Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been some time since I last posted to this site.

I haven’t stopped writing, but instead have been trying to ’seed’ my new site with content. There’s only so many words in my head at any one time! Anyway, it’s now ready to be revealed to the world.

A year and a half ago I was promoted into management at the company I work for. And then I was left to work it out for myself. Thrown in the deep end.

I’m a resourceful kind of guy so I managed to find many resources to help me become the best manager I could. The more I studied the topic, the more I wanted to have my say on it too. I wanted especially to talk about people management (leadership) from the ‘vertical’ slice of Software Development. That’s what I’ve done as a career for many years, and it’s who I’m now leading. So, without further ado, I present http://geek-herding.com

While this blog will continue, I’m going to be restricting it to thinks that aren’t work related as I want to really push Geek Herding.

I’m interested in your feedback, though if you’re not in the software development industry, or interested in leadership and people management, it might be a little bit boring.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in either topic, I’d love it if you:

• Read the articles
• Commented on the articles
• Promoted the articles (if you’re tweeting, please use #geekherding so I find the tweet!)

Even better, I’m going to be looking for Guest Bloggers soon, so have a think if you have anything you might have to say on the topic.

But now it’s news again. Art Monthly Australia have decided to run a picture of a nude child on their latest magazine cover to protest the censorship of nude children in art. And KRudd has decided to jump back into the issue.

“… frankly I can’t stand this stuff,” he says to the ABC Insiders program. “How can anyone assume that a little child of six years old, eight, 10, 12, somehow is able to make that decision for themselves?” Well that’s a good question, and one I answered last time this was an issue: it’s called responsible parenting.

Read on to see the cover and introduction to Donald Brook’s article “Art and (not or) Pornography”, or read the Editorial and notes on the cover at Art Monthly Australia

03 Art and (not or) Pornography DONALD BROOK
Issue 211, July, 2008
From time to time there is a great fuss made about whether some object is a work of art or pornographic. Experts are invited to testify, and mostly ridiculed for their trouble. Witnesses with no expertise at all are treated more courteously; often being commended for their assistance in establishing a community standard. This manoeuvre is prejudiced in two ways. First, those without expertise are not invited to testify in statistically significant numbers, and their opinions are mainly selected and filtered through the calculating minds of lawyers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, no conservative judge and jury seriously believes that a change of mind will ever be the appropriate response to evidence that a more radical opinion than their own is the community standard. (Or vice-versa, for more a radically minded judiciary and a more conservative community standard). All these good people are determined to do the right thing, and no evidence that in the domain of nutrition (for example) eating beef is the community standard will persuade a vegetarian to approve of it.

Taken from the Art Monthly Australia website.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably going to leave after the next confession: We’re watching Australia’s Next Top Model on Fox8: “Ahh! We got Jody mail!”.

Still with me? OK, that’s the end of the confessions for now, but feel free to leave your own confessions in the comments section.

What’s disturbed me about these two ‘unscripted television’ (there’s nothing ‘reality’ about it really now, is there?) is that they both show bullying between participants. Of course the hosts, producers, judges and commentators all feign horror (as well they should) but the problem is that it makes it to the TV. If they’re really so horrified, why do they show it? Apparently because it’s ‘real’. It’s ‘what’s going on’. They don’t want to hide any of the ‘journey’ (puke!) from the audience.

I had to laugh at the absolute cynicism of Jhodi Mheares when she started a program with a studio direct-to-camera piece a week after a group of girls taunted another participant until they got a reaction. She wanted to assure us that she was horrified also and that we should call some organisation or another if we were the victim of bullying. All of a sudden we’re supposed to laud them for ‘talking about it’ rather than pretending it didn’t exist.

On Big Brother, we’ve seen the constant bullying of Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice. The so-called Spa Mafia enjoy picking on him and leading him to the point where he makes a fool of himself. They then claim they’re trying to ‘educate’ him and that they’re really his friends.

We’ve seen this same group of bullies decide that blonde bimbette Bridgette should not receive any of her clothes back from Big Brother as some sort of punishment for being upset that he took them in the first place. Hello? What sort of moron-logic is this? She was upset she lost them so she doesn’t deserve to get them back? Dixie put it well: Whatever Bridgette’s reaction, Dixie would rather see someone happy than sad.

