If you need a florist in the Beverley area then the BEST place that you could possibly go would be to go to see my Mum (even though she is currently off sick) at the Garden Shed in the Market Square.
ps: The picture is from Mum and Dad’s garden because they grow them as well as sell them.
If you need a florist in the Beverley area then the BEST place that you could possibly go would be to go to see my Mum (even though she is currently off sick) at the Garden Shed in the Market Square.
ps: The picture is from Mum and Dad’s garden because they grow them as well as sell them.
The other day I was rambling on about the fact that current collaboration software is disrepectful and how we needed both process and technology to help us with this. One of the examples I gave was how you couldn’t get yourself off an email thread once you had been included in. Well on that particular one along came Omar Shahine with an add for Outlook that kills the email thread for you.
What more can I say – great minds think alike.
Another home security site – this time from the UK Government. Get Safe Online focuses on three particular areas:
It seems a reasonable way of focusing the questions. Seems to be reasonably comprehensive though I can’t see anything on working as a restricted user.
Microsoft continue their series of articles about Internet and computer safety. This time it’s focussed towards informing parents about the things their kids may be doing. Great.
I like the idea of categorising he issues by age. From my experience they look just about right.
Emily is 9 and Jonathan 13 – they definitely want to do different things.
There are loads of parents out there worrying but with little advice, this advice looks to be sound advice from a company that is supposed to not care about security . We still need to make it easier for parents especially for parents with no technical understanding but if they follow this advice then they are less likely to have problems. It seems a little strange though to be getting advice from Microsoft that says:
Encourage your teens to tell you if something or someone online makes them feel uncomfortable or threatened. Stay calm and remind your kids they are not in trouble for bringing something to your attention. (It is important that your teen does not think that their computer privileges could be taken away.)
My thesis for today is that our personal productivity is compromised by the way we do collaboration these days and that we all need to learn a new way of working that respects each other’s personal productivity. We also need to find and deploy technologies that foster these respectful working practices. I have written a bit about this in the past but I’m coming more and more to the opinion that the biggest issue is working practice and that the working practice needs to be governed by a very old fashioned word – respect.
The tools that we have today are powerful, but they don’t foster respect.
Take, as an example, the least respectful technology of them all – email. How many of us have been bombarded by email storms that simply wasted our time. How much time do we spend each day reading emails that are irrelevant to us. It’s easy for people to add people onto an email distribution without any real thought as to whether they would be interested, and no-one would ever think of asking someone if they were interested in an email subject before sending it. Once on the list though, there’s no way off it. This doesn’t happen in the paper-mail world because sending paper-mail is difficult so you think far more carefully about who you send it to. Unless of course the paper mail is driven by technology and then it becomes junk-mail.
No respect = reduced productivity.
Another example; teleconferences. How many times have you been dragged onto an urgent teleconference only for it to go on for hours with little or no progress and definitely no focus. This is a much smaller issue with physical meetings because a physical meeting is much more expensive, requires people to travel and results in a face-to-face meeting. If you are going to meet someone face-to-face you don’t want to waste their time, it’s embarrassing.
No respect = reduced productivity.
As a collaboration tool RSS and blogs help with some of these problems but we need to be really careful here. As soon as we start to be disrespectful by including posts that are unfocused, off subject, etc. we diminish the value and impact on others productivity. That’s one of the reasons that the Top 100 list thing really bugs me.
So how do we build respect. I think the first thing that we need to do is acknowledge that it’s an issue. Once we do this we will start to invest our own time in thinking about how we interact with others and how we impact upon their productivity. This might cost us, but people will soon come to realise that we are better people to work with because we don’t waste their time. The other thing that we can do as a technology industry is to start providing some better feedback loops. I would love to be able to mark an email chain as ‘not interested’ and then to never be bothered by it ever again. Going further, I would love someone running a poorly focussed teleconference to feel the embarrassment that they would have done if we had been meeting face-to-face.
Anyway, I’m not going to be disrespectful by waste any more of your time rambling on needlessly.
Something occurred to me today. I was completing a registration for Jonathan’s laptop when at the bottom it asked the usual question “we would like to send you promotional…” you know the one.
As I had registered with my true production email account that I want to keep clean and away from junk the answer was a definite ‘no’. But then the thought occurred to me. If there was an option to say “yes, but to a different email account” the answer would have probably been yes. I don’t think I’m unusual running multiple email accounts. I have one where I (hotmail as it happens) where all of the advertising goes. I look through it occasionally, but don’t look in detail because I have another account where I receive emails that are important, personal, etc.. If something is important they get given this email account, if it’s not they get the hotmail one.
The registration number of the laptop is important so they get the ‘important’ email address, the advertising isn’t…
Am I the only one who thinks like this?
Over the weekend Sue, Emily and myself (Jonathan was away on a youth weekend) went for a walk along the Lancaster Canal. It was one of those Sunday afternoon walks, which for us means – short.
While we were walking a barge passed us. I love to see barges. This one had something extra though. He was burning his log stove.
The smell of burning wood always brings memories flooding back. All sorts of memories.
