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Archive for the ‘Baldy Tales’ Category

For me, 2011 has been an interesting year with most of the excitement crammed into June when as I was about to depart for a month long trip to the USA, my grandson Mika was born up in Scotland, the day before I left. So June 2011 was to be a very intense month indeed !

Inevitably when I sit and write anything on December 31^st, I think immediately of my Father who died in 2007, if he were still alive, he would have been 91 today, his birthday. But I will think no sad thoughts, nor sing sad songs for we all have our time on this Earth and all eventually will leave it, the measurement being what we did with our time here, not the length of our stay.

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The other Saturday I attended the 80th birthday lunch of an old friend of mine Simon Mayhew which was held at a riverside restaurant, “The Depot” at Mortlake in West London and was a truly splendid affair attended by his 4 children and numerous grandchildren, I would certainly recommend the venue, both the food and service were excellent.

For a ‘present’ birthday card, I did a framed photo-montage (thank The Lord and Adobe for Photoshop), as the scaled down picture below which was great fun for me to do. The amazing thing being that I used a picture of him from almost 16 years ago when he came to my 50^th birthday, he looks no different at all, good for him and it set me to thinking around age and getting old.

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I have written about my memories and personal ties to this particular date before and will later summarize them again because they are all rather odd in the sense that I can not recall any other day in my life which has ever been connected in the same way to such a significant “news event” via so many different ‘threads’.

However, 10 years is a significant anniversary and as good a time as any to reflect on the impact of those days one of which I experienced, as so many others do on my recent holiday in the USA. Having to check in for your flight very early, US Customs/Immigration, never a barrel of laughs, as surly as ever. But also there are the political dimensions not all of which have led to bad outcomes, some indeed may well be very beneficial in the medium term.

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“The longest way round, the shortest way home ?” I was reminded of this saying recently as I reflected on my recent stay in the US with my Uncle. That unbeknown to me, I really needed that break but mainly to “break my past trail” to free up future progress, became obvious to me by just having made the trip but there was/is more.

Since my return I have had various things to do that were set up before I went on my trip plus and due to the weather whilst I was away, a veritable jungle of garden weeds to tackle in a town where the use of napalm is frowned upon so…

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Not too much to say as I have flown away on holiday but to set fear into all, I will return early July !

Recently as I am working on a major redesign of this particular we site, a task made rather more complicated by having to master the unfamiliar technology of database driven content management systems which is really what blogs are all about, I have been looking back at my past entries.

One of the things that you can do is that although this site is hosted “Out there on the Cloud”, I have a local WordPress site on my PC which I’m using for development purposes and I can use a copy of my existing bog entries as ‘data’ to populate my design experiments and doing so led me to some interesting ‘discoveries’ and realisations of the changes I’m personally going through.

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The saying, “War is too important to be left to the Generals” probably also applies to Constitutions and Politicians. Constitutional change is far too important to be left to the politicians, they just don’t seem to have a clue and certainly lack the intellectual rigour to suggest anything remotely workable.

This Thursday we have local council elections down here but also, the Referendum on changing the voting system from First Past the Post to the Alternative Vote. Funny how a Coalition Agreement can conjure that up when herds of wild stallions couldn’t get the greasy buggers to give us a Referendum on the EU !

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Really following on from my earlier post and in case anyone actually follows this blog, a minor announcement: There will not be that much in the way of “new posts” over the next few weeks although the “look” may change a couple of times.

I am redesigning this site and that is a bit of a major undertaking because of the very nature of WordPress sites which because they are “live”, the pages being made up on the “fly” as demanded by users requires quite a lot more work than say, changing a simple xhtml site knocked up in Dreamweaver.

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It is quite funny how in life, change often creeps up on you and you just suddenly “notice it” although in all truth, only change is a constant in our lives. I always liken it to a spectrum made up of a gradation from black at one end to white at the other. At any moment in time, you are looking at the colour grey but suddenly you realise that this is a darker/lighter grey than the one you had in your mind.

Physical changes as you get older, just creep up on you, it is the way of things but the real difficulty really lies in your own mind because it needs to update the “self images” we hold of ourselves, to adjust to the change in our circumstances and to also appreciate that by being smart, we can create new opportunities for ourselves which accommodate our reduced physical abilities whilst enhancing our intellectual ones. By clinging to the past and ‘resenting’ that we can no longer do rather than looking forward, eagerly to a new and different future, is foolishness.

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As I contemplate my personal future and at the age of 65, had discounted going back into IT as a possibility and would have to seek a different ‘trade’, but then I was taken aback yesterday to realise that perhaps I should not have been so hasty, there are still idiots out there complete with loon pants on ! On reflection, I thought that perhaps, I was far too quick on ‘discounting’ the knowledge that I have built up over the years and should review that.

The reality is simply determined by the “business goals” and translating those into ‘business outcomes’ is what IT is all about, the technology is very much secondary. What occasioned this was me writing some comments against an article in the “Indy” on the Coalition Governments Freedom Bill:http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-a-victory-for-civil-liberties-ndash-and-a-challenge-for-labour-2209670.html#comment-144334168

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