Author Archives: andy

About Hats…

Whilst recently watching Star Trek Into Darkness, I was somewhat disturbed to see that in this “reimagined” version the familiar old clothing had mutated into something more like Star Wars (or worse still like Starship Troopers). Indeed, there was Spock in a hat! In a HAT!

This cognitive breakdown is very weird and massively confuses the genres where previously the identification was very simple, thus:

Star Wars	Star Trek

⇒ Many hats	⇒ No hats

Easy.

I suppose the issue is that I have a personal “thing” about hats – I just don’t get what they are for, what is their purpose, their raison d’être, their shtick, their meaning and significance

I observed this particular idiosyncrasy really early in life, when I would roll up my school cap and stuff it in my pocket, just couldn’t hack the headwear.

Indeed I can honestly say that I have NEVER put on a hat and said “Mmm, I look good in this”, no, no, no, just never, ever

If we were to draw a Venn diagram (based roughly on trusty old Aristotle’s three modes of rhetoric), then my world view is something like this:

That’s me in the small yellow zone, looking out across from my ivory pillar to the array of vast human variety, like feathered, bicorn hats beloved of plenipotentiaries past and present, and so many more…hats

For the rest of the world, it breaks down roughly like this:

Rational – Practical, functional – protect the precious seat of mind, like this:

Social – Demonstrate the user’s status and authority, thus:

Emotional – Provocative, decorative, “fun”, scary, viz:

For me – No hats, except for safety purposes…occasionally, rarely…

…and probably Spock too, I am sure he would dismiss them as “Illogical, Captain”

Of course there is greater complexity in the love of hats than this rather simplistic analysis (for other people anyway) – it is not black and white, or red-green-blue, or cyan-magenta-yellow or even taupe and teal – and one can draw up some Intersections of the Venn

Rational + Social => Hats to recognise advancement (in some rational sphere)?
Social + Emotional => Hats to signify membership of particular groups or hats of some spiritual significance?
Rational + Emotional => hats that provide some sort of user comfort?
Rational + Social + Emotional => often labelled the “sweet spot”, this intersection is likely very small. Except in Mad Max, the fringed, feathered crash helmets?.

Of these intersections, perhaps one of the most interesting surprising, is the Rational + Emotional as these two domains are often considered to be at different ends of the spectrum, even mutually exclusive. Although the like of Dan Ariely have shown that this juxtaposition can be very fruitful with his study of behavioural economics.

Maybe “placebo hats” might be a better name for this R+E grouping, since this psychosomatic effect is indeed a big feature of behavioural economics.

Not just warm woolly head socks, but tinfoil confections and their ilk that give psychological comfort?

The other observation is that the peaked hat is now a conspicuous sign of global millinerial colonisation, as this is one of the most common military and police hats you see in news footage, even from the most exotic, far flung locations!

Projecting this particular observation into the future, with Darwinistic inevitability, everybody in Hatty Town will be wearing peaked hats (By Order, zu befehl), a triumph of militaristic millinery…

Moving on to apply these thoughts to the more detailed classification, we can derive this convenient framework to classify the universe of hats…

If you can explain hats to me, then do drop me a line…and to paraphrase Homer Simpson, I’d love to engage with you in a discourse on the relative merits, but I’m just not interested.

(By the way, if you do succumb to the temptation to look in a mirror wearing your new tapatooey (sic), and think “Mmm, I look really good in this”, then just remember me)

Unbalanced reporting, or just unbalanced?

Jonathan Swift was on to something when he picked out in Gulliver’s Travels the pointless and apparently irreconcilable Big-Endian / Little-Endian debate on the island of Lilliput (a metaphor for religious schism in 16th and 17th century England, as it happens).

The question “Are you a Morning Lark or Night Owl?” is another of those that has its merry bi-band of quarrelsome, bifurcated and dichotomous disputants, bickering and unable to arrive at any accommodation, mutual agreement or consensus view.

So the recent study by Dr. PK Jonason was, of course, like oxygen to those people who live to stir things up a bit, leading to headlines such as

Night owls have more ‘evil’ personality traits: study (Business Standard)

That’s not what the study actually says, as it just focuses on three personality characteristics (The Dark Triad) and their distribution amongst Chronotypes and so does not equally point to any irksome, venal, or other unpleasantness of the early risers. However when did balance ever come into the equation in getting a headline?

Well in chemistry actually, where you definitely have to balance your equations…

Didn’t Mark Twain say “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story”.

Did he or didn’t he, I don’t know, does it really matter, is it something people have a fight over, well let them!

And he was a story teller, not a scientist…

So the study may have been a bit narrow in scope, but still science (assuming the peer reviewers also agreed about this), and sadly abused by a rather unbalanced headline.

