Withered Hand video

I rather like this video that goes so badly with the song that it actually goes very well.

Well worth checking out the other songs by Withered Hand.

Warren Buffett and the business of life - by Alice Schroeder

Anyone with an interest in investment should find this a valuable read, it is also a well written account of an interesting life.

To qualify each of those statements, although there are some broad lessons to be learnt for investors, this is not a handy book of investment tips for the novice. Buffett made some horrendous mistakes in his investments, though by and large they make for more interesting reading than his successes. There was no great secret to his investment success. It was largely down to an enormous amount of hard work. Work searching out investment opportunities, work studying investment and business both specific and general. He worked to build up his capital, from the odd business while still at school to getting investment capital from relatives. He worked hard to be honest, scrupulous and above board in all his doings. Over time his business scaled up from one finding small undervalued and unfavoured businesses, to a white knight stepping in to save troubled businesses. The abiding impression is that investment is a serious business that entails a lot of hard work.

As billionaires go Buffett actually led a fairly uneventful life. He liked his home comforts, familiar food, he was loyal to his friends and through overwork tended to neglect his family, something he came to regret later in life. It was not a life of high adventure. But it was a life where commitment and principle were brought to bear, where he formed his own views and stayed true to them. In fact he is probably more likable than admirable. That is not to say there is nothing to admire, just that by the end of the book he comes across as a very decent person.

It is also worth pointing out that this is a long book, it weighs in at over 700 pages, in a small font. This is not just an account of Buffett, at times it also feels like a portrait of most of the people he met, and most of Omaha too. That said where it slowed, it was generally for a reason, setting up a context for what would later prove to be key events.

The author is to be commended, it is well written, thorough, clearly a labour of love. I would hope that most people would find it of interest, though suspect that it will appeal mainly to investors.

Why doesn't Moore's law apply to everything else?

From Wikipedia

"Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[2] All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well.[3] This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[4][5] Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.[6]

The law is named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who introduced the concept in a 1965 paper.[7][8][9] It has since been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long term planning and to set targets for research and development.[10]"

This is exponential growth, that could be charted with a logarithmic scale. The implications of this being, that things don't just increase by a regular amount, they increase a lot, every time. The rate of increase accelerates, it accelerates to inconceivable levels very quickly. Just do the maths, if the Romans introduced two rabbits to Britain, and the rabbit population doubles every year. After ten years there would be 1,024 rabbits, ten years later there would be 1,028,576, ten years later there would be 1,073,741,824.

There are some good talks on TED about the implications of Moore's Law by Ray Kurzweill. It is also interesting to hear engineers from the semiconductor industry talk about living with Moore's Law. No engineer wants Moore's Law to stop on their watch. In fact the underlying paradigm tends to shift to let Moore's Law continue, so vacuum tubes went out, and quantum computing appears on the horizon.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/edcorner/uploads/podcast/barrett091021.mp3

Anyway, this is all great. Listening to TED talks and Moore's Law evangelists does fill you with the gee whiz desire to aww shucks let put on a show and save the orphanage and save Africa while we are at it.

[aside - while the capacity of our computers has increased, how we use them has not changed all that much, software does not change much.]

But working in public policy none of the issues I come across seem susceptible to that sort of improvement. Child Poverty rates, life expectancy, levels of morbidity, public perceptions of safety and wellbeing.

None of the systems that we work through seem to be susceptible to that sort of improvement either. Is parliament 1,024 times better than it was ten years ago? Is our legislation 1,028,576 times better than it was twenty years ago?

Why is this so? Could we improve our lives at the same rate that we could improve our technology? What would a world look like that was changing in this way?

I believe that we are potentially on the brink of a new world. Just as Bill Gates left Microsoft to run his charitable foundation, applying an engineers rather steely logic to improving our human lot as a species, we too need to learn from engineers.

[aside - just what would a multi billion dollar charitable foundation run by Steve Jobs actually look like? It would certainly be tasteful, a little exclusive and pricey, and probably end up giving people things that they did not know they needed, yet.]

Engineers are not optimists, they are pragmatists, mix in a bit of venture capitalist, and you get a pretty unsentimental logic. Decide what you are going to do, decide on metrics that really measure achievement. Deploy resources to achieve this, measured against strict milestones based on actual achievement, not just measures of resources input. Constantly reality check what you are doing. Avoid the disengagement from reality that comes from building a product that no one wants, or will not achieve what you are after.

But government policy does not work like this. Public policy generally starts with a very unclear idea of what it is setting out to achieve, and even this is fuzzy and changeable, based more on political defensibility than rigourous logic. With only an unclear idea of what is the target, it is unsurprising that there is a lack of meaningful metrics to measure achievement. The political debate around the achievement of these fuzzy objectives is also suboptimal. Those responsible for delivery often have very polarised interests. For example those closest to delivery can always argue that they are not delivering because they need more resources. In reality they are unlikely to get more resources, so this is an undefeatable excuse. Those further away from delivery can always argue that there were adequate resources but they have been used ineffectively.

There is also the elephant in the room that in effect although we all like to talk about a few major initiatives, in reality most resource is already committed to ongoing work, or lost as unproductive overhead, or lost to chaff type work. You add a new task to someone's job,

but they already had a lot of work to do, = ongoing work

they need to train up and claim for expenses = unproductive overhead

and you ask them to give you detailed reports every month and answer your questions = chaff type work.

net result is not much progress.

For a commercial business, you might deploy software engineers to your new project, but in doing so you would close down the work they were doing before.

Most of what government does is not of much interest to anyone, and certainly not to politicians, but by and large it does need to be done.

If government is to become more focussed on delivery then it needs to have a far better understanding of what it is actually doing at the moment. Then it is simply a case of deciding what to do, what not to do, what to do differently. There need to be clear objectives, and clear metrics for delivery.

The debate has to move from simply being one about how much is spent to one on what outcomes are being achieved. We should challenge any claims about money being spent, asking instead what it has achieved.

The political debate also needs to move from one of easy soundbites, the media needs to move from kneejerk criticism based on juicy quotes and not evidence, the public needs to engage more deeply, realising that government services are complicated and difficult, but still capable of improvement over time. Modern technology makes government more transparent. It makes everything more transparent. It should be easier to see potentially useful metrics and apply them.

If this system of clear objectives, clear metrics, measurement against actual delivery of outcomes can be achieved then as a systems change it will lead to exponential growth. If government were only 5% more effective each year, in sixteen years it would be twice as good, and in twenty four years it would be three times as good, and in thirty years it would be four times as good. The real gains are to be had from improving systems and not from just allocating resources. But every step in improving systems is a step away from how it used to be done, for many of us it is a step into the unknown and unknowable. But we live in a competitive world, the only businesses that continue to thrive are the ones that are nimble and adaptable. They always live on the brink of the unknown. We should distrust the overly familiar and unchallenging.

Susan Boyle

This has certainly been the year of Susan Boyle, now enjoying phenomenal success. But what will happen to her when she loses her looks?

dawn of the sofa surfers

If an iPod was the size of a room and cost over £1Million then they probably would not sell all that many.

