Write the date at the top of the page and then get on with the day.

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Because I’m playing with feed readers, I subscribed to the Flickr feed for photos tagged with my name.  I thought I’d just subscribed to my photos, but I think I was also subscribed to new tags already.  Anyway.  A weird thing happens where I periodically get notifications of a few newly tagged photos, and sometimes I’m surprised to see that they’ve only just been tagged, because they are in a set with others that are all tagged too.  And I don’t think I have a way of checking whether it’s real (ie someone is actually paying attention to other people’s photos enough to be tagging me – which seems unlikely) or a “feature” of how Flickr construct the feed. 

Here’s an example:

(“putting the camp into GovCamp since 2012”)

PS I know I’m not the only Lloyd Davis in the world… as evidenced by my gmail.

It’s hard work being me, you know.

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Blogging on the train like it’s 2008.

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One of my favourite AA sayings is something like “people don’t fail at this programme because they’re too stupid, but some do fail because they’re too clever!” 

I find this “game of life” to be like that, whatever you’re playing at right now and whether it feels like it’s  finite or one of those infinite ones.  I think that lately, I mistook one particular infinite game I’ve been playing as finite. But then I’ve been drawn to say that there are no finite games, but you don’t learn that until one game you thought was finite comes to an end and here you are starting another one whether you like it or not. 

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I’m on my way in for another Coffee Morning.  Whoever comes are the right people… etc.  Last month we heard at the beginning that they’d appointed Sarah Mullally to be Archbishop of Canterbury.  This week Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election in NYC.  So a pattern is kind of emerging 😀

In his newsletter Dave points to Duncan Brown talking about bookings as an example of what he calls “design by cliché”.  It’s an interesting idea, but in the case of bookings, I don’t think that being a ‘cliché’ is the problem.  

It’s more that the reason all these things are called bookings is that once upon a time, the record of the thing it’s describing went into a book, an actual book – it might have been called a ledger or a diary or something, but it’s a description of a technology being used rather than the thing itself.  And that’s why trying to treat all bookings as if they were the same is as meaningless now as saying “I need to make a computering”.  If anyone needs an old man shouting at clouds, I’m available.

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There’s a lot of cruft in that link to Dave’s newsletter above, which may or may not be tracking you or me in some way, but I didn’t have the patience to work out which bits I could cut out.

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My dear departed pal from New Orleans, Ray Nichols, did an interesting thing when he retired.  He would describe his voluntary work as ‘interning’.  So basically he’d appoint himself as intern with an organisation or collective (it didn’t matter what) as a kind of joke, but also pointing to the fact that he wanted to keep on learning and stay slightly humble.  I’m not retiring, but I’m attracted to being a self-appointed intern in a number of contexts, making tea, helping out, observing and learning, but also sharing stuff that I know but that you wouldn’t necessarily fully employ me for.  As Ray would have undoubtedly remarked, “Just Sayin’!”  

I also think of LLM chatbots as fast, eager-to-please interns that you can mercilessly exploit without the usual consequences, but who might also make catastrophic errors if you give them too much agency. 

Poor old interns.

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I heard someone on a call the other day saying “I’ve just heard of this thing called Personal Knowledge Management or PKM” which reminded me that:

“Every day somebody’s born who’s never seen the Flintstones“

But seriously, it got me digging into when I first mentioned PKM on this blog.  And of course it was the very first post in September 2004 🙂 and then a couple of months later I went over to Amsterdam for KM Europe and took part in a PKM workshop hosted by Knowledge Board (so Ed Mitchell?) in a kind of open space form where I called a session on “trust vs suspicion, faith vs fear…aaaagh the feelings…” which definitely sounds like the sort of thing I would still do.

Ton Zijlstra was also there and he’s been one of my anchors for PKM thinking ever since, as well as being one of the stalwart bloggers who’ve kept my RSS reader alight through the quiet years (Thanks Ton!) and his post from the end of last year explaining how PKM is personal along three dimensions will form the basis of my response to my friends on that call, who are just embarking on the journey.

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I don’t think I mentioned it here, but last week I completed the Couch to 5K programme again.  The goal is to be able to run for 30 mins or 5k three times a week and that’s what I did (30 mins but not quite 5k – I’ve never managed a 30 min 5k yet).  My plan from here is to keep building on that to get back to feeling comfortable running 5k again, no matter how slowly.  Today I did 3.6k and I’ll do that another two times in the next 7 days and then see whether I can stretch up to 4k.

It feels great to have re-established this rhythm.  When I first did it 7 years ago, it was straightforward for me to run every other day.  With the passing of time (and some accumulation of mass, especially on my waistline) just having one rest day between runs is pushing it.  Having two is ideal, I think, but three runs too much of a risk that I’ll fall out of the habit – three days off followed by a cold winter morning with torrential rain would too easily stretch to four and then…

I was encouraged though when I looked up how average pace declines with age, it’s not just that I’ve gotten out of shape, I’m also a few years older.  But it would be nice to be nearer the average pace for my age than I am at the moment.