TheBlog@TheBlack.Org

Guitar Hero

2008-04-21T22:54:00.003+01:00

Y'all with the coloured buttons and "Star Power" ain't no Gee-tar heroes, this guy is. He even got a hero beard.

Memory Etearnal

2008-04-20T13:28:00.002+01:00

Computers forget less than elephants do. Which is good, because remembering stuff is one of the main things we use them for. Having an archive of your entire life sitting under your desk is a little spooky sometimes too. Some things you'd rather were not remembered.

While looking for something else buried deep in the archives of my "My Documents" folder today, I came across an old text file. "Poetry to steal your smile.txt". Poetry is a very generous description of the contents, but it possibly passes as evidence that I invented "emo" several years before anyone else. It's got some good lines (if cheesy super-angst), but I apparently lack the creative flair to turn one good line into anything resembling a good peom.

I quite like the "glass eyes and porcelain smiles" description of commuters on a train, and I'd be very suprised if the line "you're all my dreams come true, and all my nightmares too" isn't in several other more professional works. The concept of the inhabitants of a city being faceless, silent drones while the city itself is loud, angry and lustful is a good one too, I just did a fairly poor job of expressing it.

I was an angsty pathetic whinger even before I got a blog! Anyone know a good psychiatrist? I have ... uh... a friend... who possibly needs one.

Face Off

2008-04-19T09:14:00.002+01:00

Of the many random thoughts that have drifted through my mind recently, one was "I wonder what it's like to wake up with someone else's face?" It's a common plot device, various movies and books have been based on the concept of living someone else's life for a bit. Tom Hanks in "Big" springs to mind first, but there's been a whole raft of them. I think there was a mother/daughter body-swap thing fairly recently (a year ago or something no doubt, I'm not so current-affairs in the media arena).

There are people who live this surreal moment daily - face recognition is a brain function and thus can malfunction or be damaged. It must be very odd to not recognise your own face in the mirror. It must always feel a little like there's a mime the other side of a window copying your actions. You know (because the same strange thing happened yesterday, and the day before that) that it's just because your brain is a little out of whack, but you'll never quite shake the feeling something is a little off with the guy staring back at you out of the bathroom wall.

In the movies of course, while our hero/heroine is wearing someone else's body, they're still "themselves" and pretty certain they know who that is (they generally even learn something about themselves in the process of course, usually that was the universe's intention in orchestrating the body swap in the first place). So the thought that quickly followed on from the first was: "What about the inverse of that - what does it mean to wake up one morning and realise you're not the person you thought you were?" I suppose in a way, we all fall short of the person we imagine ourselves to be, or the person we think we ought to be, fairly often. For me, I set myself impossibly high standards in everything I do, so failing to be the person I think I should be is a very regular occurrence.

Life has a way of chewing up your best laid plans, your dreams and ideals, and spitting them back at you as twisted shadows of themselves. I think what really defines "who you are" is how you deal with that situation, not the plans themselves or their eventual failure.

I think when I started this post, I had a point. But now I can't think of it. Chalk up another failure.

Al Gore: Climate Change

2008-04-12T12:08:00.002+01:00

Look! Evidence some Americans worry about stuff other than the fact Barak Obama can't bowl straight!

Al Gore is probably the highest profile adovate of Climate Change action, so his newest presentation on the matter is well worth a look. I'm not sure many people here in Europe still need convincing that climate change is a human-induced problem, but plenty still need convincing that it's something we need to do something about in a hurry, and that it's something they personally need to do something about. It's something we must all take individual responsability for. Not just with the lightbulbs and the walking rather than driving stuff, although we do need to do that, we also need change the perception of politicians. The sort of policies that are required at a national and global level are largely seen as unpopular, or at the very least not "vote winners". We, as a society, need to make the environment and thus the future survival of our planet and race, an issue politicians can "run on".

