quite a lot to report

• how I am getting on with my new computer
• applying for new jobs
• starting to write Losing Definition
• Just like magic

how I am getting on with my new computer
After much effort doing installations (all trouble free, just time consuming) last weekend, my new laptop is now up and running, with the exception of Time Machine. I even ran software update yesterday, and applied a system patch, but still no joy, now TimeMachine. I've checked out SuperDuper and we are still waiting for an upgrade to that to allow it to ran with Leopard. So my backup strategy is now two-fold

• for my desktop computer - continue to run SuperDuper each week to back up the entire system into a partition on an external hard drive.
• for my laptop computer - all newly created documents to be kept in the same desktop folder for ease, and to be backed up from there.

It is now clear that routine maintenance for two computers, which for me, basically consists of doing a weekly backup, and a monthly run of Disk Utility and OnyX will become quite time consuming. However my first two computers both eventually crashed out with corrupt hard drives, which then needed to be reformated and reinstalled, so I am perfectly resigned to doing proper backups.

I also watched the OSX Leopard introductory tour yesterday, and I'm slowly getting my head round the new functionality of Leopard. A lot of it is not gee whizz new, but rather tucked away, and you have to go looking for it. Spaces seems interesting, but I've not quite got my head round it. I guess that I will just have to spend time playing around with the new OS, and browsing through material about it. A lot of it is selling functionality that I did not know I wanted, so there is the task of understanding the functionality, then understanding how to use it.

I ran the laptop, connected upto the internet router via an old ethernet cable, and the Mail worked fine, I don't think that connecting two computers to the same mail account will cause problems actually. Well not with received mail, I might need to be a bit cannier with sent mail though. I'll need to lash out on a longer ethernet cable, but it will be cheaper than buying a wireless router.

At the moment expenditure on IT seems to be a constant item, though in fairness, I am not spending on much else.

It is great being able to run two computers, it also means that I can spend an evening typing away on my laptop, while the rest of the family can use the desktop. Yesterday I was using the laptop, while Hannah was playing away on the Sims, and Sketchfighter.

If I am primarily using the laptop for typing, the screen is plenty big enough, it is light and easy to move around, the power cable with the magsafe link is easy and safe to use. I am persevering using the trackpad, and now quite like using the one finger for moving the cursor and two fingers for scrolling facility. No sure that browsing folders in CoverFlow is particularly quick, but intriguing none the less.

In terms of version control, I'm using the laptop primarily for stuff that does not need the internet connection, while the web-based stuff I do on the desktop. However I might be persuaded to upgrade to a family license for RapidWeaver in due course, just to make life slightly easier. Ditto other applications, probably just as easy buying family licenses for software from now on.

Despite all this positive stuff, with the absence of reliable backups, I am mighty glad that I am not running Leopard on my main computer, and do not intend to upgrade it to Leopard, because it might be a bit of a memory hog, I cannot back it up, and I really want complete no risk/no worry peace of mind on my main computer. Running two internet capable computers does feel a lot more secure than having one, and all the putting your eggs in one basket, that that entailed.

applying for new jobs
Actually quite a worrisome week, doing two workshop presentations on Monday, which was something that I had not exactly done before, though I had done similar stuff. As ever worry worry worry, but when the adrenaline kicks in, you just stick a smile on your face, and become larger than life, breezing through it. Just as well in this case, as some of the audience were really not used to or expecting a presentation from a government official, so there was a fair bit of questions, and issues raised, but between the adrenaline and past experience, I carried it off with reasonable aplomb. You certainly don't do these things for the hearty congratulations for the audience, but I think that we should be out there, being seen, speaking to people, and more importantly listening to people.

Then a quick briefing of the Minister, which I was leading, but I made sure that I was well prepared, and knew the points I wanted to get across, and the Minister was a real pleasure to meet. So after the initial worry that too went well.

Final worry out of three, for the week, was a job interview on the Thursday. Once again made sure that I was well prepared, even setting aside some time in the office to make sure that I was thoroughly prepared. I did apply for one other post recently, but this was the one that I really wanted, even although the other one would have paid better. This one fits in with my career plan, which is to find a post with elements of project management, working with external stakeholders, and negotiation skills. The team also looked to be a really good mix of people, and the actual work area seemed interesting. It rather reminds me of work that I was doing a while back, that was mad busy, but high profile, challenging, but you were learning so much all the time.

The job would offer a mix of building on skills that I already have, but also enhancing areas that I feel that I need to develop.

The interview went okay, not one that I felt that I had aced, but okay nonetheless. My problem being that it is difficult to demonstrate that you can do something that you have not done before, so I was delighted to be asked at the outset why I wanted the job, so I could say, probably in a gushy/enthusiastic sort of way, that I might not have all the experience on paper, but I wanted to get the experience, I thought I could do it, and I wanted the chance to prove that I could.

We use competency based interviews, which means that you have to talk about similar tasks that you have successfully done, which means that you want good high quality work to demonstrate what you can do, getting bogged down with low quality work makes it difficult to move onto a decent job. Just another aspect of the need to focus on work that delivers significant outcomes, and think carefully about what you put your time into. I am constantly amazed at the high quality of some staff, and that they are not better paid for what they have to do. I might be good at what I do, but there are a lot of really excellent people, so although the work suits me well, I won't rise effortlessly to the top.

starting to write Losing Definition
I have made a start on losing definition, writing it on VoodooPad. To date I have taken stuff that I have written in a previous start on RapidWeaver, only a few pages, and notes from my notebooks, and some poetry from the blog. I don't intend to duplicate the blog in Losing Definition, but it might have stuff that I can use. At present there is a lot of stuff there, that is just working notes, and will get edited out in due course, but I'm still not too sure where it is going, so it is not too obvious what is irrelevant yet. I'll push on with writing stuff, and trawling through stuff that I have already written to find suitable material.

I think the real art will be in the editing, rather than the writing, maybe there is an Ezra Pound who could create a Wasteland from my prose?

In any case, it will take a lot of work and iterations to arrive at something that I am happy with, but it will be a pretty dense mix when it is finished, Giorgio DeChiroco wrote a fishy paste of a novel, called Hebdomeron, which I have never read, and only just remember hearing about, but I feel like I am struggling to create some such 'mythical work'.

