Dave's just moved house (if you're one of the very wonderful friends who made it possible thank you!) and this morning was reading from the course book of his OU systems course. The course book mentioned the metaphor of a mental toolbox, and having spent the weekend dismantling and reassembling furniture I saw a connection…

Most of our furniture is self-assembly, and so comes with some semblance of it's own tools (like an allen key or a small spanner that hurts your hand). Now being a modern man in tune with my primitive roots I feel the need to keep a selection of tools in what I laughingly refer to as my toolbox. This keeps the hunter gatherer side of me happy that I am not completely emasculated by enjoying shopping.

When dismantling these various objects of furniture I was disappointed to find that my collection of tools did not always have the answer. In fact on numerous occasions I had to abandon the luxury of my cast-steel adjustable spanner to scrabble at the bottom of my toolbox for the pressed metal Ikea thing that had come with it in the first place.

The specific tool has the advantage of working perfectly as it is designed for the item. However, every item requires it's own tools and if there is cross compatibility it is only by luck. Thus, to cope with lots of furniture you'd have to carry loads of little tools that are each infrequently used.

In my own case, as I try and develop I feel that I need to move from lots of little mental tools that are each infrequently used to the mental equivalent of a proper set of spanners. The advantage is that they can deal with lots of circumstances, but they are expensive… The mental tools can only be paid for with experience, and the new set I want are very expensive!

This is my perpetual difficulty - what I want to do requires lots of generalist experience - I have lots for my age, but is this enough? Hence the hectic schedule and push for learning as I try to squeeze in my lifetime at many times the normal speed!

Q: What's the best thing about having an electronic face?
A: If you don't like it you can change it!

Thus, arrod has tried to become more open and easier to read - Dave has introduced a new method of menu highlighting and the rather swish new sitemap on the home page. Forthcoming stuff will be more minimal.

Although this seems to be falling into the common trap of becoming a blog-centric blog, I think that more is at play here. I'm getting some feedback that people like the arrod house style - the partial references to myself in the third person, the attempts to be a bit diff, the three dots... To continue this style I want to make the site feel more organic and less ordered, which is very much reflective of its content. In doing this I hope to learn more about how to get a handle on complex unordered systems.

Also a surprising number of people are approaching me about starting their own sites and I have a vision of creating a system of simple pages that anyone can copy, style themselves and fill with their own content - a kind of off-the-shelf blank arrod.co.uk for you to fill in. The technical changes have been to simplify the site, and assuming no one complains that it doesn't work in their browser, then I'll stick with it.