05.08.08
Posted in interweb at 10:24 pm by coldclimate
watching sopranos, no time to write, or read, so dumping links.
Wuffle - the thing that drives companies with mojo
Four words that drive Web2.0 companies (and I would argue, every great company)
Four more words that drive great companies
7 keys to graphic design on the cheap, because if you’ve getting started, you shouldn’t be giving other people money.
Which comes first, success or happyness? Much like so many things, you have to start one, and grow the other. They are not serial things.
And to finish off with a quote “you got friends, you got options. dont let nobody say you dont got options” - Tony Soprano.
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05.07.08
Posted in life at 9:28 pm by coldclimate
…by stopping thing annoy you.
Learn to drink your coffee and black or white and cold or hot, and life gets a little bit less irritating. Learning to drink your beer warm and flat is a step too far however.
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04.30.08
Posted in business, life at 8:04 am by coldclimate
Well, I was goign to post about Seth Godin’s interestin Signal V’s Noise post (which is nothing to do with the excellent Signal V’s Noise blog) but then realised that I had nothing more to add to it. He’s right, spam is drowning the world (and totally and completely ineffecive for legal transactions), and with the ease of productions such as delicious, blogger, flickr, twitter, tumblr and facebook, getting you badly thought through and poorly spelled “content” out there is so easy every moron can (and does) do it. Sadly this includes me. Especially the bit about spelling.
I’ve been thinking a lot about life and work and technology (and using the word and repeatedly) for a few months now, and it occurs to me that I am too contactable.
The majority of the contact that comes through these channels is rubbish. I get a couple of personal emails a week, but (work excluded) I get a hundred emails a day. I get a couple of hundred emails a day through work, but of those I actually need to do something with about 15. I am on text message distrobution lists for work related stuff virtually every weekend, yet I have only actually got invovled once in the last few months, all the rest of the time I am mearly on edge. My RSS feed reader (Google Reader) has over a hundred feeds pouring into it, yet I end up clicking “mark as read” to a hundred unread items a couple of times a day.
With mobile email and blackberry-a-likes becoming standard in work life now, virtually everybody is contactable all the time. I have to give out my mobile number (which is no major problem), but once people start ringing you at 9pm because “it’s urgent”, this is a problem. Best advice I’ve been given in the IT inducstry came from a dope smoking ex-folk singer who was a configuration management specialist: “Do the important, not the urgent”, meaning “if you stay reactive you’ll always be battling fires”.
All of noise is starting to drive people mad. Last night a team mate sent out an email at 8pm, our boss replied at 11:30pm, and I replied at 5:45am. This is not about an emergency, or even something really important, it was about the wording of a status report. Yep, you read right. Lunacy. We’re running a 24/7 team, except without shifts or geo-colocation.
So I’m going to make myself less contactable. I’ve been de-cluttering my life for a few weeks, deleting contacts in my mobile I never ring, removing RSS feeds, dumping massive swaiths of bookmarks and one-liner files, and this is helping to reduce the inflow of information. Now I need to reclaim the time.
Possibly a separate work movile is a start, or a whitelisting feature (eg. my phone will only ring if you are a friend, or you go stright to answerphone). Then a bit of inbox filtering. If you cc me in, I’ll only be reading it once a day, when I check the cc box. With a little judicious labelling I should be able to mark up those that are actually importnat.
By de-marking my time I’m hoping to regain some sanity.
Some people would tell me (and have done) that this is “the right thing” and that work “can’t tell you to do this stuff” (eg. work all hours and be contactable at the weekends), because of some form of sense of whats right (I wrote baout that a little while ago but can’t find it to link to it), but I think you have to have gone through the phase of being completely connected and the work that goes with it to then make the decision to stop. Just dismissing it out of hand as daft proves nothing, but going through the it and deciding it’s not for you is another mattter.
Now (as MSN springs into life, and at 7:22 another team mate and I discuss how early we can ring somebody), I just need to implement it, and then work out a way to stay as productive.
