Hi, I’m Barry. This is my personal website. A place for imperfect thoughts and exploring ideas.
I'm done with having a personal blog, and I've had enough of social media, so this is my goodbye post. I've been thinking a lot about what is really important to me, and how I want to spend my time. Something that has really helped with this is Derek Sivers' book Hell Yeah or No . The key message can be summed up by this: If you’re not feeling “Hell yeah, that would be awesome!” about something,…
The last time I posted here was at the start of the school summer break and we'd just returned from holiday. I could say - I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted here - but that wouldn't be true. I chose not to. There are only so many things that any one person can do in a single day, and we need to choose those things wisely. At the start of the summer I made some deliberate…
Last week we had a family holiday in the wilds of west Wales. It might have been the best holiday we've had. We wanted somewhere that was quiet, but wasn't completely isolated. My wife found us this lovely cottage to stay in. It was so peaceful. We were less than a mile from the main coast road, but that was far enough that we didn't hear anything - and there was nothing else around us. We drove…
At the start of the year I was looking after 14 Wordpress sites - some were my own, some were for clients. I'm down to four now and with any luck they'll be gone by year end. Drupal had been my go to CMS until (I think) about 2009, when I decided it was too complex and I needed a simpler solution. I switched to WordPress and have been a fan ever since. I've built so many things with it from simple…
This month has been crazy busy, but in multiple good ways. This is a quick look back and some thinking aloud abut what's next. The first half of the month was mostly about work. I took on a new client earlier this year and my first project with them was a full week digital learning workshop. I hadn't run a workshop like this for nearly two years, but I used to do them a lot. I knew from past…
I just bought a secondhand hole punch for £375, and I'm very happy. Last week I wrote about how I was thinking of spending £900 on an acme studio animation punch, instead of more than double that on one of the new M4 iPad Pros. If you want the full story you can read my value for money? post, but here's a quick summary: I do some digital animation as part of my work, but I want to relearn the…
When you're a white cishet man in your mid fifties, it can sometimes feel clumsy to add something like the pride banner that is at the top of this site. But mine is there for a reason. Even though I wanted to show my support for Pride, I was reluctant to add anything to the site, because I think there is a risk of being perceived as virtue signalling or just paying lip service. There is someone…
This is my Junited 2024 post with links to some blogs and posts that I'd like to highlight. Some are recent, some are older posts that have stuck with me. You can learn more about the challenge on Robert's blog . Let's get this started with a post from 2012 by Scott Hanselman. In Your words are wasted he stresses the importance of blogs and owning your own space on the web. A great reminder that a…
This is it, post 31 of 31. I've made it to the end. Back on day two I set out my goals for WeblogPoMo2024 . Here's how it's gone. Clear the backlog I had a folder with 251 ideas or drafts posts, some of which dated back to 2009. I've achieved my goal of reviewing every idea, deleting the irrelevant ones, and consolidating duplicate ideas. I've saved about 55 of the ideas for future personal posts,…
Every time I try to tell someone this story, I can barely get through it because I laugh so much. Let's see how it works as text. Don't read this unless incontinent old men is something you're likely to find funny. About three weeks ago I paid a visit to the town where I lived from my late teens to early twenties. I wasn't born there, but I think of it more as home than the place I was born. The…
If I told you I was thinking of spending around £900 on a hole punch - would you think I was mad? Last month I was considering buying one of the new iPad Pros. For now, that's probably a no, but I am thinking of buying something considerably lower tech and longer lasting - a hole punch. And it's kind of down to Apple... It's not any old hole punch though - it's an Acme studio animation punch.…
This is my post for May's Indie Web Carnival on the theme of Creative Environments . The invitation is for people to share their thoughts, experiences and ideas about creative environments. To give context to any consideration of creative environments, I think you first have to be clear about what creativity and being creative means to you. For me, there are three things: I'm quite clear that…
Most of the time, people's initials can be used as a convenient shorthand for that person. Unfortunately, mine are more commonly used as shorthand for something else. The classic example in work life would be where I was asked to comment on a document and just initial each section that I thought was okay. Shortly after submitting it I received an irate email from the document's author demanding to…
We’re told so many times that “life isn’t a competition” or “the race is just with yourself”. So why do we try to force children to compete? I saw Darren’s post Blogging Is Not A Competition which led me to Cole’s post Non-competition and they both got me thinking about competition in general. My daughter has always enjoyed taking part in sports, but she has never been interested in competition. I…
My second blog post of the day. An update on #WeblogPoMo2024 and making pans for #Junited2024. WeblogPoMo2024 This is my 25th post for this challenge. I missed a day earlier this week so this is my "cheat" post to get me back on track. Up until now my approach has been to just sit down and write every day without a plan, which has mostly worked. However, I'm off work now until 3rd June and I want…