Now on Friday, the Spa Mafia broke into the toilet where Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice was having a poo and doused him with shower gel. Apparently this sort of bullying is called a ‘Poo Party’, like a few years back the bullying was called a ‘Turkey Slapping’. Travis ended up in the hospital overnight with an eye infection, and the Spa Mafia just shrugged it off.

Enough is enough! If society shuns bullying as much as they’d like to claim, then it needs to be stopped. In all these cases producers were watching it happen, cameramen were filming it, editors packaged it, directors approved it and television channels screened it. I first lay the blame at the feet of the producers who told the cameramen to just keep filming. Bullying must be stopped at the very first instance. It is not acceptable in any situation. I then lay the blame at the television stations who chose to air it: how dare you use bullying to make your television shows interesting?

So do we tacitly approve of bullying after all, so long as it makes for ‘good television’? If it happens on the television, are we so used to thinking of the world-in-the-box as being constructed that we lose sight of the fact that on these shows, they are real people being bullied by real people?

It’s time to enforce some rules: Bullying is out, or you’re out. There’s no second chances or forum for excuses. If you’re bullying someone in one of these unscripted television programs, you’re evicted, eliminated, kicked off the island, handed a rose or whatever. Zero Tollerance. ZERO.

Anyway, I’m off to watch Gordon Ramsay lambast some poor shmuck on Hell’s Kitchen.

I read a headline on the ABC today: “Study paves way for 500,000-song MP3 player“. It caught my eye: was this some amazing new technology that was only good for storing compressed music files?

No, they’re just dumbing-down a technology article so that ‘the masses’ understand it.

What’s worse is that the technology in question is being developed by IBM, whose design studio has designed some award winning mp3 players back in 2005, whose web shop sells a SanDisk mp3 player .. but whose manufacturing department and sales department have no such thing! In fact the photo in the article is of an Apple iPod!

OK, so how about the story itself? It’s actually a really interesting article on some IBM research into using some mind bending use of magnetic regions on nanowires. Well worth a read if you’re into technology – even if you don’t care about portable music players.

On a side note, the Also of Interest sidebar has taken the MP3 and Song keywords and decided that an article titled “MP breaks into Song” is related

The pointlessness comes in the confusion over why this is a good idea.

Turning your lights off for 1 hour will save approximately zero energy. Though, for a lot of people, this seems to be their reason for participation. In fact, even Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, seems to think this is the point of the excercise. Their article proclaims “Energy use dimmed during Earth Hour“. That’s right, during “Earth Hour” we saved about 10% of the electricity we’d normally use — 24 tonnes of CO₂ wasn’t expelled.

It’s the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour. Sounds a lot right? Hang on, let’s do some math: 48,000 cars divided by 8,784 hours in this year = 5.4. Yes! That’s right .. earth hour last night was the equivalent of taking less than 6 cars off the road for a year.

Of course, the organizers do know what they’re talking about. They do know that taking 5.4 cars off the road for a year is pointless. According to EarthHour.org, the point is “to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming“. That’s right. It’s an awareness campaign.

Now if everyone is turning off their lights in order to keep those 5.4 cars on the road, Earth Hour has been a monumental flop. Totally pointless. Most people who participated thought they were helping to save the planet simply by turning off their lights.

At least The Age (an official press-partner of Earth Hour) acknowledges that the immediate environmental impact of the ’switch off’ will be little to none:

Given the complex auctioning process that determines the different energy sources that are fed into the national electricity grid each day, there may not be a cut at all.

So if there’s going to be Earth Hour 2009 (and I’m guessing there will be) then lets try and make sure people aren’t of the notion that Earth Hour has any sort of immediate affect on the environment. If you’re going by candlelight for the hour, use that candlelight to send a handwritten letter to a politician or business demanding some sort of specific change.

If you turned out your lights last night, don’t stop there. Make sure you take notice of the real reason for the event. Now you’ve made the statement, make sure you now do something about the environment.

So when it was asked again this week, I decided to bite the bullet and have a go at using pipes to actually do the task, and while I was at it make a tutorial.

