Month: December 2006

Early Christmas Present

Christmas Tree 2006Yesterday Alexander – The Chief Happiness Officer – made an offer of 100 free copies of his book in PDF. I was online at the time and now the proud owner of a PDF version of Happy Hour is 9 to 5.

Wishing you all a joyous Christmas and a peaceful New Year. I’m not likely to post anything on this blog for a while, but the break normally does my more creative writing the world of good.

(If you want to know why there’s a wart hog on our Christmas tree you need to read this.)

 

Talk to Santa on Windows Live Messenger

Skiing in Bansko, BulgariaYou’ve probably all picked this up already, but I thought I would highlight it anyway.

If you put northpole@live.com as a contact in Windows Live Messenger you can talk to Santa.

Emily spent half an hour talking to him this morning. It seems that Santa has too many Elves to count, it’s cold in the North Pole and Rudolph is eager to get going. He wasn’t giving anything away though when she started quizzing him about her presents. It’s a relief to know that you can rely on Santa to be discreet.

Can’t wait to see live pictures of Santa from NORAD as he progresses towards us from the East.

Word of the Day: Ideation

Grandad's had a long dayIdeation:

“the process of forming ideas or images.”

You’ve probably used it loads of times, but it was a new one on me today. All I need to do now is work out how it would be said here in Lancashire .

My Brain – A review at the end of the year

Grandad wonders whether registering at the gym was a good ideaBack in August I came back from my holidays thinking about my brain, and in particular the increasing need for people who are right-brain focussed.

I did some online tests (here, here) and discovered that I my brain is quite well balanced between the left and the right. I also decided that balance wasn’t the only issue – brain fitness was the real issue:

  • What type of brain do I need to be happy?
  • What type of brain do I need to remain employable?
  • How ‘strong’ is my brain?
  • Is it possible to change your brain orientation?
  • Is it possible to ‘train’ your brain?

This lead to a short diversion into considering the link between hand orientation (left or right handed) and brain orientation. The conclusion – it’s more complicated than that.

I decided that I need to set myself a goal and chose – remembering names. It’s always been something I struggle with. But I didn’t want to just create a technique for remembering I wanted to use it as a test for brain health. At the time I was assuming that brain health was a valid concept. Having read Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen I concluded that it was indeed possible to make a brain “better“.

From this point I have changed a few things in my daily routine:

  • I’ve cut right down on caffeine. I really like the taste of coffee so I’ve switched to decaff.
  • I’ve created a quite place routine. It doesn’t happen every day but it happen regularly enough.
  • I’m doing more exercise. Most days I do something, even if it’s just a 30 minute walk. I try to get to the gym three times a week and manage it most weeks.
  • I’ve been eating more fruit. The main way I do this is to have some fruit in my cereal at breakfast, but I’m also drinking more smoothies.

Each of these things has made a contribution to a definite feeling that I’m clearer headed than I was before. I’m also more motivated to get things done. My tolerance to trivia has also become resurgent.

As for my test, I have no proof, but I think I’m getting better at remembering names.

The plan for next year is to deal with some of the things in my life that cause anxiety because stress isn’t good for brain health. I feel better placed to deal with them now. I think my next reading may well be the Chief Happiness Officers new book and workbook. I’ve also decided that I need to find room in my schedule for a creative outlet that doesn’t involve a computer – I quite fancy wood sculpture for some reason (my great grandfather was a carpenter so perhaps it’s in the genes). My fitness routine is OK but it also needs a goal so I think I’m going to try and plan in between 5 and 10 Saturdays when I’m going to walk up a mountain I’ve never walked up before.

These are not resolutions, I’m just thinking aloud. Resolutions only work if you plan the small steps that get you to the goal and I haven’t done that with any of these yet.

I’ve grouped most of these posts under the “My Brain” category.

Count Your Blessings #91 – Decorating Christmas Trees

Christmas Tree 2006Last weekend was Christmas tree erecting and decorating weekend for me, and not just one tree, I had the joy of helping to decorate two.

It’s become a bit of a tradition that on a Saturday close to Christmas my friend Dave and I go and collect the two trees. There’s one tree for church and one for our house.

The tree for church was 14ft this year, Dave had already reserved it so we weren’t worry about choosing a tree. It has been rather wet in Lancashire this year and the tree was sodden. All the water made it heavier than anything we had previously erected. It was a good job we weren’t travelling far. It was also fortunate that Dave’s Dad and Jonathan had come to help us.

