Absence

I haven't updated this for a long time. Life got in the way. I'd finished a relationship, about.. oh, about 5 weeks before my previous post. Started what was to become a new one the day after that post. It's going well, thank you.

We've opened a small tearoom in the village of Headley, Surrey, adjacent to the only store in the village. I don't hold many hopes although the couple that run the store assured us it has every chance of being a success (they used to run the tearoom, until it proved too much for them to run both). Marian's background is in catering - she used to have a restaurant in Spain, a hotel in Holland, trained as a chef at the Metropole hotel in London - so from that aspect, we're fine. She'll be baking and cooking, I'll be serving. (Hmmmm... me and dealing with the public... we'll see.) And the tearoom itself is nice - the place was a shithole when we took it over; filthy, with colonies of spiders in the tearoom itself and rusty equipment in the kitchen. We cleaned and scrubbed, and a friend painted and decorated; Marian brought cute little net curtains for the windows and made some nice gingham tablecloths. I planted flowers by the wall and by the outside tables area. It looks lovely.

What I'm worried about, is how do we get trade. That village is... small. 600 people. People go through it from one place to another - it's on a road that can serve as a shortcut from the A24 to the A25, or from Epsom to Dorking or Reigate. That's the main road. No sidewalks, either, so people don't walk past. They drive past. And by the time they see the tearoom sign (hung just under the shop sign when we're open) and it registers ("hey, there's a tearoom here! let's stop and have a cuppa and cake") they're a hundred yards past it. I know. I did that as well.

Still we (that is, Marian) invested next to nothing and we'll only open at the weekends (I'm not packing in my business, poor as it is - I love what I do).

Bluebells

click on any image to enlarge

It's bluebell time!

Well, it's been for the past week or so, and now they're beginning to fade. A friend told me last week about Trosley Country Park and about the abundance of bluebells there, so, although Ranmore Common is no sluggard as regards bluebells either, I went there yesterday to have lunch with my friend and see the bluebells.



















I think I even found a young relative of Treebeard




It's a lovely place. I'll be going there again - when I'm fitter and have more time. Hopefully, it will be in this lifetime.

That grass needs mowing

Said my neighbour.
What's the problem? I like it a bit longer. Seems greener that way. One doesn't notice the bald spots, the mossy spots and all other sort of spots that way. Besides, this is not a golf course, it's my back garden.
And you've got lots of dandelions in your lawn, you really ought to use that weed 'n feed stuff I told you about - she continued.

Well, I don't want to use that feed'n weed see-ar-ay-pee, cos I want to encourage wild flowers to colonise that back garden, and that includes dandelions. Plus, these dandelions look really cool in my long grass. Plus, apparently dandelion leaves are really good in salads. You can pluck some for your salad, if you like.

She didn't like.

I think I just added to my "strange old bat" reputation here.

I like living here

Ok, it's pretty small. Tiny, even. A mobile home: 1 small bedroom, 1 small living room, kitchen, tiny bathroom, and a cubicle grandly named "the computer room".

But, like the estate agents love saying: location, location, location. My home is sited right at the back, by the woods. I enjoy the quiet and solitude - and the wild life that comes visiting at times. This time of year, when the woods stir to life after the long winter slumber, is enchanted.

This is the view from my "computer room" window:





This time of year, lots of trees are in flower. The flowering tree in the first photo above is a wild cherry. The second photograph is of a branch of another wild cherry.


At the back of my little plot, there's a bridleway which forms part of the network of footpaths and bridleways known as The North Downs Way. It's lined with trees on both sides, some of them sycamores. I like those tender sycamore leaves in the spring - the way light and shadow play through them.

"The Zone"

A post yesterday (by a lady called Anja) on a bulletin board I belong to resonated with something in me - so much so that it kept cropping up in my thoughts throughout the day yesterday.

Quote:

...... the best feeling is when i emerge from the fog, victorious. when i was a kid, at school, we would get this assignment to write a story or essay. i would map it out in my head and then dive in there, all sounds would fade around me and it would be like magic, i would get it down exactly like i thought i would. that was the biggest magic in the world to me, the fog ....

Now, this is exactly how I do my best work, how I find solutions to perplexing prolems - how I need to work to get anything done. I need to be able to immerse myself in that fog - unlike Anja, I can't summon it at will, I have to have no interruptions.

Thing is, I was always told I was strange needing that. I should be able to concentrate through whatever - and be able to return to full concentration after any interruption. "look at... if they can do it, you should be able to." Whether doing my school homework, or later in life, working in an office - open plan! Satan's invention - I was expected to be able to answer any stupid question or request and maintain the same level of concentration throughout. I felt very inadequate.

