will you be happy – Page 2

Working on reducing numbers (specifically, waist)

Back in December I dragged the Wii Fit out from under the sofa and did the Body Test. Boom. I’d managed to turn into a complete porker again – I put this down to the Honeymoon cruise in August (where we ate rich and wonderful foods constantly) and a general contentment post-wedding due to the … Continue reading “Working on reducing numbers (specifically, waist)”

Back in December I dragged the Wii Fit out from under the sofa and did the Body Test. Boom. I’d managed to turn into a complete porker again – I put this down to the Honeymoon cruise in August (where we ate rich and wonderful foods constantly) and a general contentment post-wedding due to the fact that we’re both foodies (in the sense that we love taste more than presentation).

There was bugger all point starting some sort of weight regime before Christmas as it was setting myself up for a big heap of failure so I put it on the back burner and in mid January I started to examine my eating a bit more.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a moveable body.
: H. L. Mencken

The thing about losing weight for me is that I love food. And I dislike denying myself the luxuries. No surprise there. If my friends are over for a game, I’d much prefer to chow down on a take-out meal rather than wolfing down a ‘portioned’ meal (which is a little like trying to stem a flood with a packet of kitchen towels).

Loving the luxuries means having some sort of control elsewhere. So, I reduced my portion sizes across the board. Instead of having two packets of sandwiches every lunchtime, I reduced to one. I’m also using fresh fruit in work for snacking rather than a stock of chocolate (which was how I whiled away my time at $BIG_COMPANY – amazing how much chocolate you can swallow when you’re deeply unhappy about the day job!)

I’d also discovered that I have no idea what it feels like to be “satisfied” when eating. I know what “full” feels like because I could barely move afterwards and I didn’t like that feeling (and feel a little ashamed that I’ve experienced it too). So I spent a little more time examining my timing with meals. I’ve always been a vacuum cleaner for food – even when I was a skinny teen (which was a change from being a chubby toddler) – and the end result was when I hit my mid-20s, I filled out both in build and in bulk. Sorting out portions was therefore important.

I’d considered doing more exercise but that’s a struggle considering that I’m already pushed for time as it is and finding it hard to get to bed before midnight anyway. I followed Nigel’s 30DaysOfFit last year and I think I need to be a bit more serious about it. That’ll be something I look at more seriously after this coming week. I’m off to San Francisco for three days and that means airplane meals, hotel meals, an official dinner and effectively no control over the quality of food I eat. With the other things going on, it’s just too hard to organise eating as well.

So, that was the promise. Reduce my portions. Take my time over meals to rediscover “fullness”. Enjoy my luxuries because Life Is Short.

So, what was the result?

In two months, from around the first half of January, to the first half of March, I managed to lose 17 pounds (1 st, 3 lbs) – which is around 2 lbs a week – a healthy rate. This was calculated by using the Wii Fit – so I’m pretty happy with it’s reliability as it also tracks the last time you were measured and gives helpful and patronising suggestions. I have noticed that the clothes which fit me at my “heaviest weight” are now loose on me which is a real-world result.

I’ve set another goal of another stone by the first week of May. We’ll see how I go.

Ulster History X

Sammy Wilson is the Environment Minister for Northern Ireland as well as a Member of Parliament for the DUP. He reckons that it’s better to have foreigners in Northern Ireland unemployed rather than locals. The DUP minister, speaking on The Politics Show, continued: “I think you’ve got to be very careful when you talk in … Continue reading “Ulster History X”

The DUP minister, speaking on The Politics Show, continued: “I think you’ve got to be very careful when you talk in those terms because people always accuse you of being racist and xenophobic.
“However, when it comes to a downturn, I think if jobs are becoming vacant and you’ve got people with equal skills, and can do the job, etc., then I think preference should be given to people from Northern Ireland.”

I don’t think there’s any doubt that the statement is espousing a xenophobic attitude.

End of the day, any taxpayer is a good employee and as long as they’re paying tax I’d rather have them working. If this means they have to employ immigrants to Northern Ireland then so be it. We’ve no shortage of people who’d rather sit at home and play computer games or watch television rather than actually get a job or, god forbid, start their own business. And that has nothing to do with immigrants.

Suggesting employers select for jobs based on nationality rather than capability means starting to slide down a slipperly slope. How much pain and anguish did we go through because previously employers were not restricted to equal opportunities and instead employed on the basis of religious background? Does Mr Wilson think that just because we’ve gotten over the ‘religion thing’ that we have to find another scapegoat?

