12/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
At the start of the year I declared ‘organisational bankruptcy’.1 I haven’t had time to do anything about it since then (recording the workshop is a full-time job), but I started today.
My scope statement is up.
In scope
- Anything to do with the running of Johnny.Decimal as a business.
- Specifically I’m going to bring
30-39 Coruscade
over from my personal system. That’s the company that the business operates under.
Out of scope
- Anything that is 100% website related. I have a separate system for that,
D01 johnnydecimal.com
.
- You’re looking at that system: it’s what gives structure to the site.
- But if we create non-text content that then gets published on the site — a video, say — that’s not in
D01
. That’s part of D85
.
And here’s the first bunch of Post-its. These have come from the things I’ve done over the last week, which I’ve been writing down.
Next up I’ll go through our file system and get everything represented there on the wall.
Note that I’m doing 20-29 Discovery
(ref. workbook/workshop) by myself, but when it comes to 30-39 Build your areas & categories
I’ll do that with Lucy as this is a system that we both use.
Of course if she also discovers some stuff and sticks it on the wall, that’s cool.
It’ll all be documented
Here at the very least, and I expect we’ll do some videos for the YouTube channel.
≡
11/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
Saturday feels like the day I talk about stuff that I do round the house, so here are a couple of really easy recipes.
They both come from my mam. I’ve been cooking them both for about 30 years; or, she has, and I used to hang around and help.
I love cooking. It keeps you busy: gives your hands something to do but allows your brain to wander a bit. It’s great thinking time.
Anyway, neither of these will tax your skills (or wallet) too much.
Vegetable soup
It’s getting cold, and that means soup. This is so easy anyone can make it.
Ingredients
- 50g knob of butter.1
- One large leek.
- One large head of broccoli.
- Two large carrots.
- Three large potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- Powdered vegetable stock.
Instructions
- In a really big pan (mine might be 5 litres?), heat the butter.
- Chop the leek in to 1cm rounds and fry until soft. Don’t brown.
- Chop the carrot, broccoli including stalk, and peeled potatoes in to chunks. It doesn’t really matter how big. Add to pan.
- Add 2 litres of boiling water.
- Add a really good amount of freshly ground black pepper. I do about 1tbsp of peppercorns but I like it spicy.
- Add 3tsp of the vegetable stock, or adjust to taste (it’s mostly salt).
- Boil gently for at least an hour.
Eat with fresh bread slathered in really good butter.
The rest will keep in the fridge for a few days, or it freezes really well.
Corned beef and potato pie
This has been a favourite as long as I can remember. When I was in my early 20s I had cool jobs where I’d fly all over the world. Mam used to make a pie to take with me. It’d be in my luggage, wrapped in silver foil.
So I’d land in Nigeria, check in, and eat a slice of pie.
One of the first web pages I ever made was this recipe. It would have been at http://york.ac.uk/~jen101/pie.html
or similar. 1995! Lost like tears in rain, alas.
Ingredients
- 2 frozen puff pastry sheets. If you can find the stuff made with butter vs. vegetable oil, obviously it’s better.
- One 340g tin of corned beef. (The ‘lite’ variety works great.)
- One medium onion.
- Three potatoes.
- Black pepper.
- An egg.
Instructions
- In an 8” shallow pie dish, blind bake the pastry base at 180C for about 15 minutes.2
- Boil the peeled, chopped potato. Drain.
- Chop the onion: half quite fine, half a little larger.
- Add the chopped onion, corned beef, and a good helping of black pepper to the pan with the boiled potatoes. Mash roughly.
- Add the beefy-potato-mush to the pie. Top with the other pastry sheet.
- Bake at 180C for about half an hour. I find turning the top oven element on at the beginning puffs the pastry a little better; then I switch back to regular fan oven.
- Near the end, beat the egg and brush over the top.
It’ll be thermonuclear so let it cool a touch before eating. Best with mushy peas and gravy.
I think I prefer this cold the next day. But I’ve always been a cold-savoury person. I like the way that everything congeals. I could eat a kilo of this for lunch the day after (with a bit of hot English mustard).
