This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Earlier this year, I gave a lightning talk on Structuring Big Data at the CloudCamp London Big Data Special – the idea being that, if we’re not careful, big data will provide yet another silo of information to manage and that linked data could be useful to connect the various data sources (transactional databases, data warehouses, and now big data too).
This week Oracle kicks off its Big Data and Extreme Analytics Summit and Fujitsu are one of the sponsors. An except from the paper is included in the conference brochure and I’ll be at the Manchester event next Tuesday – do come along and say hello if you’re at the event and, even if you’re not, please do check out the paper – I’d love to hear your feedback.
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
A few months ago, I lost the entire contents of the NAS device that holds, amongst other things, my digital music collection. Whilst my ReadyNAS Duo had two disks in a RAID 1 mirror, they both failed simultaneously – and I haven’t found a cloud storage service to send a terabyte of data to yet…
(I have been researching cloud storage though – more on that in a future post, hopefully).
With no music in iTunes, I’ve been using Spotify a lot more (combined with the music that was cached on my iOS devices) but, tonight, I decided it’s time to start the long haul of re-ripping all of my CDs (a couple of hundred albums and about 500 singles…) – this time to somewhere that’s a little more secure.
Before I do that, I decided to start out by re-acquiring my purchased music. With a couple of exceptions, this comes from Apple iTunes, or 7 Digital. 7 Digital is easy enough – it has a “Your Music” section from where I can re-download my purchases (all digital media sources should follow this model, in my opinion). iTunes didn’t used to be so simple though and I feared I may have to beg their support function to let me have my downloads back…
As it happens, that’s no longer the case as iTunes 10.6 and later allow purchases to be downloaded again from the iTunes Store (see Apple support article HT2519). For those with a lot of purchases (or for whom bandwidth is at a premium), there is another option though – I used the various iOS devices that held cached copies of my purchases to restore parts of my iTunes library.
The details are in Apple support article HT1848 but it was as simple as connecting the devices, then selecting Transfer purchases from devicename (the computer was already authorised, but it now has a new iTunes Music Library). My apps and purchased music are being copied to iTunes as I type this post (note that this feature only works for items that were purchased on the iTunes Store – and note for any items imported from audio CDs or acquired from other sources).
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
It’s been another crazy week without any time for blogging so here are some quick highlights from the stuff I would like to have written about (and still might, time permitting!)
On Tuesday evening, Mark W Schaefer (@MarkWSchaefer) spoke at Digital Surrey about the use of influence marketing on the web. It was an enlightening talk and certainly something to consider as organisations increasingly judge our online influence in deciding how to (or whether to) react to and interact with us. My personal view is that Klout and its ilk are over-rated (Klout in particular is very much led by volume of online activity – if I go on holiday for a few days, my Klout takes a hit) but, if I were to give a “tl;dr” view on Mark’s talk it would probably include this diagram:
Surround yourself with people who care about you (and your views) and have a pre-disposition to “move” (i.e. like, retweet, advertise, etc.) your content.
Create unique and interesting content – have something to say (in order to make it “move”) – make it relevant, interesting, timely and entertaining.
Be consistent in engagement – not just broadcasting but being authentically helpful and looking for opportunities to interact.
The Internet of what? Well, depending on your source of technology reading material, you might have head that we’re increasingly connecting lots of “things” to the Internet – sensors, for example – and Wednesday saw a CloudCamp Special in London on The Internet of things. As usual, the evening was introduced by Simon Wardley (@swardley) with his well-practiced (but still interesting) talk on the cycle of innovation leading up to his vision of “augmented intelligence” supported by utility computing (cloud), big data, and intelligent mobile applications.
Then, onto the lightning talks with: Andy Bennet (@databasescaling)’s introduction to the Internet of things (it’s not new!); Raphael Cohn’s fascinating recital of how Smith Electric Vehicles overcame a major business issue in that “electric trucks rule, but batteries suck, and mobiles die”; Kuan Hon (@kuan0)’s rundown on cookie laws (which have a much broader impact than just websites); Paul Downey intruducing us to the wonderful world of open source hardware (which is far more extensive than I ever imagined); and Chris Swan (@cpswan)’s review of the Internet of Things in some of his favourite science fiction novels. Oh yes, a a couple of guys from Betfair stood up and tried to plug their new application cloud, which I’m sure is very good but seemed a little too like a vendor pitch to me…
Wrapping up with a panel discussion, before beer and pizza, it was a thoroughly agreeable way to spend the evening and I learned loads about the Internet of things… hopefully I’ll write some more on the topic over the coming weeks.
