Justice, Irish Style!

Now this, I like! Pity no-one here has a spare piece of cardboard emblazoned "I am a bad PM and Mr T says I need to get s some nuts..."

Vigilante Justice, Belfast-style, for drug dealer
ALAN ERWIN

STREET vigilantes tarred and feathered an alleged drug dealer
because police refused to take action against him, it was
claimed yesterday.

The victim, in his thirties, was subjected to the humiliating punishment
in a loyalist stronghold in south Belfast.

But despite the heavy influence of Ulster Defence Association men within
the Taughmonagh estate, the paramilitary organisation's advisers insisted
they were not involved.

Frankie Gallagher, of the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG), claimed:
"The UDA told the local community to go to the police about this.

"The community responded in the way it did because it had no confidence
in the police."

Mr Gallagher claimed that frustration over inaction by the authorities had been
building for weeks. Police were given information but failed to intervene, he said.

The degrading punishment, reminiscent of IRA-style retribution on those
accused of crimes against their communities, provoked a horrified reaction.

The victim was tied to a lamppost, then masked men poured tar over him and
covered him in feathers as women and children looked on.

http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=609&id=1370592007

Rumors have it that next they will tie some cops to lamp posts, "tar" them
with molasses and decorate them with donuts, if they don't get some action
beyond blaming things on political organizations.

Go to Dear Webby for the source of this article...

The Cult of the Professional

The trouble with Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur is that it's all been done before. The collapse of preservation of information as we know it has been bemoaned, the number of untruths that would be published, the information dilution, the way it will take us all to Hell in a handbasket - 500 years ago. Shortly after Gutenberg developed the printing press which allowed "just anyone" to publish a book. Which, *gasp* might not be pure philosophy or mathematics or mechanics!

See, when books were written by hand and copied by hand, they were of course more valuable. A book was likely to be handed down among generations of students and teachers, so those handwritten manuscripts were Law with a capital L. Once books were able to be printed in quantity, the idyll was that it would put that Law, that valuable education, in the hands of the masses. What was less obvious to the idealistic printer, was that all that education encouraged many of the masses to also write, and - now their books in turn could be distributed far and wide.

And - *gasp again* - these new writers might not have the same beliefs as the early manual copying brigade. Heresy! What happened, of course, was that the noise to signal ratio went up. Early handwritten MSS had to be pretty good otherwise no-one would bother to copy the entire thing out by hand. Printed books, well, anyone could suddenly throw together a book and have it achieve wide readership. Andrew Keen is now in the same boat as all those other fuddy-duddy luddites in bemoaning how everything is heading rapidly shitbasketwards.

Trouble is, of course, if we hadn't gotten a printing press, and all those books, then Albert Einstein would have probably been a brilliant farmer with a keen grasp of seasons and rainfall... If we hadn't gotten printing presses, we might still believe that the Universe revolves around the Earth.

Those printed mass produced books sparked us across an intellectual revolution in the space of maybe eight generations. The early manual manuscripts shaped the direction we began thinking in, the first printed books accelerated us along that path. And yes, there were bullshit books in among those - but we're big kids, and we can usually make up our own minds what's crap and what's not. We've done pretty good at it so far.

And when you're talking Internet publishing, yes the volume of diaries has increased astronomically, but so has meaningful content. And (aside from Andrew) we seem to be coping with that and sorting our truths from the dross.

Lastly, think about traditional book publishing cycles. You had an idea, it could take years from putting the first thoughts on paper, to someone picking up your book and reading those thoughts. Now think about blogging. You think it, write it - and I read it. Sometimes within minutes. The speed of reinforcing ideas and thoughts has jumped another whole order of magnitude, and the progress of the last 500 years will seem a snail's pace compared to what will now come out of the dialogues we are able to carry on thanks to the Internet.

Here are some else's thoughts on Commander Keen's book.

can spam now has bacn?

Nice, concise, description of what "bacn" is.

