The Rantings of the barely human.
Hi I have always liked model trains and to mix them with a Xmas tree is great. 2 years ago I bought a little set.(pic 1) last year we made a small layout with parts of my set (pic 2) and this year we have given it our all. me doing the technical bits and Wendy adding her artistic flair to it. (rest of pics )
Pic 1
Pic 2
Its been ages since I’ve shared what I’ve been up to in here. My bad, how can I justify such a terrible absence of updates?
Well the major news is that I’ve taken the plunge and I am going properly freelance in line with our plans for LDC. Its been good to see my LDC compadres Matt and Julian make a success of it and its exciting to now be on the same road. The stuff I’m doing is varying hugely, from dealing with the security and standards implications of the storage of details for minors, though application clustering on cloud services for the lowest cost, past IBM connections customisation and freaky Java on domino and finishing with cutting edge mobile on the latest frameworks.
And its been great, I’m enjoying the variety and getting to grips with new projects. Plus I’ve been doing some fascinating development work for start-ups which enable me to work on things that are truly objects of grace and beauty.
So it’s going well, and if you have stuff you want doing please give me a kick (all my contact methods are on the top left of this page). Always glad to talk it over.
Today we loose Bruce Elgort from OpenNTF, its a complete bummer as Bruce is one of the true driving forces behind so much on the IBM/Lotus community
Everything from his loyalty to existing technology to his whole sale acceptance of everything new and cool has always made him not only fun but interesting and informative to be around.
A lot of us owe our start in the IBM community to Bruce and he will be impossible to replace.
Personally I think the kids at the college he is teaching at don’t deserve him, but that’s just me
Now I always classed my self as an equal opportunity’s person when it came to women in IT, I had always worked with women and the majority of my bosses and PMs for projects for major client have always been women ( I prefer women as PM’s in large clients as there is normally less chest beating and more getting on with the job) but recency I have discovered that I had far less of an understanding than I thought I had and to truly work well with the other 50% of mankind you have to do more than think of them as men in dresses you have to see the world and it problems from their point of view, this was down to a number of friends enlightening me and to attending things like the nerd girl talks at IBM conferences.
I realised I lacked some understanding, so when This week in tech mentioned “Lean In” by sheryl Sandberg” I figured I would give it a read and see if I could learn something.
And indeed I did, I gained a much better understanding of woman’s issues both from a work and from a home life point of view and how to assist with these. how simple decisions that feel like common sense arn’t and in fact re-enforce social stereo types (both male and female) and a bit of empathy can go a long way (this last I already knew)
But much to my surprise I took away far more than just this, I took away,
The book is not perfect, the first and last chapters really have to be battled thought, and the first feels like it is written by a cross between and hippy and a 80’s power manager, but give it time and once Mrs Sandberg gets to the meat of her experiences you will find it most enlightening.
On Friday I got an amazon parcel, it turned out to be “the Ultimate Rice Cooker Cookbook” and was sent by Andrew Magerman , its appearance has quite made my week!!, my first gift from a friend i have made from the lotus community and related to a blog post Tooo!, awesome!
after some though this turns out to be not quite true:
That’s what friends are for.
You’re welcome!