Here’s a quote from a relevant movie: American History X

Don’t laugh! They’re nothing funny going on here this is about your life and mine. It’s about decent hard-working Americans falling into the cracks and getting the shaft because their government cares more about the constitutional rights of a bunch of people who aren’t even citizens in this country.

On the Statue of Liberty it says: “Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor.” Well, it’s Americans who are tired and hungry and poor. And I say, until you take care of that, close the fucking book. ‘Cause we’re losing. We’re losing our rights to pursue our destiny. We’re losing our freedom. So that a bunch of fucking foreigners can come in here and exploit our country. And this isn’t something that’s going on far away. This isn’t something that’s happening places we can’t do anything about it. It’s happening right here, right in our neighborhood, right in that building behind you..

Here, Sammy, you should watch this. (Hint: Prejudice is bad)

America: Day of Days

I was born and experienced my formative years in the 1970s. My school permitted the students to bring home one book for the weekend and, more often than not, I picked the same book. I was inspired and entranced by the cover (I recall it was blue) and content (it spoke of wonderful, colourful far-off places) and it spoke to me of freedom, of hamburgers and of french fries. The first I was too young to understand and the latter two I had never experienced (I didn’t realise they were the same as beefburgers and chips).

The book was about America and I fell in love.

Now, twenty five years later I sat in a room and silently listened to a man speak about the future. More science, less greed, more for the people, less pollution and war. And I must say it gave me a shiver. It was about the creation of wealth, the realisation of equality, the empowerment of the common man and the stark, unforgiving truth of how America lost the heart of the world.

I’m not inspired by my leaders in my country but, for the first time in a very long time, I’m inspired by the leaders of another country. I’d never taken the time to listen to one of his speeches, never taken the time to read his writings and simply never taken the time to appreciate the man for what he was rather than what he represented.

Barack Hussain Obama, 44th President of the United States inspired me today.

I had been invited to a special viewing (via FOX) of the Inauguration by Mark Finlay of The President’s Club and, surrounded by people from all walks of life, I watched in complete silence as the swearing in of the new president began. I didn’t see but a glimpse of departing President Bush and I felt no malice or hatred. I had despised what America had become over the last eight years, the antithesis of freedom in my eyes, but tomorrow is a new day and for the first time in a long time, my eyes are open to the possibilities.

It’s not too much to say that today, tonight, I envy America and it’s people. I want to be inspired, I want to be able to say that I was there, on that day, I saw the change and I was one of the voices raised in support.

You’re very lucky, America, don’t screw it up.

(And if anyone can help me identify what this book was, I’d be interested in hearing. For posterity sake.)

Humans FTW! Sky-Bully FTL!

Can’t help but grin. Andrew is a coffee expert, smart code-head and faithful sky-bully believer. “Those stupid atheist slogans on buses annoy me no end” Probably the same amount that I get annoyed by pithy posters in public view, religious education in public schools and slogans on the side of buses promising the meaning of … Continue reading “Humans FTW! Sky-Bully FTL!”

Can’t help but grin. Andrew is a coffee expert, smart code-head and faithful sky-bully believer.

“Those stupid atheist slogans on buses annoy me no end”

Probably the same amount that I get annoyed by pithy posters in public view, religious education in public schools and slogans on the side of buses promising the meaning of life through a short course and a fee.

Believing in the Sky Bully was something we needed when we were cavemen. When we feared the sky, when we feared storms, when we sacrificed wheat and lambs in order to ensure good weather.

And yes, it annoys me that the crash on the Hudson last week is being hailed as a ‘miracle‘ and not as solely the skill of a highly trained professional human being.

Humans FTW!

Work/Life Balance

Tribal Wives is on BBC Two tonight at 9 pm (and will be available via iPlayer) and the BBC has a report on one such journey. Before she went to the Ecuadorean jungle to live with the Waorani tribe, Karen Morris-Lanz was a BlackBerry-toting workaholic single mother from Milton Keynes. Here she explains how life … Continue reading “Work/Life Balance”

Tribal Wives is on BBC Two tonight at 9 pm (and will be available via iPlayer) and the BBC has a report on one such journey.

