Interesting times when the UK PM ends the year with a Tweet and a manifesto on HuffPo. What would Churchill think...

Interesting times when the UK PM ends the year with a Tweet and a manifesto on HuffPo. What would Churchill think? http://twitter.com/DowningStreet/status/7010327451

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Coffeeeee mmmmmm

Coffeeeee mmmmmm

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LOL Unanswerable q's of 2009: Meaning of life? When will the world end? What is Miley Cyrus' phone number? http:/...

LOL Unanswerable q's of 2009: Meaning of life? When will the world end? What is Miley Cyrus' phone number? http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091201-132001

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Space Age Food

Remember how in the Jetsons and other cartoons food in "the space age" came in pills? Labelled things like "Roast Beef"?

Like most, I've wondered when the flying cars and jetpacks and spacely sprockets would become reality. After all, we already have robot vacuum cleaners and portable devices that can do everything Dick Tracy's watch or Maxwell Smart's shoephone could do. And now, as I read the ingredients list on food packets, I realise we finally have the food pills.

Take the cereal I had this morning with all it's goodness of wholegrain etc., and "a sweet burst of blueberry flavoured pieces". Now me, rushed supermarket shopper, saw "blueberry" and thought, 'good, that's healthy'.

But those "pieces" aren't pieces of blueberry, they're blueberry *flavoured*. To be precise, they are: Blueberry Puree (23%), Apple Paste, Pear Paste, Invert Sugar, Sugar, Humectant (422), Wheat Fibre, Vegetable Fat, Gelling Agent (440), Natural Flavour, Acidity Regulator (296).

There, you see: why bother to use pieces of actual blueberry when, in the space age, you can manufacture a blueberry flavoured "pill"?

Now, which pill to have for lunch: the turkey sandwich or the hamburger...

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I'm an athlete!?!

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I'm sitting here amongst the Athletics competitors as we wait to march in the opening ceremony of the 2009 World Masters Games in Sydney. We are told this will be the largest ever parade of competitors anywhere in the world -- Olympics included.

This morning I ran in the 10km Road Race, the first time I have ever done such a thing. Technically, now, I am an athlete.

This is so weird for me, because I've always thought of myself as anything but an athlete. I've played a bit of school and social sport over the years -- played badly, that is -- but that never seemed enough to qualify me as an "athlete". Growing up, I hated to run -- a combination of suffering from both chronic asthma and chronic laziness. Few days were as miserable for me as the school "Athletics Day", when I would be forced to run a humiliatingly atrocious 100 yard "dash" because it was supposed to be good for me. All it ever did was embarass me and remind me that I could never be an athlete.

When I was in my 20s I worked in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years. The fact that there really was no fun to be had there, combined with a very nice cycling and running track along the beachfront where our little studio apartments were situated, led me to take up jogging. Soon, I became addicted to running (there really was *nothing* to do there). So much that I thought I would surely continue to do it once I returned home. But, as soon as I got home I discovered there were other things to do, and that was about that.

Earlier this year I joined a gym in a foolish moment of optimism, deciding I might be able to become a bit healthier. I did get fitter, and enjoyed feeling good. Then, in June, hearing about the World Masters coming to Sydney, I had another foolish moment, thinking I might be able to run on something other than a treadmill. After all, I can't actually do anything, have no particular athletic ability, but I could run, a bit. The challenge was whether I could run 10km.

I changed the focus of my gym work a bit, signed up for the Sydney Running Festival 9km Bridge fun run, followed the training program they provided, ran the fun run and now, after just two months of training, here I am: an athlete. And addicted to running again.

Actually, I think I'm addicted to achieving.

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Death and Facebook

Just saw this on twitter:

It caught my attention, because a couple of days ago I posted this:

Over at The Punch is a reaction by Lanai Vasek (@newsbee on Twitter) who suggests that things have "gotten out of hand". That there "needs to be some sort of regulation" about bad news such as this being posted on Facebook. I understand the sentiment, but we need to accept some things if we are to remain human as technology reaches further and further into our lives. Regulation of this kind could only be de-humanising, because it seeks to control our emotional responses.

In response I added this comment to the article:

For all the "how would you like it" commenters...

This did happen to me this week: logged on to Facebook to find one friend leaving a message about the death of another. There is no doubt it felt strange compared to hearing it spoken by someone, but the news itself was sadder than the way it was delivered.

