Renaissance woman or girl with ADHD? Discuss

Whilst typing this I'm simulataneously watching a live feed of a football match and writing emails about biomass.


You see, I'm not what you'd call a 'specialist'.

If I listed my interests, it would run to a couple of pages of A4 and would include things I haven't done for years, yet continue to retain an "interest" in (chemistry, for example).

If you started to tell me why you found the breeding of yaks so incredibly fascinating I would probably listen, totally entranced, then go and read up all there was on the internet on the subject and possibly even buy a couple of books.

I have a mind that just loves stuff.

It's usually easier to engage me in stuff I have a history with, or have encountered before. You ask S. You might remember from a previous blog entry that he took me to a home match a while ago. I loved every minute and now I find myself fretting ever so slightly about how Brighton & Hove Albion are going to manage the last few matches of the season and maintain their lead in League 1. Actually, that's why I'm watching the coverage of today's Huddersfield game - they're second and although they're a good few points behind the Albion...you can't take anything for granted, can you?

It extended slightly further when S sent me a book as a gift. I'm trying to get back into reading and so anything that will make me make time to read is a good thing. Many of my friends were slightly taken aback to learn it's a book called "Inverting the Pyramid" and that it's about the history of football tactics.

I know nothing of the technicalities of football (although I now know Inigo Calderon plays at right-back and I know where to find him on the field) but I sometimes have fun muttering about the "demise of the sweeper system" whilst not having any idea what it is. I like watching the game play out on the field and I like the macro game played out in the league table.

Back to the book - I'm not reading this just to ingratiate myself with S. I don't need to. We're good friends, and if I didn't want to read it I'm capable of thanking him for the gesture and not actually reading the book.

I'm about half-way in and I'm finding it extraordinarily interesting. I won't remember an awful lot of the detail and I have no frame of reference for some of the information in the book - but I'm enjoying the read. It's great learning something new.

And that's it with me...it's all about the learning - but it's also usually about the bonding over a subject with friends.

Photography, architecture, art (to an extent), history (on a good day, with a following wind), chemistry, football, HTML, Linux, Cookery, campanology (learning what Plain Bob Minor was was a real eye opener for me), beer...you name it...it's all interesting.

A while ago I even made CJ explain, in some detail, how PFI deals work for things like hospitals and then spent a happy hour or so arguing with him as to whether it's a good idea.

If I have to describe myself (and I've had to do that for various reasons over the last couple of years) then I tend to say that I'm not very good at anything other than being quite good at a lot of things. It sounds like a bit of a self-deprecation thing...and perhaps it is but it's true.

Over lunch with my friend, AB, yesterday we talked about this. He's very similar. He loves to learn new technical things but admits to losing interest once he's cracked it. I empathise.

It's not something that's particularly well rewarded in the job circuit so you have to make up for it by being disciplined and putting in extra graft.

So is it this personality trait that lead me to only ever be moderately successful in work? Yes, possibly, but the last 8 or so years of my insurance career saw me find my niche...project management.

Many project managers are specialists who fall into management. There's a comfort thing in this because they know the subject. People like me (and my ex-boss) are more the "PM of all trades" kinda folk.

We could argue the toss about whether a good PM can manage any project (I think they can but most specialists disagree) but stepping into managing the set up for a large beer festival a couple weeks ago has reminded me that I still have it.

I went into the room on the first day knowing literally nothing about the technicalities (and there are many). I had a list of jobs that needed to be done and I had an appreciation of the critical path.

Mostly I let people get on with their jobs...but when a decision needed to be made, I asked people to explain the technicalities of the decision to me and together we came to a conclusion.

So I now know how beer is racked, vented and tapped - and why you do each of those things. I have a better appreciation of the conditioning process of beer and how you can tell whether beer is ready to serve.
I even know why a hoist with fewer than four turns on a cable drum is not really fit for purpose but that the mass of the thing you're lifting, and the height you're lifting things to can play a part in your safety decision on whether to use it or not.

