Entries from July 2005 ↓

A post on perfect.co.uk caught my eye today. Charlie Whitaker wrote: “Let’s have a debate about distributed power generation. No, let’s not. Let’s just start doing it.”

While free speech is under threat in this country, I’d like to board the band-wagon and request we ban the terms ‘have a debate’ and while we’re at it, ban all ‘meetings to discuss’.

Instead of ‘we need to have a proper debate about immigration/pensions/the health service, etc.’, it would be refreshing to hear politicians say ‘we need to make an informed decision’ or ‘we need to sell our solution to the electorate’ or ‘we need to convince people we’re listening’.

I have a feeling that debatophilia is the political corollary to the reactions of a meeting-tastic manager. You know the sort – every crisis spawns another meeting, there are meetings to schedule further meetings, and, I’ve even experienced meetings about staff spending too long in meetings…

Something I’d rather push is that there’s no value in meetings.

There’s value in making decisions, in communicating, in analysing and one way to carry out these activities is to sit down (or stand up) together with your colleagues – but it’s not the only way.

So, next time you catch yourself saying ‘let’s have a meeting to decide this’, try switching your words around: ‘we need to decide this, is a meeting called for or shall we do something else?’.

If only politicians would do the same…

This is one of the the weirdest and funniest interview I’ve read for a while from the publisher of ultra-violent video game POSTAL:

http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=367&Page=1

Verges from insight into customer service in a small company – “We haven’t done anything special for any audience, we’re just too small of a company, but the one thing we do is we answer our email and we’re honest. Wow, what a concept. We’ve proved that it works, that’s what I’m most proud of.” – to some bizarre and colourful descriptions of the game itself – “But my favorite elements would have to be smoking the catnip for bullet time the way it was MEANT to be, or playing fetch with the dogs so they’ll befriend you and eat your enemies. There’s also a strange donut in the convenience store across from the police station parking lot that makes me laugh.”, “Lighting my driveway on fire for R&D was insane!”

I used to want to be a game developer, and it’s heartening to see there are still some crazies out there having fun with it.

It’s also deeply cool to see Gary Coleman armed and dangerous –

The terrible events of these past weeks have made blogging difficult. It seems wrong to have a voice – no matter how quiet – and an audience – no matter how small – and not talk about what’s happening in my country. I’m breaking all kinds of self-imposed rules about what I thought was appropriate to talk about in this blog. Tomorrow, normal service will be resumed.

Any observations on the trivialities of technology and business are insignificant compared to the tragedy of a man gunned down by my government just three tube stops from where I work, and the absurdity of a proud city rendered ever-fearful through the simple brute will of four ordinary men.

I am truly fearful, but not of terrorists. I worry that the country’s simple desire for individual liberty, which was for me the proudest part of being British, will be further eroded by well-meaning politicians seeking to protect me from the consequences of their international brutality.

Every day it seems another of my liberties is traded away, by sound-bite, in the service of my security. After the end of the second world war, George Orwell wrote measuredly of a small incident involving the arrest of socialist newspaper sellers in Hyde Park:

“I am not suggesting that the arrest of five people for selling harmless newspapers is a major calamity. When you see what is happening in the world today, it hardly seems worth squeeling about such a tiny incident. All the same, it is not a good symptom that such things should happen when the war is well over, and I should feel happier if this and the long series of similar episodes that have preceded it, were capable of raising a genuine popular clamour, and not merely a mild flutter in sections of the minority press.” [link to text]

Every day now, I strain to hear the “clamour”. Why is no one shouting?

That’s it, I’ve reached the tipping point. Unlearn I must.

I was an early evangelist of Google, but recently it seems that Yahoo is so much better in finding those things I’m interested in. Google’s indices seem to be weeks out of date, and my search needs are often for pages that have appeared in the last few days. Strangely, Google also seems to eschew blogs – I like blogs and I like reading them.

Bye bye Google, hello Yahoo.

Now if I can only stop my fingers automatically typing Google whenever I want to search for something…

Something important is being said here about community, data and old-school protectionism. For the life of me I can’t fathom what it means, but I’ll be watching this debate closely.