I have used laptop computers for years. However combining a laptop with unmetered, always on wifi, so that you have wire free internet connectivity, and an internet that actually has compelling content, puts all the balls in the right place. Sitting on a sofa browsing the internet suddenly adds a whole new dimension to entertainment that was not available before.

Personally I do a bit of browsing, a bit of keeping up with my RSS feeds, a bit of exploring Google suggested blog articles, a bit of watching TED talks. I don't really know what the rest of my family does, but they do manage to find content that interests and engages them.

Being able to sit on your own sofa with a laptop is a different experience from sitting at a desk, however ergonomic your chair is. You sit on a sofa when you want to relax, you might read a book, browse a magazine, chat with friends, watch TV. It is time for yourself, when you are not some corporate drone chasing deadlines.

I recently bought a second laptop, one of the new aluminium Apple Macintosh laptops from the Apple Refurb store. There is just something about the design of the unibody laptops, suddenly everyone in the house wants one. It is a pleasure to handle, it is lovely to touch and stroke, it has a pleasing heft, the trackpad is much more intuitive and easy to use, the screen is a thing of beauty. It is almost as if they set out to create a magazine sized piece of aluminium jewelery. In the past I might spend the evening sitting on the sofa with the one and only family laptop sofa surfing. Now that we have two, I can be sitting on the sofa, with my wife, while we both sofa surf. Similarly anyone else in the family, if they get onto the laptop can spend their time sofa surfing.

It is not a new observation, but I believe that increasingly tv is a background to other more engaging and personalised content that we are browsing on laptops. So the television might be on, with four people in the room, but a couple of them are also browsing the internet, while one of them is reading, and someone else is flicking through a magazine, and all the time they are engaging in low level chit chat whenever one of them comes across something the others might like, so suddenly they are all watching a Youtube video of an acapella version of poker face.

Enjoy the future!

Desinging Futures

Dieter Rams the designer was interviewed by Gestalten to promote a new book and exhibition, and despite a lifetime in design, he said that the challenge for design in future should be around designing how we live, rather than around designing stuff.

http://www.gestalten.com/motion/clipHiRes?id=116

Acquiring stuff is easy, particularly now. We can all accumulate so much stuff that our houses are unpleasantly cluttered, countering our preferred minimalist aesthetic. Or we pay money to have our possesions held in storage, making space to accumulate more.

There can even be a sort of fetishistic love of stuff, the super luxury goods, "design" goods. But I think these are dead ends. An unproductive manifestation of materialism.

The real challenge is for us to determine how we will live. It is surprising that when there are a million designs for chairs, we have so few models for how we might live. There is probably a whole academic discipline, but rather than do any actual research, working for first principles.

We can arrange ourselves formally or informally.

So formal arrangements would be places like work, or voluntary organisations where people are ascribed clear roles and are expected to perform a certain function. In some situations money would be a factor, in others it would not. Another example would be where there are rules or conventions, such as how to behave in meetings or how to play a sport.

Then there are informal arrangements where there are not clear rules. These would include families, or friendships, and potentially flat sharing.

Asking a few questions to figure out how these things work -

why would people participate ?

what do they get out of it?

how do you make them work better?

why would people participate ?

often because they want to, or they have little choice. Looking at a family the adults get something out of the arrangements, mutual support, the pleasure of each other's company and a shared vision. For children participation in the family is generally less optional, but they would share the same benefits, although they would arguably be putting less into the family.

what do they get out of it?

sticking with the family, it is generally an easier way to live. People have scope to specialise, so that they can support the family doing what they do best, and avoid doing what they do less well. Many people find working together more natural and reassuring than working alone. Most people will enjoy company. Over a period of time, a diversity of approaches will reduce risk and increase robustness. Leading to an important point, a lot of the benefits of a family will accrue over a period of time, but they are hard to quantify.

how do you make them work better?

You can make any of these arrangements work better by appreciating the contribution of others more, by communicating effectively about issues, by establishing mechanisms to resolve disputes and reach important agreements. Ultimately there may need to be the sanction of excluding someone, but in practice this should be rare. I think that there does need to be a shared vision where the arrangement is informal. In theory where people are simply paid to work for an organistion, it really does not matter whether they are aligned to the goals of the organisation as long as their incentives direct them productively, but in practice we do seem to be moving away from that sort of purely theoretical model. It is difficult to imagine someone who was completely at odds with an employer, motivated solely by money, being a useful employee. Work nowadays requires too much discretion to be comfortable with people not sharing some overall vision.

Looking forward, I do think that we need to place a lot more emphasis on how we all live together. At the moment it is one of those things like air that we don't see, even although it is all around us.

Perhaps we do need to be returning to extended families all living together in the same house. But if we are, then we need to design our houses differently.

Perhaps we need to move to portfolio careers where people have much more job mobility and can take extended periods out of the work place, supported by family.

Perhaps we need to have a much more flexible idea about what is actually a meaningful contribution to society.

The existing stereotypes no longer work. The welfare state has created a system that incentivises dependency. We need to move to a system that incentivises independence, creativity, flexibility and imagination.

I am not sure that we can afford, or should tolerate a society where all the menial work is performed by university educated migrants, when our own population is unemployed or underemployed, passively consuming and disengaged from society.

We need to re-engineer society and the incentives that it offers so that everyone is able and encouraged to contribute as they can, while people are supported when they need to be. I don't think that breaking society down into the individual atoms of individuals is really helpful in this. There is a limit to what the state can achieve. People should be able to find support amongst their family and friends for the bulk of their issues, with the state providing support as a last resort. Where the state needs to step in it should be seen as a failure of society, and we should seek to reengineer society better.

All this will only work where there is a shared vision of what our society is about, what it should achieve, and where it is going. That is why the war gave society purpose and cohesion. Perhaps if we can create a clear enough vision of success for our future society we can knit together our individual atoms into something far greater than the individual parts.

Ideal Christmas gift ideas,

Ideal Christmas gift ideas,

for the older generation Vera Lynn sings well loved songs from the war, including that perennial favourite "Hitler's only got one ball"

or for the pet owner in your life, a life sized plastic bloodstained dismembered human hand, watch your friends gasp in surprise as their dog brings them a real human hand.

Warren Buffett

I have been reading The Snowball about Warren Buffett the investor.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Snowball-Warren-Buffett-Business-Life/dp/0747596492/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258270555&sr=8-1

The book is nearly a thousand pages long, and these are not small pages filled with large print! I'll allow myself to make a few observations even although I have not yet finished the book.

The first thing that impresses about Buffett is just how single minded he is, just how hard he has worked. As the title alludes to, he works on the basis that compound interest means that a little money today, can become a lot of money in the future. However to make this work you need to make a lot of good decisions, and the more money you can add to the pot the greater the reward will be. It also becomes clear that although awkward and eccentric he is a fundamentally decent person, in fact he does not seem to be motivated by material wealth or particularly by status. He is motivated by being intellectually engaged and challenged, with the accumulation of capital simply a means of keeping score in some personal challenge.

The second thing that comes across is that Buffett largely chose to live his life on the stage of professional work. That is what drove his vast fortune. And although clearly family were important to him, for much of his life he put career first and this had adverse effects that he came to regret greatly.

