A stamp collection for 2012

I hope others have had as relaxing a Christmas break as mine.  It’s been nearly two weeks of total R&R with two major highlights.

1) My kids quoting back bits of the Royal Institution’s #xmaslectures whilst at the dinner table.

2) My youngest, Ciaran, starting a stamp album.

The latter came about because Horrid Henry took an interest in a rare stamp called the Purple Dragon.  Suddenly the questions were flying think and fast.

“Dad, is the Purple Dragon a real stamp?”

“Dad, what’s the most expensive stamp in the world?”

“Dad, what’s the rarest stamp in the world?”

“Dad, did you collect stamps as a kid?”

Thanks to Google I was able to give him some sort of answer to the first few questions and then I admitted that yes I dabbled in philately as a kid but that my stamp albums were probably in the attic at Granny and Grandad’s house.

About a week later on arrival at Granny and Grandad’s house the first question was, “Grandad, can I look at Daddy’s stamp album?”.  A bit of routing around by my dad resulted in little Ciaran spending the rest of the day staring at 4 battered old albums (two of which belonged to my dad).  When we left a couple of days later we brought them all home with us.

The albums were in a bit of a state. There was a pile of stamps that had fallen out and were loose and a few pages in one album that were showing some signs of damage.  The little one and I talked through what we might need to do to sort out the mess.  I knew at the very least I’d have to move some stamps in to a new album and/or do a bit of a temporary repair job on some of the battered pages.  So, after a bit of discussion Ciaran decided that he wanted to build up an album of his own.

His older brother was most put out on Bank Holiday Monday.  He couldn’t play on the Wii because Ciaran wanted to go into town there and then to go shopping? to get … stamp hinges?

As well as the hinges we picked up, a new album and an assorted pack of stamps featuring sports themes to start his collection.  I’d already decided that  it might be a nice idea if the first few pages of Ciaran’s collection covered the Olympics as my dad had a couple of pages set out like this in one of his albums which needed attention and we had just entered 2012, an Olympic year.  We managed to get sheets together for 1972 Munich, 1980 Moscow which looked pretty good and cobbled a few stamps together for a few other games (although there’s a noticeable absence because I think I stopped collecting stamps just before the 1984 Games).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Ciaran came in from school this evening and went straight to his album to look at his stamps.  I wonder how long it will last?

Also I wonder what it will be like  to collect stamps in the internet age.  The last time I collected stamps was more than twenty years ago.  Things have moved on as the following tweet reminded me:

Masai warrior on smart phone with access to Google has better access to information than U.S. president did just 15 years ago

— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) January 1, 2012

P.S. Google Googles seems to work on some stamps, e.g. scanning a Penny Lilac worked and took me straight to the Wikipedia page, but it struggled with a Penny Red thinking it was a Penny Black.

Number Squares

My eldest (aged 7) had a sheet of number squares as his homework last week.  It was like pulling teeth trying to get him to fill it in.  He hasn’t really got the hang of his times tables yet.  He’s OK on 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 9x, 10x but the others currently leave him flummoxed.

I think number squares are great but for them to be useful I think you need to be able to complete them quickly, know immediately whether you are right and wrong, and then try again.

I wondered about printing out a whole load of copies of different number squares but as I was making them I started thinking if there was an easier way of getting him to engage with this type of activity.  So after a few minutes thought I threw together this quick Excel spreadsheet.

I decided it would be helpful to have something that he could complete on the machine as it has a couple of features that beat a dead wood version:

1) A in built timer.

2) Conditional formatting to provide immediate feedback so that he knows whether or not he has got the sum right or wrong.

I showed it him this evening and his first reaction was, “Oh no not a number square!” However something interesting then happened.  His younger cousin (age 5) asked me to write out some sums for him.  Then once he’d done his sums he came and sat down next to my eldest and encouraged him.  Then my youngest son (age 6) started to take an interest.  Suddenly they were collaborating and it had become a game with each taking turns to try and get the answer right.

I doubt it’s ever going to take over from Moshi Monsters or Club Penguin as his game of choice but it is nice to see it being used.

If it gets more use I probably ought to do another macro to reset the square, i.e. distribute new numbers in the first column and row.

However, it works OK for now.