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
The last time I went mountain biking was in 1998 (I think). Some friends and I had hired a cottage in North Wales and we spent a few days there over the new year period. I seem to recall a trip to Beddgelert (or somewhere like that), to cycle around what felt like almost vertical hillsides with very muddy tracks. I liked coming down but hated going up and, since then, my riding has been confined to roads, cycle paths, towpaths and bridleways.
More recently though, I’ve felt the need to push a bit harder – to try something a bit less sedate than the family rides out (which I might describe as “leisurely”, if I was being charitable, or “pedestrian” to be more honest…) – and when the latest catalogue from Evans Cycles landed on the mat, their Ride It! events caught my eye.
These organised rides offer all the benefits of a race, without actually racing. In fact, racing is prohibited. Even so, we were timed with chips, the route (in multiple lengths) was clearly waymarked, and there were “pit stops” with refreshments (sports drinks, jelly beans and cake!) and the ability to carry out simple bike repairs (more on that in a moment). There are two classes of event – mountain bike and “sportive”, with very different courses, run over very different terrain. Even so, I was intrigued to see where I was going to go “mountain biking” in Milton Keynes!
The answer, it seems, is the Beds/Bucks border in and around Brickhill – I really enjoyed the trail (graded 2/4 for climbing – so not too bad, although almost everyone walked some of the hills of sandy soil that felt pretty much like riding on a beach…) but was let down somewhat by my bike (although they do say that a bad workman blames his tools). You see, my “best bike” is a Trek 830, which cost me a few hundred pounds in the late ’90s and was recently serviced (by Olney Bikes) but it has no suspension, making it a bit rough for off road use. I also have a cheap full-suspension bike that I bought from a neighbour a few years ago and that’s the one I selected today. Five miles in and I took a tumble as I turned from tarmac to gravel and my front wheel was badly buckled. Unable to straighten it at the next pit-stop (despite the best efforts of the Ride It! team – thank you!) the consensus was that I should disconnect the front brake and ride on back brakes only… which was “interesting” on some of the downhill forest sections! Actually, there was some more advice too – buy a cheap wheel, then sell the bike, and buy a new one (something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but have so far failed to gain spousal approval for). I kept going until the second pit stop but by then I’d decided to switch from the medium (25 mile) course to the short one (advertised as 15 miles, but nearer to 18 according to the GPS on my phone), missing a fairly flat road section around Woburn Sands and another blast up and down through Aspley Woods. I was probably a bit ambitious going for the medium course on my first ride anyway – just because I can do a quick 6 miler from home on local cyclepaths and bridleways in half an hour, I thought it would take me about two and a half hours to do 25 miles – that may have been a little optimistic with this course!
So, the verdict on Evans’ Ride It! events: great fun; a good workout; friendly (both participants and staff); and well organised (although I was disappointed that the timing chip failed to register my start, and the GPX routes were not posted in advance on the blog as the FAQ suggests – and the link was broken in the confirmation email for my registration).
As for the verdict on my maintain biking abilities: needs more practice – and a new bike! My shopping list is something like: hard-tail; disc brakes; front forks with suspension; good quality; but not too expensive…
Those who are interested in the route can check out my workout from today on Endomondo (although not all paths are generally open to the public – some require a permit, which had been arranged for this event).
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
I take a lot of notes in meetings. I’d like to say that I’m good at it – although that’s a subjective view – some one say that the essence of good note-taking is to capture the pertinent points and not the whole discussion but I’ll save that debate for offline (although it did come up in my recent appraisal…). My preferred tool is Microsoft OneNote (at least on the PC) but there are issues around storing notes from meetings on personal devices (iPad, smartphone – and supporting cloud services) that strangely don’t seem to be an issue in the analogue world…
After a recent meeting with some senior management, where I found myself becoming the “minute-taker” because I’d been taking notes (intended for personal use), I decided that this wasn’t helping me establish myself as any more than just the most junior person in the room (I’ve been advised to think about parent-peer-child relationships in business meetings – not as in hierarchy but in terms of managing stakeholders and engaging at an appropriate level). Consequently, I’m dumping extensive notetaking in OneNote (at least for meetings – it still works for me at external events) and going back to a paper notebook.