Last Perl Mongers’ meeting Paul gave a talk on Effective Procrastination using Hiveminder. Then he put all his slides together, added a voice track and uploaded it to slideshare.net. That seemed to be a fairly effective way of encapsulating my tutorial, so I set about collecting screenshots of the process.

First thing I did was upload the slideshow to slidecast and put text instructions on Jaikufans.com. But I still wanted a full presentation, not just static slides.

So next task was to record the voicetrack. I’m well-equipped for such tasks and amazingly managed to do most slides in a single take without a full script! Then I used slideshare’s amazingly good synch tool to line up the slideshow with the mp3, and hit publish. Before I went to bed I was thrilled to see that 26 people had watched it. All from Jaiku as that was the only place the slidecast had been promoted (after all, it’s not much use to anyone else!)

Then this morning. I see I have an email from slideshare.net: I’ve beed selected as today’s Slidecast of the Day! Now I want to slidecast everything!

You can see the final slidecast, in all it’s glory over at slideshare

Right about the time I last updated this site, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors tried a course of chemotherapy, but it didn’t do anywhere near as much as they’d hoped. So they suggested a transplant would be the way to go.

His brother and sisters were tested for compatibility and the doctors settled on Olive, his oldest sister. Olive was a great match and so the transplant went ahead. He wasn’t hit with the ‘guest versus host’ disease that was the big risk, mainly due to the medication he was on. In fact he was in remission and all looked good when Fatima and I drove to Sydney on the June long weekend. Dad and June, Fatima and I went out and really enjoyed ourselves at a seafood buffet.

Unfortunately, shortly after that it all took a turn for the worse. Very quickly really. My sister Jacqui was visiting him in August when the guest-versus-host kicked in at the same time as he caught pneumonia. She telephoned and suggested it might be good to come up to Sydney to visit him soon. Shortly after she rang back to say ‘this week’, then again ‘today if you can’. I quickly changed my plane ticket (thankyou JetStar for understanding!) and managed to get to see my dad just one more time. We arrived at the hospital about 5 minutes before he died. I told him how much I loved and respected him, and I played a cassette tape Fatima had recorded for him. I can’t describe it any other way than ‘lovely’.

I always thought it would be ‘yucky’ to be in a room with a dead person, but it wasn’t. I really appreciated that at one point the others left for one reason or another and I was left alone with Dad’s earthly remains. In that time I was able to be angry with him for leaving, to be sad for myself that I’d lost a great friend and thankful for the life he’d lived.

The funeral was a great celebration. People say that, but it really was. We didn’t know many people there and most of it washed over me. But the recessional was “The Holy City”. It was a great song to go out on and it made my heart break for people who are left wondering what happens after you die.

Afterwards we took Dad to a cemetery that we’d found a way off from June’s place. It was the perfect place for Dad. It’s surrounded by gum trees and is really quiet. If it weren’t a cemetery, it’s just the sort of place Dad would have gone camping. Actually, knowing Dad, that may well have not stopped him.

The Friday before he went was the day of our 12-week ultrasound. So that was the day we knew we were having a boy. So it was great to be able to share with Dad the name we’d chosen years before. He’ll never get to meet his grandson, so sharing that was really special.

Wow, I’ve written a lot more than I thought I could!

The past few months have been an excitement of ultrasounds, doctors, obstetricians and planning. The 3D image to the left is the ultrasound at 12 weeks. Tomorrow we go back for the next scan (19 weeks! It’s going so fast!)

I don’t think it’s that common, but we actually picked names for our kids before we got married. I can’t remember, but it may have even been before we were engaged. Now we know it’s a boy, we know what his name will be, though we’re not telling anyone*.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve painted his room. It’s predominantly blue with a rainbow of pink, gold, green and purple. We’ve bought a white cot, which will look great with the colors, and are on the lookout for a similarly sturdy change table. I’m really amazed at how wobbly most of them are. I’m not laying my boy on a wobbly table!

This is the dating scan they did at about 6 weeks

This is at 12 weeks

The Baby’s room colors

*See coming post Re:Dad

I first heard of WordPress several years back, but since then two friends have started using it, so I bit the proverbial bullet and removed the shrink-wrap plastic. So far WordPress has been a dream to install, set up, customise and run. Lets see how it goes.

Edit: Just noticed that it’s one year to-the-day since my last post! Whoah!