Hello blog my old friend….

I’ve come to talk to (/through) you again….

<justification>

A lot has been going on in my life over the past little while and I just haven’t found the time to blog, or tweet or read (or do other stuff) as much as I would have liked.  In summary:

• There’s been more uncertainty than usual about the future in the sector in which I work.
• I’ve been learning a lot about a new job.  I think I’m now beginning to find my feet but I still feel like Donald Rumsfeld.  Not knowing what I don’t know, or something like that.  [As an aside the new job is located in a lovely swanky office, the only downside of which is that it has been a bit of a Faraday Cage, which again hasn't helped.]
• I’ve (hopefully) been helping the new people in my team at work learn a lot as they start their new jobs.
• My kids aging process seems to have speeded up exponentially.  I love this as I’m spending more time with them, as for example, they don’t keel over in the middle of the day for an afternoon nap anymore.  Additionally we’re doing more active things that I like, the latest favourite activities are bike rides and playing hockey.  However it does mean that I don’t have as many of those little spaces in the day which in the past I would have filled with a bit of electronic reading or writing.
• Finally, I made the switch to Android as my old iPhone finally packed in.  The home button had more or less stopped working and I decided that fixing it would probably be a bodge too far.  I have tried to blog occasionally and have several unfinished posts, one of which is a post in which I try to justify logically why I moved from iOS to Android but I think the truth is that I just wanted to give Android a try.  So far I doubt I’ve really used more than 20-30% of the  features that the phone and the associated software provide.

All of this has meant that I’ve had to think carefully about what I spend my time doing and blogging has lost out.  Incidentally I’ve also found myself playing more Android games than I ever did on the Phone and have lost a few posts in the Android mobile version of WordPress (through my own user error).

However it hasn’t helped that a lot of what I would have wanted to write about doesn’t necessarily feel like a safe topic and so I’d have to be very careful*.

</justification>

* However, it is good to see people who hold held similar positions to mine at other institutions starting to blog.  I’m sure that now the dust is starting to settle on the White Paper I might be a little more active again.

<postscript written on November 20th 2011>

What a waffly justification.  Simple truth is, I’m out of practice.  So much so that I  didn’t even manage to press publish on this post back in  September or whenever it was originally written.

</postscript>

Augmented Reality Vodka

I was wandering around my local ASDA supermarket today when I saw three things that really interested me. The first was this:

There’s a description of what it does here. In brief you hold the bottle up to your webcam and line it up with an image on the Smirnoff webpage (requires Shockwave plugin) and an augmented reality piece is launched. I’m not a vodka drinker so I didn’t buy a bottle. However I was able to simulate the effect using the above picture which I’d taken on my iPhone. There’s a quick ScreenR video (no sound) of what happens.

My thoughts: Although I’ve played a bit with AR before this was the first time I’d seen a brand using it. I thought it would probably be a good talking point, but it’s very gimmicky. What does it add to the brand experience. And, I wonder how many people will actually go to the trouble of doing this. QR codes, which are probably easier to understand and use, still haven’t taken off so surely AR is just a step too geeky isn’t it?

The second was that they were demonstrating the Xbox Kinect system.

My thoughts: I was reminded how I felt when I saw my first touchscreen. This is a possible game changer. I’d heard about this technology about a year ago from Ben Watson of Microsoft Learning at a conference (see video 5A) however it’s the first time I’d seen it in action and I for one was impressed.

The third thing that captured my attention was a branded 1TB USB drive for £50.

My thoughts: Initially my reaction was I’m sure there’s cheaper out there if I bothered to look. Then I was reminded of my first hard drive. A 20MB External drive. I think it cost about £600 back in the late 80′s. At the time this amount of storage just seemed obscene. Today I carry 400x that amount of storage onboard my two year old phone.

Overall, as I left the store my mind was buzzing thinking about the crazy speed of technological evolution. So much so I nearly forgot the milk!

I can haz teh interwebz

You don’t know what you got till it’s gone…..

I’ve been without my Samsung NC10 notebook for a while. The screen developed a fault a few months ago in which the screen would just go blank (white) when you plugged in or unplugged it from the mains. It would return to normal as long as you then turned the screen brightness down. I found out later that this was a known fault that would have been covered under the warranty.  However it wasn’t that big a deal so I carried on regardless until a few weeks ago when a couple of bubbles and a crack appeared on the screen.