Context is of course everything, it will take shape, and it is time for me to get writing, rather that waffling on about it.

Just like magic
There is a famous quote from Arthur C Clarke about any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. I think that the new Apple operating systems are approaching that level. In some sort of Harry Potter way, we can gesture, and make short incantations, to create magical works.

The geek as hero, arcana as power, a new alchemy.

Nowadays it seems like every home needs a geek, to provide technical support, the new BT adverts with Kris Marshall certainly seem to be going down this line, that there is something attractive and useful about geekery.

My first computer, a Powerbook 165c (introduced in 1993 and running System 7.1) was capable of being understood inside out. There seemed a pretty finite limit to the functionality, and the files and folders. Even adding in a works package like Clarisworks, you still had a pretty manageable degree of functionality, useful, without being confusing.

However skipping forward to my new laptop an iBook running OXS 10.5, the number of files and folders is probably over 800,000, beyond what any reasonable person would know or understand. In terms of functionality, there are now numerous perfectly legitimate ways of achieving the same end. You can customise and enhance, there is no single standard user experience. I can learn tricks and shortcuts limited only by my ability to remember them all, I can add on functionality like QuickSilver to create further magical abilities to shortcut through the complexity.

You really would need to be a genius to understand all of this, or even a decent chunk of it. Computing has therefore evolved into an art, where you need to make qualitative judgements, subjective decisions, balance issues, there are no single right answers, merely strategies that are more likely to succeed.

I often wonder who the future belongs to, it may well belong to those who can master these things. In the past work did not place a great premium on brain power, but increasingly you will need brainpower, and will be responsible for keeping your brainpower upto date, relevant and useful.

I have probably written this before, but I don't think we should be talking about information workers, but about understanding workers. It won't be about having the qualifications, or seniority, it will be about being able to do things.

Tags: backing up, presentations, voodoopad

Yesterday I made a start on getting my new laptop all set up.

My plan of attack, and results are as follows

• backed up my desktop computer - still running Tiger, using SuperDuper
• Ran Migration Assistant to move files across, but only copied across the accounts for myself and my wife
• plugged in the usual ethernet cable, and the new laptop was successfully on the net, running via my router
• ran software update, which fixed a glitch where my iTunes was not accessing the iTunes library - created with a different version of iTunes
• ran the EFI firmware update - which came with detailed instructions!
• checked all my key applications, which are listed in the dock, except for Mail which I won't use on the laptop, as my emails will get all out of sync.
• all my applications worked okay, though a few wanted to update keychain, and some had upgrades. The only one which had a problem running on two computers, was RapidWeaver, which seems fair do's and as with Mail, there would be version control issues if I was using it to update the same site from two different unsynchronised computers.

then installed Leopard - which went smoothly, and seemed to launch up okay and everything. By this stage, I was probably coming in at slightly under my half day estimate for the work.

Set up the new 320GB LaCie external hard drive, connected it up with the FireWire 400 cable and set Time Machine running.

Various attempts, various tweaks, it hung overnight. Took off Desktopia, which alters the desktop, amended the settings to the laptop so it did not sleep, or go to screensaver, checked the name in system preferences shared - various tweaks to TimeMachine, checked permissions, and verified disk for the internal hard-drive. Partitioned the external hard drive, as directed by apple support. Still no joy, the first backup via TimeMachine would start off okay, then just hang, and you could not even Force Quit out of it.

As ever various checking of the apple support page, other forums, a check on Technorati, and the blogs. My impression is that TimeMachine users fall into three categories,
1 works perfectly with no issues
2 works after some tweaks
3 won't work

I do have a problem with Time Machine, in that it does not, to my knowledge create a boot-able drive, in case of disk corruption, rather it provides a ready source for stuff you might have deleted in error.

Well, Duuhhhhhhhh

with huge disk capacities nowadays, why delete anything at all, ever???

And - an internal hard drive will always corrupt eventually, in an office setting you would not keep much of anything on your C-drive, all your data would actually be on a remote server, with proper backup routines. In a home setting you rely on the internal drive, and back that up to a single external hard drive. In the case of an office setting, if your C-drive corrupts, then it is a simple reinstall, and nothing personal is lost. In a home setting you have the worry about getting the operating system and all your purchased software up again, and the issue of your personal data. Backing up a useable system along with your data is much the best option.

So having persevered with Time Machine, I got to the point where I figured that I was in the stubborn group three, who was not going to get it working. In any event, it did not do what I wanted it to do anyway, and continuing to try using it, with the machine crashes, was more likely to corrupt my system, than provide anything that was a useable backup.

Therefore, the wheee - fun - of playing with Time Machine has been abandoned, at least until a few patches come out, and I've just partitioned the external hard drive up again, and I'll use SuperDuper to back up to partitions, as I have done before.

Time Machine does look to be a triumph of style over substance, if it could not work with a straight out of the box laptop, and straight out of the box LaCie external hard drive, both bought from Apple within the past month, then it does suggest that the pre-release testing must have been cursory in the extreme.

I'll report more fully on my experience with leopard in due course, initial impressions are that the changes seem pretty subtle, but experience may reveal more.

Usual mixed bag of material this week

in trains - a work in progress
some jottings entered as a separate blog entry
these are just random jottings inspired by the time I spend on trains, which is a lot of time. Except for the black train, which is about suffering from migraines, which has the relentlessness of an unwanted train journey.

@work
finally getting on top of what seemed like an endless volume of work, but I need to find fresh challenges, though not sure what they are. Overall getting itchy feet for some new issues to get my teeth into, it all feels a bit too quiet.

apple store
dropped in at the local apple store again. What an odd shop. I really don't think that it is about selling stuff. I cannot imagine that they actually make money. Rather they are about ensuring that Apple products are displayed to their best possible advantage, something that retailers have signally failed to do in the past. There is a long history of retailers stocking apple, then failing to display properly, or have any knowledgeable staff, then wondering why they don't sell any. Even at John Lewis, when buying an iMac, they had to call out a techie in a overcoat to talk to me about it, and even then he did not have one at home himself. Other stores were even worse, with apple computers stuck at some Sad Mac prompt - sitting there unloved.

