I’m trying to freewrite, creating an environment where I can’t be disturbed. I used my alarm clock from the kitchen – the alarm chicken. Only, just before I got started, I was disturbed by its’ noise, since it is a mechanical clock that keeps ticking.

Last weekend, and Monday and Tuesday I spent at European Consultants’ camp in Berdorf, Luxembourg.

The freewriting workshop hosted by Laurent Bossavit was one of the highlights in four days filled with highlights. I’m not sure any written description can do justice to the friendly, familiar, sometimes puzzling often hilarious and challenging company I found myself in.

During the freewriting workshops for instance, I spent seven minutes on a task (or constraint) set by someone else. I had to write a fantasy story. After laughs about the multiple meanings of fantasy, I set myself to writing a story about a hobbit.

This was the first time since (I had to in) high school that I wrote a fiction story. I found it actually quite fun. Besides having to continue writing leads to funny sentences sometimes, as appeared in the story.

While writing the first sentence I found I had to have a name for my hobbit, but couldn’t find one, so instead I decided to make the hobbit so drunk he couldn’t remember his name.

I hope that showed something about how freewriting can help to free creative juices.

One more thing I find with freewriting is that even with a few simple, generative rules you can play.

One of the rules said that you have to write without stopping. How to play with that one? Simple: write slower, so you have time to think more.

Actually, I had to write slower, because I got cramped, which seems to be a common experience when you don’t practice freewriting much.

The chicken has just rang, I now notice I was so absorbed in writing that I didn’t notice the ticking anymore.

Laurent will also host a lightning writing workshop at xp days Benelux which I heartily recommend if you want to write more often and with more fun.

(asides from a few minor edits, this blog entry was freewritten in ten minutes plus a bit, with pen and paper, with a few minor spelling edits afterwards).

If you don't want a swinging song to stay in your head all day, I recommend you do not download Chinese Fairytale ;-). Sweet pop music with a groove, a la Saint Etienne. Enjoy.

With me in this case. The world is also interesting, with many things going on on the energy front at the moment.

I just arrived home from the pair programming party in Mechelen. I worked with Pascal van Cauwenberghe on our new project 'hourensou' (Japanese for spinach, and for a practice from the Toyota way). We're building hourensou to help us level out the load for the various events we organize.

The amount of 'stuff' we have to do is getting to the level that some pragmatic automation will save us time. We've got about six people signed up to help already, as this will also be a fun exercise in making a ruby on rails application.

We also talked a bit about blogging. Pascal suggested making small deadlines for yourself and finishing 'whatever' within that deadline. So that is what I did, I made up most of this blog entry (and some more) while I drove back.

Agile Alliance election results

I was eligible as member for the agile alliance board, and I didn't get elected. A friend asked me about the election results today, apparently they haven't been made public or sent to the members yet.

Looking at the list of board members on the agile alliance website it hasn't been updated for at least a year, so I'll break the news then, this is what Rachel Davies mailed me:

The people who were elected this year are: Mike Cohn, Rachel Davies, Jutta Eckstein, Ron Jeffries, Ole Jepson, Brian Marick, Angela Martin, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock.

I congratulate the new board, and wish them a lot of fun in a year where the alliance continuously delivers value.

So, watsgeburt with me? I've been giving three training courses in a month. Two runs of eXperience Agile here in Eindhoven, and training plus coaching on Pair Programming in Karlsruhe. That has been a lot of fun and learning, some of which I hope to feed back to this blog or the systems thinking wiki.

It was also quite exhausting, maybe that's why I had a mild flu last week. This week, I was taking it fast and slow at the same time. I'm focusing on getting things done, first attacking stuff that annoys me or stressing me out. The strange thing I find, is that while I was working on 'stuff' (which I normally postpone, because It's not stuff for nothing - I hate it), I was getting lots of inspiration. As well as a lot of stuff and things done, I was hyper active this week.

What am I up to next? I'm scheduled to give some more courses in September, meanwhile making some time for vacation (It seems I'm going sailing again :-) ), do a bit of coaching here and there (I'll be in Karlsruhe august 4 and 5, so if you'd like to grab a beer, feel free to contact me). I'm also working on developing and/or marketing a few new courses on agile software development and interpersonal communication.

I'm not likely to be bored. Ever. I'll be off now, the garden and my lunch are calling me. In the meantime, I recommend a listen to watsgeburt.

I see it more as being very playful with language. I couldn't care less for most Nederhop (Dutch Rap), but this one I find hilarious - the lyrics seem to be a good deal gibberish, and the beats are excellent. The word watsgeburt itself is a neologism (or gibberish, depending on your point of view ;-), and since according to my regular search engine, it hasn't spread to English yet, let's see what happens ;-).

Watsgeburt means 'what has happened', and it's pronounced in a funny quasi American accent. There's an attempt attempt at watsgeburts etymology over at the vpro website. The origin seems unclear, most likely it originates from another .