J’ai un mal à la gorge. En Angleterre, nous avons le “TCP”

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 3 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

My family’s recent bout with non-specific cold-like illnesses included a sore throat for one of my teenage sons. He must have been feeling bad, because it was enough to convince him not to race his bike for a week. (In fairness, reminding him that previous attempts to compete whilst ill didn’t work out well was also a factor.)

“You need to take some TCP!”, said his Uncle.

“Already on it!”, said I.

For those who are not familiar with TCP (not the networking protocol), it is a particularly foul antiseptic substance that can be diluted and gargled to attack the bacteria that cause sore throats. It’s not nice. But it is effective.

Trying to buy TCP whilst on holiday…

TCP seems to be a very British thing though. I know ex-pats in the ‘States who bring it over from the UK and this incident reminded me of trying to get some in France. We were skiing, in Tignes, and I had a sore throat. Not wanting to miss any time on the slopes, I was willing to take some strong stuff to try and get better.

So, off to “la pharmacie”, I tramped… and in my best schoolboy French (GCSE grade B, Kingsthorpe Upper School, 1988) I said to the assistant:

“J’ai un mal à la gorge. En Angleterre, nous avons le ‘TCP’. En avez-vous?”

I also pointed at my throat and attempted to gargle, for effect.

The perplexed shop assistant looked at the mad Englishman on the other side of the counter, shrugged, and pulled out a bottle of cough syrup. Basically it was a sugar mix (certainly not TCP), but that was as far as I was going to get with my limited grasp of the language. Ironically, as I was writing this post I found that TCP is produced in France, for sale in the UK.

I don’t recall whether I missed any skiing time. I certainly didn’t let a sore throat ruin my holiday, but I’m equally sure I wasn’t able to buy any antiseptic for my throat. These days, a small bottle of TCP is a permanent item in my travel bag.

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Image credit: author’s own.

Weeknote 16/2021: Look after yourself – and watch out for friends and family too…

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 3 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Most importantly, this week:

  • I was reminded not to take family members’ health for granted. Also, that the NHS has many problems but a) is staffed by some truly wonderful people and b) I’m really, really glad it’s there when we need it.
  • I was also reminded that I have some really supportive friends and colleagues. You know who you are. Thank you.

Lower down the hierarchy of needs:

  • I finally got the (Enterprise) Architecture as a Service service that I’ve wanted to launch off the ground. After years of thinking that it might be useful for clients to have access to someone for a day or two a month, it seems that a couple of days a week is more useful – it’s actually time to do something meaningful. Anyway, it’s given Thom McKiernan (@ThomMcK) an opportunity to go back on site.
  • Related to above, I found I’m a little jealous of colleagues who get to visit clients and interact with humans again. I don’t want it every day – just one or twice a week would be nice.
  • I was frustrated to find that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is very misunderstood – and all too often given as a reason for not doing something, with no apparent knowledge of what the regulation covers.
  • A client project underlined that, even when using SaaS, you still have to plan for and take action around upcoming changes… such as the upcoming retirement of Microsoft Skype for Business Online.
  • I sold a bike. It felt odd:
  • Related to above, I found that Facebook Marketplace is a strange mixture of nice, normal people, and some very odd individuals who didn’t seem to understand why I wouldn’t accept their low offer when I had plenty of interest at the asking price.
  • My weekend activities were mostly cycling-related: riding in the sunshine; transporting my son to/from an XC MTB race; youth coaching, and marshalling at a road race (where my son was also racing).

This week in photos

Weeknote 15/2021: Jabbed!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 3 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week (last week)’s weeknote is a few days late, so here’s what I learned in week 15 of 2021:

  • It’s hard coming back to work after taking a complete break for 10 days.
  • Autonomy over your calendar is a really important part of wellbeing.
  • Flesch-Kincaid readability tests are just a number, but we tend to overestimate people’s reading ability:
  • Email, Teams and other “productivity” tools are real “time hoovers” and reactive working is highly stressful. I’m increasing of the view that such tools hinder productivity in favour of reactiveness. It seems that I’m not alone.
  • The Microsoft Dynamics 365 HR app for Teams is a much better way to access holiday request info than natively in Dynamics. I did laugh at the message that “Human Resources sent a card” though:
Sample of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 HR app in Microsoft Teams
  • How to be a good colleague in Ramadan – Ramadan Mubarak!
  • Not to rely on the NHS COVID Vaccination site to send notifications of bookings, even when given a phone number and email address. I had to ring 119 and navigate minutes of menus before a very helpful human gave me my reference numbers to make changes. It took around 48 hours for the text message/email to arrive, quickly followed by updated ones for new appointments. I suspect there may be some CSV files and batch jobs in the background… especially as a friend who had a recent birthday was “not 45 enough” to book her vaccination.
  • Emailing and asking for someone to do something by Close of Business that day, then emailing at 15:45 and asking them to do it by 16:30 is probably using the wrong channels and setting the wrong expectations…
  • Don’t underestimate the value of your network for presenting new opportunities.
  • Three pints of IPA may be a good way to avoid side effects of the Oxford-Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine (based on my not at all scientific sample size of one)!

