The meaning of fado
(This one’s quite long and quite personal: if either don’t interest you, skip it! 🙂 )
Author: Tom G
Minor admin changes
Two minor admin changes here: I’ve changed the permalink structure from the default “?=number” to a more readable “/year/month/day/title/” style I’ve added an RSS feed to the links, under ‘Syndication’: http://weblog.tomgraves.eu/?feed=rss Nothing to write home about, but thought I ought …
The struggle to communicate
Getting sense out a rental-car company can be hard: now try it when the person at the other end of the line doesn’t speak the same language… Travelling in Portugal is ‘interesting’, often in the classic Chinese sense… 🙁 My …
Mythquake
In the damp spaces of the days, when I can’t play tourist, I’ve been hacking at content for a book I’ve been brewing for a couple of years now: Mythquake. Basic idea is straightforward: there’s a direct metaphor between tectonic …
We apologise for the interruption…
“…normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.” (Not there is a ‘normal’ service on this station, anyway. 🙂 ) Which summarises, really, the difficulty of running a weblog on the road in a foreign country where I barely …
At the TOGAF conference
Been networking hard in the other sense over the past couple of days, at the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) enterprise architecture practitioners conference in Lisbon. More later when I’ve had a chance to rest 🙂 but some good …
An everyday tyranny?
Been offline for a few days with an annoying DNS problem (my mistake, ultimately :-{), but came across a brilliant if disturbing article by Henry Porter in London’s “The Independent”: We’re all Suspects Now [behind paywall]. Mainly about the steady …
A problem of power
Perhaps the bleakest dichotomy of all: the physics definition of ‘power’ is “the ability to do work”, whereas most social definitions are more like “the ability to avoid work”… Therein lies perhaps the most serious problem for organisational effectiveness: which …
Vision, role, mission, goal
One of my main peeves about standard business strategy-frameworks like the Business Rules Group’s Business Motivation Model is that they start way too far down, as if the organisation is the sole centre of the world. The framework I use …
Common Ground and local distinctiveness
Returning to England, I’m delighted to see Common Ground have been at it again: this time a magnificent new tome, “England In Particular: a celebration of the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive”, Sue Clifford, Angela King and …