I am perpetually in a state of getting into some sort of routine, and then changing it. I will continue with the habit of putting a list of topics at the head of my blog, and then writing them up.

I have however stopped updating my desktop pictures weekly. My home computer is stuck on one of the photos of some japanese bowls, as is my home screen saver. At work I simply pull a fresh image off my website.

1 developments at work - moving around versus staying, and end to acting up
2 developments at home - more jam making
3 working on my website
4 comments on rapidweaver and forum based support
5 anything else that comes to mind, while typing up the above stuff

1 developments at work - moving around versus staying, and end to acting up - chatting to my current line manager about the benefits of staying in post for a while as opposed to moving around. Traditionally high flyers tended to move a lot, and this meant that other people tended to copy them, if they were ambitious. However people outwith the organisation hate this. It is difficult enough to network anyway, without all your contacts moving every five minutes, and then needing to get the new people upto speed on everything, all over again. In addition, if you only expect to be in post for a year or two at most, you approach it in a much different way, from if you expect to still be there to sort out any corner cutting or burnt bridges at the end of the day. You also realise that the contact you have are essential, and whatever you think of them personally, you need to make the relationships work, rather than just cherry picking the ones you think are most productive.

I have been in the same post for three years, but it has been subject to a lot of change, and although I have been working with the same people, largely, the processes involved have changed a lot. So I have probably had the best of both worlds, the benefits of staying in post, and getting a deeper and better understanding, as well as better links to key people, combined with continuing to learn new skills. I think that this is actually a much better model for development, than simply encouraging frenetic movement all over the place.

It also looks like my short period of running the section might be coming to an end, mixed feelings on that. However, my effective line management is so senior at the moment, that it is difficult to get them to sign off on stuff, so getting someone in who is only slightly more senior than me, and more focussed, should help move things along more briskly, which is the thing that keeps me awake at night (metaphorically speaking). As ever, I'll need to see how things pan out.


2 developments at home - more jam making - the house has been a little jam factory again this week. My wife has been working on jams and preserves, including red onion marmalade! Unfortunately I did not plant any red onions this year, so my wife had to buy them, but she has been able to make use of various fruits from my garden in small quantities, rhubarb and loganberry are relatively plentiful, as as gooseberries. For a garden, the best things to grow, are those that are

very forgiving with when you pick them
redcurrents, rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrents
or keep incredibly well
potatoes, apples, onions
or are just so damn nice
strawberries

However with time, it is easy enough to just fill your garden with a bit of everything, giving yourself a big always fresh outdoor larder.

3 Working on my website - I have really been enjoying getting back into working on my website, so although there was doubtless lots else to do yesterday, I spent a fair bit of time working on the website, in so far as I spent time doing anything much. Working on the website could easily become a full time activity, not that it is all that time consuming, but the principle of shearing layers applies, you can easily tackle the work in layers, as you add more, fresh issues and complexities present themselves. I was keen to add a search facility to the website, as it is easy enough for me to search material on my own computer, it would be useful to ensure that there was similar functionality on the website itself. Thinking about it, it was clear that adding the code for google to do a site search, was technically straightforward, albeit beyond my ken. Sure enough google supplies the appropriate tools to generate some snippets of code for insertion on your website, which I duly did. I did need to do a couple of amendments
- to shorten the length of the search box, now at 22 - if you want to check the code for the relevant amendment
- to ensure that the search results opened in a new window - basically "target" - check the code for the relevant amendment too

After a bit of trawling about, I found answers on the support forums to both these questions.

Of course at present, google is working off an out of date index of my site, so the search will not actually turn up anything useful, but that will fix itself soon enough. Things like this make you realise that despite appearances, google is not actually omniscient.

I also took some photos of the coatstand I made a while back, and added some details about it to my website.

As I mentioned above, the work comes in layers, my research yesterday on the support forums, also suggests that I should ensure that all my pages are actually given meaningful names, and I really do need to update names and alt tags everywhere, I have been pretty lazy with them.