Tempting Shinies

2008-03-31T17:11:00.003+01:00

Sports car, or house, that is the question. One is an investment, the other an extravagance. One is exciting and the other practical. Both are huge cash sinks, and I almost certainly can't have cake and eat it.

Mmm, sports car...

Simple Equation

2008-03-26T19:44:00.003Z

Techs + Beer + Directors = "Oh shi....!" moments.

There's honesty, and then there's honesty. And while I'm perhaps guilty of being all too willing to be the bearer of bad news (I have my share of Chicken Little "The sky's falling in!!" episodes), at least I don't tell directors that I spent the last two years thinking of programs I could name after Batman characters... There are some aspects of the small games we all play to break up the relentless monotony of an office job that shouldn't be communicated too high up the tree.

Yes, we can.

2008-03-22T00:02:00.005Z

Schizophrenic post coming right up!

Are we doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers? The future is built on the past, but is it also bound by it?

The optimistic parts of my fractured personality believe strongly in our power to change. Even small steps in the right direction send ripples through what Luke would call The Force. While The Force is undeniably a work of fiction, it has a resonance with us. All life is bound together in a sense. The individual human mind is ridiculously complex, and the interactions and influences between them even more so. Much like particles in a gas, predicting the path of any one life is pretty much impossible, even if larger groups demonstrate predictable behaviours most of the time (if you ignore individual behaviour and look only at the group).

The current election process in the US is fascinating because Obama is a fairly unconventional candidate. He's staking a lot not only on his own ability to precipitate change, but also on the electorate's willingness to accept their own role in the situation they're in. Even if it's just fancy speeches and rhetoric, it's interesting rhetoric. Accepting personal and collective responsibility for the failures of the past is a hard thing to do, but is fundamental to real change. Obama, I think, understands this, but I'm not sure the electorate really do. We'd all much prefer to vote for a magic wand, as if simply electing a new government will fix all that we perceive to be wrong with society. It's so much easier to hope that the difficult choices we'll have to make start and end with which box to place your "x" next to on election day. And then we can carry on with our lives, insulated by ignorance from the rest of the world while someone else fixes all our problems.

While governments and presidents undoubtedly wield a lot of power, fundamental change happens elsewhere, they simply get to set the tone. Real change demands that we each see the world for what it is, stripped of our prejudices and comforting over simplifications. It requires that we each take the decision to leave our comfortable ruts (even if we hate the rut, it's got a reassuring familiarity) and step out into the unknown. And that is hard!

Of course, it's all very well me preaching change. I've got more than my own share of comfortable ruts I find it next to impossible to leave. I step out every now a then, when some carrot is offered up by life, but it's painful. It's stepping outside in winter with only your dressing gown on. Every second, every aspect of your being reminds you that this place is uncomfortable, and asks if it wouldn't be a good idea to go back inside.

So far this year I've spent a lot of time shivering in the cold, and my life feels ridiculously out of control as a result. But I need to be here, I need shift my perspectives and carve myself a new rut in a slightly better place. I don't know if I'll succeed, how much longer I'll successfully fight the urge to go back inside and hide, but I'm not ready to go back in just yet.

Change is possible. It's hard, and it's risky, and repeating the problems of our past usually comes with a handy bunch of excuses to ease our guilt. Failure to try, however, is the worst sort of failure. And one I've been all too guilty of.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. And Poll Results.

2008-02-29T23:13:00.002Z

And no, it's not a post about the America presidential race (although I guess any argument about irrational assessments of subjective values that might lie behind this rant would apply there too).

All things are relative, and so we instinctively compare ourselves to others. Various networking sites (Facebook being my own personal experience, but no doubt many other such sites have similar tools) "facilitate" this process by adding a layer of anonymity and statistics to it all. It's an excellent way of producing graphs and charts and all sorts of other fun things that look significant, but ultimately are not.

