Archive for category Life
TheRestartPage
Old timer IT people like me will love this: http://www.therestartpage.com/
Water, bridge, stuff like that
Well another year is upon us, 2012 – a year of great portent, the Olympics, the Jubilie and the (apparently) impending doom of the end of the world.
As anyone who has tried to keep a diary or write a blog will know, writing regularly is a challenge, especially when each day consists of get up, go to work, get home, eat sleep, repeat and nothing (particularly interesting for others) happens.
The usual stock-in-trade of the Mac Head blogger like me are Apple releases or moans, but apart from the iPhone 4S (which is more or less exactly the same as the original ’4′) not that much has happened really – just lots of profit and patents.
Work is bizarre at the moment but if you know where I work, you will know it’s not something I can really blog about and remain employed.
Home life is OK but unless you want to hear about my new sofa, which I doubt (although I might poll to see if you do!) there’s not much to write about .
So there you have it, I am leading an unexceptional life and not much is happening in my world, hense my lack of posts recently.
I can start making shit up if you like? No, didn’t think so.
Rest assured PJ fans, I will find something to moan about soon.
Protests worldwide
The people (proletariat?) seem to have had enough with the rich living off the cream while the other 99.99% of us get skimmed milk.
I particularly love this reaction to Chilian soldiers at one demonstration:
A year to go until my holiday (apparently)
Not that I am going anywhere in particular, just away to avoid the embarrasing 2012 Olympics in my home town, London.
The traffic will be obscene, the tube trains will grind to a halt and work will be unbearable as news organisations always are every four years – this time especially so with it being on home turf.
Then there’s the opening ceremony, oh how I look forward to missing this event. I plan to be somewhere sunny and away from a TV or WiFi.
After Bejing what can we do that will come anywhere close?
I can see it now; Double-Decker Danny Boyle, the event’s creative director, will get the cast from Slumdog to do their Bhangra party piece while Some corgies are chased across the athletics field by Cannon and Ball. Makes you proud just thinking about it.
I can’t wait to watch it on Sky plus when I get back in the country just so I can set it on 2x and drink it in to the tune of ‘Yakety Sax’ (think Bennie Hill).
Just cos I am old and grumpy, it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
Little ones at the front
I vowed not to comment – too close to home, but there comes a time…
It is worth mentioning before I rant that although I work for the papers, I am just a techie and my pay grade dictates that I am told nothing about anything.
All the opinions expressed here are based on reports from around the media and my own experience of news organisations. I most definitely am not party to any of the issues causing the company so much controversy at the moment. I feel I had to write some sort of disclaimer on this post because I am truly fearful of the lynch-mob mentality that is going around at the moment.
Well this is a mess isn’t it?
The feeding frenzy that the media sharks are indulging in a the moment has already resulted in 200 innocent people losing their place of employment (they are however not out of a job yet), and if the muck spreading doesn’t stop soon I suspect many many more good people will be in the same situation.
Mr M. has never been popular with the liberal masses but this is beginning to look like victimisation on the part of the Guardian and BBC.
Anyone who has a beef with the M family, Mrs B. or N.C. generally have given up reporting just the truth, but are now just plain making shit up to stick the knife in further.
People who haven’t been hacked (IMHO) are just believing what these morons are reporting and then going on BBC news and saying it must be all true and how terrible it all is and how disgusting.
I’ll tell you what is disgusting. The media spending millions of pounds and days of airtime covering this story when thousands of people are starving, thirsty and perishing in Mogadishu.
Looking on the BBC news channel the crisis unfolding in the Somalia is nowhere to be seen, the front page taken up with the ‘scandal’, you really have to dig to find it in “World news-Africa“. That my friends is ‘disgusting’.
To my knowledge no-one has died due to the actions of the NoW. No-one was physically injured by these events.
I agree, the actions of an number of independent contractors working at the paper was at times deplorable – at best a gross invasion of privacy and at it’s worst they hampered the progress of the Millie Dowler investigation and gave false hope to Millie’s suffering parents who were under such mental anguish I can’t begin to imagine how it felt.
