Hometown Unicorn

Last weekend I attended a Total Immersion swimming course at a school in Hampton. I had a brilliant experience (the only way to describe it) and it has transformed my way of thinking about the sport, to the extent that l now want to completely re-engineer my stroke. This morning I started out on this journey, by spending an hour just doing basic drills - glides with focus on head and arm position, and a few attempts at the two initial drills, swimming on my back and "Sweet Spot", as it is called. Relearning all this stuff isnt going to be easy, but l AM going to be patient. The prize (being able to swim effortlessly in a fish-like way) is definitely worth it!

Ok I think it's time to step in for developers.   In http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/ ,  Dave Mandi amuses us and points out that much code quality is low.   And he - largely - beats up on the quality of developers for it.   I have some sympathy for some of his arguments : in my experience, most developers have programming-language knowledge, but few know how to write applications using that language.   I know many who have Development certifications but I would not "trust" to develop re-usable software components - too often, they just aren't interested enough in software design to go from programmers who can drive languages and APIs to developers who can implement software of real and lasting value.   But, in my experience, many good developers don't write bad software out of ignorance : they do it because, as the author (later) acknowledges: "In the real world, tight budgets, shortsighted manager...

My next event is the February Ballbuster Duathlon .  I've never done a duathlon before, but I like a challenge and this is a biggie.   An 8 mile run, 24 mile bike, and then another 8 miles of running to close it out.   The key thing about this very popular race is that each of the 5 8-mile laps includes a climb of Box Hill in Surrey. Box Hill has a bit of an iconic status as a "challenge" but it's basically a pussycat in road cycling hill terms.  There are far more aggressive, far longer climbs in the North Downs (looking at you, Ranmore), and even I've been able to climb it out of the saddle, in 42x16 on my single speed - and I'm no monsta. The stats don't lie : the road is a steady climb of 120 metres (390 ft) over 2.5 kilometres (1.6 miles) but won't have you hallucinating. What it does have is fabulous views on the way up, a couple of "pretend we're on Alp d'Huez for a moment" hairpins, and a decent tea and cake stop at the top...

Aside from the buzz and enthusiasm of social software deployments, there's sometimes a back-story.  I've been wondering about how well organsations deploying social software plan catch to on-boarded users before they fall back to old habits. Here's the scenario that I am thinking of. When we deploy business change technologies, we tend to measure on-boarding as a one-off activity (we measure stuff like that partly because it's easy to measure, which is a bit of an anti-pattern in itself).  So, once a user has been trained, posted, edited a profile, added people to a network, we cross them off a list.  However, this fails to recognise what, from my experience, is the strong influence of learned-behaviour of the non-social user, and how these users' inertia can reset interactions to levels of lower social value. The reasons we fall back to old ways and habits are many: The derived social value of an interaction obeys the "Convoy" principle The answer ...

Today I start a new challenge,  working for an IBM Premier Business Partner called Portal in Bracknell, Berkshire.  I'll be helping their customers make, and get value from, their investments in IBM Collaboration software of all types : from transactional portal application dressed with user managed web content, through Social Software for organisations on the road to becoming a social business, and not forgetting along the way our Notes/Domino customers who've been getting value from Notes, Sametime and other Lotus products for over 20 years.  Today's the day to meet the Portal people and get connected - many of these people I have known from project work over the years and it's a great pleasure to be linking up with and working with them again. The main thing on my mind today : the decision to embed Lotusphere 2013 inside the IBM Connect event . I have two contradictory thoughts on this : "It's not a moment too soon" : customers are confused about t...

Like all triathletes and semi-serious fitness types, I like to record my sessions and for my recent IMUK I made a big effort to plan and record my sessions against my plan.  This is for me was doubly motivational on a rainy morning, the fact that there's a big fat zero in the "actual" column might - just - get you out for the session on the start line, you can only remember all the work you've done that got you to that point if you bothered to write it down I am going to blog separately my overall approach to Ironman training (it's not going to cause a revolution in methods), but I wanted to document here how I recorded it, in case others find the level of detail and overall approach useful. For planning and retrospective analysis, I created a spreadsheet with a main sheet for the whole training time (1 row per week, with single columns for targets for swim, bike and run for the week separate sheets for each 4 week "iteration" (next post wil...

Driving back to Shepperton - mid Monday, school holidays - was pretty uneventful, except for a stop for food at Warwick services, where me and Olly met up with a few IMUK competitors “refuelling” in Burger King. Nice to bump into the couple who crossed the line together the previous evening, and a guy in a woolly hat who I'd chatted to in the hotel car park. We got back mid afternoon, and being the sort of guy who likes to get things squared away, I spent a relaxing our getting kit put away, my foul-smelling wetsuit rinsed, and over-ripe bananas consigned to recycling. Then a relaxing evening, before back to work Tuesday. My physical state over the next few days was quite interesting. I'd got some sunburn on my right shoulder (missed that bit in T2), and my quads were sore off and on over the next few days, but to my surprise, my feet were in excellent shape : no blistered or chaffing. Coming downstairs Tuesday morning was harder than it had been Monday, and I re...