One of the major discussion points over the #geekretreat weekends was on the rockstar elements of geeks, the thing with rockstars is that they're not really the value.

It doesn't matter to the audience that stars get laid, screwed up on multiple substance, and then pass our in a puddle of their own vomit. Well, to a lessor degree, what matters to the audience is that they're getting the song. The band is not the product, the song is the product.

I think this is what's missing from a number of perspectives. I recently had a rant on a mailing list I'm subscribed to, defending personal brand, but the more I think about it, and my thanks to Sarah Rice for helping with this thought, personal brand is just another packaging, just like the rock band.

If geeks spent more time practicing, honing their skills, getting good product out, then maybe, maybe, given a little luck they might obtain the status.

I think before we even think where are the rockstars, answer me this: "What's happened to the music"

I think it's important to qualify this post, I'm not a journalist, I'm not even really a blogger, for the last bit I've used these pages as a bit of a personal mind dump, rather than putting out event dependent news and opinions, however this weekend was something special and the reflections on it will be as important as a mind dump as any other book or text that I've read that has made it on here.

It's been a long time since I've been around a group of people that have directed their minds and energies in such a beautiful, open and gracious way. Arriving on the Friday night, I bumped into several of the journalism community I know so well, I figured, like with so many other conferences, that the trend would be for people to gather around their old friends and like so many other conferences we'd walk away a little closer only to those we were close with initially. I'm wrong a lot more than I'd like to admit.

The conversation hit important mental high ground immediately, and inclusion seemed to be the theme. With rockstar personalities across the journalistic, internet and entrepreneurial board it was refreshing to see that every single one of these individuals was here to contrib to something much bigger than themselves, we were taking the best of the South African crop and focusing on how to make our country richer as a whole.

There are a number of points that need to be chunked out, and I intend to write a post on each one. As such my promise to you is to give feedback on the following topics over a period of the next week:

- The geek community
- Entrepenuers locally
- The one element that drove me a little nuts (A suprise)

In the meantime, I strongly urge you to look at the following posts, and I will be putting up further posts and links as they come out:

Elon Lohmann's Impressions of #geekretreat
First thought's from Vincent Hoffman
Toby Shapshak's commentary on the rockstar aspect of the geek community>/a>
Heidi Schneigansz and Scott Gray on working together to improve digital skills & education in South Africa
Jason Norwood-Young's amazing session on tomorrow's media
Notes from Gareth Knight's session on bootstrapping a startup, my favourite session of the retreat
Gareth Knight's views on the geekretreat

Pictures from the social side of things can be found here:

Thanks to Scott Gray - Link now fixed
Pics from Heather Ford
Gregor Rohrig's elephant shots
Gareth Knight's Flickr set

There are a number of outputs that are being put together by the geeks that were there, as these become clearer, and the projects start rolling off, I'll be linking to these too.

A special thank you to Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve D for an incredibly weekend. From a purely personal perspective, it helped me further create a resonance with the community, and helped my head deal with several incredibly large issues that I had been grappling with for a while.

Watch this space for more information coming up over the week. Due to an unfortunate incident with a flu bug in the night, I require a little more sleep than usual, and I'm not processing optimally. As soon as I am, I'll be getting out the important stuff.

I've been incredibly slack on my blog, I could say it's got to do with twitter becoming a more useful medium to me, however I'm not really sure, mostly because we as human's are fundamentally flawed in how we correlate Cause and Effect relationships.

There are however ways to break through this trap, and it's surprisingly simple, it does however take a shift of perception on how we view "reality".

Establish the Effect, this is the symptom that you know is there, if it wasn't there no cause-effect relationship could possibly be found. Let's say for example, that we have an effect of a sore throat.

So, I have a sore throat and I think it's due to the fact that I'm getting ill, because I stayed out in the cold last night. Great so we have a sequence of events, and a sequence of possible causes, and I've created meaning (which acts as the relationship between cause and effect).

1. Identify the assumptions in the above statement.
2. Do you agree or disagree with those assumptions?
3. What evidence do I have that they are valid?
4. What evidence do I have that they are false?

Ok, so...

1. The assumption is that is being out in the cold that made me sick.
2. I'm a little unsure of those assumptions because:
3. Although I do have a sore throat
4. The lozenges that I'm sucking arne't making it go away

The process of to rethink cause and effect relationships, in order to start looking at the real cause is very simple (in simple cause-effect systems, depending on the feedback of this post I will go into more complex detail at a later stage).

