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October 07, 2004
Collage
The list of 'essay' style posts that are in my head at the moment is getting longer and longer, and yet I still don't have time to write any of them. For goodness sake, I've still got pictures of lovely evenings with Ben and Mena Trott and Doc Searls back in July and earlier - both courtesy of Euan - that I haven't put live.
Anyway, for now this Fermat-like 'but the margin is too narrow' will have to excuse my lack of an elegant proof for any of the following.
- Chinese is a fascinating language to learn. Particularly if you decide to make it hard for yourself and learn to *read* it too. However the little Flash cards you use to learn the characters are a very valuable use of standing time on crowded tubes.
- The world economy is driven by markets. Markets, it is claimed, are a very efficient way of coordinating resources. However, I'm concerned that the macrodriver of economics is itself a case of market failure. Why else would a company be under pressure to lay off staff to maximize returns for instutional investors, who need to maintain pension funds, that fewer and fewer people are able to carry on paying into. My pension company wants me out of my job, for my own sake. How crazy is that?
- House prices going mental - it's because people started having kids later. Starter homes used to be affordable because they were bought by people with only one income. We could be considered well off, but the combined costs of childcare and mortgage means we have virtually no disposable income. The ecomony will recover, but only through an entire generation of tightened belts. It'll be a very slow catching up game indeed, because in our need to earn more we've postponed the wisdom and market rebalancing that next generation will bring even longer.
- Carrying an extremely heavy A-level textbook on economics and a laptop on your back while pushing a pram is more effective as a way of losing body fluid than weight.
- Damn. Grumpy Old Men is becoming increasingly enjoyable
- I now have a second party trick. Not only can I do a very good impression of Mark Steel, but I've found out I can dance like C3PO as well. At will, he said pointedly.
- I was lucky enough to be invited to the launch of Tim Wright's Oldton last night. A hugely inspiring talk about interactive narrative first, and then the utter depression of seeing the actual project and realising just how far ahead of your own thinking he is. It was like a compact version of the crushing blow when Robert McKee destroys two days of inspiration by sitting you through the perfection of Casablanca. Anyway, make sure you go and play, and go and sign up for a deck of the Oldton playing cards - a snip at 7.99
- I'm going to have to admit I'm going a bit deaf. I spent some very pleasant time talking to a chap called Lloyd from a company called Guido. They seemed really large, so I was amazed I hadn't heard of them. I still feel amazed that, over the course of the twenty minutes between the start of our conversation and my realising he worked for Guardian Unlimited, I didn't at any point drop myself in it. In some ways it may even be scary - do I manage to say that *little*?
- My talk 'Shit I'm A Manager' is now being cited as a source of great wisdom on the BBC's Leadership Course at Ashridge. I feel rather vindicated as a result of this, but not for the reason most people would assume. Some revenge can be served very very very very cold
- Blimey, I've been online for over ten years now. I have pictures of the moment of my Damascence conversion. Danny O'Brien and Ben Moor look much younger. And I had short corporate hair. So nobody's seeing those thank you very much.
- Two wonderful friends are getting married soon, and I'm hugely looking forward to their wedding
- A business opportunity I'd been looking forward to feels somewhat more unlikely, but four others have appeared in its place. Damn. This means I'm going to have to decide.
- Developing applications for mobile phones is uncannily like developing for interactive tv. Millions of slightly different devices, clunky limited user interfaces, UI usability on that opening screen is everything, functionality needs to be locked down ages in advance, and you spend most of your time managing bandwidth. But at least they're not under threat from the PVR
- When is someone going to have the sense to store the latest traffic reports in a cache of memory in your car stereo, and then play them in the gaps between tracks?
- A terrifyingly true quote from the fabulous 'Rogue State' by William Blum:
It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing and able to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job descritpiont. People capable of epressing a full measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.
There's a sort of Peter Principle at work here. Laurence Peter wrote that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Perhaps we can postulate that in a foreign policy establishment committed to imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees rise to the level of cruelty they can live with.
I wonder if business sometimes is heading the same way.
Phew.
Posted by Tom Dolan at October 7, 2004 10:54 PM
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