Louisa Parry » work

Cutting to the Chase

louisa — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:42:22 +0000

I speed-read/flicked through ‘Cut to the Chase: and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time’ by Stuart R Levine the other night. It would have seemed inappropriate to have taken more time to read it more thoroughly, plus most of the stuff wasn’t relevant to me because it was about interactions in the executive layer of big companies.

Some points were really interesting though, and I thought I’d make a note of them here for when I lose the piece of paper I wrote my thoughts on originally. Some of them are relevant to me personally, some of them to lojoco, some of them to my new official involvement with Brightbox and some to all of the above.

Define your life goal so you don’t waste time – I initially scoffed at this because my life goal is to be happy and that involves a lot of what many people consider wasting time – being silly with my friends or playing video games for hours at a time. But John pointed out that it’s just as valid for me as anyone and it all comes down to the definition of wasting time. Video games aren’t a waste of time for me – they help me relax and as I’ve said before, they distract my conscious mind and let my subconscious work through tons of crap – but working a 60 hours week is a waste of my time. Sure, I might get lots of work finished, but I’ll be unhappy.
Thinking aloud wastes time – specifically, this was talking about thinking aloud in meetings. John and I think aloud all the time at home – we joke we have shared mind with double processing capacity – and in brainstorming sessions, it’s absolutely invaluable. But in regular meetings, it just wastes everyone’s time. Think, make a decision and present it.
Provide executive summaries in speech as well as writing – not necessarily sections at the start of documents called “executive summaries” but make your point early, don’t wait for the end. Make your point then sell it.
Analyse successes as well as failures – people often focus on why things went wrong, not why they’re going right. Knowing why things are working can stop them becoming failures in the future.
Build momentum – and build it into the plan – this is currently most obvious in terms of project management but I think it’s also relevant in marketing. Build it by achieving a run of smaller successes before focusing on a big one.
Appeal to people’s self-interest – a marketing one.
Close the communication loop – this is something I’m terrible at doing – receiving emails then marking them as “action needed” then not thinking about them again until it’s too late. I might have missed out on something or caused the person to worry the message hadn’t arrived. I do this all the frickin’ time. Part of this is a problem with how I treat email: I read it as it comes in as a matter of course instead of when I’m ready to deal with it. If the job will take less than five minutes, I should deal with it straight away instead of marking it “action needed” and ignoring it (and sometimes fretting about it) for a few weeks afterwards. If the job takes longer or requires some input I can’t get immediately, I should close the loop rather than leaving the other person handing – it takes just seconds to drop them an email saying “got this message, am working on it and will get back to you by x“. I’ve been trying to do this for the last few days and it’s actually relieves my stress/worry as well as the other person’s. Two thumbs up to this idea, big thumbs up.
Measure twice, cut once – the old craftsperson saying. It wastes less resources (whether time or actual physical resources) to plan properly first rather than fixing a mess afterwards.
Don’t be afraid of 10 minute meetings – this is something I’m going to write about more in another blog post I’ve got planned but there seems to be a collective idea of meetings being an hour in length by default, half an hour if it’s a quickee, and people feel bad if that time isn’t filled. Book it in mentally – and in the diary – for 10 minutes instead.
Stay in touch with clients and partners – and not just about the specific nature of your precise business relationship, learn about their world: there might be new ways you can work together or, conversely, if you know they’re in a slump, you won’t bank on them so much.
If you need a drummer, hire a drummer – not a guy who can play the drums but lives for the piano, to quote the example used in the book. In personal terms, if my heart is not into something, I shouldn’t be forcing myself to do it if there are other options.
Don’t be afraid to hire people who will move on – good people will nearly always move on to other things because they want to keep growing and trying new things. But that’s not a reason to hire them: better getting someone who burns brightly for a year than someone who emits a dull glimmer for a decade.
Recognise that good enough is good enough – something else I struggle with a lot with things I make or do: if something isn’t 100% perfect or a 100% success, I consider it a failure. This has been a lifelong affliction (at school, if I got an A, I was disappointed it wasn’t an A+ rather than enjoying the A) so it’s going to be hard to shift but perfectionism is debilitating.
Know when to stop when you’re struggling – when a task isn’t going anywhere, stop. Rather than focusing on the next sentence or whatever, work how what help/advice/input could help you take it forward rather than just staring at the blank page.
Similarly, don’t confuse activity with accomplishment – because of the perfectionism listed above, I have re-crocheted some balls of yarn a dozen times. I feel like I’m crocheting all the time but haven’t made anything. (I have, admittedly, learned a lot about tension and shaping though, so perhaps bad example.)
Finally, if you hear the same complaint/request from two customers, act on it – obviously it’s a good idea/serious problem act on it after hearing from the first one but hearing it from two separate people is proper confirmation that something needs to be done, or at the very very least, looked at.

