Swarm Intelligence - Better Than Mob Rule!

Because of a cock-up in my forward planning today, I had to buy something to read on the train and plumped for a copy of National Geographic. The article on swarm intelligence that I’d picked it up for proved interesting enough. However there was one paragraph towards the end which struck me as especially worth sharing with you;

“Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won't be smart if its members imitate one another, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it's made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part. […] the bottom line is that our actions matter, even if we don't see how.” [Shamelessly lifted from the NGM website; please don’t sue me!]

We humans can learn a lot from nature. Go read the article.

Freakopolis

Is it just too wierd of me to admit to quite fancying one of the shop-window dummies in Austin Reed? Hmm... I guess I just never realised that metallic grey skin (and hair and eyes) were my fetish.
It's amazing what you can learn about yourself while going to see a man about a photocopier!

A Full House

The weeks do seem to fly. Only notable thing about work this week was my boss’ performance in the taxi on the way back from a meeting. We had been visiting a prospective supplier and after the usual sales pitch they showed us around their offices. On the journey home we were comparing impressions and Ian (the said boss) sat there and estimated the company turnover, profit margin and directors’ salaries just by extrapolating what we’d been told about company size and the sales targets we’d seen displayed on a whiteboard in their sales area.

Apparently this is what accountants do subconsciously…

The weekend has been very enjoyable. We were couch-potatoes on Friday night but Saturday we had invited a few friends around for a bit of a house party. It meant lots of cleaning on Saturday morning (which was no bad thing to be honest) but the afternoon was spent with Rod & Jess and Ruth & Chris. R&J headed off towards early evening after a game of Trivial Pursuit which we ended up abandoning because we got so few questions right and it was becoming tedious. We ordered pizza and Ping & Uwe turned up just in time to partake and then join us for a friendly game of poker.

Normally when you are just playing for fun, people tend to be a bit reckless with their betting and the game is over quickly, but I think because neither Ping nor Uwe had played before they were more cautious. Anyway, the game continued until about 1:30 Sunday morning when Uwe finally collected all the chips. It was a most enjoyable game, although I rather get the impression that Ping (the first player out) was a bit bored and Chris was just sizing us up for the game we’re organising for cash in a couple of weeks…

Today was the inevitable clearing up after the party, but we all three pitched-in and it was done in no time. Brett and I headed down to Bromley to do some shopping. It was a targeted trip and we were done in an hour – which, given some recent shopping trips (which have lasted all day and still not purchased everything on the list!) was pretty good going. As a result we had plenty of time to enjoy a lazy Sunday afternoon reading and watching TV. One of the new shows we’d recorded was Dexter which looks interesting, if a little morally ambiguous. The other one, Jekyll, we didn’t even get past the first ten minutes of before we gave up – although that may have had something to do with my mother ringing just as it started…

This evening, we headed up to The Dome to watch the new Harry Potter movie. We’d chosen the Dome as the venue to see what they’d done to it. It was a bit tricky to find as the signposting was minimal and generally too late unless you were really eagle-eyed. Once we got there we sat in a line of traffic until we could be charged £5 for the privilege of parking the car, which I thought was bloody cheeky as there are acres of parking and it hadn’t said anything about parking fees when we booked the tickets.

Once you get into the Dome itself the signage isn’t any better – although we did realise on the way out that there are a couple of floor-plans in the main entrance hall that we’d missed. It’s laid out like a circular street with lots of pavement cafés and restaurants (in fact, looking at the floor plan, that’s pretty much all there is at the moment; the arena, the cinema and a dozen restaurants and cafés!) So we bumbled our way around to find the cinema, the ticket machines weren’t working so Rosie had to head off somewhere else to get the tickets printed, then we joined a queue to get into the auditorium, only to find that a portion of best seats were cordoned off. We still managed to get good seats though, just behind the closed rows, and then we realised why they were roped off; the giant tent isn’t waterproof!

There was a constant flow of water down from the ceiling into big buckets balanced on seats in the roped off section. Luckily the constant ‘spit, spat’ sounds weren’t too distracting from what turned out to be quite a good movie.

