morning is broken - where did the sun go

Morning is broken - where did the sun go

After a very positive first week at my new job, the second week has been less successful. As the work area is awaiting an accomodation reorganisation, I have simply been hotdesking, finding an empty desk to work at. However where initially there was a desk handy for my colleagues that was available for three days a week, this is now no longer available, so I moved to a more remote desk, but that too will become unavailable on Monday, so I've no idea where I'll be sitting from then on.

There is also the issue of a couple of boxes, of the usual personal tat, that you lug about with you, which is not really an issue when you have a desk, but becomes an issue when you are deskless.

All in all, my choice of Christmas reading "Detox your Desk" now seems somewhat ironic.

Of course these things have a tendancy to turn on a sixpence, falling into place unexpectedly, but it is always a mistake to rely on providence.

My gut feeling at the moment, is just to let the powers that be know that I am finding this hotdesking a nuisance, and start looking at other posts. I don't really want to just go for any post, this current post would be a tough one to beat, but you cannot really strip out the hotdesking aspect. In theory things should sort out in March, but I don't get the impression that folk are talking about March, like they really believe it will be March.

At least flagging up the issue now has the benefits of clarity and straightforwardness. Being realistic offering someone a post and then expecting them to just work from whatever empty desk they can find, really is a pretty big ask. By tolerating the situation I run the risk of making it seem acceptable.

Not much else to report - still very dark all the time, which is a bit nightmarish - leave home in the dark, get home in the dark - I've seen the movies, nothing good ever happens at night.

I think I might try and work up a systematic list of migraine triggers to keep an eye on.

I have been playing around with dot mac, though I must confess that I am still struggling to get my head round what exactly it does. Granted it offers email, but then you can get that from google for nothing, the galleries and webpage just seem a bit tricksy. I remember coding stuff by hand, so I'm a bit resistant to any gee whizzery, if I don't know where the files are stored and the like. The backup is useful, but I'm not really sure how it works, or how I would actually use it if I needed to. I back up to external hard drives anyway, so it is not essential.

Anyway I suspect that I will keep the contract, simply for the sanity factor that it will synchonise my calendar and diary across my desktop and laptop computer. However I am quite sure that Apple could have built in such bluetooth synchonising functionality into a Mac without the need for dot mac, but chose not to, so they could charge for it. There are plentiful options to do a bluetooth synchronisation to a PDA device, so I cannot see the logic of not providing the functionality to actually synchronise to a computer.

The functionality available for Leopard and Tiger interfacing with dot mac differ slightly, making me slightly more befuddled, I might upgrade to Tiger for the desktop, but then again maybe not. All the peripherals work fine connected to the desktop, so probably best to let sleeping dogs lie. More ram would be useful though, when I feel brave about poking about the innards of my computers.

Still there is a long list of IT upgrades and purchases to look forward to. My Christmas spending spree was only just the beginning.

I've also bought a couple of the Clifford Fonts off of FontShop. Now I'm no Font purist, so I'll doubtless confuse fonts and faces. Anyway the whole world of fonts has apparently moved on since they came on sheets from Letraset, and even since they came on CDs, where you got all different sizes and styles for the same font.

The Clifford face is designed by Akira Kobayashi, and is a serif font, which has a nicely handcrafted, almost calligraphic quality. It does however confusingly come with various different variations. I first bought one of the three small caps versions, which has big capitals and little capitals, and is a pleasant variation on using bold all the time. Then I bought a matching normal font face. However you cannot simply bold these faces, as you normally can with electronic fonts. I'm not sure if this requires another font face.

Another confusing thing is that there are special characters like two F, basically a more attractive version of ff that respects the aesthetics of the two letters appearing together.

However I really don't know how you would make this special character appear when required, without going through the text and doing it manually.

I suspect that I am getting into high end typographic niceties here.

Suffice to say, they are exceptionally attractive fonts, though clearly not an essential item. I like just displaying them in large font sizes, just to admire the precise cut of the letters.

Hamlet in the Office

I'm not too sure how to organise this blog,

I have tended to just aggregate stuff together, running through whatever I have been upto in the week, with the odd stand-alone item.

I did start using the tags and categories, but I've rather given up on that as I don't particularly like how I was originally tagging and catagorising, but I might go back over the blogs, because I can see that using them properly does make a mass of blogs vastly more useful.

Anyway, running through the usual virtual standing items

IT
In my folly, I thought that getting an extra computer would make life simpler. It has in that I can now use the laptop as my personal computer, and get on it when I like. However version control, and all that is starting to be a major pain. I'm well covered for backing up, both computers are backed up to external hard drives, the desktop running tiger - using SuperDuper, and the laptop using leopard - using TimeMachine.

