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
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Friday, 18 September 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, 6 September 2009
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.
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.
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