I haven’t been desperately fond of the earlier Harry Potter movies; several of them seemed to be just long video-game commercials. This one felt a bit more substantial though; definitely got the more ‘adult’ feel to it that a lot of the pre-release hype suggested. Maybe the next couple will really be worth watching.

Atta boy, Husky

After doing my usual tea-lady role at the Chorus rehearsal tonight I went up to listen to the second half of the rehearsal. They were doing the March of the Toreadors from Carmen Jones and they sounded really good. The last time I heard them rehearse the piece, it was undistinguished, but now the voices are confident, the diction is clear and the choreography, instead of just looking daft, adds to the story of the song.

I was whistling it all the way home and am definitely looking forward to the shows! (1 & 2)

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

I’ve been in a funny mood this week; generally pissed-off with the world. No apparent reason for it, that’s just how I’ve been feeling. It’s meant I wasn’t very productive at work towards the end of the week but I got through it and the weekend has been enjoyable; Mark S, one of Brett’s friends from years ago, was over for a brief visit (mostly for Wimbledon) and was staying with us.

Friday night we went to hear Brett sing at the National Portrait Gallery gig, part of some scheme to get Londoners singing and afterwards we had dinner on St. Martin’s Lane with Dan L and an old flame of Mark’s. Saturday we lazed until mid-afternoon; Brett had got tickets for a matinee of Avenue Q which Mark hadn’t seen (I think it’s my fourth or fifth time seeing it!) so we did that, grabbed a drink in the now smoke-free Halfway To Heaven before coming home for dinner. Mark left late to head to the airport for a (very) early morning flight to Eastern Europe where he’s about to start a choir tour.

This morning Brett and I were up early to go into work. It wasn’t really for work, but the office was opening for staff to watch the Tour de France go by and I’d volunteered to be the nominated First Aider. They’d laid on pastries and bacon rolls and lots of coffee which made it bearable, although it turned out there was an awful lot of waiting around and watching support vehicles before the bikes actually turned up – and then disappeared again within a minute. I was busy with the office camera but didn’t get anything remarkable as they sped by.

Ah, well, at least it was a nice sunny day, in contrast to the recent weeks of endless ‘showery’ rain and floods. This afternoon I’ve done some more tweaking of my Facebook profile and finally gotten around to inviting a few friends over for a board games and stuff next Saturday.

Other than that we’ve been couch-potatoes watching TV all afternoon & evening. I fear we are watching too much TV; our spare time is becoming like an episode of The Royle Family (except without the humour.) What happened to our dreams?

The Week In Summary

This week was a bit stop-go. I took Tuesday off work as time-in-lieu of the full day I’d put in on Saturday. I spent most of the day reading or commenting on a couple of blogs in between some TV watching.

In the evening I went out for dinner with Ping while Brett was at the Chorus' Steering Committee meeting. Ping’s just back from Malaysia again, where he’d been summoned to his grandmother’s death-watch. We dined at an over-priced steakhouse on the river by Canary Wharf and had to change tables after the first course because we had a group of extremely loud American bankers sitting behind us who made normal conversation impossible. Once we were seated in the pavilion out front though, it was more pleasant. Our over-dinner chat was as eclectic as ever, ranging from funeral customs to sexual etiquette. We ducked out after the steaks though and had dessert and coffee at Carluccio’s and watched all the young, beautiful people (Ping likened it to Logan’s Run!) go about their evenings’ entertainments.

Wednesday I was back at work and dealing with an Internet outage in our Leeds office caused by the severe flooding that’s been happening in the north (103mm in one day in Fylingdales!) Floodwaters in Sheffield swamped both the primary and backup systems of our ISP and left the office offline for the afternoon.

The rest of the week was solid with meetings, mostly to do with the projects we are starting but there seemed to be so many meetings I didn’t really have time to do any work.

