About a year ago, I went though one of those few moments when I thought my normal powers of memory had somehow deserted me. It was not really anything important I couldn't remember, just the word that describes the the lights you see when you squeeze your eyes tight shut. Like this...

So not very significant in the scheme of things: not one of the words I actually use very often in conversation or in Powerpoint presentations. Just annoying, because the word was just lurking on the edge of my perception, out of reach. But something that you can get a bit obsessed about when information normally falls to hand or mind quickly...

So I Googled and Wiki'd and all those searching jobs that normally count as work, and kept finding Tom, Nicole and Stanley and their film, and other flotsam and jetsam on the endless waves of Web surf.

But, eventually, I created a mega-whiz, sharp-as-a-scalpel, spot-on search string that gave me that Eureka moment...Ding!

The word I was looking for was "Phosphene"

Mind you the Eureka moment was over quickly, as I came to that odd feeling that I had never known the word at all so how could I have semi-forgotten or demi-remembered it? But let us not confuse the story with such technical plot twists and devices.

Palimpsest is another word a bit like Phosphene, but in reverse, I know what the letters say, but the meaning slips my mind (a reused bit of parchment, in fact). It is however a word that I have read many times but never ever had the need to write down - until today. It is definitely a clever Stephen Fry sort of a word, or maybe a Will Self word

I wrote "normal powers of memory" at the top of this piece, though we Jungian Is "enjoy" the physical aspects of memory that are imposed by our brain chemitstry, being the dominant long acetylcholine pathway, compared the the short dopamine pathway of Es out there.

If you looked inside my head, it might look something like this...

...but brighter and probably in colour.

So I worked out many years ago that I should not waste my time remembering stuff, when a notebook works much better.

And so on into the Wonderful World of the Web, I have always found it useful to clip bits out and paste them into my digital scrapbook for longevity and to act as my long-term cyber memory. I gave up on browser Favourites early, as they quickly became useless signposts to where information was no more.

In my Adobe period, I printed bits of the Web to PDF files and stored them in a byzantine filing structure. But, eventually I settled on Onfolio and paid some brass for a real product...and then Microsoft bought it and gave me back my money because they were giving it away free in the Windows Live toolbar...then to become a zombie, twilighting product. The death knell was when they switched off the licensing servers last September.

RIP, Onfolio, you served me well

So I had to indulge in one of those distress-driven searches to find a new digital brain. I tried Ultra-Recall which can import Onfolio collections, but has the user experience of a broken lift. I tried TopicScape but that felt like I was in Castle Wolfenstein or Jurassic Park (the " 'I know this, it's UNIX' whilst looking at a mad graphical computerscape " moment), and a host of other paraphernalia and arcana.

So I have ended up with MacroPool's Web Research, which feels a bit like Onfolio...but German...so hopefully it will be most efficient. We'll see...

Last week seemed to revolve around cars and driving, starting the week with long distance trips (to Canterbury and Salisbury), then fixing broken cars, a damaged engine undertray and nixed horns from an unwarranted attack by a particularly vicious piece of traffic calming, plus a petrol leak, culminating in thrashing my old M5 around Cadwell Park on a track day on Friday (a good way to end the week!).  

Cadwell Park is mostly associated with bikers, but is also quite entertaining in a car, especially a tail-happy BMW - when I first enquired about track day insurance a while ago, the bod on the phone gave me a quote, and then when I said it was Cadwell, they said, ah, and added another 50%!

Here is the old girl in her war paint...


...none the worse for our trip into the bushes in the snow a few weeks ago.

In a mad moment of preparation before one of the long drives, we threw out the rubbish bag from the back of the car.  I later got a text from home saying that we had just managed to recycle 28 empty Red Bull cans: something of a record even for me.

Quite coincidentally, I was idly running my eye over two piles of books on the table in my study, all in the process of being read or passing through to the bookshelves...


On the right is a workaday pile of business books that show some current industry themes (Semantic Web, Information Security, Agile IT Organisations..).  The left-hand pile, however, reveals my recent predeliction for texts de-bunking mumbo-jumbo in all its irrational varieties, and I wonder if, maybe, this signals the start of the slippery slope to becoming Grumpy?

OK, Step forward, one and all, to tell me I'm already there...

Anyway, connecting Red Bull with grumpiness in any form, whether caused by lack of sleep, or too much blood in my caffeine stream, I was particularly exercised last week by an article in the paper - so, much so that I tore it out and carried it in my wallet, waving it at people, and saying "Says Who?".

