It's That Pollen Time Again

Every year I suffer it, usually worse than the previous year, and every year I forget it as soon as it's passed. Suddenly in the middle of the afternoon I will fell tired and incredibly reluctant to do anything - the willpower just drains right out of me. I can't string two consecutive actions together. I blame what I've eaten. I blame what time I went to bed. I blame myself. And I should be blaming the damn pollen. Because that's what it is. It lasts about eight weeks - April through May, maybe a bit of June. I fall asleep on the train - in fact, you should see my train in the evening once it's passed through Barnes: most of the carriage is sound asleep or knocked out, eyes closed, heads back, mouths open. Oh hell. And there is nothing the doctors can give you for it. I try the normal Boots antihistamine but it has no effect.

Anyway, I've been trying out the 3.2 MP camera phone on my new Sony Ericsson C510 and here are a few results. It doesn't cope with glare too well, but it's not bad.

First, a little place that does German sausages, fried potato cubes and sauerkraut, by Smithfield market...

Next, a pretty decent example of one of the best cars ever made, the Citreon DS21...

This is a cafe set up on the corner of Howland Street and Tottenham Court Road, Cilantro...

Some of the customers settle in for quite a while. I was there for an hour or so working on my new Asus netbook. I made a remark about his customer staying some time to the manager and he said that they had people who came in at 11:00am and left at 7:00pm, "they work here" he said. Like the lady in the last shot...

Those are medical textbooks she has on the table and that's a glass of water. I never saw what she had to pay for the seat.

The SAS Course I Really Need

For the last three days I've been on the SAS Essentials course. For the girl with a First in Maths from Kings who has joined straight from university, it's been a stressful time. She's had a lot to make sense of. Mind you, the brains that got her that First mean she is making sense of it quickly.

By contrast my grey head knows a fair amount of SQL and programming and I have a ton of muscle memory and preferred tricks about this stuff. The data I use is in SQL databases or spreadsheets, not SAS datasets, and I do all my report formatting, graphs and the like in Excel so it can be read across to Powerpoint. SAS has a lot of advanced analytics that Excel doesn't, but the chance of us ever using it is small - the audience wouldn't understand it. The SAS modules we have at work are the basic stuff - nothing fancy like data mining and time series forecasting. (Forecasting? What's that? I did more forecasting when thirty years ago in British Rail than anyone does here at The Bank.)

SAS isn't really a language - it's a command-line compiler that's grown like Topsy and now has a batch file  editing interface. So it has all sorts of weird notations (putting : in front of format statements when reading data but not when writing it) conventions and behaviours. The one about using an if-then with no clause after the "then" as a loop control device is something I'm sure not to do in future. As for those sodding semi-colons...

What I need is a conversion course. Throughout the three days I've been relating the SAS stuff to what I do elsewhere. Length statements are like dimensioning variables, but not quite as you don't have to Dim numerics. There's an analogue of the SQL select statement in Keep and so on. But it's been three days and we haven't done inner joins, which is presumably on the advanced course. Ah. another £5,000 or however much in the bank for SAS. I'd like to have covered that much in one three-day course.

The IT education industry has not yet caught up with the fact that their audience is split into two: complete newbies and permanent low-level users of anything, and the rest of us who have reasonable-to-serious chops in programming and data-handling in at least one tool-set. The first group need the basics courses, the second lot need to incorporate the new stuff into their existing knowledge. The courses are different.

Feeling Guilty About Inactive Weekends

I'm not getting out of the house a lot at the weekends. I used to, but I'm not right now. A quick trip to the local Sainsbury for food is about it. There are lot's of little reasons for this: the weather has been dismal for most of the weekends this year, nothing but grey skies until too late on Sunday afternoon; there hasn't been a lot on at the movies I don't see during the week; I don't have to go shopping for Stuff now that the house is more or less as I want it (for the moment); I don't have anyone to drag me out since the LTR ended all those months ago; and of course there are all those parents pushing those huge prams around, scowling at each other and pretending not to notice that their children are shouting, crying, yelling and generally behaving in a way that suggests neglect if not outright child abuse to me. Saturday is when they go out and I'm sure I've written about that before.

