take one onion

Well, a bit of a mixed year and week notes became more monthly. I never expected not to be able to type for such a long part of a year. Experiments should come and go, it feels like time to wind this one up. Too much of what I do doesn't make for viable reading material. Much of it is private and then often there is no immediate reveal of a product at the end. For some clients what I do helps shape the things they'll do next year.

Which then begs the question of what to do with this blog. One idea is being worked on in the background which I'll say more about in the new year. I think in the meantime, I'll revert to thoughts which reflect the sorts of work I do with clients and relevant news. Next up will be a piece on social objects and how they operate in frames of reference.

I've started freelancing with Friday, as a planner helping them with one of their larger clients. It is quite different to working on my own, but also different from working in a company full time. I'm back in an office with everyone working on the same thing and I'm part of that too. I can feel the pull in one direction. Yet, it is not my work in the same way that I have with Talis, Solderpad or other clients. It is good fun, challenging work and a change from the writing I have been doing of late for that other secret client.

I like the derivation of the word freelance. It harks back to medieval times, when a knight who was not bound to a noble, could offer his services as a free lance.

Looking now towards the future, I have meetings with a couple of potential to probable cycling clients at the end of the month in Birmingham, which I'm quite looking forward to and half a dozen other potentials who are coming out of summer slumber I hope.

Lastly, you can buy my book, Building Social Web Applications, at a 50 percent discount, direct from O'Reilly, this week. They have a Back to School Special, if you use code: B2SDEAL.

August is a long, lovely month, but a slow one for work. The French have it about right and now La Retour est arrive. I mostly wrapped up a big piece of strategy work for a client last month, which feels good. I'm looking forward to seeing that piece evolve into products with them.

This month started with a trip to Brighton for dConstruct, which was good again. The afternoon was stronger, in particular Matt Sheret's and Dan Hon's talks, but I enjoyed Kelly Goto's talk from the morning session too.

The Brighton Maker Faire was great fun too. Highlights for me were the SketchChair software and some of the robots, even the squirting one. My boys liked the mosaic making and the tangible feeling of being able to create things.

I've spent this week in planning and pitching for new clients, plus catching up with existing ones from after the summer. I've started working with SolderPad, helping them to see the right social object in their product plans. Moving open hardware from sets of personal projects to a curated whole will be very benefical I think.

I'm back in one piece again and I can even nearly reach above my shoulder again. I've been a bit remiss at weeknotes of late, but I decided that weeks of nearly mended was not that interesting. I've been back to work with all my clients and working on various things for potential clients to be, which is great.

I'm now two cycles into do my VAT returns, got a refund the first time from the four years of contributory expenses brought to the business and this time paid them a chunk instead.

I've got a couple of map related projects that I'm exploring in my free time, one an old idea about tall buildings. The other related to the Google Elevation Services api plus my fondness for bikes and hills. So, that was short and sweet, but I'm back to weeknotes.

In lieu of weeknotes, this week the nice people in the NHS are going to properly mend my collar bone. They will fit a titanium plate in my shoulder to hold the pieces of my left clavicle together. The plates look quite cool I think.

Image copyright Acumed LLC

I'll have a general anaesthetic while they fit the plate and it should be day surgery, this article in the Daily Mail of all places is pretty close to what I've read. This page of notes about clavicle fractures is a little out of date, but it was a real help a few weeks ago. All the cycling websites I've read say that this is the best long term outcome treatment, so I'm fairly happy about the whole thing, wikipedia agrees, too. Though I am staying away from the videos and the more gory pictures, however this animation is helpful (quicktime download). The eventual scar looks ok too.

I'll update this post as I know more.

I had the surgery, yesterday, feeling a bit sore today, but mostly ok. The plate was an acumed one in blue in fact. Mr Goldie at Whipps Cross was excellent. They had to take a bone graft from my hip to promote healing and union of the clavicle. If you are curious as to how my shoulder looks, see Flickr.

I've had a busy few weeks, recently, a mix of turning prospects in to real contracts and getting up to speed with the dictation system. Business development is a big job. I've got work for clients at the minute, but I'm aware that I need to chase new work too, otherwise it might run out. I've been following up on various leads that come to me, but I've also been trying to create a niche of clients in a subject area close to my heart. It is very early days for that, so I'll leave it there, for the moment. The other thing I've figured out is that it takes a long time to get from first chat to a contract, particularly if they don't come to me first.

The other thing I did was my first VAT return, pretty straightforward using freeagent, which does the accounts and the submission. So I just needed to get my expenses in order, noting that the HMRC allow reclaming of VAT on expenses made before registration and that you can get a VAT invoice from O2.

Lastly, my first client paid me, which is what this is partly all about, so yay.

Having fallen off my bike recently and broken my collarbone means that I can't type with both hands, for a consultant this is a poor place to be. Now that I'm on the mend I decided to buy dictation software, as it may be another 3 to 4 weeks before I can type while again.

