I've done plenty of short blogs posts this week, so I won't bother doing a full diary style round up of what I've been doing, instead letting the "thing" based postings speak for themselves.

However worth noting that I was over at my 'allotment' at my mother-in-law's, and did my harvesting, lifting the garlic and carrots that I had planted.

Also second week in my new office, same job, new boss.

I still reckon that I have an extra hour a day now, that I commute less, and I am determined to use this well. Been spending time in my garden in the evening, which is very therapeutic. Getting through stuff at work, but I'll probably need to get my head down and really get through all the various backlogs of work, that have piled up.

Tags: blogs

I am perpetually in a state of getting into some sort of routine, and then changing it. I will continue with the habit of putting a list of topics at the head of my blog, and then writing them up.

I have however stopped updating my desktop pictures weekly. My home computer is stuck on one of the photos of some japanese bowls, as is my home screen saver. At work I simply pull a fresh image off my website.

1 developments at work - moving around versus staying, and end to acting up
2 developments at home - more jam making
3 working on my website
4 comments on rapidweaver and forum based support
5 anything else that comes to mind, while typing up the above stuff

1 developments at work - moving around versus staying, and end to acting up - chatting to my current line manager about the benefits of staying in post for a while as opposed to moving around. Traditionally high flyers tended to move a lot, and this meant that other people tended to copy them, if they were ambitious. However people outwith the organisation hate this. It is difficult enough to network anyway, without all your contacts moving every five minutes, and then needing to get the new people upto speed on everything, all over again. In addition, if you only expect to be in post for a year or two at most, you approach it in a much different way, from if you expect to still be there to sort out any corner cutting or burnt bridges at the end of the day. You also realise that the contact you have are essential, and whatever you think of them personally, you need to make the relationships work, rather than just cherry picking the ones you think are most productive.

I have been in the same post for three years, but it has been subject to a lot of change, and although I have been working with the same people, largely, the processes involved have changed a lot. So I have probably had the best of both worlds, the benefits of staying in post, and getting a deeper and better understanding, as well as better links to key people, combined with continuing to learn new skills. I think that this is actually a much better model for development, than simply encouraging frenetic movement all over the place.

It also looks like my short period of running the section might be coming to an end, mixed feelings on that. However, my effective line management is so senior at the moment, that it is difficult to get them to sign off on stuff, so getting someone in who is only slightly more senior than me, and more focussed, should help move things along more briskly, which is the thing that keeps me awake at night (metaphorically speaking). As ever, I'll need to see how things pan out.


2 developments at home - more jam making - the house has been a little jam factory again this week. My wife has been working on jams and preserves, including red onion marmalade! Unfortunately I did not plant any red onions this year, so my wife had to buy them, but she has been able to make use of various fruits from my garden in small quantities, rhubarb and loganberry are relatively plentiful, as as gooseberries. For a garden, the best things to grow, are those that are

very forgiving with when you pick them
redcurrents, rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrents
or keep incredibly well
potatoes, apples, onions
or are just so damn nice
strawberries

However with time, it is easy enough to just fill your garden with a bit of everything, giving yourself a big always fresh outdoor larder.

3 Working on my website - I have really been enjoying getting back into working on my website, so although there was doubtless lots else to do yesterday, I spent a fair bit of time working on the website, in so far as I spent time doing anything much. Working on the website could easily become a full time activity, not that it is all that time consuming, but the principle of shearing layers applies, you can easily tackle the work in layers, as you add more, fresh issues and complexities present themselves. I was keen to add a search facility to the website, as it is easy enough for me to search material on my own computer, it would be useful to ensure that there was similar functionality on the website itself. Thinking about it, it was clear that adding the code for google to do a site search, was technically straightforward, albeit beyond my ken. Sure enough google supplies the appropriate tools to generate some snippets of code for insertion on your website, which I duly did. I did need to do a couple of amendments
- to shorten the length of the search box, now at 22 - if you want to check the code for the relevant amendment
- to ensure that the search results opened in a new window - basically "target" - check the code for the relevant amendment too

After a bit of trawling about, I found answers on the support forums to both these questions.

Of course at present, google is working off an out of date index of my site, so the search will not actually turn up anything useful, but that will fix itself soon enough. Things like this make you realise that despite appearances, google is not actually omniscient.

I also took some photos of the coatstand I made a while back, and added some details about it to my website.

As I mentioned above, the work comes in layers, my research yesterday on the support forums, also suggests that I should ensure that all my pages are actually given meaningful names, and I really do need to update names and alt tags everywhere, I have been pretty lazy with them.

