microtrends

Microtrends

I do enjoy the microtrends column that appears in the Times on Saturday, I have also just bought Microtrends by Mark J Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, which seems to be unrelated. Not only that, there is an article of microtrends predictions in yesterday's Times Magazine.

However not to be deterred, I would like to add my own tuppence worth.

I think that the advent of most people having decent - always on - broadband is creating a huge change in the way that the world works. I would hesitate to make any radical predictions, but these days, simply managing to discern what is actually happening out there at the moment requires a lot of insight.

Software can now do its own updating, virtually on the fly, checking for updates, and asking for permission to download them. These can be huge files. There is minimal distribution cost attached. So software can shift as a beta, and update to alpha without any huge downside.

Obviously we can all browse and download music, and all the physical record shops are on the way out. Other media are easily digitised, perhaps books less so than some others.

Broadcast media can now be downloaded or stored, and you can timeshift to avoid tiresome adverts. I would not want to be in the TV business trying to fund broadcasting through an ever shrinking part of the advertising cake.

Always on - also means that cloudware, having your applications on some remote server, makes sense, more sense than running them off your hard drive.

Similarly off site storage is possible, why back up to a hard drive, when you can put all your photos on Flickr, back up your calendar, and contacts to .mac.

We will increasingly be able to, and take for granted the ability to transfer and download vast amounts of data, and one effect of this will be that we become less aware of whether we are uploading or downloading, just as we are unaware how our computer is working, we will become unaware of where applications are, where bytes are stored, what processes are behind our interaction with IT.

There is increased scope for dumb terminals, these need not be computers, a mobile phone as dumb terminal, point of sale gadgets as dumb terminal. Things that we barely think of as IT as dumb terminals, information at bus stops, smart washing machines that will opportunistically use electricity when it is cheapest, fridges that advertise products based on your previous purchases and offer on line ordering.

As in the Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come...

new improved habits

A week of two halves.

At work all is a bit weird. I did not take any Christmas leave, so I am one of the forgotten few that is still traveling into work each week, getting a lunch and then traveling back. Well the train company certainly seems to have forgotten about us, this time of year it is still dark when I catch the train, so add in a howling gale, and late trains get to be a major annoyance. Twenty minutes late on Thursday and ten minutes late on Friday, which may not seem long, but when you are huddling there stamping your feet to keep warm, you do realise why retirement is just so appealing.

Similarly the office canteen seems to have forgotten that some of us are still in.

In terms of work, it is that odd time of year, when the email stops, the phone stops, and I rather suspect that when you take the stress out of the job, you realise just how dull much of it actually is. Anyway catching up with stuff, and being pretty productive. I've just got Detox Your Desk, hoping that it will teach me how to tame my intray, and bully my emails into submission. Probably not a bad time to think about such things. If it seems sensible I will try and implement when I get back to work, on the basis that things are working okay at the moment, but it is all a bit exhausting, and I suspect that a lot of that is down to my attitude rather than anything else.

I've also started eating a couple of pieces of fruit each day at work, which I'm enjoying.

I'll see how far into the new year I can get with my new improved habits.

At home, a bit of a high tech christmas, as pretty much all the presents I bought seemed to come from the Apple Store. Nonetheless they all seem to have gone down well. I could write a lot here, but often less is more, so I'll just mention one thing.

On Christmas day, I found myself sitting on the sofa, looking round my family, as they read, listened to an iPod, and played on the computer, and thought how lucky I was to share my life with them. Really in terms of the big things I have a great deal to be grateful for, and my family are right at the heart of that.

chaff

I have come to realise that defining much of what I actually do as Chaff is useful.

What is chaff?
Chaff is the stuff that you just sort of end up doing. It is generally not stuff that you really intend to do. You don't generally wake up in the morning wanting to do chaff.

Where does chaff come from?
Chaff in comes via all sorts of ways. It might just be little jobs around the house that need doing, mail that comes through the door, paperwork, or unexpected phone calls. But right now, most of all, chaff seems to come through the email.

Who wants you to spend time on chaff?
Well sometimes you want to do chaff, just to keep things ticking over, you need to get more paper for the printer, or answer the door for the postman. Often chaff is something that someone else wants you to do, it might be part of their grand masterplan, but generally it is not part of yours.

