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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 GBP per year, you need to ‘add value’.

George Bush covers 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'

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

Oh and that he doesn’t screw up once.

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.

smoke and mirrors

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.

what's in a name ?

There’s 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.

T-shirt humour

Do not disturb I am disturbed enough already

Music nostalgia

• Buzzocks - What Do I Get ?
• The Clash - What’s 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

out of sight

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.

The Smiths nostalgia

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.

is it just me ?

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 Interpol’s ‘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’.