... harmonised laws re: business practices with shared ethical standards? If the whole world is one big ol' market, then it needs to play by a broadly compatible set of rules. I suppose this doesn't extend to ethical behaviour. And we don't fancy sitting in the docket at the World Court over... well, anything, ever. Hell, our current President think he answers to no one but himself, anyway.
*sigh*
These are NOT faceless organisations. We have individual responsibilities and we have shared responsibilities. And American companies that behave in an ethically dubious fashion when they're beyond the reach of American justice clearly exhibit a lack of respect for the rule of law.
The market doesn't cure all ills. We should censure MS / Yahoo! for not maintaining American ethical standards while operating abroad. Sure a corporation exists to maximise shareholder value, but we should ALL operate with our ethics intact. To do otherwise implies what's good for Americans is... flexible for others. While this may fly with our "guests" in Cuba and those nice people we fly around Europe and the Middle East for "talks" in non-US jails... well... this is all plainly wrong.
... the citizens of a country carry their morals with them when they go abroad, no? It isn't so much China's behaviour, it's the behavious of my fellow Americans that disturbs me.
I'm very concerned about the two-track ethics on display here by Microsoft, Yahoo! et al. American companies doing business in America conduct themselves with a very different set of ethical standards than when they conduct business abroad. Where do we draw the line? I expect more...
While I'm not totally innocent of... um... finding music online from time to time, it's just easier to simply buy the odd track from the iTunes Music Store or just borrow the CD from a friend. Whatever happened to swapping music collections?
Although I tend to think the USD$120 yearly subscription fee is a wee bit much - remember, it can be had a bit cheaper if you buy a box off of Amazon or from eBay (USD$80) - I've been very pleased with the whole package of services from the beginning.
Right after I came back from a month in Italy in 2002 I could whisk a bunch of photos up on the web to impress my new girlfriend.
Of couse, she ran off with another chap last year, but that's another story and not.Mac's fault. I don't think.
My PowerBook was robbed from my flat over the summer (ouch - just purchased and no insurance yet). When I bought a little Mac mini to get myself connected again, the sync services dumped my address book, e-mail (where I keep a LOT of my writing drafts), system prefs, iTunes playlists, etc back on my computer.
Although I'd rather not be charged ANOTHER USD$100 or so for a new edition of iLife that provides some quick n' dirty ways to author offline, I suppose I'm going to shell out the cash.
I keep thinking that Apple should release iLife for Windows Vista. Granted the iLife apps are a unique advantage for the MacOS X platform, but wouldn't the revenue garnered from all those Windows-based subscriptions MORE than make up for it? I wonder...
And hey, this is my slice of.Mac!
I'm no techical wizard, but the article really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it? As far as I know, the rendering engine is totally different from Mac to Windows. It isn't as though they're using the MSHTML dll. Hell, doesn't Safari use WebCore for display and WebKit for their plugin architecture? (again, I'm not really up on this, so feel free to correct)
IE5 for OS9 was a fairly nice piece of software, but the OSX version was always ghastly. If the rendering engine is passé too, then... why release the code? I'd suggest the effort is better spent getting Microsoft to release a standards-compliant "browser" with be done with this particular era in the history of the internet.
Methinks these days I'm a "man of the world". Ahem.
Yes, born and bread in the wilds of Blairstown, New Jersey, lived in New York City for years... And now I'm drunk on punch in the Big Smoke and very happy to be here.
And scrupulous to use "s" over "z" in my writing.
Hiccup!
Bit of orange juice, apple juice, cranberry juice, bottle of wine, bits of apple, orange, redcurrents, sugar, simmer on low heat... when good and frothy and hot add half a bottle of vino and serve. Made the walk on Hampstead Heath all the more enjoyable!
I'm not a Brit, but my girlfriend (who is, from Kent) usually prefers "British" to "English" when she's talking with Americans or someone from the EU... although will more readily self-identify as "English" when talking to someone from, say, Scotland. Hmmm... of course, if I decide to become a citizen, I'd be "British"... or would I be an "AmeriBrit"?;-)
And just to chime in: although I love the print and web edition of The Guardian (clean, crisp layout, great content is even more an attraction then the "Berliner" format they keeping boasting about). I'm not overly fond of the way information is organised on the BBC's site and subsites, but they are fascinating to page through endlessly.
