Tuesday, March 5

Snow had fallen. Snow continued to fall; lots of it. I left the house in what seemed like a completely unnecessary reboot of winter.

Today I got off the metro at Sörnäinen as usual, and waited for a bus. Everything appeared normal: the crowds measured less than the space on the buses. As I looked round while waiting, I noticed that the scale of the work surpasses anything I had expected. Workmen have cordoned off whole chunks of the roads around the junction and closed several metro exits. Parts of the road stand blocked as far down as St. Paul’s church.

I spent the morning preparing the Structuring Information course that begins the day after I get back from India. I had made a careful list of everything that I needed to do and I worked through the list, item by item. I explored Cloud9 in a more coherent way than I had done before and prepared a step-by-step demonstration.

I proved to my own satisfaction that each student can make do with one workspace by using subdirectories. I also worked out a simple way to provide each sub-project with a back button, using an iFrame and a simple naming convention. I prepared a step-by-step demonstration of this too.

Finally, I ate my own dogfood as we used to say. I transferred all my little demonstration projects from Dropbox to Cloud9, where they sit in subdirectories in a workspace called Structuring Information 2019. I then decided that I could make myself a second, empty workspace that I could use for live demos, using the material from my reference workspace.

This may sound obvious. It sounds obvious to me now. It didn’t used to though, before I had a morning to work through it all.

I put away Cloud9 and eat lunch. I calculate that I will have one Indian soup left when we leave. I also decide that I made the right decision buying fresh coriander to add to my hummus and crispbread. I get up and go for a walk round the building, in an attempt to find something architectural to photograph. The building never fails me.

I will fail to find Jutta on Skype and settle down to finish rereading Guild Socialism Restated, which keeps reminding me, in a rather unsettling way, of Stephen Potter’s books like Gamesmanship and Lifemanship. Perhaps G.D.H. Cole’s insistence on referring to members of his imaginary guilds as guildsmen has something to do with this.

At 16:00 I will record a podcast with Sophie about G.D.H. Cole, and at 16:45 I will leave for home, trying to catch the 71 bus as the only sensible way to approximate a normal journey to Sörnäinen.

Irma will spend the early evening with the MakeSomeNoise gang, and then visit Marja.