Self sufficiency

I am often asked by those who do not know me well why it is that I do not have a Facebook page given my positions as Global Strategy Advisor to Facebook and Personal Guru-in-Chief to the Zuckerbergs. I could point out that there is a basic logical fallacy underlying the question, as there is no reason whatsoever for assuming that an individual should necessarily consume a product simply because they have played a pivotal role in its invention. You might as well ask why I do not take oestrogen given that I developed the photo-kinetic molecular distillation technique that underlies its production.

However, with the aim of writing an absorbing and educational blog I will ignore the logical deficiencies of the question, and tell my dear readers that the reason why I do not have a Facebook page is that my enlightened foster parents inculcated such a strong and abiding ethos of self-sufficiency in the boy Essay den Sushing which has survived undiminished into my old age. To give just one example, during those portions of my childhood in which we followed the ancient transhumance rituals of the Tibetans- moving to the higher Himalayan pastures with the arrival of Spring- my parents would construct a sleeping yurt large enough to accommodate themselves alone, leaving me and my adopted sister with the options of constructing our own yurts or facing the brutal thermal consequences and sleeping outside for the night.

Such fundamental lessons have stayed with me ever since, and explain why it is that I habitually provide for myself. You will never, for example, see me taking an easy ride on public transport- instead I will be driven in my own limousine, helicopter, jet or yacht. Nor will you find me taking the soft option of staying in hotels- instead I have taken the trouble of acquiring a globally diverse portfolio of residences so that I can support myself when travelling. No Googling either- I have developed my own search engine, cleverly designed to advertise only those products I have already decided I might buy. And as for Facebook- well, you might readily imagine that I, virtually the father of the concept, have my own self-developed social networking site, reserved exclusively for my personal use.   

Floods of incompetence

When one has attained the loftiest pre-eminence in so many fields of study it becomes natural to expect others to attend carefully and gratefully when one offers an opinion on some important matter of judgement. It was a surprise to me, therefore, when in 2011 I received a letter from the office of the Environment Minister thanking me for, but respectfully declining, my offer to form and chair an expert panel to review the  flood defence plans of his department, an offer I had made after watching televised footage of the devastating inundations in the December of that year. Of course, I knew what was behind the rejection: professional jealously and resentment on the part of the minister's chief advisor- the head of the UK Meteorological Office.

Earlier I had made public my views on a proposal by the Met' Office to invest £27 million in a new super-computer which its proponents claimed to be an essential tool to model climate change and which I knew to be a monstrous white elephant. For years the Met’ Office had been justifying an obsession with computers by arguing that the notorious inaccuracy of their long-term climate forecasts was due to inadequate investment in technology, and only if they were given an ability to collect data about the weather everywhere, and sufficiently vast computing power to  model that data, would it be possible to foretell climate change.

Nonsense.

Did Einstein divine relativity by using supercomputers to track all the world’s light rays? Of course not- he was led to his insights through the contemplative consideration of fundamental natural principles. The Met’ obsesses with observing the weather in ever increasing detail, when it is clear to anyone who steps back from the detail that a small number of established thermodynamic principles are governing the evolution of our climate. To put the point simply, a Lagrangian tensor depiction of the enthalpy of the planet, considered as a closed hermetic system with bi-variant dispersive thermal conductivity, when subjected to a de Vriess coordinate inversion with spinor distensions, reveals a clear and systematic increase in mean surface temperature consistent with more-extreme precipitation. The mathematics conveys the idea more clearly than do  my words:

Ergo even wetter winter weather in Yorkshire. A child could follow it, yet I might as well have been talking nonsense as far as the Environment Minister was concerned. I said then that it would all end in tears, floods of them.
 

BBC no longer ahead of its time

Just as we were fearing there might be no end to the management lunacy at the BBC, there has been a first sign of sensible thinking at the top of the crumbling corporation. On the radio this morning we hear the news that the broadcaster has 'cancelled its contract for screening Formula One races three years early'.

And I should think so too. What a bananas piece of scheduling was that, screening Grand Prix three years before they happen? Imagine, it is 2pm or thereabouts on Sunday 17th July 2016, and you are sat with your chums in front of the massive Korean TV which shows, from various angles, the silent empty tarmac of the Silverstone circuit, while a team of pundits explains how the race might be developing, lap by lap, in three years time. And here, one says, as the camera shows the famous left hander, the leading cars should be entering Maggots for the forty third time. Depending on the weather we might expect them all to have called into the pits at least once for a change of tyres, and etc etc. What sort of entertainment is that?

I suppose those who lobbied for the ludicrous contract had the obvious advantages in mind. I can just picture the scheduling committee meeting at which the decision to sign it was taken. A roomful of self-obsessed media types, nursing their lattes and iPads, checking off items on a PC ticklist- no the content would not offend LGBT viewers, yes it had been approved by the religious impact board, and so on, while the sponsor points out the attractively low cost of the broadcasting rights for races that have yet to happen, and that the outside broadcast van wouldn't get stuck in a ten-mile traffic jam of returning spectators on the A46 as it would if they were to screen the race itself.