All in all, the book was worth getting out of the library for a quick flick through but I wouldn’t particularly recommend buying it though – there wasn’t enough it in that I felt I’d have to read it all one day.

Recycle This redesign

louisa — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:48:31 +0000

Pretty much ever since we launched (How Can I) Recycle This three years ago, I’ve been wanting to redesign it – to freshen it up and to make better use of the available space.

I finally got around to doing it last month and with John’s help, we launched the new design on Sunday (and moved it onto being hosted on Brightbox).

I’ve got loads of ideas for new features – and finally got some space to fit them on the page now. Just got to find the time to implement them now…

New lojoco site! ThingsToDoToday.org

louisa — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:30:14 +0000

John and I, as lojoco, have launched a new website: Things To Do Today.

To be neat, we launched it on 1st January and I added it my projects page but forgot to blog about it over here. To steal the blurb from there though:

Updated daily, Monday to Friday, Things To Do Today is intended to be the lefty, crafty equivalent of all those “buy this gadget! look at this guy getting hit in the balls!” sites: every day, we feature four interesting things for people to do or make. These could be links to yummy recipes, fun things to make, excellent articles to read or beautiful videos to watch – or just ideas, tips or reminders for things you could or should do. If you ever need a bit of inspiration for tea or for your next craft project, you might well find the answer on Things To Do Today.

The site, like most of our sites, had been a long time coming but after months/years of procrastination, we decided to take a different tack with this one. We currently have at least five sites in development and close to completion. The “close to completion” bit is key: we’re busy perfectionists constantly indulging in feature creep so nothing ever gets finished.

With Things To Do Today, we decided to take the opposite approach – like back when Recycle This went from idea to online in just over 12 hours. I wanted to minimise John’s involvement as far as possible to avoid that bottleneck and had plans for a completely basic-to-basics site with no content management system or anything but in the end, he put in a few hours and created a micro-site with Ruby-framework Sinatra.

And a good job too, immediately after launch on New Year’s Day, we found ourselves adding an RSS feed – because it seemed insane to have a daily update site without one. And now I’d really like some sort of discussion forum because, while I’d conceived it as largely read-only, it seems weird not to have some commenting system (a site without comments, in 2009? how strange!). Hopefully that will follow in a few weeks.

I think it was a good exercise for us to swing back away from over-engineering sites but I suspect we went a little too far with the initial bare-boneness of Things To Do Today. Live and learn etc.

Hopefully the low-tech won’t harm the site in the long run though – it’s already be well received by Recycle This readers and it’s a really fun site to run – at the moment, it’s taking me a long time to create each day’s ‘To-Do’s but it’s fun research, looking up recipes, crafty patterns, watching cool videos… If you have any suggestions for things for me to include though, do holler – email: thingstodotoday@gmx.com :)

Ukepedia – our fun! new! project

louisa — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:34:05 +0000

Back in August, I had earache. Otitis Media to be specific.

After I got back from having it checked out by my doctor, I wrote a Twitter about it. John was playing on his ukelele and looking over my shoulder at the time so sang the Twitter as I wrote it.

Then I went over to Wikipedia to read all about Otitis Media, and as I read, John sang. As it turned out, the Otitis Media article worked beautifully as a song.

So we made it into a song. And we put the song on a website. And a fun new project was born.

Like with ELER, after an initial flurry of action, we’ve been a bit slow on it of late – but other members of the Church of the Ukelele have been stepping up and the collection of videos is slowly growing.

If you can play the uke – or any other instrument – and fancy joining the cool kids club, there are full instructions on the site.

There are only about 2,576,419 articles to go – so hurry!

Zach and Jeff versus The Meteorite

louisa — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:27:04 +0000

I would like to introduce you to Zach and Jeff.

Last week, I went to Liverpool for a wire-working workshop as part of a fantastic “Recycle Into Art” week, organised by the city’s Red Dot Exhibitions.