Before she went to the Ecuadorean jungle to live with the Waorani tribe, Karen Morris-Lanz was a BlackBerry-toting workaholic single mother from Milton Keynes. Here she explains how life with this remote people helped teach her to relax.My life before the jungle was very busy. I tended to work 24/7 and never stop.
…
Now I’m self-employed with my human resources firm Waponi [the Waorani word for “beautiful” or “everything in balance”]. Since I’ve become a consultant, I can stop. I don’t have a BlackBerry now. They rule your life.

Work-Life balance is something I’ve not been monitoring recently. The day job requires an awful lot of time, including regular callouts in the middle of the night and additional work on Sundays to make sure everything is working for Monday morning production.

A few years ago, Mac-Sys received a commendation from the e-Commerce awards in the area of TeleWorking. This was on the basis that Mac-Sys was a company which was operated by parents for the most part. Our engineers had families and we were very flexible with their home requirements and the same went for our administration staff. School runs (morning or afternoon) were catered for and we trusted the staff to put in the hours necessary to do the work and provided laptops, VPNs and VoIP (including Video) facilities for all staff. For many of our clients we put in place remote support options which meant they could time-shift some of their work to when they wanted. A side of effect of this was that administration work was then carried out out-of-hours which suited the clients better.

Providing this level of access doesn’t sit well with everyone and is seen most obviously in the increased numbers of executives who switch off their Blackberry devices in the evenings and weekends. Speaking to a colleague in New York recently, she described the Blackberry as a ball-and-chain and that she feels manacled to her desk by it.

I have to admit that my life is filled with technology. At home, my network is wireless, slingPlayer and printers connected via WDS-enabled Airport wireless devices. I have multiple computers and a couple of handhelds which all access this network, though not simultaneously. I carry my iPhone everywhere – and before that I carried three devices – a SonyEricsson K800i, a Nokia N800 and an 80 GB iPod Video. I enjoy having connectivity and I enjoy having this all in one device even more.

I usually turn off all email/text notifications overnight (though being on call means I cannot simply switch off the phone) and I enjoy catching up with email/twitter in the morning. Most of my interactions with my devices are social or research/reading for enjoyment.

I’ve refused a Blackberry for the day job – a telephone call is enough. A Blackberry would just have me receiving and sending email in the wee small hours and would not increase my productivity any. (On the other hand, a laptop configured with company software would go a long way but nooo…)

I don’t have an issue with the technology in my life. I do currently have an issue with the work/life balance.

DE-clutter

Back in January, I read these hints…er….laws on how to simply your life. My life isn’t as simple as that. My ‘clutter’ is virtual. It’s the procrastination that prevents me from being productive all the time. I don’t mind being productive – most of the things I consider to be productive I actually enjoy – … Continue reading “DE-clutter”

Back in January, I read these hints…er….laws on how to simply your life.

My life isn’t as simple as that.

My ‘clutter’ is virtual. It’s the procrastination that prevents me from being productive all the time. I don’t mind being productive – most of the things I consider to be productive I actually enjoy – I like being productive! It gives me a buzz.

This weekend I decided to end procrastination. I had to work hard, having the kids and with HerIndoors out and about, and every spare moment I did things that were productive, or pretended well to be.

Cleared down Google Reader. Yes, this is learning. I locked my ‘unproductive” blogs into one folder and concentrated on the productive ones.
Wrote some more Cocoa. Still nowhere near porting my Random app to the iPhone which is the current project. And no-one to talk to (due to NDA).
Filled in an Application for a job I really want. It ticks all the boxes. All of them. All I need to do now is convince a host of people I’m the man for the job.
Cleared down some ‘crap’ folders I had lingering around. You know – clear down the desktop by dumping everything in one folder and hoping Spotlight will do it’s magic. It’s been working great so far.
Read another chapter of a book I’ve been reading for 4 months. Glasshouse by Charles Stross. For some reason it took me nearly two months to read the first 50 pages, then I sped through most of it and now I’m struggling to read the last 50. No reflection on the writing, though I’m not mad keen on posthuman fantasies (which doesn’t explain why I’m really liking the Culture series), but curious nonetheless.
Cleaned the house and put on 4 washes. Sorted through clothes. I now have underwear! Woohoo!

It’s hard work staying busy. I’ll sleep tonight.

(On a side note, Tracy from SoulAmbition noted that they provide a free no-obligation first session of their life coaching! I’ve never been to a life-coach though I’ve heard great recommendations of them. Would a session fill me with confidence or leave me reeling at the great truths I’d been hiding even from myself?)

