bookmark_borderWe're taking the Costa Brava plane

Stepping out the front door, greeted by pinched skin and the glisten of frost on the car, I realise that summer is truly over. Just as well, I thought, that we’re off to Spain next week. Still mid-20s there which will do very nicely thankeweverymuch. But no, it’s not a last minute description.

As well as being thoroughly hacked, nay fucked, off about the non-running-ness brought about by my knee injury (you’ll note how I’m trying to stay away from the d- word) there has also been the small issue of Louise packing her job in. That’s not the whole story though, never is, is it.

She worked for a small local company, the type of place where job titles don’t matter that much as everyone just pitches in as and where needed. Her official title was Customer Sales Support… summat, but she was also the Office Manager and had various other admin responsibilities. It’s the kind of role that suits my wife down to the ground as she’s at her best at the centre of things (her nickname there was “the Hub”, I’m not entirely sure that was all that kind) and for a long time she liked things there. Unfortunately the company took a downturn and the CEO started to display some less than wonderful ‘management techniques’. I struggle to understand the motivation behind the ethos he was aiming for, having spent all my working life in IT where working hours are flexible, tea breaks are whenever you want them, and ultimately you are treated like an adult and allowed to get on with things.

Suffice to say that she’d been looking to move for about 6 months, but a few ‘last straws’ had passed until, when she returned home crying for umpteenth time we decided she should tell him where to stick his job. Either that or I’d go up there and throttle him. Faced with a husband jailed for murder, Louise wrote her resignation later and handed it in a couple of weeks ago. We knew we’d be ok, money-wise, for a couple of months but it took us into the unknown.

I’m not very good with the unknown and I only realised at the weekend that my stress levels were through the roof, and that I needed to dial back a little less I head off down a road seldom travelled (blimey, it IS hard to obfuscate such things).

Knee-wise it’s still sore but feels a little better, and I’m going to use my time off running to build my upper body strength, tone up where I can, and improve my flexibility with some basic yoga stuff (whatever I can manage without stressing my knee of course).

Job-wise, Louise was offered, and accepted, a job yesterday! She went for the interview in the morning and they offered her the job that afternoon. She was positively beaming about the interview and the company, and is still a little stunned that they offered her the job so quickly. I keep telling her that she is more talented than she thinks (a long standing issue with my wife) but I think, now, she is starting to believe it!

Woo hooo, what a great day.

Where does this fit with flying to Spain? Well, we had already discussed that, presuming Louise got a job before November, that we would fly out and see her Dad before she started her new job, rather than try and get a week away as soon as she is in the door. As she starts on October the 7th, that left us with next week. It’s a hard life…

In other news, I neglected to wish my mate Keith a Happy Birthday yesterday but, as he was in hospital getting his appendix removed, I don’t think he’ll have noticed. Sorry mate.

bookmark_borderMagpie

I like new things, as my Belbin team role suggests, I am the person who likes to start projects and enthuse others about it before… eventually.. I get bored with it and… ohh shiny! .. something new comes along.

I’m aware of this trait and have developed some internal habits that help me overcome it’s downsides, in other words I’ve figured out when I’m getting bored and so I start to change how I work to make sure that I see the project through to completion.

However my enjoyment of new things is beneficial and I’m constantly looking for new ideas, new inspirations from which I can learn, and for ways in which those ideas can be cross-pollinated (ok ok, stolen) and used in new ways.

One example came about when I first picked up on, after many years of being told to read it by my peers, Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. It’s a fascinating book and several of the key points can be translated into the technical writing world. One in particular stood out, the premise that an idea could be made ‘sticky’, and got me thinking about how I could adapt some of the methods into my approach to writing and structuring documentation. To my great pleasure that premise has been further developed by Dan & Chip Heath in their book Make it Stick and, although I’m only partway through it, I already have some ideas which may help make the documentation I create more useful to the readers.

There has been some discussion about our profession recently, whether it’s “just a job” or a vocation for some. I think I, like others, fit somewhere in the middle. Whilst I doubt technical writing/technical communications can be seen as a vocation, it’s certainly more than just a job to me, spilling over into my everyday life and thoughts. Typography, design, architecture, marketing and, basically any form of communication, has me questioning and prodding it to see if I can reuse any of it.

