Graham Chastney

For those of you who are reading this through a some kind of Reader you might be interested to know that I’ve been tweaking the design on this site. For the rest of you, you’ve probably already noticed.

There was a bit of thought behind it:

• 3 Columns – I like 3 column designs, most people have a wide enough screen these days to make the most of it.
• Simplicity – I like designs that are very simple, but still functional. I’m not a huge fan of designs with loads of bling. I know that this slightly contradicts the previous point but it’s a balancing act.
• Photographs – I wanted something that would showcase some of my favourite photographs. Pictures are also a great way of engaging with people, but the skill is creating a design that allows this without it being gaudy.
• Fonts – I don’t like serif fonts. Don’t know why particularly, I just don’t.

I’ve still got some tweaking to do.

Let me know what you think.

I have quite a complicated set of criteria for writing what I write on this blog.

My first criteria is value. Is what I am writing of some value to someone. It might just be of value to me – helping me to construct a set of thoughts. If I’m trying to construct these thoughts then perhaps others are too. It might be something I’ve found that I think others would like to know about and it might be a set of opinions that I want to express.

That’s the positive side, but I also have a set of criteria for things that I avoid writing about:

• I won’t write about something that I am currently being directly paid to work on. I’m never going to write about a customer’s project. That’s not the purpose of this blog and would potentially ruin my relationship with my client.
• I won’t write about something that is “mainstream” and by that I mean that I am not going to write about something in blogs like lifehacker of ReadWriteWeb. They are paid to do a good job of covering their information, anything I say is just adding to the noise. If I have an opinion to relay I may say something, but I’m more likely to do that as a comment.
• I won’t write about individuals. The internet is far to severe a place for me to write about someone.
• I won’t write about my employer, I’m not paid to blog and I don’t have a mandate from them to blog. It’s a personal activity, so I’m making personal comment.

All of these criteria leave me with a lot of grey areas; where it’s grey I’ll always err on the side of caution and not write.

I also won’t aggregate into my blog all of the other stuff that I contribute to on the web – del.icio.us it visible as is twitter, but I’m not going to copy them in as posts. The same with flickr, and facebook. If people want to connect with those streams then they can do so by the appropriate mechanism. The other reason why I don’t do this that I’m just duplicating the number of times many people see the same piece of information. I’m considering turning off notifications of my blog updates in twitter for this very reason; I regularly read the same piece of information twice which annoys me, and probably annoys others too.

I write lots of stuff and only some of it appears here. This probably makes my online persona difficult to pin down, but it’s only ever going to a part of who I am. I think that I need to do a better job of showing people where I’m contributing, but I don’t think that aggregating it all together into a single stream is the way to do it.

A spend a good deal of time pondering whether I have the balance right; I’m still not sure.

The IT landscape is composed of millions of moving components that we plumb together to create thousands of applications. We then take the thousands of applications and plumb them together to make systems.

But how do you know what works with what, how do you find out what the problems are. You’d think that this was a simple question, but it’s not. There are many reasons that it’s not simple, one of the main ones is the relationship between organisations. It’s very difficult for one organisation to validate the work of another organisation without a lot of work. Lots of the larger vendors run verification programmes but they can be expensive especially for the smaller application vendors.

Citrix has recently taken a different approach – community verification.

The IT community is integrating applications and components all of the time and Citrix is hoping to tap into all of this knowledge, but also to make it available to everyone else.

“The Community Verified site is a platform in which third party products are added and verified by community members. Community members are helping each other by posting and voting on third party products known to work in their environment.  These products do not get any Citrix Ready program benefits.”

There’s no warranty involved here just the knowledge that someone else has gone ahead of you and managed to succeed, a very valuable asset. The voting system also enables you to put some weighting behind your confidence.

In my experience it’s not integration of applications from the large well known vendors that cause the problems, it’s integration of products from smaller companies. These companies have less extensive experience and who would be struggling to undertake a formal verification activity anyway. A community based approach gives a very valuable middle ground.

On day 2 of my quest to have a meaningful conversation every day, today I had breakfast with a friend.

The conversations were all personal so I’m not going to detail them here.

It feels like a different conversation to business ones but they still require the same set of communication skills. So I’m not sure that I want to consider them as different conversations, just different subjects. I need to think about how Powell’s five levels of communication apply.

I tend to read blogs in three ways.

It’s not something I have consciously built up, it just seems to be the way I have gone.

I’ve also noticed myself subconsciously rating a whole blog in a similar way:

• Snacking: some blogs tend to be written as small chunks and I like to consume them that way.
• Dining: some blogs write longer posts these can be really good dining and require time and attention to enjoy them.
• Scanning: there are a set of blogs on which I neither snack nor dine, I just scan. It’s rare that I eat anything at all, I just look and see, the headline is enough.

I’ve also noticed that when blogs that I regard as a snack produce items that are longer than a snack they tend to get scanned. Blogs that get scanned are the ones that I’m likely to delete from my reader, because scanning is of limited value.

