and-japan-only-but-cute-mini-usb-construction-site/

It is like a Douglas Coupland novel made plastic, cute mini-fig construction worker kit that you can plug in to your computer's usb port so that the traffic cones light up.

Read More...

Tags: geekdad

Tags: satire

I have been doing some work on my blog, though at time of writing my ISP does not seem to be letting anyone see my updated site. Usually these things just sort themselves out, and generally the tech support people just read from a script and know less than I do, so phoning them is more diversion than useful activity.

Last week I was keen to put some sort of page counter onto my website, but after a little research (five minutes with google and a couple of forums) I simply decided to go for google analytics. There seem to be two relevant google options, webmaster and analytics. Read More...

Tags: blogging, internet, lifehack, Rapidweaver

I suspect that this blog posting, might seem strangely prophetic in a few years time. If you were a really smart hacker, you would seek to make your money from activities that might not even be criminal.

I'll pitch a few scenarios; Read More...

Tags: internet

Private Eye to close

In a long overdue move, The Private Eye, well known UK satirical magazine, has announced that it will close down. The Private I, has long been a thorn in the side of the establishment. Noted for its regular reprints of stories about foreign or poor people having sex with animals, and derision for our hard working political representatives and government departments. The magazine has been coming out every week for the past hundred years [sub ed - can you check this bit please - I think it might be older] and has broken such stories as [sub ed - can you find something] Read More...

Tags: satire

This is the third in a sequence of books for children, about a post apocalyptic world where mobile cities trundle across the wasteland attempting to consume each other. While the first was incredibly fast paced to the extent almost of being exhaustingly relentless, the second was a little slow. This one is a fair combination between pace and atmosphere. While the stories are aimed at children, if you think about it, the world described is so bleak and forlorn, that it is hardly mainstream fare. There is a certain economy with some of the leading characters turning up across the books, but a great many other leading characters exit from each book. This is a heartless world. Read More...

Tags: books

This will probably be a rather rambling blog post. Words to strike terror into your very soul, and drive the casual browser, screaming and fleeing, never returning, into the gloaming.

I will however fill it chock full of random search words and watch as people come here looking for something insightful on punk jellyfish, or Britney dungarees. Read More...

Tags: lifehack

Typical task management and prioritisation schemes would work very well if you were attempting to keep your computer RAM spinning over at maximum effectiveness. But when it comes to actually getting the best out of yourself they are sadly deficient. Read More...

Tags: lifehack

After a rather soggy walk, with a slightly huffy dog, I sat down with a cup of coffee to watch the latest MacWorld Apple Keynote with Phillip Schiller taking the place of Steve Jobs. If the iPhone is the god phone, then Jobs must be the god CEO.

Of course picking up the baton from Steve is a thankless task, as his keynotes are outstanding. That said, from comments he has made, it is not something that comes easily, even for iCEO Jobs, there is a lot of hard work that goes into these seemingly effortless presentations. Read More...

Tags: Apple

TS Eliot's to do list

I have just been reading about prioritisation and to do lists, and they really sound most wonderful. I have decided to put them into action, forthwith,

AM - write The Wasteland
check spelling
post off to Ezra Pound Read More...

Tags: lifehack

If you think about how a muscle works, you will tense the muscle, then you relax the muscle. It seems pretty intuitive that that is the right way for a muscle to work. If someone were to clench their fist, then try and clench it even tighter, and then keep on clenching it... You just know they would end up with a very sore hand or possibly even a damaged one.
Read More...

Tags: lifehack

I bought this as one of the cheap paperbacks that you can get with the Times. The past few have all been more aimed at women, which probably reflects that fact that women buy and read books, whereas men presumably get magazines where you can look at the pictures. Read More...

Tags: books

Well, what is the point of blogging? I've been writing these blog entries for quite a while now, erraticaly of late, admitedly.

I suppose, at its most basic, I like writing stuff down, I find it a useful way to order my thoughts. It also helps to lodge ideas in my head, so that I can come back to them later. Read More...

Tags: blogging, shares

This weekend, I have been mostly, reading

Engleby, by Sebastian Faulks, Read More...