The jury's out as to whether I made a positive difference to the set up (I might find this out next week) but I realised that it's my basic curiosity that allows me to take on these sorts of tasks and get up to speed fairly quickly.

I'm afraid it also makes me go a little geeky and try to start to explain to anyone who'll stand still long enough to listen (and a few who attempt to run away) how the 2-3-5 formation pre-dates the passing game and how England's dogged attempt to continue to play W-M was so ill fated as they pitched against sides with more flair and flexibility.

Where are you going...come back...don't you want to hear about the flat four?

Persistence of Memory

Well, then...

Here we are.

First day of spring. First day of the rest of your life. First day of the fifth year of my life "After".

Loathe as I am to mark seemingly random waypoints in life - I always feel moved to acknowlege this one. One friend tells me it's because some events are simply strongly imprinted on our memories and, sadly, these events are typically not the nice times.

With that in mind I've been running over a list of the things that stay with me although he's now long gone. Overwhelmingly, these are good things.

These things shape who I am now and so even my friends who never met him actually experience a tiny part of the person who was the centre of my "before".

So - indulge me for a second - and when you see these things in me, you'll have an idea where they came from.

1. Philip Glass.
Repetitive, intense, distinctive music from one of the most prolific modern "classical" composers of the minimalist school.
You will have heard some Philip Glass music over the last month, of that I'm sure. He's been used in BBC documentaries, adverts, films and dramas.
I never really liked most of what he did - but we did agree on one set of music he composed. Amazon River.
Haunting, technically stunning and makes you listen on several levels.
You can count beats in the bar in many ways - 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 and the way you experience the beats changes what you hear.
Give it try...

2. Beer
I moved from being a cider drinker to a beer drinker and was tutored by him.
First beer he ever gave me was Theakstons Old Peculiar.
His taste moved from dark to light beers whilst mine persisted around the mid-brown.
That was until the local pub started selling beer in four-pint jugs and he usually did the beer buying. Once converted to Bath Ales Spa, I've never really looked back from the hops.

3. Richard Feynman
Physics was never my thing at school. I didn't find the subject engaging and so mostly dismissed it out of hand once I didn't have to take an interest any more.
He handed my a copy of one of Feynman's books when I was bored one day and it brought me into the world of a man who not only loved the subject but wanted to make you love it too.

4. Curry
He took me for my first curry when he moved to Bristol. Ummm I had melon as my starter because the other things scared me.
Chicken tikka was a total revelation.
This weekend, after being inspired by another of my favourite people, I manufactured a curry from scratch, and made onion bhajis to feed houseguests.

5. Digital SLR cameras
He bought me mine after I repeated tried to use the one I'd bought him, and had fallen in love with.
That camera (Nikon D50) continues to live a useful life in the hands of my brother.
His camera (Nikon D70s) continues to live here with me - sometimes being pressed into service.
Photography kept me sane for a period of time I thought I would lose it completely.
Some of my favourite people - my lovely business partner TD, my fab Flickr friends DrP, DM, DrC, AB, MS, and all the others came into my life as a direct result of that camera.

6. Proper Coffee
My first trip to stay in Leeds was marked in my mind by a visit to a cafe (way before mass-market chain cafes were over-priced and over here). Cafe long gone now, sadly, and I can't remember precisely where it was.
In it you were served coffee in a cafetiere and it felt like the height of sophistication and extravagance.
His ever increasing quest for the perfect cup of coffee culminated in the purchase of a coffee roaster.
The legacy lives on because I now roast the coffee and grind the coffee and make the coffee with an espresso machine that needs 10 minutes warming-up time.
There is no instant fix of coffee in my place...

7 Home Cinema
Partly my fault, I'll admit. I brough home an LCD project from work to "mind" over a weekend's office move.
It was a calculated guess that the boy would have a little bit of fun with it over that weekend.
Six months later saw his 40th birthday and this was marked by the purchase of a projector, screen, new DVD player etc, etc

8 Space, the final front-ear
Both of us avid Star Trek watchers as kids...we experienced ST:TNG as a "couple" and have watched every episode countless times.

