Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Present - January 23, 2007 during the day
Project Requirements: I wanted to capture a link to an interesting blog about non-functional requirements for projects. I left my comments and would like to keep tracking this thread. I may post some more from home tonight.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Present - January 21, 2007 evening
Web Literacy and a New Kind of Media: The book I am now reading is The Cluetrain Manifesto, by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger. This book is actually turning out to be a prequel for The Long Tail and Small Things Loosely Joined, which I have talked about in previous entries. Although I haven't formed any significant comments on this latest book yet (I am not very far into it), I was again struck by a theme that has pestered me a lot as I think about the importance of the web in joining people together. I guess I'll start with the phrase "Markets are conversations." (pp xxii). The web is absolutely a conversation for me. But I love the written word and I like to read words and I am profoundly influenced by words that I read. I really can't say that about "conversations" in the traditional sense. I barely remember spoken conversations minutes after they happen. And I rarely encounter someone who says something really important out loud. At least that is the impression that I carry around. But I have always felt like my way of approaching the world was unusual. So one thing that blogging has done for me is connect me with the sixty million people who love to blog. On some level they are all like me and this is a comfort. And it is exciting to have all these people I can try to communicate with. But this huge number of people aside, --- hmmm that is a pretty huge number though isn't it? How many people connect to the internet overall? I'll have to try to find that out. Just a quick time out to google...And the answer is about 1.1 BILLION users world-wide. There is (of course) a site that tracks and presents these stats. [Side note: both Asia and Europe have considerably more internet users than North America.] When I googled the number of bloggers, the number 50 million popped, but I am sure I read 60 M somewhere. So my point is about all the internet users who do not blog. The medium of their "conversations" is something besides the written word. I have worried that most folks do not care for writing -- even find it painful or unpleasant. How can they all be happily using the web if communication is the written word? I know it's not predominantly the spoken word or video yet because those are still emerging exchange mechanisms. So how do people who don't write communicate using the internet? I searched "web literacy" and looked over the resulting blog posts. Two things popped out at me. The first is that journalists and media organizations are who you find chewing on this issue. The general consensus among these folks is that sound and image and video are the "conversations" being traded around. [In the context of how the written word is in trouble.] That conclusion seems inadequate to me. What is the medium of communication in MySpace and FaceBook? Text and images are both used, but each are supporting players to the who I am right now that is actually transmitted to others. Digg is another example of clear conversation, but not really in the coin of any of the "media" types we are familiar with. And there is also something kind of conversational about eBay, though I can't put my finger on what it is. My professional life has been concerned with, among other things, the information that makes up commercial transactions. And I am certain that eBay is more than a mechanism for brokering transactions. The Cluetrain Manifesto makes reference to the marketplace of earlier times and that is close to what eBay is. In the same way that the computer networking folks co-opted the word "fabric" as a metaphor for aspects of networking technologies, I think that fabric is also the metaphor here. But what kind of media is that?
P.S. I have read a few blogs that address the theories of Walter J. Ong. Some of the discussion was pretty abstruse, and it was hard for me to tease out the connections to my own thoughts. But it seems that he is worried that the web is re-introducing a new kind of oral tradition that will toss us back to the early civilizations where there was a kind of glass ceiling for idea complexity, because you had to tell other people about your thoughts and once the whisper down the lane started, some dumbass would lose the key point altogether. It seems to me Plato managed to do OK in this time, though admittedly he got things written down. My point is that however "simple" this new medium will make things from an idea-complexity perspective, it is not for carrying the most abstract and complex ideas of humankind, only the fast-travelling ones. Think of most of the web being stuff being the carry-on luggage on the flight, but there is still a cargo hold where the checked suitcases that are bigger and heavier will travel. No one wants that oversize suitcase in the aisle anyway.
P.S. I have read a few blogs that address the theories of Walter J. Ong. Some of the discussion was pretty abstruse, and it was hard for me to tease out the connections to my own thoughts. But it seems that he is worried that the web is re-introducing a new kind of oral tradition that will toss us back to the early civilizations where there was a kind of glass ceiling for idea complexity, because you had to tell other people about your thoughts and once the whisper down the lane started, some dumbass would lose the key point altogether. It seems to me Plato managed to do OK in this time, though admittedly he got things written down. My point is that however "simple" this new medium will make things from an idea-complexity perspective, it is not for carrying the most abstract and complex ideas of humankind, only the fast-travelling ones. Think of most of the web being stuff being the carry-on luggage on the flight, but there is still a cargo hold where the checked suitcases that are bigger and heavier will travel. No one wants that oversize suitcase in the aisle anyway.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Present - Saturday, January 13, 2007 early afternoon
Movie Tails: I am reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. I am basically trying to wrestle with what the long tail means to health care and have not reached any conclusions about that yet. But I just had an idea for a business that I thought I would slap down while it was fresh in my mind. [Which of course means that it is pretty unpolished too.] My business is called the Wisdom of Crowds Movie Theater. It operates (as a franchise?) in locations all over, but is driven through a single web portal site. The theaters themselves show movies downloaded from online sources [digital movies, not the film versions that I guess are still shown in theaters today]. Users of the web site will place their local zip code on their Google home page link (in their local stuff tab), but sometimes they will wander around and see what's playing and winning in other cities and sometimes this will generate votes for something new to their own locale.
I was interested in the idea because I almost never like movies -- they always feel to me like a cheaply-made version of the entertainment to be gained from reading -- and the arty ones still feel cheaply-made but aren't even entertaining. Maybe there are movies I would like out there in the tail. Anyway, here's the thing that makes this business successful. An Amazon.com-like avoidance of up-front inventory costs (which Chris Anderson asserts limits the movie industry from showing more than 100 movies or so a year). The particular showings in each screen of the multi-plex by each theater location is determined through a two-part voting system. In the run-up to the "booking" of the film, anyone on the web can vote for any available film and the web site keeps a running tally of the vote getters. In the final days/hours before nail down of the schedule of showings, the bookings get confirmed through advance ticket sales made at the web site. A priceline.com type sale can be made so if you buy a ticket for a showing that does not make the final cut, you are not charged. Then, like the airlines, when the schedule is presented as final, ticket holders can "book seats" at particular show-times. Although this method will still probably get the most showings for the blockbusters, the theaters can reserve the "early bird" showtime for senior citizens and only let them vote for that selection, and they can reserve an "art-house" showing for movies that arose from indy festivals and the like. They still guarantee a full house for the showing with this method, but they can cater to the tastes of their local audience. [Why not just let everyone see these long tail films at home using NetFlix? Because I think part of the social networking satisfaction on the web (see David Weinberger) arises from being part of a niche group -- locals showing up to the theater to see who else from their area voted with them? immensely satisfying. Can't you see friendships forming over always going the the 8:30 showing on screen 3 on Thursday? "I'm here, but I didn't vote for this one, did you? Bet it's gonna suck."]. I thought of this because while I was reading Chris Anderson's chapter 8 on commercial movies, my husband, prompted by a newspaper article, had jumped on line to look up a new BMW coupe being offered. [With the kids' college days drawing to a close in the near future, a car acquisition window might open up in our house -- of course, it might be the first car for one of the kids or the hybrid for me, who knows.] Anyway, one of the things car people seem to like is seeing the car in action in little movies. Is a composite newsreel of this car being put through its paces here and there at race-tracks, or being driven by James Bond for a few minutes in a feature film, a long-tail short-film that makes an associated long feature a bigger vote getter? Or could you cobble together a whole hour of such reels that enough car lovers would vote to see it in a scheduled time slot and even pay money to do so? Or could BMW pay for the tickets for a screening for this movie in return for email addresses for the ticket holders? Anyway, aren't newsreels another tidbit way way out there on the tail? [I can't stand to end a blog on a question because it reminds me of Sex in the City, a series I never took to - and won't link to either, though I have read one of Candace Bushnell's novels and it was amusing.]