Spam is unwanted email "adevertising" (in the loosest sense of the word) all the dubious scams and cons that some humans unleash upon other humans in their earnest endeavours to make a living off someone else's hard work and income. It's funny, because spammers often spend as long working on setting up their email bots as the person they're trying to scam. And they stand to lose more. But then, only the very stupid think they are smarter than everyone else, and they eventually do lose it, and then the ultimate scammer, someone's government, ends up with the proceeds...

Bacn, "not quite bacon," is the mail you do want, only it's not real email from a real person about their real lives, not quite. It's the mail that dealsdirect and oo.com and other such places send you, at your request. It's email that cron and the webserver monitor send you, if you're in IT. And the notifications that fellow Facebookers unleash every time they add an application and forget to click the "Forget It" link. You aren't pissed off at these as you are at spam, but they still clutter your inbox up.

bacn2.com is a group of people who "are doing something about it" as they say. I haven't seen anything positive, so let me give you a clue: If you don't automate, you perish.

I'll explain that: I have several email accounts and I direct them all to one account, Google Mail. In Google mail I have a very good spam filter, that automates throwing away the real dross, the spam-spam-spam-spam...

I then set up a filter rule to bypass the inbox and apply a label of "crp" to the crap emails, "dealsdir" to the catalog and sales brochure type emails, "jokes" to the cartoons and joke lists, and so forth. In all I've built up a ruleset of a hundred or so rules. One at a time, as something new cropped up and crept in.

A handful of real people are what's left, and those I manually tag and read and put away.

So - it might look like hard work, but one rule at a time is how anything like this gets built...

Smart Alex Tries to Downer Rudd, Australia Gets The Giggles

Let me join Kevin Rudd and, I think, about 95% of Australians in laughing hard at Alexander Downer.

Honestly, if I was a Liberal supporter I'd be burying my head in my hands at your ineptitude. Thank the powers that you're batting for the other side...

Is Your Company Overlooking the Value in New Tools?

So Facebook is The Next Big Bogeyman to business. I'm not surprised. I'm amazed at how many businesses are throwing away an opportunity, but this wouldn't be the first time they've done that would it now?

I remember dimly (I was a kid then) the furore about telephones on each employee's desk. The amount of time spent calling personal contacts was going to decimate productivity, cost the companies millions in lost time and even more on illicit phone call costs. Honest! This was when I was very very young, so in the early 60's, and I remember my parents talking about it with friends over dinner one night. That image stuck with me, of some big boss wringing their hands while all the workers gabbled incomprehensibly into thousans of phones, creating a Tower of Babel in dusty offices.

Was it ever so? Patently, no. A desk without a telephone today is such a rarity. Obviously, the telephones on people's desks are there for a good business reason, and those early knee-jerks (used as a noun here not a verb people) were wrong in their assumptions, so far wrong that they missed the first big paradigm shift in business in a century, since the typewriter.

Then it was computers. OMG OMG OMG!!! Put a computer on everyone's desk and there's no knowing where that would end! People playing Minesweeper from clock-on to knock-off, People using that word processor thingie to compose crap poetry, letters to their lovers, spouses, and mistresses! It was the end of office productivity as we knew it, the end I say!

Again. What's on every desk today? Yep, you guessed it... Business as we know it would slow to a grinding halt if there weren't any computers on desks.

The age of the office LAN (Now people are going to use the network for all sorts of terrible personal things, waste even MORE work time!) came pretty much together with the other revolution in personal communications, the cell phone. (I'm not even going to start on what those cell (in Australia == "mobile phones") phones were going to do to office productivity, O Noes! It was the tragedy to end all tragedies, that management was no longer going to be able to control their employees' slacking off on phones, without banning mobile phones from the workplace...)

I just have to say that A) offices with LANs are the norm these days, because there is simply no way more convenient to share and collaborate, and centralise documents. And B) in regard to mobile phones, how many people use their own mobile phone out of work hours to make themselves more available? And use the mobile phone at work to short-circuit long-winded procedures and produce results faster?

There's more, as they say. Internet. Business went to great lengths to "protect" their employees from the Internet so they wouldn't waste their entire working lives surfing listlessly from one porn or lolcats site to the next, wouldn't spend the whole day browsing from one news site to the next.

