Author Archives: Joe

The Competent Person….

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The ‘Competent Man’ (or woman) is a character in literature who has a vast range of skills and abilities that make them appear to be capable of doing anything.  Classic male examples are Jeeves or Angus MacGyver.  Now, I’m pretty sure that I’m not one of these mythical men, but I was reminded of this creature when I came across a quote from Robert Heinlein, attributed to a character in one of his novels, Lazarus Long:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Well, this quote was written about 50 odd years ago by someone who was a great believer in self-reliance, but I can manage 15 or 16 of those.  To save you trying to work out what I haven’t yet managed – I get my meat from a butcher, have invaded nowhere (unless you cound the battles I’ve played out when wargaming), fight like a girl and haven’t yet died, let alone died gallantly.

But what might we consider to be skills for a competent person today?

The thing that struck me is that we have tended to become more specialised, and often specialised in the minutiae or trivia of life.  I’d be interested to see what people think we might add to the above as ‘skills for the competent human being’ today.  Not ‘skills for the corporate drone’!  Here are my initial thoughts:

have an understanding of national politics, take part in civilised debate and research for the same, entertain small children, be a good listener, manage one’s personal privacy, plan and execute a protest, put up a blog or web site, find and hold down a job, run a household, be comfortable around the aged and dieing, host a meal, organise a funeral, apply basic maintenance to car and home, practice an artistic pursuit, understand some basic science and technology.

I guess that years ago anyone who could do this many different types of activity competently would have been regarded as a very well rounded personality but not necessarily that uncommon (obviously, replace blog or web site with something appropriate for the historical period) – today, I think that they’d be a rarity.

Which is a shame.

Thoughts?

 

 

We are the Zuckerborg….

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As I mentioned in a previous post about Facebook’s purchase of the Instagram mobile photo-mangling application, there is a long and proud tradition in software and Internet industries of companies buying technology and customers.  This is done for the following reasons:

  1. The purchasing company can’t be arsed to write or isn’t capable of writing the software being purchased.
  2. The purchasing company hasn’t time to wait to write the software or acquire the customers – it may have a pressing deadline…oh, like an IPO?
  3. The purchasing company just wants to knock a possible competitor out of the game – exemplified by ‘Bill Gates’ in an episode of The Simpsons where Bill tells his henchmen to ‘buy Homer out’ by kicking his desk over…

In this particular case, Facebook score all three scales – they have an upcoming IPO which will go better if they’re seen to have a big handle on the mobile social media market, they’ll get 35 million new customers and they knock out a potential competitor, all for a billion dollars, which probably looks like a cheap price to the Facebook management right now.

While I was writing that last post, it struck me that the approach taken by Facebook is rather like the Borg in Star Trek; “We are the Borg. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”  Whilst Facebook and similar companies aren’t currently replacing bits of our bodies with technology and absorbing our individuality in to some sort of mindless collective, their effect on the high tech industrial sector is awfully similar.

Where’s Species 8472 when you need them?

Woohoo! A new boom…?

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I’d been expecting – or should that be suspecting – it for some time but we finally do appear to be in the grip of an Internet Boom to match the real world bust.  When Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars – it was back to the good old days of 12 or 15 years ago when money flowed like water and barely a day passed without some new high point in purchases, sales and IPO prices.

So, here we go again.  On a professional level, this purchase doesn’t make much of a difference to the IT world that I inhabit these days.  Much of my work is IT ‘gruntsmanship’ where I’m more worried about referential integrity in a database than I am about making my picture of my cat look ‘interesting’.  Of course, Facebook’s real intention in buying Instagram is probably two-fold – get a chunk of technology that can help them leverage their way in to a more viable mobile presence, and get a potential (albeit relatively small at the moment) competitor out of the picture.  There’s nothing new with this approach – Microosft and Google have both adopted similar approaches at different times in their history.  It’s very much part of the tech playbook.  The sheer size of the deal seems a little crazy and what makes me think ‘bubble’ – a billion dollars in one form or another for a glorified set of Photoshop filters?  Come on….

I’m afraid that I just don’t ‘get’ Instagram – it reminds me too much of the very early days or Desktop Publishing, when everyone went crazy with fonts and created documents that didn’t educate, entertain or inform but simply screamed ‘The bod who wrote me has a new Desktop Publishing Package.’  Lots of photos, all looking the same…so much for creativity.

