In keeping with the recent post-lite few weeks, this is only very brief. I genuinely don’t have the time to blog, a malaise of very few actual bloggers, one imagines. But it’s true: my days are full of work, I don’t have time to take lunch, I work a bit late, I’m tired when I get in, I have other things to do and bang, no blog. But it doesn’t mean things don’t go on still…

• I’ve just started reading the pleasingly dense The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. My headphones being broken, a repeat of my first encounter with this Churman seems unlikely, but again it seems an interesting and thought-provoking read and I look forward to it. This on completing the tour de force that is Cryptonomicon, from which I’m still reeling.
• Work still stressful, including specifically not being blamed for an unspecified error - we’ll see how that pans out, but I’m still eminently happy with not having gone for the job before.
• I got an Olde Wood Green book! Thanks!
• Most importantly, I’m contemplating big deals all to do with the news, the local area and so on. You’ll have heard of Thursday last’s spate of stabbings in London. These are becoming as old hat as news of bombs in Baghdad, or man down in Helmand. But in a rare turn, I knew the man who was stabbed in Tottenham. Not well at all, but I knew him by name, he knew me, we would have talked in the street - in Aldi even. So I’m extremely saddened by Gennar Jaronis’ death, seemingly in a fight in the squat he called home. I’m saddened that he had to live in such conditions, and that in the time i knew him I saw him turn from optimistic, hard-working man, to alcoholic. i want to do something, for the likes of Gennar, his friends, those like him, and also those who the news marginalises as statistics - the assumed perpetrators of these crimes, the yoot of today. What can I do? I have ideas, and I have to see what I can do, but there must be something. Anything would be good. Further news as events warrant.

Ooh. I’m sleepy. And confused: for possibly the first time in my life I didn’t have any substantial food all day (pastries don’t really count, I think) and I still wasn’t hungry come teatime. It didn’t stop me eating like I know I should - nay, must! - but that was a little disconcerting. Must be to do with the somewhat frantic of problem-solving, with-childish-superiors-dealing, and Turk-pacifying. My role in life is curious. Today has been a long, hard slog, and buy the whole time, and yet, perversely I finish it listening to Gangster’s Paradise (downloaded via Skreemr, potentially the greatest thing since the Hype Machine), and various other oldie hip hop. Loving its work.

Can’t type much more, need rest, but really, it is tricky.

It turns out that avoiding wasting time on the internet is easier when you have about half as much time as you need to do the volume of work you need to. I’m sure this is some sort of fairly basic management principle, although, if you did employ the actual right amount of people to do the job, facebook and a hefty proportion of blogs would go out of business asap.

My updates are pretty sporadic here because work is taking over not only work time, but outside time as well, and so inessentials like the internet are first against the wall, sadly. Just as I was getting into it as well (yes, thank you tre, your input, I acknowledge it).

That said, I don’t really mind - I like blogging, and since pretty much no-one reads this, it’s a good place to jot down thoughts and remind me of things - but I’m at work to work, funnily enough, and if my day is filled completely with work, then so be it. Evenings (although those are becoming precious few, especially in the next couple of weeks) are good for this, and along with my web 2.0 mentor, I’m exploring the usefulness of del.icio.us and StumbleUpon - the latter is looking good stuff, i’ve already found (and been cleverly forwarded) a bunch of cool stuff. Lots of maps, and goodness knows, I love maps.

So, I’ll try and keep up this blogging lark: today I’ve been mostly working on the usual self-improvement: weekly resolutions and the like, they’re starting to add up, and I like it. It’s making me a bit… well, better, I guess.

Recently, as part of my drive to become a Better Person, I have been making a number of resolutions, promises to myself, and the like. Some of these go well, some less so, but my latest, which I have been trying out all morning, seems like the hardest.

You’d think it was simple: not use the internet while working. Aside from a quick Twitter-shaped blip, the only web access this morning has been to email a few times, and only to one person. I’ve got plenty of work done, I’ve had to be a bit more disciplined rather than the “one work email, one personal email, one webcomic” cycle.

So no actual, baby on ceiling type withdrawal symptoms, but it’s pretty hard going. Which is an awful indictment of my approach up until now. If I were to break down the number of hours spent doing work as opposed to faffing about, I’d probably be pretty embarassed. I don’t suppose there’s some sort of monitoring programme out there to tell me? (Actually, there probably is - reading Cryptonomicon is making me paranoid).

So: onward and upward - soon I’ll be the T2000 of office staff, and I absolutely, definitely will not stop until all the emails are done.

I’m here alone, at work. I’m in the office and my last colleague has just left. I’m staying out of choice, to do something that has to be done, in order to tick something off my Remember The Milk list. I am officially sucked into the working life, the office sphere, the world of homogeneity and bland, comfortable ease. But not for long! I’m setting my sights on a better world, academia, non-office, beautiful thing.

I’ve been working in civvies today, rather than the smarth (ish) clothes I’m used to working in. I think I’ve been much more productive, which surprised me. Admittedly, the fact that I’ve moved office and my boss can now see my screen directly no doubt adds to the lack of Internet-based timewasting, but I’m sure I’m onto something with the clothes.

