listening to Monteverdi

Write about TwentyTwoBlog here.

Rather than my normal practice of writing this blog in the weekend morning before everyone else wakes up, I was pottering about with some other stuff on the computer this morning and never got round to writing this.

So I am writing this on Sunday evening, plugged into iTunes listening to some Monteverdi.

The benefit of writing this in the morning is that you have the sense of huge significance, that your every thought is of the greatest of moment, and infinitely deserving of being read by all and sundry, and preserved for posterity. By evening, some sense of perspective has returned and my meanderings seems less crucial.

So in the usual fashion, some random jottings.

I like to set my daughters a task to complete, today I had them out trying to find as many wild flowers as they can, with a promise of a small reward for every one that they can identify. Much scouring of a book of wildflowers, and they seemed to enjoy it, so a useful little challenge, with a pretty posy to finish with.

The weather has been a bit iffy this weekend, so I have had a chance for some gardening, mowing the lawn yesterday, and emptying out my home made big red composter, and putting in the slighty slimy contents from the usual municipal green composter. The good compost was taken and dug in, the soil is old clay, heavy and grey. I think I will be working to improve my soil here for years.

I have been out gathering pine needle mulch in the local woods, our soil is bound to be reasonably acid, but I am trying to grow some real acid lovers, cranberrys and blueberrys, so I am keen to give them even more acidity, with a mulch of pine needles. By the by, elsewhere in the garden I have found leaf mould tremendous stuff, I can't believe that some enterprising council does not sell it, simply gather up leaves in a chicken wire cage, leave for a year, and then you have a fine rotted mulch, and keeps the soild moist and amply boosts the organic content of the soil. I reckon on gathering ten sacks of leaves for my chicken wire cage each autumn, and this gives me a decent amount of mulch each early autumn when I empty out the cage.

write about TwentyOneBlog here

It is tempting to have a huge rant about all the changes at work, but although everything seems very different and uncertain at the moment, as well as being personally quite inconvenient, I'm sure that things will fall into place eventually.

I think that traditionally jobs were about bashing out widgets as quickly and as cheaply as you could.

Nowadays a lot of that bashing out widgets work has been automated, so that clever people are not bashing out the same widgets for a whole career, instead they are figuring out how to bash out new widgets, or how to bash out old widgets in a new factory, or what sort of widgets we should really be bashing out.

Although there is a certain amount of routine process work in my job, there is a policy element, where I should be doing something new, thinking about new things, pushing forward new solutions.

I think that a lot of our organisation is about doing new stuff, relatively speaking we are not a large organisation, but like many businesses that deal with information and knowledge, we concentrate resources into the bits that deal with change and 'new-ness'. And correspondingly take resources out of an area once it has been 'fixed'.

With a new government in place there is a lot that is new, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld

As we know,
There are familiar old things.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are familiar new things.
That is to say
We know there are some things
That are new.
But there are also unfamiliar new things,
The ones we don't know
and haven't planned for.

My job is supposed to be about dealing with change, and now that there is a bit more change than I am used to, I should just get on with it, demonstrating an ability to cope well with change should be a good thing. BUT IT IS WEARYING.

Other slightly more random [my daughter's favourite word, apparently it is like 'cool' when I was young, the shorthand for all that is good, for the people your age, as clearly anyone older is hopelessly 'uncool' or 'unrandom'] notes.

Last weekend I had a few extra days appended to my weekend. Had a trip over to my mother-in-law's to tend the patch of ground over there that I am using as an allotment. It is laid out so that it can run okay with a few short trips each year, whereas my own garden is a lot closer, so it gets more regular attention. A quick morning blitz, spent digging up and digging in winter field beans/green manure which I will certainly try again, and generally weeding the plot. All going well I will have a crop of garlic and carrots and for decoration I am growing some dill from seed down the centre of the plot.

While getting some crops is welcome, I am also keen to improve the soil, currently very light, and quite poor, hence the green manure. I am also starting to understand why traditional farming patterns often involved small plots in various locations, rather than the modern practice of huge plots. By having a variety of plots, in different areas with different soils, you can plant far more appropriately, and are far less likely to face catastrophic losses. Traditional farming had to be much more sensitive to what nature would allow, as there was less scope to use brute force such as nitrogen rich fertilisers. In general nature uses evolution and good solutions, rather than brute force, and the appliance of energy intensive solutions. Smarter enzymes rather than more power.

Also did some work on my own garden, mainly digging out a small patch and putting in a cranberry pit, basically just a small area with old manure bags dug in round it, and backfilled with ericaceous compost, topped off with pine needles and pine forest mulch, with a few cranberry plants. With luck, and good acid soil, they should thrive. The composts are awful loose, might need to dribble in some clay to give it some body.

This will bring the total number of fruits in my garden upto, "I've lost count, plus one". Clearly a substantial increase!

I did keep a notebook recording what I was doing in the garden, but I'm switching onto Voodoopad, for those notes now, and it is just so great. For example noting down all the different types of greenmanures that I am using, and how I get on with them. I had been noting down some garden stuff in a notebook, other stuff on loose pieces of paper, and it just never worked in any sort of useful way. Also my handwriting is illegible.

