Blues Brothers - 30 Year Anniversary in 2010

I've written about Breaking Away as an important movie in my life, inspiring a fascination with racing bicycles, Italy and la dolce vita.

That was 1979. Here comes 1980. Last year of high school, and The Blues Brothers hits our NZ screens.

A year ago I rented the original 1980 movie to watch with Noah (with handy ear covers ready for the obvious bits), and was pretty disappointed. Sound was so-so, the picture was grimy, and the story hinged on the high points of musical performance, plunging into dull periods of conversation and inaction.

I recall yawning and reminding myself that memories can play tricks on you.

We rented it again tonight.

And discovered to our joy that John Landis has managed to pull together an extended edition with remastered sound, new scenes and extended dialogue in various places. It's back to being a classic!

What a tragedy that the original cut, tested in a movie theatre in Los Angeles and declared by studio executives as "only going to attract a black audience", has been lost forever. They forced Landis to shorten the movie so it required no intermission.

With its 30th anniversary next year, it's time to celebrate what the Blues Brothers did to create an interest in the blues for people like me as far from Chicago as it is about possible to get on this planet. This must be the greatest B-movie ever made, with more superstar cameos than the V&A museum cameo collection.

And to file under 'subliminal influence', Ray's Music Exchange (with the subsequent 'Shake Your Tailfeather' dance spectacular) has always been my favourite scene - check out which guitar the kid is trying to steal when Ray shoots 2 well-placed warning shots into the wall from the other end of the shop!








That's pretty much how I would have looked if I hadn't been able to take my black stratocaster that fateful day in April! And why going into music shops can be such fun when there are people browsing the shelves around you who, despite not being Ray Charles, Steve Cropper or Donald Duck Dunn, could highly likely still light the place up in an instant.

“It's 106 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses.”

“Hit it.”

Why I ride a motorcycle to work in Melbourne - a series.

Crazy old guy on cellphone at the top of his voice explaining to his Mum how he gets 100 minutes of talk time with the new phone he had to buy after the other one stopped working when he slept on the street in the rain at the weekend and he gets 150 texts per month for free as well and he's now just by City Road but going to St Kilda...

Wish his Mum would tell him to use his inside voice.

10 people tightly squeezed around me, all on iPhones and iPods trying to not hear crazy guy. MX newspaper with massive photo of Katy Perry's boobs falling out of her dress with headline "Has Katy got a bung eye?" based on a 2 line vox populi. 290,000 people in Melbourne read this crap every day?

Mouth "excuse me" with walking finger mime 15 times to headphone escapists just to squeeze past and get out at Albert Park. I'll take 40 degrees on the Gixxer in leather any day of the week thanks.

Favourite things - Herge illustration of Australia and NZ

Tintin was always a favourite character for me, although returning to them with Noah I have to say they are hard work to read out loud - they need the voices and accents I hear in my head but cannot reproduce. The pen and ink drawings are captivating enough on their own.

This illustration in 1959's Explorers on the Moon caught my eye - look which tiny part of the blue planet Herge has chosen to show.

Vintage Cycling Postcards - 1958 Corriere dello Sport

Corriere dello Sport was a main Italian sporting newspaper, and this card promotes the 1958 motorcycle and bicycle show. I've seen this card on eBay for up to 40 euros, I got it in the same batch as the Bartali and Coppi cards in 1994.

On the reverse it has a lovely stamp and postmark.

Vintage Cycling Postcards - Totosport 38th Giro D'Italia

This card is from the 1955 Giro, won by Fiorenzi Magni for the 3rd time. The card promotes Totosport, the Italian betting agency.

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Gino Bartali with Giordani Bike

Another in my postcard collection from that trip to the Giro d'Italia in the 1990s.

The rivalry between Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi is well documented on Wikipedia, so I won't attempt to add to the existing catalog of observation and opinion on the subject. Gino was a legend in his own right, even without the rivalry that stopped a nation.