I think that I need to do some creative thinking on how to tackle this. I asked a friend who is pretty techie, and he suggested looking at it on an application basis, which seems pretty practical. Asking what folk did on a Forum, suggested that .mac be used to synchronise the usual addresses, and calendar stuff, with one computer simply being designated the main one, and stuff living there.

There seems to be a lot to be said for this approach, I've long taken the view that running parallel systems is just asking for trouble.

Accordingly, I have taken out a free trial of .mac, and I'll see how that goes. I suspect that I will simply treat my laptop as a slimmed down typing machine, and maybe use iDisk to share a few key documents. Though ideally each application will have a lead computer, that it is used on.

With applications like DevonthinkPro, there is scope to aggregate information together into a single database, rather than trying to mirror file structures.

Anyway, a little thinking required, but I think I am working out what the problems are, and possible solutions.

Work Personal
I have deliberately tagged this section as work/personal, because in a way they overlap. As I only talk about work in the most general of senses, it is more about me than anything else.

Anyway, new job, a sideways move to a new part of the office. I'm not sure if it is the fact that there are slightly more men than women, or just a different culture, or subject area, but the atmosphere does feel completely different. Not saying anything against where I was before, I liked them a lot, but I get the feeling that I'm going to enjoy where I am now. Folk seem positive and businesslike, just getting on with stuff.

It feels like a good move for me. I suppose I should really decide what I want to do, there is a bit of me that would like to run the entire office, while another part of me, would like to slope off and do other things. Maybe I should think just how ambitious I want to be. As I get more experience, and more work under my belt, the opportunities appear to get on.

Having already tagged this as work/personal, there is also my perennial dabbling, which I enjoy, though I do keep coming back to the thought that if you want something done, you ask a busy man. I'm certainly busy, though I do wonder that I'm over-stretching myself sometimes. Some interesting meetings coming up, and some useful work in hand.

LifeHack
I did make a concerted start on Detox Your Desk a few weeks back, and while it went splendidly as I was trying to clear my desk for my old job, on arriving at my new job, I've been hotdesking, so

Creative
One of the benefits of having the laptop, is that I can now spend more time typing and writing. I use a little policeman's notebook to capture ideas, and generally I seem to be coming up with ideas quicker than I am transcribing them to the computer, and transcribing them, quicker than I can work them up fully. However these things are like the tide going in and out, liable to shift. So I'll push on jotting down ideas, and typing them up and seeing where it all goes to.

repeating descending sounds

I had this terrible dream, it must be because I had seen a bit of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the day before, but I dreamt that the entire cast of the film were chasing after me, it was terrible, I must have been in a cold sweat, they were all running after me and trying to catch me, when suddenly I woke up and sat straight up, boy was I glad that I hadn't been caught by the oompah loompahs.

I've decided that there needs to be some more humour in this blog, so if I can think of any good jokes then I'll be sure to put them in.


One thing that I have been thinking about recently is that often poetry can have a sort of internal melody, if you take a line like
tyger tyger burning bright
and you check where your tongue is as you pronounce each syllable, then it is
high low, high low, high low, high

so even beyond the simple rhyme that you can have between lines, you can have an internal repetition.

Of course this probably quite a poor example, in that it repeats the same word twice, but one of my favourite lines of my own is
we passed quiet cities in the night
which I would translate as
middle low, high middle, high middle, high middle high

which is a sequence of repeating descending sounds.


I'll not elaborate any further as it does rather hurt my head to figure this out, and there is unfortunately no easy way to cheat and look it all up on the internet. Anyway it is something that I thought that it might be worth noting.


Going round the usual circuit of my favourite topics, I have been spending more time with Devonthink Pro, and experimenting with DevonAgent.

By way of clarification Devonthink Pro is difficult to describe, it could support a paperless office, or act as a personal wiki, or even just a repository for writing. It does actually combine a number of features from shareware products (do they still call them that) that I actually use, and have paid for,
for example
I could use it as a sort of wiki - like voodoopad
or to provide a whole screen solution for typing - like Writeroom.

On the other hand, DevonAgent will intelligently aggregate the results of internet searches from a number of search engines, weeding out duplications. It has a variety of different scripts for searching. It was dreadfully slow, and seemed rather pointless, but I figured out that I had it on the wrong one of these scripts, there is a pull down available at the start of the search box. Once fixed, it seemed to run just dandy. What with the recent MacSanta and sundry other online software purchases though, I'm trying to cut down, so I'll just let the very generous free tryout period for DevonAgent play out, and see if I still want it then. I have discovered that even if you don't actually cut down on your expenditure, if you can just manage to postpone it for a while, then it is almost as effective.