And, aside from that damn Java headlines thing on the front page, I do tend to give The Telegraph's site marks over The Times (which used to be only partially accessible from outside Britain) and Independent (and damn their crappy "portfolio" pay to read nonsense - wonder where the NYT got the idea) sites. Although the Telegraph's Opinion page is silly Tory at times, their features reporting is superb.
This is the first I've heard of Google Zeitgeist
on
Google Zeitgeist '05
·
· Score: 1
I must be under a rock. Feel a bit silly seeing yearly archives from 2001! Still, I think it's rather cool, to be honest. I'm far from a maths geek (used to manage production on maths textbooks and online thingies, though), but stats are fun to play with and they've done an amusing job with their end of year wrap up. Yes, it's a wee bit self-congratulatory and so on... but... hey, it IS interesting to tease out meaning (or is that "meaning") from some raw data.
I've been reading Clare Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys and have enjoyed her description of the beginnings of the Royal Society. Composed of the best scientific minds of the day, non-scientist Pepys headed up the society (twice, if memory serves). His bottomless curiosity about the mysteries in the world around him led him to question and converse with people like, say, Newton without actually quite understanding the details.
Reminds me of the best conversations on Slashdot - a collection of exceedingly bright - or at the very least, exceedingly curious - people verbally jousting, having fun, being fools and occasionally sharing some really brilliant insights.
I suppose every generation and every age thinks it knows the deepest secrets of the universe only to find that their theories need the occasional tweak as our understand expands year after year. I find it all quite amazing.
That said, why is it that the ID people's approach to science remind me of Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes? Hmmm...
I think the reason Apple isn't catching hell for bundling all manner of things with their computers these days is the simple fact that if they didn't, no one would be writing these apps.
That's a gross simplification of where the Mac market is (and was back when Apple decided to assimilate SoundJam and spit it out again as iTunes), but I think essentially true. When you bring an iMac home - that lovely Bondi Blue baby all the way through to the current iMac G5 with iSight - you expect this thing to do something. After all, whenever you bought a Gateway or a Dell it had all manner of goofy apps designed to print, view photos, edit little movies, play music, etc. During the OS8/9 you had to tweak, fiddle and install apps to do cool stuff. A bit of a pain for most people.
Since then, vendors have lagged in releasing apps for the latest and greatest MacOS offerings... and Apple suffered greatly from the Application Gap between themselves and Windows.
Think independent. Why the hell would Steve want to be continually in the power of Adobe and Microsoft (to say nothing of Macromedia - heh, now part of Adobe-, Real, Quark and the others)? Apple has nooooo leverage with which to bargain and it's pathetic to have to beg. Soooooo...
I for one applaud Apple for taking its future into its own hands and writing DAMN good software (or buying and vastly improving) to go along with it's nifty boxes and gorgeous operating system.
I'd really like to read through some research on alternate ways to explore digital data. I'm no technical boffin but do spend heaps of time in front of my Mac Mini working on "stuff".
Now this stuff is comprised of:
Photographs -.jpg's,.psd's, etc
Essays, film reviews, stories -.doc,.txt, e-mail messages
Day job stuff - all the above file types
Now, I think a previous post pointed out that in the real world, the activities in which we engage generally are grouped together as "projects" - a heap o' photos, some line art, copy, maybe movie files.
Finding by 'type' does very little to improve my organisational abilities and really doesn't help me find things easily and neatly. Good ol nested files and folders does the trick nicely.
But when I assign the proper metadata to my photos, iPhoto (looking forward to Apterture) is a killer way to visually organise and interact with (and bloody find) my photos.
Same with iTunes - great to batch toggle the metadata that goes along with the.mp3's - although I do remember being hacked off about SoundJam's demise as (if I remember rightly) it used the Finder's file and folder info to organise the.mp3's.
Seems to me that something like Apple's Spotlight - which is one of these Type Manager apps - is just another, very simple way to display data that really isn't all that useful in the real world.
How do you organise data and find things? If by project, do you use files/folders - shove everything into some sort of database - ?