I also need to update my iPhoto stuff, as some pages, are simply taking images from my main iPhoto library, so anything new, automatically gets uploaded, whether I want it to or not. Simply a case of putting stuff in folders, and amending a couple of links.

4 comments on rapidweaver and forum based support - I really like rapidweaver. My previous website work has been based on text editors, or simply something like mozilla to do the basic coding. I have always been open to getting web software, and have on occasion reviewed the various options. However Dreamweaver is vastly to expensive for what I could actually justify. This is basically a hobby site, it is not a business. I did get Freeway some time ago, and did one page using it, but I just hated the results. I found that notwithstanding the time it took, basically I preferred the results from coding a page by hand.

However, I just love rapidweaver. It is pretty intuitive, and comes out of the box, with some pretty amazing default themes, and set ups. Basically it is easy and pleasant to use, and the finished results are very impressive.

Having said all this, is rapidweaver for everyone? For someone like myself, who is used to doing pretty basic web coding by hand, it is a delight to use. Since getting broadband, I have also taken an interest in recent developments on the web, so that I can find my way round pod-casts, technorati, support forums, and look up html tags when I need to. The other week, when I could not get rapidweaver to upload, I checked out the support forums, and tried out some stuff, before using an ftp application - cyberduck - and finding out that I have filled up my file allocation with my webprovider, and as soon as I deleted some files, everything worked okay again.

If you really don't want to get your hands dirty with code, then rapidweaver is not the magic answer. It is not as simple as just posting onto livejournal etc, you do need to understand the basics.

After all I was not born knowing the basics of web publishing, I did an hnc option years ago, and I have been dabbling ever since. If someone is keen, then I would thoroughly recommend doing some proper training, it was some of the most enjoyable and creative training I have ever done. In tandem with some training, rapidweaver is excellent.

Initially my thinking was that support forums were probably better than a manual. Certainly manuals, are forever getting printed out, then languishing unloved and unread somewhere. However while a support forum is a fine place to hang out, and is pretty good at gradually expanding your knowledge base, often in unexpected ways, they are not a particularly quick way to find an answer to a question. Doubtless the answer is out there, or in there, but finding it is not easy. Often doing a search is impossible, because your key words, are so common, they do not narrow down the possible responses, and the titles of entries seldom indicate what they contain. The titles are written before any answers are posted.

Like many things, the answer is probably better meta data, either by way of tagging, or by bringing together stuff into a wiki, so that like stuff sits together better. In terms of usability, I find that something with a degree of thoughtful editing, often suits the user best, while something with enthusiasm will contain the answer, it will be buried deep, and something unduly constrained by editing, will inevitably be very hit or miss, and less fun to browse.

Of these rough categories,
thoughtful editing - wikipedia, and various commercial, semi commercial sites
enthusiasm - rapidweaver
unduly constrained - apple support forums

There is also a slight element of fanatical zeal on the rapidweaver forums. While I love the software, I do not hang out on the support forums for hours every week, like some people do. If rapidweaver is to appeal to those with less web experience, then it needs to be presented as an easy learning curve, and that really does require a good manual, a tightly edited wiki style support, and additional technical support. Intrinsically there is no reason why the software could not support this market.

Also worth adding that the vodcasts really are excellent, and should be an essential component of technical support.

5 anything else that comes to mind, while typing up the above stuff

I really fancy getting more computer geek tee shirts, well because, basically, I guess, sort of, that is who I am. Jamfactory tee shirts (rapidweaver) links, and O'Reilly currently appeal, but all very silly and frivolous, lets be honest

I am swithering setting up additional blogs, but really not sure whether it is best to have one blog, with everything in, or separate ones, with relevant stuff in them. The functionality of a blog is pretty appealing, but there is no point in creating something too unwieldy. To be honest, this blog is vastly bigger and more rambling, than any other blog that I have read, which makes me think, that making it even bigger and more rambling, is probably a bad idea.

Tags: shearing layers, webpage, blogs

Actually quite an eventful week, so I will need to be careful not to ramble on unduly. Topics as follows ;

1 Audiobooks and Scott Sigler

2 Re doing my webpage

3 Internet access

and anything else that occurs to me.

Audiobooks,
we are now operating in a totally different world. With technologies like podcasting, there are very few barriers to entry for people that want to create content. Rather than struggling away trying to even get your work read by a publisher or agent, when minor celebrities can attract a huge advance and have their ghostwritten books remaindered a few months later, you can simply make your work available to the world via the internet.

