We’ve had an iAudio X5 MP3 player for a year or three, and it’s done great service.  Now runs RockBox rather than its rather naff basic software, and still a great sound quality, and with a 30Gb hard disk, loads of space … but, the battery was getting very very poor.  Pleasing then that you can buy another for £15, and fit it in less than five minutes (not that this was a design aim, but the skills required aren’t too complex).  Another few years of life I hope.

Email.  It’s a curse, of course, and like all real world curses, not one you could manage without.  The pain of handling it came up at a meeting at work recently; it’s a very very busy time, and the resulting volume and response time expectations are now in a space where none of us feel comfortable.  But, since most volume inside our area comes from us or one of our teams, it feels like a solution should be in our gift … and so I took the action to come up with a few suggestions.

There are loads of suggestions on the web (see here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here, and here for a tiny selection). But, few seem to really address the flavour of load at hand.  So, here’s my thinking on three views of the problem that might help – not everything is a nail, your enemy in the mirror, and the Pascal-Einstein condensate.

Not everything is a nail

As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  There are things that e-mail is great for – making requests, sending information, and conversations between two people .. but there are some where it caters for the need, but only very badly.  It gets used because that’s what people have.  A great example is the ‘what if’ type free-ranging conversations where many people are involved and drift into and out of the conversation as their interest and time allows.  This is a situation where a web forum is ideal, with clear topics, threaded conversations, one train of thinking that everyone contributes to, and an enduring record that can be looked at afterwards … and yet, at least where I work, it is used very very rarely.  The approach using e-mail often works so haphazardly that you spend far more time sweeping up half truths from groups you never knew were copied in than the value of the various contributors ever adds.

Another example is the short ‘are you there’ type messages where instant messaging works so much better – you get to know if people are around, and open to a discussion, instantly; and, it can be a very rapid way of addressing a question.  But, again, one that is not frequently used in a work context.

Clearly, this is not something that everyone can simply change – it requires stable and scalable systems to be made available.  But, the payback is likely to be great, since the theft of time and effectiveness is material.  If it is possible to address this then it should make a real dent in e-mails used for the wrong purpose.  So,  Use the right tool, not just e-mail.

Your enemy in the mirror

Most people I know have challenges with e-mail, and describe the volume as a problem … but few describe themselves as sinners and irritants of others … and yet very little comes from outside the network, so if we want to find the villains, we could do worse than to look in a mirror.  But, the challenge is that it is so easy and fast to generate work, and the more overworked we become the faster we tend to respond, and hence generate work for others.  Who can honestly say that when under pressure they have never done a ‘reply all’ with a contribution to a discussion; never sent a request that wasn’t really thought through, had no timeline on it, or was sent scatter-gun, not to just people with actions; never sent a mail to all meeting attendees with actions for only some of them, or CC’d everyone who MIGHT be interested, irrespective of how many of those mails you have to wade through yourself.  As a radical suggestion, drop all CC’s.  You shouldn’t assume that a CC will be read, and if it doesn’t matter if it is, then just don’t.  Stop doing it to others, and encourage others to stop doing it to you.

All this can be summed up in a a fairly simple guideline.  Aim to take as much time to write a mail as the total of all the time that recipients will spend reading and understanding it. That way you end up as a net reducer of mail load … and if you aren’t part of the solution you are part of the problem!

The Pascal-Einstein condensate*

“Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” as Blaise Pascal wrote in 1656.  Or, in transalation, “I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short“. We’ve all written long and winding emails when a short and well constructed one would have been better.  I confess that I am a well known transgressor.  It’s a particular case of the general point above, but one where I have seen as frequent a mis-step in the other direction, so one I wanted to pull out specifically.  Just because you have made an email short does not mean you have made it good.  It is all too easy to over-simplify a point, and miss something important – and I see it pretty frequently.

Einstein is reputed to have summed this up by saying “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.  I say reputed since I now find he didn’t quite say this … what he actually said was “Eine Theorie ist desto eindrucksvoller, je grösser die Einfachheit ihrer Prämissen ist, je verschiedenartigere Dinge sie verknüpft, und je weiter ihr Anwendungsbereich ist.” which translates as “A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability.“  As simple as possible, but no simpler sums it up pretty well though, and has the virtue of being, well, simpler!

So, my third suggestion is that You should take the time to ensure an e-mail is condensed, but only as far as is sensible -  which I hereby dub the Pascal-Einstein condensate.

——————-

I make no pretence to be a saint here – in fact I have a suspicion that I am in the large majority who could be far far better.  I pretty much know what good looks like, and I am sure most people do, I just don’t do it often enough.  So, I just have to do it, and continue to to do it. If we all did then we’d be in a better place.