1. Question the existence of an entity
2. Question the existence of a relationship.

It is possible, that additional independent, equal or greater causes may exist (in this cause I had actually burnt my throat on a cup of coffee) or it may be a combination of defendant causes. Various modeling methods may be required before understand what the root cause of a symptom really is.

This post brought to you by my studying up on archetypes to solve theory of constraint problems.

As we go through life and we grow through our formal education systems, learning about physics, math, literature and various other absolutely fundamental systems of knowledge, we tend to leave out, in my mind, something a little more crucial, an understanding of what we can expect to see from ourselves and the people around us as we start to mature.

Friendship at school is a basic thing, women develop a core tribe of a few friends that tend to take the maxim of their energy, while men tend to garner a lot more friends with a lower signal to noise ratio on friendship, thus creating greater network with slightly less individual effort. These relationships are easy to maintain as we're forced into shared experiences, we are all at the same time dealing with bullies, puberty, learning how to stumble around the opposite sex and rebellion in general.

Our early twenties we spend bounding from relationship to relationship, or one-night-stand to one-night-stand, depending of course on your level of hedonism or ability to lubricate socially, and then something incredible happens: Social Genocide.

Slowy, at first, the tree spanning fractals of your social groups start dropping nodes, two at a time. The entire reason for becoming social eats it's own tail, and the division and rift starts to happen. Not just based on couples who no longer maintain relationships with as much fever as they may have previously, but through context switching, too many people, doing too many things, and slowly the tragedy of the human dilema slips in, and the realisation occurs: Who do I identify with? I feel alone. Where do I go from here? I have no information, I didn't know to expect this.

This can be a terrifying place, it is also the place of freedom. It is a place where you have the ability to shift your perception of who you are into who you want to be, because your identity lies within your own hands, rather than the hands of those that you've known all your life. Your life starts to shape itself under self-review, rather than peer review, and if you take that step to respond to it, you have the ability, not to be lonely, rather to be free.

Who are you, when the only person you need to share with is yourself?

A couple of years back I headed off to Singapore for Vale Tudo coaching, while there the trinity of self was in an amazing place. Mind, body and spirit were in a beautiful harmony, I was training hard, experiencing different cultures, reading heavily and was somebody slipped a little something into my education.

Walking through one of their beautiful bookstores I grabbed a copy of The Ethical Slut and my coach forced upon me a rather odd looking book Shambhala: The sacred path of the warrior. After being mostly left on my bookshelf for a good 4 years I finally opened it up last night, and it's rather beautiful.

It is a lesson in personal mastery, a practice in acquiring personal freedom through gentleness, courage and self-knowledge. Without attaching to any specific culture it pulls together the potential richness of humanity.

The last week has been a difficult one, regardless have how easy it is for me to help others step through their darkness, I forget that I sometimes have to step through my own. The game is easier to see by those not playing it.

I've been working through my headspace, and realised how simple it can be sometimes. I'm a starter, I love to start things, and hate to finish them, I just get bored. Once I've worked out how something should work, there's a little switch in my head that goes *ping* it's done. Of course, this means that I don't derive the value from completing the job.

I've also noticed that life seems easy from an external perspective, we watch people do things that they've done a million time, without taking into account that they've done it a million time, and comment to ourselves "They make it look so easy." Hidden away is the blood, sweat, tears and utter frustration that have lead them to their personal mastery.

So I've stopped. Instead of beating myself up, twisting at my very core, I've stopped. Instead I've set up a system of small jobs to do on a daily basis, which are actually treats to me, to show myself how much I'm worth to myself, and slowly I build up my esteem once again.

Life is hard, and we all have the tools to deal with it, and we all deserve the best life that we can create for ourselves.

Opinion
by Nagarjuna.

'I was here before.'
'No, you weren't.'
'This will last forever.'-
Horizons of the past.

'I will survive.'
'No, you won't.'
'This will end.'-
Horizons of the future.

What happened in the past
Is not happening any more.
If you think what happened then became you now,
What you grasp would be something else.
What are you but what you grasp?

If you are what you grasp,
You would not be here,
For what you grasp comes and goes;
It cannot be you.
How can the grasped be the grasper?