For the old music publishers, a major technology shift is nothing but good news. Suddenly, all these people who stopped buying music years ago, go out again, to buy the same old albums again, but just in a new format. That is why they loved CD, but worried about downloads. They wanted the free hit, of lots of additional revenue, coming off of the same old back catalogue. But the real opportunity lies with the Long Tail phenomenon, where we can now access material that is really specialist with complete ease. For print media there are the same challenges, the old print publishers are simply trying to get more money out of their existing, pile them high, sell them cheap, back catalogue. But do we really just want to read/listen to the same old stuff, in a new format. I would prefer to read/listen to new stuff. I listen to a lot of podcasts, often lectures from universities, etc, and if I really like the speaker, then I just add their book to my Amazon wishlist, and that way I am never short of thought provoking stuff to read. I can read stuff that I find well written and thought provoking, from anywhere in the world.

Another paradigm shift is the degree of closeness between those who produce material, and those who consume it, I can put a comment on my blog about the audiobook I have just read, the author can pick this up on technorati, or google alerts, and drop me a note. Authors are vastly more accessible, and this creates a degree of loyalty. Even just a small degree of contact, increases your overall impression of a producer, and your loyalty to them. Now you can buy material by people you have corresponded with.

I am really impressed with what Scott Sigler has done with his audiobooks, like google and amazon he has clearly decided that the more traffic and awareness he can generate, the better he will do. He is producing a professional quality product, and despite setbacks, has just used the new possibilities to reach and create an audience. Clearly we don't know what the future looks like, but I think it looks a lot more like what Scott is doing, than what it does now. This has to be a good thing.

Re doing my webpage -
I have finally found some software that I like, and can afford, so I have started to update my webpage. Currently running the old site and the new site, in the same directory, with the new going by index.html, and the old by index.htm, so it is probably pot luck which site you will get. However putting together a site with RapidWeaver is hugely easy, so I don't think it will take too long to put most of my content onto the new site, and then delete the old one. I cannot really be bothered archiving the thing, because I would need to rewrite all the links to the homepage. The bulk of the site was coded using a text editor, which means that all the coding was done by hand. It is a pretty good way of getting to know html, and actually quite fun, in a puzzle sort of way, but now that blogging is so easy, who has the time.

Anyway, I absolutely love Rapidweaver, and the revised website is coming together pretty quickly.

Internet access -
listening to a podcast from the iTunes University, someone was explaining how the current internet capacity was built up, and from his explanation it sounds as if the current reliability and resilience of the internet may come to be seen as the exception, rather than the rule. We are currently enjoying a massive overcapacity in the network, largely built from people building capacity, going broke, and their assets being bought out by others very cheaply. Clearly not a model for building major infrastructure that is likely to work twice!

And finally,
I really don't get the iTunes University, why don't they just podcast like everyone else, why does the content need to be badged over at some virtual university, when they could simply set up podcasts that people subscribe to, great idea, but a complication too far for many I suspect.

Tags: blogs, webpage, audiobooks, internet, iTunes

Write about TwentyFourBlog here.

1 First of all a few words about the images that I am posting with each blog
2 Then a few musings on audiobooks
3 Then some thoughts on how I am getting on at work, and where I was on Friday night,
4 Then maybe some thoughts on why project management does not really work for policy work.

plus anything else that occurs to me


First of all a few words about the images that I am posting with each blog
I have decided to set a new desktop image each week, both on my PC in the office, and my iMac at home. So far they have been a mixture, some from Flickr that caught my eye, the image of a cranberry harvest came from wikipedia, and was there because I have been researching cranberrys and had put in the smallest of cranberry bogs in my garden. Clearly I will not be rivalling Ocean Spray anytime soon, but I would like to squeeze as many edible plants into my suburban garden as I can. Last weeks funky turtel was drawn by my daughter as a Father's day present, using ArtRage software. This week is simply some japanese bowls, each with something arty in them, sitting on my laminate floor, lit from above with an anglepoise lamp. My digital camera is the cheapest one that I could buy in Argos, so I simply go on the principle of taking lots of shots, and the lighting and focal length is bound to be right in one of them. The japanese bowls will be my desktop image this week.

Then a few musings on audiobooks
I got a free audiobook on the MacFormat disk, Ancestor by Scott Sigler, and being extremely cautious, tried it out before I lashed out any real money to buy an audiobook. The Scott Sigler was pretty good in an airport fiction sort of way, and he deserves his success. Having established, that I do actually like listening to an audiobook, I then went and bought one that I had to pay for, The Big Moo by Seth Godin et al. Seth being something of a self made legend on the internet. Actually a pretty good too listen, and something I will definitely hang onto and listen to again.

