Take the tube to Tottenham Court Road, then take a 5 minute walk towards Oxford Circus and you come across one of Londons iconic music venues, the 100 Club.

The list of people that have played the club over the years is huge. Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen and the Stones all played there, but it’s probably best known as the place where Punk started.

I can’t claim the 100 Club was my introduction to the live music scene in London. That honour goes to either the Rock Gardens or the Marquee Club. I can’t recall which as I was a bit of a drinking lightweight at that time (not much has changed then).

On one celebrated evening in 1976 the club hosted Sex Pistols, The Clash and then Siouxsie Sioux. The following night came The Damned, The Vibrators and Buzzcocks.

I was born a decade and a bit too early to be there on that night, but I was front and center when the club hosted Inspiral Carpets and Supergrass. They displaced Grunge with BritPop as the next “big thing”. I was not there for any of Oasis early concerts, but did see Paul Weller, Damien Albright and Ian Brown.

Unfortunately this week the club announced that after 68 years it’s time to close the doors. The owner blamed soaring overheads and unless there is a last-minute sponsorship deal or new buyer the club will close at Christmas.

It’s location is incredible, right in the center of town, but every other shop on Oxford Street is a loss leader for the big corporate stores and the independent stores have long gone. I guess it demise was inevitable considering the changes that have gone on around it.

I’m sorry to see any music venue close, especially one that was part of my growing up. Reading NME it’s happening more and more, notably in London, as rents go up and the clubs can’t break even any more.

The mid 90’s were a good time to be a music fan in London and the 100 Club was a big part of that for me.

Last night at CineBarre in Mountlake Terrace there was a showing of the football movie Pelada and a Q&A with one of the makers.

It’s an independent documentary that’s been doing the indie movie circuit for a little while now. This was its first showing in Seattle and was well worth the effort.

It’s about how the game of football is universal, how all it takes is a ball and you’ve a game that crosses cultures and languages. Four young Americans spend time in 25 different cultures getting involved in pickup and organized games. There are no professionals, no manicured pitches, just football and people that the game is a way of life for.

There were games in Argentina against old men that have played every Sunday morning for decades, on the beach in Brazil, on top of buildings in Japan, against bootleggers in Nigeria, the street in China, inside a prison in Bolivia and a ghetto in Buenos Aires that the police had advised them to stay out of.

There were a couple of rather telling segments. Playing as a woman in Iraq and the slums in Nigeria big deals, but most notable was the games in Israel. FIFA loves to play on the notion that football can unite people across political or social boundaries. Pick-up games in the middle of Jerusalem show this to be total nonsense.

The group found a field that was used by mostly Jewish players, but as the evening went on some Arab players turned up. The rules were simple and used all over the world, 5v5, 10 minute games and the winner stays on. The evening they were there was a couple of days after a Palestinian hijacked a piece of construction equipment and killed a number of Israelis and tension was high.

You could feel the tension when the Jews and Arabs were playing each other. Perhaps the most telling line of the movie came from one of the Jewish players, he was asked about the game, playing Arabs and crossing boundaries. He answered “although there are some people who try to portray football as being above politics, above all tensions, it’s bull. We will play with them, but we hate them.”

Pelada is a good independent documentary, and worth the effort to search out.

If there is a world leader that going to say something dumb there are two usual candidates. Everyone’s favorite Venezuelan Hugo Chaves, or the man heading a seeming permanently “a crumbling coalition” government Silvio Berlusconi.

This week it’s the Italian’s turn. The coalition he heads has split and he has lost his majority in the Italian parliament after a falling out with former ally, Gianfranco Fini.

At a recent political gathering Berlusconi told a joke in which Adolf Hitler is begged by his supporters to return to power after they discover he is still alive. After resisting, Hitler says: “I’ll come back, but on one condition … next time I’m going to be evil.”

Opposition politicians demanded Berlusconi apologise to Israel and the Italian Jewish community. The opposition party leader, Antonio Di Pietro, said: “At this point the problem is not political or judicial, but psychiatric.”

This is why we all love Italian politics, the opposition speculate that the PM is mentally unstable (perhaps with good reason). But wait, there is more from the man.

He then started discussing the economy, he suggested (and you can’t make this stuff up) that marrying into money was a good idea.

At which point he said “I am friendly, I have money, legend has it I know how to do ‘it’, and lastly because girls think: ‘He’s old and rich, he will die soon and I will inherit everything.”