It’s been a difficult couple of weeks without my little netbook.  It’s amazing how much this my internet use has been even more curtailed than usual.   I use a computer at work, but generally at work I’m working, rather than surfing the net for stuff that interests me.   We do have another computer  at home and I have my iPhone but these have their limitations, namely I can never get to use them because I have a Farmville addicted wife and two kids, who are always on them.

Anyway, this sort of screen damage is never covered under the warranty because it is always assumed to be user caused impact damage.  The nice people at Sykes (who Samsung use for their customer support) quoted £189 to get a new screen fitted at one of their repair centres and well over £100 (I didn’t make a note of the price) for just the part itself.   I dithered a bit at this point and did a bit of googling.  I contacted, D & J Henry, who also happened to be my local Samsung repair centre, and do electronics repairs for Argos.  They quoted £100+VAT which was a bit more reasonable.  I was very tempted to just pop around and see them, but I tried a couple more google searches before I made up my mind. Up popped up the website for LCDs4less.co.uk who were selling the screen for £65.75 including overnight delivery.  Then I also found a piece which showed most of the necessary steps and confirmed to me that I could handle the repair myself (I’d previously managed to replace my iPhone screen and the NC-10 looked equally as simple).

There was only one problem. There seemed to be several different screens to chose from.  The very helpful LCDs4less people told me there were actually two different types of screen and the only difference was the size (one screen is 10.1″ and the other is 10.2″) but I thought it was best to ask Samsung (Sykes) for the part number.

Once I knew I was after a BA59-02415A LCD PANEL-10.2WSVGA;CLAA102NA0ACW,WSVGA  I ordered the part last Saturday.   I got a despatch note on Monday and the screen was sitting waiting for me on Tuesday evening when I got home from work.

The repair was was very straightforward and took all of ten minutes.  The first few steps are shown in this article. The article doesn’t show the actual screen removal but if you are interested it’s simply a case of undoing an extra eight screws and detaching a ribbon cable at the back of the screen.  In retrospect whilst I had the case undone I probably should have gone the whole hog and ordered in a digitiser as well.  The idea of a touchscreen net book really brings out the inner geek in me.

I have an overactive mind so various thoughts hit me as I was making the repair:

1. the ease I had in sourcing a specialist piece of equipment over the internet

I’m not a huge internet shopper so it always surprises me when it the process works well.  I’m not sure how I would have gone about making this order just a few short years ago.  The interwebz has definitely changed businesses.

2. the value of information and skill

I was reminded of one of the key messages I picked up from Freakonomics, a book I read maybe four or five years ago and a blog I used to follow religiously. This message was that there is value when there’s an asymmetry in information, but that many of these asymmetries are diminishing with technology and a move towards the openness of information.

I also think that there ‘s something about the application of knowledge or information or maybe even confidence.  It’s easy to get information; it’s more difficult to know you have the experience or the skill to apply information.

(As a separate story, this week, even though my wife works for a DIY retailer and so would get a huge discounts on the materials, I’d just paid a local company to put in a new garden fence for me.  Why? Well simply because my wife, probably correctly, didn’t have the confidence that we (I) had the skill / experience that a tradesman would.  Note to self: Brendan if you ever get the time there’s another blog post in that story about sub-contractors, brand and WOM.)

3. the value of trust of both information and of brands

I’ll not launch in to a diatribe about the care that’s needed with internet research, but could I trust this information/company crossed my mind several times.  This was even more the case when I replaced my iPhone screen. The lack of solid information at that time was why I felt it was necessary to video the repair I made.

I’ll also not mention anything about the additional trust I had in D & J Henry simply because I knew where they were based and that I could visit their premises in person.

Instead I’ll just mention the brand premium.  Sykes were able to charge more than D & J Henry because they were closely associated with the Samsung brand.  I’m sure I knew D & J Henry were the Samsung repair centre (from the Samsung website) but I’m sure I only got a cheaper quote because I range their general customer line rather than taking the Samsung route.