What sold me on the iPod was when my daughter instantly got how it worked without any instruction, seeing a demo model at the local Currys. If a child can get the clickwheel, and love it, then apple is doing something right.

The perennial downside is that there is not much software, but with the growing role of cloudware, and online purchasing, then it really is not that much of a problem now. And to be honest, the off the shelf iMac now comes with a tremendous suite of software, you don't need that much more, unless you are getting pretty specialised.

I suppose that I am an apple fanboy, but would like to see them doing more to put worth back in the hands of users, some of their activities feel more like revenue streams.

I have just heard that new Apple Chips will come out in mid November, so another reason to postpone buying a new Macintosh. Perfect knowledge just makes life so much more complicated!

Note to self, I would like to get some shares in apple sometime.

mountain goat - going to scotland
from the blogosphere, and forums it sounds like my current favourite band, the Mountain Goats will be Going to Scotland.

They are very impressive live, so I am strongly thinking about getting tickets. Probably a mountain of logistics to worry about, particularly now I have a job, and children, but hey, what is life without a little mid life rebellion.

Stewart Brand supports nuclear power
I heard on an Economist podcast that Stewart Brand, one of the people I list as an inspiration, has now come to the view that nuclear power is sufficiently safe, and climate change sufficiently threatening, that he now supports nuclear power. I'll have to dig up the original quote for myself, but certainly an interesting view. I have been somewhat torn on nuclear power for some time now. I was impressed with the professionalism of the people working in nuclear power when I met them through work, and although my preference would clearly be for everyone to reduce their demand for energy to sustainable levels, I really don't see that happening any time soon. Therefore we will probably need nuclear power in the short term to help transition us to less intensive energy use. I actually see the growth in broadband and computers as a positive thing, if we start living our lives more virtually, then audiobooks replace dead tree books, downloads replace CDs, broadband replaces unwanted journeys. I don't think a world where we are all housebound is desirable, but getting rid on unwanted trips cannot be bad.

I hold a modest shareholding in a nuclear power generator, and have found it difficult to square this with my desire to hug trees, but I am coming round to it not just being a pragmatic move, but an important gesture too.

Nature seems increasingly out of whack these days, if cars were elephants, we would be petrified at the sheer number of these hungry beasts tearing up our environment, but they are not flesh and blood, but iron and oil, and we don't even notice them. My intuition is that a system will struggle, struggle, and fail catastrophically, like collapsing fisheries, we are all on that brink of environmental catastrophe.

writing losing definition - books that inspire me
I have decided to start work on another novel, with a working title of Losing Definition. The title refers to how your sight loses its sharpness as you age, and similarly issues and opinions also become less clear cut. I suppose that the temptation is to withdraw within yourself, or a fantasy world. I'll probably just assemble it as a collection of blog style entries, and then reorder them until I am happy. I'll probably take some stuff from here, but writing as fiction would loosen it up a bit, and make for more fun.

I worry that it should have more of a plot, but I'm really not that bothered with plot, characters, or dialogue, so it will just be what it is, rather than some mainstream genre. If seeking inspiration, or parallels, then I suppose my little shelf of wonderful books would be
Confessions of Zeno - by Italo Svevo
Tristram Shandy - by Laurence Sterne
Jonathan Wild - by Henry Fielding
Way of all Flesh - by Samuel Butler
Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is laid - by Malcolm Lowry
m - by John Cage
jPod/Microserf - by Douglas Coupland

also a dash of science fiction, that most liberating of mediums, recent reading of ten best science fiction novels, included,
the following films
the Saragossa Manuscripts
the Falls
Wim Wenders - road movies, especially the State of Things
Art films I saw at University generally

and finally a dash of Burroughs, Ballard and Sladek.

As none of these have hit the mainstream, I will write to suit myself, and aim for self publishing onto the web, rather than anything more lavish. However I have enough to live by, and would prefer to write what I want anyway.

Fonts and Clifford
I remain very confused about all the different versions of the Clifford font that you can get, but have decided to buy a couple of the individual styles for use as my default font. Until now I have used Palatino as my default typeface. Also checking out the various half remembered theory behind fonts, etc, for example how we now use font to mean typeface. It is curious how fonts seem to have gone from calligraphy, to hot metal, to digital printing, to lcd screens, without any big issues, when so many other information mediums have made such heavy weather of the issues of transition. And strange that I am coming back to a typeface based on calligraphy, for displaying on my iMac screen, or printing on an inkjet printer.

One of the words we should all know is skeuomorph

we surround ourselves with comforting skeuomorphs, are we afraid of the new.

Tags: fiction, fonts

Feeling pretty run down this week, there has been a cold going run down, so by simply feeling run down, I have probably got off lightly.

At work I have decided to simply concentrate on putting in the hours, rather than getting distracted by lunch-time trips, or heading home early. So I've shifted my default train home to a later one, which along with the feeling a bit run down, means that I've not been out in the garden in the evening, though truth be told, the weather has been pretty dismal.

An interesting week at work, I've had a meeting a day for the past week, and they have all be interesting and useful in their own way. Working through ad hoc meetings, seems a very productive way to progress things, fortunately someone else organised all the meetings this week, so I simply turned up to them, which is a lot less effort. The downside is of course that you still need to prepare for meetings, and follow up on actions arising from them, so simply committing to attend a lot of meetings, is simply avoiding the office, unless you actually do the work before and after. I also seem to be averaging twenty emails a day, many needing a fair bit of work, so I've been playing catch up when I get back to the office. Working longer hours has helped with this though.

Overall I am rather impatient with things, by nature I am an inpatient person, but I figure that God needs impatient people, or nothing would ever get done. I do feel that while other folk are making grand progress with things, I am not making enough progress on the things that I am directly responsible for, but then I exacerbate the problem, by wanting to start on even more new strands of work whenever I create any free time.

All that said, I seem to be getting good feedback, and things are going well, so I suppose I am doing the right stuff, and doing it well.


I also bought another pair of new shoes, in the shoe-shop sale, so in addition to feeling a bit run down, I have mighty tired feet, trying to break in my new shoes. Until the heels get a bit rounded, and the soles lose their slippiness it is heavy going with new shoes, like wearing diving boots. Exacerbated of course, by all the walking to these meetings!

