I'm really interested in flow and how organisations and people don't the systems they are creating, but instead see the features of those systems. I've been using Activity Theory as a framework to understand and explain how this works, but also looking at Dan Hill's strategic design book and revisiting service design as an approach. We are now in a position to build interesting services rather than just do the digital bit or make a app. The digital bit now can change the whole scope of a project, well beyond being mere marketing. The work going on at GDS is a strong example of this sort of approach, but it can be applied at smaller scales than a whole country. The talk I gave at Ignite Strava was driving at this, don't look at the data, look at the behaviour which drives the activity which generates the data. Support the behaviour and that will help to determine which activities are important and which lead to generating good reusable data.

I learnt to ride at seven or eight, had fun on a BMX, then road bikes while I was in my late teens. Mountain bikes arrived a few years later. Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s didn't exactly encourage long distance road rides. University and my twenties zipped past, my racing bike being used for frantic dashes to college. I finally bought a mountain bike in my late twenties, I rode that in Epping Forest, for commuting and adventures up to the Peak District. Then I moved house and changed jobs, which pushed commuting beyond the realm of the possible, 12 miles and 8am starts weren't feasible. I started climbing and mountaineering, then had two lovely boys, my mountain bike lived in the shed. It was the school run which led me to buying a Brompton and falling in love with cycling again. A Cannondale CAAD10 arrived about nine months later.

I mainly ride in London during the week, using my Brompton to explore the city. It comes everywhere with me, like my ice axe did in the mountains. I don't carry a lock for it, as I've never been turned away from anywhere with it. My Brompton is a big part of my life, the small size means it is rarely far from me and I'm used to riding, wheeling and sometimes carrying it for much of the week. I do treat it badly though, I get off it to do things, go to a meeting or get home and see my family. So it is the bike which is folded away and left grubby, whereas my road bike gets all my attention.

My Brompton has changed my relationship with London, I wait a lot less, as my transport is under my desk. Merino has become a firm part of my wardrobe, with a shirt to change into tucked in the Brompton bag. That is my only concession to commuter riding. I need to be able to get off my bike and go straight to a meeting. The design of the front luggage system on a Brompton makes this possible, as I don't need to ride with a backpack. I wear normal shoes and jeans, I save the lyrca for my CAAD10.

On my road bike I often ride in Essex, Epping Forest starts behind my house. I make a regular Sunday loop out into Essex, sometimes I manage a mid-week ride, but turbo training with the Sufferfest is also likely. I ride in sportives, particularly in Sussex, I'm envious of the plentiful cat 3 hill climbs and I rode in the Pyrenees last year, which was breath-taking. This is the riding that is my most indulgent, when I can push myself, exploring my strengths and frailties in a way I can't on a Brompton. A road bike fits this terrain perfectly, through mine I've discovered I like hill climbing, easing into the rhythm of the climb balanced by the burning in my legs feels right somehow. I do wish London had some proper mountains nearby.

I track my rides by GPS now, like many. I made a map to see how my understanding of London changed by bike. Blue points at a dozen or so tube stations versus red ribbons from east to west and north to south. The data came from Chromorama, which uses the TFL Oystercard as its source, and from Jonathan O'Keeffe's Strava Ride Mapper. I feel I know London much more intimately from a saddle, than stuck in a tube tunnel. Instead of patches around tube stations, I know whole connected swathes of London. The smells and sights of London are much more a part of my world now. I miss reading while commuting though, but not the tube carriages.

Like climbing, I love the focus that cycling offers, your mind empties and for those moments it becomes about the senses. I can't understand people who ride with headphones. I ride to relax; for the sun on my skin; pushing it on a climb; a pretty view; to get to work; and to show to myself (mainly) that at 40 being active is possible and fun. Strava helps too. I'm also encouraging my boys to ride. At 3 and 6, they're both riding and my eldest is having lots of fun at Lee Valley Youth Cycling Club, where I'm a volunteer.

Watching my boys take to cycling is a delight and there will be a lot more of that in the next ten or more years. For me, this summer I've have done my first century ride, the Dunwich Dynamo and followed that up with a much more hilly one in Sussex as training for the Tourmalet in the Pyrenees. I've also tried my first race at the London Nocturne, which was great fun. Fitting in more than just cycling for commuting alongside my life with my two boys and my lovely wife will always be a compromise. It can't be cycling first, I'm not a pro rider. This in fact gives me freedom to pick and choose my challenges. This year was about distance and hill climbing. I know the hills will stay, but next year it might be racing or cyclocross. Cycling also forms part of my business life, helping road.cc, Vulpine and others with digital strategy. It seems a Brompton can take you a long way.

Which then begs the question of what to do with this blog. One idea is being worked on in the background which I'll say more about in the new year. I think in the meantime, I'll revert to thoughts which reflect the sorts of work I do with clients and relevant news. Next up will be a piece on social objects and how they operate in frames of reference.

I like the derivation of the word freelance. It harks back to medieval times, when a knight who was not bound to a noble, could offer his services as a free lance.

Looking now towards the future, I have meetings with a couple of potential to probable cycling clients at the end of the month in Birmingham, which I'm quite looking forward to and half a dozen other potentials who are coming out of summer slumber I hope.

