Author: JP

I’ve been reading William Gibson’s Spook Country for the past few days; it feels different from his earlier books, there’s an increased sense of curious detachment in the observer/narrator. Somewhere within the early pages of the book, Gibson mentions a wooden top in passing.

And that’s what this post is about. Wooden tops. And the other things I associate with them. I’ve probably been working just a little bit harder that I should have been, and I was pretty tired when I picked the book up. So much so that I fell asleep while still seated, with the book slipping from my hands into my lap. Not something I do very often.

The upshot of that was that I found myself sometime later in that peculiar half-awake half-asleep state, a state brought on by tiredness and accentuated by sleeping “out of context”. And my thoughts started drifting towards wooden tops and their role in my childhood. Wooden tops as playthings.

Play is a wonderful thing, rich with learning, rich to watch, rich to participate in. I can get lost for hours watching a child play, how a child discovers stuff about play and playthings, how boundaries get drawn and tested, how early social interaction takes place, how values and mores get established.

I was privileged in being able to attend a school, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta, where play was considered important. When I was in Small School (forgive me if I don’t get every detail right, I’m talking about a time over forty years ago) I used to get on the school bus around 7.15, and get there about 8.00. And then came the play routine. 8.00 to 9.00 (before school); then 11.00 to 11.20 (Small break); then 12.00 to 1.00 (Big break). Then after 3pm, for inter-class and inter-school matches.

From 1966 t0 1969, the routine was simple. The January to May term was Hockey term. We knew it would get hotter and hotter. The winter grass had been mown, and the ground was baking hard and dusty. Since some of the kids had hockey sticks, it seemed perfectly reasonable that the morning game was “Cowboys and Indians”. It didn’t matter that everyone was an Indian, the Cowboys were the ones with the hockey sticks, and the Indians the ones with handkerchiefs covering their mouths. Lots of running, lots of whooping. One corner of that foreign field, right next to what was then the National Cadet Corps or NCC Office, became the Indian Reservation. And Cowboys and Indians was nothing more than a frenetic game of team tag with a little bit of punching and wrestling thrown in.

The Cowboys and Indians rules were simple. Both teams were interested in having some Indians capture some Cowboys and take them to the Reservation. This task, of chase and capture, was left to the “weaker” team members, those who didn’t want to run too much or get involved in some mild fighting. That left the rescue mission, and the defence, in the hands of those who really wanted to tangle. The odd bruised lip or eye, the even scrape on the knee, lots of dust on the clothes. And that was all she wrote.

The Summer Term was different. The hot and dusty field turned into one of lush grass, and Football was upon us. And that’s all we did. Multiple matches going on everywhere on the field. If you weren’t particularly interested in football, you played handball in the “gym” underneath the classrooms. When it rained too much, the handball crowd were crowded out of the gym, as the footballing horde ran for cover. And if you weren’t interested in sport, you tended to wander around collecting paraphernalia floating in the puddles that formed, because it rained and rained. Sometimes it was about frogs. Sometimes you didn’t want to know what it was you had just picked up. But it was fun nevertheless.

Tag changed. No hockey sticks, no Cowboys and Indians. Now you had new guns, guns that could fire things. Guns called water bottles. Guns that squirted at your enemies. And the wetness didn’t matter, everyone was wet most of the time anyway.

The winter term was, in some ways, the richest play term of all. The grass remained, but mown short. Very short. And it was cricket time. Most of the time we played tennis-ball cricket; the balls used to be white, though towards the end of my time at school we could actually buy red tennis balls for cricket.

Indians may be mad about cricket, but it didn’t feel that way at school. During cricket season, there was a welter of games going on around the school, none of them remotely associated with cricket.

We played strange games with wooden tops. The tops were themselves gaily coloured and had a groove to them; they were conical in shape, tapering to a point where there used to be a big nail. The game was in two stages. First stage you wrapped some special cotton-based rope (thicker than twine but thinner than hemp rope) around the top. You performed some predefined manoeuvre with your top…. simple maneouvres included just getting the top to spin on the ground; more complex ones included getting the top to play on your palm; and really complex ones had you “walking” the top from end to end actually spinning on your “rope”.

Each round had a loser, and the loser had to place his top in the centre of a circle drawn in the mud. Other then took turns to “kill” the supine top, by landing their spinning top on it, usually with some force. And then what followed was some form of bragging rights ritual: you would pick up your top and show your friends the “colour” you had picked up on your nail, colour that had been scraped off the top you hit. The real objective, however, was go far beyond picking up some colour. You cracked the target wooden top into pieces.

If you weren’t adept at spinning tops, then you went for marbles. First you drew a line. Then you dug a hole in the mud, beautifully shallow and bowl-shaped, some five or six yards from the line. Each player in turn then played for the hole, using your index finger as a spring (you held the marble against your right index finger with your upside-down left index finger; you pulled back your right index finger with your left, aimed, fired). Once you’d played round one, it became a bit like croquet as well. Your turn rotated. When it was your turn, you could do one of two things. You could hit someone else’s marble. Or you could go for the hole. If you hit someone else’s marble, then you had another turn. And so on.