Thus, my friends have rated me as a reliable, organized chap (which is blatantly untrue) but rather disappointingly haven't rated my hair as all that good (only 40% success rate there - on the plus side my hair is apparently my best feature) Seems only one person has ever been asked how crazy I am (and readers of this blog will surely know the answer: very).

Bizarrely, I'm apparently #10 for both "more loyal" (with a 1:0 win/loss ratio) and better singer (with a 0:3 win/loss ratio). I'm clearly not a better singer than much more than a cat that's been skinned in most of the many ways it's apparently possible to skin one. I'm ranked #12 for "better sense of humor" but #21 for "funnier", how does that work folks? I can be a cynical misery at times I know but I rather thought my sense of humor was one of my few social strengths. I know it's not shone through so much recently though.

My main weaknesses (both with 0:3 ratios) are apparently singing as mentioned above, and being happy (or rather, not being - too many of my facebook friends also read my blog I think). I also score poorly on all those questions I'm frequently forced to skip such as "more attractive", "rather kiss", "a better body" etc (although I do have a single success on "rather sleep with", so I pity the poor sap I was being compared against on that occasion!).

Of course, all this is plagued quite badly by the issues of a small sample size. Most categories have only a small handful of votes, so the numbers aren't especially robust.

You can do the reverse, and group up your friends based on how well they've scored from just your own rankings. Apparently I don't have enough female friends because they all manage to fit into the "most desirable" box. Presumably because I rated their eyes as better than my chunky chemist friend at some point.

Breaking the Habit

2008-02-12T23:56:00.000Z

Watching "The Bridge" on More4 about people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge probably wasn't a good idea.

I'm capable of thinking some extraordinary things about myself. Suicide is a good example of this. I've been fascinated, if that's the right word, by suicide for most of my life. It's not really an interest in other people's suicides (which I feel is always tragic, and it troubles me that these people feel such pain, so hopeless that they take their lives) it's more an interest in the concept of killing myself... yet it's not really thinking about actually doing the deed in a planning sorta sense (much as I whinge here often enough about how pathetic and hopeless I am, I have much to live for). I'm really going to struggle to actually explain what I mean. Do other people ever think about it? I really have no idea.

It has occurred to me, on and off, that life would be a whole lot easier if I wasn't living it. Yet I have no reason not to, beyond the fact that life is complex, difficult and I really don't understand so much of it. I find it darkly amusing to suggest that the only reason I'm still here is the embarrassing prospect of having to explain myself in the afterlife: "why'd I kill myself? Dunno really... I just couldn't be bothered with living". It's a pretty poor excuse for bailing out. It's not really true of course... but there is an element of apathy there. And maybe that's more depressing than anything else. I could probably make so much more of my life than I currently am, I just don't put the effort in.

I could probably whinge on for a long time about the state of my life and the way I live it.. and most of it wouldn't even be true. Some of it I'd kinda believe, much of it I'd mostly not believe but say it anyway. I'm not sure I understand why. I'm not quite sure why I talk myself down as much as I do either... I talk myself out of taking any real risks, making any real changes, and I talk myself into thinking things are much worse than they are. I don't imagine I even get close to the short of despair "jumpers" must feel... but I don't what they must feel. I don't know, in all honestly, what the inside of anyone else's head looks like at all. I'm inclined to believe I'm the only person on the planet that thinks the way I do, that everyone else is somehow reading from a different set of rules and life makes perfect sense to them. But maybe everyone else feels that too.

Slaves to Grass

2008-02-10T12:39:00.000Z

My next post was going to be about games, but as with all other posts that are vaguely about me, it very rapidly descended into an angst-ridden whinge about how pathetic I am. I have no reason to believe anyone is especially interested in me telling myself I'm a failure as a person (and I'm pretty well practiced at dissecting myself and coming up with a diagnosis of "complete loser"), so I'll blog about something else instead.

The more eagle-eyed of you may have noticed that a substantial number of links over on the right hand side of this blog are TED talks. (On reflection, I think the number of people who visit this blog often enough to notice changes in the sidebar despite my complete lack of posting is probably about zero).

