May 2017 from russelldavies on Vimeo.
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We've been lucky enough to live in the same flat for more than fifteen years.
And one of the benefits of being in the same place for a long time is I finally know where the scissors are. They're where the scissors usually are. We've been here long enough for things to find a place and for the persistence of time and habit to return them to that place, more often than not. And the more often they're there the more likely they are to be there. It might not be the best place for them, but it's the place where they are.
I'm finding a similar thing happening on my phone. I use Things, for instance, as a To Do manager. I'm always trying new ones, many of them look very fine, but I seem to find Things under my thumb when I look down while To Do ing. And I'm To Do ing more and more. The tiniest thing crosses my mind and I thumb it into Things, things that I might be about to do right now, things I'm thinking about for when I get to the top of the stairs.
This pleases me. Partly because it makes me more likely do stuff, partly because it feels like an investment in a useful habit.
I feel like I'm getting more forgetful as I get older, I have no idea if I actually am, obviously, I can't be objective about it, but it's not impossible and it's certainly not going to decrease. Developing a well-worn To Do habit, in a trusted and well understood app feels like a useful hedge against increasing forgetfulness, a sort of ageing remedy, one that's digital rather than pharmaceutical, a behavioural equivalent of the scissors being where the scissors are.
May 28, 2017 | Permalink
There's a sub-genre I enjoy, I guess you'd call it Stories About The Obsessive Behaviour of Rich, Creative People. Karl Lagerfeld is normally involved. It might also be called Things I Might Do If I Were Rich, And Creative.
There's a choice example in last week's New Yorker, a profile of legendary printer Gerhard Steidl.
Two samples:
"Steidl’s place at the head of the table is indicated by a stack of cream-colored notecards, made to his specifications at a nineteenth-century paper mill on the west coast of Sweden. He uses notecards to annotate his conversations, and writes on them with Staedtler pens, which he keeps, lined up, in the breast pocket of the white lab coat he wears while working. All of Steidl’s choices are refined. “He has the best paper scissors on earth,” Singh told me."
and
"Steidl is driven to Paris dozens of times a year. He makes the trip in a Volkswagen Phaeton in which the passenger-side seats have been replaced by a bed, as in the first-class cabin of an aircraft. He drinks a glass of good red wine before leaving Paris, and is asleep, sandwiched between two pillows, by the time the driver has reached the periphérique. “I wake up when the car gets off the highway—I see the Burger King sign, and I know I have arrived in Göttingen,” he told me. “Not one minute earlier.”
These stories are not just about self-indulgence. They're about obsession and attention to detail, I suspect the riches are a product of that obsession not the cause of it. Beyond a certain point they feed each other.
Gerhard Steidl Is Making Books An Art Form
(Karl Lagerfeld is involved)
May 21, 2017 | Permalink
I always thought the best written and most useful pieces of communication produced at GDS were our incident reports. As I remember they used to be only internal but now, splendidly, they're on the blog.
This is a textbook example from Dai. It's technically accurate yet understandable by the layperson. It describes what happened and what mistakes were made, clearly, without hysteria and lays out a plan for fixing it.
One of the reasons these are so good is that they're written by the people who worked the problem, they're not filtered through a comms team.
Wouldn't it be useful if we got one of these that everyone could read about WannaCrypt / the NHS hack?
It would have to start with the immediate technicalities. And I guess there'd have to be hundreds of different ones, because responsibility in the NHS is so dispersed. But maybe someone (NHS Digital?) could draw them together.
The 'what next' section would be tricky. It would be difficult to expect the authors of an incident report to address decades of failed leadership and exploitation by vendors but they might at least get to point out that this is the failure of a system and a culture, not the individual fault of some administrators or engineers.
More importantly, as these incident reports started to accumulate - because the incidents aren't going to stop - they'd constitute a body of evidence about the problems we're facing. And they'd be a valuable resource in the education of the journalists and decision-makers who currently babble away so cluelessly about this stuff.
(Obviously, it's possible this already exists, or someone's working on it, and it's a well established procedure. If this is the case then someone should be working on making it easier to find.)
May 14, 2017 | Permalink