Signs and symbols

I made this sheet of signs and symbols when I was an explorationist at Statoil. I had always used Macs until then, and wrote my thesis in LaTeX; both make it very easy to write scientific signs and symbols. It seemed to be a struggle on the PCs we had at Statoil, so I made a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts for myself.

I sent it around to some people when I left ConocoPhillips and some said they liked it. So I thought I'd put it here for anyone to take. The idea is to print it out and put it on your wall. Next time you catch yourself writing 12 km2 or 25oC or not bothering with the pesky acute accent in resumé, just glance at the list. On Windows you would hold down the Alt key, then with NumLock on, type out the number indicated on the number pad (the numeric keys above the alphabet keys won't work).

What is Agile*?

The name Agile* is connected to a concept I want to promote in my work as a geoscientist: agile interpretation. What the heck is agile interpretation?

It's borrowed, or stolen if you prefer, from the agile software development philosophy. The idea is that you take an idea or strategy and, above all, stick to it. It drives everything that happens next. Then you do something, anything. This is anti-perfectionist and quite counter to many people's intuition (including mine). Then you iterate, as quickly as possible.

This might sound obvious, but it's not how most projects work. Most projects, of almost any kind, build a plan, preferably with a Gantt chart, then slowly but surely execute that plan, then... fail. Or if they don't fail, they at least are late and over-budget. This is not agile.

Unless you're building a nuclear reactor, I think it might be wiser to start small but bold, do good things quickly, fail often, and become adaptable and resilient. This is agile.

Landed!

After a predictably exhausting trip across Kensington, then across Calgary, then across Canada, then across Nova Scotia, we have landed in our new town. Next week (we hope) we make the final move across the village to our house. Before then, we have some painting, planning, repairing and replacing to do. Fun stuff, but I am going to be trying to make myself useful to present and future clients while we do it. We'll see how that goes!

In the meantime, I got my new business cards just before we left Calgary. They are a bit home-made, but I like it that way. The geeky 2D barcode thing is a QRCode, and very easy to make online (just Google make qrcode). This one points at this website. You can encode more or less anything in them, but the more text you encode, the bigger they get. They max out at 255 characters.