Friday I got an out of the blue text message from Chris C in Dallas asking how Brett and I were, which seemed a little out of place as usually he emails. It wasn’t until later on, when I saw that the car-bomb discovery was getting coverage in the States, that I connected it. It’s nice to know that people care about you.

That evening was leaving drinks for a couple of guys from work; Mark R from Finance and Maurico S one of the consultants. I’m sad to see them go as they were both distinctive characters in the company. Mauricio had a great sense of humour, very wry and understated and he was always fun to chat to. Also tended to wear distinctive red Merrell trainers as a kind of trademark. Mark, somewhat more plain spoken, was always direct in what he said and was an interesting guy to be around. He always seemed more well-read on topics than anyone else and he too had a distinctive brand of clothing; on dress-down Fridays he invariably wore a bright pink t-shirt for no other reason than because he could. I will miss them both.

Here's To Dreams

I came across this on one of the blogs I read. Like them, I’m not watching the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ show but this clip is certainly an uplifting indicator of what they can occasionally find. Apparantly the singer is a chap called Paul Potts who works for the Carphone Warehouse, earns a bit extra stacking shelves at Tesco and has always wanted to sing opera. Here’s to dreams! (And here’s to hoping he can sing more than one song that well!!)

Being Alive

Well, I think it’s a while since I’ve griped to my blog, so you are probably overdue a dose of self-pity. I’m feeling run down lately and could really do with a holiday. There’s outstanding issues with both the old and the new landlords which just feels like it’s never going to end. The finances are still in a state from the move. Work seems to be a never-ending list of important things that all need to be done as soon as possible.

I didn’t help myself yesterday either; there was some work taking place at the office and I went in with Rob & Gaetan. I shouldn’t have really; Rob was more than capable of running the day, which is what I let him do so, while I got some useful thinking and planning done, it was really a long, wasted day. I also missed hearing the Chorus sing at West End Live.

Friday night had been a bit more enjoyable though; Mike G from work had invited us along to the ‘First Anniversary’ of his housewarming party. He has a lovely house between Greenwich and Deptford; quite modern, built over four floors with a room on each floor and large windows to front and back. The party was on the roof terrace where he’d laid out food and fired up a barbeque. It was quite chilly, but the food and drink were good and it was nice to socialise with people from work a bit. I don’t do that enough.

Today has been all about taking it easy; It’s taken me all day to wash all of the dishes that were stacked in the kitchen. Admittedly I didn’t do them all in one session, but there were quite a few of them because one way or another I just haven’t gotten around to doing any this week…

In between times we’ve been watching West Wing DVDs and surfing blogs and Facebook.

I need a holiday.

Vertical Farms

A farm that provides;

• Year round crop production in a controlled environment
• All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs
• Elimination of environmentally damaging agricultural runoff
• Food being produced locally to where it is consumed

Once you've covered the environmental impact of building the thing, it might just work...

See here for more.

We Are the Champions

Feeling good today. We eventually made it to Vinny’s party around 3pm on Saturday and that was all very pleasant; a good mix of choristers, his singing students and friends. The feature of the garden was a massive fishpond heavily stocked with coy carp and giant goldfish – although it did have a little metal bridge across it which made me think of a James Bond villain’s hideout…

We got pleasantly drunk and then got a phone call from Rosie saying they’d watched the Heroes finale at Ruths without us, so instead of going on there we headed home. We pigged-out on pizza and ice cream for dinner. (Classy!)

Sunday wasn’t such fun though; I woke up with the beginnings of a migraine episode, realised I didn’t have any of the preventative pills left and had to make do with damping the symptoms while moping around listlessly all day.

Today I was back at work and the leftover fatigue and nausea cleared out by late afternoon. Our new Helpdesk guy, Maliq, started work today – although I only got to chat with him for a short while in between triaging my inbox after a week away. Then tonight I was at Chorus and feeling healthy again. All went smoothly, had a nice chat with Martin B (the German one) and later Paul G. After we’d cleared up and I was heading home I left with the sounds of We Are The Champions ringing in my ears; so much better sung live by a hundred men than on a CD by a few!

