Status-Q

I have several good friends who are architects, and I have a great respect for the profession as a whole.

However…

There do seem to be some basic rules which not all architects, bless them, appear to have picked up on, but everybody else understands (so you’d think it ought to be drummed into them at architecture school).

I therefore offer a few pointers for any architects who missed the first class at college. (I expect there are plenty of blogs where architects complain about their software, and rightly so!) So here we go:

1. Concrete and cement buildings always look horrible after ten years.

You can understand them wanting to experiment with this nice new material when it first came out, but that was a very long time ago. They should have realised the error of their ways before our city centres were filled with all these nasty stained buildings. Yes, there are some structures you can only build this way – like motorway bridges – but if you have to make buildings out of it, for God’s sake cover them up with something aesthetically pleasing afterwards.

2. Flat roofs are a bad idea.

Things fall on roofs (like leaves and raindrops). If the roofs are flat, they don’t fall off again. It’s not that hard.

Yes, I know we like Frank Lloyd Wright, but haven’t you noticed the number of houses where flat roofs are replaced with pitched ones? As well as being more practical, they usually look a lot better. Put it this way: how many people do you know who go the other way? “You know, I’ve always liked this house, but that sloping roof is a pain. I’m thinking of taking it off and replacing it with nice flat one.”

3. Innovate around heating and ventilation at your peril.

Here in Cambridge, Norman Foster’s striking Law Faculty building was plagued with internal gales as the single centralised temperature control tried to equalise things around a vast building. (The dramatic open plan design also caused major noise problems. Both issues were dramatically reduced when the architects reluctantly introduced more glass partitioning, something that had been gently suggested by the faculty staff before it was built.)

A mile or so away, the new Computer Lab building rejected traditional heating and air conditioning in favour of a system which took into account the high density of power-hungry cathode-ray-tube monitors and tower PCs. It was completed in 2001, just as people were starting to move to laptops and LCD screens…

So those are my starting suggestions; get those under your belt and, I think we can agree, you’re well on your way to having happier clients.

Any other suggestions for Architecture 101?

I remember, in my youth, returning a book to my local library, where I had to pay a largish fine because it was distressingly overdue. The librarian glanced at the book, which had a title something like “25 Steps to Organising Your Life” and said, wryly, “Ah, yes, we make a lot of money from that one – it’s always late”.

I soon abandoned self-help books; I just had to: I couldn’t help myself. And I remained very disorganised. But I did hear some good things about David Allen’s book ‘Getting Things Done‘ soon after it came out in 2001, and decided to give it a try.

Since then, of course, it’s become a huge best-seller, spawning an amazing range of blogs, seminars, software products and further books. If you’ve somehow missed all this, try a Google search for ‘Getting Things Done David Allen’ and look at how many items come back. Even more impressive, it made me become a bit more organised, though I am yet but a humble neophyte in the GTD cult and have wavered in my devotion over the years.

Twelve years later, the book seems a little dated, with all its references to hanging files and index cards, and it could probably always have done with some abridging. But I’d still recommend it: it contains some very sound advice on how to condense your life into some sophisticated to-do lists, and how to manage those lists so they don’t then take over your life.

And if you buy into Allen’s methodology, a range of software exists to help bring it up to date. My favourite is OmniFocus, which now exists in Mac, iPad and iPhone forms, all of which are splendidly designed for their respective platforms, and all of which sync very nicely together. You should be warned that, if you have the devices, you’ll eventually want to buy all of them, and doing so will set you back around $140. The Omni Group writes very good software, and prices it accordingly. They do offer a money-back guarantee if you aren’t happy with it, though.

Anyway, for many years I didn’t really grasp the full potential of OmniFocus. It is a brilliant implementation of GTD and adds some useful features of its own. But it can be slightly daunting, too, so it’s worth exploring some of the resources out there. In particular, David Sparks, a.k.a MacSparky, has done a trilogy of screencasts which are a great introduction and will take you from beginner to expert in an hour and a half. I’ve been using OmniFocus since before it was officially released — about five years now — and I learned several useful tips. Recommended.

