and now for the normal stuff

and i was wondering again about a whole lot of really trivial things again..

i think i will allocate at least a small portion of this blog to my nagging concept of the social cairn as i have most ineptly named it.. :-) i am really wondering about the term i have coined for this really Arb construction within the realms of my mind .. i wonder how many of these things are really just accidental and how many are planned?

let me pose one item as an example:

this is a picture which in all consequence is most probably an anomaly, a freak of coincidence, but it is amazing?

One would image that in our daily life our path is crossed with any number of these insane anomalies, some planned, some unplanned like this one.

how often do we stare past a pile of carefully arranged paper clips or others? stones carefully arranged in a pile of dust without noticing?

But Like i said this are absolutely arb :-)

just a thought

I was sitting at my machine again the other day, or should i say still..

i was typing to no avail, nothing was happening.. i did not click into the actual box where the text goes..

this is something i have experienced often and am sure that you have experienced .. But my thought is ...

Where are all those words.. where have they gone .. IS this something like the monkey in front of a typewriter .. do those words combine somewhere in the ether so make a story. And if so is this story something like the tree falling in the forest when there is no one to listen.

the sound of one hand clapping, the beat of a butterfly wing, the words of unspoken words drifting through the ether..

if there was a key logger on all machines globally and these lost words were combined would it create a deconstructivism William Burroughs like novel?

or is
THIS just not likely?

if enough people type randomly into nothing on their computers will it create the greatest deconstructivist novel of all times? Or is it in fact the greatest piece of writing in progress. By nature it could land up being the greatest form of art?

after a little reading i realize that in fact it is Deconstruction and deconstructivist ?

semantic, vernacular?

either way it could well be sub conscious art?

from wikipedia on the interweb :
J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."^[1]


in a similar way the social cairns are deconstructivistic .. yet not really, rather disparate and unconnected? or is that not the connection? or are they subtly all joined at a sub conscious level?


btw..

project n on a list of manuy things to do is to capture the social cairns on electronic media, thus destroying them like Schroedinger's cat..

But that is us as humans looking to see to understand to destroy.. whilst only trying to understand. do they need to be understood and seen, is that the next step in the evolution of this form of social expression, is it something that has been around for long or not, or is it new, or is it a new name for something old? we will have to wait and see wont we

operational readiness and project success

Part 1:

a thought totally unrelated to the normal stuff i blog about has just not been leaving my neural pathways, i began wondering about the effect of the organization on the effectivity (this does not appear to be a word?) of the outcome of an IT project.So often we are quick to pull out the simple anecdotal multidimensional matrices which combine scope, people, process and other simple project attributes, but in 90% of the cases we tend to miss out on one whole dimension of data that is very important to the success of IT projects. Let us call that dimension of data the operational readiness of the organization. This can be broken down to a panacea of different attributes. Where to start?
I suppose let us start at the simplest and easiest to determine, that is in the milieu of the organization. that being infrastructural readiness. This is often only seen as the ability of the customer to deliver the appropriate hardware and environment in time for the deployment of the development test and production environments. Something we never take into consideration is the ability or rather the agility of the organization to be able to adapt to changing requirements due to business or technical constraints and technical incidents. How often does the project not at loose at least 10% or in many cases upto 180% of the time of the project to delays in this simple task? This is geared up for both fixed cost engagements as well as time and material engagements. The difference being the cost is just shifted at the end of the day. The thing that is not taken into consideration is the impact on the human capital on both sides of the equation. The longer the engagement, the longer the extensions of changes to the initial plan the higher the incidence of project fatigue and ip and human capital loss. With project fatigue efficiencies drop on both sides. This is in the domain of the team leaders and project managers to correct these human impacts. In the more advanced methodologies this is where the change specialists step in and moderate the impact of delays on the customer, but what if anything is ever done for the development team. I have digressed slightly, but will faithfully return to the thread of the discussion. Back to operational readiness and efficiency in implementing change. As i mentioned before it is the measure of the agility of an organization that allows it to cope with the inevitable catastrophes and disasters along this road. We more often than not depend to heavily on the inherent ability of the vendor to deliver according to acceptable configuration instructions and management of complexity for the install process to go through simply. Please keep in mind we are talking here about multi-tiered application server and software installs and not your run of the mill single contained application installs, yet even these can give problems.
The question is then how to mitigate and manage this process?

when setting up scopes and technical specifications and processes, is it not better to then make sure that these factors are built into the management of the process and its outcomes and more importantly the ensuing time lines.


