elsewhere elections in Scotland

There has been quite a lot going on in the past week.

My boss for the past couple of years has left on early retirement, so I am now running the branch. The branch is just me, so I don’t anticipate a lot of disagreements with my staff. I am keen to recruit staff both above and below myself, but I’m not sure how long that will take.

In the past, I could simply work to my strengths, as could my boss. However now that I need to pick up more of her work, I will need to think more strategically, and have a better understanding of how the various blocks of work fit together. I am used to doing or batting off small discrete chunks of work, but I will need to shift my focus onto managing larger less tangible and finite pieces of work. [Thinking strategically?]

At a higher level you deal with issues that never go away, so the emphasis is less on batting away things, more on marshalling and understanding them.

This really is not a case of doing more of what I used to do, it is a case of doing stuff differently. I don’t imagine that it is impossible, but I’ll just need to find a way of working, that works for me. I’ve started out with some mind-mapping software, and I’m arranging and attending a lot more meetings. Early days yet, but interesting so far.



After my blog comments last week, there have been a couple of useful and appreciated comments on the OmniOutliner forum, and a couple of different pieces of software have been suggested for my idea of a self sorting blog. Increasingly it sounds like OmniOutliner is not what I am after, MacJournal, and Voodoopad have been suggested, and elsewhere I have come across Mori.

I have downloaded a version of Voodoopad, and I’ll have a play around with it, I’ll also do a little more research on the other options. There is a learning curve to all of these, and I’ll need to consider carefully what features I really need before I create some compendium of everything I ever thought about anything. Something that will stay good indefinitely would be good, rather than something that gets stranded next time there is a change of Mac Operating System.



Having adopted a partial GTD methodology, I have finally ordered a new external hard drive. It has not yet arrived, but should do on Monday. I know, I know, I really must have a hard drive, or some method of backing up my material. Particularly now that my daughters are buying songs from iTunes and they are only on the iMac hard-drive. Hot cross daughters, are something to be avoided.

Of course this meant that I needed to do a lot of research.

First - do I need an external hard drive, wouldn’t it be more secure to simply back up to something over my broadband connection.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/firefox-os-why-my-hard-drive-software-are-obsolete.html

I investigated this option,
.mac - looked expensive for what it offered
Amazon S3 - a possible
G-Space - saving to various G-mail accounts, just looked too fiddly to really work for me. I don’t have the time to master and run anything complicated.
British Telecom - similar service, not sure how well it supported a Mac.

In the end I still decided that I still needed an external hard drive, so that if my iMac is corrupted, I can boot up from the external hard drive and reinstall from there. Yes I know that I could reboot from system disks, and then reinstall the software and strings to get my broadband working, and then upgrade the software over the internet, and then reinstall my data from the last back up, and then resubscribe to all my podcasts, and then put in my bookmarks again, and then reinstall my contacts, ....

However the idea of simply formatting the corrupted hard-drive, and then migrating over a recent system just seemed so much easier. I am currently working on the one computer, so if it goes down, I am effectively cut off from the internet. If I had a batch of computers, then another strategy would doubtless suggest itself.

I have had three Macintosh 1993 - powerbook 165c, 1998 - original bondi blue imac, and my new 2006 intel imac.

The first two eventually succumbed to a corrupted hard drive, which is what finally prompted me to buy a new computer. Accordingly I do expect my new computer to eventually succumb to creeping corruption of its hard drive and fall over. I would like to minimise the catastrophe.


Elsewhere, elections in Scotland.