≡
10/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
The phone rings.
Hello, this is John Noble from the late 1980s.
Hi John, it’s you in 2024. They call us Johnny now. What are you up to?
Oh hi. I’m just messing about with ELIZA on my Amiga 500. It’s an AI, you can ask it questions and stuff!
Cool. Honestly I thought you’d be a bit more surprised that I called you.
Anyway, I remember ELIZA. Hey I’ve got news. We have actual AI now!
No way! Real AI?
Well, kinda. They call it ‘AI’ but there’s nothing intelligent about it. Setting that technicality aside, it’s pretty amazing.
You can talk to it and it’s basically indistinguishable from a human. You can ask it almost anything and it’ll give you a pretty good answer. It can translate language essentially flawlessly, instantaneously, and you can speak that text out loud and have the translation read back to you. Some studies have shown that it’s as good as your GP in diagnosing medical issues. It’s being used to design new antibacterials, which we really need. It can make therapy more accessible. It can enhance education by personalizing learning experiences for students. It’s revolutionizing customer service with chatbots that offer instant assistance. In fields like agriculture, AI-driven solutions optimize crop yields and reduce resource usage. It’s also contributing to environmental conservation through predictive analytics to combat climate change. Additionally, AI-driven robotics are advancing manufacturing efficiency and safety standards.
It’s so good, I wrote the first half of that paragraph myself and I asked ChatGPT to finish it off with ‘more very positive things that AI can do’ and it did that, instantly, for free.
Wow! That is amazing. So how does everybody feel about it?
We all hate it.
Oh. That doesn’t make sense. The technology sounds extraordinary.
Yeah the technology is. But it’s been rammed down our throats and we’re all sick of it already.
I use this platform called Thinkific to host my course videos. I spend hours and hours thinking about how to teach people these skills that I have; meticulously crafting these lessons so that each flows cohesively from the next; so that the message is clear, so that the viewer is taken on a journey from concept to concept.
But now there’s this massive button that you can’t turn off that wants to create your course for you ‘with AI’. As if you, the cretin, have signed up for this teaching platform but actually you’ve no idea how or what to teach. It’s demeaning. And so the internet is being filled with this dreck, this tedious, banal slop, to the point where real human content is becoming hard to find.
Right. That seems like a sha— And then you’ve got these companies that basically steal all of your data to make these new AIs. Because they need to be trained on actual human data.
The problem is that we’ve structured society so that in order to make anything, you eventually need it to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So rather than having normal companies that pay normal prices for things and treat people like humans, you’ve got these absurd structures whose only purpose is to pay back their investors, at all costs. So they’ll just shaft their users in service of these billions of dollars.
I can sense your frust— So the whole world has been taken over by these assholes and what should have been an amazing, transformational technology — I haven’t even mentioned the internet yet have I? that’s a whole other thing — anyway so it feels like what should have been transformational is just being ruined because a bunch of dudes have to be absurdly, offensively rich at everyone else’s expense. It’s not like they can even spend the money, they just want it so they can say that they have it. And so everything’s screwed and it’s only getting worse.
…
Sorry. Are you still there?
Yeah. Look, is there anything I can do from the late 1980s?
Yeah. There are these thing called emoji. In October 2010 with the release of Unicode 6.0 there’s a new one: it’s called ‘sparkles’.
I need you to find whoever designed that emoji and cut their hands off…
≡
9/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I cycled up to the inaugural Canberra CBR Small Business Expo today.1 Here is my report.
I got lucky: crystal show!
Who doesn’t love sharing a conference centre with a bunch of pseudo-scientific woo.
And it turns out that the ‘Canberra Crystal Show’ was just a guy selling a bunch of crystals. So, a shop.
It’s a shame that the people who think crystals “…can help one attain ‘Lemurian awareness’ — the balancing, nurturing, loving, spiritual and sensuous consciousness…” have ruined what would otherwise be a perfectly lovely rock.
