Category: Uncategorized

I've spoken to +1000 knowledge workers over the last few months.

Here is what everyone is predicting for the new world of work in 2022

[a thread] 🧵👨‍💻🏡

— Charles Kergaravat (@CKergaravat) November 30, 2021

Thank you Steph.

FYI: chrome://settings/content/notifications

"Sites can ask to send notifications" -> off

— Steph Hippo (@stephhippo) April 26, 2021

pic.twitter.com/9zF8dWMeat

— Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe (@codepo8) June 15, 2021

It’s funny ’cause it’s true

Christmas and New Years are over, so I guess it is safe to publish my wish list for 2019.

1. Movies Anywhere in Europe. Because I am tired of having all those DVDs in the living room.
2. Outlook.com/Gmail would have a view in their web interface that lets me view my text messages. For no other apparent reason that it would be convenient.

So, who knew? I got a new job, which means I will be leaving my employer through the last five years. Actually, it’s five years to the date.

For the most part, the last five years have been pretty good. I have had my share of big exciting projects, and I have been part of transforming a financial institution into a lean agile software machine. Well, we tried anyway.

Now that my last day looms ever closer, I find myself being oddly at ease yet reflective. I suppose that is a good thing though. It suggests that the previous five years meant something on some level.

Leaving the familiar and venturing out into something new can be a bit unnerving, but this time around I feel much better prepared compared to earlier. I guess with age comes experience. Be that as it may, switching jobs will provide me with the space to do some of the things I want to do outside of work, but it also keeps me receptible to change. As a Scrum master I think it is important seek out new input and inspiration. In other words: staying lean and hungry. Over the course of the last 12 months or so, I have felt more fat and lazy than I’d like, and that is all the reason I need to make a move.

I will continue to be a Scrum master, however, in a more scaled environment. I will also stay in finance, which I still find interesting.

Anyway, enough rambling, I have some packing to do.

I got Garmin Forerunner 630 for Christmas and this little bad boy actually supports Android notifications. Who knew how much fun you could have with a phone OS that is actually being actively developed. So anyway, when my Fitbit started coming apart I started using the Garmin full time just to try out the whole wearable thing for a little while.

So far it works pretty smoothly. The Bluetooth connection seems to be rock solid, and I get most of my notifications on the watch now.

However, I am not sure what to use these notifications for at the moment. Now it’s my watch that vibrates instead of my phone (not really, they both vibrate). I guess the benefit is that I can quickly see if it’s a notification I have to react to or not.

For now I don’t really see the point, but at the same time I am oddly interested in this, so I will keep the experiment going a little while longer.

Julian Assange says Chelsea Manning was granted clemency to make Assange look like a liar https://t.co/N3JxLkxf3y pic.twitter.com/lQ6uF6BdnV

— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) January 24, 2017

 

It is no secret that I have been struggling with this blog for a couple of years. Most of the things I have wanted to write are inappropriate outside of work context, and everything else seems like uncritical regurgitation of already published news stories.

For a while there, I tried to only post how-to articles, or should I say, bug reports. Every time I ran into a problem, I would publish the solution if I found one. My post about fixing the OneDrive sync engine issues have received a lot of hits WordPress tells me.

It is a slightly depressing situation as I have always enjoyed blogging about whatever came to mind. However, perhaps there’s a reason for this blogging fatigue. As many other people have pointed out, the rise of Facebook, Twitter etc. have made it easier for people to create content in a more on-the-fly manner. The content is usually not very interesting as there’s little thought behind it. I would argue that a blog post reqiures more effort to produce, as it is longer and contains more information as opposed to a tweet which tends to be 140 characters worth of dopamine stimulating nothing.

In the immortal words of Denis Leary “have we turned into gerbils ladies and gentlemen?” I don’t know about you, but I certainly have. Everyday, I mindlessly scroll through status updates mixed with an unhealthy dose of advertisements in order to feel that I am up-to-date. Freeconomics have ruined my imagination. Thanks a lot Google.

Think for a moment about people like the late great Arron Swartz, who had serious visions for the Internet and compare that to how the it has now become nothing more than a vehicle for advertisement and privacy violations.

We as IT people should be focusing on making the world a better place. I sincerely believe that we have a lot of the tools required to do so, and here we are looking for new ways to enslave our users, making them dependent on their smartphones so we can come with new a creative ways of exposing the to advertising, making them want shit they don’t need to impress people they don’t like with thngs the cannot afford.

Anyway, enough complaining from an bitter guy. I will be attending Scrum kick off tomorrow with my new team. Hopefully that will spur some inspiration.