Personally blessed by 3 popes, and known as Gino the Pious, he died at the grand age of 85 in 2000 after open heart surgery .

Like all postcards, I struggle to guess if it's a fake or real. Finding it in an Italian flea-market in 1994 gives me some confidence it's not a digital print, as technology was not that great then. Nor had the internet made a global market for cycling memorabilia.

I found one the same recently on eBay in Italy for 15 euros that looks pretty similar, though the signature has some interesting variations and the picture has a pure black and white treatment where mine has a blue tone. You decide which is real!

International differences - getting a job in America

The startup I went to work for in the USA, now rolled up into a company called PreVisor, was in the serious business of selecting employees for Fortune 500 companies of all kinds.

The scale of the USA employment market is massive. Walmart for example, have over a million employees, turning over at an unbelievable rate (because the job sucks!), and over 12m job applicants a year. Most apply on-line, so how do you deal with that many resumes in your in-tray?

ePredix was a genius idea, providing an online, short psychological assessment which scored in real-time a view of the suitability of the person for the job. One key was that it was legally defensible, asking job-relevant questions that truly predicted the likelihood of success in a job.

This test was what we were competing with.

If you can't read the questions, click on the picture and it will open in a new window.

And think about what you'd be prepared to say to get a $6/hr job at a Rent-A-Center branch in Arkansas.

International differences - the philosophy of Click & Clack

If you have never listened to Car Talk, then you have not lived. It is probably the #1 syndicated show on radio in the USA, and listened to by a wide variety of people - many not interested in cars at all.

Starting out as a mechanical advice show on Public Service radio, it morphed through the personalities of the Magliozzi brothers into a sociological and philosophical series of pithy observations, through the lens of a mechanic. As vehicles became less and less fixable by the average American, the show became more and more about people.

Our neighbour in Minneapolis had been on Car Talk - she was famous! You have to have an interesting car problem, which you line up weeks or months in advance, then the show calls you live on air.

Their podcasts and books are priceless - check them out on iTunes. Make sure you get to the end, where they will make up a set of phoney credits for the show.

Here's one of my favourite moments of Tom and Ray's reflections on life in the USA (and its difference to life elsewhere), in their newspaper column from July 2003.

Don't get me started on Americans and guns.

International differences - another in the series

NZ Sports Culture.

Can you tell I've just been going through some old folders from our time in the USA? Hence all the posts in this series.

This cartoon was a complete surprise to me when I opened the Minneapolis paper one day. Made me homesick.

Priceless.

International, but not worldy. The true meaning of POOF

The stated aim of this blog was to reflect on the cultural differences that sometimes trip us up when crossing international borders - you think you know what is going on, but in reality it is something quite different.

I hung onto this email from 2003 as one of the prime examples. ePredix, whom I worked for in San Francisco and Minneapolis, were part-owned by a large, successful, global consulting form Personnel Decisions International.

As Australians and kiwis we had a bit of a chuckle at this faux pas, but my time since has given me cause to wonder about the blunders we all made in reverse!

Nice save Cindy Marsh.

The Psychology of Amplifiers

I do love XKCD.

Lonely Planet Band for Christmas

The band added Robbie William's Let Me Entertain You to the Espy set and went wild again celebrating the end of 2009 in style. Once again supported by Sparkle Motion, who performed a tight version of their Espy set and showed their musicianship.

Bunch of miscellaneous photos, as always biased towards Slabotomy's #5 guitarist.




Here's a taste of the skills of Mark Broadhead shooting bands and events.

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (2 in a series)

As a child I was fascinated by the stories of UFOs in Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods series of books. Well, there's my first sighting on the horizon of this photo, taken returning home from Thoughtworks' Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney.

Sadly, too many easy explanations I suppose. Gas balls escaping from a federal carbon trading policy perhaps...

Melbourne Weather Phenomenon (1 in a series)

Observed last week from our rooftop on a day of moist, Southerly winds driving up against the side of Melbourne's tallest tower block on a bright, sunny day.

