youth implosion

June 16, 2005

stifled, disaffected and missed opportunity university town youth – get back in your bedrooms and posture about life, death, futility and raging against the machine again. you with your lacklustre meanderings and your banal life choices make me sick. you’re boring me to death. it’s like watching a slow road accident, not the creative, exciting, willful collision that you should be. let me know when you’re ready to come out again and I’ll save a place on the wall outside the guildhall so we can sit and look ridiculous together. but at least we’ll be drawing our own conclusions and being the cause that generates the effect, not just the pointless slothlike gang mentalisms that stoop outside Tesco Metro with dogs or shuffling around the doorway of HMV underneath our one big hoodie.

wake up. court a reaction. get out of my way.

voip for thick peasants

June 14, 2005

that’s the guide I needed. until I gave up. after all, I’ve got a free ear piece that came from a sharp gx10 that happens to work on a panasonic tcd545em so I just use that to conference in to the multitudinous calls we have. no matter that I end up sitting for hours with a plastic crab in my ear and a slightly wibbled rubber cord hanging from my mouth like a black dog dribble. I can hear everyone and they can hear me and the phone line is all paid for.

the thing is, I want to look more ridiculous. I want to look like I’ve just walked into a call centre in glasgow and sat down at an empty desk with my super skate headphones the size of my own head and a great big protruding boom mike in front of my mouth that looks like I’m chewing a small horse. I want to get a high-end VoIP headset and talk at my PC like its a quiz show. so I need to do some research. which means I have an excuse to trawl around crappy online telecoms shops and PC overclockers to see what the great and good are buying and wearing while they’re using teamspeak, windows media player and skype all at the same time while sat in a dark room in yesterdays underpants drinking jolt and sniffing into a mars bar.

turns out you can get rather nice high quality audio headsets are better than the headphones I’ve currently got and will plug straight into the Audigy 2 and let me crossfade and mix all my inputs and outputs so I can join the platform globalization conference call in the style of a bedroom radio podcast, with SOS by ABBA fading out in the background as I introduce myself and my plans for homogenized transitional deterministics, while Carmina Burana builds excitedly in the background and I announce my climactic project update to the strains of the 1812 overture and a cross-faded Been Caught Stealing. so I gotta get me one of those. of course, I can’t have the headset connected to the soundcard at the same time as my 5:1 speakers as the green plug does both front left and right and headphones from the same socket, so I need to get one of these. still, that’s more hardware, so it can’t be bad.

I had that victoria silvstedt in here the other day

June 10, 2005

go away, I’m updating the stylesheet. go on, get that face and hair of yours out of my office and leave me alone. I’ve had enough of you gawping over my shoulder when I’m trying to amend the dynamic press release indexes to incorporate feedback from the central web publishing team, who incidentally are looking for a compelling reason for extra country specific venues to migrate their operations to their centralized model for hosting, maintaining and supporting the business requirements for a worldwide authoring community and so we’re trying to meet in the middle with the globalization programs for FY06 based on the common web platform architecture but we can see some potential collisions with field requirements and the approach I’m already taking with the centralized model because we both know the product set we need is ages away and so with 5 staff in iberia where’s the value add?

so having you with your breasts and the rest barely contained in that outfit and your holster strapped to your thigh that looks like it must contain an experimental ice ray gun or something, is frankly a bit unnerving. I’ve spent 9 perfectly good productive months sat in this office with my window on the world unsullied by nefarious distractions or instrusions until the day that some halfwit bill poster decided that actually the ITV celebrity wrestling adverts should go on the side of the phone box that faces directly across the street at our row of genteel victorian terraced town houses, as opposed to the side which faces into the traffic where it didn’t matter to me that “he’s finally taking her up the aisle”, because I couldn’t see it unless I popped out to M&Ms for a ginsters and some thai sweet chicken mccoys. but now, whatever I’m doing, whenever I’m doing it in this room, there’s always you, victoria, draping yourself over my shoulder like some drunken slapper from down riverside on a friday night, pressing into my back while I’m trying to work out the non-locale-specific version of Logged in as:, or sticking your thigh-length boots into my arm when I’m figuring how we’re going to tackle the issue of the syndicated catalogue. I can’t even write a meaningful email without your ridiculous hair tumbling over my keyboard while I type. so just go away and leave me alone. get c4 to stick up an advert for cheese or desperate housewives or something instead. I’m trying to concentrate.

get distracted yourself. its friday and you need a reason to look at something inconsequential and rubbish.

which way round for globalization development?

