garden
I should really be writing up minutes and cleaning the toilet ...
09/09/07 06:49 Filed in: Personal
I should be knuckling down to write up the minutes
from yesterday's meeting, but playing with my blog
instead. I should also be far more upto date with the
usual dull chores, as I even had a day off this week,
but knocked a bit sideways with a bit of a headcold,
so taking it easy, and not being too bothered about
it.
Pleasant enough day off, doing heavy work in the garden, getting rid of the sweetpeas, which were still thriving, and full of flowers, but I needed to make room for the planters that I was putting in.
This year I have grown,
teasel and wormwood from seed, and chamomile from little shoots. I did try feverfew, but it never sprouted. I do however already have plenty in the garden, so it is not a tragedy of the first magnitude.
Anyway, the chamomile and wormwood, were getting a bit unhappy in their pots, so having turfed out the sweetpeas, I put in some large plastic planters, filled them with soil, and put the chamomile in the outside two, and the wormwood in the middle. The wormwood is supposed to like rocky soil, so I topped off the planter with some rocks and grit, and it does look quite atmospheric.
Some other work in the garden, and spent a fair bit of time doing the watering, as it is all so parched. Concerned to find that I might be losing a blueberry to the dreaded dog pee.
After a week of all meetings, last week was a bit quieter, but it will take more than a relatively quiet week to put that particular world to rights. There is a vast amount to do, I probably need to plan more and delegate more. Just being very busy is not the answer. Also having to revisit decisions that were made before I took over, which is taking time, and will hopefully be for the best in the long run.
I am enjoying various forums on the internet, particularly now that I am setting them to log in automatically, and putting the links on my toolbar. With broadband they seem to load pretty fast, and a lively forum is the quickest way to find out stuff. Also intrigued by the ecosystem that is developing on-line. For example with RapidWeaver, the web design software, you can get software for layout - Blocks, by another developer, but even on top of this, you can get an enhancement to that add-on by yet another developer. So you have layers upon layers of independent development. There has probably been shareware as long as there have been PC's but now that e-commerce is so easy, you can buy and sell software without a lot of hassle. So for low volumes it is now worth the trouble. Accordingly, I don't imagine that many of these developers are making a huge living from this, but presumably it is worth their while. Another aspect of how this is an ecosystem, in addition of the interdependence of various developers, is the inter-relationship between developers and customers. Many will have a sustained relationship with their customers, via forums and blogs. That way they can draw upon the experience of customers to improve their products, and hopefully purchase up-grades over time. When you are talking about software costing a tenner here, a fiver there, then it does get to be a bit of an impulse purchase.
I am surprised now, by just how much of my spending is shifting to on line. In addition to the usual iTunes, there has been RapidWeaver, a growing collection of add-ons for that, as well as Amazon, and the Apple Store. A lot of the impulse purchasing is shifting onto the internet, and I do tend to use the internet as a first port of call for researching larger purchases too.
Just yesterday, I added QuickTimePro and some fonts to my wishlist, though not sure that I can justify the expense of any of them.
Pleasant enough day off, doing heavy work in the garden, getting rid of the sweetpeas, which were still thriving, and full of flowers, but I needed to make room for the planters that I was putting in.
This year I have grown,
teasel and wormwood from seed, and chamomile from little shoots. I did try feverfew, but it never sprouted. I do however already have plenty in the garden, so it is not a tragedy of the first magnitude.
Anyway, the chamomile and wormwood, were getting a bit unhappy in their pots, so having turfed out the sweetpeas, I put in some large plastic planters, filled them with soil, and put the chamomile in the outside two, and the wormwood in the middle. The wormwood is supposed to like rocky soil, so I topped off the planter with some rocks and grit, and it does look quite atmospheric.
Some other work in the garden, and spent a fair bit of time doing the watering, as it is all so parched. Concerned to find that I might be losing a blueberry to the dreaded dog pee.
After a week of all meetings, last week was a bit quieter, but it will take more than a relatively quiet week to put that particular world to rights. There is a vast amount to do, I probably need to plan more and delegate more. Just being very busy is not the answer. Also having to revisit decisions that were made before I took over, which is taking time, and will hopefully be for the best in the long run.
I am enjoying various forums on the internet, particularly now that I am setting them to log in automatically, and putting the links on my toolbar. With broadband they seem to load pretty fast, and a lively forum is the quickest way to find out stuff. Also intrigued by the ecosystem that is developing on-line. For example with RapidWeaver, the web design software, you can get software for layout - Blocks, by another developer, but even on top of this, you can get an enhancement to that add-on by yet another developer. So you have layers upon layers of independent development. There has probably been shareware as long as there have been PC's but now that e-commerce is so easy, you can buy and sell software without a lot of hassle. So for low volumes it is now worth the trouble. Accordingly, I don't imagine that many of these developers are making a huge living from this, but presumably it is worth their while. Another aspect of how this is an ecosystem, in addition of the interdependence of various developers, is the inter-relationship between developers and customers. Many will have a sustained relationship with their customers, via forums and blogs. That way they can draw upon the experience of customers to improve their products, and hopefully purchase up-grades over time. When you are talking about software costing a tenner here, a fiver there, then it does get to be a bit of an impulse purchase.