My father died a few days before my fifth birthday. I don’t have any real memories of him, but I do have a diary. It's just one diary, from 1973. It's tiny, a little pocket thing with a week per page and enough room to give each day maybe a couple of sentences. Most weeks there are two or three entries. Things like: 11 February 1973 E & I took Barry to Crystal Palace Park to see animals. Fine…
What would be the point of adding analytics to this blog? About twenty years ago, I was certified in Crystal Reports and Crystal Analytics, and I was trained by a couple of really experienced developers. Aside from the technical skills, they both taught me this key principle of designing reports: Data must be meaningful and actionable. I've read a lot of praise for Tinylytics, and I started…
This morning I was reminded of my time working in HR and two particular things that happened. I’ve worked in learning and development in some form since the mid 90’s. In 1999 I was working for a national food retailer and I was persuaded that a stint as an HR generalist would be “good for my development”. It probably did help my development, but I wouldn’t want to do it again. I guess it’s no…
How I learned to stop worrying, ignore other people's opinions, and make peace with using Adobe Creative Cloud. They say that a lesson is repeated until learned, and today was a lesson day. A client sent me a video file that needed a quick fix. It had been passed through various people, and the person who sent it to me received it as an mp4. I fired up Davinci Resolve 18, imported the video and...…
I've tried to avoid blogging about blogging, but I've got to day 20 of WeblogPoMo and I'm starting to flag. When I started this challenge, I set out to write a post every day for 31 days - and at the moment I'm still planning to do that - but it's getting harder. It's not a lack of things to wrote about that's getting in the way. I've got quite few ideas for thing to write about, but they'll be…
I went to the Apple store today and had a look at the new iPad Pro. These are my current thoughts. We went into Southampton for lunch today. After we'd eaten, my wife and daughter both had some shopping they wanted to do, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to pop into the Apple store and take a look at the new iPad Pro. For context, I've had a few iPads: iPad, 1st generation that I bought on…
Plenty of people have been writing about their blogging workflow, so I thought I'd share mine. It'a all about simplicity. When I decided to start blogging again, there were two simple requirements: It had to be self hosted It had to be simple - post from anywhere, with no build processes or other malarkey Here are the very few parts that make it work. The Posts I have three folders on my hard…
I'm pretty sure that everyone who works with technology both loves and hates it in equal measure - me included. One of the smartest people to have ever lived on this little planet of ours was Douglas Adams, and he left us way too soon. He said some very smart things about technology, computers and the internet (and a lot of other stuff) but these are two of my favourites: Technology is a word that…
I'm starting to wonder if I'd be better off going all in on Windows. This is not a Windows vs. Mac. vs. Linux post. I've used them all, and they're all wonderful and awful in different ways. Since deciding to split my home and work tech I've been mostly happy. But there is definitely some friction when switching OSes and I started to wonder if I should settle on one. In my update post earlier this…
For years I was all for discarding old media formats and switching to digital, but now I'm back to buying physical products. I've always liked innovation, and I've frequently suffered from the expensive mistakes of the early adopter who buys the first version of everything! I had no problem discarding my books and CDs and replacing them with a Kindle and an iPod. About twelve years ago, when we…
It's late, I've had a busy day, and so today's WeblogPoMo2024 post is going to be a short update on a couple of previous posts. Guitar Ten days ago I wrote that learning guitar had broken music for me . The good news is that yesterday I listened to music for the first time in weeks. I didn't think about it, or analyse it, I just listened to it and enjoyed. This morning I got the guitar of the wall…
I've read a few posts recently on what it means to be an introvert, so I thought I'd share my experience. I work in learning and development, and although I mostly work from home creating digital content, I do sometime run face to face training activities. In fact, until a couple of years ago I used to run a five day digital design workshop four or five time a year. At nearly every workshop, the…
The more you produce, the greater the chance that some of it will be good. I'm over a third of the way through the WeblogPoMo2024 challenge and a couple of things have occurred to me. The first is that there's power in being prolific. Since I set up this blog in February I've written more posts than I did in the previous ten years, mostly in the past couple of weeks. The more I write, the more…
Yesterday morning I visited the town where I spent my teens and early twenties, and in the afternoon I visited my oldest and best friend. It brought back a mix of memories and got me thinking about regrets. A few times in my life I've said to someone that I don't have regrets, but that isn't really true. I'm guessing that we all have some regrets, but what matters is your relationship with them. I…
