dreamfish

Drifting, like a Situationist

dreamfish — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 03:24:47 +0000

I’m back.

I can’t thank enough all the people who’ve helped me during this. All of Terry’s affairs are now sorted (as far as I am aware) and now I have to re-invent myself. My compass is spinning.

Terry David Smith

dreamfish — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:58:06 +0000

1960 - 2008

My life in rectangles

dreamfish — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:00:24 +0000

Long time, no posts, no explanation.

See a rolling 24 hours of images from my webcam. Guildford doesn’t get anymore exciting than this.

Personal zeitgeist

dreamfish — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:50:22 +0000

vicissitude over IP

dreamfish — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:45:51 +0000

Ack! If Skype once more randomly switches its SkypeIn privacy settings to ‘calls only accepted from contacts’ then I will throw it out of the window. Unfortunately, that means the laptop it’s on ends up going too. Before working out what was wrong, I had visions of having to deal with Skype customer support who, despite SkypeIn being a paid service, still state it could be up to four days before you get a response.

Don’t get me wrong - normally I love Skype as it’s an integral part of keeping my long-distance (4000 mile) relationship going. I just always get a sinking feeling when it goes wrong, as it could be another x hours of my life wasted dealing with (where x is usually > 2).

Myth of the cave

dreamfish — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:29:01 +0000

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

And so it goes with philosophy - which is both good and bad. The good part is obvious, the bad part is when you’re itching to study a particular work. In my case it’s Heidegger, specifically Being and Time - which I’ve heard is the most amazingly original philosophical work of the 20th Century. However, opinion has it that due to it being such a dense and complex book that builds on the ideas of Heidegger’s predecessors you have to study Nietzsche (e.g. Beyond Good and Evil) and Husserl (e.g. Logical Investigations) first…

… and before you can read them you have to have read Kirkegaard (e.g. Either/Or)…

… and before you can read Kirkegaard you have to have read Kant (e.g. Critique of Pure Reason)…

… and before you can read Kant you have to have read Descartes (e.g. Meditations on First Philosophy).

I think you can get away with starting at Descartes, if you have already have a good understanding of classical and mediaeval philosophy. Alternatively, just read Sophie’s World instead.

Maybe after all that, I can then move forwards to Existentialism and eventually Semiotics (as I see Organizational Semiotics as the next big thing in project management).

BTW trivia note: Sophie’s World is set in Norway and I was co-incidentally in Norway the first time I read it (Mjølfjell, to be precise).

It snowed a bit today. Only a bit.

White Noise

dreamfish — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 15:43:34 +0000

Not much again recently, as my new job has been keeping me very busy. It may be the extended Easter bank holiday weekend but I’m actually doing some work tomorrow, so I can always stay one step ahead.

Just finished reading Girlfriend in a coma, another Coupland classic. Very intense - kind of like reading an extended issue of Adbusters. I well recommend it.

More recent recommendations: do go see The First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum; don’t go see King Tut at The O2 (overpriced and disappointing).

Otherwise, as my default Linux installation, Fedora Core 6, is getting somewhat old (the way to tell is yum updates come back empty) and I have the luxury of dual hard-drives in my machine, I thought I’d try out Ubuntu 7 first. However, it has only confirmed that we still have a way to go. It is indeed much better at installation and hardware detection but it had problems automounting my iPod and, always the killer, handling proprietry media formats is still a nightmare. Even when it comes to MP3. It is, unfortunately, why I still have to have a Windows box to fall back on. Maybe Ubuntu 8 or FC8 will ameliorate my cynicism.

Happy Dance

dreamfish — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 20:55:56 +0000

I’m now employed as a project manager working for a company in Guildford (that is shortly to move to Woking), but spending most of next week at the head office in Leeds - where I will take the opportunity to meet up with Daryl.

It all happened quite quickly. In response to a Jobserve entry, a recruitment agent contacted me on the Monday. I had a phone interview with the company on the Tuesday, followed by a face-to-face on the Wednesday. By 5pm I had been told I’d got the job. Even the CEO emailed me to say it was the quickest hiring they’d ever done! I suppose that should make me feel special.

Anyway, they specialise in agile PM which will be a ‘challenge’. Also, I may well end up working on site across the South East.

Organisational Semiotics

dreamfish — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:04:56 +0000

Well, that’s been a fun few weeks - though I didn’t always do nothing. One plan was to spend some quality time with Terry but the weather somewhat put paid to that. However, during occasionally bursts of sunlight, we visited Oxford and the Dorset coast (more specifically, the towns of Swanage, Studland and West Lulworth). Contrary to previous practice, I no longer put up photos on my site as Terry has a dedicated photo website that includes a soupçon of the pictures we take.

Now I have to start looking for a new job. I’ve signed up on LinkedIn, including one of my less scary photos. Anyone need a project manager?

BTW The webcam should be back proper now. Watch it and weep.

continuity and change

dreamfish — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:32:55 +0000

The continuity is that it was raining yesterday, it rains today and will do so tomorrow.

The change is that due to ‘restructuring’, I have been downsized/rightsized/supersized as of Friday when my company decided it needed significantly fewer project managers. I’m taking the rest of January off to spend some quality time with Terry in some quality locations before starting to look again - as a project manager, that is - something so many find hard to understand but is plainly logical to me as:

I love doing project management (and I mean that without any sense of irony or the need to add the words “kill me now”)
I’m too far behind the curve when it comes to development zeitgeist (EJBs to me are like YouTube to a fifty year old)

In the meantime, I’m going to do absolutely nothing - followed by lots more nothing.