But something else that often lacks before this process even kicks off is the vision and drive by the organization to go down the cataclysmic pathway of a development or implementation process(in most cases my reference is towards business intelligence delivery, but this applies just as well to the other forms of technical magic woven by IT guru's sic!). How often when a project is defined the total cost is never totally defined or envisaged upfront.. so often as a project manager or system/technical architect or similar we tend or put in what we call as FAT in he plan and attempt to bolster best laid plans with an acceptable variance. Is this maybe not where we should put he most effort in when a project is designed and planned. Yes in most cases budget and time line and rapid delivery are key outcomes. We must however be totally cognisent that without effective planning at this stage we will fail.

This brings me back to the question of operational readiness and how we determine it. How often as a vendor we recognize a requirement in a customer through the sales and lead process and chase down the deal. In an attempt to deliver and maintain sales forecasts and budget we just don't seem to take into consideration the implementation of the change process within the organization. the vendor and implementation company strives of agility and the ability to deliver through adversity, whereas the customer is not geared up for these levels of change. At the end of the day i suspect this is the challenge for most organizations and vendors supplying services and deliverables. How do we ensure this level of operational readiness? The foremost question that actually comes to mind is to determine the most parsimonious route through this challenge. How is responsibility determined and how are its impacts or the effects of the lack of change managed and mitigated in the life-cycle of the project? Is there a way to manage this change process and its impacts to the organization. If we look at the statistics, albeit that they are deceptive and evil, what is the eventual success rate of most IT based projects. Experience teaches us many of these things, but by the time the experience is paramount how many of these practitioners have suffered massive burnout and no longer have the drive to deliver change and results to a new customer. The best way would be to develop a methodology that is both usable and practical for the implementation, in this case BI, of a project. And there are many existing methodologies and processes that have been defined, but how do we modify and augment them to work in the environment we find ourselves in? Often methodologies or frameworks are only as strong as the team and management both on the side of the vendor and the customer. At best we could wish for some form of partnership between the customer and the vendor. This of course is not possible if the operational readiness of either parties is lacking. So we may have to devise a framework or methodology that can cope with this.

the f word and rain creation and other anomolies like not using the W word anywhere near Sterkfontein dam

I was thinking about some anomalies in the time space and rain continuum. A while ago i was listening to radio and saw some news reports about the faith like potato dude praying and then the rain fell. And over the years there have been many different rain making ceremonies and festivals, from leaving brooms above the front door to many other historically more perverse and brutal options....

But something that has proved to be a winner in my case would be the fishing word .. can say it now because A decided that i should go fishing on sunday .. and for a change it wasnt even me who prompted or even said the word .. and what an untimely and insane cold front is on its way across the country .. bringing rain for the whole of this week up to and past next weekend .. so maybe a thought of fishing brings rain but a proxy thought of rain is even worse?

it may be coincidence, but it does seem to be better to just pretend to not want to go and then go at the last minute then u might be guaranteed for it not to rain of have the wind blow us away. this could be considered as the bain of the flyfisherman.. but on a more obtuse note .. us as humans read a lot of sense into coincidence and make meaning out of the patterns in our lives without realization of the randomness of events. I may of course be totally wrong and things may be driven by some higher power or by some form of divine intervention, my bad for not accepting it i suppose? can we pray for rain?

if enough of us have the state of mind to change soemthing will it change? if we believe hard enough and enough of us believe will we grow fangs? i know not what the future holds?

maybe we are bound by my cynicism and others like me, who without the world would be a different place with faeries and dinosaurs roaming our back gardens or the space between our minds and the world we live in?

