blame canada...

It's only been a few short weeks since we were in Lanzarote, but a lot seems to have happened in that time... and I'm very, very pleased that we're off to Canada tomorrow.

It's been a good week for me at work: I've laid the groundwork for a move into something that I will find a lot more fulfilling whilst also escaping a toxic boss (and making my views on said boss clear to his boss, which was both difficult to do but very pleasing when done).  I also got the news today that I passed the first of the two exams I sat last week.  The results of the other - harder - exam should be out next week, but in the meantime, I have an actual, honest-to-goodness professional qualification.  Just as I'm maybe about to change career.

Anyway.  I'm on holiday now.

We fly off to Whistler at some point tomorrow afternoon, and hopefully whilst we're there I'll be able to forget all about work and just get on and enjoy what I hear is supposed to be one of the best resorts in the world.  Plus, I think Canadians are awesome people.

Bring it on.

I'm off to a snowy mountain and may be some time.  See you on the other side.

won't listen....

I'm a stubborn, silly man.

For the last seven or eight days, I have been so stuffed up with cold that even I have been forced to accept that going out for a run was a stupid idea.  I'm now broadly on the mend, although the dregs of what remains of the cold appears to have descended into my lungs, giving me one of those annoying, hacking coughs.  We're leaving for Canada on Saturday, and the most important thing was that I was feeling well enough for it not to ruin the holiday.  Rest.  Rest would be sensible.  Play the long game.

So I went for a 5.30 mile run in the freezing cold air with running club.  Wearing a dressing-gown*.

Kill or cure, I reckoned.

Well, my lungs felt okay during the run, which was good, but with about a mile to go my knee really started to hurt.  You know, the knee I'm supposed to be resting so it doesn't ruin my skiing holiday.  This morning it was all stiff and sore.

Idiot.  Idiot.  Idiot.

Luckily, I had a physio appointment scheduled tonight anyway, and I think it's going to be fine...although I might need another steroid jab or to see a specialist.... Still.  For now, I think I got away lightly.

Lesson learned.  I really need to know when to stop.

....So after physio, and in spite of the fact that I'd be coughing more or less constantly since I finished running, I went for a swim.  After 20 lengths, I realised that I was wheezing and thought I'd probably better stop.

Hmm.  Some people just don't learn, eh?  Oh, and I've also given my cold to my wife.  Ooops.

Still.  Nearly there!

* It was comic relief night at running club, and we were all out in our PJs, onesies and dressing gowns. And no, I wasn't about to go running in my new onesie... in spite of popular demand.  Word, it seems, is out....

running free...

I was sorry to hear the news today that Clive Burr had died, aged just 56.  Burr was the original drummer with Iron Maiden, playing on their first three albums.  "The Number of the Beast" was one of the very first albums that I bought for myself with my own money and was certainly the first one that really represented the way my music taste was going.

I initially bought it - on cassette - because I really liked the cover and without any real idea what the band sounded like.  Little did I know that it would prove to be one of the most formative records of my adolescence and was the gateway drug that took me into the world of heavy metal.  Even today, when I think my music taste is pretty diverse, I still get a visceral thrill when I hear a good, solid guitar riff.  Clive Burr - with drum kicks like the one you hear on "Running Free" - was a part of that and I have a lot to thank him for.  I'm sorry to hear he's died so young: 56 is no kind of an age.

The other thing that made this news catch my attention was the description of his death.  Here's the BBC, for example:

"Former Iron Maiden drummer Clive Burr has died at the age of 56 after suffering from multiple sclerosis".

I know I've talked about this before, and I know that I'm sensitive to mentions of MS like this... but whenever someone in the public eye with MS dies, they are often described in ways - directly or otherwise - that make it look like it was the MS that killed them.

That's not really how it works, and I think it's lazy journalism to make the link like that.  Apart from anything else, it just casually reinforces people's preconceptions about the condition. MS is not very nice and can cause increasing disability; it also statistically means that you are likely to have a shorter lifespan than average.... but of itself it isn't really likely to kill you.  Instead of taking an opportunity to enlighten people about the condition, even in passing, people are just talking about how Burr finally "succumbed" to his MS.  It's depressing.

That aside, I was quite touched reading some of the tributes to Burr.  Apparently he was diagnosed with primary progressive MS - a particularly nasty and hard-hitting varient of an already unpleasant condition- in the early 90s and was crippled by the financial cost of his treatment.  His old mates from Iron Maiden got together to play a number of benefit gigs for him ("Clive Aid") to help him hang onto his house and to pay his medical bills.