I have it here now and I am waving it at the screen in an agitated way.  It is entitled "Night-owl children ruin body clocks" from the Sunday Times, and the first sentence reads "Children who are allowed to stay up past their bedtime watching television or playing on a computer are at risk of late-night sleeplessness for the rest of their lives".  To me this is grade A bunkum, as despite the strictest bed-times enforced by my parents, a thin gruel of educational TV and definitely no computer games (not invented), today I inhabit a nether-world of late nights, living in a time zone that is somewhere about GMT - 2 ("Mid-Atlantic" according to Windows clock) or GMT - 3  ("Montevideo/Buenos Aires/Georgetown/Greenland").

I recall a moment during an interview many years ago with PWC Management Consulting, walking around the offices taking in the atmosphere. My escort said "We have hot-desking here, and starting time is 9-30am" (how civilised, I thought), "but if you don't get in by 7am then you don't get a desk" (ho ho, st&ff that for a game of soldiers, I thought)

Who are these mysterious people, "they" who dictate when we should sleep and wake? Who says what bedtime is and should be?  In a world of the Internet, Digital TV and 24hour opening at Tesco who needs to have a set bedtime?  Says Who?  Nanny? Granny? the NHS? [see footnote]

Alvin Toffler put his finger on this point in "Future Shock" many years ago, when he commented on the transition from cock-crow, to factory whistle and school bell - training us all to live, work and sleep to a rhythm of coordinated factory production.  Be a good little robot, and Thank Ford for the Brave New World. (OK, mixed literary allusions there, I know)

Well, ranting aside, I was pleased to see later in the week, another article in the same domain, but this one said  Teenagers improve grades with a lie-in.....    Unlike Matter and anti-Matter which annihilate themselves in a E=MC² sort of way when they get mixed together, News and anti-News stories just sort of disappear with a slight "moo" and a whiff of fish.

And so to bed...


[footnote: the worrying aspect is that the article quotes the sort of statistics about insomnia, sleep-walking and sleep-related breathing problems that some intellectually challenged politician might seize on to force us all to go to bed at 8pm...for our own good]

Being of a fairly rational turn of mind, I don't have much truck with Numerology and similar horoscopological mumbo-jumbo, but I have, over the years, observed that product development tends to have difficulties around 7th major version of a piece of software, the antithesis of the "lucky number 7".  This is not a rigorously tested rule (it could be 5 or 6 or 7 or 8), but something more of an intuition with some empirical basis: rule or not, if it comes to pass for Microsoft, it does not bode well for Windows 7.

...well, not according to the entrails of this goat that I have been using to forecast the future of the global banking system, anyway...

A more robust, analytical explanation is that these difficulties are some manifestation of James Utterback theories about dynamics of innovation; of product and process innovation and dominant designs...



... maybe mixed with a bit of boredom, laziness, hubris, and less rational, human things (lemma  here)

Windows is moving from Vista (6), to version 7, and so maybe it already had its bad moment.  However, it is difficult to see how much more development can go into the product as it is, at 28 years old, quite far down the right hand end of the innovation curve, beyond the flush of youth (worrying about its pension, and oooh, it is so chilly, let's turn the fire up, and what are we having for lunch, i've lost my teeth...)

Exercise for the reader: try plotting where you think Windows 1.0, 3.1, 95, XP and Vista fit on the curve?

Many of the other core information technologies we hold dear today are also really quite ancient: RDBMS, Word Processors, Spreadsheets, all dating from the 1970-80s.  So what's new in the world, multi-touch, then, the much touted new technology for Win 7, who needs it on a desktop, I ask you? 

Don't get me going about Tom Cruise and Minority Report - although I do still keep half an eye on developments in data gloves...

There is a lot of talk of Cloud Computing and other exciting things, but apart from the fact that it is, in the main, new applications that will drive up usage, not base technologies, there is an interesting trend about where computing stuff actually happens, and more of it is likely to be happening in non-human places, and between consenting machines...

If these population estimates above are any way true, then only about 8% of connected devices are human-type information appliances, the other 92% are machine or devices that do things useful or mysterious - the balance is tilted to the machines by the 50 billion cockroaches in the basement;  analogous to the rat statistic - you are never more than six feet from one, but you may not know it...

If you take this Machine-to-Machine (M2M) intelligent device view of the world and mash it up with the Semantic Web & RDF  - creating machine readable data on the web, and maybe, as a by-product, defining the lingua franca so that machine can talk unto machine.

So, if the washing machine says, "I'll be back", get the h*ll out, Judgement Day is coming!

Confusing as ever, over the last couple of days, the Lincolnshire Wolds handed out another helping of its quixotic and capricious micro-climate.

Whilst the rest of Britain wears a white overcoat, the skies over the Wolds looked like this...

...and the ground looked like this...

