work
Poets Day
07/10/07 06:34 Filed in: Personal
I have been out a fair bit in the past week, going
out to a variety of meetings in different places, so
it has been a bit erratic when I have had a chance to
get something decent to eat. Probably as a side
effect of that, I seem to have been getting a lot of
headaches, which becomes a little self perpetuating.
Once your head is a bit fuzzy, your judgement is a
bit fuzzy, and you do tend to lose a bit of
perspective.
Slightly weird on Friday, when I could not focus my eyes for about half an hour. Certainly disconcerting at the time. This growing older has little to recommend it.
All told it has been good to get out and see some new people. I think in our nature of work it is incumbent on people to be accessible and get out, though whatever you do, is only the merest scratch of the surface. Some very impressive thinking and practice going on, which I would like to draw on.
Got a chance to visit a new Apple Store - wow/hmmm - wow in the sense that it was very impressive, hmmmm - in the sense that it was very clearly a premium sort of place, no cheap end of lines to be had, big tables with lots of the same model, which you could just play with for a while. Quite a simple idea, but useful, as it allowed me to try out the new aluminium keyboard, which seems okay, but I'd like the keys to have a more positive action, and to look over the laptops, I think that the small white laptops just look more laptop sized, so I would probably just go for one of those. Some software, but not a vast selection. A lot of people around, but it was that sort of place, it needed to have folk milling around, or it would just be a big empty barn. The staff seemed friendly and helpful, which is good, as otherwise it might be a bit daunting.
Not too sure what I did yesterday, nothing too much, but after a long week, I am not going to OD on doing nothing much.
I should of course point out that this is all via 'official sources' namely
http://www.themountaingoats.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mp3s:home
I am particularly impressed with the live music recordings, I guess that they will be pretty variable with some being absolutely dreadful in terms of sound quality, but the ones I have listened to so far, are pretty okay for sound quality, and the good natured joshing with the audience more than makes up for that. In fact quite a few of the songs sound lighter and brighter live, with the recorded versions being a little austere. Although the subject matter can be quite dark, there is always a sense of humour at play. These are songs of self-dramatising characters, and always border on the absurd.
So I have downloaded various rarities to my ipod, and a few concerts, which I will add to. It is a little tricksy, getting the stuff into iTunes, but double clicking on the downloaded MP3 seems to work best.
The forum on the official Mountain Goats site also looks to feature less spelling mistakes than most, and more thoughtful/amusing comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberries
Although some were a bit mouldy looking, and there were less with that wonderful sheen of a really good berry, it was a good picking, and the dixie was filled reasonably quickly. Took them home, crushed them up, decanted the juice into a pyrex to sit, and we can add it as a jus to ice cream. I firmly believe that we need to be emulating the diet of a hunter-gatherer, so the more berries the better.
I am slightly in two minds about work, I suspect that we should be more ambitious in what we are attempting, but I am not sure that it is within my means to do this. As ever long walks with the dog are always beneficial in figuring out where you want to go with things.
Finally - poets day on Friday - piss off early tomorrow's saturday. Came up with an opening line for a poem -
its good to be a dog
now to write the rest of it
Slightly weird on Friday, when I could not focus my eyes for about half an hour. Certainly disconcerting at the time. This growing older has little to recommend it.
All told it has been good to get out and see some new people. I think in our nature of work it is incumbent on people to be accessible and get out, though whatever you do, is only the merest scratch of the surface. Some very impressive thinking and practice going on, which I would like to draw on.
Got a chance to visit a new Apple Store - wow/hmmm - wow in the sense that it was very impressive, hmmmm - in the sense that it was very clearly a premium sort of place, no cheap end of lines to be had, big tables with lots of the same model, which you could just play with for a while. Quite a simple idea, but useful, as it allowed me to try out the new aluminium keyboard, which seems okay, but I'd like the keys to have a more positive action, and to look over the laptops, I think that the small white laptops just look more laptop sized, so I would probably just go for one of those. Some software, but not a vast selection. A lot of people around, but it was that sort of place, it needed to have folk milling around, or it would just be a big empty barn. The staff seemed friendly and helpful, which is good, as otherwise it might be a bit daunting.
Not too sure what I did yesterday, nothing too much, but after a long week, I am not going to OD on doing nothing much.
- a bit of reading the papers, I do like the Times on a Saturday - not sure I will ever read it cover to cover, but a good read, with some very good regular columns. One of my daughters is even starting to get into reading it. She also came home from school shocked, telling us about how dreadful the Nazis were to the Jews and did we know about it! Pointed out to her that we did actually know about this, and Stalin and Mao were equally appalling.
- Having bought four Mountain Goats albums and two EPs, I now have enough of their music to just play it on shuffle whenever I am out iPod-ding. But always good to add to it, though less good to be buying it at the rate of an album every week or more. Accordingly delighted to come across various Mountain Goats music available for free download.
I should of course point out that this is all via 'official sources' namely
http://www.themountaingoats.net/wiki/doku.php?id=mp3s:home
I am particularly impressed with the live music recordings, I guess that they will be pretty variable with some being absolutely dreadful in terms of sound quality, but the ones I have listened to so far, are pretty okay for sound quality, and the good natured joshing with the audience more than makes up for that. In fact quite a few of the songs sound lighter and brighter live, with the recorded versions being a little austere. Although the subject matter can be quite dark, there is always a sense of humour at play. These are songs of self-dramatising characters, and always border on the absurd.
So I have downloaded various rarities to my ipod, and a few concerts, which I will add to. It is a little tricksy, getting the stuff into iTunes, but double clicking on the downloaded MP3 seems to work best.
The forum on the official Mountain Goats site also looks to feature less spelling mistakes than most, and more thoughtful/amusing comment.
- Also yesterday, did a trip to get some last brambles. However on checking up, we have now passed Michaelmas, 29 September, so according to tradition, the devil has either spat on, or urinated on the brambles, and they should not be picked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberries
Although some were a bit mouldy looking, and there were less with that wonderful sheen of a really good berry, it was a good picking, and the dixie was filled reasonably quickly. Took them home, crushed them up, decanted the juice into a pyrex to sit, and we can add it as a jus to ice cream. I firmly believe that we need to be emulating the diet of a hunter-gatherer, so the more berries the better.
- Also steadily putting more stuff onto iGTD which is one of these task management tools. Not sure that I have quite got the hang of it yet, but starting to get there. Once set up with recurring tasks, it should imply chug away reminding me of what I need to do.
I am slightly in two minds about work, I suspect that we should be more ambitious in what we are attempting, but I am not sure that it is within my means to do this. As ever long walks with the dog are always beneficial in figuring out where you want to go with things.
Finally - poets day on Friday - piss off early tomorrow's saturday. Came up with an opening line for a poem -
its good to be a dog
now to write the rest of it
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,