4. and finally, how consumer electronics is designed to be disposable and how the make do and mend culture that I grew up in doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

Thinking about points 1,2 and 3 I think that there are probably lessons and parallels for all sorts of industries but especially for the one in which  I work, the higher education industry.  Especially when I read Seth Godin’s latest post and some of the responses to it.

Taking a holiday

So 2010 is nearly two months in and I find myself on only my second (or is it third) blog post of the year.

My low number of posts has certainly not been due to a dearth of ideas. Quite a bit has happened over the past month – although I didn’t think the world really needed another post about the failures/sucesses of Apple and Google with their recent product launches. That said, I haven’t seen that much about the difference in approach the two companies make in their product launches.  I was also quite interested in what’s going on at Facebook as they sent me an email as from my last job I’m still an admin of a Facebook page with a large number of fans. It said that, “To ensure a positive user experience, we require admins of large pages to confirm their affiliation with the brand, business, person or entity that their Page represents. ”  I thought this was interesting especially in light of Project Titan.

In addition to all of the tech news there are some really interesting things going on in my area of work. Personally I’ve also been through some interesting times – visiting for the first time what I consider one of the craziest, most unsustainable cities in the world (previously I’d only seen the Tarmac of DXB).

Nor has my low number of posts anything to do with an infatuation with a new micro-blogging service. For the record my initial reaction to Google Buzz was, “Wow looks good but not really for me – yet”. What was bizarre about Buzz for me was that I have never used my gmail as a primary email, instead its the email I use for all of my web services. Therefore I only had one automatic contact from an IM conversation.

Instead I took a holiday; both metaphorically and literally.  The low number of posts can all just be attributed to a busy start to the year. I just haven’t found my usual time to blog. So, partly out of guilt (why do we blog anyway?), I’ve resorted to piecing this entry together when waiting in shopping queues, waiting for my kids, on buses and in various other moments when I’ve had more than 30 secs to myself with my phone.

This is a lot harder than it sounds especially as the week before last was half term and so most of this blog post was written whilst I was on a family holiday and one of the key phrases that I heard if my phone is ever visible is, “Dad, can I play on your phone”, particularly when we are in taxis, on aeroplanes, waiting at airports etc.  Top tip: an iPhone is a godsend to keep kids amused when the flight home is delayed by five hours.

The holiday has been great although we haven’t done a huge amount. The kids are at the age where they are very happy just playing on the beach, having a swim, playing the occassional round of minigolf and dancing at their mini-disco in the early evening.

Our one proper outing was to visit Sioux City, so we now have two little sherrifs running around shooting each other.  I loved how you can become a fan of their albino crocodile on Facebook.

It was a lovely disconnected holiday for me.   I didn’t touch the Internet (although the kids have – when there was torrential rain we visited an arcade and instead of playing air hockey or pool they spotted some computers and asked to play moshimonsters). Nor have I watched much TV, other than some of the events from Vancouver 2010 on German Eurosport. It’s funny but usually in the Winter Olympics I’d be hooked on the curling – this time it’s mainly two-man bobsleigh, snow jumping and biathlon. TV scheduling all seems to be based around national preferences and medal chances.

Instead of being online in my downtime when the kids are in bed, I’ve immersed myself in a book.  I’m pretty pleased with myself on that I managed to read two books cover to cover and get halfway through a third.

The first book was a great page-turner, The Ghost by Robert Harris. The wikipedia description is spot on – the lead is not that subtle a characterture of Tony Blair.

The non-fiction was John Simpson’s “Not quite world’s end“. It was harder going but thoroughly enjoyable.  It contrasted nicely with The Ghost and I identified well with many of the situations he found himself in, especially those in Africa.  He’s really isn’t a bad old boy, but what I found most interesting was how vigorously John defends the BBC.

Far more vigourously than the corporation’s director-general Mark Thompson seemed to do on Newsnight this evening.  I’m a license fee and independent state broadcasting fan but I really don’t know what to think of how poor this performance was.  It left me wondering what exactly to think.

Anti-social blogging

Last weekend I did a WordPress installation. (I also finally got around to having a five minute play on Google Wave.)

Whilst doing this I was reminded that I’ve written before that tools are used differently by different people.  I was reminded of this because I didn’t start waving publicly and I had no intention of using WordPress conventionally as a blog.

