It’s been a while since I blogged so I’m going to take it easy on my first blog post for a while.
Now that I’m fairly settled at Headshift I find myself turning my attention back to the industry I spent a lot of time in prior to my move into Social Business Consulting. During my time at Pfizer I had a lot of exposure to the efforts internal to the organisation attempting to get social business up and running. Now I’m on the outside I find myself looking into the marketing side of the pharmaceutical industry.
There’s some interesting stuff out there. Like most industries they are in the early stages of understanding this stuff but unlike most industries they are having to find ways around some tough regulations that are imposed on them. One thing that is very good to see is that some people “get it”.
Sid.
P.S. I hate the term “marketing”, it makes me feel a little dirty.
Wow, it’s been a hectic past few weeks. Starting a new job has really kept me busy…as I’d hoped.
When it comes to the life side of the work/life balance, the biggest change has got to be the commute. On one of my last days commuting back from the Big P I took the picture below on the left. That was on one of the days I was cycling along the Kent coast and you can see Richborough Power Station in the background. It was quite cool to cycle in, the views across Pegwell Bay are pretty nice. It was also cool on a Friday to catch the cafe when it was still open and have a natter with the owner.
That’s gone now though. That’s a 30min cycle ride of the past. The 15 mins door-to-door by car has gone now too. They’ve been replaced by a 2.5hr door to desk commute that takes me through the whole of Kent, into London, under Tower Bridge and along Shad Thames.
At the minute I’m still enjoying the commute. It means I get a few hours a day to catch up on stuff and I also get to laugh at my fellow commuters. You guys really need to cheer up a bit. I’m keeping track of my recommendations for London Commuters and when I hit 10 I’ll drag out a post about it.
The commute means my life has changed a lot. Before I used to get to spend a lot more time with Michelle whereas now I find myself grabbing an hour at the end of the day. It means I get very little done during the week and that stuff round the house gets done on weekends. It does however mean I plan a little better and also I get an extra hour of exercise walking to and from the train station.
My plans for the commute are to put it to good use. So far I’ve done a few route cards for our Three Peaks Challenge and I’ve done a lot of reading in an attempt to get up to speed with things. Next on the list is Spanish and catching up on a load of podcasts.
Other than the commute things are good. I’ve managed to cram in some gym time during lunch. It means I don’t get to lunch with my new colleagues but they’re an understanding bunch. I also get to meet up with friends every now and then. Generally, despite the commute, the lifestyle is a lot better.
Today was a weird day for me. After 7 years 35 weeks and 2 days at Pfizer today was my last day. It was my first job after University. I started out on the bench as a research scientist, moved into a project managers group, then into an Operations group looking after IT systems, then into an Informatics role for a year before heading back into the Operations group just before I decided to leave.
Why did I chose to leave? Well both my girlfriend and I worked there and what with all the redundancies going on it made me feel fairly uncomfortable staying there and relying on the same company for all the money coming into the house. I’d also had itchy feet for a fair while. After hooking up with the DIGWWW guys and being inspired by the fantastic work they were doing behind the firewall I started to think that was where my calling was.
I’ve met a load of good people at Pfizer, unfortunately I’ve also met plenty of not so good people but that’s inevitable in a company of that size. However the memories are fond ones.
But I won’t dwell on Pfizer. I’m now looking forward to an exciting future with Headshift. I start in their London offices on April 15th and I’m over the moon. I’d had my eye on Headshift for a fair while and when I was offered a position with them as a consultant it took a lot of effort not to burst into spontaneous cheshire cat style grin. I don’t think I managed it.
I am heading there with mixed emotions. On the one hand I can’t wait to get there and get to work with some good people. On the other hand I’m absolutely shitting myself that I’m going to be in way too deep. These guys do social software for a living, I feel like I’ve just dipped my toes into a hobby-like activity. I’ll have a lot to learn and hopefully I’ll be able to show those guys a trick or two. I doubt I’ll be able to match the experience they have but I’ll do my best.
Wish me luck!
Sid.
Since we bought our house and started doing a variety of work on it I’ve always been a little interested in how it’s all plumbed together. Literally. The way the plumbing runs through the house interests me probably a little more than it should do. Then lay on top of that the electrics and the soil waste systems and you’ve got a pretty interesting network there.