It’s all pretty ‘regional’
Lucy and I have this term for things that are a bit, well … regional. You know. Not quite big-city-lights. Like, you’re not going to stumble across David Letterman at this thing.
We find ‘regional’ things tremendously endearing. The whole of Canberra — the capital of Australia, I will remind you — is pretty regional. This expo was super regional.
I met the Minister for Something
May I present Mick Gentleman, Minister for something to do with business, they said. It’s not really clear what?
Anyway, he was available, so he gave a little welcome speech and I asked him for a selfie. He was very obliging.
That’s the Grease Monkey chicken van over my shoulder. When I first started travelling to Canberra (as a weekly FIFO from Melbourne) we’d go to Grease Monkey every week.
Every subsequent week we’d say, shall we try somewhere else tonight? And we’d say, yeah. Then we’d finish work and go to Grease Monkey.
I got sushi today because if I got Grease Monkey for lunch Lucy would have given me the stink-eye when I got home.2
Conflicting advice
I saw a talk given by Emily of Ivy Social. I went in to the session thinking, I’d already cancelled my Facebook account by the time Emily started high school, there’s nothing Emily can teach me about social media.
I was wrong. It was a great session and I wrote a bunch of stuff down.
One of her key messages was: be authentic. I really liked Emily.
The next guy’s talk was about how small business can use AI tools. He explained how you could just give Meta AI a web page and ask it to write you a month’s worth of blog posts and social media.
I wasn’t sure how authentic that was. I wanted to shout “nobody will read this turgid dross!” from the back of the room but I was eating a fried chicken burger my sushi.
He was one of these older blokes who can’t actually explain anything very well. “Yeah then we just load up AI and tell her what we want”, he said, and yes he called the AI “her”.
I don’t know who invited him. Maybe I’ll have a word with Mick.
He said that ‘prompt engineers’ get paid $300k. I really don’t think they do.
Anyway. I really liked Emily.
≡
8/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
The workbook received a one-star review today. One star means that you couldn’t like a thing less. You couldn’t imagine it being worse.
The review?
Your templates won’t download with Mac Safari
Our reviewer — let’s call him Robert1 — purchased the 130-page book at 11:09 and had one-starred it by 11:20 because he couldn’t download the templates. Which are at the back of the book.
He hasn’t even read it.
A better ratings system
Years ago, eBay removed the ability to negatively review a purchase. Then YouTube removed the display of ‘thumbs-downs’ on a video. (You can still mash the thumbs-down button if it makes you feel better. I hope it doesn’t.)
I propose the abolition of the simple 1-5 star system. It serves nobody well.
Instead, you should have to click a link that describes, in words, how you feel. Here’s how they translate.
⭐️
I could not imagine how this product could possibly be worse. Everything about it is pure crap. It has no redeeming qualities.
I wish a pox on the creator and their family. If I ever meet them I’ll spit on their shoe. I hate myself for spending money on it.
⭐️⭐
This product is pretty bad, but is nevertheless serviceably useful. I’ll use it begrudgingly if I need to, until it breaks, at which point I’ll find a better model to replace it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This product does what I expected it to do. Not much more, not much less.
If every product was like this life would be like living in Zürich: banal, but tolerable.
⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️️
This product is pretty good! It’s about how I expect most products to be.
If I made a product and it was like this I’d be pretty happy with myself, but I’d strive to do better next time.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The phone rings
“Hello?”
“Hey Alex, it’s Johnny. You need to come over here and see this thing. Now.”
≡
7/31 daily posts as part of WebvlogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
User PMunch
asks on Discord:1
Basically I’m worried about space
There’s more, but you can read it in the Discord thread. In summary: we have more than 100 customers. How does that work?
I never pretend that Johnny.Decimal is perfect, and one of the ways that the standard implementation ‘fails’ is when you have more than n number of something. More than 10 categories of thing, for example.
Or more than 100 of pretty much anything. One of my design principles is that you don’t have more than 100 of anything.
So, we need to adapt. What I’ll do eventually is document these patterns formally, so I can give them names and refer to them.
