Wholeness

I just sat through 6 hours of a BBC documentary called “the death of yougoslavia”. I don’t even know where to start to describe the horror, pettiness, brutality, treachery and madness of that conflict. It does my head in to watch all the key players sitting comfortably in a chair and talking about it as if it had all been good sport, a geopolitical game with no consequence. We, the human race, are really fucked up.

It's true, I am a geek

If anything has to be said about the last 12 or so months, it is that I have become more tuned with my inner geekness (from the land of geekdom). In the sense that I actually think that being a geek is one of my redeeming features.

It’s not just that I help out friends with pc problems, or play video games (only the good ones, with compelling gameplay, storyline and challenging… well most of the time), or build my own systems… I actually enjoy the intellectual challenge and creativity (yes you read me: c-r-e-a-t-i-v-i-t-y) of programming.

I learned some basic php this year working on the campagnes francophones project, and it has been one of the year’s highlight.

ahh, weaving code….

function delta_r ($coord_in, $coord_out)

{

global $debug;

// calcul de la distance maximale parcourue par tous les navires lors de la rotation

while (list($key, $nested_arr) = each($coord_in)) {

list ($x_in, $y_in) = $nested_arr;

list ($x_out, $y_out) = $coord_out[$key];

$delta_j = sqrt (($x_out-$x_in)*($x_out-$x_in)+($y_out-$y_in)*($y_out-$y_in));

$delta_r_table[$key] = $delta_j;

} // end while

return $delta_r_table;

}

Lo-Fi Folk Festival

This wednesday I got me a ticket to the lo-fi folk festival at la Maroquinerie to see Dawn Landes. I discovered Dawn 12 months ago at an Andrew Bird concert (opening act). She’s from Cincinnati, Ohio, and I love her stuff. She’s produced by a very cool french label Fargo - great lineup, check them out. Dawn has a great voice, sounds as cool strumming her folk guitar as she does on her Gretsch, incredible legs, and great contact with the crowd, she actually speaks to you in concert!

Needless to say the concert was awesome, and very intimate as there couldn’t have been more than 50 people in the room. I kind of feel bad for the artist, but it’s great for us fans enjoying that intimacy.

Now it wasn’t all just about Dawn. I had the pleasure of discovering a very talented act, brother and sister Angus and Julia Stone. They created a beautiful bittersweet universe. Angus does wonders on guitar, with that soft innocent voice. Julia has a strong voice, and great presence. She can also play multiple instruments to great effect (keyboard, guitar and trumpet, at the very least). You should definitely listen to them, their awesome.

Finally, the Young Republic also played that night. They are young alright, and no shortage of talent… but, dunno, something missing. Their best act was a cover by Neil Young (can’t remember the title), and the stuff they write is ok-ish but it just didn’t yank my dangle (just made that up, sounds real corny verging on the pathetic).

Paris, contrary to popular belief, hasa very very cool music scene for small relativeley unkown acts. We likes it!

What's wrong with organisations (extracts from article by Simon Caulkin)

It’s a weird paradox. Despite management’s obsession with hard numbers, many organisations are a fact-free zone, swirling with untested assumptions. Horrifying sums of money are committed on superstition or whim. Thus, fact-based management is really triple-distilled common sense. It’s hard. It requires judgment, practice, help, humanity and wisdom. It needs scepticism and experimentation. It needs reasoned optimism and learning, and, as F Scott Fitzgerald put it, the ability to function while holding two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time.

It’s no use putting good people to work in a crappy system; conversely, putting people in a good system and expecting them to improve increases their individual and group capabilities - another example of the (ignored) self-fulfilling nature of so many assumptions.

They overestimate power, fail to cut losses, underestimate cost and difficulty, and ignore the lessons of failure. They put too much faith in superficial impressions and repeat what worked in the past. Or they fall back on unexamined but deeply held ideologies. (An unqualified belief in anything, except the likelihood of being wrong, is a certain predictor of tears ahead.)