I also need to update my iPhoto stuff, as some pages, are simply taking images from my main iPhoto library, so anything new, automatically gets uploaded, whether I want it to or not. Simply a case of putting stuff in folders, and amending a couple of links.

4 comments on rapidweaver and forum based support - I really like rapidweaver. My previous website work has been based on text editors, or simply something like mozilla to do the basic coding. I have always been open to getting web software, and have on occasion reviewed the various options. However Dreamweaver is vastly to expensive for what I could actually justify. This is basically a hobby site, it is not a business. I did get Freeway some time ago, and did one page using it, but I just hated the results. I found that notwithstanding the time it took, basically I preferred the results from coding a page by hand.

However, I just love rapidweaver. It is pretty intuitive, and comes out of the box, with some pretty amazing default themes, and set ups. Basically it is easy and pleasant to use, and the finished results are very impressive.

Having said all this, is rapidweaver for everyone? For someone like myself, who is used to doing pretty basic web coding by hand, it is a delight to use. Since getting broadband, I have also taken an interest in recent developments on the web, so that I can find my way round pod-casts, technorati, support forums, and look up html tags when I need to. The other week, when I could not get rapidweaver to upload, I checked out the support forums, and tried out some stuff, before using an ftp application - cyberduck - and finding out that I have filled up my file allocation with my webprovider, and as soon as I deleted some files, everything worked okay again.

If you really don't want to get your hands dirty with code, then rapidweaver is not the magic answer. It is not as simple as just posting onto livejournal etc, you do need to understand the basics.

After all I was not born knowing the basics of web publishing, I did an hnc option years ago, and I have been dabbling ever since. If someone is keen, then I would thoroughly recommend doing some proper training, it was some of the most enjoyable and creative training I have ever done. In tandem with some training, rapidweaver is excellent.

Initially my thinking was that support forums were probably better than a manual. Certainly manuals, are forever getting printed out, then languishing unloved and unread somewhere. However while a support forum is a fine place to hang out, and is pretty good at gradually expanding your knowledge base, often in unexpected ways, they are not a particularly quick way to find an answer to a question. Doubtless the answer is out there, or in there, but finding it is not easy. Often doing a search is impossible, because your key words, are so common, they do not narrow down the possible responses, and the titles of entries seldom indicate what they contain. The titles are written before any answers are posted.

Like many things, the answer is probably better meta data, either by way of tagging, or by bringing together stuff into a wiki, so that like stuff sits together better. In terms of usability, I find that something with a degree of thoughtful editing, often suits the user best, while something with enthusiasm will contain the answer, it will be buried deep, and something unduly constrained by editing, will inevitably be very hit or miss, and less fun to browse.

Of these rough categories,
thoughtful editing - wikipedia, and various commercial, semi commercial sites
enthusiasm - rapidweaver
unduly constrained - apple support forums

There is also a slight element of fanatical zeal on the rapidweaver forums. While I love the software, I do not hang out on the support forums for hours every week, like some people do. If rapidweaver is to appeal to those with less web experience, then it needs to be presented as an easy learning curve, and that really does require a good manual, a tightly edited wiki style support, and additional technical support. Intrinsically there is no reason why the software could not support this market.

Also worth adding that the vodcasts really are excellent, and should be an essential component of technical support.

5 anything else that comes to mind, while typing up the above stuff

I really fancy getting more computer geek tee shirts, well because, basically, I guess, sort of, that is who I am. Jamfactory tee shirts (rapidweaver) links, and O'Reilly currently appeal, but all very silly and frivolous, lets be honest

I am swithering setting up additional blogs, but really not sure whether it is best to have one blog, with everything in, or separate ones, with relevant stuff in them. The functionality of a blog is pretty appealing, but there is no point in creating something too unwieldy. To be honest, this blog is vastly bigger and more rambling, than any other blog that I have read, which makes me think, that making it even bigger and more rambling, is probably a bad idea.

I know that I have already posted this week, but that was a mid-week jotting, so to keep to my usual pattern of a weekly blog ...

