Kids growing up so fast

In the next few weeks I'll be writing a bit about what's going on at work, with Service Oriented Architecture, web service semantics, different layers of organisational constructs to support both business and development ideals, and project management and expecations handling.

But that's not this post. This post is about my daughter Grace who's six and a half. Before christmas we inherited an old computer from my wife's sisters family, an old beaten thing we were going to give to the kids for educational games and homework and such things, and in no time I whipped it clean and hooked it into our network.

While I was at work last week I got this in my inbox ;

A secret story
a long time ago a daddy,mummy sat
soon thay found out that thay wer having
a BABY.

For those still not in the know, me and Julie are expecting our third child in July (every evening julie spends trying to find good names), and Grace is as excited as we are and decided to write me the above wonderful email, from her Gmail account no less. Not bad for a seven year old. She'll be blogging in no time.

While I was writing this blog post I've been chatting with her on Gmail talk, and she says the most wonderful things. I need to spend more time with her when neither one of us is grumpy in the evening after a long day. :) Tomorrow is Australia Day, a holiday, so I'm already looking forward to it. I feel so blessed with my wonderful little family.

Update: Yes, Alia, you're right; Grace is indeed seven, not six (fixed). It seems she was growing even faster than I first thought. :)

Off-road music

As many of you know, I'm a sucker for baroque music, with a passion for Monteverdi (early italian), Bencini (middle italian, roman style), Galuppi (late italian, Venezian style), Telemann (late german), Schutz (early german with italian influences), Lalande (late french, small steps away from the dominating Lully style), Biber (middle italian in Austria, violin extraordinaire).

But I do occasionally sin, I do have a musical past, and dip my musical ear in more modern stuff still. Mostly, this is due to listening to Pandora.com at work which is a kind of a digital radio with empathy; I can pop in a tune I like or an artist I appreciate, and it will play music of a somewhat similar kind. And sometimes it presents stuff to me that's new and that I like, which is what this post is all about.

Regina Spektor : I have no idea what music Pandora.com thought I had in common with regina, but one day she popped up, and I took notice. She's of Russian-Jewish background, but have lived in New York since she was about 10. She's a singer/songwriter/pianoplayer/guitarfiddler that comes up with the most amazing tunes, and she's not afraid of being different. And I think it is this "different" that I like so well with her; strange noises, pivots of musical direction, strange lyrics, using her voice as more than just a pretty voice (and she really has a pretty, strong voice). She's not afraid of letting the music be music, and that's quite refreshing; song structure follows the musicality of it, not some verse-refrain-verse-refrain-brigde-refrain-refrain pattern we're so sick of these days. Good stuff; here's a few videos ;







Happy Rhodes : Combine an amazing sense of feel with the voice markup of Kate Bush and Annie Lennox, you've got Happy; diverse yet uniquely Happy Rhodes music, with a voice that continue to amaze me by its range and clearity within it. I used to have a crush on Kate Bush, and maybe this crush is the continuation of it. Here's a fantastic live recording : listen out for where she switches voice register at around 2:10 without wffort, without it sounding wrong ;

Home Video : melancholic modern quirky. Not even sure why I like it. I don't think these guys are famous, nor do I think they will be, at least not in this configuration. I think they appeal to people who quite enjoy subtle melodic changes over longer periods of time, you know, those who also liked bolero, except with a modern beatbox twist.

Ambrosia : Tickles me with their Toto sound (I'm a fan of the older Toto, and a worshipper of the ground that Jeffrey Porcaro walked on), a band of the late 70's and early 80's. Look for their album "One Eigthy" which is produced by the faboulus Michael McDonald ("Yah Mo B There!", the Doobie Brothers) and features the amazing Richard Page of Pages and Mr Mister fame (of which I adore). Here's a video ;



Piano magic : Again a quirky creative modern sound. My last band before I got married and had kids were a band called "sundrunk" (yes, as in Nietsche) where I was producer, percussion, arranger, drummer, synther, whatever, and Piano Magic reminds me a lot of what we were doing. It's not so much a favourite kind of music as it's an interesting expression I enjoy listening to.

The Magnetic Fields : I've always loved Tom Waits. This is his more melodic cousin, more on the road than down the alley, yet as deliciously melancholic and bare, like a Waits younger brother that went back to school and kept his dayjob. And then moved on.

Various jazz : In my contemporary jazz channel I've really enjoyed Erik Friedlander, Alan Pasqua, Darek Oles and the norwegian jazz group Tord Gustavsen Trio.

