Jul 2
Well more heat than sunshine. Hot in Glasgow but no bad. Glasgow goes mental if the heat lasts too long. About 15 years ago we had a spate of 'incidents' on a Friday night after two weeks of relentless sunshine. Makes us go mental. While we're enjoying it though I'm oft reminded of one of my favourite poems that describes the duality of the Scots. That's right. A poem.
Scotland
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
'We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it.'
by Alastair Reid.
Jul 2
Blogging was become a blockage for me. I like my writing time stuff but always felt that the blog demanded some real time and some real content. I din't have the time and not really the inclination. And Twitter was becoming my place to post how I felt, images, stuff. So I've decided to take a looser, more free approach to this. Hence starting up this site and doing the redirect thing. I'm writing this via my email and that seems a bit more friendly than opening up an interface and then deal with the blank page. We'll see how it goes. I am not missing the irony that this is the first blog post I've done in a while and it is about how I don't post in my blog. Hrmmmmm.
Feb 3
As seen on the Metro in Paris. I dare say that Wall Street English now goes something like, "Oops", "Sorry. Really, really sorry", " we have no idea where the money's gone" and "Brother can you spare $34 billion?".
Jan 26
I'm off to a great little thing in a couple of weeks which will be a great little fund raiser for a good cause as well as looking as how the online can carry into the offline.
Twestival is a great idea. On the 12th February Twitter users from all over the world will get together in their respective cities for some fun, some beer and some music all in the name of raising money for a great charity,
Charity : Water.
I'll be heading over to the
Edinburgh Twestival and I'm really looking forward to putting some faces to names. And just to see how it all feels. I've always quite liked the wall that exists between on and off line but I think that's also quite a bad habit to go into when you're working in and around the Internet. I think there is a tendency for people who do planning in agencies to make people stats and figures caricatures rather than people with feelings and emotions that shape and define them rather than what way they talk to each other with technology. I'm just looking forward to having some beers with some great people in the name of a great cause.
Quick update: Due to my lack of credit card functionality I'm unable to attend. I'm sad not to go but I accept that's the way of it due to lifestyle choices. However I did make a donation to
Chartity:Water and I'd implore you to do the same. I'm not a big one for the charidee callouts but even if you have a couple of notes in your pocket I would ask you to donate. Sure, we're living in tough times just now but if we can't offer our fellow brothers and sisters a secure, clean water supply in this day and age, to give the most basic of fundmentals, then we're in worse shape then I dare think about. Twitterers of Scotland, have a great night for a wonderful cause. I'll raise a toast.
Jan 23
Just fired off my first presentation here at Good to a client that some thoughts and insight into their website and overall planning. Above is the before and after of the kick off meeting. It was nice to get that under my belt. Three hours. Everyone happy. Let see what happens. Not a bad end to a great first week.
Jan 21
Right, well I'm going to be blogging daft. It is a new year and I've got all sorts of news. The big thing is that I left Equator and am now working with a new company,
Good Creative. I'm in for a spell to look over all sorts of stuff here.I'll be dropping more on it as we go.
I handed in my notice to Equator in September with no job to go to. I wasn't hacked off at Equator, it is a truly great company with some really inspiring people working there but I felt that the role I was in wasn't really comfortable. To use the well worn cliche, it's not you, it's me.
Obviously this was all a bit nerve wracking but was required to give myself a kick up the arse. With no job to go to I could spend some time exploring new options. A clean slate. Credit crisis be damned, I wanted to work to get to a place that made me happy.
However after talking to a couple of very good friends I found that my passion was still in the wonderful, oh so geeky world of the Internet. I talked to a bunch of other peeps, then called Good about the fact that I was leaving at Equator and if they had any project work that I could do. And they did. And now I'm here.
Four months notice was tough but luckily I've was working with great clients and a great team at Equator. My leaving night was. Well wonderfully bizarre. It will be a night I will never forget my analyst assures me. Pictures of the horror that came my way and of my lovely ex-colleagues can be seen
on my Flickr.
So to 2009. More blogging, an imminent trip to Paris, new work challenges and babies dropping around me everywhere. I'm very excited. Not bad. Nat bad at all.
Dec 28
10 days off from work and I'm only just getting into the swing of it. I've never been great at taking breaks. I don't think I've taken my full holiday allowance in around 10 years which is never ideal. I'm owed 6.5 days this year alone. It's not healthy and not ideal and not something that I'm remotely proud of. I just have found myself in careers that I actually do enjoy. That's no excuse though and things will have to change.
The first thing I've been doing is enjoying each hour of each day during this time off. I'm really quite getting into it though I
Dec 19
From Mr Fry's lovely blog...
Don’t you sometimes long to be CEO of a company like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Nokia or Microsoft? So that you can say to your coders, your designers, your development teams and your software architects: “Not Fucking Good Enough. I haven’t said ‘Wow’ yet. I haven’t gasped with pleasure, amusement or admiration once. Start again. Not Fucking Good Enough.”
And (forgive this ranting sidebar) how one would lay into the packaging department! “Nowhere near Fucking Good Enough. I’m not enjoying opening this. It’s clumsy, dumb and contemptuous. I’m in product-opening hell. Not Fucking Good Enough."
He just not wrong you know. Not at all. Words I'm going to be living by in 2009! Thank you.
Dec 15
We're talking big old major gloom out there my friends. In ways that haven't touched most of us. $50 billion lost in some crazy con? Guess who is paying for that! Yup! I could go on about the badness, the darkness, the beginning of the end. But you know where to find that. Turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper.
I'm looking for some happiness, some hope. Some light to banish the darkness.
And to that end I'm celebrating those that for every single year previously I've sneered at. Those who take the time, the care and the expense to decorate their homes with multi-coloured strings of flashing illuminance.
As I travel down the roads I'm loving it. To heel with the world, to hell with care and with prudence and with the future. Let's look at now and let's look at how to celebrate now. I tell you I'm loving it. It makes me feel warm on the cold nights.
So to those who brighten our lives in a gaudy, fun, twinkling way: Thank you. Hopefully for this year only but thank you. You've cheered me up.
Nov 26
Those that know me would say that I'm a social creature. I enjoy meeting new people and am interested in their thoughts, their viewpoints and, ideally, their hilarious stories. I enjoy meeting people and passing on information both trivial and important. I totally agree with Hoss Gifford when he said that the best social network he's been involved with is in the pub.
Given that however I've never been that social with online social networks. I've done what most do be passive by just networking with those that I already know by adding them to Facebook, Bebo, etc.
While it is a little early for new year resolutions I'm determined to be more active in my online social networking. Defining what becoming more social means I'm already firing off
tweets to those people asking questions on
Twitter using the very helpful
trends feature on my new iPhone application,
Tweetie.
I'm not changing the world but hopefully I'm helping engage people or pointing them in the right direction. Currently I'm mostly contributing to iPhone related tweets but I'm going to open up my responses as I see fit.
Of course this doesn't just stop at Twitter. I'm looking to be more social online in a number of ways. I'm going to be looking at
Yahoo! Answers and see how I can help there. I'm going to join a couple of forums that I'm interested in to contribute.
Linkedin has a similar format to Yahoo Answers and I'll try to share their too.
Of course the trick is to add worth not to add noise to the social element of these tools. I'm only going to contribute if I have something to add, not just to add mud to the waters. I'm hoping that by being more social in social media tools that I'll get something out it too rather than just being a passive observer. I'll be interested in how it will work out, what people I'll meet and what stories I'll have to tell. Just like real life.