First one to get his marble in the hole collected all the marbles.  The really sought after marbles were the “Chinese” ones, those that had a smoky white, almost milky, sensation to them, rather than the traditional ones which had something that looked like a coloured plastic “leaf” at the core of a clear glass ball.

Hockey, football, cricket. Tops. Marbles. Topped up with carroms at home. As you grew older, and you entered Big School, volleyball entered the fray; in season, so did badminton. You had some table-tennis and tennis and basketball at the edges. Handball in the gym was a particularly extreme sport; this was where a long line of trousered teens splattered a small ball at the wall, with an implied Plimsoll line below which a shot was considered foul. A bit of squash, a bit of tennis (it was played with a tennis ball), a lot of gusto and many many deeply red and hurting palms. That was traditional morning fare in cricket season.The school didn’t have a swimming pool or a squash court, so those pursuits were left to the particularly privileged. Rugby and rowing were pursuits played outside school hours, “privately” as it were, although there was at least one rugby celebration played in the extreme wet, without shirts, as part of the Aloysian games.

Looking back, I realise just how much I learnt as a result of the open policies about play at St Xavier’s:

• We learnt about losing. There were many times when you were placed in teams by the teacher, so there was always the chance that a “good” player was in a “bad” team, and you learnt to lose with grace.
• We learnt about winning. Winning with grace. We never left a field without a Three Cheers for the losing side.

• We learnt about taking part. Nobody was excluded from anything. And there was always something else to do if you felt like it. The playground wallflower was a myth.
• We learnt about teamwork, about fairness, and about recognising other people’s skills. At least one tournament each year was held on a Pick-Up Teams basis, somewhat similar to the US Draft Pick for some sports.  [I remember the joy I had when I was First Pick First Pick, in 1968, for the holiday soccer tournament. There were 16 captains, all from Class 5. Warren Willis, who had first pick, picked me, and I was still in Class 4. Heady days.]
• We learnt about the pride of wearing a shirt, for your class, for your school. There were many opportunities to represent something.
• More than anything else, we learnt about authority, and the need for authority on a playing field. The referee ruled. The umpire ruled. No ifs. No buts. No arguments.

Play is important. Even at work.  More later.

I keep getting told that perception is everything. I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those guys who finds that statement puerile. It’s like telling me “Hypocrisy is OK, live with it”.

Not getting my drift? Let me take an example. “Laziness”. Some people get called lazy because you see them lounging around at work, chatting to people, occasionally even smiling. Dare I mention it, even laughing out loud. Some of these “lazy” people get a lot of “work” done, if you measure work in outcomes rather than in perceived effort.

Don’t believe me? Think about Thierry Henry on a bad day. Head-up footballer, wandering slothfully around with a minimum of effort, looking to all the world as if he wasn’t part of the game. Couldn’t care less. Then suddenly a couple of frenetic bursts, some incredible skill, and it’s 2-0 to his team.

Perception is not everything. Don’t let them kid you. Stay honest, with yourself and with those around you. Don’t get tangled up with the credit-stealers, concentrate on your outputs and outcomes.

That’s how I thought, for many years: There is good laziness and bad laziness. Some people are just lazy, they don’t get anything done. It isn’t just perception, there is actually no output of value, no outcomes that are meaningful.

More recently, over the last five years or so, I’ve learnt something more. Even good laziness comes in different styles and types. It isn’t enough to focus on outcomes, you need to focus on prevention of root cause as well.

So I started looking for a different brand of lazy person now. One who observed and conversed and thought. One who did not act in haste, while appearing to all to be doing very little. One who was more interested in getting the job done right rather than clamouring for the transient glory. One who found the root cause of a problem and then fixed that, rather than faff around looking busily heroic while getting 90% of nothing achieved.

So now that’s what I look for. Lazy people who fix root causes and prevent recurrence.

Why lazy people? This post, in Test Early, is a good place to go if you really need that answered. Headlined Fire Your Best People and Reward The Lazy Ones, here’s a taster:

People like troubleshooters because they can solve a problem when a project is under pressure such as getting that emergency fix out the door immediately. Without question, you need troubleshooters on your project. However, many times the (exclusive) troubleshooters are the ones that cause the problem in the first place, be it a hard-coded value, duplication of code or a large complex method only they can understand.

Before you start thinking that I’m trying to gather together a group of slackers, I’m suggesting the complete opposite of this. I just want people to think about the total time involved, not just fixing the symptom. There are people that are both troublepreventors and troubleshooters. These are the people you want to keep and reward. However, on a given team, I’d opt for more troublepreventors than troubleshooters as they save everyone time, money and headaches.

