Popping my Wikipedia Cherry

I popped my Wikipedia cherry the other day.  

I didn’t contribute much.  It was in an entry about food.  I changed the following sentence from:

It is in trend for corn syrup to be flavored with vanilla extract ^{(citation needed)}.

to:

There is now a trend for corn syrup to be flavored with vanilla extract ^{(citation needed)}.

Two minutes later someone deleted the whole sentence, presumably because it wasn’t supported by a citation.  So my contribution to the sum of human knowledge was there for – oh – gosh – 120 seconds!

If gods existed and magic worked

I do sometimes wonder what the world would be like if gods existed and magic worked.

If magic worked as mechanically as, well, mechanics then I doubt it would make that much difference. We’d just rush about the place in our seven league boots or on our magic carpets.  As Arthur C Clark said: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistigishable from magic, but it’s less obvious that the reverse is true too.  If you could summon up spirits from the vasty deeps, you’d probably just get their voicemail.    I think a magical world would be shiny but mundane like a cross between Ikea and Comet.   You’d expect there to be less of a problem with pollution and global warming of course, but maybe there’d be a shortage of newts’ eyes in much the way that there is a shortage of tigers and rhinoceroses already and for exactly the same reason. (Rhinoceroi? Rhinocerodes?  Why is there never a greek scholar around when you need one?)

Ok, so magic would be dull, but what about the power of prayer?  

It seems to me that if prayer worked then it would be just another form of insurance.

Travel insurance? – Check.
Passport and tickets? – Check.
Prayer? – Oh, no, hang on a minute while I get down on my knees.

I’ve certainly sat down to meals where grace was as meaningless and mechanical as putting a napkin on your lap.

If prayers and special pleading worked,  it would suck great big hairy cheese-monsters.  It’s always shit when the middle-sized bully gets the big bastard on their side.  For example, you’d have to avoid competing against one of the deity’s top pray-ers if you wanted that promotion:

Let’s see now, Aphra has more experience, better qualifications and a personality that will really fit in, but we’ve just had a note from the Big Guy that we’ve got to hire the other one.

Functional prayer just sounds like belonging to the mob:  The power of prayer – putting the god into godfather.  

On top of which, I’m not at all sure about a world where there’s a god who’s nicer to those who are nice to it, and who really did throw thunderbolts at the bad guys.   That suggests a world where the supreme being has the emotional intelligence of a five year old, a point well made 40 years ago by Gene Roddenberry in The Squire of Gothos not to mention everyone who’s ever written about the classical or nordic gods since Homer had an eye test.  

And if we go for the nature-thang, we end up with a world where healing spirits heal you without any of that annoying waiting-lists-and-cold-hands-on-your-privates stuff, and where sister wind and brother rain come to your garden but are far too nice to fart about or piss around like drunks at a barbeque, which – lets face it – is how they behave right now.  It sounds nice, but would you really want to live in a world which was trapped inside a shop in Hebden Bridge and full of wind-chimes, incense, velvety lace and oestrogen?   

Mind you, the only way I can make sense of a world where Sarah Palin could be president of the US freaking A is to conclude that this whole universe is indeed the bad-acid trip of some great big hairy cheese-monster.  

I take it all back.  I’ll have the Hebden Bridge one, thank you.

Ruthless blog-promotion – how long does it take?

It’s a fair cop.  I’ll hold my hand up to it: in these days of cyber-vetting I wanted anyone who googles me to find my professional persona.   The quickest way to make sure of that seemed to be to write a blog, but the days of “build it and they will come” are gone so you’ve got to put in some effort. 

“Quick” is a relative term of course, and this is the first time I’ve actively promoted a blog rather than allowed it to grow organically, and that has been time consuming bit.  If you are about to do this yourself, you might like to know how long it takes.

There are a whole bunch of ways to kick-start a blog, once you’ve got a blog to promote: 

• content
  • links
  • tags and categories
• people
  • networking
  • reputation
• listings
  • blog directories
  • beauty contests

Content: 

You’ve got to have a blog to promote!  If your content is poor, the blog will fail.  Unfortunately it needs more than good content to succeed.

Links: put links in your posts.  Your blog is more useful and therefore more attractive; your stats will be more informative and that  tells you what your hot topics are.  Some of the people you link to will call by to see who is linking to them.  Your blog becomes a conversation rather than just a speech, and that helps the blog build up a reputation.

Tags and Categories: use them to label your blog.  Categories help people find their way round your blog, tags are useful for infrequent topics.  They both help people find similar blogs, and they help search engines find you.

Promoting to real people

Networking: put the word out among friends and colleagues and in the online places where you already hang out.  I’ve got links from my profiles in Facebook and Linked-In, I emailed some pals, I posted the site’s address in a few of the forums where I’m a regular and I added the link to my email signature. Not surprisingly, the first few comments were from folk who know me.  They know who they are, and the drinks are on me.  

