Recent Posts

Saxondale

I really enjoyed this comedy co-written by Steve Coogan.

The opening sequence features Coogan struggling to keep his calm in an 'Anger Management' course and is always hilarious.

Unfortunately, the final episode of the series was on Monday night but, no doubt, it will be endlessly repeated on BBC3 in the near future.

knowledge management is hard

Knowledge management presents a difficult challenge particularly when you work in a relatively small department of highly intelligent, technical consultants who are scattered around the globe and travel a lot.

I just started another blog as an experiment to see whether we can try to improve the way in which we share knowledge and communicate with each other. Searching email archives is so 1990's, don't you think ?

The blogging interface and the set of CMS features isn't as rich as WordPress (or alternative Content Management Systems) but that's not really the point.

Oh and another thing. Unless you happen to work for Oracle Corporation, you can't actually see this embryonic blog. Sorry.

wheels on fire

Arrived at a clients offices in Birmingham this morning just as Radio Five news reported a major power cut affecting businesses and homes in the area.

Apparently, vandals had set fire to two tyres and rolled them into the electricity sub-station last night.

Whatever happened to the good old days of getting drunk, singing songs and placing red cones on top of traffic lights.

Still, the outage freed up two hours for an interesting discussion about disaster recovery.

rare occurrence

Far, far away by Slade, from 1974, as the music used to entertain customers placed on hold.

Hats off to Vodafone corporate. I was actually a little disappointed to miss the end of the song when my conversation with the agent resumed.

Ferguson's mind games

He (Ruud van Nistelrooy) is a striker who can score upwards of 20 goals a season and there are not many of those going around.

So why are we selling him them ?

Let's wait and see if Saha, Rossi, Ronaldo and Ole manage more than 20 goals (between them).

so farewell then, NIS

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 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.

P45 for British blogger

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.