I read this in an interview with Burr from a few years ago:

When the band found out about Clive’s multiple sclerosis they stepped in and helped they best way they knew how – by playing for him. Their help has transformed his life. “They bought me a vehicle...” He pauses. “Meeeeeeeemes, what car is it again?” he shouts. “We call it the Clivemobile. It’s a Volkswagen Caddy with blacked-out windows. It’s like an American gangster’s car. They’ve put concerts on to raise money, not just for me but for other people with MS. They put a stair-lift in our house. Sometimes I’ll go up and down the stairs, looking at the gold and platinum records on the stairwell. Ha ha.” Better than that, and what he appreciates most of all, Mimi says when Clive is out of earshot, is that they involve him. “They say if ever you need anything, just ring, just call,” she says. “Whenever they play in London, Clive knows that he’s only got to pick up the phone and he’s got two of the best tickets in the house. It might not sound like much, but it is to Clive. Finally, to him, it’s like his achievements – who he is and what he did – are being recognised.”

Nice touch.  Horrible disease, but a nice touch by the band.

Sad news.  Burr played a small but vital role in my musical life and I salute his memory for that.  RIP.

cold...

For someone with a chronic condition, I am absolutely appalling at being ill.  Oh, I can cope with the slings and arrows that MS throws at me well enough, but the first sign of a sniffle and I turn into a horrendous grouch.  Yeah.  Even worse than usual, if you can imagine that.

I first noticed that tell-tale tickle at the top of my lungs around this time last week.  I was still well enough to go running on Wednesday, but by Thursday I was sliding fast into a full-on coughing, snuffling, snorting bundle of fun.  I spent most of Saturday and Sunday in bed and, although I think I'm now on the mend, I'm in the middle of developing an unpleasant hacking cough and I also have even more of a Johnny Cash singing voice than normal.

The thing is that I don't really get colds.

Occasionally I'll get a bit of a scratchy throat, but that quickly passes on without developing into anything else.  I used to think that this was because I am supremely fit and eat an almost industrial quantity of fruit and vegetables every single day.  And perhaps it is....after my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis though, the smart money would be that I simply have a hyperactive immune system that squashes anything before it gets a chance to gain a foothold.  Whatever.  There had to be an up-side, right?

My goodness, did I catch this cold though.  I haven't been walloped by something like this in YEARS.  It is a touch unfortunate that it coincided with the exam I needed to sit on Friday and managed to ruin my weekend, but as long as it buggers off before I leave for Canada this coming Saturday, then I think I can overlook all that.

Obviously, because I'm a man and it's what men do, I've been pumping myself full of massive quantities of analgesics, painkillers and decongestant.  Unfortunately for my poor, long-suffering wife, I've also been transformed into an grumpy, uncommunicative pain in the arse.  Yup.  More than normal.  I don't do ill very gracefully, I'm afraid.  I don't like being ill.  I'm grumpy that I feel under-the-weather and I'm grumpy that I can't go out running and I'm rather afraid that I externalise that grumpiness at the people around me.  It probably wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't also epically unsympathetic when anyone else is ill around me.

I'm quite the catch, huh?

Still.  I'm on the mend now and I may even be stupid enough to attempt to go running with running club tomorrow night.... after I've injected myself with my usual dose of immuno-supressants tonight.  They're probably not going to speed up my recovery, right?  Unfortunately one of the things about MS is that being sick like this causes a spike in your white blood cell count, and that can sometimes trigger a relapse when my stupid body doesn't know what it's supposed to be attacking and goes for my nervous system rather than the cold virus.  Hence I still need to inject and risk that I may well wake up feeling awful all over again in the morning.

Also, I'm doing a little experiment.  I've been drinking hot water or green tea all day to soothe my cough.  I've been interviewing all day today, and one of the candidates suggested that I should try a little jamaican rum to help the healing process.  Yeah.  This evening I'm all over that idea.  Diluted, of course..... but still.  I feel better already.

stand...

I've got a meeting with my boss's boss tomorrow.  In that meeting - which is in the diary at my request - I'm going to essentially tell him that I want to change job roles as I am increasingly finding that I can't work with my boss.

Clearly, this is not something that I do lightly.  Apart from anything else, this is something of a challenging conversation to have without coming across like a whiny little baby.  Boo hoo, etc.  I've thought about that, though and it's a chance I'm going to have to take.