My wife has started college, so we will soon be returning to the world of queues around the computer, while she does her essays, so I suppose I really will need to order a new computer. I think I have more of less decided on a model, but I'm currently swithering on just waiting until OS Leopard comes out in October. However I do wonder what spec of machine it will require to run. From early reports it currently sounds buggy, slow and memory hungry. Obviously TimeMachine is going to use up a lot of hard disk space, and I am bound to need more than a gig of ram to run it, I would have thought.

One option is to just buy now, and get a family pack upgrade to Leopard, but I don't like upgrading the OS on a Mac, as I generally buy with the basic amount of RAM, and upgrading the OS, without upgrading the RAM seems a recipe for problems.

Of course, passing on the currently computer to my girls, still means that I won't be improving my access at all, as I will still have to queue up behind my essay writing wife, to get at the computer in the evening. That said, I don't really see a strong case for buying a laptop at the moment. If I am buying a new computer every year or two, that will just have to suffice.


Autumn is upon us, time to tidy up the garden, the paperwork is also stacking up, and I need to rejig the stuff that I have just dumped up the loft. I would also like to get started on some serious cleaning and maintenance around the house. And of course I really need to make a wardrobe for our bedroom, after last week's trip to IKEA, I have starting to work out some ideas in my head for this, and I might document these as a woodwork project, from concept to design, to final build, over in the Making/Furniture pages.

All in all a very eventful week.

1 first week at my new office
2 share price volatility
3 lots less travel time
4 held a leaving do for my old colleagues
5 miscellaneous, I want a new computer

1 first week at my new office
I have now gone back to my old office, a few minutes from the railway station, so I no longer need to add a tedious bus journey onto my daily commute. On checking wikipedia, I find that my new office has Art Deco influences, and was completed in 1939, as well as being Category A listed! It is somewhat like being in an episode of Poirot sometimes, although for much of the accommodation, it is rather timeless, - office type accommodation, being as office type accommodation is. Getting used to my new location, and new colleagues, though I had worked with them to some extent in the past.

A little apprehensive to begin with, but now hugely impressed with the move, office, colleagues, work etc. Apart from the commute, I really liked where I was before.

2 share price volatility
the shares of the world seem to have dropped through the floor, with the FTSE even going below 6,000 for a while. I think that this demonstrates why you need a steady head to invest successfully. I took a print off of my share portfolio and the whole portfolio was down 11%, mainly shares I have held for a year, with every single share showing a loss.

Accordingly if I had sold everything the week before, and then bought them again, I could have made a tidy profit. Demonstrating why the shrewd investor always has a time machine. Somewhat galling too, was that I had recently sold off half my stock of a building society and bought shares in 3i, if I had held off the purchase I could have bought much better.

However on reading some articles, and checking my portfolio again, I'm now showing a more modest loss, and 3i, is once again showing a profit. Clearly for the long term switching from a building society to 3i has been a good move.

My most problematic stock has been British Energy, which I have been buying opportunistically when the price has gone down, but to be honest the price is down more than it is up recently, so I am wary of increasing my exposure. It is by any measures a high risk stock, it is not inconceivable that they could fail again, leaving the stock worthless. However they provide a fifth of the UK's electricity, and it is difficult to foresee the UK without nuclear energy for the foreseeable future. I would not buy shares that I felt were unethical, and I do have a green tinge, but I feel that realistically nuclear energy is here for the next thirty years.

3 lots less travel time
as per my new office, I now find myself in the happy position with at least an extra hour to myself each day. I have always told people that I spent three hours a day traveling, but was less sure on the precise split. So I knew that moving to a more central office would make a difference, but was not too sure how much. Based on the past week, I reckon that it must be easily an hour per day that I am saving now. Now I simply get off the train, and arrive at the office ten minutes later, though if I ran it would be quicker. Similarly for coming back, I just leave the office ten minutes before my train leaves, rather than leaving forty minutes before the train leaves, and still missing it sometimes.

Basically I have now lost the bus journey that I used to make, and the connection time and faff, involved. So, for once I seem to be back building up flexi time, have some spare time at lunch, and have a whole extra hour in the evenings. I seem to have more time and energy everywhere. I even managed to spend a couple of hours in the garden during the weekday evenings, something I've not been able to do in years.

Lately, the gardening has been a chore that I have had to squeeze into the weekends, with long grass to cut, and overgrown borders to weed. Being an overdue chore has sucked the pleasure out of it, while being able to simply spend an hour pottering, is much more pleasureable. Being an hour, offers scope for doing something that is a bit of a chore, and something else that seems more fun. That way, neither particularly seems a chore. And to be honest, the evening is much the best time to potter, as it avoids the day time heat.

So this week, I have managed to give my main lawn a much needed mow over, thankfully I have a flymo, so it will cope with grass upto "gosh that needs a cut". Also tidied out my cold frame and started pulling onions and laying them out in the cold frame to dry. Not yet complete with the onion pulling yet, but if the weather is upto it, having some time in the evenings will make a vast difference. Often the problem with jobs is not that you don't like them, it is just that you have too many the same. Accordingly it is nice to spend some time in the garden after a day in the office, or even spend half a day doing the garden, and the balance doing something on the computer.

However now the heavens have opened and rain has stopped play. Yesterday the burns were all swollen, I would not be surprised if there was flooding. Many of the developments round here have been built with sustainable urban drainage systems, which means that a lowered area will fill up with water during periods of prolonged rain, and gradually drain over the following days. I suspect that our heavy clay is part of how this works, clearly it would not work on a light sandy soil. In any event it is quite nice to be plugged into what is happening, to see these ponds created, fill up, and then drain away, as the weather changes.

4 held a leaving do for my old colleagues
in order to catch a few more people, we postponed our leaving do by a week, so we had actually left, but came back with some bottles of wine, to be presented with the usual card and gifts.

I must say that I have been hugely impressed by my old colleagues, I did give the customary speech, which probably included most of what I wanted to say. Of course being introduced by the Unit head, as possessed of a fabulous dry wit, with lots of competing free stand up comedy available at the Fringe, I was under no pressure at all!

I suspect that my management style is Management By Worrying About, and the leaving do was one of those things that I worried about, but on the day it all went well, and it was wonderful to be able to say how much I had enjoyed working with these people. They are friends now, rather than colleagues.