Here and where again?

The title for this blog post derives from the autre-title for “The Hobbit” which was “There and Back Again”. It details an arduous journey, full of frustration and friction, in order to have an adventure and then return home. As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be … Continue reading “Here and where again?”

As the months pass in $BIG_COMPANY, it becomes clearer to me what I want to be doing with the rest of my life.

Not this. It’s not even that I dislike corporate wage slave culture. I actually have no issues with it. I loved my time in Nortel and only moved on because timing, opportunity and encouragement were right. This is just mind-numbing. And typical, of course, of worst-class pandering to executives while stripping the workers of their pay rises. Not good enough for me.
I’m also not sure about whether I want to get back into IT work. It’s something (I think) I’m good at, having done it for over a decade now and there are new areas of business I’d like to move into, certainly, but the allure of crawling around chasing cables in a dusty footwell under a desk just doesn’t have the same appeal.
There are some things I’m totally enamoured with. Ubiquitous wireless. Co-Working. Bedouin working. The ‘Presence’ aspect of social software. The tricky thing is how to get all of that to pay a mortgage and feed a dog. Yes, I have a plan. I just need the timing to be right (after all I’ve got a full dance card until around September).

At the moment, with someone leaving $BIG_COMPANY every week, it doesn’t surprise me that I feel this way (and that I’m obviously not alone). I do wonder what sort of job you have to be in to get the freedom to attend talks and trips like Paddy’s Valley. I asked to attend a 1 day Open Source event in Belfast and was told it would be annual leave – some companies have such vision!

The answer is therefore to figure out what I really want to do, get paid for doing it, and wander off into the sunset.

It’s the question that drives us.

Job Satisfaction. Graphed.

This little diagram was ‘stolen’ from a management course I went on. I couldn’t find the reference so if anyone knows of the original diagram, then put something in the comments. I have drawn it mostly from memory here with some annotations. Click the diagram or here to see it in better resolution. The concept … Continue reading “Job Satisfaction. Graphed.”

The concept is that a new start comes into a job with a highly inflated opinion of his ability and, when presented with the reality of work, quickly loses faith and confidence and has a lot to manage his way through.

I think therefore, when hiring someone, it’s absolutely essential to catch them before the big drop off in comfort (which can take months to repair).

nerdz

PeeJ noted this link to The Nerd Handbook: Really it’s a couple of pages describing how to meaninfully interact with a nerd who is painted for the most part as being a borderline Autistic with directional (and somewhat immutable) focus. …control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. … Continue reading “nerdz”

PeeJ noted this link to The Nerd Handbook:

Really it’s a couple of pages describing how to meaninfully interact with a nerd who is painted for the most part as being a borderline Autistic with directional (and somewhat immutable) focus.

…control issues mean your nerd is sensitive to drastic changes in his environment. Think travel. Think job changes. These types of system-redefining events force your nerd to recognize that the world is not always or entirely a knowable place, and until he reconstructs this illusion, heâ€™s going to be frustrated and heâ€™s going to act erratically.

The stresses of “the real world”, where people are erratic and inconsistent, lie, cheat, grandstand, self-promote and generally act in socially acceptable ways is just not where my comfort zone is. I like to be with people I know and trust. While PeeJ may consider me to be present the air of being obnoxious (and he’s probably right), there’s a much more complex interplay here as despite the fact I don’t communicate well (his word was ‘atrociously’) I’m not doing too badly. I think.

The ability to instantly context switch also comes from a life on the computer. Your nerdâ€™s mental information model for the world is one contained within well-bounded tidy windows where the most important tool is one that allows your nerd to move swiftly from one window to the next. Itâ€™s irrelevant that there may be no relationship between these windows. Your nerd is used to making huge contextual leaps where heâ€™s talking to a friend in one window, worrying about his 401k in another, and reading about World War II in yet another.

Yup. Which is why I can have the SlingPlayer open, while surfing the web with Godlike open at page 285 and email and IM conversations going. It may not be efficient but it gives me happy. It’s hard for other people to understand this and it often seems untidy because, by extension, we really ‘need’ 30″ high resolution screens attached to our laptops to keep everything visible and a large desk with our papers, books and pet projects. Our attention may wander to any one of these things (and I believe it’s part of the good procrastination thing that I’ve talked about before).

Your nerd might come off as not liking people. Small talk. Those first awkward five minutes when two people are forced to interact. Small talk is the bane of the nerdâ€™s existence because small talk is a combination of aspects of the world that your nerd hates.

I had a rather negative experience of this recently where it was assumed that when I met her friends I’d automatically embarrass her because I’m not interested in football or cars. I am, however, interested in computers, technology, gadgets, business and suchlike and a lot of other guys are too. This was highlighted a couple of weeks later when we went out for dinner with one of my friends and his wife. We geeks successfully stayed away from our geek topics while the conversation steered itself around shoes, hair, weddings, holidays and other essential stuff and the only references to our nerdish tendencies was when the womenfolk brought them up. These geek things were, after all, the reason we were in a nice restaurant, eating nice food and having good conversation.

If youâ€™ve got a seriously shy nerd on your hands, try this: ask him how many folks are in his buddy list? How many friends does he have in Facebook? How many folks are following him on Twitter? LiveJournal? My guess is that, collectively, your nerd interacts with ten times more people than you think he does.

I would agree absolutely that I interact daily with more people during my downtime at home than I do during my work day and also any other time. My buddy lists are huge and used every day. I twitter. I blog. I receive and respond to emails. I run more than one forum. Social skills? Yeah I got them. It’s again back to the small talk.

Looking back earlier this week to a wedding I attended, I don’t think it was immediately apparent that I was a geek though I was and so were my friends there. Geeks aren’t bad at all – they have incredible attention to detail and, unlike a lot of other sorts of people, they do have passion for things. Passion is something sadly missing in most people’s lives (or if they have it, it’s for the beer or the football which I consider to be unconstructive).

I’m not going to sweat it. The people I love, love me for who I am now. Though I admit that I dress (and smell) a lot better since her indoors came on the scene. I even like aftershave now…

Character and Social Networking

I’m a firm believer in a society founded on a results-based economy. Now that may be a term used by financial whizzkids out there in the real world, but what I mean here is that in your interactions with people daily, you should be considering the end result – what you want to get out … Continue reading “Character and Social Networking”

Now, that sounds terribly cynical in black and white and I must stress that I’m not advocating that we start categorising our friends and acquaintances on what we can get out of them because that would be a horrific application of the idea, but rather that we judge our own actions on the results that may occur. If I do this, what will happen?.

It’s this philosophy that gets you out of arguments by just apologising rather than scoring points. When I argue, I like to sulk for a little – just a few minutes of self-indulgence when all the witty and cutting remarks I didn’t say in the argument swim around my head. The result is the same – with these remarks I would have completely won that argument, but what would I have lost? Having won this argument, will I congratulate myself in my ivory tower, alone and proud?

Aldous Huxley, my flavour of the month, wrote:

And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principleâ€“the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”

Seeing as Social Networks are now the ~~bubble~~ rage, how do you apply a social results-based economy to social networking? We see a little of it in social networks at the moment with the granting of “friend” status though some, like Robert Scoble, have popularised the friend status to the point that it becomes worthless. How can you complain about a limit of 5000 friends? Get over yourself. LinkedIn does a little better but is such a narrow niche and the recommendation system becomes reciprocal. You’re more likely to recommend someone who has recommended you, but who takes that first step?

With the Identity Crisis looming (and yes, it’s a crap name for my theory but you try churning out good names. We need Tim O’Reilly to popularise it and make a book!), we have to consider the consolidation of our various online identities into one semantic entity so that “the system” knows who we are but only provides that information to those we permit, to those who have some relevance to us. I don’t relish the idea of OpenSocial being the panacea there because it’s an advertising engine and I don’t see any of our governments stepping in to create something that they, by default, cannot control and mis-use.

The Jabber model works for me. I have the passwords which link my various online identities into one Island (server, service, online shopping portal). Other people verify this online identity is “me”. They have tenuous virtual connections to me through these other services which may or may not include an entry on my “Island”, we just may be strangers in strange lands elsewhere.

This post has rambled on long enough but the gist is: making your choices carefully and not based on reaction is what separates us from the animals. Being able to build social networks beyond the immediate family (or the Dunbar number) is a quality unique to humans as a consequence of our technology. The actions we take identify us as a person – they give us character. Through this display of character, we may be able to make connections to other people and have other people make connections to us on a basis of recommendation.

It would be nice to know that the people I associate myself with online all display good character. But in truth, I have no way of knowing and some of the people you’d expect to be fine, upstanding citizens simply are not.

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