The workshop was run by Alison Bailey Smith, a wonderful artist and thoroughly lovely person who I’d already featured on Recycle This – she makes jewellery, accessories and clothes using reclaimed wire (typically from inside old televisions) and other “rubbish”, such as tomato puree tubes, sweet wrappers and ribbon from bouquets.

The workshop was billed as learning how to decorate bags – to make better use of the time, some people chose to make jewellery instead but since I needed a new nice bag, I stuck to the original remit.

We started off with Alison showing us her knotting technique but I somehow kept forgetting how to do it in the middle (don’t ask, I can’t explain it), so when Alison suggested knitting it instead, I jumped on that. Then I spent the next hour knitting a strip – which in hindsight wasn’t a terribly good use of my time but I liked the finished strip.

I’d picked out a nice simple clutch bag from the selection of charity shop bags Alison had brought along for us to use and the copper strip looked nice against the black – but I wanted to add some features as well. I played with some of the different techniques Alison had shown us – such as wrapping scrap plastic with wire then coiling it – but nothing seemed to fit as well as Zach and Jeff. (I’d previously used their kin to make earrings. These guys were going spare.) Then someone pointed out the coil I’d made out of a lime green M&S carrier bag strap looked like a meteorite, and hey presto, a handbag with a story was born.

I sewed the wiry earth, the dinos and the meteorite onto the bag with thinner, darker wire (visible in parts on the finished item) and a curved needle – my, my, that was more difficult than I thought but everything seems pretty secure now.

When I showed John the finished item, he was sad because he thought that there was an inevitably unhappy ending for Zee and Jee but I pointed out they were plastic so it was beautifully circular.

I had a thoroughly great time at the workshop, learnt so much and was really interested to see how everyone took a different approach and came out with something different. Since then, I’ve also learnt how to crochet so when I finally get my hands on an old TV of my own, I’ll be able to do all kinds of fun stuff with the wire. Plus, I have a great new bag too.

An Eggscellent Idea

louisa — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:39:52 +0000

Earlier this afternoon, someone on our recycling blog Recycle This suggested using old frying pans to make fake food art.

I thought “hey! I’m THAT COOL too! I could do that!” so here is my knitted fried egg. John wanted to plastinate a real one but I thought knitting would be more fun. I used leftover white wool from knitting booties for John’s niece and the yellow wool is leftover after I knitted a stripey “bumble beeanie” hat for the man himself a few years ago. I used stuffing from an old cushion and the cardboard for the egg’s base is from a cereal pack.

The egg (which works as a really good frisbee because of the cardboard base) is just sitting in the pan at the moment but I’ll stick it in when I’ve got some velcro — and when I’ve knitted the accompanying sausages. Now, I just have to figure out how to do the beans…

(Click the close-up shot for a bigger version)

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LUGRadio Live 2007

louisa — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 22:10:33 +0000

Just back from LUGRadio Live 2007 – the annual weekend of geekery in Wolverhampton. As well as being in a different location to last year, it had a completely different atmosphere for me – last year was too hot to circulate much but this year, I chatted to lots and lots of interesting people.

Good & Bad points below but all in all, it was pretty cool (both in temperature – hurrah! – and as a quality statement) and we both had a great time.

Good things:

The venue for the event itself – The Light House – was much, much better than the Student Union last year. It was light and airy and generally pleasant to be there for many hours at a time.
It was also very convenient – for the Novotel where we stayed and for the city centre – no need for taxis and stuff.
After watching the entire first series of Heroes in the preceding week, finding other people to discuss it with at length in the pub on Friday night.
We had a stall for our Geekz tshirts and sold enough tshirts to cover all the costs of the trip and then a little bit more. Which was nice (and more than we expected).
I didn’t see many talks because I was manning the stall but Gervase Markham was as good as last year and I also saw Peter Stean talking about creative ways of using IT to tackle social exclusion – some cool things been done out there.
As I said above, I chatted to loads of interesting people – especially of note for me, Glyn from the excellent Open Rights Group who we pretty much hung out with all weekend (mostly because he had a supply of Maltesers), our IRC buddy Mister RevTig, our fellow Planet WYLUGer Andy Davidson, Patrick from Sun (who we met there last year too and is a thoroughly nice chap), and the aforementioned Pete Stean.
Fun moment: working on a new FOSS-celebrity tshirt design only to look up and see said FOSS-celebrity (Alan Cox) stood in front of me. I showed him the design and he seemed bemused that his face would be on a shirt in a couple of weeks time.
Bacon toasties – something I only seem to eat at LUGRadio Live these days. The Novotel breakfast hash browns were pretty good too.
And speaking of food – great kofte kebab (aka “lamb sausage that took forever to make”) on Friday night. John liked my post-kebab lamb breath and I could still taste it in the morning (although admittedly that was only a few short hours later – see below). Mmm, lamb that lasts.