*Reference is a rather geeky one to the Bose-Einstein Condensate – see here.  Sorry.

I’ve always loved the simple elegance of a pendulum clock mechanism.  But, clocks commonly hide in huge cases, which hide the mechanism away.  So, in our newly decorated drawing room we thought we’d have a clock out in the open air.  I dare say that dust will cause issues, that we’ll need more oil and cleaning than we might, and that it won’t keep such good time.  But, as a piece of classical kinetic aesthetics it’s hard to beat.

We got this from Klockit.

I bought this on impulse on the way to Canada – it was 4 for 3, and I had the three books I wanted, so added this one … look, such poor form, I am already making the excuses in my head (and indeed in the post).  As you can guess, not my favourite book of all time.  It’s interesting and instructive if you believe that outliers (people with astonishing achievements) are a direct function of innate ability and pretty much nothing else.  But, the surprises I had heard before.  I knew that the athletics jocks were the kids born at the start of the rating year.  I knew that there is seriously hard work is a key factor is the success of most really successful people.  And, I knew that accidents of birth date, culture and the like can have a gigantic impact.  If you haven’t read about this stuff then it might be an interesting read, and probably somewhat surprising.  That I have heard it before doesn’t make it bad, so why have I got a downer on this book (and I have got a serious downer on it)?

The problem for me is that it has a horrible survivor bias in it.  A survivor bias is the tendancy to disregard cases that don’t survive from reviews.  In this case, Gladwell reviews interesting cases of outliers, but, by definition, they exclude the people who weren’t outliers.  And, lest it pass people by, there are a LOT of people who aren’t outliers.  So, he points out is that there is little about outliers to suggest that it is the innately gifted which make up such a group.  He says that it is enough to be clever enough (or a good enough sportsman or whatever).  And so it is.  But, it also matters that you work very hard, and get all the lucky breaks.  And, there are legions of people who fail on one or more criteria – and that doesn’t make them bad people, just not outliers.  You can see this in spades in the music industry, where you have to be able to sing well, dance well, look good, and even then it’s a lottery.  This isn’t unfair, it’s just the maths that comes with a model that promotes the promenance of a few people hugely, and you start with a huge pool.

So, I suspect that the aim of the book was to show, as the Observer puts it “Makes geniuses look a bit less special, and the rest of us a bit more so”.  The truth is sadly very different, and much tougher on the soul.  It is that you not only have to be innately good (though maybe not brilliant), but also work very hard and get very very lucky.  Are you feeling more special?

I was somewhat ambitious on the book front when we were in Canada, taking five with me, and then succumbing in the airport and buying another three that took my fancy.  That was never going to work, but in the event we played Canasta most evenings, so I got through only the new Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy book called ‘And another thing’ by Eoin Colfer, and the first half of ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ by Lawrence Durrell, that I’ve wanted to read for ages.

The Hitch-hikers book was always going to be interesting, since Eoin Colfer is carrying on Douglas Adams defining work with its unique style, and where the books were a development of what started as a radio play, and in many respects work better in that format.  And, for the most part he does that well, it was an enjoyable read that had an Adams feel, and didn’t feel like it let down the standard.  About the only point that started to niggle were what felt like a materially larger number of ‘guide asides’ – entertaining, but occasionally in such frequency that they distracted.  It was good to see him adding new features and angles to the Adams universe, as well as leveraging much that Adams created.  All in all, if you liked Hitch-hikers guide to the Galaxy then this is well worth a read, though it’s probably not in my top ten books this year.

The Alexandria Quartet, however, is already in my top three for the year, and I haven’t finished it yet.  It is actually four novels that deal with the same people from different angles – I am half way through the third (Mountolive) having read Justine and Balthazar.  This is definately not a light fluffy read that can be picked up and put down, since there is so much depth, and the description is so rich that it works your mind more than most books that romp through events.  The characters are developed better than any other book I can recall, with ones understanding building up in layers, often with the characters own understanding of themselves.  And, though Alexandria of the 1930’s is far far from my personal experience, I almost feel like was there personally.  It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading it, but I’m very glad I have.

Binary clocks are so last millennium.  You know the ones I mean – each of the normal decimal digits are represented in binary.  If you don’t know what I mean, I suggest you stop here and move along to something else .This is a bit of a bodge, since a real binary clock would use pure binary for each section … and you can get these as well :-

But, just too easy.  Everyone knows binary, it doesn’t really qualify as a properly geeky skill, or push any boundaries in number representation.  I was thinking about how one might use a numbering scheme where the base used increments each digit.  So, the first digit is binary, the second in base three, the third in base 4 and so on.  It might sound like a ludicrously hard thing to understand, but in working it out, it turns out it is quite possible easier than binary, since 2×3x4 just happens to equal 24, and adding another digit (in base 5) gets you to 120 which is handily exactly twice the number of minutes in an hour.  So, showing the hours down the left, and the three digits next, you get :-

This is pretty easy to use – the first digit shows which 6 hour block of the day you are in, the next which two hour block etc.  And, it has the beauty that the granularity gets finer as you head to the right.  In use, an idea would be to use different colours for each digit value – nothing for 0, red for 1, green for 2, etc.  Then you have three lights for hours and four for minutes (down to 30 second intervals).  And, I think it could truly be called cool in a world where the old geeky standard is mainstream.