Picking a tree for our house was a little more tricky. Christmas Tree 2006I wondered around a couple of times. They had very tall thin trees and shorter fatter trees, but no shorter thin trees. As I was about to give up the lady from farm bought another tree out. It was still wrapped in the mesh they put it in for transportation. She started to unfurl it and branch by branch out came a wonderful smaller thin tree, great.

Once we got to church we lifted out the huge 14ft tree and pondered over what we were going to do. We thought we could just about get it into the pot, but we weren’t sure the pot would stand up with a sodden tree in it. Having done this a few times we knew that once we took the tree out of its transportation mesh there was no going back Christmas Tree 2006so we had to be sure. We struggled to put the tree up into the pot and managed it, but we still weren’t sure it would stay up. A pragmatic approach was needed, out came the saw. The church Christmas tree is now a magnificent 12ft tree. We could now get on with the decorating.

Once home it was time to put up the Chastney family tree. Putting up the tree has become a fabulous time of remembering. Out of the garage comes the box of decorations; decorations that have been built up over years.

There’s are decorations that we have been sent by family who were living in Florida. We look at these decorations and remember two fabulous holidays. One different from the other but both fabulous in there own ways.

There’s a decoration given to us by a spiritual mentor who is no longer with us, but we know she is loving her time in Heaven.

There are decorations which are carvings of African Christmas Tree 2006animals reminding me of a trip to Cape Town, South Africa.

There are decorations with dates on them which remind us of a time when Jonathan and Emily were only small.

The lights on the tree remind us of a time when we helped decorate a ward at the local hospital. We went to one of the local department stores and asked them if they could help in any way. They gave us all of the previous years decorations. There were boxes and boxes of lights. There were so many that we bought some of them home and put them on our own tree.

We don’t have a designer tree, we have a memory tree.

Microsoft Software Assurance Tipping Point

Acorns by EmilyThere’s no new news here, I’m just bringing together a number of pieces of information that I’m not sure many people have put together.

Microsoft released it’s Software Assurance licensing programme some time ago now. Many customers looked at it, but struggled to see the benefit in it. There perception was that it worked for people who were going to adopt every release of Microsoft software as soon as it came out, but that was about it. The thing is that many customers don’t upgrade quickly, nor do they take every release. Many enterprise customers skip versions of Office, taking every other one, many did the same with Windows, skipping Windows 2000 and moving straight from NT or 98 to Windows XP.

Microsoft is steadily changing the landscape on Software Assurance though. A number of recent announcements have increased the pressure on customers to take Software Assurance, or made it more valuable, depending on your point of view.

Desktop Optimisation Kit

Microsoft have made the Desktop Optimisation Pack available to Software Assurance Customers. This kit includes four interesting components:

  • Microsoft SoftGrid – formerly Softricity SoftGrid
  • Microsoft Asset Inventory – formerly AssetMetrix
  • Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset – formerly Winternals IT Admin Pack
  • Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management – formerly Desktop Standard GPOVault

As you can see, this is a bundling of recent acquisitions – and only available to Software Assurance customers. These products will be available for a period as separate products with perpetual licenses, but eventually the plan is that they will only be available to Software Assurance customers (source: Gartner).

Yes, that’s right, if you want these capabilities you need to have Software Assurance.

These products are the type of products around which you build a whole process, you don’t just deploy them for some added value. In other words, they are the type of products which you get locked in to.

If you have spent a load of money packaging and deploying applications via SoftGrid you aren’t going to change to anything else easily.

If you have invested a lot in getting a GPO management process which relies upon the capabilities a AGPM then you aren’t going to replace it easily.

The Desktop Optimisation Kit now puts a cost on exit from Software Assurance.

Vista Enterprise

There will be one edition of Vista which will only be available to Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreement Customers – Vista Enterprise.

The primary benefit of Vista Enterprise is the availability of BitLocker without all of the cost of Vista Ultimate. If you are an enterprise customer you probably don’t want all of the Media Center capabilities that Ultimate anyway, nor do you want the heavier hardware footprint that it brings because that just pushes cost up. As an enterprise customer you probably do want desktop hard disk encryption.