5 miscellaneous, I want a new computer
last week we set up a new desk, with bed above, in my daughters' room. They are still working on tidying the room, it currently being at the "oh my god, this is even worse" stage, which I am advised comes before, the "see it is perfect now" stage.

Megan starts at high school next week, and she was worried about having somewhere to do her homework, so hopefully this desk space will help. I am minded to buy a new computer, that way I could put my current computer up to the girls' room for them to use. Current intention is that although they have a computer in their room, they will not have internet access, they will need to use the computer in the living room to access the internet, something that seems to work better than software based parental controls.

But with Tiger coming out in October, there seems to be very little incentive to buy an iMac before then. Also, I have still not seen a new one in the flesh yet. John Lewis apparently won't get any for another three weeks.

If I was an apple reseller, I would be mighty pee-ed off that you could buy a new iMac at the Apple store now, but were not even getting to see one in the flesh yet. It is after all having stores like John Lewis being willing to sell Apple Macintoshes on the high street, that is helping drive the brand.

I currently have a 17" screen, and would sensibly like to move upto 20", though being immature, the 24" really is very big!

Of course I would also like to be sensible and boost my share portfolio, buy a whizzy digital camera, scanner, etc etc.

Tags: garden

There has been a bit of speculation on why Apple would want to introduce an internet browser for the PC market. On the face of it it is an odd decision, granted making a browser can be quite profitable if search engines are paying to be embedded, but I don't really think that is the reason.

My take on it, is that you need to follow the money. These days Apple is making a lot of money from things that are not actually Mac OS platform specific, the iPod works equally well for both PC and Mac, the iTunes site likewise, the iPhone does not require you to own an iMac.

Not only are these good revenue streams, but they probably have better margins, and a more realistic potential for a growing market. Even if Apple only manages to snag a small fraction of the mobile phone market the potential revenues are huge. People replace their mobile phones far more often than their desktops.

We are now entering the world of the post-pc gadget. Granted everyone will probably have a computer of some sort, but that is pretty much a commodity market now, people can get a laptop for a few hundred, and unless there are compelling reasons, then they will simply buy computers that only offer a tiny margin to the manufacturer. There is now little scope for compelling additional functionality to append to a computer, and it is not a highly visible object that you feel compelled to keep updated to be fashionable.

So if Apple wants to grow, then it will not be looking to sell more iMacs, or new operating systems, it will drive forward in the post-pc market, and find compelling ways of offering content online.

It is not inconceivable that the Mac OS might cease to be radically differentiated from any other operating systems, as more and more of our lives are lived via broadband, the amount actually residing on our hard drive is bound to diminish, so less applications on your desktop, and more as cloudware. The internet is driving our lives now, and as it is already operating system neutral.

In short, Apple operates in three realms,
hardware and associated software, the iMac, iLife,
cloudware like iTunes
post PC devices like the iPod and iTunes

the market they have been in longest, is not the one with the most potential, so why restrict your potential by tying in either your cloudware or post pc devices to the Apple OS and hardware, a PC version of Safari, is merely a component of this strategy.

Tags: iPod, iTunes

Write about TwentyThreeBlog here.

Online Identity
I was listening to a pod-cast which was talking about marketing your pod-casts, and using your online identity as a brand.

I suppose that I could market my pod-cast, but it is not really about anything in particular, and will likely remain like that. Well I suppose it is about something in particular, it is about whatever happens to be of interest to me at the time of writing, but I have quite varied interests, so that hardly helps.

There is also the whole issue of an online identity. At the moment, I do not pass on details of this blog to people I know, and although I would be contactable via this blog, it is a standalone identity. I do not intentionally lie or mislead in my blog postings, but then again, I do not really write anything that would make it tremendously easy to identify who I am. Despite that, this is hardly the most impenetrable of disguises, and I could be identified from this blog, with relative ease.

My point being that one of the benefits of the internet is that one can establish separate identities, that meet your various desires and needs. For most people the appeal is that these are separate, the person one chats to about software glitches is not necessarily looking at photos of your family holiday, and vice versa. As in normal society, you choose how much to reveal to others, you focus on what is of mutual interest, but bring in extraneous material at your discretion.

However with searching now so easy, it is far easier for the curious to pull together these disparate identities. For people in the public arena this is probably not new, but for your average person, it is a disconcerting thought, and your average person is far less equipped to cope with any unexpected consequences.

At Work
My role at work continues to evolve. Some time ago, I was the junior member of a small team, now I am the team. Initially it was my role to promote a piece of work, but with a change in administration, my role is now more one of spinning plates, and potentially taking on more plates. Obviously I now have vastly more work to do, but the more important point is that I am expected to do that work in a different style. Because I am now leading the team, albeit one consisting solely of me, I am judged on the big ticket items, rather than the more mundane. The last year has been so intense, and I have such a long commute, that I personally feel that increasing my working hours is not really an option that is sustainable. So, in the jargon, it is a case of working smarter rather than harder.

In practice, this has meant that I am now picking up a lot of engagements, either speaking at, or simply attending meetings, that my boss would have handled before. I am also having to initiate meetings to progress what I want to do. Accordingly when I am in the office, I need to work through incoming work much more effectively. I have adopted a slight variation of the GTD principles,

if it can be done in a few minutes, simply do it then
if it relates to a category of work, simply put it in a folder with other similar work, so that I can devote a half day to it all sometime
if it needs a bit more work, and has a deadline - set up a paper folder with the deadline and quick description on the front
if it needs a bit more work, and has no deadline - simply flag the email

also for when I am at my desk, I tend to work away from the desk whenever I can, for example, if it is reading, I go through to our canteen, if it is something that I don't want interrupted on, I go down to a hotdesking area. That way I am reasonably available, people can leave a message, that I will get back to, but my availability is not slowing me down.

There is a need to be able to work effectively away from my desk, so I have set up couple of pencil cases with everything that I need, from indigestion tablets, to marker pens, and my favorite little film tags, for highlighting relevant material. I suppose that I could be better organised about carrying about work that I could do, but I have generally found that I will have some task that it usefully completed over a cup of coffee somewhere, like writing an agenda, or organising my thoughts on something.

