google ethics

Consider the evidence;

• you cannot find a photo of a Google server farm on Google images
• Google's motto is don't be evil
• the amount of energy required for two Google searches is enough to boil a kettle of water

even the most rudimentary of research, admittedly more than I can be bothered doing, demonstrates that there is not enough energy in the world to do all the searches that Google does, and if there was then miniscule advertising pennies would not pay for it.

The answer is obvious, Google do not use server farms, they use a giant disembodied kidnapped alien brain

Douglas Coupland made plastic

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/28/useless-and-japan-only-but-cute-mini-usb-construction-site/

It is like a Douglas Coupland novel made plastic, cute mini-fig construction worker kit that you can plug in to your computer's usb port so that the traffic cones light up.

I've dropped an email to Lego pointing out that there is a vast untapped computer geek market for Lego toys that you can plug in to your computer's usb socket.

With any luck they will rush into production and mail me one.

in the good old days topless women would wave a flag to make sure you did not miss them

google analytics and dull productivity blogs

I have been doing some work on my blog, though at time of writing my ISP does not seem to be letting anyone see my updated site. Usually these things just sort themselves out, and generally the tech support people just read from a script and know less than I do, so phoning them is more diversion than useful activity.

Last week I was keen to put some sort of page counter onto my website, but after a little research (five minutes with google and a couple of forums) I simply decided to go for google analytics. There seem to be two relevant google options, webmaster and analytics.

Webmaster - not really sure what it does, and it wants a site map to do most of it. So I decided to pretty much ignore it.

Analytics - this provides a piece of code that you insert into your webpages and then google kindly tracks hits to your website and provides lots of spiffy analysis that you would happily pay money for.

The piece of code is easily inserted in Rapidweaver (by way of explanation - go to the setup button, press the advance tab, and paste the code into the relevant box, alternatively, Rapidweaver is a software application that you can use on an Apple Macintosh computer).

This whole process passed my stringent test for ease of use, not only did I manage to do it, but I managed to do at while watching NCIS at the same time. Clearly this is not heavy duty mental gymnastics we are talking about.

Now that I have the technology to monitor traffic, I have also been reading up on how to boost traffic. Basically quote your webpage address everywhere you can, and update your site. So, I have updated the site to put the blog page as the home page, as it is the one that is updated most often, taken out a page that had some images on it, as my photos are uploaded to Flickr these days, tagged all my blogs again.

I will probably try and keep my blog entries short and snappy, and restricted to a single topic, which should make them more useful to the casual browser of interesting tags, who might not be interested in wading through just everything.

I have also looked at the technorati top 100 blogs. What an incredibly odd selection. Basically if you took out all the computer orientated and productivity orientated, then you would not have much left. Strangely this does not reflect public interest in other forms of media, so I suspect that blogs are still a rather techie persuasion.

Also browsed some of the less obvious productivity blogs, and I am inclined to agree with Merlin Mann (http://www.43folders.com/2008/09/10/time-attention-creative-work) that productivity and lifehacks are getting to be an unproductive distraction rather than something genuinely useful or informative. Certainly browsing some of the productivity blogs and the me too comments, carefully providing links back to their own productivity blogs, felt rather arid. If people find them useful, then good luck to them, but it does need to be done well to bring anything new or worthwhile to the table.

Maybe that explains why technorati no longer seems to track blogs that well, the number of blogs has entered the gazzillions while the quality has taken a nose dive.

Maybe we are just at a time of transition, we know that things are different now, but while we know that we are not in Kansas anymore, we still have not quite figured out where we are.

thinking of new crimes

I suspect that this blog posting, might seem strangely prophetic in a few years time. If you were a really smart hacker, you would seek to make your money from activities that might not even be criminal.

I'll pitch a few scenarios;
google ranking - say you could find a magic piece of code to insert in someone's webpage that automatically pushed it up the rankings, into the top three or four results, the ones that people actually looked at. Maybe you worked in google and put this facility into their code, maybe you analysed successful pages and through brute force found some way of mimicing the sites that they rate highly, maybe you worked out some software hack that created a recursive loop that bumped up prominence through little known features within DSL and ISP.

