The toilets on Boeing 777 aeroplanes come with a stern warning. "Flushing anything except toilet tissue down the toilet may cause external leaks and is a safety risk".

If this is true, then I assume what it really means is that the contents of the toilet, when flushed, are not stored on board but instead are sent rushing out of the plane in mid-air through some kind of Bernouilli tube. This would certainly explain the vicious suck which the toilet appears to have - presumably caused by the pressure difference between cabin and the freezing outside.

I imagine, therefore, frozen pellets of my pee raining out of the back of the plane at 300 miles per hour and landing in a trail like huge hailstones on the unsuspecting ground below.

The thought kept me entertained at 4am this morning anyway.

At 6.10am this morning I was 37,000 feet over the middle of America, sleepy eyes screwed up looking at the most vivid of sunrises.

The curvature of the earth was highlighted by a crescent of fire - above the black, misty edge of this world the sky burnt yellow, through orange to flaming red, finally diffusing into deep blue and then black. A few minutes later, the red sun appeared like a sparkling ruby in the centre of the display and the glow through the windows of the aircraft lit up the inside of our metal tube like dancing firelight.

It made getting up at 4am this morning somewhat more pleasing.

Travel on a low-cost carried like EasyJet in the UK and you'll find when you get on board the stewardesses are orange-faced, slightly plump, Liverpudlian or Essex girls with cheeky grins and sharp tongues. Fresh-faced from their Travel and Tourism NVQ, energetic, smiley, these are party-girls out to have a good time. They're feux holiday reps with the same brisk organisational style.

On British Airways, you generally get something more refined, more experienced, more stockings, less tights. These are James-Bond-style brunettes, infinitely sexy, early-thirties, calm under pressure, probably horse-ride at weekends and likely hold a man's attention in every continent.

Go on any Asian carrier - Thai International is a good example - and the stewardesses look like they've stepped off the catwalk, stunning, wearing elegant sarongs, smiling million-dollar smiles. Courteous and subserviant. Service is effortless. They bow when you board and disembark.

Now you get on any US airline - American, Continental, SouthWest (are my sampling points) - and you'll see US stewardesses are almost to a woman aged, over-50, haggard-looking, with scraped-back fake-blonde hair, wearing ill-fitting, plain pinnafores and lower than knee-length skirts. I'm not criticising invidividuals here, I'm sure they're all lovely women looking after their families in Minnesota or Kansas, but I'm fascinated by the contrasting stereotypes. They seem to have been selected especially to bulge in places their uniforms have least been designed to do so. They're austere as they pass out the $5 beers and throw packets of those "salted snacks" which double-up for peanuts in these allergy-afraid days. Why are attractive American girls not in the airline game?

I have no idea why there is such a clear distinction between each nation's stereotypical stewardess. I'm not sure it's even worthy of comment but strangely, it disappoints me every time I fly to the US. How silly.

UPDATE: Just to pursue this pointless and sexist line of enquiry still further than it ought to be pursued... I determined by observation that the American stewardesses in First Class are significantly more attractive than those in coach (as defined above). Which makes me question who is the person and what is the process by which stewardesses get assigned their classes and, since it is so obviously selecting on "attractiveness" how is this possible in today's supposedly equal-rights society? I picture the selection process as similar to the picking of the football team at junior school - where the worst players get left until last and picked over by the captains for their every flaw. The bulging stewardesses left to waddle and squeeze down the aisles in coach while the slender ones wander between the gloriously-spaced first-class swivel beds.

PS I wasn't upgraded, I just peered into the wonderful comforts of first class from economy.

This story comes by way of a friend of mine.

Guy, let's call him X, goes into the toilets at a bar, selects a stall and settles down to answer a call of nature. All of a sudden from the next door cubicle, a voice says "Hi". Quite seriously.

X looks round nervously. Obviously, being on the toilet is the last refuge of male silence - it's never good to talk while on the bog. Especially not in a public place. But anyway, up for a laugh, our man answers back, "Hi".

"How are you?", comes the reply.
"I'm doing okay", says X, feeling confident now.
"What're you doing?", comes the reply.
"Erm, having a poo?", says X, now more confused than anything.

Then this, from the other stall:
"Sorry, John, I'm going to have to hang up, some dickhead in the next door cublicle keeps answering all my questions."

In this situation, what do you do? Come out of the stalls and make nothing of it, or cower there waiting for your new found enemy to leave?

My new boss and I are going through tough times together but we have a pretty good working relationship already. I asked for advice on how I should work with him, he said, "just call me sweetheart once a day and everything will be fine."

He Skypes me this morning from home:
"Hi"
"Hi sweetheart", I reply, getting into the new regime.
"Call me at home".

At Ross's house the phone rings. He answers.
"Hello sweetheart", says Ross, grinning.
"Why, thank you", replies the Doctor's assistant calling Ross to cancel his appointment, not skipping a beat. Apparently she doesn't get many people answering the phone this way, but wishes more did.

When I phone thirty seconds later, I get a much more serious and sober response.

I found out today there are two other people in the office calling Ross sweetheart every day. I feel cheated.

