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Scooter's Coffee House

Caffe Nero in Muswell Hill or Savino's or CB1 it aint.

Most upsetting of all the coffee tastes like dried, roasted squirrel's arseholes.

Maybe if I put some more sugar in it, it'll only taste like hedgehog testicle sweat.

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Trying to explain to my American colleagues that this is a lot more space than you would ever get in a London office...

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JP Morgan Kansas City

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The first rule of stand-up

Rules for running daily standup meetings are to help teams get started with them. There's no magic in this formula. These rules should not be a straight jacket imposed on the team forever more. Sticking strictly to the formula makes the daily stand-up feel like it's "being done by numbers," which stifles self-organising in the team.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1934356433?ie=UTF8&ref=aw_bottom_links&for...
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What is the stand-up for?

It's essential to get the message across to the team that their daily stand-up is for *them* to sychronize their work. It is *not* held for a project manager or team lead to gather progress from the team or give feedback on their work.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1934356433?ie=UTF8&ref=aw_bottom_links&for...
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Retrospectives

One approach to adopting Agile we've used with some teams is to make retrospectives the first Agile practice to introduce.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1934356433?ie=UTF8&ref=aw_bottom_links&for...
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Agile and Jobs

If they are scared that they will lose their jobs - you won't be able to do any Agile coaching.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1934356433?ie=UTF8&ref=aw_bottom_links&for...
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Self-organising

There is a very tricky understanding between Scrum and non-Scrum. If we continue to apply the principles of directed, supervised work we are doomed to Lean and Scrum being another fad, another cover for a continuing use of Scientific Management and its management practices.

http://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/microsoft-and-brian-harry/

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Great if you are running a factory line (maybe)...

Our tendency and tooling from waterfall and predictive processes is to view people as assignable, parsed, optimized resources. This works great if you are running a factory line and people are doing simple work. It really sucks if you are trying to do creative, complex work where there are many competing ideas and solutions emerge from interactions.

Ken Schwaber

http://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/microsoft-and-brian-harry/

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The Role of Project Manager

We have found that the role of the project manager is counterproductive in complex, creative work. The project manager’s thinking, as represented by the project plan, constrains the creativity and intelligence of everyone else on the project to that of the plan, rather than engaging everyone’s intelligence to best solve the problems.

http://kenschwaber.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/agility-and-pmi/

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Pollen (sorry it's late, I really did write it yesterday - I blame 3's pants 3g dongle)

Pollen

Ok – this is a tricky one because as far as I know I know almost nothing about pollen, lets see shall we. What is pollen? Well, I've put my time in as a slacker, so I've watched more than my fair share of documentaries about plants. Pollen is all to do with sex. Pollen is genetic material. And just like how with humans, you have to get the genetic material from the man's parts to the ladies parts so that you can make babies. It's just like that with plants, or with some plants anyway. I'm a bit hazy about if it's that way with all plants. And just like with humans. Although it's relatively simple to explain what goes on, glory be, isn't there a mighty palaver actually getting it to happen. With plants, it's not simple, in fact I think it might even be more complicated that dinner and a movie (and much more complicated than a bottle of Lambrini and a bag of chips wi' bits). So I think that the plant has both bits, male and female (sometimes, it doesn't - I think Jesus I really should have paid more attention when I was watching slacker TV). And in Rural Science class, but, ironically, I was too busy imagining what it might be like to inseminate Louise Heckmondwicke who was sitting at the desk in front of me and had just recently acquired a full set of breasts – almost overnight, as if they'd arrived mail order. So you see, I was paying far to much attention to my own insemination problems to listen to how it works in geraniums. There are some stamen. And some anthers. I think that's right. And when a geranium loves another geranium very much, or even when it loves itself very much. Shit. No.

Look, lets look at this a different way. Lets look at it as a package delivery problem. These flowers have got some pollen, and they want it delivered to some other flowers, who live a long way away. So they can make an exotic baby which is a combination of both strands of DNA, who is better looking and more resistant to disease. This is almost exactly the same reason why countries all over the world send their children on high-school exchanges to France. And because flowers don't have access to FedEx, or maybe because they do and realise that if they send it FedEx, the flower at the other end is going to have to go and pick up the pollen from a depot on an industrial estate outside Wood Green, they have a bunch of alternative strategies for delivery.