1 my experience with RapidWeaver
2 using GTD at work
3 making jam
4 thinking
5 anything else that occurs to me

1 my experience with RapidWeaver
over the past week I have continued to experiment with RapidWeaver and add new parts to the website. Of course, in order to add something meaningful to the website, you need to have something worth saying. Accordingly I have so far relied on existing content. My very first website was done for a college course, and was all about woodwork. I am not sure that I want to recreate it, but I would like to take some photos of the various woodwork projects that I have done, and put them onto this site with some notes about any interesting design features. I enjoy thinking about design and design solutions, and I think that I have come up with some worthwhile ideas.

It is becoming apparent to me that it is a lot more useful to spend a couple of hours working on RapidWeaver, than simply tinkering for half an hour. If you have a decent amount of time, it is possible to explore options, do a little research, and then make some decent progress. A short session, simply tends to be meaningless tweaking.

I have been using voodoopad to create my own personal wiki for various topics. I might consider either putting elements onto this website using Rapidweaver, for example I could easily enough use the blogging element to record my work in the garden.

I would appreciate a manual for the package, mostly you can get by by experimenting and tweaking, but a manual would be useful in detailing all the functionality. For example what is a permalink? That said, the vodcasts are excellent, and there are still a couple more of them that I can watch, so they might clear up some issues.

2 using GTD at work
after initial enthusiasm for GTD, truth be told, it fell by the wayside at work, through simple pressures of too much firefighting, and not enough time. Basically the section probably needs three people to run properly, and I have been trying to run it single handed. There have been, and will be a lot of changes, so a purely mechanistic project management approach would have been ineffective. The GTD lists simply ended up being lists where stuff got dumped, never to be seen again, but I was finding it difficult to actually track progress across a variety of strands. I have had to focus on the higher level work lately, so this means more strands of work, but they are slower moving, whereas the lower level work tends to be a small number of fast moving strands of work.

Well, I suppose I am split, in strategic mode, I have a lot of slow moving work strands, in operational mode, I have a few fast moving work strands.

Anyway, the pace of work has slackened off slightly, so I have tried to organise myself better. My old approach with GTD, and the one I use at home, is a single jotter, with a page per work strand, and a list of work to do on each. I have amended my work process to
• a single word file
• with a numbered list in word format
• with collapsible items
• each workstrand is a numbered item - descriptive title sorted alphabetically, so all meetings are - meeting - blogs Liaison , meeting - quarterly audit
• with actions as subtopics, next action and not much more
• with narrative as body text - for example what has this working group agreed,

this seems a useful way of killing two birds with one stone, it tracks what stage everything is at, and it gives me a ready prompt list for what to do, for example it is a single list of everything I have promised to do, so if there is a meeting coming up, it is easy enough to see what I promised to do, and what was agreed last time.

being able to collapse all, and expand all, means that I can drill down, or see all, as is most appropriate.
The ability to embed and link in documents is a little constrained, but overall this seems a pretty workable solution.
Because the listing is so useful, I tend to keep it open all the time, and add, or delete items from it constantly. This encourages me to use it, and keep it upto date.

Time will tell whether this is the solution, or merely an artifact of having slightly more time on my hands!

3 making jam
we seem to be living in a monsoon climate, so yesterday, although not without rain, was relatively speaking, a day of sun. We made the best of the day, by heading off to a local fruit farm, where they were selling off punnets of strawberries cheap. I think that with the weather they have been down on visitors, so they were grateful for people coming to take some off them off their hands. The joy and terror of soft fruits is that they go from money to mush almost immediately. I suppose we could have done a bit of fruit picking ourselves, but the weather was still pretty iffy. Anyway took a wander round the local market town, which was clean out of granulated sugar. Obviously everyone is thinking the same as us. They have a soft fruit festival next week, which might be worth a trip.

My wife has now started on the mountain of strawberries and has done three double batches of jam, making 38 jars of strawberry jam. [22lbs of jam]

Alarmingly this still leaves a not inconsiderable mountain of strawberries to process, and turn to jam. Then she will start on a few punnets of gooseberry jam that we also bought.

