graham’s blog

Practice what you preach

I came to Switzerland in 1978 and was surprised to learn enough French to get by with in the course of 4 months. Ever since that era I have perfected my French and consider myself bilingual. I often calculate, think and dream in French but of course make many errors most of which are more visible in written form. Then there is my accent, but I’m trying to keep on topic here

Many people ask me how I managed and I always tell them that the only barrier to learning is in holding back and failing to try, because the person you are trying to communicate with wants to understand you and the errors you inevitably make aren’t as important as the message you are trying to convey. You always have to “Go for it!” and leave your inhibitions behind.

How come I don’t practice what I preach then? I’ve been mulling over this for a few days.

I have quite a few visitors and family members that are more comfortable in French and each attempt I have made to write in French and in English has “lost steam” after a few days or weeks due to lack a perceived lack of interest.

A good webfriend reminded my lately that it wasn’t because there was an absence of comments that people aren’t reading what I am writing. This must of course be true when I write in French too.

I’m going to try again and to hell with my faults in French (which incidentally is a lot harder to write than to speak, in my opinion).

I won’t even try to do too much spell checking and grammar sifting. I will only have one rule. Black writing for English and blue writing for French. (Once I work out a comfortable way of accomplishing that)

If I’m successful at it, I’ll consider adding a plugin and doing it as professionally (well almost as) Stephanie does on her perfectly bilingual blog.

Three unrelated things. Or not?

I was ill yesterday and without going into the details it was a digestive disorder sort of thing. It floored me for the day but I’m feeling a lot better today.

I came across an article on conjoined twin girls, Brittanny and Abigail Hensel, in our local free newspaper and that led me to a video on Youtube. It’s an amazing story and I’m surprised I didn’t find out about it until now. Here’s the video. There is also an article devoted to them on Wikipedia.

Finally, I received an info by email this morning. Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s personal translator for French is giving a public talk in Lausanne on the 9th of April. His subject is “Interdependence and Universal Responsibility”. Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist Monk and before becoming a monk he obtained a PhD in Cellular Genetics in 1972.

I really want to go and listen.

I used to watch tennis

I can’t resist the following sequence of headlines from my local paper :

• “A Melbourne, Roger Federer lance son année de tous les records”

• “Roger Federer, météore noir et dévastateur”

• “Roger Federer se trouvait sur une autre planète”

• (Roger Federer) “n’a pas besoin de coach…”

• “Federer a eu chaud”

• “Federer rassuré. Son banquier aussi…”

• “Grand huit pour le No 1 mondial”

• “Fin de série pour Federer qui craque devant le <<Djoker>>”

I won’t translate word by word but the sequence illustrates how sports journalists “work”. When sportspeople (and specially the top players) win they are unstoppable. They are the best, unstoppable, on another planet, don’t need a coach, are reassuring and repeat their prowess without an end.

And then they lose.

For me, that is the only sporting finality. You win or you lose.

The headlines will be similar (at least for some of the players) at the next tournament. Then the next. And the next.

More thoughts on blogging

“ I think it’s entirely possible that the ego-driven, comment-driven water-cooler blog is being replaced by Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think, not for one second, that the inherently closed communities of social networks are a replacement for the idea-driven blog designed to be read by surfers, strangers and the masses.

Seth Godin

Can’t resist an extra post

Although I wrote a week ago indicating I was going into hospital and wouldn’t be updating for a while, an interesting post by Stephanie has prompted me to slip this post in before making myself rare again for a while.

From my point of view I’ve spread my self about as thin as I can get over the Web since the beginning of this year. The other day I attempted to MindMap my presence but was unable to get the big picture (or rather I gave up after a several iterations).

As each new Web 2.0 product came on line I was there with a login and enjoying the sparkliness of it. I had the impression I was spending my time filling endless profiles and likes and dislikes and when I was happy with it something else came along.

Well I’m easing off all that now. My job is in front of a computer all day long and my leisure time was pursuing this “in front of computer” doing all the unprofessional computing activities that you can’t or don’t do at work.

The end result, although stimulating for a time, was becoming increasingly frustrating and also, if I try to be honest, somewhat addictive. I think it goes with my personality and I’ve seen it before.

A few years ago I was an MMORPG gamer (Asheron’s Call, Earth and Beyond, Everquest, Guildwars etc etc.) I would play for hours on end, discuss game related matters on the forums and sleep infrequently.

That time has passed and in retrospect, and having had the time to reflect, this whole Web 2.0 phenomenon has a lot of similarities.

So how do you balance it all I wonder? Do you get the time to get out and about, to watch films, read books, watch DVDs and enjoy the company of others?

This blog has become an extension of me and I am no longer in any doubt whatsoever that I will continue to maintain it but I am at the same time integrating the essential benefits of Web 2.0 while stepping back from being an early adopter and grabbing all that is offered. I’m avoiding the sparklies and relearning that life exists outside the computer monitor.

I think, in a nutshell, that I’m aiming to integrate Web 2.0 into my life rather than integrate my life into Web 2.0.

So tomorrow morning I go into hospital. I’ll see y’all on the other side and I’m looking forward to that.

Wiki and blog use in Business

Stephanie made an interesting post today reporting on a Suw Charman talk over at Google.