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04.28.08
Posted in technology at 10:00 pm by coldclimate
Tonight I finally got all my favorite technologies talking to one another and now when i wave my wiiMote about in the air, little lights in my room get brighter or dimmer (and when I work out how to multiplex the serial signals you’ll be able to change which lights are on so change the colour!).
When I get a chance I’ll write it up.
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04.26.08
Posted in randomosity at 7:42 am by coldclimate
Rest in Peace Humph, I shall miss you. I never did get a chance to see you play at the Bulls Head, and I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue won’t ever be the same.
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04.21.08
Posted in rant at 8:58 pm by coldclimate
I hate this sofa. I hate everything about it.
It’s a sleek, low grey number, topped with several black leather cushions. Looks brilliant, doesn’t bloody work.
The it’s so low, when you sit on it, your knees come up round your ears, and the depth of the seat front to back is clearly designer for a giant with the fremour abuot 4 feet long. Your arse end up only inches above your ankles vertically, but your knees aren’t actually over the front of the seat so your feet dangle uselessly until they go numb.
Yout can’t curl up on it sideways either, because it’s missing one end, and the material is slippy enough to mean you slowly side horizontal. If you pile the oh-so-manly black leather cushions up they slide off one another like a stack of well oiled ducks.
You can’t even sleep on the fucker - it’s just not long enough and you hang off the open end. If you had an arm or side on that you could curl into it and sleep (all be it a bit crunched up), but that missing end gets you again.
Basically, it was clearly designer by a salesman who thought he knew whaty people wanted, or my a very tall or very small designer, who had no eyes and wears velco clothes. Wankers.
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04.20.08
Posted in ideas at 3:43 pm by coldclimate
TV has lots of good stuff on it, but it has huge amounts of trash too. Virtually everything comes down to the lowest common denominator, which given some of the truely horrific thing syou here people coming out with, is pretty low.
Now, if I made TV, things would be very different, oh yes…
Firstly these giant adverts for Andrew Lloyd Webbers latest production, also known as I’d Do Anything and it’s ilk. A bunch of fairy pretty, fairy talented ladies singing and being set “challenges”, the public then vote or something, and some judges make some comments. Eventually one of them is chosen, and ALW and co go on to have a west end hit with the audience being one third old ladies, old third over excited children and one third horny father stating at the pretty that got voted in (and taking along their children). One giant adverts.
Now if I ran this thing, it would be different. Firstly, they’re have to do everything that actors have to put up with. They’re have to live in shit cheap accommodation, and eat at antisocial hours. They’re have to do several performances with raging hangovers, and paint the set themselves.
And the judges, they’re be history, or rather they would be very different. Gone would be that bloke form Torchwood, Denise van Whatsit and the bloke who play Dame Edna. In their place would be the top selection of Jeromy Clarkson (the voice of reason for such matters), Clare Balding from the racing, John McCririck and in place of lloyd webber i’d have Jack Dee. That would just about sort it. Oh - and the telephone voting would be gone, you’d only be allowed to vote if you were a registered voter for the General Elections (and you’d have to go to go to a polling station just like the GE too). Much better.
Next up - Shipwrecked. 40 teenagers on an island, full of booze and makeup and being set “tasks” and having to “survive on their own” etc etc. More fake that Jordons tits or the super cheap choclate you get in Christmas decorations.
My Shipwrecked, that would be another matter. I’d load up the place with the 40 brats, all excited that they get to become stars on TV etc etc, and I’d ditch it at sea half a mile off the island. When they swam ashore they’d find some tarpaulins, boxes of matches, machettes, rope and maybe their first night’s meal. Then we’d watch them all from a distance through long lenses as they waited for rescue and had to survive. Lord of the Flies all over again. Chloe, Harry and Antwon wouldn’t have a clue what had hit them, it would be ace.
Big Brother - so many improvements could be made. Every little turd who goes on it now wants to launch their career, become a super star, be famous etc etc etc, but when questioned they will say it’s all about expressing themselves, an interesting experiment in learning to live with others etc etc etc. blah blah blah.