Lastly, you can buy my book, Building Social Web Applications, at a 50 percent discount, direct from O'Reilly, this week. They have a Back to School Special, if you use code: B2SDEAL.

This month started with a trip to Brighton for dConstruct, which was good again. The afternoon was stronger, in particular Matt Sheret's and Dan Hon's talks, but I enjoyed Kelly Goto's talk from the morning session too.

The Brighton Maker Faire was great fun too. Highlights for me were the SketchChair software and some of the robots, even the squirting one. My boys liked the mosaic making and the tangible feeling of being able to create things.

I've spent this week in planning and pitching for new clients, plus catching up with existing ones from after the summer. I've started working with SolderPad, helping them to see the right social object in their product plans. Moving open hardware from sets of personal projects to a curated whole will be very benefical I think.

I'm now two cycles into do my VAT returns, got a refund the first time from the four years of contributory expenses brought to the business and this time paid them a chunk instead.

I've got a couple of map related projects that I'm exploring in my free time, one an old idea about tall buildings. The other related to the Google Elevation Services api plus my fondness for bikes and hills. So, that was short and sweet, but I'm back to weeknotes.

Image copyright Acumed LLC

I'll have a general anaesthetic while they fit the plate and it should be day surgery, this article in the Daily Mail of all places is pretty close to what I've read. This page of notes about clavicle fractures is a little out of date, but it was a real help a few weeks ago. All the cycling websites I've read say that this is the best long term outcome treatment, so I'm fairly happy about the whole thing, wikipedia agrees, too. Though I am staying away from the videos and the more gory pictures, however this animation is helpful (quicktime download). The eventual scar looks ok too.

I'll update this post as I know more.

I had the surgery, yesterday, feeling a bit sore today, but mostly ok. The plate was an acumed one in blue in fact. Mr Goldie at Whipps Cross was excellent. They had to take a bone graft from my hip to promote healing and union of the clavicle. If you are curious as to how my shoulder looks, see Flickr.

The other thing I did was my first VAT return, pretty straightforward using freeagent, which does the accounts and the submission. So I just needed to get my expenses in order, noting that the HMRC allow reclaming of VAT on expenses made before registration and that you can get a VAT invoice from O2.

Lastly, my first client paid me, which is what this is partly all about, so yay.

There is pretty much only one option for dictation software on the Mac. Dragon Dictate is a retail only package, because it comes with a dedicated headset, this is a Plantronics 610 with an approximately 2 m long cable. It plugs into a specific USB adapter and the Dragon dictation software listens to this. There is a wireless version for about £100 more. I bought the wired version of Dragon Dictate from Amazon for £130.

I got the software yesterday, it takes about 10 minutes to install. The headset is quite comfortable and the setup takes about another five to ten minutes. since then I've used it to write about half a dozen e-mails including words like peripatetic, pneumothorax and phrases like King's Cross. It is pretty accurate and certainly faster than one-handed typing. It does require a slightly different way of thinking as Dragon dictation works best with flowing sentences, it makes many more mistakes if you give it halting fragments of text. It works by matching word frequency and sound analysis. There is an inherent statistical bias towards Americanised speech, but it's quite straightforward to edit this. One annoying bug is its habit of adding space before every word while editing. So if you are not careful you can end up with double spaces between words betraying your edits. I'm hoping they will fix this in a subsequent revision.

Reading on various support forums for Dragon Dictate it seems that having a recent i.e. less than two-year-old Mac running 10.6 is pretty essential. Having 4 or 8 gig of memory installed helps a lot as well. The ability to dictate directly into MarsEdit or Mail is a real help. I can see myself using this quite a lot even when I have recovered, as despite having written a book my typing speed has never been that quick. I'm aware that this won't work very well in a shared office, but for using at home it is fine.

I'll update this review, as I use and train the application more. It is possible to both train Dragon dictation in terms of the vocabulary you use by giving it documents you have written and train it to your voice by reading sample documents they provide. I think a few hours spent doing this will improve the accuracy a lot. At the minute it varies a lot from stretches of near-perfect, when I give it 10 to 20 words at a time to getting one in 10 words wrong if I give it halting speech. Because of the statistical nature of its matching it often substitutes phrases rather than getting individual words wrong. So you develop a habit of reading what it is just typed for you, which is a slightly odd style of writing. Though on the whole it is a good and enjoyable experience.

The experience has given me some time to reflect on what I've been up to this year so far. A lot of the work I'm doing is product strategy, but for some clients my role is more of CTO, helping them to commission appropriate technical services and understand the wider implications of what their product is. The product strategy aspect of my work tends to focus on ensuring there is a understandable benefit for someone using their application. It is all too easy to focus on the feature set or the business to business side of a new endeavour. This means that the core user experience, which is often the only experience gets short shrift. Being able to the question “why would they tell anybody about using your application" is often a useful prompt.

I'm still learning how much support a company provides that is hidden away. The IT department in any company has never been top of my list of useful things, but I can see the sense in Apple's Joint Venture programme. Managing my company bank account; paperwork from HMRC; and ensuring expenses and my accountant are kept up to date consumes plenty of time. I'm hoping to be able to carve out a week or so soon to build one of the app ideas I've had on a shelf for a while. Writing some more here would be good too.

