“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary”

Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

I suspect most geeks have taken stuff and encrypted it – although I rarely do these days, because:

• I generally forget the password over time
• After a few years, the software isn’t generally easily available

So encryption is just a fancy way of deleting things slowly

Being an electronic records geek, I now tend to keep things I care about spinning on a hard drive (backed up!) in a good long term file format. Encryption just adds two additional risks, that I will lose the password or the clever encryption software.

But it appears that is no defence… and you might think they use these kinds of laws against people they “know” are guilty but can’t prosecute them for anything else (which in itself has civil liberties issues), but in this case from the article:

Det Sgt Neil Fowler, of Lancashire police, said: “Drage was previously of good character so the immediate custodial sentence handed down by the judge in this case shows just how seriously the courts take this kind of offence.

Seems our Policemen friend was just trying to say how serious they take it:

“It sends a robust message out to those intent on trying to mask their online criminal activities that they will be taken before the courts with the ultimate sanction, as in this case, being a custodial sentence.”

But what he really seems to be saying is “If we think you are trying to be a criminal, and you can’t provide your password, then you go to Jail”.

That can’t be right, can it? Not in England. Only Police States have laws on the books that the Police can use to get you if they think you are guilty of something but can’t actually prove it?

And let’s not even get into the situation where it might not be me who put the file there… because it isn’t exactly hard to store a file on someone else’s computer is it?

I’m feeling kind of creeped out right now…

This article titled “Low-dose Prozac may help relieve the misery of PMS” was written by Alok Jha, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 17th September 2010 13.43 UTC

Low doses of the anti-anxiety drug Prozac may alleviate the misery of premenstrual syndrome (PMS), scientists have found.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham found that Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine, raises levels of a sex hormone that can drop sharply in women at the end of their menstrual cycle. This sudden drop is thought to cause the symptoms of PMS.

Millions of women around the world suffer the effects of PMS every month in the week before the start of their menstrual period. Symptoms can range from anxiety and irritability to headaches or joint and breast pain.

Not all women show symptoms, but around 75% are thought to experience PMS and, in up to 40% of cases, it can interfere with daily activities. Around 3% of women can experience a severe form of PMS, a psychiatric condition known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

Thelma Lovick, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham, thinks she has evidence that a 2mg daily dose of fluoxetine in the final week before menstruation could alleviate PMS. She presented her work at the British Science Festival in Birmingham today and her three-year study on rats, which were induced to have PMS-like symptoms, was funded by the Medical Research Council. Lovick now plans to submit her research to a scientific journal for peer review.

“We’ve got available to us a drug that is already in production, it’s already gone through its safety tests, something we could use at very low dose to perhaps ameliorate the development of pre-menstrual syndrome in women,” said Lovick.

Normally progesterone levels fall during the pre-menstrual period and this is when symptoms appear. “Progesterone is a hormone that circulates in the bloodstream and gets into the brain,” said Lovick. “It breaks down into ALLO and it’s this change in the ALLO concentration in the brain that causes excitability in the nerve circuits in parts of the brain that are involved in emotional behaviour.”

Lovick thinks it is the sharp fall in the brain’s ALLO levels that triggers PMS symptoms. “ALLO can alter the activity of nerve cells, thus it is described as a neuroactive steroid. It enhances the activity of GABA, one of the brain’s inhibitory neurotransmitter chemicals, and in those parts of the brain that process emotional responses, ALLO normally produces calming effects.”

When the levels of progesterone, and hence ALLO, in the brain drop during the final stages of the premenstrual period, that natural inhibition is turned off. “As a consequence these brain circuits become more excitable, leaving the individual more responsive to stress, which is often manifested behaviourally as anxiety and aggressive behaviour.”

If ALLO levels could be allowed to fall gradually at the end of the monthly cycle, thought Lovick, PMS might not develop. She confirmed this idea by monitoring the hormone in rats’ brains as they were administered fluoxetine.

“Millions of women take Prozac but the dose they take it in is relatively high. One of the effects of fluoxetine is that it acts on serotonin systems in the brain, that’s why it’s used as an antidepressant. One of the things it does in addition is increase ALLO concentrations in the brain and it does this at very low doses.”

Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, warned against self-medicating with fluoxetine. “Prozac is associated with a number of different side-effects. The most common is sexual dysfunction, it can lower libido and induce impotence. It can stop you sleeping and make you anxious and wound-up and affect appetite. And particularly in young people, under the age of 30, it can trigger suicidal thoughts and self-harm. I don’t know if these side-effects would occur at low doses but it would strike me as unwise to start tipping drugs out of capsules.”

Fluoxetine in sometimes prescribed as a treatment for PMS by some doctors in the US, but it is given at doses normally used in antidepressant therapy. Lovick said the standard antidepressant dose – 10-20mg per day – is inappropriate for PMS.

Her research team found that the dose required to produce a response was only a tenth of that found in the most commonly prescribed form of fluoxetine. “And you’d only be taking it for about a week so the side-effect issue should be non-existent,” said Lovick.

The team now want to take their findings out of the lab and into clinical trials.

Kendall agrees that the use of low-dose fluoxetine in PMS needs more study. “PMS makes a lot of women quite miserable and if there is something we can do for them, that would be very good. But it is premature to say this is the thing.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

And then sometimes you get occasions like this one – must have been quite dramatic really. I wonder how much people say “Prove you own XX of the company” and “Prove that meeting was correct” and “Show me the bit in the company rules which say I have to do what you want” – and when people decide to comply or take it to Court.

Fascinating mix of law, management, and good old interpersonal relationships – with a healthy dose of basic logistics like “We’re locked out, where can we hold this meeting?”.

This article titled “Biscuit matriarch stages takeover of family firm in car park” was written by Giles Tremlett in Madrid, for The Guardian on Thursday 2nd September 2010 17.57 UTC

It was a strange way to wrest back control of the 100-year-old family company but, after her sons locked her out, María Teresa Rodríguez – the matriarch of Spanish biscuit manufacturer Galletas Gullón – decided to call a board meeting in a car.

The meeting in the company car park, attended by her daughter Lourdes and another major shareholder as photographers surrounded the Mercedes, saw her appointed sole administrator of the company.

The 68-year-old thereby took away control of Spain’s third-biggest biscuit manufacturer from her three sons and two brothers.

The 35-minute meeting, also attended by a notary who sat in the passenger seat, was duly advertised with two posters stuck to the front windscreen.

A family feud pits the Gullón men against its women. Sons and brothers had tried to block Rodríguez’s attempts to take control by declaring the board meeting irregular and locking her out of the company HQ.

A security guard turned mother and daughter away from the front door of Spain’s biggest biscuit factory, in the western town of Aguilar de Campoo. But those in the Mercedes controlled 80% of the company. Their takeover was a shoo-in.

The man in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes was Juan Martínez, the former company chief executive fired by Rodríguez’s sons last year. He held 16% of the stock.

Rodríguez had appointed him to help her run the company after her husband, José Manuel Gullón, died in a car accident in 1983. Rodríguez herself had been executive president – until she, too, was eased out by her children.

Last year’s rebellion against them and the decision to sack Martínez sparked the feud over the business, which has 400 employees, exports to 80 countries and has an annual turnover of €162m. It also saw a court award him €8.2m for wrongful dismissal.

“The company will go to my children, but only when I decide,” she said in a recent interview.

Yesterday’s board meeting failed to resolve the underlying problems. The sons today claimed it had not been properly convened and said their mother was illegally using voting shares left to them by their father.

“None of the reasons they have given to invalidate the meeting are true,” said a spokesman for Rodríguez. “All legal actions taken by the sons and brothers of María Teresa Rodríguez pursue a single illegitimate aim: to keep hold of power.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

First watch the video.

Then check out this article on The Register for more detail.

“The main finding is that knowing that unexpected events might occur doesn’t prevent you from missing unexpected events,”

It is a sad aspect of politics that complex issues need to be boiled down to soundbites and in the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster it has come down to “Let’s punish BP because it is all their fault”. I suspect there’s a lot of fault to spread around and such a simplistic conclusion is no doubt more than a little unfair – but it is also not at all helpful for getting the problem fixed.