A Packed Social Diary

What is it about Saturday, 16th June?

It seems to be the day when everyone is planning something. Brett and I have received no less than four invitations to events today, we have the parents down to help with the garden and I hear on the radio that three Premiership footballers plan to marry today. I don't know about the footballers but compared to a normal weekend, that's a lot of stuff happening.

In other news, I am qualified to provide First Aid again - must remember to do more frequent refreshers this time so it doesn't expire again. The whole process seemed easier this time though, despite a few nerves in yesterday's assessment.

Next week at work sees my new Helpdesk guy starting with us. It's taken a while to get to this point and I'll be glad to get the whole team together finally - although it turns out that Gaetan is on a training course Monday/Tuesday so he'll miss the welcome lunch (something which I'm sure he's going to groan loudly about!)

Brett is currently suffering from a bad back. Unlike me after moving house, there was no obvious cause for it and I'm still not convinced that it's muscular in origin rather than being a disk problem but I think we're giving it a couple more days on Ibuprofen before getting the medical services involved.

Right, off for breakfast and thence to B&Q and thence to Vinny's birthday party and thence to Ruth's barbecue and thence to Tom's performance...

The Butterfly Effect

For the rest of the week I'm on a First Aid course in Islington. Whilst out exploring the area at lunchtime I came across buildings belonging to City University and was reminded that I'd applied for a place there many years ago. I eventually took up a place in Dundee and spent six years based in Scotland instead but today I wondered what I might have ended up doing if I'd gone to City instead.

It's the unanswerable question of course, but it did make me realise how much of my life turned on the decision to go to Dundee rather than City. I would never have met Rod or Jess and the chances are that they may never have met each other either. I would never have met Simon or Bruce, so Rosie would never have met (or married, or divorced) him either. I would never have gotten involved with Saga and so likely would not have travelled nearly as much as I have. That travelling had quite a major effect on my outlook on the world and I think broadened my mind considerably.

Who would I be in that universe? Would I have completed the electronics course I applied for and gone straight into industry? Would I have joined the Chorus earlier? Would I have joined it at all? Where would I be living today and with whom?

The whole thought process really only occurred because we watched a movie called The Butterfly Effect on TV the other evening. It’s unnerving is all, to think how foreign my life could have been from this standpoint…

Aftermath of the Relocation

Unfortunately, the second half of the move didn’t go quite as smoothly as the first; on day two they realised that the van wasn’t going to be big enough for all our stuff and asked for a transit van to be sent from their depot. Somehow it got sent to our new address rather than the old one which caused a couple of hour’s delay. When we finally cleared out of Wimbledon, Brett and I drove over to the new place to wait for them… and wait for them… and wait for them. It transpired that the big van had broken down. The smaller van arrived in due course though and they unloaded its contents. The subsequent two hour wait was made only marginally more bearable by the eye-candy provided some of the very well-built movers, relaxing in the sun…

An unfortunate clash of dates that we couldn’t change meant that we had tickets to the previews of Drowsy Chaperone on the night we moved but as the time approached there was still no sign of the van, so we decided that Brett should go into town to hand out the tickets to our group and I would join them as soon as possible. In the end this meant I joined them for aftershow drinks, but at least by then everything of ours was in the new flat and mostly in good shape.

I took the next day (Friday) off work and, as it was a Bank Holiday weekend that meant we had four days to get the place in shape. Even so, as I sit here a week later, while we may have everything out of boxes, there are still piles of things lying around waiting to be found a home. Compared to Wimbledon, the bathroom and kitchen are very small and lacking in storage space, consequently we have made several trips to various furniture outlets looking for shelves and cabinets with quite specific dimensions. Hopefully by the end of today we will have sourced the right combination and can begin to shift the piles lining the hallways.

In between all of that I had arranged to take some pictures of Richard S (ex-chorister Martin N’s partner) for his website, so he will be turning up shortly too. Oh for a weekend off to enjoy the sunshine!