something on a different note completely? I was speaking to pastor aquaintance of ours on religious matters .. yes i was dont be so surprised? these things happen and he descrived a metaphor for me that was facsinating to the nth degree, he said he likened the faith, or belief in a god or a higher being and a bible to a bucket... how could you explain to someone about what you believe if you have a bucket full of water from an amazing river, I suppose the same goes for flyfishing? and many other things .. how can a fly sitting on a tbale at my desk even come close to the experience of flyfishing other than to those who know the truth? what is the truth .. what can a book translate to us about the truth of a situation? i suppose that is what makes good authors who can translate the living into words.. not to be confused with the living word.. now that is something completely different?

I sometimes wonder a lot as i am sure you have noticed about a lot of trivial and unimportant things that go on in the world around me. having noticed the interactions between people in a closed environment .. wierd is ll i can say..

But is suppose the relevance of our lives are only in context to those around us? or do they ahve inherrent value of their own? Now that is somewhat of an eclectic and non sensical statement to make? but i made it? it a likens to something in the vain of does a falling tree make a sound in a forrest if no one witnesses the demise and fall of the tree? we may see it days, months or years later.. the tree fell we see the tree, we know it happened? but did it happen, we never experienced it? similarly the sound of one hand clapping? who knows? do goldfish sleep?

Does it really matter?

how complex the web we weave, the web woven around this mortal coil of life, something so essentially simple yet infinitely complex. size and nature of life and its complex weave we cannot understand, the simplicity of the blue sky, the depths of our minds and the woven paths?

what crap..

oh yes tomorrow we view my view on GT through my modern day box brownie .. or rather my nokia 5000 1 mega pixel camera?

enough rambling for now, more later on in the week

just some things

i was wondering about a new term?

Social Cairns, something similar to flash mobs if people are involved, but more in the lines of something like performance art or anonymous art. Think if we were to create small insignificant beacons throughout our social landscape. small Cairns indicating the presence of an activism or awareness of those around us who partake in the activity. do not get me wrong this is nothing new, it may just be a more abstract and no group based expression of this phenomena. the Free masons and other trades often created messages and symbols of their existence or interaction with inanimate objects by means of cryptic signals, messages and symbolism. So what would i be proposing, now there would be something that would destroy the notion of this anarchistic representation of this form of symbolism, in some ways the graffiti artists do something similar. The graffiti artists sic! if we can define them as such are more an expression of a homogeneous anti-societal collection, which through its anarchism and behaviours tend rather to be homogeneous and constrained to a general underlying thought. what i am proposing is something far less structured than this, something far more unconstrained by bias and preconception. the only similarity or conformance of the notion is that it exists. I am not sure how long something like thsi would take to gain momentum and or to even gain conscious momentum. It could land up taking very long and gain immense momentum yet not ever actually be recognised or even be noticed by anyone.

technology

oh i hate technology and its manifestations ..

how i could have sat for 3 hours fixing up something .. for it to be destroyed by some or other electronical stuff up ..

oh well we all learn lessons through this .. type in another interface and the copy it accross ..

Damn this is frustrating ..

oh well another lesson learnt, this is through the cyborg nature of our lives, living through our fingertips .. that is why this happens .. these ramblings should be verbally transmitted around a fire with a lot wine or sherry in some location and not over the wires and electrons of a BLOB..

oh well seeing that i started this i supppose i had better finish it ..

where does this leave us, or more so me specifically -- even more distant and segregated from reality, not closer even though there is a translation of things from the realm of the electrons within my cerebrium or some or other part of my brain .. through to an interface through electrons pulsing through my nerves into a plastic and metal device with more electrons .. somehow i think the uncertainty is just to great .. isnt that what we expect from electrons .. well

i should have listened to the post on xkcd that i saw today ...

http://xkcd.com/658/

all that i have done is increase the uncertainty by trying to look at where the electron was..

all i know now is that the cat is dead or isnt it?

oh well onto something new .. tomorrow we start something new .. the format changes for a while

a correction

on the significance of f stuff seems to have gotten completely corrupted and dont think it will make any sense even to me
..

