Wednesday, 11 October 2023
Sunday, 8 October 2023
Luka and Artificial by Ed Adams
Friday, 6 October 2023
Back once again with Strava , Swift and Garmin
Thursday, 5 October 2023
biting the dust
The long term aspirations of the crass Tory branding at their conference were bared for all to see. Cancelling a project started in 2009 ten years too late. But as J-RM says, all the new projects are 'front-loaded'. Of course they are. Spend as much as possible on the 'shovel ready' before anyone realises the project is going down.
Paper the plans with aspirational diagrams, like the one below.
Wednesday, 4 October 2023
The iron heel - a Tory trope?
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ Famously from George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Suella Braverman illustrates the totalitarian trope by standing on a guide dog tail whilst talking at the Tory Conference (she did later apologise).
But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.
A picture of undistilled power, control, and oppression: the key themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four and much of the work Orwell wrote in the wake of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
A current distillation of that type of power is illustrated below by a knowing heckler ejected from the conference and escorted away by police. Not a good look during your speech, Rishi.
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels is said to have influenced Orwell. In Swift's Book IV, Gulliver finds himself among the Houyhnhnms, horses with reason and intellect who have perfected a kind of totalitarian society:Their prudence, unanimity, unacquaintedness with fear, and their love of their country, would amply supply all defects in the military art. Imagine twenty thousand of them breaking into the midst of an European army, confounding the ranks, overturning the carriages, battering the warriors’ faces into mummy by terrible yerks from their hinder hoofs.
Ouch.
Tuesday, 3 October 2023
mythical project control
With all of my writing recently, I've been neglectful of rashbre central and I think this is my 'worst year ever' for creating posts.
Anyway, this time I'm back in the tar pits of project management. I've often mused at the silence of Jacob Rees-Mogg in all of the current government turmoil, but decided that he could be adopting a farmer's position over the various twists and turns. Then I stumbled across the Infrastructure and Projects Authority Annual Report for last year and realised his strident Minister of State at the Cabinet Office role means he is across all of the infrastructure projects. Remember Red Amber Green? as a quick way to signify that things are in good shape?
- Red = eek
- Amber = oh dear, we can probably continue to fudge our responses for a bit longer
- Green = tickety-boo.
Well, it is interesting to note that J R-M sits over half a trillion pounds of investment. He probably describes it as successful whilst presiding over 5% Green projects and 78% Amber and 9% Red. By a stroke of genius, there are another 7% of project now classified as 'exempt' from this kind of troublesome scrutiny. Like some of the power station projects.
That 7% alone is worth £48.2 billion. Remember when things were measured in millions?
Using one of Jacob's own charts it come out something like this:
In amongst the projects listed are HS2, the schools rebuilding programme, Skynet 6, the Single Trade Window. To be honest, there are charts in the summary that don't add up. Take this chart below which shows whole life costs. Check out military and it says the whole life cost is £3.9 billion. Bong. That's not right.
On this other chart it says it is £194.7 Billion.
No wonder they can't keep a handle on the projects when there are such large amounts of billions sloshing around in the spreadsheets.
Of course the change to a three tier rating system has successfully buried the Amber/Red projects. No one wants to be the Project Manager who gets the extra scrutiny and so this could be seen as a master-stroke.
It is tempting to examine these numbers further. Let's use a simple filter for the Green Successes, and to be generous, we'll add the Amber/Green as successes too. Oh dear, from 2013 at 48% successes, we are down to 10% in 2022. Oops.
Still. with the debating skills of Eton, I'm sure this can be explained away. Otherwise use a few more charts to obscure the message. Then there's the Government Project Delivery Profession accreditation scheme. Oh yes.Monday, 2 October 2023
Andrey Kurkov - Grey Bees
I based much of Ed Adams 'Play On, Christina Nott', referencing a similar era, having my own direct experiences from my time in Moscow.
Suffice to say crime, oligarchs, corruption, gangsterism. In Moscow and prior to that in St Petersburg. It was Putin, of course.