I was interested in the idea because I almost never like movies -- they always feel to me like a cheaply-made version of the entertainment to be gained from reading -- and the arty ones still feel cheaply-made but aren't even entertaining. Maybe there are movies I would like out there in the tail. Anyway, here's the thing that makes this business successful. An Amazon.com-like avoidance of up-front inventory costs (which Chris Anderson asserts limits the movie industry from showing more than 100 movies or so a year). The particular showings in each screen of the multi-plex by each theater location is determined through a two-part voting system. In the run-up to the "booking" of the film, anyone on the web can vote for any available film and the web site keeps a running tally of the vote getters. In the final days/hours before nail down of the schedule of showings, the bookings get confirmed through advance ticket sales made at the web site. A priceline.com type sale can be made so if you buy a ticket for a showing that does not make the final cut, you are not charged. Then, like the airlines, when the schedule is presented as final, ticket holders can "book seats" at particular show-times. Although this method will still probably get the most showings for the blockbusters, the theaters can reserve the "early bird" showtime for senior citizens and only let them vote for that selection, and they can reserve an "art-house" showing for movies that arose from indy festivals and the like. They still guarantee a full house for the showing with this method, but they can cater to the tastes of their local audience. [Why not just let everyone see these long tail films at home using NetFlix? Because I think part of the social networking satisfaction on the web (see David Weinberger) arises from being part of a niche group -- locals showing up to the theater to see who else from their area voted with them? immensely satisfying. Can't you see friendships forming over always going the the 8:30 showing on screen 3 on Thursday? "I'm here, but I didn't vote for this one, did you? Bet it's gonna suck."]. I thought of this because while I was reading Chris Anderson's chapter 8 on commercial movies, my husband, prompted by a newspaper article, had jumped on line to look up a new BMW coupe being offered. [With the kids' college days drawing to a close in the near future, a car acquisition window might open up in our house -- of course, it might be the first car for one of the kids or the hybrid for me, who knows.] Anyway, one of the things car people seem to like is seeing the car in action in little movies. Is a composite newsreel of this car being put through its paces here and there at race-tracks, or being driven by James Bond for a few minutes in a feature film, a long-tail short-film that makes an associated long feature a bigger vote getter? Or could you cobble together a whole hour of such reels that enough car lovers would vote to see it in a scheduled time slot and even pay money to do so? Or could BMW pay for the tickets for a screening for this movie in return for email addresses for the ticket holders? Anyway, aren't newsreels another tidbit way way out there on the tail? [I can't stand to end a blog on a question because it reminds me of Sex in the City, a series I never took to - and won't link to either, though I have read one of Candace Bushnell's novels and it was amusing.]
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Present - Evening January 10, 2007
Why Google is Wonderful: This is a short story about IBM. Suppose a business is in a stage of project (organizational change, software development, technology implementation, etc. etc.) maturity where requirements are captured in MS-Word docs that are scattered all over LAN drives. Yet through use case adoption and various other improvements in how things get done, the actual completeness and quality of the requirements has been on a steady uptick. If IBM comes along and presents their Rational tools, and in particular, RequisitePro, the idea of a nice central repository for all this information would be very attractive and look like a real step forward in the management of this critical project information. According to Wikipedia's history of the RUP framework, this toolset probably dates back to the early 90s and perhaps even 80s. The idea of RequisitePro is that you set up a nice project-specific repository structure and load it with a variety of MS-Word docs that the project needs/creates, and then link selected text snippets from the document to a structured database of Requirements Types (all kinds of things are requirements types in this world) and set classification and other attributes by entry or from pick lists. Finally, you can link database elements to one another in value chains of any sort that serves the project. Finally, you can look at all these various project-related information sources using one navigation structure and easily move from one element to another. So what's not to like? Well here's where that historical note comes in. The web has changed the world a good deal since that time. So when the expert Business Analyst is presented with this tantalizing new tool, here is what she is looking for: She would like to enter RQP and type in a search term and within a moment or two be presented with every keyword hit from all projects, all documents, database entries - any field, discussion thread comments, and audit trail records, all sorted in order of relevance. Then she would like to click on the ones she likes and drag them to a space to start her own project repository. [And have the system remember the connection to the original.] Well, software programs from that era don't do that kind of thing. Database searches are SQL queries that return data that you make a report out of and then you can print the report and look at it. Of course, if you set up a query to search every single element of every table, you would likely crash the system for everyone. Oh, that's right, and SQL can't look at MS-Word docs, never mind miscellaneous spreadsheets, diagrams and PDFs that you might attach. She has been working in the world of business applications for years, so where did she get her nutty notions? The answer is so simple. We all google. And the blessed thing about google is that what it does is so simple and obvious that we now think that we should be able to do it everywhere and all the time. [I mentioned the notion of tagging as an alternative to "database attributes" to the IBM sales guys but they brushed me off.] Software is like coffee: it smells so much better while it's dripping than it tastes in your cup.
Cancer Liquifaction: Last night Charlie Rose had cancer researchers as his guests as part of the Charlie Rose Science Series. [If you pop to his site pretty soon you can see photos of his guests.] Each of them seemed to be on a passionate high about the possibilities on the horizon that was very infectious (what a pun- yeech). Why this interested me is that they were in essence talking about the same subject that David Weinberger discusses in his writings. [e.g. Small Things Loosely Joined]. These researchers posit that cancer treatment requires that we gather and organize the breakdown of human genome data, the classification of pharmaceutical and other treatment profiles, the cell behavior of the many different cancerous growths, and the cause-effect relationships that exist among factors. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, the particular subset of each of these factors for that single individual is pulled together in a hypercube of data from which one can project the best treatment approach. [This is a crude layperson's description, of course.] Every individual person needs a unique set of information to get effective treatment. But the essential logic for putting all the pieces together is already or nearly already available. What's missing is the will (and funding) to load the body of reference data and then to break the problems down to the single individual level and add that data to the database.
Healthy LifeStyle Octopus: As important as clinical trials and scientific research are, they remind me of the Britannica-Wikipedia question. What about the millions of notes and comments that exist, albeit undocumented, about how people feel day to day, how they respond to various treatments, and what train of ailments occur under what lifestyle and other environmental conditions? When I went to the doctor with allergy symptoms and came away with a prescription for some antihistamine, the data capture ended with the filled prescription. We are missing lots of useful information about health and health care delivery. So about the octopus. I have been trying to find out whether my image came from Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) or Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). [Both of these are wonderful books.] I couldn't confirm either way, but here is the metaphor from one of them that has stayed with me (though obviously not the attribution) ever since: Life is like putting an octopus to bed. Once you get three or four legs up on one side of the bed, one or two legs have flopped out on the other side, so you run around to the other side and put those on the bed and... you get the idea. A healthy lifestyle is one of the legs on the octopus. All the habits and food choices and other behaviors that lead to recovery from ailments or staying well are part of a bigger context of all the things that make up daily living. If wellness were the only focus of one's life, which can certainly be the case if your life is threatened, then you ignore the other legs and keep on track with the behaviors needed to get better. But most of the time for most people, lots of worries and obligations and of course temptations compete with these legs for attention. Before you know it, work pressure leads to eating that pizza at the lunch meeting (it's free after all). Staying healthy often seems like a dash around the bed to stick a flopped off leg back up there. This approach probably does not optimize good health. Good health seems to be a very individual set of behaviors and choices under specific constraints in environment and resources. Could a really robust web of personal experiences and stories provide a better way to keep the legs on the bed? Or could the intervention of lifestyle coaches who reinforce our focus on health (help us keep the health care legs on the bed) improve outcomes?
Blogging and OPBs: When I was on my walk today, I felt my comments on cancer information were pretty strong. I can't quite bring them off here. And I don't really want to draft and edit until I get the message exactly right. I left a comment on another blog that rejected the idea of blog report cards because I don't want to see the careful language of business and academia polluting the interesting conversations going on. But I posted that message feeling small and petty. Someone posted their thoughts and I wasn't very kind to them. Maybe this comes from living in the south. I had an acquaintance from France who said that folks there could passionately debate any idea with anybody (articulate enough to hold their own), but they have no interest in the personal details of anyone's life; and folks in the US south could endlessly discuss the personal details of people's lives with perfect strangers but won't discuss meaningful ideas with any but their closest friends. I was invited to comment on my issues with Warren Redlich's health care economics blog, but keep putting it off with some kind of silly scrupulousness. Maybe since I am not southern, I can gird my loins and get on with it.