It's a little deeper than that. I really don't feel the urge to dash out and Do Things. My energy levels feel low and I have to say the thought of whatever I might do does not fill me with any particular zip. I used to man the phones at the AA call centre once a month, but the local phone rep stopped calling and the trek to Cynthia Street was a little depressing first thing of a Saturday morning, so I let it drop. I'm going through a period where I don't want to get away anywhere - first, because I always wind up coming along with myself and second, because why would I want to go away when I don't want to come back? (You either get that or not, it can't be explained.) 

Yesterday I woke up after eight good hours's sleep (as opposed to this morning when I woke up absurdly early) and my first thought was "I need to find another job". I think I'm avoiding something. I tell myself that I'll discuss the grading issues with my manager at the half-yearly review (if it's good, I have some leverage; if it's average or worse, I have to go anyway and there's nothing to discuss). I think I should be doing this and that - visiting old friends, a day at the beach, except that doing them on one's own is a little weird after an LTR. It's not that I think it won't be fun, it's that I think it won't change anything, and that means there's something I need to change, and I'm not sure what.

Or it could be that I'm just more comfortable being around me, especially since I've done the house more or less to my liking. One reason I used to go out was that it was depressing staying in. Given that I'm living in a white box at the moment, I'm not sure what that says. It's not terribly intimate but I do feel relaxed in it. Perhaps that's how it's supposed to be?

Michael Phillips' "The Undercover Philosopher"

There are a number of books based on the recent work by psychologists and experimental philosophers which look at the way ordinary people argue and make inferences. It's not a pretty sight. Michael Philips' book is as good as any of them (I've read a few) and if you don't know about Confirmation Bias, Anchoring, the Familiarity Heuristic or just how low the standards for science journalists are, then it is well worth the read.

However, there's one thing Philips and the others miss. People don't hold silly beliefs because they can't think straight. No. They don't think straight so they can hold silly beliefs. And people hold silly beliefs because it helps them define themselves, blocks out unwelcome facts and justifies their choice of goals and ambitions. Christian. Accountant. LISP programmer. Liverpool supporter and Oakland Raiders fan. Such people believe certain things to be true and have devout hopes that other things will be. Having a personal and intellectual identity that is not based on a core set of beliefs is right up there with triple-lutzes and the ability to speak six languages as requiring years of study, practice and the right genes in the first place.

If that seems hard to believe, then think about what it's like at work. The fact-free management strategies; the products launched without the slightest testing; the endless spin from HR, IR and PR; the need to go along to get along; the group-think; the staggering hypocrisy of the "corporate values". The opposite of science, said Lewis Wolpert, isn't art, it's politics. Policies must be seen to be right until their sponsoring Minister is relieved of her post, when the outgoing Minister's fact-free policies are replaced by the incoming Minister's fact-free policies. Everyone knows it's nonsense, but since everyone's jobs depends on it, everyone has to behave as if it's all true. This is known as "denial" in the trade, and that everyone knows they are professing twaddle only makes the denial more vehement and the peer-pressure more intense.

The spin and nonsense that pours out of politicians, bureaucrats, PR firms and corporate PR is not caused by an inability to apply deductive logic. It is a way of jamming the lines of communication, so that nothing of any significance can be transmitted. While the newspapers, bloggers and pundits are discussing the latest distraction or blatant codswallop, they cannot be laying out the facts - which would be far more damaging.

As for the more technical fallacies of reasoning explained in these books, there is no way that a GP or Health Service bureaucrat is ever going to understand that if the false negative rate of a test is nine times the prevalence of the disease, the chance that a positive reading means that you actually have the disease is only ten per cent. Because if they did, they would realise that testing for low-prevalence diseases is going to be very expensive if accurate and stigmatise way more people than it would save if cheap.

And if that paragraph meant nothing to you, or you didn't understand the calculation, then read Philips' book. Carefully.

Moving to the Cloud

I have taken my first tentative steps to using the Cloud. In other words, I'm slowly transferring my computer life from a housebound computer to servers situated God knows where but that I can access from anywhere at anytime. I read about Dropbox in Rands' blog about his favourite development tools and wondered about using it for on-line backup of the few files I really need to keep. I'd set up a Gmail account a while ago and had played about with setting up iGoogle, but not really got much further than making it a fancy personal portal. Reading a review of an Android phone, it seemed that Google had advanced since I'd last looked at it. So I went back to take a look.

