Fortnightly Mailing

What I plan doing when I stand down from my role in ALT / People have started asking

I left my job of the last 9+ years on 8 May.

A friend emailed me with "what are your plans?".

This is most of my answer:

The short answer is that I'm not much of a planner. 

I only ever worked for ALT half-time and I will continue to do some independent work. My aim is to put my knowhow to good and productive use.

I will get back into writing Fortnightly Mailing more consistently. Tweet less, write more.

I fantasise about spending more time:

• reading the books that are stacked up on the floor of my office;
• practising the piano for the lessons I've been having for the last four or so years;
• fell-running.

A close friend has just bought two fields a shortish distance away (see below) that she intends to make back into a traditional hay meadow. I will help her with that.

I already spend quite a bit of time being an FE college Governor and earlier this year I was appointed for a second four year term.

I used to be quite good at advising and representing people on employment issues. If Citizens' Advice Bureaux will have me I may put myself forward as a volunteer.

I am intending to do some Udacity courses, compensating for the fact of having been diverted early on from a childhood interest.

I am standing for election - in a crowded field - to the Board of the Open Rights Group.

[Small edits 17 May 2012.]

Tyin to Finse, Easter 2012

Moon rising over Bjordalsbu hut (1580m)  in Skarvheimen, 6 April 2012

Over Easter I spent 10 days skiing with a friend, in a 200km upside down J shaped route, from Lake Tyin South of Jotunheimen, via Tomashelleren and Yksendalsbu to Fondsbu, and then more-or-less due South to Finse, the high point on the railway line between Bergen and Oslo.

Norway had had about its warmest ever March, with snow much reduced below 1000m. Luckily by the time we set out cold conditions had returned, with temperatures down to -20^oC on some nights (hence the semi-obsession with stoves in the pictures below).

From the second day, fresh snow had begun to cover the nasty  "boiler plate" left by the thaw; and from day three, with the North West wind largely gone, conditions gradually improved.

Douglas Adams via Donald Clark. This stuff is "alright really".

Donald Clark ends his recent talk at TEDxGlasgow with a nice quote from Douglas Adams's 1999 How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet:

1. Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.
2. Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it.
3. Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

[Source]

The talk is a nicely condensed and developed version of Donald's "Don't Lecture Me" from the 2010 ALT conference, here presented alongside its associated Twitter-stream:

Disclosure. I (still, but not for much longer) work part time for ALT.