it has come to this.

90 in 90. Um, well, not really.

So,  hi there.   Been a while, huh?

Admittedly, I did not keep up with the 90 in 90 project for the full 90 days.   While this might look like a failure on the surface, I must say that the exercise was a huge success for me.   When I started the experiment, I was in a bit of a creative rut, more tied up with project administration than doing anything creative or novel.   After just a few days of carving out some daily time to reflect on different approaches to a tough problem, I found that I was able to start to climb out of that ditch.   I went from living in budgets and email to working on several new approaches to problems we face on the project.

Maybe 90 days was too ambitious, but setting aside some time for regular creative practice was a great catalyst for refocusing effort on new and novel projects.   If 90 in 90 was a failure, it was only because it got me passionately working on small projects that couldn’t be fully articulated or completed in a single day.

I’ll take that kind of failure any time.

17/90: Away.

Like many people, I find that my widespread use of collaboration and communication technologies makes it possible for my work life and its demands to find me almost anywhere and any time on the globe.   This makes it almost impossible for me to really get away, meaning that I miss out on a lot of the restorative benefits of time off.   Even more problematic is that I find that some of my best ideas and best work come as I’m truly unplugged or shortly thereafter.   In short, my current uses of collaboration technology let me stay engaged with work, all the time, for better or for worse.

I really want the Away application.   Given that getting away from it all can be hugely beneficial, I think that there is an opportunity to develop  a system that filters out, evades and distracts from the distractions of work relentlessly.   Such an application, might provide video and audio feeds of real and far away places (not simply video loops) and actively prevent all but the most urgent messages from showing up.

For this to succeed requires a much better understanding of relaxation.   It is easy to interrupt relaxation with work, but I think more challenging to preempt work with relaxation.   If we could figure this out, however, the benefits would be huge.  Rather than burning down psychic reserves, technology could help provide a retreat mechanism for reflection and rejuvenation.

16/90: Failure multipliers

We often take reliability for granted since the published MTBF numbers for vulnerable pieces of hardware tend to be quite high.   Given that the a component is likely to fail every 6.5 years, we should generally be good.  Right?

Systems for remote collaboration, however, are a place where failure gets multiplied.  Since these systems often consist of networks of components, that are connected to communication networks that send traffic to other networks of components, the reliability of the overall system quickly drops far below the reliability of any individual component.

In order to better understand system reliability, I’m experimenting with diagramming a complete end-to-end system as a network and attempting to make some reliability judgement about each component.    If nothing else, a network-based representation of a distributed system may help articulate the vast number of threats to system reliability, which range from a component failing to a power outage at a given location.   I’ll add diagrams to this post when they are finished.