Cancer Liquifaction: Last night Charlie Rose had cancer researchers as his guests as part of the Charlie Rose Science Series. [If you pop to his site pretty soon you can see photos of his guests.] Each of them seemed to be on a passionate high about the possibilities on the horizon that was very infectious (what a pun- yeech). Why this interested me is that they were in essence talking about the same subject that David Weinberger discusses in his writings. [e.g. Small Things Loosely Joined]. These researchers posit that cancer treatment requires that we gather and organize the breakdown of human genome data, the classification of pharmaceutical and other treatment profiles, the cell behavior of the many different cancerous growths, and the cause-effect relationships that exist among factors. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, the particular subset of each of these factors for that single individual is pulled together in a hypercube of data from which one can project the best treatment approach. [This is a crude layperson's description, of course.] Every individual person needs a unique set of information to get effective treatment. But the essential logic for putting all the pieces together is already or nearly already available. What's missing is the will (and funding) to load the body of reference data and then to break the problems down to the single individual level and add that data to the database.
Healthy LifeStyle Octopus: As important as clinical trials and scientific research are, they remind me of the Britannica-Wikipedia question. What about the millions of notes and comments that exist, albeit undocumented, about how people feel day to day, how they respond to various treatments, and what train of ailments occur under what lifestyle and other environmental conditions? When I went to the doctor with allergy symptoms and came away with a prescription for some antihistamine, the data capture ended with the filled prescription. We are missing lots of useful information about health and health care delivery. So about the octopus. I have been trying to find out whether my image came from Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) or Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). [Both of these are wonderful books.] I couldn't confirm either way, but here is the metaphor from one of them that has stayed with me (though obviously not the attribution) ever since: Life is like putting an octopus to bed. Once you get three or four legs up on one side of the bed, one or two legs have flopped out on the other side, so you run around to the other side and put those on the bed and... you get the idea. A healthy lifestyle is one of the legs on the octopus. All the habits and food choices and other behaviors that lead to recovery from ailments or staying well are part of a bigger context of all the things that make up daily living. If wellness were the only focus of one's life, which can certainly be the case if your life is threatened, then you ignore the other legs and keep on track with the behaviors needed to get better. But most of the time for most people, lots of worries and obligations and of course temptations compete with these legs for attention. Before you know it, work pressure leads to eating that pizza at the lunch meeting (it's free after all). Staying healthy often seems like a dash around the bed to stick a flopped off leg back up there. This approach probably does not optimize good health. Good health seems to be a very individual set of behaviors and choices under specific constraints in environment and resources. Could a really robust web of personal experiences and stories provide a better way to keep the legs on the bed? Or could the intervention of lifestyle coaches who reinforce our focus on health (help us keep the health care legs on the bed) improve outcomes?
Blogging and OPBs: When I was on my walk today, I felt my comments on cancer information were pretty strong. I can't quite bring them off here. And I don't really want to draft and edit until I get the message exactly right. I left a comment on another blog that rejected the idea of blog report cards because I don't want to see the careful language of business and academia polluting the interesting conversations going on. But I posted that message feeling small and petty. Someone posted their thoughts and I wasn't very kind to them. Maybe this comes from living in the south. I had an acquaintance from France who said that folks there could passionately debate any idea with anybody (articulate enough to hold their own), but they have no interest in the personal details of anyone's life; and folks in the US south could endlessly discuss the personal details of people's lives with perfect strangers but won't discuss meaningful ideas with any but their closest friends. I was invited to comment on my issues with Warren Redlich's health care economics blog, but keep putting it off with some kind of silly scrupulousness. Maybe since I am not southern, I can gird my loins and get on with it.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Present - January 7, 2007 - early evening
More about Health Care: This is my response to the kind note from Warren Redlich (aka Albany Lawyer) on my blog of January 2. I am still trying to perfect my understanding of the blog structure and what goes where, so it is likely that there is a more appropriate way to keep a thread alive about a topic, but I don't exactly see it. I could comment on the comment, but that seems a silly thing to do in my own blog. Anyway. I spend a good deal of time thinking about the health care system, as a system, and trying to understand what actions might be key leverage points to creating a more economically sustainable, humane, and effective system. I cannot claim to have reached any conclusions. Yet. So in answer to Warren's question about how to pay for the layer of low-tech services I was proposing, I must confess that I do not have a workable economic model in mind. But here is what I was thinking. There is a lot of money in the health care system today. A significant portion of it goes to dealing with health problems that are chronic (i.e. keep costing money) or ones that have reached a critical stage. To what extent are these costs a result of: (1) failing to completely solve a problem once it presents (presuming that one can -- I know that there are many constraints on this), (2) having a system where problems present later than is optimal for effective treatment, (3) problems presented that are entirely avoidable, and (4) [variation on #1] sending someone home without adequate support to prevent the recurrence of the problem. It seems to me that the actions needed to address these four sources of cost are low-tech, not high-tech. (This reminds me a little of the shibboleths in IT Project Management that the multi-million dollar failures are almost never traceable to technology problems and almost always to relationship and behavioral issues. Of course, the IT world is responding to this belief by devising technologies to deal with it.)
My son cynically pointed out that I am describing the dream of "managed care" which was a failure. I don't think that we really tried managed care. First of all, I think that we tried "managed care" like downsizing was trying "reengineering the corporation". You can't decide that you will reduce the maintenance costs for owning your car by deciding that half the time you simply won't fix the thing making a bad noise. That doesn't support maximizing car longevity and it doesn't make the owner's experience more pleasant. Such an approach increases long-term costs as well as complaints from owners. My second comment on "managed care" is that health is quite personal, as are most of the behaviors associated with good maintenance. Folks need to trust their coaches on these matters and neither healthcare providers (who responded to lower revenues with the 90 second doctor visit) nor insurers (who have some work to do to build trust that they have a real interest in member health) built a trust foundation for managed care. Indeed, I can't see evidence that anyone had any goals unrelated to the bottom line costs and recompense for health service delivery. The goal of managed care was intended to be better health through routine maintenance as a mechanism for reducing the cost of repair services. No one focused on the goal.
My final comment on this subject is that I have watched a few interviews with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Intel guy (my apologies for forgetting his name -- I will research and correct this note) on their global health care initiatives -- that have led me to feel hopeful that you can combine structured systems thinking with humanitarian instincts and devise disciplines that, if practiced, can meaningfully change health outcomes. If this approach was applied to the US health care system, I think we could begin to see improvements. The goal of more healthy people more of the time would, IMHO, be the most effective way to pull costs out of the healthcare system.
So, in answer to Warren's question, I think that coaching, social networking, nagging, holistic assessment, & support services that seek to take care of the non-technical issues of wellness and recovery would pay for themselves because there would be more wellness and more complete recoveries.
My son cynically pointed out that I am describing the dream of "managed care" which was a failure. I don't think that we really tried managed care. First of all, I think that we tried "managed care" like downsizing was trying "reengineering the corporation". You can't decide that you will reduce the maintenance costs for owning your car by deciding that half the time you simply won't fix the thing making a bad noise. That doesn't support maximizing car longevity and it doesn't make the owner's experience more pleasant. Such an approach increases long-term costs as well as complaints from owners. My second comment on "managed care" is that health is quite personal, as are most of the behaviors associated with good maintenance. Folks need to trust their coaches on these matters and neither healthcare providers (who responded to lower revenues with the 90 second doctor visit) nor insurers (who have some work to do to build trust that they have a real interest in member health) built a trust foundation for managed care. Indeed, I can't see evidence that anyone had any goals unrelated to the bottom line costs and recompense for health service delivery. The goal of managed care was intended to be better health through routine maintenance as a mechanism for reducing the cost of repair services. No one focused on the goal.
My final comment on this subject is that I have watched a few interviews with Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Intel guy (my apologies for forgetting his name -- I will research and correct this note) on their global health care initiatives -- that have led me to feel hopeful that you can combine structured systems thinking with humanitarian instincts and devise disciplines that, if practiced, can meaningfully change health outcomes. If this approach was applied to the US health care system, I think we could begin to see improvements. The goal of more healthy people more of the time would, IMHO, be the most effective way to pull costs out of the healthcare system.
So, in answer to Warren's question, I think that coaching, social networking, nagging, holistic assessment, & support services that seek to take care of the non-technical issues of wellness and recovery would pay for themselves because there would be more wellness and more complete recoveries.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
Present - January 2, 2007
Visiting the Louvre: During the holidays I went with family to the High Museum in Atlanta. They have a visiting exhibit from the Louvre. This was a very popular exhibit and we were there with hundreds of others. --- I just realized why I am reluctant to go forward with this topic. In fact I did not enjoy the art particularly because the crowds pushed me along at a pace that wasn't comfortable and they were in the way of where I wanted to stand to look at the paintings and their talking and even their presence detracted from just absorbing the art. I responded by chattering to my companions which seemed wrong somehow too. But jabbering my complaints isn't even very interesting to me. One of the things that got me excited about blogging the other day was being able to celebrate ideas that I feel passionate about. I want be free to be critical of things when I need to be, but not as a matter of course. I want blogging to be a more positive experience in my day. So I am going to try harder to find things that please me to write about. [In spite of it being the painting that has gotten all the press, I am really charmed by the little princess. She has so much dignity, but at the same time looks like she knows that she is missing out on the carefree life a young girl should have.]
