Graham Chastney

This post isn’t going to say anything of any real value other than to say that I’m trying out the WordPress Client Beta for BlackBerry.

It looks like it will be a really tidy little application for blogging those ideas that are on my mind and need to be written there and then.

The problem with those ideas is that they aren’t, on consideration, normally that good.

There has been a bit of discussion around recently about the value of blogging, with some people giving in because they can’t make a decent living from it.

I don’t do it for a living, but I was intrigued as to what my blog would be worth.

I don’t think I’ll be giving up the day job any time soon.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are really making progress.

Wii Breakfast

Today I have finished work with a reoccurring question on my mind – “how do I communicate better?”

I’m not sure whether it’s just me, or whether this is something that we all struggle with. I have some information that I need to move from my mind into someone else’s mind.

For thousands of years we have spoken; for thousands of years we’ve drawn pictures; for hundreds of years ordinary people have been able to read and write; businesses spend billions every year on technology in the hope that it is improving the way that its staff communicate – and yet we still can’t make the distance from one brain to another brain any shorter.

So I’ve decided that I need to do something.

I’ve decided to try and have a meaningful conversation with someone every day. I’m not talking about information sharing I’m talking about communicating. Hopefully this will lead to better communication all around.

“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.” – George Bernard Shaw

If I’m successful I’ll let you know, if I’m not I’ll simply forget that I ever write this post and so should you.

I have a bit of a usability problem with Lotus Notes tabs.

It’s a simple thing but it catches me out every day and has become an annoyance that I feel like I need to write about.

When I start Notes the first thing I do is to take a quick look in my inbox and then open my calendar. The two tabs that I have open look like this:

As I open items to read the tab bar starts to fill up and the size of the tabs starts to reduce.

The number of tabs that I need to open depends on the size of the screen that I am using. On my laptops it’s only four items before I get to this:

I’m now stuck, which is my calendar, which is my inbox. Opening more items just makes the situation worse. If I had a shorter name it would be less of an annoyance, but I don’t have a short name.

I’m not sure why Lotus couldn’t do something with the icons to show me which view of my mail file I am looking at, perhaps it’s configuration issue I can work my way around, or even the way that Notes has been deployed to me, but I haven’t done anything to create this situation.