It took me a while of experimenting to get the hang of it, but I've made the jump. Google co-ordinates with Windows and Mac, which is useful since I have a MacBook Pro and a Windows 7 Asus netbook. As always, before you do this at home, take backups of your Address Book / Contacts / Calendar / Mail.

I set up Gmail to collect the mail from all my other accounts, and my computers' mail clients to collect mail from Gmail. Two things here: 1) Make sure you leave the original on the server when your mail client downloads; 2) set up a rule to copy the messages from your Inbox to a local folder on your machine. Otherwise when you delete or archive the original in the Gmail Inbox, you'll lose the copies on your machine next time it synchronises. Don't forget to change the account you're sending the mail from to your Gmail account. After a while people will update their contacts and you can close down the other e-mail accounts. Don't do that, however, until you have contacted all the recruitment agents you have ever talked to and updated the contact details on LinkedIn, Monster and any other site you are on.

I set up Gmail contacts - use the Google Contact Manager gadget in Gmail - with all my contacts and then synced the Mac Address Book to it. Finally I set up a Google Calendar and an account for it in iCal.  So Google is acting as the central server for my mail, contacts and calendar. Again: I use the Google account in iCal to make appointments in the future, when an appointment is done, I move it from the Google calendar to a local one. So I have a record of what I've done on the Mac, but not on Google. I did this because the Google Calendar functionality for recurring events isn't quite as smart as iCal and I nearly lost the records of one recurring event by doing so.

I set up Dropbox on the Mac and Asus. Henceforth any documents I want to work on from multiple locations have to be stored in the Dropbox directory. And you must close the file you're working on before it will update from your PC to the cloud copy at Dropbox, ready to be downloaded to your other machine. Dropbox handles conflicts sensibly, so you won't lose stuff if you work on the document on two machines but for some reason don't update the copy on one of them first.

There's more involved than you might think, but it's less complicated than it sounds. The reward is that all your computers are using the same data and sync to your cloud server. There's still more tweaks to learn, but it feels good. And because I've set up an amazing iGoogle, I can go anywhere, log on and have my life in front of me just like that.

However, the To-Do and Notes are in my Moleskin cahier notebook and that's where it's staying. As one acquaintance said when I jotted something down "Wow, that's real old-school". It's also way, way, faster than trying to type it on your iPhone or even on your computer.

Happy Easter

Tech Moves

This is going to be a very subjective post. No careful thought here. This weather sucks! It's as cold as bloody February and we're coming up to the Easter weekend. At least I have a Columba from Lina Stores in Soho to keep me going, plus three Rivette movies I found in Fopp to keep up the cultural quotient.

Finally I upgraded my mobile phone. And not to an iPhone either. Far too many people on the Chav Express (the Waterloo to Reading train) are playing games, looking at photos, and maybe listening to music - not mobile blogging, sending literate texts and looking at interesting web sites. iPhones are toys that cost £40-odd a month.

I settled on the Sony Ericsson C510 - free with a 300 minute £15 24-month contract from Vodafone and I may go for the £5 Internet, which along with the Orange £5 broadband brings my costs to £25 a month. The C510 plays really well with Snow Leopard - get the downloads of Media Sync here and of the iSync drivers here - and they work just great. I have an 8GB memory card and a special adapter for the phone to a 3.5mm jack plug (from Carphone Warehouse) so I can use my Bose noise-cancellers. The media player is sharp and clear with decent bass - for a portable media player. The camera isn't quite up to my Canon A590 IS, but it's way better than I need for this blog. Oh, and as a phone it's a step up from my trusty Motorola V220. I think the iPod Mini from the mid-Oughties is about to be retired.

The other side of that acquisition is the Asus 1005P netbook. Windows 7 Starter 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 10-inch screen, 90% laptop-sized keyboard. It makes my 15-inch MacBook Pro look positively hefty. I downloaded Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird and have been up and running for the past week or so. I am not going to use Office 2007 and have you ever known anyone actually use Microsoft Works? It's a nice little machine to use. It's not a Macbook Air, but it does cost about £270 against the Air's £1,200 or so.