In the Larks/Owls debate, of course, you find it is of course that things are more complex than the simple binary,

There are some key consulting frameworks that are designed to help people solve more complex problems than just by pure binary thinking

The Boston Grid is a good example that expands thinking to at least two (binary, smoothed, averaged) dimensions and has four outcomes (or more if you start sub-dividing the individual boxes, but that gets hard to read, and clarity of thinking is, of course, the whole point, not “clever” smart aleck chart drawing).

Note in particular the national difference that shows that, in the analysis, Spaniards are more Owl-ish than the Larky Italians (well, relatively), and Machiavelli was Italian, so put that in your pipe and smoke it… Gift with a bow

Binary decision constructs are generally (*see footnote) grossly over-simplified and massively averaged “big picture” way of thinking about stuff, and most situations are actually formed from a spectrum of factors, which the human mind reduces ad absurdum to “are ye wi’me or agin me”.

Someone once said that I “hoover up complexity” which was, I think, a compliment overall, on balance, and in the general scheme of things, but also a cogent warning to avoid rocket-scientist gibberish, too!

Even a well-meaning spectrum view can still present a one sided and possibly biased picture, and the balancing aspects need to be added.

The Autism spectrum is an example of what can be considered as a one-sided spectrum, since “Normal” sits at one end, not in the middle like a properly balanced continuum.

I rather liked this view Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain: converging evidence!! that describes a wider spectrum from Schizophrenia through “Normal” to Autism.

The real story is probably nearer to a 2D surface, or in fact many more dimensions, but that does start to hurt a little bit.

And so, maybe a enigmatic spider-web diagram to finish…

*Footnote

Ok, so putting “generally” against any assertion is one of those averaging and simplifying devices used to smooth over the roughness of real-life situations. But what the heck, this is rhetoric, and I stand my ground, Sir!

Cool, Not Cool…

This is not a seasonal story about the hot weather, but instead, after a couple of years with my trusty Nokia Lumia 800, I have now upgraded to Windows Phone 8, with a Lumia 925…

Well, it is actually the second one, first one looked like this after a couple of days. Nice bright bars down the screen and the rest was fuzzy, so went back for replacement…

As I might just have mentioned before, I am quite a fan of Windows Phone, and I was looking back at a random list of Cool & Not Cool things from when I picked up my first WP7 device, an HTC HD7 (having moved then from an HTC HD2), and added a few current observations…

Cool…

Then – WP7 Nov 10	Now – WP8, July 2013
Voice recognition	Still quite a cute feature, but rather unreliable if you are out in the sticks with poor 3G connection – the suggested words can be quite hilarious, but often unprintable
Ascetic design, v clean	Yup, still nice and clean. Not so sure about the mix of big screens and larger live tiles. I think a one-third size live tile would be good (for three across)
Office integration	This just keeps getting better, especially Office 365 integration – but you do need to setup up your account through Office, not the standard account interface, otherwise you can’t add the Office365 location later
Consistent handling of outlook calendar entries e.g. Tentative	Yup, took Android a while to catch up with this
Exchange ActiveSync	This works nicely, and also connects to legacy Exchange 2003 servers, which Office 2013 will not do
Inbox count new not unread (better than Android)	Still a plus point
No Twitter integration	Oh dear, this has got worse (yes, Twitter is now integrated). Twitter is not really my thing, and the integration with the MS account is just a bit too tight. You can tweet stuff you didn’t meant to!
Stuff generally integrated together , e.g., click on senders name in email and go to profile to call	This is very neat and intuitive…
Facebook integration and linking different sources into single profile	…as is this too
All the stuff that just works,, and makes me go Mmm, and the little surprises that make me go ooh and aaah.	Still plenty more Mmm, Oooh and Ahh!

