Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

which way round for globalization development?

June 9, 2005

I’m not sure where this bit goes. I mean, I understand the idea of your über plan and all that, ’cause you’ve been banging on about that and doing those staroffice presentations with all those circles and arrows and things for years, but what exactly do you want me to do when somebody managing global content deletes a node in the global tree and expects the whole operation to be supported seamlessly across multiple venues and countries and languages?

er, I dunno. I only did the strategy, right? or did I do the business requirements as well? I can’t remember. oh, that’s what you mean. so what do you want me to tell you? everything we asked you to tell us 6 months ago about how you actually want this content platform to support a centralized content model at a level where we can actually write something approaching a functional spec which we can turn into something we can actually begin to engineer. have you got time to do that? oh, sure! um, but what is it you actually want me do do? I mean, have I missed something out from the globalization requirements that I did last year? well, yeah. you need to let us know how somebody might actually utilize the platform to perform some kind of task which supports the operational model that you put in those requirements so we can work out whether we need to re-architect the system to enable slurping by delta and node deletion and actually what the criteria are for us having actually delivered a globalized platform that meets your needs, which, by the way, are probably not the same as they were a year ago, because everything’s changed.

oh, right. hang on, are you telling me that my own business requirements might be wrong? you can’t do that, I am the business. there mine. it’ll take them home and not let you play with them if you start saying nasty things about them. no, we’re not saying they’re wrong, they’re just not quite, well, right. here’s a whole bunch of stuff we noted that you might want to consider, because what you’ve asked for and what we’re doing aren’t necessarily exactly converging on a neat path. oh, ok, thanks. jesus! that’s loads of stuff! yeah, but we want to make sure we do it right, right?

so we reach an agreement that I pull my dumbass finger out and actually do those process flows n’ stuff that I never get round to doing and the engineering team will do what’s right, like they always do, and if they need anything urgently to progress the globalization development, they’ll let me know, so I can make something up and filter it back into the strategy later. only joking. I’m calling it the pragmatic globalization development chain (because of course, aggressive pragmatism leads us into systemized sticky matrix approaches), which is how it’s always been really, except the engineering team know globalization as well as the rest of us these days, so I’m much more deferential when I tell them absolutely positively that global content is US-English and the tiered fallback model only goes 2 levels, because they’ll probably be able to point out to me just how that won’t really work, even from a business point of view, but in a really nice way.

that’s not you, you’re an imposter

June 8, 2005

so I finally meet the team after about 6 months and nobody recognizes me. there I am wondering around BRM looking all english and trying to put faces to polycoms and I’m just looking like a freak in a tube station after I’ve been kicked out of Ruby’s. you, you’re, um, you must be, well, you look a bit like Liz, but she’s in Burlington. so. no. hang on, you’re, no, I know this, you’re…Bob! Hey Bob! you look just like you do on the video conference. no, that’s a compliment, really. Bob?

hoisted by my own petard. our internal org system means you can look up anyone in the company and get all the details you want, including all the hidden fields they’d forgotten they’d filled in in 1998, which say things like ‘clammy’ and ‘executive’. it also lets you see where people are working, which office they’re in, how you get there, what they’re doing, what they’re having for lunch in Guillemonts and stuff like that. it also has the option to integrate some optional detail, such as your calendar appointments and a picture of yourself. so, calendar, that’s genius, right? I mean, we’re all over the place, literally, so coordinating the time in 2 weeks when everybody you need to be on the phone at the same time to discuss how you’re going to allow someone in france to author a whitepaper that someone in germany can subscribe to without exposing the whole content branch and then arguing for hours about what global content is anyway is difficult, so you look up everyone’s calendars and see for yourself that the only time everyone is free is 22:00 your time when you’d planned to go and see Sin City and get lagered up afterwards because its thursday and you never do any real work on friday anyway.