So, we’ll see what happens next.  The Facebook IPO will be the ‘market maker’ for this new boom, and will also probably flag the high water mark.  On a personal note, I’d like to make soem money out of this boom having missed out on the previous two – I’m a cheap date, have good ideas and am known to work for peanuts – anyone wanting to give me money, I also have some old rope in the garage…

 

 

Good Lord…it’s Easter!

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Or, as a Christian, I should really say “Good, Lord…it’s Easter!”

I have to say that I didn’t expect to find myself writing a blog post today – it happened by accident after I’d approved a few comments on this blog and thrown out some spam.  For the last 2 months I’ve been on something of an Internet diet.  I’ve used the Net for work, kept an eye on Facebook and Twitter for personal messages and for photographs of my lovely Godchildren, but that’s been it.  I’ve made the odd post, but have tried to stay away.  Along with avoiding the demon drink, my Social Media retreat was part of my Lent Observance.

So, did I miss anything?

Well, actually….er…..no.  Without going too much in to details, I’m debating whether to keep the diet going for a while longer, and put the time that I would have spent on facebook and Twitter in to my Blog and the ignoble art of making money. I’ve actually been less stressed and worried and irritable than usual, and I do believe that at least part of it is because I’m ignoring all those folks on Facebook and Twitter that don’t just wash their dirty laundry in public but also dry it, iron it and then point out how they’re carefully putting it all in the drawers for future use, complete with lavender scented sachets.

It brought me up sharp when I realised how much this bugs me; to be honest, if some folks I knew carried on in real life in the way they do on Social Media I would have dropped them from my Christmas Card list years ago!  Which is the real them?  Which leads me on to the next question – which is the real me? Social Media Joe, Blogger Joe or day to day real world Joe?

I hope that they’re all the same – or at least similar enough to not cause too much dismay to people around me.

I want to be…WYSIWYG!

“I heard the news today, oh boy…”

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…which many will recognise as the opening line of the Beatles song, “A Day in the Life”.  Unfortunately, I had to change the next line to ‘…and was as angry as Hell’ rather than ‘About a lucky man who made the grade’.

Today, on Westminster Bridge in London, people protesting against Government Plans to ‘reform’ the NHS are gathering in an event called, on Twitter, #blockthebridge.  It appears that a few thousand people are gathering, and at the time of writing the protest was peaceful.  Although you might be ignorant of this protest unless you’re following it on social media like Twitter and Facebook, becasue neither the BBC or Sky News have seen fit to report on it.

After all, there is a more important story happening..Sir Paul McCartney is getting married! Yes! We’ve had the interviews with the waiting fans, know that Sir Paul and his bride to be went for a workout this morning, know the colour of the wedding car and it’s just popped up as ‘Breaking News’ on the BBC News channel where we have live footage of a car parked in a driveway waiting to drive off.

Quite honestly, it’s shameful – McCartney and (on Sky) dead pop singer Michael Jackson have managed to provide some suitably anodyne and irrelevant ‘OK’ or ‘Hello’ style celeb puff pieces to cover up that people are fighting for the future of the NHS.  It’s either piss poor editorial decision making or censorship, and given the coverage not given to the Wall Street occupation in the last week I’m going with censorship.

Oddly enough, it would have been John Lennon’s birthday today, and I like to think that as the co-writer of the song I quoted above he would have been tempted to go and join the protesters rather than attend the wedding, had he still been with us – were he not already occupying Wall Street, of course.

And in case you’re interested, the BBC are now showing a bus pulling up at a Register Office….

 

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-10-09

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  • The revolution begins at home – Opinion – Al Jazeera English http://t.co/WwXdAorZ via @ajenglish #
  • Shame on BBC and Sky not reporting protests about NHS bill on Westminster Bridge #blockthebridge #blockthebill #fb – censorship. #
  • Jobs was utterley ruthless – @wisemonkeyash – and that's how he did what he did. #
  • Sunday 9th October is International Day of Prayer for the life of Yousef #Nadarkhani http://t.co/HWlrDKzC – please r/t and pray. #fb #
  • “@HLMenckenBot: The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe. – quite a bit of truth in that. #
  • Kind of scary – Global Financial Meltdown within the month? http://t.co/xPKeHyc2 #
  • Take a look at Hillsborough Forum on Natwest Communityforce. Vote for HF to win £6,000. Go on VOTE!!!!

    http://t.co/N7Ewxneq #

  • Seven things you should know if you're starting out programming http://t.co/r96iOjMF via @guardian #
  • My economic prediction is stagflation. Been saying this for months and given 5% inflation and effective zero growth, I recon I'm right. #fb #
  • #ff @harry_moseley – don't normally do ff, but this is a good cause. God bless you and yours, Harry. #
  • Nice tribute at http://www.apple.com. #fb #
  • Bugger. Steve Jobs has died. Whilst never a Jobs fanboi he was a truly iconic figure. God bless him. #fb #
  • Hobbling to the Rawson! #

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…and yes, I saw Jupiter!