Top of the sidebar right now is This one

It's an interesting concept - to view ourselves in evolutionary symbiosis, in the same way we view other species. We understand that flowers and fruit evolved the way they did to attract birds, bees and monkeys. We know (despite our instincts to anthropomorphise everything) that getting eaten is the intended purpose of the fruit. However, as Michael says, we don't see ourselves in similar relationships. Your stance on ecological issues largely just casts you as "omnipotent guardian" or "omnipotent exploiter". We believe ourselves to be separate from "nature", and we certainly feel we know best what's good for "nature" (although again, our tenancy to cast all animals with human emotions and desires is somewhat counter productive here).

I don't think the ideas behind the Polyface Farm model he mentions are anything especially new (indeed, before industrialisation and the introduction of an endless list of chemicals to farming, farmers largely had no option but to do this kind of thing, go check out medieval farming) but it's always good to see someone using and promoting a relationship with nature which is a little more sympathetic to the way it works. I hope the idea catches on, but I doubt it will.

Take a look at a food chain diagram in almost any school text book, and I bet you find grass at the "bottom" of the chain. The lowest of the low, eating nothing but sunshine. The argument here is that this is an oversimplified view of the world, that the relationships are much more complex and thus "bottom" depends entirely on your perspective. Grass is a hugely successful organism, covering (I think) more of the earth's surface than anything else (except the ocean, which doesn't really count). It's a king of species - after all, it's convinced humanity to tend to it - to plant it, to feed it, to water it, to weed out the competition.

Our view of the world puts us at the top, the pinnacle of evolution and the rightful masters of all we survey. Maybe this is just because the idea that we might not be in charge is something that scares us. (a significant number of our collective phobias relate to a loss of control) But it reminds me of another worldview, which in days gone by put the earth at the center of the solar system, and really it's just as wrong. We need to step back a little, and view the entire planet as a single system, one we are part of, not just custodians of.

Christmas Blog

2007-12-25T16:46:00.000Z

Merry Christmas to anyone reading this (stealing a few moments away from the family like me). I'd include some suitably festive photographs, but I didn't bring the USB cable for my phone, and the bluetooth on my parents laptop does work, so they'll have to wait until I get back to the flat. Also waiting until I get back to the flat is introspection and a review of the year I've had (New Year's Eve seems a good time to post it, if I get around to it at all) but I hope you've all had an enjoyable and rewarding year

Christmas presents this year cross off another of those items on my "I should really get.." list that I never quite seem to get as far as making decisions on (this is mostly large items - car, house, etc, but also includes smaller items). Mum and Dad got me an espresso maker. I need all the assistance I can get to get up on a morning.

Anyway - back to the festivities, even though I don't live here any more, I've got to play the good host.

The Morph

2007-12-04T22:08:00.000Z

Someone said to me today, "you're morphing into a manager". It says something about the culture (and management) at my company that a) this is something that can be said of me (I wouldn't say "managing" is what I'm doing at the moment, coping... hanging on for dear life.. something like that) and b) this isn't intended to be a compliment.

But it does raise some interesting complexities that, I imagine, all manager types face. I think the comment was basically that I was being too "on message" and not nearly cynical enough. It just happens that I do believe in the potential for, and power of, positive change. But in many ways, it doesn't matter what I actually think. People look to me for leadership and guidance, whether they admit it or not. I'm supposed to be the guy with the answers, and if I admit to doubts then this only reinforces their own. I must act to counterbalance rather than amplify any anxiety and concern, regardless of my own level of comfort. It doesn't mean dishonesty, or relentless false cheer, this is counter productive in that it destroys trust. It means "managing my message" or somesuch empty sounding phrase. It means I must make an effort to point out the things that are going right. But this doesn't come easy for me... I'm a natural cynic.