Many years ago (before mobile phones and the internet), I was living overseas when I heard about the death of my aunt -- via a letter from my brother which described her funeral. The vagaries of international post had meant his letter arrived before the one from my father with the actual news of her death. *That* was a shock. And I felt so far away, isolated in time as well as space.

Today, I find Facebook and Twitter keep me connected to friends and family spread around the globe in a way that is far more immediate and personal than anything previously. In the past I may have gone months or years without hearing from or about an old friend; now I hear about babies and relationships and all sort of news as it happens. And I like that.

Hearing about deaths is not really that different from hearing about births. In fact, if "bad" news was regulated and I could only get somebody's idea of "good" news via social networks, that would actually be more isolating, less human. It would make social networks a false world. Pleasantville. Eden before the apple -- a world of unknowing.

In the end, I just saw what happened to me this week as a marker. The first time, but not the last, that I will find out such news this way. But life is like that, full of good and bad.

Recursively perpetual recursivity

About 523 times a day I wonder about the importance of the things I "have" to do...you know, those things that if you don't do them you'll get fired or divorced or arrested or something like that. Or the bank will charge you $40, because they are doing it really tough and it's all your fault, because you didn't do that thing and they had to get somebody from Madras to call you to tell you that you should have done that thing and they had to record the call so that they could train the person to be even better at telling you that you should have done that thing. Or even worse, people won't talk to you in the tea room, or that guy in HR won't include you when he forwards to everybody else in the company that really interesting email that you mustn't scroll to the bottom of too quickly because it would be cheating to know that the answer is "elephant" before you worked it out the long way and that says so much about human psychology (and he would know because he works in HR).

It seems that most of these things you "have" to do arrive thanks to one of the really great pieces of technology we created in order to make our lives easier and more efficient. Office email, for example, must be the best tool ever invented for making workplaces more efficient. You see, once upon a time your boss would have had to make decisions, typically really negative ones, saying "no" to things because they would have been too hard, would have taken up valuable time and resources, cost the company money. What a sourpuss. But today we are very, very efficient, so the boss can be much more positive and say "Yes!", and then send you a quick email, written using time-saving poor grammar and spelling and especially without wasting any time using the shift key when starting a new sentence, passing on to you something Very Important because you have the same Outlook thingy that makes everybody else so efficient and you clearly have the time to do this Simple Thing because they never see you doing anything other than sitting at your computer reading the Outlook thingy. Heck, you can probably use Word, too, and maybe make a PowerPoint which you can send in an email because that is very business-like and professional, and years ago you would have had to make overhead transparencies and work out which way they are supposed to go on the projector or wait a week for 35mm slides (did you remember the spare bulb?) and the fact that you can now just send that PowerPoint to everybody in the whole organisation with one click of a button shows how far technology has brought us. Think of the time that has been saved! And as soon as you've sent that one off, the boss has sent you another email asking you to fill in all the green boxes on the attached spreadsheet, but don't alter the yellow ones, because they have been filled in with data from the Corporate Information System, using business rules that are more up-to-date than the ones on the intranet for which the link no longer works, a clear demonstration that you don't know how to access the most up-to-date processes that would allow you to make your own spreadsheet of the warehoused report data and that is why you have a boss. Of course, there is an explanatory Word document attached to the email reminding you that the figures you use on a day-to-day basis to assess your departmental results will not work for this report because the other system double-counts the annualised hours while not taking into account the weighted on-costs, so you must use the numbers in the yellow boxes on the spreadsheet or the business will not have any reliable data as a basis for critical management decisions that will move the company forward. Just get that spreadsheet back by close of business today because this is now really urgent after it took three business days to put the spreadsheet together. You have the Outlook thingy and know how to email PowerPoints and are terribly efficient, so make sure it happens or else your budget will be reduced by the amount in the red boxes on the spreadsheet. By the way, speaking of budgets: for someone who emails so many PowerPoints, why did you go so far over budget on photocopying last month? Do you have any idea how much that is now that we have to include all indirect costs when reporting our expenditure on an amortised basis using forward projections as the basis for the previous month's results?