Health Care: I just finished reading a blog by Warren Redlich about health care. I certainly take issue with some of his propositions, but that isn't what struck me. I continue to have a theory that there is a missing range of services that would improve the health of sick folks and help keep healthy people feeling that way that do not require all the expensive gadgetry or years and years of professional education that we all take for granted when talking about the health care system. I think we like MRIs and specialists the same way that we like iPods and flat screen TVs. What we need to do is get the community college system set up to train folks in a whole range of personal services connected to getting and staying well -- all low tech. If you are well off and want your own dedicated individuals, so be it. If you are one of the rest of us, then you obtain the use of these folks in group settings (like maybe at work or at your gym). Think about what it is like when you have someone you love in the hospital. All the high tech diagnosis, surgery, and critical care procedures are handled with a good deal of proficiency. But there is never anyone around to help them walk to the toilet or see that they drink enough water or assess how well they will be able to carry on once sprung from the hospital. Likewise there are few people who get regular nutrition counseling, a camp-counselor type leader for a brisk five-mile hike, a morning phone call to remind them of resolutions, not to mention meals-on-wheels type deliveries of nutritious fare to help with avoiding fast food on busy days. Elderly folks have ridiculous drug cocktails and the mechanisms for making sure they are taken on schedule and for collecting symptoms of adverse events, signals of incorrect dosages, or drug interactions is simply haphazard or missing altogether. All these simple low-tech strategies I am thinking of have the potential IMHO to save millions in health care dollars because the expensive procedures performed in an impersonal vacuum devoid of any holistic monitoring of the whole self and related living context simply do a lousy job of getting folks well and keeping them healthy. This inevitably plays out in more tests and procedures and incomplete treatments for avoidable conditions. How many expensive medical procedures are simply the result of there being no way to provide people with assistance in changing habits?
Service Economy: Could one of the answers to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US be a return to the creation of a neo servant class? Although the term is loaded with negative connotations, I am thinking of the provision of personal services by professionals who have been trained to be experts at particular types of service. This approach, it seems to me, could make them able to command more respect and pay for the work they do. We already see some of this going on, of course, with housekeeping and catering services and such. With the aging population, including quite a few folks who won't have any money to retire on, the idea of creating complex interdependency networks where everyone gets lots of personal services from other people seems both economically practical and conducive to a more harmonious society.
Escape Fiction: A quick update on The Lighthouse. I am about two thirds of the way through the book, and I am getting bad vibes on the prospects for Adam D. I wish one of my more lighthearted writers would turn up with a new [paperback]. I have a Nora Roberts, two in fact, but I just can't warm up to vampires, especially as protagonists, so I haven't started to read them yet.
Health Care: I just finished reading a blog by Warren Redlich about health care. I certainly take issue with some of his propositions, but that isn't what struck me. I continue to have a theory that there is a missing range of services that would improve the health of sick folks and help keep healthy people feeling that way that do not require all the expensive gadgetry or years and years of professional education that we all take for granted when talking about the health care system. I think we like MRIs and specialists the same way that we like iPods and flat screen TVs. What we need to do is get the community college system set up to train folks in a whole range of personal services connected to getting and staying well -- all low tech. If you are well off and want your own dedicated individuals, so be it. If you are one of the rest of us, then you obtain the use of these folks in group settings (like maybe at work or at your gym). Think about what it is like when you have someone you love in the hospital. All the high tech diagnosis, surgery, and critical care procedures are handled with a good deal of proficiency. But there is never anyone around to help them walk to the toilet or see that they drink enough water or assess how well they will be able to carry on once sprung from the hospital. Likewise there are few people who get regular nutrition counseling, a camp-counselor type leader for a brisk five-mile hike, a morning phone call to remind them of resolutions, not to mention meals-on-wheels type deliveries of nutritious fare to help with avoiding fast food on busy days. Elderly folks have ridiculous drug cocktails and the mechanisms for making sure they are taken on schedule and for collecting symptoms of adverse events, signals of incorrect dosages, or drug interactions is simply haphazard or missing altogether. All these simple low-tech strategies I am thinking of have the potential IMHO to save millions in health care dollars because the expensive procedures performed in an impersonal vacuum devoid of any holistic monitoring of the whole self and related living context simply do a lousy job of getting folks well and keeping them healthy. This inevitably plays out in more tests and procedures and incomplete treatments for avoidable conditions. How many expensive medical procedures are simply the result of there being no way to provide people with assistance in changing habits?
Service Economy: Could one of the answers to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US be a return to the creation of a neo servant class? Although the term is loaded with negative connotations, I am thinking of the provision of personal services by professionals who have been trained to be experts at particular types of service. This approach, it seems to me, could make them able to command more respect and pay for the work they do. We already see some of this going on, of course, with housekeeping and catering services and such. With the aging population, including quite a few folks who won't have any money to retire on, the idea of creating complex interdependency networks where everyone gets lots of personal services from other people seems both economically practical and conducive to a more harmonious society.
Escape Fiction: A quick update on The Lighthouse. I am about two thirds of the way through the book, and I am getting bad vibes on the prospects for Adam D. I wish one of my more lighthearted writers would turn up with a new [paperback]. I have a Nora Roberts, two in fact, but I just can't warm up to vampires, especially as protagonists, so I haven't started to read them yet.
Monday, January 1, 2007
New Year's Day 2007 - Evening
Habits: This entry today has more to do with trying to establish the blogging habit than having anything to say. Except that facing this empty page and putting something down is at the heart of writing anything anytime. I would like my blog work to be part of capturing the best of what I have to say and that doesn't fit with sitting down to do this late in the evening when I can tell that my mind is starting to slow down for the day. I can already see that my musings here will dwell on the simple logistics for awhile. The missing days since my previous posting are, of course, connected to the holiday black-hole which sweeps you along into the various required events of the season.
Playing Well with Others: One of the things I am most determined to do is to begin to make connections with the world of the web. Mainly because I am intrigued by the possibilities and want to see where they lead. I started this blog thinking that one of the most important things to do is to place links inside my entries to pages that bear on the subjects I discuss. I want to indicate what other web pages seem most relevant to my personal concerns. I have pretty much only succeeded so far in linking to the David Weinberger site. [which I will not superfluously do again here. See my first entry.] This is an appropriate first choice because reading his book prompted me to jump into this. However, the fact that he somehow detected my link and responded to something I said has been very unsettling. My initial reaction was elation. It was thrilling to be taken seriously, especially about my ideas. Probably it was unlucky that our xmas travel occurred just then, with no convenient opportunity to blog and lots of time to stew. I am now a little spooked. I definitely feel a reluctance to be candid about my family members (most of whom I love very much). But during this past week even my ideas began to seem dangerous and exposure of them risky. I don't really know why. The actual facts of my daily life are pretty boring and I don't commit crimes or have any shameful vices except the reading of romance novels. But to come full circle, upon my return, I anxiously searched all my blog entries for comments only to find that there were none. So, as seems to be a pattern with the worries that I carry around with my like a tummyache, my journal here is essentially private, if only because it isn't very interesting to anyone else. And naturally, I am perversely annoyed with that thought and determined to find some way to be more interesting. Indeed more controversial.
Connections 2: This evening I spent some time on a safer mode of connecting with the web. I customized by Google Home Page to show me a few things about the world each time I log in. This is a simple webby thing to do that I have never before bothered with. I may find the NPR headlines and writers issues and art-work-of-the-day all a little tedious after awhile.