Is chaff unimportant then?
Well not really, it includes routine maintenance sort of stuff that you know needs done, and helping out other folk, and even just being a sociable person. Bump into someone and have a ten minute conversation you were not expecting, then that was chaff.

What is the problem with chaff then?
The problem is that unless you are careful, you easily end up spending all your time on chaff. You are bogged down with chaff before you leave home, commute in, chaff again, spend half the morning on endless emails, get interrupted and lose the plot, attend a meeting that seems pointless, commute home, big pile of spam and TV programmes that you end up watching every week but don't know why. All your day has been caught up with chaff, and then there is no time for what you deep down feel you ought to be doing.

So chaff is evil and we should avoid it?
No one can avoid chaff, it is a fact of life. You might be able to delegate it. If you did not do any chaff, then you would end up a jobless, unthinking robot with no friends.

How do you deal with chaff?
You need to find your own ways of dealing with chaff. For example by devoting fixed amounts of time to chaff, for example only check your email periodically and then only for a set amount of time. Knowing that it is time limited, encourages you to get through them quickly. Tackle a pile of chaff at the same time, rather than letting it interrupt you all the time. Don't be afraid to try different approaches to constraining your time spent on chaff.

One thing that I find works well for me, is when I draw up my task list for the day, I divide it into two columns, chaff, and everything else. So all the stuff that is chaff goes into the chaff column, and the rest goes into the other column. When doing work, I then try and alternate the different columns, so that a chaff task, is followed by something from the 'productive' column, and then back to the chaff. That way nothing completely grinds to a half.

Do you get extra time then?
You probably won't end up with extra time, but you will at least be taking control of the time that you do have. For example if you can ring fence time in your diary for something and are prepared to stick to it, then you can have that half day to read that important report you always meant to.

Why not skip chaff altogether?
You need to work with other people, if you simply ignore anything that does not fit in with your masterplan, you will end up starving and alone. However you can avoid chaff taking over your life. The important thing to realise is that how well you tackle chaff says very little about you, it is how you tackle the big issues that says something about you. Find ways of getting chaff out of the way as quickly as possible to let you devote your time and energy to the big stuff, rather than simply leaving the leftover time and energy to the big stuff, if you are lucky.

So remember chaff is not your friend, chaff makes you feel busy without being productive.

Bully chaff, treat it badly, take back control of your life.

Brian Eno to advise the Liberal Democrats

Those of us who have followed the career of Brian Eno are delighted to hear that he is now a special adviser to the Liberal Democrat party, perhaps we can look forward to a bold move to Party Political broadcasts that are purely ambient, with unfocussed yet very arty photos, for the duration. I enjoyed the slowed down country and western that he used in Apollo, thrilled to the slowed down Pachelbel Canon he used in Discrete Music, surely this man can connect to the youth of today, with the plangent tones of the Smurfs slowed to a glacial pace, revealing their inner beauty and discordant elements. If that does not speak to the youth of today, then I for one, don't know what will.

This is a man with a bold vision, he left Roxy Music just before they got successful, to release a bunch of solo records that no one has heard of, many of them on his own Obscure label. Having built up some success with his solo stuff, he then stopped writing music with words, and ignored endless calls, "please Brian can we have some more songs again, please, please", finally getting round to writing songs again, decades later, by which time, no one was terribly bothered anymore.

Don't we all want our political leaders to be more like Bono and U2, well clearly the Liberal Democrats have found their man, the man who was not content with driving the Talking Heads to new peaks of pretension, knew that that was not enough, and then brought us U2, the very summit of wrap around sunglasses wearing musical pretentiousness.

A man of the people, his diary details how he avoids the general public including his fans, and includes a couple of urine related anecdotes, only one of which I can really bring myself to repeat here. This is a man who has actually peed on a Duchamp urinal!

This is a man who famously burst a lung having sex, his credentials for the post of youth adviser, are self evident.

Perhaps this is what the country needs, we need to articulate our position in the world clearly, and nothing does this like a major Art Statement,

the KLF famously burnt a million pounds, well politicians have been getting away with this for years, without even providing much shock or entertainment.

We need pomp, we need grandeur, we need men who aren't afraid to wear make up and dress up like women, we need more references to modern revolutionary Peking opera, we need Eno.


