Open letter - No to the Cogges Link Road

Dear Sir,

I’d like to register my opposition to the planned Cogges Link Road. In my view the road will serious impact the beautiful public park which I enjoy running through and visiting with my two young children.

The park land is part of the Windrush floodplain which if reduced further will only exacerbate future flooding. It appears to me that the link road will simply move the traffic bottleneck and won’t reduce traffic congestion. Expanding the A40 junction at the top of Oxford Hill would achieve the same objective as the link road but with a greatly reduced impact. In the past promises have been made (regarding Mill St, Marriots Close) to replace lost park land with alternative land. In neither case the promise has been kept.

I have a beautiful photo of my son sitting in the long grass surrounded by daisies and buttercups. I’d like that photo to represent a place we can continue to enjoy and not become just a memory.

yours faithfully
James Webster

I hope we’ll see a decent level of oppostion. People are starting to get organised: http://witneyfirst.com
, and on facebook.

What magpies can teach us about management and why I don’t watch the apprentice

Magpies seem to be jacks of all trades - scavengers, predators and pest-destroyers, their challenging, almost arrogant attitude has won them few friends. With its noisy chattering, black-and-white plumage and long tail, there is nothing else quite like the magpie in the UK. When seen close-up its black plumage takes on an altogether more colourful hue with a purplish-blue iridescent sheen to the wing feathers, and a green gloss to the tail. Non-breeding birds will gather together in flocks.

source RSBP

Magpies are, perhaps, most famous for the peculiar habit of lining their nests with shiny items. As a manager I’m also tempted to allow the glittery and the shiny to distract me. The symptom is most prevalent in the absence of long term goals. When there isn’t a long term direction to maintain then the latest development framework, methodology or web app can easily take over. (It’s not hard to find something more shiny than writing a process document or performance review.) Shiny is also a metaphor for ‘the now’, it’s very easy to make your decisions based upon ‘the now’; the current project or the current performance of an employee. Think very hard about your long term objectives and keep them in focus. Then learn to recognise the genuine opportunity from the shiny bottle top.

Predator, Challenging and Arrogant are words often used to describe managers and like magpies few friends result. I don’t watch The Apprentice, not because it isn’t good tv - it’s great, but because all the hopefuls seem to be trying to make themselves into the very worst kind of managers. Noisy chattering, arrogant, predatory, glitter chasing managers.

tumblr

I’m really liking tumblr: http://jwwebster.tumblr.com/

The UI and integration with other feeds is really nice - it just works.

Outwell Georgia XL

Taking photos of the tent as you unpack it for the first time is something I always thought I must do. Finally I actually remembered.

I give you the monster Outwell Georgia XL in 16 photos.

Despite the detailed photo log it still didn’t go back in the bag the same way it came out. However it did go back in the bag first time which for me is unheard of.

BBQ Lunch

The idea of a bbq lunch was taken up with great gusto. The full weight of project management experience was thrown at the task and everyone ate their fill with zero left-overs. You’d expect nothing less from the team that developed LoveFoodHateWaste

My trusty BBQ handled the job admirably.

Torchbod

A nice 5k run from the office to Charlbury and back through the park. Dave Harris and I did this as part of his training for the Blenheim 10k.

Life after flying

To fly or not to fly, that is the question (that very few of us are asking). It’s a questions I’ve not fully answered myself but I’ve at least come to a localised stability point: No more personal flights.

I don’t particularly enjoy flying or travelling in general. Arriving I like, but I’ve never been able to enjoy the getting there. The experience of checking in, security, waiting around, boarding and sitting in a tiny seat (I’ve yet to fly business class for any distance - perhaps now I never will) followed by foreign immigration - not my idea of fun. Where do the Americans recruit their immigration officials? America if full of cheery, pleasant people yet they somehow seem to find enough miserable, humourless, people to staff their entry stations. Actually they don’t seem to find enough - if they had enough I wouldn’t have to queue for an hour every time I arrived in Seattle. Anyway I don’t like flying - even though they give you free alcohol.

Flying with children - let’s not even go there. I’ve heard stories of pleasant flights, but I’ve heard that ‘I only need one pair of shoes and it won’t take long’ and I’ve a friend who’s working on a perpetual motion machine in his spare time - I don’t believe any of you.

—–

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. St Augustine

I’m not sure St Augustine was referring to The Maldives but that’s where I’d like to go. It’s a holiday that Rachel and I once promised ourselves.

However I can’t think about that holiday without coming back to something I read on Tom’s blog:

“Consider this. You’re in an airtight room (the environment), with a number of plants (your share of natural carbon-hoovers). Getting food and clean water into the room takes oxygen out of the air. Heating the room also takes oxygen out of the air. An artificial scenario, but then pretend it’s some sort of dream. The type where you can’t just wish for a pony, or more plants.”

We’ve been brought up with a certain understanding that we take more than our fair share of the earth’s resources. I don’t recall air being one of those scarce resources. If the science is only half right (and it seems we are finally coming to consensus) then carbon emissions need to be limited world-wide. If there were an even, binding distribution, an allocation to every person then it would be clear that we cannot ‘afford’ the carbon costs of flying. How about an uneven distribution heavily tilted towards the developed world? We probably still couldn’t afford the carbon.

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“Telling people to plant trees [to solve climate change] is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.” - Oliver Rackham

There is always offsetting. I think offsetting is better than nothing but it’s not really solving the problem. See CheatNeutral and watch their excellent documentary on youtube.