Bad Things:

The cafe and restaurant owners of Wolverhampton seem to have found a way to super-heat water to above boiling point but keep it as a liquid. I burnt my mouth on a cup of tea from the Lockworks cafe and on the (very watery) tarka daal I had with our curry on Saturday night – and I know of at least two other people that were similarly injured.
Lack of wireless on Sunday. Lockworks cafe had a wireless connection on Saturday so I thought I’d be able to connect on Sunday morning to work but no one (I spoke to) could connect to it. At the end of the day, it wasn’t the end of the world (I’ve done the work since we came home this evening) but still.
And speaking of technical stuff: darling GPS device, thanks for breaking utterly on the way down but not telling us, thaaaaaanks. (Thankfully we happened to notice JUST before we reached the M6/Wolverhampton junction so we could use signs and my directional spidey-sense to get us there).
Seeing 6.30am on Saturday morning as we had to be at the venue setting up the stall at 8am. We only got to sleep around 3.30 that morning and were up again until about 2 last night. TIRED. (Although it was amusing to descend in the lift at the Novotel pre-7am and see a group of similarly shell-shocked geeks slumped on the sofas in reception, wondering what they’d got themselves into.)
Prevailing undercurrents of sexism and homophobia at various times from various quarters. Pah.
Constantly crashing – either through low blood sugar or tiredness – because we ended up eating rather randomly.
As great as the venue was for the exhibition/general ambience stuff, the acoustics in the Atrium were really bad – we were sat on the chairs for ‘Live and Unleashed’, only about two-thirds of the way back and could hardly hear what was going on (particularly what Adam Sweet was saying).
Also, because the Lightning talks room was up and out of the way, I thought it was harder to just randomly wander past and get capture – you really had to make an effort to go up there for the talk – as bleugh as last year’s venue was in a lot of ways, I liked being able to flow in and out.

A year on

louisa — Thu, 24 May 2007 19:23:39 +0000

So it was a year last weekend since I left work at the University of Leeds and things are going well. Not rolling-around-in-piles-of-money-and-giggling well (at least not all the time – but we’ve had our moments) but steady well (aka ‘enough for me to be able to afford the trip to Lindisfarne’ well).

John’s joined me in the crazy world of self-employment and he seems to be enjoying it too – he’s got a steady stream of consultancy work as well as doing development for our future projects. In fact, the former is delaying the latter at the moment but no biggee.

Highlights of the year:

Those “woo! I don’t have to go to work tomorrow” moments that happened regularly for the first nine months or so.
Recycle This getting mentions in the national press and on the international green blogging scene
Fametastic getting all its references in various international celebrity media.
Fametastic‘s relaunch at Christmas so now I don’t feel as embarrassed about the design anymore.
The success of the new Shop@Geekz shirt designs and how happy John and I were when the stickers arrived (we were blown over by the awesomeocity of them). We’ve got more designs in the works – maybe even in time for Lugradio Live in July.
I actually started writing again for the first time in a long time. I’ve wrote 30,000 words of something – then admittedly hit a wall but I’ve picked it up again now.
The fact I bought a spider plant for Â£1 this time last year and I now have 14 spider plants and have given some more away – free plants make me happy!
My green hoodie. I bought it for not very much money late last year and worn it (along with a scarf) as my winter coat and the greenness of it make me smile constantly. I not particularly fond of having a purchase make me happy but meh, it does.
And on a related note, how little money I’ve spent now that I don’t feel the need to buy cheer-up books or clothes on the way home from work.
Or practically limitless snackery and elaborate lunches I had to buy (and eat) to get me through the day at work – I only realised a couple of months ago how much I relied on that sort of thing to break up the day. I haven’t lost the weight I gained in the last year of work (because of the lack of walking to bus stops these days) but I’ve cut back my daily intake a lot and it’s a lot healthier now too.
It’s hard to put into words but I guess the feeling that I’m starting to take charge of my own life. In some ways, I’m still a bit “wherever the current takes me” – and I think that’s healthy because fighting your way upstream isn’t always a good move – but aside from that, I just feel a lot more in control and that’s making me feel a lot more comfortable in myself.
John’s hair. The artist formerly known as Mr ShavedHead’s hair is now about 2inches long and while I don’t know if it’s a proper highlight, it certainly is high. And wide. And scruffy. Gianni christened it the “Urban Teddy Bear” look.
The constant support of the cats. I now feel cruel that I heartlessly abandoned them for eight hours a day before last May. I think they’ve forgiven me though. :)