PS - I should disclose to the reader that I own substantial numbers of aforesaid Eno's records, am not at all peeved that he never replied to my geeky fanboy letter twenty two years ago, felt that the god-like Talking Heads went off the boil with Remain in Light, and find U2 singles moderately catchy.

How to choose a political leader

There are obviously many different ways to choose a political leader, but the current system of choosing one based on how young they look seems to be pretty poor. Merely the fact that someone is youthfull does not recommend them to me as a political leader. My daughters are fine people, as are their friends, but I would not honestly recommend that they start running the country, unless perhaps they had tidied their room first.

Two possible approaches spring to mind ;

we should vote for candidates on the basis on which they resemble a James Bond villain. Now this would guarantee that we had someone who would walk the world stage with grace and stature, someone who was a confident leader, though perhaps cabinet members would be well advised to avoid upsets prior to leaving the room, lest they be tipped into a piranha filled garden pond.

This is an equal opportunities policy, equally open to men and women, and all races, including the purely fictional. You need neither be old or young, and lets face it an evil laugh is not a terribly difficult skill to master. You should of course have a bizarre, and sinister personal trait that is just the other side of unbelievable, such as webbed hands, or a third nipple, but lets face it, with plastic surgery these days, such traits are easily replicated.

The scope for other cabinet members is also tremendous, wouldn't Question Time be more entertaining if burly Koreans, were to throw steel rimmed bowler hats at the opposition, or Grace Jones started jumping from the ceiling. After all what is politics there for, if it is not to entertain us.

Not only is this policy sensible, and practical, but it could easily be introduced almost immediately. Gordon Brown, with the mere addition of a purring white cat, and some sinister backlighting, could easily become the megalomaniac "B" recently escaped from the Chinese Tong with their radioactive gold, the brains behind the former UK Prime Minister, this shadowy Scot from his mountainous lair in North Queensferry, controls the world's money supply to his own sinister ends.

With put down lines like "No Mr Cameron, I don't expect you to talk, I expect you to DIE!!!!!"


Alternatively, we should vote for the Prime Minister on the same basis that we choose to run a student election, that is the vote goes to the Football team mascot, or primate that has garnered most support. Similarly root vegetables would also be encouraged to run. I do however feel that it would be important not to split the primate vote, lest some lesser candidate like a career political managed to benefit, but surely these problems are not insurmountable.

The splendour and gaiety of election day, stuffed toys for mascots, pretty posters, witty slogans.

Then followed by five years of dreadful indecision and sliding into catastrophe and debt. But frankly I don't watch the news much, so the latter seems a small price to pay, if it makes the elections a bit more jolly, which lets admit is something that all right thinking people ought to be concerned about.

consider the future

As one year is on the way out, and another is on the way in, it is worthwhile to pause a moment and consider the future.

One thought that lurks like an elephant in the room, is the impact of globalisation, and world markets, on our lives. Britain is no longer the manufacturer of assorted sundries for all the world. We are no longer the pre-eminent power that we once were.

And yet, too often we think that we exist cosily within a welfare state that will protect and nurture us all, regardless.

But exactly what competitive advantage does Britain have as a country. It is difficult to argue that we are smarter, or work harder, equally although some in Britain own capital, or land, most of us do not, in any substantial way. In fact, Britain is fast becoming a nation of debtors. Dependent on favourable interest rates, merely to stay afloat.

We no longer have the easy benefit of living in a pre-eminent country. Mere location does not carry the benefits that it once did. The fact that we live in Britain does not make us ready workers in factories. Likewise services are increasingly capable of being outsourced, just as manufacturing has been.

At the moment we are all familiar with the outsourcing of call centres, but our lives are increasingly digital. This Christmas the shops seem unusually quiet, as shopping increasingly shifts online. So retail need no longer be on our high street, if we simply order on line, who is employed, where. Orders could be managed and sent automatically, vast sheds could provide goods for delivery. Goods that are increasingly made overseas.

So JK Rowling writes a book, it is published by a UK company, then printed overseas, comes over by the container load, and is distributed by Amazon. Where exactly is the role for the British worker in this scenario. Likewise the entire country cannot make a living providing services to each other. We need to provide exportable goods and services, to balance those we import. But increasingly the exportable goods and services have very little staff component. The staff component is highly skilled/valued, a superstar component. JK Rowling, James Dyson, Whisky brands, top universities, there is a role, but increasingly it is a role for the rich few not the poor many.

