Here are mine.

1. I’ll buy a belt – I broke mine last year.  It was an overly complicated reverse belt model and I want to simplify it back to just a leather strap and a buckle.
2. I’ll lose a little weight – After putting a bunch of weight back on over Christmas I’ll be kicking of with Improving the Shed again this year.
3. I’ll surprise a few people – I’m going to do a few things that may surprise a few people but I’m keeping those to myself for the time being.
4. I’ll do some more Social Business Design – Despite a lot of people claiming Social Media and the like has already taken over the world, it hasn’t.  I’ll continue to help people understand what it’s all about and that not only can you build a web tool that is “social” but you can also use plenty of the principles to run businesses more effectively.
5. I’ll say I’ll blog more but I won’t.
6. I’ll sell my first house
7. I’ll buy my second house
8. I’ll reduce my commute – from the current 5 hours a day to something much more sensible
9. I’ll make some in roads to owning a campsite – Whilst I enjoy the work I do and the life I lead at the moment I doubt it will see me to retirement.  After having lots of conversations with Michelle it looks like we’re going to go down the road of owning our own little piece of the UK.
10. I’ll continue to get carried away
11. I’ll still act like a child in my own time
12. I’ll start to get used to having small people around – I’m not a natural with children but friends are going through that time in their lives when the little buggers are beginning to get everywhere.  I have no choice really and I’ve been surprised by my ability to cope so far.
13. I’ll finish both the Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge and the National Three Peaks Challenge
14. I’ll continue venturing into a more emotional place every now and then – not very often though.
15. I’ll figure out how to use iCal – or I find a suitable replacement for the worst bit of Apple software ever
16. I’ll say I’ll learn a musical instrument – and I’ll hope I will but undoubtedly I won’t.  There’s always hope.
17. I’ll have some good times
18. I’ll have some bad times
19. The first thing I’ll do in 2011 will be to have a hangover.

I’ll probably do more things but for now I have stuff to do.

Sid.

So I’ve done a little reading around and I can now confirm that I still have no interest in politics.

I’ll not go into details since I’ll sound amateurish in my thoughts but I’ll give politics another go once I see some good stuff coming from any party.  I very quickly got fed up with the childish bitching between the parties rather than seeing any solid policies.

That’s all.

Since joining Headshift I’ve struggled a little to blog as I find the context quite turbulent.  The problem is that in one day I can switch from talking to a small third sector organisation to talking to a large multi-national corporation.  It leads to some very interesting days but it’s a bugger when it comes to blogging on a specific topic

For instance, the last blog post I wrote around the social business use cases for pharma started life as some sketches, grew to something akin to a 12 page document and was finally trimmed down to just the three use cases.  Initially I found it difficult to structure the post but eventually settled for trimming it down and putting it into a few posts instead of 1 massive one.

I think partly the struggle is with idea overload.  So many things just swimming around in my head leads me to unstructured verbal diarrhoea.  I’ll be working on it though so hopefully I start to get back into the groove of blogging.

At the moment I’m quite up for as much disruption in the business world as possible.  I see public money being pushed into banks who should have been left to fail, car companies who should’ve been left to fail, rail operators who should be left to fail, etc etc, you get my drift.  When I see it I can’t help but think it’s all because they have just become too big for their boots.  So when it comes to Royal Mail I’m a little sad because I think we’ll be losing a British institution but then the silver lining is that it gives the little guys a chance to do some innovative things.

A report on the BBC website this morning reminded me that there are good alternatives to Royal Mail.  It also reminded me of a system I experienced in the states where local stay-at-home moms would act as distribution centres.  Then it reminded me of the letter-based small world experiment, which, with a little imagination you could apply to delivering letter without the aid of the postal service.

So I’m not too concerned about losing a door to door service because what comes out of the other side is likely to be better anyway, we just might have to go through a little pain to get there.

Sid.

Anyway, I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to resurrect this blog.

In the future there’ll be a few posts about this, that and everything. I’ll probably cross post my work-related ones here and combine them with some other worthwhile posts. I’ll also be looking to aggregate a whole bunch of stuff here.  The general topic will be whatever falls out of my head at any given time.

For those wanting to follow my social business posts then you can either follow the category feed from this blog or you can head over to my Headshift blog where you’ll get the benefit of everyone else at Headshift too.

Until next time…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.