Month: January 2009

Count Your Blessings #133 – A hat for my head

Walla CragThere’s no getting around the fact that I’m getting older, and getting older brings with it some consequences.

One of the consequences for me has been the migration of hair follicles from the top of my head into my nose and ear cavity. This bring two problems, one of which I won’t discuss today, but the second one is that my head now needs something to keep it warm in the cold, and cool in the heat.

Once upon a time I had hair that was an ample cover for my head, and even ventured down onto my shoulders, but those days are no more.

The simple addition of a piece of cloth on my balding pate makes all the difference, and I’m grateful for it.

“That is why, no matter how desperate the predicament is, I am always very much in earnest about clutching my cane, straightening my derby hat and fixing my tie, even though I have just landed on my head.”

Charlie Chaplin

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0It is with some sadness that I announce the retirement of Jimmy and Grandad 1.0. It is with a little excitement that I announce the arrival of Jimmy and Grandad 2.0.

Both Jimmy and Grandad have known that this day was coming and have embraced it with the resilient attitudes you would expect. Many of you will not know this but Grandad has for some time suffered from repeated fractures in his legs due to Jimmy and Grandad 2.0his age, and Jimmy’s clothes have, quite frankly, become a disgrace.

Jimmy and Grandad 1.0 were there to witness the arrival of their upgraded selves and welcomed them with open arms. As with many upgrades some things are better, and newer, other things are not quite what they used to be. You will notice that the new Grandad has had to resort to glasses because his eyesight isn’t quite as good as Grandad 1.0. You will also notice that Jimmy 2.0 doesn’t quite have the same wide smile as Jimmy 1.0.

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0So I would ask you to welcome the new Jimmy and Grandad as they try to take on their new roles. It can be quite demanding to be expected to travel so widely.

Jimmy and Grandad 1.0 will be entering retirement on the third floor of the bookshelf. From there they will be able to continue their studies of human behaviour without having to participate in quite so many adventures.

It is the end of an era.

Jimmy and Grandad 2.0

My Tools: Lotus Notes

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEver since I started using Wakoopa something has been nagging away at me. Sitting at number 3 of my most used applications has been a tool that I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to write about – Lotus Notes.

In this week of Lotusphere I’ve finally decided that I can’t avoid it anymore.

But why to reticent?

The primary reason is that I have a very mature relationship with Notes, I’ve been using it since version 2 (now on version 8+) and the relationship has not always been a good one. It has been an incredibly powerful tool helping me to achieve things that I couldn’t have done in any other way. A number of years ago (too many to count actually) I was working with a team and we were processing a lot of paper forms, Notes enabled us to automate the process quite quickly and very efficiently. But that was some time ago.

For me Notes (and Domino) is an application development platform, that happens to also do a reasonable job as a personal information tool. The problem is, these days, I only use it as a personal information tool. All of the things I used to do on Notes have pretty much gone away, being replaced by portal type tools. Some of these portal sites are little more than web enabled Domino applications, but I’m not using Notes to access them.

So that leaves my relationship with Notes as a “personal information tool” relationship, and it’s in these capabilities that my love-hate experience is the most acute.

I love the ability to access my email, calendar and tasks across a firewall boundary, something that Notes could do long before Outlook.

I hate the lack of trust I still have in the calendar. This week I tried to delete an item, got an error message, went to the IBM support site to find an answer. The answer, and I paraphrase – get stuffed. The problem is, this is a reoccurring appointment which I can’t delete and lasts almost forever. I have never been able to trust my Notes calendar.

I love the enhancements to the Notes 8+ interface. I especially like the ability to see all of the emails in a thread from within the email.

I hate the way that flagging works and the document properties dialogue.

I could carry on, like I say this is an old relationship.

Whether Notes is winning market share or loosing against Exchange is, in my opinion, irrelevant. As an application platform it’s loosing to the web. Both Exchange and Notes are also going to loose to the web in the long run (even if they persist at the back-end) for email, calendaring and tasks.

So I’ve done it, I’ve written about one of the oldest tools in my kitbag. A tool that I think will be around for a good while yet, but only because it’s not easy to get rid of. If I was starting a business today – I wouldn’t start from here.

Twitter: Stats and Wordle

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallThis morning I was wondering about the things that I type into twitter. Twitter is one of those things that is used for all sorts of communication. Briefly looking at mine they seemed to be mainly “status” updates telling people where I am and what I am doing.