I prefer to believe it is an outpouring of sonic energy and awesomeness from a searing 1997 Gibson SG being cranked up by the occupant of an upper-level apartment. He shall remain nameless in case the Department for the Environment get any complaints about contribution to global warming.

Pseud's Corner - Signspotting in Melbourne

If only we had some effing eggs we could make an effing omelette. Much amusement for 8 year old boys of all ages.

Where did all Melbourne's water go?

38%!! Bizarrely, I am so excited that Melbourne's water storage levels are back above the 1/3 of capacity mark for the first time in ages. But the situation deserves an economist's eye methinks...


If you think I can rant about the dodgy nature of Melbourne's toll roads and speeding taxes, don't even get me started on the water situation in Australia's fastest growing city (1800 new residents a week according to The Age last weekend).

Expect a Michael Moore documentary at some stage on the collusion between Victoria's state government and the desalination industry that has led us (via corporate wankerism and short term political cycles) through utter political brinksmanship to the edge of a crisis where the only solution has become vast water projects.

Any planner would have to be blind(folded) to not see the correlation between Melbourne's population growth and the decline in our water stored in the city's dams and reservoirs. Instead, playing to our bleeding heart environmental psyches, the blame has fallen on the uncontrollable 'global climate change problem'. "No incompetence to see here Mr Public, it's all the fault of that dreadful climate change bogeyman".

First step: prepare to be sobered up and go to this page on the Melbourne Water website to see for yourself how the trend has been in water storage since 1997. Great interactive graph - static version above. Ugly situation indeed.

Let's see what the Bureau of Meterology have to say about the long term rainfall trends for Melbourne. Always ups and downs basically, although the worst time in history has definitely been the last decade.

Plenty of websites will confirm we have had a drought since 1997 . Is that to blame? Well, certainly - less inflows means an inevitable decline in water levels.

But how have we been growing our storage facilities over the last 3 decades to cope with the completely predictable (compared to weather forecasting that is) influx of immigrants like me? Storage in lakes? Storage in urban reservoirs? Stormwater storage in the monumental new suburbs going up on Melbourne's outskirts? Water tanks? Conservation programs?

Checking out this page on Melbourne Water's site I think we see the culprit - the dreaded 'corporatisation' starts to occur in the 1990s:

1991: The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works merged with a number of smaller urban water authorities to form Melbourne Water.

1994: Three years later, the Victorian Government announced that Melbourne Water was going to be divided into three retail water companies and a wholesale water company.

The only 'new' storage construction I can see on this timeline since bureaucratisation is the celebrated reconnection of the Tarago Reservoir in 2009, the closure of which was the first act of the new-born Melbourne Water organisation 15 years earlier.

The timeline is full of money invested in strategies and action plans, campaigns and buzzwords, retreats and think-tanks, call centres and quality assurance programs, millions was spent on computer billing systems, advertising and bugger all done to actually store more water.

I guess they all really missed having Wikipedia back in the 1990s. The planners and politicians just needed this graph on their wall to jolly along their water resource strategy thingo.

Turn it 90 degrees to the right and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our declining water levels in the dams.

Lonely Planet Band Rocks the Espy

The gig finally arrived.



A great audience filled the Gershwin Room at the Espy on a Wednesday night - mid-summer this time so lots of beer bought to keep the venue happy. The pool of friends and family from both the Thoughtworks band Sparkle Motion (who opened the night with a hard-rocking set), and Slabotomy who played 2 sets raised over $1200 for The Hotham Mission.

Tony and Maureen Wheeler came along to support the crew, and like most were amazed by the rotating talent on stage.

Photos are mostly from LP documentarian Mark Broadhead, whose skills at capturing such vibrance in next to no-light situations are renowned. Please excuse the obvious bias - I've only grabbed the ones with me in them, as I know Mark likes to have a bit of an edit before he puts them out in public.