This (last) week in photos

Weeknote 15: Pyramid training (Week 16, 2018)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 6 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

This week has been pyramid-shaped:

  • Monday: start work on Customer A’s End User Computing Strategy.
  • Tuesday: work on Customer B’s Surface/Windows 10 rollout (I’ve stopped pretending that it’s anything to do with a “Modern Workplace” because it’s completely technology-focused). Then, up to Stafford ready for Wednesday’s team meeting and an opportunity for dinner at The Market Vaults (great “dirty burger” and real ale).
  • Wednesday: Team Meeting – opportunity to catch up with my fellow Architects (we’re generally working on different projects so always good to get together). Second trip to the Market Vaults in as many days…
  • Thursday: Back with customer B, then over to the Microsoft Cloud User Group meeting in Birmingham.
  • Friday: trying to write customer A’s strategy but in reality dealing with customer B’s “issues” (and politics). Then, spend the evening at the local “urgent care centre” after my youngest son bangs and cuts his head on a wall whilst playing Xbox (3-4 hour wait means “urgent” is a relative term in an under-funded NHS)… anyway, playing on the Xbox is clearly a dangerous activity!

In other news, I finally managed to get my turbo trainer back to Wiggle using the Asda To You service. It’s a simple but smart solution and a great example of diversification where otherwise near-empty supermarket trucks take parcels from stores to the central distribution hub. Advantages include local drop-off for customers, extra revenue for the supermarket and empty truck space gets used (with the consequential effect of fewer trucks on the road). And they’ll take parcels up to 25kg.

I need to wait for Wiggle and Tacx to work out what’s wrong with my trainer and repair or replace now (so no Zwifting) but at least the sun is shining so I can ride my bike outside…

Talking of sunshine, I wish this was one of my pictures but one local photographer/drone pilot grabbed a shot of Olney in this week’s sunshine:

The rest of the weekend will include a road bike ride, then another attempt at the towpath MTB training with my eldest son (last time we attempted that ride a big puncture ended play), checking out a car boot sale as a potential opportunity to sell some of the contents of our loft – and taking my Mum for afternoon tea as a belated 70th birthday present.

I’ll wrap up this week’s post with another Instagram shot… these road markings amused me as I navigated Birmingham’s one-way system on Thursday evening…

Last Orders at The Fantastic Tavern (#TFTLondon)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

About a year ago, I wrote about a fantastic concept called The Fantastic Tavern (TFT), started by Matt Bagwell (@mattbagwell) of EMC Consulting (ex-Conchango – where I also have some history). Since then I’ve been to a few more TFTs (and written about them here) and they’ve got bigger, and bigger. What was a few people in a pub is now a major logistical challenge and Matt’s decided to call it a day. But boy did it go out with a bang?!

Last night’s TFT was at Ravensbourne (@RavensbourneUK) – a fantastic mixture of education and business innovation hub on London’s Greenwich peninsula. I was blown away by what Chris Thompson and the team at Ravensbourne have achieved, so I’ll write about that another day. Suffice to say, I wish my university had worked like that…

Last night’s topic was 2012 trends. Personally, I thought the Top Gear-style cool wall (“sooo last year, tepid, cool, sub-zero”) was way off the mark (in terms of placing the trends) but that doesn’t really matter – there were some great pitches from the Ravensbourne students and other invited speakers – more than I can do justice to in a single blog post so I’ll come back and edit this later as the presentations go online (assuming that they will!)

The evening was introduced by Mike Short, VP of Innovation and R&D at O2/Telefonica who also sits on the board of governors at Ravensbourne and so is intimately involved in taking an institution with its rooms in Bromley College of Art (of David Bowie fame) from Chiselhurst to provide art, design, fashion, Internet and multimedia education on Greenwich Peninsular, next to the most visited entertainment venue in the world (The O2 – or North Greenwich Arena). Mike spoke about O2’s plans for an new business incubator project that O2 is bringing to London in the next 3 months as O2 looks at taking the world’s 6bn mobile device subscribers (not just phones, but broadband, payment systems, etc.) to connect education, healthcare, transport and more. In an industry that’s barely 25 years old, by the end of the year there will be more devices than people (the UK passed this point in 2006) and the market is expected to grow to more than 20bn customers by 2020.

Matt then spoke about the omni-channel world in which we live (beyond multi-channel) – simultaneously interacting on all channels and fuelling a desire “to do things faster”.