The start was always the same, though...As Kirk or Picard seriously intoned "Space, the final frontier" he mimed an ear in the middle of his forehead with his hand.

When alone and catching a sneaky episode on some junky cable channel - I still do it.

9 Klaatu barada nikto
From "The Day the Earth Stood Still" best of the 1950's B-movie sci-fi films. Nuff said.

10 Resistor colour codes
I can't even remember which colours they are, or how the knowledge of them turns into knowing what the rating of the resistor is.
But the mnenmonic persists...
Big Blondes Rip Off Your Garments Behind Vivid Grey Wagons.
He won 10p in physics class for that, I'll have you know.

I miss him dreadfully, of course, but there's nothing I can do about that.

And as I make tea in a teapot, listen to the Ting Tings, the Fall, or Maximum the Hormone, or read my books on the history of football tactics, or church architecture whilst remembering that Edward II was killed with a poker up his arse, or take pictures with my M8 and edit web-pages with a text editor I realise that the influences from people I like, love and admire continue.

Good innit?

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Enlightenment

Funny, isn't it?

When I first started doing project management for a living I couldn't understand why you have to be trained in that stuff...and why people get it so badly wrong.

After all, it's just so much common sense, no? I do it naturally when I'm running things - surely everyone does.

I said as much to my boss, CNG, who was the epitome of the craft, as far as I was conerned. When he managed a project, it stayed managed.

"Shhhh...don't tell people that", says CNG, "I've been peddling common sense for nearly 20 years".

Nevertheless, the more work I managed the more I saw that, despite it mostly being common sense people mostly didn't do it. It's why poorly managed projects go over time, over budget and/or don't deliver what people expected.

Our company has excellent project management skills and excellent technical (architecture, landscape, design, construction) skills but we both agreed we're a bit under par on the selling ourselves front.

It's particularly important for us to be able to get our message over because we sell a service that most people don't even know they want.

We've been told that we talk engagingly on the subject and our enthusiasm defintely gets people on-side but we have a website that doesn't get the message across nearly as well as it should.

So, today, we attend a design/marketing workshop.

I was waiting for mind-blowing insight; big ideas that identified exactly where we've been going wrong.

So, after three hours or so, three discussion groups and some presentations did I have enlightenment?

Oh yes. Yes indeed.

What I learned was...ummm...common sense.

Each of the discussion groups broadly said the same thing as far as we were concerned.

1) Understand who your audience is
2) If you've got more than one group in your audience, make sure they get a tailored message.
3) Understand what your audience is looking for - and give it to them.

Well, duh...

I really don't understand why two intelligent, capable people couldn't aready have worked this out and put it into practice, but the fact is, we haven't.

We've been looking at our website for ages wanting to make it better and yet couldn't put our collective finger on what was wrong with it.

Now we've got a starting point to do our much overdue rewrite - but we're not starting with colour, fonts and pictures this time - we're starting with a strategy. And looking at it - it feels quite embarrassing that we needed to betold that by someone else.

But that's the thing, isn't it?

One man's common sense is another woman's revelation.

Due respect to all of us who peddle common sense...or, rather, not-so-common sense.

Aga Saga

A salutory reminder that nothing lasts for ever came whizzing into my life a couple of weeks ago.

A few months back I got a certain amount of satisfaction from replacing the elements in my oven myself.

How does my oven repay me for £70 worth of hardware and a couple of hours of my love and attention? It failed again.

I finally decided that my relationship with the cooker was over. Another tricky decision to make, another decision to make on my own. Not only that, I have very little enthusiasm for cooking for just myself. I still love cooking for friends but that's not a daily event.

I wasn't much in the mood to do research but I learned from the impulse purchase of the outgoing model and started to surf to look for alternatives.

What became clear is that cookers of the right size are not cheap.

When we'd had the "new" kitchen installed (about seven years ago, now) we'd investigated a top of the line range cooker but dismissed it on the grounds we couldn't really justify the extra expense when the cooker we had was working.

In my research I discovered that a local department store was having a sale of range cookers - so I decided to go and scratch and sniff and see if I could pick up a bargain.