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Well, I mentioned in my last post that I was going to haul the venerable telescope out of the garage, set it up and then take a look at Jupiter.  And on the 29th September I managed to do that. (For anyone curious as to the 10 day gap between doing it and blogging it, I’m blaming workload and the fact that my computer decided to kill itself on the morning of the 30th!)

The first thing I have to say is that time hasn’t been kind to the three decade old optics of the telescope, and a suburban back garden surrounded by people who waste half their electric bills on porch lights is never going to be good for any form of astronomy.  But I focused in on Jupiter and after a little twiddling of the focusing wheel and magnification was rewarded by a slightly astigmatic pale disc in the eyepiece. Tracking the telescope manually, by keeping the planet in the middle of the field of view I was able to just make out the faint banding of the Jovian atmosphere, which became clearer as my eyes dark-adapted.

What was fascinating was how quickly the techniques and mindset came back after a good few years not playing with the telescope in this way.  I was also reminded that my gardening duties have been seriously ignored in recent months, based on the dog-roses that were trying to trip me up at every step.

And I was able to see three of the Gallilean moons – which immediately took me back to when I first saw the planet all those years ago.  This is one of the great things about Jupiter as a target for first time telescope users; seeing teh Gallilean moons (which appear as tiny sharp pin-pricks positioned next to the planet) provides a direct historical connection to Gallileo (for whom they’re named) and his original use of a simple telescope to view Jupiter all those centuries ago.

I’ve been reminded that Astronomy is a hobby with a lineage; when we use a telescope we can share the wonder of viewing the heavens through the telescope that was experienced over the last 500 years by countless astronomers, professional or amateur.  By looking at the stars with our naked eye we go back to the first time that some unknown worthy in Africa or the Middle East looked up to the skies one clear night and noticed that that patch of stars look awfully like a Sabre Tooth Tiger….

The skies are available for us all, but like everything else on our planet they’re geting polluted – perhaps time to support efforts against light pollution, starting with taking a catapult to that bloody floodlight that a near neighbour has as a porch light.

It’s weird what brings you back….

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…to blogging.

I’ve had a few months that should eventually give me plenty of grist to the blogging mill, but to be blunt right now much of my time is being spent writing PHP and .NET code for those wonderful people called ‘paying customers’. Most people in small businesses will probably agree that this year has been pretty lousy; I’ve been freelancing for over a quarter of a century and this has definitely been the worst time for doing business I can remember, so when business turns up you don’t turn it away…

Anyway…the weird thing that brings me back to blogging.

When I was a kid, my mum and dad bought me a very simple telescope – it was made by a company called Tasco and was a refractor of maybe 1.5″ – 40mm in new money – on a table top tripod.  A length of scaffolding pole was brought in to use as a mounting, and my exploration of the heavens from my Nottinghamshire back garden began. One of the first objects that I looked at was the planet Jupiter, and despite the VERY modest nature of the telescope, and the fact that the town where I lived was stretched out between me and the part of the sky  containing the planet, I was stunned by the fact that I could see exactly what I expected to see – a little blob surrounded by 4 smaller blobs – the planet and it’s 4 largest moons.

Within a few months I’d managed to get a pair of binoculars for a birthday present – I still have them – and a 3″ refractor for Christmas and astronomy became a major part of my life as a teenager, until I left home and went to live in Manchester.  And then over the intervening decades I lived in cities and towns, occasionally wheeled the binoculars and telescope out to take a look at things like Hayley’s Comet, even managed the odd photograph, played around a bit, got in to radio astronomy…but never again looked at Jupiter.