Internet People are Real People

2007-11-29T20:08:00.000Z

There's a curious feeling in non-geeks that "internet people" (as in, people you're only ever likely to meet in a virtual sense, on forums, in chatrooms, and if you're really tech-savvy, some sort of VOIP) aren't "real people". They know this isn't true of course, they're not quite like the characters you meet in single player games, all scripted dialogue and simple action-response AI. But somehow the impression they're less than real persists, they seem to be 2D in some way.

Thats a rather long-winded introduction to the following links, a pair of my favourite recent discoveries: Merlin Mann - how can you not like a guy called Merlin? - who runs 43Folders.com a blog-cum-productivity advice site; and Jonathan Coulton a ex-coder musician who releases his work under a creative commons license, and whose excellent catalogue includes Code Monkey and the credits song for Valve's Portal, you probably have to play the game - and you really should - to fully appreciate the genius of the song though. So here's the guys, (and this is the link) being entirely too human and interesting for "internet people".

Part 1
Part 2

Billions and Billions

2007-11-21T00:04:00.000Z

This Oooooooooold, but you gotta love StumbleUpon... no wait, I meant, you gotta love John Stewart's ability to sum up the absurdity of the world. This one is on Us Foreign Policy over the last couple of decades. Reminds me somewhat of a story from my childhood, about a carpenter making a table. When he's finished, he found one leg was a little too short... so he chopped a bit off all the others... only now one of the others was too short, so he chopped a bit more off the longer legs... and so on until he presumably ended up with a coffee table or a crude version of garden decking. For a very small garden.

Reading List

2007-11-20T16:03:00.000Z

One of the many cool features of GoogleReader is the ability to tag posts as public, and share them with your friends. So eye's right for "Sanity Inside", a list of things I've recently found informative, entertaining or thought provoking.

In other news, I'm crazy busy at work (and more than a little stressed), so despite yet another resolution to post more often (although I expect everyone has long since given up reading my blog if they've not added it to some form of RSS reader), I've had neither the time nor energy to do anything even half worth posting about. I noticed a nice view of the Yorkshire Wheel though an arch in the wall on the way home last night, so maybe I'll take a picture on my way home and post that. Not sure how it'll come out, it'll be an interesting experiment!

Season of Colour

2007-11-03T16:15:00.000Z

Autumn is the season when, realising the bleak greyness of winter is fast approaching, Nature has a last frantic display of colour. Take away the rapidly shrinking daylight hours and general dampness that's associated with it and autumn is easily my favourite season. I guess that shows me up for the hopeless romantic that I am.

I love the pictures of miles of rolling New England hillsides coloured in pretty much every shade but green, like nature's very own fireworks show. I'm not really a tree-hugging hippy type, but every so often you've got to look around you and be amazed at the the world.

This is a picture I took on the way into town this morning. I've been contemplating snapping the tree on the way in to work all week - at the start of the week the bight morning sun lit it up so that it shone a bright yellow with the York Minster in the background. I've always been late for work, or traffic has been in the shot, etc, so I've not taken it. Unfortunately it's now dropped most of it leaves, and it doesn't quite work, so I've had to made do with the leaves on the ground. Also, I managed to lose the sun for a few minutes when I took this one, so it came out a little greyer than I'd have liked.

Never mind, Nature will be doing these galas of colour this time every year for all eternity. That is of course, providing mankind manage not to stuff things up too much more than we already have.

Trying to reach you

2007-09-28T22:32:00.000+01:00

My domain hosts track a whole bunch of interesting stats. For example, Googlebot (the program that creates the Google search index) has visited my blog 5187 times this year. Roughly 0.6% of visitors have been using a Mac, etc.

However, by far the most interesting and amusing stat is that of "Search Keyphrases". Stuff someone has typed into a search engine and ended up at my blog as a result.

Winning the 2007 list by some margin is "they're coming to take me away" with 23 hits. That's slightly worrisome is it not? Maybe apt, but also worrisome. There are 17 other hits with variations on this phrase.

