Unreliable information since 1972
This evening, I spent two hours eating chocolate.
OK, maybe not quite. But I spent two and half hours learning about chocolate, and there was tasting involved. Because zoo_music_girl and I were at a tasting at my favourite chocolate shop in London (and therefore, the world) L’Artisan Du Chocolat, run by the man behind the chocolate, Gerard Coleman.
I’m talking about food here, so obviously, I’m going to go on a bit…
Because I’m not just interested in nice things: my nohari window.
My Johari window. I’m always curious about this sort of thing…
1) Settling for second. “Settling” full stop. If it’s not good enough to be your first choice, then why are you fucking bothering with it? Are you seriously telling me that despite that fact that you’ve only got one go at this, you’re willing to populate your life with substandard experiences, people or things? Are you seriously telling me that you can’t find something else to occupy you, in another avenue of life that *is* your first choice?
2) Lack of ambition. Related to the first. I don’t expect everyone to be the best at whatever it is they do. But I expect them to be the best they can, and to strive to better themselves, daily. Again: we’ve only got one lifetime. What’s the point of hanging about?
3) People who want to be famous. I have no problem with anyone who wants to be at the top of a profession where fame is a side effect. Acting, being in a band, film-making, writing, being an artist of any kind: this is good shit. It’s people communicating what’s inside their heads. It’s imagination made manifest in the world. It’s what makes us human, rather than animal, and anyone that encourages more of that is a hero in my book. But if you’re just doing it in order to be famous, or because it’ll give you an easy life, then you should fucking stop now, because you’re devaluing the contributions of people who actually have something to say at worst, and at best, you’re taking up airtime/attention span that could be used for something good. (This is why I hate boy bands and the like – these are not people who have something to say. These are idiots who want their fifteen minutes and an easy life. It is not a co-incidence that Robbie Williams and Will Young have both grown on me as time has passed, and they’ve started to speak for themselves, while just about anyone else that’s come in to the culture by their route is still on the “castrate with rusty implements” list. Warhol was full of dangerous ideas, and that whole fifteen minutes business may have been the worst…)
4) People who can’t communicate. If you’re speaking to me, you’d better be lucid. If you’re writing, you’d better be able to spell and punctuate. I don’t expect everyone to be perfect at it all the time (christ knows, I’m not by the time I’ve had a few drinks) but if you’re asking for my attention, you’d better be able to do something with it.
5) Lies. I don’t mean the little white social ones that stop us all from killing each other. I mean big ones of sort that politicians come out with, or like creationism. Again: who has the time to waste?
6) Things Not Working Properly Even After You’ve Given Them A Good Thumping.
7) Thinking about things I hate. Life’s too short. (But I’ve written this now…)
Well, perhaps not, but I seem to be doing other things at the moment, hence the lack of real-life updates in the last while. But you can all stop nudging me (and I’ve set those to go straight into the trash now, so you’re out of luck in the future), because look: I speak my wisdom unto you!
In short: the new job is a new job, with all the attendant stuff. More when I’ve got a better handle on it.
I am going to see Kodo tomorrow. If you are not, then I pity you (unless you saw them tonight), because Kodo are one of The Best Things Ever. If you do not love Kodo, then take your soul back and ask for a refund, because yours is defective. And in a week and half’s time, I am going to taste very fine chocolate during the day, and then possibly go clubbing in the evening for the first time in fuck knows how long.
Other good things: The roof in my room is fixed, and I’ll even be able to hang my curtain back up some time in the next couple of days. (I may not be sleeping much until then, of course.) I have recently re-read all my Powers collections, and they remain ace.
And that’s your lot. Any questions?
Blowing the trumpet one last time for work for at Sanctuary, and further proof that anyone going out-of-house there (as happens all too often) is on the bad crack:
Fan response to the new Robert Plant site (and in it’s own thread here) – starts about halfway down the page, and is almost uniformly positive. I take a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that they’re willing to believe that elementary things like the mailing list might actually work now (because I know they will) where they didn’t before.
And as I should have said last time, while I’m personally proud of the functionality (some of it a lot tricker than it looks, since the CMS has to be operable by the barely-skilled), the credit for the thing looking so bastard pretty should of course go to the estimable Mr Clandillon.
So, in summary: we’re bloody great, and should be given all the prizes and the adulation of your women.
This entry was originally published at my workblog.
I’ve just booked my ticket for Saturday 4th of March. Who else is going?
My workblog got the news, but I forgot to mention it here: I’m done at Sanctuary, and to be honest, the level of joy this brings on is hard to articulate. I’ll miss my immediate colleagues, who were a good laugh, but I’m so glad to be out of the music business I can’t tell you.
In 15 months, I have added one URL to my CV. And that only went live ten minutes before I left the office yesterday. (Robert Plant’s site if anyone cares.) One, out of five major projects I have worked on in that time. The rest have been held up by Sanctuary’s internal politics, which goes some way to explaining their less-than-a-penny share price as I walked out the door. As one might imagine, one project live in fifteen months is not the sort of thing that I like, as a professional web developer. It looks bad for me, and takes away almost all the pleasure I take in my trade – what I do is build tools for people to communicate with, and if they’re not being used to communicate, then what’s the point of the work?
But I’m done now, and will be starting at WAI on Monday. Roll on taking pleasure in going to work again.
As some of you may know, today is my last day working at [crisis-hit/ailing/beleaguered] (delete as appropriate) Sanctuary Group after 15 months with this. With about 15 minutes to go before I leave, the first website I’ve worked on for them (of any size – I don’t count the wee puff piece three page sites for individual albums and the like) has just gone live.
Robert Plant (Grand Wizardy Bastard and Lord of Elves) has just got a new website. It’s taken 15 months, and in the process has cost him something like 23 grand. It might interest you to know that our quote for it, when we were asked about it, two weeks after I got here, was about 8 grand. But his management went with other people, who did the job badly (and charged for it), then had to come back to us to get it done again. They also hired an outside animator for the flash bits of the new site I’ve just linked to, and hard to pay him almost as much as the rest of the site cost, just for the animated bits, because they didn’t agree an up-front cost with him, and so just got charged at day rate.
Every other major project (about four of them) I have worked on for Sanctuary has got bogged down in the internal politics of the company, and has yet to go live.
So, let’s recap: in a year, I have added one URL to my CV. Everything else was held up by office politics. The one URL I have added cost nearly three times as much as it should have because of management incompetence. I could use my time here to write a “how not to deal with new media” book. This is doubly ironic, as the new media team at Sanctuary are world-class – they’re seriously good and switched on people, who are just hampered by the fact that they’re in service to idiots who fear change, and who won’t take risks or in some cases, decisions.
Thank god I’m going back to agency work, where people actually get things done.
This entry was originally published at my workblog.
Google have run some stats to tell us about the quailty of HTML generally found on the web. One for later…
Get a log just like flickr’s. I suspect I’ll wind up using it on my new ala.sda.ir site, which may give me the design cues I’ve been looking for…
This entry was originally published at my workblog.