June 9, 2005

I’m not sure where this bit goes. I mean, I understand the idea of your über plan and all that, ’cause you’ve been banging on about that and doing those staroffice presentations with all those circles and arrows and things for years, but what exactly do you want me to do when somebody managing global content deletes a node in the global tree and expects the whole operation to be supported seamlessly across multiple venues and countries and languages?

er, I dunno. I only did the strategy, right? or did I do the business requirements as well? I can’t remember. oh, that’s what you mean. so what do you want me to tell you? everything we asked you to tell us 6 months ago about how you actually want this content platform to support a centralized content model at a level where we can actually write something approaching a functional spec which we can turn into something we can actually begin to engineer. have you got time to do that? oh, sure! um, but what is it you actually want me do do? I mean, have I missed something out from the globalization requirements that I did last year? well, yeah. you need to let us know how somebody might actually utilize the platform to perform some kind of task which supports the operational model that you put in those requirements so we can work out whether we need to re-architect the system to enable slurping by delta and node deletion and actually what the criteria are for us having actually delivered a globalized platform that meets your needs, which, by the way, are probably not the same as they were a year ago, because everything’s changed.

oh, right. hang on, are you telling me that my own business requirements might be wrong? you can’t do that, I am the business. there mine. it’ll take them home and not let you play with them if you start saying nasty things about them. no, we’re not saying they’re wrong, they’re just not quite, well, right. here’s a whole bunch of stuff we noted that you might want to consider, because what you’ve asked for and what we’re doing aren’t necessarily exactly converging on a neat path. oh, ok, thanks. jesus! that’s loads of stuff! yeah, but we want to make sure we do it right, right?

so we reach an agreement that I pull my dumbass finger out and actually do those process flows n’ stuff that I never get round to doing and the engineering team will do what’s right, like they always do, and if they need anything urgently to progress the globalization development, they’ll let me know, so I can make something up and filter it back into the strategy later. only joking. I’m calling it the pragmatic globalization development chain (because of course, aggressive pragmatism leads us into systemized sticky matrix approaches), which is how it’s always been really, except the engineering team know globalization as well as the rest of us these days, so I’m much more deferential when I tell them absolutely positively that global content is US-English and the tiered fallback model only goes 2 levels, because they’ll probably be able to point out to me just how that won’t really work, even from a business point of view, but in a really nice way.

that’s not you, you’re an imposter

June 8, 2005

so I finally meet the team after about 6 months and nobody recognizes me. there I am wondering around BRM looking all english and trying to put faces to polycoms and I’m just looking like a freak in a tube station after I’ve been kicked out of Ruby’s. you, you’re, um, you must be, well, you look a bit like Liz, but she’s in Burlington. so. no. hang on, you’re, no, I know this, you’re…Bob! Hey Bob! you look just like you do on the video conference. no, that’s a compliment, really. Bob?

hoisted by my own petard. our internal org system means you can look up anyone in the company and get all the details you want, including all the hidden fields they’d forgotten they’d filled in in 1998, which say things like ‘clammy’ and ‘executive’. it also lets you see where people are working, which office they’re in, how you get there, what they’re doing, what they’re having for lunch in Guillemonts and stuff like that. it also has the option to integrate some optional detail, such as your calendar appointments and a picture of yourself. so, calendar, that’s genius, right? I mean, we’re all over the place, literally, so coordinating the time in 2 weeks when everybody you need to be on the phone at the same time to discuss how you’re going to allow someone in france to author a whitepaper that someone in germany can subscribe to without exposing the whole content branch and then arguing for hours about what global content is anyway is difficult, so you look up everyone’s calendars and see for yourself that the only time everyone is free is 22:00 your time when you’d planned to go and see Sin City and get lagered up afterwards because its thursday and you never do any real work on friday anyway.