Tags: books, Academia

If this blog seems a little more distracted than usual, it is because I am typing it out while listening to Come Dine With Me, which I must confess is just about all I watch on tv these days. The commentary is delightfully catty, which saves me all the trouble of supplying a catty commentary to keep my family amused with. It does have the desperate air of a car crash some nights, when the guests really fail to gel. I had always thought that dinner parties sounded quite jolly and sophisticated, but Come Dine With Me, has helpfully disabused me of this notion, and I really don't think that I am missing out on much, sitting at home sucking on my frozen ready-meal. Read More...

Tags: tv

Technical Problem,

my website vanished yesterday! Read More...

Tags: Rapidweaver

Another short review of a book that I have just finished.

A present from my uncle, Findings, by Kathleen Jamie is a selection of short essays. Kathleen is a poet and lecturer at St Andrews University, and the essays follow a rather particular style. They describe trips or observations, predominantly of the natural world, which then provide a prompt for more philosophical musings. Read More...

Tags: books

Normally I get up early, and write my blog when I have a nice quiet house to myself.

However, this week, I am writing my weekly blog entry before my Sunday tea, just as the weekend is on the way out.

It has been an odd few weeks and weekends lately. The past few weekends I have been helping out with planting bulbs across the local area. We did manage to get some extra volunteers the first week, but the weather has been so dismal since then that the volunteers must have all perfectly sensibly stayed in their beds. Nevertheless, the bulbs are now all safely in the ground where they should be, and with any luck a decent number will pop up in the new year, to brighten up some dull corners.
Read More...

Tags: gardens

I have not written a blog entry about the recent financial upheavals, although I have been meaning to.

At first things had the grim logic of a horror film, of course the clues had been there, we had been cocky and arrogant, and now was the time of our come-uppance. Every morning the news seemed to be reporting something that was impossible, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, and most shocking to me Halifax Bank of Scotland. You had dealt with these businesses all your life, you knew people that worked for them. Read More...

Tags: shares

Just a thought, if you look at what makes a computer game interesting and engaging, then what does that tell you about

• what kind of job you might enjoy most
• how employers should design engaging jobs

So I asked my daughters about what made a good computer game
includes activity or activities that you enjoy

• it changes or develops as you go on
• includes an element of challenge, for example to beat others, or to beat your personal best
• not too short

Read More...

Tags: lifehack

I will just take this opportunity to jot down a few impressions about the last book that I read,
The Irresistable Inheritance of Wilberforce,

by someone rejoicing in the rather unusual name of
Paul torday author of salmon fishing in the yemen, Read More...

Tags: books

I am just back from a short visit to Belfast. It is fair to say that it is a city of huge contrasts. I cannot think of anywhere else where I have been made to feel more welcome, or where I have been more apprehensive. Driving round the streets tells you one story, huge bridge shaped cranes at the docks, big enough to lift a ship, the loss of shipbuilding must have ripped the heart out of the place. Sectarian murals on the walls and gable ends, beautiful but deeply disconcerting. From the air it looked leafy and beautiful, on the ground much of it had an air of staunch working class-ness.

The taxi drivers, when asked, could tell you about when no one dared drive a taxi, when not knowing the name of a pub meant you came from the wrong side of the divide and could be fatal. There was still a wariness, but the more usual concerns of drunken students, and stag parties were starting to rear their head. The papers had a sense of heightened reality, there was an edge to disputes, government seemed to hang by a thread, but then it had hung by a thread for so long now, it was not alarming. Read More...

Tags: belfast

I'm miffed I did not get that job I applied for, which in my gut tells me, that I do really want to move on to a piece of work that will really challenge and engage me. To be honest it is not the money, or the status, it is just that I want to work on something that stretches and engages me.

HOWEVER - not challenging in the frequently used sense,
"this is a challenging post, which requires a good sense of humour" Read More...

Is regeneration a myth?

I was at some event, and one of the people attending, someone who actually lived in one of these areas that was being regenerated, said that the best thing to do would simply be to knock down the whole place. These places are often deeply unloved, even by those that live there.

The money spent on regenerating some places, you could probably have gold plated them over the years. And yet they persist as deprived areas for generations, they were deprived when I was young, half a lifetime later, I come back and it is still the same places that are run-down despite the best efforts to regenerate and shed loads of money.
Read More...

Tags: Regeneration

I have not troubled myself to re-read my blog posting on criminology, but I have that nagging feeling, that it is not quite right.