So, my big brother, they’d all troup into the house, and get locked in. Every week one would be removed at random, and when they walked out of the door expecting baying crowds and Devina meeting them there would be… fuck all! No cameras would have been watching them, no crowds following them on telly, nothing. As the door closed behind them there’s be a taxi to the nearest tube stop and a cheque for the minimum wage for 8 hours every day they were in there. They’d had an interesting experiment, learned a lot about themsleves, and we’d had plenty of time to watch something worth while.
I could go on, but I guess you get the idea. Now vote for me.
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04.17.08
Posted in life at 10:00 am by coldclimate
I’m trying to get into a new routine in the morning. I am traditionally a night owl and slug-a-bed, but I’m trying to affect a change. Gone are the days (erm, nights) of staying up until 2 am buggering about with stuff followed by dragging my grumpy bum out of bed at 8am to struggle into work, fueled by caffine and 10am bacon sandwiches, being grumpy all day and only getting productive at 9pm.
Firstly, I’m getting out of bed when my alarm goes off. I used to use 2 alarms, the radio coming on (BBC radio4) to “warm me up” and then my mobile phone’s harsh and abrasive beeping to actually drag me out of bed 15 minutes later. The problem being that I woke up when the radio went off, and then dozed until the phone went off. This method taught me how to doze through alarms. Now I have one alarm - the very harsh and rasping beep of my alarm clock, and once it goes off I have to get out of bed ot turn it off (it’s on the other side of the room). I’ve started not closing my curtains at night so that the rising sun “warms me up” to getting out of bed.
Once I’m out of my pit I then make myself get out of the bedroom and go for a shower, rather than risk “just laying down for a moment” and thus sleeping for another hour.
I’m also getting up earlier. By setting my alarm 15 minutes earlier ever week I should have time to get use to it, and also me getting up an hour earlier each month. I don’t know how early I’ll push it, but 6am seems like a good time. The page that got me motivated to start makign the most of my day is written by a man who is up and out by 4:30am, but I think that’s a bit extream for me. He loves sunrises, I do too, but not that much.
And what do I do with all this extra time I now have? Well, not a lot just yet. I have a cup of coffee and flick through the over night emails. This morning I upgraded a wordpress plugin and glaced my work email because stuff was going on late at night. If I get super motivated, I might start putting my shoes on and going out for a walk (a pre-emptive strike on running) or take the camera out to photograph the world before it gets up. What I won’t be doing is going back to bed to sleep through the sunniest, quietest bit of the day.
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04.14.08
Posted in food, randomosity at 11:34 pm by coldclimate
Put a bottle of cheap dark rum in the freezer. The next day, mix 5 parts fiery ginger beer (not ale), 2 parts dark rum, and one part fresh lime juice. Pour over ice. Slip. Shout Yaaarrrgh and stomp round in circles!
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04.13.08
Posted in randomosity at 11:10 pm by coldclimate
I am a bit of a data whore. I want to know where I’ve been, what I’ve listened to (via last.fm), what I’ve read (via LibraryThing), and if I could record my thoughts (Twitter maybe?) so I could read then again later (especially when I was sober again), I would do.
What I could really do with is LibraryThing for wine. WineThing :) Yes, that is a great idea. Somebody go make it now!
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Posted in interweb at 3:32 pm by coldclimate
Yes, I’m excited by the idea of a new Bond film (the last one being a great film), but the title, well, it leaves me cold. Luckily there’s a wee man called Martin, normally accompanied by an accordion, who has recorded a rather good theme tune. Especially the bit about teaming up with Reg Hollis. Thats genius.
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04.03.08
Posted in ideas at 5:08 pm by coldclimate
I’m having a slow day, lacking motivation or energy, and my eyelids feel heavy, so the only answer so coffee. Black Crack in liquid form, possibly only trumped by redbul rip offs from Tescos in potency.