I was recently given some Moleskine notebooks as a present and these are perfect for the job (there is a Moleskine app for iOS too but that kind of misses the point). But Moleskine products are a) attractive and b) expensive – that meant that I needed to find a system for note-taking that would 1) work well and not just end up as a horrible mess of hieroglyphics and 2) not result in pages and pages of notes just like the ones I used to make in OneNote…
I called my friend (and long-time Moleskine user) Garry Martin (@GarryMartin) for advice – after all, why not start from a system that works for someone else? Garry recommended an approach that’s outlined by Michael Hyatt in his post on recovering (or even rediscovering?) the lost art of note-taking, including the use of symbols for scanning later:
Indent everything.
Use stars for important things.
Use an open square for an action (and tick when complete).
Use an open circle for an action on others that needs to be tracked (and tick when complete).
Use a question mark for items that need additional research.
Additionally, Garry recommended the use a different colour when going back later with additional information.
It’s early days yet – and this is only one small step on a long journey but let’s see if this return to a simple notebook will help me overcome the digital mess that I’ve created in previous attempts to streamline my work.
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Last year, I was involved in the production of Fujitsu’s White Book of Cloud Security (continuing the series after the White Book of Cloud Adoption) and earlier today I was sent copies in eBook form. I emailed them to my Kindle (app), only to find that Amazon doesn’t support .EPUB format books. Whilst I understand why Amazon might like its own content to appear in a different format, not supporting the .EPUB standard for people to add their own content seems strange (and I’m not alone in thinking this – Jason Perlow wrote about Amazon’s lack of support for .EPUB back in 2010).
Thankfully, it’s pretty simple to convert between .EPUB and MOBI formats, using freely available software (Calibre) – as highlighted on Twitter by James Williams (@LoneGunmanUK) and Travis Atkinson (@TravisWhayne). It’s a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut (I don’t need an eBook library – just a conversion tool) but it’s undoubtably powerful and it seemed to do the job for me.
Incidentally, on my iPad, the .MOBI files viewed in the Kindle app seem to have better results than the .EPUBs in Apple iBooks (which seemed to resize some graphics to the point of illegibility).
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
Last week I kicked off my new initiative to actually get some blog posts out, despite not having time for all the details…
This week was less event-focused but nevertheless contained a few things that I thought were worthy of note.
Kids coding in C? (Our Arduino)
Last weekend, I was “playing” with my new Arduino proptotyping board, with my sons. Understandably, my 5 year-old wasn’t too bothered (to be fair, he liked putting components onto the breadboard) but I was amazed to see just how my eldest (who is 7) grasped the programming side of things. I’m not saying he’s writing C – but just using some example code to flash a set of LEDs in sequence, he asked why he was putting // in front of some lines. I showed him that each was a function call and he was “turning on and off” different things that the program could do. Before I knew it, he wanted to chain functions together, before then moving on changing the delay times on the lights. I thought that the coding side of things would be an uphill struggle but I was really encouraged to see how quickly kids can start to adapt the examples. Hopefully our Raspberry Pi will arrive later this month – and then I’ll get him writing in Scratch or another child-friendly environment!
New toy for Mark
Last November, I wrote about ordering my new car and it arrived on Monday. No longer am I tarred with Top Gear-esque comments about Audi drivers (I did really like my A4 though) – I’m now a sensible, 40-something Volkswagen-driving type! The Tiguan (or “softroader” as my hardcore Range Rover-driving manager calls it) has a towbar too, so I should be able to load the family bikes on more easily and, hopefully, we’ll get out a bit more this spring/summer… which leads me on to the next feature…
Another decade on the clock – and my “Fit at 40” challenge draws to a close
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
A few weeks ago now, I attended a webcast as part of a series run by Citrix to promote GoToMeeting. Rather than saying “hey, look at our product it does x, y and z”, Citrix used the product to host others giving advice on presentation techniques.
Ironically, some of the presentations were awful – I dropped out of one on “presenting with impact” as (in my opinion) it lacked any kind of impact; suffered from poor audio on the main presenter’s line; started out with irrelevant facts (which were later suggested as an approach to make a session memorable); and then launched into a poll before even getting going. I did later return to the recording of this session and around presenting with passion, preparation, body language and the need for practice/preparation – but the fact remains that it initially turned me right off… (and I was surprised to find a professional communicator who hadn’t seen Prezi – although I’m not really a fan of that tool). Sadly, those first impressions stuck with me for the same presenter’s follow-up session on “communicating with impact”, which really failed to keep my attention (if I was being charitable, I might say that was perhaps as much an indictment of the delivery method as of the content).