Reading: Reading books has been my main refuge since I was around nine or ten. During my idle moments (which I did not find nearly often enough) over the xmas holiday, I have been reading P.D. James latest novel The Lighthouse. I always get caught up in her stories and once again I am drawn back to this book. I'll be setting all the others I am reading aside, until I finish it. But with her books, this it is really an unwilling compulsion. I actually don't want to get mixed up further in the woes of her characters, but I will be. I have also read every novel by, say, Elizabeth George, and in her books, I am caught up in the lives of Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers and look to each book to further my time with them. The transitory characters that make up the plot of the particular story are not very compelling, or I guess, memorable, because I can't think of very many of them offhand. But not so with James. I find most of her characters kind of detestable and disturbing, but I don't easily forget them. In contrast to George, I find that Adam Dalgliesh doesn't like people intruding in his life and I feel sort of compelled to respect that. He shares only what he wants to. I also have to say that I never forget that James wrote a novel where the protagonist slept with her stepfather. I didn't like any of those characters and was pretty repulsed by the offhand ending which featured that little sexual tidbit. So I expect that I approach all of her novels with trepidation.
P.S. : Just noodling around, I found this blog and both the list of favorite novels read in 2006 and the comments she made about the books made this a must-link-to for me.
Playing Well with Others: One of the things I am most determined to do is to begin to make connections with the world of the web. Mainly because I am intrigued by the possibilities and want to see where they lead. I started this blog thinking that one of the most important things to do is to place links inside my entries to pages that bear on the subjects I discuss. I want to indicate what other web pages seem most relevant to my personal concerns. I have pretty much only succeeded so far in linking to the David Weinberger site. [which I will not superfluously do again here. See my first entry.] This is an appropriate first choice because reading his book prompted me to jump into this. However, the fact that he somehow detected my link and responded to something I said has been very unsettling. My initial reaction was elation. It was thrilling to be taken seriously, especially about my ideas. Probably it was unlucky that our xmas travel occurred just then, with no convenient opportunity to blog and lots of time to stew. I am now a little spooked. I definitely feel a reluctance to be candid about my family members (most of whom I love very much). But during this past week even my ideas began to seem dangerous and exposure of them risky. I don't really know why. The actual facts of my daily life are pretty boring and I don't commit crimes or have any shameful vices except the reading of romance novels. But to come full circle, upon my return, I anxiously searched all my blog entries for comments only to find that there were none. So, as seems to be a pattern with the worries that I carry around with my like a tummyache, my journal here is essentially private, if only because it isn't very interesting to anyone else. And naturally, I am perversely annoyed with that thought and determined to find some way to be more interesting. Indeed more controversial.
Connections 2: This evening I spent some time on a safer mode of connecting with the web. I customized by Google Home Page to show me a few things about the world each time I log in. This is a simple webby thing to do that I have never before bothered with. I may find the NPR headlines and writers issues and art-work-of-the-day all a little tedious after awhile.
Reading: Reading books has been my main refuge since I was around nine or ten. During my idle moments (which I did not find nearly often enough) over the xmas holiday, I have been reading P.D. James latest novel The Lighthouse. I always get caught up in her stories and once again I am drawn back to this book. I'll be setting all the others I am reading aside, until I finish it. But with her books, this it is really an unwilling compulsion. I actually don't want to get mixed up further in the woes of her characters, but I will be. I have also read every novel by, say, Elizabeth George, and in her books, I am caught up in the lives of Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers and look to each book to further my time with them. The transitory characters that make up the plot of the particular story are not very compelling, or I guess, memorable, because I can't think of very many of them offhand. But not so with James. I find most of her characters kind of detestable and disturbing, but I don't easily forget them. In contrast to George, I find that Adam Dalgliesh doesn't like people intruding in his life and I feel sort of compelled to respect that. He shares only what he wants to. I also have to say that I never forget that James wrote a novel where the protagonist slept with her stepfather. I didn't like any of those characters and was pretty repulsed by the offhand ending which featured that little sexual tidbit. So I expect that I approach all of her novels with trepidation.
P.S. : Just noodling around, I found this blog and both the list of favorite novels read in 2006 and the comments she made about the books made this a must-link-to for me.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Present - Wednesday Evening - 12/20/2006
The Bot Problem: More musing on David Weinberger's book, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" (which I finished today). The story about the two web sites killed for doing the wrong thing -- one was the site that pinged eBay to grab data from them so that users of their site could examine auctions across multiple vendors (they were found to be guilty of trespassing on eBay). The other was the ThirdVoice site that let their members overlay "sticky notes" on web sites as a way of communicating comments to one another. Here's my take on these. The former is actually a violation of David Weinberger's essence of the web. The interaction between this company and eBay was not a connection between two people. The "ping" was a faceless electronic being that was slipping in to do business that is not interlinking humans with one another. That is why this site broke with "web morality". I thought of this in connection with the issues that "World of WarCraft" is contending with. It seems that when people enter this world, they expect to interact with other people, the otherness of the environment notwithstanding. The participants are cheated of this human interaction when they are secretly sharing their space with bots that are, again, there to do business not connected with interlinking humans to one another. What makes me unhappy about the ThirdVoice outcome is that it seems to me that sticky notes are exactly one person communicating with all the others in their self-identified group of ThirdVoice members. Among the things that they ought to be able to communicate about is other web sites. So their efforts do not seem to be "web immoral" to me.
Flowery Language: Since I am so new at this blogging thing, I feel self-conscious. One of the things that I have learned from being in therapy is that I resort to stuffy, difficult to access language when I want to keep people at a distance. I am not entirely happy about this little diagnosis because I happen to really like words, and some of the ways I like them put together is not particularly accessible. However, some stuffiness is really boring too. I don't think that I have a "web voice". It't too soon to tell if that will be OK. But I can tell that I am attempting something kind of in-between that doesn't strike me as being direct and conversational, nor particularly polished either. It's so funny that I feel vulnerable to criticism and a little scared of it, but at the same time so ridiculously ebullient about doing this. I have this urge to try everything I am thinking of all at once. I am amazing myself sitting here writing after hours of xmas shopping and wrapping. I should be too tired. I am tired. But this feels important and fascinating.
Wiki 2107: I want to write a novel set in 2107. I have been diddling around with lots of small bits of the story. And I know the kinds of things that I think would be important about that world. However, I have found the notion of building the entire world in which this story would be set kind of daunting. As I was out doing my five mile hike today, it hit me that this would be a great use for a wiki. What if I found out how to start a wiki and created some kind of framework for describing what the world would be like one hundred years from now? Would people all over the world help me build this world by adding "facts"? It then occurred to me that I would be sort of stealing the ideas of all these folks if I used this world in my novel. But the fact is, if I were setting it in 2007 or 1907, I would be going out on the web and reading stuff about what the world is like and using facts that I find as background for my novel. Why would this be any different?
My Very Own Stuff dot com: People in a lot of ways are identified with their stuff. What they choose to own and what they feel they need. I know that there are lots of people in the world who have some major catching up to do to get stuff and I hope they do. But there are also a good many countries such as this one where we have blown right past any optimal point in the acquisition of stuff and now the accumulation of stuff is both embarrassing and ridiculous. Why would I need to buy a stuffed bear to go with my books? Why even think of that? So where I am going with this is that I think even the people here who have been trained by TV from birth to collect stuff and never stop are starting to find it all a little tedious. So there are several things that occur to me. Maybe if we shared our stuff on line at a web site, the stuff would not only have more meaning, but we would consider the stuff we have and buy in terms of that meaning. I am picturing a kind of cross between eBay and real estate sales listings. There is some mechanism for "space" which could be rooms and yard or cars and collectible beanie babies or whatever. Folks post pix and comments about their stuff and collect comments. Find other people who have /like /hate the same stuff. Anyway that's one idea. Another is that the pretend stuff from World of WarCraft (for instance) could become another way to have stuff that moves out of games and into social networking. Why can't personal web sites be furnished and bedecked? Finally, and more simply, won't it be the case that the zillions of things already on the web that people go get that are essentially nothing more than bits -- won't those things start to become more interesting and desirable than things that you go out to the mall to buy? And it will take just as much "manufacturing" labor, if not more, to create these kinds of things of comparable cost. So the world of work is going to shift to some pretty strange things.
Flowery Language: Since I am so new at this blogging thing, I feel self-conscious. One of the things that I have learned from being in therapy is that I resort to stuffy, difficult to access language when I want to keep people at a distance. I am not entirely happy about this little diagnosis because I happen to really like words, and some of the ways I like them put together is not particularly accessible. However, some stuffiness is really boring too. I don't think that I have a "web voice". It't too soon to tell if that will be OK. But I can tell that I am attempting something kind of in-between that doesn't strike me as being direct and conversational, nor particularly polished either. It's so funny that I feel vulnerable to criticism and a little scared of it, but at the same time so ridiculously ebullient about doing this. I have this urge to try everything I am thinking of all at once. I am amazing myself sitting here writing after hours of xmas shopping and wrapping. I should be too tired. I am tired. But this feels important and fascinating.