I am surprised now, by just how much of my spending is shifting to on line. In addition to the usual iTunes, there has been RapidWeaver, a growing collection of add-ons for that, as well as Amazon, and the Apple Store. A lot of the impulse purchasing is shifting onto the internet, and I do tend to use the internet as a first port of call for researching larger purchases too.
Just yesterday, I added QuickTimePro and some fonts to my wishlist, though not sure that I can justify the expense of any of them.
The romance of maintenance
25/08/07 07:35 Filed in: Personal
There is a wonderful line in How Buildings
Learn by Stewart Brand,
the romance of maintenance, is that there is no romance to maintenance
I think that we have a different relationship with things now. Traditionally life was all about maintenance, for the very rich, they simply had more people to do the maintenance for them. A great country estate, was a machine to provide a certain lifestyle, with gardeners maintaining a high maintenance image of what the country should be, with housekeepers maintaining the house in all its splendour, with the kitchen staff creating complex and demanding dishes.
These people were never idle, they were always busy, trying to grow pineapples using manure to provide heat, polishing silver cutlery every day, locking doors, lighting lamps, tending fires.
For everyday people there was also a huge amount of maintenance, keeping yourself clean, polishing shoes, ironing shirts, blacking lead, waxing the floor.
The standard notion now is that all this work was drudgery, and we are well rid of it. Even for the very rich, it seems absurd that you would maintain a house, or even a garden in such a labour intensive way. I suppose we view the labour as demeaning, and the tasks as pointless.
We live in a period of temporary abundance. We still enjoy the benefits of cheap oil, which is after all, just that oxymoron of free energy. We have the billions of China slaving away to provide for our every need, regardless of how trivial. All the while we are drowning ourselves in cheap debt, while the more long-sighted minds of the East are slowing becoming our creditors.
We can all recognise, that for something we really like, for something we enjoy owning, maintenance can be a form of veneration, what else is the point of waxing a car each weekend, or polishing shoes daily, or obsessively keeping your garden weed-free. In its way, these things are an expression of your love.
Maintenance need not be mere drudgery, it is only a chore when you see it as pointless and meaningless. I really enjoyed having a wood stove, and although it was vastly more work than just switching on a fire, it was work that I enjoyed. It was tactile, you could smell the ash, and smoke, you took the ash outside where it was cold, and came inside to light the fire, which slowly warmed the house.
We are always looking to impose some meaning onto our lives. In our relationship with our possessions we can simply acquire more and more, better, more impressive possessions, or we can choose sufficient and useful possessions, that we are then commited to look after and maintain, and even to dispose of wisely.
If we are to cope with the coming environmental pressures, then we will need to be prepared to move to a different way of looking at possessions. Rather than simply adding more and more possessions to our lives, endlessly getting rid of the tired and shabby, which they all too quickly become, we need to focus on choosing wisely, and then looking after what we own.
This is not such a different attitude. After all, it is how you would treat people, you don't simply get a flashy wife, then trade up to a new model, you choose wisely, look after and nurture.
Over the past week I have been working in the garden in the evenings, and rather than finding the gardening a chore, as I did when I had to try and squeeze the whole garden into a weekend blitz, whenever the weather was fine, I have really enjoyed it. It is fine to just start in a corner and work through all that needs to be done. Knowing that what does not get done will always get done the following evening. After a day spent at my desk, or sitting on a train, some time alone, pottering in the garden, is precious, all the more precious for being a contrast with whatever else I have been doing.
I suppose that a garden is your little microcosm of what the world could be like, your own private section of some larger perfection, even if the larger perfection just exists in your own mind. There is nothing more natural than to tend your garden, to nurture and maintain.
Having more time to maintain the garden, I now feel less compelled to simply go out and spend money on plants. When you don't have the time, it is tempting to just throw money at something, so that you think you are doing something. Someone who never goes fishing, buying the magazines to read on the train. People who never do any cooking, spending thousands on a kitchen.
There will always be some tasks that you are not good at, have no interest in, do not enjoy. The world should include people who will work for you, nowadays it always seems cheaper to buy new, than to simply maintain, but if we start to make a conscious decision to keep things for the long term, to pay for their upkeep, then the costs, are just the costs. The cheapest way, is not always the best.
Maintenance is an expression of our place in the world, part of our relationship to it, tending and nurturing, like the parent, the gardener or the shepherd. It is the responsibility of ownership, rather than just the selfish pride of it.
the romance of maintenance, is that there is no romance to maintenance
I think that we have a different relationship with things now. Traditionally life was all about maintenance, for the very rich, they simply had more people to do the maintenance for them. A great country estate, was a machine to provide a certain lifestyle, with gardeners maintaining a high maintenance image of what the country should be, with housekeepers maintaining the house in all its splendour, with the kitchen staff creating complex and demanding dishes.
These people were never idle, they were always busy, trying to grow pineapples using manure to provide heat, polishing silver cutlery every day, locking doors, lighting lamps, tending fires.
For everyday people there was also a huge amount of maintenance, keeping yourself clean, polishing shoes, ironing shirts, blacking lead, waxing the floor.