I am a bit disconcerted about having to pay more for an audiobook than for an actual dead tree book, logically the cost of selling one more audiobook is pretty much nil, so you would have thought more competitive pricing would be in order. However I do spend a lot of time with my iPod, between commuting and walking my dog, so it is nice to have some decent content to listen to. I suppose that the content has to be pretty linear, not the sort of thing that you need to jump back a chapter to check things, and anything visual would need to be embedded, so no tables, but the odd images would certainly be technically possible. Not much use for reference, who wants an audiobook dictionary, but good for stuff that would work well as a lecture.

I could see myself building up a pretty extensive library of audiobooks, but at the price they are charging currently, I think I will need to stick to podcasts mainly, with the odd audiobook as a treat. No doubt the groaning floor of my loft will appreciate this, I am currently filing a small but constantly growing library up there.


Then some thoughts on how I am getting on at work, and where I was on Friday nights,
Things seem to be going pretty well at work, folk seem happy enough with what I am doing, and relaxed enough about what I am not managing to do. It seems to be largely an issue of perspective, I am expected to sort out the big things, and as much of the rest as I can. To be honest I am enjoying it, I am getting slightly more money, though hardly enough to notice, but the pleasure is really being able to tackle things as I see most appropriate. I meet up with my line manager once a week, so hopefully I am not likely to go too far off target. Elsewhere folk seem happy enough with what I am doing too, which is always gratifying. Getting out meeting people, talking to them, and more importantly listening to what they have to say is proving absolutely vital, it is where all 'my' best ideas come from.

The downside, of course, is that it is pretty exhausting trying to run everything all the time. My new member of staff starts shortly, and of course that will help too. However there is also the requirement to be able to step back far enough from what I am doing, to be able to see the priorities in proper perspective, rather than just chasing about being busy all the time.

One thought that has occurred to me, if there is a perfect job for me, then it has to be one that I am actually capable of doing and enjoying, if the job is so exhausting it wears me out, then clearly it is not the right one for me.

Anyway, a wonderful evening on Friday, as per
http://jessinacastle.livejournal.com/

attended the celebration for Jess, chatting with lots of her friends, some of whom I knew, some I didn't. I suppose the best thing that you could say of the celebration is that Jess would have loved it. The whole thing was a wonderful tribute to a wonderful woman, as if there was nothing negative in the world, and we were filled with memories of a remarkable woman.

Then maybe some thoughts on why project management does not really work for policy work.
I do quite like the project management methodology, but it simply does not work for the kind of policy work that I do for a day job. Project management works on the basis that you can agree a specification for what you want to do, and then work to deliver that specification. With policy work you decide on an overall policy direction, then you carry out research and engagement work, then you decide on what you are going to do, then you move forward a bit more. The work can be usefully broken down into chunks, and project management can be used for bits of it, but by and large it is a process of keeping to a vision, communicating your vision, and trying to move it forward, while being attentive to the feedback and changing environment around you.



and while I think about it, why iTunes is starting to annoy me
reason one - they always seem to funnel you back to the same stuff, I buy pretty obscure alternative music, and rather than suggesting, other similarly left field music, they invariably try and get me to buy whatever it is that has the A&R muscle behind it this week
reason two - partial albums, what is it with all these partial albums, which generally cost as much as the actual CD, but have half the tracks missing, who exactly is in the market for them, need to buy an Ivor Cutler album in a hurry, too lazy to go to Fopp to buy it, simply download a partial album for extra cash, but without some tracks.
reason three - you would need a screen the size of a wall to fit the entire homescreen on it, it is like trying to watch a movie through a letter box, if apple are responsible for all the individual elements, can't they at least look a bit slicker
reason four - audiobooks that cost more than the book, with an audiobook there is none of that tedious dead tree stuff, precious little marketting, no shop to run, the customer simply downloads the thing at their own expense and then cannot pass it on to their mates. Surely an audiobook should be a lot cheaper than the paper book, not selling at a premium.
reason five - where is the customer support, it is being run as a cash cow, precious little sign of any responsiveness or willingness to engage with customers.

and while I think about it, maybe I should be writing more
someone mentioned how well written something I had done was, just a little thing, but other people have commented on my writing before too. Lately I have been feeling that I want to do more creative stuff, and I am dabbling a bit with photos and sketches, really just for fun, because I know that there are people far better at those than I will ever be. But when it comes to writing, I really am pretty good, so maybe I should be finding the time to write something that I really believe in, and think is important. I don't want to write airport bestsellers, but there are the odd books that have inspired me, I am not getting any younger, so maybe I need to get started on something. A book of ideas, something challenging, but ultimately positive.

and while I think about it, I really like Stewart Brand's website
http://sb.longnow.org/Home.html
I mentioned a while back that I did not know how to brand my website, as it was not about anything in particular, but I rather like Stewart Brand's as like many of the people I really admire, he is not about anything in particular, but uses this as a strength, rather than a weakness.