My mother died on the 26th. At the time I had no idea how it would change my life. In fact it’s through writing, therapy and a lot of reflection that I have realized just how profound the change has been.

My mother died, as she had lived, trying to force the world to her will. She wanted to be at home, and was waiting for the ambulance to arrive to take her there.

I think mum had a good life, she was only 63 years old when she passed and for over 40 of them married to dad. She had been diagnosed with cancer three years earlier and had been in and out of hospital only for the last month or so.

I’d made three visits to England during that last month and during those visits she had generally been restless and somewhat disturbed by what was going on. I last saw her three days before she died on my way to Heathrow. It was different; she was calmer, more relaxed and peaceful.

At the time I did not realize what was going on, but looking back it was our good bye, and I think she knew that.

After her passing I chose not to view mum, I want to remember her as she was last time I saw her. Her closest friend Jen did, she said the pain was gone, the lines had disappeared and she looked so peaceful.

I no longer fear the moment when I will be no more. I accept my mortality and longer worry about this brief life. And I can trace that feeling back to Friday the 26^th, I know that afternoon in the Royal Surrey her passing was both peaceful and while untimely, her death itself showed how natural it is to die.

That doesn’t mean I accept or welcome, I intend to fight against it. I’ve taken up tennis again; I’m getting niggling issues sorted, be a good patient and look forward to another 40 active years.

However this was only a part of what happened to me that day.

When I got the call from dad that my mother had died that Friday I knew I would never see her again. In that moment my day was full of practical things, dad, airplanes, suits and so on, but there was something I was sure of, total certainty that I would not see here again.

I could make many arguments against religion. Darwin may only be theory, but it’s the best explanation of how we came to be (which is the definition of a theory). I do believe that many of the world’s ills have been caused by religion, for example the Catholic opposition to any form of birth control is putting a huge strain on our planet’s resources. This is without getting into the appalling claims of abuse being aimed at various churches, along with allegations of cover-ups going all the way up to the Pope.

Don’t get me wrong here; the thing that happened to me in the emotional wake of my mothers passing wasn’t the strengthening of my feelings against religion. It was the strengthening of my atheism. I believe that there are as many people living “Christian virtues” among the faithless as the faithful. As part of this journey is seeing where I’ve gone wrong, and there are many places I’ve been very wrong and I need to change.

The loss of mum was so hard, much harder than I thought it would be.

In the last few weeks a couple of my mothers close friends have passed. Last month was Natalie, her youngest son was born on the same day as my brother. At that time we lived on the same street, that lasted untill I was 11 or 12. A few years ago she moved just a street or two from my parents once again and was a regular visitor. Her death did not come as a total shock, she’d had some health problems over the last year or two.

Last week another one of mums closest and oldest friends, Kay Bannister passed. Mum met Kay in 1959 when she used to baby-sit Kay’s eldest sons when mum was 13. I had no idea, I learned about it this week. Kay’s passing did come as a surprise, she had a heart problem no one knew about, including herself and always seemed in pretty good health.

Like Natalie, Kay has always been part of my life, when dad was away mum didn’t like being in the house by herself and we’d typically stay with Kay. Her youngest son Chris is the same age as I, we did a lot of growing up together. We went on vacation with both Kay and Natalie’s families at various times, I recall Scotland, Isle of Wight, Dorset and Cornwall. These were two people that were big parts of my life growing up and two of the people who promised mum they would help look after dad.

I have seen them both recently, Natalie came by dads house when I was here only a few weeks before she passed. Candidates for the tontine are starting to run out.

Pain indicates there is something wrong, whatever the source of the pain is it indicates something needs to be heeled. Acknowledging that pain is the first step, without that the pain does not go away, it lingers and the healing process takes longer.

I accept my pain, and feel my grief knowing that it will pass, knowing it will strengthen me and help me work towards being the person I want to be. I know what I want to be, and it’s not who I am today.

At work we use Earned Value to track our projects, not the most straightforward way to do it, but one that seems to add a lot of value for the work done.

I like EV, but it does become a little bit of an acronym hell. This is in a business world already overpopulated by PowerPoint’s bearing total gibberish.

EV has a number of issues in actual use. First it tends to be a little complex for the one-slide leaders who like simple stop light charts. There is no chance of having the time, or my boss having the attention span to talk 10 or 12 different EV metrics.

So if I have to choose one or two EV metrics to talk when reporting out to those with the attention span of a Golden Lab at a Frisbee factory, what am I going to use?