Instead I’m thinking of using WordPress as a simple web back-end for a five web-page site for my volleyball club because:

1. It can be updated easily from an iPhone which is important for updating scores from the game.  From this tweet it seems that I’m not the only person thinking in this way.
2. I wanted to produce a better browsing experience for iPhone/smartphone users.  I could have done this by looking at writing some new CSS but it probably would have meant additional JQuery work whereas WordPress has a great WP-touch plugin that can just be turned on.  So I figured that it might just be simpler and better to move the site over to WordPress (as it also adds a great deal of flexibility e.g. the site could be easily updated by others within the club if need be).

The installation was extremely straightforward – as they claim it really is a five minute installation.  Although it was far from a five minute job to get the site up and running.  In fact although I’ve got something working well in a subfolder I’ve not replaced the current site yet.

I’ve spent a couple of hours on this little project over the course of a week (and have made a note of what I’ve done so far below for my own reference):

1) I dropped some content in to blog pages.

2) Find some way of displaying Google Maps on the blog. I tested a few different variants but settled on the Google Maps Plugin for WordPress primarily because it’s incredibly simple and allows relative scaling of the map.

3) I also needed the Exec-PHP plug-in as I use this to run a simple include lifting the league table from the Associations webpages and inserting it on the Results and Fixtures page.

4) Find a theme that I could easily modify.  I settled on Starscape.  To modify it I did the following (N.B. again I’ve listed these in full to remind myself of what I did):

• Knock off some of the features that I didn’t want – e.g. date icons on posts, the links to home and RSS in the header, one of the sidebars and the footer.
• Added a new favicon.
• Moved the search below the sidebar
• Centralised and reduced the size of the text in the header.
• Created three PNG images for the header and footer - center and top and footer images (although I think I might need to re-look at these as I don’t think that they work in the way I’d like yet).
• Modded a couple of the php files (Page Template – page.php) – e.g. changing words from things like “Published” to “Last updated” etc.

5) Installed and configured the WP-Touch plug-in.  This was actually far easier than modifying the theme.  All it really took was choosing what not to show, shortening the name of the site and uploading a couple of icons.  I did have a bit of difficulty with the home page redirection setting.  It claimed that there were too many redirects.  However simply changing this to the default WordPress setting made all of the difference.

This was the first time I’d played about with WordPress or looked properly at what it can do.  Having seen various  plug-ins and options I know I’ve not even scratched its surface yet.

My only difficulty so far has been finding option settings.  For example when installing the Google Maps Plugin the documentation said “install it in the plugin’s admin page under Options”.  This left me a little lost.  I couldn’t immediately see the admin page and spent some time searching around the php files before eventually realising the admin page can be found under Settings on WordPress rather than within the plugins section.

I still need to do a bit more testing before I send my little site live.  However having got this far I can see myself catching a bug and writing my own custom themes.

Refereeing

This season my volleyball club have been paying for a referee (Chris Mason) as having proper referees really makes a difference to the quality of the games we play. It also usually means that we have players on the bench rather than refereeing.

However at this evening’s volleyball match against Nuneaton, as we had a couple of subs I second refereed. It was probably the first time I’d refereed properly in about five years. When I was younger, before kids and marriage I refereed quite a bit in the London Leagues, National Leagues, National Cup competitions and I even line-judged an international. However about five or six years ago when my youngest was born I couldn’t/wouldn’t find the time when I got the phone call and I gradually lost interest.

I was amazed at how much I remembered about the movement involved. The second referee is on the ground and is constantly moving from one side of the net to the other to watch the ball come over from the attacking side. I was fine following the rotation and even blew up a couple of rotation faults. I was also pretty good with the whistle although there was one incident when I hesitated in blowing up a back court hit. However I have to admit that I wasn’t prepared for the new net touch rules. I’d seen the video below a few times (the action starts about 40secs in) and had been playing volleyball with the new rules but it just hadn’t prepared me for refereeing a game.

It got me thinking about the importance of practising a skill. And as I really enjoyed the evening for a moment I was tempted to renew my registration with the EVA. The idea of registration was quickly put on hold by my wife reminding me that I’d be out three nights this week as it is.

