Year: 2010

bookmark_borderRoll on 2011

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Ahhh the scent of the new year is on the breeze (although weirdly it’s mostly whisky and shortbread, ohh and steak pie…).

I resolve to be better, to improve, in 2011.

I will eat healthier. I will exercise. I will read more books. I will do the things I enjoy. I will embrace positivity and say yes. I will reject negativity and say no. I will have fun. I will find out more about how I am now.

And I will probably not keep to all those promises but I resolve to try my best.

Here’s to a 2011 and I hope yours is full of more ups and downs, and more YAYs than BOOOs.

bookmark_borderWhat I don't write about

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Every now and then I get a notion to write about something that irks me, a point of view or statement made by someone else that doesn’t sit quite right with me.

I’ll fire up notepad, create a new blank file, and start typing in an effort to coral both my thoughts and the random words spewing from my head. Inevitably I give up.

Why? Because so much of what I read these days is so badly informed that arguing against it is pointless, or is written by someone who won’t even consider the fact that they might not be 100% on the money, or seems to be written using statements that other people take to be absolutes.

It’s the “absolutes” that really annoy me.

Taking a statement with the presumption that it is complete and full encapsulation of an opinion is very short-sighted, and the usual follow on from that is to presume that you are also in complete opposition with the differing point of view.

So “I like the colour blue” suddenly becomes “I like every colour that is a possible shade of blue” and is extrapolated into “therefore you must hate red”.

So I don’t write those types of things anymore. Not that I wrote all that many of them in the first place but in my continuing quest to avoid negativity wherever I can, I choose not to write about that stuff.

I choose not to write about a lot of other stuff too but that’s for entirely different reasons.

bookmark_borderLego Advent

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Mumsy knows me well, she knows I am still a big kid and so she bought me a Lego Advent calendar.

It’s AWESOME! (if somewhat random…).

Each window has a little lego kit to build, all of which will come together and, well, I’m not really sure they WILL all come together, like I said, it’s all a bit random…

And looks like this:

And no, I don’t know what everything is but I don’t care. I got to play with Lego every day!

bookmark_borderWhite Christmas

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I am starting to get royally fedup with this perpetual monotone. I get it, it’s winter. Can we move on now?

Along with the cold and ice and snow, the rapid filling of my calendar is a sure sign it’s the festive season. Communal gatherings of friends and family, and the usual desire to “finish this by the end of the year” has my calendar swarming with outings, tasks and reminders.

And then, on top of all that, my best mate goes and breaks his arm so I need to go and help him wrap some presents. Numpty that he is.

However, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

For all those reasons and more, the year is ending on a high and, whilst there will be melancholy tones here and there (it’ll be the first Christmas morning I’ve spent alone, ever), I’m looking forward to it all.

After that, thoughts turn to 2011, of plans and hopes, attending Glastonbury, taking a photography course, and more travel as I’m determined to stop relying on the festive period as the catalyst to seeing my far flung friends.

There will be ups and downs, as always, but so much of this year has been about change, about looking back and realising what it will take to make the future more of what I want.

2011 will be a good year. Oh yes. Mark my words.

bookmark_borderLooking forward

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2011 looms larger and larger in my view and as we start to plan out our goals and aims for the coming year, so I find myself increasingly struggle to make time to write some blog posts, add to that a couple of weeks of food poisoning, and I’m a little behind with things.

That said, it is looking like we are well placed to enter the new year with all the foundations in place to make measureable improvements to the information we offer. We have routes into customer projects via support call outcome codes (if it was an information related issue, I’m contacting the project to see how it arose and what we can do to fix it), stats on what areas of our knowledge centre are being accessed down to the topic level, via our recent upgrade of Author-it, which will allow us to target the areas of the documentation that are being most heavily used, and we will soon be launching a Q&A style forum within our developer community website, allowing a level of user-generated content to be available to all of our customers.

Personally I’ve started to get to grips with the ISTC website and hope to use some of the time available over the holidays to crack on with moving it to a CMS. There is some restructuring required as well and I’m hoping to start adding some new sections in the early part of the year, more on that nearer the time!

To everyone who has visited this blog, I wish you all the very best for the coming festive period, and in to the coming year!