When I was young we had a real fire at home. It was really a coal fire, but it burnt wood just as well. We had central heating so we didn’t need to light it for the warmth, we lit it for the experience.
Lighting the fire always bought with it a sense of achievement, because everything that we burnt we had worked to gather.
People around us knew that we burnt wood (because they could smell too) so every time they were doing something with a tree in their garden they knew that if they asked us we would come and do it for them on the condition that we took the wood. This was in the days before the health and safety people really took a hold on our society. We didn’t use chain saws, we used a bow-saw. Sometimes this was a one man operation but often required two of us; one on either end and loads of teamwork. My Dad also understood the theory of pivots. Most people wanted the tree out – roots and all. Having first attached a rope to the top of the trunk we would often chop off the branches of a tree; leaving the main trunk. We would then proceeded to dig the tree out pulling on the rope to make sure that it fell the right way. Every now and then one of us (usually Stephen, my brother, or me) would climb up the trunk to provide a bit more leverage. I remember Stephen being up one particular tree when there was an almighty crack and the tree came down with a thud. We both learnt when to jump. In modern speak we would call these occasions male-bonding times; we were just having fun.
When I was a child the popular Sunday afternoon activity was to go walking along the East Yorkshire coastline. We would often use this as an opportunity to collect drift wood. Drift wood burns in a different way to other woods because it contains loads of salt; this makes it cackle and hiss, but it also makes it glow blue and violet. One time I remember us biting off a bit more than we could chew and carry this huge log between us for what seemed like miles only to find that we couldn’t fit it (and us) in the car. There’s only so much you can get in a Morris Marina.
Saturday’s were reserved for a different type of fun – the allotments. We had two. For some reason which I have never understood (because you don’t ask those questions when you are younger) there were at opposite ends of Beverley; where I was bought up. You can’t have an allotment without having a fire. There is always something to burn. Even if there wasn’t we would make sure that there soon was. In the Autumn a fire wasn’t just fun, it was essential I remember sitting in front of it trying to warm my hands up so that I could feel them again. An Autumn fire brings another delight – fire baked potatoes. There really is nothing like the smoky, nutty taste of a potato straight of the embers.
We have a chiminea in the garden these days which burns reconstituted wood because it’s too smoky with real wood. It doesn’t quite smell the same but the memories are still as powerful.
The joy of a wood fire seems to have passed down the generations too. Jonathan always has a story to tell about the fire whenever he returns from Scout Camp.
Smell is a powerful sense. The way that it connects together memories is a real blessing.
Microsoft have published another one in their series of documents detailing how they do IT internally. This one covers the whole arena of Active Directory Schema Management. It’s an interesting read.
If you are looking for something that removes the leap-into-the-dark feeling that anyone updating schema gets then sorry but this document doesn’t do that. What it does do is outline a practical industry-standard mechanism for reducing the risk, but nothing that actually removes the risk. They seem to have become confident in doing lots of changes which I suppose is an advantage that they have. Most of us do so few schema updates that we are always going to be wary of them.
In my personal opinion the Microsoft technologies currently contain far too many leap-in-the-dark moments that have the potential to result in massive impacts on the customer base. Schema changes is one of them, group policy changes another; but perhaps that’s what we get when we cry out for more powerful tools.
Speaking as someone who has to deal with the consequences of bugs a lot of the time this video really appeals.
Speaking as someone who works on projects the thought of this type of technology coming our way scares me.
I regard myself as someone who reacts to change well and as someone who is constantly changing the way I do things.
So why am I being so useless at adjusting to a Bluetooth headset for my phone?
I keep picking the phone up rather than sticking the ear piece in.
I keep forgetting to switch it off when I’m not suing it. I phone home on it the other day while it was in my shirt pocket. Which means that Sue knew I had been shopping.
I keep holding the phone in my hand while using it.
I suppose it all goes to show that our brains are wired a particular way and changing that wiring isn’t always easy.
Perhaps us IT folk should be a bit more tolerant of users reacting to new software.
I must say, though, that I don’t think that the Bluetooth stuff has quite got there yet. The phone doesn’t always reconnect the headset when it’s turned back on, nor does it always react to button presses.
Sometimes I am stunned by my reaction to bad news. It doesn’t have to be that bad for my ‘bad news’ reaction to kick in but it always seems to go down a very similar route.
I get the bad news and then I enter into this state of numbness where I can’t think or move forward for a while; quite often the time taken to recover is completely disproportionate to the news.
Take today for example. Next week is a school holiday for my kids and I was hoping to take two days off during the week. As it’s getting towards the end of the year I thought I had better check how many days holiday I have left. unfortunately I only have enough days to take one day off. Argghhh.
For what seems to be a very long time I have sat here going ‘argh’ and little else.
I’m actually writing this blog as a kind of therapy to help me get the news into perspective. It’s not really that big a deal, it just feels that way. And as I write I feel the numbness lifting.
Recognising a reaction is often a big part of resolving it. I think what I need to do now is to try to understand the process that gets me back going again.