And the few are mobile, there is not much that they need to stay for. Society is increasingly becoming divided between the prosperous few, and the unskilled many. The welfare society relied on an implicit contract between the generations, and the classes, that you put in, and you took out, at times you put in, at times you took out. But increasingly there will be people who have virtually opted out of the welfare society, they pay for their children's schooling and university, they never claim benefits, barely access the NHS, would never be eligible for benefits anyway. If these people are superstars, then the world is their market. They need only stay here while the quality of life suits them. Overtax, or under-provide and they are free spirits to move on, as they will. They feel no duty to provide endlessly for a feckless underclass, they spend their lives doing their best to avoid.


Having said all this, I do not think that it is a vision that we need to fall victim to. A superstar economy is not an economy that I want to live in, nose pressed enviously against a window, watching the conspicuous consumption. By and large, the high end, high value work is not individual work. It derives from a group. You might talk about superstar academics, but really academics exist in a campus. I've blogged before on how big companies like Google, and Apple are starting to talk about having a campus. Why not government departments, or R&D facilities. Who does not enjoy spending time at a campus. Fresh young people carrying books, and arguing about things that they believe in. Great people become great, by surrounding themselves with other great people.

If we want to have a superstar economy, then we need to think in terms of campuses. Creating networks of possibility, easy soft quick links between like minds, fast track ideas, and approaches. Hothousing ideas to see what works, testing different models.

In terms of government, a devolved model offers tremendous opportunities, for small agile nations to try out ideas, that would be incapable of implementation in a slower larger country.

All this thinking is of little benefit, if it cannot inform how we out to adapt to thrive, you cannot merely adapt to survive, that is a charter for extinction. You need to adapt to thrive.

There are probably no certainties, but certain things are doubtless safe bets;

networking - you should build and build your networks, your capacity to create, and draw on networks.

information technology - you should be a relentless and determined user of information technology to deliver your goals, though not necessarily as an end in itself.

acceptability - you should be capable of interacting productively with as wide a population as possible. This might mean languages, or simply a welcoming smile, or helpful demeanour. The future belongs to those who can move about easily.

curiosity - you should always be curious, always asking and trying. The curious mind is a nimble mind.

time poor - the libraries of tomorrow are endless, not mere shelves, nor libraries, but warehouses recreating themselves endlessly. We need to become adept at skimming and dipping. Comfortable in our relative ignorance.

balancing between an attention to detail, and being easily bored - willing to put the time into figuring out something, but quick to move onto more interesting pastures.


And I suppose on a personal basis, it is always useful to be fit, healthy, and have some money behind you. If I can manage these things myself, if we can manage these things, if they can manage these things ...


Finally in personal terms there is an interdependence between having qualifications, experience and abilities. You need to balance these, as on their own, each has its limitations, but together they reinforce and support each other. The qualifications reinforce the skills, but it takes experience to actually demonstrate them. Any personal development needs to take account of all three, if it is to succeed.

Addenda - I've just read the attached article, and much of it chimes with what I have said above, however, even beyond this, it is very thoughtful and worthwhile
http://www.scotlandsfuturesforum.org/The%20Goodison%20Group%20in%20Scotland/GGIS%20Final%20Report%202007.pdf

writing Christmas cards

I'm not sure how worthwhile it is doing this blog, I've already done an update on our trip to see the Mountain Goats, and there is not a huge amount to add beyond that.

I've been spending the weekend writing Christmas cards, and wee notes to put in with them. Not that I actually have that many to write, it is just that I'm not terribly quick. Just as well I have a deadline to work to, or I would never get them done. Christmas is certainly a once a year, imperative to drop a note to all sorts of good friends that you don't see often enough.


One thought, amongst many, obviously, I was thinking about my job.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist and I'm always beating myself up that I don't manage to do absolutely everything that I hope to do. I suppose my job, in common with many these days, is largely self defined. I decide what I need to do, or what I ought to do. That's why you get paid smart guy rates, because you have that degree of autonomy.

That means that there will always be a tension between the two extremes -
that old standby of how little do I need to do to avoid being sacked
or
doing everything possibly in my power to sort out all the problems of the world.

And part of my comfort level is to find a balance between these two extremes, a comfortable comfort level, one that I don't feel guilty about.

In order for work to be sustainable, you really need to be comfortable in yourself. Being guilty, angry, worried, all the time, will tire you out.

