Tsoureki - Greek Easter Bread, the egg went a bit wonky

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Jazz Careers

Careers_in_jazz_002.pdf Download this file

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Definitely too hot for Stringers

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This guy - he should fuck off

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T shirt sizes for transformational backlog tasks

Just thinking:

S: Just one thing to do, an email to have, a conversation to have, something to order, or book.
M: A meeting needs to happen.
L: Several things need to happen.
XL: A number of meetings, a number of actions.
XXL: Needs breaking down further, not what needs to be done to achieve this.
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CV v1.3

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And another thing...

Another thing that Sue Walden taught me last night was that what she called 'verbal mirroring' can help you to stay in the moment. Verbal mirroring is trying to talk in your mind at the same time as someone who is speaking. That sounds a bit new age but ii helps you do what you need to be doing, what I need to be doing, more of the time than I actually do - paying attention to what's going on around me rather than drifting off into some little dream world.
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Notes from last night's improv

Just a few notes on my Improv class - it was taken by an American lady - Sue Walden, I'll get the details in a minute because I've stuck the 'Yes And' badge that she gave me onto my over coat. It was a departure from the normal sessions that we have at the Spontaneity Shop and I think there was a bit of impatience after we'd spent large of chunks of last week's session taking about improv in a kind of group therapy session. The thought occurred to men and some of the others that we'd rather just be doing scene after scene. We can talk up a storm in the rest of our lives, what we want to do for the three hours of improv is scene after scene after scene. And after this class, I had the same kind of hunger, yes,it's always good to revisit the basics (especially if you hardly ever apy attention) but what I really want to do right now is scenes. Scenes and scenes until I'm sick of them.

So my heart sunk a little when Sue said she needed a flip chart and pen and paper. But the exercises we did were compelling. I particularly liked one where we improvised all the different ways that we could possibly get from one point to another across the stage, having been told there were only a small number of fixed rules. Then we went back and added in all the rules that we'd imagined. Yup. That was interesting. And I liked the communal drawing at the end, and I dunno, to my mind the 'thing' that three of us did with differently-coloured pens looked more crazy and in some sense more attractive than the animals that the pairs came up with. I dunno, maybe that's threesome parental pride. And the sense of relief was immense when we realised that we could make the extra head into a baby. Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

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Wanted: Agile Coach/Mentor Please RT

I'm looking for both a coach and a mentor (I don't imagine them to be the same person) to help me to the next stage with my career. I've been working for the past fifteen months as a iteration manager/scrum master and I've greatly enjoyed the experience, but with the contract ending in the summer I think it's time to consider carefully what I should looking for in my next move and how I should prepare for it.

I spent the two and a half years before my current job  working as a freelance trainer and consultant in Agile methods with a variety of clients. While in my current role I've continued to run occasional training courses.

Coach

I'm looking for someone to help me assess what I can do in the short term to make myself a better scrum master, as well as a better coach and trainer. Obviously, I'm prepared to pay market rates for this advice.  As a trainer and coach myself I absolutely believe in the value of getting outside professional help.

I'm not looking for a life coach. I'm looking for someone with solid experience as a scrum master, or as an Agile coach and trainer.

Mentor

I'm looking for someone who's a few steps ahead of me in their career, this will probably mean someone who's been involved in the industry longer than Agile has been around. I'm also interested to talk to people who have experience of running their own consultancy or training business out side of the Agile domain.

I would expect to pay for mentoring. The idea would be that this would be a mentor/mentee relationship that would extend over a lengthy period of time and benefit both of us.

Please contact me if you're interested in either of these roles (or send this link to anyone who you think might be):

Email: mark.stringer@mumbly.co.uk
Phone: 07736 807 604

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We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched...

We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn't know what we were doing.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

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Unmoderated groups will almost always end up arguing about needing a moderator

"The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

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Tech vs Social

The line between 'technical' and 'social' is not a clear one, and never can be.

 

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.html

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Learning From Experience

Iearning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
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