I played bass on Hot and Cold, added a nerve tangling E on Song 2, held the G - F - G - Bb - F - G line for Lady Marmalade, some rocking chords on Dakota (my favourite) and was honoured to tinkle away behind Zjelko on a searing Creep. 6 notes, 5 songs, and another lesson in how to bring the house down from the gods of Slabotomy's theatre of rock.

Agile Australia 2009

Eric Jansen of Thoughtworks sent this photo of me in full flight evangelising Agile and Lean software development at October's Agile 2009 conference in Sydney, Australia.

The slide is one of my favourites - and comes with a quote from Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy where the war psychologist treating a variety of soldiers with new psychological therapies reflects on how change is a messy process:

"Rivers knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay."

Don't expect your change to agile to be elegant!

The conference was excellent, with a range of speakers including Jeff Smith, the CIO of Suncorp and Dave Thomas from Bedarra - both of whom you can see on video on the conference site.

Lonely Planet Band Returns - Espy Hotel, 25 November 2009

Get this in your diary quick – the Espy is always a special night out for Lonely Planet and the band.

Joined this year by Thoughtworks' Melbourne band Sparkle Motion, it promises 3 sets of rock so good you won’t dare admit that you stayed home and watched NCIS Los Angeles instead.

Proceeds to the Hotham Mission.

That stunning poster was done by David Robertson, Ezra and Will from Robertson Communications Consultancy (R+R) in Wellington New Zealand.

Consumer Review: Melbourne Eastlink toll system, impossibly stupid.

The occasional h1bpositive blog visitor might recall the fine Winter's day out Matthew, Jamie and I had on the motorbikes back in June. After riding to Noojee, we came home via the much lauded Eastlink, Melbourne's new tollway, hailed as the poster-boy of public-private infrastructure funding.

We'd each organised our pre-paid tollway passes to travel on Eastlink, a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare as the rules and processes for motorcycles and cars vary considerably, and the Eastlink/Breeze web page would count among the worst possible User Interface designs ever created.


I eventually bought 4 passes over the phone (figuring we'd ride again out that way sometime soon), and had the foresight to email myself with the order details, just in case something went awry in future. Call it intuition, or call it twenty plus years working with computers and customers for a living.

To my amazement, in September, I got an overdue notice for riding on Eastlink without a pass. One trip, 12:32pm on June 20, 2009. Clocked riding into the Melba Tunnel in an unauthorised fashion. Outstanding Debt:

Toll charge $1.04
Invoice fee $8.45
Lookup fee $1.40
GST $1.08
TOTAL $11.97

I rang Breeze to seek an explanation. Now - quick caveat to my rant here - the lady I spoke to was sensational with her service, but, she's working for bozos. $2.5b bozos. First I had to quote the 12 digit invoice number - not the reminder notice 12 digit number, but the original invoice number buried in fine print of the letter on page 1. Man, these guys are planning for the future - no Y2k-like character limit for their invoice numbers. Not real easy to communicate over the telephone however.


That number, along with my registration plate, motorcycle type and colour, enabled her to see the infringement notice. Then, she logged into a second screen that enabled her to see if that license plate number had any purchases registered against it. Tick, tick, tick, one moment please caller, tick, tick... and yes ... there they are, 4 passes purchased on 19 June.

So... the 'computer' could see my registration plate had 4 passes credited against it, and the computer could see that I had made a trip on 20 June, but somehow the computer had recorded that at 12:32 on 20 June, the mighty Gixxer was without passes on the tollway. The pass ordering computer and the traffic tracking computer seem to be different computers.

I guess that could happen - the road construction consortium would have outsourced vehicle tracking, invoicing and administration to the lowest bidders, as they all do nowadays. There might have been a momentary glitch in 'the computer' as the Gixxer roared by? So maybe it's actually 3 computers? One on the road, one for ordering, and one for billing? Or 4? Road, ordering, billing, infringing? Or 5? Road, order, bill, infringe and reconcile?