The standard notion now is that all this work was drudgery, and we are well rid of it. Even for the very rich, it seems absurd that you would maintain a house, or even a garden in such a labour intensive way. I suppose we view the labour as demeaning, and the tasks as pointless.
We live in a period of temporary abundance. We still enjoy the benefits of cheap oil, which is after all, just that oxymoron of free energy. We have the billions of China slaving away to provide for our every need, regardless of how trivial. All the while we are drowning ourselves in cheap debt, while the more long-sighted minds of the East are slowing becoming our creditors.
We can all recognise, that for something we really like, for something we enjoy owning, maintenance can be a form of veneration, what else is the point of waxing a car each weekend, or polishing shoes daily, or obsessively keeping your garden weed-free. In its way, these things are an expression of your love.
Maintenance need not be mere drudgery, it is only a chore when you see it as pointless and meaningless. I really enjoyed having a wood stove, and although it was vastly more work than just switching on a fire, it was work that I enjoyed. It was tactile, you could smell the ash, and smoke, you took the ash outside where it was cold, and came inside to light the fire, which slowly warmed the house.
We are always looking to impose some meaning onto our lives. In our relationship with our possessions we can simply acquire more and more, better, more impressive possessions, or we can choose sufficient and useful possessions, that we are then commited to look after and maintain, and even to dispose of wisely.
If we are to cope with the coming environmental pressures, then we will need to be prepared to move to a different way of looking at possessions. Rather than simply adding more and more possessions to our lives, endlessly getting rid of the tired and shabby, which they all too quickly become, we need to focus on choosing wisely, and then looking after what we own.
This is not such a different attitude. After all, it is how you would treat people, you don't simply get a flashy wife, then trade up to a new model, you choose wisely, look after and nurture.
Over the past week I have been working in the garden in the evenings, and rather than finding the gardening a chore, as I did when I had to try and squeeze the whole garden into a weekend blitz, whenever the weather was fine, I have really enjoyed it. It is fine to just start in a corner and work through all that needs to be done. Knowing that what does not get done will always get done the following evening. After a day spent at my desk, or sitting on a train, some time alone, pottering in the garden, is precious, all the more precious for being a contrast with whatever else I have been doing.
I suppose that a garden is your little microcosm of what the world could be like, your own private section of some larger perfection, even if the larger perfection just exists in your own mind. There is nothing more natural than to tend your garden, to nurture and maintain.
Having more time to maintain the garden, I now feel less compelled to simply go out and spend money on plants. When you don't have the time, it is tempting to just throw money at something, so that you think you are doing something. Someone who never goes fishing, buying the magazines to read on the train. People who never do any cooking, spending thousands on a kitchen.
There will always be some tasks that you are not good at, have no interest in, do not enjoy. The world should include people who will work for you, nowadays it always seems cheaper to buy new, than to simply maintain, but if we start to make a conscious decision to keep things for the long term, to pay for their upkeep, then the costs, are just the costs. The cheapest way, is not always the best.
Maintenance is an expression of our place in the world, part of our relationship to it, tending and nurturing, like the parent, the gardener or the shepherd. It is the responsibility of ownership, rather than just the selfish pride of it.
my new office has Art Deco influences
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.
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.
On returning from holiday
05/08/07 07:05 Filed in: Personal
Just some thoughts on getting back from my holiday.
Yesterday we drove back from Wales, which is probably
too long a drive to be enjoyable, I was pretty green
by the end of it, and my wife's leg was beginning to
get very locked, as opposed to just a wee bit locked.
I think someone's bum must have gone to sleep, as I think I heard it snoring.
It is strange to come back home after a short break, I have a couple of wind up clocks, one had stopped, my cacti all seemed unphased, but a succulent looked a little parched. The fridge was empty, you could smell the vague dog smell, but he was still at the kennels. A large pile of mail, none of which looked very interesting. About 120 emails, likewise, little of interest there. Outside the garden all seemed equally unphased, the grass has continued its patchy growth in parts, and in general it all looks a bit shaggy and unloved, but basically it is becoming a fertile spot, the spent loganberries falling to the ground, the bramley bent with heavy fruit, the sweetpeas, supplying yards of wonderful colour. The onions plants seem pretty much spent, so I will probably just pull them and weed them at the same time. Overall a bit of attention and the garden should be fine, the basics are all there, stuff seems to be growing, and seems to be happy, so the rest is simply detail. I'm not sure that it will ever be a low maintenance garden, but hopefully not a high maintenance garden either. It is quite flattering that most of the plants in the garden seem to have grown very well in my absence, some even flowering!
I really will need to knuckle down and figure out how to train my loganberries, after a couple of years in the ground, they have started to produce long heavy branches each year, and some proper framework and system is clearly required. I would also like to move the water butt, from where it sits unused next to the shed, closer to the house, and run it from a diverter from our house rainwater gutters. With the slopes in the garden this would work fine. One of the problems with a big plastic water butt, is that it really does need to be sitting on something flat and level, or it will gently fold and collapse. Not so easy in much of my rather lumpy garden!
I had intended to spend half today in the garden, getting it a little tidier, but today would appear to be a day of steady drizzle, so I may need to change my plans! Also on the list for today is picking up our dog from the kennels, as it really takes a dog to make a home!
