Catmachine

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea. This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!” In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here. “What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.” It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other ...

What makes getting up in the morning so difficult sometimes? I've just spent ten minutes wrestling with my volition, although in this case it's been time well spent as I was deliberately analysing what it was that made me want to stay in bed. Apparently it's not physical tiredness (and if I was writing a Wikipedia article I'd have to "cite" something here). All the physical body needs to recharge its batteries is around half an hour's lying down and then it's good to go. No, it's the brain. It's always the brain. Lying there analysing why I didn't want to get up I noticed there was a mental glow in the back brain and a general low level endorphine buzz throughout the body. I was enjoying it enough to be physically conscious of the Happy Mechanism. Usually the Happy Mechanism kicks in when we're doing something that we oughta, so what was it about lying there in bed and possibly falling asleep again that was biologically better for me ...