Month: January 2010

Blessings #145 – Tree Skeletons

I love this time of year when the trees have dropped their leaves and have exposed their skeletons.

Preston SunsetIf you look through my photostream on Flickr you’ll find a multitude of pictures  that either have them as the central feature or use them to frame the scene. I’ve created a set for them just to see how many there are.

I think it’s the intricacy that they expose from trunk to bow from bow to branch and from branch to stick and twig. Each one of them constructed in a unique and fascinating way. In the summer you can only really see the leaves on the outside, while these are also wonderful, there’s something fascinating about seeing the skeleton.

Sometimes I look at a particular tree and  ponder the reason that made a particular branch take the route that it’s taken. Whatever caused it to bend and climb in that particular way? Why did that bow shoot off in that direction?

Levens SnowAt other time I wonder about the people who’ve climbed a particular set of bows. I think about the history that this skeleton has seen. I image which route would be best to scale the heights. Every now and then I decide that it’s time to climb myself.

These skeletons are also the promise of a season yet to come. They may be skeletons now, but soon a story of new life will start to unfold. These woody branches will soon be heavy laden with leaves and even fruit. The birds will become more active and build their nests. Eggs will be laid and chicks fledged. As time goes on, of course they will be returned to there skeletal state.

These trees go through a cycle and they know what to be doing in which season. You don’t see a tree full of leaves in the winter, and a skeletal tree in the summer is a dead tree. The trees seem quite comfortable with this, they aren’t constantly trying to fight the elements like we do. They know the rhythm of the seasons and how to live within it.

For everything there is a season,
     a time for every activity under heaven.

This little video does a wonderful job of showing the cycle of the seasons.

Why am I wound up by this?

If this sounds a bit rambling and off-message then it probably is, but I’m experimenting.

One of the reasons I write a blog is that I find it cathartic – it helps me to construct my thoughts, analyse them and then, if necessary, spit them out. In writing this I am expressing a set of feeling, the feelings don’t necessarily relate to real issue or problems – feelings are like that.

Levens SnowToday I am wound up. This particular thing has been winding me up for weeks and this thing is a document.

This document is a long very document -  160 pages and 31,000 words at the last count., that’s almost half way to being a novel. I’m currently responsible for the editing of this document.

The problem with this document is that it can never be finished. As soon as we get one version signed off there’s another set of updates ready to be incorporated. Some might regard a document like this as a good thing – I struggle to see it that way.

Every time I open it up for updates, there are a set of people ready and able to “help” us update it. I am inundated with a thousand opinions some of them specific and useful, many of them are just opinion. Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting in the stocks with people to throwing rotten vegetables at me.

Although it takes a lot of words to say it, this document, in my opinion, has a very simple scope. Within this scope, it has a purpose, it’s going to make a difference to something. I struggle, massively, with doing things for which I can’t see any viable outcome. What’s the point in doing something if it’s not going to result in anything.

Having written the document I want to get on with the outcomes, I want to do something with the information that the document makes available. I want to put the document to bed and then go and build something, fix something, create something. But that’s not how it seems, I’m here, updating this document, again with few perceptible outcomes from the last time. I feel like a train on a track with no station in sight.

But why do I care? I’m being paid aren’t I? It’s just part of the job isn’t it? Someone has to do it don’t they? And that’s when the non-conformist in me comes out.  None of these answers have ever been sufficient, and why should they be. If something isn’t fulfilling its purpose – why bother doing it. We already do too many things in life because they give us “a tick in a box” so I’m not sure why I should do any more of them.

As I said at the beginning, I’m just expressing feelings here, and those feelings don’t necessarily reflect upon the reality of the situation. What I need to do is to turn these feelings around and writing them down helps to expose them to the cold light of day.

In that cold light of day I can realise things about this situation:

  • I can realise that I don’t need to carry this document on my own, I don’t think I’ve actually been asked to, and even if I have, I shouldn’t.
  • I can see that I need to set myself a target with a purpose attached to it. This target can give me something to aim for and give the revisions to the document something to live for.
  • I can start to assess the opinions of others as another set of opportunities to be filled. If people want this document to do something different to what it’s designed for it’s because they have a need for that kind of a document.

It’s necessary to change the way I see the situation before I can make a change to the situation. That’s the point of writing it down, changing me so I can see things differently and make the necessary changes.

Social Networks – Unexpected Results in the Snow

I continue to be surprised by how deeply engrained in our day to day life social networking has become. I had another example of this last week.

Snow in the TableWe’ve been having some extreme weather in the UK over the last few weeks (just to be clear, this is extreme for the UK, it’s normal for other places in the world).

We had for the third time this year a lot of snow starting last Monday, travelling from Scotland and working its way to the South – or so I thought.

We’d already had our snow on Monday evening and Tuesday morning so continued with my plan to travel north to Edinburgh on Wednesday. Having check the weather forecast and road information I concluded that I’d be fine to travel. No more snow was expected and the roads were clear.

This is where social networking kicked in – on Tuesday I had twittered:

Tomorrow I am supposed to be in Edinburgh – what do you think the chances are?

As it happened I had a lovely drive up the M6 as far as Carlisle, enjoying the view of the snow over the Lake District. Passing Carlisle, it started to snow and by the time I’d got to Lockerbie we were down to a single lane and managing to do little more than 20mph. At that point I again twittered:

Did I get to Edinburgh ? No. I got to Lockerbie before turning back.

That evening I received a phone call from my Mum – who isn’t on any social network. She was wanting to make sure that I was OK and that I was home.