Last night, fed up with work, I left and went to the Slam. What's the Slam?, I hear the Brits cry. Slam Poetry is performance poetry. So I went to a poetry evening. But this wasn't no ordinary drippy poetry evening, Slam Poetry is something else. You get three minutes, no props, just you and a mike, speaking your mind to an audience, in rhyme, while five members of the willing crowd judge your lines. It's tough. But it's funny and it's touching and moving and powerful and fascinating and entertaining and educating and generally all-round a bloody good night out. Even if I did go alone and sit in the corner, listening to fine words and drinking beers I didn't need given I was driving home.

Before the Hotel TV rots my brain and the powerful words fade from my over-tightened, fragile mind, before they leave the delicate place where they inspire me, let me jot down briefly some of the words covered. In verse. Tonight.

A poem about Tomorrow. A tale of African delight. A boy, in a field with a spear and the task of becoming a man by killing a lion. He feels alone. All alone. Until he looks round and in the long grass, stand his ancestors, each with a similar spear, fighting tooth and nail for him, willing him on to become a man.

These Slammers, these educated few, the passport-holders of the US of A, are a breath of fresh air and a demonstration that someone, somewhere is starting to spread the word that the ways of the Republicanist States have no place no more.

It's been one of those days when the pressure and the stress of working boil over to the point where, ironically, it feels right to raise a red flag, naval gaze, discuss how the team is performing, blow a gasket, pull on the brake, shout that you wanna get off. Basically, to raise the ugly issue that things are not going well, that things better get better and that unless they do, you ain't hanging around much longer.

I went to my bosses and screamed for help. Slightly more constructively than perhaps I make out. But the effect was the same. I lost a few hours work but gained a significant amount of motivation and inspiration. I'm lucky I have supportive bosses.

I learnt a bunch of stuff:

I knew it already but that I'm motivated by having people I greatly respect, respect me.
I felt what it's like to have others tread on my toes and appreciated what it's like when I tread on theirs.
That it's okay not to tolerate crapness in people who work for you. There's no room for failure or inability.
That sometimes when things are difficult, seem impossible, the right thing to do is rise up above it all and set out to just do better. There's always something you can do.
That it's important to do something everyday which makes the job better.
That it's lonelier the higher up an organisation you climb.
That it takes inner resolve to come out smiling when everything seems to be falling apart. But that those around you need those smiles.
That teams take a long time to mesh properly and to work productively together.
That simple communication failures are at the heart of most people-induced problems at work.
That delegating work to other people is much easier than it first appears - and that it's possible to relax having done it

Oh and we set in motion our very own "work day" - every Friday, no more meetings.

About pragmatism
Brian builds houses. His architect designs incredible things for his houses including a magical suspended porch which sticks out of the wall and provides a state-of-the-art, crisply-designed sun-shade. It's main feature is it has no posts holding it up from the outside. That's pretty cool, but when the builder comes, Brian asks him - 'so how much is it going to cost to have me this sun-shade?'. The builder sees it'll need steel reinforcing beams all through the rest of the house to suspend the porch.

'If you can live with posts instead, it'll be easier to build and cost you $15,000 less', says the builder.

This is the lesson on pragmatism. I'm the builder. The business team are the architects. It's my job to introduce reality into the situation. And get a better, cheaper, faster job done.

Fantastic, vintage, Dervala. She's back.

I've linked to this article before, but I re-read it the other day and it's haunting me how many mistakes we're (ie my work are) making at "doing a good job" and it seems that even the simplest of things we take for granted in organiations of more than 10 people are so easily suppressing our basic creativity and actively preventing us from achieving our goals. It shouldn't be this hard.

Here's a good example:

To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you're supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can't measure their productivity.

The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can't make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun. If employees have to be in the building a certain number of hours a day, and are forbidden to do non-work things while there, then they must be working. In theory. In practice they spend a lot of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun.

If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.

That may seem utopian, but it's what we told people who came to work for our company. There were no fixed office hours. I never showed up before 11 in the morning. But we weren't saying this to be benevolent. We were saying: if you work here we expect you to get a lot done. Don't try to fool us just by being here a lot.

The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working. I'm convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.

For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive.

Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect. So is email, on a smaller scale. And in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation-- breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful.

You can see how dependent you've become on something by removing it suddenly. So for big companies I propose the following experiment. Set aside one day where meetings are forbidden-- where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Some amount of communication is necessary in most jobs, but I'm sure many employees could find eight hours worth of stuff they could do by themselves. You could call it "Work Day."

The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time just thinking as I do actually typing. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood. This is a critical phase-- this is where ideas come from-- and yet I'd feel guilty doing this in most offices, with everyone else looking busy.

It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. And that's one reason open source, and even blogging in some cases, are so important. They show us what real work looks like.

and another...

I think the big obstacle preventing us from seeing the future of business is the assumption that people working for you have to be employees. But think about what's going on underneath: the company has some money, and they pay it to the employee in the hope that he'll make something worth more than they paid him. Well, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. Instead of paying the guy money as a salary, why not give it to him as investment? Then instead of coming to your office to work on your projects, he can work wherever he wants on projects of his own.