Mellow and or electronic : Suzanne Ciani has surprised me with complex and melodic compositions. I'm mostly happy with my Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze / Vangelis / Kitaro setup and I've been looking for other things, but not much has popped up in this category.

There's also the occasional song by the occasional group / person that catches my ear, and maybe I'll talk about them in the future. Until then, enjoy the music, and I'll leave you with one of my all-time favourite Victor Borge pieces. I simply love this!

What friggin' IT people shortage?!

Hot in the news today is how Canberra are looking for outside help in getting skilled workers to the city:

The ACT Government has begun linking Canberra employers with job seekers in the United Kingdom and Ireland to ease the city's skills shortage. The move is part of the Live in Canberra campaign.

What friggin' skills shortage? I've been urgently looking for a job for over a month, and I've got absolutely nothing in this city so far. Zilch. Nada. And no, it's not that I haven't got skills (in fact, I've got two job offers from overseas [one of them finalised; we're currently working out figures to see if we can afford it], and a couple of prospects in Sydney), it's that I'm not one of those who's sold their soul to J2EE, best-practices, and PRINCE2 which plague the government sector, nor am I an Australian citizen which seems to be a prequisite there, although I'm pressed to understand how workers imported from UK and Ireland would go better in that regard.

Notice that this is part of the "Live in Canberra" campaign which I'm pretty sure doesn't include information about them closing 39 schools this and next year, so if you've got kids, living in Canberra is a bit of a challenge these days, to put it mildly. The ACT local government is really poorly run, nobody here likes them. heck, people are even looking to liberal government, because, if Labour can only measure things in dollars and cents, we might as well go with those who's got a good track record in that departement to do it. (In the past, Labour actually had values, but Jon Stanhopeless' government is prioritizing a 8 million dollar dragway and a 6 million dollar arboretum in a friggin' drought area over keeping local schools and communities. Go figure.)

Can you tell I'm upset?

When small and neat becomes big and rough

I use the excelent Bloglines.com web-based news aggregator, and recently I noticed a note of help on their frontpage, however you could only help if you lived in San-Franscisco (I assume for usability testing) and if you accepted money for your time, so that ruled me out on a large scale, but because I've been using it for such a long time, love it and can't live without it and because I have many really good ideas (unbashfully, of course :) on how to turn it (with simple means) into the most awsome KM tool, I wrote them an email anyways asking them how I could help otherwise ;

I'm not living in the Bay Area (or the US, for that matter), nor am I after your money :), but I'd love to be part of the process of making Bloglines better, so if there is a way, please let me know. I'm sure you've already got on your todo list things like tagging, content evaluation and textual marking, but I'd like to explore Bloglines as a serious knowledge tool with annotations, text analysis brokerage and various exports.

I just got their reply, which is such a spot-on example of what happens when you go from small and responsive to large and missing the point completely ;

Thank you for your interest in testing new Bloglines ideas. We have received a huge amount of interest and if you could provide the following information, we will be able to better schedule out our sessions. [...] 5) which of the following times will you be available to be in the San Francisco SOMA neighborhood for 1 hour for $75 on Tuesday, December 19th? [...]

Here's to hoping that part of their usability testing includes their own reading capabilities and / or systems. :) Customer love is hard to come by, and silly mistakes is often enough to make people look in some other direction to cover their needs. I'm not that easily turned off, though, but it sure is one for the records.

Confluence User-Interface

Some time ago I got a mail from someone asking what I meant when I wrote "The out-of-the-box interface sucks big time" (see section on Confluence). I wrote back a long mail, but there was no follow-up reply, and because I've got several mail from people who also struggles with that very default interface, I have decided to post that mail here so that a) the information isn't lost, and b) you now know what I think about the Confluence default interface (at least before version 2.3). Also, we may package up our enhanced interface as an open-source thingy so that others can use it, but I'll have to sort some stuff out first. Here we go ;

> Could you elaborate some more on exactly what
> sucks about Confluence's UI so much to you?

Not so much to me, because I'm a geek, and with a bit of clicking and a bit of huffing I learn the paradigm of the interface and start using it. My users, on the other hand, hated it. Every test we did left them confused and uncertain about where to click next. My users are not geeks, nor incredibly computer litterate. And I'm an usability guy. Sparks surely would fly.