I suppose we should be grateful that the idea did not spread from BBC Sport to the other farcical fiefdoms, especially BBC News with its mania for speculation. One imagines an 'Election Night Special' three years ahead of the election itself, at which a panel of pundits pontificates about the possible contenders, swing seats, the likely timing of the first completed count, and so on. No (head waggles in sad retrospection) the BBC is not the broadcasting force we had made it in my day.

The Boss

Bruce 'The Boss' Forsyth (b1949) Anglo-American singer, song-writer and entertainer. Best known for catch phrases- 'nice to see you', 'didn't he/she do well', 'your are my favourite'- and songs about the declining fortunes of the American working class. Appeared twice at Glastonbury (2009 and 2013).

PRINCE 2 Agile

The new agile version of the project management method formally known as PRINCE 2 has now been published, and what a godsend it is. After all, just because the world has finally recognised that agile methods are a much better way to manage pretty much everything, why should you have to miss-out on the esoteric mindless over-complete bureaucratic bloat-fest that you've come to know and love, especially if you are a consultant living off your PRINCE 2 expertise.

To commemorate the birth of  PRINCE 2 Agile the EDSRF is making available a limited edition of the 'iVAX', another inspired fusion of the classic and the modern. The 'iVAX', pictured below, takes the tried-and-trusted VAX mini-computer format and brings it bang up-to-date with a docking station compatible with all iPhone and iPad devices. The discreet and stylish docking facility may be seen at the top of the left hand terminal in the picture below, where it is supporting a black iPad 6s.

As with PRINCE 2 Agile, the 'iVAX' genuinely does combine the best of both worlds, as you can now view textual data from your iPhone via a crystal clear green-screen VDU, and back-up those treasured photos on 9-track 1/4 inch magnetic tape or ANSI-standard 80-char punch cards. Air-conditioning requirements for the iVAX have been kept to a minimum by the use of 80 ns cycle time (12.5 MHz) solid-state processors implemented with emitter coupled logic (ECL) macrocell arrays (MCAs).

The iVAX model shown has two terminals, two 10.5 inch tape reels, a six-bay processing unit. The memory options range from 16KB to 256KB, enough for an entire 3.2s of music or around 498 milliseconds of video. The docking unit, shown in close-up below, ergonomically couples the iPad to the VAX 2488 operator console, allowing the iPad to be charged from the minicomputer's 3-phase 420amp power supply.

The iVAX, combining the best in old and new in the spirit of PRINCE 2 Agile, is available to order with a six-month delivery, allowing bags of time for you to engineer some space in your machine room.

And just to prove its effectiveness, we used PRINCE 2 Agile to manage the production of this very blog post. Readers wishing to see the actual project brief, project initiation document, product descriptions, quality log, risk log, test log, highlight report, exception report, stage plan, work package docket and minutes of the stand-ups should contact me via the comment box below.

Illegal project management

Recalling  my recent post on the subject of 'legal' project management, which I discovered to mean the application of formal project management techniques to the practice of law, readers will not be  the least surprised to learn that I have been busy ever since in formulating a breakthrough in crime prevention- illegal project management.
The underlying idea is simple but brilliant.
The world knows that since the introduction of formal project management methods there has not been a single instance of a project that has been delivered on time: all have been horribly mired in mindless overblown bureaucracy. What better then than to encourage the adoption of formal project management techniques by the criminal fraternity? a master-stroke that will lumber the would-be felon with a bureaucratic ball and chain of immense debilitating power.
A moment I did not lose in formulating my new method: PRINCE- Projects In a Criminal Environment. Of course, I took all the necessary steps to ensure that my new creation, PRINCE, was horribly over-complete, with a remorseless focus on the generation of meaningless paperwork, and to promote a hierarchy of PRINCE qualifications, which rewarded the slavish adoption of terminology over any practical skills in larceny. The result has been miraculous- the incidence of  major organised crime has plummeted since the launch of PRINCE, as 'top-end' criminals are now too bogged down in paperwork to pull off any capers. My next development is to be a formal programme management methodology for those with large portfolios of criminal projects, which I plan to launch in Sicily next summer.

The Great General Election Surprise

There have been speculations in the media about the temporal correlation between the recent lack of posting on this blog and the political campaigns preceding the general election in the United Kingdom, prompting some to suggest that I have been too occupied on the latter activity to have time to spare for the former. The unexpected re-election of David Cameron as Prime Minister, which suggests the intervention of  a political manipulator of unparalleled cunning and potency, has provided further fuel for the media rumour machine. In response to the direct questions that have been put to me via my legal representatives by the so called news programme 'Today' on BBC Radio 4, I can neither confirm nor deny my involvement in the outcome of the election, owing to gagging clauses in my contract with a certain party.