If you could do that, then you could name your price. Obviously you would not want to flood the market, but the savvy hacker could live very well on such knowledge.

share picking - maybe you could find some way to pick shares, some thing you could track that would give some insight, for example tracking web traffic in advance of published sales figures. Something that gave you an insight, or even just a little advance notice of turnover and profits just that little bit before everyone else knew.

distorting web 2.0 - maybe you could find some form of social marketting on the web, perhaps using cheap overseas labour to post favourable reviews, to boost site traffic, to create a buzz and drive traffic to one site or away from another. Web 2.0 makes us aware of music and books we did not know we wanted, the capacity to channel that where you want must be worth money.


The internet is relatively new, and the rapid monetization of the web is even newer. People, regulators, governments, we really have not yet got our head round the fact that there is an awful lot money to be made in cyberspace, and that there might be ways to do this that we feel are unacceptable.

The pre-monetized internet was largely self policing, and the fact that people might make a living from it, seemed absurd.

But now, there is the scope to use brute force computer analysis, insiders hacking key net infrastructure, or even shed loads of chinese, to make the internet focus its fickle attention the way that we want it to. The web is uniquely vulnerable to this because it is different from other media. It relies on unmoderated opinions, the opinions of people that opt in to give their opinion. Such a model cannot easily be hacked by one person, but as spam shows, with a little technical know how, or cheap labour, it is possible to achieve influence levered way beyond the scope of your initial input.

Is it even possible to regulate such behaviour?
Would policing such behaviour destroy the very accessibility that attracts us?

Maybe it is time that we started to think about how we could police the internet, learning from sites like wikipedia where it does work.

Private Eye to close

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Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve

This is the third in a sequence of books for children, about a post apocalyptic world where mobile cities trundle across the wasteland attempting to consume each other. While the first was incredibly fast paced to the extent almost of being exhaustingly relentless, the second was a little slow. This one is a fair combination between pace and atmosphere. While the stories are aimed at children, if you think about it, the world described is so bleak and forlorn, that it is hardly mainstream fare. There is a certain economy with some of the leading characters turning up across the books, but a great many other leading characters exit from each book. This is a heartless world.

The book is tremendously well written, packed with character and incident, what impresses me most is the sheer beauty of so much of the prose. This is someone that could turn his had to first rate poetry, writing for children. I cannot praise this sequence of books too highly. They are as good as anything I have read.

Random Quote - Anger and a sort of panic rose in him. He felt that this woman had stolen something from him, although he no longer knew what it had been. He tried to bare his claws, but could not move. He might as well have been just an eye, lying there on the wet earth.

Punk jellyfish

This will probably be a rather rambling blog post. Words to strike terror into your very soul, and drive the casual browser, screaming and fleeing, never returning, into the gloaming.

I will however fill it chock full of random search words and watch as people come here looking for something insightful on punk jellyfish, or Britney dungarees.

First of all, shoutout for Dustin Wax and an exceptional series of postings on the Lifehack website about lifehacks and productivity.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/author/dwax

They are so good, that I read one, then feel compelled to jot down something in my blog, only to find out that his next article anticipates and trumps this, with even greater insight, better written, etc etc. Not only does he write with insight, he also seems to walk the talk, by getting an awful lot done.

Anyway, I'll maybe post the odd comment to his articles, but I probably won't do a lot of blogging on productivity. I don't know, it does look like lifehacks are going out of fashion. We seem to be entering a post productivity landscape.

I have done a little tinkering on google and have set up a google analytics account, to get an idea whether anyone does ever access this site. I am not exactly strenuous in providing interesting content, or sticking to any particular topic, so I am certainly not expecting massive traffic.

At work, as usual, a couple of steps forward, and a step back. My workload has recently doubled, but I have taken on management of a member of staff. Fortunately no one else delegates any work, and I delegate plenty, so I it works well for both of us. However change afoot, and I'm worried that I might find myself trying to cover two jobs on my own!

In order to maintain sanity, I do find it useful to block out time on specific tasks, also just focus on the stage I'm at, so reading productively, planning effectively. Deliberately not worrying about the eventual outcome, just trusting to identify the relevant components, and do them all effectively.

