Book Review: The Seven Deadly Sins

I have previously made my position on Lance Armstrong quite clear - I believe that he is a hero and I don't think particularly highly of the people like David Walsh who have spent so much time hounding poor Lance about his drug use. It is not that I believed that Lance never used performance enhancing drugs, it is just that I didn't think it was a really big deal since apparently practically all of the leading cyclists use such products. Therefore I probably would not have bought this book, but since I received it as a Christmas present I enjoyed reading it. I suppose it is always good to read materials which challenge your assumptions.

The sub-title of the book is "my pursuit of Lance Armstrong" and the cover photo shows a silhouette of a cyclist in racing gear. This makes it quite clear that the author thinks of himself as a hero. I was personally put off by the implication that his persistence and dedication in sticking doggedly to this story over the years is somehow comparable to the dedication required of a professional cyclist.

The first thing to note is that the book is very well written. David has been a journalist for many years and clearly knows how to lay out the narrative in a way that is quite gripping.  He really described the life of a sports journalist very well, even if I think he has an overly high opinion of the importance of his profession.

While I previously thought of David as a virulent anti-drug campaigner, it is clear from the story that he started out quite ambivalent on the topic and only developed these strong opinions after observing the effect that drug use was having on professional cycling. As I read the book, I also found myself constantly re-evaluating my own attitude towards drug use in sport.

However, while the author eventually becomes convinced that this is clear choice between right and wrong. He thinks that drug abuse in sport is a terrible cancer which must be fought at all costs, but I still think that there is a lot of moral ambiguity in this story. For example, David is gushing in his praise for Betty Andreu and the role that she played in bringing down Lance Armstrong - but I think the morality of her actions is very questionable.

The quick summary of her story is that she and her then fiancé Frankie Andreu (who was a professional cyclist) were visiting Lance Armstrong in hospital while Lance was undergoing treatment for cancer. She claims that she overheard Lance tell doctors about his use of performance enhancing drugs (in answer to the standard question "what other medication are you on"). Betty subsequently repeated this story to David Walsh when he was researching a his book LA confidentiel. Lance still claims not to remember this conversation, but Betty is adamant that she heard it because it caused her to tackle her husband Frankie about his own use of performance enhancing drugs. I tend to believe Betty accurately recalls the conversation, but I have serious reservations about the morality of her repeating it. Even according to her version of events, the doctor asked her to leave the room before he interviewed Lance, but Lance said it was OK for her to stay because she was a friend whom he felt he could trust completely. Admittedly Lance was particularly vicious in his treatment of Betty once she publicly spoke out against him, but I can hardly blame his for being annoyed that she would betray his trust in this way.

As I read this book it became clear that Lance Armstrong is ruthless in pursuing his goals. I suppose that this should not be surprising since he could not have won so many bike races without a ruthless determination to train and win. However, it was scary to read how ruthless he was in dealing with public relations. He went to great lengths to discredit anyone whom he saw as an enemy - especially if that person was a former friend (e.g. Greg LeMond). No doubt psychologists would have a field day analysing how this attitude arose from the tough environment in which he was raised, but this is outside my field of expertise.

Overall I recommend this book to both Lance Armstrong fans and detractors. It is an entertaining read and also a book which makes you rethink your attitudes - what more could you expect in a book. Clearly it was a very good choice of Christmas present - thanks!

Looking for a Triathlon swimming coach - any tips

One of my proudest achievements last year was to complete a Triathlon. I did it shortly after passing the half century mark and it definitely helped me feel like I will have many productive years alive ahead of me. Therefore, I decided that I will complete one or two Triathlons again this year.

I am not necessarily aiming to be fast, but I do want to make sure I am able to comple the course. I am reasonably confident that I will be capable of finishing the cycling and running legs. Unfortunately, I am not as confident of the swimming leg - typically I need to stop a few times to catch my breath and check direction. I think it would be a good idea for me to team up with a formal swimming coach for a few sessions. Does anyone have any advice for me on who would be a good person to go to for advice?

Young Scientists in action again

January is often a dull month after the excitement of the Holiday period, but in Ireland the highlight of the month for me is always the Young Scientists exhibition. This years event is kicking off today and I can see that there is a great batch of excellent projects on display This gives me great confidence in the future of the Irish economy to see young people with a great enthusiasm for getting involve in science and technology projects.

I will be helping run the IBM stand on Saturday afternoon and I am looking forward to viewing the projects myself in the morning. The IBM stand will feature a number of exhibits -  I will be involved in showing off the power of the scratch programming environment which is a popular programming environment for young children who are learning to code for the first time. I also believe that there will be a stand representing the CoderDojo movement so we will have a chance to see what young Irish coders are capable of acieving.

