Finding the chase and cutting to it

I live in the UK.  Climate wise, it’s OK, we get to grow most crops and the winters are not too severe and the summers are not at all monotonous!

Snow storms do bring this country to its knees though.  Major routes are focused on as they are a lot easier to manage but that leaves many streets where people live unnavigable.  But that makes sense in terms of logistics – focus on the many and let individuals fend for themselves.

Why don’t we have Snow Duty?  Every 4 years, one in every four house in a street has Snow Duty meaning they have snow and shovels and they are responsible for keeping their street clear.  Part of the package is a reduction in your council tax – so you get paid for your labour and the inconvience, even if you don’t actually have snow that year – the 25% of the population is enough to ensure that injury and illness and plain being away mean the street is covered.  Where people don’t pull their weight their neighbours can complain a system can exist for recouping the money.

This would still leave some minor roads unmanaged but it could really help London and the denser villages in the country.

I (like many others) research web 2.0 and its many forms.

I produce two blogs, run four wikis and have produced various user generated content sites from scratch.

In five years of doing this I am coming to the conclusion that there is no single correct answer for achieving a goal.

Platforms are evolving all the time: I love word-press but I wouldn’t dream of using anything by 2.7.  I love TWiki – a powerful incarnation of the wiki with many powerful tools and my ultimate preference for creating web sites with many contributors (I even formed a company offering consultancy on this) but for small, quick collaborative tool mediaWiki is perfect.

So, there are a lot of great, evolving web tools out there.  Go on, try one a as solution for your problem.

We expect our roads to be bad during snow fall.  England is a temperate country and it’s not very easy to provision enough snow gear during spells of bad weather.

Schools and offices often close and this really does help to protect life.

So why do the schools web-sites say “Service unavailable” and “Server too busy”?  There was plenty of warning about this, even if the snow fall was during a Sunday.  Did no-one think reprovisioning bandwidth or balancing the server was necessary?

Not a great photo, but us enjoying ourselves

I always felt a little sorry for Ron Livingston as Jack Berger telling Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) during an episode of Sex and the City that the man she was waiting for a call from just wasn’t that into her.

As someone who’s been married nearly 10 years (crikey) it seems like a blatantly obvious thing for someone to say, but Miranda’s character hadn’t figured that out yet.  Which got me thinking: when do you figure this one out?

I was largely single for a good 10 years before I met my husband and there were many relationships where there were quandaries about should I move to be with them or stay rather than move away, live with them, get more serious, is this worth the effort.  My partner was in similar situations, but he was the one it wasn’t a question.  The mechanics became the interesting part and things just happen.

Some friends seem to be having issues with their relationships and I always think, does it have to be difficult?  If it is, are they the right person?  But then, is it just luck that I’ve ended up with the right person for me (80% of the time 😉 ).

Which is weird, right?

Hope you’ve had a Merry Christmas.

Mine was spent with my family, which was ace but meant that recovering from a security hack on my server took a little longer to resolve than normal.

Thankfully though, I keep a regular backup.  I also make sure my web user has limited access to the rest of my work.

So, system is re-hardened and normal service has been resumed.

Happy new year everyone! 😉

courstesy of wikipedia

Trust is vital in any open source community, although it is through absolute strangers.

This is an interesting concept though: can you trust someone you’ve never met and can you trust someone you know well if they’ve let you down?

It is often a lot easier to trust someone you’ve never met.  This is how friendships are established after all – you trust until someone lets you down.

Yet, you do trust yourself even though you, well should, know yourself really well.  You know when you’ve let yourself down.  But you should have trust in yourself.  You will screw up, everyone makes mistakes, but without that ability to forgive, you can’t move on.

Various things have happened today that have made me feel very angry and sad.

I have had an email conversation with a friend from a large company.  He inherited this company just before the credit crunch hit and as a result he has had a real battle.  I guess some one in the company has felt that either my friend has not done a good job or they could do better.

I say this because that person has taken privy information and leaked it to the press and this has made things very awkward for my friend.

I do not feel this is what the founder of the company intended and it makes me feel awful and reported this to another friend who said I shouldn’t be surprised – that’s business!

I’m sorry, but truth, trust and honesty are what defines a person and makes them last.  If we are defined by what we do, then the person who has behaved in this way is horrible.

I’m glad I don’t work in my friend’s company, although I think he could do with all the help he can get,IMHO…

This is nothing more than the thought that Maslow’s hierarchy badly outdated.

Love and belonging at top, then self-actualisation and esteem.

Base layers are the same: we all need to eat and have shelter and feel safe. Self-actualisation is fairly easy now however the rest is a complete bonus and only truly achievable if you are happy!

Why do I say this when half the world is starving and suffering?

It’s a fair question.  May I say that in the developed world many, especially those with access to the internet, can create with relatively little cost.  They have self esteem, self respect and as materials are already provided and things happen relatively quickly and cheaply now.

Yet, these same people are often personally unhappy including being separated from their loved ones or even being isolated.  More people than ever live alone.  This is what they wish for – indeed I think this may be why social networking sites have had such a great uptake of users.

So I think the pyramid needs to be changed to reflect this change.  Of course, I am happy to be wrong 🙂

or how cheap and easy tools make life easy

sounds good doesn’t it: write it, get it authorised and publish it.

toothpastefordinner.com

This is the whole basis of blogs – they do this job superbly.  Yet most businesses are still outsourcing this job through expensive packages and complicated processes.

But life really doesn’t have to be that hard.  Or does it?

Along with my interests in getting computers to do the boring bits for us, I am interested in how information is managed.  Information that sits on one person’s hard drive could be talking about the most exciting thoughts in world peace and solve world hunger but it’s doing nothing sitting on that machine.

This is where publishing comes in: you don’t have to run a major business or have a degree in journalism to put fingers to keyboards and say your piece, spout how good your product or service is or what you’re doing to change the scene if not.

So come on; the world is waiting with baited breadth!

Surgeos in action

an interesting article on Radio 4’s this morning got me thinking.  Would I be happy letting a robot operate on me?

I have to say, I don’t know.  If the operation is a success then it’s obviously a no-brainer.  However, is the robot likely to make that operation more successful?  That’s the real question…

People do screw up, surgeons doing routine surgeries are no more like to remember an uneventful surgery than an experienced driver is likely to remember his/her journey into work along the normal route.

Does that mean the robot would be better?  More consistent?  Less likely to make an obvious mistake?  I don’t know, but I do think that the simple operations are the means for training up coming surgeons and the means for relaxing when you have lots of experience.  So maybe they should be saved for the humans…