I’m being haunted, by the bosses I’ve had over the last ten years or so. I can’t help it, and it’s not really their fault either, neither of us can help it. Every time things get a bit stressful, I find myself talking through whatever it is with my old bosses, in my head. Worrying [...]
I just can’t sleep tonight, I can’t make it happen. It’s 4 hours since I went to bed and this must be the third time I’ve turned on the light to do somethign because I’m bored. It’s also ages since I posted, time to write again. Donald Rumsfelt, the eejit who seemed to be very [...]
I’m bored of having marketing messages yelled at me via my inbox with giant image only emails demanding I click on things to get full details. So I am going through my inbox unsubscribing from all the sales mail subscriptions that I get. Some notes on how hard it is to actually unsubscribe… STA Travel [...]
During these troubled times, lots of companies will try and “do something new” to make more money. There’s nothing wrong with this (so long as you do it well), but I like this… Set your goals and don’t suck. Eg. Stop trying to be everything to every man, and be everything to somebody. Possibly Related [...]
I’ve just had a bath, and a very large gin, and whilst sitting there reading INC magazine, I ran across some words on mangement styles which seem extreamly obvious, but extreamly useful. On the subject of managing your staff, “Trust, and verify”. Now this at first is super obvious, but I’d never through about it. If [...]
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Well, it would appear that the UK is perma-fucked when it comes to all things economic at the moment. Those heady days of rising house prices making you more money that your job earned you are over, and cheap trips to the USA to do a bit of shopping [...]
Funny what makes grumpy about things isn’t it. When I was a regular windows user and I was copying groups of large files around it was the totally bonkers time estimates that annoyed me. You really had not idea how long copying a thousand files around locally was going to take, but 7777623 minutes seemed [...]
The UK really is the home of innovation, really it is. It’s not been a week since Twitter announced they are not going to be able to provide an SMS service in the UK (I’d not even finished my blog post about Orange missing a huge opertunity here) and already a small UK firm has [...]
Image via Wikipedia So, having left my analytical left brain job (or rather I will on Friday) to go and work in a more creative field, I was greatly heartened to read We’re not sporty, but when it comes to spelling we Indians are the bee’s knees, explaining why India (and China I suspect) are [...]
I see lots of blog posting about developing web-apps and online stuff using agile-dynamic-insert-your-favorite-buzzword-methodology-here, but lots and lots of software is not developed in this way, and sometimes I think some of the lessons learnt developing monolithic and sprawling software can be useful to everybody, you AJAX powered-django hacking,python boys included. A few years ago [...]
Warning: you are entering a post written on an early morning train, after too many coffees, not enough sleep, and very very little thought. Your milage may vary, your home is probably not at risk however. Having spent the last week in the company of many fine geeks (Thinking Digital followed by BarCampNE), I suddently [...]
Heard from Tara Hunt, thought I thing she was quoting somebody else. “You make money because of the things you do, not from them” Possibly Related Posts: Haunted by the ghosts of bosses past The state of your knowledge So long, farewell and goodnight Some brilliant advice 10 minutes of INC causes revelation
I got a piece of spam today – addressed to me, and asking for my bank details and my phone number, asking if I wanted to become a mystery shopper. Its either a scam, or totally untargetted spam, but luckily he included his phone number! Adam Jones of Secret Shopper @ google mail . com [...]
Well, I was goign to post about Seth Godin’s interestin Signal V’s Noise post (which is nothing to do with the excellent Signal V’s Noise blog) but then realised that I had nothing more to add to it. He’s right, spam is drowning the world (and totally and completely ineffecive for legal transactions), and with [...]
My brain (and my rss feeds ) has been going into overdrive today. Managing your time thought your calendar, diffiuclt to switch over to one imagines. Only works if people don’t expect instant responces to emails. An interesting paradigm shift, not having a bad table, rather than having people thing ill of you (and websites [...]
I think everybody agrees that reuse is a good idea generally. Reusing glass jam jars is vastly more efficient that recycling them into new jars. Reusable templates are much more efficient that drawing the damned thing ever time. Reusing code libraries is the only way the majority of programs could ever be created. There are [...]
Phoning somebody who’s left your office, about a minor point in a document they wrote which needs clarification, and finding out that they quit the whole company and really aren’t interested in talking to you. And it’s before 9:30am. And you’ve not had a coffee. Possibly Related Posts: Haunted by the ghosts of bosses past [...]