Blast, I only reached page two before that planned downtime (at 3.15pm on a Friday, yeah right) happened.
I'm assuming that the editors at ZDnet reviewed their editorial policy and decided to pull the piece. Or the nice lawyers at One Infinite Loop sent them a friendly "Hallo" from the state of California.
I may be very, horribly wrong about this, but didn't Apple ease into the music buisness by doing what it does best: enabling people to get stuff done? Take something complex and make it simple?
I used SoundJam with my old PowerBook, mp3's all over my PB and G3 and then Apple came along, snatched up SoundJam and gave birth to this stupid-simple way to - wait for it - rip, mix, burn all my music.
To be perfectly honest, I don't own all the music I've ripped. I have heaps of stuff from ex-girlfriends (glad I always ripped 192kbs w/variable bitrate on) that I never bought. Apple enabled people to do what they've always done in the era of albums and mix tapes - and go one better!
Then they brought out a way to transport the music - iPod - and slowly but surely tried to confer legitimacy on something that hitherto had been something slightly dodgy.
Now how does this affect video? I wonder... to me, the test is: does it help me store/view/manipulate stuff I've 'found' on the internet like, say, REVENGE OF THE SITH (hehe) and use it in a meaningful way. Hell, what is meaningful and how do people really want to work with video?! This whole thing strikes me as a mindshare/market research exercise.
Apple wants to know how we consume video and what we want to do with it. And THEN they'll find a way to exploit it for maximum profit.
Best idea I prediction I saw was for movie download/burning stations at Apple Stores across America, creating a wholly new distribution channel for movies.
Discuss!
I'd be very surprised if Apple doesn't take advantage of Wi-Fi in digital cameras and create some really compelling community-building tools for the homepage section of their.Mac service.
First step might be co-opting Flickr's user-assignable keywords. That's a killer feature that encourages casual browsing and random connections between people.
I've used.Mac for years now and (although I reckon they'd prefer you use iPhoto as the gateway to the service) I'd love to just connect my camera to a network when on the road and access a secure,.Mac-hosted interface for upload/download to iDisk or even to publish.
Hmmm... what do we think? New.Mac feature?
That's the point at which I find myself with the iPod. I have a 10GB, 2nd Gen iPod (solid-state, no turning plastic piece) with no good reason to buy something with less capacity. I don't jog (use the cross-trainer and can happily rest the thing on the machine's cupholder) nor is space at that high a premium in my life.
((Actually, I had an original 4GB iPod that was stolen, but I digress...))
And I rather like the ability to plug the thing in via Firewire without having another dongly dock thing hanging around.
So why should I upgrade - what's the value proposition for me? Higher capacity would certainly lure me, but that seems to be stalled and a bit pricey at the moment.
So what ARE the features that might make one trade up? More information syncing, video (in some form), higher capacities for file backups or portability... hmmm...
Actually, I didn't make all that much more than some of the temps. Still, I had some job security and they got sacked after I left the company. I'm not entirely sure that the team would have worked nearly as hard... and certainly the structure wouldn't have been in place. I worked my arse off at the start...
I prefer to think of my time there as working my way UP and out rather than DOWN and out.
Yes, I was promoted.
Oh you're right - that part I understood all too well. If my team were the corporate proxy for 'me' then my fortunes rose and fell with the team.
And I made certain things went well at all costs.
But it IS a strange position to be in, eh? I thought myself successful as a manager when it all ran like some perpetual motion machine.
To be honest, I'm rather sick of office life and would much rather be snapping photos or scribbling... but it pays the (mounting) bills!
I suppose I'm actually rather attentive. What I resent is having to sit in a bloody office. THAT I manage to escape fairly regularly. Not too popular with the co-workers on that score - but I no longer have a staff;-)
I managed a small dev/production team for a publishing company. My highest priority after I was hired was to make myself redundant and not altogether needed in the office.
I did this by "empowering" those that worked for me. By that I mean I analysed what the manager (me) needed to do and delegated the responsibilities evenly. Although I was always available to "ok" team decisions, in practise it meant I did very little during the day. I made myself obsolete!
