Road Testing Posterous
I tried posterous a couple of months back after hearing it mentioned on the net@night podcast and thought it seemed very impressive. I love the fact that you can email your blog posts with minimal effort, and even include photos and media and have it seamlessly embedded. But it was a solution waiting for a problem, I didn’t know quite what to use it for. I already have a blog at http://alexbowyer.blogspot.com/ .
But then I met Werner Vogels and he told me about http://werner.ly/, his posterous site which he uses for things that don’t quite fit on Twitter or on his blog – and I was inspired to do something similar myself. I realised that the time it takes for me to write a blog post properly and add photos, links etc, using the Blogger interface, has become something of a barrier to my blogging. I’m typically only getting one or two posts a month out as a result. Part of that is that I use it somewhat for therapeutic writing, and part of it is that I want every post to be “as good as it can be” (my perfectionist streak coming through).
And at the same time, at the other end of the spectrum, I manage to update my Twitter status several times a day. When you have to fit something into 140 text only characters, there is much less barrier to entry. But I know that there are plenty of things I’ve wanted to share and haven’t – maybe because I wanted to plan them out and make them something more complete, or maybe because they needed images or media to do them justice.
So I’m hoping that this posterous blog will be the perfect thing to plug the gap. I’m going to impose a limit of 500 words and try and blog here more often than I do on Blogger. You can expect the content here to be a little less polished, but hopefully a little more frequent and certainly more images, clips, etc. I am not sure yet if I am going to blog some or all of these posts to Blogger too.. perhaps if they relate to one of my categories. Will see how it goes with that. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!
I was just testing the facilities of posterous and I uploaded a picture and some music (Soundcheck Song by Hera). I’ll leave them in for you to enjoy …
One week in startup-land
The last month or so has been a period of change for me – in that time I started one job, left it after two weeks, had a week off, and started another one! As a result of which I haven’t really established any kind of routine and haven’t been very good at blogging (although I have been “tweeting” or micro-blogging – you can follow me on Twitter as @alexbfree).
The first job was a web development job I found via PHP Québec, and it was the first tech job that came along really. It was perfectly ok, and helped me brush up my PHP and MySQL skills, but as you will have realised from my recent posts, my heart’s not really in it to “just” be a programmer any more. I want to work with real teams and businesses, develop ideas and do stuff that matters.
A Serendipitous Moment
I felt it was a most fortuituous occurrence when I discovered this job ad back at the start of April. I knew I had to apply; it described an ideal candidate with insatiable curiosity, an analytical mind, a passion for all things Internet, an awareness of GTD for organisation and most of all a desire to change the world a little at a time. It was like reading a description of myself. I knew I had to apply.
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Team Productivity: Tools of the Trade
Seven Strategies for Success
I wrote in my last post about my desire to work with teams to help them to be more productive. I’ve been thinking about what my “tools of the trade” will be and how I can add value to the teams I work with. Fortunately I have a wide variety of experiences I can draw on, from my various roles at IBM as well as my work with voluntary organisations and prior employers. What follows is a list of strategies that can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of a team.
1. Use wikis and collaboration tools
E-mail attachments are inefficient and create versioning headaches; internal websites and repositories controlled by one individual or with limited access controls prevent people with key knowledge from sharing it and create information bottlenecks. Something I’ve successfully done in two different teams at IBM and am starting to do again in my current job, is to introduce and encourage the use of a wiki, a website that is editable by everyone, for everything from collaborating on documents or designs to reviewing documents and creating new starter guides. The impact on a team can be significant, not only does everyone have a single point of reference and a “place to put things”, but every team member is empowered to share his insights and correct things himself when he finds mistakes.
Life after IBM
Finding a new path to follow
Every now and then you come to a point in your life when you are at a fork in the road, you have a choice before you and you know that whichever choice you make, your life will probably end up very different – for example, when you decide what University to go to, or move in with a partner. For me, that is exactly how it feels at the moment. Not so much the decision to move to Canada – of course that was a huge decision to make, but more the decision to leave IBM and “do something different” that came with it.
Thoughts on leaving IBM
I know a number of people who’ve left IBM in the last year or two – Roo Reynolds, Robert Berry, Ian Hughes and Alan Lepofsky to name just a few (A search on Google reveals many more). Usually there is a good reason – the offer of a fantastic job or the fruition of a plan to set up your own business. I think there must be a “physical law of IBM”: An employee will tend remain there unless acted on by an external force!
For me, the choice was not a career choice so much as a lifestyle choice – to be with my wife and help her get her career off to the best possible start with a postdoc position in Canada. It wasn’t possible to move to IBM Canada because there was no “pull” from the Canada side. I hoped at first I might do the same job remotely, but that proved impossible. But once I accepted the reality that I would need to leave IBM, thought processes began about what else I might do, I became more and more excited about the possibilities of a fresh start.
Read MoreVive la différence!
Surprising and not-so-surprising differences between life in the UK & Canada
On the whole, life in Canada is pretty similar to life in the UK. That was possibly the biggest surprise. Nonetheless, after our first month here we’ve noticed various things which are definitely different from what we were used to back home – some have a big effect and some are just minor differences which you may find interesting. So without further ado, here are 10 things that I’ve found different living in Canada.
1. Groceries and Food
I always thought that with the combination of American mass-market economics and the French food-loving influence, that it would be easy to buy groceries affordably and cheaply here. It was a big surprise to find out that the price of groceries here is somewhat extortionate! For example, a pack of 3 peppers (capsicums) (which works out cheaper than buying them loose) is $4.99 (just under £3) meaning they are about £1 each – twice the price they are in the UK. And cheese is horrendously expensive, varying between $20-$40 a kilogram (£11-£22) meaning a 250g block of cheese similar to those you might buy at home for under £2 will set you back more like £4 here. And that’s for basic cheddar. If you want some nice French cheeses it’s a lot more.
Another thing that’s disappointing is the quality of the food, the fruit and veg is often tired and doesn’t keep more than a couple of days.