As I made the coffee I notice quite how perfect the small milk containers all. These teeny tiny pots (they must have a name), fit into the palm of your hand and hold a tablespoon full of milk, you’ve probably used them a hundred times and never looked. I certainly hadn’t. They are masterpieces of design.
The plastic body must be made out of a piece of thin plastic that starts life as an oddly shaped circle (a circle with a child circle tagged on the side I guess), probably about the size of a 2p coin. This is then extruded to form incredibly thin walls, which despite being thin enough to see the shadow of your finger inside, hold in the pressure of me squeezing the little pot in an ill-advised mid-office experiment.
The walls are also ridged, a tiny detail but which means the pots and so much more easily gripped. They don’t rotate in your fingers, and if they are cold and have condensation on (which they will because you wave them above our cup of hot water) they remain very grippable. I doubt the fins add enough surface area to radiate heat more easily, but it’s not impossible.
Where the body of the pot joining the tab which you will hold to open it, it flairs out, forming a teeny tiny spout. This makes pouring far more easy, and means that the shape of the foil lid can’t be circular but instead has a natural “tab”. This means that you automatically grab the tab to open it, and pour it using the spout, completely without noticing .
The foil lid is equally clever. To start with it’s not foil, it’s very thin plastic. Thus it won’t degrade like foil, or be as easily dented or damaged. It is however silver coloured on the underside, to remind you of the foil that was and convey a sense of normality. It’s glued to the top (I think), thought it might have been sealed in place with a quick blast of heat to melt it to the plastic pot. It remains however very easy to pull off, and another benefit of not being foil - it doesn’t tear and splinter like metal yoghurt port lids. The tip of the lid which protrudes out of the circular top and onto the tab of the tub is however not glued down, in fact it’s curving very slightly up because of the tension. You can’t help but use this bit to open it. Amazing!
So this little pot of milk has so clearly been designed (and redesigned) so as to be instantly usable. The amount of airline pots I’ve struggled to get into (and ended up stabbing at ineffectually with the plastic knife) is unreal, but with a few simple changed, this pot just works.
If only software was the same, so intuitive.
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Posted in ideas, technology at 2:15 pm by coldclimate
So today another good idea got made into something. With everything ever for sale being available on the web, the price wars were always going to happen, and in some ways we’ve moved past them (I’ll buy from Amazon because it’s easy even if Jeff’s Mega Book World is a pound cheaper). Once you go beyond the rock bottom prices, the more interesting things include sales, and offers. I linked to a paper which found bargins on Amazon a while ago and today (via the magic of Twitter’s public timeline) I found Buy it Later, a Firefox plugin which lets you maintain a hotlist of stuff you’re interested in, and then messages you (emails or tweets) when they drop in price, or come back into stock.
I might sign up. I should sign up. I should get out of the habbit of buying books one at a time as I hear abuot them, and wang them all on a list like this instead.
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04.01.08
Posted in randomosity at 8:52 pm by coldclimate
What a fantastic little article is What every American should know about the Middle East. This will only take you 2 minutes to read (really) and I guarentee that you will learn something (if I know my demographic). I was embarrassed at how I knew the basics, but missed a few critial bits.
Go in, click through, see if you’re not enlightened.
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03.27.08
Posted in randomosity at 11:36 pm by coldclimate
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true” : Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Posted in randomosity at 9:28 pm by coldclimate
Next heated meeting I have I’m rolling out…
“Take it easy. We’re not making a Western here”
Thank you The Sopranos.
A few more I might just throw out there
Tony: Think Christopher, think! The big f**king picture, huh…
“I don’t understand”
“Thats because I wasn’t fucking talking to you”
“She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu.”
“They fucked him so had, he had two ass holes when they buried him…”
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03.26.08
Posted in business, technology at 11:23 pm by coldclimate
My brain (and my rss feeds ) has been going into overdrive today.
Managing your time thought your calendar, diffiuclt to switch over to one imagines. Only works if people don’t expect instant responces to emails.