That leads me nicely into talking about balance, that of doing the work vs finding new work. I've got enough work at the minute that I'm not taking on new clients until some way into April, maybe early May. However the meetings to get the work for later in the year take time to prepare for and turning those interesting conversations into something that I can invoice is harder with some prospective clients. I'm enjoying the variety and the larger client I have at the minute is certainly giving me something to get my teeth into. I suspect this balancing act will be a common state of affairs for a while.

I bought myself a new MacBook Pro last week, having discovered that I can claim the VAT, even if I'm going to be flat rate registered, as long as I spend over £2000. So a shiny new MacBook made its way to me via Kazakhstan of all places.

Last week covered a huge range of subjects for clients and prospective clients, from cryptography to QR-codes and near field communications to healthcare and data markets. This is one of the things I really like about my new way of working. Lots to learn and understand, then translate into useful products or advice for my clients.

I bought the Brompton to shorten the 20 minute walk from my son's school to the tube station, my plan was then to get on the central line and change trains to get to Kings Cross, when I worked for Nature. I realised that the return journey of cramming onto the central line at 6ish was dismal at Liverpool Street, so started riding all the way home and sometimes riding from Liverpool Street to Kings Cross. Then 'flu, the snow and Christmas intervened, plus a change of job but I'm now riding in and out most days. Fifty miles a week is not uncommon now. I'm saving money vs having an Oyster card, though losing my place on Chromorama as a result. I think I'm saving about the best part of a hundred pounds a month, so the Brompton will pay for itself in about a year, if I ignore the extra breakfasts that seven miles each way encourages, maybe 18 months including the extra bacon.

It has made me fall in love with cycling again and become a bit fitter too. My ride from home to Old Street is about 35 minutes, plus a bit of waiting about at traffic lights, so I get more than the recommended five half hour stretches of exercise a week just travelling in and out. All this riding has turned my mind to doing something more purposeful and I've started to look at what sort of racing or group rides I might want to do. Of all the different possibilities I think cyclocross might be the one. I've got two lovely boys, so the idea of spending most of the weekend in the saddle away from them on a 60 mile road ride doesn't appeal, nor slogging all day through a forest on a mountain bike. So the hectic mud and fun of laps on a cyclocross race seem to be the thing. It is a very popular sport in Belgium and in the US, less so in the UK, but there is a London league. However finding in stock cyclocross bikes amongst the endless array of road bikes, single-speed fixes, mountain bikes and hybrids makes for slow progress. I found two, maybe three that might fit my six foot four frame and found a place to ask too.

Back to the Brompton, my preference has become to use it for the majority of my journeys, certainly short hops around zone 1. Unless it is really chucking it down, you don't get that wet much wetter on a bike than walking I've found. A mix of howies epic jeans and merino gives good clothes to ride to work in. Plus I bring a shirt to change into once I'm in work and take it easier on the way to work. I have got the upgrade bug now though, so I've bought different grips for the handlebars and better lights for the front of my bike. There is a big difference between being seen versus being able to see. The top end of the Olympic site needed brighter lights to let be see the potholes properly. I didn't get a Brompton with a rear rack and sometimes I regret that, usually a spare rucksack carried in the bag that attaches to the front of my B will suffice for bringing a big box home. I can't wait for it to warm up a bit though.

I had my first client visit out of London last week, a day trip to Talis to see Leigh, Chris and Zach. We spent the day talking over their new data marketplace Kasabi, I'm helping them with the wider social aspects of their product. How to link the data sets and applications to human activity, which will help it feel more like a community and less of a store. I think it will be a great product when it is done, the curatorial and API development features feel like they will make a difference.

The trip to Birmingham, hiring an accountant and a bit more work coming in has made this last week really feel like I'm running a company now, even with half-term last week. It is all quite exciting, I just need my VAT number then I can send off an invoice to my first client, which will then feel very real. A day late on weeknotes this week, but I had a trip to the dentist and an early night instead of posting this.

I'm still finding Freeagent a real help to organising the admin side of my business, so I'll be signing up for that when the trial runs out. I've got an accountant now and have my first meeting with him this week, which should help with the bigger picture in terms of the finances.

One of the things I miss about being freelance is the overall shape that a larger company gives to a working life. I don't mean Outlook and silly network policies, but more the sense of overall direction and pattern of sometimes useful meetings. The last month and a bit have been part filled with a search for that shape. Getting some clients helped move things on to a more convincing basis for me too. Now there is a stable pattern forming. The beginning of the week is client work until Thursday, when I can catchup on admin or reading, then I get to spend the afternoon with my first son, finally Friday is more client work at the minute, but in time might become my twenty percent day. It is not a complex rhythm, but finding the edges of my working life and where it stops is feeling necessary. Every minute could be a working minute, but I think that is not a good route. Solving the eternal work vs life balance, when there is a lot of flexibility in working style, still needs as much thought as when there is a 10-6 expectation too. That said I'm really enjoying being freelance, even when it spills out in to the whole of my day.