Building a reputation: is a matter of getting out there and joining in. No, not hustling. Not spam.  Not ”Cool site.  I link to you.”  Reading is more interesting than writing anyway, but I sometimes find it’s easy to let it fall by the wayside, so this is a discipline that has become a pleasure.   I use Google Reader to gather together the new posts in blogs I read regularly. 

Online Listings

Blog Directories: this is the arduous work of submitting your blog to blog directories, but it’s worth it.  A quick google produces a long list of directories, and then you just register with them and add a reciprocal link to your site.  I say “just”: this is time consuming but mindless.  The directories I’ve submitted this blog to are in the column on the right, but don’t take my word for it: google for the latest advice.   (Update:  Robert A Kearse has commented on this post and provided a link to the list of 300 or so active blog directories on his site – an extremely useful resource).

Beauty contests: is the term I’ve used for sites like Delicous, Stumble Upon and Digg where readers vote on their likes and dislikes.  I’m not convinced by the wisdom of crowds so I find this soul-destroying.  I’m not an active users of any of the sites and, stupidly, I’m not convinced that the people I want to read my blog will use them either.

Which brings me to the question of who is my reader?

Who are you, Reader?  

I fondly imagine that you are some other IT-like person and we are in a pub after work shooting the breeze.  But who knows?  I’m a little afraid to ask.  I’d love it if you came back again and again, subscribed to my feed, hung on my every keystroke, trembled when I posted, quivered as you read.  

In fact you were chasing a search term and will probably never come by again.  

It was nice…

… oh, you’ve gone…

So – how much time did this ruthless self-promotion take me?

Content

Creating content – up to an hour a post: the first draft is always longer.  Adding links, tags and categories is a matter of minutes or moments.

Look and feel – a couple of evenings messing about with WordPress Themes and widgets: this is so soothing that I still tinker with it every now and again.

Promoting to People

Networking – hardly any time at all: I mentioned it in passing and left it at that.

Reading and commenting – I set myself a target of between one and two hours every evening for two weeks and then a couple of hours once or twice a week thereafter. First of all you have to find the blogs, which is where all those blog directories finally prove their worth, but then it’s just a matter of subscribing. Reading and commenting is the fun bit though, where the web turns into a dialogue.

Online Listings

Blog directories and beauty contest sites – several evenings and a couple of weekends: dull but easy to multitask (I cooked food, watched tv, gossiped on MSN, listened to podcasts, stroked the cat and drank tea while I did it).

Is it worth it?  

What’s “worth it”?   At the quantitative end of the scale, I can tell you how many visitors I get but with a blog like this it’s not just numbers.  If I wanted numbers I’d put up pics of public people’s private parts, or cute pictures of cats with illiterate captions, such is the wisdom of crowds.  

I’m pleased that the blog is sparking conversations, and I enjoy the conversations it’s sparked.

I guess the acid test would be unsolicited job offers.  But now I’ve mentioned it, they wouldn’t be unsolicited.  

Damn.  

Should have thought of that.

Couldn’t have put it better myself:

The simplest solutions are often the cleverest. They are also usually wrong.

Building on sand

I’ve just come to understand one of the core differences between IT and medicine: most medics know how to arrive at a conclusion based on evidence but most people working in Business and IT don’t.  As a result far too many decisions in Business and IT are based on something that looks like evidence, sounds like evidence, but actually isn’t evidence.  And I don’t know about you, but I find that slightly sickening.  

What’s my evidence for this view? (Ha!) It’s an internal document I’ve just been reading which says:

A conservative estimate of £10m p.a. colleague efficiency savings would be realised through deploying SuperSystem to 25,000 users across the organisation.

It includes no references. There’s no way for me to come to my own conclusion. No links to any validatable and verifiable studies showing what savings have been achieved elsewhere.  Da nada.  Nothing.  As a reader, I have to trust the writer’s judgement.  The older I get, the less I like that.

It’s not just a matter of being given the evidence though.  It’s a matter of being able to evaluate it.  Consider this from a campaigning website:

Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid. Its basis is the highly reactive hydroxyl radical, a species shown to mutate DNA, denature proteins, disrupt cell membranes, and chemically alter critical neurotransmitters. The atomic components of DHMO are found in a number of caustic, explosive and poisonous compounds such as Sulfuric Acid, Nitroglycerine and Ethyl Alcohol.

Now if you’ve an iota of common sense you’d want it banned, wouldn’t you?  Ha! Fooled ya (unless you were paying attention in chemistry lessons of course).  It’s water.  The DHMO site is there to show how easy it is to baffle with pseudo-scientific bull.