A bigger, and perhaps the biggest problem is that the project has to be fully understood and defined. And in a world where bigger projects full of go/no go gates and smaller projects is a little more ad-hock this is becoming difficult to do.

Scope creep destroys the whole basis of EV and makes it meaningless. The baseline must be complete, understood and adhered too. Deviation, creep, rescoping means re-baselining and what I see as probably the most important EV metric, Cost Performance Index (CPI) utterly meaningless.

This brings me to today’s discussion in cubeville that was started by a college project I’m working on.

First we pulled out our PMBOK’s and spent a little time reviewing all the EV metrics. I think we all agreed that first is Cost Performance Index (CPI) is the first we should follow.

CPI is a straightforward; it compares the work actually done to the actual costs of getting that work done. What have we completed, compared to what we have spent.

When CPI=100% for every hour we’ve spent on the project we’ve earned one hour of value.

It’s a snapshot of where we are today. If the actuals are correct (hours, cash, widgets delivered) and the project baseline accurate then CPI gives a good idea how close you are to budget or projections you are. It’s simple and the results are clear.

Last week at the BTEC there was a paper presented that stated that once you got to 20% of project completion, performance to date becomes an accurate indicator of future performance.

It was based on the analysis of a number of Department of Defense contracts and the data showed that once you got to 20% of the way through your project, you could accurately predict the final results to within 10%.

If you were to divide total budget (BAC) by the CPI at 20% project completion, you should be with in 10% of the final cost.

So if you were on time/budget at 20% completion, you would close to budget at project completion.

However if you were at 25% of budget at 20% completion you would end up at somewhere around 125% (+-10%) at project completion.

This potentially a huge “early warning” that a project is in trouble. However you’ve spent the money and CPI shows what we’ve got for that expense. What do we have to do to get back on track?

That’s where my second EV metric comes into this. To-complete Performance Index (TCPI). TCPI shows how efficient we have to be to finish the project on time/budget with where we are today.

TCPI is another simple one it’s “work remaining/funds remaining”.

If the project is behind or over budget and TCPI needs to be moved back to 100% there are two ways to do this. Rescope and reduce the amount of work, or increase the budget to compensate.

It is not uncommon for projects large and small to go over budget and when making a new forecast it’s easy to assume that everything will suddenly go right, that problems are behind us and from here on it’s all going to be OK.

Once the TCPI shows that the budget is no not realistic for the work remaining the first question from leadership should be how much money will it cost to complete the project. The risk at this point is that another unrealistic budget is completed, and every month it’s revisited and matched to actual performance with out ever understanding what was wrong with the initial estimate.

This revising makes the whole point of tracking EV pointless as the metric is not being tracked to the original baseline.

The conference was fun, I made some interesting connections and learned a few things that are only going to help.

One of the advantages of staying in Disney resorts are the restaurants. Disney has you and they would prefer you went for dinner in their restaurants, and Thursday night we obliged with a wonderful dinner in the Animal Kingdom Lodge. First this hotel is spectacular, zebra, giraffe and wildebeest roam outside the hotel rooms. The theme and attention to detail is exactly what you’d expect from Disney, exceptional.

The food in Jiko at the Lodge was exceptional, great wine list and some interesting beers. The group filled up the show kitchen and the food was prepared as we watched, very impressive. I was wondering is the slower beasts found around the resort end up in the kitchen, I was assured this is not the case.

On Saturday I had a whole day to get my Disney geek on, Friday night turned into an unintentionally long night, but come Saturday after a decent nights sleep everything felt a lot better.

The idea was floated of EPCOT and going for a drink in each world, being within staggering distance of the hotel made this an easy option. Of those staying an extra day a few had over done it Friday night at the reception (including one of my managers, it’s going to cost them a good performance appraisal at the end of the year) and this idea did not appeal, so off to the Magic Kingdom we went.

We drove to the Contemporary resort, parked there and walked the 10 minutes to the park. Staying inside Disney and having the transportation service was really nice, but being able to park at any resort was even better.

The Magic Kingdom may be about the most micromanaged place outside North Korea, and I think that’s a complement to Disney and the way in which Disney does things, they really are the master in controlling the environment. The place is as ever immaculate and even though it’s only been 8 months since I’ve been there I still get that silly grin as I go through the turnstiles.

First surprise was how empty the park was for a warm Saturday in early September. Staff at the hotel had complained that trade was down significantly over a typical September. It should be quiet as kids are back in school, but attendance in the Magic Kingdom looked really light, so much that there was no queue for Space Mountain at lunch time. We walked straight in and onto a car, no waiting.