The first idea that these crazy flowers have come up with – and I know this wouldn't probably be your first choice, is they throw a party for bees. But if you're going to throw a party for bees and you want them to come, you've got to serve special drinks – this stuff called nectar. If you wanted wasps, you could just stick with the econo-pack of Stella – actually, the wasps would probably even drink carling, but the bees. The bees. The bees are a bit like having fucking ethical tree-hugging fucking vegans round for dinner – they're very fussy. So you have to break out this sugar water stuff that is the only stuff that they eat and wouldn't really be nourishing enough for anyone else – it's kind of like the etymological equivalent of Shloer. And while the bees are all slurping up the nectar – you dust them with pollen. Yeah, I know that's weird. But the hope is that later in the evening – probably when you run out of Shloer. They're going to go to another party. And your pollen is going rub off on their carpets and curtains (this metaphor is starting to feel like a motorbike laying in bits on the kitchen table). Deep breath. Your pollen will rub off on the carpets and curtains and you'll have babies together. Really. That's how it's supposed to happen.

But of course, this is a really elaborate method of having babies. It's a bit like not only insisting on the birthing tub, but insisting that it's filled with water from the dead sea and the mid-wife has to be an obese druidess in a purple velvet dressing gown called Layla. And pollen is fucking expensive. Even more expensive that Shloer.

So some plants do something simultaneously more callous and more romantic. They literally throw their sperm into the wind and let the elements carry it where they may (again, I've done something very similar whilst thinking about Louise Heckmondwicke during the Summer holidays). The weird thing is that some times this works. Sometimes other flowers of the same species catch this pollen and bada-bing bada-boom a new seed is created. And then sometimes, that gets blown away on the wind to land who knows what where? For a lot of plants, this is a wind-powered deal.

But there's a problem. Isn't there always? Yup, there's a problem. Well, it's a problem for some people anyway. It's not so much of a problem if you have shares in the companies that sell over-the-counter anti-histamines. Yup that's right. This is other species. A species, which quite literally should not be sticking it's nose into plant-sex, for some reason that absolutely no-one knows, this other species starts reacting badly to their being pollen in the air. Streaming nose, puffy eyes, but the most disturbing symptom for the loved ones of sufferers is the sustained and intense periods of whining.

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The First Slice

The first slice should always be based on the basic flow. For some complex systems this slice may not even cover the whole of the flow. You may just take a sub-set of the basic flow, skipping the detail of some steps snd stubbing up the solution for others, to attack the biggest challenges in implementing the use case and learn whether or not it can be implemented.

Ivor Jakobson - Use Case 2.0
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Writing for a hour on - work

Writing for an hour about any subject – work.

The reason that I ask other people to suggest subjects for me is that otherwise I would go with the things that are uppermost in my mind. And what I want to do by writing something like this is “stir the pot” a bit. But work's such a big subject, I get the feeling that writing about it will result in a substantial amount of stirring.

Philip Larkin famously (or famously if you did my exam board at A-level English) asked “Why should I let the Toad work squat on my life?” But of course, this isn't exactly a rhetorical question, rather it's a fucking obvious one. Because you need the money Phil, that's the answer. Of course, by the time Larkin was writing that, he was probably at the stage where he could have given up a proper job and replaced it with an “Poet in Residence” at some prestigious American university. If you know anything about Larkin, you realise that he'd probably much rather have stayed on as a librarian in Hull, which of course is exactly what he did. But enough of Larkin. What about ME. Why do I work – well, mostly for the same reason that Phil does – I need the money. It was only after I'd spent getting on for two and half years not having a proper job that I realised that there were any other benefits of work. During that period when I was “Self-unemployed” I did find myself either alone – for a lot of the time, or when I was in the company of real human beings, I tended to find myself talking about what had been happening on twitter. Not a good sign. But then when I got a proper job, in a proper office after a long break I was amazed at how much banal chat there was. Most of my colleagues seemed to do nothing but talk about cars and football and babies. I was also amazed at how lazy some people were. I distinctly remember being in a meeting very early on which was easily the most pointless meeting that I'd ever been in my life. Of course to get the job, there'd been some, not exactly lying exactly, but lets just say, some extremely robust statements of the facts. And so when I'd started, I'd been very worried that I might be found out. That my skills weren't exactly shit hot, more piss warm. But then I was in this meeting, which was the most pointless, aimless, non-sensical meeting that I've ever been in and I cheered up.

I distinctly remember thinking to myself “This meeting is really shit! Great! There's pretty much no way I could do worse than this!”