An interesting paradigm shift, not having a bad table, rather than having people thing ill of you (and websites having no excuse for the “bad table”).
Building an entire work life by dealing with crisises could be highly profitable, but might well not be doing what youy want or taking you where you want? If you can keep on top of the stress levels, there’s a lot of jobs to be had, but are the rewards for being the person who sorts out the root cause of the fires bigger? Maybe.
Hyperconnectedness V’s The danger of easy access, are these two sides of the same coin? Maybe twitters one-way-ness is the only reason it’s not a complete killer (and hasn’t caught on the way IM has to run large projects). Other people seem to be having the same thoughts.
The more I hear about muxtapes, the more I hear about muxtapes. muxtapes is everywhere. Internet makes tipping easier, if the product is good, and this reduces the need for advertising, which is can be evil. Speaking of evil marketting, I hovered over a targetted advert today on a site of which I am a memeber and noticed that embedded in the url was my name, my age, my sex, the last thing I searched for and the site this advert was being placed on. I’m sure thats breaking UK data protection acts, be aside, it gave me an evil idea.
A simple shell script calling curl repeatedly, and when they analyse their stats, they’ll find lots of people looking for unrelated subject (mostly very rude) with very silly names (all very rude) clicking on their adverts on some very rude sites (where they’re probably hoping their adverts are being placed). Karma?
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03.21.08
Posted in ideas at 10:29 pm by coldclimate
I spent a lot of time (at the moment) thinking about how I think, and how I work, and how I can lear to think and work more efficiently. I really liked the advice on this list, called appropriately, how to think.
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Posted in shiny, technology at 7:04 pm by coldclimate
I bought a wiiMote a little while ago because, well, they looked fun. No other real reason. Here’s how I got it up and running with my favorite programming environment, processing.org
Firstly, you need to make your laptop have “blue teeth” luckily my iBook came with these coloured nashers, which I’ve not really used and now wouldn’t be without. The wiiMote talks via these blue teeth to the iBook, so long as it has something to connect to.
Step in Darwiin, which is a wiiMote client. Install it, turn on the teeth, and press 1 and 2 togehter on the wiiMote and it just connects. Wave the wiiMote around in the air and you’ll see the wavey coloured lines representing it’s 3D velocity. It just works out of the box, which is nice.
There is a Darwiin version which rolls in OSC. OpenSoundControl is a protocol for communicating with devices. One nice feature is communication via TCP/IP, so a device can be connected to one machine and controlling another.
This also means that if you get a library that talks OSC, it can communicate with devices it cannot natively speak to, and such is the way with processing. Get the OSCP5 library and processing can now commuicate with Darwiin.
So far so good. Add in the WiiController class (included in the oscp5 download), and you’re ready to rock (and roll, lets not forget pitch control). Now you can access what the wiiMote is doing simply with wiiController.x, wiiController.y, and wiiController.pitch.
This was a good start, but moving a dot around the screen wasn’t that exciting. Poing however, now there is an adrenaline rush. So, crack open the collision detection, switch all the mouseY’s for wiiController.pitch (with a scaling factor) and bobs you uncle, you have wiiPong.
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Posted in business, rant at 6:27 pm by coldclimate
I think everybody agrees that reuse is a good idea generally. Reusing
glass jam jars is vastly more efficient that recycling them into new
jars. Reusable templates are much more efficient that drawing the
damned thing ever time. Reusing code libraries is the only way the
majority of programs could ever be created. There are however limits.
When reviewing documentation of formal processes, be that performance
testing approaches, or client bids, or upgrade instructions it is
obvious many of them are reused from other projects. His is not a bad
thing, after all if you had to recreate these from scratch every time,
you’d spend three quarters of it re-inventing the wheel, re-finding the
things which caused you problems last time, but reused and reworked
documents have some major problems, the majority of which appear because
the document is a reused, recycled, reworked and reissued version of a
document which has been reused, recycled, reworked and reissued which
is a.. you get the message. Like a copy of a copy of a VHS tape, each
re-iteration introduces problems, not removes them.