Wiki 2107: I want to write a novel set in 2107. I have been diddling around with lots of small bits of the story. And I know the kinds of things that I think would be important about that world. However, I have found the notion of building the entire world in which this story would be set kind of daunting. As I was out doing my five mile hike today, it hit me that this would be a great use for a wiki. What if I found out how to start a wiki and created some kind of framework for describing what the world would be like one hundred years from now? Would people all over the world help me build this world by adding "facts"? It then occurred to me that I would be sort of stealing the ideas of all these folks if I used this world in my novel. But the fact is, if I were setting it in 2007 or 1907, I would be going out on the web and reading stuff about what the world is like and using facts that I find as background for my novel. Why would this be any different?
My Very Own Stuff dot com: People in a lot of ways are identified with their stuff. What they choose to own and what they feel they need. I know that there are lots of people in the world who have some major catching up to do to get stuff and I hope they do. But there are also a good many countries such as this one where we have blown right past any optimal point in the acquisition of stuff and now the accumulation of stuff is both embarrassing and ridiculous. Why would I need to buy a stuffed bear to go with my books? Why even think of that? So where I am going with this is that I think even the people here who have been trained by TV from birth to collect stuff and never stop are starting to find it all a little tedious. So there are several things that occur to me. Maybe if we shared our stuff on line at a web site, the stuff would not only have more meaning, but we would consider the stuff we have and buy in terms of that meaning. I am picturing a kind of cross between eBay and real estate sales listings. There is some mechanism for "space" which could be rooms and yard or cars and collectible beanie babies or whatever. Folks post pix and comments about their stuff and collect comments. Find other people who have /like /hate the same stuff. Anyway that's one idea. Another is that the pretend stuff from World of WarCraft (for instance) could become another way to have stuff that moves out of games and into social networking. Why can't personal web sites be furnished and bedecked? Finally, and more simply, won't it be the case that the zillions of things already on the web that people go get that are essentially nothing more than bits -- won't those things start to become more interesting and desirable than things that you go out to the mall to buy? And it will take just as much "manufacturing" labor, if not more, to create these kinds of things of comparable cost. So the world of work is going to shift to some pretty strange things.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
PAST - September 8, 2001
VISION
Me: thin, flowing clothes, energetic, coolly insistent, manipulative, dispassionate, early riser
Environment: someone else keeps house, Europe/Islands, Travel but not adventure, personal writing space, comfortable bed, daily quiet time, meditation(?)
Activities: Prolific writer, financially secure, daily exercise, my own schedule, travel frequently
Effects: do no harm to the universe, break deadly patterns, better slime mold, contribute to consilience
SC: get up early, do what's important, don't let unimportant things become urgent [Stephen Covey]
GZ: avoid anger cycles, ask for help, find consiliences
NR: write, research using www, feed my passion
Important & Urgent: financial to dos, car fan, tour Duke, get up early
Important & Not Urgent: writing, out-writing, chris-college, adrian-grades, being slim, financial security, exercise, travel, comfortable bed, master consilience
Unimportant & Urgent: laundry, oa form, bank card problem, homework for MBA, palm pilot
Unimportant & Not Urgent: computer card games, novel reading, housework, gardening, home repair, carry-all
Daily Habits: get up early, write daily, no whites, exercise, meditation
Investments in the Important: work on long-term manuscript, punchlist for college admissions, punchlist for financial issues, travel planning, map out career path
Keep Unimportant Things from Becoming Urgent: Bills, Housework, Laundry/Ironing, Homework, Adrian's homework and grades, home repairs
Fake it Till You Make It: no temper, I'm beautiful, I'm a crone, I'm a high-powered consultant, I'm a writer, I'm thin & fit, I'm not timid
For Monday: Mojo vet appointment, put hair appointment on calendar, check on IRA, make eye appointment for Chris, deposit checks at bank, found out about oa ordeal, fix email problem with Mindspring, get rid of virus, get palm pilot
Me: thin, flowing clothes, energetic, coolly insistent, manipulative, dispassionate, early riser
Environment: someone else keeps house, Europe/Islands, Travel but not adventure, personal writing space, comfortable bed, daily quiet time, meditation(?)
Activities: Prolific writer, financially secure, daily exercise, my own schedule, travel frequently
Effects: do no harm to the universe, break deadly patterns, better slime mold, contribute to consilience
SC: get up early, do what's important, don't let unimportant things become urgent [Stephen Covey]
GZ: avoid anger cycles, ask for help, find consiliences
NR: write, research using www, feed my passion
Important & Urgent: financial to dos, car fan, tour Duke, get up early
Important & Not Urgent: writing, out-writing, chris-college, adrian-grades, being slim, financial security, exercise, travel, comfortable bed, master consilience
Unimportant & Urgent: laundry, oa form, bank card problem, homework for MBA, palm pilot
Unimportant & Not Urgent: computer card games, novel reading, housework, gardening, home repair, carry-all
Daily Habits: get up early, write daily, no whites, exercise, meditation
Investments in the Important: work on long-term manuscript, punchlist for college admissions, punchlist for financial issues, travel planning, map out career path
Keep Unimportant Things from Becoming Urgent: Bills, Housework, Laundry/Ironing, Homework, Adrian's homework and grades, home repairs
Fake it Till You Make It: no temper, I'm beautiful, I'm a crone, I'm a high-powered consultant, I'm a writer, I'm thin & fit, I'm not timid
For Monday: Mojo vet appointment, put hair appointment on calendar, check on IRA, make eye appointment for Chris, deposit checks at bank, found out about oa ordeal, fix email problem with Mindspring, get rid of virus, get palm pilot
Present - 12/18/2006
Blog titles: I'm getting hung up on creating a title for these entries. I am glad the title line is there because I want to flag the entries to show if I am doing a current post (like now) or am transcribing a journal entry from my past or I am writing as Anne from 2106.
Which 50% is wasted: I have been outraged by advertising for years. To lure people into spending money as a way to assuage emotional needs that the products for sale are irrelevant to, and certainly contribute in no way to meeting is despicable. But just one more menopausal irony. Now that I can see the death of advertising on the horizon, I am feeling tender toward the creative service agencies and amused by the frantic attempts to get our attention. I don't know if I see starving commercial artists out on the streets or companies who make consumer goods that we really don't want that much struggling or what. But as shallow as it was, this buy junk to feel better culture is the one I am familiar with. And I am starting to feel all this connectedness which is making me start to view corporations as masses of regular people -- so I have some care for their survival.
The solution mosaic: One of my common struggles in my work is this. In the world of IT, there are lots of sources of good advice about what things to do and how to do them. I spend a good deal of time online and reading books and articles to understand as many of these things as I can. But I find that real work is always messier even than the advice that starts with assertions about messiness implies. So I pick through all kinds of theories and models and "best practices" and spend my time trying to build some kind of mosaic that looks more like what I really see. This doesn't really work, of course, because what I am doing is simply adding yet another model to the infinity of them that already exists. However, I think that I figure out a lot of useful stuff during the exercise of picking apart and mosaic building. So in making all this work actually helpful to my employer I have two challenges. The first is that my ideas inevitably compete with various folks who are married to some particular single model or construct. It seems to me that very few IT folks have an appetite for the way that I work things out. Most seem to want a religion to adhere to like zealots. They are always trying to get me to drink their Kool-Aid. The other challenge is that I have been infected with wikiness. I think that my mosaic may just be the right set of tiles, drawn from all over the place, but that what is needed is for me to put them in play in some initial condition, and make it possible for the practioners to keep rearranging them to suit themselves. And add new ones. And fling some of mine out. My ongoing role then is to keep looking for likely tiles to drop into gaps that I notice and then step back and see what happens. This is so not how PMOs and other bodies that can influence projects like to work. It wasn't so long ago that I was explaining to everybody why the SEI Capability Maturity Model made so much sense and stressing the importance of defined and repeatable process to getting things right. As it happens, I do have a really good argument for my wiki-world being a natural outcome of reaching level 5 maturity, but I am not going into that right now.
