John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Jumbleup: 27 December 2005: A lot's happened for me to blog about. There was the irritating American woman in the post office who started her sentence with 'actually ... ' and went on to say (to the postmaster) ' .. I need to borrow your pen'. No please, no thank-you, no 'would you mind if'. Actually, very irritating.; There was the day when I got Dick a Dum Dum and Hortense Cumberbatch in my head. Why? Secrets and Lies was the film that was so funny, yet so tragic that I couldn't let it all out in the cinema and when I got outside I tried to talk about it and just collapsed helplessly to the floor.; There was the awesome pleasure on my birthday of driving to York listening to a recent and a 3-month old NME cover CD and discovering the collapsing beauty of The Go! Team .. Ladyflash sounds like a DJ's collection's fallen off the wall and somehow jigsawed together in a breathtakingly random way. There's Motown and big beat, there's scratching, even banjo and a flute solo. It's produced with the innocence of a sixth form project, but above all, it makes you smile. Beautifully crazy.; Then there was the realisation that the Arctic Monkeys are just bloody good. Their one song (Fake Tales of San Francisco) on those CDs completely stands out. I don't think theirs is a tale of Internet marketing success, I think they're just very, very good and would have succeeded with a strategy of asking grandmas to pass on a good word.; I even went to a school re-union, photos to follow.; I've been getting into sky too, particularly sunrises. I've a whole week of sunrise photographs to share with you one day.; What are those jokes "what's the difference between a lighthouse and a mouse" on? Where do you want me to start? One's a mammal, the other's a man-made building ...; I had a dream I'd bought a washing machine from a member of The Raincoats, I couldn't remember which one, only that it wasn't Gina Birch. I thought her name began with an n so maybe it was Ana Da Silva.; Then there was the best Barbara Ellen (Observer) piece ever .. it turns out that people only have one-night stands with people they don't really like. That's because it's OK to take the risk because you've no intention of staying even friends with each other afterwards. If you actually like someone, you're likely to take it slowly. You don't want to mess things up, so, a steady hand at the tiller is required. That's excellent news for me. It means the reason I've never had a one-night stand isn't because I'm horrible, but quite the opposite. Barbara, that's just fantastic. Have I ever told you how beautiful you look in the candlelight?
blog: 26 December 2005: Times they are a changin'. You'll have noticed not a lot of blog activity in the last couple of weeks. Well, that's because I've crossed the Rubicon.; Basically, way back in the eighties I used to earn a decent wage working for a PR company. I ran the media department and I employed a chap (Smuts, aforementioned) fresh from a marketing degree in South Africa. We became best buddies, and eventually decided that we'd be better off leaving and forming our own company selling media information, a media directory.; Believe it or not, we created our own media directory using a Sinclair QL and a daisy wheel printer made of real metal. Shockingly, we sold a few.; That company grew into a PR and marketing company. We were idealists. We wanted a great company, one that was good to its staff, good to its customers, and good to the environment. Possibly predictably, it didn't work. There were some good times, but eventually Smuts and I parted company .. it's to his eternal credit that he still talks to me .. and I took the company on to the dizzy heights of 17 employees and then to the dizzy depths of going bust. I paid reasonable wages, but that left the company on the breadline all the time, and any money we did get, I tended to plough back into the company one way or another to try to help it to grow, so there was never any reserve.; Through all that, including the dark days of me earning nothing or very nearly nothing, and of us having 50p a week for treats, Ali stood by me, and us, coming over to cook full Sunday dinners and paying for holidays and such like.; She even took herself off to study as an Occupational Therapist for three years, and supported herself, pretty much, since I couldn't.; When she graduated, she wanted to move by the sea, and given my predilection for working at my failing enterprise, she got a job in Scarborough and took off. Not long after, she bought the house we live in now and which is still hers.; It was a while before I really realised my business wasn't doing what it had to do. I was, really, a great marketeer, but I was spending my days refereeing between frustrated employees. In the end, I decided I'd just be a marketing consultant on my own, made my employees redundant, and one dark and long night, drove the contents of my office to Scarborough in a Luton van, arriving at about 3am where, together with Ali and a couple of friends, we filled her house with boxes until there was just a corridor to the kitchen, and almost nowhere to sit. I'd arrived.; Later that year, I was wandering around Scarborough and saw an advertisement for the Scarborough campus of Hull University and their Internet Computing course. I don't believe in fate, but when something so unique (at the time, it was a unique course) is right on your doorstep, and you stumble across it, well that's fate and sometimes I do believe in accepting the direction life blows you in.; Ali supported me through that course too .. yet another three years of living