It is really fun putting together a page on voodoopad about how I have planted up cranberrys, what the various books said about them, posting in a few pictures, some interesting facts from wikipedia.

The more I use voodoopad, the more impressed I get with it, and the more useful it gets.

Final piece of random jotting. My ipod Nano went phut yesterday, my iMac refused to recognise that it was attached. Tried a few things, updated the iTunes software, restarted, swapped round cables, reset my factory settings on the iPod itself. Then worked through the five R's that you are supposed to try, and the second recommendation, the hard reset, press the menu and select at the same time, till the apple appears, did the trick.

Reading through the support material on the Apple site was not much help, they really need to update it, for example iTunes 7.2 rather than iTunes 7.1 and the iPod software updater no longer seems to exist as a standalone piece of software, but trawling round the endless look that is the support articles, who knows? Maybe that is why the need to employ geniuses as tech support.

As a mea culpa, the iPod battery was well run down, I was asking the ipod to sync more stuff than it had room for, and there was a new version of iTunes to install, so some ipod moodiness was not altogether unexpected.

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As a PS I note that wikipedia is to launch a new search engine, one of my pet gripes lately has been that google has jumped the shark as a search engine. I am repeatedly finding it dificult or impossible to find anything useful using google. To be honest, most of the time I do find something useful it is simply a link to a wikipedia page, and I hardly need google to tell me that I could look in wikipedia. The problems with google are

there is so much stuff on the web now
advertised stuff is bumped up to the top, but is not often much use
the sorting for most useful does not seem to help much

I really rather miss the old yahoo where they had stuff sorted into relevant topics, and there was a degree of authorial authority. I'm all for Wikinomics and the wisdom of crowds, but there does need to be some sort of rethinking of how google works if it is to continue to be useful. Maybe a wikigoogle is the way to go.

PS today's image is a wikipedia image of a cranberry harvest,

life is good right now

For me, life is good right now.

I was listening to The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats, and my wife told me the singer had a nasal voice, and when I looked on wikipedia, they too said he had a nasal voice, it is something that I would never have been able to tell. She sees things that I simply cannot see. I love and rely on her totally.

My daughters are moving through that long stage between being totally dependent, and being totally independent. I want them to be ready for life's challenges, and possibilities. In my eyes they are already incredible and wonderful people.

I recognise that I like things that make me think, I'm far less interested in learning for the sake of learning. I guess that most people are not like that. The internet has opened up a vast library of information and ideas up to me, where I can contribute with ideas of my own.

I have a sturdy house in an unpretentious street, I am filling my garden with fruit trees and bushes, learning and trying out new ideas.

My involvement in my local community regularly makes small differences to people's lives, making the place more welcoming.

My work helps people, and hopefully makes a positive difference to the way that people view themselves.

I am content with my little spot in life, I am on the road to being a little more than I am now, but I am not so bad as I am.

you need to start from where you are

When you are young you are all alike, striving to be different, and death confers some sort of celebrity. But you don’t really understand the value of what is lost.

When you get older you are woven deeper into the fabric of life, part of generations both older and younger than yourself, linked to friends and colleagues, touching so many different lives.

A work colleague died on Thursday after a long battle with cancer. I heard on Friday morning, and did my best to phone round those that knew her best.

It was a pleasure to work with Jess, she was like a child in a sweetshop, seeing everything as an opportunity, keen to try things out and put her imagination to good use. But she was also a tremendously warm person, I used to tease her about trying to sort out all Scotland’s problems through lunching with different people. She made friends wherever she went, and kept friends whenever she moved on. She was a permanent reminder that we should strive to make a real difference to people’s lives if it is in our power.

One tiny example, after she was diagnosed with cancer she was outraged with the indignity of hospital gowns, that opened up the back. Never one to rant when she could make a difference she campaigned on this, publishing a lengthy article in the Herald.

We all have to figure out what we believe in, Jess is gone now. But she was so very alive when she was alive, she touched so many lives in such a positive way, she is a part of what is good about the future. We all exist in a wider context, touching lives and making a difference. We should all strive to fill that gap that only we can, making a difference through what we do, and how we do it. When you die you leave so little behind, but let it be good whatever it is.

run through the sequence

Keeping myself organised

To run through the sequence, will help put my thoughts in context.

I’ve always worked from to-do lists, but found writing a fresh list each day tiresome, as often it was entirely a carry forward of a previous list, but just with new stuff.

On reading Getting Things Done - I worked out a rough list of a dozen projects to record against. These were a mixed bag, from Garden, to Professional Development, and also including my Birthday wishlist. I allocated these projects a page each, and used film tags to provide a usable indexing.

I used a similar system at work.

For both I also used a daily A4 sheet as a shorter term to-do list. Lately I have split this into two columns,
quick stuff and prioritising
longer stuff

Anything not done within a day or two, can be transferred as a task into the proper GTD jotter. The GTD jotter is reviewed each week.