so that’s good. what’s more revealing, however, is the choice of picture that folks use to let people determine exactly what they are like. mostly people don’t do it at all, which is fine, because a lot of people don’t have the slightest interest in investing the time to find out how you do it, or more pointedly reserve the right to not not let you know what they look like as that’s an infringement of their civil liberty, which is also fine, except that appears to be predominantly the U.S. go to Korea of Singapore and they can’t wait to stick in their pictures of them grinning into a Canon that the manager has taken round the office that morning. those that do upload themselves will generally do the ‘a bit too close and not very well lit in the office but that will do I suppose, I mean it looks like me I guess’ thing. others will play that maverick card and lob in a hilarious offcut from google image search that lets people know the kind of person they are without actually letting you know what person they are. you know, a darth vader, a dilbert, a muppet, a full face blowup PVC gimp mask from a BDSM site they just happened to come across when searching for ‘leather cleaner’, honest. those kind of things are ok. I mean those kind of pictures, not those kind of masks. or sites, er, anyway.

there is another category of image that occasionally turns up, but you only know if you already know what the person looks like, so its a kind of elaborate vanity test that sometimes you pass, or sometimes you fail to excuse effectively. this is the category called ‘well, its always me behind the camera, so there’s never any current pictures of me, so I had to use a 10 year old picture, that’s all I had’. and that’s where I found myself, wandering down the corridors at 5000 feet, blanks looks all around, trying to hide the fact that I might just have added a few pounds and lost some hair and maybe gone a bit gray since that photo you saw of me on the org tool that is 10 years old. my new boss didn’t recognize me until the next day and then she said ‘you’re an imposter! that’s not you on the org tool!’. dammit.

so now I’m up to date and look just like I really look, so if anyone looks me up, it’s their fault.

globalization. head. wall.

June 7, 2005

there’s no myths associated with globalization just a simple truth. you’ve got to change all your business processes mate, cos this globalized solution ain’t gonna work if you keep producing stuff like you’re in an exam room with your arm over the answers and then expect it to spread the sharing message to where the revenue is, which is not where you are, probably. the burgeoning underclass of globalization managers have been squirrelling around for years, trying to get you in a small room with no natural light just so you can understand how it might actually be possible to transform our beautifully crafted concept album of monetization through pragmatic centralization into a workable, sustainable and accountable framework for managing our messaging and enabling our commerce venues with cascading content inheritance and local value-added content support, like what I just drew on those concentric circles in staroffice, in case you were trying to work out what that was. this projector’s a bit rubbish. and I’m in another country, of course.

I mean, it’s not like its gonna even cost you a fistful of dollars. you’re already building that central web application architecture, right? I just know you’re gonna be fully internationalized an’ that, and lookit, you got hooks into localization workflows and all that stuff going on, so its gonna be like sticking a lemon on the eiffel tower. easy innit? so why not let us talk to the authors and business owners so we can’t just have some sort of arrangement where we give them this lovely globalized platform where localized milk and internationalized honey flow across the plains of centralization and over the cliffs of subscription and into the valleys of unified content taxonomies and they just have to change the way they’ve been creating stuff for the last 10 years. I think they’ll be open to that. I expect they’re falling over themselves to break their agreements with their press agencies and design vendors and actually, I bet if we pointed out to them that copy and pasting entire sections of our corporate site into Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: URGENT: Re: [Fwd: emails and then expecting the intern to create the online equivalent of the cistine chapel on 15 disparate sites in 10 languages in flash isn’t the most viable authoring solution, then they’d probably have some kind of religious experience and convert wholeheartedly to the church of g11n and succumb to the divine and all-knowing truth of ‘the content model’.

so, I’m off down the newsagents to pick up my copy of Marketing Matters – But Not If I Can’t Employ My Friends To Do It magazine and I’ll leave it to you to arrange the con call that has to work for Santa Clara, Camberley, Singapore and Moscow that will kick this stuff off. but don’t do it on Wednesday afternoon, cos I have an appointment with a medico about a collapsed idea.