so that’s good. what’s more revealing, however, is the choice of picture that folks use to let people determine exactly what they are like. mostly people don’t do it at all, which is fine, because a lot of people don’t have the slightest interest in investing the time to find out how you do it, or more pointedly reserve the right to not not let you know what they look like as that’s an infringement of their civil liberty, which is also fine, except that appears to be predominantly the U.S. go to Korea of Singapore and they can’t wait to stick in their pictures of them grinning into a Canon that the manager has taken round the office that morning. those that do upload themselves will generally do the ‘a bit too close and not very well lit in the office but that will do I suppose, I mean it looks like me I guess’ thing. others will play that maverick card and lob in a hilarious offcut from google image search that lets people know the kind of person they are without actually letting you know what person they are. you know, a darth vader, a dilbert, a muppet, a full face blowup PVC gimp mask from a BDSM site they just happened to come across when searching for ‘leather cleaner’, honest. those kind of things are ok. I mean those kind of pictures, not those kind of masks. or sites, er, anyway.

there is another category of image that occasionally turns up, but you only know if you already know what the person looks like, so its a kind of elaborate vanity test that sometimes you pass, or sometimes you fail to excuse effectively. this is the category called ‘well, its always me behind the camera, so there’s never any current pictures of me, so I had to use a 10 year old picture, that’s all I had’. and that’s where I found myself, wandering down the corridors at 5000 feet, blanks looks all around, trying to hide the fact that I might just have added a few pounds and lost some hair and maybe gone a bit gray since that photo you saw of me on the org tool that is 10 years old. my new boss didn’t recognize me until the next day and then she said ‘you’re an imposter! that’s not you on the org tool!’. dammit.

so now I’m up to date and look just like I really look, so if anyone looks me up, it’s their fault.

globalization. head. wall.

June 7, 2005

there’s no myths associated with globalization just a simple truth. you’ve got to change all your business processes mate, cos this globalized solution ain’t gonna work if you keep producing stuff like you’re in an exam room with your arm over the answers and then expect it to spread the sharing message to where the revenue is, which is not where you are, probably. the burgeoning underclass of globalization managers have been squirrelling around for years, trying to get you in a small room with no natural light just so you can understand how it might actually be possible to transform our beautifully crafted concept album of monetization through pragmatic centralization into a workable, sustainable and accountable framework for managing our messaging and enabling our commerce venues with cascading content inheritance and local value-added content support, like what I just drew on those concentric circles in staroffice, in case you were trying to work out what that was. this projector’s a bit rubbish. and I’m in another country, of course.

I mean, it’s not like its gonna even cost you a fistful of dollars. you’re already building that central web application architecture, right? I just know you’re gonna be fully internationalized an’ that, and lookit, you got hooks into localization workflows and all that stuff going on, so its gonna be like sticking a lemon on the eiffel tower. easy innit? so why not let us talk to the authors and business owners so we can’t just have some sort of arrangement where we give them this lovely globalized platform where localized milk and internationalized honey flow across the plains of centralization and over the cliffs of subscription and into the valleys of unified content taxonomies and they just have to change the way they’ve been creating stuff for the last 10 years. I think they’ll be open to that. I expect they’re falling over themselves to break their agreements with their press agencies and design vendors and actually, I bet if we pointed out to them that copy and pasting entire sections of our corporate site into Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: URGENT: Re: [Fwd: emails and then expecting the intern to create the online equivalent of the cistine chapel on 15 disparate sites in 10 languages in flash isn’t the most viable authoring solution, then they’d probably have some kind of religious experience and convert wholeheartedly to the church of g11n and succumb to the divine and all-knowing truth of ‘the content model’.

so, I’m off down the newsagents to pick up my copy of Marketing Matters – But Not If I Can’t Employ My Friends To Do It magazine and I’ll leave it to you to arrange the con call that has to work for Santa Clara, Camberley, Singapore and Moscow that will kick this stuff off. but don’t do it on Wednesday afternoon, cos I have an appointment with a medico about a collapsed idea.

dripping into the sculpture trail

June 6, 2005

pandering over a mass of crusts it was really an experimental twitch into tractorland. sue and patrick came and thus stood a ceramic torso and the soup dragon from the clangers on a feline hump. emily and peter were wailing in the bushes with green garden bale straps and harmonicas and everything was in tune enough for jazz. over at number 17, owl was scratching on a willow tree and I peered through a cairn, waiting for the gap.