I have been running this system for about a month - does it work?

Well it does work upto a point. The daily to do list works more effectively. The longer term GTD jotter is starting to seem a little old. Stuff is initially entered when it seems like a good idea, obviously a month later, the precise idea might have evolved a bit, so it will be useful to revisit some of the pages. Maybe there is a need for something a step up from a weekly review, where tasks are reviewed more critically, and amended as necessary.

However the main impetus for change is that I am increasingly using Voodoopad on my computer. It is like some Borgesian concept of the ultimate jotter. It allows you to apply a sense of organisation, but also allows freedom and anarchy. I have gradually been putting more and more stuff into Voodoopad.

At present the index on the home page is

. AllAboutMe
. BirthdayWishlist
. BlogS
. BooksRead
. EmergencySurvival
. GTDSoftware
. LifeHack
. MacFormatArticles
. PersonalProductivity
. RandomStuff
. RegistrationCodes
. SelfSortBlog
. Trivia
. Voodoopad
. WebPosts

It is quite sweet that it assumes that you know an html home page is best named index.htm

I always find following a set format restrictive, that is why I prefer working to a more freeform style. A filofax is better than a diary. Voodoopad encourages this.

The ability to store everything to my ipod, also means that I can carry all this stuff about quite easily anyway.

It is easy enough to amend stuff on a computer, simply amend, it is easy to find, no need to rely on film tags, it is always legible.

My preference for using a jotter initially was based on the fact that software did not seem to offer substantial benefits that I could not obtain from using a jotter. A jotter was always physically accessible.

The use of Voodoopad changes this slightly. The software does appear to offer significant benefits, you can easily paste in text, images, links, even put in your own sketches.

The material is accessible from my ipod anytime, albeit not in an editable format.

The major problem is that I need to share a single computer with the rest of my family. Therefore I cannot simply noodle away on the computer entering stuff into voodoopad whenever I want to.

Increasingly the solution would appear to be buying another computer.

I always feel that keeping parallel records going that do exactly the same thing is a recipe for trouble. They always end up out of sync, and then what do you do, waste time trying to figure out which one is right. Much effort, to no useful end. Far easier to develop proper processes, such that you capture all the information in the same place.

I quite like the fact that I am evolving processes that work for me. Once I get things just right, I’ll doubtless lose interest, and it will just slip into the background as one of those things that I do without thinking.

water on water

Water on water, rain on the loch, a boat with two fishermen.

An odd week, I had a public holiday on Monday, and took a day off on Tuesday, and was out of the office on Thursday, so a bit away from the usual routine.

I don’t imagine my long weekend was very productive in any technical sense, but I just feel that I have been working so hard, for so long, that it is okay to indulge myself a bit. We headed out to a new garden centre, well the place is so big it is like a mall with a gardens theme. Not sure what I think of it, I don’t want it taking away trade from all the local small struggling quality businesses. We all headed into town, so that my daughters could get birthday presents for us, their parents. They are just a little too young to go off shopping on their own, but they are keen to get whatever flexibility they can.

Usual stacks of paperwork, both personal and community council.

Delighted that my new cordless mouse and external hard-drive arrived. Got them both set up easily enough. I’ll register SuperDuper and start regular back ups. The cordless mouse is a frivolous purchase, to bump up the AppleStore order enough to take advantage of a money off voucher. I know I need to be backing up, so good to get that task finally ticked off.

Also tinkering about with voodoopad. Initially the sheer plainness of it was disconcerting. But once you start adding stuff, the ability to create freeform lists is invaluable. You can nest material within material upto a certain point, but it becomes hopelessly confusing after a while. Voodoopad lets you simply create pages, and then these can be linked to from anywhere, and link to anywhere. The search facility is also pretty awesome. I am just adding stuff and adding stuff, and figuring out how to organise it as I go. I guess that it is always about 80% okay, but the time spent finessing out that last 20% would be wasted, so it is easier to just add yet more stuff that is 80% okay.

One of the things that I really picked up from GTD was this idea of universal capture of all your ideas. I’m filling up a little notebook full of random stuff, and this blog was initially used as a braindump. However I am now figuring out that these are different things. The blog is primarily a diary of what I am thinking about, the notebook is a braindump. The problem is that neither is a particularly useful end in themself. I therefore intend to capture all the stuff from my notebook into voodoopad, and incorporate my blog entries in as well.

The eventual idea is to use voodoopad as a single place to capture stuff, and organise it as I go. The more stuff is in voodoopad, the more it will be able to act as a resource of my ideas and material that I felt was worth capturing.

Of course there is always the issue of scale, for a few pages, voodoopad is pretty dull, plain vanilla, for a certain number of pages it is pretty cool, with search etc. I’m not sure if it will simply get too large and cumbersome to use at some point. For the lack of any way of knowing, I suppose I just need to try it out.

My girls have woken up, and will be nagging me to get on the computer to play Sketchfighter
http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/sketchfighter/

Next on the shopping list will doubtless be our second computer, doubtless followed by another...

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.