Not Cool…

Then	Now
No cut paste and limited multitasking	WP7.5 fixed the cut/paste issue, but multi-tasking is still pretty weak. A manifestation is the way Lync wimps out if you don’t use it, and can’t be set to start when the phone powers up so you can miss IM messages
How to easily get a file onto phone without SharePoint?	Now that the Office 365 integration works, not really an issue. But the Windows Phone app looks promising too. Being a bit more direct (the Zune connection to my WP7 never seemed to work properly in Win 7 64-bit, so hoping…)
No task synch	That was fixed, but, alas, Outlook tasks don’t really cut it for me, anyway. More anon (below)
Default calendar for meeting invitations	Still slightly annoying in that it remembers the last calendar you used (which may not be the one you want). But actually better than Android, which insists on making Gmail the default calendar…grr
Not always clear which text is active and connects to something else	Still true, but I live with it
Proliferation of email tiles – needs universal inbox	Fixed in WP7.5, a good feature. Wish I could do it in Outlook!
LinkedIn integration would be good	All present and correct since WP7.5
Bluetooth connection to laptop doesn’t seem to work	Bluetooth is still pretty naff, no keyboard support etc. And changing the phone name is essential, but you can only do it via the PC app
Bing maps veeerry slow and not obvious you can do anything when it tells you where you almost are (appears to be off by half km or so …)	The Nokia stuff is much better
Where is the user manual ?	This is still true. Of course, I don’t need the manual to get started with the phone (real men don’t…), but the manual would make an interesting leisure read one evening (a million HTML-borne information fragments don’t do it for me)
Absurdly long SharePoint URLs for Microsoftonline and then it doesn’t work anyway as BPOS SharePoint Online is only 2007, and then phone only works with SharePoint 2010 even though the marketing blurb and help pages tell you how to set it up…	WP8 + Office 365 pre-face-lift (i.e., wave 14) both play nicely now. Still waiting for my wave 15 upgrade…
No way to sync call log	Damn, this is still true. I really liked the feature of being able to backup my call log, and occasionally look back to who I was talking to when, and how long…
Limited range of settings	Well, yes, still.
Outlook (email) white background	Definitely fixed now

To-Do, or Not To-Do

The other big change in my electronic life is re-embracing electronic to-do lists. The otherwise brilliant brain chemistry of the Introvert…

The best bit is that whereas the extrovert brain is only as big as the blob of protoplasm that it is…the Introvert brain is, conceptually at least, bigger inside than out – a veritable cerebral TARDIS of a thing that can hold entire universes!

..means that you are cursed with a relatively poor short term memory.

I can generally remember three things in immediate list memory. If there are four things to remember, then remembering the fourth item bumps one of the others off the list. So remembering anything more is quite mentally intensive and may also involve physical props, like knotted handkerchiefs and other aide memoires. So very early on, I thought “FTFAGOS” and outsourced the mental list to a small leather notebook, with a little gold propelling pencil attached, thrust into the back pocket of my Wranglers (we are talking the 1980s).

There was a long journey after that from pure paper through an electronically assisted paper To-Do list, a sorted list in Excel (printed and inserted in my Filofax), to the miracle of the Psion 3. I actually rated the 3 higher than the 3a, as the To-Do list had more features but lost the ability to copy and paste the to-do’s into day notes in the calendar, which was a really useful feature to help remember what I did when – still looking to rediscover this long lost feature. The big point is that some jobs just don’t get finished in one day and will span across multiples, split into bits, “started but not yet finished”. It probably doesn’t feature in GTD or any other time management scheme, getting some way through a job and saying “I’ve made a start on that, and I’ll finish it tomorrow” is a great motivator.

Lost my memory for about two weeks in about 1990, when I dropped my Psion 3 and the batteries fell out…Psisync kept me safe after that, together with this note

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR ELECTRONIC BRAIN

scrawled on to the inside of my skull right above my pineal eye…

I abandoned the electronic to-do list when I moved into the consulting world, as the electronics were just not just not up to the frantic, rapid action, agile working, often across multiple projects.

And so to now, In an unscripted moment the other day, one of those procrastinating, displacement activities that was not written on a To-Do list anywhere, I suddenly decided to catch up with the latest and the best in To-Do world.

…in the spirit of discovery and exploration of the world of technology, you understand…

So I have now committed my life to ToodleDo and a carefully selected cross-platform array of mobile clients:

Android – ToodleTasks Phone and Tablet editions
Windows Phone – Viperal Tasks
Windows / Outlook – gsyncit (update – 7 Nov 13) Now moved to TaskUnifier Pro – ~~the way I would rather use Outlook tasks just does not gel properly with the Toodledo sync’d items, and splurges across my Windows Phone task list too~~ (Update 27 Apr 15) Now that Taskunifier has stopped development, have now moved to TaskAngel Desktop version.
Apple iOS – well, you can only have so many fun in your life, and I have no space in mine for an iPhone/iPad…

And I am still seeking the elusive link that allows me capture the electronic audit trail of what I did each day (don’t get me going on electronic timesheets, gah!).

So, with all that electronic support, but for the missing feature, I still have a paper To-Do list for TODAY, and as well as ticking off the jobs I have done today, with a big tick, thus:

I can TICK OFF THE JOBS THAT I HAVE STARTED AND FEEL GOOD ABOUT THIS EVENING AND KNOW THEY WILL GET FINISHED TOMORROW, (honest), thus:

Try it for yourself, it will make you feel good, too!

Whither or wither Spreadsheets?

Adding my voice to the many past considering the future direction for spreadsheets…

Why?