I took plenty of photos on my holidays, with my ultra cheap digital camera, about a third seem worth keeping, so I'm jolly glad that I did not have to pay to develop them. The photos always seem a bit hit or miss, so I try and take a few of each potential shot, so that hopefully there will be one good one in there. I'll sort out a photo album for this site, and probably write a little more about the holiday.
I really enjoyed the holiday, it is wonderful to be able to spend some time away from the routine hassles, and I just love being in the country. I would like to be able to shift the balance of how I spend my time now, so that I can spend more time outdoors, growing stuff and enjoying.
It was also great to be able to catch up with family members we had not seen in a too long a while.
I think successful rural communities rely on community spirit, whether is it just people using good local shops, keeping their gardens, having time to chat to neighbours, or helping out as volunteers.
Another element of the holiday that I really enjoyed was being able to visit the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, generally called Mac by the locals. I am always a bit wary of these things, I really like things green, but I don't have much time for the outer green fringes, of knit your own jumper from lentils, and lets listen to gaia's angry whispers. Having said that I do try and listen to everything with an open mind.
Anyway, I really enjoyed looking round CAT, it was really spectacular, and it was great to see how they were managing to apply green principles in an everyday way. Often I feel that the ecology movement can be joyless and worthy, or an expensive affectation, but for me, CAT seemed to strike a pretty good mid-point. I particularly enjoyed looking round what they were doing with the gardens and greenery generally, they seem to be moving along similar lines to myself, and if I say so myself, I think that my garden is slightly ahead of theirs in areas. Much of my planting and choice of plants here has been fairly quixotic, so I was glad to see that in parts it chimed with theirs. I do just love to see bushes and trees with fruit on them.
Also interesting to see how they were working on generating energy, like everything else, generating energy all seems pretty peripheral until you need to start doing it yourself.
There was an excellent book about CAT - although it was 10 years old, it was a wonderful read, I was really sorry to finish it, and I would love to read more in a similar vein. Although there is a lot of focus on green technology and green lifestyles, there seems to be little said or written about more sustainable communities, which is probably an issue that we need to start tackling as a society. how can we reconnect our local communities and give them meaning.
Anyway, to wrap up this little discourse, pulling together these threads, almost as if I had planned it that way,
on returning from my holiday, I recognise the value of much of I am doing already, and would in future like to focus on
spending more time outdoors, and connected with nature
better links with my family and friends
work on strengthening the local community, as it is community that gives life and meaning to our built environment
I think someone's bum must have gone to sleep, as I think I heard it snoring.
It is strange to come back home after a short break, I have a couple of wind up clocks, one had stopped, my cacti all seemed unphased, but a succulent looked a little parched. The fridge was empty, you could smell the vague dog smell, but he was still at the kennels. A large pile of mail, none of which looked very interesting. About 120 emails, likewise, little of interest there. Outside the garden all seemed equally unphased, the grass has continued its patchy growth in parts, and in general it all looks a bit shaggy and unloved, but basically it is becoming a fertile spot, the spent loganberries falling to the ground, the bramley bent with heavy fruit, the sweetpeas, supplying yards of wonderful colour. The onions plants seem pretty much spent, so I will probably just pull them and weed them at the same time. Overall a bit of attention and the garden should be fine, the basics are all there, stuff seems to be growing, and seems to be happy, so the rest is simply detail. I'm not sure that it will ever be a low maintenance garden, but hopefully not a high maintenance garden either. It is quite flattering that most of the plants in the garden seem to have grown very well in my absence, some even flowering!
I really will need to knuckle down and figure out how to train my loganberries, after a couple of years in the ground, they have started to produce long heavy branches each year, and some proper framework and system is clearly required. I would also like to move the water butt, from where it sits unused next to the shed, closer to the house, and run it from a diverter from our house rainwater gutters. With the slopes in the garden this would work fine. One of the problems with a big plastic water butt, is that it really does need to be sitting on something flat and level, or it will gently fold and collapse. Not so easy in much of my rather lumpy garden!
I had intended to spend half today in the garden, getting it a little tidier, but today would appear to be a day of steady drizzle, so I may need to change my plans! Also on the list for today is picking up our dog from the kennels, as it really takes a dog to make a home!
I took plenty of photos on my holidays, with my ultra cheap digital camera, about a third seem worth keeping, so I'm jolly glad that I did not have to pay to develop them. The photos always seem a bit hit or miss, so I try and take a few of each potential shot, so that hopefully there will be one good one in there. I'll sort out a photo album for this site, and probably write a little more about the holiday.
I really enjoyed the holiday, it is wonderful to be able to spend some time away from the routine hassles, and I just love being in the country. I would like to be able to shift the balance of how I spend my time now, so that I can spend more time outdoors, growing stuff and enjoying.
It was also great to be able to catch up with family members we had not seen in a too long a while.
I think successful rural communities rely on community spirit, whether is it just people using good local shops, keeping their gardens, having time to chat to neighbours, or helping out as volunteers.