However I did spot something on the EVA page that caught my interest.

The essence of a good official lies in the concept of fairness and consistency.

I found this interesting and thought about my day job. Especially when the page went on to say things like “This demands a huge element of trust”, You need to be “accurate in your judgement”, “an efficient organiser” and “an educator” and a good referee remains in the background.

Face to face

I saw this poster at Heathrow this morning and it struck me as being quite apt (especially because when I first started in my current job a number of people referred to me as the contracts guy).

It should probably come as no surprise that I don’t think of myself in that way.  I think my role is about listening and understanding our staff, our partners, our influencers and most importantly our students and then advocating to, for and with the university’s partners. But this is probably a different story.

I sort of disagree with the statement in this advert, but I do agree with the sentiment.  I’m a great advocate for using technology to allow the face to face communication to happen where possible.  However sometimes you really do need to meet in-person.

And this is why I was quite happy to be at Heathrow this morning at silly o’clock jumping on a flight.  I love travelling as it allows me quiet relatively undisturbed thinking time.  So on the drive down and whilst waiting in the airport I got the opportunity to do a little bit of work.  However I allowed myself to be sidetracked a bit on the flight by a delightful in-flight movie, “Julie & Julia” about a blogger re-creating every recipe from a book by a cook called Julia Child (who is played by a brilliantly over the top Meryl Streep).  I wished I’d given it my full attention and watched it properly as I think it would have been the perfect way to spend  flight and unwind.

It’s going to a busy week, as it’s not just about meetings with our partners.  I’ve also got four days of being a stand bunny both here in Athens and then in Nicosia.  I was hoping to have a bit of time this afternoon to have a quick wander out to see the Acropolis.  I didn’t, as I had to set up our stand this afternoon, send a few emails (that I wrote on the plane) and then attend a British Council briefing session.  I hope I’ll get a bit of time on Sunday morning.

It has been an interesting day for me that’s been full of reflections.  I’d begun to think about a few things and make a few mental notes about the market on the subway journey in to the city centre.

Then, when I went in to the exhibition hall to prepare our stand this afternoon I saw that a Open University in Greece stand was in a prime position.  And then when I got back to my room after the British Council briefing I saw that Brenda Gourley was speaking at #educause09 (quite an interesting hashtag that I’d been following for the past couple of days).   I watched the video for a while and there was quite a lot of interesting stuff, especially I would think for an American audience, who may not be familiar with the Open University.

One of the key issues that I picked up on, was Brenda talking about the need for collaboration with partners for delivery as a survival strategy in the global context.

I’ve heard Brenda speak several times but unfortunately this time I wasn’t able to hear her finish.  It had got to about 8:30pm and neither my colleague or I had eaten since breakfast on our flight in the morning.

However interestingly at dinner my colleague raised the importance of meeting our partners face to face.  His quote was something like, “One meeting is worth a thousand exchanged emails.”  So I showed him the photo I took this morning.  He smiled, said yes that’s it, and it felt like a circle had completed.

Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day and the topic is climate change – which is something I think about frequently but only in a peripheral way.

I was first introduced to this idea at university 15 or more years ago so I spent this evening seeing if I could search out one of the old essays I wrote back then.  The specific essay I wanted was about climatic history since the arrival of homo sapiens on the planet.  I remebered that it contained some predictive data and I was interested in seeing how this data stacked up today.  I was also interested to see what my thinking back then was.  I imagine I bordered on the radical.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

These days I’ve probably become too comfortable with life’s little luxuries and I’m sure I don’t do enough personally.  I imagine that there a lot of people like me on the planet.

However changes are happening to our planet and for once I find myself agreeing with Gordo…

“Like every parent, I want to leave a safe and secure world for my children. And I want to be able to look them in the eye because our generation stood up for their future.”

Although I wish it went further (in terms of an earlier peak for ommissions) I’m actually quite proud of the UK bid for Copenhagen and I pledged support online tonight.  The pledge is copied below in full.

‘I call for a global deal on climate change, and I want it to be:

• Ambitious – no more than 2 degrees temperature rise, developed-country emissions to peak in five years; the whole world in ten
• Effective – keep countries to their word, and let money flow to where it will make most difference
• Fair – support the poorest countries to cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.’