dripping into the sculpture trail

June 6, 2005

pandering over a mass of crusts it was really an experimental twitch into tractorland. sue and patrick came and thus stood a ceramic torso and the soup dragon from the clangers on a feline hump. emily and peter were wailing in the bushes with green garden bale straps and harmonicas and everything was in tune enough for jazz. over at number 17, owl was scratching on a willow tree and I peered through a cairn, waiting for the gap.

but then it got apocaplyptic and elisabeth and colin were getting all gothic in the minstrels gallery, so we stepped around 12 kneeling cushions with eyes while josh simply stepped across them and then formed an orderly fish queue for the minibus that would take us to the place we started, so we could go all the way round and sink into the car park. got a call on the bus. they were walking, but they still got there before us and waved through a porthole as we passed the fighting rabbits and flapped over the horizon.

so now its a casserole and we don’t have to get ready for tomorrow, we can get ready for the rest of our lives. honey, eggs, prawns and a peugeot 104. cairn.

it’s just the same over here you know

June 3, 2005

Boulder. Norwich. they’re just like the illegitimate children of upper-middle class families separated at birth and rehoused on different sides of the atlantic. I mean, the nucleus of these places is like the result of an illicit conflagration between two drugged-up psychology students from the university on the edge of town, but peel off a few layers and progress a couple of miles into the suburbs and further out to the wilderness, then things get much more like the unfortunate in-bred collision of two disenfranchised and disaffected 15 year olds on crack who stumbled out of elementary with a working knowledge of woodworking and a lovebite on the neck. this is where people start building their own houses out of pieces of wood they salvaged from the local authority rather than getting the thursday edition of the local post and leafing through the property pages thinking about the next progression up the stakeholder lifestyle ladder and how much the difference between what they currently own and what they really need to work from home and walk to school and have an acre and have that one extra room that would make all the difference would be.

and there’s a great big community of hippies that won’t go away. they came to the university in 1975 to study geology and life sciences before there was such a thing as life sciences and they just never went back home. they just moved into the golden triangle with their afghans and tabalas and hung tie-dye on the wall and CND in the window and opened up the alternative pulse shops that Tesco and Walmart are now buying up and turning into drugstore expresses to cater for the burgeoning population of 2005 hippies that come to study, well, geology and life sciences, but have already got cars and mortgages and actually, are soo busy they can’t begin to think about the G8 summit or even cooking their own dinners so they congregate at the microbrewery and pretend to like football and try to shag each other, but in a polite way, cleaning up after themselves.

but always creeping in from the outskirts are the indigenous population of the unintelligable underclass that really own the city. they have been here for generations, often never leaving their own self-made house in the country. mostly they’ve not had any social intercourse outside their own extended family. mostly they’ve had no intercourse at all outside their own extended family. they suddenly appear over your shoulder when you’ve been busy checking out kites in the window of ‘kites and things’, their dribbly grin poking out of their bleached fringe, which is poking out of a baseball hat that you’re wondering just how it could get so unclean. they don’t want anything. they just do that looking at you thing and then gather together again like some idiot mercury in the middle of the high street and laugh. you’re not sure whether it’s at you or just in general, but you check your purse and head into a book shop all the same, because you’re safe in there, if a little grubby after the experience.

I’m only joking of course. I was born here and I’m quite normal.

not from round these parts

June 2, 2005

er, that’s a lovely pickup truck you have there. is that a gun in your pocket or are you just telling me this is a really crap place to stop and take a picture? I’m being ironic, you see? look, all this beauty. and then stuff like you. that’s a classic juxtaposition, ain’t it? it’s really purdy an’ all, but you ain’t from round these parts, are you boy?

well, no. if I was, I would know that you can’t get here from Nederland and then onto Denver Airport in 3 hours, but that’s where I find myself right now, so if you’d be so kind as to get that dog off my leg I really need to be tearing down the 70 at 80 miles an hour, wishing I’d filled up with gas somewhere closer to civilization.

anyway, the picture is here. it’s somewhere between here and here

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