Of course my garden is a veritable fruit spot, with blackcurrent, rhubarb, loganberry, flowering quince, strawberry, redcurrent, blueberry, cranberry and gooseberry, though none yet in particularly large jam making quantities, also five apple trees, and one damson. Then of course there are countless herbs, with dill and fennel being particularly decorative. I am currently trying to grow wormwood from seed, so with luck I will have some wormwood bushes in due course.

I managed a quick cut of the lawn with yesterday's okay-ish weather.

Today actually looks pretty good, so I will try and do half and half, half a day in the garden, half a day tackling the various paper work that accumulates.

4 thinking
thinking can be split up into two processes
understanding - our understanding is only ever partial, simply based on a few prominent variables. That is why society's understanding seems to shift, and hindsight is always so informative. We do our best to evaluate which are the prominent variables, but we can be wrong.
decision making - which is a specific process that is worth considering in detail.

5 and this week, nothing much else occured to me as I wrote this, so here ends this blog.

There has been a bit of speculation on why Apple would want to introduce an internet browser for the PC market. On the face of it it is an odd decision, granted making a browser can be quite profitable if search engines are paying to be embedded, but I don't really think that is the reason.

My take on it, is that you need to follow the money. These days Apple is making a lot of money from things that are not actually Mac OS platform specific, the iPod works equally well for both PC and Mac, the iTunes site likewise, the iPhone does not require you to own an iMac.

Not only are these good revenue streams, but they probably have better margins, and a more realistic potential for a growing market. Even if Apple only manages to snag a small fraction of the mobile phone market the potential revenues are huge. People replace their mobile phones far more often than their desktops.

We are now entering the world of the post-pc gadget. Granted everyone will probably have a computer of some sort, but that is pretty much a commodity market now, people can get a laptop for a few hundred, and unless there are compelling reasons, then they will simply buy computers that only offer a tiny margin to the manufacturer. There is now little scope for compelling additional functionality to append to a computer, and it is not a highly visible object that you feel compelled to keep updated to be fashionable.

So if Apple wants to grow, then it will not be looking to sell more iMacs, or new operating systems, it will drive forward in the post-pc market, and find compelling ways of offering content online.

It is not inconceivable that the Mac OS might cease to be radically differentiated from any other operating systems, as more and more of our lives are lived via broadband, the amount actually residing on our hard drive is bound to diminish, so less applications on your desktop, and more as cloudware. The internet is driving our lives now, and as it is already operating system neutral.

In short, Apple operates in three realms,
hardware and associated software, the iMac, iLife,
cloudware like iTunes
post PC devices like the iPod and iTunes

the market they have been in longest, is not the one with the most potential, so why restrict your potential by tying in either your cloudware or post pc devices to the Apple OS and hardware, a PC version of Safari, is merely a component of this strategy.

Actually quite an eventful week, so I will need to be careful not to ramble on unduly. Topics as follows ;

1 Audiobooks and Scott Sigler

2 Re doing my webpage

3 Internet access

and anything else that occurs to me.

Audiobooks,
we are now operating in a totally different world. With technologies like podcasting, there are very few barriers to entry for people that want to create content. Rather than struggling away trying to even get your work read by a publisher or agent, when minor celebrities can attract a huge advance and have their ghostwritten books remaindered a few months later, you can simply make your work available to the world via the internet.

For the old music publishers, a major technology shift is nothing but good news. Suddenly, all these people who stopped buying music years ago, go out again, to buy the same old albums again, but just in a new format. That is why they loved CD, but worried about downloads. They wanted the free hit, of lots of additional revenue, coming off of the same old back catalogue. But the real opportunity lies with the Long Tail phenomenon, where we can now access material that is really specialist with complete ease. For print media there are the same challenges, the old print publishers are simply trying to get more money out of their existing, pile them high, sell them cheap, back catalogue. But do we really just want to read/listen to the same old stuff, in a new format. I would prefer to read/listen to new stuff. I listen to a lot of podcasts, often lectures from universities, etc, and if I really like the speaker, then I just add their book to my Amazon wishlist, and that way I am never short of thought provoking stuff to read. I can read stuff that I find well written and thought provoking, from anywhere in the world.

