What it's all about

... is illustrated well in this Savage Chickens cartoon.

In the office yesterday for a short Sunday shift, only nine and a half hours. Ingrid and I were alone until about 2pm when AY, his second-in-command and a flunky turned up to work in our office on their project. Cheeky buggers. He also deigned to talk to Ingrid for an hour about the project; as she reported afterwards, he glanced over the first few rooms, expressed general goodwill and confidence, then dived into detail design of one feature of room twelve.

Driving home with SIC, she asked how we were doing; I told her the situation as we see it. She expressed worry and sympathy, and asked me whether I thought Ingrid was pushing herself too hard, whether she was in danger of collapsing into illness or burnout. Different management styles in action; surely not just the fact that AY is male and SIC female.

Packed everything up for the move to another room in a different co-worker's apartment tonight. Looking through absent colleague's music CDs, it occurs to me for the first time that the record companies might actually be less than total frauds and liars: well over 90% of the CDs in her collection are copies! It's a generational thing, I guess: she grew up with easy, high-quality copying. Would we have "shared" copies of our LPs, had we had a suitable technology? Probably.

Here's another Public Service Announcement. If you haven't yet read Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Koran then drop what you're doing and find a copy. It's a short, easy read, you'll finish it in an evening. A truly delightful book, quite wonderful. Upon finishing it, I turned back to the first page and started again.

More later, perhaps.