One of the things that fascinates me, at the same time as it depresses me and infuriates me, is the way that everybody knows how to behave in a work environment. Everybody knows how to kowtow to the boss and the boss knows instinctively how to be a witless dick. This must have been something that was going on when we were roaming the savannahs. In the absence of powerpoint he would have a stack yeah-high (I'm holding my hand about shoulder height) of either interestingly painted flat stones, or pieces of tree bark. In fact, wouldn't it be great if all these cave paintings that everybody gets so excited about weren't actually “religious paintings” at all but presentation slides for a sales meeting “Uggg has been doing a marvellous job over in Waterbuffalo, so good in fact that he'll be moving, as you can see from this mysterious dot-pattern org-chart which future generations will confuse with evidence of invasions by extraterrestrials”

“And in this painting you can see that we predict mammoth slayings will double in number over the next quarter, for no reason at all other than our bonus is tied to it.”

I think this makes a lot of sense. One of the most important things to consider when you're talking about work, is cognitive dissonance. Logically, you need a job, otherwise your wife will leave you, your landlord will evict you, your cat will fuck off, and, most heart-breaking of all, your dog will stay with you and just give you this look that says “What happened? Why aren't we going back to the house? I used to really like it when I got to lie on the rug. And why are we sharing food now? So it's logical that you need a job. And for a fraction of a second, you're happy that you've got a job. And then in the following millisecond, you realise that you have a boss. OK, it was logical for you to get a job, but what happens now, the things you're asked to do, the way you feel about those things, the things that you find yourself doing all by yourself, without any prompting at all, that, really isn't logical, far from it. The most logical thing to do at work would be to slack off as much as humanly possibly, check updates on facebook more than 60 times an hour and arrange your chair so you can fantasize about doing animalistic and degrading things to the new girl in accounts. Or, actually, something I know at least one person did at one of the places I worked, spend all your time running another business from work.

Now that is logical. But what I tend to find myself doing when I'm at work. And I don't really like to admit this too loudly, is that I tend to try to please my boss. I also try to do a good job. In his fantastic blog post about “The Office” and what we can learn from it, Venkatesh Rao says that there are three kinds of people in a work environment the losers, the clueless and the sociopaths. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the losers and the clueless is that the Clueless don't know that they're doomed. It doesn't take much time after reading that article, if you're at work. And then you find yourself desperately wishing you could be a sociopath and grudingly admitting to yourself that you're probably a loser. The courage and steely determination to genuinely do fuck all only really comes easily to the kind of guy who killed cats for fun during his school holidays. You can try not doing what your boss tells you, and, especially in IT, where nobody can see anything. But the real problem with this, if you aren't a sociopath is that you let the other people that you wok with down as well. To let your own team down, that really takes a lack of regard for humanity.

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Maybe Brussels isn't so bad after all...

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You're in Bruxelles now boy

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Discover a New Life of Vocal Desperation or Possibly Even, Actual Fun

Henry David Thoreaux might be most famous for saying "Most men live lives of quiet desperation."

I didn't realise the truth of that until I recently signed up for a stand-up comedy course. Is that a joke? Maybe, I'd need an open spot somewhere to find out.

Actually, I didn't really realise about the quiet desperation until I was about half-way through the course, with 5 actual live gigs under my belt and there was the possibility in view of not being able to do anymore (my day job at that time was thinking of sending me to Bournemouth). I realised that I'd been living it and really didn't want to go back to it. I was simply having too much. Even though at that point I'd done a grand total of 21minutes of stand-up (my first gig was a minute long).

There were a few other things that I hadn't realised before I started the course. I hadn't realised that London is pretty much the centre of the stand-up comedy world (except in August when everybody who has anything to do with comedy is in Edinburgh). I hadn't realised how easy it is to get a 5 minute open spot at somewhere like the Lion's Den on Shaftsbury Avenue. And I hadn't realise what a slippery, ephemeral thing is the skill of making people laugh, how utterly awesome you'll feel when you get it right and how low and shitty you'll feel when you don't.

The course I signed up for is called 'Stand Up or Die' and details can be found via the tutor for the course Logan Murray (google him, you'll find his website). Logan is a great tutor for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he treats you like adults, rather than students who may well turn out to be more talented than he is. Secondly, and I suppose relatedly, if he's in anyway bitter about not being a cosmic megastar, unlike some of the people he's worked with and taught, he's doesn't let it show. The course crucially creates a safe place to try out daft ideas and behaviour. So safe and so encouraging that you start to think - hey, I might just be funny enough to stand on a stage and make people laugh.

