Last night I put some thought into how I might fulfill my goal of being able to remember peoples names and then it struck me:
“Graham you dimwit you can’t set yourself a goal of remembering people face, names and roles when 99% of the people you interact with are faceless individuals who you very rarely ever meet”.
So I’ve modified my objective to de-emphasize the face bit. But that might not be so important as I can normally remember faces, it’s names and roles that I forget.
I’ve decided that I am not going to get anywhere with this brain thing unless I have a goal to focus on.
My first goal is going to be this: developing a technique for remembering the association between names, faces and role for people I come into contact with.
Remembering names is a popular issue and there seems to be a lot of techniques already so this should be attainable.
I’ve chosen this goal for a number of different reasons:
I’m still working on the basis that brain strength is something that it is possible to build.
I went out to the gym this morning before starting work. I don’t shower at the gym, so got back wonderfully sweaty and just a little smelly (I seem to be sweating a lot more than I used to).
On arriving at home, I jumped into the shower for a wash. When I got out of the shower I put on clean clothes. This wasn’t a special occasion, putting on clean clothes is something I do quite regularly (too regularly for the washing machine sometimes).
We have a saying in our household: “You can tell how good a day it’s been by the state of your clothes”. Muddy clothes symbolise a great day. We are fortunate to be able to make such a statement. We don’t worry about messy clothes because they can soon made made clean again.
Just before we went on holiday our washing machine broke down and we had to rely upon the generosity of friends. Our friends were wonderfully generous, but it was still a hassle.
Now we have a new washing machine (7Kg load, no less) the hassle has been reduced significantly, but I wanted to remind myself that this situation is a luxury. So many people live in situations where such luxury is only a dream.
One of the things that frustrates me the most is organizational friction. I’m talking here about all of those things in an organizations which you know are simple to do, but difficult to get done. Everytime I come across someone who says that something can’t be done because they need approval from a Line Manager, CIO, Gordon Brown, Elvis it’s just friction. It’s purpose is to slow you down, or even to stop you.
Dilbert highlighted this today:
What makes this cartoon, like so many, funny is that it’s very close to the truth.
Friction produces two effects – heat and wear. The same is true for organization friction, especially when it’s used against people trying to get on with their job. People worry that organizations without friction will run out of control and fall apart. What these people forget, though, is that no-one has yet invented a perpetual motion engine.
Many organizations would perform a lot better if they went after the friction rather than trying to increase the friction to retain the control.
For those of you wondering, yes I have some across some friction today.
I was watching Imagining the Tenth Dimension yesterday with intrigue. The intrigue didn’t so much come from the idea or concept, but rather the method of communication. This site tries to convey a very complex scenario by using diagrams, animations and voice.
Having started to research our leaning styles a little in order to understand a little more about brain polarization I was intrigued by how others would interact with this site. I (as a right-brained person) found myself primarily following the diagrams and animation. Do left-brained people focus more of the voice? Is the concept easier to understand in words than in diagrams?
As an IT Architect I regularly come across issues which have multiple dimensions, because they have multiple variables. I have often tried to portray these problems as diagrams and often struggled, the diagrams becoming too complex for many people to understand Trying to explain the multi-dimensional problem in words is also problematic. This issue is often made worse by different people wanting to understand their dimension, and not being too bothered about the other dimensions. I have often found myself writing documents which repeatedly say and illustrate the same thing, but in different dimensions representing different members of the audience of the document. I’ve also used PowerPoint as a mechanism to constrain myself to a single slide for each dimension and hence each audience. This constraint actually helps to remove the desire to explain every other dimension.
If we want people to engage with something we need to show a dimension that’s relevant to them and not to confuse them with the totality of all of the dimensions. Showing all of the dimensions might not be enough though, we might need to show all of the dimensions in a way that is relevant to people with different learning styles.
tags: Architecture, Thinking
One of my worries with Windows Live Writer was whether people would be motivated to extend it to include the functionality that I wanted it to have.
Well two of my requirements have already been met.
There you go, just like that. Although Beta code, both of these projects go beyond the capabilities I already have in BlogJet. FlickrWriter allows me to search by tag which Blogjet doesn’t. Tag4Writer provides an interface, BlogJet requires me to go into the code.