The key to all this was papering over all this by using my office time to work on my writing. I also managed to be "at home" far more than anyone else.
By steadfastly refusing to actually "do" anything, I very quickly learned how to put together a damn good team that produced quantifiable (and quality) results every time.
Am I lazy? Hmmmm... not sure. The department brought lots of projects in on time and under budget. The affairs of the department flowed smoothly. But I really didn't need more than a few hours of time in the morning (and a few hours in the evening) to do the job.
Hmmm...
Hmmm... so much for moving to London and feeling far more confident that an attack like this wouldn't happen in England.
Had a few too many drinks last night to celebrate the Olympic win.
I was on the Victoria line this morning going from Highbury down to Green Park to have a coffee before my meeting near Hyde Park corner. Thought it strange that Kings X was closed and the power flickering.
Didn't know what was going on at Green Park. Walked along Piccadilly @ 9.15 and wondered why so many damn people were walking about and the buses jammed.
People on the street here in central London seem in good spirits. Everyone's sending texts to friends and family. Called my mum in South Carolina.
The sound of sirens has been pervasive all morning and into the afternoon. Now I'm contemplating a loooong walk back to Islington.
Proud to be a former New Yorker and very proud of the reaction of the PM, too. (GWB was a bit cringeworthy, to be honest)
Maybe I'm just bleary this Sunday morning, but I didn't see a discussion of bitrates or sound quality in any of the Radio 3 FAQs or "Jargon Buster". Tis an issue with any of the online stores offering classical music, too.
Actually, the Jargon Buster is v amusing. Maybe I'm just waaaay out of touch, but I've never come across the terms "iPod Sunday" and "iPodectomy". Yeech. Those wacky Beeb webbies - or have they been cribbing from a PR "Fact sheet"? Hmmmm...
Sorry, up late watching Live8 - on a side note, was surprised at the tracks from last night's concert in Hyde Park on sale via iTunes, gosh!
So kudos to Radio 3 for making all this available, but maybe they could spare a little more bandwidth for higher bitrates (or even charge a nominal fee for a FLAC or AppleLossless bit of Beethoven)
So the Jedi can hold elective office? Why didn't they simply form a delagation in the Senate and kick Palps bottom at the ballot box rather than beating on a poor, helpless old man. Shame on those nasty fanatics!
So on which side does Alastair Campbell fall? Hmmm... they don't do the God thing, but maybe they're schooled in the ways of the Force;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... harmonised laws re: business practices with shared ethical standards? If the whole world is one big ol' market, then it needs to play by a broadly compatible set of rules. I suppose this doesn't extend to ethical behaviour. And we don't fancy sitting in the docket at the World Court over ... well, anything, ever. Hell, our current President think he answers to no one but himself, anyway.
*sigh*
These are NOT faceless organisations. We have individual responsibilities and we have shared responsibilities. And American companies that behave in an ethically dubious fashion when they're beyond the reach of American justice clearly exhibit a lack of respect for the rule of law.
The market doesn't cure all ills. We should censure MS / Yahoo! for not maintaining American ethical standards while operating abroad. Sure a corporation exists to maximise shareholder value, but we should ALL operate with our ethics intact. To do otherwise implies what's good for Americans is ... flexible for others. While this may fly with our "guests" in Cuba and those nice people we fly around Europe and the Middle East for "talks" in non-US jails ... well ... this is all plainly wrong.
... the citizens of a country carry their morals with them when they go abroad, no? It isn't so much China's behaviour, it's the behavious of my fellow Americans that disturbs me.
I'm very concerned about the two-track ethics on display here by Microsoft, Yahoo! et al. American companies doing business in America conduct themselves with a very different set of ethical standards than when they conduct business abroad. Where do we draw the line? I expect more ...
While I'm not totally innocent of ... um ... finding music online from time to time, it's just easier to simply buy the odd track from the iTunes Music Store or just borrow the CD from a friend. Whatever happened to swapping music collections?
Right after I came back from a month in Italy in 2002 I could whisk a bunch of photos up on the web to impress my new girlfriend.
Of couse, she ran off with another chap last year, but that's another story and not .Mac's fault. I don't think.