Good question! Well it follows from the thoughts in an earlier post about user interfaces, and I am an avid user of spreadsheets and numerical modelling tools

And what does “spreadsheet” mean anyway? It doesn’t spread anything? Not like a “word processor” processes words

The term is related to an archaic way of keeping your accounts, on a big analysis sheet. I used to get them from Stores when I was a young engineer, and we would use them as desk covers, to scribble random notes, hold our coffee cups, but never added a number up on one (we had already moved from slide rules to calculators with memories, maybe one or two). You can still buy analysis sheets at Ryman (or maybe you can’t, if you use analysis sheets you might not have a computer…or Interweb)

WHO CARES?

Why are you so angry? Get out of my post!

So what should spreadsheets look like in a touch world with rich mobile clients on tablets?

Aside; I once tried a fully laptop-less day out with just an iPaq, Excel Mobile and virtual laser keyboard. Suffice it to say what with a bouncy train, small tray table and tiny screen I did no useful work that day! (well it was a corporate karting day so I did some bonding instead…)

Excel and similar don’t really work on a small screen, and even in the touch enabled Office 2013 instantiation the interface is just too clunky, and the analysis pad metaphor becomes less appropriate for useful modelling, when you only have fingers and the on-screen keyboard takes up most of your screen real estate making formula entry a royal pain.

Also spreadsheets do just spread… so you need all the screen you can get. I have a two screen setup with combined width of nearly a metre. That’s 350 thousand square millimetres, right there, just for numbers…

Looking at developments you now have hipster ‘sheets like Grid. So hip, in fact, it does not do any calculations!

Lets just step out of the room for a moment and imagine how that VC pitch went…

Pitcher: I’ve got this great idea for a new spreadsheet

VC guy: OK. Tell me something good about it.

Pitcher: Well, it’s a grid thing that you can put numbers and text into so that you can organise the page really well…like, in straight lines up and down and across the page…

VC Guy: So…it’s a table…

Pitcher: (breathlessly, jumping up and down in seat) And what is really exciting is that you can paste pictures of all your friends into it too!

VC Guy: So…how do you add up pictures then? (Said languidly but with a raised eyebrow; you see VC guy does know spreadsheets)

Pitcher: Oh, it doesn’t do any calculations, but you can put pictures of your friends it!

VC Guy: So…it’s a table…tell me something that is great about it…

Pitcher: You can put pictures of your friends in it!

VC Guy: So…tell me something else great about it

Pitcher: Mrmrmmble…you can put pictures of your friends in it…

VC Guy: So…WHAT? (stands up, preparing to throw Pitcher into a nearby pit of hungry wolves)

Pitcher: Did I say it runs on an iPad?

VC Guy: Brilliant! I’m in, put me down for $25 million! (choir of angels sings, sunshine beams down from the sky)

Well maybe, then maybe not, but we can wonder

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Anago Assemble which has the modelling studio interface down pat (pat-ented, too, according to the website), but it is a previous generation web-only, non-touch system and comes with consulting attached, and no downloadable version.

So a touch “spreadsheet” might actually look something like this scribble below…

…with two views: a model view where you can fondle and dab to make set up the calculations with some nice radial menus, finger friendly szzyzzhing and szzuzzhing of the on-screen objects, carousel effects, and such like, and a page view where you position the output displays (cue more szzyzzhing and szzuzzhing)…but overall it would have to be different, of course, from any patented concepts, which makes it harder…

Not really like the spreadsheets of old, though. Nuff said.

Well not really, one last thing, just down the page here is a whacky idea which is only very peripherally related to the topic of this post and that I once sent to Mindjet in a geeky outburst to help them add a new feature to Mind Manager…a sort of pivot table for Mind Maps. It would probably have Tony Buzan turning in his grave, but it did get a bee out of my bonnet. You saw it here first, everybody will want this…

On Bullets …

In the world of consultancy, of bullets there should be three
Except in Europe: France and Germany, where there may be five or seven, you see
So all the rest of your good thoughts should cluster under, all MECE…

With apologies to everybody everywhere

So that was my first attempt to write a blog post on my Samsung Note 10.1 whilst mobile.

What did I learn?

Getting used to hand writing recognition on a non – Windows device takes a little while – still not yet really as good as Windows 7/8;
WordPress for Android is not very good at handling anything but basic text – had to enter HTML tags just to have some bullets, ugh!
WordPress for Windows phone is much prettier and even has a visual editor;
Windows Live Writer is hard to beat and generally sets the benchmark- although I have not yet tried anything heavyweight;
Zoundry Raven does not seem stable enough to rely on
Poetry (or even Poetree) is not my bag at all!

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Cool…

Not Cool…

To-Do, or Not To-Do

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