Oh yes - Instant Messaging. Once shunned as "the biggest waste of productive employee time ever," it's at the stage now where I do half my business online via IM, keep in touch with colleagues, share solutions, and ask tough questions. I also use it to talk to my workmates because that way their phone stays open for customer calls, and is far easier to use and costs less in terms of interruption than the phone. I ask a question, and wait. When my colleague has time, they answer my question.

Now it looks like it's Facebook's turn. Rather than realising that this way, an employee is available at home and has the same resources at their disposal at home and is thus likely to do odd work related things from home, thereby increasing their value to the company, managers have become knee-jerks again.

I think it's because they trumpet stuff like that "IM is going to ruin us all!" and then when it doesn't happen, they either pat themselves on the back and say "Gosh we sure stopped that, how did we do it again?" or else, they blame the lack of productivity on the next thing - "Sheesh, we just got things back on an even keel, and then this Facebook thing comes along..." After all, they would never lay the blame where it fairly and squarely belongs, at their own feet...

65% of workers in big (>1000 employees) companies rely on each other, not management, to solve problems...
37% ignore company policy rules because they have a better way to get things done...
- The Informal Organisation, Katzenbach Partners, July 2007

Management is clearly not up to speed, and not listening, not keeping a finger on the pulse. if they were, those employess would have no need to go elsewhere for solutions, would not have to do things differently just to get things done.

86% of workers use an unsupported tool at work to boost productivity...
- Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management, Yankee Group, July 2007

And that's just a tip to the iceberg, working as a System Administrator for the last 15 years I can tell you that those "unsupported tools" are what drags many a company out of the gutter and into productivity.

As long as management is allowed to do this, companies will always lag behind, always lose productivity compared to the more avant garde companies. Instead of condemming each new advance, and then playing catch-up when everyone else is using that particular tool, it is part of a manager's job to evaluate the tool, find the positives, and find a way to use it.

One other thing. As a System Administrator I've long wondered why most companies have an IT Policy at all. It is a management tool, a tool designed to prevent the 10% of employees who will always find an "alternative" for each of these tools from abusing the system. It seems to me that it's always easier to pinpoint and warn those individuals than to penalise the whole workforce.

In most organisations, there is a Policy to not steal or damage Company property. If someone has stolen items of equipment from the Company, they are sacked, and often prosecuted under Law as well. If someone has stolen IT resources such as bandwidth, computer time, and IT staff time in blocking them, what happens is that everyone is penalised, and the culprit goes on to find another way to circumvent the system.

It's why, whenever I could, I'd let people know that bypassing the IT Policy is fine with me provided it doesn't happen all the time. I've explained it in various offices I freelance in, thus:

"If you see someone wasting time and IT resources day after day, talk to them about it. If necessary, tell your next in line. Because if you don't, that's another thing I will get told to shut down for everyone, and then you lose as well as that person."

Invariably, in every place I've been allowed to enforce IT Policy my way, it has resulted in employees who are happier, who have access to more tools, and I've had to block and prevent far fewer legitimate tools and applications than at organisations run by knee-jerks.

PS:
I could not find that dubious reference to a blog post about "having better things to do at home than waste my time" so I suspect that this is a bit of a furphy. Yes, I used that big evil search engine Google to look for it, if you find this reference please let me know because I suspect that it will be a highly tongue-in-cheek article which has been misquoted.

And secondly - did you notice the VERY current dates on the research quotes above? That's because I'd spotted this slideshow on that "Evil Facebook" and remembered it - and bingo - there's support for my article! Oh yeah and I did it from my sickbed, where I could be working for my employer right now if they only embraced similar tools more....

UPDATE: And now here is the first of no doubt a few similar articles following mine which you may enjoy. Another one. And another one. Hehehe - watch out! Disaster looms! .

German scientists claim to have broken speed of light

Great, just great! Now how are we supposed to see anything coming?

And what's the speed like now that they've totally broked it? Am I going to be stuck watching old re-runs on TV? No, wait...

Kitty Litter Times

In what seems to be a move to create more work for the recycling and rubbish collection services, our community newspaper got delivered to us this evening from a station wagon swerving across both sides of the road, which is a bit faster than the old hand delivery into the mailbox, to be sure.

