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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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 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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03.06.08
Posted in business at 6:02 pm by coldclimate
Phoning somebody who’s left your office, about a minor point in a document they wrote which needs clarification, and finding out that they quit the whole company and really aren’t interested in talking to you. And it’s before 9:30am. And you’ve not had a coffee.
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03.03.08
Posted in business, interweb at 12:29 am by coldclimate
I love trustedplaces.com, and because I love it, its the only site I spend time being active in really. I’m a passive user of hundreds of sites and numerous emialing lists, but there are a couple of sites I actually contribute content to, and trustedplaces.com is one of them. The big question is why.
Well, it’s a bloody good service is one answer, and I’ve used it to find places to eat, but I must have uploaded more articles than I’ve used, possibly even more than I’ve read really.
The answer is simple. I have a vague and distant connection to it, and this makes it seem just a little bit more “mine”. I’ll happily tell people about it, recommend it, and when I go somewhere that I’ve found through it I try to make sure they know thats why I’m there.
How do I have this connection? Nothing really. I once went out to dinner with Randomcat Chris whom I’ve know a very long time. He in invited Gareth, who know in passing and have a huge amount of respect for. Gareth brought with him Ian Forester, who at the time I didn’t know, but I was amazed by backstage.bbc.co.uk, and it turned out Ian headed it up. I started reading Ian’s blog, which is excellently written and well thought out unlike many of my rambles, and he mentioned trustedplace.com. I wandered across it, thought it looked interesting, quite liked the idea of writing for a different audience (learn by doing I guess) and so I signed up. I’d been there all of about 2 minutes before I recognised a name, and found that Tom Reynolds who writes the brilliant Random Acts of Reality was also a member, and I was hooked.
Now this is all pretty patchy. I’ve never me Tom Reynolds. I’ve only met Ian once. I suspect it’s at least a year since I’ve seen Garath. Really, these are all pretty tenuous links, but they got me started.
What’s held my interest is the love and time that the sites founders clearly have. I emailed them when I found a minor bug, and they got back to me in hours to say thanks. They’ve asked me to go along to some of their social events, all of which I’ve managed to miss, but their asking increased my connection to the site. I’ve even “friended” them on facebook (bah! spit! more on this another time) but the key thing is I’ve built a relationship to the trustedplaces brand, and I have customer loyalty. There are lots of ratings sites out there, and I won’t touch them.
Thats the kind of marketing that can’t be bought. I takes time, dedication and the sort of investment that big companies just won’t make, and I suspect it’s the real power of scial networks, be they digital or physical.
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02.18.08
Posted in business, randomosity at 9:27 am by coldclimate
Sitting on the train this morning, reading the news and catching up on my inbox (pre-7:30am - get me), I looked up, and my mouth fell open, as I watched the firey peach ball of sun burning off the layer of mist which was caught agains the frozen ground. It was breathtaking, magnificent, almost too perfect really.
Right here, right now, I resolve to get up a little earlier each day, and to look up every so often from my work, because nothing else I am likely to see today will catch me so unawares.
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02.15.08
Posted in business, ideas at 5:20 pm by coldclimate
If you’re having trouble fitting the diagram onto a page, or to not let Visio mess up your alignments, then the solution you’re trying to design is too complex.
Paraphrased: If it wouldn’t fit on the back of a fag packet, you shouldn’t even think about it.
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02.13.08
Posted in business at 8:34 am by coldclimate
As I give what I’m doing with my life far too much through at the moment, I enjoyed both these articles, “Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world” and it’s follow “Open letter to employees across the corporate world“, both of which makes some very good points.
This morning I ache, I pain, my back hurts and I’m back on a train at 6:30am continuing the journey I abandoned at 8:30 last night because the trains were knackered. The only bonus is, I get to see an amazing sunrise from the train.
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01.28.08
Posted in business at 12:06 am by coldclimate
After a minor rant about the genius of Seth Godin, and how cynical mass markettign will never make effective use of toold such as Digg and Delicious if they do silly things such as pay idiotic companies to blog, Digg and submit to Furl every bloody article they write online, I lost control and splashed a fuck load of cash on Amazon buying books about permission marketting and the new economics of the internet.
Why oh why?? Whilst they are interesting in themselves, most of the books I’ve bought are written by people who give most of their best stuff away online anyway! I could have read a bunch of blog article archives and got much the same information!