Other amusing phrases that have ended up here (Don't ask how, but no doubt repeating them here will draw more people with crazy searches to my blog) are

"magazine for the black men" err.. what?
"female bbc newscasters" I don't know.. I don't want to know.. but some people on the internet have strange fetishes.
"what does ig stand for in google ig" It's "iGoogle" folks.
"rgldm" Eh what? But there's a whole 7 hits for this, maybe it's a special language involving no consonants?

Might be fun to seed by blog with random bizarre phrases and see how long they take to turn up in the search stats. If Googlebot visits me around 20 times a day (considerably more than any other single entity), anything I write will soon appear in the catalogue of all human knowledge that is GoogleSearch.

Misc Stuffs

2007-07-30T11:27:00.000+01:00

Task 1 of my new Linux world - Get Vista PC and Linux PC to talk to each other and share files.
Step 1: Enable a Samba share on the Linux desktop - Done. This proved to be pretty easy, right click folder, select "share" or something like that, some very simple dialogue boxes and we're all done.
Step 2: Map to the folder on the Vista Machine - Fail. Turn's out, Vista doesn't like samba shares much. A dig around the internet suggests this isn't me being stupid, but rather Vista refuses to use the authentication protocols that samba supports. Looks like I need to do a bit of a registry hack to get it to work too, as the security policies admin tool isn't included in the "Home" versions. Something to try tonight (I gave up yesterday before cordless peripherals went flying across the room, I've only just tidied it.)

That a point to Linux then, for being far easier than Windows when it comes to setting up talks with the opposition.

I watched the first two episodes of Heroes yesterday (they were getting a rerun late at night when I was cooking but should have been sleeping). Seems ok, but I'm not sure it's necessarily all that special (it's got rave reviews everywhere). Strikes me as reasonably derivative American supernatural-scifi, maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention to catch the subtler depths.. or maybe they just come later. Still, can't turn down a good bit of supernatural-scifi with existentialist voice-overs in the intro can you?

The flat is almost restored to it's former glory post PC building (it's been host to a large pile of boxes for a week) although I've yet to devise a good solution for the storage of all the spare bits of stuff... cables, brackets, more cables, expansion ports, and yet more cables, etc. Up to this point the solution has been "large cardboard box" although this does make finding anything in the tangled heap of electronics very hard, and runs the risk of damaging things. A more compartmentalised solution which is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the various sizes of ... stuff... that I've got is needed. And if possible, it shouldn't cost me any money or much time.

Web 2.0

2007-07-27T19:36:00.000+01:00

2 Days, 2 Posts, Web 2.0!

I've eventually caved in to the pressure from various sources (I think the list of people who've asked me now is nearing 10) to set up a Facebook account, so I'm on there now, under my RealName(tm) for those of you that know it.

Back to the Blog

2007-07-26T11:19:00.000+01:00

Bored at work (shh!) so I thought I'd write a blog post again. No doubt in the months and years since I was last active here, everyone has completely given up checking for new updates. If you are still reading, throw me a comment, it might even encourage me to post more regularly than... well... never.

I've made my first baby steps into the real geekosphere in that my old PC, having served me faithfully for over 2 years (with some minor upgrades and replacement parts) has reached the end of it's life as my "gaming rig". However, rather than cannibalise it for parts as I usually do, it's been given a new lease of life as a secondary desktop running Ubuntu Linux. Gone are the days when installing Linux required a degree in computer science, an infinite amount of patience and a week before you could even get X to work (the bit that displays the desktop and draws all the program windows for non techys). The install is, all things considered, even easier than your average windows install (although about equivalent to the Windows Vista install I did around the same time, more on that later). Like most Linux flavours, Ubuntu comes on what is known as a "Live CD", a fully functioning version fo the OS that runs from the CD without any install necessary. This is great if you want to "try before you buy" as it leaves everything about your PC intact until you're ready to hit that "install now" button. Everything works a dream, and looks a whole lot prettier (yes, I'm shallow) than my last encounters with Linux back in 2000-2003. I've yet to do anything more challenging than opening Firefox with it, but I'll keep you posted. The ultimate plan is to turn it into a media-hub of sorts, with a TV card and some TV recording software.