As an IT professional, my mind boggles as to how these things happen, and it's an embarrassment to the profession. So, who are the chumps who put together this computer system, and how much did it cost? Perhaps they did it on the cheap?

The billing infrastructure was part of a much trumpeted $2.5b (yep, billion) traffic management system for this tollway. The winning bidder was Traffic Management Systems - a listed rollup of various Australian traffic signage and control systems companies, which is listed under the TTI stock code.

TTI's publicly stated turnover has only been in the range of $57m - $95m, stating turnover of $57m in the year the tollway system was built (they only had 6 months to bill between the contract being let in November 2005 and end of financial year in June 2006), then $81.5m in 2007, and $95m in 2008 when the roadway finally opened. Thus they clearly didn't get all of the $2.5 billion. I'm going to guess a mere $100m for the computer system over the 2+ years.

A $100m computer system then. Reckon they would only give that contract to a really proven and solid software development company, that had a track record and long term profitability. So let's check out TTI's track record of success during Australia's largest infrastructure boom from 1998 to today:

WTF? Peaking at $46 at the end of 1999, these guys are an unprofitable penny dreadful trading at not more than a few cents a share for years on end. Have been since a year before they got the Eastlink contract. At 6c a share, I could own the whole damn company with the money I'm paying in bogus $11.97 tollway fines.

Chances of them having the smartest IT people to make that system work? Not good.

Customer Service have promised to get back to me with how this all happened. I won't hold my breath, as without doubt that's yet another computer system they were recording my complaint details into when I rang.

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13.10.2009 Result!

Product Review: Suunto T1 Heart Rate Monitor

Suunto - Finnish for 'Disappointment'?

After my little heart problem in 2008, I decided to return to the Heart Rate Monitor market after several years in absentia, years spent muttering like a crazy person about pathetic battery life, interference issues, fragile chest straps and repeated disappointment.

In the 1990s, most bike shops were pretty reluctant to sell them, as they delivered way too many opportunities to test out the warranty service of the manufacturers.

The actual NEED to have a new gadget was too much of an opportunity to miss in life. The main result of my 5+ hours of internet research was the conclusion I really wanted a Power Meter of some kind instead. At several thousand dollars I was able to resist that temptation with ease.

My friend Glen has been a Polar stalwart for many years, valuing the data functions, the big watches, and the software for his PC. He was not loving the need to send them away to get batteries changed, which seemed bizarre in this day and age. Nor was he loving the data loss every time we rode under the power lines outside the Scienceworks museum on our Altona rides, but he'd worked out how to join 2 broken training sessions again on the computer.

I just couldn't get my head around their range of products. The ideally featured Polar HRM (for me) came as a bike computer, not a watch. I don't like a big hulking bike computer, I prefer my little minimalist unit. And I wanted something to wear in the gym.

Not to mention there was no way I was paying THAT much for an HRM!

With plenty of time on my hands recovering from open heart surgery, I finally concluded that the new Suunto range of HRMs, provided they lived up to the other products developed and sold by Suunto (avionics included), were a fine-looking, 12 month warrantied, and well featured product for a great price.

So, to cut a long review short, I'm here to tell you they're rubbish.


The critical flaw is the plastic watch face, and the lack of a protective bezel. Within weeks this watch becomes unreadable in normal use. It's not something you think about, how much you bump your watch. Now I know why the Japanese watches with plastic faces have such monstrous surrounds (think G-Shock). And why expensive watches have glass faces.


The flaw that actually killed by T1 was the screws in the back coming loose in Month 13 of ownership (I lost 2 before it became obvious) rendering it open to the elements, and subsequently ... dead.

Desperate to keep the standout cool factor of the Suunto range, I went back to the catalogue to find the unit that would overcome these problems - surely the really expensive ones had glass faces? Nope - 100% plastic across the range. Disappointment, thy name is Suunto.

