Last night’s weekly Blank and Jones session on di.fm Trance channel (5 – 7pm BST) was rather good in the first hour: just what you need to persuade you to work a little bit longer. In the second hour they usually have a guest mix, but not this time. The second hour was particularly non trancey – a bit more progressive, although it did include a very nice remix of Client’s Here and Now.

Blank and Jones Tracklisting 18 October 2004

Tracklist 1st hour:

1. Serge Devant feat. Jan Johnston – Transparent
2. Sonar Methods – Echoing Waves
3. Tranquility Base – Surrender (Filterheadz Remix)
4. Precusor – Pulsar (Dub Mix)
5. Delerium feat. Sarah McLachlan – Silence (Above & Beyond Remix)
6. Ferry Corsten – Sweet Sorrow (Thrillseekers Remix)
7. Alex Morph – Unification (Fred Baker Remix)
8. Icone – Astra
9. Robert Natus – Arkus P. – Hardcore Salsa (Paffendorf Remix)

Tracklist 2nd hour:

1. Eric Prydz – Call On Me (Filterheadz Remix)
2. Lostep – Burma (Sasha Remix)
3. Blank & Jones – Urban Hymn
4. Circe Du Solei – Mer Noire (Tiesto Remix)
5. Client – Here and Now (Cicada Remix)
6. Mylo – The Pressure
7. Deep Dish – Flashdance (Meat Katie Remix)
8. Beach Pump – People From Ibiza
9. Bootleg – Every You! remix of Placebo’s song Every You Every Me

Panorama, which appears to now be the Daily Mail of television journalism, decided to attack the sugar industry last night. It was a rather peculiar programme. So what did we find out?

1. That the World Health Organisation is a political institute lobbied by the food industry. Gosh! I would never had expected that. Let me think for a bit. WHO can influence the way food is managed in around 90 countries. So, it stands to reason that the food industry should be concerned about what they decide.
2. That some conferences that recommend how foodstuffs are to be consumed are funded and influenced by the food industry. What’s unusual about this? Take the IT industry as an alternative example: Conferences all over the world are sponsored by IT companies. They usually have promotional stands at these events. The only valid concerns that Panorama had was that the funding was not made clear to the participants and that the recommendations were not vetted by the participants following the close of the conference. However, that said, these two issues appear to show up the naivety of the participants.
3. That food labelling is a bit of dodgy area and provided that the ingredients are described on the label, manufacturers can name the food whatever they want. Knock me down with a feather.

Panorama worked with the Co-op to produce a mousse that was targeted at children. So we had the fun name, labelling, free gift and fun bouncy advert. They even stuck children in front of a TV for ten minutes (which included the advert during this period). After that they let parents and children out into a store to see if kids would go for it. Guess what? They did. What’s more other shoppers who were not part of the ‘experiment’ did too. That’s not surprising either. It’s a supermarket dummies. It’s designed to sell food.

What irked me even more was the fact that after parents were told that each pot of mousse contained about 4 1/2 teaspoons of sugar (half the recommended intake for a child), they appeared shocked and decided that if they’d known that they wouldn’t have let their children have the dessert. Where do I start with this? Hmm.. The labelling said that out of every 125g, 26g is sugar. Now, parents, go and get a bag of sugar. Measure out 26g of sugar. Now see how many teaspoons that makes. Spooky isn’t it? I won’t even bother commenting on letting children decide what they want to eat.

So there we have it. Or maybe not. No-one in the programme complained that jam has too much sugar (over 60% of jam is sugar), nor was there any discussion that the reason there is so much sugar in foods is because of the need to cut down on fat content. And of course, sugar makes fat.

Governments need to spend time and money educating people about food. How food works in the body and how to read food labels. And whilst I’m on a roll, perhaps how to bring up children.

About 8 years ago, a friend of mine bought one of those really expensive coffee machines that uses liquid capsules of coffee. These capsules looked like a those little plastic UHT milk containers that you find in cheap restaurants. You’d bung one into the machine and press a button. A few minutes later you get a cup of coffee which actually tastes like coffee.

The Philips Senseo was released in The Netherlands last year and was made in co-orporation with Douwe Egberts. It’s had rave reviews on Amazon, so given its fairly low price (when compared with grown up filter coffee machines) I thought I’d buy one and try it out.

My main conclusion is that it’s rather groovy.

The Senseo system works with what are known as coffee pods, which look like round teabags, except they are filled with coffee. A number of different machines have coffee pods, and they can be bought in different sizes. Douwe Egberts sell the official ones, but there are many other vendors for other coffees – included flavoured ones – and teas. I’ve found you can get one big mug of coffee out of one pod. The machine itself dispenses one or two standard sized mugs of coffee, which means you can put one or two pods into the machine at once.

There’s a water reservoir around the back of the machine. Press the on button and the machine draws water into its boiler and then boils it. This takes about 90 seconds. After that you simply press a button indicating whether you want one or two mugs and the water is filtered through the coffee pod(s).

It’s an incredibly easy thing to use. There’s no mess – just throw the pod away and rinse its holder through water. Furthermore, you don’t end up with wasted coffee.

Tesco in Inverness only sells Douwe Egberts medium and dark roast coffee pods, which means I was bouncing round the ceiling this morning after trying it for the first time. However, I’ve ordered some Decaf and Vanilla pods from Cafépods. The advantage with these ones is they come in sealed sets of two. Douwe Egberts’ ones come loose with a resealable sticky tab.

