Growing up is optional

I got the opportunity to go to work with a friend tonight who drives a highway patrol car for the police. We had to go really fast (I won’t say how fast) to catch a guy doing 126km/h (78mph). For the foreigners, the speed limit here is 100km/h, the roads are not straight, and it is strictly policed.

Rush hour is the boring bit, although there was a minor accident that we had to go to.

If you get the chance, do it. More details may follow…

One thing I forgot to say: When we stopped anyone, they all reach for their cell phone the second we walk away from the car to write-up the ticket. I guess everyone wants to tell someone. Either to vent, or for consolment? What did you do last time you were stopped?

• A new skateboard
• 4GB iPod
• Beer

It’s less than one week out from the general Election here in NZ. As you have your piece of democracy this Saturday, remember one thing: Unless there is a clear majority winner, under MMP nobody will be accountable for any promises made during the campaign.

Lazy post about what I’ve been doing:

• Been studying heaps. 1st assignment is in, working on 2nd.
• Playing with Pandora - very cool. Let me know if you want an invite and I’ll see what I can do.
• Can’t find a builder to do up my bathroom. Can find every other service though.
• Work’s really busy.
• Thinking about the general election. Still undecided centre vote.

Will we see commercial/enterprise Gmail? I was thinking the other day about the whole Web as a platform thing and how Google, with their huge platform is going to utilise this. What I though is that one of the next big things Google will do is look at the possibility of commercialising the ‘killer app’.

Google have already proved they can take email from the desktop platform to the web platform. Personally I prefer Gmail to Outlook or Thunderbird. However, for a commercial user, one thing they have over Gmail is the scheduling/calendar functionality, although this is not yet at version 1.0 in Thunderbird. Also, I don’t know whether Google are working on this , but I suspect that someone there has the foresight to at least assess its value. We may even see it as part of a ‘Gmail Pro’ targeted at the serious, but not necesarily enterprise user.

However, there is the issue of privacy and security. Google would have to ensure that these were well sorted out before any commercial organisation would seriously consider using it.

Administration could be an interesting issue for an enterprise version. Although keeping it simple is best, I can hear the cries already of ‘but I need to change this to stop our users…’

At last we are on the uphill stretch to Summer! All of the darkness is starting to get me down. It’s not as bad as a Scandanavian winter, and I don’t mind the cold too much but I hate arriving at work in the dark and getting home in the dark. What little time I get outside during the day is in the shadow of high-rises, which create dark windy corridors. The wind is good for one thing; it makes the waves. There hasn’t been enough surf lately. Thanks goodness for winter storms!

A while back I wrote about the up side of being a generalist. In fact I went as far as saying that I was a ‘Specialist Generalist’; specialising in knowing a bit about everything. Unfortunately I am falling into the generalist trap like Richard said: …because I’m a jack of all trades Generalist, too much of my time gets taken up doing menial Web things for business people - just because I can.

The end result of this is that I get bored. Which in turn creates its own problem: I become unmotivated.

The hard part is deciding what to do about it. There is no point blaming anyone other than myself for this; my situation is the result of my decisions. Nor is there any point in waiting for someone to get me out of it; the only person that can get me out of it is me.

The natural next step is to answer the following questions:

1. Where do I want to be x years from now?
2. What do I have to do to get there?
3. What am I going to do about it?

These may sound like trivial questions, but they’re not. The first two are particularly difficult. The answer to the third should become obvious once that first two are answered. However, answering it and doing something about it are two different things.

So I’ll start with a basic question: What do I like to do? More random thoughts may follow…

<rant>I hate wearing a tie, so I don’t unless I have to go to a meeting that requires one. Today I showed up at work in tidy jeans and a tidy shirt with a collar. I was told several times that this was ‘a bit casual’ by several female staff, to which I responded I’m no more casual than you.

Relative to other males in my workplace, I am dressed casually. But if you put what I was wearing, cut to shape of course, on a female it would not be considered ‘a bit casual’. In fact, they would all go around commenting on how much they liked so and so’s new shirt and that they would like one for themselves.

Maybe I need to find a job where I’m not so outnumbered by women.</rant>