What's my brain doing when I'm not looking?

What's the best way of problem solving? "I'll think about it" you say when confronted with a tricky problem - but it appears this is probably the worse thing to do.
There's an interesting extract in Saturday's Guardian (here) about how the different halves of the brain deal with information differently - left side is logical, right side is doing something much vaguer. Some neuroscientists are saying that this vague stuff the right side of the brain is doing is actually really very important in problem solving.

What the inside of my head feels like most of the time

When I'm stuck with a problem (which is usually in programming, maths or engineering - it's what I do), I do tend to sit down and think about it. Then stand up and think about it. Then get frustrated after an hour and go and do something else - and it's then that the solution often comes. And this is without trying - so there must be something going on in my head, which I'm not conscious of, that's making connections. I think this is the right side of my brain at work.
But sometimes it's slow - I still get small moments of revelation when something I learned at college suddenly makes sense - and I graduated almost 20 years ago.
This also explains why it's difficult to teach problem solving. You can go about it logically - but actually it's the weird connections the right side of the brain is making that finds the solution.
So "I'll sleep on it" may be a better approach when I've got a problem to solve. I wonder if I could get away with invoicing for time spent asleep...

Just when you think you know what's going on

So here's what's happened in the last week or two. Tories announce an unpopular budget; Tories embroiled in funding and influence scandal; Tories try to distract public by picking fight with union that isn't even on strike; incompetent cabinet office minister fuels panic buying with some ill chosen (or was it?) advice. Labour surge in the polls, despite rather than because of their leader; lib-dems remain dead men walking. Labour retain Bradford West with increased majority as a protest against the government.

The last bit didn't happen - instead George Galloway pulls off his election magic in another constituency with a big muslim population.

This was a surprise - not just to me, but to the media too. The World Tonight last night had very little (or even nothing?) about this item - devoting more time to the untimely passing of the banjo legend Earl Scruggs than the recently closed polls.

Galloway is a divisive figure - even in my own head. I agree with a lot of what he says, and he can say it very well. His powers of oratory are well known - but he is also comes across as a publicity seeking, self serving egotist. That doesn't make him wrong, just difficult to believe sometimes.    


So what does this mean for the bigger political picture in the UK? Probably not much. The Tories and Lib-dems have too much invested in the coalition to break it, as the outcome of any resulting general election would be too uncertain to call. If (big if) it were to happen, Labour would have to have changed their leader (perhaps find another Milliband from somewhere) to win a workable majority.

So it's probably a case of big news in Westminster, but we'll be stuck with the current lot until 2015.

2 months old, going on 87

Life as an independent consultant is a bit like being really old: you don't get out much, you eat a lot of soup, you worry about heating bills.

It's been two months since I started working as "Horritt Consulting", and things seem to be going pretty well. I've managed to invoice for 86% of my time so far - my target is 80% so I've one day a week to do admin, research, CPD, hoover the office and look for work.

Is eight cups of tea per working day excessive?

I'm finding it quite fun being everything from CEO up to office cleaner. I'm learning lots of new stuff, and using the stuff I learnt about geodatabases in Indonesia (there'll be an another exciting post about using Spatialite and PostGIS to process big spatial datasets soon...).

Having your own office space is great, as I used to hate working in a big open plan office, and the commute is down to around 2.5 metres. Takes me about 3 seconds if the traffic's not too bad.

There are some interesting jobs coming in too. I'm now looking at some potential work in the Philippines, which could be very exciting.

There's some things I've found difficult:
Not getting out much. Popping out for a paper is the highlight of the day. I'm trying to get round this by getting out and about to meet people at least once a week.
Getting paid 2 (or more) months in arrears. Fortunately I have a credit card, but living off one of those isn't ideal. Perhaps I should be chasing those invoices harder.
Focus (I should be working while I'm writing this) - giving up smoking hasn't helped. There's always something diverting to do - make another pot of tea, play a bit of guitar, listen to a really interesting programme on Radio 4 about fishing quotas, look out of the window.
Organising my time properly - never one of my strong points.

It'll be interesting to see how much work there is after March when the new financial year starts - lots of the stuff I've been doing is happening because people are trying to spend their budget for 2011-2. But at least I'll have had a few good months to begin with. 

Sunset from the office window