Earlier this year I started looking at buying a new telescope – all singing, all dancing, one that would take my camera  and follow the stars around – maybe even find stuff automagically!  then financial constraints walloped my bottom again and so the plan was back burnered.  But…I read that Jupiter was visible again in the sky a few weeks ago, I have a telescope in the garage, it’s clear…so….what’s stopping me spending some time re-acquainting myself with old Jove?

And that’s what I intend doing tonight.  Watch this space – I can’t offer photographs but will let you know how a 35 year old 3″ refractor on a well dodgy tripod manages…..

Just one more thing….

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Yesterday, Peter Falk died.  The 83 year old veteran actor had had dementia for a few years – an ironic end for a man who will always be known as Columbo, the dishevelled homicide detective with the razor sharp mind. Enough will be (rightly) written about Mr Falk over the next few days, and I’m sure that the TV planners are already dusting off parts of their schedule for a few re-runs, but I just wanted to blog about what Peter Falk meant to me as an integral part of growing up.

I blogged about the show a year or so ago – here – and it’s sad to come back to it in this way.

Columbo was part of the ‘Mystery Movie’  TV series developed in the US in the late 1960s / early 1970s that featured feature-length stories from three or four detective, once a week. So you’d get a Columbo one week, McMillan and Wife, then a McCloud, etc. They were standard viewing in Pritchard Towers – although I was usually dodging in and out of the living room, doing homework and hobbies or just ‘mucking about’ in the evening.   Columbo is always associated with my early teens; whereas I was not always allowed to watch some TV police shows, Columbo was OK and passed parental screening.

It was like a jigsaw puzzle – you knew who did it, when, how and to whom.  the trick was working out how Columbo would piece the clues together to get to the murderer. If there was ever such a thing as a ‘Police Opera’, Columbo was it.  There’s a saying ‘The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings’ – in Columbo, it wouldn’t be over until the man in the mac turned to the suspect as he was leaving after an interview and said ‘There’s just one more thing…’.  That was the ‘Black Spot’ for the murderer – they were marked for nicking, and it was just a formality from there on in.  The bumbling detective who, in the words of one character, ‘looked like an unmade bed’ was in many cases almost apologetic when he slapped the cuffs on – indeed, there were a number of episodes where the murderer was much more sympathetic than the victim! Columbo was like a favourite uncle, complete with dreadful car and a dog as laid back as he was, called ‘Dog’.

Like another of my favourite detectives, Morse, first name was never mentioned; I got the impression that his mysterious wife (like Arthur Dailey’s ‘er indoors’, mentioned often, never seen) would call him to dinner with a quick ‘Lieutenant, dinner’s up’.  To me he had a number of character traits that were charming and unusual to see in a lead role in a TV detective show.  He was untidy, (apparently) easily distracted, showed humility and was pretty non-violent. He also had a sharp mind, dogged persistence and a sense of fair play and justice. In other words, he was a nice guy who just happened to be a homicide cop.  He didn’t have ‘issues’ like modern cops, but you could actually believe in him – I think even now I want my police murder squad people to be either Columbo or Morse.

Falk was also brilliant in one of my favourite war films ‘Anzio’, in which he played a member of a squad of GIs stuck in a farmouse with German soldiers around them, but for me his greatest film role would be as, wait for it, unkempt, dishevelled, private detective ‘Sam Diamond’ in the brilliant comedy ‘Murder by Death’, which sends up every ‘locked room’ mystery you will ever have seen.  It was on TV a few days ago.  There is a description (and spoilers) here.  If you’ve not seen it, and don’t mind fun being poked at Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade et al. then do take a look!  Falk has some brilliant lines – I have to say that my favourite, after he finds out that he and his girlfriend are locked in a room with a bomb set to explode in 30 seconds, is :

[a bomb is about to explode]
Sam Diamond: I’ve got an idea! I don’t know if it will work but I’ve got to try. Turn around!
Tess Skeffington: I’ve turned, Sam.
Sam Diamond: Whatever you do, don’t turn around until I say so.
Tess Skeffington: [turns around] But Sam…
Sam Diamond: I SAID DON’T TURN AROUND!
Tess Skeffington: Yes, Sam.
Sam Diamond: Good! Cause… I think… I’m gonna cry.

When the news came through about Peter’s death yesterday, I heard it first from Twitter, and then came the grubbing around for a few minutes on Google and such to get it confirmed.  I have to admit to being a little bit teary – but then I realised that I was sad and smiling – all those super memories I have put there by Peter Falk. 

Let me find my Columbo box set…