I should be more accepting of the fact that I cannot do everything under the sun, that I possibly might.

Another balancing factor, is being able to split work into different strands, so that you can spend some time on one strand, some time on another, that way, if you are never getting to the bottom of anything, at least you are keeping things ticking over nicely.

Similarly, you need to be able to split your life into different strands, so that if one strand is not going so great, then at least the others are more satisfying.

Finally coming round to the initial point that I was intending to make, I was wondering about what I could do to make myself better at my job.

I don't think that it is as easy as just working longer, it is more complex than that. It is about skills, and creativity, networks and experience.

I'm not sure that I could bottom it all out in one go, but simply tackling the task with a loose methodology, which is kept under review, usually works.

I guess that important things to do would be to
1 make time for development, for example
2 pick up on opportunities offered at work
3 personal study, social policy and social research for a start
4 network
5 identify useful skills to develop, for example
6 negotiation
7 plan and track, and think innovatively about my development.

I'll think about making a personal project of this for a while, ....

Other jottings, I have just figured out how to send files between my computers by Bluetooth. Boy it is so cool.

Nearly tripped over a young deer this afternoon, out walking the dog, and this little deer shot out from just before me, and hopped off away across the field. Its little white rump bobbing up, as it skimmed over the field like a stone across the water.

Of course my dog was too busy pee-ing on something to spot any of this.

Going to Scotland

Just a quick blog entry. I headed over to Glasgow on Monday, to catch the Mountain Goats, at Oran Mor. They were part of the Pineapple Folk Gathering, along with
Emmy the Great
Alasdair Roberts
and Micah P Hinson.

I'll not pretend that I had heard of anyone else on the bill, but the word on the blogs was that it was a pretty good line up, and lets face it, if the other bands were good it was simply a bonus, a chance to see the Mountain Goats live was just too good to miss.

Anyway, first up was Emmy the Great, who was enchanting, a wonderfully relaxed way with the audience, which was very winning, and the songs were gorgeous too, densely literary, but lightly musical. I've downloaded an EP from iTunes. Certainly one to watch out for in future, if she gets round to actually recording and releasing more stuff. Perhaps not the most ruthlessly ambitious artist out there!

Alasdair Roberts was probably the most 'folk' of the acts, it did rather pass me by I am afraid, musically good, but the lyrics and vocals failed to grab me. He did probably suffer from being the most traditional act, on a rather more lo-fi bill.

Skipping to the last act, Micah P Hinson, ostensibly the headliner, he was slightly shambolic, but engaging, and came across as a sort of drugged up Richard Hawley. The most fabulous of deep Texan drawls, and the sort of Dick Dale/Billy Bragg almost orchestral electric guitar. However after the energy of the Mountain Goats, an hour long set felt a bit long. One to check out on iTunes though, there was some cracking stuff in there.

Finally, the Mountain Goats, clearly the stars for the night, my wife was at the back and she said that a whole bunch of people appeared just for them. I was however in the throng at the front. They came on, John Darneille, slightly goofy/cuddly, tie-less suit, and Peter Hughes long and dapper with a suit, tie and waistcoat. They set up amiably enough, looking exactly as they look in the photos, which is an inane thing to say, but it always disconcerts me.

They kicked off with It Froze Me, which was quite slow, then alternating between belters and quieter songs. However even with the quieter songs the whole room was rapt and quiet.

I think that the power of art is that suddenly you have something that is much more than the sum of its parts, it is no longer a mark on paper, or notes and words, it is something that forcibly grabs you and affects you. Here were two men, with guitars, creating something at once deeper and richer than normal life, something that seemed more real/true and more passionate, than the everyday.

There was a bit of good natured banter with the audience, I particularly liked when John started to introduce a song as being about, when you want to be locked up alone in your house for months, and Peter said that that could be any of them.

John also had a rather endearing way of asking for a beer from the bar. He shredded a guitar string, quickly flicked it up, and carried on with the song. There was more banter while they were offered a guitar from Emmy.

There were quite a few of the songs where we were all singing along, No Children in particular, but there were a good few others, where a lot of us knew all the words.

They finished up, I went back to see my wife, and say how awesome it had been, and they came back for a howling mad version of Houseguest, which is worrying/disturbing, but very funny.

