Clarke Ching's Rocks and Snowballs

Gmail and Groups

Hi ya all,

I need a bit of advice. 

Does anyone use GMail to read yahoo (and similiar) groups?  I’m considering swapping completely to Gmail from MS Outlook, but I’m not sure how well Gmail’s conversation style will work.

Any thoughts?  Any alternative suggestions?

Clarke

Selling oneself short

Okay, if you are a techie (like me and many of my friends) then you are probably a bit crap at selling yourself.

Here’s something I’ve figured out during the last few months that might help.  (Apparantly non-techie know this already). 

Contrast:

Alternative 1

Your manager comes over to your desks, interupts you mid-thought and asks “How is everything going?”

You answer off the top of your head – a little bit annoyed that your train-of-thought has been interrupted – with the problem you are currently solving, “I’m just trying to sort out the whatsit-layer-something-or-other-techie thing.  It’s been causing me grief for the last day.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to fix it.  I’ll keep you updated.”

Your manager walks away suprised and a bit perturbed that things seem to be going badly.  She also knows though that you probably will solve the problem since you almost always do.  She makes a mental note to herself to ensure that she never lets you talk to anyone from another team because your “refreshingly honest” style gives an unduely bad impression of how things are going.

With:

Alternative 2

Your manager comes over to your desks, interupts you mid-thought and asks “How is everything going?”

You automatically say “Great”.  Then you pause for a moment and think of why this is true.  “I’ve done X, Y, and Z.  P is happy with this and I’m waiting on Q to finish W before we hand over to R”. 

Your manager smiles knowing that things are in good hands.  She pauses, waiting for you to fill in the gap.

You continue, “Right now I’m just trying to sort out the whatsit-layer-something-or-other-techie thing.  It’s been causing me grief for the last day.  I expect I’ll I’ll be able to fix it, but I’ll keep you updated if there are any problems.”

Your manager thanks you and offers her help if you need it.  She walks away feeling happy that good work has been done and comforted that you she knows about – and that one of her best staff is working on – what is obviously a difficult area.  She makes a mental note to herself that you’d be a good person to stand in for her when she is away on holdiay later in the year.

Try this with your current project, right now. 

• Ask yourself, out loud,  “How is my current project going”. 
• First, answer the way you normally would by focusing on the problems you are solving.
• Second, answer by automatically saying “Great” or “Good”, then justifying why things have gone well, then talk about the problems you are currently working on.  (Hint: You often won’t even need to talk about the problems - after all, you are going to sort them out aren’t you)

Contrast the two.  Did the 2nd version sound better? Did you feel better saying it? 

Most importantly: Was the 2nd version (suprisingly) more honest than the first?

Service Oriented Gridlock

Have you ever had a problem that you don’t know was a problem until someone else gave the problem a name?

Matt M has just given a name to a former employer’s growing problem, that no knew existed:

While you will find person after person who complains about the existence of stovepipes, applications that deliver function directly to the user and are not integrated with other systems, there is also a danger in becoming overly coupled to existing systems. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is touted as a way of ensuring that the coupling between systems is as loose as possible. However, moving from stovepipes to coupled systems, even relatively loosely coupled systems, represents a move from independent projects to dependent projects, and introduces a great deal of schedule risk into projects that are under development. A move from stovepipes to SOA can introduce what I refer to as Service Oriented Gridlock (SOG) to an enterprise, where no application can be deployed without affecting other applications, resulting in a dependency chain that greatly diminishes the ability of capabilities to be delivered to end users (the thing which stovepipes excel at doing).

This post is the first in a series.  I’m looking forward to learning from the rest.

Photo's

Photo’s of the new baby, and one of the old baby:

http://clarkeching.blogs.com/photos/alice1/

 

It's a girl

Baby no-name-yet, 8 pounds 6, was born at 12:57 AM, this morning, 24th August 2005.

Mum, Dad, Baby all well. 

I’m going to bed now :)

Old School Photos - a trip down memory lane

I work with one of my best friends – Graeme.  We grew up together in New Zealand, went to school together and eventually both ended up working in the same portacabin in Fairmilehead, Edinburgh, Scotland.  We work with a nice bunch and they’re always asking us if we have old school photo’s of each other – just for the laugh.  I actually have a few (my Mum keeps sending them to my wife – just for the laugh, I suppose) but I’ve kept them secret until now.

But today one of my colleagues politely asked us what school we went to and when we niavely told her she figured out the year we started then plugged the details into www.worldschoolphotographs.com (which claims to have collected old school photos from schools around the world).  I’m amazed but she found a photo.  It’s funny, Graeme still looks the same 20 years later, but I don’t  (there’s definitely less hair on my head now)

Give it a go.  It made me smile.

(And before you ask, I’m not willing to share what schools I went to or when).

Thanks ... for the imdb help

Hi y’all,

Thanks to the 9 people who kindly offered suggestions about how I could speed up my imdb and ebert movie searching. 

As it turns out I found out that someone else had solved the problem for me.  It is the firefox Movies and Music Search 1.41 extension.  It was the final straw that tipped me from using the wonderful multiple-tab-sitting-on-top-of-IE avant browser and switch to firefox.

Collaboration

Haven’t finished reading this HBR article on Collaboration yet but it looks like a great (and unusually for HBR) FREE article. 

[via David Anderson on the AgileManagement yahoo group]

 

BTW: It looks like HBR have figured out that freebies attract customers.  If you’re don’t normally read HBR and you find this article interesting, would you mind dropping me a comment?  I’m interested to see if there honeypot articles do indeed word.

 

No Frills computer systems

In 1986, Ryanair – now one of Europe's biggest airlines – bought a plane and started flying from Dublin to London:

There were no computers.  Staff spent their days retrieving files from two carousels, one to record forty-four names for each flight from Dublin to Luton and the other for flights from Luton to Dublin.  Passengers had to call to the office to collect their ticket.  Pat Carroll headed the London reservatsions office, which stored its files in boxes.  When someone booked a flight, one of the staff would delve into the box and find the flight they wanted and write the name on one of the foty-four spaces, then search for the box with the return flights and do the same.  At the end of each day the Dublin office rang through to London to exchange passenger names booked on each flight.

[from Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe ~Siobhan Creaton]

How can I, a simple man, automate this ...

How can I, a simple man, automate this ... 

So, here I am browsing my local cinema’s website.  What I’d just love it if I could highlight a movie name then right click and choose a menu item that opened up two browser windows/tabs – the imdb.com site and the ebert review for the movie name I’ve just highlight. 

I probably do this 5 times on the average week and it’s really annoying to have to

• go to my local cinemas website
• highlight and then copy the name to the clipboard
• Click on the google toolbar then type ‘imdb’,  space, control-v, enter
• choose what is usually the top link … which takes me to imdb.com
• Read the front page, especially the community star rating and the front page review
• Click on the external reviews link and open it (typically in the same window), click Roger Ebert (who is thankfully and deservedly positioned right at the top) … which opens up the review
• then if I don’t like the move I usually have to back, back, back, etc until I get to the local cinema’s page.

There must be an easy way to automate this.  This is the double-O’s after all.  Any suggestions?