Today I had to do something I'd been dreading and putting off for ages, but it turned out fine and I got to hang out with my oldest friend. My dad was a builder, and through that became property developer. As he got older he mostly sold off the places he'd bought, but when he died there were a couple left that passed to my mum. She's 87 and lives in a care home and so I look after things for her.…
If you have an app, or a website, or a book, or anything else that seeks feedback I am only ever going to rate it one star or five stars, or more likely not at all. Let me tell you why. The short version is that there are only two reasons why I would leave feedback - either you've delighted me (five stars) or you've annoyed me (one star). Let's deal with the positive first. There are some things…
There's a saying in business - what gets measured, gets done. The same flawed logic exists in our everyday technology. The fundamental problem with the "what gets measured gets done" mantra, is that it's usually the wrong thing being measured. Important things are usually really hard to measure, so we don't do it. Unimportant things are usually really easy to measure, so we do it all the time.…
When things go wrong, don't get bent out of shape - have a rubber plan! Many years ago I was at an event where the keynote presentation was made by a motivational speaker named Robin Sieger . It remains one of the best keynotes I've ever seen and I often think about some of the things I learned from it. One of those is the "rubber plan". The concept is pretty simple - plans have many benefits, but…
It's not uncommon to find posts where people talk of their intent (or desire) to consume less and create more. I've decided to do the opposite. Wait! What? Okay, I'm not talking about doomscrolling social media or drinking from the YouTube firehose. This isn't about idle consumption, it's about deliberate consumption of (mostly) quality output. In my work I spend a lot of time creating things,…
I recently saw a Mastodon post by Scott Hanselman asking - do you ever use the scream test? . Well, I have and it really works. I used to run the elearning team in a big UK corporate. Every Monday, one of my team would spend her entire day running and distributing reports to managers across the business. At one of her performance reviews I asked if she thought that everyone who received a report…
One of my goals for taking part in WeblogPoMo2024 is to surface any logistical and technical issues with my writing/publishing workflow. Well, I've found one already. Because I want to make sure that it's working, I subscribe to my own RSS feed. This morning I noticed that there were duplicate copies of all of my posts (all eight of them!). I asked the ever helpful Simone if he was seeing the same…
This is a follow up to a post I wrote in February titled Guitar and Me which was about my commitment to learning guitar. Things have taken an unexpected turn. In that post I said: This time I’m making a commitment to myself to stick with it, and I’m making that commitment in public. So, I’m going to look very silly if I don’t do it. On the 6th February I started practicing guitar for a minimum of…
This is my day 2 WeblogPoMo2024 post, which explains why I decided to do the challenge. I'd seen a few people posting about their plans to take part in WeblogPoMo2024 but it was only on 31st April that I decided to take part. No planning, no theme, no ideas! I don't have a particular theme, but I do have a purpose, and I think it will be helpful to me if I document it here. Clear the backlog I…
Today is Cow Day - and for us, that's the real start of spring. We live on the edge of a town, but right next to a country park, which means that we have great views from our front windows. We get to see lots of natural changes as the year goes by, but there's one managed change that we always look forward to - and that's Cow Day (that's what we call it in our house anyway). The section of the…
Inspired by Lou’s post here are my ten albums. His prompt is “List 10 albums that have stayed with you over the years in some way. Don't take too long on the list - just a few minutes. These don't have to be great records, or critical darlings, just ones that mean something to you personally.” Revolver - The Beatles Seventh Son of a Seventh Son - Iron Maiden Stop Making Sense - Talking Heads 90125…
Last week I made a really big decision - to completely separate the technology and tools I use for home and work. The short story is Windows for work and Mac/iPad for home. If you want the background and the reason for the decision, read on... Where it began In 2006 I set up my own digital learning consultancy business. For the first couple of years I was still working in my corporate job…
A week ago, I set up this blog using WordPress - and yesterday I switched to Kirby. But to be clear, this has nothing to do with the recent stories about Automattic selling user data to AI companies (although I do have thoughts on that which I will post about at some point). I started building this blog about a year ago using Kirby, but I was learning as I was going and I was never happy that…
Many, many, years ago I had guitar lessons. I must have been about 9 or 10 years old. Back then I was more interested in climbing trees, playing football and generally larking about outdoors with my friends than I was in practicing. So, the guitar got put away and never played. Since then, I’ve thought about learning many times, but never did anything about it. In 2019 I turned 50, which is one of…
It feels like this post has been a long time coming. Over the last year or so I’ve really enjoyed the renaissance of blogs – as a reader. The urge has been there to start blogging myself, but a number of things got in the way (maybe I’ll blog about some of them) and I’ve put it off. But no more! The blog is up and running and I’m looking forward to having my own place on the web again. I’m a…