These days with personal publishing also a hobby for many, myself included, obviously, then anyone who is interested in communicating ideas and information is able to draw so much from such a wide pool of sources that, and I hold my hand up in admission here as well, I’m somewhat surprised that we have been a little slow to grab onto these new ways of communicating. Mind you, blogs, wikis and the like, are all still very new so I expect that to change over time.

But it won’t stop me constantly scanning the horizon for something new.

Have you taken inspiration from an odd source? Spotted a clever way to tackle information, or noted an idea or two after reading a, seemingly, unrelated book. How much of a magpie are you?

bookmark_borderthe offended people

I don’t link to his column very often but he is routinely excellent and always readable, particularly this week. Charlie Brooker on “the offended people” ~ “They come in two flavours – huffy and whiny – and it’s hard to know which is worst… Combined, they’re the very worst people on the planet – 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it’s true (it isn’t), but because it’ll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives.”

bookmark_borderCocoon

I’m currently playing with the new O2 Cocoon, a mobile phone cum lifestyle friend, or whatever warm fuzzy marketing spin they are putting on it.

Essentially a mobile phone with media player leanings, there are a few nice touches that elevate this above your standard mobile phone fare. I’ll post more about how it handles day to day usage in a week or so, but first impressions are good.

And, these days, first impressions start with the box, or more accurately with the unboxing experience. When I picked up the phone from the Post Office I was a bit perturbed at the long thin box I was presented with, had I been sent a keyboard by mistake? I was relieved to see the word Hello, spelled out in an LED font, lightly embossed on the surface of the box.

After cutting through a small piece of tape, I opened the magnetic catch and swung the box lid open to reveal the phone nestled in a large soothing background image of sky and flower blossoms. But where were the usual cables, booklets and other paraphernialia that accompanies every gadget these days? Twisting the box round a small tab labelled “Pull” caught my eye and, on doing so, a drawer slid out containing all of the above and more.

Unlike other mobile phones I’ve received, the dock, a headphone splitter and two sets of cables greeted me.

Now, like most people, I’ve owned a mobile phone or two, so I know the first thing to do is get the battery charged. Extracting the slim white usb power adapter (which will handle other usb powered gadgets, hello iPod?) and the battery from the box. Now all I had to do was figure out how to get the cover off the phone so I could insert the battery. Does it slide? No. Umm.. pull? No. How the hell?? Ohh wait, what’s that little button on the side? Ahhh, a lock for the battery compartment, how handy, if a little different from any of the other mobile phones I’ve used before.

Once I’d cracked that little puzzle, I plugged in and there I saw the first flash of something different, the light blue OLED display on the white plastic surface. Unless you’ve seen one before it’s hard to explain, suffice to say that what looks like a solid plastic surface, actually contains a set of lights underneath, through which information can be displayed. In the case of the Cocoon, it will display the time, message info when received, and the title of the currently playing track. Kinda neat and leads us to the dock which is supplied with the phone. Sitting the phone lengthwise in the dock, the display acts like, well, a clock. Upon investigation I realised that this was a key feature of the Cocoon, and that using it as an alarm clock, was part of the core design.

Thinking about it, it does make some sense. You set an alarm, dock your phone, and you have a nice subtle clock on your bedside table. After all, how many of us have a bedside alarm clock that tells us the time all day, when we aren’t even there. Hmm there are “green” connotations afoot!

Once charged, and with the PAYG sim inserted, I had a quick play with the interface and it’ll come easily to previous Nokia users I’m sure, but I’m not one so it feels a little ‘off’ to me. But that’ll change as I use the phone more often. Nothing is particularly hard to find.

Alas I can’t tell you much more as I can’t get it to talk to my PC, the USB will charge the phone but I can’t connect to it to try and sync my contacts. I’ll try on the Mac later.