I love trustedplaces.com, and because I love it, its the only site I spend time being active in really. I’m a passive user of hundreds of sites and numerous emialing lists, but there are a couple of sites I actually contribute content to, and trustedplaces.com is one of them. The big question is why. Well, [...]
Sitting on the train this morning, reading the news and catching up on my inbox (pre-7:30am – get me), I looked up, and my mouth fell open, as I watched the firey peach ball of sun burning off the layer of mist which was caught agains the frozen ground. It was breathtaking, magnificent, almost too [...]
If you’re having trouble fitting the diagram onto a page, or to not let Visio mess up your alignments, then the solution you’re trying to design is too complex. Paraphrased: If it wouldn’t fit on the back of a fag packet, you shouldn’t even think about it. Possibly Related Posts: Hot and sour manly popcorn [...]
As I give what I’m doing with my life far too much through at the moment, I enjoyed both these articles, “Open letter to CEOs, COOs, CIOs and CFOs across the corporate world” and it’s follow “Open letter to employees across the corporate world“, both of which makes some very good points. This morning I [...]
After a minor rant about the genius of Seth Godin, and how cynical mass markettign will never make effective use of toold such as Digg and Delicious if they do silly things such as pay idiotic companies to blog, Digg and submit to Furl every bloody article they write online, I lost control and splashed [...]
I keep seeing adverts which are making great offers, mobile phone deals better than mine, bank accounts with higher interest rates, even home insurence which whoops mine. Home insurence is the most boring thing in the world, its so boring it makes watching Jeeves polish the gravel outside, so anything that gets me excited about [...]
In the last week I’ve come across some brilliant tools to make my digital life easier, so I throught I’d better share. The Refresh Newcastle group put me onto some, and Google did the rest as and when I found I needed something. MAMP I do most of my development work on a php/mySQL stack, [...]
As I got off the tube to walk to my hotel this week, I passed a couple and their children buying Twix’s before getting the tube home. I think they’d probably been to the theater. I was staggering back form the office, it was 11 at night, and I realsed what a complete mess I [...]
Aways visionaries in music (Kid A – idiocy that sounds perfect), Radiohead have released (or rahter are releasing – it’s on pre-order at the moment) their whole next album and you can pay what you like for the download. Lots of people have lots to say, and I find the idea that they are behind [...]
It would appear the music industry is just not thinking, listening or doing anything more than bitching a sueing to try and maintain a business model thats just got working anymore. They’re even contradicting themselves now, for example check out these gems, only lines apart. “when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we [...]
Between my Outlook install for work, and my gmail account which aggregates the mail from about 4 or 5 pop3 addresses, I was drowning in a sea of email. I got about a thousand messages a day, of which a good 800 were spam, and of the remaining 200 I probably only had to deal [...]
Elitism is alive and well One of the perks of my job is that just occasionally I get to travel first class on the British Train network. This afford plenty of opportunities for a spot of people watching. First Class travel by train not like first class air travel. The cost is roughly double, rather [...]
I’m reading a really interesting article from changeThis and the following paragraph struck a note. “Ever wonder why some solutions lack inspiration, imagination, and originality? It’s because we don’t think as deeply or as broadly as we must to solve the problem. We tell ourselves the optimal solution is a luxury. We throw some resources [...]
This is a really interesting post. A share buy back and dividend package is a common thing in the market at the moment (as far as I understand), and they seem to be driven by people who ar eout to make money (hedge fund manager, share traders, Wall Street analysts, etc), and by people who [...]
I work in a technical consultnacy*. Often I am frustrated by our apparent lack of technical staff, and the way we do business. This is a very common thing I imagine. These three articles make for interesting reason. The first is very simalar to Joel On Softwares book about how to hire the right technical [...]
This little cartoon makes an excellent point, if you’re going to have a brilliant product, don’t let a silly thing that can easily be changed get in the way. Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101 Getting Redis and CodeIgniter to play together Mushrooms, live! Train + wifi + bored + guardian api + [...]
Whilst several of these 19 eponymous Laws of SoftEngg are pretty flippant, there are some complete gems in there. “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned” which should be taken into account in all planning of technical activities. On the subject of what kind of company you [...]
Costco is not a big thing in the UK (in fact, it’s unheard of I imagine) but I think theres lots of good stuff to be learned from How Costco Became The Anti_Walmart and the summery 5 business lessons from Costco over on Signal V’s Noise is a nice quicky read. Its interesting to read [...]