Another paradigm shift is the degree of closeness between those who produce material, and those who consume it, I can put a comment on my blog about the audiobook I have just read, the author can pick this up on technorati, or google alerts, and drop me a note. Authors are vastly more accessible, and this creates a degree of loyalty. Even just a small degree of contact, increases your overall impression of a producer, and your loyalty to them. Now you can buy material by people you have corresponded with.

I am really impressed with what Scott Sigler has done with his audiobooks, like google and amazon he has clearly decided that the more traffic and awareness he can generate, the better he will do. He is producing a professional quality product, and despite setbacks, has just used the new possibilities to reach and create an audience. Clearly we don't know what the future looks like, but I think it looks a lot more like what Scott is doing, than what it does now. This has to be a good thing.

Re doing my webpage -
I have finally found some software that I like, and can afford, so I have started to update my webpage. Currently running the old site and the new site, in the same directory, with the new going by index.html, and the old by index.htm, so it is probably pot luck which site you will get. However putting together a site with RapidWeaver is hugely easy, so I don't think it will take too long to put most of my content onto the new site, and then delete the old one. I cannot really be bothered archiving the thing, because I would need to rewrite all the links to the homepage. The bulk of the site was coded using a text editor, which means that all the coding was done by hand. It is a pretty good way of getting to know html, and actually quite fun, in a puzzle sort of way, but now that blogging is so easy, who has the time.

Anyway, I absolutely love Rapidweaver, and the revised website is coming together pretty quickly.

Internet access -
listening to a podcast from the iTunes University, someone was explaining how the current internet capacity was built up, and from his explanation it sounds as if the current reliability and resilience of the internet may come to be seen as the exception, rather than the rule. We are currently enjoying a massive overcapacity in the network, largely built from people building capacity, going broke, and their assets being bought out by others very cheaply. Clearly not a model for building major infrastructure that is likely to work twice!

And finally,
I really don't get the iTunes University, why don't they just podcast like everyone else, why does the content need to be badged over at some virtual university, when they could simply set up podcasts that people subscribe to, great idea, but a complication too far for many I suspect.

Write about TwentyFourBlog here.

1 First of all a few words about the images that I am posting with each blog
2 Then a few musings on audiobooks
3 Then some thoughts on how I am getting on at work, and where I was on Friday night,
4 Then maybe some thoughts on why project management does not really work for policy work.

plus anything else that occurs to me


First of all a few words about the images that I am posting with each blog
I have decided to set a new desktop image each week, both on my PC in the office, and my iMac at home. So far they have been a mixture, some from Flickr that caught my eye, the image of a cranberry harvest came from wikipedia, and was there because I have been researching cranberrys and had put in the smallest of cranberry bogs in my garden. Clearly I will not be rivalling Ocean Spray anytime soon, but I would like to squeeze as many edible plants into my suburban garden as I can. Last weeks funky turtel was drawn by my daughter as a Father's day present, using ArtRage software. This week is simply some japanese bowls, each with something arty in them, sitting on my laminate floor, lit from above with an anglepoise lamp. My digital camera is the cheapest one that I could buy in Argos, so I simply go on the principle of taking lots of shots, and the lighting and focal length is bound to be right in one of them. The japanese bowls will be my desktop image this week.

Then a few musings on audiobooks
I got a free audiobook on the MacFormat disk, Ancestor by Scott Sigler, and being extremely cautious, tried it out before I lashed out any real money to buy an audiobook. The Scott Sigler was pretty good in an airport fiction sort of way, and he deserves his success. Having established, that I do actually like listening to an audiobook, I then went and bought one that I had to pay for, The Big Moo by Seth Godin et al. Seth being something of a self made legend on the internet. Actually a pretty good too listen, and something I will definitely hang onto and listen to again.