My PowerBook was robbed from my flat over the summer (ouch - just purchased and no insurance yet). When I bought a little Mac mini to get myself connected again, the sync services dumped my address book, e-mail (where I keep a LOT of my writing drafts), system prefs, iTunes playlists, etc back on my computer.
Although I'd rather not be charged ANOTHER USD$100 or so for a new edition of iLife that provides some quick n' dirty ways to author offline, I suppose I'm going to shell out the cash.
I keep thinking that Apple should release iLife for Windows Vista. Granted the iLife apps are a unique advantage for the MacOS X platform, but wouldn't the revenue garnered from all those Windows-based subscriptions MORE than make up for it? I wonder ...
And hey, this is my slice of .Mac!
I'm no techical wizard, but the article really doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it? As far as I know, the rendering engine is totally different from Mac to Windows. It isn't as though they're using the MSHTML dll. Hell, doesn't Safari use WebCore for display and WebKit for their plugin architecture? (again, I'm not really up on this, so feel free to correct)
IE5 for OS9 was a fairly nice piece of software, but the OSX version was always ghastly. If the rendering engine is passé too, then ... why release the code? I'd suggest the effort is better spent getting Microsoft to release a standards-compliant "browser" with be done with this particular era in the history of the internet.
Methinks these days I'm a "man of the world". Ahem. Yes, born and bread in the wilds of Blairstown, New Jersey, lived in New York City for years ... And now I'm drunk on punch in the Big Smoke and very happy to be here.
And scrupulous to use "s" over "z" in my writing.
Hiccup!
Bit of orange juice, apple juice, cranberry juice, bottle of wine, bits of apple, orange, redcurrents, sugar, simmer on low heat ... when good and frothy and hot add half a bottle of vino and serve. Made the walk on Hampstead Heath all the more enjoyable!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, made my Christmas ;-)
And just to chime in: although I love the print and web edition of The Guardian (clean, crisp layout, great content is even more an attraction then the "Berliner" format they keeping boasting about). I'm not overly fond of the way information is organised on the BBC's site and subsites, but they are fascinating to page through endlessly.
And, aside from that damn Java headlines thing on the front page, I do tend to give The Telegraph's site marks over The Times (which used to be only partially accessible from outside Britain) and Independent (and damn their crappy "portfolio" pay to read nonsense - wonder where the NYT got the idea) sites. Although the Telegraph's Opinion page is silly Tory at times, their features reporting is superb.
I must be under a rock. Feel a bit silly seeing yearly archives from 2001! Still, I think it's rather cool, to be honest. I'm far from a maths geek (used to manage production on maths textbooks and online thingies, though), but stats are fun to play with and they've done an amusing job with their end of year wrap up. Yes, it's a wee bit self-congratulatory and so on ... but ... hey, it IS interesting to tease out meaning (or is that "meaning") from some raw data.
Yes, Lex Luthor! Look for the secret map with Costa Del Lex, Luthorville, Marina del Lex, Otisburg, etc ...
I've been reading Clare Tomalin's biography of Samuel Pepys and have enjoyed her description of the beginnings of the Royal Society. Composed of the best scientific minds of the day, non-scientist Pepys headed up the society (twice, if memory serves). His bottomless curiosity about the mysteries in the world around him led him to question and converse with people like, say, Newton without actually quite understanding the details.
Reminds me of the best conversations on Slashdot - a collection of exceedingly bright - or at the very least, exceedingly curious - people verbally jousting, having fun, being fools and occasionally sharing some really brilliant insights.
I suppose every generation and every age thinks it knows the deepest secrets of the universe only to find that their theories need the occasional tweak as our understand expands year after year. I find it all quite amazing.
That said, why is it that the ID people's approach to science remind me of Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes? Hmmm ...
I think the reason Apple isn't catching hell for bundling all manner of things with their computers these days is the simple fact that if they didn't, no one would be writing these apps.
That's a gross simplification of where the Mac market is (and was back when Apple decided to assimilate SoundJam and spit it out again as iTunes), but I think essentially true. When you bring an iMac home - that lovely Bondi Blue baby all the way through to the current iMac G5 with iSight - you expect this thing to do something. After all, whenever you bought a Gateway or a Dell it had all manner of goofy apps designed to print, view photos, edit little movies, play music, etc. During the OS8/9 you had to tweak, fiddle and install apps to do cool stuff. A bit of a pain for most people.