...ok, a little bit of snow, and it was slippery down the (unsalted) hill to town. Indeed, the score on the journey out on Monday morning was:

• An oil lorry stuck in the mud/slush in the grass verge
• An articulated grain lorry that had slid to a halt up the hill - being rescued by local farmer and tractor
• one lady who had parked her car up the nice new Miss-Marple style finger posts
• a couple of dainty wiggles and balletic sideways moves from the 4x4

But we made it past the place where, a couple of weeks ago, I took a 180 degree flip into the mud and bushes (rear wheel drive that time), on the ice-sheet provided kindly by Anglian Water who have never fixed the leak from the hill-top reservoir, and past the useless grit bin at the top of the hill.

Isn't there some sense of completeness in the Cosmos, in the fact that Wikipedia has an entry on grit bins (with pictures). Although this article and similar might give suggest some organisations have a rather more proprietorial attitude to their bins than Wackipedia might suggest...

The keener-eyed amongst you may be wondering about the pile of junk in the foreground - a legacy of last summer holiday. Unlike the sun-worshippers and other more conventional holidaymakers, I set myself the task of making a Pond Cam, to observe the comings and goings at the pond (and prove that I still "cut it" on a down and dirty bit of systems integration and soldering). And here it is replete with wireless infra-red camera and solar panel...

Well it works (day and night), which was a good result, but not without its challenges, like the relatively short range of the wireless transmitter, so this coming year I might just take a few days off in the summer to IP-enable the pond to close down the distance. Well, it is already mains-powered, so why not a little bit of powerline Ethernet, an IP Web-cam and some video streaming...

A bit of context here: It's a wildlife pond so is intended to look a bit scruffy, with bits of old rotting tree stumps (no suburban goldfish here), and it does the job very well!

Roll on summer (or the promised, but as yet unseen 15cm of snow).

Life, media-style, is normally quiet in the nether regions of Lincolnshire, but having had an earthquake last year, it seems that the papers are thirsting for more excitements from the Wolds.  So we have started the year with an exciting story "Tentacled Alien Destroys Wind Farm Generator", pictured below just after the accident (a genuine photo, for sure)...


I have commented before about the impact of global warming, but I think having an ocean-going octopus visiting now is rather premature, and in fact any, extra-terrestrial cephalopods foolish enough to embrace a windmill is going to end up as sushi.

Of course, the alien story is a good way of diverting attention from the otherwise suffocating Credit Crunch

I was going to write something clever about "interesting times" here but when looking up the origin of the phrase it turns out that the alleged curse has very little provenance - the quixotic and capricious Wikipedia suggest it might be related to the proverb "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period" (寧 為太平犬，不做亂 世人; pinyin: níng wéi tàipíng quǎn, bù zuò luànshì rén).

Bubbles are always predictable with 20:20 hindsight, and make a nonsense of some of the great prognostications and punditry, when all comes crashing to the ground.  Arthur C. Clarke summed up the dangers of prophecy as Failure of Imagination, and Failure of Nerve.  To which we could probably add Failure of Intelligence to make an unholy trinity.  Intelligence comes in many forms of thinking process as well as keeping a good look-out.  Previous major failures of forecasting include the dot.com bust, of the prior forecasts for commercial trends were spectacularly off:

... and which also makes me think that, in the terms of control systems theory, that the whole global commercial and financial system is large and complex enough not to observable, let alone controllable (although the jury is out as to whether it is quantum indeterminate).

Which brings me to one of the classic, but flawed frameworks that are often used in the crystal-ball gazing process: the PEST analysis which attempts to scan important trends in Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural and Technological  domains.  Variants posited include:

• PESTLE/PESTEL - Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, Environmental;

• PESTLIED - Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, International, Environmental, Demographic;

• STEEPLE - Sociodemographic, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical;

• SLEPT- Social, Legal, Economic, Political, Technological

• FARM: Feudal, Agricultural, Religious, Magical (for medieval lords, thanes and serfs, etc..)

OK I made the last one up, but it demonstrates that PEST is a rather basic cookie-cutter analytical tool, and certainly not MECE  in its scope.  Inevitably, the framework you use for forecasting is influenced by the current frame of reference and warps the lens with which you look at and filter the trends.

In the spirit of improvement, albeit strapping wings to a pig, I can offer my own variant: PESTO.  The "O" stands for "Oh sh*t", that category of all other things that we didn't think about in the other four categories, or plain just aren't under the microscope, or even do not yet exist, be imagined or people don't think can happen, and so on.

The Red Queen trumps Karl Marx - change is constant and things always move on, become different. Change is, not dialectical, sorry Karl, you backed the wrong horse.

The solutions to long term forecasting problems, is to think/work in short cycles, and react/respond quickly to keep up with the changes, and adapt to events as they arise.  Be Agile!

Postscript: I cannot finish without acknowledging the death of my Uncle Edward in December, the last Gueritz of his generation, and remarkable with it. You can read his story here