Tags: blogs, audiobooks, webpage

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

This blog will be a bit ragged.

On the one hand, I think it is useful to be fairly straightforward, but equally no point in being too candid, when a quick search on technorati and anyone can find all the unkind words you posted about them in nineteen oatcake.

Overall the blog entries that I enjoy reading are about what people think, and are reasonably candid, so I will try and stick to that style.

Having posted my idea of a self-sorting blog on the forum for Omni-Outliner, a Macintosh outliner application, no interest. I see the idea as vastly powerful and useful, though not necessarily easy to implement. Imagine all your entries, sortable and browsable in the way that iTunes or Amazon is, you liked this post, other readers also liked this one, similar posts include, ...

One thing I have found with software, it is hugely difficult to sell a concept, people like to see something tangible.

I will probably use Omni-Outliner myself, for when it comes to capturing the random stuff in my small notebook. The process of capturing seemingly random stuff is useful, as very often two not so good ideas can combine, or some opportunity simply arises to do something off your wish list.

I now have a few business ideas, that I would like to hawk round, and if someone offers me a couple of hundred pounds for a few minutes work, then that is good money.

I have also got some ideas for 2000AD scripts, that I can write up and submit when I have a bit more time. I did have a script published years ago, and although it never seems to impress anyone else, it remains something that I am hugely proud of. I could probably work on conveying a more professional image, but at my age, I am ill inclined to jump through hoops for someone else.

I am still trying to work out which hard drive to buy for backing up. Having done a fair bit of research, and then some more, I think I am narrowing down the issues. It is amazing just how long it takes to research and work up ideas. The temptation is always to be doing stuff, and think that thinking time is wasted time, but I am increasingly realising the thinking time is well worth the time spent. A proper way of backing up my computer is essential, especially now that I am starting to buy music from iTunes. Even more crucially, my daughters are buying music from iTunes and saving it to their accounts. If this music gets lost, then I will have some hot cross bunnies for sure!

For sake of being trivial, my iTunes purchases to date are
Laurie Anderson Oh superman
The Phenomenauts Re-entry - album
Holly Gollightly and the Brokeoffs
you can’t buy a gun when you are crying - album
The Mooney Suzuki
people get ready - album
Four Fifty One socks and shoes
the Fratellis flathead
the Red Guitars good technology

I would also suggest, If your breasts, by Ivor Cutler, which is only eight seconds long, so you can hear it in its entirety simply by previewing it. This makes me laugh soo much, but people might find it puerile.

Finally things are all a bit up in the air at work. My old boss is leaving on early retirement in the coming week. We have worked together for the past couple of years, and although some other people have come and gone, for a lot of the time it has been the pair of us getting through an awful lot of stuff between us. I have constantly been told that our branch was too small, and we had far too much work to do, but by and large we have done it, and done it very well too. Working well together does mean that you have to compliment each others skills, and specialities, and we have. By nature I am methodical and organised, more delivery focussed, whereas my boss is probably more thoughtful and considered, as well as vastly more knowledgeable. So it has worked well, I worry about delivery, she figures out what we will deliver. You get very used to simply leaving the other person to cover their area, and concentrating on your own area.

But all good things come to an end, she is off on early retirement, and I am still at my desk.

Obviously this presents quite a few issues, I’ll need to start working to a new boss, I’ll need to cover all the work of the branch until we can fill vacancies, and it can take months to fill a vacancy, although there are always temporary staff.

Factor in that I simply worked through Christmas, and seriously feel like I would just like to take off and veg out for a month.

Also I am not sure whether I want to stay in my current post, I would hate to leave the branch with no-one there, equally I don’t want to commit to another three years there. I don’t want to simply mark time, if it is just spinning plates, then I would prefer to do something new.

In usual fashion, I’ve been fairly vocal on all this, and had a very useful meeting with my new boss on Friday. I suppose I could really make an effort to seem a bit less flaky, and a bit more professional, but I really do feel pretty maxed out, so no point in pretending that I am Mr SuperWonderful, when I feel like, Little Mr OnTheVergeOfANervousBreakdown.

At the end of the day, my health comes before the job, you cannot simply grab at every opportunity, some you just need to let go by.