Since then, vendors have lagged in releasing apps for the latest and greatest MacOS offerings ... and Apple suffered greatly from the Application Gap between themselves and Windows.
Think independent. Why the hell would Steve want to be continually in the power of Adobe and Microsoft (to say nothing of Macromedia - heh, now part of Adobe-, Real, Quark and the others)? Apple has nooooo leverage with which to bargain and it's pathetic to have to beg. Soooooo ...
I for one applaud Apple for taking its future into its own hands and writing DAMN good software (or buying and vastly improving) to go along with it's nifty boxes and gorgeous operating system.
Now this stuff is comprised of: Photographs - .jpg's, .psd's, etc
Essays, film reviews, stories - .doc, .txt, e-mail messages
Day job stuff - all the above file types
Now, I think a previous post pointed out that in the real world, the activities in which we engage generally are grouped together as "projects" - a heap o' photos, some line art, copy, maybe movie files.
Finding by 'type' does very little to improve my organisational abilities and really doesn't help me find things easily and neatly. Good ol nested files and folders does the trick nicely.
But when I assign the proper metadata to my photos, iPhoto (looking forward to Apterture) is a killer way to visually organise and interact with (and bloody find) my photos.
Same with iTunes - great to batch toggle the metadata that goes along with the .mp3's - although I do remember being hacked off about SoundJam's demise as (if I remember rightly) it used the Finder's file and folder info to organise the .mp3's.
Seems to me that something like Apple's Spotlight - which is one of these Type Manager apps - is just another, very simple way to display data that really isn't all that useful in the real world.
How do you organise data and find things? If by project, do you use files/folders - shove everything into some sort of database - ?
Blast, I only reached page two before that planned downtime (at 3.15pm on a Friday, yeah right) happened. I'm assuming that the editors at ZDnet reviewed their editorial policy and decided to pull the piece. Or the nice lawyers at One Infinite Loop sent them a friendly "Hallo" from the state of California.
I may be very, horribly wrong about this, but didn't Apple ease into the music buisness by doing what it does best: enabling people to get stuff done? Take something complex and make it simple? I used SoundJam with my old PowerBook, mp3's all over my PB and G3 and then Apple came along, snatched up SoundJam and gave birth to this stupid-simple way to - wait for it - rip, mix, burn all my music. To be perfectly honest, I don't own all the music I've ripped. I have heaps of stuff from ex-girlfriends (glad I always ripped 192kbs w/variable bitrate on) that I never bought. Apple enabled people to do what they've always done in the era of albums and mix tapes - and go one better! Then they brought out a way to transport the music - iPod - and slowly but surely tried to confer legitimacy on something that hitherto had been something slightly dodgy. Now how does this affect video? I wonder ... to me, the test is: does it help me store/view/manipulate stuff I've 'found' on the internet like, say, REVENGE OF THE SITH (hehe) and use it in a meaningful way. Hell, what is meaningful and how do people really want to work with video?! This whole thing strikes me as a mindshare/market research exercise.
Apple wants to know how we consume video and what we want to do with it. And THEN they'll find a way to exploit it for maximum profit.
Best idea I prediction I saw was for movie download/burning stations at Apple Stores across America, creating a wholly new distribution channel for movies.
Discuss!
I'd be very surprised if Apple doesn't take advantage of Wi-Fi in digital cameras and create some really compelling community-building tools for the homepage section of their .Mac service.
First step might be co-opting Flickr's user-assignable keywords. That's a killer feature that encourages casual browsing and random connections between people.
I've used .Mac for years now and (although I reckon they'd prefer you use iPhoto as the gateway to the service) I'd love to just connect my camera to a network when on the road and access a secure, .Mac-hosted interface for upload/download to iDisk or even to publish.
Hmmm ... what do we think? New .Mac feature?