Another element of the holiday that I really enjoyed was being able to visit the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, generally called Mac by the locals. I am always a bit wary of these things, I really like things green, but I don't have much time for the outer green fringes, of knit your own jumper from lentils, and lets listen to gaia's angry whispers. Having said that I do try and listen to everything with an open mind.
Anyway, I really enjoyed looking round CAT, it was really spectacular, and it was great to see how they were managing to apply green principles in an everyday way. Often I feel that the ecology movement can be joyless and worthy, or an expensive affectation, but for me, CAT seemed to strike a pretty good mid-point. I particularly enjoyed looking round what they were doing with the gardens and greenery generally, they seem to be moving along similar lines to myself, and if I say so myself, I think that my garden is slightly ahead of theirs in areas. Much of my planting and choice of plants here has been fairly quixotic, so I was glad to see that in parts it chimed with theirs. I do just love to see bushes and trees with fruit on them.
Also interesting to see how they were working on generating energy, like everything else, generating energy all seems pretty peripheral until you need to start doing it yourself.
There was an excellent book about CAT - although it was 10 years old, it was a wonderful read, I was really sorry to finish it, and I would love to read more in a similar vein. Although there is a lot of focus on green technology and green lifestyles, there seems to be little said or written about more sustainable communities, which is probably an issue that we need to start tackling as a society. how can we reconnect our local communities and give them meaning.
Anyway, to wrap up this little discourse, pulling together these threads, almost as if I had planned it that way,
on returning from my holiday, I recognise the value of much of I am doing already, and would in future like to focus on
spending more time outdoors, and connected with nature
better links with my family and friends
work on strengthening the local community, as it is community that gives life and meaning to our built environment
- in more concrete terms,
- look over my finances, to focus on investing prudently, with a view to being able to free up time to do stuff other than just working,
- get an extra computer, which would reduce the family queue to use it,
- consider moving over to a woodburning stove for our living room,
- and for the garden
- sort out the loganberrys
- not feel that routine work is a chore, it is the effort from which all else flows
- consider building in storage for logs etc in the spare space,
- consider collecting rain water,
faffing about
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.
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.
listening to Monteverdi
10/06/07 19:47 Filed in: Personal
Write about TwentyTwoBlog here.
Rather than my normal practice of writing this blog in the weekend morning before everyone else wakes up, I was pottering about with some other stuff on the computer this morning and never got round to writing this.
So I am writing this on Sunday evening, plugged into iTunes listening to some Monteverdi.
The benefit of writing this in the morning is that you have the sense of huge significance, that your every thought is of the greatest of moment, and infinitely deserving of being read by all and sundry, and preserved for posterity. By evening, some sense of perspective has returned and my meanderings seems less crucial.
So in the usual fashion, some random jottings.
I like to set my daughters a task to complete, today I had them out trying to find as many wild flowers as they can, with a promise of a small reward for every one that they can identify. Much scouring of a book of wildflowers, and they seemed to enjoy it, so a useful little challenge, with a pretty posy to finish with.
The weather has been a bit iffy this weekend, so I have had a chance for some gardening, mowing the lawn yesterday, and emptying out my home made big red composter, and putting in the slighty slimy contents from the usual municipal green composter. The good compost was taken and dug in, the soil is old clay, heavy and grey. I think I will be working to improve my soil here for years.
I have been out gathering pine needle mulch in the local woods, our soil is bound to be reasonably acid, but I am trying to grow some real acid lovers, cranberrys and blueberrys, so I am keen to give them even more acidity, with a mulch of pine needles. By the by, elsewhere in the garden I have found leaf mould tremendous stuff, I can't believe that some enterprising council does not sell it, simply gather up leaves in a chicken wire cage, leave for a year, and then you have a fine rotted mulch, and keeps the soild moist and amply boosts the organic content of the soil. I reckon on gathering ten sacks of leaves for my chicken wire cage each autumn, and this gives me a decent amount of mulch each early autumn when I empty out the cage.
Rather than my normal practice of writing this blog in the weekend morning before everyone else wakes up, I was pottering about with some other stuff on the computer this morning and never got round to writing this.
So I am writing this on Sunday evening, plugged into iTunes listening to some Monteverdi.
The benefit of writing this in the morning is that you have the sense of huge significance, that your every thought is of the greatest of moment, and infinitely deserving of being read by all and sundry, and preserved for posterity. By evening, some sense of perspective has returned and my meanderings seems less crucial.
So in the usual fashion, some random jottings.
I like to set my daughters a task to complete, today I had them out trying to find as many wild flowers as they can, with a promise of a small reward for every one that they can identify. Much scouring of a book of wildflowers, and they seemed to enjoy it, so a useful little challenge, with a pretty posy to finish with.
The weather has been a bit iffy this weekend, so I have had a chance for some gardening, mowing the lawn yesterday, and emptying out my home made big red composter, and putting in the slighty slimy contents from the usual municipal green composter. The good compost was taken and dug in, the soil is old clay, heavy and grey. I think I will be working to improve my soil here for years.
