Advice for the future

I don’t know if this is something that Martin Sutherland has come up with himself or recycled, but it’s advice to remember for the future:

• A job interview is not a test of my worth as a human being
• Getting through to the next round of an interview series, or being offered a job, is not a validation of my existence
• If offered a job, I am not under any kind of obligation to accept it
• Accepting a good offer for a bad job leads to stress, misery, self-doubt, and despair
• A job interview is the prime (and possibly only) opportunity to find out if the job is bad for me. Use this opportunity wisely.

So now I’m an academic…

You know when in an idle moment you say ‘oh go on’ to a mad idea, and it suddenly takes on a life of it’s own?

Erm. Didn’t quite expect this.

Testing trackbacks to Infosential

A test of trackback to Infosential

Bit of a copyright theme, tonight…

…or maybe I’m just noticing it more. Anyway, why copyright may be obsolete…
(via Techdirt)

A productive morning

For once, this morning was productive - a project brief, project proposal and two case studies, all PDF’d and emailed away. So now I can fiddle around with things with a clear conscience until later this afternoon, I’m going to have a play around with Agendus for the P800…

Update: It didn’t work. At all, which for a 0.9 beta doesn’t inspire confidence. And the P800 sync software is now slowing my laptop down, grrr…

Wiki weaving

An interesting idea, this one - wikis are one of those ideas that seem instinctively like a good one, but are very difficult to explicitly explain why. The idea of everyone being encouraged to contribute is somewhat alien in an IT world where user rights lock everything down. The obvious objection is that the Usenet factor will come into play and most postings will be more or less crap, but there seems to be something about wikis that form a community-wide bozo filter that prevents that happening.

Instinctively I can see a use in my line of work (or the potential line of work that is about to be proposed to the Most Backward Client, at any rate) - but it would be a question of whether it would be possible to adequately explain the concept and use to a bunch of people with more or less interest in the technology and processes behind the platform. Let alone convincing the Most Backward Client that it was an answer to some of their problems. Probably not, is my gut feel.

Quote from Gary Hamel

“The market for pre-washed, ready-to-eat salad grew from nothing in 1980 to $1.4 billion by 1999. Send an email to everyone you know in your company: table-ready lettuce, $1.4 billion. If someone can do this with a vegetable, what the hell is our excuse?”

Gargoyles

One of the joys of living somewhere like Leeds is that a significant chunk of it was built at the height of the British Empire by bewhiskered Victorian aldermen who were having no truck with concepts like non-permanence or understated. Their buildings were stone-built, designed to last, and were usually done on a scale suitable for the State Capitols of a multinational superpower. And understated didn’t usually feature when t’committee considered the interior decor, either - most of the public space in Leeds is liberally plastered with gargoyles, terracotta mouldings and tiled walls that never fail to remind me of the toilets at my first secondary school.

There’s nowhere in Leeds where this is done to enthusiastic excess in quite the same way as the Central Lending Library. 120 years of council beauracracy has done its best to hide it by nailing the odd security system and fire exit sign to the walls, but in the main it’s the same Gothic madness as was dreamed up by the architect, who was quite clearly out of his mind on wool fumes when he sat down to decide what the walls were going to be covered with. It’s a combination of delicately-sculpted plasterwork tracing the outlines of doorways and roofribs, stained glass, moulded terracotta the colour of hobnob biscuits and ceramic floortiles that have withstood six generations of Leeds footfalls and would have done sterling service protecting the space shuttle, if only Nasa had known about them.

The inspired madness didn’t stop with the architect, however - two years ago in a glorious fit of artistic overindulgence, the City topped it all off by commissioning two stainless steel gargoyles - six feet tall apiece - that are chained to the railings of the first-floor landing balcony. And quite stunning they look, too.

Staring out of the other window

Staring out of the window