but then it got apocaplyptic and elisabeth and colin were getting all gothic in the minstrels gallery, so we stepped around 12 kneeling cushions with eyes while josh simply stepped across them and then formed an orderly fish queue for the minibus that would take us to the place we started, so we could go all the way round and sink into the car park. got a call on the bus. they were walking, but they still got there before us and waved through a porthole as we passed the fighting rabbits and flapped over the horizon.

so now its a casserole and we don’t have to get ready for tomorrow, we can get ready for the rest of our lives. honey, eggs, prawns and a peugeot 104. cairn.

it’s just the same over here you know

June 3, 2005

Boulder. Norwich. they’re just like the illegitimate children of upper-middle class families separated at birth and rehoused on different sides of the atlantic. I mean, the nucleus of these places is like the result of an illicit conflagration between two drugged-up psychology students from the university on the edge of town, but peel off a few layers and progress a couple of miles into the suburbs and further out to the wilderness, then things get much more like the unfortunate in-bred collision of two disenfranchised and disaffected 15 year olds on crack who stumbled out of elementary with a working knowledge of woodworking and a lovebite on the neck. this is where people start building their own houses out of pieces of wood they salvaged from the local authority rather than getting the thursday edition of the local post and leafing through the property pages thinking about the next progression up the stakeholder lifestyle ladder and how much the difference between what they currently own and what they really need to work from home and walk to school and have an acre and have that one extra room that would make all the difference would be.

and there’s a great big community of hippies that won’t go away. they came to the university in 1975 to study geology and life sciences before there was such a thing as life sciences and they just never went back home. they just moved into the golden triangle with their afghans and tabalas and hung tie-dye on the wall and CND in the window and opened up the alternative pulse shops that Tesco and Walmart are now buying up and turning into drugstore expresses to cater for the burgeoning population of 2005 hippies that come to study, well, geology and life sciences, but have already got cars and mortgages and actually, are soo busy they can’t begin to think about the G8 summit or even cooking their own dinners so they congregate at the microbrewery and pretend to like football and try to shag each other, but in a polite way, cleaning up after themselves.

but always creeping in from the outskirts are the indigenous population of the unintelligable underclass that really own the city. they have been here for generations, often never leaving their own self-made house in the country. mostly they’ve not had any social intercourse outside their own extended family. mostly they’ve had no intercourse at all outside their own extended family. they suddenly appear over your shoulder when you’ve been busy checking out kites in the window of ‘kites and things’, their dribbly grin poking out of their bleached fringe, which is poking out of a baseball hat that you’re wondering just how it could get so unclean. they don’t want anything. they just do that looking at you thing and then gather together again like some idiot mercury in the middle of the high street and laugh. you’re not sure whether it’s at you or just in general, but you check your purse and head into a book shop all the same, because you’re safe in there, if a little grubby after the experience.

I’m only joking of course. I was born here and I’m quite normal.

not from round these parts

June 2, 2005

er, that’s a lovely pickup truck you have there. is that a gun in your pocket or are you just telling me this is a really crap place to stop and take a picture? I’m being ironic, you see? look, all this beauty. and then stuff like you. that’s a classic juxtaposition, ain’t it? it’s really purdy an’ all, but you ain’t from round these parts, are you boy?

well, no. if I was, I would know that you can’t get here from Nederland and then onto Denver Airport in 3 hours, but that’s where I find myself right now, so if you’d be so kind as to get that dog off my leg I really need to be tearing down the 70 at 80 miles an hour, wishing I’d filled up with gas somewhere closer to civilization.

anyway, the picture is here. it’s somewhere between here and here

twitching in the flatiron crossing

May 26, 2005

Nordstrom, Foleys, Nordstom, Foleys, erm, left. No, straight on. will they have socks? of course they will. they’ll have those thin old man socks that cost $15 dollars and have diamonds up the side. right then, Foleys. Left. No, hang on, I can get presents in Nordstrum too. right, Nordstrum it is. ok, left. I think, hang on, ALRIGHT MATE! I’M THINKING!