The need for a licensing agreement to use Enterprise Edition puts another cost on the exit from the agreement. How many customers would want to deploy clients as Enterprise Edition, to then downgrade to Business Edition. If you’ve made extensive use of BitLocker it’s going to be very expensive to change.

Conclusion

These two activities provide a benefit to Software Assurance customers, which will mean that it’s preferable to more customers, but it will also add a cost of exit from the agreement which will make them more cautious.

(I’ve also learnt that writing a complicated post while blowing into a tissue every 2 minutes is hard work . So if you saw an unfinished version of this post – sorry. If this post doesn’t make much sense – sorry.)

 

Touran Returns

Cat steals the dog foodI now have the VW Touran back as the family car.

The description  of work makes for interesting reading:

  • Checked oil level on dip stick – no oil
  • Removed intercooler pipes – full of oil – replaced
  • Also found catalyst full of oil – replaced.
  • Also replaced turbo and turbo oil feed pipes.
  • Tested – all OK.

Thankfully there was also one other important piece of information:

  • Net Total: 0.00

Thank goodness for warranties, but I would like to have known the total cost.

Seems to be fine, though I think I will be keeping a close watch on the oil levels for the next few months.

Service was good and the parts came earlier than expected. It’s a good lesson for service organisations – “under promise and over deliver”.

Technorati tags: ,

Amazing HD Videos to Download (BBC)

Grandad wonders whether the old computer will run VistaThe BBC is currently running a fabulous programme Planet Earth. As part of this campaign they have also made available a number of HD videos to download – they are amazing.

My personal favourite is the Angel Falls one.

It isn’t that long ago when we were all happy with videos that were no bigger than 320*320 and not very clear either. These files demonstrate what full quality video can look like in reasonably sized files – 1 minutes in 50MB. Having said that, there was a time when I would have thought that anything taking 50MB was completely unreasonable. 

If the programme makers continue to make stuff like this they have nothing to fear from the likes of YouTube.

Technorati tags: , ,

Will it blend – iPod?

Grandad takes a bathI’m sure this is sacrilege of the highest order to some of my friends but it made me laugh .

Gadgets Impact on the Family

Jimmy brings the dog foodIf you are addicted to your Blackberry, or any other gadget that you use outside the office you should really read this:

BlackBerry Orphans – Wall Street Journal

The refusal of parents to follow a few simple rules is pushing some children to the brink. They are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad’s shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents’ obsession with their gadgets. Bob Ledbetter III, a third-grader in Rome, Ga., says he tries to tell his father to put the BlackBerry down, but can’t even get his attention. “Sometimes I think he’s deaf,” says the 9-year-old.

These things all have one really important button – “Off”.

I haven’t fallen into complete addiction, yet, but I know what these kids are talking about. The other day I found myself at the dinner table with friends searching for something on my phone. Sue pointed out in very clear terms how rude this was, and she was 100% right. I won’t be doing that again.

Technorati tags: ,

Shameless Plug

Formby BeachI’ve been trying to get the Pastors in my church to engage with blogs. I’ve finally got them writing things, what I need now are people commenting. That’s where you come in:

They both write really well and have each of them has something to say. You won’t be disappointed.

Word of the Day: De-portalize

Baby tries to get to the dog foodDe-portalize has cropped up in a few posts recently.

The basic premise is this: The value of a portal was in its ability to aggregate together everything in one place, the failure of the portal was the inability of the portal to get people to information quickly. Rather than using portals, people preferred search, once they have found something they then use tagging, adding favourites and subscription.

I have never been a fan of portals. I’ve never seen the point, they’ve never been able to answer the question that I’m asking. I consume a steady stream of information, most of it via subscription, there are then a number of sites that I go to, but most of them are accessed via favourites, the rest of the time I use search.

The emerging generation are exactly the same. Emily (10) accesses a few games on the Internet, she never remembers the URL of them, she relies on Google to get her there.

One of my pastimes is to operate the web site of our church. More than 50% of the traffic comes to the site via search, another 10 is referral. The other 40% is people who come direct, but I’m sure many of them are using favourites, I know I am. The front page stands as a place for information, but I’m really more concerned with the content, because that’s where people are getting to via search.

I’m not sure that there really is a de-portalization going on, I don’t think that the Internet was ever truly portalized.

(Speaking as an English person I find the need to create new words for things a bit of a mystery, especially when they end “ize”.)

Technorati tags: