A sour taste …

Looking up some information on positivity and passion in software development today I found myself confronted by something that I just didn’t expect – and I’m still not certain how to react.

Katthy Sierra, an author I admire and respect has decided to stop writing  her Creating Passionate Users blog because of a rather nasty flame war involving death threats which rapidly became a very public discussion.

There are never any winners from something like this, and in the mess of deleted sites, sensationalist reporting and public and private discussions it is hard to see the facts of the story. What I have seen is not pretty. It leaves a nasty aftertaste. Among glimmers of human decency there are a lot of nasty words and mean spirited statements. It all seems so not what the debate about blogs and content and passion for communication should be about.

I now don’t know what to do. To use Kathy’s work to illustrate a positive message of passion and desire for excellence is going to lead people to a debate that runs counter to this message and thats a tough one to deal with both honestly and with integrity.

Lessons about Time and Space

I feel there have been so many lessons about time, and personal space this week. 

Two very different books talking about very different sides of the same things. And the ironic lessos  that arose from trying to talk about either of them. ‘Flow’ talking about the pleasure of having a quest or a goal. Something that makes time rich and wonderful and which moves effortlessly round the task like a well balanced tool.  ’Faster’ on the other hand illustrating the futility of trying to hoard or save time when you have no worthwhile way to spend it. That compromising everything leaves us with nothing to hold onto. Nothing to love. Nothing to admire and respect and cherish 

It sounds obvious to say you can’t create time or the space to use time. Space is as much mental as physical. After an exhausting day there may be plenty of time – but jobs can so easily just turn to dust in the hands of the weary. And it is no use trying to make either time or space when the task is bright and fresh. My own attempts at hacking time have been spectacularly unsuccessful this week. Stretching and squeezing time like a toothpaste tube doesn’t work. It just leads to an ugly splurge of consequences that need to be worked through and sorted.

Wisdom comes in making the right compromises. Still trying, still having goals but having the realism to know that the time to achieve them is constrained. Learning to think inside the box.  Learning to compromise some of the important parameters of time cost and quality rather than losing the lot by not finishing.

One of the other books I read this week was Joan Aitken’s The Witch of Clatteringshaws. A book the author chose to finish quickly in a big bang ending, rather than to leave either the long running series of stories, or the final tale unfinished after her death

There are time when a speedy end is indeed better than a half finished story  

Faster than the speed of night.

There was a post here yesterday. Nothing exceptional, nothing grand just a little post about the irony of reading “Faster” by James Gleick as quickly as possible due to a glut of library books all arriving at once.

I came back to the computer today and my post had vanished without a trace.

I can’t remember what it said now. At the time it all made sense. Now it all seems so yesterday. I guess that’s the joy of our modern fast moving age.

A small salutary reminder to always save.

Time gentlemen please

I was so busy writing my last posting that I managed to miss my bus and not get half my morning jobs completed before the rest of the household woke up.

There is a certain irony there, but not one that was appreciated by my loving family. Serious apologies to Groundhog Mum who had to pick up the pieces. And fervent promises that it won’t happen again.

Going with the flow

 Yesterday I found a perfect description of what Ground Hog Mum has tried to describe as the zen like state you have to be in as an active parent when you’re looking after two young active children.

Its a feeling I know from writing code, but its taken me a long time to realise that it is there with kids too. Kids as the psychologists would express it are ‘a deep immersion activity’. Lose concentration for a moment and you’ll be rescuing your youngest from the debris of the telephone table. The trick to staying sane is not to worry about all the things you want to do but can’t. That when you let go you paradoxically get your control back to enjoy what is happening.

The description Michaly Csikszentmihalyi gives of flow is:

• The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing
• We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing
• The task has clear goal and provides instant feedback
• One acts with a deep and effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life
• Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions
• Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over
• The sense of duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours

Of course it doesn’t always work like that. There are many, many times when I rage against it. I have other things I want to do. There just seems too much going on. The times when I throw my hands in the air in frustration like a comedy Shylock.

But as Mr Csikszentmihalyi rightly says when it works its one of the most valuable things there is.   

Cooking the books

One of the nice things about this bit of dead time post Christmas is that its given me my best chance in ages to just read and read. To read books that I want to read and not just the ones I think will be useful. I like the conversations contained in books.

I love the chance to see the world the way someone else sees it. To connect with another person’s passion and experience. I’ve enjoyed the feeling when a  good non fiction book uplift the soul and stretches the mind in a new direction. The neatness of a cleverly set up crime novel, or of an alternative universe that hangs together.

Books rich enough to entertain yet with enough of a familiar voice to feel comfortable. A cosy conversation with old friends and new acquaintances.

Reading different books has made me wonder just how useful the useful books really are. I accept the need for coding cookbooks and training manuals to keep my professional skills up to date. There is however a thin line between books that offer genuinely helpful advice on specific problems and the “snake oil” of books that promise that by following an easy system you can change your life. 

There is part of me that is susceptible to that promise of  ’Joe 90′ style magic. That I’ll read a book and instantly be a better coder. A more organised more professional person and a wonderful father. Delia Smith is great when you need to bake a cake for the first time – but reading it doesn’t turn you into a chef. 

There is no such thing as a recipe for living that suits everyone. Such friends soon seem overbearing. The short term high  soon wears off. Working with other people’s systems just makes me miserable when I can’t make them work for me. These books can disconnect you from your own ideas thoughts and passions. The type of people  who say “nonsense – this is the only sensible way to do this”. The ones who poo-poo any suggestions you make  and disparage anything you’ve managed to achieve by yourself.  

 If I have a second resolution for the year its that I want to idle more. I want to read books that matter to other people. To read books by people who enjoyed writing them and want to share. And if I read cookbooks I want ones with ideas and passion. Good friends who listen appreciate and say “why don’t you try” or “this works for me”. Books that treat me as a colleague on the same journey, not as a student.

It seems to me that that is far more what being a good father is all about.

Too many books …

I’ve found the limitation with LibraryThing. 

Having now reached 200 books I now need to either stump up the princely sum of $10 or prune my book list .

Happy New Year

Yesterday was my first day back at the office. It was also the first day of snow.

The snow has been a long awaited event in our household. Our eldest has been looking forward to snow for what feels like most of last year.  I had a fair idea just how excited she was going to be. I would also have loved to see what our youngest would make of the new experience – she was too young for snow last time round. It just felt like a classic piece of timing that I wasn’t going to be there.

Walking into the office I decided I wasn’t going to grump about what I was missing, or get frustrated by how many people had decided to stay at home. Instead I made my first resolution of the new year. There are many things I can’t control. I can’t avoid missing out on some of the fun moments with the family.  I can however at least make sure that that what I’m doing with my time is the most useful thing the circumstances allow.

The quiet day meant I got a lot of little jobs tidied up. Binning a huge pile of rubbish from my desk felt fantastic. The girls had a fun filled day, and there was still a chance for a priceless shared moment after work. A walk to the post office with my eldest daughter while she jabbered about her day and  dancing in the falling snow catching snowflakes on her tongue.

Adding a booklist

Having spent yesterday grumping because the wordpress.com policy of no plugins meant I couldn’t add a book list to my sidebar, I stumbled acros a posting by Amyth called Adding LibraryThing Book list to WordPress.com blogs

Once I’d worked out that the way to add arbitrary code to my sidebar was to drag a ’Text 1′ widget in from the widgets menu  it was all very straightforward. The only gotcha I spotted is that if you edit a text 1 widget in situ it does seem to have a nasty habit of changing all your & to & amp ;. I resorted to editing the code in textpad  and pasting back in. 