In Business and IT this is done all the time.   I’ve done it myself.  I’ve found some statistics that seem to support my case and bunged them on to a slide with a footnote saying “Source: Gartner” or wherever.  It’s an empty ritual: no-one makes any pretence of reading the study or critically evaluationg Gartner’s data and conclusions.  We go through the ritual so we can all pretend we’re being objective and rigorous, but in fact we’re not.

This flaccid acceptance of rubbish is widespread.  Some time ago I was in a meeting where the discussion went as follows:

Bloke:	Our target is that 80% of balls will be blue
Ben:	So that means they’re pie-bald and 80% of the surface of each ball will be blue?
Bloke:	Er, 80% of the balls will be blue
Ben:	Oh I see – you mean that for every 100 balls, 80 of them will be entirely blue?
Bloke:	(Snarling) … It’s just a turn of phrase…

It was all I could do not to snarl back “No it isn’t a turn of phrase – it’s a number” but the other people in the meeting weren’t interested.  Which only goes to prove my point, really.  

Imprecision, innumeracy, lack of scepticism, lack of critical thinking, call it what you will: it lures us in to blarney and over-optimism.    Yes, it’s hard to be rigorous and objective because in Business and IT by and large we don’t have standardised tools like double blind controlled trials to base our decisons on.  There are exceptions of course, like the the rules-based numeracy required of accountants and the occasionally rigorous testing of direct marketing campaigns.  But neither of those apply to the world of IT.  

Wherever we work, we cannot give up the responsibility of using our brains and for seeking out and using the best analysis and measurement tools we can find.  The problem is too many people charged with making decisons lack the habit of critical thinking which you need to cut through this sort of fluff.  It’s a cultural issue too: why was I the only person in the meeting who was outraged that a proverb was presented as a metric?  Because I don’t work for an engineering company, for a start.   Finally, the fact that it’s difficult is no excuse for giving up entirely and relying on “street smarts” “judgement” “instinct” or “gut”.  It was gut instinct that led medics to grind up spiders with dung and rub them in to people’s eyes to cure blindness.

Double indemnity

I was scratting around in Facebook, as you do, and the ONLY name I recognised from my Uni days was that of my first boyfriend.  He looked like Henry V and, well, let’s say he was the master of the mind-fuck.

25 years later, he can still do it.  The only one of HIS friends whose name I recognised was my ex husband’s!

I don’t know about you, but I really do find that rather funny.

Too cool for school

Surely the whole point about being young is you do things the adults just don’t get?  You talk in ways adults don’t understand.  You listen to music they dislike.  And you do things on the internet they just can’t keep up with.  I thought that was the whole point?  

So I’m slightly baffled by Georgia Southern University which is – wait for it – running a class in:

How to get on to Facebook.

Huh?  I thought all these little Gen X-ers, Millenium Kids and Net Natives where BORN knowing how to use Facebook and Beebo and Twitter and all the rest of it.  I thought that Facebook stopped being cool when the wrinklies in print and broadcast media got there.  And here is proof positive if ever it was needed: it can’t be cool, it’s taught in school. 

Still, it will at least be a class they attend, I guess.

Which may be why Georgia Southern are running it, of course.

Unspectacular quirks

The Singing Librarian has tagged me to tell y’all six of my unspectactular quirks.  This is harder than it seems.  I rather like showing off (who’d'a thunk?) so while it would be a pleasure to produce spectactular quirks, unspectacular ones require much more application and effort.

1. While I rather like things to be tidy, I’m far less bothered about them being clean.  Your immune system – use it or lose it!  I’m well socialised so I do wash, but my tolerance for dirt is distressingly high.  Well, distressing to other people.  
    
2. I like jargon.  So much of it is clever or funny or both, and there are times when jargon expresses ideas more concisely than simpler language.  However, I do admit that some people use jargon as a substitute for thought, and I have a long term project to teach myself to write more simply.
    
3. Ah Ha!  Let’s make that #3: I have a long term project to teach myself to write more simply. It’s much harder than it looks, writing simply.  I don’t know if I will ever master it.  It’s taking its time: at school I relished the discipline of clawing the meaning out of a piece of writing and turning it into a lucid and logical precis, and the main reason that I still blog is the writing practice it gives me.
    
4. I always wear black underwear.  About 12 or 15 years ago I experienced severe social anguish in the dressing room of a health club when a svelt and glamorous woman donned her svelt and glamorous undies and I realised that my un-matching bra and knickers were socially SO-o-o-o inept.  Ever since then I’ve only ever bought and worn black undies.  Not sets – I’m too mean for that.  Just black, and hoped they match.  This is certainly a quirk, and I am far too un-svelt for my knicker choices to be spectacular.
    
5. I have three browsers on my PC: Google Chrome, which I am using right now and which I like apart from the lack of a spell-checker; Firefox, which I like but which eats system resources, and IE6 which I don’t like because it doesn’t do tabs.  IE7 trashed my PC, so I trashed it.
    