I’m not a scruffy oik, I’m really not. But wearing smart clothes at work feels a little like pretending I’m some sort of serious, dedicated worker, and really, I’ll work hard and I do my job blooming well, but I’m not in it for life, I’m here for the money. So I like to be in jeans and T-shirt, I feel that much more like me, less pressurised into working, and thus working better.

Cod psychology, I has it.

I’ve been at the Tottenham Carnival all afternoon - as always tons of fun. There was a significant proportion of Young Conservatives over where I spent most of my day (no that wasn’t the food secion, you at the back), which was weird - I can’t imagine these people living in North London’s hood, but maybe I’m wrong. I don’t imagine that Conservatives have much of a foothold in N17: the Guardian backs me up, and, satisfyingly, the whole of Haringey is either LibDem or Labour-councilled; Tottenham’s 100% Labour. But bless ‘em for trying, the wellie-booted neckbeards

Aside from this, many delicious chicken/rice/peas/plantain/dumpling/coconut were had, and one less than delicious ginip. It wasn’t bad y’know, but I wasn’t a fan. At risk of being one of those annoying community-minded types, it was fun! I enjoyed particularly nationality-spotting. Being on a children’s stall, I saw mostly Turkish, West Indian and African children, but there was plenty more there - I’m a little bit proud of living in a place like this, where really, no-one even thinks to bother with racial disharmony. Good old Tottenham.

I’m trying out Twittr, as can be ascertained by the distinctly failed widget on the right. Hopefully by the time you read this, that’ll be sorted. I wouldn’t bother much with the del.icio.us link though, I’m not using much of that. In the meantime, check me oot.

I think I kind of like Twittr. It is what it is, it’s unpretentious, and for a purpose, and as such is much better, and much less annoying than a stack of annoying Facebook updates. All the controls are in the right place, I can track who I want easily, it can search my address book - it’s pretty sound, if a little unstable. I also like Remember The Milk, which seems solid and useful and nicely designed as a tasks/to do/calendar app. These things I’m exploring are from a Top 100 Tools For Learning list (I’ve tried digging it, furling it, delicious-ing it, we’ll see if there’s any point), which has proved interesting - things have changed since I was at school and the height of sophistication was a world map printed onto a blackboard.

I’ll be adding Infinite Thought, who’s excellent article on universities inspired yesterday’s post, to the Blogroll.

I.T. has written an interesting article - or at least part of it - about universities, the point of them in general, and so on. While it doesn’t go as far as most academics would, which in my experience includes dismissing the entire administrative community as a vast, mindless red-tape machine, it raises some interesting points about the future of what a university is required for, and argues nicely as to why the endless chains of middle-management are doing nothing but drawing out a death.

These are fair points - I have to agree with a lot of what he says. As an admin monkey, I have to explain that tedious and hideous though audits may be, they’re a necessary thing to ensure the comfortable academic community doesn’t get decimated by apocalyptic waves of lawsuits. Some bureaucracy is necessary to ensure that insane lecturers such as those I deal with on a regular basis, don’t run roughshod over the friendly, easy-going ones.

That’s what I’ve been dealing with for the last few days, and the curse of the administrative team, I made one mistake. I’ll admit this, it wasn’t just me, etc., but the fact of the matter is I made a mistake - a pretty small one in relative terms. And yet I’ve had a barrage of emails like an aerial bomdbardment both to me and over me - for professionals, these people are pretty snarky. The worst was the academics I’ve been dealing with, with whom I didn’t make a mistake - the phrase ‘toys out of the pram’ has rarely been as appropriate.

I certainly agree with IT on many things, and it’s an interesting discussion as to the future of universities: I’ve worked in maybe the worst and maybe the best in London, one after the other, and it’s interesting seeing the parallels. The thing I’ve seen both times though: academics don’t understand admin; admin doesn’t understand the academic. C’est la vie.

Well gosh, very little time here to post! Work sets in, lots of course materials to faff about with, a ton of online VLE stuff hanging over our heads, and a bunch of crazy enquiries, like all the time. Work too hard for blogging!

It doesn’t distract me quite enough to prevent me from dipping that all-important wrist into Web 2.0 and creating a Flickr group. A small step, you might cry, and rightly so, but for me it’s a step into a geek zone that I’ve not quite crossed before. I blame Neal Stephenson, and certain others. Forums (forae?) are one thing, and I think I’ve had quite enough of them, and even Facebook is a little bit lowest-common-denominator, but the world at large, cyberspace, the Intarweb, this is all starting to take off in my head. The net has become something indispensable and integral to most peoples’ lives, and as such is rapidly losing stigma. There’s a multitude of tools on it that make the most of free-conomics: Wikipedia, flickr, google of course, but so many more. You want teaching tools? You got ‘em. You want images? Got ‘em. And so on.

I like it, I like where it’s headed and that the internet is moving away from its seamy, bodge-it-together beginnings to something fluid and useful and fun. Better than the telly, anyway.

You can find my flickr group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/woodgreen/. As the URL suggests, it’s London’s best Wood Green-themed, so do contribute, if you can.