On last week's WB40, Chris and I spent some time dissecting the arguments put forward in a fascinating article Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in which Venkatesh Rao proposes that the thing that humans are really good at is being not quite great at a lot of things, and this is the quality that will hold … Continue reading Mediocrity, consciousness, and competence
Category: Themes
I get great joy from being able to munge together bits of off the shelf technology to be able to create a thing that serves a need. It's probably a result of spending too much time with Lewis Richards over the years... Towards the end of last year I was asked by a client if I … Continue reading VR on the “cheap”
"Jump and a net will appear" were the words of wisdom that a colleague at Microsoft have me as I took the plunge into working free range done five and a half years ago. The first year felt like free fall. Should I give up, get a "proper job", knuckle down, put up with things? … Continue reading The loneliness of the long-distance free ranger
Inspired by Chris King's post (itself inspired by Matt Jukes' post) a quick rundown of what makes up my normal carry bag when I'm heading to work at a place other than my home office at the beginning of 2019... The Bag A North Face Borealis. Probably overpriced, but the best work rucksack I've yet … Continue reading What’s in the bag?
At the end of 2018 I presented at the London Strategic IT Partner forum. Here's what I had to say... https://youtu.be/VXmFQRk4wv8?t=45 Big thanks to Jon Baxter for permission to repost the video.
A couple of weeks ago I was running an event for the technology leadership team of a pharmaceutical company. The team is geographically dispersed across the planet, and one of the things that become clear from our conversations was that they were missing informal contact and conversation. As is often the way when teams are … Continue reading The #globalcanteen
Sometimes my better ideas come from my mildly sarcastic one-liners... A couple of weeks ago I was in a workshop with a group of people when someone said that they were working on a project to promote "Paperless Meetings" within their organisation. "You should be striving for meetingless papers" I quipped. It's been a recurring … Continue reading Meetingless papers
A bit of a "how to" post reflecting on a session I ran yesterday for the technology team from a retail client. The Brief All of my most exciting pieces of work come at short notice. I spoke with the CIO from the client on Tuesday, and he wanted an interactive and fun session to … Continue reading Agile Simulation: Method and Reflections
You wait for blog posts about how we record WB-40, and then two come along at once... The problem How to get as good audio quality as you can when using a web conferencing service like Zoom? The method An audio setup as documented in this article:https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2018/02/16/podcasting-primer/ And then some clever ways of using the … Continue reading Getting good audio results when interviewing on Zoom
This is a very specific description of something I worked out how to do today. If you edit audio for things like podcasts you might find it useful. If you don't then probably not so much... The need Just about every week these days I have an interview to edit for WB-40, and coming soon … Continue reading Apply transcripts to audio in Audacity