on her wages. We got no loan, and no grant. I paid my way doing DIY .. I built the kitchen in the first year, but later was getting web development work.; When I graduated, after a couple of weeks I had a full roster of clients and it's been that way ever since, but at first, I believed (I still believe) that I should be working for next to nothing because I was, effectively, a rookie developer (albeit with a world of business and marketing experience). So I developed my pricing method which basically means if I'm doing something new, I'll do it for nothing. For the next client or year, I'll do it for a fiver an hour. The next, a tenner and so on until I reach the going rate for the task.; The other thing that seems obvious is that, having graduated two years ago, I'm still learning. A degree is just an introduction. I knew everything at an introductory level, I could put things into context and make judgments between technologies and strategies, but I was no seasoned professional. Not only did I not know anything in detail, but I didn't have a huge lot of specific experience either, I mean, in things like PHP programming. I had plenty of experience in life, business, and marketing, and plenty of technical experience supporting computer systems and, prior to that, programming them.; So I implemented a scheme whereby everything I was doing was supplemented by learning. I have a strategy to offset the known problem of forgetting almost everything you're taught after a year or two, and whatever I'm doing, I try to supplement it with a little learning. My room is stuffed with books .. I'm studying for the Linux Professional Institute exam formally, but also anytime I come across a problem I can't solve, I reason that I've some missing knowledge and set about plugging the gap, by buying a book, and then adding that book to my study plan. Learning time, of course, is never chargeable even if it's for a specific client's project.; All this is investment in myself, investment in my future. All fine. Except it all adds up to "so, John, if you charge £p per hour, and you work 50 hours a week, how come you are only earning £p x 15 per week?" Very good question.; I don't really like targets. I don't like priorities either. Both mean there are things you should be doing that never get done. I aim to evolve a repeatable, long-term profitable equilibrium, a system that reacts in a measured way to various metrics. For instance, I know what I'll do if I lose a client and end up with a free time slot, and I know what I'll do if I lose two clients. I know how to handle too many clients, and, with a little more work on COSMIC FFP I'll be able to let clients know a budget figure and timings for developing their projects. How would I be able to do that if I were forever blown about by those with the loudest demands?; So there I was, ticking along, earning perhaps 40% of my potential but happy and working hard and learning new things and occasionally blogging what interested me along the way. And then something happened.; The last two months were supposed to be good months, income-wise. I wasn't on holiday, no-one was coming to stay, nothing was happening to get in my way. Pretty much everything I do now is at the going rate as I have enough experience, and so by Christmas I should be reasonably comfortable. But I wasn't. I'm struggling, in fact, to pay my half of the household bills. So far this month I've received £100.; My partner, too, was starting to look around at other career options. I couldn't rely on her income to keep us afloat while I happily meander from day to day. It's become clear that now is payback time. Now is the time when I should be able to give my partner the freedom she's given me, allowing her to flower and develop her career.; So I switched my day around. Evolution wasn't enough, I revolutionised my working day. Changed it completely. And by Jove it's worked! Suddenly I am managing to work the alotted hours for each client, and it's all productive work, not mixed in with learning and development tasks. This month, possibly for the first time ever, I've hit the notional income target that I set when I started out. Blimey.; The big unknown is what the clients will act. They have been party to the meandering, they've been happy to pay a little each month and for steady progress to be made. Recently, however, there has been a shuffling of feet. Nothing overt, but a feeling of .. well, maybe it's about time this project was delivered.; Obviously I've spoken with my clients and I'll speak with them again on this subject, but I sense a new wind, completed projects and a timeslot move-around, a new energy, a strength and determination in what I do. I think I've realised that I've actually arrived now. It may mean new clients, so I'm no longer trying to put off new business, in fact, I'm seeking it (so if you know anyone who wants to improve the way they use the Internet, let me know).; So that, in short ( :-) ) is why I've not been blogging so much. It's not the end of my blog, but it is a change in it. I'll probably be less frequent, although I've just as much to say. I may be more businesslike. We'll see. But I hope you stick around and continue to read .. I'm certainly not going anywhere, this blog has been great fun and I've received some great feedback too.; If you don't want to keep manually checking to see whether I've published anything new, you can get notified when I do by using my rss feed. Your email client will probably handle RSS for you, or perhaps use the Firefox plugin Sage, I'm sure you'll work out a way but if not, get in touch and I'll work it through with you.; Till the next time ..
