Across Weirdish Wild Space

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Songbird just popped out a 1.0 release candidate, a huge jump from the 0.7 release they’ve had on the site. Lotta talent behind this mozilla-based music player including some of the master crew behind the llama-ass-kicking winamp.

I’ve never been that big a fan of iTunes. I’ve always considered it a necessary evil because of needing podcasts seamlessly (downloading via rss in NetNewswire and related is never as smooth and integration with my iPod (particularly automatic syncing of podcasts), but fact of the matter is it’s at best a mediocre music player, lacks customization, and I really, really dislike the way everything gets pumped through the iTunes music store. Sure Apple has to monetize those song sales, but really. I never buy from them and after a while it annoys me.

On Linux, there’s been some interesting things going on, but really what I want out of my player is something that’s going to just simply play my music, help me enjoy it more, manage my podcasts and iPod, and probably most importantly, help me discover or find out about other music I might like.

Strangely, because I’d seen previous versions of Songbird, and while I’d liked it better than Amarok (which i think has a schizoid interface), I thought it was a little simplistic as a drop-in replacement.

I have to say though, I’ve just downloaded the 1.0 release candidate and it is really quite impressive. First and foremost the last.fm integration and music recommendation engine is actually well thought out, works well in the interface and is unobtrusive and fast. I learned new things about bands I’ve had in my library for years just tonight. Surprisingly, since I don’t go to many concerts, (mostly because I never find out about them in time), I really like the concert feature which lets me know when bands in my library may be having concerts near me in London (I’d love it if it alerted me when certain bands I’ve flagged are playing in London until I turned off an alert since usually my problem is never being able to know about tickets before they’re sold out), and really loving the lyrics feature which has already let me know how wrong I’ve been singing along to some songs I’ve had for years to.

To be honest, it could easily replace my iTunes on my desktop, though now I have to find a way to get the equivalent functionality I have in SizzlingKeys (or that I could get with QuickSilver, I’d love that too) so I can keyboard command the thing without moving off the keyboard. There really needs to be a OS integrated way to deal with manipulating at least the fast play/pause, fast forward/switch/back function from the keyboard and would love it if it had some sort of growl or equivalent integration (correction: just found a couple of growl integration add-ons here but none updated to the 1.0rc yet).

A few bugs I ran into but overall for a release candidate, a pretty damn solid version of the software to look at. Oh, and another nice thing, it manages my iTunes collection from Songbird meaning that I don’t even really have to switch at the moment.

God, I love The Onion. I”m very glad that even their ability to poke fun at those in power hasn’t been dampened by Barack’s election win. Seriously, the one good indication that democracy and freedom are still alive and well in any country are people poking fun at politicos with impunity.

And in other political parody awesomeness…

• Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress
• Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

Well, much like the rest of the jubilant free world, it’s hard not to look at Obama’s landslide election in the United States and hope that, well… finally they’ve come to their senses. It’s been a hard eight years, and I don’t think anyone would argue that things have gotten amazingly worse than they were under the tender ministrations of the Bush years.

Also, the historic precedent of the 44th president can’t be denied and hopefully will reverse some long-standing horribleness about racism and the politics of exclusion in the States.

Anyhow, the poor guy has a hell of a job ahead of him and a whack of messes and crises to deal with. Let’s hope he can live up to the potential and promises of his campaign and the speech he made in front of the Tiergarten in Germany.

As I write this, Indiana, North Carolina and Missouri are still processing votes with it looking like Obama will take two more of those states, but currently,

• Electoral College votes : Obama 251 – McCain 171
• Senate : Dems 56 – Reps 40 (4 remain)

Let’s hope the next four can do something about the last eight.

Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked so Obama could run. Obama ran so our children could fly.
- interwiewee on NPR Radio

Seriously, 28 Oct and the snow is coming down in huge, big fluffy flakes and sticking to everything. It’s actually very beautiful but I can’t believe it’s snowing this early already.

Wow… I am seriously jonezing for some snowboarding now though. Anyone got any ski trips planned yet ?

I’m pondering whether I could pull off National Novel Writing Month this year and pen a novel in the month of November as the nights get longer and the days colder.

50k words by the end of the month ? That does seem a little daunting. Say 2000 words a day over 25 days ?

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a good novel, but…

Any great suggestions anyone ?...

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

OK, as more than casual readers know, I’m a huge fan of Warren Buffet. Not only do I try and invest like him, but I think he’s very sharp beyond being just an astute and wiley investor. Great, but very long interview with him here on the Warren Buffett CNBC Interview:

”... you only find out who’s
been swimming naked when the tide goes out. Well, we found out that Wall Street has been kind of a nudist beach.”

(via clusterstock.)

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

Interestingly, we have noticed as well, the difficulty in prioritizing at the story level rather than epic or theme level so I thought this was a pretty nice presentation.

Really liked the idea of Kano analysis as an additional screen on the product backlog : exciters/delighters, and mandatory/baseline. Particularly the idea of driving that via a simple survey of just a few tens of users – a functional questioning asking how people feel if it’s present and a dysfunctional question asking how people feel if it’s absent.

Bit long, but definitely worth your time if you’re using doing agile development and working with a product backlog (doubly so if your backlog is more of an attic that never gets looked at). Weird little thing, note the slides appear below the video of Mike doing the hand waving and talking which makes full screen not so useful on it. You’ll miss important stuff… so maybe move the browser down 1/8 of the screen before starting the presentation.

(via someone, but I don’t remember who… =< )