I suppose that in essence, this is a top down approach, consider the most important priorities, first, and fit the rest in round them,
generally, in the past I have taken a bottom up approach, considering all the things that need done, and then trying to fit them in.

Of course the former approach is fine for a team leader, with some discretion, but it is not so applicable for a team member when your tasks are very fixed, and you have less discretion.

Anyway, interesting to see how I am coping with the current challenges, and changing how I work. My gut feeling is that I am probably pretty good at working at this level, but only if the work is of a manageable intensity. I can see that it would be incredibly easy to burn out working like this.

At Home
I am writing this on a Sunday morning, yesterday was wet and dreich. I suppose that I should have done a lot of useful stuff, but to be honest, we were mainly faffing about. Headed up to the new local garden centre, which also sells food, and pretty much everything else. My wife bought some food, I bought some slug pellets, I am finally giving in with having an organic cold frame. I have tried everything, a sandy base, copper tape round my pots, beer traps. This place is not a cold frame, it is an eat all you want slug conservatory! The little black pieces of snot, are dining on tender shots of basil and camomile, and are presumably looking forward to dining on wormwood and feverfew once they sprout. Nothing is growing in the place, I water it faithfully, the slugs and snails eat their fill, leaving it stripped bare!

I also bought a copy of Getting Things Done to send to a friend.

My girls, bought a couple of books for me - Father's Day - and got their faces painted, and one of them even got a goody bag for appearing on the radio show that they were doing when we were there. Easy enough to see who got the best end of this deal.

Also watched a few vodcasts, is that a word, the new Steve Jobs address and the interview along with Bill Gates. One does wonder where they got the idea for PC Guy and Mac Guy, presumably they wanted to cast Bill Gates in the PC guy role, but he was otherwise engaged.

Interesting and thought provoking stuff, technology is at quite an interesting stage at the moment, and I think that we just have to bite the bullet and reckon on buying a new computer every year. Interesting to see that only a small minority (10%) now use an MAC operating system other than 10.4 or 10.3.

Certainly my advice has been that the computers now are so good, so well specified, have so much additional functionality, you would be a fool not to buy one.

Of course running the IT for a family of four is bound to be expensive. Over the past year and a bit, I have
got a new computer, bought, set up, and working with peripherals
moved from dial up internet, to broadband, much wailing and swearing, and a lot of time doing that sort of English as a foreign language teaching, that you do whenever you phone technical support somewhere
got my wife and myself, both using our own iPods
got the whole family set up with their own iTunes and email accounts, and able to share their downloads when they want to
sorted out an external hard drive and an effective back up methodology.

I am now looking to buy a second computer, either a laptop pre October with extra Ram, and upgrade to Leopard, or maybe wait until October and get something with Leopard.

Amongst the many interesting ideas on the vodcasts (does anyone actually call them that, and indeed what about those phonogram recordings, that were all the rage) is the emphasis on post-pc devices, which includes iPods, iPhones, personal organisers, and I suppose anything else that you can find a use for, extending out to a set top box with a hard drive, like tivo, a handheld gaming device, digital image photo frames, and all sorts of other things that I have not really registered. Apple is pretty good at pushing out the boundaries of what a computer is, look at the all in one computer and display of the current iMac, the unloved Newton, the iPod, the Mac Mini, or even the early luggable portable macintoshes! Clearly the model of desktop or laptop, and nothing much else, is unlikely to continue.

Another interesting thing was that Steve Jobs did not really want to predict where computing would be in a few years, which is quite a sensible position for a clever person. There are simply too many unknowns and variables, for it to be constructive to speculate. We can think of possible directions, and good luck to those who want to make money out of them, but it would be insane to think you know what will come. Sometimes it is useful to accept uncertainty, and develop strategies to deal with it effectively. Simply knowing that things are uncertain, is not the same as relinquishing any control, you simply plan and control in a different sort of way.

Tags: blogs, gtd, garden

Write about FourthBlog here.

Some more random jottings

* I shall love you until death makes strangers of us.

* The gravity engines - it is assumed that man will colonise planets with similar gravity. However if you can use gravity engines to convert gravity into energy, which seems conceptually possible, though physically improbable, then you could colonise planets with very high gravity, by living in discrete low gravity bubbles, surrounded by gravity engines.

* Hellish creatures - what if creatures evolved that used chemicals to phase in and out of our time stream, using time to rot away material that they could then consume in the future. What if such creatures left a backwash that could catch a man and pull him down through time. What if such travel was strictly one way. How much would you dare travel, down through time, till you ran out of futures?

Cool Stuff

To explain a little. I recently got a new iMac computer, and from there got Broadband, expensive but worth it. I dabbled with iTunes, but until a friend recommended podcasts for long commutes, I did not see much need for iTunes or an iPod. However I now have an iPod and listen to quite a lot of podcasts. I do commute a lot!

Much of what you see when computing is simply a metaphor. The desktop is a metaphor, the material is not there in any physical sense, it is just presented like that, to make your life easier, just as the files on a hard drive are not single neatly filed items.

The metaphors of computing and what they signify are starting to change quite a lot, it seems to me. It is difficult to understand what things actually do.

Clearly an iPod is not really a flash drive walkman, it is something cleverer than that. However google is simply a very high tech version of the old biblical concordances. It is interesting to try and step back and think about what we are really using, and what it really does. Or to just dive in and swim around in all these new possibilities that were inconceivable a short while ago.

The podcasts led to the Indiefeed Alternative/Rock feed, and that led to listening to the Thermals, which led to me researching them on google, and wikipedia, and listening to segments of their tracks from wherever, and my wife ordering a couple of CDs from Amazon. This is probably a tediously ordinary story, but inconceivable a few years ago. I remember reading about endless bands in the NME but you never knew what any of them sounded like. As Billy Joel sang, you can’t get the sound from a story in a magazine.

Alternatively listening to a podcast of a lecture by Professor Howard Frumkin on public health and town planning
http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/podcasts/

I could then check out his presentation as a pdf, (I have an iMac so not having it in powerpoint is a big deal to me), check out his books on Amazon, and add one to my Amazon wishlist, so that when my wife asks for ideas for Christmas presents, I can direct her to my Amazon wishlist.

Other cool stuff
http://yugop.com/ver4/index.asp?section=stuff&id=6
Though I have no idea what or why, but I do like creating grey waves.