Maybe a few specifics are in order. I'll talk about some of the biggies ;

Where am I? If we are true to the Wiki form, every page is a page, but in Confluence this is not so; there are pages, label-pages, news, configuration, reports, and so forth. How does the interface reflect where you are and state you're in? The breadcrumb is really the only way that this is reflected, apart from the content (or sometimes hints within it) itself. but the difference between the content parts are cognitive hard to tell apart; the information shape is too similar across them all, and so we become relient on analysis of content instead of cognitive recognition. (basically the tabs aren't clear enough, nor consitently "content" based as sometimes you use them for functionality, and the same real-estate and concept is swapped depending on what you do and wherer you are)

Further on to this is the confusion people have when they're on a page and they can't edit it. (Difference between a page and a news item, or even a list of labels when things get a bit unclear) using tabs as functionality is also confusing here. A bigger problem occurs after some use of the system; why does a page have four function based tabs when "pages" is one of many content tabs? Where did my page go? Aren't pages part of the space? What is the difference between a page and a news item? And I could go on and on about using titles of pages as persistant links and the tree-structure imposed. :)

Why can't I label stuff as "fish fingers, bollocks" as with Flickr? Why can't we do controlled vocabularies? (This stuff isn't that hard to do; we've hacked Confluence to support it!) How can we do facetted navigation which better suits complex Wikis? Why aren't there better ways of dealing with lots of spaces? Why is added metadata to a page so hard (and with macros, so ugly)? (In fact, why aren't there a really neat user interface to attach metadata to pages, like properties, using bandana? Macro properties only works with extreme geeks, not human beings!) I can go on and on, and I'm pretty sure that there's *good* answers for why things are the way they are, and I certainly understand that a lot of these things are hard to change as they become legacy. In fact, I suspect most of the default user interface is built up over time and no-one dares to change it because it is very complex and rigid. (For example, why are there no Velocity templates for dealing with labels? I suspect a rushed job?)

Having said that, though, Confluence is fantastically flexible, and can do pretty much everything we want it to do, but at some point we need to add users to it, and that's when things start to break down a bit. We can't embed metadata in content, as normal people would balk at the macro scripts!

As a technologist I understand every decision that has been made, why things work the way they work, and I can figure out how to do pretty much anything I like; I grasp the paradigms and I can get around the interface to make it do what I do. I understand that conceptually a page belongs under the "pages" tab, but the interface doesn't reflect this and adds confusion. I understand how I can use the system to create hidden pages to do special stuff, and then include that content into a column of special info, and so forth. I can figure out what files involve the labels (and just that they're called labels instead of tagging makes things further tricky; another word to learn that means the same as something else) and implement a scheme of local and global controlled vocabulary. I can figure out how to have access control outside the realms of user administration, or to do news aggregation across spaces and repurpose these in external applications, and more. But I'm telling you, it hasn't been an easy ride! :)

I brought Confluence and JIRA into this organistation, and we use them both, even in synch, and technically it fits us like a glove (although with a few added features it would make a better kill, of course), but the user interface failed again and again. People will not battle with a user-interface; they'd rather forget about the tool alltogether. In our scenario, these are normal plain people trying to do very plain stuff. They're not geeks. Even the very concept of a Wiki is scary to them, and as such the interface must be as gentle as possible.

...

Anyways, I could ramble on about the user interface, the cognitive challenges it imposes, the confusing paradigms, Confluence as part of a greater set of "web 2.0" tools (sorry for using that expression), information architecture in a Wiki world, persistant identification (and how Confluence fails especially through repurposing of content), facetted navigation, content semantics and news aggregation (which is a neat business model in itself!) and so forth. I don't mean to give the Confluence guys pepper (hmm, a Norwegian expression, I fear), but I've spent over a year in the complex belly of the beast in trying to make the interface reasonably user friendly for our very boring normal users. So, um, forgive me. :)

I am a rock

I am a rock. Gravity holds me down, and all I can do is observe. I watch things go on around me, things that over time polishes my rough surface smooth. I see things change, and I accept change as a natural state. I am too slow to object.

I once wanted to become a tiny sand grain, dropping in between other rocks, pushed along by water wherever it went, take me on adventures, and show me the way. But I realised - sometimes I think a bit too late - that after being a grain, that after the next step, there was nothing. A rock has no light youth, only a slow decaying distance between being something important and being nothing.

I am happy to be a rock. Everything changes, yet everything stays the same. Drip drip will turn me to a pebble. Time to move on.

Melbourne

I've just spent four days in Melbourne with Julie to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. The kids were dropped at friends and relatives (their godparents for two days, then their granddad for the other two), the dog taken care of, the garden watered, and the car stored away. We bought flight tickets online (which turned out to be a mistake) and booked and paid our hotel online as well (which turned out to be a smart thing to do).