stick the ceramic aztec trophy in the boot and swish through the doors, straight into Chan in menswear. “is there anything I can help you with today sir?” erm, no thankyou, I’m just being british and stalking around your footwear in a deliberate fashion while hunting for socks I refuse to ask you to locate for me. these shops are always empty when I go in them. I mean, Nordstrom. it’s huge, but there’s absolutely noone in here. is that just me? anyway, I don’t find socks, but upon realizing that flatiron crossing isn’t just 2 huge department stores stuck together in the middle, I head off into the wilderness of thursday evening mall shopping in Colorado. I need a tshirt. I have to fly back tomorrow in a tshirt that was fine when I flew out a week ago but following numerous bar meals in the tap room, with fat tire, slabs of hotel chocolate, lunchtime sushi, nachos, burgers, subways, beer, enchiladas, tubs of lard etc., my uber gut stretches the etnies logo out of shape and I look like I should be sat in a golf cart in florida with a havana in one hand and a colostomy bag in the other. so I just need to scale up slightly for the plane. it’s the altitude you see, it adds 20 pounds because of the air pressure or something, honest. right, banana republic. nope. helly hansen. yeah, right, I really need microfibres that stretch to fit and expose every contour. gap. nope. dick’s sporting goods. ooh, maybe, lets have a look. eh? there’s people wall climbing in here. that’s just stupid, get me out of here. hang on, they’re playing the carpet crawlers by genesis in a sports store in a broomfield mall in 2005. that’s just weird. mind you, I hang on for a couple more minutes to listen and pretend to look at basketballs I’ve no intention of buying. “you gotta get in in to get ou-ou-ou-ooou-out”. nope. abercrombie and fitch. it’s too dark in there. and a man just came out with a sideways head, I don’t like the look of that. pacific sunwear. sorry, Pac Sun. sounds a bit like Pac Man that martin has in his basement. ok, there’s 21 year olds in there I aspire to be like and I desperately want to wear their tshirts and be in their gang, so I’ll take a look, even though I’ve come straight from BRM01 and I’m wearing my meeting clothes so obviously I just look like their dad. or creepy trying-to-be-trendy uncle or something. ah so what. right, over to the shirt rack. ooh, fox, etnies, hurley, mad monkey, wet dog, quiksilver, billabong, rolf harris, and they’re 3 for 2. I have to try one on, because I still don’t know whether a US medium is a UK large or whether that’s just random. “Hi I’m Sara! I’ll be unlocking your changing room door for you today and closing it behind you! If you have any questions in Pacific Sunwear today, please give me a shout!”. er, ok. in the end, medium is medium, and I really need a fat git size today, so large it is. $42 dollars and a withering smile from me that says please let me be in your gang later and I’m out of there.

still no socks though. but now I have a shopping bag with stuff I’ve bought in it. that makes me a shopper. that means I can browse around other shops and for some reason staff completely ignore me, like I’ve been seduced by the dark side and they don’t need to pursuade me to part with my money. I’ve crossed the line. I will spend more, it’s the law. so with me bulging comfort blanket in me right hand and me left hand in my trouser pocket, I head back to victorias secret which I passed by earlier but pretended not to be interested in, even saying something like “ah yes, brookstone” out loud to myself so people thought I was intent on going somewhere else. I can now cross the threshold of this place as a shopper, which means I’m not just gawping at plunge bras like a 15 year old, I might actually buy one as well. for my wife. but actually, victorias secret is just so rampant it all gets too much for me and after doing one circuit, humming to myself apparently nonchalently, I try to stumble out gracefully, but I trip over the electronic tag detector in the doorway and set off the alarm with the magnetic strip on my library card. I think I just about hold it together while I crawl around the floor, picking up the contents of my wallet as it slithers away from me across the polished floor and me glasses fall out of my shirt pocket, where I’ve been keeping them like some professor or something. stand up. shoulders back. walk on. smile. try not to notice the entire staff in there are peering at you around the counter and the stock cupboard door like you’re some kind of pantomime freak on holiday who left his costume on. never mind that they’re all 19 and called Kirsty and they would have been happy to help you if you had any questions in victorias secret today, it’s too late. you’re an idiot. a fat idiot who hasn’t bought any presents and looks like a stupid dad person on vacation, looking for socks and loitering around lingerie shops.

anyway, I did get some socks. calvin klein, $10 each. then I went back to the hotel and sat in the bar on my own watching tv. I’m going to drive to Aspen tomorrow.

Things what I writ