Brenda shock: 10 December 2005: Brenda's gone. It can't be! We love you. Not enough to pick up the phone and vote, obviously. That'll teach me.
York parking: 8 December 2005: This works, but I just had to click on all of the Ps to work out my options. I need all day parking. I just printed my own map and annotated it, crossing out the Ps that don't offer all day parking, and encircling each P with a ring for each hundred car capacity it has. Something tells me I shouldn't have had to do that. Different sized symbols to reflect capacity would be nice, and different symbols for short term, all day, and evening parking, or a way of switching off the ones you don't want, would improve it.
Smuts v Stallman: 8 December 2005: I have a friend who is related to Jan Christian Smuts so I just read the biography by Kenneth Ingham.; Smuts fought in the Boer War and rose to be prime minister of South Africa twice. He was popular among world leaders, a friend of Churchill, and the British saw him as exotic and took him to their hearts in the darkest days of the second world war.; Interestingly, I'm not sure Ingham likes Smuts very much, he seems to be constantly sniping at him.; What Smuts did have was self assurance. Classified by Kerlinger's four ways of knowing, Smuts is a perfect example of someone who knows things are true through intuition. Ingham writes that Smuts had a good intellect and once he'd worked something out, he'd consider anyone who disagreed with him to be either stupid (because they didn't reach the same, self evident conclusion), or an enemy.; Kerlinger says the problem with the method of intuition comes when two or more experts work something out differently. He also cites a Greek philosopher (this is from memory) who reasoned that women have fewer teeth than men, without actually bothering to check.; So the thing that dogged Smuts throughout his life was his belief that native black Africans were simply incapable of reaching Western European standards of civilisation. It didn't matter that there were Africans already educated along European lines by missionary schools. Facts have no importance to someone who knows by intuition. There's no reference in the book about Smuts referring to science, although he probably thought he was part of that tradition of intellectual curiosity.; However it wasn't that he wished Africans ill. He simply thought that everyone's interests were best served by having white people who had, after all, created the infrastructure of the country, rule that country, and black people cordoned off into separate areas where they could continue to live as their nature intended. That sounds bad, I can't seem to write what I really mean. There's nothing in the book that says Smuts wished any harm to Africans, his policies were for their benefit too. There was, for instance, a minimum wage.; Cordoning-off Africans allowed physical control but aided the development of social and intellectual movements. Smuts, however, pretty much ignored all black calls for equality, land rights and so on, again believing that he knew what was best.; Smuts enjoyed the company of women, not particularly in a sexual sense, but he felt more comfortable with them than with men. Perhaps there was something feminine in his style too, because he was a networker who enjoyed discourse with the world's leaders. Through this, he could gather ideas from across the world and weave his own theories. Many times Ingham says Smuts gave an important speech, wrote a report, or sent a letter of advice to a world leader, which, although important because of the combination, actually contained nothing new. Smuts took on board the things he heard from his network of world leaders and wove those ideas together to form something new. In a sense, he was the salesman selling people what they had told him they wanted. He cooked new meals from existing ingredients. Perhaps he added zest, spice. Coming, bronzed, from South Africa, he was exotic and charming, and being so far away, his ideas weren't tainted by involvement. He had a birds eye view of the machinations of the world.; Smuts' strategy then, was to use his social skills and his intellect to put himself in a position where he could hear what was happening (he was uncannily skilful at predicting the early moves of the second world war) and feed it back to people with verve and urgency.; Richard Stallman is another man who is sure of his intellect, but in this case with good reason. He was always more or less top of his class, and in later