I had intended spending the time between Christmas and New Year doing two things: 1) setting up a standing desk in my home office and 2) scripting and recording the content for a new website I'm setting up.
But I got a cold and I'm not as far along as I had hoped.
1) I have just finished setting up my standing desk and I am now standing in front of that using Dragon dictate to typing up this blog post. So far, so good. Two of my former GE colleagues, Gillian and Sandeep, both emailed me independently, before Christmas, to say that they were experimenting with standing desks. Both of them said that although it was early days for them they were very happy – despite the initial soreness as the bodies adapted – and that they were feeling much happier for the change. Both of them have had desk-induced back and shoulder pain, like myself. So I got myself off to IKEA and bought myself a Dave laptop desk for £17, popped it on top of my normal desk and secured my MacBook Pro to it with the help of some Velcro tape. And nothing bad has happened so far. I suffer so much shoulder pain that anything is worth a go to try and relieve it. I'll let you know how things go ...
2 )So… the new website. I have decided to put most of my agile and TOC presentation material out into the public domain. This is stuff I have delivered at public conferences over the years which, otherwise, no one else gets to see. Earlier this year I purchased ScreenFlow, a Mac-based screen recording and editing application, with the intention of doing this ... but I never got round to it. I wasn't so much procrastinating as I was thinking about how to go about it. My thinking is now mostly done, I got the equipment, I've got the URL, and now I just need to get the first chunk of content out.
The website is called: TheQuarterInchWhole.Com.
Why the "quarter inch hole"? It's based on the famous marketing saying, from the 60s, by Theodore Levitt, which says that people "don't buy a quarter inch drill, they buy a quarter inch hole". I think there is an awful lot of public domain information written about agile as the "quarter inch drill", it is not nearly so much written about the "quarter inch hole". In other words, there is a lot out there about how to do Agile, but there's not much written about WHY to do it. It's mktg. 101: sell the BENEFITS, not the features.
So, I've got the URL, and I'm about to start preparing the first few video chunks.
Oh, there is one thing I'm missing: a very simple way of hosting the site. I'm very happy to pay for the hosting but don't want to have to do anything particularly technical. I'd like it to look pretty, but not too pretty. Any suggestions?
I'll keep you posted.