Although I would like to be as successful at investing as Warren Buffett, I will never have access to the capital that he does. In order to make serious money investing, you need serious capital. But I am learning all the time, and the little snowball of my own stock of capital is growing steadily so I would hope to be able to make increasing returns on my capital over the years, though enough to retire on seems unlikely!

And although I admire his single minded devotion to what he did, I am too much of a family person to ever want to make those sacrifices. At the end of the day it is for each of us to recognise where our priorities lie and try our best to reflect those in how we live our lives.

further to my website woes

by way of explanation as to why my website vanished for a week or two and has now reappeared.

I had been playing about with various settings that I did not really understand and accidentally amended where the website was getting uploaded to! All now fixed. But in future I will only publish my most recent blog postings on my website

http://www.sposh.demon.co.uk/

with the full set of blog postings appearing on

http://tallmanbaby.blogspot.com/

I might upgrade and get a php enabled account for my website, but I always hate committing to spending money on a monthly basis, so maybe not.

climbing mountains

Sometimes a job is like climbing mountains, you are never quite sure if you will reach the summit, or what you will find when you get there, but you just set off any try anyway.

With my new promotion, and new job, things are a bit like that. I have a rough idea what to do, who to ask, and how to go about things. But overall it all unfamiliar territory, so I am falling back on techniques that have worked well elsewhere, and I hope that they will work here.

But all in all, I am enjoying it, there is a real challenge about what I am doing, and how to do it. I just have to remind myself that when you are climbing new mountains you don't know what you will find and you have to rely on your wits.

website woes

For some time now the main focus of my website has been my blog. However the advice on the forums seems to be that a Rapidweaver blog will fall over eventually, and I am best to use some other approach.

That is why I switched to Rapidblog, which works with a blogger account and basically seems to paste in content from the blogger account into your page as displayed on a browser. Creating a page on the fly for you.

However this did not work. After some checking with the application support and my internet provider support, the issue seems to be that to use Rapidblog and php I need to have my website enable for php, which it is not. I would need to upgrade my website to allow this at an additional monthly cost.

I'll have a hum and a haw on whether it is worth paying monthly for webpages with php enabled, or whether I will just use blogger for my blogging, Flickr for photos, and my website for anything else.

I have no interest in crosswords for example, but trying to get a webpage working is something that I quite enjoy the challenge of, in an aggravating sort of way.

On the other hand, I have plenty of useful stuff to do, and the website is not really a major issue in the scheme of things. It is at risk of becoming a time sink, swallowing a lot of my time in doing technical support work. Watch this space, or not, as the case may be,

In the meantime, my blogger account is

http://tallmanbaby.blogspot.com/

Religion

It strikes me that Christianity is very much a religion for farmers, shepherds and fishermen. The lord is my shepherd, fishers of men. Celebrating the harvest home, and the joy of rebirth at Easter as the cold earth reawakens.

But we have been hunter gatherers for far longer than we have been farmers. I wonder what they believed, did they believe in gods, did they have creation myths.

Farmers have to work hard, plough the hard land, make sure that there is seed set aside for the next year. It is a life that favours hard work and prudence.

On the other hand hunter gatherers don't really work hard, it is quite a light life, with times of plenty, and times of scarcity, but one where you need to go with the flow of what nature provides. It is a life that rewards flexibility and an understanding of your environment. Perhaps their understanding of their environment was so close and implicit, that it was like guiding a sailboat before the wind. They did not mediate or complicate their understanding of their environment, they just observed it endlessly, and relied on it for their needs. Who needs a metaphor when you are living in the real thing.

One Straw Revolution -by Masanobu Fukuoka

Zen and the art of organic rice farming

The One-Straw Revolution is not really written as an book, but as a collection of short discursions. These cover the author's life, his farming methods, his conversations with the students that visited his farm, and his philosophy on the impossibility of understanding nature. For me the book got a bit repetitive by the end, but it was never less than readable and thought provoking. With hindsight I would have simply launched straight into reading the book, and left the rather wordy introductions by other authors till later.

If you are interested in the Japanese approach to life, then you might find "Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit and Use" by Toshio Odate, of interest too.

I suspect that often we are striving to find a technical solution to the wrong questions, when books like this can make us wonder if maybe we should be asking a better question. File next to Thoreau's Walden.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3E5TLC4J10OBL/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

The end of days

Friday was my last day in my old job, on Monday I start my new job, a promotion to a different part of the organisation.

It is so weird rushing to try and tidy up all the loose ends, write up handover notes, file everything useful electronically, get anything contentious agreed, get anything difficult done, let everyone know, say bye and thanks to everyone, and then it is done.

It was a rush right up to the end, I paid out over £6m on my last day, and writing handover notes till I was the last person in the office, and headed home at 6.

After being so much of my life, the page has been turned, and on Monday I have to start getting to know about something completely different, getting out to know a new bunch of of people, figuring out how to do a whole load of new things.

You should always quit when you are ahead, so I suppose I left at a good time, I was enjoying my work, I really liked the people, and found them great to work with. I suppose I was spinning my wheels a bit, I was wanting more to get my teeth into, not more work, but more challenge.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

The latest Girl ... book caught my eye, but being boringly conventional I decided to start with the first in the sequence, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even if the cover is not quite so eye catching.

For - it is a good read, I read it inside a week, which is unheard of for me. It is engaging, thought provoking and is about somewhere sufficiently different (Sweden) to be interesting.

During most of the book nothing much happens, for the remainder the action comes thick and implausibly fast.

Against - despite the title, the girl hacker is probably in less than a quarter of the book. There is an abiding cosy middle classness things, the trains run on time, and young people are polite. Everyone rapidly becomes implausibly rich because being poor is unspeakably dull.

The bulk of the book is about the journalist author's alter ego, a brilliant journalist, who solves crimes, saves lives, wins awards, beds numerous women, and is just generally wonderful.

My geek comments would be that no top hacker would use a bog standard Apple McIntosh computer, they might use a hackintosh, they might use a Linux distro of their own devising, or Windows running on a Mac, or most likely a PC laptop. The trojan programme that plays an integral part in the later plot is just balderdash, as it presumes that you would not notice that you were working off a remote server instead of your own hard-drive. I would have thought that whenever your wifi signal dropped it would be a bit of a give away. And a trojan version of Internet Explorer!

All criticism aside, it is a well written book, it is engaging and likable and although far from perfect it well deserves its success. I'll be buying the subsequent volumes.

Heroes, Villains and Velodromes: Chris Hoy and Britain's Track Cycling Revolution - by Richard Moore

This book is not something that I would usually have read, but a friend who is a keen cyclist loaned me his copy, and I have been steadily reading away at it for a few months. Despite the cover, this is not really a book about Chris Hoy, it is about the renaissence within Scottish cycling. For non-cycling fanatics it is a bit dense, and the human interest is sparse. But it is not really that sort of book. Where it does excel, for me, is in showing the sheer doggedness and determination required to succeed. By any reasonable standards Chris Hoy faced obstacles that must have seemed insurmountable. His physical achievements are remarkable but it was through mastering his own psychology that he laid the foundations for what he achieved. He was advised to go away and devise a training programme that excited him, and that is what he did. He visualised all the myriad possibilities for a competition, so that he could cope calmly with any of the anticipated setbacks.