specialist maths classes was evidently more capable than his peers who later became maths professors. He considers himself borderline autistic. I saw no evidence of Stallman turning to science as such either in the book Free as in Freedom although you might say he is a supreme computer scientist.; Despite both being sure of themselves intellectually their characters and situations inspired different strategies. Stallmans is clearly stated. He says he can't think ahead, he can't think what people's next moves will be. He's spent his life making sure the base is as strong as it can be. That base is the General Public Licence, a software licence that allows free distribution, access to the software and the right to make changes to it. It's because of the GPL that we have such a vibrant free and open source software industry today. Linux, for instance, carries the GPL licence.; Smuts, on the other hand, seemed not to tackle the issues of South Africa much at all, except in respect of its position within the Commonwealth and on the world stage. His world was all strategic, and all about high ideas and communication, something Stallman was notoriously bad at.; Having read books on success strategies, my mind isn't matching these strategies with anything I remember reading. What I'm interested in, then, is what insight can be gleaned about strategy from these two men who have both enjoyed success, who started with perhaps similar predilections but who employed completely different strategies and achieved success with them.; Oh, there was one other thing from the book which struck me. Seen from Smuts' point of view, as confidant to world leaders and as a strategic overseer, the build up to World War II has an air of dark inevitability. There seems to be nothing any leader can do to stop the world powers, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy moving inexorably towards war. That inevitability must have been a hell of a feeling at the time for everyone. Ordinary people are helpless anyway, but if their leaders could see no way out, that's quite a place to be.; This was a failure of one of Smuts' pet projects, the League of Nations, and it's how the United Nations came about. That and nuclear MAD seems to have worked so far at least.; Linux: next
Ellen MacArthur: 7 December 2005: We all know Ellen Mac Arthur as the fastest round the world yachting elf, but something even more special happened on Sunday's Top Gear.; As regular viewers will know, each week the program places a 'star in a reasonably priced car'. Resident incognito car racing expert The Stig trains the star to race around the Top Gear track, and their resulting times are recorded from week to week in a chart.; Remembering that there's nothing but the sea in MacArthur's head, that she spends 6 months a year out on it, she's only really owned a series of lacklustre cars, has no interest in them, and felt she could have done better if she'd had just one more lap, pleaded for it and was refused. Remembering also that the list contains people who have plenty of money and time to mess around in nice cars, and people who have a real interest in fast cars, such as Jay Kay, she was waiting for a middle score.; She came top, 1m 46.7s. The fastest ever: Damon Hill, on a separate list for Formula 1 drivers, came in at 1m 46.3s.; So that raises a really fascinating question. Ellen MacArthur's strategies are winning strategies, whatever she applies herself to. It's her, not the sport she's chosen. I wonder what those strategies are. My g/f immediately thought she'd spotted them "there's someone who listens to what she's told and applies it precisely".; That would suggest a very female way of being the best. My immediate thought is that a bloke would listen to The Stig, think "yeah, but ... ", and do his own thing anyway. Blokes don't really respect other people's opinions, they like to do their own thing. Winning isn't worth winning unless you've done it through your own efforts, it would feel false if you won by taking other people's advice.; I wonder if this is the triumph of a lack of ego. Is MacArthur completely able to take advice on board, so totally switched-on, hearing and learning everything without filtering it through any ego? Is she also so well trained, not just strength but reaction times and precision, that she's physically capable of implementing exactly what she's told?; There's an Ellen MacArthur book knocking around the house somewhere, I need to read that to see if I can work out what's going on.