It is also quite nice to treat tasks as a palette of things that I could do, rather than a shameful list of things that I should have done. So, stuff gets struck off within impunity. A bit of this is accepting that I can easily identify far more things to do, than I have time for. The skill is in selecting the best to do.

Not much else to report, I had a trip away from home, huge railway trip, had time to kill in a cavernous secondhand book shop. Bought a second hand book by Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe novels. The television adaptations were a family favourite. I've not read the book myself yet, but my wife was well impressed. I was also looking for Tschiffely's Ride, which is the sort of book that you ought to be able to find second hand. However the books defied order and beyond checking through thousands of books, it was impossible to find a copy. There is a town in Dumfries and Galloway that has a plethora of second hand book shops, we will maybe need to make a trip to stock up on unfashionable books. It does not get any greener than reading second hand or library books.

How old it sounds to be talking about "green" now.

have more fun at work

Typical task management and prioritisation schemes would work very well if you were attempting to keep your computer RAM spinning over at maximum effectiveness. But when it comes to actually getting the best out of yourself they are sadly deficient.

Do you really want to run yourself like you would run a machine?
Would you want to work for a boss that thought that way?
Would you allocate tasks to a new member of staff like that?

Probably not.

That is not to say that task management is not susceptible to some sort of organisation, it is just that conventional schemes tend to neglect the fact that they are dealing with people.

You need to start from the point of view that you are dealing with a person, and that person just happens to be you.

So, first and foremost, you need to protect your prime asset which is your physical and mental health.
You need to ensure that
you eat properly,
you drink enough, not just tea and coffee,
you need to get regular exercise,
you need to get fresh air and see some real daylight, and trees and stuff, every single day,
you need to give yourself proper breaks,
you need to banter with the folk around you
you need to think that you are doing something meaningful,
you need to believe you are making a positive difference
you need to get regular check ups from your optician and dentist and go see the doctor when something is bothering you
you need to pay attention to little health niggles and do something about them

beyond that, it never does any harm keeping your hair cut, and your clothes neat and tidy.

Once you have the right attitude to your physical and mental health, you need to ensure that you respect your energy levels and sense of fun.

Basically if it is not fun, then something is going wrong. It might not be fun all the time, but if you are not having any fun, or it is not fun most of the time, then you really need to change something.

When you enjoy something you are more alert, you notice more, you think faster, and more creatively, you learn more easily. There is bound to be some structure, if you are getting paid by "the man", then he will expect you to jump through some hoops. However assuming you are an office drone with a certain degree of autonomy, you have no one to blame but yourself if you are not enjoying things at least a bit.

So,
1 work in short discrete chunks.
2 after each chunk give yourself a break, even if it is just browsing a magazine for a minute while you drink a cup of tea
give yourself a reward when you have been good
head home early if you don't feel great
3 mix up the different types of work you are doing, so if you have been reading for a while, maybe spend some time catching up on phone calls
4 split work into strands, and then concern yourself with making sure that each strand is at about where you want it to be
5 start the day with ten minutes prioritising out your time and tasks for the day,
I get bored with the same format of list, and change it around from time to time, I currently use the left side of the page for things that aren't likely to happen today, the right for things that are, that way, I cut the page in half and remove the previous day's half page, and avoid re- writing the longer term stuff, which only gets updated once a week or so
6 it always helps to have a couple of tasks lined up, so when you finish one, you know what to start next
7 you don't need to prioritise every task in the list, some will probably still be there tomorrow
8 it is handy to have some spare short tasks that can get done if you have five minutes to fill in
9 it is handy to have a stock of tasks to fill any other gaps that you might experience, for example reading or phone calls for gap time
10 don't go mad on using every spare minute
11 don't try to multi-task
12 try and keep every work strand moving along, even if it is just half a day per week, while you concentrate on other stuff.

Set an end time for tasks, especially ones where it does not matter too much how well they are done. I try and have all my emails dealt with by 10am, so they might just get a cursory response, but they really don't need much more. Tasks that need to be done well can be more flexibly resourced.

The most important thing is mental discipline. Your mind is a fantastic tool for imagining dismal scenarios. It is incredibly easy to imagine a myriad of depressing ways in which things might go wrong. However it serves little or no useful purpose.

