Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

Word slow to open?

I found the following advice yesterday about 2 weeks after I'd given up looking for it:

Q. Lately Word and Excel files (Windows XP+SP2, Office 2000) take 7 or 8 seconds to open. The other day I read that the answer might be to delete the Normal.dot document template file. This I have done and now a blank Excel file opens in a flash! However, Word files whether blank or existing and existing Excel files still take a while and show 'requesting virus scan' in the bottom left screen. I very much doubt that my PC has been infected because I'm careful on the internet and use AVG, Windows Defender, Spybot, Spyware Blaster and Comodo firewall. If you could suggest a course of action to get back to normal rapid opening of Word and Excel files I should be delighted.
Ken Christie, via email

A. The 'Requesting Virus Scan' message can slow things down a bit and it's due to a component in AVG called the Office Plug-in, which scans documents for Macro viruses. These are a genuine threat for those who exchange or handle a lot of MS Office files, but if you feel the risk to your machine is low or negligible then it can be switched off. There easiest way to do that is download the latest version of AVG, run the installation program. When you get to the Add or Remove components stage uncheck 'Plugin for Office' and continue the installation.

Incidentally, the same problem can arise with other antivirus programs and the cause is normally the same. The procedure to switch off or disable the Office Plugin varies, but you will usually find the answer in the program's Help files or on the publisher's support website.

[via The Telegraph]

plural

What's the plural of Lexus?

A neighbour has two of them and I'm concerned that I'd look ignorant if I ever have to discuss them in plural ...

European TOC Thinking Process course with Bill Dettmer

If you are a TOC person then you'll know who Bill Dettmer is.

He wrote to me last week to share the following which some of you may be interested:

It looks as if I'll be coming to Europe this summer to do one or more Thinking Process courses. The public one is scheduled for June 25-July 2 in Linz, Austria.

If you know of anyone who might be interested in taking the new, improved Logical Thinking Process course (using the new book and software), they should contact:

Christoph Steindl - Managing Director, Catalysts (steindl@catalysts.cc) www.catalysts.cc

Social Networks?

I just joined up with facebook or the other one whose name fails me ... and it sent other people emails inviting them to be my friends ... which I didn't realize it was going to do. If you are on that list then sorry ... I didn't mean to spam you.

I keep getting linked in invites and yet I've never found anything useful in linked in and I've never invited anyone else. I only accept invites because it seems rude not to. I would delete my linked in account if it weren't for this nagging doubt that I might offend someone.

I am not impressed with people who have lots of links on linkedin ... in fact, I consider them to be "easy" - in the old fashioned sense of the word. Is that wrong?

I looked briefly at twitter ... and didn't get it. I have 2 small children. I don't need more chatter in my life. I need less.

Help me, please: Am I missing out on something really important due to my ignorance? Am I just too old (38, to be precise)?

Carnival of Trust

Hello my friends!

Can you recommend any good articles or blog posts about software development and trust?

I'm hosting June's Carnival of Trust and I'd like to give it a software development focus.

Any suggestions?

Clarke

The French!

A delightful article about "The French", from today's New York Times.

[My butcher ...] Monsieur Yvon has cooked my Thanksgiving turkey when it was too big for my oven and taught me how to make the perfect pot-au-feu. I have watched him lovingly choose just the right pair of center-cut lamb chops for an elderly client. Were they to be cooked today or tomorrow? Grilled or sautéed?

Even when he bears bad news, his explanations are delicious. Once I ordered a 16-pound turkey and got an 11-pound bird instead.

“It was the fault of the foxes,” he said gravely.

“The foxes?” I asked.

“Yes, the foxes.” It seemed that the electric fence surrounding the turkey pen had shorted out and the foxes had had a field day.

“They only ate the big turkeys,” he explained.

Linda Rising in Edinburgh - 21st of April

We are truly spoiled here in Scotland. 

Here's your one and only chance to learn how to do agile better from Linda Rising, one of the Agile word's original thinkers, right here in Scotland. 

Linda will present a one day workshop on the 21st of April, in Edinburgh, covering two skills vital to the agile practitioner:

1. How to introduce new ideas, like agile, and make them stick, and, 
2. How to get the most out of retrospectives by doing them properly. 

Linda is a very experienced author, practitioner and teacher.  It would be a shame to miss this opportunity. 