—–

Probably the single most polluting thing you or I will ever do is step on to a plane. Take that tempting return flight to, say, Thailand, and you become immediately responsible for about six tonnes of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere - three times more than is likely to come from any other activity you do in the year, including driving and heating your house. This is why aviation is the most bitter and divisive issue in environmental politics today. from Mark Lynas the newstatesman

So no more personal flights. Forever? I just don’t know. We have good friends in New York and those white beaches and cloudless skies are still waiting. If I do fly again it will be with a very keen awareness that what I’m doing is expensive and that it’s not my money that I’m spending.

—–

The spamless life

I recently had a query asking how to minimise spam. I was halfway through replying about how mail clients like Thunderbird handle spam when I realised that I get very little spam. My work account at Amazon gets lots of spam but they have a heavyweight server to detect it and my mail rules do the rest. However at home I don’t get much spam. The answer, I believe, is Google. Just as in Sunday-school the answer to everything is ‘Jesus’ and in Maths, beyond a certain level, the answer is always zero so the answer to most of today’s computing problems is Google (whether this is a good or a bad thing is open to debate). In this specific case the answer is Google Mail.

I’ve had a Google email account since the very early days. I sent a copy of all my email to Google simply so I’d got an independent secure copy. I rarely delete email, you just never know when it will be useful. Relatively recently Google added new functionality, allowing you to connect to your gmail account as if it were a POP3 server. (I once implemented a POP3 server and client using Java and Delphi - this was back in the 20th century). Google has it’s own clever spam detection rules and it has been quietly filtering my mail. If I log-on to the gmail web client I can see that actually I have lots of spam.

To have a spamless life you’ll need an email account that will allow you to bulk forward your emails to another account. Most accounts should let you do this although you may have to go hunting to find the option. You then need a Google Mail account - which is free. The biggest criticism of Google mail is that their systems read your email so that they can choose good adverts for you. Personally my email really isn’t that interesting and if it was I’d just encrypt it.

Once you have an active account click on the settings link (top right) then under the Accounts heading you need to tell Google to send email using your current email address. Once created you need to make this the default address. If that all worked you should now be able to send email from Google as if it were your own account.

Now select ‘forwarding and POP’ and choose one of the enable POP options. Which option will depend on how much email you already have in your Google account. You can play with the other options but that should be the Google account setup complete.

The complexity of configuring your email client varies from client to client but there are pretty good docs.

What should be happening now is that email sent to your account will be forwarded to Google. Google kindly filter out the spam and then you collect your email from Google. Although you now have a second email address your contacts shouldn’t notice because it is hidden behind your old account. A second advantage of this setup is that you can send and receive email anywhere through the Google mail web pages (Many accounts offer this anyway so it might not be helpful).

It is well worth testing this by sending email to yourself and getting a friend to email you. Before writing this I asked around to see how other people were solving this. Reassuringly Simon outlined an identical setup.

Jogging with Google Maps

I’ve wanted to jog regularly, or more accurately run, since I was young. Until the last month it never quite worked probably because I focused on speed not distance . Suddenly I’m running several times a week and loving it, looking forward to the next opportunity. There are a few reasons behind this but a big one is the enjoyment of planning the routes. Witney has some beautiful footpaths around it and they are great for jogging.

I’ve been planning my routes using Google Maps. To find my routes search for “Jogging Witney”. You should get about 10 Google results in a panel on the left hand side. Scroll down and at the bottom you should see a link to user created content (like this). I’ve saved five routes so far, click on any of them and a pop-up should appear on the map. To see the route you need to click again on the ‘Jogging Routes’ link. If that all worked you should be looking at some pretty coloured squiggle. If it didn’t work then try moving the map to Witney and re-searching - Google’s context based search algorithms don’t always do what you want.

The best way to view the routes is to select the hybrid option.

Three of my routes going through the country park

To add your own routes to a map select My Maps then Create new Map.

These four icons should now have appeared on the map. They are for moving, drawing a pin, a line and a shape. To draw a route you just need the line. You can start anywhere on your route (assuming it’s circular). Keep clicking and dragging the map until you are finished and then double click to finish. You can now give your route a name and a description, it can be saved for public or private viewing.

You can now also view your routes on Google Earth and even fly around them! To load your routes into Google Earth you just need to download the KML file. There is a link on the top right hand side of the map. KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is simply an XML file describing what you’ve just drawn on the screen. The file should already be associated with Google Earth, if it isn’t you’ll need to save the file and then load it into Google Earth using Add -> Network Link (that on the Mac version).

That’s really cool but there is one big thing missing - how long is each route? It can only be a matter of time before Google add this but until then you’ve three options.

1. Run it - with a pedometer or Nike+ (which really is super cool.)
2. Use the Google distance measurement tool (further down the My Maps page). To use this you need to redraw your entire route. That’s easy enough now that’s on the map but it is time consuming.
3. Use this neat (but random) site.

The site needs your KML file pasted in as text. If you saved it to disk then just open it in a text editor and copy across. Copying from Google Earth is even easier. Right click (or equivalent) on the route (which should be showing in the Places, My Places pane on the left hand side. Copy and then paste into the middle text box entitled GE PATH LENGTH MEASUREMENT. Hit the calculate button and you should get back a distance with a breakdown of the distance between each of your points.

Now you just need to actually get out there and run it…

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