Anyway back to my “very useful meeting” with my new boss. We set out our respective positions, and agreed a way forward. I am now pretty confident that the situation is not quite as bad as I had anticipated, the workload should be less unrealistic than I had anticipated for the next few months, and we should get some new staff in post quicker than I had thought might be the case. Also I am to take on the lead for the branch, not just because I am the only one here, but so that we can get moving on some important pieces of work. Clearly we cannot really get motoring until the branch is fully staffed, which would be three staff. However, equally, we need to get some things moving now, or we are losing valuable ground.

I’ve agreed a plan of attack, and I’ll have weekly meetings with my new boss, so we should be able to figure out pretty quickly whether we are actually making any progress, and figure out a new plan of attack as necessary.

On the basis that I am spinning a few plates, but concentrating on putting the major work in motion, it sounds like interesting work for a few months. I did apply for a couple of other posts, for fear of just being swamped where I was, but I’m now considering cancelling those applications, and seeing how things pan out where I am.

Decisions, decisions.

There is a vast difference between the approaches required at the different job bands. At a more junior level, you have clear and finite objectives, and are expected to deliver them to the best possible standard. That was certainly the approach in my original department. However at a more senior level, you have a more general work area, and you are expected to make meaningful progress across it. However it is far more difficult to agree specific and meaningful objectives at the outset. Even if you can, these are easily set aside if something else comes up.

I suppose that this could simply be a rationale for not planning, but equally I suppose, if you have a bunch of staff working to you, it will soon become apparent what meaningful progress does look like, and what running about like a headless chicken all the time looks like. The higher up you get, the more of a judgement you have to make on how good to actually do something. Are you spending too much time on something that is simply not that important in the scheme of things.

I do feel a bit conflicted trying to be a whole branch of three people in myself. However if I am working to the clear remit of delivering stuff, rather than spinning plates, then I can be more proactive in my decision making, rather than being reactive, and worrying too much about what I am not doing. To be honest I am now quite excited about getting things moving, the feedback from my outgoing boss, was that often it is important to make decisions, even if they are wrong, rather than simply failing to make decisions. Whereas at a junior grade the work is more finite and quantitative, and a wrong decision is pretty obvious, at a more senior level, the work is infinite, and qualitative.

I always take the view that good people can make bad systems work, and bad people can make good systems fail. I suppose that what this is saying is that there is a vital interpersonal side, the getting the folk right element, that you cannot neglect. But it is all a bit voodoo, and subjective, so it is easy to neglect.

Edward de Bono has a theory of different hats, for different ways of thinking. What I am talking about is something similar.

One skill set is methodical and organised against well defined and finite objectives. At this level there are relatively few other resources to call on, because basically this is grunt work that takes hours to do. You co-operate so that you can offer mutual assistance and advice, but there can be equally productive ways of working without a lot of networking or mutual assistance.

The other skills set is creative and proactive working with an imperfect understanding and higher level objectives. At this level there are plenty of resources to call upon because this is where the right contacts, experience or ideas, can ensure progress very quickly and with little real effort. How effective your networks are is crucial at this work level.

If you are moving from one type of job to another, it is not simply a case of getting better and doing more, you really do need to do things differently, or it is not going to work.

Equally if you are working in one way, looking at someone working in the other style, they seem impossibly flaky, or unduly mechanistic. It is very difficult to perceive someone’s effectiveness if you are on the other side of this particular divide. Also it is very difficult to perform, unless you know what style is expected of you. Many posts are actually transitional, they require substantial elements of each approach. Very few posts are so senior that there are no mechanistic elements to them.

[I have worked to the principle that this blog is about me, so readers can form whatever opinions they like about me, but it is not about anyone else, so it is inappropriate to write about anyone else. This is not because I am not interested, or don’t think anyone else is, but simply because it seems inherently unfair. This means I don’t really say anything bad about anyone, but also, don’t say positive things about people when I could/should. At this point it would be wrong not to say how much I have enjoyed working for my old boss, she has been a tremendously easy and supportive person to work for. Not only that, she is one of the nicest people I have ever met, vastly nicer than I am. Also vastly cleverer than I am. It is inspiring to work with someone who is that nice, but who has managed to rise to a very senior position. Clearly you do not have to be a ruthless so and so to do well.