Two things have triggered this:

A couple of weeks ago, the director of my department stood up in front of everyone at a briefing and said it was really important to him that everyone was happy in their work.  If we weren't happy, he said, then we should tell him so he could do something about it.  I'm not happy.  As you might remember, six months ago, I nearly quit my job in frustration.  That can't be a good sign, right? Perhaps I should still resign and do something more fulfilling with my life, but I actually really enjoy large parts of my job: I like my colleagues and I like my customers and I actually believe in what we're trying to do.  What I have been completely unable to get my head around is my total inability to get through to my boss or to even help him understand that I can make a contribution; that I can help him.  I'm actively being kept away from areas where I can help and have even, in one case, been expressly forbidden from talking to one of my stakeholders without him being present to supervise my conversations.  I come back from meetings we both attended to single line emails sent via BlackBerry suspiciously demanding I share my point of view on what just happened, as though I'm secretly harbouring seditious thoughts ("I saw you talking to X and Y after the meeting.  What were you discussing?"  WTF?) .  I get consistently good feedback from my customers and I think they at least value my input, but I'm starting to doubt my own worth and this simply can't go on.  It's an increasingly toxic environment and I'm going to do something about it.  For my own sanity, if for no other reason.  I know I can be difficult to manage, but this is different.  I've always been able to say something positive about every single one of my bosses.... until now.  I hate that change.

The other thing that made up my mind was a conversation with C.

C is extremely successful in her own career and is doing brilliantly well on the back of her own talent and hard-work.  Naturally, I bend her ear a lot about my frustrations and how I find it incredible that my boss can destroy his relationships with his key business customers - and he's an open joke with some of our most senior business stakeholders  - and that my department rewards him for this by increasing the size of his empire.  You know what C. said to me?  She said that I should tell someone.  "If it was me, I'd want to know".

She's right, too.

Now, I'm not a complete fool.... I'm not going to wander into this meeting with a set of grievances that I'm going to emotionally list out in full.  As it happens, the guy I'm meeting also runs the area of the department I most want to get into, so I can use that to put a positive spin on the whole conversation.  But he's no fool either and he's heard feedback like this before.  What I am going to do, is to look this guy in the eye and tell him that I want to move and to leave him with no doubt about why.  Hopefully without looking like a cry baby.  At least then I will know that he knows.

To paraphrase Martin Luther, 'I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other'.

Wish me luck.

never too late....

You know that thing where you're sitting an exam, and everything seems to be going fairly well and you're maybe even a little bit ahead of schedule?  You know, when you're casually - and perhaps a touch smugly - checking stuff through after you've finished and you suddenly realise that you've misread a small -  but crucial - part of the scenario that underpins the whole paper and you then have five frantic minutes checking back through your work and desperately scribbling out words and replacing them with other words?

That.

Yikes.

I made a bit of a mess of my answer paper making the corrections, but I think I might just have got away with it.  Still it was a bit of a shock, all the same.  I suppose I should just be grateful I noticed it when I still had some time to do something about it.

Whether I did enough remains to be seen.  The pass rate is only 50% and I should be okay, and I guess I'll find out soon enough when I get the results in a couple of weeks.

That was a tough but very interesting week.  Now I'm going to put my onesie on and have a bit of a nap.

One working week to go till holiday.  My main objective now is just to shake this damn cold....

one....

It's my birthday today.

In 2001, I spent my birthday in Agadir in Morocco between a week spent trekking in the Sahara and a week hiking in the Anti-Atlas mountains.  We were with our guide, Brahim, and his family.  They baked me a cake.

In 2007, I spent my birthday somewhere up above 3,500m in the high Paramo in Ecuador.  We were camping, but our guide - Ivan - had smuggled up a bottle of red wine and the cook managed to rustle up some excellent French fries on a camping stove to help me celebrate.

In 2009, I celebrated my birthday by renting a cinema and watching a screening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with my closest friends whilst drinking excellent champagne.

In 2010, I spent my birthday in a rainy Gympie on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland with Deb and Jaimie at Margaritaville.  We didn't have a cake, but we had a lovely meal the day before to celebrate Deb's birthday (happy birthday, Deb!) and then had a breakfast straight off the BBQ on the veranda for mine.

2013?  Well, I've spent the day learning about the application of business analysis techniques.  I have an exam tomorrow, so I've got to spend my evening revising and going over my homework.  In addition, as I've got a stinking cold, I'm not drinking (which might just be for the first time on my birthday in decades....)

....but on the plus side, my wife has given me a onesie for my birthday, so I still reckon I'm ahead.

Best.  Present.  Ever.

schoolin'

It's a bit of a change of routine for me this week and I spent a chunk of my afternoon under exam conditions sitting an exam in the company of an independent invigilator.  I'm doing a course, you see.  Two courses, actually.  Both of them industry standard British Computer Society courses with an actual qualification at the end of them both -- subject to exam results, of course.  By the time we get back from Canada in three weeks time, I could be the proud owner of a shiny pair of new qualifications for my CV - Foundation and Practitioner in Business Analysis, if you're really interested.