Well worth reading even if you are not a cycling buff, though maybe less of a page turner for non buffs.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Heroes-Villains-Velodromes-Britains-Revolution/dp/000726531X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254069129&sr=8-1

I want something I can use from this

A paradigm is a metaphor that lets us see patterns in complexity. This is valuable because it helps us to interpret the past and predict the future, rather than perceiving events as random white noise.

By definition a paradigm is imperfect. It is a metaphor, it is not the real thing. It will explain some things, it will not explain others. A paradigm should be testable, if it bears up reasonably well then it is a usable paradigm, if it consistently fails, then it is a bad paradigm.

However a paradigm is can be used positively or negatively.

Negative paradigms are a form of fatalism; I am getting older and not so good at things, things always go wrong for me, people seems nice at first but once you get to know them they let you down, there is no point in trying because it won't work anyway. You can do all you like to keep fit but just get run over by a bus anyway. These negative paradigms often delight in their counterintuitive nature or rely on anecdotal evidence of people who were disproportionately lucky or unlucky.

Often these paradigms are a form of comfort, they tell you that there is no point in making an effort in future because whether you make an effort or not, the end result will be the same anyway. You have lost nothing by not making an effort in the past, because it would not have made any difference anyway.

There are positive paradigms too. These more actively and objectively seek to find a pattern in observed events that can be used to positive effect for example by modest changes in behaviour.

For example you might observe that people with a positive attitude and can do attitude at work tend to do better than those who are obviously negative, you could accept this as a general rule and then seek to demonstrate the behaviours that you have observed in others even if you do not feel that it is naturally you. Assuming you want to do better at work.

You might observe that groups of cyclists are more visible and hence safer than lone cyclists, and act upon it by cycling with others whenever you can. Assuming you want to be safe on the road.

Often these things can be little perceptual tricks, things that don't cost much effort but have a disproportionate effect. Things that make one example stand out above the others. Things that are associated with better long term outcomes.

Rather than using paradigms as an excuse for inaction, you can use them as a means of changing your own behaviour to achieve your own goals. It follows that you should have explicit goals, you should objectively observe/record relevant events, you should attempt to establish useful paradigms, you should amend your behaviour to test these paradigms, and be prepared to start all over again. Embedding the useful behaviours and constantly seeking out new paradigms and behaviours.

The world is one of constant competition against others - for example for jobs, and against an indifferent nature - for example seeking a long and healthy life.

You are born with what you are born with, but it is your paradigms and resultant behaviours that are what is really you, they are what you have actively chosen. What you do today makes you who you are tomorrow.

Snow Leopard upgrade updated

Just some further observations on Snow Leopard after a week.

Additional glitches - Mail ceased to send emails via my ISP, this has now sorted itself with no intervention on my part. It does rather confirm my view that the way to go, is to use googlemail for my default mail address. I know some people get paranoid about cloud computing by in my experience it is more reliable.

Rapidweaver would not run, installed an updated beta version, subsequently fully released. Also had to update all my plugins. Just downloaded and installed all the plugins that I have bought. They all seemed to behave and recognised that I had already paid for them.

Various other applications are providing free updates, nothing too troubling.

The mobile me sync option seems to run for a loooonnnnggg time, and the update dates looks odd, but suspect it is a teething thing. Nothing actually worrying, just general oddness.

My ipod needed a reinstall, no one else has had this problem, so it is probably unrelated.

The newly installed printer driver now lacks the heading cleaning option, it is just a generic driver lacking the full functionality of the original driver (ink status, head cleaning, test page), but it does seem to printer sharper copies and now sorts them into the correct order, which it did not do before. I can just press a button on the printer for three seconds to get it to do the head cleaning, so this is not too worrying.

My laptop hard drive makes a small noise, I don't recall from before.

Good but odd changes, computers will now run a screensaver even when they are not logged in. iTunes offering sharing in a more transparent manner, albeit sharing between different accounts logged in to the same wifi hub, rather than sharing between different accounts on the same machine. The iTunes wishlists is a nice add-on, though I simply dragged tracks to a wishlist playlist, and it served the same purpose, with less eye candy.

The new iTunes store is a thing of rare ugliness, but I am starting to get used to it. iUniversity still looks old style.

Spore has frozen once, but that seems to be the first time it has done it, so I am not too worried.

Otherwise, nice to all be operating on the same system, and flakiness seems reduced, there are a few nice tweaks, and everything is faster, but not much that you would notice. The iLife and iWork apps are similarly nicer in a suble sort of way.

Snow Leopard upgrade

My Mac Box Set (family edition) arrived during the week, so I have now upgraded all three of our domestic computers to OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to iWork 09 and iLife 09. Two of the computers were on OS 10.5 Leopard and one on OS 10.4 Tiger. [There is also an Acorn and dead bondi blue iMac up the loft, obviously I did not upgrade them!]

It will be good to have everything on the same OS again. Things progressively seem to gather complexity, so I need to take the opportunity to simplify when it arises.

Impressions ?

Doing three computers takes ages, particularly if you add in things like backing up, and checking over the drives with Disk Utility. However working through them systematically, getting one computer pretty much sorted before I started on the next one, it was possible to do them all in about a day.

By way of explanation for the incredible time taken, a back up can take an hour, creating a timemachine vault for the first time takes several hours, each Snow Leopard install took just under an hour. iWork was around twenty minutes, iLife around forty minutes.

It is worth keeping an eye on the process, just in case of snags. Interestingly the Leopard-Snow Leopard upgrades rebooted part way through while the Tiger-Snow Leopard upgrades rebooted almost immediately. Presumably the reboot is to allow the computer to run off the OS on the DVD rather than the one on the Hard drive.

The most noticeable feature is the faces recognition in iPhoto, which similarly takes half an hour to process all your photos.

The Garageband tutorials don't seem to have caught anyone's imagination.

It is now possible to customise the date and time setting to include the full date in your menubar- yayyy !

Full screen capability in Pages - yayyy !

It shutsdown just incredibly quickly, like it crashed! everything else seems quicker too

General reduction of flakiness about ejecting disks, deleting trash etc.

Conclusion
- is snow leopard worth it - yes, it seems robust, frees up hard drive space, speeds up processes and reduces general flakiness - having said that it is not noticeable in a whizzy eye candy sort of way
- is iWork worth it - probably not on its own, but if you are doing the whole bundle then probably worthwhile. Some nice new things, but new templates are really just eye candy, you never use them do you?
- is iLife worth it - probably, faces recognition is a cool and useful add on. Without GPS on my camera, I'm not so much of an anorak that I want to manually insert geographic information.
- would I recommend my mum upgrade - yes, but on the grounds that it will just make everything run smoother, not on the grounds that it will look any different.

It is really cool that Apple have managed to sell an upgrade that really does not look any different. However the under the hood stuff is impressive.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.ars

As I noted above, things do seem to get more complicated, you do have to be brutal every now and again to make them simpler. The review above is very good on how Apple have made decisions, including difficult ones,

[such as leaving a relatively open door to pirate copies, abandonning support for old stuff, not filling your hard drive with unnecessary printer drivers - assuming you are connected to the internet to download the ones you require instead]

on the basis that they improve the user experience, even if it does mean alienating people running twenty year old scuzzy (SCSI) printers.