I have also been lucky enough to work with some other tremendous people over the past year, we had a secondee from a stakeholder organisation, and she was incredible, like a kid in a sweetshop, all excited at the possibilities, and undettered by how incredibly difficult everything seems to be. I also had a new member of staff, and really enjoyed training them up, and getting them to realise that they already had a lot of the key skills for the work, and encouraging them to think about the real point of what we are actually doing. There have also been countless other folk drafted in, or loosely attached to the project, and without exception they have all been positive and unstinting in their efforts, and a huge pleasure to work with. Had a single person been difficult, our seemingly impossible task really would have been impossible. My main regret is that I did not get a chance to work more with all these people. Heartfelt best wishes to anyone that recognises themselves in the above.]

Tags: blogs, iTunes

I have been missing my blog. I am developing a hierarchy of recording stuff. I keep a number of notebooks. I say, a number, because I would have to count them.

Firstly - I carry around a small pocket notebook to record stuff.

I keep a jotter for work and one for home, that I use for the run of the mill notetaking, for example minutes of meetings, and working notes. I glue a business card to the front of each, and write the dates covered on the cover with a marker pen.

I keep a notebook for creative ideas for woodwork and the garden, it also includes clippings that I find inspiring, and might want to pick up on to some extent.

I keep a notebook of what I have done and planted in the garden. Initially this was organised into helpful categories, and also included a running diary, but I never used the helpful categories, and now I just use the running diary, but this means that I cannot find things without a lot of effort.

Following on from reading A Year with Swollen Appendices, by Brian Eno, I kept a diary for a year.

I also keep various other virtual notes, I have been trying to get familiar with omni-outliner, and I use it for the odd list, but they seem to get compiled, then sit unloved on my desktop.

And finally there is my blog.

I suppose there is a sort of evolution going on here, the stuff that works will keep on getting used, while the stuff that is just that bit too much faff, for the use, is abandoned. I supposed that I could move towards making more of these records electronic, but I quite like the ease of simply recording stuff without a computer. There is usually a queue forming round our computer anyway, so the more that I can do without it, the easier my life is.

A lot of the subsequent usability of a record is in how easy it is to search, which is determined by how organised it is, or how searchable it is. I did toy with the idea of writing an entire novel on file cards, which I would write, and then sort and resort. Obviously this is not an entirely new idea. William Burroughs worked with cut-ups, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno, is organised in a rather idiosyncratic way. There is also post-modernism, or even Tristram Shandy if you want to look at experimentation in ordering.

The idea of order is actually dependent on there being a reader.

* The material can be written in any order you like,

* organised in another,

* and finally read in yet another.

[another example of input - process - output]

The organisation in the middle serves some purpose, does it facilitate or inspire the reader. A phone directory in a purely random order would be a very different beast from one in alphabetical order. Similarly although a phone directory is in alphabetical order, that is not how you read it. You use the order, so that you can search it, you read it in an interest defined order. If technology can do the sorting on the fly, for you, then the actual order of material is irrelevant.

For example I often spend an evening browsing across the internet, following up on interests. Checking out wikipedia, then maybe a forum or two, check blogs via technorati, put a book on my wishlist at Amazon. The order is responsive to what interests me, I hyperlink, or jump up to my to bookmark bar, to do a fresh search.

Returning to the three categories above, the web is written in a certain order, it is organised in another, but I choose to read it in yet another.

This works because of the power of hyperlinks and searching.

I have a number of problems with novels, I don’t really think that the novel is a valid art form anymore. It has lost its purpose and role. Like when contemporary music hits a stale patch, everything seems like a pastiche of something else.

Part of my problem with the novel, is that the author imposes their order on the reader. There might only be one strand that interests you, only one character you are curious about, but these are twined into the whole, and you cannot opt out of the rest. There are many fine things about narrative, it keeps you reading. But I am not sure that the lasting value of writing lies in how strong the narrative is.

My other problem with novels, is that they impose a single viewpoint. I am increasingly coming to the view, that I always believe two contradictory things, and constantly have to decide between them. Generally an author will have decided, how do we view this person, what happened next, is this action a mistake. A novel creates a pattern and narrative. That is why they are so appealing. However novels do not really tell you anything about the present tense, but we live in the present tense, we are constantly in a decision making mode.

Do I make another cup of tea, I would like another cup, or do I keep typing, for fear of losing the thread of what I am writing. Factor in that I drink far too much tea, and decide to carry on typing. The debate is parked for a short while, but will resurface when I run dry of ideas along this thread, and the balance of the argument tips, and I decide that there is no longer a thread to lose, I’ll start drinking less tea tomorrow, and I will make myself another cup of tea.

We would all love to be that person in a novel, Gully Foyle in The Stars my Destination, Matt Damon striding up the hill with a shot gun to kill the assassin that is chasing him. These are people devoid of ambiguity, pure of purpose. But we live with a constant critic, worrying about the opportunity cost of what we have done, what if we had done something else, when does the balance of the argument tilt, when do we give up on this bad investment, when do we give up on a bad marriage, when do we decide to change career.