I have been out gathering pine needle mulch in the local woods, our soil is bound to be reasonably acid, but I am trying to grow some real acid lovers, cranberrys and blueberrys, so I am keen to give them even more acidity, with a mulch of pine needles. By the by, elsewhere in the garden I have found leaf mould tremendous stuff, I can't believe that some enterprising council does not sell it, simply gather up leaves in a chicken wire cage, leave for a year, and then you have a fine rotted mulch, and keeps the soild moist and amply boosts the organic content of the soil. I reckon on gathering ten sacks of leaves for my chicken wire cage each autumn, and this gives me a decent amount of mulch each early autumn when I empty out the cage.
write about TwentyOneBlog here
02/06/07 08:03
It is tempting to have a huge rant about all the
changes at work, but although everything seems very
different and uncertain at the moment, as well as
being personally quite inconvenient, I'm sure that
things will fall into place eventually.
I think that traditionally jobs were about bashing out widgets as quickly and as cheaply as you could.
Nowadays a lot of that bashing out widgets work has been automated, so that clever people are not bashing out the same widgets for a whole career, instead they are figuring out how to bash out new widgets, or how to bash out old widgets in a new factory, or what sort of widgets we should really be bashing out.
Although there is a certain amount of routine process work in my job, there is a policy element, where I should be doing something new, thinking about new things, pushing forward new solutions.
I think that a lot of our organisation is about doing new stuff, relatively speaking we are not a large organisation, but like many businesses that deal with information and knowledge, we concentrate resources into the bits that deal with change and 'new-ness'. And correspondingly take resources out of an area once it has been 'fixed'.
With a new government in place there is a lot that is new, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld
As we know, There are familiar old things. There are things we know we know. We also know There are familiar new things. That is to say We know there are some things That are new. But there are also unfamiliar new things, The ones we don't know and haven't planned for.
My job is supposed to be about dealing with change, and now that there is a bit more change than I am used to, I should just get on with it, demonstrating an ability to cope well with change should be a good thing. BUT IT IS WEARYING.
Other slightly more random [my daughter's favourite word, apparently it is like 'cool' when I was young, the shorthand for all that is good, for the people your age, as clearly anyone older is hopelessly 'uncool' or 'unrandom'] notes.
Last weekend I had a few extra days appended to my weekend. Had a trip over to my mother-in-law's to tend the patch of ground over there that I am using as an allotment. It is laid out so that it can run okay with a few short trips each year, whereas my own garden is a lot closer, so it gets more regular attention. A quick morning blitz, spent digging up and digging in winter field beans/green manure which I will certainly try again, and generally weeding the plot. All going well I will have a crop of garlic and carrots and for decoration I am growing some dill from seed down the centre of the plot.
While getting some crops is welcome, I am also keen to improve the soil, currently very light, and quite poor, hence the green manure. I am also starting to understand why traditional farming patterns often involved small plots in various locations, rather than the modern practice of huge plots. By having a variety of plots, in different areas with different soils, you can plant far more appropriately, and are far less likely to face catastrophic losses. Traditional farming had to be much more sensitive to what nature would allow, as there was less scope to use brute force such as nitrogen rich fertilisers. In general nature uses evolution and good solutions, rather than brute force, and the appliance of energy intensive solutions. Smarter enzymes rather than more power.
Also did some work on my own garden, mainly digging out a small patch and putting in a cranberry pit, basically just a small area with old manure bags dug in round it, and backfilled with ericaceous compost, topped off with pine needles and pine forest mulch, with a few cranberry plants. With luck, and good acid soil, they should thrive. The composts are awful loose, might need to dribble in some clay to give it some body.
This will bring the total number of fruits in my garden upto, "I've lost count, plus one". Clearly a substantial increase!
I did keep a notebook recording what I was doing in the garden, but I'm switching onto Voodoopad, for those notes now, and it is just so great. For example noting down all the different types of greenmanures that I am using, and how I get on with them. I had been noting down some garden stuff in a notebook, other stuff on loose pieces of paper, and it just never worked in any sort of useful way. Also my handwriting is illegible.
It is really fun putting together a page on voodoopad about how I have planted up cranberrys, what the various books said about them, posting in a few pictures, some interesting facts from wikipedia.
The more I use voodoopad, the more impressed I get with it, and the more useful it gets.
Final piece of random jotting. My ipod Nano went phut yesterday, my iMac refused to recognise that it was attached. Tried a few things, updated the iTunes software, restarted, swapped round cables, reset my factory settings on the iPod itself. Then worked through the five R's that you are supposed to try, and the second recommendation, the hard reset, press the menu and select at the same time, till the apple appears, did the trick.
Reading through the support material on the Apple site was not much help, they really need to update it, for example iTunes 7.2 rather than iTunes 7.1 and the iPod software updater no longer seems to exist as a standalone piece of software, but trawling round the endless look that is the support articles, who knows? Maybe that is why the need to employ geniuses as tech support.
As a mea culpa, the iPod battery was well run down, I was asking the ipod to sync more stuff than it had room for, and there was a new version of iTunes to install, so some ipod moodiness was not altogether unexpected.