Perhaps the real genius has been to release an update with no new features and have the marketting chutzpah to convince people that it is a good thing that they want to pay for.

Technical savvy + marketting savvy = apple savvy


Annex A
My suggested approach
1 run software update
2 back up system
3 dismount external hard drive
4 install AppTrap - to cleanly delete applications
5 check AppTrap is running
6 review all applications, and delete anything that is really old or does not get used - goodbye Quicksilver
7 where applicable, delete podcasts to get enough free space on the hard drive for installing everything - only really an issue with the laptop
8 run disk utility
9 run onyx and do maintenance scripts
10 run Snow Leopard update
11 run iLife update
12 run iWork update
13 run through applications to get updates if required
14 delete superceded applications from Dock
15 after light usage back up again

Annex B
snagging issues
Bento 1 - does not run under Snow Leopard - need to upgrade to Bento version 2 to run under leopard
Onyx will not run under Snow Leopard - simply wait for an update version
Mail reports issues with Omnifocus script - presumably the script that lets you send an item to your email and have it appear in your omnifocus task list.
Mail once again will not send mail - I'll need to speak to tech support for my ISP about this, but I have pretty much switched to using Googlemail and Mailplane so this is not a pressing issue.

Annex C
observations - Spore does work, pretty much everything else still seems to work, with the exceptions noted above no problems encountered.

falling into place

After being focussed on getting a promotion, for what seems like forever, I have finally cracked it. I had an interview on Tuesday morning, before I went in I picked up a message on my Blackberry saying that I had been unsuccessful at interview for a post the previous week. This week's interview seemed to go okay, but there were vast areas where I did not have relevant experience, balanced with other areas where I was possibly overqualified or exceedingly impressive. Later that evening a message popped up on my Blackberry offering me the post.

So now I have moved from thinking long term strategic thoughts about my current post, to trying to figure out how to get it tidied up before I move on in a few weeks.

Similarly a lot of my emotional energy has been tied up in applying for posts, and moving over to not filling in endless application forms and heading along to regular interviews seems so odd all of a sudden.

This weekend I have been,
walking the dog - still waiting for my pedometer from Amazon, so the walking seems a bit pointless if I am not amassing some enormous stepcount

one afternoon tidying the garden - to the extent that the brown bin the council take away is full, and my compost bin is full

ordered the new Mac Box Set, with iLife 09, iWork 09 and Snow Leopard - I'll upgrade the whole housefull of computers at the same time so they are all on the same OS etc.

reading a Chris Hoy biography that I borrowed from a colleague/friend, so that I can give it back to him before I finish up.

starting to worry if I really have got the post, I don't suppose I will quite believe it until I sit down at my new desk.

morning out gathering brambles with the family, so that my wife can do a batch of bramble jam. I like to get at least one batch of bramble jam made each year.

So, I am waiting for my pedometer, snow leopard, new post, the council to empty my bins so I can fill them up again, ....

and I am happy, after an awful lot of hard work things are all falling into place.

gardens, red onions, job hunting and thinking of China

This weekend seems to have flown by, most pleasantly by and large.

Decent weather yesterday, a little warm for walking my dog, he was pecht getting back, I was too. Then worked on my garden in the afternoon, with number two daughter assisting.

Part of the joy of gardening is that it is all a bit of a playground. It really doesn't matter all that much what you do, it will all pretty much grow back anyway. So I just play about with what I think might be interesting or fun. In that spirit, I just gave number two daughter a quick tour of the garden, explaining what I thought needed done, and asked her to choose what to do. For some reason they always seem to want to trim the hedge, until they actually start wielding the shears and realise that it is hard work.

She concentrated on weeding out a little flower bed, and then transfered in a couple of box plants that I would like to shape into something geometric when they get big enough. I also got her to trim a box plant that I'm just trimming into a globe shape, it is surprisingly difficult trimming something to be round in three dimensions. I weeded the veg patch and lifted the red onions that I have been growing, they are now sitting in the cold frame to dry off. There is a certain quiet glory in harvested food. My damson tree, which clearly suffers vertigo as it is striving to avoid any great height, tying itself in bushy knots, has maybe a dozen gorgeous purple damsons growing. Not enough for jam, but good to see.

Otherwise, I've been playing around with a pedometer. There was a free pedometer in the house, so I gave that a go. And found out that :
I actually do more than 10,000 steps most days, without any particular effort.
I do less steps at the weekend, because I don't have to walk to catch public transport and everything in my house is closer to hand, obviously.
the most annoying thing about a cheap pedometer is when it resets itself, losing my awesome daily stepcount!!!

I've ordered one on Amazon, and once it arrives, I will try and develop some sort of exercise regime based on tracking my steps. Also ordered Cousin Basilio (book), which I seem to remember was good, and Coup de Torchon, the Bertrand Tavernier film, which I remember enjoying.

I'll try and build up a little stock of arty filmhouse type films that I remember being good. I've recently got State of Things (Wim Wenders) and the Saragossa Manuscript (Jan Potocki book, Wojciech Has film) and enjoyed watching them both.

I have been patiently adding the odd book or DVD onto my Amazon wishlist, but last time I looked half of them were unavailable, so clearly I need to go that extra step and actually buy some of these things, rather than leaving them skulking on my wishlist.

Otherwise, being playing about with Kuler, got a couple of awesome teeshirts from RedBubble. All is relatively quiet at work, so finding productive and sensible things to do with this largesse of time.

Autumn is here, keen to get out and get brambles, went out a few weeks ago and they were not yet ripe, but the back road where I usually do my brambling should be about ready now, so I'll need to get out.

Watched Benefits Busters, then chatted about it when getting my hair cut. All amazed at how much single mums can get in benefits and how well they seem to do without doing any work whatsoever. I suppose for society it makes more sense for a single mum with four children to bring her children up full time, rather than going out to earn the minimum wage. However being detached from the job market while the children grow up is not a great long term option. It is incredible just how unscientific getting jobs is. You can study all you like, getting a job still seems to be pot luck at the end of the day. In China the state decides what you are going to do before you even go to university, a system that does have something to recommend it!

There is a bit of a difference in how people think about work.

There is the view that work is basically unpleasant, and you only do it if you really have to, and get paid. And even then you are duty bound to do as little as you can possibly get away with. Doing more than that is breaking solidarity with other workers and is encouraging employers to take liberties, or raise the bar unacceptably on the level of effort they deem sufficient and appropriate.

Alternatively there is the view that work is part of who you are, how you define yourself and how the world sees you. Therefore you strive to work to the best of your abilities and take a pride in your work.

I was initially tempted to say that this was a class difference, but I don't think that it is so much to do with the person doing the work, as the type of work. A craftsman would always take a pride in his craft, someone bashing out widgets probably won't. I suppose that a lot of people have been stuck with a bad experience of work where there is no merit in working hard, where the culture is to do as little as possible. That attitude does not transfer well into more modern jobs where the worker is expected to constantly innovate and challenge themselves.