Best of luck to all participants!

What does it mean when you are endorsed by someone on LinkedIN

When I initially signed up for an account on Linkedin, the site asked me to provide a list of my skills. I didn't think this unusual because  knew that LinkedIn was intended to be a site to help people build their career (as distinct from Facebook which is more intended to be more of a site for people to enjoy themselves and relax). However, since I was not seeking out a new job, I didn't pay too much attention to what I filled in there.

Recently I started getting notifications from LinkedIn to say that one of my contacts on the site had "endorsed" one of my skills. I never actively sought out these endorsements and so I was somewhat intrigued to know what was going on.

About 2 weeks ago, I got a LinkedIn connection request from someone I know and when I approved the request I was presented with a list of the skills this person claimed to have and was asked to endorse them. Since I knew this person to be reasonably competent, I clicked the "endorse" button beside some of the skills. Then the site asked me if I wanted to endorse more skills from other contacts. It began showing me an apparently random set of people/skill combinations and prompted me to either click on the "endorse" button or else click on the "next" button to see more choices.

In general, I endorsed contacts' skills when I had a reasonable knowledge that the person did hold the skill that they claimed. I sometimes declined to endorse someone's skills either because I did not know them very well of because I knew their abilities and I did not rate them very highly (two very different situations). Although I spent a while reviewing skills, I abandoned the endorsement exercise before I had a chance to review most of the people/skill combinations so many of my colleagues were not endorsed by me due to lack of time/motivation.

I suppose the bottom line is that when you see that the skills a person's LinkedIn profile have been endorsed by someone else it gives you a slightly increased confidence that the person does indeed hold the skill that they clam, but if there are no endorsements for their skills it does not necessarily mean they are not skilled.

I'moving to Zurich

One of the wonderful features of the internet is that it should not matter where in the world you are located. The protocols of the internet were designed to treat all traffic fairly so once you have a connection to the internet you should be able to get at any internet resource.

However, there are a number of industries (primarily music and movies) who continue to try an pretend that the internet is not a global phenomenon and continue to try and limit availability of their products and services to particular geographies. As I wrote before, these services are doomed to obsolescence - partly because such a business model is seen by consumers as unfair, but also because it is a technically difficult task to restrict your internet service to a particular country or set of countries.

There is an advertising series running on Irish Radio stations at the moment with the punch line "That's it, I'm moving to Zurich". The "joke" is that the speaker is actually planning to change pension providers to Zurich Life rather than actually emigrate to Switzerland. However, it seems that the administrators of our work network are planning a similar move.

It used to be the case that we could not access any Irish related web sites from work because most internet geo-location serviced (such as Where is my IP) seemed to be of the opinion that we were based near Portsmouth in the South of England (presumably since we used an internet service provider who was based near there). My colleagues didn't mind too much because it also meant that we got a chance to try out services which were supposedly only available in the UK. However, a recent change in our network configuration means that most internet servers now thing that I am based in Switzerland (not too far from Zurich).

I wonder are there any interesting TV shows running in Switzerland that I should try to catch up on?

Is Google AdSense a lucrative way to earn money?

Many bloggers believe that including Google AdSense advertisement on your site represents an opportunity to earn some significant money that will defray your costs and even provide you with an additional source of income. When I established this blog, I deliberately decided not to include any advertisements because I wanted to make it clear that I was not motivated by potential earnings.

When I registered for Movember I decided to temporarily enable Google AdSense ads for the month. I was partly hoping that this would provide me another way to collect money for the charity, but I was also experimenting to see how much money could be earned from this stream.

The bad news for the Irish Cancer Society is that this did not result in a significant revenue stream. In total I earned 7 euro and 64 cents during the month. Since they don't allow you to withdraw any money until your account earnings exceeds 10 euro, there was very little chance that I would consider giving up my day job and living off my AdSense earnings (in order to ensure that the charity didn't suffer I made a personal donation in lieu).


This experience, matches the experience I had a few years ago with trying AdSense advertisements on the web site of a local soccer team. The earnings from google were negligible, while the club had no problem convincing local businesses to pay several hundred euro per year to have their logo appearing on the web site. Of course, it could be the case that the local businesses are paying above the market rates for the existing advertisements - in fact many of them may be consciously doing this in order to build up good will in the community or to support what they believe is a good cause.

Are we suffering from Affluenza?

