miscellaneous
Couple of lunchtimes ago, I got soaked. My thin summer shirt clinging to me like an orphaned monkey.
In the morning I’d had a look at Metcheck, the online weather forecast. No rain for the whole week it said. Stupid thing.
When I got back to my computer, water dripping off the end of my nose and onto the keyboard, I had another look at Metcheck.
Cheltenham 2pm: 0.0mm rain. Stupid thing.
This is Mark Ritson's view of Twitter from his Marketing magazine column in January of this year. While not completely emphatic (note the 'may' just to cover one's posterior) it's still a thumbs down.
“This may also be the year that Twitter joins the ranks of the Sinclair C5 or CB radio as a fast-fading fad. Tweeting will steadily decline throughout 2010. So please, I beg you, no more conference presentations on how to leverage Twitter to build brand. Enough.”
Southwold on the Suffolk coast is the quintessential British
seaside town. Beach huts, a promenade and a pier. So not exactly a hot bed of anti-establishment revolt then. This is the land of solid church going and letters to the Telegraph, all washed down with the elixir of life – Adnams.
Are you proud of yourself?
Proud of what you do for a living?
Not me. I’m feeling pretty ashamed of myself today. Let me tell you why.
Firstly, what do I do for a living? Well, it depends who’s asking.
An art director I used to work with would just tell people, “I work in an office”. He couldn’t be bothered trying to explain the ephemeral nature of how he earned his moolah.
And I can understand that: I was born in North Yorkshire, son of a farmer’s son. From a background of people who worked for a living, basically. And fought in wars.
In the past few days, some proactive soul has taken to chalking alerts onto the pavements of my local streets:
It’s the simple things in life that give me the greatest pleasure as my children well know.
My esteemed, multi-talented and much-in-demand colleague, Riley has just shown me a trick that has literally (I don’t use the word lightly) TRANSFORMED my online experience.
Approaching my dotage as I am, the font sizes of the type on the innumerable corporate websites I have to visit each week, literally (I don’t use the word lightly) give me a headache.
It's not trendy to say 'trendy'. Saying 'fashionable' hasn't been for some time.
'On trend'. That's what you say now. Amazing what you can pick up reading old copies of Heat in a doctor’s surgery.
My background is as a copywriter. But I'm still impressed – stunned,
sometimes – by the power words can have on the perception of a thing.
What you call something can change its value utterly. Even though the thing itself hasn't changed at all.
I missed the start of the new series of Mad Men.
Well, actually I caught up at the weekend, thanks to the magic of iPlayer. It was as well-written as ever, although I wasn't so sure about with Don Draper’s ad for London Fog raincoats (A woman flasher with the line ‘Limit your exposure’?)
But I had to watch it on a computer because my Sky+ box broke. I rang them to see if they could fix it, and had an... interesting customer experience.