Read Me
I have done a fair bit of writing other* than blogging in my time but serious blogging is in a category of its own. Here I control the horizontal, I control the vertical.... It's both challenging and fun — the pieces have to be well-presented, readable, engaging and informative but within those broad constraints I can do pretty much what I like.
You will therefore find the pieces here to be an eclectic mixture — of style and content. As a general rule, the longer the piece the more serious it is and the more likely I am to bother with weeding out typographical errors and mixed metaphors (unless I'm just messin' with ya'); conversely, the shorter the piece the more likely I am to completely repudiate it and/or completely deny I ever wrote it.
The subject is business — in theory and practice. Blah blah Lessons Leaned, blah blah Tips & Tricks, blah blah Anecdotes, blah blah Case Studies, etc. (blah).
The purpose of it all is, of course, to show what a jolly-good-all-round-egg I am, with a view to eliciting unrefusable offers to do interesting stuff for you and your organisation to our mutual benefit.
As to the title of the blog, "The Ineffable Knack," it seems that I have a knack for bridging the cultural and linguistic divide between technologists and non-technical management, and for achieving things (with the assistance of the genuinely hands-on) often considered borderline, if not actually, impossible; I can't explain it — dead systems spring to life in my presence and otherwise healthy systems reveal their hidden vulnerabilities by collapsing as I walk past; my eye unerringly alights upon the unuspportable figure in a report, the flaw in a methodology, the gotcha in the contract.
I am not a specialist, I am a generalist — with not just a knack, but The Knack beloved of all Dilbert aficionados. Unlike Dilbert however, I have eyes.
* poetry1, magazine articles2, essays3, a book4, manuals, training courses, specifications, bids, usw.
1 Sonnets, haiku, etc. (some published)
2 Philosophy Now; IEEE Electronics & Power; Navy International
3 FQXi "Time" Competition
4 Fragments of Berossus (as yet unpublished)
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