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Two Epicurean additions this week, which is becoming a habitual Friday evening event. Firstly, faux canard à l'orange, which I really didn't think would work but it did, which was consumed with a time-honoured favourite cocktail of sidecars (gin and cognac versions). The evening was appropriately finished with a viewing of Agatha Christie's, The Pale Horse, ho-hum another story of the personal violent crimes of the lackadaisical English ruling class. Give me the roughness and depth of Georges Simenon's characters any day. Mind you, Simenon actually associated with such people so I guess he was engaging in some artistic immersion. He was a rather colourful character, larger and even less probably than his own literary creations.
Our workplace has established a "culture working group" following a staff survey that showed that there were a few gaps in paradise. A very prominent one was a "low articulation of mission", so I've taken up the task of finding out what staff think our mission actually is - and unsurprisingly, every single person surveyed thus far has a different idea. Which shows quite clearly that (a) there is a low articulation and knowledge of what it actually is and (b) staff weren't involved sufficiently, to begin with. In any organisation, no matter what its size, it is important that there is a shared understanding of the mission (what an organisation does) and the vision (where it ideally sees itself in the future); this really is Management 101 stuff and it worries me that it has been overlooked. Appropriately, I collected a certain stiff piece of carboard this week from the POB (MSc in Information Systems Management), along with an abstract for a book chapter on quantitive approaches for high-throughput on HPC/cloud hybrid systems.
This week was included Reo Maori day, so I spent a little bit of time working on that, along with continuing work on my book, Esperanto for Anarchists. The limited cycling adventure of the week saw me visit All Nations Park, notable for the small Northcote cemetery and outdoor gym equipment. This week also saw the global COVID-19 figures increase to thirty million cases (up from twenty million just over a month ago), and now almost one million dead. Here in Melbourne, we're still restricted to 5km from home with stage 4 restrictions, which all makes sense. On August 7 our daily cases of COVID-19 (14-day average) was it 459.8; we were on the verge of something very bad. So we took a hard line; as of September 15, we're down to a daily case average of 49.6 and it's still falling.
Our workplace has established a "culture working group" following a staff survey that showed that there were a few gaps in paradise. A very prominent one was a "low articulation of mission", so I've taken up the task of finding out what staff think our mission actually is - and unsurprisingly, every single person surveyed thus far has a different idea. Which shows quite clearly that (a) there is a low articulation and knowledge of what it actually is and (b) staff weren't involved sufficiently, to begin with. In any organisation, no matter what its size, it is important that there is a shared understanding of the mission (what an organisation does) and the vision (where it ideally sees itself in the future); this really is Management 101 stuff and it worries me that it has been overlooked. Appropriately, I collected a certain stiff piece of carboard this week from the POB (MSc in Information Systems Management), along with an abstract for a book chapter on quantitive approaches for high-throughput on HPC/cloud hybrid systems.
This week was included Reo Maori day, so I spent a little bit of time working on that, along with continuing work on my book, Esperanto for Anarchists. The limited cycling adventure of the week saw me visit All Nations Park, notable for the small Northcote cemetery and outdoor gym equipment. This week also saw the global COVID-19 figures increase to thirty million cases (up from twenty million just over a month ago), and now almost one million dead. Here in Melbourne, we're still restricted to 5km from home with stage 4 restrictions, which all makes sense. On August 7 our daily cases of COVID-19 (14-day average) was it 459.8; we were on the verge of something very bad. So we took a hard line; as of September 15, we're down to a daily case average of 49.6 and it's still falling.