6.  I’ve just been to Shetland for a holiday.  Actually, I think that is rather spectacular, and I’ll write about it next week as simply as I can.  

The rules of this meme are as follows:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. – Check
2. Mention the rules. – Check
3. Tell six unspectacular quirks of yours. – Check
4. Tag six bloggers by linking. – Ah, I feel suddenly shy about this so I am going to invite you to tag yourself.
5. Leave a comment for each blogger.
6. There is no sixth rule, but I agree with the Singing Librarian who things that there should be.      

 

If not duffers, won’t drown

Better drowned than duffers 
if not duffers won’t drown

The young teenagers in Swallows and Amazons spend their entire summer camping and sailing around Lake Coniston.  When their father gives them permission by telegram, he explicitly states that he trusts their common sense and sense of self-preservation to keep them out of danger, and he puts in a  rider about the Darwinian consequences of stupidity.  

This may seem a long way from good Business Analysis, but it’s too easy to let caution drive out common sense and pragmatism when you are in the world of risk avoidance and business rules.  I’d forgotten what it was like to live in a world where I’m trusted not to be stupid.  Shetland is a delight because it is just such a world.  Let me give you three examples:

The Broch at Mousa is an archaeological site of international importance.  Brochs were large cooling-tower shaped buildings built by the Picts in the last few centuries BC.  They were only ever built in Shetland, Orkney and Northern Scotland and little is known about them because the Picts seem to have been wiped out by the Norse in the first millenium AD.  The Broch at Mousa stands 13 meters tall (about 4 storeys) and is the most complete.  

The Broch at Mousa

Compare it in your mind with Stonehenge, the Pyramids at Giza or the Taj Mahal in terms of unique cultural importance.  The building isn’t particularly fragile but it’s a dry-stone building so it is vulnerable to souvenir hunters.  

Get this: there is a cupboard containing torches to help you climb the staircase spiraling around the broch inside its double-skinned walls.  

Inside the broch at Mousa

The underlying assumption here is that they can’t stop you, so they might as well make it safer.  They assume that you’re bright enough to realise that it’s risky particularly so in the wet or the winter, and that you have enough imagination to work out the consequences of breaking a leg on an uninhabited island. If not duffers, won’t fall.

Sign on the door of the Broch at Mousa

Second example:  we had a long chat about shipwrecks with the chap who was manning the Croft House Museum.  He had a practical interest in the subject because he’d been the last man to sound the foghorn at the light-house where we were staying.   We talked about the ferry that ran aground at Blackpool.  

The Blackpool Ferry - originally came to rest tilted at an angle but has now sunk on to its side

He simply could not understand why there were security guards around it.  If not duffers, won’t be crushed.  

Final example: the coolest level crossing in the world is where the road crosses the runway at Sumburgh airport.  There are lights, there is a bloke and a barrier but there’s nothing to stop you hanging a left and drag-racing.  If not duffers won’t burn up and down the runway as fast as your souped up Purgeot 206 will take you.

It would be easy to distract myself with a Daily Mail style rant about ‘elf an’ safety gorn mad, and it would be equally easy to speculate romantically that life on Shetland was so hard for so long that common sense is ingrained (the duffers presumably having been darwined out of the population) but that’s not really the point I’m making.

I am just going to note that if part of the role of the Business Analyst is to design lean systems that do just enough and no more, systems that are as simple as possible but no simpler, then Shetland is a living case study in how to do it.

Besides being a superb place for a holiday.

Do more! Procrastinate.

I’m off on my hols this evening, but I’ve spent most of this weekend so far procrastinating.  There’s one phone call I have to make, and I’ve managed to put it off for 48 hours.  But that has left me fidgety all weekend.

In fact, when I look at my to do list I see I’ve done it all including stuff I’ve avoided or forgotten for weeks.  But since everything I did was a displacement activity, it’s all been strangely unsatisfying.

There’s an irritating exercise they do in Time Management classes:  The tutor gets a great big open topped glass jar and a bunch of rocks and puts the rocks in the jar until it’s full.  They then say “is it full” and of course the students say “yes”.  Then the tutor gets a bunch of medium size rocks and puts them in the jar and shakes them down so that they settle down around the big rocks and says “is it full”.   Some students get it and say “no” and some don’t and say “yes”.  Then the tutor puts in sand, and all the students think it must be full by now. Finally the tutor pours in water.

The lesson you are supposed to draw from this is to do the big stuff first and you’ll get much more in than you expect.  The other lesson is not to lift up a large jar full of rocks sand and water because it will smash on the floor if you drop it.

You see, I disagree with that lesson. (I would, of course).

Procrastination is the most wonderful tool if you fill in the time with displacement activities.   I have actually done everything on my list, except make that phone call.  Procrastination may be unsatisfying, but it can be remarkably effective.  You just have to choose what to procrastinate about.

Right, that’s me.  See you in a fortnight.