There is pretty much only one option for dictation software on the Mac. Dragon Dictate is a retail only package, because it comes with a dedicated headset, this is a Plantronics 610 with an approximately 2 m long cable. It plugs into a specific USB adapter and the Dragon dictation software listens to this. There is a wireless version for about £100 more. I bought the wired version of Dragon Dictate from Amazon for £130.

I got the software yesterday, it takes about 10 minutes to install. The headset is quite comfortable and the setup takes about another five to ten minutes. since then I've used it to write about half a dozen e-mails including words like peripatetic, pneumothorax and phrases like King's Cross. It is pretty accurate and certainly faster than one-handed typing. It does require a slightly different way of thinking as Dragon dictation works best with flowing sentences, it makes many more mistakes if you give it halting fragments of text. It works by matching word frequency and sound analysis. There is an inherent statistical bias towards Americanised speech, but it's quite straightforward to edit this. One annoying bug is its habit of adding space before every word while editing. So if you are not careful you can end up with double spaces between words betraying your edits. I'm hoping they will fix this in a subsequent revision.

Reading on various support forums for Dragon Dictate it seems that having a recent i.e. less than two-year-old Mac running 10.6 is pretty essential. Having 4 or 8 gig of memory installed helps a lot as well. The ability to dictate directly into MarsEdit or Mail is a real help. I can see myself using this quite a lot even when I have recovered, as despite having written a book my typing speed has never been that quick. I'm aware that this won't work very well in a shared office, but for using at home it is fine.

I'll update this review, as I use and train the application more. It is possible to both train Dragon dictation in terms of the vocabulary you use by giving it documents you have written and train it to your voice by reading sample documents they provide. I think a few hours spent doing this will improve the accuracy a lot. At the minute it varies a lot from stretches of near-perfect, when I give it 10 to 20 words at a time to getting one in 10 words wrong if I give it halting speech. Because of the statistical nature of its matching it often substitutes phrases rather than getting individual words wrong. So you develop a habit of reading what it is just typed for you, which is a slightly odd style of writing. Though on the whole it is a good and enjoyable experience.

About three weeks ago I misjudged a steep bank in woods near my house while on my mountain bike. I fell right over the handlebars and broke my collar bone, cracked four ribs and punctured my lung. I'm pretty much back to work now. I can attend meetings, take phone calls and even write using the Dragon dictation software. It'll be another three weeks before I know if I will have surgery. My left clavicle is sort of healing, but my doctors will make a final decision in three weeks time. All in all quite frustrating, but good to be on the mend.

The experience has given me some time to reflect on what I've been up to this year so far. A lot of the work I'm doing is product strategy, but for some clients my role is more of CTO, helping them to commission appropriate technical services and understand the wider implications of what their product is. The product strategy aspect of my work tends to focus on ensuring there is a understandable benefit for someone using their application. It is all too easy to focus on the feature set or the business to business side of a new endeavour. This means that the core user experience, which is often the only experience gets short shrift. Being able to the question “why would they tell anybody about using your application" is often a useful prompt.

Last week was mostly spent in Texas, eating excellent food and in fine conversation with friends. I went to maybe seven or eight sessions in total. Some very good ones, Randy Farmer's session on reputation and the session on federating the social web were both good. The wikileaks session was fascinating too, partly down to Carne Ross' contributions. Mostly it was a huge mass of people and conflict. Great sessions were miles away or all on at the same time, at one point there were five sessions I wanted to attend, all at the same time. However the food and great conversation outside the sessions more than made up for the variability of the actual conference. I paid for an upgrade on BA to world traveller plus, thinking it would be as nice as Virgin Atlantic's premium economy. I was a bit disappointed, but my back appreciated the seat, so I guess it was worth it.

I'm still learning how much support a company provides that is hidden away. The IT department in any company has never been top of my list of useful things, but I can see the sense in Apple's Joint Venture programme. Managing my company bank account; paperwork from HMRC; and ensuring expenses and my accountant are kept up to date consumes plenty of time. I'm hoping to be able to carve out a week or so soon to build one of the app ideas I've had on a shelf for a while. Writing some more here would be good too.

That leads me nicely into talking about balance, that of doing the work vs finding new work. I've got enough work at the minute that I'm not taking on new clients until some way into April, maybe early May. However the meetings to get the work for later in the year take time to prepare for and turning those interesting conversations into something that I can invoice is harder with some prospective clients. I'm enjoying the variety and the larger client I have at the minute is certainly giving me something to get my teeth into. I suspect this balancing act will be a common state of affairs for a while.

Others have noted in the past that week notes can get a bit dull with too much working for secret client. Well my main client is one of those at the minute, but I also had fun with Talis recently. So a bit of a brief update this week will be all, sxsw next week so I'll update from Austin.

I bought myself a new MacBook Pro last week, having discovered that I can claim the VAT, even if I'm going to be flat rate registered, as long as I spend over £2000. So a shiny new MacBook made its way to me via Kazakhstan of all places.

Last week covered a huge range of subjects for clients and prospective clients, from cryptography to QR-codes and near field communications to healthcare and data markets. This is one of the things I really like about my new way of working. Lots to learn and understand, then translate into useful products or advice for my clients.