If you’re working in Hursley, sat a couple of centimeters in front of your screen, coding away all day, where do you go for a break? Well, Hursley has a Japanese garden, with a fish pond, fountain, trees and bits of modern art. It’s a cool place to get away from the technology and a bit of peace and quiet.
Here’s a quick video clip of the garden.
– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
Some people in D block have made this very impressive dome of vending cups. It’s in a very quiet corner of the building, meaning that not many people have come across it yet. News is spreading though.
It makes me wonder if geek-made creations might be the future of corporate art.
– Roo Reynolds (Pervasive Messaging Technologies, IBM Hursley)
We have all been feeling it, a change in the landscape. The term web 2.0 has been used a lot, but the most appropriate one that sums it up for me if the “fifth wave”.
We have had mainframes, minicomputers, pcs, and client-server/Internet. Nominally these could be called waves 1 to 4. The fifth wave is all the enabling technologies that have become pervasive. Broadband, always on connectivity, open standards, easy to use tools, scripting, J2EE etc. When all these tools are put in the hands of of people with ideas and allows them to implement those ideas we have the fifth wave.
Fair enough not everyone can feel the wave yet. It may be more of a settling of the levels. However, it is clear that there are platforms and avenues for the new ideas. People remember the dot.com era, so we have the balance of ‘yes thats very good but will it work’. The important thing is that there are enough of us around who understand what the wave is and can help generate those innovative solutions to problems. I think its fair to say there are here in Hursley.
Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
The Hursley site tends to have a few oddities, which differentiate it from other IBM locations. One of them is that we have a pub on the site (IBM sites are generally alcohol free). The Hursley Clubhouse also acts as the focal point for all the clubs and societies running in Hursley. It’s kind of like the corporate equivalent of a Student’s Union. They run a whole set of activities: football, sailing, flying, gaming, as well as some more esoteric ones, such as the model railway club. Visitors to the Clubhouse are often surprised to see a full model railway in operation. A lot of people, like me, use the Clubhouse more for its food and drink service. You’ll often see a few Hursley big wigs supping a pint on a late Summer Friday afternoon.
We’re also lucky that Hursley village, which is only a five minute walk from the IBM site, has two pubs of it’s own. The Kings Head and the one which I tend to go to more often, The Dolphin. The Dolphin is a very traditional, old English pub. It was built around 1540, reportedly from the remains of HMS Dolphin. We tend to go there when there’s a birthday, people join or leave and for any other special events. It’s nice to be able to walk there from our office and it tends to be packed with IBMers most lunch times. It is quite odd going somewhere that has been around for over 450 years when we spend all day working on stuff that hasn’t been released yet and probably only has a life expectancy of 5-10 years. It’d be interesting to know if any code we write today has a chance of still being run in 2460. Somehow, I doubt it.
Here’s Ian celebrating a birthday in The Dolphin this week.
– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
A small snippet of what went on at the rocket launch day can be seen here. A fine example of both engineering, common sense and good practice at work
Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
Darren has already posted this week on how he and his department spent an afternoon launching rockets together.
Today, my team and I enjoyed similar team-building fun by going go-karting. I’m slightly bruised this evening (no accidents, but some of those corners were sharp), and we all had a lot of fun.
– Roo Reynolds (Pervasive Messaging Technologies, IBM Hursley)
I got interested in ‘pop’ psychology in college. It was primarily through doing some AI work, and also trying to figure out how to model behaviour in games. Both of these were sidelines. However, having seen Derren Brown do his mind tricks on the TV, part NLP part magic, it struck me that it was a useful set of things to be armed with should someone try and ‘manipulate’ me. e.g. customers, managers, salesmen. I did my usual thing of buying a book, and not quite reading it all the way through. However, some of the basics did start to gel. e.g. When people are explaining things, some of them use words like I hear, to the tune of etc, other use images, I see where you are coming from, it looks bad, and others use ‘feel’. If someone who sees things, talks to someone who hears things, there is a disjoint. So NLP is about adjusting to empathize, or abuse the differences. There is way more to it than that. Natural communicators adjust to these sorts of things automatically. It can be taught, but its a practiced art. Anyway it will be interesting to see what Hursley Lab people, many from a development background make of this information. Something that is more akin to sales school that a deep technical audience
Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
When I joined IBM, out of college, I used to work in the HQ at North Harbour down in Portsmouth. Thats only 25 miles from Hursley. It was a suited and booted environment, lots of accountants and sales people, and us techies busy writing code for internal systems. We knew of Hursley, but it was a ‘research’ place a world away, very few of us visited. Then, and I remember it well, the project I was on was going to be relocated to Hursley. This was a shock for many people, but for me I thought that it would be great to be in the heart of research, with a big country house and acres of fields around. I think I was expecting Bletchley park, and lots of code breakers, in the cryptogarphic sense rather than the testing sense.
We duly moved in 1995 into Hursley. I have to say at the time it was a little dissapointing. We all ended up in an open plan office, sitting with the same people on the same project doing the same thing. The biggest difference was that I turned right out of my road on the way into work, not left. Now this observation is not all doom and gloom, or a negative reflection on Hursley. It is something that hits us in corporate life. Whilst a location, or area might have a certain buzz about it, its the people you work with day to day that make the difference. Back then, yes I sound old, we had little in the way of communications. Yes we had email, but email is not the way to get to together with like minded individuals outside of your department/office/cube. In 1997 I moved to join a group, the Interactive Media Centre, which was also based in Hursley. This was a complete change, even though I had been on site for 2 years, I had not met many of the people in this small group. It was a very different, graphic designers, producers and techies all together, all with very different perspectives. We grew on the internet/e-business wave.
This ability to move to other groups and have a complete change is very important. It is a social grouping, and it is about physically being in the same place, something that happens less and less in business. What has been interesting to me is how the world has altered, such that it is possible for people to gather and share ideas through things such as this blog (or any other blog), through websites, games etc. So it is now much more important for people to look at their virtual peripheral vision(VPV), to get involved with things in a structured way, or randomly as suits their style.
You do not have to make a complete commitment, moving site, moving department or changing your skillbase in order to get hooked up with people who you have an affinity too. Where you can spark some ideas around, show off or have serious discussions. The roots of this blog are people who happened to have ended up in Hursley, but who do different roles, have different personality types, but like to share thoughts and comments on a variety of topics. I am not suggesting people don’t move jobs, but if something is missing from your working life, its certainly worth exploring with your VPV.
Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)
Darren’s lovely photo of Hursley House shows where we work. The view from the lawn really is impressive. Can’t see anyone playing frisbee in this shot, but I guess it was a bit late in the day for that.
I’ve never actually worked in the House itself; there are several more modern buildings behind it, and I’m currently in D-Block. It is very good to show off to visitors though, and an excellent location to host meetings.
OK, so I’m part of a group of techie/creative people who work at IBM’s Hursley Park Lab in the UK. We have regular technical community meetings, well more like a cup of tea and a chat really, about all kinds of cool stuff. One of the things we talked about recently is that although there are lots of cool people and projects going on in Hursley, we never really let anyone know about them. So, we decided to try and record some of the stuff that goes on here in an unofficial blog.
The plan is to give a bit of a UK flavour to it all, but talk about the technology coming out of the lab, things people are playing with, but also some of the fun side. Hursley’s a very unusual place, compared to most technology sites, so we want to get that across. Anyway, hopefully lots of different people who work in and around Hursley will contribute.
– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)