And yes I’ve used both of them to create this post.
Via Tim Heuer
tags: Windows+Live+Writer, FlickrWriter, Tag4Writer, Microsoft
One of the things I love about being on holiday is that I reconnect with how big the sky is.
It helps, of course, when you are sat on a beach where the sky seems so much bigger anyway. Sometimes it’s like the sky and the ocean are merged together to form a single complete continuation. Sometimes though the ocean reflects the sky so that it forms a funnel.
While we were in France we saw some fabulous skies. 
One day we went out to Chateau de Dinan which is a huge rock formation sticking out into the Atlantic. It’s only connection to the mainland is a huge stone arch. It’s like it is defiantly saying “attack me if you dare”. There is nothing between these rocks and America, other than Atlantic Ocean. As I looked out the sky felt huge.
Another day we went to Quiberon. Quiberon is a peninsula that sticks several miles out. As we traveled that day the sky was low and it was raining. 
Our hopes of a good day weren’t high as we sat under the shelter of the car’s estate boot for lunch. The sky certainly wasn’t big then. Being true Brits though, we stuck with it. It was still raining when we decided to go swimming despite the cold and the rain. As we entered the water the rain stopped and the sky started to expand and grow. At one point a huge black cloud stretched out in front of us like some huge space ship inspecting the small planet beneath it. At others the sun broke through to reveal the true expanse of the sky.
The other night Sue and I were out late in the Lake District with friends (that’s another story). The Moon was up and the stars were shining. 
We decided that there was still adventure to be had and things to be seen so we headed up Kirkstone Pass to be as far away from light as possible. The Stars and the Moon gave another view of the vastness of the sky.
When I was younger the vastness of the sky used to make me feel small and insignificant. When I became a Christian I saw the sky differently, I saw that the vastness of the sky was a confirmation of God’s great love. God could have chosen to completely disregard this tiny little planet in the middle of the vastness of universes, but He didn’t. God chose to send Jesus to this earth for this people. That makes this earth and this people massively significant.
My last post made Steve think I wasn’t impressed with Windows Live Writer.
I wasn’t wowed, but I am still impressed.
The first things I tend to see in any new product are the things that it doesn’t do compared to my current capability, that is what my last post was reflecting.
I am impressed with the cleanness of the WLW interface.
I am impressed with the way it deals with posts and drafts, retaining a local copy.
I am impressed by the way it properly formats my posts. It’s nice to be writing in the same colours and fonts as will appear on the blog. It’s even nicer to be writing in a screen that is the same width as the blog without having to guess where things would actually appear. For those of you looking on the web you will notice that the paragraph spacing is much batter than in my previous posts.
I am impressed that they have written a product that covers ore than just Spaces.
I am impressed that they have created a plug-in capability and SDK.
The thing that concerns me about the things I think are missing is whether I believe Microsoft have a motivation to put them in, or whether a plug-in movement will be built which will add them in. Microsoft has little motivation to put Technorati tag support in, or Flickr support, or a broad Ping Server list.
But I am still impressed.
Thought I would give Windows Live Writer a go.
First impressions – it’s BlogJet with bits missing. Some of the screen are even in the same order, it’s a bit too close a likeness sometimes. The similarity to BlogJet is be interesting in itself though – I like to use BlogJet. BlogJet costs a small amount of money, so a free alternative is interesting.
I’ve already found a few places where BlogJet is definitely better. I add Flickr pictures into my posts which is best done using some code cut from Flickr. Switching to the code page is easier in BlogJet because it’s just a tab at the bottom of the screen, it’s a bit more complicated in WLW. You can use F12, but as I’m not likely to live most of my life in the tool I suspect I won’t remember that.
When working with code BlogJet highlights incomplete code, no such joy in WLW.
I was living in hope that Windows Live Writer would have the Microsoft Office wiggly line for spelling mistakes, but unfortunately not. You need to do the spell check. As others have mentioned Spell Check is Shift+F7, I have no idea why, F7 doesn’t do anything? Once is Spell Check there is no “Ignore All” option either. The Office Grammar checker would be even nicer, but I suspect I’m pushing for too much there.