Ohh and if you are wondering, no I didn’t buy the phone, yes I was given the phone as part of a promotion, no I don’t need to blog about it if I don’t want to (and if I end up not liking it, it may find itself on eBay). Am I whoring myself out? Perhaps, but if you were thinking of buying the Cocoon then hold off a week or so and I’ll let you know what I think.

Finally, a quick word on O2. One of the thing that has plagued Louise and I is the signal coverage in our house. Orange and Vodafone are sketchy at best but the Cocoon gets a good signal in all parts of the house so, if nothing else, I’ll probably be switching to them when my Orange contract is finally dead.

bookmark_borderOn my Mac

Well I’ve had it for a while now so here are some of the goodies I have installed on my MacBook. I’ve tried a lot of apps over the past few months, the following are the ones I’ve settled on.

One thing to note is that there does seem to be a different kind of software community built up around Macs, and I guess it is because the audience (whilst growing rapidly) is still small in comparison to the Windows community. There also seems to be more of an emphasis of home/fun usage, something Apple have concentrated on in the PC vs Mac adverts. I’m still not yet using the Mac as my main computer, largely because I can’t get my wife off the damn thing.

I am using a lot of the Apple supplied applications, Address Book, iCal and things like that, so most of the applications I have downloaded are either specialist or fit with the way I use a computer.

Anyway, at the moment, I am using:

  • Adium – instant messaging client that supports all the major IM channels.
  • AppDelete – which provides an easy way to delete installed applications. Installation on a Mac is, mostly, very simple. Removal less so, hence the thinking behind this application.
  • Aurora – an MP3/iTunes aware alarm clock. Ideal when travelling, can wake the Mac from its ‘sleep’.
  • Bean – for basic word processing requirements
  • Cyberduck – FTP client
  • FuzzyClock – rather than 13:45, displays “quarter to two”.
  • Growl – a wonderful little app which provides subtle (skinnable) notifications for various system events. Extendible using plugins, and feels like it is part of the OS
  • iConiCal – sets the dock icon for iCal to the correct date. Normally it’s a static icon until you open iCal, this app runs at login to change the icon. WHY this doesn’t happen this way within the OS I have no idea.
  • iStumbler – a better way to discover what wireless connections your MacBook can ‘see’. Includes Wifi, Bluetooth and Bonjour connections.
  • MagiCal – a replacement clock and drop-down calendar. Ideal for a quick check on a date.
  • MarcoPolo – automatically runs scripts to change settings when you change your wireless connection. Handy for me as I take my MacBook into work on occasion, when it picks up the wireless connection at work, it mutes the sound.
  • QuikSilver – at one level a keyboard application launcher, on another level (which I’m not at yet) a hugely powerful tool to help automate and quicken basic tasks and file manipulation.
  • Seashore – a handy graphics app, good for quick edits.
  • Skim – a PDF reader.
  • TextWrangler – handy text editor with support for most text based filetypes, good for quick code hacks.
  • VLC – an excellent video player with support for, well, every type of video I’ve tried.

All of the above are free, as in beer (where DID that phrase come from?). I have donated to some, and have bought other apps, most notably Adobe PhotoShop, but those are the ‘finds’, the none obvious stuff which I highly recommend you check out.

One type of app I’ve yet to settle on is which web browser to use. I immediately installed Firefox to give me something familiar, and coupled with my use of Google apps and Google sync, it doesn’t look like that will be changing anytime soon. Oddly though, I have far fewer extensions installed on my MacBook than I do on my PC.

There are three other items that I’ve purchased for my MacBook which I’d like to point out. One is a Radtech screen protector, a simple cloth would do to be honest, but this doubles up as a screen cloth for the shiny glass effect MacBook screen. The other is a set of Cool Feet, which sucker onto the base of the MacBook, helping circulation and cooling, and providing a nice typing elevation. Finally, my Wrapper, a customised sleeve for when my MacBook is fast asleep. Provides a little bit of protection and keeps it clean!

There are a myriad of other tweaks (check out the Kinkless Desktop and an application called ‘Hazel’ for a key part of my desktop workflow) but those are for another post. For now, the applications listed above should give you a good starting point, and none of them will cost you a penny.