If you worked for BP right now, I wonder how you’d feel about your company being the scapegoat. And what about the engineers working frantically to find a fix? Bet they love to read the papers in the morning watching Obama wanting to know “Whose ass to kick?”. And then when they finally get to spend time with their kids, I can just imagine the conversations (“Daddy, did the President kick your ass? Is that why you are never home?”).

This is one of those complex situations with many many contributing factors and we’re all in fact a little bit to blame. Perhaps those who enjoy vilifying BP so much should consider that they aren’t doing much to solve the problem – and if they really cared about fixing properly it the first thing they should do is quit driving their car so much…

The iPad starts shipping 28th May (which means the App Store will work for those of us who have iPads already…) to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK, and you can place your order next Monday.

UK pricing from Apple’s Press Release: £429 (inc. VAT) for 16GB, £499 (inc. VAT) for 32GB, £599 (inc. VAT) for 64GB for Wi-Fi models and £529 (inc. VAT) for 16GB, £599 (inc. VAT) for 32GB and £699 (inc. VAT) for 64GB for Wi-Fi + 3G models.

There’s also rumored Euro pricing here.

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

Worth 5 mins, if you have it.

To my value set, there’s nothing more tragic than a closed mind (although poverty of ambition comes close). As a parent I look at my young boys who are desperately curious about everything, and then I compare that to some of the people I interview as a potential employer and I wonder what goes on in the school system (and indeed corporate life) to extinguish that curiosity or even worse have people hide it because they think it is somehow “wrong”.

No hope of getting in to the office today and even if we did I suspect it would be lonely!

Anyway, naturally I want all those pesky paper recipes somewhere electronic, so I can search them (and paper is *so* old fashioned!

I also want to be able to spit out a shopping list. Ideally, I want to be able to do a weekly meal plan, produce a weekly shopping list, and have it all work out nicely.

SousChef for the Mac does this… quite nicely in fact. but…

I have multiple machines, and I want to be able to do this from whatever machine I’m on. I also want to share the database with the rest of the family because this is a collaborative endeavour.

All this points to a web-enabled SousChef. Or at least, SousChef with a database which is shared in the Cloud.

Oh, I need something with UK units, and Weight Watchers aware.

A few minutes Googling tells me there’s nothing out there… which sucks.

BTW, SousChef is really impressive, lots of nice touches. But I need the “Any machine, any one” bit…

Bit frustrating really, stuff’s out there but not quite. The geek in me wants to write my own, but I don’t have time. Would love to find a solution. Perhaps there’s a business here?

I’ve just recently discovered two really interesting web sites. The first is Twistori which shows Tweets mentioning various different emotions. Simple, and quite entrancing.

From that site, I found WeFeelFine which is a really funky visualisation of similar data (but weblogs, not Tweets), but you can focus on specific demographics (sex, age range etc.).This is their Mission:

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

How lovely.

People are fascinating!

Not sure where I found this – probably somewhere in the Twitter stream… apologies for no direct attribution, I’m a bit behind on reading and it’s all just ended up as loads of Windows open in OmniWeb.

As an Apple fan & stock holder… oh well…

Twitter is excellent for sharing context at a distance. It gives you the gentle “This is what’s happening” you get if you all work in the same room, or live together. 

As such it’s excellent at stitching companies together. We’ve got people in different locations, and I know that Twitter has increased the quality of our relationships in ways that Wikis, Blogs etc. haven’t. 

Twitter is of course optional in our company and it’s interesting that those who have yet to come on board are beginning to feel a little out of the loop. At the moment it’s just a social thing but I wonder if those increased social ties will in time impact work as well – we shall see. Human beings don’t stop being social animals when they get to work. 

In addition, Twitter increases my circle of context. Which enriches me. Sure there’s the Celebs but more interesting are the movers & shakers in the world who I would normally never get to hear anything from – now I get to see what’s interesting in their world. I can think of at least 2 very relevant things I’ve picked up in the past few days alone, which makes Twitter much more cost effective than any other “networking” event I’ve ever attended.

Is Twitter going to revolutionise the world as much as the breathless news articles claim? Of course not. Is it interesting? - definitely. Will I (and my company) continue to experiment and use it – indeed so.