Some example of what I mean for different blogs:

A reader is, of course, essential to this type of working.

The question this leaves me is this:

How do people relate to my blog?

Am I a snack?

Am I a dinner?

Or am I a scan?

If you want to be noticed as a blogger – you have to blog.

It would seem like a reasonably easy equation, but how much do you have to blog to be really noticed, if noticed is what you want to be.

Well it would appear that the answer according to Technorati is at least 2 to 4 times a day, and if you want to be really, really noticed you have to blog more than 10 times a day.

Well, there is little chance of me getting to 10 a day, perhaps I should just aim to be one of the 22% of top 5000 bloggers who write things that are so good that writing less than one post a day is good enough.

I still think that quality is better than quantity – but then I would, I don’t have a lot of quantity.

I quite like the idea from Micro Explosion Media of the meal verses snack ratio.

Personally, I try for three posts a week and employ my meal verses snack ratio with those three posts (one meal, two snacks).

I suppose that’s about what I do. Perhaps a few too many snacks recently though.

I’m sure I’m not going to be the only one to be this over the next few days, but it’s fun all the same.

In celebration of 10 years Google has made a specific search available to show results from 2001.

Being the humble fellow that I am, I had to see what the difference in the results for “chastney” were. So from 2001:

I have to admit to doing this in the full knowledge of what the result shows today:

That’s right, in 2001 I didn’t feature at all, today I feature in the top spot – twice.

Back in 2001 there were only 328 entries – now in 2008 we mange 11,800, still a relatively small number.

One of these days I will manage to write something to surpass my now defunct post on Windows Live Writer Dictionary Hacks. The problem is – I keep linking to it.

It’s nice to see that Jimmy and Grandad get a mention under my Flickr stream, but that’s probably only because they were the last pictures that I posted.

It also shows that I need to work a bit harder on my “happenings” site so that it appears somewhere.

Congratulations to FiredUp for winning the Computer Weekly IT Lifestyle Blog Award for 2008. Congratulations to the other writers in the other categories too.

Thank you to everyone who voted for my humble writings.

Here's to another year of pondering and writing.

A short video to make you smile:

I bit of reflection for a Friday evening.

When I first started writing this blog I was still in my thirties – three years later I am into my forties and still writing.

I know lots of people who have started blogging and stalled, or crashed altogether, but something keeps me going. I’ve often wondered what that “something” is, actually I think that it’s “somethings”.

Probably the single biggest reason is that I enjoy it. Sometimes the reason doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that, but there is more. I regard it as a privileged that people actually read what I write. I get very little interaction directly on my blog, what I do get are people commenting to me when I meet them and sideline conversations that have been prompted by something I’ve written. That feedback cycle is quite edifying and gives me an encouraging lift.

This is post number 631, which isn’t the thousands that I see other write, but it is roughly 1 every working day which is actually amazing.

Writing about things helps to develop the thoughts around a subject, I’ve particularly found this in the My Brain series of posts, where a little reading got me thinking about something which then urged me on to read some more. Reading a bit, writing a bit, cemented the thinking. I started with a couple of big questions; while pondering them I asked and answered other questions. It’s growth and growth is good. Those with agile brains will be the ones of value in years to come, not to mention the ones who have a happy and fulfilling retirement.

I’ve recently been really enjoying thinking about the tools that I use and why I use them. I have a friend whose garage is immaculate, the tools all have their place and only depart from it when they are being used. I have a few boxes in my garage where my assortment of tools lurk in wonderful randomness. My IT tools are similar, I collect them, use them, leave them lying around. They wait, lurking on hard disks all over the place. Writing about why I use the ones that I use is actually helping me to sort them out a bit.

There is another theme that I think about quite a bit, it’s kind of links the brain theme with the tools theme. I am concerned that the tools and working environment that we are currently exposing ourselves too might actually be as dangerous as the ones that other heavier industry exposed our fathers too. I don’t mean that there is a disease like asbestosis lying undiscovered out there, what concerns me is what we are doing to our brains. I’m think of conditions like ADT, and Deindividuation, we don’t really know that much about the long term impact of high IT use. My son has finished school (already) after completing his GCSE’s. Some of his friends are really proud of the amount of time that they have been spending on WoW. One of them is playing so late into the night that he is almost nocturnal. He’s in danger of working his body clock all the way around until he’s back on the right time. These are brains that are going through rapid development and very susceptable. Are we really sure that this is not doing them irreparable harm?

On a lighter note, I also really enjoyed the company of Jimmy and Grandad. It started as a bit of fun, and has continued that way. Emily (who take many of the pictures) and I have had some strange looks from people as we have exposed them to the delights of these two fellows and the rest of the family.

It’s now Friday evening and time for me to go into the garden and remove some weeds. Gardens are definitely good for the brain.

Microsoft clearly have funkier music on their conference call lines than we do. There’s no way that we could dance like this, I have to admit to considering it though.

But like so many people approaching their 40’s I don’t move like I used to .

Enjoy.

Link: Microsoft Conference Call