Review Score:

Function: 7/10. While it held together (for 13 months), it proved to be an easily understood HRM. Unreadable, but easily understood. Battery life acceptable, and ability to change batteries in the watch and chest strap yourself highly prized.

Form: 2/10. Despite looking very cool in the box, life in the real world overwhelmed the Suunto - the plastic face became decrepit in no time, and then the screws that held the back in came out, rendering it ... dead.

Price: 3/10. Part of the reason for buying was the low price. I could buy 2 for the price of a Polar or similar unit in a mainstream brand. Then again, I would have to buy 2 (or in fact 3-4) if they have this lifespan.

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Eddy Merckx

I've bought a lot of stuff on eBay over the years, particularly when it comes to restoring vintage racing bikes.

I think this postcard might count as the dodgiest thing I've ever obtained, 99% likely to be a simple reproduction (including the signature) - which is pretty much impossible to tell on the web, and hard enough to tell in the flesh in this era of digital printing. I've seen way too many of this card since with the signature in identical position!

That said, I didn't pay much and it celebrates The Cannibal in full racing pose on one of the 2 coolest racing bikes in history.

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Fausto Coppi Bianchi 1953 World Champion

One of my bikes is a Fausto Coppi Lugano 53, a steel bike made in the 1990s to celebrate the great Fausto Coppis' world championship win in Switzerland in 1953.

Coincidentally, I also have a signed postcard (the signature on the back matches the sticker on the bike uncannily - I guess he autographed about a million things in his time!) celebrating his win in Switzerland.


Coppi also cleaned up the Giro that year, one of only a handful of cyclists ever to win a major tour and the Worlds in the same year. Chapeau!

Cycling Vintage Postcards - Fausto Coppi Emotonico 1946

The story of Fausto Coppi has been written many times, and I've no need to try to outdo any of the authors.

When we were in Italy to see the 1995 Giro D'Italia, we found ourselves stuck in Florence on a quiet Sunday morning. We're read about a Sunday market in the hills nearby, with a bus that went to Fiesole, leaving only a 5km walk along country roads.

One of the treasures collected that day was some bike racing postcards from the 1940s and 1950s - plenty of the stall holders refused to sell us anything being foreigners, but somehow my passion for cycling won out.

This card dates from the period when Coppi was restarting his career after the war. As a prisoner in a low security environment he had enjoyed a small opportunity to get back on his bike, and came out of retirement with the minimum of sponsors, one of whom was Emotonico.

He won 3 stages of the Giro in 1945, competed in several other major races and his career, once in danger of being starved to death by the deprivations of life as a POW was reborn, with life on a major trade team.

Cocksure - Malcolm Gladwell on the Global Financial Crisis

This story from the New Yorker is an excellent teaching tool for Australians and New Zealanders attempting to understand or explain the underlying causes of the GFC.

Speaking at a special conference in May, Gladwell, reflects on whether it was incompetence or overconfidence that tipped us all into 2008's recession, and has subsequently cost the US Government North of $5 trillion (so far) to try to dig their way out of the shit.

He uses the case of the British army, arriving at Gallipoli in April 1915 at the peak of their military powers - by far the superior combatant, but frittering away their advantage while they set up their battle 'governance' - ships offshore for the command, soldiers ashore with all the administrivia of the typical British Army battle setup being put in place before they attacked. Their confidence of victory was supreme.

Amazingly, this was after a shockingly failed naval attack on the Dardennelles, which had effectively telegraphed the British intention to invade 4 long weeks before the fateful late April beach assaults.

Infamously, on April 25th when the British command realised their cocksure attitude had just cost them the strategic advantage against an opposition perceived to be Turkish rabble with limited ammunition, they pressed the button and proceeded to sacrifice 44,000 Allied soldiers on the beaches and hillsides of Gallipoli, with 96,000 wounded. The Turkish army lost nearly 87,000 men, while the Anzacs had 11,000 casualties and 24,000 wounded.