The park was rather spooky with the sparse crowds and I was wondering what we’d missed. It really was that quiet.

Talking of spooky, the “Not so scary Halloween with Mickey” was being pushed. The Halloween decorations were out in force and while this is a holiday I don’t understand, I really don’t get it. The roots go back to the British tradition of all hallows eve (early 16^th century) and the even older Celtic festival of Samuin. I struggle with going from that to a giant fibreglass pumpkin with Mickey on it.

However it is Mickey and therefore I was at Disney, and that’s cool.

I have just enjoyed an entertaining Italian GP while sitting in a bar in Salt Lake City airport on a Sunday. Which to be clear, is not a sentence I’d ever have thought I’d relay.

I asked for one of the TV’s to be turned over to catch the last half of the GP before catching my next flight. By the time the GP ended there were maybe a dozen people enjoying the race between flights.

Fernando Alonso said winning the Italian Grand Prix for Ferrari “It’s something only really to compare with the Spanish Grand Prix victory in 2006.” Surly an understatement, drivers I’ve ever met has felt that winning at Monza in a Ferrari would be the absolute highlight of their career.

This was Alonso’s first season with Marinello team and his third win of the year. With Vettel finishing fourth, Weber in sixth and Hamilton DNF’ing the title race has been thrown wide open once more after being given a little clarity in Spa.

Button claimed second (just under three seconds behind Alonso) after a great drive. He led a significant part of the race from the start. Alonso took over the lead with a quicker stop for tires and better in lap.

Massa was a comfortable third just behind Button. He was close, but never quite quick enough to worry the McLaren driver.

Vettel was fourth and Weber sixth, the two Red Bull drivers were unable to keep up with the top three. They looked closer in qualifying than they did in race trim.

In between the two RB was Rosberg in the first of the Mercedes. Schumacher was well beaten once again this weekend by his teammate and finished ninth. I’m surprised by Schumacher’s lack of pace throughout the season. Over the last few outings he’s typically been a lot close to Rosberg than this weekend.

Schumacher has publicly written off 2010 as a learning year. With Ross Brawn running things and both drivers under contract for next year it will be interesting how the off season goes for the team. I don’t imagine Schumacher will tolerate a repeat of this year where both the package and the driver were not quite there.

Williams had another good weekend as the best of the real privateers, both cars finished in the points with Niko Hulkenberg showing why he so sought after over the closed season. He took part in a great battle for sixth between Weber, Kubica and himself.

Now the circus heads off to Singapore in two weeks. Conventional thinking says this is a track the favors the Red Bull cars over the Ferraris and McLarens, but all three teams have been working hard to find something extra for the remaining races that are all over “slower”, more technical tracks.

Ferrari had an awful showing two weeks ago on a track that should have suited them rather well. Today they did very well, Hamilton retiring after tangling with Massa early on helped. If Alonso wants the chance to really take this championship the team has to be consistent.

The result today has significantly tightened up the points championship. There are 24 points between the top five drivers in the championship. With five races and a maximum of 125 points available it really is as good as I’d hoped it would be. Lot’s of opportunity for both drivers and teams to make this their year.

Final word to Alonso “In 2007 [when he won for McLaren at Monza] there were not very nice words because I was in McLaren fighting Ferrari. But here now it is very different, this welcome and support by everyone is great and Felipe (Massa) and me. We had a fantastic weekend.”

I believe that the best battles in a GP weekend are within the teams. They are the only other driver with the same equipment, same team behind them and whatever resources can be brought to bear in doing the job.

A top team should be able to put two good cars that are close to equal at any GP. The only variables are limited to the driver, the strategy employed and the small group of mechanics and the race engineer who is responsible for making the calls.

So for the three teams I looked at for this were Mercedes, McLaren and Red Bull.

The reasons for choosing McLaren and Red Bull are obvious. Each has two very good drivers and both teams are at the sharp end of the drivers and constructors championships.

Mercedes, that’s also simple. Michael Schumacher vs. Nico Rosberg.

It’s no real stats analysis, but a little simplistic fun that threw up some interesting results that actually back up some of what I’ve claimed in the past (mostly).

Here is the average race finish position of the six drivers I’ve been looking at

• Schumacher           8.36
• Rosberg                   5.64
• Vettel                        3.79
• Weber                       3.79
• Hamilton                 3.36
• Button                       3.43

So what do we learn?