appologies

this is frigin irritating cos i spent about 3 hours writing a whole lot and it is all gone to only be replaced with crap little <<>> stuff

On a whole lot of ((little) things:

On a whole lot of things:

Something I have been pondering for a few brief moments is the nature of humanity and what constitutes humanity as a whole. Is it the individual or the collective? Does the individual hold more inertia than the collective? You may ask why I ask that? Or what a frigin stupid question. It has more to do with some thoughts I have had about the continuity or perpetuity of the human race…
Are we not a large mosaic of dynamics and individual inputs that together make a conglomerate. Supposing that the conglomerate is uniform enough to indicate a commonness that we all hope to see. Or are we more a nougat of life being melted and molded together into one or maybe cassata would be a better analogy .. But I digress .. it could be closer to a load of olive bread, but that is for later .. not now ..
My actual question is more along the lines of how much the individual partakes and is constituent of the whole or the sub whole of humanity on a regional or meme base. The actual question we have to ask is are we a self defeating organism .. something like a yeast? We grow .. we exploded our exploits and living destroy our own existence and break ourselves down, only to pop up from the remnants of our existence.
How important is the individual and how important is the collection of individuals in society and its makeup. One of the things we can observe is that in many cultures or subsets of society are very homogonous and in other cases very heterogeneous. Which of these creates a homeostasis or chaos. Do humans tend towards homeostasis or towards chaos? These may seem like silly questions, but guide us to our eventual destiny?
Something closer to home I was thinking about was the value of politicians as a whole.. What value do they actually have for us in their current manifestation.. and yes that is an open ended question.

How much value does the individual deliver to society..

How much value does society deliver to the individual?

Are they interchangeable, or is the one more important than the other, where do we start to debate this from? Do we look at the anarchists, the nihilists or do we look towards some form of divine intervention or direction. Who knows what is more effective in guiding the Meme’s we call culture. How sustainable are the memes we follow or promulgate. In general how sustainable is the human race as a whole. Apparently humans are fairly sustainable in the short and medium term. How do we measure the cost of being human in the long run? Should we attempt to or be part of the phylogenetic inertia that we are part of? That is not meant to be depressing in any way.

As a totally different subtext myself and a few others, have debated the un-humanness nature of owning a GPS. What does it take away from our ability to find adventure and excitement in our daily lives…. That is not saying that there is no Technical value in GPS’s for specific applications, but the thought of navigating myself to work and back on a daily basis staring at a little screen taking away our natural/unnatural ability to find our way home or get lost in the process thereof.. It has taken away our ability to utilize the internal zen art of navigation which has for many years served us as humans very well in a way to either expand or limit our lives. I think in an urban context there could be some perceivable value in using a GPS, but to be real what benefit does it give to us on the proverbial road trip other than to take the road less traveled. Sometimes I think we should rather focus on the journey, what we see and experience rather than the temporal break between being at point A and then being at point B. Fundamentaly I believe that when we go on an extended journey the benefits of not having a GPS by far outweigh having one, that is unless we are bound by some form of temporal constraint to be at point B by a predefined point in the timespace continuum. Often the route through or eventual ending in point C may actually develop our humanity more than we could ever imagine. That is I must now interject and highlight that I speak from a specific meme within society and not from a “general perspective” whatever that General is;-) I suspect the ability of road tripping in most peoples lives no longer exists and will at some point reach a mythical perspective or manifestation, something like the tales of the Argonaut or the search for the golden fleece. When did the eventual Golden fleece become more important than the journey and the people and places that where interacted with both humanistically and tangentially than finding the Fleece. Lets try and imagine .. Jason picked up his GPS plotted his course on Google earth found the Fleece and sent it to sotherbeys to auction over the internet.. End of the story. Maybe this exact point explains to me why there is this huge (re)surgence of computer games and especially those of the role playing nature. It was always something that perplexed me beyond internal rationalization why people would choose and alternative reality to that which we experience on a daily basis. I suppose how exiting our lives are when we sit behind a desk staring at the electrons darting over our LCD or CRT or PS or whatever.. and rush home switch on another screen. Humans seem to have lost the propensity to be able to interact with their own environments in a healthy and interactive way. We have been bound to the media and their interpretations thereof .. I am not saying that there is no place for fiction and media, what I am saying is that in my belief it has taken away from us the ability to be human. What is it that makes us human, this of course could in turn lend itself to an unending diatribe of disparate philosophical or phenomological debates? But as a small aspect of it, how many people actually ever get to appreciate walking on their lawn, the lawn in front of their flat, the nearby park without their shoes on, let alone walking without shoes when the lawn is wet or heaven forbid muddy or dusty. When last did the general populace consider what it is they are doing when they eat a vegetable, a piece of steak. Whn last did you watch the sun rise or set.. and not accidentally whilst driving to or from work? Dunno somehow us as humans seem to have lost perspective on the zen art of navigation of our own lives. Do we need to have a route planned, is the route that life choses for us not to be appreciated and embraced to try and get as much out it as possible.
Just as a subscript for those negative people out there…
(Not MLC rather an appreciation of life to be experienced by all)
Not to harp on this for another 100 pages or more which I could .. maybe another day, or as I stated to someone today, did I answer you or did I think about it in my head and have a meaningfull one way discussion with myself and come up with fantastic outcomes and conclusions.

