From the We Blog Cartoons by Dave:
Out of the Window
From the We Blog Cartoons by Dave:
Month: April 2006
Comment authentication change
Oh yes, forgot to say. I have changed the commenting regime again, no authentication required anymore, but you do have to be able to screw-up your face and read jumbled letters. Have a go you’ll see what I mean.
Count Your Blessings #62 – Jesus the Man
I’m currently reading “The Jesus I Never Knew” by Philip Yancey. It’s inspired me to rethink about Jesus the man.
I have never connected with the pictures of Jesus that a fluffy white haired, white bearded and wearing white. Likewise the Jesus that is clean shaven with children sat on his knee looking all sweetness and smiles. All these pictures suggest to me is that Jesus isn’t real.
I believe Jesus was real and I have found it a real blessing to try and think about some of the things that are common to us men and hence were also part of Jesus.
As Jesus was a carpenter did He get nerdy about the latest a greatest tool or was He more of a heritage man who revelled in restoring something old? These tendencies are common to a huge number of men, just look around at the number of gadget magazines and vintage clubs. I’m sure these things are not unique to our age but reflect something deep about manhood. If there had been a Screwfix catalogue I’m suspect He would have subscribed.
While He was in the carpentry shop how did Jesus react when something went wrong? Firstly, I am sure that Jesus did not produce perfect furniture, making perfect furniture takes too long and the family needed feeding. Secondly, I’m sure things went wrong. Jesus was working with imperfect tools and imperfect materials so I’m sure that He hit a piece of wood too hard and split it from time to time. If that was the case, where did Jesus have a scar. I can’t imagine anyone working as a carpenter and not having some scar or other it’s inherent in the job.
How goal oriented was He? All men are oriented to the goal whatever the goal is. We constantly set ourselves new goals in order to reach them. I’m sure Jesus was the same, but I’m intrigued what the goals would have been. Did He seek out adventure?
I often wish the Gospels included hints as to the tone of Jesus voice when He was talking. Was the Sermon on the Mount said in a constant monotone or was there places when He was shouting, was there places when He was talking more gently. When was that, which bits was He most passionate about?
So why is this a blessing to me – because it makes Jesus more real and in so doing brings him closer.
Knowledge, Information and Communication
I have been doing a good deal of thinking over the last week about the whole area of information sharing, knowledge collection and sharing, information creation, etc.
Hand-up anyone who thinks we have got this area sorted? Not many then.
Hand-up anyone who thinks that we will ever get this area sorted? Not many their either.
Why is it so difficult?
The main issue is clearly not our ability to get information from point A to point B because we can do that in abundance.
The issue is obviously the gap from the eye to the brain, the finger to the brain, the ear to the brain and the nose to the brain. Once in the brain there are huge issues getting the information to morph into knowledge.
We have had this issue for thousands of years now. It started when we started talking. The problem with talking is that it needs to be repeated every time someone wants the same information and that people have this ability to undertake memory housekeeping and forget things. So we created drawing and writing to stop us having to repeat things and we created singing to help people remember. Later on in time we created ways of recording what we are saying and seeing. Then we realised that passing all of this information around way difficult so we created this thing called the Internet so that everyone could read and hear and see everything.
Then we realised that the problem with having access to everything was that we had moved the bottleneck right up into our own heads. We discovered that we weren’t actually very good at getting our heads around all of the information available to us. Without consuming the information we have no way of knowing that the information is relevant and there isn’t enough time to consume all of the information available. Actually there isn’t enough time to consume even the tiniest proportion of the information.
So we went about inventing and boy could we create. We created pages, links, applications, wikis, blogs, collaborative workspaces, instant messaging, document stores, calendars, email, databases, search.
But none of them resolved the problem because the issue was still in our heads. That didn’t stop us though, we were convinced that if we just had a way of viewing the information, if we just put it somewhere else we could resolve the problem. Each of these new mechanisms did change the way that we worked, communicated and shared knowledge but the change was never the change we were expecting.
Every time though we really wanted to communicate we reverted to our best and most efficient mechanism for communicating – we gathered in the same room and talked to each other.
I have never been lost…
Today I shall be wearing the proud words of Christopher Columbus:
“I have never been lost…but I will admit to being confused for several weeks”.
Sounds like much of my life.
(I’ve added some Jimmy and Grandad pictures to flickr)
Inbox out of control? Your Not Alone
The FT has an interesting article about the challenges of email management which features Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.
The line I really like is this one:
“No one is giving me more heartbeats per day or more minutes; there is no Moore’s Law for humans. I am not becoming twice as intelligent and half as cheap; if anything the cost is going up and I’m slowing down. Given the real limits of human cognition, the machines – who have, after all, gotten us into this mess – are going to have to get us out of it.”
Sounds like he is describing me.
ARCast on Motion
Ron Jacobs has posted a couple of Podcasts on Motion.
I haven’t listened yet so can’t comment on how good they are; Motion looks like a very interesting approach to business modelling.
Back from Holiday
We have had a good holiday – thanks for asking.
Count Your Blessings #61 – Hanging On
I seem to spend a good deal of my life in a state that can best be described as hanging on. Sometimes I’m hanging-on for the ride, other times I’m hanging-on with gritted determination desperate to not let go.
Climbing Helvellyn bought this home to me again, in a couple of ways.
I am no longer a mountain goat, I’m not sure I ever was, climbing is now something that requires a good deal of determination. Jonathan, on the other hand is a slim young man who wasn’t out of breath the whole way up.