There is a third catagory beyond these two. It is not so much what you do, as what you say you do. If you can say with conviction that your job is critical to your employer, then if your job is unique, and it is vaguely plausible then people will probably believe you. So in differentiated, skills based roles, the ability to sell yourself arguably becomes more important than ability. This is because it is difficult to put any useful metric on a unique job. So the outward perception becomes reality. Part of this mentality is that every job is a stepping stone to another job.

For an employer the risk is that people move shamelessly into the third catagory.

Finally some more musings. China and India seem to be pursuing very different economic models. India is going for a service based economy, whereas China is going for a manufacturing based economy. On this basis, I suspect that India has made the better choice for the long term. Just a thought.

Spore

I had posted a while back on why I would not be buying Spore.

My youngest daughter threw a mega huff when her tamagochi died, it was seventh generation or something, so I relented and got her Spore. I figured that anyone who got get that vexed about a tiny pixilated virtual something, would probably find Spore engaging.

I saw a copy in the AppleStore, but it looked awfully expensive, so checking out Amazon on the free internet that they provide I figured out I could certainly shave a tenner off the cost with some judicious shopping.

I've installed it onto my newest computer, running on an administrator account. All a bit odd, but the reviews seems to be that it really does not like having to scrape by on an older machine.

Feedback? Well the target audience, youngest daughter loves it. She has been happily lost in it for a few weeks now. Oldest daughter had a brief go or two, only to quickly find youngest daughter a bit over eager with the assisting when it got difficult.

I've not tried it myself, so I don't really know much about it. It does look to be relatively linear, but that probably is no bad thing, just exploring might get a bit dull. The final stage universes do seem absolutely vast. There was even a wormhole! The use of user created creatures looks to be a really neat touch, there is even one species that looks like giant bananas.

In a nutshell, if you are into this sort of thing, then it is a really amazing game, but it is not going to engage everyone. If you want to see how quickly you can get to the end of the game, then you missing the point.

Latest Headline from the Sun Newspaper

Attractive young woman has breasts, we have the photos

dystopia number 1

#1
This is a cold wet country. Too cold and wet for scratching a living from the soil to ever be terribly appealing. An orange or even some spices are unspeakably exotic. Of course there is always the surplus processed food from time to time, but I'm used to living on root vegetables and kale for half the year, so a chocolate bar would make me vomit.

We live in the corners that are too small, or steep or crooked to be farmed. We none of us really own our land, we have no money to pay lawyers or argue our case. We just rely on the fact that what we have is too trivial for anyone else to want. It is a system that works well enough. My family has been here for a couple of generations, as have most of our neighbours.

If anyone ever listened to us, they would hear that we have a myriad of ideas to expand our foodbase. If we could have some common land then we could each maintain some livestock, we might fish the streams, and create freshwater ponds if the water were allowed to run freely. But this landscape is not here for us. It is concreted over, bulldozed and scraped into whatever form suits the people with power.

We live in this country, but we are not of this country. We are the voteless nameless poor. But I am teaching my children to read, I hope that with an education they might find a better life.

#2
I speak five languages fluently, and have qualifications in three major work areas. I work a standard ten hour day, but have to travel for three hours daily, catching a variety of buses and trains to reach my place of work. I feel tired all the time. When I get home I just sit, sometimes I go straight to sleep. At work I seem to live on coffee, I always have to be courteous and professional. We are monitored constantly, any deviations from our set scripts or designated customer transit routes is punishable by pink ticket, more than three pink tickets in a three month period, or a running average of two for three consecutive periods or one for a year, means that you are automatically dismissed. On dismissal it is virtually impossible to find another job. Every year the universities produce a million new people looking for work, and employers only want the keenest and most enthusiastic of employees. Most of us work an hour or two of unpaid overtime each day. I have spent weekends helping my boss with housework. There is no loyalty here, I hope that my boss is dismissed and I will be a candidate for his job. He is hoping that his boss will be dismissed and he will be a candidate for his job. No one ever retires any more. We are all dismissed before we go grey. I hope to get my children educated and a little spare money saved up, so that when I am no longer quick enough for this work, I can find some lower paid work closer to home. It is not much of a life, you are treated in a vile manner. People that have never done anything better hate anyone that has been something once. Mostly people just commit suicide.

I am just so tired all the time, maybe my children will have a better life. They are learning their languages and programming skills, and not wasting their time in the virtual world or with any books and music. I am so proud of them, they have no personality to speak of at all, they are good citizens.

#3
Friday nights are good. Last week I got some speccy kid from the loop on the ground and kicked his head like a football. He thought he could cut through our patch. The police were round pretty quick and we all legged it. We all save up our credits and get a skinfull on the Friday. The rest of the week is just crap. This place is a dump. They stuck in some stupid art things, but we had them all trashed in no time. Or they send in some poncy do gooders to speak to us. I really fancied one, she had skin smooth like plastic. She was all full of nice words, but you could tell that she couldn't wait to get out this place, back to her nice HabUnit. Not that I needed her, I've got dozens of kids, don't know all their names, but they are all over. Can't be so bothered with the shagging now. The girls just give you earache, and christ they get ugly as they get older. Young they are not bad, but after a few kids and years here they are dog ugly.

I don't care though, get munged all week, save up the credits for a Friday, tried all that book stuff, but it was just rubbish, who wants to spend years learning all that stuff. I don't need to be bossed around, I'm my own man. I've got respect and no one messes with me.

#4
This society is all wrong, if those lazy dogs in the government could just do their job then I would not have to put up with all their rubbish. The Louis Vuitton was caught up in traffic for an age this morning. I'm busy, RupMac (spelt Rupert Mackenzie-Smythe) was at the Pear Tree, had to catch up with him before he headed over to the Dubai TriCity, dreadful garish place, but everyone is there these days, and almost missed him. Saw EmVa, and SoEl, and their usual crowd. Talking about the latest schemes, might go for that derivative shorting carbon trades, that whole system is teetering and I could make a shed load shorting it. I think the organ business is on the way out, been good for a while, but those Chinese monkey boys only have so many kidneys and livers. If you have brains, the contacts and a little hard work, there is always money to be made. When the Louis Vuitton stopped there was some proles moaning on about things. One was crippled, that is just offensive, I should not have to look at that, it is only a few thousand credits to sort out that sort of thing, it is just vulgar going about in that state.

My great grandfather is now on the full battery of support systems. With any luck he might pop his clogs soon, and that will boost the old sadly depleted. Of course my useless grandfather will hog most of the money, but even he could not waste all of it on himself.

EmVa is hopeful that the genetic testing will give us a 99%, don't want any useless prole spas genes, just the best blue blood and LVMH CyberEnce. Get one in the gene tanks, and onto the wating list for EtoSEAD.

eyecandy works

My blogging has been much depleted of late. Of course this just means that I been off doing something more interesting.

There was the annual family holiday, which really was excellent. What with the tunnel vision to study for my paralegal qualification, everything else rather got shoved to one side, so there has also been catching up, with the garden and community work. At the same time work has shifted from mad deadlines, to a more measured pace, which is letting me get in about some of the more strategic thinking and longer term work.

I have also been ramping up the number of applications for promotion that I have been putting in. I suspect that my fate is forever to be a very creditable second choice, always getting pipped by someone who's experience is just a bit more relevant. Fortunately there is no danger of me ever running out of ideas for things to do, but it would be nice to rake in a bit more money doing it!