The only thing left is a colour printer. It has to do photo-quality and be networked - wireless will do. Haven't settled on one yet, but I'll get there. Maybe.

Another Meaningless Feedback Exercise

Recently one of the team sent round a request for feedback about internal communications and how we could make our new office a great place to work. This hit a nerve and I sent this back...

I know this exercise is about posters round the office and stuff like that, but I'm going to hi-jack to get serious for a moment.

Comms in a large company is about management "delivering a message" to the staff. Whether we hear it or agree with it is irrelevant: the job is done when the words are spoken. We're a publicly-quoted company and Stock Exchange regulations mean that management can only tell is what they have already told the Stock Exchange. Unless it is has no market significance. I like (our senior manager's) weekly note, but the rest of the printed comms and the articles on the Intranet are internal PR and describe a world where everything is good and the sun always shines. Not the company I work in.

Can we make this a great place to work? Not when so many other people seem to be busy making it frustrating and irritating to work here. In the short time since the takeover, the bureaucracy has run completely out of control. I am far from the only person who feels this way. Here are just some of the irritations:

I have 10 passwords for internal systems from logging on to my laptop to making travel bookings. I could get more but simply don’t use the additional systems. The existing systems have out-dated organisation charts, names and job titles. Every time we want to use a new system, we have to tell it our details.

We have managers who have been in post for six months and more and are still not registered with the bureaucracy for their relevant sign-offs.

The data security measures come across as distrust. We are not the enemy, hackers and and organised criminal are, but we are treated as if we are going to steal and misuse data at every opportunity. The security is also at times farcical: we sat through a DVD about data security that told us to shred newspapers! We had internal comms written by someone who didn't know the very important difference between deleting and shredding a file. When I asked why the company had introduced lock-down on its computers, the answer was that most of the staff could not be trusted to use their computers sensibly.

We have an IT support desk that doesn’t know what software it supports. We have restrictions on the size of e-mail attachments but no company-wide way of sending large files to each other. We have no collaboration software – which you can get for free from Google Docs!

We have no documentation for the databases we use – even the Group Data specialists say they would talk to the person with product knowledge to find out which tables are the “good” ones. We have no official support from Group Data.

We have an integration process so out of touch with the business it was going to implement an unworkable solution to providing Brand information – until we found out by chance and raised hell. That's just one example and I have no doubt I will find others as I get more involved. Never forget that the grand plan dismisses the people now, but integrates the systems in two years' time. There is no world in which that is a sensible decision.

The Balanced Scorecard process took a senior manager two hours to complete, of which thirty minutes was spent on a helpline. He asked us to bear with it and fill in the forms. How about that he said that we were not to waste our time on it until HR made it useable? It shouldn't be as unthinkable as it sounds.

How many hours are wasted by all this? How many managers have decided that their job is simply to engage with the bureaucracy and have given up trying to do any productive work? How much goodwill does the company lose and how much morale does it damage?

These details add up to a feeling that won't go away because someone puts cookies out every day.

What it feels like to work here is that we achieve what we do despite the organisation, not because of it; it feels like we are here for the benefit of the “support” functions, not that they are here to support us; it feels like the organisation sacrifices productivity and morale for the appearance of compliance and it feels like we are not trusted. Above all it feels like any request to change anything will be denied because there are no resources, and any complaint will be spun right back as if it's a good thing. This is why the majority say they do not think that management will do anything about the results of the staff survey.

Could this be a great place to work? Let's get real - this will never be Google. Could this be a better place to work? Start by fixing the air conditioning before it gets to June and we're all sweltering. Get my managers the sign-offs they need so we don't have to keep going to other managers for signatures. Get us an official Group Data support person / mentor for six months so we can learn all we need to. And while I'm having dreams - make our procurement intranet as easy to use as Amazon. As for decoration? In my dreams we have a budget for some decent art - the Contemporary Arts Society can help there (hell, the guys at the Seven Dials Club did a good enough job) - otherwise I would prefer bare walls to point-of-sale posters.