Each iteration introduces document creep. Things are not removed
because “they were there already, and it must be for a reason, so we’ll
need one too” rather than being thought about logically. Each project
has it’s own quirks and just because a previous project manager wanted a
break down of the risk profile in it (because they understood that area
and wanted to feel like they were really adding some solid content)
doesn’t mean your document needs on necessarily.
Joel On Software has an excellent article about this explaining that
ever Microsoft document had an Internet section, because one of them
once did (cant find the damned link!). As well as not removing things, everybody adds something.
This is because otherwise they don’t feel like they’ve bought into this
document, it’s not really theirs until they’ve added the section about
refactoring SQL to run more efficiently, or the best method for counting
the spiders using toothpicks, or whatever their specialist subject is,
and thus the document gets a little bit bigger and a little bit less
manageable.
The other thing that people never ever want to remove, are the reviewers
and people who need to sign a document off. Often these people are very
senior, and really, honestly, they are not going to read it, so they get
somebody who works for them to be on the list as well and so on and so
forth. Nobody will ever remove a reviewer or signee (I’m not sure this
is a real word), for fear of the “Why the hell didn’t I see this
before!” conversation that will take place if something goes wrong. The
problem with this is too fold.
Firstly, it gets to be virtually impossible to get the documents
reviewed and signed off, because all 20 people who review it won’t
finish it on time, and then once you finally work in the 87,746 changes
they suggest (20,341 of which will be the same) you’ll never get to 47
senior people on the list to sign it off. Why, because they’ve not read
it. Why have they not read it brings me onto the second reason why this
is bad.
Secondly, people end up completely swamped. With everybody producing
documents wanting everybody else to review it and sign it off, people
stop doing it. They delegate it if they can, or they skim read it and
miss the critical points. They are snowed under with stuff, the content
of which they are interested in 6% of. There’s a greats story about
NASA crashing a probe into Mars which was caused by one group working in
inches and the other in metric units. Somebody actually had an email
about this in their inbox, but they missed it because it was 40 feet
down.
So how do you get round this? What’s the solution? Here’s what I
recommend.
- Do re-use documentation. Get a big stack of examples, not just one, and slice them up into bits.
- Work out which bits you need. Go back to first principles if you have to (I always fall back to who, what, where, when, why and how).
- Write a framework. If you are having to juggle layouts to get things to fit neatly, you’ve probably got too much in there (see my post on implicit feedback loops in PowerPoint)
- Do not review by committee. Get individual sections reviewed by single people who understand that area. Get a peer to review it over all to make sure the individual bits hang together.
- Consult people before picking a way forward, if the review is the first time they see it they will go in cold and be surprised by everything they don’t understand,
- Have a single overall reviewer. They need to be the person that is going to have to do this stuff or be responsible for it.
- Have a single overall sign off person, they might then delegate it, but do not add their delegate to the list. If Jeff nominates Steve to review it on his behalf, Jeff will sign if Steve does. So why have both? If Steve isn’t senior enough to be seen to shoulder the responsibility, just have Jeff (who’ll still get Steve to read it). If Steve is senior enough, why bother with Jeff.
- Be vicious with what you write. A diagram can save hundreds of words, if it’s the right diagram.
- Don’t add content just because you feel you should. Include what is needed eg. The approach, the steps to do it, the justification and the timescales. You do not need to include, other than as a single line, all the other options you discarded.
- Put a summary at the beginning. Each section of the document should be summerisable into a couple sentences. Having this allows a super busy person to glace it and see the things that they needed to glean from the 40 pages of fine detail included later. A 150 line details plan can be turned into “Starting on 19 of May, finishing on 25th of May, 5 daily check points, each server being brought online one at a time, approximately 2 every day, and this will give enough information to point out that there is a strike on the 20th.
Who knows if this works, but once you’ve staggered through some of the 40 pages documents which say absolutely nothing, you’ll give anything a try.
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