Maybe that the point though? The product is great, and speaks for itself, so I actively go and buy it even though I could have it in another (all be it less useful) form, for free.
Imagine if other products were like that? If you could get sticky tape from WHSmiths for free from a big roll in the shop, would you buy the little take away rolls they were selling for profit, or would it have to be a remarkable product to make you spend the cash?
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01.12.08
Posted in business, randomosity at 12:56 am by coldclimate
I keep seeing adverts which are making great offers, mobile phone deals better than mine, bank accounts with higher interest rates, even home insurence which whoops mine. Home insurence is the most boring thing in the world, its so boring it makes watching Jeeves polish the gravel outside, so anything that gets me excited about home insurence must being properly exciting.
All of the offers above, which I saw in about 10 minutes of this evening tv, were only open to new customers. This makes perfect sense for many businesses, new customers bring in new money, and so long as you’re not completely screwing you existing customers too much, they probably won’t move on, so by offering short term deals which look very tasty you get some new blood, and so long as they don’t move on, your customer base is up.
The problem with this is two fold. Firstly, if your existing customers twig that you love them less that you love new blood, they’re going to be pissed off. They’ve given you X squillion pounds for donkey’s years and what do you do, you offer Joe Smo a better deal! They get pissed off, they spot another deal, and they move on.
Secondly, this process is getting easier! The Internet makes finding a better deal easier (moneysupermarket and moneysavingexpert are both well known), and your rivals are making it easier to switch. Halifax bank will apparently making moving banks as easy as one signiture, First Direct will even give you £100 to move to them.
So, if this cold war of cheap deals for new customers to steal them from your rivals continues, whats the problem? Your customers are getting a great new deal (this week) and movings so easy is not a problem for them to switch, and you’re getting new customers every day, and some of them won’t be bother to switch so hopefully you’re gaining right?
Wrong. Customer loyalty is worth so much more than the the sugar-high quick hit that are new customers. Loyal customers talk about you. Loyal customers will forgive you’re minor mistakes and if you handle them well they’ll even sing your praises. Loyal customers get their family to come to you. Loyal customers will drip feed you money over a massive period of time.
Why not offer your long term customers your better deals? I’m sure I’ve read of smaller banks only offering their higher interest bonds to existing customers, and O2 phone customers seem to be able to access deals that are advert, but apart from that I’ve not seen any thinking other than short term “smash and grab” techniques and this seems to be self defeating in my book.
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01.08.08
Posted in business, shiny, technology at 1:04 pm by coldclimate
In the last week I’ve come across some brilliant tools to make my digital life easier, so I throught I’d better share. The Refresh Newcastle group put me onto some, and Google did the rest as and when I found I needed something.
MAMP
I do most of my development work on a php/mySQL stack, and normally I do it here on coldclimate, which is all very well and good, but it has all the problems of working remotely. Latency, need to be online, slow debugging, the potencial for a rogue piece of sql to drop my comments table etc, so some local development area was needed. My iBook has a local copy of Apache, and PHP installed, but installing mySQL was a ball ache, and upgrading to php5 looked like a nightmare. Step in MAMP, and all in one install which is easy as pie to get going with, but where each item in your tech stack is separate, meaning it’s much much easier to install upgrades, downgrades or even have multiple installs at the same time. Out of the box, it works a treat. (Mac only kids)
CodeIgniter
Following on from discussions about Ajax development kits, I was pointed to CodeIgniter, which is a php framework. MVC based (as all good code is in my book), I was knocking up a blogging site from scratch inside an hour as a play thing. Impressive, and means you can stop rolling all your own libraries. (Cross Platform - php based)
Musorg
Having set about getting my music collection under control I needed a method for batch editing mp3’s ID3 tags. Under Windows I use Tag and Rename, and it’s ok, but slow. On my Mac I’d just use iTunes, except then I’d need to import all my stuff into iTunes etc. ball ache city. Step in Musorg, which lets you pick I directory, and easily edit all your tags in one go, or file by file, quickly and easily. Remember to hit save before moving directory though! Once all the tags are sorted, I can throw the files as the Synology Cube, and forget about them. (Mac only)
jQuery
Another framework, this time proving aJax functionality quickly and fairly easily. I’m yet to really get going with this yet, but I’m hoping to use it and CodeIgniter to get my next project up and running quickly. (Cross platform - browser based)
