Blog
The sum of the parts ?I went swimming with Tess and Anna tonight and given that I’m not too well I only swam for 30 lengths, which left plenty of time to sit by the pool, watching the girls and reading New Scientist. Of the articles I read I was most amazed by this description of how honey bee swarms [...]
Should my Daughter study economics?
My eldest daughter - 15 years old - is doing some long range career planning and she’s been really struggling to find something she really likes. Its not as though she doesn’t enjoy school - she likes most things and is predicted to get a good crop of A and A*’s. Her problems seem to [...]
25 placed to work
As part of HP’s happiness at work initiative they have listed 25 new places to work. I’ve repeated the list (minus a few of the less relevant ones like the Eiffel Tower!) below with my comments in blue: The garden. There?s nothing like an English summer. And even if the sun shines, you can still get [...]
A perfect day
Dave Pollard gives us his idea of how one might aspire to spend the day: So, for example, a 24-hour day might be allocated to the following important activities: 9 hours a day for sleeping and personal hygiene 2 hours a day for physical exercise — running, meditation, working out, yoga, hiking etc. 3 hours a day for play [...]
The Working Group - changing enterprises from within
This looks like an excellent group for people like me, working within a large enterprise, providing advice and solutions to large enterprises and trying to manage the disruptive enterprise 2.0, web 2.0 disruptive wave of change - while keeping our business and their’s running and profitable. The mandate of the group: The goal is to have a [...]
Mobile users are happier?
I’m a mobile worker and a happy one, but I can imagine that lots of mobility projects just provide more burdens on the time of already stressed out employees. The whole always on, can’t go 5 minutes without email culture seems to be replacing face to face contact and telephone conversations. I’ve seem a whole [...]
Home office energy saving
I already have energy saving bulbs in my home office (and the rest of the house) but this Christmas I thought it was time to make a bit more of an effort so now I have my centre desktop monitor plugged into one of these plugs. I then have an 8 way extension cable plugged [...]
Wifi Purge
Although I was aware that I was being exposed to a lot of EM radiation in my home office I didn’t really give it much thought, that is until I read this article - The Gathering Brainstorm - in the Ecologist magazine. I then did a quick count and found that I was being [...]
Walking while you work
I do a lot of work while out walking, normally this takes the form of phone calls, dictating notes, listening to recorded teleconferences and listening to PODCASTS. While at home I found that I could scan my RSS feeds with my laptop resting on the handlebars of my exercise bike (which is in the [...]
Home office update
I’m currently brainstorming ideas for my new home office, I spend about 6 hours a day in it right now, so its the most important (time wise at least) space in my life. Debbie and I currently share the room and I essentially have one quarter of the wall space, Debbie has two walls and [...]
The pleasure of getting things done
Scott Adams over on the Dilbert blog has an interesting post where he talks about the please of getting things done, in his example: The other day I cleaned off the top of my desk. This involved sorting the rubble into mounds that had something in common, and then dealing with each mound. There were bills [...]
Ultramon returns
If you use multiple monitors then you need Ultramon. I have three and I really don’t know how I would use them effectively without it. It makes the whole experience so much more natural. My favourite features being: The ability to drag maximized windows by the task bar and drop them onto other displays The ability to [...]
Working in the open
This blog represents my own - pretty feeble - attempt to work in the open, sharing my ideas with the broader community and getting feedback and insights along the way. I don’t worry about who’s reading it - customers, competitors etc because I trust that the benefits are greater than the risks and that what [...]
Hiding Twitter
I’m liking Twitter, but my tweets are only really relevant to a few people who are working with me regularly or following me closely. So although I like the integration with my blog, and I like the fact that Twitter Tools is providing me with a permanent archive of them (effectively a diary in my [...]
Disaster recovery appliance
I’m not much of a server guy, but this announcement from Platespin appealed to me, a server appliance for real-time backup: Once plugged and configured the system performs live backup of up to 25 physical or virtual servers on continuous basis (incremental backup). If something bad happens the administrator is informed through the web console or Blackberry [...]