You're not different from what happened then.
If you were, you would not need a past.
You could survive without having to die.
The past would be severed, revocable.
Others would experience your acts.
Without a past you would be
Either manufactured or uncaused.

'I was here before.'
'No, you weren't.'
'I was and I wasn't.'
'You neither were nor weren't.'
'I will survive.'
'No, you won't.'-

Opinions are absurd.

If the gods were us,
We would be eternal;
For the gods are unborn in eternity.
Were we other than them,
We would be ephemeral.
Were we different,
We would never connect.

If I were half a god and half a man,
I would be eternal and ephemeral.
What can be ephemeral
Without eternity?

If this ends, what world would follow?
If this never ends, what world would follow?
Like a flame of a lamp
The flow of matter and mind
Neither ends nor never ends.

This would end
If mind and matter failed to flow
From the dying of their past;
It would never end
If mind and matter failed to flow
From a past that never died.

If half this ended and half did not,
I would end and never end,
Leaving half the grasper
Dead and half undead,
Half the grasped destroyed,
Half undestroyed.

Everything is empty-
In whom? About what?
Do opinions erupt?

For Gautama
In whose embrace
Dharma was shown
And opinions vanished.

What a strange act of synchronicity, I was on my way home tonight piecing together the structure of this post in my head, juggling through topics and realising the single biggest topic I wanted to talk about was Organisatonal Development and how misunderstood it is locally. Upon arriving home I met the first person to ever understand what it is that I do, on title alone (in other words, without the big picture, long conversational pitches and actually working on a project). Which in turn kind of through my pitching arm out, none the less, I have a a point to make.

Organisational development is about behavioural science, systemic thinking, processes, workflow. Most of all it's about people, and understanding how to best utilise themm. It is NOT human resourcing, hell I hate the term, people are not resources, we are the reason for corporation, processes and policy revolve around us, you and them.

There is however the greater role that has been lent the title "Strategic HR" which is become a larger more powerful source of business intelligence, and making the machine a far more humane and wonderful beast. Strategic HR, now sitting at the highest point of the business unit corporate ladder requires a strange blend of business acumen, political savvy and personal psychology understanding and is slowly becoming one of the most sought after and listened to area's. Through the 90's new CXO roles developed such as the CIO and CTO. My hope is that in future, through the want to better understand people in the workforce, a CXO role is developed for Strategic HR.

At the end of the day, business, as life, is about people. Let's treat each other with the respect that we deserve.

Attention has become the new black, almost as if the old new fads of TQM, Theory of Constraints, SCRUM methodologies et al. have been broken down structurally into a single point of failure: Focus.

Wired online recently put out this article on "Digital Overload Is Frying Our Brains", and the read is an interesting one and well worth it. Maggie Jackson looks closely at the neurobiological responses to attention deficit, and in a basic cause and effect type method suspects the digital age to be behind us being a lot of distracted over ADHD type people.

I tend to disagree..

To be fair, I've been thinking of writing this post all day, yet I've been distracted, distracted by work, eating, relaxing and various other things that I mark as a higher priority than my blogging.

You see, as much as we do live in an age where distractions happen often, and multitasking has become common place, I still find that I can focus for hours on end, without any dstraction, on a single task quite happily. In my mind the secret is about priority, the simple question of "Is this task the highest priority to me right now?".

My view on this is once things are prioritised they become easier to deal with, "Yes I want to do that, because it'll lead me to this" gives a lot more focus than, "yeah maybe for 30mins I'll do that and then play x-box"

I don't think we're in an age of attention deficit, I think we're in an age of lost priority.

It's not often that I do a full tech post, mostly because I find that philosophy and human behaviour tend to have a larger target audience. Having said this I've been hacking this thing for the last 8 hours, and I've finally got it right. So I'm publishing so that others can avoid my problems.

It turns out the latest version of the MacTeX LaTeX package comes without a critical set of files. You can however install the tex4ht source files here.

You also need to install your font files in the following directories:

/usr/share/texmf/fonts/
/usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/ht-fonts/

Run a updmap-sys and then run a texhash so as to update your ls-R files.

I'm finished, I've been staring at this problem all day, and feel like I've wasted a day doing so. I realise that I can now get to what I needed to do tomorrow (or the day after, depending on what the day brings).