So I am now wondering whether I should spend my time aggregrating various writing into a Devonthink Pro database, rather than the current rather haphazard scheme where it is split up between various software applications.

However to be honest, I suspect that little of this stuff is so dazzzling that it worth adding yet more faffing about organising it, instead of just actually writing anything.

Accordingly, I'll probably just push on for the moment as is.

Work wise, I have been tidying up from my old job, ready for a new job. It is amazing how brutal one can be about handing over and deleting stuff when you know that you are moving on. The fact that we had a change of government has also meant that a lot of stuff from before May, is really of no use/interest any more.

Anyway, new job on Monday, so new challenges ahead. I guess that new challenges keep you young, or like new children, just perpetually knackered.

whither

Whither

whither technorati, whither google?
I used to rather enjoy typing in things that interested me into technorati and seeing what came up. However lately it seems to be filled with junk postings, and my own blog which might have appeared has not.

Like so many things, it seems to have failed to scale, or been a victim of its own success and been spammed out of usefulness. I'll maybe give it a few more tries, but it is at risk of going from one of my frequently used sites, to simply that I used to use.

Similarly things are increasingly difficult to actually find on google. There have been a few instances where I have failed to find what I'm looking for on google, despite no shortage of suggestions.

I have been experimenting with DevonAgent. I did download a whole slew of discounted software on the back of the MacSanta promotion. One of which was DevonThink Pro, however I did not get round to downloading DevonAgent. Basically DevonAgent is an enhanced web search engine. It does create a neat little graphic of interlinked themes, much like that electronic thesaurus that is around.

I'm not sure that it adds much value beyond google at the moment, but, I'll experiment a bit further and find out.

At the moment if I am doing a search for something, most of the time I can get by by using a site like Wikipedia, IMDB, or AMG.

Maybe we will need a new paradigm for internet searching, in case like technorati the old way of doing things has failed to scale or been spammed out of usefulness.

And while google is pretty much synonymous with internet searching, it has broadened its brand very substantially, I certainly use google mail, google maps, etc a lot, I maybe don't actually search as much as I used to. Well certainly not using google to search for everything.


While on the topic of 'whither', whither this blog.

the lesson with successful/popular blogs seems to be to do regular postings on a topic that will be of interest. So unless my thoughts are indeed a topic of interest to anyone, then this blog is likely to lurk around the blogosphere, and won't ever make me a fortune.

That said, I enjoy writing it, it is a useful discipline, and actually spending half an hour writing about something, certainly encourages you to think about it all the more. Blogging lets me develop and document my thinking. I guess then, that this year, 2008, will include more of the same, that is more stuff on completely different and random topics that catch my interest.

Last time I checked the google search box for the blog did not seem to work, but the one on the home page did, so something else to put on my tech support matching hat and anorak set for there then.

microtrends

Microtrends

I do enjoy the microtrends column that appears in the Times on Saturday, I have also just bought Microtrends by Mark J Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, which seems to be unrelated. Not only that, there is an article of microtrends predictions in yesterday's Times Magazine.

However not to be deterred, I would like to add my own tuppence worth.

I think that the advent of most people having decent - always on - broadband is creating a huge change in the way that the world works. I would hesitate to make any radical predictions, but these days, simply managing to discern what is actually happening out there at the moment requires a lot of insight.

Software can now do its own updating, virtually on the fly, checking for updates, and asking for permission to download them. These can be huge files. There is minimal distribution cost attached. So software can shift as a beta, and update to alpha without any huge downside.

Obviously we can all browse and download music, and all the physical record shops are on the way out. Other media are easily digitised, perhaps books less so than some others.

Broadcast media can now be downloaded or stored, and you can timeshift to avoid tiresome adverts. I would not want to be in the TV business trying to fund broadcasting through an ever shrinking part of the advertising cake.

Always on - also means that cloudware, having your applications on some remote server, makes sense, more sense than running them off your hard drive.

Similarly off site storage is possible, why back up to a hard drive, when you can put all your photos on Flickr, back up your calendar, and contacts to .mac.

We will increasingly be able to, and take for granted the ability to transfer and download vast amounts of data, and one effect of this will be that we become less aware of whether we are uploading or downloading, just as we are unaware how our computer is working, we will become unaware of where applications are, where bytes are stored, what processes are behind our interaction with IT.

There is increased scope for dumb terminals, these need not be computers, a mobile phone as dumb terminal, point of sale gadgets as dumb terminal. Things that we barely think of as IT as dumb terminals, information at bus stops, smart washing machines that will opportunistically use electricity when it is cheapest, fridges that advertise products based on your previous purchases and offer on line ordering.

As in the Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come...

new improved habits

A week of two halves.