And then they were finally off. The only disappointment was the lack of Mountain Goat merchandise, but I suppose I can always design my own Mountain Goats shirt.

Good to see a few mentions on the blogs, and photos on Flickr. Also from some of the banter from the audience, it seemed clear that many of the people there had been listening the bootleg recordings of previous gigs rather than just the records. This is a group that you cannot find in a record shop, and whose best-selling record is rated

30,286 in Music by Amazon.

And yet, they filled an enthusiastic audience of over a hundred, singing along to a wide variety of their songs, on a Monday night in Glasgow, with virtually no publicity.

I suppose the fact that they are very good must be a factor, but the web is creating opportunities that never existing before for artists with talent to find their audiences.

grinding and crunching of glass

Work -
And another week. It has been an odd sort of week, rather than trying to grab things by the scruff of the neck to sort them out, I have been trying to focus on tidying up my current post, ready for taking on a new post in the New Year. So less meetings and appointments, and plenty of tidying up emails and filing the important ones. Also trying to step aside and let other people lead on things that normally I would have, really not something that comes naturally to me.

Went along to what might well be my last meeting for a favourite project. It is good to be able to tell people in person that I will be moving on, it seems a lot more straightforward than just bouncing their emails later. Someone I had been working with, suggested that maybe I was one of the new breed of civil servants, which is quite flattering. I rather suspect that I tend to do things the way that I think that they should be done, and if that happens to accord with current thinking, then it is just lucky. Anyway it is great project, that I'm delighted to have played a part in, and it should be on a firm footing for the future, which is all you can really hope for.

Friday- a day long presentation of research findings, which was marred by being held in one of the most depressing facilities I've ever seen. It had obviously had a fair bit of money spent on it, all glass, and stainless steel. Which sounds grand, and it certainly did have a certain wow factor, but glass sliding doors always scare the bejeezus out of me, casually close one, and you get a great grinding and crunching of glass, as it closes unpleasantly. The accoustics were also pretty dismal. It was the usual 9.30 for 10.00 but for once it was absolutely packed when I got there at 9.30, and it got busier from then on.

All in all pretty interesting, I liked the social research stuff more than the more quantitative stuff like the economics.

Well? -
Still full of the cold, like death warmed up on Tuesday, though I don't think anyone noticed! Quite a few interesting emails on my personal account, from different pies that I have had my finger in. It is intriguing how a little effort here and there, builds up over the years.

IT Geek -
Now that I have diagnosed that it was a problem with the external hard drive, getting the new laptop set up, and backing it up, is really pretty straightforward. It has been running on Tiger for a week or two, so now I have installed Leopard. I've got a new external hard drive, and put four partitions onto it, one big one, and three small ones. I'll use the big partition for TimeMachine and back up to the others using SuperDuper once it is Leopard compliant. Clearly the learning lesson for me here, is that small baby steps, one thing at a time, making sure everything is working fine before trying anything else, is the way to proceed with IT.

In fairness - now that the moody external hard drive is out of the equation - leopard seems to be running just fine, TimeMachine is trouble free, and I'll need to reacquaint myself with the various new features that Leopard brings.

Also in fairness - the tech support for my hard drive seems fine, they got back to me a couple of times and I'm just waiting for details on how to return the hard drive to get a replacement.

It is tremendous fun doing a real Victor Meldrew routine bemoaning the failings of the modern world, with comic gravity, but I would prefer honesty to comic splendour.

With luck my family tech support role should now diminish. I tend to take the view that IT is a means to an end, though recently it seems to be taking up hours, and I'm not getting much beyond doing family IT geek stuff each weekend.

Writing -
Someone suggested that I should be writing more, currently feeling a bit beseiged, a myriad of small tasks on one side, and on the other a desire to create something of such jaw dropping perfection, that I never seem to get anything done.

There is probably a benefit to just jotting down a blog full of mince, in that it at least gets you writing something.

another blog

Another week, another blog. Strange how things change, like the seasons slowly creeping up on you.

Pretty quiet week, I’ll be moving to a new post in the New Year, so trying to focus on clearing up old tasks, rather than starting on new ones. Letting various folk know that I’ll be moving on, it is good to let people know in person when I can, so although I’ll still be in post for a while yet, it will probably be the last time I see a few of them.