Replacing the old girl is a shiny new build PC running Vista. This also looks very pretty, but Aero is hardly the revolution Microsoft would have you believe it is. Sure, the frosted-glass look of the window edges, and the wizzy "stacked windows" task switcher look very nice and will impress your mother, but they not about to revolutionise the way you see and use the desktop. As with all new builds, nothing went quite as smoothly as it really ought to - from the graphics card arriving minus a capacitor, to the components I'd bought not fitting ideally into the case (they're all in there, it's just not quite ideal in some places). Vista itself seems stable and reasonably slick. UAC is proving to be annoying, it could really do with the option to "always allow" for certain programs/operations. Some of the new admin/troublshooting tools are pretty nice, but the sidebar is pretty useless. Windows built-in CD writing abilities now include burning movies and other files to DVDs, but still don't support writing an ISO image which is somewhat frustrating, but perhaps viewed as an anti-piracy measure (even if lots of people distribute perfectly valid ISO images - Ubuntu for example is downloaded in this form). No doubt I'll find more niggles, there's always plenty of those. But at least it plays all my current and future games, something unfortunately Linux still can't offer me.

Stand Up, Stand Off?

2007-03-01T14:21:00.000Z

One of the many new dilemma's I've been facing recently is that of my relationship to other people in my newly created team. Many of these people (currently) are close personal friends, are were long before I was elevated to their line management. All are around my age, and we enjoy having a laugh together (it's an effective group coping strategy for what is a fairly stressful role). However, now I'm their boss. I assign their work, officially evaluate their performance, and should they step out of line, it'll be my responsibility to discipline them.. or at least, start that process. Are these two roles compatible?

The accepted wisdom is largely "no". You can't be a friend and a manager, as one directly impedes on the other, it's too much of a conflict of interest. I'm not particularly prepared however, to cut ties and say "right, now I've been promoted I don't want to be your friend". Maybe it's somewhat inevitable eventually, the stresses and strains of our work relationships will cool the personal ones - certainly when it comes around to performance review and pay review it would be easy for them to feel betrayed by a poor rating.

In situations where the needs of my "staff" conflict with the objectives of my superiors, whose side do I take? Is compromise a "lose-lose" situation where both sides feel I've not met my obligations to them?

And what about new starters? How do I avoid them feeling like second class members of the team, where others receive preferential treatment, without compromising the need for strong leadership and direction in order to mould them in the way the company requires.

Some tough decisions and sticky situations loom I think. More than ever I feel I don't understand people, their emotions or the nature of relationships well enough.

2007-02-28T15:30:00.000Z

I think if you look back over all my posts, there are probably more "not dead" posts than anything else. But there you are, I'm still not dead. So in that respect at least, things could be worse.

Work could aways be better, but I think that goes for the vast majority of the worlds population. I've now officially got my own team, with full line management responsibilities (performance reviews and all that jazz). It's only a small 4 man team at the moment (myself included) but it's due to grow to 8 very quickly. I've found the recruitment process interesting, and if it's as hard to fail to get a job elsewhere (so far we've ended up offering roles to everyone who had applied), I stand a very good chance of landing something should I ever work up the courage to leave my comfy cocoon.

Things I did not know

2006-12-28T11:22:00.000Z

A Voyage of Discovery on the paths of the internet.