=============================
As a PS I note that wikipedia is to launch a new search engine, one of my pet gripes lately has been that google has jumped the shark as a search engine. I am repeatedly finding it dificult or impossible to find anything useful using google. To be honest, most of the time I do find something useful it is simply a link to a wikipedia page, and I hardly need google to tell me that I could look in wikipedia. The problems with google are
there is so much stuff on the web now
advertised stuff is bumped up to the top, but is not often much use
the sorting for most useful does not seem to help much
I really rather miss the old yahoo where they had stuff sorted into relevant topics, and there was a degree of authorial authority. I'm all for Wikinomics and the wisdom of crowds, but there does need to be some sort of rethinking of how google works if it is to continue to be useful. Maybe a wikigoogle is the way to go.
PS today's image is a wikipedia image of a cranberry harvest,
I think that traditionally jobs were about bashing out widgets as quickly and as cheaply as you could.
Nowadays a lot of that bashing out widgets work has been automated, so that clever people are not bashing out the same widgets for a whole career, instead they are figuring out how to bash out new widgets, or how to bash out old widgets in a new factory, or what sort of widgets we should really be bashing out.
Although there is a certain amount of routine process work in my job, there is a policy element, where I should be doing something new, thinking about new things, pushing forward new solutions.
I think that a lot of our organisation is about doing new stuff, relatively speaking we are not a large organisation, but like many businesses that deal with information and knowledge, we concentrate resources into the bits that deal with change and 'new-ness'. And correspondingly take resources out of an area once it has been 'fixed'.
With a new government in place there is a lot that is new, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld
As we know, There are familiar old things. There are things we know we know. We also know There are familiar new things. That is to say We know there are some things That are new. But there are also unfamiliar new things, The ones we don't know and haven't planned for.
My job is supposed to be about dealing with change, and now that there is a bit more change than I am used to, I should just get on with it, demonstrating an ability to cope well with change should be a good thing. BUT IT IS WEARYING.
Other slightly more random [my daughter's favourite word, apparently it is like 'cool' when I was young, the shorthand for all that is good, for the people your age, as clearly anyone older is hopelessly 'uncool' or 'unrandom'] notes.
Last weekend I had a few extra days appended to my weekend. Had a trip over to my mother-in-law's to tend the patch of ground over there that I am using as an allotment. It is laid out so that it can run okay with a few short trips each year, whereas my own garden is a lot closer, so it gets more regular attention. A quick morning blitz, spent digging up and digging in winter field beans/green manure which I will certainly try again, and generally weeding the plot. All going well I will have a crop of garlic and carrots and for decoration I am growing some dill from seed down the centre of the plot.
While getting some crops is welcome, I am also keen to improve the soil, currently very light, and quite poor, hence the green manure. I am also starting to understand why traditional farming patterns often involved small plots in various locations, rather than the modern practice of huge plots. By having a variety of plots, in different areas with different soils, you can plant far more appropriately, and are far less likely to face catastrophic losses. Traditional farming had to be much more sensitive to what nature would allow, as there was less scope to use brute force such as nitrogen rich fertilisers. In general nature uses evolution and good solutions, rather than brute force, and the appliance of energy intensive solutions. Smarter enzymes rather than more power.
Also did some work on my own garden, mainly digging out a small patch and putting in a cranberry pit, basically just a small area with old manure bags dug in round it, and backfilled with ericaceous compost, topped off with pine needles and pine forest mulch, with a few cranberry plants. With luck, and good acid soil, they should thrive. The composts are awful loose, might need to dribble in some clay to give it some body.
This will bring the total number of fruits in my garden upto, "I've lost count, plus one". Clearly a substantial increase!
I did keep a notebook recording what I was doing in the garden, but I'm switching onto Voodoopad, for those notes now, and it is just so great. For example noting down all the different types of greenmanures that I am using, and how I get on with them. I had been noting down some garden stuff in a notebook, other stuff on loose pieces of paper, and it just never worked in any sort of useful way. Also my handwriting is illegible.
It is really fun putting together a page on voodoopad about how I have planted up cranberrys, what the various books said about them, posting in a few pictures, some interesting facts from wikipedia.
The more I use voodoopad, the more impressed I get with it, and the more useful it gets.
Final piece of random jotting. My ipod Nano went phut yesterday, my iMac refused to recognise that it was attached. Tried a few things, updated the iTunes software, restarted, swapped round cables, reset my factory settings on the iPod itself. Then worked through the five R's that you are supposed to try, and the second recommendation, the hard reset, press the menu and select at the same time, till the apple appears, did the trick.
Reading through the support material on the Apple site was not much help, they really need to update it, for example iTunes 7.2 rather than iTunes 7.1 and the iPod software updater no longer seems to exist as a standalone piece of software, but trawling round the endless look that is the support articles, who knows? Maybe that is why the need to employ geniuses as tech support.
As a mea culpa, the iPod battery was well run down, I was asking the ipod to sync more stuff than it had room for, and there was a new version of iTunes to install, so some ipod moodiness was not altogether unexpected.
=============================
As a PS I note that wikipedia is to launch a new search engine, one of my pet gripes lately has been that google has jumped the shark as a search engine. I am repeatedly finding it dificult or impossible to find anything useful using google. To be honest, most of the time I do find something useful it is simply a link to a wikipedia page, and I hardly need google to tell me that I could look in wikipedia. The problems with google are
there is so much stuff on the web now
advertised stuff is bumped up to the top, but is not often much use
the sorting for most useful does not seem to help much
I really rather miss the old yahoo where they had stuff sorted into relevant topics, and there was a degree of authorial authority. I'm all for Wikinomics and the wisdom of crowds, but there does need to be some sort of rethinking of how google works if it is to continue to be useful. Maybe a wikigoogle is the way to go.