coComment
Another handy tool born out of dicussions on the Refresh mailing list. I woke up with an idea which I hadn’t the inclination nor talent to write, so posted it up to see if anybody fancied a go at it. Somebody pointed out it existed already (always a good sign). coComment is a Firefox plugin which keeps track of all the comment you post on blogs, so you don’t loose track of where you said something and makes finding peoples replies easier. Now coComment+Google reader +rss = perfection. (webbased)
Sharepoint
Yes, I hate virtually everything about Sharepoint’s ideology and methodology, but once I got down off my high horse and stopped trying to have full control of the code it generated, I was able to get so much more done. Much as I don’t like working in it, if you use it in a completely point and click manner (even abstaining for FrontPage if possible) with some good templates, somebody with no technical experience can have a website with document stores, chat rooms, message posting, blogs and a wiki up and running in a few hours, which is quite incredible really. Yes, the code it generates is vile, portable as a breezeblock, fugly as mutant pug dog and only works on IE with a fixed screen resolution, but in a corporate environment with browser monoculture and fixed machien builds, this doens’t matter. It just works. Scary. Getting off my high horse was like biting off my own tongue though. (Microsoft only)
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12.20.07
Posted in business, rant at 10:16 am by coldclimate
As I got off the tube to walk to my hotel this week, I passed a couple and their children buying Twix’s before getting the tube home. I think they’d probably been to the theater. I was staggering back form the office, it was 11 at night, and I realsed what a complete mess I looked. You can almost hear the conversions….
“See Johnty and Henry, when you grow older, and after you’ve passed a handful of A-levels, a degree, a masters and some industrial certificates, you to could be just as successful as this man! Look at his sallow skin, his sunken eyes, look see, the left one is all bloodyshot from sneezing because he’s ill but still at work!
You could spend hours trying to understand something thats intractable and complex with virtually no introduction to what it is, and then be told you’ll have to work right through Christmas and New Year, and that it is vitally urgent that it happens correctly first time. Imagine all that time you could spend away from your friends and family, and the hours on the train! Look look - I think he’s even got stress related excema on the backs of his hands! Wow - imagine that! Better than being a racing driver or a fireman hey!”
Fucking hell, how depressing.
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10.05.07
Posted in business, music at 2:09 pm by coldclimate
Aways visionaries in music (Kid A - idiocy that sounds perfect), Radiohead have released (or rahter are releasing - it’s on pre-order at the moment) their whole next album and you can pay what you like for the download. Lots of people have lots to say, and I find the idea that they are behind the times for this, maybe in the concept of a downloadable album, but not in the mpayment method surely?
Good luck to them, I paid £4, and it came to £4.45 once you included the card charge fee.
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Posted in business, music, rant at 11:17 am by coldclimate
It would appear the music industry is just not thinking, listening or doing anything more than bitching a sueing to try and maintain a business model thats just got working anymore. They’re even contradicting themselves now, for example check out these gems, only lines apart.
“when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed”, a far point , if you want music you should be paying for it in some form, and for that payment you should recieve something that you can use in multiple places in my book (aka. DRM free, or some form of open DRM).
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.”
NO NO NO - he bought that CD. He paid for it. You were not harmed in this process. If he rips it, and then does not distrobute it out to other people but just uses it for personal use in multiple places, you are not being harmed by this action!
Using this crazy logic, should I be expected to buy a different copy of each thing for the places I want to use it? I like music in my car, but it has a minidisc player (yes yes - I know, but I bought a car, not a stereo). Should I ignore the recordability of minidiscs and re-buy Nick Drakes back catalogue on mni-disc? Is it actually sold?
Should I re-buy all my Rolling Stones CDs on tape so I can play them in the kitchen when Im cooking? No, thats just plain stupid, much like this idiotic stance Sony BMG are taking.
Play fair, sell it for a fair price, in a fair format, so people will actually buy it and listen to it. Yes, people will probably distrobute it and other people might get it for free, but if you don’t stard doing this, you’re locked into an ever decreasing circle of lower sales, higher prices, more piracy, lower sales, continue until existing music industry is gone.
Personally, I like CDbaby’s mp3 downloads. A bit cheaper than the cd cost, open format, 90%+ of the money going to the artist, massive choice.