Unintended Consequences: There is an interesting web site (will find link in a minute) that talks about systems theory and posted some diagrams and other info that got me really excited. The reason was that I think that things go wrong in projects often because of unintended consequences. These seem after the debriefs to be things that "should" have been known. But this key information that should have been known is always tucked away in some corner behind a cardboard box, so none of the busy people notice it. I am looking for ways that you can know that you're missing something and go looking around when it is earlier enough to avoid someone having to be voted off the island over it. So anyway, systems theory, in the distilled form above, seemed promising. But the leap from abstractions to concrete examples isn't working for me.
Something else about me. I like to scuba. I was not a natural, and I still am pretty much on the timid side of things. But the lure of that world overcomes my fears. I recently went to the aquarium that's in Long Beach CA and they have some really nice tropical fish displays. Seeing how amazing visitors found that glimpse into the sea made me realize what an incredible privilege it is to be able to drop down into that world and just hang out.
Which 50% is wasted: I have been outraged by advertising for years. To lure people into spending money as a way to assuage emotional needs that the products for sale are irrelevant to, and certainly contribute in no way to meeting is despicable. But just one more menopausal irony. Now that I can see the death of advertising on the horizon, I am feeling tender toward the creative service agencies and amused by the frantic attempts to get our attention. I don't know if I see starving commercial artists out on the streets or companies who make consumer goods that we really don't want that much struggling or what. But as shallow as it was, this buy junk to feel better culture is the one I am familiar with. And I am starting to feel all this connectedness which is making me start to view corporations as masses of regular people -- so I have some care for their survival.
The solution mosaic: One of my common struggles in my work is this. In the world of IT, there are lots of sources of good advice about what things to do and how to do them. I spend a good deal of time online and reading books and articles to understand as many of these things as I can. But I find that real work is always messier even than the advice that starts with assertions about messiness implies. So I pick through all kinds of theories and models and "best practices" and spend my time trying to build some kind of mosaic that looks more like what I really see. This doesn't really work, of course, because what I am doing is simply adding yet another model to the infinity of them that already exists. However, I think that I figure out a lot of useful stuff during the exercise of picking apart and mosaic building. So in making all this work actually helpful to my employer I have two challenges. The first is that my ideas inevitably compete with various folks who are married to some particular single model or construct. It seems to me that very few IT folks have an appetite for the way that I work things out. Most seem to want a religion to adhere to like zealots. They are always trying to get me to drink their Kool-Aid. The other challenge is that I have been infected with wikiness. I think that my mosaic may just be the right set of tiles, drawn from all over the place, but that what is needed is for me to put them in play in some initial condition, and make it possible for the practioners to keep rearranging them to suit themselves. And add new ones. And fling some of mine out. My ongoing role then is to keep looking for likely tiles to drop into gaps that I notice and then step back and see what happens. This is so not how PMOs and other bodies that can influence projects like to work. It wasn't so long ago that I was explaining to everybody why the SEI Capability Maturity Model made so much sense and stressing the importance of defined and repeatable process to getting things right. As it happens, I do have a really good argument for my wiki-world being a natural outcome of reaching level 5 maturity, but I am not going into that right now.
Unintended Consequences: There is an interesting web site (will find link in a minute) that talks about systems theory and posted some diagrams and other info that got me really excited. The reason was that I think that things go wrong in projects often because of unintended consequences. These seem after the debriefs to be things that "should" have been known. But this key information that should have been known is always tucked away in some corner behind a cardboard box, so none of the busy people notice it. I am looking for ways that you can know that you're missing something and go looking around when it is earlier enough to avoid someone having to be voted off the island over it. So anyway, systems theory, in the distilled form above, seemed promising. But the leap from abstractions to concrete examples isn't working for me.
Something else about me. I like to scuba. I was not a natural, and I still am pretty much on the timid side of things. But the lure of that world overcomes my fears. I recently went to the aquarium that's in Long Beach CA and they have some really nice tropical fish displays. Seeing how amazing visitors found that glimpse into the sea made me realize what an incredible privilege it is to be able to drop down into that world and just hang out.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Past - Sunday 3/28/2004 Morning Pages
Morning Pages: 10:05 am writing very fast. This is the first day of truing ot do this. Writing this stream-of-consciousness stuff is not new for me. i ahve quaite a few notebooks full of exactly that. There are a couple of differences with this. First and foremost, these morning pages are a way to begint the day. The real test of this process will begin tomorrow when i attempt to rise early enough in the morning to complete this exercise before I go to work. I am very anxious to see if this is the "practice" that breaks me free of my "stuck" palce and -- well and I don't know what. One of the main reasons that I am stuck, I think, is that moving at all will take me around a corner and I have no idea what is over there in that new place. Very scary. The second thing about these morning pages that makes them different from my journaling in the past is that in some sense I always viewed that effort as a development of "product". That is, the words I lay down needed to have value in an of themselves. Morning pages (from The Artists Way, by Julie Cameron, 1982) are a process. These words themselves specifically do not have value. They are put on paper only to indicate that the process is moving along, until the 3 page mark is reached. I suspect that if this works I am going to start to working on these in a laptop because it hurts my hand to write this much in longhand. But the longhand process is what we are told to use in the book. It flashed into my mind that this act of rapidly collecting throw-away thoughts that no one sees is a very good technique to use in a creative JAD-like session. I'm going to read up on those next week. Th third key point about thse morning pages is that they are a reminder that creativity and good ideas do not come from the stream of word-based left-brained thoughts that spill out of the pre-frontal cortex. These word clusters are primarily mini-moviesl those scripts that the mind keeps on file and runs on request from the emergency management center. They are little rote-based connectors of memories that the left-brain keeps on file for assisting in emergencies. They are used to: soothe distress by presenting the familiar, tie-up thoughts and so to surpress incoming input from outside-- like pain from the body or visuals that are terrifying, and to create emotional states and impulses to action that are rehearsed and efficient. Right-brained, creative ideas waft into the mind as complete metaphors, as new connections of disparate parts, very much like a Picasso painting, and they arrive having no baggage- no connections to emotional content, no direct impulses to action, no connection to family, tribal, personal history, especially of trauma. Is art the act of liking the two in a deliberate fashion? Do creative ideas only have value when this is don by teh owner/possessor of the idea? So we have a well of images that make new thoughts when we pull one up from the well and put it to use.
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Twelve weeks - Artist's Way + walking again + 20 lbs
Task Classification: * Really attracted to doing this one, X really resisting this one, -- Neutral
weeks run from Sunday to Sunday. She recommends end-of-week check-in on Saturday. I may do Sunday. 20 mins for review-> tasks done? Feelings?
Week One Tasks:
* 1 Morning Pages
X 2 Artist Date
* 3 Blocks- 5 years-life negative self-worth
X 4 Write horror story
X 5 Letter from my wounded child -- her voice
-- 6 Champions of self worth
X 7 Letter to mentor who encouraged me
* 8 Imaginary lives - 5 of them
-- 9 Turn blurts from negative to positive
* 10 Take your artist fro a walk to absorb images
---------
Twelve weeks - Artist's Way + walking again + 20 lbs
Task Classification: * Really attracted to doing this one, X really resisting this one, -- Neutral
weeks run from Sunday to Sunday. She recommends end-of-week check-in on Saturday. I may do Sunday. 20 mins for review-> tasks done? Feelings?
Week One Tasks:
* 1 Morning Pages
X 2 Artist Date
* 3 Blocks- 5 years-life negative self-worth
X 4 Write horror story
X 5 Letter from my wounded child -- her voice
-- 6 Champions of self worth
X 7 Letter to mentor who encouraged me
* 8 Imaginary lives - 5 of them
-- 9 Turn blurts from negative to positive
* 10 Take your artist fro a walk to absorb images
Present - Very First Entry - 12/17/2006
Project Management RPG: I'm trying to convince my sons who are both skilled at various complex games played by young people that the world of project management and delivery (and portfolio management and related blah blah) should be modeled as a pastiche for a role playing game and the conduct of the project as a single game. I can't decide if this would work best as a simulation merely to meet training objectives or as a background information source for practitioners on the job. They are skeptical. It seems that they believe the exercise to be pointless and/or too boring and trivial a case for all the work that would go into creating a game. I can be a bulldog about ideas that I really believe in, so I may keep after them about this. I want some useful conversation on exactly how one would go about creating this.
