I particularly resonated with the tale he tells in the beginning, about how writing classes in school almost killed his desire to write. It almost did that for me too. Working from an outline doesn’t work for me. I usually wrote my essays the night before, when I was angry enough to start writing. Afterwards my MSc thesis almost did it. I find it hard to write where my energy is not.
But apparently, something draws me towards writing of some sort, even though lately it’s been limited to blog entries, e-mails and instant messages.

I said “I’m reading”, in the first paragraph, because I got somewhat stuck on the first exercise, which is deceptively simple…
It is a test to measure the time it takes for you to start writing down a fieldstone.

I’m Sorry, did I break your concentration?

I thought,

how hard could it be. I’m in my office, I’ve got pens, paper, computer.

I failed this test. It took me longer than five seconds to start writing something down. The five second test showed me I had no index cards present, couldn’t find a pen and it took me much more than five seconds to open firefox, navigate to my wiki (there’s a bookmark in thet toolbar but I don’t see it, apparently), and find a suitable page or make a new one.

Clearly I wasn’t ready to start applying this method…

After this test, I’ve changed a couple of things in my environment. I made sure there was a fresh stack of index cards and some pens beside my bed (The title and introduction of this entry originated there). And I finally got around to make the gnome-blog applet on my computers’ desktop functional. I need something I could just post to, and worry about organizing it later. The wiki is great for writing articles-to-be and relating them, as well as for collecting systems-administration stuff I figured out eventually. Finding a new page in the wiki when I have an interesting link or something pops up is sometimes enough to break my concentration;
I noticed I miss a lot of the interesting links and stuff that come up during chat sessions.

I took a first step. Make it easier to collect fieldstones. The next step would be doing something to organize the fieldstones after I’ve added them. I can search them already, which is good. Now I would like to have something to organize and relate them too.

If you have an interest in writing, want to try another style, or find your fun back doing it, I find Weinberg on Writing worth checking out.

Having enjoyed the first one a lot last year, we (Marc Evers, Vera Peeters, Pascal van Cauwenberghe, Nynke Fokma, Rob Westgeest and yours truly) decided to organise another Agile Open.

Agile Open is an unconference aka Peer Conference , where the sessions and programme are made by the pariticipants.

We scouted for another location, but ended up choosing the Elewijt Center in Mechelen again – there is something very comfortable about a well organised conference facility, where people know who you are. As I noticed last friday when we went there for a meeting. Nynke and I arrived a bit late, and before we could ask for directions we were greeted at the desk – “Ah, I was wondering if you were going to turn up today. Vera Is over there in the Lobby, next to the paintings”. I find the “Cheers factor” very important-

you wanna go where people know,
people are all the same-
you wanna go where everybody knows your name

I want a conference to have the Cheers factor (the SPA conference is where I found that first) . If the location has it already, that makes it even better.

So, I hope you wanna go to Agile Open. Space is limited to 40 people, so we can know each others’ names :-). If so, I’ll see you at April 27 and 28 in Mechelen, Belgium.

The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and
vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone
who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see
this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a
big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation
going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding
from their ears, they would get so mad.

So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an
enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion.

I had a good laugh about the waterfall 2006 conference conference yesterday. Stalwart Analysis: Especially The Effluvia of Determined Thought by Don Sengroiux made me remember the good old bad days at comp.object (read the names in the paper closesly :-) ). Have fun.

I was reading about set based development again, in the toyota way fieldbook and in the new book Mary Poppendieck is writing. If you want to participate in the review process, join the leandevelopment yahoogroup).

So, what does set based development have to do with looking for new stuff for the blog? Well, I'm still using the old rublog software for this blog. I'm trying several other things in private, with a couple of my friends to evaluate, and I hope to start using textpattern on a new blog (in dutch) that I'm planning to have soon (toyota way principle 13 - make decisions slowly by consensus, implement rapidly) now that I have found that textpattern supports most of my needs.

One of the nice things about not converging on a single solution early, is that you can allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised by what you find (even when you were not really looking :-) ). I compose electronic music every once in a while (think techno, ambient), and would like to have a podcast for that, because my friends keep asking me "and, did you make any music recently?" and I usually forget to mail around urls. While I was looking to resolve an issue I was having with textpattern, I stumbled across loudblog, a podcasting system. It took me only about fifteen minutes to set it up, so now I have a podcast, and my friends can subscripte to it if they want to keep up with what's happening musically :-) .

If I would have been totally focused on just selecting the one perfect blogging tool, I probably wouldn't have tried out loudblog and I wouldn't have had a podcast, but postponed selecting a podcasting tool until later. If I'd see bringing up the podcast in the light of set based development - it wasn't. I tried one thing, installed it, liked it and that's good enough for now (until I get dissatisfied with it and want something new ;-) )

I'm not the only one trying out new things, as I saw Johanna Rothman introducing the AYE blog.

Installing the scanner was a no brainer 'apt-get install sane' (sane is the universal scanner package in linux) and printer and scanner were both autodetected.

To get value from the first story, I scanned the 17 index cards for Rob in a couple of minutes (I was doing other things meanwhile). The scanner takes about 10 cards at a time. I made two small scripts (about 4 lines in total :-) ) to cut the cards in the correct size (10x15 centimeter) and convert everything to jpeg. I chose to use 'scanimage', a command line tool, since that was less work than xsane (a graphical front end, more suitable for incidental scanning). I made a zip file of the cards and sent them away. That was cool.

Now I was missing one feature from a table with story cards - shuffling them around. We wanted to make three choreographies, and had made markers on the cards for that. I didn't quite know what to use for that, so I left it for a couple of days. Then it dawned on me, that OpenOffice Impress ( a presentation package) has a slide sorter that makes it very easy to move slides around. Importing the scanned cards one by one was very cumbersome though. Time for the next story:

Messing with open office xml turned out to be a bit error prone (I didn't bother to read the spec either. I unzipped the sample presentation I made by hand, looked where the images were and manipulated the xml with rexml ( a ruby library for working with xml as a tree representation). I still officially dislike xml, but used this way it was very simple for me to make my openoffice more valuable to me. To see how it looks and feels, you can download these stories as Impress 2.0 (OpenDocument Presentation format) or stories as PDF.

 
Scanned index cards are handy and fun for sharing course layouts, and possibly also for archiving user stories - with other forms of electronic storage (except digital photos, but scanned cards are easier to read) I miss the visual blips and seeing the cards makes it easier for me to relive bits of a planning meeting when necessary .

Maybe there are more applications :-). If you're interested in trying out the script, let me know. It might be fun to release this as open source, but I need to do some work on packaging it then - that would go best with some feedback from early users.