Why would I pay £15 for a cd only to be told I can only play it on my shelf bound stereo at home when I spend half my life onthe road. Idiots.
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10.02.07
Posted in business, rant, technology at 10:59 am by coldclimate
Between my Outlook install for work, and my gmail account which aggregates the mail from about 4 or 5 pop3 addresses, I was drowning in a sea of email. I got about a thousand messages a day, of which a good 800 were spam, and of the remaining 200 I probably only had to deal with about 20 of them right now, instantly, when they arrived. Ignoring my gmail situation (which I dealt with separately), I have finally reached a state of inbox zen, and I’m working far more efficiently for it. There are some useful tips in several articles, but here is my journey.
When you’re working in a Microsoft environment, each application tends to demand to have your attention every time something happens. Each time an email arrives a little box slides into view in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, with a helpful first line of the email and the senders name. You can’t help clicking on it, it’s just instinct. I’ve tried to ignore them and if I’m really really busy it works, but most of the time I’ll stop what I’m doing and flick back to Outlook and see. AIM is the same - each time a contact logged in, up comes the status box and a little tinny sound is played to make sure I know something has happened. AIM aside (because I turned off all of the attention seeking little blighters), these constant interruptions reduce your productivity both explicitly (by dragging you away to another application) and implicitly (by breaking your concentration). After seeing the improvements in moving to word processor (one that is not a DTP package in all but name), I was determined to do something about the curse of email.
First think is first - sort out my 1500+ message inbox. In Outlook I created a set of folders. One for the current project. One for time and expense reports. One for training, holidays and other such company admin. One for Promo email from external companies. One for personal banter. I then groups all of my inbox by subject header (going on the idea that threads of emails are generally on one subject) and cleared down my inbox. There’s no magic bullet, you’ve just got to put your head down and plow through the backlog. It took a couple of hours whilst some scripts were running on one of the servers.
Thats the history sorted out, now to deal with the present. I went through my newly filled folders and created rules for the big bunches of mails along the lines of “If it’s from them, put it here”, “if it’s got this in the subject, put it here”. They don’t need to be fine detail, you can refine it later. I did run up against the problem whereby Exchange server limits the number of rules you can have (or our exchange servers do - possibly this is a customised rule). Now most of the mails I receive get filed automatically.
Now, instead of watching my inbox, I have Outlook defaulting to the Unread Items smart-list (I’m sure there is a M$ term for it, but the Apple smart-list is the only one that comes to mind), and have added the col um “folder” to the display, removing the size column (you’ll never sort this by size) and ordering by date received. As email arrive they are filed, and I can see they are new. Occasionally Outlook defaults back to the inbox which is a pain because you miss the new emails that has been squirreled away, but it happens less and less. Maybe it was just me in old habits clicking on inbox.
At the end of the working day I take 10 minutes to go through all the messages in my inbox that didn’t get auto-filtered, and file them into the correct category. I’d probably create a few more rules if I had the option.
The last three of things I did have made the biggest difference. First I switched off the automatic highlighting, and thus the little pop-up boxes in the bottom right of the screen have fucked off forever. Now I check back to my email when I’m finished doing something, gone are the interruptions.
I switched my email editor away from being Word (bloatware if ever there was one) and then switched by mail format from HTML to RTF. Ideally I’d go for plain-text, but as most people don’t switch the default font from system, my emails arrive virtually unreadable for more of the company. By not having Word fire up each and ever time I wrote an email, I don’t have the pauses, hangups and memory overhead that comes with Word. I also don’t get the highlighting of incorrect spelling, which I liked, so i turned on “force spell-check before sending”. It’s a small price.
Lastly I increased the amount of time between automatic updates. When Outlook hangs, even briefly, all of the other M$ Office applications hang also, and even the briefest flicker of hesitation causes me to alt-tab to see if my machine has hung. The majority of these brief hangups seemed to me to be when n outlook scurried off and checked the exchange server over our slightly dodgy network, and either had to wait to poll a response or suddenly had to drag a large attachment across. By increasing the time between send/receive sweeps to a full 5 minutes (from 30 seconds) these glitches have all but vanished. I don’t know if Outlook is doing some stuff in the background (I doubt it) or if the reduced frequency simply means reducing the frequency of glitches in proportion, but I barely notice them.