I have recently been enjoying MyTexts which is another bare bones word processor type thing, pretty much like WriteRoom, Voodoopad, Devonthink, all of which I have bought and use. I guess that having a whole stack of different word processors is like my vast pen collection. Not really about functionality. Anyway MyTexts is clean simple and elegant. Recommended.

Also been admiring the Kuler website which means you can tap into a zillion colour schemes, or create your own, and Mondrianum which allows these to be incorporated into the Mac colour picker.

There was an article recently about someone's house, an incedibly colourful house, mainly white, with splodges of fantastic bright colours. And the person said that colours gave them energy, and it made me think that I am sort of like that. Bright colours and attractive shapes, eye candy if you will, do give me energy. I like forming ideas into simple venn diagrams that explain how things are related to each other, I like using my lamy four colour pen to organise my notes into different types of stuff. I love the anglepoise lamp I recently got from Habitat because it is red and a nice shape.

Of course different things motivate different people, but if I like colour then I should use it to organise my world, and help me to engage with things. So for me, eye candy is tax deductible, eye candy works!!!

John Lautner

What I love most about the architecture of John Lautner is the way that he sets his buildings within their surroundings, sometimes a building is designed to blend in or stand out, from its environs, but Lautner designed his buildings so that when you were inside one, looking out, it was hard to tell where the inside ended and the outside began.

The curves of the Mar Brisas house mimic the curve of the bay beyond,


The Elrod Residence encapsulates the boulders that surround it


The Pearlman Cabin uses pine trunks to frame the windows, so the frames merge into the surrounding woods when viewed from inside


These look to be splendidly livable houses for people who like to look out at the world. Perhaps in a perfect world we could all live in John Lautner designed houses, or our houses could encapsulate some of the technical chutzpah and site specificity that make them so special.

As a child Lautner's parents brought him up with substantial and rich time in the great outdoors. It is inspiring to hear about parents making such a conscious effort to offer opportunities to their children that are thoughtful and unique, rather than the more generic aspirations that seem to come without thinking.

tinkering with my website

Thankfully things have quietened down a little recently, and I have been distractedly tinkering with my website.

Running a website is one of those things that seems to be entirely resistant to methodical project planning. Rather than setting out with a clear objective, it seems to be a process of tinkering, fixing the problems you created, finding new things you want to do, getting fed up with the time it is taking, leaving it alone, coming back to it with a better idea. Probably an iterative process in the jargon.

Specifically I have returned to trying to put a search function onto my website, I had tried before with the Google Search option that you could insert using code that Google supplied. However this never seemed to pick up on material deeper within my site, so I ended up removing it.

Lately a new RapidWeaver plugin has appeared. [RapidWeaver is the Macintosh application that I use for coding the website, but it is supported with a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes.] So I have tried RapidSearch, it seemed to encounter similar problems, the developer advises that no one else has reported anything similar, so I am wondering if it might be how the pages are nested within each other that is offending the Google sitecrawlers somehow.

Anyway, I have installed a sitemap, courtesy of Sitemap by Loghound, and tried to simplify my website so that there is less nesting of folders, page elements, and the main blog page is now the home page, rather than deeper within the structure.

I will just have to put the whole issue to one side for a while and wait and see if once the Google sitecrawlers have passed over the site again it is all tickety boo.

I have also been doing a little additional tinkering. Yesterday I put in a favicon. No I didn't know what it was either, it is the wee icon in the address bar that some sites have.

I really will need to get the RapidWeaver manual and read through it properly, my site is getting to be complicated enough that it is probably worth me having a rough idea what I am actually doing.

I might even get round to enabling comments on my blog!

All in all it is just a gradual process of getting the hang of a certain level of complexity, tinkering away around the limits of my capability, and thereby gradually expanding them. There is probably a lot else in life that is much the same.

why democracy is over-rated

Within the western world we have always taken our particular society to be the model to which other, less developed societies should aspire. With the current economic depression, and building climate change, it is increasingly impractical that other countries should aspire to exactly our model of consumerist democratic capitalism.

The sacred cow amongst all the features of our society has always been democracy. It is difficult to defend consumerism or capitalism as something that starving people should aspire to, but democracy is surely all that is right about our society.

Democracy is invaluable in a post conflict society, unfortunately those are not that rare. It is useful in polarised debates.

However democracy is ridiculously clunky. You are allowed to vote a few times each decade. Is that really the best we can do.

It creates all sorts of distorting behaviour.
It encourages ridiculous and polarised arguments.
It encourages careerist politicians to align themselves with political parties, rather than their own ideals.
It places undue reliance on the small number of people who can combine popular support with the technical ability to govern to an adequate standard.

For a long time we have been defending democracy as a least bad system, rather than one that was actually good in itself.

But the bulk of the world is not run through democracy. I live within a small family, it is not democratic, nor is my wider family. My working environment is not democratic, nor is the community organisation that I am involved in.

That is not to say that people's concerns are ignored, or that things are never put to the vote.

All of these systems operate on a common sense sort of approach, where clear roles are ascribed, people have the opportunity to raise concerns, if you want something done, you will probably have to do a fair chunk of it yourself, and finally people have broadly similar abilities to do something.

These are not situations where there is a lot of telling other people to do something. There is a lot of asking people, influencing people, supporting people, being given permission to do things, etc etc.

Practical experience even supports this. If you are in a group that is forever putting things to the vote, then you are in a group that is frankly disfunctional. If you are in a group then there should be sufficient common ground on what you as a group are actually about, that issues that are so divisive and binary that they require a vote, should be remarkably rare.

The answer to a post democracy society is not that we should all be voting more often. Within America where they vote on propositions it is worse than anarchy. Democracy makes appalling decisions all the time, Hitler was democratically elected.

The people who make decisions should be the ones who have invested the time and effort to gain some understanding of the issue, and have some investment in the outcome. Clearly this has to be wider than just a particular interest group, demonstrating their venality. Recently British MPs seem to have been demonstrating far more venality than public interest.

There is a good supply of people willing to represent the public interest, probably never enough. These people are like gold dust within our modern super complex society. They are not motivated by greed or power, but the simple human desire to make things better, to leave things somehow better than they found them, or look after things that they know to be valuable.

These people are the capacity within our society, and they need to be nurtured and supported. They need to be offered opportunities, and development, given confidence and validation.

We want to live in a society that is more finely tuned to us. We do not all want to wear standard Mao jackets, whether they fit or not, all drive Model T Ford's in black, whether we like the colour or not.

I live in a small country, but I keep on getting told that all manner of things need to be administered on a regional basis, and even a region is far too big an area in which to make generalisations. Just as consumers of goods we demand near infinite variety and customisation, from houses to tee-shirts, as consumers of public goods, we demand a highly nuanced product. One that reflects where we live, our asprirations, how we see ourselves.

And between the public good and the private goods, there is a third area. The times when we are not delivering a public or a private service. Do we stop and offer advice to a traveller with a map, do we smile at our neighbours, do we tidy up the spilt rubbish, do we volunteer within our community. We increasingly need to operate within all these different realms if we are to create the kind of society that we want to live in.