In Death and the Penguin, journalist/author Viktor takes a job writing obituaries for a local paper, which seems ideal for him - reasonably well paid, not too demanding of his time, and enabling him to write even if it isn't the novel he'd like to. But somehow the hapless author finds himself dragged unwittingly into a tangled mess of organised crime that becomes more complex and dangerous by the day.
The thing about the post-Soviet setting is that reality can be very bizarre, as well as bleak. It feels like a novel that captures the spirit of the time. Viktor is oblivious to things going on around him and his lack of curiosity about his situation and fatalism is understandable and even protective in a world where trying to understand things is likely to be impossible and definitely going to be dangerous.
The presence of the penguin might suggest a cutesy element, but the entire book is without any sentimentality. The ending I felt was a masterstroke. The penguin is a loveable character, but it is never anthropomorphised or seen behaving in a way that is not believable for a penguin that finds itself isolated in a flat with just a middle aged human for company. Even the arrival of a little girl is not a cue for domesticity - the child is treated much as the penguin; fed and cared for but not cherished. And the girl herself is as matter of fact and pragmatic as the rest of the characters.
Friday, 29 September 2023
Ed Adams : The Church : work in progress
I've almost finished my novel called Luka, and decided to make a start on the next one. It has a working title of 'Cozy 2' at present and is a direct follow on from 'Cozy'. I'll change the title when I can think of a better one (The Church?).
This one is also set in Exeter and will be about a ecclesiastical man who is dragged into a world he doesn't fully comprehend. He's seen stuff on the margins, that's for sure, but this...
I'll look for interesting characters too. I dropped Stéphane Gérard into the first Cozy novel, knowing I could use her again later.
She arrived at the party at Magister Grange as a very close friend of Bettina Kübler, a Swiss researcher, at Brant, Geneva, working on eDefense. Stéphane works in weather systems using Théorie des Jeux to manage climates. It is typical Brant work and also typical Brant mischief. She is Swiss (or was it French?), but based in Exeter, which has those connections with meteorology.Thursday, 28 September 2023
Picture it
I thought I'd post something that was a bit of fun. Well of general interest anyway. I see that Digital Camera World have produced a list of the top 50 photographers. Like any such list, there will be people missed out etc, but I thought it was a pretty good attempt to list them and to show illustrations of their work. Above is Henri Cartier-Bresson, complete with a brace of Leicas, and below is Annie Leibovitz, snuggled up to Mick.
The whole list is impressive, with Ansel Adams, Sebastião Salgado, Bill Brandt, Julia Margaret Cameron, Irving Penn, Don McCullin, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, Alfred Stieglitz, Joel Meyerowitz, Edward Steichen, Bert Hardy, David Bailey, Man Ray, Martin Parr, Lewis Hine, Robert Mapplethorpe, Weegee... and so the list goes on. I can instantly think of pictures by everyone I've mentioned as well as thinking of others not in the list. Let alone some of the modern hot shots depicted below.
Thursday, 21 September 2023
Climate forward with agreeable lunches
Now there's an interesting juxtaposition. The day after Rishi earnestly announces a roll back of the much vaunted Net Zero ambitions, there is an unrelated summit in New York about climate change. Called Climate Forward, it is about the actions needed, with an earnest agenda and an agreeable lunch.
Featured artists include Bill Gates, Al Gore, Robin Wall Kimmerer (environmental biologist) , Michael R. Bloomberg and Ebony Twilley Martin (Greenpeace exec director).
Most speakers get 30 minutes to make their points. I guess it's a drinking from the firehose event.
It is good for the New York Times to show it has an international perspective, but will it become a landmark event? We shall wait to see.
Wednesday, 20 September 2023
Best get used to Chinese (simplified)
Less than Net Zero.
Net Zero rollback? Just push the inconvenient stuff to a date so far in the future we'll have all forgotten it. 2030? Make it 2035. or did I hear 2050? Spray paint everything Bright Green. That'll do the trick. Make dispatch boxes Green. Thats a barnstormer of an idea.