The BBC’s graphic on not sitting up “too straight”:

Correct posture (image from the BBC)

But the real position for corporate situations I think is quite often more like this:

Correct corporate posture.

It’s one of those sayings to encourage people to break things down into smaller tasks, but I came up with a little visual idea for dealing with the “too bloody big” tasks. One of the developers on my team was getting stuck on where to begin on a fairly daunting bit of work. This was my attempt to break the mental deadlock: a picture of an elephant with the various tasks written on it. The good thing was that it seemed to work: she got that nasty bit of work done.

So I present to you the “elephant list” or “task elephant” concept.

The idea is that you visually play around with your list and use the elephant to track your progress/keep track of the list. As you think of new tasks, add them somewhere on the elephant. You can pick symbolic areas of the task elephant if you like.. I’d suggest perhaps:

• the rear end for the really shitty tasks
• the head for the ones that require a bit of thought
• the legs for the bits to get you up and running
• the back for the ones you just have to grin and bear and do a bit of hard slog
• the trunk for the last task

Or just stick ‘em anywhere that the text will fit, but a bit of thought about where on the elephant they belong forms part of the exercise really: to think about what’s required to get those done.

My cleanup GWT elephant list.

A lot of the exercises and games in Agile software development are about engaging interest, engaging different bits of the brain and being a bit silly. The elephant list idea certainly does that as a handful of people wanted to know what the elephant was all about, so it’s something different at least.

Anyhow, I’ll post up a month or so in the future and see how the concept is working out.
Here’s my quick and dirty elephant task list template if you want to try the idea out yourself:

Quick and dirty task elephant template. Double click to get full sized (then right click-> save as).

A few years back (ok a handful of years back.. I’m getting old) I had the “pleasure” of having a seat next to the trading floor while I was consulting at Macquarie bank. It was a fun team to be sitting with, but the constant roar of non-nonsensemustgetthistradecommunicatedtosomeonebyyellingquickly got a bit hard on the nerves. Sure: you were awake, but it was more of a fight or flight type instinct.

Unlike the economy, I escaped from the insurance bankers and got back to a quieter seat, but I’d have to say that too much exposure to that sort of environment day in day out would slowly but surely fray your nerves.

Now THAT is a transformer!

If I want some welding done on whatever “mad-max” vehicle I’m driving in the post apocalyptic/post comet strike world: I’ll be giving this guy a call to see what he’s coddled together out of scrappy wires, string, cardboard and metal.

Update: Image had died. That’ll teach me to rely on the internet!

Rekha : An inspiring little girl from India (image ABCNews.go.com)

In the past she had been working with her family to keep food on the table before a UNICEF sponsored program gave her an opportunity to get an education:

Like her father, she helped to support her family by rolling a type of cigarette called beedi. Then two years ago, a government non-profit program plucked her from a life of child labour to enrol her in special school.

Along with learning the standard classes, Rekha and dozens of other former child labourers were also taught leadership skills. The school, part of a UNICEF program, was free of charge so that families would not remove children from the program due to cost.

Nothing wrong with kids working a bit to help the family, learn some skills, earn some money, work ethics etc but getting stuck into harsh factory conditions (assuming that’s the case here) isn’t really teaching the kids anything other than misery and leaving them with no choices.

When I was little I got stuffed into spiderweb filled crawl spaces on weekends to lay electrical cable and hammer in cable clips (and the odd fingernail) onto electrical cables or digging trenches to earn my pocket money. Difference is that that was one day (perhaps rarely two days) a week rather than 12+ hours a day/7 days a week and I went to school monday to friday. That and as a spoilt westerner: my childhood version of “tough work” is nothing compared to what the kids in India or africa put up with.. As I’m sure my Father occasionally pointed out.

In Rekha’s case the work she was doing has been blasted for both the working conditions and the toxic nature of the substance they’re handling. A CNN article describes the problem:

Handling burley tobacco leaves without gloves, in unwashed clothes and rarely bathing, these children can absorb the same amount of nicotine in one day of harvesting that they would from smoking 50 cigarettes.

So a necessary part of any childhood, education is the key to avoid falling into an endless cycle of poverty or unhealthy work (including forcing the next generation and the next into child labour as well). This is because with education comes a much wider range of possible futures, as was the case with little  Rekha:

It was from these leadership classes that Rekha gained the strength to defy her family, her village and change her future. And with this decision, she inspired a chain reaction among her friends and throughout her village.

Good on her, I hope she inspires many others to refuse to be “promised”, bought, traded or sold. Back in India’s history books an old skinny guy named Ghandi had a pretty massive impact through quiet refusal to do things, so it’s not like her actions are without precedence.

I think the days of people treated as bargaining chips or livestock should fade into dim memories, documented and discarded from acceptable practice. Perhaps Rekha’s given the world a bit of a much needed nudge in that direction.

A true hard working bike

What would have been interesting was if the creator of this beast had installed a centre stand and some sort of hookup with the wheel that allowed the bike engine to drive the grinding wheels too.

Does the helmet double as eye protection?

Still: I like the idea of a trade that comes to you, with minimal vehicle footprint and then putts off to the next job.

In terms of work itself I’ve been doing the usual reading half a wiki to find out what things are and how things are done. Fighting the urge to track down and torture the people responsible for making J2EE (JEE sorry) and messaging kinda painful to get up and running: IBM.

RANT WARNING!!

I mean I used to whinge about IBM’s painful install process back 5 years ago when I taught Sun’s J2EE architecture and developer courses and STILL nothing has changed?? Get on with it guys. You do so much other stuff so well, but boy do you make people suffer to get things installed!

END RANT!!

What else is new in enterprise techie stuff in Sydney:

• Still no one using ruby (or one of these other fanboy languages) on anything important or real (thank fuck for that) and using either Java or .net based stuff.
• Lots of places with hiring freezes, the usual stupidity to get around such things (hiring contractors instead of employees).
• A bit of gloom about the economy but no where near say the UK (the part of the world that invented gloom).
• Ajax stuff making a bit more of a show (google’s framework in particular)

I’m working with a couple of colleagues of mine from the old days at CustomWare Asia Pacific. Things seem to be in place fairly well: automated build stuff, unit testing, morning status stand-up (although what sadistic fucker puts these at 9am eh?).

Anyhow, it’s kinda good to be back working although thankfully the daylight saving hour helped me be a bit more awake. Guess I’m an upstanding member of the community again (e.g. I’m paying tax and helping clog up the CBD again?) and I don’t feel quite so worried about dropping a chunk of cash on a new toy.