Bear in mind that this is a local paper, delivered free, whether or not we want it. There is no way to stop the publisher wasting our share of the forest, it is delivered anyway. I'd much rather see it online but obviously talking about the environment is easier than doing something about it to these people.

Now to add insult to injury, this unwanted paper is delivered to us not by bicycle to the mailbox as before, but by someone's not-so-late model station wagon, in low gear, wasting petrol. Said station wagon being in front of us as we came home, not concerned one little bit that he was blocking traffic in both directions, and especially not concerned that we were waiting patiently for him to pick a side of the road away from our driveway...

Doesn't stop there though. Not content with wasting paper on a publication we don't want, and then delivering it at an environmental cost, the paper is landing on the driveway, just a piece of sanctioned litter that can get blown around.

Oh yes. Almost forgot. Because the paper is delivered by a polluting car, they can't put it in the letterbox any more, so to protect it from the rain, it's stuck in a plastic bag which has been knotted shut. Yep, if you're going to be an environmental disaster you may as well make it a good one!

Oh yeah - and then I thought I might look in the paper - what is so precious that it has to be placed in manufactured plastic bags, tediously hand knotted shut, and then delivered in the evening so it would have to survive the longest time before being brought in, and left laying around like litter on every driveway?

Oh yeah - seven more included flyers and catalogs, that's what. That a waste of more paper, probably more pages than the paper itself has, and a way to get around our "No Junk Mail Please" placard. Seems like it's okay to do shit like this if you put "community" in your name...

Do things like PayPerPost represent opportunities?

I'm testing if Pay Per Post has anything to offer me in terms of making the odd tenner from blogging about things that might be interesting to me and all of you out there. In order to do that I need to have their "tools" installed on the blog, but I'm loathe to do so unless there's a compelling reason to do so.

Problem temporarily solved by placing the tools link into this post - it will stay on the main page long enough to see if there's any advantage to be had, will drop off the queue soon enough, and if I like it I'll place a permanent link down the foot of the blog. To differentiate PPP postings I'll also add a buttonette to those articles, should that be the case, and perhaps place the link directly into the relevant articles.

I'm not selling out, but I am becoming ill more often and regular 9 to 5 paid work is becoming harder to get to so I need to see if I can find other income streams. One thing I'll do, is include a review of PPP for you so that you too can give it a try if it proves to be an honest enterprise.

Twitter hits 11

"Engineering. Engines at Warp Factor 9!"

"Och, ah cannae gie her any more Cap'n, she's gonna blow!"

And yet every time the good old Enterprise not only didn't blow as hard as the plot, but actually pulled the rabbit out of the hat and managed to find the mythical 11 setting.

Well, Twitter has just painted another number on the dial, with the volume of tweets officially hitting a level at which I can no longer catch up on what happened in the last eight hours. Of the just under 260 people I keep an eye on, I can say that there's 20% who form the core of those messages, say about 50 or so. At this point, is where Twitter should be looking at letting me put my friends in groups so that I can start watching relevant feeds.

For example, I have a dozen folks who are in Perth type of local, and a further dozen that are Australia local. Then there are exceptional friends around the world whose messages I wouldn't like to miss for the world. I can think of an easy two dozen of those. And there are news/blog release sites, which just announce the latest articles of interest, and again, I don't want to miss those but when around 80 - 150 articles hit my one bulging RSS feed in a day, I'd rather view them as a separate group please.

I was talking in a previous recent article about the future of social messaging, communications - with especial regard to IP telephony and voice messaging - imagine a scenario where you wanted to follow a conversation between your friends, and there were five irrelevant messages between each friend message - pure babel. So grouping/prioritising (such as Particls already does) for your pareticular things that you pay attention to, will be a must. If Twitter doesn't soon build some attention filtering in, in the form of groups or a similar mechanism, they stand to be abandoned because of the sheer impossibility of following a conversation.

A new thing that Twitter now has to try and accommodate. More Bluebirds of Crappiness in ur serverz. But it's the next step and it will have to be taken.