These people, however amoral, didn’t kill Millie. It seems to me they are being vilified by the press more than the individual that did (and a number of other poor souls).
The commercial pressure placed upon all news organisations to come up with the next big story is immense. NoW were not unique for what they did, just for who their owner is/was.
I find it unbelievable that none of the other national newspapers have used private investigators, none have used blagging to obtain pertinent information for a story and none realised that most mobile phones voicemail services and answer machine have four digit security codes that are rarely changed from the defaults. These practices are probably widespread in the industry.
There is always more behind these headlines than we are told. Somewhere someone is playing chess and we are all the little ones at the front.
Spammed? – me too. Bas^%*ds.
Once again my personal domain has been used by spammers to send an untold number of emails to poor unsuspecting individuals around the globe and no doubt the same domain will be blocked by spam filters because of it.
I have just opened my mailbox to find 47 bounced messages with replys from all manner of languages.
Folks, if you have come here because of it, I feel your pain 47 fold I really do.
Nothing I can do will stop this however – my domain name is out there and if anyone chooses to stick a fake email address into their email client it will look like it’s from me.
Up your filtering, delete the mail, move on – that’s the best advice I can give.
Peace out.
Advice from the Dalai Lama
This was purloined from someone’s blog but I lost the URL so my apologies to the original owner but I thought it was a great piece of text..
At the start of the new millennium the Dalai Lama apparently issued eighteen rules for living. Since word travels slowly in the digital age these have only just reached me.
Here they are:
- Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
- When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
- Follow the three Rs:
- Respect for self
- Respect for others
- Responsibility for all your actions.
- Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
- Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
- Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
- When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
- Spend some time alone every day.
- Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
- Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
- Live a good, honourable life.
- Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
- A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
- In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
- Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.Be gentle with the earth.
- Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
- Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
- Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
Been a long time
You blink and then shwosh it’s the new year.
Yes OK I have been a little delinquent with my blogging recently – too much work, not enough life to talk about I guess.
Much has gone by in the last half a year; I now have an iPad, SunTalk has finished, my Son is now taller than me, most of my fish have pegged it (3 left) and we are preparing to spend an obsene amount of money moving the studios to another building. Oh and we bought a new car too.
And life goes on. I will try to be a bit more vocal from now on.
Introducing…
Brad(s) Wright
Which one you ask? Well both of them actually.
It is not often you meet someone with the same name as you (unless you are called John Smith I guess).
Some time ago I started receiving mistakenly addressed emails for someone in Australia with the same name as me – Brad Wright. After some research I found his email address and forwarded the mails on to him. He was thankful and we kind of hit it off.
Well Brad was in London this week on business and we met up.
I arranged the meal, which is always dangerous with my (dis)organisational skills, but I thought I had done really well choosing a nice resturant near to where I thought he and his wife were staying in north London. It was a fair drive but I thought it was easier for me to travel as he’s a visitor and didn’t have access to a car etc.
Well for one reason or another I left with just enough time to get there but hit traffic on the M25 and was a little late. I emailed him and called the restaurant to make sure we didn’t lose the booking and they were very nice about it all but this was cockup #1 of the day, #2 as it turns out was that they were not staying in N20 after all but in central london in a private club – in my defense the postcode Brad sent was wrong and I had based my arrangements on this.
I am not the best at making small talk and the couple (Brad and his wife) were very kind and made conversation when I dried up. I was hot, bothered and on edge due to my own issues of hating to mess up (see cockup #1&2).
Despite all this, the company was delightful and we shared stories about kids and wives and work and hobbies and we had a surprisingly large number of things in common (he’s a Mac guy too!) and I wouldn’t of missed it for anything.
So here’s to all the Brad Wrights in the world. If they are all as nice as that one, we are all Wright.
PS. Anyone called Brad Wright reading this, please leave a comment – we’d love to hear from you – oh and I’m the one on the left!