PS today's image is a wikipedia image of a cranberry harvest,
Galanthus nivalis
20/02/07 13:09 Filed in: Personal
I’ve got a day off today. Ostensibly so that I can
attend a dental appointment, but I could probably
have got across from work if pushed. However I do
feel long overdue a day off, and I have a ton of
annual leave accumulated, so I won’t feel unduly
guilty.
I seem to have landed pretty lucky, it is a lovely day. Clean and bright, as only a spring day can be. The garden is starting to bud and grow. Well truth be told much of it never seemed to stop growing. The primroses have never stopped, but the snowdrops are now up and the crocuses are now following them. I’ve naturalised some snowdrops in my front lawn as it never gets walked on, and the first cut is actually pretty late, so the snowdrops will have died back before I need to give it a cut. I’ve put in some crocuses round the back garden, just tucking them in round the sides of the lawn, in all the hard to reach bits that the mower never reaches to. They are now popping up, little colourful surprises.
Elsewhere in the garden stuff is starting to bud, and some stuff isn’t but I’m sure that in the fullness of time it will all sort itself out. Gardening is always a rough art. You never get it right all the time, but just labour away, and chalk up enough triumphs to keep you motivated and enough failures to stop you getting complacent.
I do enjoy having the house to myself, a little peace and quiet. At the weekend we went to Culross and there was a huge patch of snowdrops up by the Abbey, so deep they seemed to be stacked up on each other, so deep you could smell them. I suppose they had simply found the right spot, and been left to their own devices for year upon year, and in their quiet way just added on a few more each year, until they formed a snowy mountain. Often just leaving things to their own devices makes for a far better outcome than people ever could. I don’t suppose anyone would ever think to accumulate quite so many plain white galanthus nivalis, or smooth the rough edges off their stonework, or train ivy across an old wall, but left alone these things happen. I like the sort of texture that comes with age, nature seems a lot better at gently sorting things out than we are. I left some lesser celandine in my front garden, a stocky little thing with bulbous roots and little yellow flowers, and slowly it has spread out, gently extending its boundaries, some unshowy flowers, never choking out anything else, but just quietly filling up some gaps that I’ve not found planting for yet. None of my introduced plants seems to show the same steady progress, they tend towards the invasive, the plain stationery, not dying but not doing much else, or the temperamental, happy until something unexpected like winter comes along.
Gardening just seems to be a direction of travel, you never actually get there, you just keep asking new questions, trying out something else. Every year the garden seems a bit different, the big stuff gets bigger, stuff gets its roots down and accelerates on, the failures quietly melt away into the compost and back to soil.
I seem to have landed pretty lucky, it is a lovely day. Clean and bright, as only a spring day can be. The garden is starting to bud and grow. Well truth be told much of it never seemed to stop growing. The primroses have never stopped, but the snowdrops are now up and the crocuses are now following them. I’ve naturalised some snowdrops in my front lawn as it never gets walked on, and the first cut is actually pretty late, so the snowdrops will have died back before I need to give it a cut. I’ve put in some crocuses round the back garden, just tucking them in round the sides of the lawn, in all the hard to reach bits that the mower never reaches to. They are now popping up, little colourful surprises.
Elsewhere in the garden stuff is starting to bud, and some stuff isn’t but I’m sure that in the fullness of time it will all sort itself out. Gardening is always a rough art. You never get it right all the time, but just labour away, and chalk up enough triumphs to keep you motivated and enough failures to stop you getting complacent.
I do enjoy having the house to myself, a little peace and quiet. At the weekend we went to Culross and there was a huge patch of snowdrops up by the Abbey, so deep they seemed to be stacked up on each other, so deep you could smell them. I suppose they had simply found the right spot, and been left to their own devices for year upon year, and in their quiet way just added on a few more each year, until they formed a snowy mountain. Often just leaving things to their own devices makes for a far better outcome than people ever could. I don’t suppose anyone would ever think to accumulate quite so many plain white galanthus nivalis, or smooth the rough edges off their stonework, or train ivy across an old wall, but left alone these things happen. I like the sort of texture that comes with age, nature seems a lot better at gently sorting things out than we are. I left some lesser celandine in my front garden, a stocky little thing with bulbous roots and little yellow flowers, and slowly it has spread out, gently extending its boundaries, some unshowy flowers, never choking out anything else, but just quietly filling up some gaps that I’ve not found planting for yet. None of my introduced plants seems to show the same steady progress, they tend towards the invasive, the plain stationery, not dying but not doing much else, or the temperamental, happy until something unexpected like winter comes along.
Gardening just seems to be a direction of travel, you never actually get there, you just keep asking new questions, trying out something else. Every year the garden seems a bit different, the big stuff gets bigger, stuff gets its roots down and accelerates on, the failures quietly melt away into the compost and back to soil.