At work all is a bit weird. I did not take any Christmas leave, so I am one of the forgotten few that is still traveling into work each week, getting a lunch and then traveling back. Well the train company certainly seems to have forgotten about us, this time of year it is still dark when I catch the train, so add in a howling gale, and late trains get to be a major annoyance. Twenty minutes late on Thursday and ten minutes late on Friday, which may not seem long, but when you are huddling there stamping your feet to keep warm, you do realise why retirement is just so appealing.

Similarly the office canteen seems to have forgotten that some of us are still in.

In terms of work, it is that odd time of year, when the email stops, the phone stops, and I rather suspect that when you take the stress out of the job, you realise just how dull much of it actually is. Anyway catching up with stuff, and being pretty productive. I've just got Detox Your Desk, hoping that it will teach me how to tame my intray, and bully my emails into submission. Probably not a bad time to think about such things. If it seems sensible I will try and implement when I get back to work, on the basis that things are working okay at the moment, but it is all a bit exhausting, and I suspect that a lot of that is down to my attitude rather than anything else.

I've also started eating a couple of pieces of fruit each day at work, which I'm enjoying.

I'll see how far into the new year I can get with my new improved habits.

At home, a bit of a high tech christmas, as pretty much all the presents I bought seemed to come from the Apple Store. Nonetheless they all seem to have gone down well. I could write a lot here, but often less is more, so I'll just mention one thing.

On Christmas day, I found myself sitting on the sofa, looking round my family, as they read, listened to an iPod, and played on the computer, and thought how lucky I was to share my life with them. Really in terms of the big things I have a great deal to be grateful for, and my family are right at the heart of that.

chaff

I have come to realise that defining much of what I actually do as Chaff is useful.

What is chaff?
Chaff is the stuff that you just sort of end up doing. It is generally not stuff that you really intend to do. You don't generally wake up in the morning wanting to do chaff.

Where does chaff come from?
Chaff in comes via all sorts of ways. It might just be little jobs around the house that need doing, mail that comes through the door, paperwork, or unexpected phone calls. But right now, most of all, chaff seems to come through the email.

Who wants you to spend time on chaff?
Well sometimes you want to do chaff, just to keep things ticking over, you need to get more paper for the printer, or answer the door for the postman. Often chaff is something that someone else wants you to do, it might be part of their grand masterplan, but generally it is not part of yours.

Is chaff unimportant then?
Well not really, it includes routine maintenance sort of stuff that you know needs done, and helping out other folk, and even just being a sociable person. Bump into someone and have a ten minute conversation you were not expecting, then that was chaff.

What is the problem with chaff then?
The problem is that unless you are careful, you easily end up spending all your time on chaff. You are bogged down with chaff before you leave home, commute in, chaff again, spend half the morning on endless emails, get interrupted and lose the plot, attend a meeting that seems pointless, commute home, big pile of spam and TV programmes that you end up watching every week but don't know why. All your day has been caught up with chaff, and then there is no time for what you deep down feel you ought to be doing.

So chaff is evil and we should avoid it?
No one can avoid chaff, it is a fact of life. You might be able to delegate it. If you did not do any chaff, then you would end up a jobless, unthinking robot with no friends.

How do you deal with chaff?
You need to find your own ways of dealing with chaff. For example by devoting fixed amounts of time to chaff, for example only check your email periodically and then only for a set amount of time. Knowing that it is time limited, encourages you to get through them quickly. Tackle a pile of chaff at the same time, rather than letting it interrupt you all the time. Don't be afraid to try different approaches to constraining your time spent on chaff.

One thing that I find works well for me, is when I draw up my task list for the day, I divide it into two columns, chaff, and everything else. So all the stuff that is chaff goes into the chaff column, and the rest goes into the other column. When doing work, I then try and alternate the different columns, so that a chaff task, is followed by something from the 'productive' column, and then back to the chaff. That way nothing completely grinds to a half.

Do you get extra time then?
You probably won't end up with extra time, but you will at least be taking control of the time that you do have. For example if you can ring fence time in your diary for something and are prepared to stick to it, then you can have that half day to read that important report you always meant to.

Why not skip chaff altogether?
You need to work with other people, if you simply ignore anything that does not fit in with your masterplan, you will end up starving and alone. However you can avoid chaff taking over your life. The important thing to realise is that how well you tackle chaff says very little about you, it is how you tackle the big issues that says something about you. Find ways of getting chaff out of the way as quickly as possible to let you devote your time and energy to the big stuff, rather than simply leaving the leftover time and energy to the big stuff, if you are lucky.

So remember chaff is not your friend, chaff makes you feel busy without being productive.

Bully chaff, treat it badly, take back control of your life.