It's been a bit of an eye-opener to study the absolute nuts & bolts of my job and to see quite how far my company has drifted from any recognisable industry norm.  To be honest, it's impossible to study this stuff and not to wonder how on earth I'm going to be able to take it back and apply it in my day job. Data modelling? Soft Systems methodology and User Perspectives? It's all pretty basic stuff, and we simply don't do any of it, thinking that we can jump straight into detailed requirements and then wondering why our requirements aren't very good and don't represent what the business actually needed.

This is probably a bit dull if you're not really into project lifecycles - and honestly, what kind of person really is? - but apparently some 80% of project defects can be traced back to the requirements phase... but on average, only 12% of project time is spend actually gathering and documenting requirements.  At my place, I think that time we spend in requirements is much shorter even than that.  Only last week, our director stood up in front of everyone and specifically said how we needed to be spending days on requirements and not weeks.....

I've learned what seems like hundreds of new techniques in the last couple of days, and I've discovered that even the ones that are deemed to be the most basic and essential to the whole process are not recognised or understood by my own department.  CATWOE?  We don't even acknowledge that there is a need for conceptual systems modelling in the first place, never mind understand what is apparently the number one technique for any BA.

Ironically, the reason we've had the chance to do this training is under an initiative called [*sigh*] "Delivery at Pace", specifically "Requirements at Pace".  And what are we learning?  That we need to spend much, much MORE time on the analysis phase of projects and not less.  It's been a brilliant course and one I really could have done with doing years ago... only I didn't appreciate either the gap in my skills or how easy it was to fix.  Still, better late than never.  It's a good course and it's been a really interesting, stimulating week so far.

My boss is a champion of this Pace initiative, and has been busy advancing his own career by blowing smoke up the collective arses of the Leadership team about what this will mean and how much more quickly we'll all be working.  Oh, we'll be working a lot more efficiently and delivering a much higher quality of output, for sure.  But faster?  No.  It just doesn't work like that as we'll simply have to be doing more work to make sure we capture this stuff right.  You invest time here to save time and money later in the project lifecycle.  It's really simple and is proven.  If you think otherwise, then you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Ah....

You know you can rely on me to break it to my boss gently and tactfully when I get back into the business.  He's a toxic idiot who understands nothing.  Is that sugaring it up enough, do you think?

touch each other in black and white....

We were in London over the weekend.  Amongst other things, we ended up checking out the Man Ray exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

Lots of fascinating photographs, obviously.... but two things in particular struck me and have stayed with me since:

During his first stay in Paris in the 1920s, Man Ray hung around with people like Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.  Surrealists, artists, etc..... and I couldn't help but think what interminable bores they must have been.  Can you imagine the conversations in the coffee shops?  Have you ever been to a party where someone is droning on with mock profundity about death or God or something like that?  I imagine it would have been something like that.  Surrealism was an interesting idea, but it's not something I'd like to have a drink with, I think.

They were mostly funny looking blokes too, doubtless a product of dubious nutrition in their childhood. That brings me to my second thought: Man Ray consistently batted above his average through his life and had relationships with some truly beautiful women.  Many of them - like Kiki, pictured below - were his models too, of course.

The one that really grabbed me was Lee Miller.  She was a model and a brilliant photographer in her own right, but as she appears in Man Ray's photos, she's stunning.  Compared to the bulbous, stunted surrealists pictured in many of the other photographs, she is a breath of cornfed air from the United States.

Just look at her.

She was in her very early 20s when she first met Man Ray, and he was seventeen years her senior.  The photographs he took of her are incredible and I found it really hard to take my eyes off her.  She originally came to Paris to be his assistant, but it's not hard to see - from his point of view, anyway - why she quickly became his model, his muse and his lover.  He took several nude photos of her, but actually I found them a lot less interesting than just these simple shots of her in profile or looking directly at the camera.

Stunning.  Captivating pictures.  Just jaw-dropping.  Not just the model, but the photos themselves.

Lest anyone think me too cultured (we also visited the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum), I also ate a massive burger at Meat Liquor and browsed some tat on Oxford Street.

As you were.

bones up against the wall

I am short-tempered,
Quick to take offence and slow to forgive.
I am vain.
I am toweringly confident and I am desperately insecure.
Emotionally, I am closed.
I am a rock.
My affections are secrets, rarely expressed.
My opinions are loud, even when unspoken.
I am awkward and prickly.
I am cussed.
I am stubborn.
The glass is half-empty and cracked beyond repair.

I criticise.
I judge.
I destroy.

I am all.

I am tolerant and kind.
I am playful and quick to laugh.
I am considerate and quick to praise.
I am loyal.
I am honest and open.
I am modest.
The glass is half-empty and cracked beyond repair,
But still I pour myself in.

I give.
I help.
I try.

I am nothing.

I am all of these things.
I am the best and worst of us.

I am the day and they only see the night.