I am a bit disconcerted about having to pay more for an audiobook than for an actual dead tree book, logically the cost of selling one more audiobook is pretty much nil, so you would have thought more competitive pricing would be in order. However I do spend a lot of time with my iPod, between commuting and walking my dog, so it is nice to have some decent content to listen to. I suppose that the content has to be pretty linear, not the sort of thing that you need to jump back a chapter to check things, and anything visual would need to be embedded, so no tables, but the odd images would certainly be technically possible. Not much use for reference, who wants an audiobook dictionary, but good for stuff that would work well as a lecture.

I could see myself building up a pretty extensive library of audiobooks, but at the price they are charging currently, I think I will need to stick to podcasts mainly, with the odd audiobook as a treat. No doubt the groaning floor of my loft will appreciate this, I am currently filing a small but constantly growing library up there.


Then some thoughts on how I am getting on at work, and where I was on Friday nights,
Things seem to be going pretty well at work, folk seem happy enough with what I am doing, and relaxed enough about what I am not managing to do. It seems to be largely an issue of perspective, I am expected to sort out the big things, and as much of the rest as I can. To be honest I am enjoying it, I am getting slightly more money, though hardly enough to notice, but the pleasure is really being able to tackle things as I see most appropriate. I meet up with my line manager once a week, so hopefully I am not likely to go too far off target. Elsewhere folk seem happy enough with what I am doing too, which is always gratifying. Getting out meeting people, talking to them, and more importantly listening to what they have to say is proving absolutely vital, it is where all 'my' best ideas come from.

The downside, of course, is that it is pretty exhausting trying to run everything all the time. My new member of staff starts shortly, and of course that will help too. However there is also the requirement to be able to step back far enough from what I am doing, to be able to see the priorities in proper perspective, rather than just chasing about being busy all the time.

One thought that has occurred to me, if there is a perfect job for me, then it has to be one that I am actually capable of doing and enjoying, if the job is so exhausting it wears me out, then clearly it is not the right one for me.

Anyway, a wonderful evening on Friday, as per
http://jessinacastle.livejournal.com/

attended the celebration for Jess, chatting with lots of her friends, some of whom I knew, some I didn't. I suppose the best thing that you could say of the celebration is that Jess would have loved it. The whole thing was a wonderful tribute to a wonderful woman, as if there was nothing negative in the world, and we were filled with memories of a remarkable woman.

Then maybe some thoughts on why project management does not really work for policy work.
I do quite like the project management methodology, but it simply does not work for the kind of policy work that I do for a day job. Project management works on the basis that you can agree a specification for what you want to do, and then work to deliver that specification. With policy work you decide on an overall policy direction, then you carry out research and engagement work, then you decide on what you are going to do, then you move forward a bit more. The work can be usefully broken down into chunks, and project management can be used for bits of it, but by and large it is a process of keeping to a vision, communicating your vision, and trying to move it forward, while being attentive to the feedback and changing environment around you.



and while I think about it, why iTunes is starting to annoy me
reason one - they always seem to funnel you back to the same stuff, I buy pretty obscure alternative music, and rather than suggesting, other similarly left field music, they invariably try and get me to buy whatever it is that has the A&R muscle behind it this week
reason two - partial albums, what is it with all these partial albums, which generally cost as much as the actual CD, but have half the tracks missing, who exactly is in the market for them, need to buy an Ivor Cutler album in a hurry, too lazy to go to Fopp to buy it, simply download a partial album for extra cash, but without some tracks.
reason three - you would need a screen the size of a wall to fit the entire homescreen on it, it is like trying to watch a movie through a letter box, if apple are responsible for all the individual elements, can't they at least look a bit slicker
reason four - audiobooks that cost more than the book, with an audiobook there is none of that tedious dead tree stuff, precious little marketting, no shop to run, the customer simply downloads the thing at their own expense and then cannot pass it on to their mates. Surely an audiobook should be a lot cheaper than the paper book, not selling at a premium.
reason five - where is the customer support, it is being run as a cash cow, precious little sign of any responsiveness or willingness to engage with customers.