• Rosberg is outperforming Schumacher by a significant margin, on average almost 3 places.
• Vettel and Weber have the same average finish position. The reason Weber leads in the championship is he’s picked up points at every race he’s finished. Vettel has one finish out the points. This is how you win championships, consistency.
• Hamilton and Button, again very close. Both have two DNF’s (aginst Red Bulls 1 each) and more finishes outside the points (Button 3, Hamilton 2).

Doing the same for qualifying and it starts to get interesting.

• Schumacher          9.64
• Rosberg                  7.0
• Vettel                       2.21
• Weber                      2.21
• Hamilton                5.21
• Button                      7.43

• Again Rosberg is clearly out qualifying Schumacher and by almost the same average he’s beating him by in the races.
• Vettel and Weber have the same qualifying position on average. Again impressive.
• The McLaren duo on the other hand there is a clear difference. Button is being beat a significant amount on the grid.

This is the important number, the difference between the average qualifying performance and average race position.

• Schumacher           1.29
• Rosberg                   1.36
• Vettel                       -1.57
• Weber                      -1.57
• Hamilton                1.86
• Button                      4.0

The higher this number the better the driver performs in the race. Again it’s simplistic, but lets go with it.

Button improves by an average of 4 positions between his start and finish places in each race. Assuming everyone finishes (unrealistic I know) he passes four cars in each race.

Hamilton has a slightly better average starting position, but does not pass as many cars during the race (just under 2 per race). But that average finishing position means more points in the standings.

The really interesting number is the -1.57 of the two Red Bull drivers. We know the margin between them is razor thin. The numbers all along support that, however this negative number that they are struggling (not in an HRT or Virgin way) executing in the race. That errors or strategy mistakes are costing them points. Their average finish is a position and a half worse than their average grid position.

They go backwards. The team can’t translate it’s qualifying performance into the race.

We know the Red Bull cars are fast, the drivers fast, but errors by the drivers and the team are costing points. This has been my hunch all along, and the stats (as simplistic as they are) seem to support my thoughts.

As for the two Mercedes drivers, Rosberg is doing slightly better in the races than Michael. It’s not a huge difference, but it’s there. But the Red Bull thing, that’s interesting and shows that if they were just even between race and qualifying, they’d be walking away with the championship this year.

I thought this was an interesting exercise with some surprising results.

Made it to Disneyworld and the conference after a couple of delays, the PM track is very full and a couple of excellent papers tomorrow that are dealing with decision making and EV metrics that I’m actually rather looking forward too.

As good as the PM stuff is, the restaurants at Disney are even better. Last night a few colleagues, old and new, and I ate at Todd English’s seafood restaurant in the hotel. Some of the best seared ahi I’ve ever had.

Conversation turned to memorable moments growing up, those times we look back on and know that was special.

My special moment growing up was easy, going to see Star Wars for the first time. I’d never seen anything quite like it, from the opening sequence where the Imperial Star Destroyer is chasing the Rebel ship with the Princess on it, to the moment the Death Star exploded, I’m not sure I blinked once.

I went with dad to see it in the first week it was released in England. The queue at the Odeon cinema at the top of Guildford High Street was all around the side of the building when we arrived. During that first release I ended up seeing it three times, twice with Dad and one final time with mum who complained it was too loud for her.

For an 8 year old it was something else, I think it’s safe to say that no cultural event has had a similar impact on me in my life. At the point my pocket money went on the bubble gum cards, plastic figures and at Christmas I got a lightsaber.

OK, it was really just a torch (flashlight) with some opaque tubing attached to it, and it only really worked if you stood in the dark. Still I did not care, I had a lightsaber and 8 year old me was a Jedi damn it!

I do remember trying the Jedi mind trick on mum, she of course did not get what was going on. I was asked to clean my room, a mundane chore that took me away from either Saturday Swapshop on the TV or killing Stormtroopers and rescuing princesses depending how interactive I was that day.

I replied to the request (reasonable request BTW) with sweeping my hand through the air and saying “You don’t need me to clean my room…”

Mum was clear “Yes you do.”

With another sweep of my hand “You don’t need me to clean my room”

“Yes I do, and why are you waving your arm around like that?”

I tried to explain that I was trying Jedi mind tricks I’d learned from Star Wars. I was probably at least a little disappointed that the Force was not as strong with me as I’d have liked to believe.

I was then told to put the Force to work picking up my crap off the floor of my bedroom…