I’ve already mentioned wikipedia, and I use this blog, so they are obviously both cool, as are operating systems that update on the fly through your broadband connection. One more site strikes me as particularly cool at the moment, and like the others, I drip drip drip heard about it through podcasts, until I eventually checked it out, having no idea what to expect.

Flickr - basically a fantastic shoe box of shared photos. I’ve not delved deep, but I do like the random interesting images. I do like the overall high quality of the photos that you initially come across. I do like the page of popular tags, with the different font sizes, presumably demonstrating their popularity. I do like the slideshow option for the tags. I do like the way you can wander through images as you interests take you.

A couple of thoughts occur.

Just as walking across my field last week, I knew that many feet make a path, and a path presumably leads somewhere, and my feet keep the path there. Where no feet walk there is no path. The internet now uses our feet to make paths, everywhere. People buying this book on Amazon also bought this, people downloading this podcast also downloaded that one, popular searches today are...

Even quietly wandering through the internet we are leaving a path, that is of value to others, although we might not know where we are going, we are leaving a path, because in aggregate all these paths do amount to something.

Having once wandered, it is impossibly difficult to retrace your steps, without the back or history on the browser, it would be like a Borgesian library, an image once glimpsed, but never to be seen again.

There was a wonderful image on Flickr of a stone like chain against an old barn wall. The textures were gorgeous. I clicked to see more images by the artist. Within a few minutes I has seen a few dozen images of her life. I had a rough idea what she looked like, where she lived, what car she drove, her pet dog. On the one hand I was growing to know and like her. On the other I have no connection with her, I will never know her name, or conceivably meet her. I felt uncomfortable. I felt that I was intruding too much. All this technology seems to offer intimacy, as people we offer intimacy quite casually. Here are the photos on my desk of what matters most to me, I leave my filofax lying about. But we want privacy. On the morning commute no one wants to speak. We are all tired, lost in our private worlds. Intimacy and privacy are oxymorons, but the internet seems to offer both, but offers neither. You think that you are an unseen observer, but you leave paths, and trails, you think you are an anonymous poster, but the astute observer can pick up clues, that lead back to you.

Maybe we need a new sense of etiquette to cope. In the early days of the internet you just did not post personal details, so the various texts you left across the internet would not identify you too easily. Now google can search the internet for a duplicated misspelling in an instant, you leave images and fragments of your life, you link to others you know, who might be less discrete than you. Common user names across different domains, lazily duplicated passwords, we are living our lives in a shop window of our own devising. Like the early evening commute when you see in peoples houses, before they think to pull the curtains. We are at once intimate, but private. Alone but potentially endlessly observed and studied.

When I was young cars were less usual, housewives were more common, it made for a safer environment for children to grow up in. Those days are gone, and I don’t suppose you would want them back. You have to accept responsibility for the downsides of the changes you experience. If we are to live in this virtual shopwindow, then we must accept its implications. Random people can contact us, and start conversations, we have to accept that people are who they say they are, they might be hyperintelligent canines, or bots in Turing test mode.


Why do I need a webpage?
I initially used bulletin boards, way back, before I could access the internet. Then set up my own webpage. I still have a webpage, but have not updated it in ages. However I could post all my jottings to this blog, and all my family photos to Flickr, why go to the trouble of a webpage. May webpages are simply created in the same way that these blog entries, are pasted together to make a page. No html required. Simply cut and paste into some software online that does the job for me. I suppose you need a website to display a portfolio of work of some description to market yourself in some way, but unless you have a high degree of need, then blogs and flickr seem so much easier.

Tags: fiction, cool, paths, webpage

Write about FirstBlog here.

Twenty First Century Boy

Post apocalyptic fiction
I’ve been browsing the web, following up on my childhood enjoyment of post apocalyptic fiction. Mainly thinking in terms of John Wyndham, and my personal favourite John Christopher. Despite huge popularity, at least with librarians of the time, Christopher, or Sam Youd to give him his real name, is now largely out of print. He is probably best know for Death of Grass, and the children’s trilogy the Tripods. I fondly remember the trilogy set in a medieval future past, aroundWinchester. Also worth flagging up here, as I will doubtless return to it, that JG Ballard was the writer that really inspired me, in a way that I did not think fiction could.

Anyway, having been once diverted, as a child I found post apocalyptic fiction enjoyable, there was also the post apocalyptic fiction that seemed all over the television at the time, such as the Survivors, Judith Hann dropping a text tube and creating a quiet apocalypse, the Changes, though the Peter Dickinson books were better, and I suppose Living in the Iron Age, which gave me a lifelong desire to get a lurcher dog, which I have at last fulfilled.

Extending out further from these obvious examples, you could also add Watership Down which is in its own way a post apocalyptic tale, albeit a bunny apocalypse. It sits very well with the others, and it is difficult to imagine something similar being written now. Jumping back, the wartime industrialisation of death inspired its own fiction, the last of the Gromenghast trilogy, and the longing for an idyllic shire as respite from horror, in the Lord of the Rings. The pre-war horrors, albeit only culturally acknowledged later, of eugenics inspired other fiction, such as Brave New World. Had Nazism not put eugenics beyond the pale, it is curious as to where that science would have taken us by now. Before the war, the study of race, of doliocephalic heads, was acceptable. Now that we can conceive of manipulating dna, it could return in an altered, and now “acceptable” form. It was ill-conceived then, as different races, we have more in common, and upbringing has far more impact, and is more capable of improvement.

It is a truism that science fiction is about today, and not about the future, if the post war fiction came to terms with the war, the seventies and eighties tried to make sense of the mutually assured destruction of any nuclear escalation of the cold war, what is such fiction doing now? Well, I recently read and enjoyed a novel, Snow, but there is certainly no great taste these days for post-apocalyptic fiction. Steam-punk, setting fiction in a technological victorian empire is popular, 2000AD has given a variety of alluring examples, from the Gothic Empire of Nemisis, I was devastated when Kevin O’Neill dropped out of illustrating the series, as the first few pages are my favourite comic art ever, to Leviathan, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, from 2000AD alumnus Alan Moore.