D-Day

Half-way through the process now and it all seems to be going well. The movers left around 4pm with about half the flat in their van. (Who knew the place had so much space?!) Rosie and I ran some essentials over to the new flat while Brett was at an audition in West Dulwich and then met up to give him a lift home. I need to be in work tomorrow morning so will be meeting up in the afternoon to help supervise the unloading in Grove Park.

Right now I want a shower before bed as feel grungy as f**k.

And So It Begins

Today is the day; up as usual and then into the organising of stuff so there’s some hope of finding it after it’s all been transported. Only panic so far has been work-related; the Helpdesk texted me at 9am to say '[Main File Server] offline. Won't reboot.' The network support team is stretched pretty thing today, what with me at home, Rob in Leeds and Rav on a course. Luckily Barry arrived in the nick of time and sorted it out before I had to go in myself.

The van arrived around 9:30 and after a brief tour and agreeing what was to stay tonight, they set to work packing up our lives.

I think we’re all feeling a bit like spare parts now; there’s not much for us to do but stay out of their way. I’m breaking down all the electricals so that we’ll have all the four-bars and extension leads we need in one place when we get there. Just now I’m waiting for the Mac to finish backing itself up to my file server before I power them both down and disassemble the office area.

Will be glad when it’s all over.

Moving Day T -1

I’ve taken a half-day off from work this morning to do some of the clearing up and organising ready for the movers tomorrow. I alternate between relief that someone else is going to be doing all the hard work and panic at the amount of organisation that we still need to do. Rowan is off all day today, so I keep reminding myself that between her and Brett and my part contribution, we’ll get it done.

Still there’s a lot to do – and it isn’t helped by having to go to a Chorus meeting tonight. Just what I need!

Moving House

It’s Sunday morning and there’s lots to do. We eventually got the lease signed on our new Grove Park flat on Friday and yesterday we went over there to complete the inventory and do a bit of cleaning. I took a day off work on Thursday primarily to make sure that all the utilities knew we were moving and were switched on at the new place. I also managed to prepare most of my own Change Of Addresses ready to send once we’d signed (which I actually still need to get around to!) As ever there’s something on the web to help you out; a site called IAmMoving.com came recommended by the Royal Mail site and includes a change of address generator; you select all the people you wish to notify from a series of lists, enter the relevant details and it will either (depending on what the recipient will accept) send the email for you or generate a letter to print out and send. It’s quite a clever idea and I like it – especially since I assume that, having set up the list and entered all my details, they’ll still be on file the next time we come to move.

On our way back from Grove Park yesterday afternoon we called in on Rod & Jess and had coffee and arranged lunch for today in Wimbledon. They’ve just bought a horse at the livery stables here, Jess is back at work full-time now and has had to mothball her online book business. Rod is working four days a week and enjoying the extra freedom it gives him.

Anyway, back to today, I think it needs to be about tidying up and organising things; we’ve booked movers to do all of the packing and actual moving of our stuff but I think everyone would benefit by us making sure that things that need to be together are together when we move. Books, papers, clothes, DVDs all need to be gathered up. I also need to back up the data on all our computers to protect against the almost disk failure(s) that will occur as the machines are moved…

…And it’s such a lovely day out there.

The Weekend Again

Another week gone. It went pretty much as expected.

Although a cock-up at Chorus on Wednesday meant a wasted trip up to Camden for me and also meant I was on the train to work on Thursday – a trip which ended up taking me an hour and a half!

Rob S is doing okay at work; he’s hit the ground running and is already getting stuff done. The future looks bright.

I’m feeling pretty down on the world though and don’t really know why, especially since it’s been a great weekend; Brett and I had dinner with Joe R on Friday night. We dined at Iguana next to the Royal Festival Hall and then had a drink at the National Film Theatre’s new lounge bar area. Joe and Brett ended up trying to out-geek each other over Sondheim lyrics…

Saturday afternoon I was at another photographic tuition session. Don’t think I’ve mentioned them before but they emerged through the Out Photographers Group I got involved with a while back. So far I’ve done two sessions, both on working in a studio with lighting. This one was about photographing the male nude and was equally interesting. A lot of the shots I took were crap, but I know why they didn’t come out well which is what learning is all about. A couple of the better ones are here.