Focus yourself on each individual process. Be brutal, once you have planned and prioritised, live absolutely in the present process and task. If you are reading, read to the best of your ability. Don't read, rather feebly while still half thinking about planning.

So, your ten minutes prioritising is when you jot down what you need to do. Then you totally stop worrying about it.

You may be responsible for something really significant. Plenty to worry about. Instead split it up into a series of individual processes. Each of these processes are things that you have done before,
you can read documents
you can plan how to achieve goals
you can seek support from colleagues
you can carry out actions

not only have you done each of these things before countless times, in fact you are really good at them. You know that you are good at them, everyone knows that you are good at them.

There may be some areas that you are not so strong on. However that is just something that you need to develop. That is not a problem either. You did not start off being so great at everything, you got great at things through trying and learning. So maybe you need to give yourself more time for something, or ask for more support.

The important thing is to recognise the processes that are likely to cause a problem. It might be that you don't have the skills required. It might be that you won't have enough time to do some of it.

This is where your creative problem solving side comes into play. Think creatively about how you might solve the problem, other resources you might bring into play. Don't let yourself get distracted with perfect world solutions. You have to do something, so just figure out a least bad option and go for that. If you are worried about it, make sure and flag to your boss that you are going for a least bad option early on. If he is that bothered he can supply you with a better option.

Don't give yourself grief that you do not need to.

So,

trust the process - if you have other people, or processes that contribute to your work, then let them do their job. Get some impression of how reliable they are by all means, do some light exploratory work on options if they don't deliver, but you don't need to do their job for them. What is worth doing is keeping a close eye on them, so that you know really early if they are going to fail to deliver.

decisions mean making choices - once you have prioritised for the day, don't mentally revisit the process all day. You have decided that there are three priorities. There is no magic trick that lets your boss know exactly how much work to give you each day. It is like Tetris, sometimes those little tiles just keep on arriving until it is game over. Use prioritisation to decide what order to do things in, if that means that something is not done, then that was what you decided. You have plenty of experience, you decided that was the least important thing. Live with it, don't stress over it.

making choices means saying no to options - learn to live with the fact that you are continuously saying no. Not read that magazine after a month, throw it out. Not made that phone call after a week, just score it out and forget about it.

grace under pressure - the real test of someone's mettle is how they respond under pressure. Anyone can be gracious when things are easy. If you can be gracious when you are under pressure, it is a good habit to get into. You are less stressed when you are smiling and positive. You solve problems better and other people respond to you better. Management will notice how you respond to pressure much more than they notice just how much work you are getting through.

learn to live with shoddy work - most work does not need to be done superbly well, free up time to focus on the priorities by getting through the chaff as quickly as you can. Better a reputation as someone that gets things done, than a reputation for someone who never puts an apostrophe wrong in an email.

The good staff are always busy. That is because the good staff can always think of useful and productive things to do, and people are keen to give them work because they know it will be done. However to get above good, you need to think about where your time is going, and accept that not everything needs to be done really well, and there are plenty of worthwhile things that you maybe just don't get round to doing.

View the task list as palette to choose from. You need not use every colour on the palette, you need not do every task on the list, but try to pick the best of stuff to put your energy into.

Finally - try try try to be true to your own values. This is difficult. Try not to work with people you do not respect, you run the risk of ending up like them. Try not to copy habits you dislike in others, you are worse than them if you know that it is wrong. Try to avoid work that diminishes you, your life is so short, why spend it on such things.

Life is about making decisions, sometimes the right answer is just to say no, this is not for me. Maybe you have just freed up some time for something really important that you just don't know about yet.

Phillip Schiller's Apple Keynote - so what ?

After a rather soggy walk, with a slightly huffy dog, I sat down with a cup of coffee to watch the latest MacWorld Apple Keynote with Phillip Schiller taking the place of Steve Jobs. If the iPhone is the god phone, then Jobs must be the god CEO.

Of course picking up the baton from Steve is a thankless task, as his keynotes are outstanding. That said, from comments he has made, it is not something that comes easily, even for iCEO Jobs, there is a lot of hard work that goes into these seemingly effortless presentations.