For much of the initial climb I was talking to myself; “Just hang in on it will get better soon”; “One more step and then rest”; “Four steps up is another metre climbed, and there’s only 800 of them”. I was hanging-on determined to reach the summit even though my body was telling me the opposite.
There are a number of routes up Helvellyn. Striding Edge is the famous one because it is a long sharp ridge with steep falls on either side. In places they are sheer cliffs. for most of it the path is only just wide enough to walk on, and it’s all rocks. Part way along the ridge, with the mountain goat in front, I stepped from one set of rocks to another. Unfortunately my back foot became wedged in between the two rocks where I had placed it on my previous step. With my body weight moving forward and my foot staying put I lost balance and fell over. Because my step was slightly sideways I didn’t fall flat onto the path I fell off the path onto a steep hillside which didn’t stop until Red Tarn some 200 metres below. it was one of those slow motion moments. I was no longer thinking about the aches of walking up I was thinking “it doesn’t matter how much it hurts just hang-on to something”. As it happens I fell onto some rocky grass, clung on and stopped. Jonathan had stopped to talk to a man making his way down and they both came over to make sure I was OK.
I now have a scratch on my face, a graze on my hand and a bruise on my knee but apart from that I am completely fine. A few metres either way and I would have fallen onto some very sharp rocks. If I’d been moving any faster I could so easily have ended up a lot closer to Red Tarn, and a lot more damaged. If I had fallen the other side I would have fallen straight down a cliff.
The top, as with all mountain peaks, was a time of elation. Restrained English elation, but elation all the same. Sometimes hanging-on is all you can do, sometimes hanging-on is all you need to do.
That is why we have a great High Priest who has gone to heaven, Jesus the Son of God. Let us cling to him and never stop trusting him. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin.
Count Your Blessings #60 – “Views that will last forever”
All of my blessings posts seem to be prompted by something I am reading or by an event that happens in my life. This one is now exception.
The title of this post – “views that will last forever” – is something that Jonathan said after a special day for the two of us and it really struck me.
This last week has been a holiday week for the Chastney family, one that we spent catching up on family primarily. First to Graham’s Mum and Dad’s and then on to Sue’s Mum and Dad’s. Sue’s Mum and Dad live in the beautiful Lake District town of Keswick and while there I try to take in some of the countryside. This time I felt a real need to break out of the mold a bit and do something a bit more dramatic. I didn’t really want to do this alone so pulled Jonathan into the plan. And the plan was this; whatever the weather we would climb a mountain, preferably one of the big ones. My personal dream was that we would climb Helvellyn and do it up Striding Edge because I had never been up that side.
The day of the climb came and in true Lake District weather fashion it was raining, but we had made our plan and we weren’t going to change now.
There are two thing I have learnt about Lake District weather. The first is that you should always stick with your plan because it can change in minutes. The second is that Sue’s Mum is rarely wrong and she was expecting it to brighten up.
So of we go around to Glenridding and up Striding Edge. I’ll probably talk more about that another time because there are all sorts of things that come from it. But so as not to give too much away; we made it up Striding Edge and down Swirral Edge. As a taster for a future post; I have a bruise on my knee and a scratch on my face as war wounds.
Just as we are heading back into Glenridding I say to Jonathan, “Well it’s a good job we didn’t let the weather stop us isn’t it”.
“Yes it is because I would have missed those views that will last forever”.
Anyone who has ever achieved something will know what he means.
When was the last time you created some “views that will last forever”?
Quiet Week
Next week will be a quiet one from me.
Jimmy and Grandad will be going on tour and so I need to accompany them. I’ll be taking the camera along to make sure that you don’t miss out on any of the adventure.
iNotice – I don't think so
Stu has written an article on a concept called iNotice. I was going to write a comment, but the comment got so long I changed it into a post.
Could we not have a feature in our instant message solution which allows me to be added to a list of people who wants to contact them? Perhaps it could add me to a “need to chat urgently” group in sametime or change the colour of my icon? I’d call this functionality an iNotice, potentially link it to an SMS.
I think that the challenge that iNotice really faces is human nature. What people are trying to do in using the ‘do not disturb’ type functionality in their Instant Messaging client is to protect them from interruptions. The challenge is that if you knew what an interruption was before it interrupted you then you could decide whether or not to accept it. The problem is that you can’t, by definition. You rely on the person interrupting you to give the interruption the correct priority. Unfortunately, whatever mechanism you provide for interruptions will become abused.
It reminds me of a very old manufacturing story where a factory was struggling with getting the urgent parts through their systems. Their planning means that there was always some urgent parts. The answer – a ‘red list’ for the really urgent stuff, which was given special treatment. Unfortunately human nature meant that soon everything became urgent and was on the ‘red list’. The director responsible for manufacturing soon got fed up of this and introduced an extra-special list which required his signature. Soon the director was so fed up with the number of requests that he had to sign that he delegated it. Soon everything was on the extra-special list.
Soon afterwards the director retired. The new director who took his job abandoned all of the lists. Interestingly the Japanese had a different approach; they fixed it so that everything was urgent and called in Just-in-Time.
Interruptions are exactly the same, it doesn’t matter how many hurdles we put in front of people, soon everyone will circumvent them. We can create extra technologies or we could try to change human nature. I see GTD as a Just-in-Time approach for information workers which doesn’t require more technology, it requires a different approach.