Now this is something I am directly involved in. I use both socially and feel that they are good and useful tools in businesses. One of the problems, from my point of view, is that technical enterprises tend to attempt to solve problems through the use of software tools. Most problems are either social (people) or organizational (people and structures) problems and can only be resolved by directly addressing the causes of the problem.

Personally I would love to read the blogs of my boss and of my Director. I feel it is a much better (and well organized chronologically) medium than newsletters or email distributions and could contribute towards animating business life in my service and organization respectively.

In a service comprised of 12 or so members a wiki would be an excellent way of sharing and building info and documents.

The problem of course is once again people and the organization but (un)naturally my organization is spending a disproportionate amount of time on deciding which tools we need and focusing on the technical platform and the functional matrix of the tools on option.

A social and organizational matrix might be a more efficient way of attacking the problem because in the past our IT department has been known to propose tools that were neither useable or understood and were thus never adopted.

More about this later if it interests you.

Some newness

Isn’t it a little paradoxical that my last post was about an absent friend when I was being a little absent myself?

It’s a little cyclical with me. I’ve been blogging for over three years and it’s become an online presence that I won’t give up. I’ve never really found my own style though and have hovered around different styles over the years. I had a lot of activity a year or so ago and then several friends quit and I went a lot quieter. That’s what happens when you get very “discrete”. It only takes one or two people to quit or be quiet and the whole thing collapses.

Now I do know that I have a silent following of several friends that drop by from time to time to see what’s up (and that includes some members of my family too) but they rarely, if ever, leave a trace in the comments so I have no idea when they visit or if they find anything interesting.

Some of these are French speaking and probably don’t comment because they feel it should be in English. This is far from the truth however. I would happily accept comments in French and I would even go bilingual if there was a demand. This is a little chicken and egg story though as I have tried before. This is interesting because we have an international expert on hand and Stephanies blog has been bilingual for as long as I’ve been visiting.

I digress though (once again).

So what have I been up to these past few days? I’ve been watching the 3rd series of Desperate Housewives on TV (better than season 2 in my opinion), I’ve been working on a new professional site that I am building for an association that has created a school for technicians in Tanzania. I’m tinkering with the idea of creating a part-time business building and maintaining websites as I’m getting quite good at it.

I am also an expert for English as a foreign language for young Apprentices at Commercial School so I’ve been busy officiating at Oral Exams and getting ready to mark the written papers. It’s a busy time of the year.

I also had my Mum visiting from the UK over the past few weeks (she came back with us after our visit to the UK at the beginning of the month. It was lovely seeing her and having her closer to me and I was delighted to be able to have her at home and spend some time chatting. My parents having retired to the UK (They lived here in Switzerland for many years) I miss them a lot and it’s a shame they are so difficult to get to travelwise.

The first word is the hardest

Well with illness and holidays its been quite a while since I last blogged. I could have done so the last few days but couldn’t quite work out where to start. I had a few things to say but they were finally fading from memory and I suspect from being interesting.

So here I am back and blogging. I still have a residual hearing problem and two final days with my new antibiotic treatment but I’m feeling a lot better than a few weeks ago.

So how are you all? I’m off to do a little blogwalking to catch up with your news.

Sore throat

I fell ill with a sore throat between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. I wasn’t well enough to go to work so I set off with Aspirin gargarisms and throat pastilles. Unfortunately I don’t feel much better today so I hope it’s not a bacterial infection. I don’t think so because it’s not worse than it was yesterday (but it’s not any better either).

I’ll just have to see how I am tomorrow morning because if I don’t go to work I’ll have to go to the doctors because you can only stay off work two days without a medical certificate. I didn’t want it to come to that. Let’s hope I feel a lot better tomorrow because I have a busy weekend ahead.

Two anecdotes

Two relatively trivial events stick in my mind this morning, probably as some form of relief from yesterdays post.

Firstly I use Pandora when I can’t decide what music to play or when I am looking for something new. It’s a great service and in it’s simplest form you give it the name of an artist you like listening to and it makes a play list of similar music that you approve or disapprove and the software learns from that. That in itself is cool and I heartily recommend that you try it out.

So the other day I keyed in Deva Premal, a wonderfully inspiring, soothing and relaxing artist and Pandora did it’s magic. I discovered two artists that I had never heard, Moya (Maire) Brennan and Laura Powers. Between my eMusic (non DRM) and iTunes (definately DRM) accounts I was able to purchase a few CDs worth of music and added them to my iPod.

Stick with me here as I’m almost finished and it gets even more interesting.

I am also a member of Last.fm which acquired scrobbler some time back. Whenever I play music on my PC my account on Last.fm is updated in real time and this gives an idea of what artists and songs I am listening to with some really cool statistics. Basically anybody can see what I am listening to.

A few days ago I got an email from Laura Powers thanking me for listening to her music, she had noticed from aggregation of listeners to her music that I was listening, hence the email. Now I am sometimes thankfully a little naive so this might well have been an automated response of some kind but it was, all the same, a nicer than usual email.

The other event was an email I got through YouTube yesterday. I put up a videoclip I had edited of a visit to my hometown 15 odd years ago and a guy wrote to me to compliment me on the video but also to ask me when it was shot as he found one of the children accidentally filmed in the video looked a lot like him and he lived in the neighbourhood around that time. I paraphrase his own word here “scary”. Scary indeed. Talk about global village!