Dog Tired
Busy as several unfeasibly large busy things tied up together into a great big busy bunch of business. More projects on the go than you could shake a stick at. More than you could shake an entire bundle of sticks at. Nay, more than you could shake a full face cord...well...you get the picture.
Haven't been this busy since I was catching bullets for itemus as things were falling apart all around them...
Much more to blog soon. Promise. Just dog tired right now and need to kip furiously and dream of bunnies.
In the meantime, in a lame attempt to keep you mildly entertained, here's a recycled rant scraped out of the cruft at the bottom of my email inbox from earlier today.
A friend in the UK set me off on this particular rant by raising his concerns about the ugly trend towards polyphonic ring tones on cell phones.
This senseless misuse of engineering talent drives me nuts. Never in the field of human commerce was so much "feature bloat" crammed into such small devices by so many.
I wonder how many engineers and supporting techies are currently engaged around the world in the meaningless and entirely pointless pursuit of further "enriching" our phones and other gizmos? How many Ph.D.s are squandering their education on projects to squeeze hundreds of cheesy TV themes through a speaker the size of a dime?
My own little Nokia comes pre-loaded with a choice of 50 annoying ring tones, and there are thousands more available for download. Why? It's a phone: I want it to ring like a phone.
Apart from anything else, if my pocket suddenly starts playing the theme from Bewitched in the middle of a meeting, doesn't this brand my forehead with the word "pillock" more clearly than just about anything else I could do?
This strikes me as another example of Neil Postman's "Faustian bargain" as quoted by Stuart Jeffries in Tuesday's Guardian piece: "...for every advantage that a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage."
The advantage of feature-bloated polyphonic ring tone phones, presumably, is something to do with the ability to "personalize" our mobile "experience".
The disadvantage is that everyone else in the meeting will look at you with that special mixture of contempt, loathing, and pity that always accompanies the sudden realisation that one of your co-workers is a complete knob.
BTW, I had much more to say about this in my original draft - but Blogger ate my post. Sniffle.
I'm afraid I don't have the energy to recreate it, but trust me: it was awfully, awfully good.
I had this whole long diatribe worked up about the Faustian bargain of blogging.
Plenty of tortured logic, bad analogies, sloppy grammar, pompous ostentation - classic Michael stuff. Sadly all gone.
It all hinged on the tissue-thin conceit that successful blogging is a sort of selling.
If you can consistently write well about interesting stuff, exposing your soul to the world at large, you stand a good chance of pulling a solid stream of repeat readers (and we all love dem readers).
If it's selling, there has to be a product. The "product" here is your unique voice, your native intelligence, your opinions, your narrative, your ideas. All manifestations of the soul, you could say. When you blog, you're selling your soul. (I know, I know - groan at will...)
The flipside is that the act of opening even this tiny window into one's soul could be considered a risky proposition - for all sorts of sound and silly reasons. Imagine what would happen if the people you work with found out what you're really like. Gasp!
I know from some of my discussions at last week's Jupiter Biz Blogs conference that there are people out there - even active, veteran bloggers - who think this is a scary thing.
And there are already a number of scare stories of bloggers being fired or just feeling pressured into temporarily suspending their blog after a little too much soul exposure.
Somehow, in my first cut of this post, I managed to make a syllogistic leap from this last thought to conclude with some groovy ideas on the Faustian bargain we all make when we blog. But I’m arsed if I can remember what they were...
Drat.
Maybe someone else can pick up the thread for me…?
Haven't been this busy since I was catching bullets for itemus as things were falling apart all around them...
Much more to blog soon. Promise. Just dog tired right now and need to kip furiously and dream of bunnies.
In the meantime, in a lame attempt to keep you mildly entertained, here's a recycled rant scraped out of the cruft at the bottom of my email inbox from earlier today.
A friend in the UK set me off on this particular rant by raising his concerns about the ugly trend towards polyphonic ring tones on cell phones.
This senseless misuse of engineering talent drives me nuts. Never in the field of human commerce was so much "feature bloat" crammed into such small devices by so many.
I wonder how many engineers and supporting techies are currently engaged around the world in the meaningless and entirely pointless pursuit of further "enriching" our phones and other gizmos? How many Ph.D.s are squandering their education on projects to squeeze hundreds of cheesy TV themes through a speaker the size of a dime?
My own little Nokia comes pre-loaded with a choice of 50 annoying ring tones, and there are thousands more available for download. Why? It's a phone: I want it to ring like a phone.
Apart from anything else, if my pocket suddenly starts playing the theme from Bewitched in the middle of a meeting, doesn't this brand my forehead with the word "pillock" more clearly than just about anything else I could do?
This strikes me as another example of Neil Postman's "Faustian bargain" as quoted by Stuart Jeffries in Tuesday's Guardian piece: "...for every advantage that a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage."
The advantage of feature-bloated polyphonic ring tone phones, presumably, is something to do with the ability to "personalize" our mobile "experience".
The disadvantage is that everyone else in the meeting will look at you with that special mixture of contempt, loathing, and pity that always accompanies the sudden realisation that one of your co-workers is a complete knob.
BTW, I had much more to say about this in my original draft - but Blogger ate my post. Sniffle.
I'm afraid I don't have the energy to recreate it, but trust me: it was awfully, awfully good.
I had this whole long diatribe worked up about the Faustian bargain of blogging.
Plenty of tortured logic, bad analogies, sloppy grammar, pompous ostentation - classic Michael stuff. Sadly all gone.
It all hinged on the tissue-thin conceit that successful blogging is a sort of selling.
If you can consistently write well about interesting stuff, exposing your soul to the world at large, you stand a good chance of pulling a solid stream of repeat readers (and we all love dem readers).
If it's selling, there has to be a product. The "product" here is your unique voice, your native intelligence, your opinions, your narrative, your ideas. All manifestations of the soul, you could say. When you blog, you're selling your soul. (I know, I know - groan at will...)
The flipside is that the act of opening even this tiny window into one's soul could be considered a risky proposition - for all sorts of sound and silly reasons. Imagine what would happen if the people you work with found out what you're really like. Gasp!
I know from some of my discussions at last week's Jupiter Biz Blogs conference that there are people out there - even active, veteran bloggers - who think this is a scary thing.
And there are already a number of scare stories of bloggers being fired or just feeling pressured into temporarily suspending their blog after a little too much soul exposure.
Somehow, in my first cut of this post, I managed to make a syllogistic leap from this last thought to conclude with some groovy ideas on the Faustian bargain we all make when we blog. But I’m arsed if I can remember what they were...
Drat.
Maybe someone else can pick up the thread for me…?