And now for something totally different:

Recently I went fishing in the north west somewhere .. I was punished by the development of our infrastructure, or better put infrastructural upgrade.. it turned a medium length journey into a substantial journey, that is not the point.. yet it is.
I had a fantastic time, thought of nothing much other than the fishing and standing hip deep in a river and watching the otters, birds and zillions of other things swimming and floating by. The point being that I did not feel like I should submit myself to the arduous journey through the unending roadworks and enforced stops where the large road was put into a single directional lane being swopped around every now and again… like every 20-30 minutes.. note from my previous paragraph, yes we can choose not to take some journeys and do not have to travel the same road twice .. especially when it is bad .. So I decided that there must be an alternative route back home..
Then specifically chose to only get vague verbal directions as to the 350km detour through towns and roads I have never traveled before let alone even knew of their actual location .. thus with the aid of my Zen internal GPS and without looking at a Map drove through the center of the freestate on my way home on very long very straight roads that very few people have ever been on.. What value u may ask… but what if I got lost, would I not be late.. sure there was a chance.. but in principal most roads eventually lead to gauteng in some or other way.. this was specifically liberating to be able to get in a car and allow my internal compass to guide me along the route home. Now before you even attempt to find some kind of spiritual message in this .. there are none .. this was purely just something that happened.. with little or no real outcome other than exposing myself to the universe and its wims.. I know to specific readers of this blog there will be an inordinate number of explanations and objections against this.. yes some of them may be true, some not, depending on when and how you look at it all these explanations will change and may be true and even in retrospect. The past changes as much as the future with enough shifting in perspective..

Oh well enough for now ..

On something more tactile ..

Notes on baking bread .. that was the original or one of the original purposes of the blob…

I have discovered something of value to me and maybe you when u want to bake an awesome bread ..

I found that the high foam beer yeast works like bomb .. for south Africans the “big yellow sorgum brewing yeast packet “ and then also recently have found that brown bread flower definitely tastes good in this configuration. Another pointer is making the dough about 5% more moist than you would expect, this is logical, but never thought why.. u think about it .. then for baking it I now bake only round breads inside a flat bottomed heavy cast iron pot with a lid .. it just seems to work better .. maybe it contains the moisture better and stops the bread from drying out.. still makes a crust ..

Oh well enough for one day.. more down the temporal line

something short

i have more than a few half completed comments on life and everything around me ..

but don't seem to be able to commit to them, things are strange, people are stange or stranger than i would ever had imagined, a worl implodes, a society implodes around us.

yet we are still bound to find some meaning in it on a daily basis.

something that has struck me is that we are all the same yet totally different. We all have the same gripes the same complexities to deal with in different ways ....

things just need clarity within us, only we can give clarity but we are often unable to see the wood for the trees.

more will follow tomorrow