So now I have achieve inbox zen. My inbox is always zero at the end of the day. Email no longer gets under my skin and breaks my concentration. My other applications seem to run a little happier, and all it took was breaking “doing it the way it is always done”. Not everybody I work with likes the new regime, and I’ve had several phone calls along the lines of “but I emailed it to you 5 minutes ago!” and if it really is important, I can hit send and receive and in it pops. Normally it’s already there, and I have just been too busy to see it, and if it’s really really important, they’ll call me to demand an answer.
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09.18.07
Posted in business, rant at 5:32 pm by coldclimate
Elitism is alive and well
One of the perks of my job is that just occasionally I get to travel first class on the British Train network. This afford plenty of opportunities for a spot of people watching.
First Class travel by train not like first class air travel. The cost is roughly double, rather than five or six times the cost, and thus the comparable increase in luxury is not that as seen with airlines. I’ve never flown first class, but by all accounts is falls into the “super luxury” category of life and thus possibly the massive mark up is justified. I suspect however it (the mark up) is there to engender the “fear of standard” as described so eloquently in The Undercover Economist.
First class trains are another matter. If you have a full price, completely flexible, expensive enough to make your heart falter ticket, you may use the first class lounge in the station. There are nice seats, free tea and coffee which aren’t bad at all, and no station announcements to wake you from your slumber, resulting in a very restful 40 minutes kip, and a missed train. Thanks God you had that fully flexible ticket hey!
Once aboard the train (the one after the one you planned to get), the seats are a little nicer, and theres a it more leg room, and the free tea and coffee continues (though this time at greatly reduced quality in my opinion). The carriages are a bit quieter, generally screaming children free, and if you keep your ears open you get to pick up some wonderful titbit’s from big companies. This afternoon I could have noted down the major players on the client and service provider for a nice juicy front-page-of-the-tabloids government project, the money involved and what a bunch of fairly junior employees thought of their clients. I didn’t note it, I couldn’t be bothered. You are generally spared the ear achingly pathetic tinny tones of be-tracksuited yoof playing piss-poor happy hardcore “remixes” of 1980’s TV theme tunes, which is a blessing worth paying the ticket price for alone in my book. Many times I’ve been driven almost to psychotic rage when the dulcet tones of Nightrider (Screaming Ecstasy Remix featuring DJ Dust and MC Fuckwit) melds into the throbbing beat of Smashface and Fucknuts genre challenging bangin’ house rework of Bagpuss’s “Fiddlestick and flap noodles”. Christ Almighty, even making up these shitty track names makes me angry (and laugh).
So as my train now glides tiltingly (yes, this is being written on the train right now) down through the country, whom am I sharing this journey with? Well, across from me is a lady in her middle 30’s, sporting a knitted waistcoat over a loud spotted brown silk top, a vacant smile on her face, eyebuds wedged deep into her ears. Maybe she is enjoying a little happy hardcore, but she is gracious enough to not play it through her speakers.
The rest of the carriage look a little like me, all be it me three years ago (less jaded, better groomed, louder and not yet beaten into submission by SLAs, client requests and contracts) or a little older. The older group split wonderfully into two groups, those who have achieved for the day and at 5pm can unfurl the paper and attempt the crossword, and those who must be either under the cosh or chasing promotion because they’ve printed enough documents to highlight with pen for the journey.
There are a scattering of people who are joining me in the frantic typing and editing, mostly using Word from what I can see. I’ve gone for the full-screen old-school editor JDarkRoom which is have been evangelizing about for a little while. It’s unlikely anybody will read over my shoulder, but not impossible.
The train company are providing free wireless, which I shall make use off in a little while to post this. I wonder how secure people are being? My copy of Ethereal is playing up and I don’t have my Mac about me to have a noisy through the traffic, which is a shame. You’d be amazed at what other corporate juicy nuggets and gems of private information float about the airwaves.
Right - I’m off to make use of the loos, leaving all my valuables in plain sight, safe in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to be lifted in this atmosphere of genteel business casual. I’ll lock my keyboard though, you never know what sneaky bastards are about 
Radio silence for a few days, I’m off to learn things, the likes of which will never impress at cocktail parties nor Christmas tables.
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08.31.07
Posted in business, ideas, technology at 9:42 am by coldclimate
I’m reading a really interesting article from changeThis and the following paragraph struck a note.
