bookmark_borderMerry Holidays!

I hope the holiday season finds you all well, thank you for visiting and reading, and all the best for 2013!

Gordon

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bookmark_borderFor those that shave

I have been converted.

It started as a bit of a whim, a bit of a ‘hey, I might try that’ but it’s already blossomed into a wonderful ritual and, quite possibly, the beginning of a slightly fetishistic obsession.

I’ve started reading blogs about it, watching videos about it, and with each new piece of paraphernalia I discover I disappear down yet another rabbit hole of delight, a warren of wonder awaits.

For many years, every since I started doing it when I was barely into my teens, I’ve not really given it much thought. You learn one way of doing it and go with the flow don’t you. Sure there are trends and new ideas that come on the scene but, fundamentally, things don’t really change.

But I’ve finally seen the light and in the last couple of weeks, despite the odd mishap, I’ve been converted to a new way of thinking. There is something about the fact it takes a little longer, that it needs attention to detail and a slow, steady hand, that appeals. It’s not often in today’s hectic rush that we take the time to do something properly, although I think it’s a trend that is reappearing as we all start to rebel against the manic pace of modern life.

If I’m honest, I was a bit wary at first but it took only one go to convince me that I had found a wonderful thing. It’s a bit like discovering that there is coffee beyond Nescafe, fillet steak beyond McDonalds hamburgers.

I can still remember that slightly nervous feeling I had but the minute I was finished, and ran my hand over my face I was amazed!! Who knew switching to a double-edged safety razor would have such an effect!!

What prompted this? One article on the excellent Wirecutter website on the best safety razor (seriously, check it out, if you want the best of things this is the place to go).

If I’ve piqued your interest, then I’d suggest you do a quick bit of learning and as an inexpensive way to start, as you probably already have shaving gel, grab this Wilkinson Sword Blades Classic Double-Edged Razor +5 Blades for less than £7.

The handle is plastic, so it’s light and easy to use and after a couple of shaves you’ll have the basics down. You will notice an immediate difference to those safety bladed shaves you are used to, and yes there is an increased danger you’ll nick yourself so be careful.

If, like me, you like the better things in life, you’ll start to look around for something a bit classier and soon you’ll realise that there is a wealth of choice available. You’ll probably want to look into getting a good shaving brush, soap, and a heavier weighted shaving handle and the minute you start reading up on this stuff, well it could take you weeks.

If it helps, here is my current setup:

It’s not that cheap to get started and I’ve yet to get a shaving mug (used to generate a good thick lather) as I’m still learning the best way to handle the razor but it’s next on the list, but once you have the basics, the only things you need to replace over time is the shaving soap (or creme) and the blades themselves. The rest of the kit should last a lifetime.

A while ago, I had a shave with a cut throat razor. It was a gift, the full experience, hot towels, preparation balm, massage, before the shave itself. I can honestly say that I am getting a better shave with my current setup (although that’s likely down to the training of the woman that shaved me, and I’m not convinced her blade was sharpened properly either).

I urge you all to try it, even if you start with the cheap Wilkinson option, it will change your approach to shaving and become something you enjoy, rather than a chore.

bookmark_borderHo Ho HOLIDAY!!

The festive season is upon us, cards have been posted, presents have been bought, and in a couple of hours I’ll head home, leaving work behind until early January.

2012 has been an interesting year.

We started the year with a challenge, one of making the information we produce ‘findable’. Cutting across more than 20,000 topics of information, it was always going to be a big project, particularly as we still needed to keep up with product development. As the year draws to a close the final pieces of this mammoth project are falling into place and should, fingers crossed, be launched in the first couple of weeks in January.

From my viewpoint, it’s been an excellent example of giving people the space to do great things. I’ve not interferred much with this project, gently pushed it when it was needed, made decisions when required but by and large left the team to get on with it. The results are looking good.