I’ve done that for the first pattern I talk about: multiple systems [13.01].
Until then, here’s me thinking out loud. I’d like to do more of these: maybe one a week? Send me your questions.
≡
6/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On this week’s Hemispheric Views the gents once again cause the community to respond. This time: what’s the perfect album?
I’ll submit two.
Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms (1985)
Links to listen on all the services.
This album arguably got me in to music. I heard Walk of Life on Newcastle’s Metro 97.1FM1 somewhere in the late 80s. I would have been about 14.
I didn’t know what it was — sacrilege! Dire Straits are from Newcastle, total local heroes — so I called the station. The lady told me, and that was it. Now 14-year-old me likes music.
Yeah yeah so this is dad rock. It’s an absolute classic though, nothing wrong from start to end. And it’s stood the test of time. We still listen to it, often.
Fun fact: this was the first ever CD with the DDD
mastering symbol on the back. The three letters were either A
or D
for analog & digital and they indicated how the album had been recorded, mixed, and mastered.
Most CDs were AAD
, very few were ADD
, and this was the first DDD
.
If I only listen to one track it should be…
The title track, #9 Brothers in Arms. If it doesn’t melt your heart you might not have one.
Destroyer’s Kaputt (2011)
Cookie rooftop, Melbourne. 2011 or thereabouts. A sunny afternoon with friends. The DJ plays the track Kaputt, I am instantly in love, I ask them what it is, my life is changed.
And I really mean changed. This album set my musical taste on a whole new trajectory. I discovered a love for, what? Shoegazey-lofi-jazzy-soundscapey-lushness? I dunno, this isn’t a Pitchfork review.
Just listen to the album. And if you like it, you should immediately then listen to The Radio Dept.’s Clinging to a Scheme, which could easily be on this page but I have actual work to do so a link’s all you’re getting.
But really, listen to that as well. The two are partners in my mind. One always follows the other.
If I only listen to one track it should be…
The title track, #6 Kaputt. I am in awe of talent like this.
≡
5/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On Sunday 7th May 2023 I went to bed. Lucy was already there. I remember lying silently for a few minutes. Then I asked her a question.
“Can I quit my job tomorrow?”
I Was An IT Consultant
That felt like a confession worthy of title case. All my life I’ve been an IT Consultant. Not a bad way to make a living, and like Cal Newport says: do what you’re good at. I was good at it.
And some of the jobs were great. Maybe I’ll write about some of my past jobs one day. But the job I had last May was not great.
Johnny at his old job
It was so not-great, I felt bad taking the money. It was so so not-great, I felt like it was damaging my reputation. And I can’t just ‘turn up’ at work: if you’re paying me to do a job, I am going to do a stellar job. On this project, that really just wasn’t possible.
The state of modern IT infrastructure projects isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
At the same time, my little forum was starting to see a bit of action. The sort of thing that makes you think, huh, have I got a thing?
When you’re 46(?), and you have a thing, it’s time to do something with that thing
46? 47? Honestly when you get to this age you stop counting. Late 40s.
So when you’re in your late 40s and all you’ve ever wanted to do is not work for someone else, and you realise that you’ve got this thing, then it might be time to do something with that thing.
I’ve looked for ‘the thing’ for years. Friends and I have had weekly meetings where we try to come up with ‘the thing’. The problem is that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be the boss of a big thing. The CEO of some company. Responsibility. Power. Staff. Stress.
I just don’t care. I’m not that guy. I want what they sometimes disparagingly call a ‘lifestyle business’. Something that pays the bills, probably won’t make you rich, but doesn’t consume your entire life.
Well here I am with this realisation. This little website that I’ve kept going for about a decade now1 is my thing.
Anyway so I say to Lucy, “can I quit my job?”
And after a long chat discussing the pros (I don’t go to that place any more) and the cons (food costs money) we decide, yeah, I’ll quit.2 To spend time on the thing.
It happened fast.
I told my consulting company3 on Monday morning. Two weeks notice.
