ia play

FringeHog explains why Polaroids are the ‘magic cameras’:

The “Magic” of Polaroid 

More FringeHog-ery, this time on personal energy:

“Human beings can survive for more than a month without food and for five days without water, but the average man, it is said, can’t live more than six hours without plugging in. Now fast forward to the future, say ten years from now. Imagine a world in which energy is abundant, portable and ultimately, personal. In this future electricity is disconnected from the power grid: no more sockets, no more wires.”

Now this might get me interested. I often fear I’m a bit of a luddite. I’m not interested in fancy interfaces or lots of functionality on my phone. Mostly I just want my phone to stop running out of battery.

The thing I would really like for my laptop is instant boot-up. I don’t understand why we all seems to think it is fine for the computer to putter away to itself for a few minutes before it lets you use it.

(I find the welcome message on work computers a bit menacing. “Good morning, Karen. It is 10.15am”. Why does it tell me the time? Just letting me know that it knows what time I got in?)

Now there’s some nice consequences of time to kill chatting with Chris, Vicky, Noush & Olivia (whose company I’m going to miss terribly if I get hauled down the other end of the office) but it just doesn’t seem very efficient.

I guess what I want from my gadgets is summed up by a colleague’s frequent appeal to our management to “perfect the basics before you start tacking bits on”. But there’s plenty of voices out there in “more! add more!” camp so I’ll be spending my mornings chatting for sometime to come.

FringeHog has been thinking about breaking the sleep barrier:

“In 2020 imagine that a 17-hour work day is the norm: business, home life, school and recreation all blend together in seamless shifts of just a few hours each. The sleep patterns of knowledge workers could be mapped, networked and optimized to create a truly 24/7 company. Gone are excuses that we simply “don’t have the time” to work out, or read, or learn another language. Freed from the biological mandate of sleep, could we become a more creative society?”

This sounds like adding extra lanes to the motorways. There must be a chance that cutting out sleep will just mean more time available to work, which a few will utilise to get ahead and then everyone else will join in.

That’s always been my justification for the chickens and the manual coffee grinder.

I’ve been reading The Stand (much to Iain’s disgust) and The World Without Us (which seemed to merit less disgust) . At the same time I stumbled across the I am Legend inspired We all secretly want to eat dog food in hell which argues that we like apocalyptic movies because

“people do survive, even if they have to endure horrible things in the process”.

So maybe my current enthusiasm is just a sign that I’m stressed. It could be all down to the desire for a cosy catastrophe.

Even at the best of times good-life-ery overlaps with survivalism so it isn’t uncommon for me to be immersed in apocalypta. One minute you’re reading about making butter and then the next it’s how many guns you should keep in your bug out bag.

All this self-awareness doesn’t stop me wanting to see Life After People.

In the last week I’ve had a succession of conversations with people about their inadequate managers and how incredibly depressing and demoralising bad bosses are.

Someone suggested that I’m surprisingly serene about my bosses. I guess, I’ve come to believe that unless you can always choose your boss and choose well then you need to find ways to progress regardless of who you work for. And to be happy regardless of who your boss is.

Now it has been a long time since I’ve suffered ‘the terrible boss’ but that period in my life was strangely productive. I can genuinely say I wouldn’t have my current job if it wasn’t for that boss. At the time it was very, very hard to see the relationship in a positive light.

It is very easy to get angry with your boss for not being the person you want them to be. We don’t like them to be flawed. We want them to be bigger, better versions of ourselves. That’s pretty unrealistic.

Over at zenhabits Albert Foong suggests it is:

“the disparity between how reality is and our beliefs about how reality should be causes our suffering”

So what can we do? Beyond recognising it is all our fault?

It helps to recognise that bad bosses:

• have something to teach you. It might takes you ages to figure out what that is but it is a point of principle for me to believe in this
• show you your own strengths. Seeing something done badly can help you rate your own skills more
• give you an opportunity to be the good person, to help them
• might be someone who you can form powerful partnerships with, precisely because you are so different

In my experience it isn’t enough to think this way, especially if you work for them for long. You also need:

• a mentor (someone you choose, someone you respect and who understands you. This is your real boss!)
• support network (peers you can talk to, who will listen, emphasise and can suggest stuff. You have to help them too but this helps with perspective on your own problems)
• an professional identity beyond this job. Speak, write, volunteer, network. Be more than your boss’s employee.

The first list is about getting something out of the relationship, about not putting your life and career on hold till you get away from this person. The second is about getting through emotionally.
And whilst I firmly believe that managers are here to make you happy, there’s certainly a case for saying the reverse is also true.

Steven Johnson has been writing about literacy scares in Dawn of the digital natives, inspired (or incensed?) by the recent National Endowment for the Arts study.

He seems especially irritated by their insistence on considering reading to be something that only happens when you have paper in front of you. He highlights this quote from the report:

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

The New Year resolution to write regularly was going great but has noticeably trailed off. I’m in the midst of an exhausting time at work and everything else has suffered. Including thinking about what I’m doing.

Now I enjoy crises at work. They make it clear what the problem is and what needs to be worked on right now. But continuous frenzy doesn’t allow you to observe yourself and what you are doing.

Sometimes life is best contemplated on Sunday morning, sat on top of the rabbit hutch, enjoying coffee and sunshine whilst the chickens, rabbits and cats romp. Zazen, Loasby-style.

I realised the other day I’ve never actually read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and that was undermining my ability to spot when senior management were systematically misusing the concept. So I got a copy from Swapshop – these are really not the sort of books you should ever have to spend money on.

I’ve been slightly resistent to reading it. At university David Gauntlett introduced us to Charles Mackay’s the Madness of Crowds during lectures about moral hysteria about media (and Victorian moral outrage at the bicycle, if I remember rightly). ‘Madness’ is not the easiest of reads but the stuff on tulip mania makes your jaw drop at times. It may have been my rosy memories of those lectures that made me irritated at Surowiecki’s concept.

Now Surowiecki isn’t rejecting that groups of people sometimes (frequently?) do intensely stupid things. He is more interested in describing the conditions under which a crowd can be surprisingly smart. The book should really be called ‘When Crowds are Wise’.

I haven’t finished it yet and don’t really feel like it would matter if I don’t. ‘Wisdom’ and other pop theory books are more tightly written than ‘Madness’ but the structure is repetitive and they outstay their welcome pretty quickly. Tellingly, most are expansions of magazine articles, expanded (or padded) with a series of anecdotes and a smattering of scientific studies that are briefly skimmed over. They make me crave depth. But maybe not as much depth as Mackay gives you!

Pop theory books are such easy targets, I shouldn’t really expend energy on them. Just read ValleyWag instead.