The many ensuing battles at Gallipoli are ingrained in a generation of kiwis and Australians minds - in a way they were nation-forming, as they they were for modern Turkey.

New Yorker is kind enough to offer their embedding code to bloggers, so I encourage you to watch this video and then buy a copy of the New Yorker some time to encourage them along. The print industry needs all the help it can get these days!

It's not about the money - bogus taxes disguised as 'road safety' (again)

Living in America I learned one important fact - the moment someone says "it's not about the money", they might as well go to the nearest whiteboard and write up in blue marker "actually, it's all about the money".

I've written before (perturbed of Port Melbourne?) about the money being made by the advertising and media industry from bogus anti-speeding advertising campaigns developed to allegedly prevent people speeding on Victorian roads (as opposed to cleansing the obvious tax raising nature of the speed cameras). Now the Victorian opposition have outed some further facts on the road safety impact of the massive increase in speed camera installations across Victoria (from a story by Clay Lucas in the Age, September 29, p3):


That would be nothing then.

$437m will be raised this year by the Victorian Government from speeding taxes, up from $397m last year. That buys a lot of government salaries and screwed up IT projects (don't even get me started) for Mr Brumby and his village improvement committee.

I suppose we should be delighted someone in Australia (other than the mining industry) can manage to grow their business in the Global Financial Crisis.

Click on the article to read the whole sorry thing.

Go forth and make your voluntary tax contributions, Victorians.

We know Agile rocks, but can Rock be Agile?

If I learned nothing else this Winter, it was that the process of making music in a rock band is pretty damned spontaneous and collaborative - with changing requirements the whole time as singers come and go from rehearsals, too many guitarists of differing abilities attempt to play on the same songs, musical keys need transposing for different vocalists and instruments, and downloaded tabs proving to be largely misleading and mostly wrong.

Some of the funnier moments were when the riffing of our talented lead guitarists and bass player started to go awry (it happened occasionally), and cries of "Jazz!" would go up, seemingly a code word for 'over-wrought bullshit riffing going nowhere here". Or maybe it's just that Tad has a big black Fender Jazz bass?

To the newbie, some rehearsals seemed to confirm every stereotype of rock music (think Spinal Tap), and as the resident 'Nigel' I would occasionally start looking for tiny stonehenges descending from the ceiling of the warehouse. But there is a mojo about a rock band that is so tangible you could use it to keep the 7:30pm Pizza delivery warm while a troublesome vocal is ironed out.


With this in mind, with great trepidation I suggested a little experiment as we kicked off the Christmas/ Summer band this week. An Agile story board - with suggested songs on cards, prioritised at a standup before each rehearsal, building up the set-list and eliminating the cries of "what's next?" and "where's the vocalist for this one gone?"

Would this kill the band's mojo? Plenty of software developers claim Agile does, but they don't work for Lonely Planet ;-) They're using their 'mojo' to build crap code somewhere else.

I spend much of my day job devoted to implementing Agile Software Development at Lonely Planet, where the fundamental principles of managing the delivery of software in a socio-technical fashion have a lot of parallels to the way I observed our band working - particularly getting started and getting organised each Thursday night, but also ensuring close teamwork from a multi-disciplinary musical group, and regularly reviewing what works and what doesn't.

Needless to say there was hue and cry from the artists about "it's not ROCK!" and "you can't organise rock music!"

It's always a little hard to tell among a dozen good-natured Australians in the presence of 2 dozen Carlton Bitter precisely when you are having the piss taken out of you (sometimes easier just to assume 'all the time'). Anyway, I was saved from humiliation by the real musicians grabbing the tools (board, cards, microphone, pens - see the photo) and in a matter of minutes we had the priority song-list for the night.

Someone quickly suggested we add the vocalist's name to the card. No cards would get played if they didn't have the requisite MP3 track to listen to, the lyrics on paper, and Tabs. Some cards got prioritised downwards for when our ace drummer is able to join the team later in the year. A card even got put in the 'not to be developed' column (Dave, we miss you already).