On the minibus to work yesterday, there was a trailer for a Radio2 show (“The Class of 2006”) about breakthrough acts of 2006. It mentioned Jose Gonzalez, who was catapulted to fame by the Sony Bravia advert with the bouncy balls in San Francisco. I’d always liked the track, but never bothered to find out who it was. Armed with this new information however, and a quick trip to the BBC website to check the spelling, I hit Google to see what I can find out about him. He has his own website of course (who doesn’t these days?) and an album “Veneer”, which is rather good and now on my iPod.

Also up at the top end of the search results was a link about those iconic adverts themselves (which also have their own website). I’d always assumed both ads (the Balls one in SF, and the Paint one in, as it turns out, Glasgow) were largely CGI. The technology is pretty much good enough to fool our eyes these days, so we increasingly use some sort of “sensibility check” to decide what is real and what is not. Pouring a gazillion balls down the hill towards central SF, and drowning a tower block in multicoloured paint both seemed to be fairly daft things to do in reality, so I’d assumed that while the backgrounds where real, the brightly coloured effects were digital. But I was wrong, it turns out Sony did in fact throw half a million rubber balls down the unmistakeable hills of San Francisco, and “blow up” a tower block with several tonnes of paint. The behind the scenes shorts on the website are worth a look. I think they had a whole lot of fun filming such crazy stunts.

Whenever I go home (and especially at Christmas) I get asked all sorts of obscure questions because I have a reputation of knowing pretty much everything. Not all of them I can answer of course, I don't know everything, but in the spirit of trying I usually go away and find out. Something I wasn't directly asked, but a discussion which caused me to seek to fill another gap in my knowledge was one on "Glace Cherries". I’d always assumed these were cherries that had been de-stoned and sweetened a little. However the consensus of opinion of those much more experienced in cooking and such (my Mum, my Nan, and my Great Aunt) was that “Glace” was some sort of fancy synonym for “fake”, and that they were gelatine or something similar. While I was in the mood for digging around the internet I decided to check. Turns out I was right - they are real cherries, preserved, soaked in syrup and dyed, so now I know a bunch of stuff about the process of making them and their history (at least in the US).

Boxing Day

2006-12-26T11:46:00.000Z

Or, "Boxing up the leftover turkey Day" as it's full title must surely be.

I'm been talked into taking a portion of said leftover turkey back to York. It was actually a reasonably good one - mother splashed out on a free-range organic one, and it would appear this does genuinely make a real difference to the quality of the meat .It's not really surprising, but it's nice to be able to confirm that Mother Nature is much better at building a good turkey than the production line barns are. Hopefully the turkey had a significantly better quality of life too. I'm not one of these people who feel it's wrong to eat animals, or rear them with the express purpose of killing and eating them, however I do feel that we should avoid subjecting them to unnecessary cruelty during their short lives. Most animals seem to feel pain and distress, and whatever your beliefs on their levels of self awareness, you can't argue this is a good thing.

There'll be more turkey tonight however, as we make the traditional return trip to my grandma's (only a few meters down the road), something we've been doing as long as I can remember. Then it's back home for me (for despite me calling this 'home', my flat is really the place I associate with the word now) and back to the grind tomorrow. No rest for the wicked.

Christmas Cheer

2006-12-25T18:03:00.000Z

Christmas is always entertaining in our house. My family are all rather eccentric and varying degrees of forgetful.

It's a relationship that works better in principle than practice - we all get on very well when we're not actually in a room together. However, bring us together, and we've got very little to actually say to each other.

Christmas wouldn't be Christmas in our house without at least one appliance based disaster (this year, the microwave burnt out while cooking the sprouts, last year it was the dishwasher) plus more faux-pas from nutty family members than I can count. Without several pages of background you probably wouldn't really get them (and no doubt you've got to be there really). Suffice to say, I'm entertained and despairing in equal measure for the entire holiday period.

Highlights of my present pile this morning are probably "Why don't penguin's feet freeze?" The 2nd compilation of "Last Word" letters from New Scientist and an electric can opener (the height of laziness I'm sure) with an integrated knife sharpener.

Merry Christmas to you all