I suppose that I should change my perspective. Crime is not an issue that can usefully be understood on a personal/individual basis.

What we need to do is to create social environments in which people can prosper. Not everyone will do well, but there should be the capacity there for people to do well. It is easy enough to look at social environments that seem to work well, or point to ones that do not work well.
Read More...

Tags: community, criminology

I was pretty excited about the Spore Creature maker, although truth be told I only made one creature. So I was pretty keen to get Spore when it did come out, my daughters certainly enjoy Sims so this seemed like something that they would also enjoy.

However on the day of the big release, it was not available for Mac, so that put me off for a day or two. Then the links to get a Mac version were down, and it was pretty opaque what the Mac system specifications were. There were a few good reviews on the US Apple store site, one bad one on the UK Apple Store. The reviews of Amazon were phenominally negative.
Wikipedia shed a little more light on things, and checking out some personal blogs via Technorati a bit more. Read More...

Tags: spore

I have been meaning to write a blog entry on this for a while, but suspect that I'll not be able to sort my thoughts out fully.

Housing allocation is getting to be a major issue for local authorities now. In the era before right to buy, the housing stock was much easier to manage. Now the better stock tends to leave council ownership, so there are
private houses
mixed council owned, and right to buy housing
unattractive council housing that is not being bought. Read More...

Tags: housing

I have been reading a criminology Reader, I like to read up on the theory of a policy area when I get started, and a Reader is actually a pretty good way of doing it.

Basically a Reader assembles a lot of key texts into the same book, so that lecturers can simply ask students to get the Reader, and then they can ask them to compare the theories of different writers. Thereby saving the task of hunting down articles in obscure journals. Read More...

Tags: criminology

I'll just tuck this sort of diary stuff into a separate blog entry, to try and keep things a little neater. After last weekend, the working week has felt a bit of a struggle. Not in a bad way, just that it took me a fair while catching up on my sleep and getting back into a routine after being out on the Saturday night.

Not an incredibly busy week, but pretty steady, I tend to measure these things by meetings, so there were a couple of meetings where I was simply attending/supporting, which was fine. A couple of pretty informal ones where I was just meeting people. And one where I ended up sorting out the agenda and chairing. Read More...

As predicted a few blog entries ago, I did not get that post I applied for. Not much surprise, they were in a rush to fill it, so they would have phoned up and offered the post to their candidate within the day, so the fact that I had not got a call, pretty much confirmed that I had not got the post.

But I do feel ready to get my teeth into something more challenging than what I am doing now. It would be easy enough to get depressed by being knocked back, and give up trying, but ... Read More...

I am probably a bit more distracted than usual, as I was out with the Strathclyde police last night, seeing how they police the Glasgow night time economy. They do quite a lot of these tours for people, letting them see at first hand how to police a major British city.

It is only fair to say that I have been apprehensive about the trip for some time, but on the night it was hugely informing and I would recommend it to anyone. The police have been working with various partners to ensure that the city is well lit, well covered by CCTV, safe zones exist with orderly taxi queues and paramedics on hand. Read More...

Things have been all very busy lately, with much that is strange and new. So I have fallen out of my normal routine, spending more time on things than I normally might, and doing things that I normally might not.

I set myself a sort of target to do a blog entry a week, but seeing as I have missed a couple of Saturday's, I posted a short story that I wrote a while back by way of recompense. I'm not sure what anyone else will think about it, but reading it now, with enough time elapsed for me to have forgotten the detail of it, I still think that it reads very well. It is so difficult to get perspective on what you write, it is easy to be over-critical, and as soon as you are familiar with something, it is impossible to be objective. You really need to be able to look at something with a stranger's eyes. So with my stranger's eyes, I still like it, so content to upload it here. Read More...

Tags: lifehack

This week has been my long awaited week off work, though as ever, nothing is quite what it seems, or says on the tin.

I did end up going into work on Wednesday for a job interview, which I suspect I was not successful in, although the interview went okay, there is a lot of tough competition these days. Read More...

Tags: Chic Murray

Things that you learn from picking brambles

• keep moving - there are always more bramble bushes to be found
• don't get bogged down finding the last bramble on the bush
• don't stretch or reach too far, better to keep moving

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Tags: foraging