Of course plans were impacted when the company I work for was merged with KANA software. Thankfully it was, for us, a mostly seamless experience. The day to day activities of the team haven’t changed (yet), but there has certainly been a lot more for me to pick up as the requests for documentation resource started to come in from other parts of the organisation. We are still figuring out how best to provide a service but it’s already looking like we will need to hire to backfill some gaps in other geographies.

Elsewhere I finally managed to get the new ISTC website launched, and have since enhanced it in a few places, adding in new Area Group pages, and generally beefing up the functionality in the background. Plans are coming together for the next set of changes so keep an eye out for those.

So, plenty to keep me busy in 2013, and that’s without covering off the building of a new community website at work …

One highlight for me has been getting back into the blogging habit here and generally feeling a bit more excited about my profession, hopefully I will continue to get a lot of value from sharing my thoughts here in the future!

That said, I’m off on holiday now but will be back in the first week of January. If you celebrate it, have a very Merry Christmas, and all the best to you all for 2013, thanks for reading!!

bookmark_borderGoing Paid

Yes, I know, first world problems and all that, shut up…

With the news that Instagram can now start selling my photos, something I didn’t agree to when I signed up, I’ve been looking at what services I use the most and wondering if I might be better to switch all my online/digital actions to only use paid for options.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for companies to make money and that offering services for free isn’t ever going to be properly scalable until you reach a critical mass (think Facebook and Google). What really irks me about the Instagram change is that I don’t have an option other than to stop using it and delete my profile. If they’d given me the option, I’d likely have paid for it.

That got me thinking, could I switch to only using apps and services I’ve paid for?

I use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for most of my ‘social’ activities. I’ve recently gotten back into FourSquare (as I pull the data into the journalling app Day One) but it’s not really something I’m using socially, it’s purely a tool to make up for my own, shockingly bad, memory! I use several Google services, Mail, Docs, Calendar for my personal information management.

I do not pay for any of these services.

I use Evernote to capture incidental data, notes and links, and the wonderful Dropbox (try it!!) to sync files between all of my devices (personal and work laptops, iPhone and iPad). I have an iTunes Match account to host my music in iCloud.

I pay for all of these services.

So I guess the question is, can I replace Twitter, Facebook, Google and Instagram with paid for options?

For many years I’ve paid for a Flickr Pro account. It was one of the first services I used that even offered a ‘paid’ option (I was still using Blogger at the time) and thankfully, it seems to be going under a bit of a revival. I looked at alternatives (500px) but with such an investment in time, I’m happy to stick with Flickr. The Flickr app seems pretty good, and I’ve also got the Camera+ app on my iPhone which has allows me to upload photos to Flickr. That takes care of Instagram.

When it was announced, I paid for access to App.net, a pseudo-replacement for Twitter. Whilst I’ve not really gotten into it, perhaps all I need is a bit of a push (and for more of my friends to be using it). I’m not ruling out Twitter just yet but as it continues to look to lock down it’s system, I’ve no doubt there will come a tipping point which pushes me to ditch it.

So what of Facebook and Google?

I can replace the latter for the most part, a combination of Dropbox for documents, my own mail server (part of the hosting account I pay for as part of this blog) and the calendar is already driven from my work Exchange server (it just syncs to Google). I’m not inclined to leave Google though, their ecosystem works well.

That leaves Facebook. I’ve pondered deactivating my account there before. I get some value from it, as I have friends and some work colleagues on there, not to mention my family. What value does it have? Well that largely comes about because ‘everyone’ uses it. Organising a get together or a trip is pretty easy if everyone has a Facebook account. The problem with only me closing my Facebook account is that my friends would still use it and I’d likely miss out on news and events in my social circle (well, one of them at least). Sure I could try and convince them to use Google+ (which is definitely improving) but that’s not gonna be easy.

Other than Instagram, I’m not making any decisions right now. I can see a time when I delete my Facebook account, but as someone said, I’ve not yet accounted for the next cool new service to come along (although they are increasingly looking more like aggregators than anything ‘new’). Time will tell but at least it’s good to know there are options out there for when a company pulls a fast one and leaves you with little choice but to seek alternatives.