I was planning an art-deco bookcase for the back room (see here), but reality has rather intruded.  We did a massive cleanse (for us at least), and threw out or gave away over 500.  But, when we did the maths that still left far more than would go into one walls-worth of bookcases, even if they went to the roof.  Building two was going to be wildly expensive and time consuming, so we decided to go back to a simple model, though still roof-high and with doors on to keep the dust out (photo below shows both bookcases side by side, though they are on opposite walls) :-

After quite a bit of research, the best option appeared to be the venerable Billy bookcase from Ikea – with vertical extensions it goes over 9 feet up.  But, the old design lives on – I plan to bring it out at some other time.

Brief post for Breff and JIm who I think are in Ireland.  Title says it all really, we’re home safely.  Loads of photos on Flickr in a set here.  Photos with Kat, Alan or Sara are flagged as family only – if you think this should be you then let me know and I’ll add you.

The time has come, as it does in all trips, to call time and head home.  And, whilst we’ve had a great time, with 2000 miles done in a 30 foot RV with very undamped suspension, we feel we’re done travelling for this trip.  Last time I posted was as we turned around at Thunder Bay; since then we’ve returned all the way back to Toronto, and on a little bit further to visit the Niagara Falls.

The trip back gave us more snow, with 3-4 inches at Nays (mid-way along the top of Lake Superior) – that allowed for a simply gorgeous walk down towards Nays Point, where we were the only people about – the only other tracks we saw in the snow were deer, moose, and other smaller animals.

We also decided that it was quite possibly the best snow we had ever experienced for making snowballs.  We then had a beautiful drive back down the East side of Lake Superior, marred only by being pulled in by the Canadian Police, who informed us that Sa and I had managed between us to get confused about who was paying for fuel, and had simply driven off.  I think it was fairly obvious that we weren’t trying to ‘gas and dash’ since we had pootled on, stopping to see the sites and have lunch – not really a ‘dash’ (not that you could in this bus – above 60 miles per hour feels pretty brave).  Very nicely, they took the relevant amount of cash and said they’d give it to a car returning past the fuel station and drop it off (photo after they left!)

There was hardly any traffic at all on the road – it would be typically several minutes between cars coming the other way, and we didn’t see anything on our side apart from when we got stopped for 20 minutes behind an overturned car.  When we set out, we had read that the north of Lake Superior was a gorgeous drive; having done it we’d vote the East better.

The day before yesterday, we set of from Sault Saint Marie for the about 240+ mile trip towards Britt, with a theory for going slightly further if time allowed.  We were making good time, so decided to go for it and head for a camp ground near where we got the RV, so making the trip to Niagara the next day shorter.  But, when we arrived there, despite  being said to be open, it was deserted, with an envelope containing a bar-code allowing you to get past the gate … and when inside we found burned-out electrics and no water, and a feeling that we were in some kind of horror film and would be picked off one by one through the night.  I know it sounds silly, but we all felt it independently, and whilst the gate was still open we decided to leave quickly before being trapped.  I won’t name the camp-ground since I’m sure it’s a lovely place normally, when there are people there, not just spooky looking corn dollies.  We decided that we’d head off for another camp-ground, by now feeling quite confident in our navigation.  Quite foolishly it would appear.  We couldn’t find the first two camp grounds, and ended up only 50 miles from Niagara, having done 490 miles in the day.  But, the night-time team navigation was quite entertaining.

Yesterday we spent the day at Niagara, and it really is pretty cool, even if there is a huge amount of tacky stuff around.  The Victoria Falls felt better, if anything just because it was less built-up, with elephants fording the river just upstream.  But, the amount of water at Niagara was huge, and it was fun to get down to right at the bottom of the falls in the spray.  Handy to have a waterproof camera for that!

(You can see the viewing platform position below)

It was also interesting to see the effort lavished on the power stations, with Ionic columns at the front of a huge building … seems that the Victorian fascination with large engineering was present in Canada as well (I suppose it was a British Colony/dependancy in 1905).

Now all that remains to do is return the RV, head for the airport and on to home.  A really enjoyable impromptu trip, though I think we are all looking forward to our own beds.

Edit : Linked in photos and fixed name of columns