I suppose I am inclined to get a bit sentimental, I’ve been involved in some interesting pieces of work over the past year or two, and some decent projects have come off well. Of course I’m only a contributor to the successes, they all very much team efforts, but nice to have been around and played my part.

I have been rather touched by the reaction of people to hearing that I’ll be moving on, you never really get much impression of what other people actually think of you, but quite a few seem genuinely sorry to see me go, and grateful for all my help over the years. I’m a bit of an Eeyore at heart, I never feel that I manage to get done as much as I intend to. I do my best to get back to people quickly, and do what I promise to, but I’m acutely aware that I never quite manage it all. It is heartening to hear that nonetheless the general impression is one of helpfulness and genuineness, rather than gormless incompetence.


I’m still struggling out of a cold and seem to feel pretty run down much of the time, so I am just trying to take things easily. It does just feel dark all the time, and it can be perishing cold. I have been out to the shops a few time, and the fellow shoppers seem to be demonstrating the seasonal rat-like selfishness, panic behind their eyes, as they rake through consumer goods stacked high, seeking something made in China that satisfies some joyless duty to swap gifts. When did Christmas ever end up so joyless. Joyless is the most depressing of words. Etiquette can make kindness joyless, Christmas seems to make shopping and giving joyless. Basically, I think that whenever something is getting joyless there is something far astray.

I’m probably on schedule with my gift getting, but hopeless on suggesting anything that anyone else might get me. I rather wish that I had just toughed it out, and said, give the money to charity.

Not much else to report, I’ve figured out that all my IT problems with my new MacBook backing up, must be down to the external hard drive I bought being defective in some way. Of course getting a new laptop, external hard drive, and upgrading the OS, and installing all sorts of software, all at the same time, made diagnosis a pain.

My best guess is that there is some intermittant problem in the Hard-drive that crashes backups, and this corrupted the system on my laptop. I reinstalled the original operating system, and it seems to be running okay now. I’ll proceed slowly, and if all is going well in a week or two, maybe run the OSX Leopard upgrade again.

I’ve reported the problem to LaCie, but I seem to be stuck in some tech support hell, where they take days to respond. I don’t really want to be doing basis diagnostic stuff for the next month, when the hard drive is pretty obviously crocked, so I’ll try and push for a quick replacement.

Learning lesson to all this, in things IT, take little baby steps and make sure that you are on sound ground before proceeding to the next stage.

Once I get the External Hard Drive sorted out, I’ll probably get a new desktop, which will let me retire my current one to my daughters room, which will let them play Sims, and ArtRage etc to their heart’s content. That would bring us upto a three computer household, which does not seem unreasonable as there are four of us.

Of course there are actually more computers than that. There is a really old Acorn in the loft, which is less powerful than your average mobile phone these days, and a bondi blue iMac, which went phut, probably a defective power block.

I guess a lot of this IT stuff nowadays, is probably written off totally within three years, so I always get much more use out of them than that. I’ll not feel unduly guilty. Any IT kit here gets a good home, and is well used.

I am intrigued by the speed of the laptop, my impression, confirmed by speedtests in the magazines, is that the laptop is actually slower than the desktop, this is despite them both running the same system, and the laptop having IGB ram, to the half gig of ram on the desktop. I guess that it must be other components making the difference. To be honest, I’m not sure that it actually makes a vast difference, but I’ll maybe look at picking up some more RAM.

Moving to using the laptop, and desktop, means that file synchronisation is now rearing its head. I’ll need to figure out how best to organise things so that they are where I want them to be when I want them to be there, without running a spaghetti bowl of wires all over the house all the time.

Cool software - Rogue Amoeba Radioshift, lets you listen to, and record streaming radio. Not all the possible channels seem to be streamed, but the obvious BBC ones are, and as far as I can tell, you need to be connected to the internet to do the recording, but the quality is impressive, you can edit the stuff, and save to iTunes. I don’t seem to have figured out the editing yet, but I’ve not even read the short instructions, so more a comment on my relative density, than the software. I bought it Friday, upgrading from demo, instantly persuaded by the opportunity to record an episode of the Burkiss Way on radio 7. I have fond memories of radio comedy, including the Burkiss Way, so I’ll maybe need to scour the schedules to build up a little stock of radio comedy for my iPod.

Also recommended, check out MacSanta for deals on Macintosh shareware this month!!!
Yaaaayyyyyyy!!!!!!!!