While pondering this question Charlie highlighted TweetStats

Looking at these stats I was interested to see that there is a good spike of activity at the start of my day – which would coincide with the “status” update theory.

TweetStat also links to Wordle from where you can see that among my most popular words are – time, today, home, day – all of them “status” words.

Wordle: Twitter

“Blog” is there as a popular word because I send through updates to my blog too – more “status” information.

Have I got stuck in a twitter rut?

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Count Your Blessings #132 – An Ikea Sofa-Bed

Bassenthwaite MorningIn the upstairs study where I spend much of my working life is an Ikea sofa-bed. It’s not a grand sofa-bed, in normal Ikea style it’s quite a simple affair. There’s little more to it than a metal frame, some wooden slats and two large pieces of foam. Yet for all its simplicity this sofa-bed is a real blessing to me.

For me, this sofa-bed represents a place of quiet, a place to stop and to relax.

At the other side of the room from this sofa-bed is my desk covered in all sorts of detritus; bills to pay, letters to be responded to as well as more than my fair share of technical gubbins associated with my work.

The sofa-bed is different though, it’s a place of tranquillity.

It’s almost like it’s a room of two halves, but to put a divide between the two would be a mistake. It’s not the contents of the room that make the difference it’s really my attitude to what happens in the different places. The desk can be quite a stressful place as I’m trying to get my work done. When i make time to be quiet I sit on the sofa-bed.

There’s are few things I like more than to sit on the sofa-bed with a cup of coffee and to write in my journal while the technical gubbins provides some quiet relaxing music.

The desk is a place of labour and stress. The sofa-bed is a place to stop and contemplate, because that is what I have made them.

It’s a blessing to have a place of quiet.

My Tools: PowerPoint – 14 hours and Word – 4 hours

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallIt’s only a small sample of a week, but one of the statistics that I’ve found very interesting on my application usage has been the huge difference in time spent in PowerPoint (14 hours) compared to Word (4 hours).

That means that I am using PowerPoint for nearly 20% of all of my active application time.

Once upon a time my primary communication method was a document, I’d spend ages getting the words right, correct, and accurate. Today, I’m nearly always creating diagrams, and crafting a set of them together to build a story.

Some of this change is because my role has changed – I’m not working directly on projects most of the time, I’m trying to influence thinking, helping people to understand things.

The other reason the I’m not writing documents is that no one reads document anymore. I’ve tried writing documents to more fully explain my thinking, but it’s no use, people only want a document these days when a process mandates that they have one.

On the whole I actually think that this is a good thing, I’d much prefer that people focussed their efforts on understanding rather than on grammar (especially as mine is so bad). But there is also a real danger here, and that is the effect of the passage of time. Documents shouldn’t need any explanation, a presentation nearly always should. That’s fine when a presentation has only just been created, the author is available for questioning and they can still remember what they meant, but over time that is less and less likely.

The value of the presentation degrades much faster than the value of the document.

Therein lies my question: are we scrimping on the cost now, only to see the costs come flooding back later on? Or perhaps that is what we are hoping the mandated policy will fix?

My Tools: At least 94 of them

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallI was starting to think that the My Tools series was running out of steam so I thought I would do some analysis on how much I use the various tools. My chosen tool for this is wakoopa.

I’ve only been running it for a few days and I’ve already accessed 94 different applications. Considering that I’ve written less than 20 articles and some of them were about parts of applications, or physical tools I clearly have a long way to go before I really cover the full set of tools that I really use.

If you want to look at my usage profile it’s here.

On a lighter note, look out for something happening on the Jimmy and Grandad front, you will be shocked.

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Returning to work: Needing more context

Jimmy, Grandad and Grandma go to CornwallEvery time I return from a break I think about writing this post – and then forget.

Returning from a break can be a very frustrating experience for IT users and one of the main reasons for that is that all of those so-called scheduled tasks have been queuing up in the infrastructure waiting for you to plug-in or turn on.

There can be quite a number of them: system updates, password expiry, anti-virus updates, password expiry, application updates, browser updates, etc.

The main challenge here is that the activities aren’t really “scheduled”, they are just set by a simple daily, weekly, monthly elapsed agenda without any context. Any break in the system being online means that the activities are just queued up waiting to happen.

Personally, the ones that I find most frustrating are the password expiry ones. You always have a lot to think about when you return from a break, thinking about new passwords is one that you shouldn’t really be burdened with. What I find worse are the passwords that expired just before I went on holiday.

It can’t beyond us to do this in a less intrusive way. We only have to understand the context a bit better and schedule appropriately.