Moving on to the 2012 trends, we saw:

  • A. Craddock talking about smart tags – RFID and NFC tokens that can interact with our mobile devices and change their behaviour (e.g. switch to/from silent mode).  These can be used to simplify our daily routine to simply enable/disable functionality, share information, make payments, etc. but we also need to consider privacy (location tracking, etc. – opt in/out), openness (may be a benefit for some), ecology (printable tags using biodegradable materials) and device functionality (i.e. will they work with all phones – or just a subset of smartphones).
  • Riccie Audrie-Janus (@_riccie) talking about how, in order to make good use of technology, we need to look at the people element first.  I was unconvinced – successful technology implementation is about people, process and technology and I don’t think it matters that kids don’t understand the significance of a floppy disk icon when saving a document – but she had some interesting points to make about our need to adapt to ever-more-rapidly developing technology as we progress towards an ever-more complex world where computing and biology combine.
  • @asenasen speaking about using DIY healthcare to help focus resources and address issues of population growth, economics and cost. Technology can’t replace surgeons but it can help people make better healthcare decisions with examples including: WebMD for self-diagnosis; PatientsLikeMe providing a social network; apps to interact with our environment and translate into health benefits (e.g. Daily Burn); peripheral devices like FitBit [Nike+, etc.] that interact with apps and present challenges. It’s not just in the consumer space either with Airstrip Technologies creating apps for healthcare professionals. Meanwhile, in the developing world SMS can be used (ChildCount), whilst in Japan new toilets are being developed that can, erhum, analyse our “output”.  Technology has the potential to transform personal health and enable the smart distribution of healthcare.
  • Matt Fox (@mattrfox) talked about 2012 becoming the year of the artist-entrepreneur, citing Louis CK as an example, talking about dangerous legislation like SOPA, YCombinator’s plans to “Kill Hollywood”, Megabox (foiled by the MegaUpload takedown) and Pirate Bay’s evolution of file sharing to include rapid prototype designs. Matt’s final point was that industry is curtaining innovation – and we need to innovate past this problem.
  • Chris Hall (@chrisrhall) spoke about “Grannies being the future” – using examples of early retirement leaving pensioners with money and an opportunity to become entrepreneurs (given life expectancy of 81 years for a man in the UK, and citing Trevor Baylis as an example). I think hit onto something here – we need to embrace experience to create new opportunities for the young, but I’m not sure how many more people will enjoy early retirement, or that there will be much money sloshing around from property as we increasingly find it necessary to have 35 year and even multi-generation mortgages.
  • James Greenaway (@jvgreenaway) talked about social accreditation – taking qualifications online, alongside our social personas. We gain achievements on our games consoles, casual games (Farmville), social media (Foursquare), crowdsourcing (Stack Overflow) etc. – so why not integrate that with education (P2PU, eHow and iTunes U) and open all of our achievements to the web. James showed more examples to help with reputation management (spider  graphs showing what we’re good at [maybe combined with a future of results-oriented working?]) and really sees a future for new ways of assessing and proving skills becoming accepted.
  • Ashley Pollak from ETIO spoke about the return of craft, as we turn off and tune out. Having only listened to Radio 4’s adaptation of Susan Maushart’s Winter of Our Disconnect the same day, I could relate to the need to step back from the always connected world and find a more relevant, less consuming experience. And as I struggle to balance work and this blog post this morning I see advantages in reducing the frequency of social media conversations but increasing the quality!
  • Ravensbourne’s Chris Thompson spoke about virtual innovation – how Cisco is creating a British Innovation Gateway to connect incubators and research centres of excellence – and how incubation projects can now be based in the cloud and are no longer predicated on where a university is located, but where ideas start and end.
  • The next pitch was about new perspectives – as traditional photography dies (er… not on my watch) in favour of new visual experiences. More than just 3D but plenoptic (or light field) cameras, time of flight cameras, depth sensors, LIDAR and 3D scanning and printing. There are certainly some exciting things happening (like Tesco Augmented Reality) – and the London 2012 Olympics will e filmed in 3D and presented in interactive 360 format.
  • Augment and Mix was a quick talk about how RSA Animate talks use a technique called scribing to take content that is great, but maybe not that well presented, and make it entertaining by re-interpreting/illustrating. Scribing may be “sooo last year” but there are other examples too – such as “Shakespeare in 90 seconds” and “Potted Potter”.
  • Lee Morgenroth’s (@leemailme‘s) pitch was for Leemail – a system that allows private addresses to be used for web sign-ups (one per site) and then turned on/off at will. My more-technically minded friends say “I’ve been doing that for years with different aliases” – personally I just use a single address and a decent spam filter (actually, not quite as good since switching from GMail to Office 365) – but I think Lee may be on to something for non-geeks… let’s see!
  • Finally, we saw a film from LS:N profiling some key trends from the last 10 years, as predicted and in reality (actually, I missed most of that for a tour of Ravensbourne!)

There were some amazing talks and some great ideas – I certainly took a lot away from last night in terms of inspiration so thank you to all the speakers. Thanks also to Matt, Michelle (@michelleflynn) and everyone else involved in making last night’s TFT (and all the previous events) happen. It’s been a blast – and I look forward to seeing what happens next…

[I rushed this post out this morning but fully intend to come back and add more links, videos, presentations, etc. later – so please check back next week!]