I'm fairly certain when my personal mini-stonehenge arrives it will have 'Scrum-master Flash' or a similar witticism etched on it to remind me of the evening - but anyway, we used to try to organise the set-list on an Excel bloody spreadsheet. Even I can see that certainly is not Rock.

Google Goollery Recognition for Lesley Melody's Paintings

A cool website bubbled to the surface of the blogosphere recently called Goollery.org. It features lots of different expressions of the way Google has changed our lives, many of them artistic, but lots of them practical and inspirational as well.

The great news is that Lesley's Google Earth paintings have been accepted to feature on the site - and there is the Heathrow one above. Such excitement - thanks Goollery!

The 2 paintings featured are in her current Gallery/Exhibition as Artist in Residence in Melbourne Central.

The Etape de Tour Saved My Life - lessons for cyclists (and others)

The 10 things I learned from Open Heart Surgery

The afterword to the 5 part story of how a perfectly innocent doctor's signoff for an Etape de Tour bike race entry form revealed a collapsing aortic heart valve, resulting in 44 year old cyclist Nigel Dalton having open heart surgery in early 2008.

Feel free to make an appropriate hand gesture and go "well, duhhhhh!" at any of these:

1. You can find a way to keep riding bikes after open heart surgery - you do not have to give up your passion, or wrap yourself in cotton wool. Racing - probably not, and you should own the best protective gear possible plus carry some extra equipment (see part 5). Ride with friends who know what to do if there's a tumble, and avoid drafting complete strangers.
   
2. Not all serious health problems have visual, external symptoms. As a fit, active cyclist I had no symptoms at all for what should have been a debilitating condition. My heart took a year on drugs to shrink back to its normal size after surgery. Get an annual medical checkup. I'm talking to you guys out there, mostly.
3. $600 (about $300 after an Australian medicare rebate) spent on a full ECG and stress test is the best investment you can make in your cardiac health if you are in your 40s. Contact your GP or someone like the Victorian Heart Centre at Epworth Hospital in Melbourne. Don't piss around with this stuff, monitor your blood pressure at the very least.
   
4. Get a personal trainer with rehabilitation credentials (like Trewrehab) to manage your physical recovery program after big surgery. Being in a gym with all those athletes around will be much more motivating than being in a class sharing a few exercise bikes and tips on giving up smoking, and I think it's more likely you will avoid the dreaded cardiac depression.
5. If you're ever given the choice of suffering the acute embarrassment of an early in the evening pain-killing suppository by the pretty, charming blonde nurse with tiny, delicate fingers; or waiting until later that night so it doesn't wear off by 5am - take it early. I did, and the night nurse/former Soviet bloc weightlifter with fingers like a rolled up Saturday editions of the New York Times will never know my immense relief at that decision.
   
6. Do what you are passionate about before you suffer a major health problem, so that when you are questioning the meaning of your life afterwards (brought on largely by the avoidance of the opposite condition!), the answer comes fairly easily. Hopefully it was "doing what I am already doing" as I was lucky to discover.
7. It took me 12 months to recover fitness after open heart surgery (valve replacement). They'll tell you 3 months so as not to depress you, but don't count on it. See item 9 as the corollary to this lesson.
   
8. After 2 months, whilst you feel so much better, you are not back to normal. Beta blockers (like Sotalol in my case, to prevent cardiac arrhythmia), anti-coagulants (Warfarin), Panadol and the healing process will combine in ways you never imagined to make some job requirements as a Manager almost impossible. You NEED high blood pressure to 'pop' new ideas from that brain! Get more sleep as you are learning to listen to a whole new set of signals from your body as to what 'tired' and 'enough' are
   
9. It does get better every single day. Celebrate that.
10. Hug your family every day (and your friends whenever you can) because there is a chance in this world you might not see them tomorrow.