At the start of the session we had lunch with the people who’d been there in the morning doing a straightforward shoot and one of them was Michael C from the Chorus. We chatted some and talked about sharing the costs of a studio session in future. We also talked a bit about me photographing the Chorus in action during their show at Cadogan Hall in July which sounds like great fun.

Rosie messaged me as the session was coming to an end to ask if we wanted to head down to Greenwich for a barbeque with Ruth and Chris who’d been over last weekend. We also had an offer of dinner at Ping’s place, as he is recently back from Malaysia and wanted to catch up.

In the end we headed over to Notting Hill for dinner. It was actually Simon R from the Chorus who was cooking as he and his husband Matt V have been staying in Ping’s house until their own house purchase completes. Ping had also invited the chap he’s been seeing for a while, Uwe, a German guy who runs a business in Vauxhall. He turned out to be lovely too; very engaging conversation. So the evening was a great success; the food was good and tasty, the company was convivial. I got to show off my photos and take a few more and then it was a single tube trip back home again. Marvellous.

Today has been less energetic. I spent a while this morning struggling with Brett’s Mac trying to make it let me write to the portable hard drive I keep my photography on. It used to work fine but for some reason now will only let me read from it. Very frustrating and I think that’s what darkened my mood. Other than that it’s been a day of surfing the web (am liking Facebook more and more as a proper social website, designed for keeping up with your existing friends rather than finding new ones) and watching TV (we now need to buy West Wing Season Six, as we’ve just finished Season Five…)

Wasted Day

We’d planned to go to the local Merton Hall where they were having a country fair this weekend but we slept late and then it started raining heavily, so we abandoned the idea. Haven’t done much more than be a couch potato this weekend and, apart from yesterday feel it’s been a rather wasted time.

Tomorrow I’m back at work. Rob S starts as my Assistant Manager this week and I am a little worried that I am pinning too much hope on him being able to come in and take a lot of work off my shoulders. Maybe I’m just feeling down because of the weekend’s inaction.

Sunday with Ruth and Chris

Saturday was fairly domestic; laundry and washing-up being done, then some shopping. I spent the afternoon and evening upgrading my laptop to Windows Vista; I want to see how it works with our systems at work as suppliers are beginning to supply machines with it installed by default and I need to decide which will cause us the least pain – giving people the Vista laptops as they arrive or retrofitting XP to those machines.

The upgrade experience went fairly smoothly, although it took the best part of three hours to complete; two hours to do the actual OS upgrade and a further hour of mucking about to get my VPN client to work and try and get the Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack reinstalled and working. (I’m still not actually sure about that last one!)

While waiting for the upgrade to complete we watched the latest West-End reality competition show (Any Dream Will Do) and I read some more one of my old favourites; The Riftwar Saga. It’s rather disappointing though; when I was a teenager reading it for the first time it was a stunningly good story, but now that I’ve (finally) read The Lord of the Rings so many of the stories I enjoyed as a teenager are clearly derivative. Admittedly I only started re-reading Riftwar because I couldn’t find the first two books of the contemporary Empire series…

Today Rosie had invited two of her friends, Ruth & Chris, over for brunch. While I had not been desperately enthusiastic to begin with, once I got out of bed I kind of got into the swing of things as we prepared the food. It turned out that they were very pleasant company; they were happy to make themselves at home and I didn’t feel like we had to be on our best behaviour or entertain them at all. We had a pleasant meal, chatted some and then played Risk for most of the afternoon.

We ordered Chinese for dinner and settled down to watch a couple of DVDs, Primer and DeLovely. Primer was a real head-fuck with, according to Wikipedia, no less than nine interacting timelines to deal with. I managed to follow a lot of it, but still had to read the plot explanation online before I totally understood what was going on. DeLovely was just a pleasant movie with some great tunes.

Ruth and Chris headed off shortly after the movies finished; a lovely day.