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Norton Internet Security

Our love affair began back in the days of running a cable across my bedroom for my meagre dialup connection and the protection (Firewall, Virus Checker) you offered. After that. I felt obliged to renew my subscription every July.

Each new version looked very similar and you hardly ever notified me of viruses or security breaches. Maybe you eliminated them all ruthlessly and silently but for 35 GBP per year, you need to 'add value'.

Tonight, I was shocked to discover that your 'CCPROXY.EXE' application was consuming more than half my paltry 512 MB of memory and spinning the CPU at 100% when I am trying to watch important music videos.

I wouldn't mind but that is with 'Norton Internet Security' disabled !

So, farewell then, Norton Internet Security/AntiVirus. Thanks to Tim Hall, I am now using the freely available AVG and the firewall provided with my Linksys wireless router.

Whats weird about this video is that it appears to be culled from the same speech.

Oh and that he doesn't screw up once.

Quelle horreur !

A female UK blogger is sacked by a French company, supposedly for 'gross misconduct'.

I went to look at the actual blog to discover what juicy office gossip she had revealed, but the blog is such an incoherent, rambling mess of disjointed thoughts using pseudonyms to conceal her true identity, I simply gave up.

Inevitably, Robert Scoble thinks this is very, very important. I don't.

Many years ago, in a parallel universe not far from here, I was involved in a CRM proof of concept. This involved producing a demonstration of a callcenter application accessing customer and product data from disparate legacy systems in a polished, unified, modern user interface.

The scenario was pretty standard fare. A motor insurance company where a customer calls in to renew his motor policy and the callcenter agent walks through a standard 'question-answer-retort' guided dialogue.

The demo climaxes in a superb cross-sell to add the customers son who has just turned 17 as a named driver to the existing policy (the pre-sales guy was positively orgasmic about this addition) with a substantial discount as part of some campaign.

Now, choosing names is very important so of course the demo initially used dead pop stars, politicians, historic figures, alternative comedians and footballers. This was mainly because the marketing guy thought TEST USER wouldn't impress the CEO's of blue chip companies.

The initial novelty of using celebrity names soon wore off as we struggled to make the software components actually do what we wanted. In fact, we were desperately tired of the endless repetitions of the dialogue ('Take 369'), that we were completely oblivious to the names appearing.

We were just hoping and praying just that the demo behaved and ran through to completion without an hourglass, a blue screen or an unexpected 'cross-sell' opportunity emerging from the 'Home, Buildings & Contents' division.

Finally, the proof of concept was finished, we were exhausted and the demanding marketing man was (finally) happy.

Imagine our surprise, a few weeks later when he returned with two complimentary CD's. 'Great job guys. The Sales MD was absolutely delighted and thinks this collateral will really help us make that breakthrough into SME in Q3. I thought you might be curious to see the fruits of your labour.'

So we thanked him, waved goodbye, then sat down to watch the CD. We were both genuinely dumbfounded when the following words, spoken in best BBC English, came out of the tinny PC speaker:

'Norman Whiteside of Manchester is looking for a competitive quote for his car insurance. '

Theres nothing worse than slaving away all day over a hot keyboard trying to coerce various pieces of software to synchronise a single customer record from one legacy system to another.

Of course, the mouth-watering and long awaited climax to a hard days graft (and knowledge transfer) finally arrives at 18.47 when you are tired, irritable and just want to go home.

This is it. This is your moment. Seize the day. You are poised of the edge of greatness, about to scale your own personal Everest.

There is only one thing stopping you. We have to choose a name for the 'customer'.

Your heart sinks as the integrator pauses for an eternity, pauses again, looks enquiringly and then suddenly types in:

Username: TESTUSER FirstName: TEST LastName: USER

You politely plead: 'That's really not a good name to use.' 'Why ? Oh wait. I get it. We will need more than one account for testing.' Your mood darkens still further as he modifies the data:

Username: TESTUSER1 FirstName: TEST LastName: USER1

You snap and the wafer thin veneer of professionalism and consulting is shattered. 'Excuse me. Can I drive for just one minute ?'

Username: MSTIPE FirstName: Michael LastName: Stipe

A small point admittedly but one that significantly increases the satisfaction levels for everyone concerned when that confounded customer finally appears on the other side.

All of which reminds me of another story.

Do not disturb I am disturbed enough already

• Buzzocks - What Do I Get ?
• The Clash - Whats My Name/Garageland
• Sex Pistols - EMI
• Siouxsie And The Banshees - Love In A Void
• Joy Division - She's Lost Control
• The Chameleons - In Shreds
• The Fall - Smile (John Peel on intro)
• Nirvana - About A Girl

My long suffering wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary every year in July.

To mark this momentous milestone, ~~I buy her flowers, chocolate, champagne and book a corner table at our favourite restaurant~~, the wife takes the kids camping in the New Forest with her girlfriends while I make the annual pilgrimage to the Hook Norton Festival of Fine Ales with my mates.

So, if you'd like to read something from me in a different style, full match reports for the 2002 and 2003 festivals are already available online together with photos of a human pyramid. We even have our own stalker.

So, it transpires that my first blog article was actually written four years ago - not just a personal web journal but collaborative blogging (Blogger) and social networking (Flickr) and I didn't even know it.

A video of Jean (unplugged) with Sandie Shaw on vocals and Johnny Marr on acoustic guitar in Kew gardens surrounded by Morrissey, Rourke, Joyce and assorted children.

I think I might wake up tomorrow morning to discover I dreamt all this. If so, I apologise profusely in advance.

When you are in a crisis meeting, and a consultant or project manager says We desperately need an intervention from ABC - now !, do you ever find yourself idly scribbling the lyrics from Interpols Say Hello To the Angels on your pristine pad of white paper ?

This is a concept This is a bracelet This isn't no intervention

Two hours later, in the same crisis meeting, when the same consultant or project manager forcefully asks 'Is Freddie Geekmeister from Advanced Technical Support engaged ?', are you ever tempted to reply 'No. As far as I know, Freddie Geekmeister is currently a bachelor of this parish'.

When the ratio of the combined letters of the To: and Cc: distributions lists divided by the number of letters in the email is high, do you ever find that the relevance and worth of the actual content is correspondingly low ?

When you say to someone, 'I got your mobile phone number off your .signature so thanks for that and they reply 'You're welcome', are you ever tempted to reply 'Well actually no I didn't because you don't have a .signature so I had to ask 8 different colleagues from 3 different companies which wasted 37 minutes before I finally tracked you down'.

And when the crisis meeting finally draws to a close, and the project manager spontaneously asks you to read out aloud, to all 17 attendees, those three, crucial, important, decisive actions that he has seen you jotting down on your A4 pad, which will immediately rectify the situation, do you ever find yourself in a mild state of panic ?

Or is it just me ?