The latest eBook, I borrowed from the Fingal Libraries eBook lending service was called "Affluenza: When too much is Never Enough". This book talks about how modern Australia seems to be suffering from the affliction of Affluenza, which is defined as:

"a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"

This was a really thought provoking book. The book was specifically talking about Australian society, and hence most of the statistics included related to Australia. In a few cases they reported data relating to the United States for comparison. In summary the authors conclude that the level of wealth in Australia and USA is roughly similar as is the level of obsession with consumerism. However, while most American's realise that they are a rich consumption obsessed society, Australians seem to think of them selves as surviving in tough economic circumstances.

When I read the book I wondered whether or not Irish people are suffering from the same malaise. The Irish media are full of stories about how dramatically circumstances have changed for Irish people in recent years since the demise of the Celtic Tiger. However,  I am old enough to remember how tough times were in former decades and so I don't think we are that badly off at the moment in comparison.

I was delighted to read the survey reported in yesterdays Irish Times which contained an interesting fact that the percentage of Irish people who claimed to be "totally happy with their standard of living" had increased from 59% in 197 to 71% in 2012. The journalists seemed surprised with this statistic given Ireland's current economic crisis, but I think it is a sign that we have a good perspective on our economic circumstances.

The Mo has got to Go

Today I cut off my moustache since November is over. Although it is only a short while since I started growing it, I had got used to the feeling of a hairy upper lip. My growth was nowhere near as flamboyant as some of the samples that I saw my colleagues growing. In fact, according to this amusing guide to facial hair in the technology industry my moustache reveals that I am a natural legal analyst. I don't think that is the image I want to project so I will stick with clean shaven for now.

Although the growing season is over, the money collection will continue for a few more days. If you want to donate money my Movember page is still open and the green envelope is still at my desk.

Contributing to my Mo

My mo-running partners

As I mentioned earlier, I am participating in the Movember fundraising initiative. My moustache is progressing reasonably well, although the moustache is slightly hard to see it since it is grey in colour as compared to the hair on my head which is light brown (and getting lighter as I age). This week people are saying to me "are you growing a moustache?", while last week they were saying "you missed a bit while shaving".

Unfortunately the fund raising is not going quite as well. Mainly this is to to my own reluctance to come straight out and ask for donations. To help get around this fact I am going to put a sign up on my desk at work with a donation envelope directly below it. For those of you who want to donate on-line, there are full instructions available from the  Movember website.

Is it a good idea to write about your work on your personal blog?

Recently I attended a presentation by Marie Wallace telling people how to "tackle" social media. She made the point that it is important to have a clear idea for what your goal is for using social media or else you won't achieve it. During the subsequent discussion it became clear that most of the people attending the talk were planning to write primarily about the things that they are working on and associated social networking and blogging primarily with  advancing their career. In addition they didn't really enjoy using sites like Facebook and preferred to only use sites like LinkedIn with a more business orientation.

I enjoy engaging on social networking sites and my motivation is more personal that career oriented, but the discussion caused me reflect to  upon my motivation is and what I blog about. As I looked through my old posts I noticed a post which I wrote about a year ago analysing my motivation and this is generally still accurate a year later. However, I was surprised how few of my blog posts mentioned IBM or the work I do for them.

At a rough count, my blog post fall into 3 categories:

1. Roughly 20% have something to do with IBM or the projects I work on. I included anything vaguely work related in this category e.g. I wrote several posts about the Young Scientist Competition which are not really related to my work, but I counted them because I got involved through IBM's sponsorship of  the event. 
2. About 50% were technology related posts that had nothing to do with my work (e.g. reviews of mobile phone  applications) .
3. The remaining 30% non-technology related (e.g. expressing opinions about politics or sport)

Since I spend well more than 20% of my time thinking about my work I would have predicted  that (due to simple statistics) a higher percentage of my output would be work related.

I make no secret about what I work on, but my reasons for not writing about work relate to two main reasons:

• If I write about IBM or an IBM product I find it rad to get the right balance. If I a praise the company too highly it sounds contrived, but if I am too critical of an IBM product/policy it might have negative consequences too.
• It takes me longer to write about a work related product because I feel that people will expect me to be accurate and check all of my facts. For example if I was to write a technical article for DeveloperWorks about a product I was working on, I would typically expect to spend several weeks getting it exactly right. In contrast I can write a comparison between RunKeeper and MyTracks in a much shorter time and I don't feel obligated to double check any of my statement since I don't claim to be an expert.

After reflecting upon this a little, I decided to keep with my current balance of allowing personal posts to predominate on this blog. After all I have plenty of other forums in which to write about my work. If articles are published elsewhere about stuff that I am working on, I often promote them to friends and colleagues by sharing on Facebook and/or Twitter. Perhaps I in the future I will try remember to also cross post to LinkedIn, since this seems to be more popular with my generation.