and while I think about it, maybe I should be writing more
someone mentioned how well written something I had done was, just a little thing, but other people have commented on my writing before too. Lately I have been feeling that I want to do more creative stuff, and I am dabbling a bit with photos and sketches, really just for fun, because I know that there are people far better at those than I will ever be. But when it comes to writing, I really am pretty good, so maybe I should be finding the time to write something that I really believe in, and think is important. I don't want to write airport bestsellers, but there are the odd books that have inspired me, I am not getting any younger, so maybe I need to get started on something. A book of ideas, something challenging, but ultimately positive.

and while I think about it, I really like Stewart Brand's website
http://sb.longnow.org/Home.html
I mentioned a while back that I did not know how to brand my website, as it was not about anything in particular, but I rather like Stewart Brand's as like many of the people I really admire, he is not about anything in particular, but uses this as a strength, rather than a weakness.

Write about TwentyThreeBlog here.

Online Identity
I was listening to a pod-cast which was talking about marketing your pod-casts, and using your online identity as a brand.

I suppose that I could market my pod-cast, but it is not really about anything in particular, and will likely remain like that. Well I suppose it is about something in particular, it is about whatever happens to be of interest to me at the time of writing, but I have quite varied interests, so that hardly helps.

There is also the whole issue of an online identity. At the moment, I do not pass on details of this blog to people I know, and although I would be contactable via this blog, it is a standalone identity. I do not intentionally lie or mislead in my blog postings, but then again, I do not really write anything that would make it tremendously easy to identify who I am. Despite that, this is hardly the most impenetrable of disguises, and I could be identified from this blog, with relative ease.

My point being that one of the benefits of the internet is that one can establish separate identities, that meet your various desires and needs. For most people the appeal is that these are separate, the person one chats to about software glitches is not necessarily looking at photos of your family holiday, and vice versa. As in normal society, you choose how much to reveal to others, you focus on what is of mutual interest, but bring in extraneous material at your discretion.

However with searching now so easy, it is far easier for the curious to pull together these disparate identities. For people in the public arena this is probably not new, but for your average person, it is a disconcerting thought, and your average person is far less equipped to cope with any unexpected consequences.

At Work
My role at work continues to evolve. Some time ago, I was the junior member of a small team, now I am the team. Initially it was my role to promote a piece of work, but with a change in administration, my role is now more one of spinning plates, and potentially taking on more plates. Obviously I now have vastly more work to do, but the more important point is that I am expected to do that work in a different style. Because I am now leading the team, albeit one consisting solely of me, I am judged on the big ticket items, rather than the more mundane. The last year has been so intense, and I have such a long commute, that I personally feel that increasing my working hours is not really an option that is sustainable. So, in the jargon, it is a case of working smarter rather than harder.

In practice, this has meant that I am now picking up a lot of engagements, either speaking at, or simply attending meetings, that my boss would have handled before. I am also having to initiate meetings to progress what I want to do. Accordingly when I am in the office, I need to work through incoming work much more effectively. I have adopted a slight variation of the GTD principles,

if it can be done in a few minutes, simply do it then
if it relates to a category of work, simply put it in a folder with other similar work, so that I can devote a half day to it all sometime
if it needs a bit more work, and has a deadline - set up a paper folder with the deadline and quick description on the front
if it needs a bit more work, and has no deadline - simply flag the email

also for when I am at my desk, I tend to work away from the desk whenever I can, for example, if it is reading, I go through to our canteen, if it is something that I don't want interrupted on, I go down to a hotdesking area. That way I am reasonably available, people can leave a message, that I will get back to, but my availability is not slowing me down.

There is a need to be able to work effectively away from my desk, so I have set up couple of pencil cases with everything that I need, from indigestion tablets, to marker pens, and my favorite little film tags, for highlighting relevant material. I suppose that I could be better organised about carrying about work that I could do, but I have generally found that I will have some task that it usefully completed over a cup of coffee somewhere, like writing an agenda, or organising my thoughts on something.