“Ever wonder why some solutions lack inspiration, imagination, and originality? It’s because we don’t think as deeply or as broadly as we must to solve the problem. We tell ourselves the optimal solution is a luxury. We throw some resources at the problem and move on. Or tweak a previous solution and fit it to the current situation. We favor implementation over incubation. Then we wonder why the reaction to our idea is ho-hum.”
Is this why big IT firms who rely on reuse (not good code reuse - total wholesale reuse of documentation, design, code, testing methods and financial agreements) end up building semi-customised systems where they have to bodge togehter a final solution that is not fit for purpose, elegent or (by the end) cheap? I suspect so.
Another interesting point it makes is “We’ll take whatever seems to meet the bare minimum requirement to achieve the goal. Then we stop looking for the best way to solve the problem. Essentially we say: “good enough.” ”
You could have lifted this from a course I was on a few years ago. Descoping, requirements filtering and catogorisation are some of the methods of cutting down the amount you have to do, and if you follow that up with tight deadlines and budgets what you’ll end up with is a solution which is “good enough”. eg. legally it does what you agreed (which is vastly reduced on the inital contract because of some excellent descoping and budget-linked change requests). What you don’t end up with is something which is “good”.
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08.09.07
Posted in business, rant at 11:05 am by coldclimate
This is a really interesting post. A share buy back and dividend package is a common thing in the market at the moment (as far as I understand), and they seem to be driven by people who ar eout to make money (hedge fund manager, share traders, Wall Street analysts, etc), and by people who earn commision (in effect, it’s actually a consultancy fee).
There are two really interesting phrases in there:
“We should have thrown the fellow out the window, along with his PowerPoint slides, but what happened was, my fellow board members and I were so busy deleting emails from our Blackberries that we just didn’t notice the last slide”. Electronic communication allows you to be contactable all the time. This massively reduces your productivity (though it does sometimes allow you to make better decisions), and in this case, it distracts you from what you should be doing, ijn this case, listening.
“So, in order to finally start getting things done instead of spending all day explaining to these hedge fund fellows and the Barking Seals on Wall Street why we weren’t “returning value to shareholders,” we decided to do the big buyback and the big dividend.” There’s a wonderful book by Bo Burlinghamabout companies that have decided to stay small, and retain the power, and I think this is exactly why. Hedge funds seems to act as a destabalising factor in the markets, because they are managed (often very aggressively) to make sure they make money even if they fuck other things in the market (in this case, the company that they pushed into the share buy back).
One last thing to rememeber - consultancies are not doing you a favour - they make money too. A lot of money. And it’s got to come from somewhere. “Adding value” is one of those wonderful phrases which is actually very hard to explain, and hence, beloved by we consultants.
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08.07.07
Posted in business, technology at 11:38 am by coldclimate
I work in a technical consultnacy*. Often I am frustrated by our apparent lack of technical staff, and the way we do business. This is a very common thing I imagine. These three articles make for interesting reason. The first is very simalar to Joel On Softwares book about how to hire the right technical people. The pair of FAQ articles are both funny and highly informative. If you’re a geek working in a big corporation, or a manager in a big corporation who is frustrated by geeks, I suggest you read them both.
A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality is an excellent little read. It’s focussed on Perl, which isn’t for everybody, but I beleive the principles apply to all languages (in fact, as it points out, good programmers are language independent anyway).
The Hacker FAQ is a guide to working with geeks for managers. Good geeks are an excellent resource and will make you a stack of money, but they (we) don’t work in the same way as accountants, planners, HR, testers or many other staff. Read this, and understand why and how best to cope with this.
The Manager FAQ is for geeks and aims to explain why that irritating tosser in a suit (me) lurks over your shoulder and demands you work even harder when you’re clearly sorting out somebody elses crap.
As you might have noticed I consider myself to have a foot in both camps. I beleive this might be handy in the future.
(* honestly I do! My inability to spell does not hinder this though it is sometime a problem. I don’t spell check blog posts because I write them in a free-flowing and dynamic style. See!)
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07.18.07
Posted in business, technology at 2:50 pm by coldclimate
This little cartoon makes an excellent point, if you’re going to have a brilliant product, don’t let a silly thing that can easily be changed get in the way.
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