Because few of us know any alternative, we have no idea how much better we could do than the traditional employer-employee relationship. Such customs evolve with glacial slowness. Our employer-employee relationship still retains a big chunk of master-servant DNA.

...

Nothing shows more clearly that employment is not an ordinary economic relationship than companies being sued for firing people. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. If you want to stop buying steel pipe from one supplier and start buying it from another, you don't have to explain why. No one can accuse you of unjustly switching pipe suppliers. Justice implies some kind of paternal obligation that isn't there in transactions between equals.

Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. But you can't have action without an equal and opposite reaction. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. And that seems a bad road to go down.

Next time you're in a moderately large city, drop by the main post office and watch the body language of the people working there. They have the same sullen resentment as children made to do something they don't want to. Their union has exacted pay increases and work restrictions that would have been the envy of previous generations of postal workers, and yet they don't seem any happier for it. It's demoralizing to be on the receiving end of a paternalistic relationship, no matter how cozy the terms. Just ask any teenager.

I see the disadvantages of the employer-employee relationship because I've been on both sides of a better one: the investor-founder relationship. I wouldn't claim it's painless. When I was running a startup, the thought of our investors used to keep me up at night. And now that I'm an investor, the thought of our startups keeps me up at night. All the pain of whatever problem you're trying to solve is still there. But the pain hurts less when it isn't mixed with resentment.

I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. After Yahoo bought our startup I went to work for them. I was doing exactly the same work, except with bosses. And to my horror I started acting like a child. The situation pushed buttons I'd forgotten I had.

The big advantage of investment over employment, as the examples of open source and blogging suggest, is that people working on projects of their own are enormously more productive. And a startup is a project of one's own in two senses, both of them important: it's creatively one's own, and also economically ones's own.

Read the full story at http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html

Having done many psychological tests over the years, I always find it uncanny how accurately we can be defined as people from just a few short questions. I found these descriptions of my personality so spot-on and they help explain aspects of my behaviour at work recently which have been causing me anguish.

What is INTJ?

one more

Detailed analysis

Do the test for yourself... and a second opinion.

What I find amazing is that we will all find it almost impossible to fully appreciate what it is like to "be" a different type - it so significantly affects everything about the way we perceive reality. It helps immensely just to appreciate that there is a difference.

My life is brilliant .
My love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan.

You're beautiful. You're beautiful, it's true,
I saw your face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
Cause I'll never be with you.

Yeah, she caught my eye,
As I walked on by.
She could see from my face that I was,
Flying high,
And I don't think that I'll see her again,
But we shared a moment that will last till the end.

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
I saw your face in a crowded place,
And I don't know what to do,
'Cause I'll never be with you.

Lalala lalala lalala lalala laaaaaa

You're beautiful. You're beautiful.
You're beautiful, it's true.
There must be an angel with a smile on her face,
When she thought up that I should be with you.
But it's time to face the truth,
I will never be with you

So many pretty girls, so little time...

I am home for the weekend. My mate Hemel and I take a long weekend and head out walking in the Dales. With my parents on holiday, it is strange to be at home in my home town and yet not "just" at home seeing my family.

We draw huge lungfuls of the bracken and heather and wet-peat flavoured air of the moors. We trudge through the mist to the top of Ingleborough and gulp our lunch down in five-minutes flat to save getting cold in our thin jackets and pathetic towny skins. We smoke fat cigars to celebrate our summitting of the 696m Pen-y-Ghent and take photos of each other laughing in the fog.

We go clubbing at Time, a sizable and glamourous night club which wasn't called Time when I left Harrogate and will probably be called something different next time I return. We ogle at the ever-so-slightly-seedy 18-year olds who queue outside, giggling. We gawp at the bikini'd dancers handing out flyers in the freezing cold of this October night, glad of our jackets. And later we dance awkwardly in the heat of the club our walk-tired limbs complaining through the fug of beer.

The next day in the sunshine, we stand on a pack-horse bridge over the river Nidd and throw pooh-sticks through the vividly-bright yellow leaves of a beech tree. We talk of the future, map out the opportunities which will let us retire by 40 and give up the rat race. And we reminisce about the past.

I think of all the things I did in the country as a kid, growing up. And how rarely I do them now. I think about the way London and work makes you forget what it's like and how much fun it is to kick up leaves or throw sticks into a quiet river or just marvel at beautiful, majestic, untouched, scenery or shout out loud or run across a field or down a hill.

Perhaps it's just the change that does me good. It wasn't easy to return to work today. And nothing I did today compares to looking out over the Yorkshire Dales on a blustery October weekend. In contrast work makes me feel numb.

...but I laughed out loud.

I'm throwing a party.

Eat, drink and be merry

Everyone else in my gaggle of friends seems to have been throwing lavish weddings recently or otherwise living it up. With little prospect of any of that on the horizon and, not having had a proper birthday party since my very successful joint-21st party nine years ago, I figured - why not have a blow out?

Now very much looking forward to being 30.