Having successfully gone off on a tangent for three paragraphs, I must return to my thoughts on ordering.

I do find this blog useful as a way of capturing material. I have consciously made it a diary of my ideas, rather than something of any physicality, it is not a diary of what I have done, but of what I have been thinking about. That then is the input.

However a blog has a very specific order, and like the American date format, a rather illogical one at that. It starts with the most recent, entry, but that is ordered from oldest to newest, because that is the way that we write. We simply start at the top of the page. The assumption is that people are most interested in what you wrote most recently, so that is where they start, they can then drill down.

I have been thinking about a self-sorting or self-organising blog. Clearly as my blog is about ideas, I would like to see it organised, so that all the stuff on the same topic sits together. That way I can see what I have already written on something. Maybe I will contradict what I have already written. Maybe I will now have enough material to work up into an article. Maybe I am looking for some creative ideas for an article. Over the past few weeks I have developed three product ideas, and about half a dozen ideas for 2000AD comic strips. At a certain point I will want to pursue these.

I have been doing some searching on the web for software that would give you a self sorting and organising blog. I don’t think it exists, because the order that a blog appears in, is a crucial aspect of it actually being a blog. In a sense I am not really writing a blog. The date order of entries is less relevant than the topics covered. So maybe I am looking for something else altogether. A blog peppered with hyperlinks gets close to what I am thinking of, but I think the crucial thing is that the reader can search, manipulate and order the material themselves. I do not want to impose my order onto the reader.

I would love to find a way of doing this as a blog. However in the meantime, I may well experiment with Omni-Outliner, and if it does not allow web publishing, try and pitch this idea to them. Like a lot of my ideas, it falls short of being something that you could patent and make money from, but some sort of recognition would be welcome.

Getting down to the detail, Omni Outliner basically produces an outline, but allows you to sort it, include check boxes etc. I could just enter stuff, with appropriate details in columns, put a timestamp against each row, and then type away. Obvious problems, what if an entry covers more than one topic. How does it get sorted. Does the entry appear more than once, that is once per topic, or only once. Also what about a piece like this, that is finely crafted, and covers a variety of different sub-topics but is actually best read as a single entry. Is this blog entry a single entry, read from top to bottom, or do I split it up and lose the development of a single argument.

These are not new problems. They are probably just an artefact of how we look at things. When you browse the internet, or Amazon, or iTunes, you do not worry about passing the same point twice. In fact the more often you pass a point, the more it will pique your interest. That is part of intelligence. The recognition of patterns, gosh that is the third time that someone I respect has mentioned this author that I have never heard of, maybe I should check them out.

Just to park the thought, there are tags, and digg, etc, none of which I really understand.

Are we creating something like a phone directory, which you are not expected to read from cover to cover, but use all the time, or a novel, where you have to complete it.

Is it software, or dead tree?

Maybe, what we are looking for is a constantly evolving and updated, repository of ideas, images, and material, that people think is worth recording, easy sorted, organised, and searched, which allows you to flag some as private, some as friends only, some for public consumption. A compendium of your blog, your flickr, your myspace. A freeform version of what is unique and important about you. The problem with most of these things, is that they are too constrained, you start your diary on 1 January, but give up before February, because you did not fill in every box, or you did not have enough space, or you decided you did not want to record the day you spent in bed hungover, or...

A free form, easily searched and organised, braindump of what it is to be you. Now that is something that would catch your soul.

As a coda, reading through this, I have been writing about three different things. As per my point in an earlier blog, what is the difference between a leaflet, and and exhibition? We impose a way of looking at things, because that is what we expect. We expect a leaflet to conform to a certain format, and a exhibition to conform to another. Both convey information in a style to which we are accustomed.

There is a narrative book, some less narrative than others, such as Tristram Shandy, but clearly the order is consciously chosen and important, you would not think to reorder a confusing book into chronological order to improve it, or the chapters into popularity order so you did not miss the best bits.

There is a reference title, such as the Yellow Pages, telephone directory, dictionary, and even some reference books such as you DIY manual. These are tools that you use to find out more.

Then there is software, or amalgamations of software, that allow for a reader defined pathway through material. Technology has enhanced the ability for us to follow pathways, that is part of the success of Amazon and iTunes, they tempt and distract you with things that they think you might be interested in.

I suppose what I am saying, is that I would like to create something more like the last category, than the first.

Tags: blogs, gtd

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