Graham Chastney

It’s been a little while since Jimmy and Grandad have been out.

I think they are feeling just a little upset by having their house moved from my nice warm study out into the garage, so I should probably make it up to them by taking them out.

But where?

We are going to the theatre in Manchester on Saturday night, but I’m not sure I can get away with flash photography in the Royal Exchange . Might be fun to try though.

Ever been running a My Brain category for some time now. It started with the question of whether it was possible to “strengthen” your brain.

Steve lent me Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen which talks a lot about examining people’s brains which concludes that the brain can be changed by the environment and “training”.

Church of the Customer had an interesting blog recently that highlighted some research being done at Arizona State University.

I wonder what my brain would be like?

I’ve recently been through a whole load of personality/leadership/management type profiling. All of them have used a similar tool to do the assessment. They have all used questionnaires of one kind or another. At best, these questionnaires are an indirect assessment of what my brain is actually doing. Taking the direct approach seems like a very interesting approach.

Coaching Tips also picks up on the research.

Following on from my post about Infomania and Facebook the BBC is today reporting on a set of workers who have lost their jobs because of ebay addiction.

Unison welfare officer Mark Fisher said people got “addicted” to certain web sites.

“People get very involved in eBay, Sky Sports and their favourite soccer teams. It happens in many, many offices,” he said.

“Obviously we cannot justify people spending a couple of hours of working time looking at these sites – but temptation was put in their way,” he added.

“We plan to push for the authority to make changes to its IT system, to help prevent workers landing themselves in hot water.”

He called for Internet access be limited to lunch break and that web access should be filtered at other times.

“We want them to take temptation out of people’s hands,” Mr Fisher said.

I suppose that’s one way of doing it, but is that really realistic. Is it actually practical to filter out every site that would potentially land people in hot water if they used it too much?

To be honest, I’m not entirely comfortable with the word “addiction” in this context either. If someone really is an Internet addict they shouldn’t be using the Internet at all. Alcoholics don’t go from over drinking to moderate drinking, they go to no drinking. It may be that for some people that is the case and they should stay away from the Internet all together, but I’m not sure that it’s really like that for everyone who overuses the Internet. I’d like to be able to suggest another word, but I’m not sure what that would be, perhaps “mania” is a better word.

What’s not told in this story is what level of training these people were given and whether they have been offered some form of rehabilitation. Traditional training has always focussed on the practical side of IT systems – click here, type there – but very little training has been undertaken on the social elements. As I’ve said before, I think we are moving into an age where we need to start training people to be safe Internet users in the same way as we train them to be safe drivers. Safe for themselves and safe for others. We need to start doing this as early as possible, from children through to adults, if we are going to avoid an epidemic in the future.

Am I the only one getting a little fed up with the volume and intrusiveness of Apple Update?

I’ve not checked the validity of the iTunes update history on wikipedia, but it seems about right. That’s 6 updates in less than 3 months. Even Microsoft manage to keep it to one set a month.

It’s not actually the volume of the updates that frustrates me though, it’s their intrusion.

Take this morning’s update as an example.

The first thing is the update dialogue:

It pops up slap bang in the middle of the screen and tells me that I have four updates available. Thanks for the blatant interruption.

It’s a strange list too. Why am I being asked to install a Security Update for QuickTime 7.1.6 and QuickTime 7.2 and iTunes + QuickTime 7.4.2. I could understand it if they were all incremental updates but two of them are full on installs, they aren’t part installs. They are full installs of different version of the same thing.

Rather than messing about (because I have enough bandwidth) I click “Install 4 Items”, and then for my next annoyance:

License agreements – yes agreements plural, one for QuickTime, one for iTunes + QuickTime and yet another one for Apple Software Update. These are agreements that I have had to click on 6 times in the last three months. Agreements that I don’t think have changed and if they had changed I would be struggling to notice where.

So I click – accept and accept and accept, then we are off:

Having downloaded and installed 85MB of software for what appears to be a minor update to do with ring-tones for the iPhone. An update about which I couldn’t care less. I’m in the UK and I couldn’t buy an iPhone even if I wanted to for another six weeks, and I don’t want to.

Then it’s time for the ultimate intrusion, the ultimate software installation sin.

Reboot? What for? This is supposed to be a minor update. Then I remember that I have this to go through all over again for two more devices, a real productivity killer.

I like to keep my software up to date because it’s normally easier that way. I think I might make an exception though and remove Apple Software Update only updating iTunes and QuickTime when I absolutely have to.

Am I really seriously considering getting locked into this software by buying hardware from them as well.

Rant over.

I’ve been using the built in Windows Media Player capabilities on my iMate SP5 as my primary mobile media player for a while now. The jack plug socket has developed a fault recently which means that the plug needs to be in a specific position to get stereo sound. Often this isn’t a problem, but when I am exercising it is definitely a problem.

I’ve mostly been happy with this way of working, the only thing that has been a real problem is that limitation of 2GB which has meant me developing a rather complex process for getting the current podcasts onto the card. It’s also meant that everything is heavily compressed and quality suffers (the strange thing is that quality seems to suffer more for music that is quieter, when it’s even more noticeable).

So I think it’s time for a change – but to what?

I’m not even sure whether I want to go to a dedicated media player or not. I quite like the convenience of have a combined phone and media player (and that’s a surprise to me). Should I just get a new phone and put a bigger memory card in it?

Most of my media is in WMA format, apart from podcasts which are nearly always in MP3. So it would seem sensible to go with a WMA compatible device, but I’ve not really seen one that makes me actually want it. I quite like the look of the Sony ones, for instance, but I’m not sure that 8GB is actually enough. There is something about the handling of the Creative Zen Vision:M that I don’t like. Am I being to narrow in my thinking?

So what about the iPod’s – ummm. One of the things that my recent leadership assessments told me was how high I valued the "new". this means that I hate being a follower and buying an iPod would feel a bit too much like following the pack. Would it be such a bad thing to follow the pack for once? I also think that I would have to start afresh ripping my music collection because I can’t imagine that the transpose from WMA to AAC (or even MP3) would give a quality of file that I would be happy with. That seems like a lot of work. It would need to be an iPod Classic because I’m still not sure that 8GB would be enough. Is an iPod Classic too big?

Don’t even mention Zune – I’m in the UK and it’s not available to me, but perhaps Microsoft have a story to tell there. Would I want to wait even if they did?

Choices, choices.