I had deliberately not twittered that I was setting off because I didn’t want some people to worry, but still my Mum had found out even though she has no simple way of seeing my updates.

How did she know? She’d been speaking to my sister, who’d seen my original update in Facebook. That wasn’t something I was expecting.

I’m going to have to be even more careful in the future.

http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?set_id=72157623171858968&text=Winter%202009/2010
Created with flickr slideshow.

Count Your Blessings #144 – McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives

Just saying the words makes me salivate – McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive. Not just “Chocolate Digestive” but “McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive”.

From Red to WhiteLots of other people do chocolate digestives but there is only one chocolate digestive worthy of the name McVitie’s.

Every super-market that I go into has a generic version of the chocolate digestive, but none of them quite make the grade. They’re just biscuits, there’s something about a McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive that lifts it above the others.

Sitting in my home office look out as the rain gently washes the snow into a grey mush of sludge and ice my heart is warmed by a cup of coffee and a McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive. There is something wonderfully homely about the taste of a McVitie’s Chocolate Digestive. I’ve eaten them all of my life and I suppose that the smell, the taste, even the look of them connects me with periods in my life long since forgotten.

I know that some people regard a dunked chocolate digestive as the pinnacle of culinary excellence, but I’m a purest, if something is delightful on its own, why add to it.

Sue makes a wonderful Bonoffee Pie with chocolate digestives as the base. Wonderful as this is, there’s something in me that feels that this is a waste of perfectly good biscuits.

McVitie’s Chocolate Digestives – a British tradition that we should be proud of and a blessing I am privileged to be able to participate in.

The only problem is – one never seems to be enough.

A Lack Of Planning On Your Part Does Not Constitute An Emergency On Mine

This is also one of my sayings so thought I would share it:

Unfortunately in the job that I do saying these words rarely makes a difference to the outcome – and the effort that I have to put in to help someone with their “lack of planning”.

The thing is, I feel like I know the gentleman in the picture, but can’t place him?

Blogging – 5 years on (well nearly)

I’ve been blogging for nearly 5 years now. It will be 5 years proper in April, but I’m likely to forget then, so I’m commemorating this event now.

A Trip to Hadrian's WallActually my first post was on 04/04/05 and sometimes I wished I’d posted a day earlier so it could have been 03/04/05, but I wasn’t that fortunate.

The first words weren’t very profound, but we’ve been on a long journey since then:

Welcome to my new home for Oak Grove.

This site will continue to focus on my work-type related stuff. I’m also planning something new for more general information and musings.

Graham

The description of “work-type related stuff” has probably been quite fair. My work is quite broad and increasingly focussed on concept and ideas rather than on technology products. The change in post topics has reflected this – I don’t think I’ve written about a technology product for some time, and the most popular posts at the moment are on team dynamics and rich pictures.

I continue to be hugely interested in how technology can add value to peoples day to working life – and the massive void between the technology available and the technology being exploited. Businesses move at a pace that is a mystery to me and I have to admit that I am still perplexed by what it takes to influence people to change. Someone once said “when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change – you will change” but that seems a bit negative.

Writing about concepts is much more difficult than writing about products, the audience is smaller too, but I’ve always written about things that I find interesting and will continue to do so.

The work on rich pictures has lead to some great conversations with my peers and customers. Much of this conversation has been carried out behind the firewall, as we move forward with our own internal social and enterprise networking exploitation, something that wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago.

Over these last 5 years my working life has changed massively, but there are yet more massive changes ahead. I think I’ll leave that for another post though. One of the things that I do intend to do in the coming months is to revisit the subject of the brain mainly to assess how this changed the way that I think personally.

Castle CragBack then I wrote under the name “oak grove”, there’s some history to that name, but I’m not going to get into that today. One thing that has changed has been the lack of Jimmy and Grandad. I’m not sure why that happened, it just seemed to come to a natural end. Perhaps it’s time to bring them back. What do you think?

I’ve also been writing my Blessings posts for most of that time too; these posts come less often mainly because I find they need a bit more work and for me to have the time to be creative. Some of the responses that I receive to these posts are wonderfully profound and often a privilege to receive.

To those of you who have been with me on this journey – thank you for your input. To those of you who are a little newer on the road – welcome.

There are no regrets, only lessons

I liked this, so thought I would share it.

2009 Top 10 (sort of)

Before I start into 2010 I wanted to do a quick review of 2010.

Statistics are wonderful things and one of the joys of the rich set of measures that are available these days is that you can quickly get some idea of what is going on. as with all statistics though they are there to help to build a story, they are not the story.

So here are some of my Top 10’s for 2009 since I’ve been on grahamchastney.com which has only been for part of the year. (I didn’t really see any value in combining two sets of statistics especially as I moved to grahamchastney.com in February).

Top 10 active posts:

1 Team Development: Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing
2 Rich Pictures
3 Slow Logon v Slow Applications
4 My New Fear of Working from Home
5 My Tools: Office Clip Art
6 Where’s the Whiteboard?
7 The IT Vendor – Pen League Table
8 New design for this site
9 Brabantia: Excellent Customer Care
10 Windows Live Writer Dictionary – Hack

The main thing to note here is that one of these posts has outstripped the others, and two posts have far outstripped any of the others.,

image

The main reason for this is that both of these posts appear high on the Google page order.

Top 10 search terms:

Search Term Views
forming storming norming performing 132
dilbert whiteboard 59
graham chastney 35
rich picture 20
runshaw bus fire 19
rich pictures examples 16
dilbert white board 15
galleny force 14
rich pictures 13
preston maritime festival 13

Like I say, statistics only tell part of the story.