There is a couple of weeks before I need to close my Instagram account though, and whilst there is still time for them to back track and for it all to be deemed a big mistake, the fact this was allowed to happen at all is what leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Bye bye Instagram.

 

UPDATE: Instagram have published a clarifying post, stating that there intention isn’t to sell photos and that the wording wasn’t great in their original T&C update. I disagree, I think the wording was very clear (I’m not alone in this) and so whilst the words may have changed, the intention to monetise Instagram is clear and understandable. For me, it’s not a question of them being ‘bad’ for trying to make money, it’s the lack of options for me, the user. If anything, whilst I probably could keep using Instagram, the whole affair has given me a bit of a kick. It’s very easy to ‘rely’ on a free service then grumble when it changes.

bookmark_borderStop the conversations

In the New Year we are instituting a No Talking rule in my office. If anyone has a question, they have to write it down and pass it to a colleague who will then write down their response. This should cut down on the amount of chatter and conversation that, obviously, is having a huge impact on productivity.

There will be no more talking in our office, the conversations will stop!

I am, of course, joking.

What I’m actually pondering is how to extract the casual knowledge that currently exists in the heads of the development team. The little snippets of information that take seconds to utter when prompted by a nearby colleague, but which remain out of the grasp of the product documentation and thus are invisible to anyone not sitting in our office. You know the type of thing:

“Hmmmm, hey Alice, my build failed with error 4932, any idea how to fix it?”

“Ohh sure Lewis, just set property 73 to false and it should run just fine.”

The above names have been changed to protect the innocent.

This kind of conversation happens everyday, across the breadth and depth of our (very large) product and, as we have development teams around the globe, it is a real problem and one we need to solve.

The No Talking rule might sound ridiculous but it may be one way to help people realise just how much information they impart to each other, face to face, that isn’t captured anywhere else. That’s the theory at least.

I work with smart people, they are friendly, helpful and professional. They go the extra mile and genuinely want to do a good job. I’m not just saying this but they are one of the best groups of people I’ve worked with, but that doesn’t change the fact that they way they work is flawed.

Ultimately the challenge will be to change the culture, just enough, to be more info-centric. For example, if the software build system breaks, the developers fix it, yet it seems obvious to me that our information channels are broken and my perception is that they don’t care enough to want to fix it.

How do I get them to invest in this idea? Talking to my girlfriend she rightly suggested that one method that might work would be to pitch it as a time-saver. If every developer was to count the number of questions she was asked over the course of a week, I think they’d all be surprised at the number. Whilst not all of the questions would be something that needs documented, I’d warrant a fair number would be. As I said to a during a discussion with a couple of team leads last week, I’d much rather my team was inundated and overrun with requests to add information to the product documentation, at least that way we’d know the size of the problem.

So maybe I will suggest a no talking day, or maybe there is another mechanism out there that the developers will buy into. Maybe the first step should be to ask them what they think, are they even aware this problem exists (I’m sure they are, it’s just not the most pressing problem in their day to day list).

Regardless, one way or another, it’s something we need to fix, preferably without stopping the conversations.

bookmark_borderTime to plant a tree

It’s already halfway through the month, my Christmas holiday is within touching distance (I finish up on Friday), and then it’ll be 2013.

As I spent a lot of time last week in airports I did some quick (and very rough) calculations and realised that I’ve logged around 21,500 miles of air travel this year, and visited four different continents on the way.

Holiday in Tunisia, holiday in Singapore, a flight to London, and a work trip to the USA. It’s by far the most air travel I’ve ever had in one year, at a guess I’d say in the past it’d have taken me several years to rack up that many miles but the fates (and monies) aligned this year so whilst I do feel a little bit (carbon) guilty, I know that next year the number won’t even reach half of that, probably much less.

Seriously though, should I plant a tree or something? All those poor carbons I’ve used… burnt? stood on? What should I do!