Last time I wrote on this subject, I promised more ruminations on paper and Palm. Somewhere in amongst this will be Newton too.

After working abroad, I returned to the UK full of european sophistication. Well, okay, perhaps not, but I certainly felt empowered to do my own thing. I previously wrote about my angst at using formal documentation methods (log books, for example). But now, 8 years on I felt completely justified to go my own way and document my working life the way I wanted to. So I turned back to Filofax. I didn’t keep using the Psion 5, because at this time in my career, I simply had too much to do and too many responsibilities as to be able to stick them down onto the Psion and do work at the same time. Plus, I was concerned at losing all the information in the Psion.

The Filofax served me well for almost two years. I’d reached an organisational tranquility, where I knew where everything was and what my teams of 40 or so people were doing (or at least should have been doing ) But, I still spent some time drawing up my own forms and having problems with deciding what to archive away. Then I remembered these A5 based systems. When I first discovered these being used by my colleagues I dug around on the internet to discover that they could be purchased but you had to go on a course first. Slightly limiting. So I checked again and this time found that you could buy them without going on a course (which let’s face it is a much better business model!)

Time/system

I bought my Time/system round about the start of 2000, just before I moved up to Inverness. Now, the thing that struck me about this was there was a complete integrated strategy about managing your time, your work and your life. More importantly for me, a way of being more effective and saving time. I did believe the hype because I recognised the issues that it was supposed to address.

I cannot say why it worked for me, but the phrase that Time/system uses which dominated my early experiences was “if you think it, ink it”. I could track progress on a number of sub-projects and tasks, decide what to do in the next days, months and quarters, and keep tabs on delegated activities, estimates etc. Quite an achievement for what is essentially a bunch of paper and some dividers. But, it’s the philosophy that counts. There was also a real bond I found with my Time/system, which was missing from all of the other organisational tools and devices I’d tried. Even the Newtons!

But my time with Time/system eventually came to an end. Why? Well, when I started Junctionbox Media full time, I didn’t have much to do. Work wasn’t coming in and so my Time/system binder was looking very blank day by day – and that was a really depressing thing to see. So I put it to one side and waited.

Tablet PC

By the time work did start coming in so that I needed to manage my time properly, I gave Tablet PCs a go, with FranklinCovey’s TabletPlanner. Suffice to say it did work, but there was still something missing. Not being able to easily search for stuff, file it, extract it or print it was a problem. So after about 8 months I gave up on this – sold my Tablet PC and went back to Newtons.

Newtons again

I wasn’t having much luck now. I grabbed a second hand Newton 2100 off Ebay and swooned when it arrived at my door around the end of 2003. It filled me with great pleasure as I remembered and discovered all the little things that make the Newton great. Unfortunately, I discovered shortly afterwards that the two pieces of software I was using to synchronise with my Mac were to be discontinued. Very unfortunate given the software I was using didn’t currently synchronise all that needed synchronising. So I had to rethink my organisational strategy.

Back to Palm

Palm’s on the other hand did have synchronisation. I use Entourage on my Mac and it’s rather good at what it does. I have a calendar, notes, tasks and projects. Albeit, projects don’t have any concept of timelines or dependencies – it’s really just another dimension of categorisation. I bought a Palm T3 and my life felt so much better. Unlike some people who rely on their PDAs entirely, I use Entourage when I’m at the desk and the T3 when I’m elsewhere. However, about this time I ended up with an awful lot of work which needed managing. I tried To Dos, but that didn’t help me plan, so I ended up going back to listing things on paper. Why? Because I could annotate, reorganise and prioritise visually. Plus it gave me a sense of satisfaction crossing things off and not watching them disappear. An IT project manager once remarked “I like being able to see how much I’ve accomplished. Having the item just disappear on a screen tends to have this numbing effect.”. The other huge benefit is that there is a ready built archive of information. Where does your life history go when you rely on electronic devices?

Where PDAs (and therefore by my choice Palm or Newtons) have the upper hand over paper are in repeating activities or events and in providing reminders. If one relies on a paper based system (e.g. Time/system) there’s also the demoralising issue of manually ‘rolling-over’ tasks not completed to the following day. However, I found out recently that the reason I found such actions demoralising was I because I was misusing the purpose of daily tasks.

Where now?

A difficult choice. At the moment my main work is managed using an issue tracking system called Mantis. Primarily because the majority of my work is development and bug fixing. For new projects I use Entourage for milestones and paper for tracking what needs doing. With the exception of using Entourage for a subset of my organisational requirements I appear to have gone back to paper. That is, Entourage for periodic tasks or long term planning, and paper for everything else. I also have this deep seated passion for paper which is rooted in my childhood – my mother was a company secretary who used to horde the stuff (actually she horded everything: sugar, baked beans, old magazines, clothes, tins of fruit etc.) and I had a relative who worked for Croxley Script.

But there’s more to this. On Wednesday I took the decision to resurrect my Time/system and re-read the Time/system manual in light of where I am now with my life. Maybe this was prompted by this post, but I really feel the need to get a grip on things. I also found this article from Time/system which was almost a revelation! Furthermore, one of the things I never really managed to do first time around with it was to handle recurring activities. I wasn’t in the frame of mind to copy information from long-term to weekly to daily, nor did I realise the importance of doing such long term planned mundane activities when they turned up. My Palm (and Entourage) allows me to procrastinate.

Sleep, Snooze or Wake Up. It’s my choice.