Weeknote #1
Background
In the spirit of perpetual beta, I’ve decided to move my weekly design-related post to Fridays and institute this new feature: the weeknote.
A fairly new invention, starting in 2009 by a design company called BERG, weeknotes are a very simple idea. An individual or a group simply reflects upon what they have been up to for the last week.
In this month’s Wired magazine Russell M Davies points out that a week is an amount of time that works well for us humans. Months, on the other hand, are strange beasts of varying lengths that take external prompts such as calendars to comprehend fully:
And that magical seven-day formula has seen off all sorts of other temporal recipes: Soviet stabs at five- or six-day weeks, the various Decimal calendars, the Hermetic Lunar Week, the Javanese Pasaran Cycle, the Etruscans and their Nundinal system, even the Celtic style based on eight days and nine nights. All are beaten under the wheels of the mighty seven-day juggernaut. It just seems to sit right in our heads.
Each week I’ll simply post what I’ve been up to. Whereas ‘Things I Learned This Week’ is about exciting new stuff, this is more prosaic stuff. If you want an example of other people’s (much better and more impressive) efforts, have a look at Ewan McIntosh’s at NoTosh. In addition, Weeknotes.com collates weeknotes from individuals and businesses around the world. They have a widget for jiggery-pokery calculations relating to the week you started your business, but I’m going to start with #1. :-p
Weeknote #1
This week I have been mostly…
Finishing stuff
I’ve finished a bid for JISC funding in collaboration with JISC Digital Media, completed setting up my new work 13″ MacBook Pro, and put the finishing touches to my presentation for the TeachMeet at bMoble Conference.
Tinkering with this site
The CSS (stylesheet) with this site was broken and made the blog look strange under Google Chrome. I’m pleased to say I managed to fix it – with the help of my Twitter network. 🙂
Messing about on the Wii Fit
I’m really enjoying Wii Fit Plus which we invested in recently. I was delighted when my Wii Fit Age was initially calculated at 28 (a year younger than my chronological age). However, this slowly crept up until, to my shame it hit the heights of 46 (gulp!)
Fretting about my Open Source credentials
I actually wrote a blog post about this over the last few days, but have shelved it for the time being. I’ve not quite made my mind up whether to stick with my mostly-Apple-and-Sony (but closed-source) setup, or whether to try and move to a more Open Source approach. The main prompt has been the release of the Google Nexus One in the UK, I suppose. After a quick review of the hardware and software around me I realised that I use very little Open Source stuff nowadays. Given my background in OSS advocacy, this continues to trouble me. :-s
Not buying an iPad
In my previous roles I could justify buying cool new stuff as ‘market research’. Not so anymore and, indeed, I’ve realised how much better it is when technology fills a need (c.f. Sony ebook reader). I’ll still be getting an iPad later in the year, however… 😉