Logan pushes two related ideas on the course. All creativity comes from play - and by playing games you can achieve "paperless writing" i.e. you don't have to sit at a desk to sweat blood to get material for a routine - you can achieve the same, or even a better result by farting about playing games with your mates.

Those are the bits that I can consciously recall, but there's clearly something else going on. Because between session 4 and 8 just about all of us started gigging. Finding open spots around London and trailing out to pubs in forlorn parts to wait all night, sober, for a five minute spot. And by the end of the course and the final showcase last week, even those few on the course that, if you'd held a gun to my head, I might admit were a bit weak, even those, seemed to have found either a new material or a new attitude to their material that made them capable of making people laugh.

As it turns out, I am being sent away from the world centre of comedy (not to Bournemouth, but to Kansas City Missouri!) I'm not sure that I'll be able to gig there (they do have one comedy club that claims to have an open mic night) but I will certainly make the most of any return visits, and who knows, while I'm out there I might pick up some material.

As Henry David Thoreau also said "In thw Wilderness is Our Salvation"
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!!!

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The use-case slice

The use-case slice is the most important element of Use-Case 2.0, as it is not only used to help with the requirements but to drive the development of a system to fulfll them.

Ivor Jacobson - Use Case 2.0
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Slices

The system should be built in slices, each of which has clear value to the users.

Ivar Jakobson - Use Case 2.0
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Additive

The most important thing is the additive structure of the use-case narrative.

Ivar Jakobsob - Use Case 2.0
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Slides from The Digital Publisher

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8370610/TheDigitalPublisherSlides.ppt

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Slices

Most systems require a lot of work before they are usable and ready for operational use. They have many requirements, most of which are dependent on other requirements being implemented before they can be fulflled and value delivered. It is always a mistake to try to build such a system in one go. The system should be built in slices, each of which has clear value to the users.

Use Case 2.0 - Ivar Jacobson
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Just about to wash this off...

Oh well, I suppose that's the end of the course - sigh.

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IMG00256-20120313-1751.jpg

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Self-Knowledge

If you admit to yourself that you're fat, it has advantages.  You know it's a very bad idea for a fat man with glasses to go on Big Brother.  Just before the first commercial break, there'd be the first murmurs of a disagreement with some of the other cretinous inmates.  By the time they're back from the adverts they'd have your head on a stick and be chanting "Kill the Pig."

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Videos of TUC Save Our NHS rally, March 7

Heart-breaking. This is really what's happening.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Scott-Samuel
Date: 10 March 2012 10:41
Subject: Fwd: Videos of TUC Save Our NHS rally, March 7
To: Lock Alex , angela rowe
, Helen Haines ,
Mark Stringer , Themis Halvantzi

My pinko half brother doing his thing:

Cheers,

Nick

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Come and See Me and a Bunch of Other Funny People TONIGHT in Fulham

It's a comedy competition, the audience gets to decide who wins.

http://www.belushis.com/bars/london/fulham

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TMOABS - Two Minutes of anything but silence on the Supernatural

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Lonesome Death of a Fat Man - Gig #9 Touching Cloth, Dirty Dick's, Liverpool Street

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TMOABS - Two Minutes of anything but silence on Bertram Russell's Teapot

To finish this story. Wittgenstein was rocking back and forth on his chair and Russell said to G.E. Moore - "Go on then! Ask him a question!" I also now know what Russell's teapot is.

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T-MOABS (Two Minutes of Anything But Silence)

Hello,

A few weeks ago, when I asked friends on Twitter and Facebook to suggest subjects that I should write about for an hour.  Now I've got a full-time job again and not so much time on my hands, so I'm trying something a bit more radical.

What I'm going to ask people to do is suggest a subject that I talk about for two-minutes.  However badly (or well, I suppose) it goes, I'll post it on Youtube.  The idea is to practice thinking on my feet (although I might sit down) whilst at the same time, possibly, coming up with new material that I can use in my stand-up.

So, please, when you see me asking for suggestions, do reply.  And also, let me know what you think of the videos.

Lots of Love,

Mark

PS Come and see my gigs http://mumbly.posterous.com/tag/gigs.

Next one is Wednesday March 7th in Fulham http://mumbly.posterous.com/gig-golden-jester-competition-at-belushis-in

-- 
http://www.mumbly.co.uk       http://twitter.com/Mark_Stringer          07736 807 604

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Here we go again...

March2012CV.doc Download this file

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