They told ‘the customer’ — whose project was the shambles to be escaped — on Monday afternoon.
On Tuesday morning my account manager gave me a little shush and come with me wave from down the corridor. We went downstairs.
“Alan is having you offboarded”, he tells me. Alan4 was the Program Director. He wasn’t there; he hid somewhere else that day. (I never saw him again.)
And sure enough, by midday on Tuesday I had handed back the customer’s laptop and access card. So now I find myself at my SmallConsultingCo and we’re all wondering what I do for the next 8½ days.
“Rather than me sit here and pretend to work,” I say, “why don’t you pay me out until the end of this week. And I’ll go home now, and we’re done.”
And they say yes.
So at about 3pm on Tuesday I walk in to the garden. Lucy’s there with the chickens. “I’m finished”, I say. “I’m done.”
Johnny in the garden with chickens
We had no plan and so for a while I used Microsoft Teams
A sentence I hoped never to write.
Given the disaster I had just witnessed, surely, I thought, helping large organisations be more organised is the way.
And so I started looking at developing a Teams app. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at developing a Teams app.
Do not.
The state of Microsoft Teams development isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
The state of disorganisation inside ‘the enterprise’ — the pure raw chaos that is today’s workplace, the sheer immensity of the challenge that would be making it sane again, the almost incomprehensible extent to which it’s broken and the fact that the people ostensibly in charge of your organisation’s data have no idea what to do and have essentially given up — isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
This feels like a natural place to end. Because the next part of this story is where we did find a thing to make that was useful, and I’ll tell that another day if I run out of more interesting things to write.
Suffice to say, 🥳
It was one of the best decisions of my life.
Thank you. Because we can afford to buy food because of your support. That sounds cheesy but it’s totally true. Whether you’ve bought one of my things or just spread the word or just been a friend online or whatever: you make this possible.
This is my job now. One year ago I couldn’t have imagined it.
≡
4/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On Saturday morning, I dust and vacuum the house.
Without fail. Every week. For years now.
We call it the ‘floors chores’ and it’s just one of my jobs. I’ve come to love it: we eat breakfast,1 I clean the kitchen, then I put on my noise cancelling AirPods and vacuum while listening to ATP.
Routines are powerful but they’re hard to establish. We treasure the floors chores because it means our house is always clean. By now it’s effortless.
It would be ideal if we could reach this state with our work. In his latest book Slow Productivity,2 Cal Newport advocates for the formation of rituals:
“…form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important.”
– Slow Productivity, p. 163.
So why are they so hard to establish?
Picture your work day
And by ‘work’ I just mean whatever it is that you want to get done.
If we assign shapes and colours to tasks, where shapes are analagous to categories and colours to areas (in Johnny.Decimal parlance), our days mostly look like this.
The types of work you do flow like words on the page, from left to right,
then on to the next row.
Chaos! None the wonder you can’t concentrate. Every switch is a switch in mental state; in the knowledge that you’re holding in working memory; in the files and apps you need open to perform the task.
This is not the best way to work.
Let’s reimagine. Here’s the same shapes, rearranged. And let’s introduce some line breaks; perhaps they’re actual breaks in your day?
Similar shapes have been moved together, and we’ve moved all of the ‘heavy’ stuff to the front; maybe it’s harder work that you should do while your brain is fresh?
Work in categories
I think we usually behave like the first diagram because we haven’t sufficiently categorised our work to enable us to behave like the second.
And this calls back to yesterday’s post and my desire to eliminate ‘due dates’.
Imagine establishing a routine such that you know, as sure as I know that I’ll do the floors chores next Saturday morning, that on the first Sunday morning of the month you tackle all of those heavy blue boxes.
And say they represent all of your home finances: paying your bills, checking account balances, updating your subscriptions, transferring your health insurance, finding a better savings account.
If you knew that you did that every month, you’d never need to be reminded to do it.
And you’d never get that slighly panicked feeling: oh crap, did I forget to pay the credit card this month?
How nice might that be?
≡