The Web: I recently went to an entertaining lecture by David Weinberger and immediately went to Amazon and ordered Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Most well written books end up changing my whole world view in some way, and this is no exception. I am working to fit his key theses (as I understand them) into my current work, life choices, entertainment, conversations. My entire interior life is a crazy borg structure where I have assimilated any book that has struck me as meaningful. Except that the whole is not a neat polyhedron, just an endless collection of things slapped on top of each other. Kind of like the web.
Bio Pix: I am 51 years old. My two sons are adults (just) and off and running on their own lives. I have a job that is interesting and presently pretty rewarding. My husband is a nice man and we get along better every year. It seems to be easier to find common ground and comfortable compromises on things. All this adds up to a kind of empty space. During my long walks (for exercise and contemplation and solitude) I plot out novels I would like to write. In addition, I develop lengthy arguments about things. All kinds of things. I craft an opinion and go over it several times until I get the words I want just right. Sometimes I speak these thoughts aloud and this is awkward when I am not alone on the hiking trail. In recent years, this is as far as my writing has gone. I do not think that this makes me a writer, but the compelling urge to design stories in my head has to mean something important. To my life. I have tried numerous strategies for addressing the blank page and none have worked very well. Except that I have a pile of little spiral notebooks that contain journal like entries, most of them only partly complete. So this web approach I am presenting to myself as no more arduous or anxiety producing than my journals but also a stepping out into a new place. [All the hits for "empty nest" have a sort of self-help flavor. I was looking for something a little more ascerbic. No links.]
About Past Entries: I have the present ambition to transcribe the journals from my past into this journal here as well. I want to see what I was thinking about and who I used to be. I have a lot of trepidation about this. First, my impulse to journal in the past came when things were not going very well. The entries are a pretty whiny and discouraging view of my life. They are a truthful, but not complete account of my life. When things are going well, I am in the flow of my life and not inclined to document the details. Even worse, some of the facts about my past don't show me in a very admirable light. I would like this blog to be a dispassionate view of myself -- when the subject is my own life and not my ideas and interests. I am ok with passion about ideas. Anyway, the transcription of my journals will carry my biography back to when I was about twelve years old. I have not yet figured out what to do about the dates for these historical entries, but I have decided not to be to particular about this structural issue.
I have a lot of passion about the brokenness of the health care system. I have only recently started feeling optimistic about things getting worked out. I want to mention this as one of my interests for this maiden entry, but I am not of a mind to say anything about this subject today.
I enjoy travel more than almost anything except reading books. I don't have any philosophical positions about travel and I find travel commentary a pretty boring read, but I hope to find something worthwhile to say about places.
Listening to Music: I used to believe that I really love music. I still enjoy going to a club to hear blues music now and then. But most of the time now I prefer silence to most kinds of sound.
Bio Pix: One of the facts about me that I am not really comfortable about is that I am addicted to romance novels. I read voraciously and have consumed lots of books on many subjects, but I always return to my favorite types of romances for comfort and escape. I had a dream last night and Nora Roberts was in it. She was a little supercilious to me. This has never happened before, but isn't it strange that it happened at all?
Bah Humbug: In the past I was very Scrooge-bah-humbug at this time of year. I am feeling mellower now about the whole christmas thing, but I still wish there were some way to do without it altogether. I like my tree and the strange little ornaments the boys made as children and this and that little ornament gotten over the years. But that is about the only thing in the plus column about christmas. [The web has lots of spots with bah humbug themes, but none I really want to link to. The Slate article was amusing, though.]
Family Issues: I don't really want to deal with anything very painful tonight. So there are a few specific topics I will skip over including family health issues and my sister in law who was killed with her children in Afghanistan and this will be the first christmas without them.
About Really-Future Entries: In addition to sticking in this blog all my old journals, I am also planning to create entries from an alter ego who lives one hundred years in the future. Her name is Anne. I have some notes on her life. She lives in the Florida Keys, but she has a job that takes her all over the globe and the next big crisis will be in South America. I don't know where yet, but she really isn't inclined to go. I think her ex-boss will appeal to her vanity and her idealism, so she will get sucked in. She has a job that is very difficult to describe in terms that make sense in our current world. I will let Anne speak for herself soon.
I think I will post one historical journal entry, just to get a flavor of how this works.
The Web: I recently went to an entertaining lecture by David Weinberger and immediately went to Amazon and ordered Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Most well written books end up changing my whole world view in some way, and this is no exception. I am working to fit his key theses (as I understand them) into my current work, life choices, entertainment, conversations. My entire interior life is a crazy borg structure where I have assimilated any book that has struck me as meaningful. Except that the whole is not a neat polyhedron, just an endless collection of things slapped on top of each other. Kind of like the web.
Bio Pix: I am 51 years old. My two sons are adults (just) and off and running on their own lives. I have a job that is interesting and presently pretty rewarding. My husband is a nice man and we get along better every year. It seems to be easier to find common ground and comfortable compromises on things. All this adds up to a kind of empty space. During my long walks (for exercise and contemplation and solitude) I plot out novels I would like to write. In addition, I develop lengthy arguments about things. All kinds of things. I craft an opinion and go over it several times until I get the words I want just right. Sometimes I speak these thoughts aloud and this is awkward when I am not alone on the hiking trail. In recent years, this is as far as my writing has gone. I do not think that this makes me a writer, but the compelling urge to design stories in my head has to mean something important. To my life. I have tried numerous strategies for addressing the blank page and none have worked very well. Except that I have a pile of little spiral notebooks that contain journal like entries, most of them only partly complete. So this web approach I am presenting to myself as no more arduous or anxiety producing than my journals but also a stepping out into a new place. [All the hits for "empty nest" have a sort of self-help flavor. I was looking for something a little more ascerbic. No links.]
About Past Entries: I have the present ambition to transcribe the journals from my past into this journal here as well. I want to see what I was thinking about and who I used to be. I have a lot of trepidation about this. First, my impulse to journal in the past came when things were not going very well. The entries are a pretty whiny and discouraging view of my life. They are a truthful, but not complete account of my life. When things are going well, I am in the flow of my life and not inclined to document the details. Even worse, some of the facts about my past don't show me in a very admirable light. I would like this blog to be a dispassionate view of myself -- when the subject is my own life and not my ideas and interests. I am ok with passion about ideas. Anyway, the transcription of my journals will carry my biography back to when I was about twelve years old. I have not yet figured out what to do about the dates for these historical entries, but I have decided not to be to particular about this structural issue.
I have a lot of passion about the brokenness of the health care system. I have only recently started feeling optimistic about things getting worked out. I want to mention this as one of my interests for this maiden entry, but I am not of a mind to say anything about this subject today.
I enjoy travel more than almost anything except reading books. I don't have any philosophical positions about travel and I find travel commentary a pretty boring read, but I hope to find something worthwhile to say about places.
Listening to Music: I used to believe that I really love music. I still enjoy going to a club to hear blues music now and then. But most of the time now I prefer silence to most kinds of sound.
Bio Pix: One of the facts about me that I am not really comfortable about is that I am addicted to romance novels. I read voraciously and have consumed lots of books on many subjects, but I always return to my favorite types of romances for comfort and escape. I had a dream last night and Nora Roberts was in it. She was a little supercilious to me. This has never happened before, but isn't it strange that it happened at all?
Bah Humbug: In the past I was very Scrooge-bah-humbug at this time of year. I am feeling mellower now about the whole christmas thing, but I still wish there were some way to do without it altogether. I like my tree and the strange little ornaments the boys made as children and this and that little ornament gotten over the years. But that is about the only thing in the plus column about christmas. [The web has lots of spots with bah humbug themes, but none I really want to link to. The Slate article was amusing, though.]
Family Issues: I don't really want to deal with anything very painful tonight. So there are a few specific topics I will skip over including family health issues and my sister in law who was killed with her children in Afghanistan and this will be the first christmas without them.
About Really-Future Entries: In addition to sticking in this blog all my old journals, I am also planning to create entries from an alter ego who lives one hundred years in the future. Her name is Anne. I have some notes on her life. She lives in the Florida Keys, but she has a job that takes her all over the globe and the next big crisis will be in South America. I don't know where yet, but she really isn't inclined to go. I think her ex-boss will appeal to her vanity and her idealism, so she will get sucked in. She has a job that is very difficult to describe in terms that make sense in our current world. I will let Anne speak for herself soon.
I think I will post one historical journal entry, just to get a flavor of how this works.
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