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It's been a little while since Jimmy and Grandad have been out.
I think they are feeling just a little upset by having their house moved from my nice warm study out into the garage, so I should probably make it up to them by taking them out.
But where?
We are going to the theatre in Manchester on Saturday night, but I'm not sure I can get away with flash photography in the Royal Exchange 
. Might be fun to try though.
Ever been running a My Brain category for some time now. It started with the question of whether it was possible to "strengthen" your brain.
Steve lent me Making a Good Brain Great by Daniel Amen which talks a lot about examining people's brains which concludes that the brain can be changed by the environment and "training".
Church of the Customer had an interesting blog recently that highlighted some research being done at Arizona State University.
I wonder what my brain would be like?
I've recently been through a whole load of personality/leadership/management type profiling. All of them have used a similar tool to do the assessment. They have all used questionnaires of one kind or another. At best, these questionnaires are an indirect assessment of what my brain is actually doing. Taking the direct approach seems like a very interesting approach.
Coaching Tips also picks up on the research.
Following on from my post about Infomania and Facebook the BBC is today reporting on a set of workers who have lost their jobs because of ebay addiction.
Unison welfare officer Mark Fisher said people got "addicted" to certain web sites.
"People get very involved in eBay, Sky Sports and their favourite soccer teams. It happens in many, many offices," he said.
"Obviously we cannot justify people spending a couple of hours of working time looking at these sites - but temptation was put in their way," he added.
"We plan to push for the authority to make changes to its IT system, to help prevent workers landing themselves in hot water."
He called for Internet access be limited to lunch break and that web access should be filtered at other times.
"We want them to take temptation out of people's hands," Mr Fisher said.
I suppose that's one way of doing it, but is that really realistic. Is it actually practical to filter out every site that would potentially land people in hot water if they used it too much?
To be honest, I'm not entirely comfortable with the word "addiction" in this context either. If someone really is an Internet addict they shouldn't be using the Internet at all. Alcoholics don't go from over drinking to moderate drinking, they go to no drinking. It may be that for some people that is the case and they should stay away from the Internet all together, but I'm not sure that it's really like that for everyone who overuses the Internet. I'd like to be able to suggest another word, but I'm not sure what that would be, perhaps "mania" is a better word.
What's not told in this story is what level of training these people were given and whether they have been offered some form of rehabilitation. Traditional training has always focussed on the practical side of IT systems - click here, type there - but very little training has been undertaken on the social elements. As I've said before, I think we are moving into an age where we need to start training people to be safe Internet users in the same way as we train them to be safe drivers. Safe for themselves and safe for others. We need to start doing this as early as possible, from children through to adults, if we are going to avoid an epidemic in the future.
Am I the only one getting a little fed up with the volume and intrusiveness of Apple Update?
I've not checked the validity of the iTunes update history on wikipedia, but it seems about right. That's 6 updates in less than 3 months. Even Microsoft manage to keep it to one set a month.
It's not actually the volume of the updates that frustrates me though, it's their intrusion.
Take this morning's update as an example.
The first thing is the update dialogue:
It pops up slap bang in the middle of the screen and tells me that I have four updates available. Thanks for the blatant interruption.
It's a strange list too. Why am I being asked to install a Security Update for QuickTime 7.1.6 and QuickTime 7.2 and iTunes + QuickTime 7.4.2. I could understand it if they were all incremental updates but two of them are full on installs, they aren't part installs. They are full installs of different version of the same thing.
Rather than messing about (because I have enough bandwidth) I click "Install 4 Items", and then for my next annoyance:
License agreements - yes agreements plural, one for QuickTime, one for iTunes + QuickTime and yet another one for Apple Software Update. These are agreements that I have had to click on 6 times in the last three months. Agreements that I don't think have changed and if they had changed I would be struggling to notice where.
So I click - accept and accept and accept, then we are off:
Having downloaded and installed 85MB of software for what appears to be a minor update to do with ring-tones for the iPhone. An update about which I couldn't care less. I'm in the UK and I couldn't buy an iPhone even if I wanted to for another six weeks, and I don't want to.
Then it's time for the ultimate intrusion, the ultimate software installation sin.
Reboot? What for? This is supposed to be a minor update. Then I remember that I have this to go through all over again for two more devices, a real productivity killer.
I like to keep my software up to date because it's normally easier that way. I think I might make an exception though and remove Apple Software Update only updating iTunes and QuickTime when I absolutely have to.
Am I really seriously considering getting locked into this software by buying hardware from them as well.
Rant over.
I've been using the built in Windows Media Player capabilities on my iMate SP5 as my primary mobile media player for a while now. The jack plug socket has developed a fault recently which means that the plug needs to be in a specific position to get stereo sound. Often this isn't a problem, but when I am exercising it is definitely a problem.
I've mostly been happy with this way of working, the only thing that has been a real problem is that limitation of 2GB which has meant me developing a rather complex process for getting the current podcasts onto the card. It's also meant that everything is heavily compressed and quality suffers (the strange thing is that quality seems to suffer more for music that is quieter, when it's even more noticeable).
So I think it's time for a change - but to what?
I'm not even sure whether I want to go to a dedicated media player or not. I quite like the convenience of have a combined phone and media player (and that's a surprise to me). Should I just get a new phone and put a bigger memory card in it?