We arrived at Melbourne Airport on friday morning, taking the SkyBus which dropped us to Spencer Street Station, and we walked to our hotel on Dudley Street. The hotel had a good reception area but really bad rooms and was located quite a big walk away from pretty much anything (and both of these things are not good factors when you're pregnant, so, yes, Julie is pregnant again), so we cancelled the next two nights, went to an internet cafe and booked ourselves into the Crossley Hotel on Little Bourke. Many thanks to the fantastic WotIf.com.au service for online hotel bookings, and the fantasticly friendly staff at our first hotel (which I won't mention by name).

I'm not going to go through all the little things we did and saw throughout the city, but I'll try to summarise it as best I can; we loved it! Melbourne is a beautiful city with a European feel to it, lovely people, not too busy (as Sydney, for example) and fantastic architecture and art everywhere you turned. I was quite taken with it.

One of the highlights for me was visiting the State Library of Voctoria, a fantastic building situated centrally and close to the university. What a feel and ambience! I spoke to some nice reference librarian about various bits and pieces, even talked about E-Resources and new search engines / interfaces, so if the library needs an manager / techie / EL1-2, I'm right there. :)

We ate and we ate and had coffees and drinks everywhere, too many to mention. the food was great everywhere, but the coffee highlight was indeed Pellegrino's (corner of Little Bourke and Crossley) who knew exactly how to make a mocha right! Thanks.

The Melbourne Natural Museum was also great. So was the art centre, although we missed most of the Australian Art that's somewhere else. I loved going on the trams, as Oslo (my hometown) also is a tram-town. I loved the arcades and the alleyways. We ate in one of them with live jazz music one night. Fantastic!

We went to Bennets Lane Jazz Club to see and hear Elena Stone Band which we knew nothing about. It turned out to be freakin' fantastic! Elena was a fantastic performer, singer and composer, and we enjoyed the concert so much. I noticed that the drummer was not only damn good and played smack on to my liking, but also a leftie, which of course made me warm and fuzzy inside, as I'm a leftie percussionist myself. (Wish I could remember his name, though)

The only negative thing on the whole trip was that we misinterpreted the flight details, and missed our flight. Because these tickets were bought online (but not cheap!) there was nothing they could help us with, and we had to buy new tickets; 600$ later, and the vanishing of our christmas budget. So the take here is that Qantas sucks, and don't buy your tickets online.

Thanks, Melbourne, for a fantastic four nights. It certainly gave us a craving for more. See you in a little while.

Need unique talent?

There's a distinct chance that in about two months I'll be out of a job. I've worked for the National Library of Australia for three years now, and after such a time on a contract the job needs to be made permanent. But because I'm not an Australian citizenship they can't employ me permanently due to Australian law (which requires citizenship for permanent jobs). And I can't take out dual citizenship because Norway doesn't support it, nor do I think I'm willing to screw up my identity and future planning based on a quick and possibly stupid decision. So.

So, if you're looking for unique talent, this may be the perfect time to talk to me. I'm not so much your standard programmer as I'm a problem-solver, project manager and the sort of person that aren't afraid of huge problems and unknown territories. In fact, I think I thrive on the really big stuff. I've been in the IT industry for almost 20 years, doing all sorts of stuff, but have a knack for practical knowledge management, team development work and product design. And good ideas.

I have a CV you can peek at. It's reasonably up to date, although I'm working on it. I've also got a LinkedIn profile page you can view. You could read this blog, too, to get an idea of what I could be useful for.

I'm not stuck in Canberra even though right now that's the easiest option (as we have a house here, and somewhat of a network of family and friends). For the right job I'll move around, even back to Norway. We do have a plan of moving down the coast to the Wollongong / South Coast area (more family down there) from which I can commute to Sydney, and if we can make a deal where I work some hours on the train and some hours in Sydney, I'm your man.

Start-ups and consultancies is fine by me; I've been doing that in the past for many years. No more public service, though, and no huge companies unless in brings some serious challenges with it. I'm into everything from information architecture and usability to semantic data modelling and Topic Maps to knowledge management and project management. Feel free to ask. I'm easy to get along with.

Feel free to point people to this blog post, and post any good pointers if you find them. But no general job databases; I hate those, and that's not where the interesting jobs are found. Wish me luck. Cheers.

Update: my email is alexander dotty johannesen at gmail dotty com, where 'dotty' is a dot. Just thought I'd add that.