That is not to say that these changes are onerous. We instinctively want to live in a village with a common village green, where we know everyone, and everyone knows our name, we want to know what is going on, and have people take an interest in our well-being.

Strangely the public sector seems to be falling behind the private in providing this sort of nuanced neighbourhood. Look at Amazon, RedBubble, LiveJournal. We want to create little online neighbourhoods, to look out for each other, insult each other from time to time, disagree certainly, but we keep on coming back to the honeypot of human interaction. That is why media is dead. How slow to watch a film, or tv programme. We want to be there with our friends, real or virtual. We want to stop to get a cup of tea, then make jokes as they occur to us. The interactivty with people you enjoy is now the killer product.

I have long argued that any meetings that are not enjoyable are unsustainable, any job that is not enjoyable is unsustainable. If you have to bully people into doing something you can only do it until they find another option.

While the private sector is increasingly offering this sort of nuanced, interactive, fun, engagement, the public sector is stuck with old models. The public sector still works on democracy, struggles with the idea of focus groups and qualitative evidence gathering, what do they tell us, are they undemocratic, why not stick a user group/board on top, would that fix it.

What is required is truly decentralised decision making. The centre has a function, but it is not the top of the hierarchy. It is merely one node within the structure. A node with more connections than most, granted, but merely a node that specialises in facilitating and co-ordinating other nodes within a network.

Through my life I have always thought that the real decision making power lay somewhere just outside my direct experience, whenever I accessed one source of power, I realised just how limited and constrained it was. They were able to influence, and make decisions granted, but not on a whim, and only within certain parameters. Where ever you go to, the real power seemed to lie somewhere just out of reach, just beyond the horizon.

That is because all the nodes just have different types of power and influence. None are absolute. The accounting department is no more or less important than the chief executive's office.

We need to change the narrative, away from the cynical red-top and Private Eye narrative that those who make decisions are venal and self serving. The people who make decisions are ourselves. The barrier to entry is not money or who you know. It is the patience and diligence of getting involved and accepting you have power but like a cyclist that power is only proportionate to how much effort you put in, how much you actually do yourself.

A world of cyclists is always safer than a world of motorists. Because the effort and energy and decisions are decentralised and spread out. It is more difficult for cyclists to make bad decisions, they make bad decisions more slowly, and suffer the consequences more directly.

We need to re-engineer our world where we are not cynics but participants. Where it is our time and energy that drive decisions. Where we know things could be better, and we work towards that. There is a role for government in this, for the private sector, but the real motor needs to be the people asking for more power, not politicians trying to find someone to take it.

[attached video by Bruce Sterling is on a vaguely similar theme, and is incredibly worth listening to.

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/video-from-reboot-11/

]

capacity

when is something too big?

Yesterday we struggled to get to where we were going in the car because a major attraction was so large that all the local roads were backed up with cars trying to get there.

Then we struggled to find a parking space in a nearby village/town where we were going to eat lunch. Despite all the available parking spaces being taken, it was not at all obvious where all the people associated with these cars were, the shops certainly were not busy, we had the restaurant virtually to ourselves.

The maths are not that complicated, any business will need customers, but the number of customers is dependent on the number that will or can get to you. For a bricks and mortar business, they need to be able to get parked or be able to get to you via some other mode of transport, or even just live within walking distance.

For those trying to encourage economic growth, perhaps the best idea is not to focus on supporting businesses, but investing in the infrastructure that lets people access a bricks and mortar business. Putting on more trains, or better buses, or more parking, lets more people get there, let the business focus its efforts on making them want to come.

Too often the problem is a pinch point, the businesses are fine, but there is no way that enough customers could actually visit to sustain them. The importance of modal shift in traffic usage is key. Old fashioned town centres just cannot function if they rely on individual people each driving there, then seeking a parking space. The logistics of the space required to park all the cars driven by enough people to sustain all the shops is absurd. Whereas a few extra train carriages come at relatively little cost in terms of space and infrastructure, but bring in hundreds of extra customers.

graft

Often the only approach that is going to be successful is just sheer hard graft.

We recently had a temporary member of staff, who was also finishing off studying for a legal qualification, and I have never seen anyone work so hard. Everything she was given she just got on with it, when she had a spare minute she pulled out her text books and worked through them.

At the same time I was studying a criminal paralegal course, and I tried to adopt the same attitude, just putting in the hours studying. Applying an element of critical thought, always asking if I was studying the right thing, in the most appropriate way. By the end I had put a lot of hours into the course, and got a result that was much better than I had hoped for.

By stripping out ideas of talent or aptitude, just seeing the issue as one of graft, applying the hours of effort required, constantly making decisions on how best to use your time resource, the emotions get drawn out of the process. It just becomes a more straightforward transaction. There is not a sense of entitlement, or that life is not fair, just a sense that you need to get on with it.

There is a similar lesson in Geoff Colvin's work on Talent is Overrated
http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/talent-is-overrated

Although media coverage has focussed on Malcolm Gladwell's book on Outliers, the Geoff Colvin book actually looks to be the better of the two. It stresses the value of deliberative practice, where you deliberately focus on the areas outwith your comfort zone and practice those, all the time getting feedback on how you are doing, until you finally get better at them. It even puts a figure of 10,000 hours on the time commitment required to be really remarkably talented.

Of course it is always possible to identify people that just seem to have a natural aptitude, but once you start to look into it, by and large their aptitude has been obtained via a huge amount of prior application. I overheard a conversation on the train, some architects chatting, and they mentioned the notebook that one of their number kept, it was packed with hugely detailed and wonderful drawings of architectural features that he had seen, they all kept such notebooks, but his stood out as incredibly impressive. Yet he kept the notebook to himself, never showed it to anyone. It was not a product in itself, it was just part of his creative process.

The designer's notebooks at the ECA were one of the most impressive things there. The endless iteration of ideas.

But what is talent? If we follow the definition that we are talking about a remarkable ability in something, then by definition that is all we are talking about. Media functions to bring to our attention people who can do remarkably well things that we can only do badly.

But what intrinsic merit is there in such talent. Does it benefit the individual? Does it benefit society?

We are not failures because we are not remarkable, we have made other choices, those hours went into something else. Often caring for others. But we can learn from people who just put in the hours of study, who did not just get lucky. People who jot down things, and organise their lives.

Perhaps the remarkable thing about remarkable people is that underneath they are actually not so much different from ourselves, they just put their time into different priorities. The question we should be asking is how wisely we did spend those hours, and how wisely we will use the hours before us.

various shoutouts

Just a quick shoutout for some recent finds on that interweb thingy.



First off, it is a well, you know, a sort of, its like a, well why not just give it a try, play around a bit, play around a bit more,

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix

Secondly, getting bored with your desktop and want to put a clock on it. This works just peachy on my Mac, and there are plenty of templates to choose from, and if you are so minded you can even create your own.

http://vladstudio.com/wallpaperclock/

Thirdly, check out some arty tee shirts. Probably a little pricey, but then when you consider just how much of a part of your visual identify a good tee shirt can be, then paying a bit extra for something that is exactly right seems a small price. There is a myriad of other community stuff that I have not explored too.

http://www.redbubble.com/t-shirts/featured

Finally, Just a cool tune, give it a whirl.

http://www.myspace.com/deadplantstheband