That why when Anja shared this with us it created such ripples in my thoughts.

And then, this morning, through one of those coincidences, while web-hopping, I encountered in two separate articles the zone - a concept very similar to Anja's fog.

Quote:

We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone. The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. ........ The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...000000068.html

Another article, How to Shut up and Get to Work references the one I quoted from above

Quote:

When you have a long stretch where you aren’t bothered, you can get in the zone. The zone is when you are most productive. It’s when you don’t have to mindshift between various tasks. It’s when you aren’t interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an im. The alone zone is where real progress is made. Getting in the zone takes time. And that’s why interruption is your enemy. It’s like rem sleep – you don’t just go to rem sleep, you go to sleep first and you make your way to rem. Any interruptions force you to start over. rem is where the real sleep magic happens. The alone time zone is where the real development magic happens.

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/webapps/how-to-shut-up-and-get-to-work


I feel vindicated.

Flo, her expensive computer - and Tiscali

Flo (name changed to... well, you know - names are always changed in these kind of things, aren't they?) well, anyway, Flo called me one day to ask me about building her a new computer and installing her a wireless network. New client at that point, she'd pulled my name out of the local directory.

Unlike most clients, she wasn't looking to get the cheapest deal she coud - she wanted a relatively high spec box, and she was aware it would cost. So I costed one for her.

For those who are interested, here are the spec:

• Asus K8V-MX SKT754 motherboard;
• AMD (Newcastle) Athlon 64bit 3000+ 512kb L2 Cache 754pin;
• Corsair memory, 2x512MB matched pair, DDR 400 CL2.5;
• Seagate Barracuda Plus 200GB 7200RPM HDD;
• NEC dual layer DVD writer;
• Sapphire Radeon 9600 AGP X8 256MB DDR DVI TV-Out;
• Internal floppy/ media card reader;
• Good quality silver with black trim case, 350W PSU.

Nice case, isn't it?

With that, she wanted a 19" Neovo glass fronted monitor and Canon Pixma iP5200 printer.

Done. Delivered. Installed.

We had hassle with that computer. Flo thought she knew about computers. She also had a "knowledgeable" mate (there's always one of them, isn't there) who castigated her for getting an Athlon instead of a Pentium IV (never mind that in independent tests, Athlon beat the laggard P4 hands down, especially in multimedia apps, which she intended to run.) Faults were found, faults were rectified or pointed out not to be faults. I spent extra hours on installing her software as she had it on her old computer, then upgrade her old computer to WindowsXP so that her 10 year old son could use it for his homework - cos the little tyke couldn't possibly do his homework on Windows 98 now, could he? - and didn't charge. Just so's I end up with a happy customer.

Anyway, all that aside - she also wanted wireless networking, so that her son could access the internet from his own computer - for his homework. So, I got her a Linksys modem/wireless router and a wireless network card, went there to install it.

Found Flo tearing her hair out - her broadband connection had failed and would not reconnect. So she got on the phone to -
yes, Tiscali customer support.

According to Flo, she spent some two hours on the phone to them - various "technicians" put her and the computer through their paces. Eventually the advice was - yes, "reinstall Windows" (see my post about ntl "customer service" below.) So she ended up with two instances of Windos XP on her computer, a confusing choice of Operating Systems at boot ("please select your operating system: Windows XP or Windows XP") and no internet connection.

I looked down at the modem - ADSL light was flashing; the modem wasn't trained. I asked her whether she told Tiscali that and whether she asked them to check the line. Yes, she had, and they assured her the line was just fine. Had she suggestd to them the modem had developed a fault? Yes, she had - their answer was, no, it's a Windows problem. OK, I said, let's try the router.

Installed the router, it trained without a problem. Her internet connection was up and running in less than 15 minutes.

This time I did charge her to sort out the mess of two XP installations.

Found on the web

on the site of an interesting young man. (I hope he updates it more often now...) His site is called siteaboutnothing.

The following was really emailed to a prominent ISP in the year 2000:

> Incidentally, have you ever visited your Tech. Support?  I have
> this image of a room full of Bermudan pyjama clad folk, swinging
> gently in hammocks, sipping from a glass of iced mango, pineapple
> and durum juice, with umbrella, reading Socrates's Elegy to a Roman
> Churchyard, listening to Beethoven's "Tech Support Blues" whilst
> all around them computers quietly hum.  When a problem arises that
> is not coffee down the back of the server or a loose wire, they
> heroically struggle with incomprehensible faults from indecipherable
> software that refuses to do what it says on the box until some
> inspired genius does something truly novel which for no particular
> reason, cures the fault.
>
> It is like that isn't it ?  Not just a call centre with subcontracted
> technicians?