I suppose that in essence, this is a top down approach, consider the most important priorities, first, and fit the rest in round them,
generally, in the past I have taken a bottom up approach, considering all the things that need done, and then trying to fit them in.

Of course the former approach is fine for a team leader, with some discretion, but it is not so applicable for a team member when your tasks are very fixed, and you have less discretion.

Anyway, interesting to see how I am coping with the current challenges, and changing how I work. My gut feeling is that I am probably pretty good at working at this level, but only if the work is of a manageable intensity. I can see that it would be incredibly easy to burn out working like this.

At Home
I am writing this on a Sunday morning, yesterday was wet and dreich. I suppose that I should have done a lot of useful stuff, but to be honest, we were mainly faffing about. Headed up to the new local garden centre, which also sells food, and pretty much everything else. My wife bought some food, I bought some slug pellets, I am finally giving in with having an organic cold frame. I have tried everything, a sandy base, copper tape round my pots, beer traps. This place is not a cold frame, it is an eat all you want slug conservatory! The little black pieces of snot, are dining on tender shots of basil and camomile, and are presumably looking forward to dining on wormwood and feverfew once they sprout. Nothing is growing in the place, I water it faithfully, the slugs and snails eat their fill, leaving it stripped bare!

I also bought a copy of Getting Things Done to send to a friend.

My girls, bought a couple of books for me - Father's Day - and got their faces painted, and one of them even got a goody bag for appearing on the radio show that they were doing when we were there. Easy enough to see who got the best end of this deal.

Also watched a few vodcasts, is that a word, the new Steve Jobs address and the interview along with Bill Gates. One does wonder where they got the idea for PC Guy and Mac Guy, presumably they wanted to cast Bill Gates in the PC guy role, but he was otherwise engaged.

Interesting and thought provoking stuff, technology is at quite an interesting stage at the moment, and I think that we just have to bite the bullet and reckon on buying a new computer every year. Interesting to see that only a small minority (10%) now use an MAC operating system other than 10.4 or 10.3.

Certainly my advice has been that the computers now are so good, so well specified, have so much additional functionality, you would be a fool not to buy one.

Of course running the IT for a family of four is bound to be expensive. Over the past year and a bit, I have
got a new computer, bought, set up, and working with peripherals
moved from dial up internet, to broadband, much wailing and swearing, and a lot of time doing that sort of English as a foreign language teaching, that you do whenever you phone technical support somewhere
got my wife and myself, both using our own iPods
got the whole family set up with their own iTunes and email accounts, and able to share their downloads when they want to
sorted out an external hard drive and an effective back up methodology.

I am now looking to buy a second computer, either a laptop pre October with extra Ram, and upgrade to Leopard, or maybe wait until October and get something with Leopard.

Amongst the many interesting ideas on the vodcasts (does anyone actually call them that, and indeed what about those phonogram recordings, that were all the rage) is the emphasis on post-pc devices, which includes iPods, iPhones, personal organisers, and I suppose anything else that you can find a use for, extending out to a set top box with a hard drive, like tivo, a handheld gaming device, digital image photo frames, and all sorts of other things that I have not really registered. Apple is pretty good at pushing out the boundaries of what a computer is, look at the all in one computer and display of the current iMac, the unloved Newton, the iPod, the Mac Mini, or even the early luggable portable macintoshes! Clearly the model of desktop or laptop, and nothing much else, is unlikely to continue.

Another interesting thing was that Steve Jobs did not really want to predict where computing would be in a few years, which is quite a sensible position for a clever person. There are simply too many unknowns and variables, for it to be constructive to speculate. We can think of possible directions, and good luck to those who want to make money out of them, but it would be insane to think you know what will come. Sometimes it is useful to accept uncertainty, and develop strategies to deal with it effectively. Simply knowing that things are uncertain, is not the same as relinquishing any control, you simply plan and control in a different sort of way.

Write about TwentyTwoBlog here.

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

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

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

So in the usual fashion, some random jottings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For me, life is good right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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