Technically Phillip was fine, the audience looked at little stoney faced throughout, and let's face it, we all knew that there was not another iPhone waiting in the wings. In fact even the sort of stuff the pundits were predicting were small beer, so it is pretty amazing the level of world wide media coverage for a presentation by a single computer company. I certainly don't imagine Dell or Microsoft getting the same sort of coverage.

Of course I already knew roughly what was in the presentation, and without Jobs to edge us from vaguely impressed to feverish hyperbole, the stuff seemed worthy, but a little dull.

So we got, upgrades to iLife, and iWork. There was a new 17inch MacBook, and the one more thing was that iTunes was going DRM free.

On the one hand this does not sound terribly exciting. More functions on a spreadsheet is not really the sort of thing that sets my soul on fire, and longer battery life, zzz. Coming away I did not feel terribly wowed.

On the other hand, the upgrades to iLife look quite useful, I can see the faces recognition being a real asset, I was starting to think that I do need to organise my photos by person a bit more, so that when required I locate mutual friends. The tutorials on Garageband sound like the sort of dodgy Bert Weedon video you could pick up, but just really well done, and effortlessly integrated.

That is the thing with the iLife improvements, they are not the sort of thing that will change your life, but they are the sort of thing you were starting to think might be useful, and they are done in a no brainer/effortless sort of way, when of course we could all think of slightly more cumbersome ways to do it cheaper, but they would be a little too much effort, so we will probably just end up getting the upgrade.

It is interesting that Apple has put the emphasis on creativity and usability, they are encouraging you to learn to play an instrument through Garageband, they are making it easier to share photos with your friends through iPhoto.

The upgrades to iWork seemed quite dry. The standout item for me, was the online sharing of documents. Initially I thought, well why not just use googledocs, and who knows an exclusive band of Mac-Users, such that online collaboration need only entail fellow Mac Users. But the implementation did seem pretty slick, it looked effortless and the sort of no brainer stuff that you could actually get other people to use, and being browser based, computer platform should not be an issue.

So it might be possible to start to shift the world of work to a mixed economy model, where there are some people with Macs, some with PCs, online collaboration through web based tools, some Macs running windows, some linux based netbooks, with always on internet access the glue that sticks it all together.

The new laptop, with a whizzy new battery. Well probably too pricy for me, I prefer a cheap laptop that does not cost as much as a small car. But longer battery life will be handy for folk, and if it will last five years, then the fact that it is not readily replaceable should not be that much of a worry. Who is running about with a five year old laptop these days. I guess with laptops it is always possible to carp at something, this one lacks ports, that one does not let you hot swap batteries, this one is too dear, but let's face it, people buy more laptops than desktops these days. Laptops are entitled to come in all shapes and sizes. That way folk can pick the one that suits them best. Just imagining that there is a single yardstick to measure a laptop against is pretty daft these days. If anything, it is the desktop that can safely come in a small mix of shapes and sizes, while there is a justifiable diversity to the laptops available.

Then the "and finally", DRM free, iTunes, and a ready way of swapping all your existing music onto DRM free. Well I checked mine, and for a little over a tenner, I could switch it all. Not something that worries me greatly, but for a tenner, I'll probably just do it.

So, in the end, I was not terribly blown away. But, I will probably upgrade iLife and iWork, I will probably upgrade my iTunes library, I'll probably have a good look at the online document sharing option. So, in the end, although I was not terribly blown away, I am probably sufficiently impressed to stick my hand in my pocket, and spend a bit more on Apple stuff. Maybe not the price of a whole new computer, but a decent software upgrade that lets me get a little bit more use of out my existing set up. Probably not a bad pitch, for these credit crunched times.

And that is the beauty of where Apple is now, it is not just a computer company, it is not just about hardware, it is not just a software company, it is not just about applications, it is not just a media company, or a retailer. It is not just about working effectively, or high status items to show off, or family computers, or geek computers, or creative stuff. Somehow Apple is very good on the boundaries, the stuff we have not quite thought through, the edges where we kind of sense something useful lurks. That big friendly round apple, I guess you kind of trust it even when it is a little out there.