That's the point at which I find myself with the iPod. I have a 10GB, 2nd Gen iPod (solid-state, no turning plastic piece) with no good reason to buy something with less capacity. I don't jog (use the cross-trainer and can happily rest the thing on the machine's cupholder) nor is space at that high a premium in my life. ((Actually, I had an original 4GB iPod that was stolen, but I digress ...))
And I rather like the ability to plug the thing in via Firewire without having another dongly dock thing hanging around.
So why should I upgrade - what's the value proposition for me? Higher capacity would certainly lure me, but that seems to be stalled and a bit pricey at the moment.
So what ARE the features that might make one trade up? More information syncing, video (in some form), higher capacities for file backups or portability ... hmmm ...
Actually, I didn't make all that much more than some of the temps. Still, I had some job security and they got sacked after I left the company. I'm not entirely sure that the team would have worked nearly as hard ... and certainly the structure wouldn't have been in place. I worked my arse off at the start ...
I prefer to think of my time there as working my way UP and out rather than DOWN and out.
Yes, I was promoted.
Oh you're right - that part I understood all too well. If my team were the corporate proxy for 'me' then my fortunes rose and fell with the team. And I made certain things went well at all costs. But it IS a strange position to be in, eh? I thought myself successful as a manager when it all ran like some perpetual motion machine. To be honest, I'm rather sick of office life and would much rather be snapping photos or scribbling ... but it pays the (mounting) bills!
I suppose I'm actually rather attentive. What I resent is having to sit in a bloody office. THAT I manage to escape fairly regularly. Not too popular with the co-workers on that score - but I no longer have a staff ;-)
I managed a small dev/production team for a publishing company. My highest priority after I was hired was to make myself redundant and not altogether needed in the office. I did this by "empowering" those that worked for me. By that I mean I analysed what the manager (me) needed to do and delegated the responsibilities evenly. Although I was always available to "ok" team decisions, in practise it meant I did very little during the day. I made myself obsolete! The key to all this was papering over all this by using my office time to work on my writing. I also managed to be "at home" far more than anyone else. By steadfastly refusing to actually "do" anything, I very quickly learned how to put together a damn good team that produced quantifiable (and quality) results every time. Am I lazy? Hmmmm ... not sure. The department brought lots of projects in on time and under budget. The affairs of the department flowed smoothly. But I really didn't need more than a few hours of time in the morning (and a few hours in the evening) to do the job.
Hmmm ...
Had a few too many drinks last night to celebrate the Olympic win.
I was on the Victoria line this morning going from Highbury down to Green Park to have a coffee before my meeting near Hyde Park corner. Thought it strange that Kings X was closed and the power flickering.
Didn't know what was going on at Green Park. Walked along Piccadilly @ 9.15 and wondered why so many damn people were walking about and the buses jammed.
People on the street here in central London seem in good spirits. Everyone's sending texts to friends and family. Called my mum in South Carolina.
The sound of sirens has been pervasive all morning and into the afternoon. Now I'm contemplating a loooong walk back to Islington.
Proud to be a former New Yorker and very proud of the reaction of the PM, too. (GWB was a bit cringeworthy, to be honest)
Maybe I'm just bleary this Sunday morning, but I didn't see a discussion of bitrates or sound quality in any of the Radio 3 FAQs or "Jargon Buster". Tis an issue with any of the online stores offering classical music, too.
Actually, the Jargon Buster is v amusing. Maybe I'm just waaaay out of touch, but I've never come across the terms "iPod Sunday" and "iPodectomy". Yeech. Those wacky Beeb webbies - or have they been cribbing from a PR "Fact sheet"? Hmmmm ...
Sorry, up late watching Live8 - on a side note, was surprised at the tracks from last night's concert in Hyde Park on sale via iTunes, gosh!
So kudos to Radio 3 for making all this available, but maybe they could spare a little more bandwidth for higher bitrates (or even charge a nominal fee for a FLAC or AppleLossless bit of Beethoven)
So the Jedi can hold elective office? Why didn't they simply form a delagation in the Senate and kick Palps bottom at the ballot box rather than beating on a poor, helpless old man. Shame on those nasty fanatics!
So on which side does Alastair Campbell fall? Hmmm ... they don't do the God thing, but maybe they're schooled in the ways of the Force ;-)