Fearless Change: Introducing New Ideas

Those who attend conferences or read books and articles discover new ideas they want to implement in their organizations—but they often struggle when trying to implement those changes. And, unfortunately, those introducers of change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising provides you with proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn what forces in your organization drive or slow change, and how to plant the seeds of change for buy-in and participation—from start to finish. One of the best things about these approaches is that you can use them on yourself to become more effective. Bring your organizational and personal change challenges and learn how these patterns can help you. Linda will discuss these and many other lessons as documented in the pattern language in her book (with Mary Lynn Manns), Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas.

Join Linda to learn how to overcome adversity to change and to celebrate your improvement successes and your organization’s new found practices.

Project Retrospectives

Project Retrospectives are an important part of any software development process. For those who are pursuing Agile development, the Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto states that, “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.” How can this be done? By taking the time to reflect and learn and proactively determine what should be done differently in the next iteration, release, or project.  Linda’s presentation will introduce techniques for project retrospectives, whether they are “agile” or not. The techniques help teams discover what they’re doing well so that successful practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance. Retrospectives are not finger pointing or blaming sessions, but rather a highly effective process in which teams reflect on the past in order to become more effective in the future.  Linda will share her experiences with leading retrospectives of several kinds for dozens of projects—successful and unsuccessful, small and large, in academia and industry.

Linda's lessons learned can be applied to any project to enable teams and organizations to become learning organizations.   

Who is Linda?

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics and a background, which includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, and the change process, Linda is the author of numerous articles and four books Design Patterns in Communications, The Pattern Almanac 2000, A Patterns Handbook, and Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, written with Mary Lynn Manns. Find out more about Linda at www.lindarising.org

Details

The training will take place in Edinburgh City Centre on Monday the 21st of April, starting at 9:30 running to 4:30ish. 

Because I'm doing all the admin etc for free and because you are paying for your own lunches, the course only costs £200 all up, payable directly to Linda on the day. 

Don't forget to bring your copy of Fearless Change along with you and get it signed.

We will end the day with an evening AgileScotland session

If you want to sign up for a position, please email me clarke.ching+linda@gmail.com and I will add you to the list.  (If you've already expressed interest then I will email you shortly to confirm details.)

Clarke Ching

079 2011 4893

10 things you might not know about divorce

Here are 10 funny and interesting things you probably don't know about divorce, from the Chicago Tribune.

My favourite is the West Virginian radio station which gave away a free divorce as a prize:

"Sure, we can give away concert tickets, and we do.  That's going to make you happy for a while.  This is the chance to make someone happy for the rest of their life.'

I wish I was this cunning ...

i only took 30 seconds to turn me from naive to cynical. 

It happened a few years ago while watching the episode of the West Wing where C.J. Craig, the president's press secretary, decided that rather than having a nice, polite official inquiry into the president's cover-up of his multiple sclerosis they should let the inquiry be run by the most vehement republic possible.  Why?  Because no matter what a Bartlett-hating republican concluded Bartlett's supporters would simply say "what else would you expect?" and Bartlett's detractors would simply say, "we told you so".  In other words, nothing would change.  I lost my innocence when I realised that they were referring to the whole Clinton / Kenneth Star / impeachment thing .  I gained a lot of respect for Clinton that day because I would never had thought of something so cunning and I never spotted it at the time.

Some time later, when I saw the stuff going on at Guantanamo bay, my first reaction was "Why aren't they hiding that sort of thing? Why is all this stuff on TV?  Oh, because they're hiding something far less palatable".  I might be wrong - but don't forget, I'm cynical now.

And then today when I read about Sony's plans to charge customers $50 extra for laptops which DIDN'T have "bloatware".  They've subsequently retracted the charge ... and made all the papers.  Sony must be terribly disappointed with all the free publicity for their range of "bloat free" laptops.  Perhaps it is just the jaded, cynical part of me ... but they couldn't have engineered this could they?

And then today I see a letter from Jeff Bezos on amazon.com's home page apologising because the new kindle ebook reader's have proved so popular that they've not been able to keep up with demand.  The cynical part of me says "Apology?  That's not an apology.  It's an advert using the age old influence techniques of social proof (everyone is buying them ... therefore ... they must be good) and scarcity (they're in short supply ... therefore ... I must have one)."  It's clever marketing.

Or am I just being cynical.

Really, really, really unfair

From The Telegraph:

Woman killed as stingray leaps into boat in US

A woman sunbathing on a boat has died after a stingray leaped from the water, hitting her in the face and knocking her to the deck.

That really, really sucks.