BlogJet doesn’t do a good job of dealing with Tags, but at least I can create an “Auto Replace” which replaces a keyword with a set of code. Using this code it’s then really easy to create tags. There is no such option in WLW.
WLW allows you to add ping servers, but doesn’t have any in the default.
Given all of the effort Microsoft has put into smilies in other products I’m also a bit surprised that they haven’t put smilies into WLW. BlogJet smilies are great.
For some reason it can’t delete a post it creates in order to understand the make-up of the blog – that’s what this post is about. I thought I would leave it there as a reminder. This is a niggle really, I was just pleasantly surprised that WLW even considered blogging tools other than Spaces.
One thing I have notices, and it’s only a small thing, WLW does a proper selection when you double-click, BlogJet always selected the space following the word.
It’s still a Beta so hopefully we’ll see some changes.
It’s one thing being in flick and being able to see where a picture was taken – but what about the other way around – that’s where flickrmap comes in.
You know that a service or technology has made it into the mainstream when there is vibrant and active eco-system surrounding it.
It seems that every time I look into it someone has built something new to enhance, support or simply have fun with Flickr.
This week there has been three:
Profile Widget is doing a similar thing to Flickr Inspector but this time it’s using the information available to create a nice banner for either a user or a group.It’s these kind of enhancements that make people passionate users of a service and creates a self feeding eco-system. As other Web 2.0 type services make it to this point we are in for a very interesting future.
Tags: Localize Bookmarklet, Flickr Inspector, Profile Widget, Flickr
In his latest post Stu discusses an interesting approach to resolving some of the assurance issues that we are going to face when Enterprises use Web 2.0 services. I briefly discussed some of these assurance issues in my post about Enterprise IM.
Stu’s idea is that services could be ‘insured’ by an external party that is already trusted. It’s an interesting approach and there is some precedence for it. When I deal with a small retail organisation online I look for some form of assurance before putting in my credit card details – safebuy is a good example of this. It’s easy to get into a cycle of “but who assured them?” but there is no ultimate assurance it’s just about building trust.
I don’t need quite the same level of assurance from a larger, well know, organisation because I know that they are trustworthy already. They have already built trust and aren’t going to risk it, it’s the new people who have a problem. Flickr being bought by Yahoo makes it more trustworthy. Services delivered by Microsoft or Google already have a level of assurance.
Anyway, I’m off at a slight tangent here. getting back to the subject at hand.
If an enterprise is going to place its corporate data into a web service what assurances do they need? Well it’s a sliding scale, and that helps the new starters. Enterprises can build trust over a period of time, trusting them with the low value, not so sensitive information first and then building up to the more sensitive stuff.
It helps, of course, if the service doesn’t actually need to keep the data, it’s only there for a short period of time – webex being a good example.
Another way of building assurance is through audit; being able to come along and to check. How do you know if the service provider is following good security processes? The only real way is to go and see. But if some external, trusted organisation, undertook the auditing for everyone things would be so much better. It wouldn’t please everyone, but it would please most.
Perhaps that’s where the traditional service providers come in. I see two ways of them getting engaged.
They could partner with a specific set of services and build a set of ‘branded’ (and hence assured) services. Adding a layer of integration to make it even more compelling. In this model you would go to the service providers site and use what appears to be their service, but really it’s just a collection of other peoples services. In terms of functionality there would be very little to choose between this and the collection of services that someone could put together themselves, the difference would be in the services (support, contractual, assurance, financial) that is provided. While this sounds like a nice idea, it also has loads of problems. The major problem being that this model is effectively the model that we have today, a model that people aren’t happy with because it restricts flexibility and adaptability too much. The service providers would have to be able to move very rapidly.
The other way the service providers could add value would be to just be service assurers. The level of assurance would depend on the service. People wanting to use ‘assured services’ would gain a level of trust in the service being provided but would still have all of the flexibility and adaptability. The challenge here is that as the market matures around the services the need for an assurance agent becomes diminished. Why pay for assurance if you have successfully used a service for several years without problems.
The other issue to layer onto this is the changing nature of enterprises and the move towards evermore independent working – but that’s a World is Flat discussion which I’m not quite ready to launch into yet.
Tags: Web 2.0, Web Services, The World is Flat, Service Providers