Back at work and it feels like we have never been away! One thing I did manage to get round to over the Christmas break was catching up some tech reading.

“The End Of Mr. Y“, by Scarlett Thomas, is a good read for taking your brain out for a stretch and follows the (mis)adventures of Ariel Manto, a PhD Student, as she uncovers and explores the Troposphere. Next up is “The Blue Nowhere”, by Jeffery Deaver, a techno-thriller which follows an investigation into a master hacker (cracker) serial killer who socially engineers his victims - I will be writing a sum up of this shortly. “Daemon“, by Daniel Suarez, is a riveting page turner as law enforcement agencies attempt to locate and stop a seemingly intelligent software program as it crosses over from the logical world into the physical one. I recently read “Daemon” is heading for the big screen.

Next up on the reading lists is “Neuromancer”, by William Gibson.

Do you have any good tech reading recommendations?

I believe it is a common misconception that people don’t like change. I think that what people generally object to is change being blindly foisted upon them. If I get to work and I’m told “Hey this has changed and you now do this” I’m less likely to embrace the change as I would if I got to work and someone said “Hey, you know that change we’ve been working on - let’s kick it in today”. I don’t mean involving people in a purely superficial way either but really engaging people (and I’m not talking about team building weekends either!). If you give a new user a computer, what is the first thing they are likely to do? You got it, change something. Be it the wallpaper, the icons, the screen saver time out and hopefully their password. We all like to do this because it makes us feel more comfortable and in control. There may be technical reasons for not doing this (allowing users to set screen savers on thin clients) but on the whole giving a sense of control adopts a positive attitude to change.

We are changing all the time, everything around us is experiencing constant change. However, if you decide to blindly change something without involving people (even those on the periphery of the perceived change) you can bet that trouble will ensue shortly after. Of course communication is the answer but it needs to be handled sensitively. Talk to people, keep people in the loop even if they are not directly involved and if something is confidential then keep it that way. When we are at work we want to be part of something, to feel that our voice counts for something and that we are making a difference, even if we’re not seemingly directly involved. I’m not talking about going over the top either and blasting people with memo’s - just talk to people like their opinion matters.

What do you think?

A similar discussion can be found on my other Blog at Creative design by committee is OK - but who wants OK?

So Dixons issues a profit warning due to poor Christmas sales

With two very young children in our household Christmas means the house is now filled with huge blobs of plastic toys - sometimes I think that friends and family either think we live in a warehouse or that they have some wicked sense of humour. I am often also gobsmacked at the almost thesis worthy way in which these toys are attached to the packaging materials which means either severed fingers or so much twisting of little plastic wire seals that the fun of the toy is lost by the time it is opened. Fortunately Santa way busy opening all their toys on Christmas Eve (and came armed to the gills with batteries) so they were ready to play come Christmas morning.After playing with these blobs of plastic for a few minutes each then raising an almost cynical eyebrow my two (nearly three) year old daughter reverted to the two things she likes

So thinksecret.com will no longer be published according to their post Apple, Think Secret settle lawsuit. An amicable settlement? Is this a win for the big Apple or for the lowly Blogger

Sex, Drugs and the Spam Patrol - How many plasters until the next loophole?

I imagine that

With Christmas looming up and the New Year on the horizon many peoples thoughts may be turning to what 2008 may mean for developments in technology, so here are my 5 finger in the air predictions for the 52 weeks ahead:

• The Octo-Core CPU driven by the need for high powered servers for virtualisation tasks will make its debut
• The Pico-Projector will appear in mobile phones and handheld gaming devices
• Unified Communications will stop being a buzz-term and actually start being useful
• The Budget ‘back to basics’ laptop will appeal to the masses of non-techies driving a change for simplicity in computing devices
• Server OS development companies will rethink the GUI and look for inspiration in their text based roots

No doubt I will be hiding in a corner cringeing come this time next year wondering how on earth I could have been so off the mark with my predictions! So, what are your predictions for technology in 2008?

Am I the only person in the world who likes Mondays?

Most people I talk to can’t wait until Friday - personally I can’t wait until Monday. Does that really sound so strange? People often look at me in horror when I tell them about my love of Mondays. But. there is something fresh about Mondays, something new and something optimistic. On Mondays I draw a line under all those outstanding jobs and set my schedule for the week ahead. Key data backups occur over the weekend and are checked on Mondays and I often visit our off-site storage facility with the weekly IT archive box. My user base also seems a lot quieter on Mondays, maybe something they did at the weekend?

On Mondays I find time to check the budgets, do the paperwork and scan upcoming schedules for maintenance renewals and even get some time to check some of those email newsletters that seem to come through the email system with an ever increasing ferocity. Catching up with technical Blogs also happens regularly on Mondays and software development also comes a lot easier earlier in the week (on Monday afternoons in particular) and I am often at my best coding away in Cobol or C# (or whatever else I happening to be working on