I came out of the shop some fifteen minutes later quite a lot poorer but with a new cooker of the exact type that I'd yearned after. It was the display model and a third off and it ended up priced only a little more expensive than the other cookers I was grudgingly considering from my research on t'Internets.

I have to say that the delivery and fitting of the new cooker did, at times, seem to be like the punishment of Sisyphus. Then again, it only took exactly two weeks from choosing to having it working - albeit via a day of no heating, some delivery angst, blown electrics and a discovered electrical fault with the new device.

On the way I've learned:

That Mercury can be solid at room temperature - very solid indeed, in fact. You ask the poor buggers who delivered it

That an MCB is not the same thing as an RCD but both may trip at the same time when your cooker has a wire with stripped insulation.

That a modern gas cooker connector has a built-in cut off valve - you don't need 24hrs without hot water when you disconnect your old cooker

That I could have predicted my old cooker was going to blow elements on a regular basis - it's their USP, apparently

That the make of cooker recommended by the wonderful "Steve" (he who mended my new cooker) is Rangemaster. Remember that if you're shopping for cookers at the weekend.

That there are some bloody good workmen out there

I'm pretty chuffed at the whole episode, truth be told. Panic and angst were kept to a minimum for once.

...and most importantly, when I have houseguests in a couple of weeks, there's a better than reasonable chance I'll be able to cook for them.



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Valid Discrimination

DSC_6475 Skyline
Originally uploaded by Lillput

So, the EU have said it's illegal to charge women less for their car insurance than men.

That's a good thing, surely? Stamping out discrimination wherever we find it...yay for the advancement of society.

Actually, I happen to think this is a bad judgement. It over-simplfies what is a fairly complex subject.

So, for anyone who's interested, here's Insurance 101...and by insurance I mean pure risk stuff - push investment into the equation and life gets more fraught still.

My explanation is beyond simple and shouldn't be taken as based on actual statistics.

Principles of Insurance
1. Insurable interest
This means that you can only insure against an event happening if that event occurring causes you financial loss.
This means you can't take out life insurance on celebrities or on your neighbour's house.

2. Utmost Good Faith
This means that, when taking out insurance, you must disclosure relevant facts you're aware of to the insurer even if they don't ask for them.
This allows the insurer to price the risk fairly and accurately and stops you from insuring against something that you know is pretty likely to happen.

3. The cost of the premium must relate to the risk
So you wouldn't charge someone £20 premium for the potential loss of a £1 biro. You would refuse the insurance.
Also you take into account risk factors for the risk being insured.

4. Premiums for similar risks are to be pooled
So you keep the monies for life assurance premiums separate from those for household insurance.


Pricing the Risk

This is the crux of the soundbite story...and it starts with large numbers, claims experience, and a knowledge of statistics - or ready access to an infinite supply of actuaries with an infinite number of abacusses. Or something like that.

Let's ignore motor insurance at the moment and examine life assurance.

We all want to insure against the risk of us dying in the next year. We want to insure for £1000 just to pay for our funeral. There are 1000 of in the group.

We're going to do this as a sort of mutual arrangement with no profit, admin charge or anything like that.

We check with the ONS (I haven't, BTW) and determine that the mortality rate for the whole of the UK population is one death per thousand per year.

This keeps the maths nice and simple and we each put £1 in the fund a year.

During the ensuing 12 month period there is one death and the fund is paid out.

This carries on for a few years. Sometimes the fund lies untouched because no one died, some years two people die. But on the whole the fund meets claims as required.

You have an uneasy feeling that because you're 27 the chances of your family benefitting from the fund are are smaller - actually, much smaller than 99 year-old Doris who is also in the pool.

You start to feel that your £1 stake in the venture against Doris' £1 is rather unfair.

No one wants to start the year having a doctor poke them about, check their health and ask them loads of annoying questions about the amount they smoke, drink and go to the gym. But you all agree that 99 year-olds should be charged more than 27 year olds for the £1000 insurance.