I wanted to split my books into those I’d read those I’d read, the ones I was currently reading and those I’ve yet to read. In LibraryThing. To achieve this I tagged my books as ‘planned’ ‘read’ or ‘reading’  and then filtered by the tag using  ‘tag=read’ or ‘tag=planned’ in the sample below. The full list of widget options can be found here:   My final code looks like:

 <a href="http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=groundhogdad"> <img border="0" src="http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?view=groundhogdad&tag=read&type=random&font=Verdana&num=10&width=180&top=Random%20selection%20of%20books%20I've%20read%20and%20enjoyed&fsize=8" mce_src="http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?view=groundhogdad&tag=read&type=random&font=Verdana&num=10&width=180&top=Random%20selection%20of%20books%20I've%20read%20and%20enjoyed&fsize=8"></a> This was the first time I’ve heard of Library Thing, but having tried it out

I would heartily recommend it as a system. Adding and tagging new books couldn’t be simpler and the service is completely free. All they ask is user-name and password – you don’t even have to give an email address. To give myself something to play with I added in and tagged a selection of books from a list I’d made  of books I wanted to read for work. My reading habits aren’t quite as unbalanced as the list currently suggests. More work needed, but it gives me enough to move forward with sorting through my random reading lists and scribbled notes and  turning them into something more coherent.

Un-boxing Day

There is something about this time of year that renews my desire to simplify and just get rid of junk.

It is a feeling that starts before Christmas. The mutterings start when all the kids toys have to be shuffled from the various corners to make room for the festive paraphernalia. It grows while bruising and bashing myself searching an attic full of boxes and bags  to find the decorations. On Christmas Day itself there is the clutter of boxes, and new aquisitions sitting in random piles  and in the days after Christmas each new item has to be found a home.

Money is tight, as is space in the house. Over the past couple of years de-cluttering has become a way of life. Any new item has to pass an “assimilate or die” test before being welcomed into our home. 

1. Is this something that will be used and used frequently?
2. Does this reflect something that is true for us? A difficult rule to express properly – the more sparingly used the more effective it is. There are some things that are not ”useful” but they are a strong part of who you are. Something of beauty, something of strong emotional value, something worth keeping and standing by.
3. Does this item have a clear space to live. Often this is a good way of sanity checking rule 2. Would I be willing to get rid of two other things to keep this one?  

 Out of necessity we’ve developed the following strategy:

• A batch of children’s stuff will make its way to the next local NCT sale.
• Anything of value which we can’t use will end up on ebay 
• Books which are not going to be read go onto GreenMetropolis, our bookswap site of choice.
• Anything not of sufficent value will get offered on freecycle
• Anything too much hassle to sell will go to charity – for personal reasons usually one of the cancer charities.
• Anything else we try to recycle as greenly as we can.

Christmas in the past has been hard because of the frustration of wasted effort. People dear to us have spent their money and emotional effort on well meant gifts that would be difficult for us to appreciate or enjoy.

This year we felt the balance was better, and as a result we all enjoyed Christmas more. It made a differerence that  set up Amazon wish lists for ourselves and the two girls and publicised them well in advance to avoid friends and family. It  also helped that we had worked with the girls go through their toys and games before Christmas, storing away or getting rid the things that were no longer being used. 

Now post-christmas, as a household its time to start the clearout again. Looking round there is still so much around that doesn’t belong and won’t get used.

My own personal bugbear is book and notes. I love information. The fantastic thing about reading is that every book you read encourages you to discover new books, articles authors and ideas.  I would happily surround myself with books that I would like to read despite knowing in my heart of hearts that I never will.  

I had been going to write more about my search for a balance,  however I’ve just noticed ythat Merlin Mann has restarted a thread running on 43folders.com which links both books and decluttering that I’d like to track. Both the original articles and comments on both threads are well worth a read.

Knowing others are thinking the same way at the same time helps tighten my own resolve to keep moving forward. I just hope the binmen are working on Monday.