Most of my media is in WMA format, apart from podcasts which are nearly always in MP3. So it would seem sensible to go with a WMA compatible device, but I've not really seen one that makes me actually want it. I quite like the look of the Sony ones, for instance, but I'm not sure that 8GB is actually enough. There is something about the handling of the Creative Zen Vision:M that I don't like. Am I being to narrow in my thinking?
So what about the iPod's - ummm. One of the things that my recent leadership assessments told me was how high I valued the "new". this means that I hate being a follower and buying an iPod would feel a bit too much like following the pack. Would it be such a bad thing to follow the pack for once? I also think that I would have to start afresh ripping my music collection because I can't imagine that the transpose from WMA to AAC (or even MP3) would give a quality of file that I would be happy with. That seems like a lot of work. It would need to be an iPod Classic because I'm still not sure that 8GB would be enough. Is an iPod Classic too big?
Don't even mention Zune - I'm in the UK and it's not available to me, but perhaps Microsoft have a story to tell there. Would I want to wait even if they did?
Choices, choices.
There are days when thoughts come together. I've been wondering about the impact of Facebook on infomania. This follows on from some of the reports in recent days about the productivity impact of Facebook and a newish report on Informania.
To recap, infomania is the condition that your boss (probably) has when they feel the need to checking emails on their Blackberry while they are talking to you. it's the need that they have to make sure that they aren't missing out on something.
As we increase access to information and information sources then we increase the infomania that these people all feel. Facebook is just the latest source of information.
This need to access information costs business lots of productivity, but is it really Facebook that is to blame. I've written before about the Blackberry effect on the work/life balance as another example.
My starting point is that infomania not the tool's problem, it's a human problem. We are still in control of the machines, we still have access to the off button (although I was in a meeting earlier this week where a senior manager didn't know how to turn his Blackberry off). It's our choice not to use it.
The numbers in the report are startling:
Intel employees spend an average of some three hours per day processing email. About 30 percent of messages (one million per day) are unnecessary.
On average, knowledge workers can expect three minutes of uninterrupted work on any task before being interrupted.
On average, a major interruption occurs every 11 minutes, the time to return to an interrupted task is 25 minutes ...
The bottom line: Infomania causes a damage of about US$1 billion per annum for a knowledge-intensive company of 50,000 employees. As usual with such calculations, this value is conservative, representing only more direct aspects of the problem. Additional, harder to measure damages exist but are not included.
If those numbers are true, then we need to do something to protect people from themselves. If we were talking about a drug we would probably ban it. If not an outright ban we would at least have a huge education programme making sure that people understood the dangers they were entering into. Anyone can buy a computer and connect it to the Internet without any understanding of the potential dangers. A car is a dangerous thing, so we train people how to use it properly.
I wonder, though, whether we need to go further.
It's been a few weeks since I started using Facebook.
I'm mostly enjoying the experience. I have a few friends, some from work, some from my personal life. I've even had a couple of surprise people contact me from my dim and distant past.
I've added a few applications and there are a few active groups that I have joined.
It's not changed my life but it has got me thinking: If Facebook were my corporate portal would it do a better job? I've not concluded that one yet, but I am struck by the amount of effort corporate organisations have to put in to get people to use their specially built portal when Facebook gets thousands of new subscribers and active participants every day.
Did this report really need writing?
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks.
Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.
Apparently all of those people who are in my list of friend on Facebook might not actually be real friends. Is anyone in IT naive enough to believe that anything that is displayed on a two dimensional screen can come anywhere close to replacing a real person to person interaction.
Previous research has suggested that a person's conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people who we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. Larger numbers just require too much brain effort to keep track of.
But Dr Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked over 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face.
Five close friends that's it - it's not going to be changed by IT any time soon. As a task oriented person I'm not sure how people maintain a network of 150 let alone 200. As I have a people oriented wife I know it can be done, actually 200 seems a bit light .
via Wikinomics
I have been away on some Leadership Training for the last two days hence no blogging.
I have learnt a lot about myself over the last few days - very interesting.
I've learnt that I'm, predominantly introvert which is why I always have to be hyper prepared for any presentation I am giving in an area where I feel intellectually exposed.
I've learnt that I am predominantly task oriented - and not that people oriented. There was one moment when we were doing I team exercise when I was so focussed on the task that I didn't even notice another member of the team trying to get involved, even when they were almost barging me out of the way.
I've learnt that I over focus on doing the new thing, when the old thing is good enough.
I give good feedback, apparently.
And lots, lots more.
But I've got some tasks to do, so bye.
For those of you who have implemented my dictionary hack for Windows Live Writer - you'll need to do it all over again with the updated beta released yesterday (12.0.1277.816).
The only difference is that the default path for Writer Dictionaries has changed to \Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Dictionaries
I was hoping that one of the 28 languages which Writer has been released in would be British English. I can't find a list of the available dictionaries anywhere so I'm not 100% confident that they haven't resolved this problem and that I've just been given the US version rather than the British version.
The new Windows Live unified installer seems to work really well updating both my Writer and Messenger applications. Not sure that I'm too keen on the new look of Messenger though.
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