Thankfully, another webcast was more useful – Roger Courville from 1080 Group spoke about “eight things we can do to improve virtual presentations” and, by and large, they were good tips (for face to face presentations too) so I’m sharing my notes here:
Put a complete idea in the slide title – and keep slides visual for “picture superiority” (although the brain does see a few words as an image).
Create a sense of presence – paint a vision to demonstrate 1:1 attention/facilitate a common connection.
Draw the audience’s eyes to your slide’s main point – direct attention visually (additive) or reduce and simplify (subtractive) – make sure the audience doesn’t have to guess what the main point is!
Keep “wholes” whole… and then build it out if you want to – i.e. show the big picture and then drill down into details.
Analyse (who, what, where, when, why and how), synthesise (action or relationship), visualise (consider how things might look visually or spatially). It’s possible to get a tutorial (and template) for this tip by subscribing to the 1080 Group newsletter.
Pause for power – in advance of a key point for a sense of anticipation or afterwards to allow the brain time to process. Pause for effect and pause for interactions. And, to add some insight from the communicating with impact presentation, allow silence, to give time to digest information and to add gravitas.
Ask your audience what or when is best. Improve things based on feedback – either “on the fly” during the presentation, or by building an understanding over time. And, although this wasn’t one of Roger’s tips, it seems like a good point to take another cue from the communicating with impact presentation: consider the audience’s DNA (demographic, needs, and attitude) – and be ready to flex your style.
Start you next presentation by “storyboarding” (see the comments on “beyond bullet points” below) – think about the flow of the presentation (content), before filling in details (think how PowerPoint leads us to step straight in and start creating bullets!) – and “design in” interactions (demo, poll, etc.). By way of illustration, Roger also referred to Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points book which I confess I haven’t read but is structured around three core themes:
Tell a story – you only have a few seconds to create an emotional impact.
Distil your ideas – instead of throwing everything into the presentation, go into the minds of the audience and figure out what to communicate (with an effective structure).
Create visual prompts – not just pretty slides but building out the storyboard to take the audience on a journey to an effective presentation.
Two more points I picked up that I though were worthy of note:
The average soundbite dropped from 43 seconds in 1968 to less than 8 in 2010 – reflecting our reduction in attention span?
Slides don’t equal duration – more slides do not (necessarily) equal more content. [I particularly subscribe to this one!]
And a quote:
“The act of organising information is in itself an insight” [Edward Tufte]
Even the presentations I were less enamoured with presented some insight, like:
Get someone you trust to review your presentation style – and let them be frank, to tell you about your style, impact, and use of filler words like um and err (which come across as lacking in confidence).
Direct conversations with open and closed questions, together with summaries (for example, “let me just check…”, list key points and end with a closed question).
Online presentations lack feedback from listening noises (like those that might be applied on the phone).
Using this information, I’m hoping to improve my future presentations and, judging by the number of “death by PowerPoint” sessions that I attend, a few other people could learn from this too. There are also a few more resources that might come in handy:
Citrix has also published a special edition of Roger’s book, The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook, which includes more details on the concepts that Roger described in his presentation.
1080 Group also has a couple of quick (1 page) surveys that share the results at the end, which might be interesting too:
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
This post is probably of limited value because it only applies to a factory-fitted retractable towbar on certain Volkswagen models (mine’s a Tiguan Sport) but, being a towbar newbie (I don’t tow but I do want to fix a decent bike rack onto my car!), I wanted to see how to “fold out” the towbar (and to retract it again). The driver who delivered the car didn’t know how, there are no instructions in the handbook, and googling didn’t turn up much either but it’s quite straightforward once you find out how…
Lift the rear hatch (boot) door and look out for a cover on the top-left of the rear bumper.
Lift this cover by tucking something into the hole and prising it off (the car key works well for this) – there is a “knob” underneath.
Give the “knob” a good tug and the towbar will be released. Pull the towbar it out until it locks into place.
To retract the towbar repeat steps 1-3 but push the towbar back in under the bumper.
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.
A list of items I’ve come across recently that I found potentially useful, interesting, or just plain funny:
.