GTD is quite an investment of time and effort. OmniFocus is not cheap and requires some learning. And I’m still a very long way from being the world’s most organised person. But, for me, at least, it’s definitely been worth it.

Thieves raid Microsoft's R&D centre in Palo Alto. They only take $3000-worth of kit. But they do millions of dollars of damage to Microsoft's marketing.

Lovely story in the Guardian.

(And it just shows, by the way, the power of press reporters. This would have been a thoroughly uninteresting story if Angela Ruggiero, who wrote the original piece in the Palo Alto Daily Post, hadn't picked up on this particular twist.)

I think this page from Examiner.com is possibly the best therapy I’ve seen for struggling authors.

Last year, I sent out a tweet:

Ok. I've decided. My new year's resolution will be Rhenium Chloride.

but it didn't elicit much of a response. Perhaps it was too soon after the festive celebrations or perhaps many others, like me, found that this particular Re solution has remarkably few applications in normal day-to-day life.

This year, I'll sick to this rather nice image, spotted by my brother:

Original source unknown, sorry!

This is probably a very obvious thought to those who wear glasses more frequently than I do…

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get rotationally-polarised contact lenses? Then contact-lens wearers could just walk into 3D movies and not have to wear low-quality plastic glasses like the rest of us. It would probably be a much better experience.

I remember my mother telling me about visiting an African orphanage for young blind children, a long time ago. The children asked her to go into the dormitory and read them a bedtime story. When she got there, however, it was pitch black. The children didn’t need any lights to get ready for bed, but there was no way she could read them anything. So, instead, they pulled out their braille books and read her stories, a role-reversal which delighted everybody.

Well, maybe those of you who have had to put up with various eyesight-enhancement technologies and found them to be a nuisance in the past will soon have an advantage over those of us who can’t get retina-projected Google maps so easily…

Thanks to Richard Watts for prompting the idea…

Rose and I invented a new word this week. It’s a technical cycling term, so may not become widespread, but I think we may see rapid adoption of it in East Anglia and the Netherlands.

ishybutt (ˈɪʃibʌt) (also ishibutt)
noun the experience of sitting on a bicycle saddle, only to discover that it has been raining.

Hope you find it useful in daily conversation.

John's been writing about the somewhat bizarre practice of LinkedIn 'endorsements', where you can affirm that an acquaintance really has the skills they say they have.

Well, frankly, I wouldn't, in the first place, link to anyone I thought was likely to lie on their CV. I'm old-fashioned enough to remember the days when a LinkedIn connection was meant to imply some sort of endorsement in itself.

Interestingly, you can also endorse people's expertise in skills they never knew they had. I never listed any on my LinkedIn page until some kind friend said I was awfully good at 'Architecture', which I assume they meant in the sense of 'computer systems architecture', but, who knows, perhaps they had seen my old garden shed modifications? Hoping for some interesting job offers from that one.

It is, of course, a brilliant marketing trick on LinkedIn's part. In a world where page hit numbers are everything, it's hard to imagine a better email campaign to make users feel obliged to come back to your site over and over again.

When it all started, I added 'LinkedIn Endorsing' to my list of skills, and a couple of friends have kindly endorsed my abilities in that area. So maybe, by way of bringing a little festive cheer, I should be endorsing their LinkedIn-endorsing-endorsing?

Oh, and Happy Christmas, everybody!

For some years, I had a handy sign-up form on the right-hand side of Status-Q allowing you to receive new entries by email, thanks to the good folk at FeedMyInbox. Sadly, they’re going to be closing down at the end of the year. As an alternative, you can use IFTTT to create RSS-to-email recipes.

However, since the most-used RSS reader out there, by far, is Google Reader, and the various apps that can sync with it (my current iPad favourite being Reeder), I’ve replaced the FeedMyInbox link with an ‘Add to Google’ button, so it’s dead easy to include Status-Q in your Google feeds, should you so desire.