So the pool is restructured, more people are recruited and now all the 99 year olds are pooled together and charged the same amount of money as each other. The chances of them dying is calculated as 1/10, therefore 100 claims are expected so the premium for everyone is £100 for the year.

In the 27 year-old's pool the claims rate is calculated as 1/10,000 and therefore the annual premium is £0.10

(I'm praying I've got the maths right here).

We can acutally put all the pools together and the premium charging will still be fair as long as keep the differential pricing.

I can't imagine that anyone reading this thinks this is in any way discriminatory.

The bigger the pool gets, the more accurate our prediction become and the chance of there not being enough money in the pool to pay claims reduces considerably.

I don't even have to prove the statistics to you, you know them already.

What if I was to factor in smoking? We're all used to smoker/non-smoker premiums. Why should non-smokers pay the same insurance premium as smokers?

What about drinking?

What about racing drivers?

What about miners?

What about Glaswegians?

What about people with high Blood Pressure?

Still reasonably comfortable with this?

OK, lets move on...

What about people with a family history of breast cancer, or cardiac disease, or Huntingdon's disease?

Hang on...this isn't about the people in the pool any more. People can't do anything about their family history - it just gets handed to them.

I would argue that, try as I might, I can't do anything about being 47 either but you were happy that I paid more towards the fund than you at your mere 27 years...

So, you're grudgingly on my side on that.

We're 50 years into our fund now and I've kept scrupulous records of everyone in the pool and, more importantly, how old they were when they died. For some reason, I included information about hair, eye and skin colour. Religion, musical taste and sexual orientation.

I can prove to you that fair-skinned, gay, Roman Catholics with a penchant for Judas Priest survive, on average, 5 years longer than the average population - no matter where they live and whether they smoke.
I have no idea why, but the numbers demonstrate it.

Should we charge them less?

Or are the straight, dark-skinned protestants going to feel discriminated against?

And back in the real world

Yes, that last example was preposterous. Nevertheless, this is where "Sheilas' Wheels" comes in.

On the whole, insurance isn't a matter of morals - it's a matter of numbers. Charging premiums according to risk is NOT discriminatory (leastways not in the way that word is usually used). It's about us paying our fair share for the risks we bring to the pool.

The problem is, some of these factors that affect our risk are rather emotive and the transition from factors we're comfortable with to factors we aren't isn't so much a grey area, as a big muddy quagmire.

So what are we to do?

I don't think the EU needed this particular sledgehammer to deal with this particular nut.

In the UK, proper monitoring of existing principles-based regulation - with particular reference to "Treating Customers Fairly" would have gotten the job done.

I honestly believe that the age-old principles of insurance are sound and generally work to ensure that insurance as a whole is calculated fairly.

But insurance has to existing in the outside world, too...

One of my friends, TT, made a very good point about the divisive nature of differential insurance premiums and this needs to be considered but it's not about insurance risk, it's about the way society expects us to behave.

Take compulsory insurances - the most readily understood example of which is motor insurance.

You're not allowed to drive without it but if you're a 17 year-old male Scouser you probably pay considerably more than your female counterpart in Surrey, even if you're both driving the same class of car.

The cost may be so great that it's unaffordable, or you may even be denied insurance through the normal route.
These are the cases when legislation has to come in to protect the minority of the population and "Act only" insurance comes into play. Time was, when your existing insurer couldn't refuse you insurance completely, but at a minimum would have to offer you "Act Only" insurance which provided the minimum requirement to make you road legal.

So the state can step in to provide a framework to reduce the level of disadvantage for some quarters of society.

And if you think it'll stop insurance companies charging differential rates for different risks, you're probably wrong.
Experience tells us (and, let's face it, insurance is all about experience) that the financial bods will find a way to skirt around legislation they believe to inappropriate.

I'm not condoning this, only suggesting that the legislation itself is likely to be largely ineffective - as well as very heavily flawed.

...oh and for the comments I've seen on news sites on the matter - women don't get all insurances cheaper, and never had. Long term disability insurance (or Income protection as it's also known) is significantly more expensive for women. I'd hazard a guess that medical insurance is too.



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