Troubleshooting per se is not bad; but unless it goes hand in hand with prevention of recurrence, unless it goes hand in hand with removal of the root cause, it has limited value.

I love being led astray. Probably not in the sense you imagine.

I really like illusions. Someone making me see something that is not there.

I really like sleight-of-hand and prestidigitation. Someone making me not see something that is there.

I really like mystery novels and films. Someone making me draw false conclusion after false conclusion.

You know something? I never get jaded. Even though I’ve been doing this for years, even though I can often see what the person is trying to do. I still get fascinated by the person’s attempt to lure me down a different path. Lead me astray.

And so to this video. I could not see it. And I imagined something completely different. I won’t spoil it for you by telling you what I thought, or what it turned out to be. Suffice it to say that I was way wrong, even though I’d been warned.

Every now and then I get a message I dread, telling me that my password has expired and that I need to set a new one.

Why do I dread it? Let me think. I have no problem with the majority of my web accounts and signups and subscriptions. For the most part, I set my password once for each of those and, once I’ve done that, I never really have to change it.  That’s the theory anyway.

As I learnt more about identity theft and phishing and strong passwords and weak passwords, I tended to make sure I used passwords that were considered at least marginally complex, not to be found in dictionaries, both alpha as well as numeric, case-sensitive where possible, and not even vaguely connected to anything else in my life. If that wasn’t problem enough, I then had to make sure the passwords were such that I could construct a question that would help me work out what password I had chosen. This may be fine if you use things like “the name of your first pet” or “your primary school”. What kind of question would beget the answer “X4bh3A21”?

So I started doing something else. I brought in a materiality test. I used really complex passwords only where my identity could be used to do something with money. The rest of the time, I kept things simpler.

When OpenId turned up, my life got a lot easier.

I now had a system. Two types of password. One type to be used for general things, “strong” yet easily remembered, and OK for use in multiple contexts. A second type to be used for things you did with money, “stronger” and not that easily memorable, and explicitly not to be used in multiple contexts. OpenID in use where possible, Sxipper where possible.  Both password types didn’t need resetting per se; I chose to make regular changes to the ones that had the possibility of financial impact.

If only it were that simple.

Work passwords don’t tend to work that way, for some reason. You get regular messages to change them. Particularly for things like laptops.

And for Blackberries. Oh yes, Blackberries. I’m one of those guys who doesn’t particularly like device proliferation, so I don’t keep a separate work mobile. As is the case with many of you, my Blackberry is my phone as well.

If only it were that simple.

I have a Blackberry with a non-standard keyboard; even though it is QWERTY, the letters are distributed over 14 keys rather than 26; 12 of the keys represent 2 letters each, and the two remaining keys have just one letter each. The double-letter keys toggle between the two letters on the key, while the single letter keys behave as normal. Beyond that, 10 of the keys also have numbers on them, accessible only by pressing some other function key first. So now, when I set a complex password for the Blackberry, I need to think of something else. I need to think about the number of keystrokes I need to use in order to enter the password. Oh for the days when an 8-character alphanumeric password required just 8 keystrokes.

And the moral of the story is that passwords are passe. Or soon will be.

Incidentally, I love trivia. And one of the pieces of trivia I delighted in finding out many decades ago was this:

If you were restricted to using only one row of letters on a standard QWERTY keyboard on a typewriter, the longest word you could come up with was ….. TYPEWRITER.

In similar vein, I tried to figure out the longest word I could make on the multi-tap Blackberry keyboard, if I restricted myself to the letters that came with “tap 1”. Now the letter set for the 14 keys is as follows:

QW ER TY UI OP AS DF GH JK L ZX CV BN M

The first tap therefore produces Q E T U O A D G J L C B M.

I guess I was mildly delighted to find that the longest word I could construct was …. CALCUTTA!

Little things please little minds :-)

Some of us are passionate about our faith and our beliefs. Some of us are passionate about science and things scientific. Some of us are passionate about both. (I belong to this category). Some of us believe that being passionate about both is not possible.

Whatever your particular position in the debate, I would urge you to take a look at these photographs.

I’ve had a childlike interest in science all my life, and I guess I’ve striven to have a childlike faith as well. Ever since I was old enough to read and understand anything at all, I’ve found snow crystals fascinating.  Over the years I’ve had quite a few opportunities to see snow crystals under a microscope, some botched gloriously, some mildly successful. Over the years I’ve seen many blown-up photographs of snow crystals, and I’ve been pleasantly taken aback every time.

This time, “taken aback” is too weak;”fascinated” does not do it justice. “Entranced” is not enough. Neither is “spellbound”. Even the vernacular “gobsmacked” is woefully inadequate.

So I’m going to go back to my Sixties roots and claim I was “blown out of my mind”. Seeing the photographs conjured up other images in my mind, images of military-industrial artifacts covered in a fine dust and made part of a majestic monochrome world.  Seeing the photographs reinforced my passion for science, and further reinforced my belief in a creator.

Let me know what you think.