As I was boarding out the loft my mind was wandering all over the place. Our loft is pretty small so my mind had to wander to stave off the claustrophobia! One thing I noticed was the water tank up in the loft. I got to thinking how it must take a little bit of energy to get the water up to the tank. Then I started thinking about the energy that is stored there. Then I started thinking about how if you put a little turbine on the downpipe you would effectively have yourself a mini hydro-electrc dam.
Cue me reading the Yanko Design Blog this morning. I was well chuffed to see the “Mini Hydro Turbine” idea by Jin Woo Han.
It probably needs a little bit of work to get going but imagine a set of these little dudes on your pipes powering your gadgets. As you pump water into the house you can generate a bit of energy. As water is gravity fed to your taps you’d get energy. You could collect rain water and use it for energy.
Awesome idea.
A moment ago, following a little tweet, it became obvious that with some technologies I like to hold on to the past. In regard to the tweet I think MP3 has revolutionised the way we handle music in an outrageously positive way but there’s no denying we have lost some quality. OK, I’m not as passionate about it as the Sterophile guys but this backwards move is a touch disappointing.
This morning, during a break from listening to my new Mistabishi album, I went along to a meeting I was hosting. As usual when I have nothing to display from my laptop I tend not to bother taking it. Today we were talking about rather abstract things so I much preferred a whiteboard and a pen. That seemed to freak some people out. I think all of the attendees asked me where it was despite knowing that when I feel I don’t need it I won’t take it along. It’s not surgically attached to me you know!
Then the last thing that prompted me to write this little post was my very recent trip to the toilet. (Bear with me!)
At work we’ve just gone through the process of replacing all of our hand towel dispensers with the lovely Lotus Professional enMotion dispensers. Don’t they look lovely? Well as lovely as they look they are bloody useless. From what I can see their primary purpose is to dispense me a towel without me needing to touch them. “Brilliant”, I hear you cry! “Bollocks”, I also hear you cry as you turn round and realise you still have to touch the scabby door handle to get out of the toilet. Not only that but they have motion sensors that don’t work, paper feeds that jam far too often, far too many settings to help you control the lenght of paper that is dispensed (it’s never enough!) blah blah blah blah.
So before I have to bring out my other rant about why GPS is crap compared to a map, a compass and a little bit of knowledge please, I beg you, use technology where it’s appropriate. I’d be happy with a pile of paper towels on the shelf or even just a scabby towel on a hand rail.
I’m only 12 pages into this book but so far I’m not really liking it. It’s painting a very bleak picture of the corporate world.
It seems to me that the whole basis of the book is that when you work in a corporate environment all you do is argue. Now I’ve had my fair share of arguments at work but I must say the majority of my conversations have been discussions.
I can only feel pity for organisations if they choose to implement this technique. Why? Well they must be in a pretty bad state if all people do is argue. It would mean that they are going right back to basics regarding how people talk to each other, come to decisions, work together etc etc.
I think I’m going to stick it out a little further and see if it get’s any better but I don’t have much hope.
It’s a real shame since the last book I read, Dan Pink’s A whole New Mind, was pretty good.
You know those things in life that you start doing that just slot right into your life like they’ve been there forever? You could do without them but you’d rather not! That’s what MicroPlaza is for me. MicroPlaza has just slotted right in, works wonderfully, feels like I’ve been using it for ages and I’d miss it if it left!
For a while now I’ve been flicking between my RSS reader and Twitter as my sources for cool stuff on the web. The RSS Reader for some reason feels like nothing is going to take me from leftfield. I know who I get RSS feeds from so I know what to expect from them. Twitter is a little different in that it aggregates feeds from all over the web and can throw up more random stuff through the power of the retweet.
One of the things I love about my RSS reader is that it delivers summaries (and full articles) to me so I can flick through fairly quickly without going anywhere else. With Twitter however if someone posts a link they have 140 characters to get across we I should pay attention. Sometimes that’s not enough. Microplaza skips through that, concentrates all those cool links into one place, gives you a nice sized thumbnail and does plenty of other stuff that I’ll let you find out for yourselves.