So, anyway...I got home today and checked my personal email because I thought there might be something I "have" to do and email makes me very efficient -- I've been doing it all day, and look how much I got done! Today there was this email in a very low activity account, similar to one I receive every month, telling me that one old message has been automatically archived. This "old message" would, in fact, be the one from last month telling me that one old message has been automatically archived. And that message that was archived last month...well, you're really smart like me so I'm sure you understand (if you don't understand, just read Wikipedia or ask the lazyweb via twitter). I'm guessing there must have once been some slightly different email that started this chain of recursivity -- it was probably one welcoming me to the email account. But I don't have to worry about it, really, because they have all been archived, which means I can access them anytime I want to read about the previous message being archived and even read the one original email that was so important it had to be archived and made the system send a message saying it had been archived. This is very, very efficient, because before email I would have had to file letters every month, and after a few years I would have had to go and buy an archive box and rent a space somewhere to store the box. And put a summary record of the archived letters in a lever-arch file labelled "Archives" and put that on a shelf in the back room. Plus I would have had to file the receipt for the archive box for tax purposes, because it was probably all business related, these letters about last month's letters. How great that this is now done automatically for me, and I only have to spend a minute or so each month reading an email about it. It will be so easy to find all the emails when I'm audited. Everything is so much more efficient today.

I'm really glad that, thanks to the new technologies and such, I could blog about this and have it automatically posted on twitter and facebook so you all know about it and can access it more efficiently now that it is part of my lifestream and your timeline or newsfeed, which is a really useful way of archiving things for all of us, you know. It means you can learn from my experience, which is a great thing technology allows us to do that I don't think we could have done so easily in the past. And after all, if I didn't have all this technology to make things more efficient, how could I possibly find the time to get anything done?

 

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Coffee is a drug

No surprises, I guess, that coffee is a drug. But I don't just mean in the purely chemical sense.

Most days I only have one coffee -- but if I don't have it, I really feel it. Typically it's just that "hanging out for the taste" thing you get, but some days the need is so bad I get a headache.

Somebody once said that "life is too short to drink bad coffee" (I think I saw it on a Bodum mug -- maybe their marketing department made it up, or maybe somebody profound really said it). Well, the thing is, when you only have one coffee a day you want it to be a good one. Okay, so clearly my body, and perhaps my brain, needs the caffeine. But it's not just that: I really enjoy the taste of a cup made by a skilled barista using a good blend. When either of those things is missing -- blend or barista -- it is really disappointing.

So, as for any drug, I have to know my suppliers. If I'm somewhere away from my usual sources, I go on long excursions in search of a good fix. I check out cafes for the brand of coffee in use -- I have my preferred ones and there are lots I will still clear of. I look at the brand and type of espresso machine -- if it's one of those "press one button for a complete cappucino" types it suggests the staff are button-pressers, not baristas. I look at the clientele -- you can usually pick a true coffee lover in any crowd, but if any customers have that knowledge-worker look it's certain they've chosen a good supplier.

Today, I realised there was another level to this coffee-as-a-drug thing: once I score, I'm happy.

On workdays I get my coffee from one trusted source. Once I have that takeaway cup of well-made coffee in my hands, I take a sip, and it's done -- completely satisfied. Most of the time I finish drinking the coffee while walking back to my workplace. I haven't even sat down and savoured it. Sure, I've tasted it, decided whether it's particularly good today or not quite up to scratch. But it's the moment of that first sip that does it all for me. After that, drinking it is an almost unconscious act. In the end the cup goes in the bin and I'm ready for the rest of the day. Most importantly, I'm not hanging out for a coffee for the rest of the day.

That's it: once I've had the hit, I can get through the day like a normal person. Coffee is definitely a drug.

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Cultural Sensitivity FAIL

This sign was on the inside of a toilet cubicle door at the Scientia building at UNSW. I've never seen a warning anything like this anywhere -- in all the toilets I've visited around the globe. That suggests to me that some incident had occurred at this venue prompting the need to warn future users of this fine latrine.
 
But I was struck by the pictures, presumably intended for those who could not read English (because the written warning is quite clear and needs no illustration). The pictures suggest what position one should not adopt, but do not say why. It could quite easily be taken as "if this is how you normally use a toilet, you cannot use this one". In fact, there are many possible interpretations, most of which would not be helpful.
 
If the intention of the sign is to reach out to non-readers of English, it has done so in a rather culturally insensitive way (which may also lead to disasters other than broken toilets!)

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