If I were to write post apocalyptic fiction now, I do not think it would be so judgemental. My view of hunter-gatherer societies is a benign one, I have a great deal of respect for them. If man were to be forcibly returned to a stone age, then society would quickly be forced into a way of living that suited us well for countless millenia. Hunter gatherer society is not one of savagery. Even the horrors of radiation have lost their sting, after Chernobyl, we know that nuclear horror is survivable. You would survive by avoiding the badlands, by not being top of the food chain, by trying to develop some cultural adaptations to recognise and avoid radiation exposure, by being very careful to preserve good genes to pass on. Grim as life might be, I don’t think people would huddle together, depressed, fearful, beating the living daylights out of each other, after a spot of rape and being pillaged. If Inuit man could survive in the arctic, then future man could survive post apocalypse.

Society as we know it doubtless would not.



Why Blog?
As a child I always wanted to write novels. I have now written a couple, one of which I have web-published, the other lurks in a pile of notebooks. However I am now unsure of the novel as an art form. Whereas the early novels of Tristram Shandy and Henry Fielding are towering examples of wit, opinion, experimentation, we now seem to suffer mediocre fiction by the yard, emanating from every hue of celebrity. Wandering into a bookshop, I do not feel an urge to add to the huge yardage of fiction.

One problem is that originally there was some toil in writing, now there is none. There is toil in getting published, but that is hardly the same. And there seems to be a huge dearth of editors. But everyone with a wordprocessor is sitting there churning out a thousand words a day for an eager posterity.

What are all these books about, meeting some focus group demographic desire for box ticking fiction. Some ersatz form of mausoleum, your soul forever encased in soft covers.

I found writing a novel a struggle, I hate dialogue, I really have no empathy for anyone apart from myself, I am not much interested in plot, I would prefer to wallow in constraints, rather than transcend them, I enjoy subverting everything, including myself. Why struggle to fit into a novel, the countless thoughts that my imagination lets fly, harvesting only the odd one that happens to fly in roughly the right direction, at the right time.

I toyed with the idea of a novel of file cards, short standalone texts, that might one day be composited together, John Cage has done some writing along those lines, M, and William Burroughs is the king of the cut up. But the ambition to write was tucked away, I was not sure what I wanted to do, but although writing a novel was close, it was no cigar.

But things are different now, and I suppose that a blog is what I make of it, and maybe the blogosphere is where Tristram Shandy walks now.

What not blog
I am writing this at 6.45 on January 2007. I suffer from migraines, and find it easiest to stick to complete regularity of waking and eating. Accordingly each weekend I wake before 6.00 and come downstairs. Some quiet time, with my head still full of half sleeping creativity and looseness. Also sharing a house with wife, two daughers, and dog, it is fine to have some quiet time.

I intend to blog publish more or less in the order written, and more or less in first draft. However I hate spelling and grammer mistakes, so I’ll delay publication briefly to check through the text. However I will not generally check my facts, so if I don’t have recall of technical detail, or spelling, then in error, in it goes, checking facts just seems too tiresome.

I have signed the official secrets act, so nothing particularly about work goes in, largely on the grounds that it seems unfair to talk about other people, in whatever catty frame of mind I might happen to be, giving them no right of reply. However also probably inappropriate to write about work anyway.

This will probably be predominantly about whatever happens to exercise my thoughts, so intitial randomness can be expected, followed no doubt by predictable tedium.

Accordingly, although it is about me, it is about me in the oblique way, of commenting on books I have read, rather than placing me in the context of people I know, and things that I do.

on Apple
I first bought an apple macintosh computer way back, a Powerbook 165c, with 4meg ram and an 80 meg hard-drive. Eventually traded up from that to one of the early iMac models, and recently got a new iMac.

The 165c was vastly better than PCs, and an object of deep love. The first iMac was okay, but lacked the same differential from PCs of the time. The current iMac is in my opinion hugely better than the PCs on offer.

Technology lends itself to futures thinking, Nicholas Negroponte endlessly writing about publishers not being in the dead tree business, bits and bytes, rather than vinyl and paper. The Digital Economy by Tapscott struck me as very good when I read it too. But the history of IT is not generally one of innovation in terms that we can readily understand. Apple seems unique in recognising technological potential and putting it into a useable product. Taking the mouse from Parc, putting a graphical user interface out there, internet ready iMacs, taking out floppies, shifting to usb, recently the ipod, itunes, webcams as standard. There was also lest we forget, the illfated, much derided Newton with handwriting recognition, the most beautiful computers know to man, at prices on ly a design museum could afford, their ability to piss off everyone who dealt with them within a few years, suppliers, users, etc.

I suppose Apple leads rather than following. It recognised the potential of flash drives, to create music players, the technological possibility led to a product. It recognises that most people are permanently connected to broadband, so it is okay to design hardware with broadband updatable operating systems. It recognises convergence, dealing with data, not dead trees. So itunes is a digital amazon. Your ipod works with your itunes on your imac. Your diary, your photos, your music, your contacts, all synchronised without effort. So now we have broadband, and ipods, we can have podcasts and audiobooks. There is also .mac, priced beyond my scope. Apple is becoming the sort of multiplatform, multidevice, multiapplication monster. Get an ipod,trade up to an iphone (name not currently owned by apple), connect to your imac, synchronise to .mac, and browse itunes, use isoftware. Every one a revenue stream, everyone going back to Apple, so that if like amazon, itunes makes a loss, no worries, you make the money on the ipods, or if you take a share of the mobile phone market, you make shedloads of money on phones, that means you can sell computers at a loss. In the past microsoft was the unloved behemoth of IT, but apple is morphing itself into the sort of creature that those who instinctively disliked microsoft feared.

Open standards, accessible for all, open source, in html the whole world runs free. I suppose that being so long the over-educated rebel at the back of the class, better read and more cultured than the teacher, apple is ill prepared for running the school. That comes with different responsibilities. It is a duller job. Less self indulgent.

But why so bad, if making money on phones subsidises free updates to an operating system, if the software and innovation are as good as they are, if we all keep on getting such good things, so cheaply, if apple can continue to exceed our expectations and redefine our tastes, maybe we should just live with it.

When does the free thinking rebel turn into the unwelcome tyrant, maybe Steve Jobs should be thinking of checks and balances, an apple welcome in a wider world.

Tags: fiction, blogs