Most of the MicroPlaza functionality is like Twitter on steroids. The public timeline, the following, the sorting by popularity, the bookmarks etc. Where it gets a bit more interesting is the Tribes and the “Being Someone”.
Tribes are basically groups. You can group all of you stuff together. If you follow a bunch of tech people, a bunch of mates, a bunch of cycling enthusiast then you just tribe them all up to split them out. Very cool. Twitter, take note!
Being someone is weird. It feels quite stalker-esque. It lets you see what someone else would see. Cool but weird.
All in all MicroPlaza rocks.
If you wanna give it a try then head over and register. It’s invite only still so only the first 20 of you guys who get on over there will be able to sign up through that link.
Have fun with it.
Sid.
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently is privacy. It started with a few internal work emails, continued with my Personal Information Protection post, was added to by a few more work emails, embellished upon when I read 10 Facebook Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know and has taken a good twist with Security at work trying to prove a point by finding out what they can about me from my online presence.
The more I think about it the more it seems to me like privacy is a thing to be cherished. However, with the continuing use of social software it’s getting harder and harder to keep things private. One slip on any of the networks and there’s sufficient crosstalk to mean the grapevine will take over and very soon your privacy won’t be so private anymore.
I struggle with this on a regular occurance because I don’t have an amorphous mass of friends. I have friends from where I grew up, friends from Uni, friends from work and friends from various other places. Some I like meeting in groups, others I like to meet individually and others I’d prefer not to meet at all (I still call them friends but they’re usually people I’ve met online and who I feel I have only one thing in common with.) Add into the mix some work contacts and some mere acquintances and you’ve soon got a bit of a headache.
As I type this I’m currently custodian of a secret. It’s not a big secret and it’s not going to come as a massive surprise to most people but it’s not quite ripe enough to be revealed en masse. The problem is I have a subset of friends who I really want to tell and a subset of friends who need to be kept in the dark for a little while.
So that means Facebook is out. Even if I created a bunch of groups, set my security settings etc for this one occurance I would have to faff around changing them again when something else came round. Twitter is out since everyone can see pretty much everything. My blog is out since I don’t have control of who reads that either. The list goes on.
So I started thinking about how you could work a grouping system or a tiering system to somehow control who sees the message. But that’s not how the web works and it’s proving quite difficult to think of anything. Come to think of it, it’s very difficult to do in the Enterprise too but for some reason we persist in maintaining ACLs etc.
So right now I haven’t shared my secret. There are ways to do it, all old school technologies, face-to-face, email, phone etc, but I wonder if there’s anyway to keep anything private on the web.
I’m sat at a friends house watching Something for the Weekend and Richard Bacon is talking to the TV chef about Twitter again. It’s yet another bit on TV about the popular micro-blogging site, of which I’m a massive fan.
It follows all of the hype created by Stephen Fry, Jonathon Ross and many others over the last few weeks.
As someone who has been talking about Twitter and other micro-blogging sites for a while it’s interesting to see how it’s taking off with celebrities in the UK. It’s clear that they see it as a great tool. Most people don’t “get” Twitter that quickly. Most people have to spend time finding people they want to follow or building their networks of followers. For the celebrities they already have their network. It’s been built up over years of TV appearances and stints spent using classic media. Twitter for these guys is a natural step.
The fall out for me as a Twitter user is that my use of it is changing. If you look at my following list at the moment you’ll see it’s heavy on the “work-related” side of things. As more and more of my friends get on there it’s starting to swing in the other direction. That presents some difficulties for me since I like to keep personal/business separate and don’t really buy into the work/life blur as much as some people I know.
So will Twitter try and adapt to it or don’t they see it as a big deal? I’d like to see a few things in there such as groups etc but I’m happy to wait and see how it develops for now.
Anyway, breakfast is ready (cheers Clare) so I’m off for my bacon and eggs!
Sid.
Well it seems like one of my first charitable efforts is being organised for me. Unbeknowst to me (I missed a team meeting!) our group decided to do something charitable and a bit team-buildy. In March we’re going to be heading over to Martha House and helping out in their sensory garden.
I’m looking forward to it already.