I was going to do a parallel “lowlights of the year” but I don’t really want to focus on the negative. There have been a few stressful moments (but nothing too major), I’m still not as organised as I perhaps need to be and John & I are still the world’s finest procrastinators but these things will sort themselves out in time. Hopefully.

Filters I’d like to see added into GIMP

louisa — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 17:23:16 +0000

I use GIMP every day. For those that don’t know, GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program – ie, the free software equivalent of Photoshop. I’m probably not supposed to call it that but meh.

I mostly use it for pretty basic things like cropping/resizing, sharpening and adjusting the colour levels on photos for use on the various websites I run. For doing that sort of thing, GIMP is pretty fantastic.

But work on pictures for Fametastic in particular has made me realise that as extensive as its filters are, it would be a lot more useful to me if the programmers added some additional features.

De-smugify: this would be particularly useful for editing pictures of Ben Affleck and Jude Law. I think it’s physically impossible for them to be photographed without looking utterly, utterly smug and up themselves. This maybe just because that’s how they are but I don’t want them to exude their pomposity all over our website if it can at all be helped.

Pout Removal: for use on, specifically but not exclusively, Victoria Beckham, who seems physically unable to smile. Perhaps she knows that thing about frowning using more muscles than smiling and assumes therefore that frowning will use more calories, thus helping maintain her stupidly stick thin physique. Or maybe she’s scared for the future: smiling = smile lines = perceived need for botox = botox injections = higher centre of gravity = falling over in public = alcohol/drug addiction rumours = rehab = 30 days out of the paparazzi’s sight = nooooooooooo!
You’re not really hard you know Script-Fu: this script would be an extension of the Pout Removal filter for use on rappers-turned-music-producers/execs (such as Sean Combs or Timbaland). Despite being multi-millionaires and living obsessively pampered lives, they still feel the need to try to look stupidly tough on every photo. Because genuinely tough people wear tuxedos and pose on red carpets.
Auto colour levels adjuster for Oompa-Loompa to Human skin tone: “No no, Ms Jessica Simpson/Ms Tyra Banks/Mr Peter Andre/Ms Christina Aguilera/Ms $Soccer_WAG, of course that amount of fake tan isn’t too much. Here have some more. More. More! MORE!”, say tanning shop owners everywhere when they’re not busy coming up with puns for their shop names (my favourite pun around Leeds: Tanzinere on Potternewton Lane – genius, utter genius).
Auto colour levels adjuster for Three-weeks-dead to Actually-still-alive skin tone: Pete Doherty, Marc Anthony, here’s looking at you, you creatures of the undead. Get thee to Tanzinere, immediately!
New haircut/nose/boobs-ise: a celebrity gets a radically new haircut or cosmetic surgery and all old photos of them are instantly out of date. The aforementioned Ms Beckham and various socialite starlets like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie are particularly prone to needing this filter.
Clearasil: this one is admittedly for use on photos on me rather than them. It took me ages to de-pimple my arse with the clone tool last year.
Instawrinkles: Nicole Kidman & Steve Martin (amongst others): BOTOX IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. It does not make you look younger, it makes you look scarier. On Nicole particularly – and even more so when she has her hair pulled/blown back, it makes it looks like her facial features are having a race to the centre of her giant bobble head.
Wonky-eye-fixer/creator: the former for use when Paris Hilton’s eye does its drunken lazy thing. The latter for use on Paris Hilton for comedy effect.

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Small packet. Small packet. Small packnet. Small parquet.

louisa — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:53:28 +0000

I’ve just written the phrase “small packet” 76 times in a row.

To avoid any unnecessary knocks to John’s self-esteem, I should really say it had nothing to do with him.

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