I know I’m only posting videos on here these days. I’m too busy writing music to do anything else. Sorry. Who am I kidding? I know nobody cares. Anyway, look at MRirian (and she’ll look at you), or you could look at her strange, compelling ears.
Archive for the 'Media' Category
I don’t love her like I want to marry her, although I suspect it would be great being married to her, well at least really interesting and stimulating, but I do love Miranda July more than anyone else in the world who I don’t really know. Not only is this film about how buttons are made really perfect, but also she’s got a great thing on her site about good reasons to vote which applies just as much here as it does in the US. (If you’re intimidated by the way her site asks for a password use mine - “nobody”.)
So, today the BBC launched BBC World News, the new name for their global channel BBC World. They’ve changed the on-screen branding and everything. There’s one thing that won’t be changing though - the website remains www.bbcworld.com for now as they put it. Why would that be. Surely they snapped up the bbcworldnews.com domain as soon as they thought of the title. Didn’t they? Oh dear.
I’ve been listening to Ivor Cutler a bit lately and, let’s face it, he doesn’t get played on the radio as often as he should be, so I decided to infringe the copyright and put some on here because there are plenty of people in the world who would love him and who don’t know about him. This track is from Jammy Smears.
Compare and contrast.
The school my daughters go to has a terrible website. Not only does it look bad but also it can only be updated by someone knowledgeable going in to the school during school hours and sitting on a tiny chair to do the typing. This means the content is very stale and thus mostly useless.
So I suggested a site hosted on an external server that could be easily updated by anyone. Great, they said, let’s do it. I did it. The site was running by March 2007. I didn’t want to provide the content so a couple of people involved in the school volunteered to take over the actual running of the thing. I showed them how to use Wordpress and off they went.
Time passed. The summer holidays passed. I contacted them and asked them if there was anything I could do to help. Eventually they showed me what they had done. They had produced quite a big report about the site. It said how often various sections should be updated, who would be responsible, how the navigation could be organised. The site itself was unchanged. In fact, Google analytics told me that nobody has visited it at all for several months. The site is still sitting there, unused. I’ve edited a few things - the term dates are correct now. It only took me five minutes.
Fast forward to nowadays. My dear friends at Stan’s Cafe, a trendy theatre company in Birmingham, had a big meeting last week to talk about their future. One of the things they decided to do was to experiment with some kind of private forum for keeping people in the company informed about upcoming shows and maybe to promote more discussion between members. I offered the director, James, a couple of options: A wiki and a Bulletin Board. He went for the latter, it’s already live, the members are being added today. The meeting took place exactly 7 days ago.
The Stan Talk forum might be a success, it might not. If it’s useful it will thrive, if it isn’t it will wither and die. It doesn’t really matter either way because we didn’t spend too long making it and it didn’t cost much. The school site has already had many more words written about it than it will ever contain. Maybe it will serve a useful purpose one day but it won’t be there to impress the OFSTED inspector who is coming on Thursday.
I’m tempted to conclude that this is the difference between effective organisations and ineffective ones. But I know that the school is very well run, the leadership is excellent and they handle the business of schooling children very well. It’s the accompanying bureaucracy that cripples their ability to move quickly and act decisively.
I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, apart from watch out if you ever get asked to work with a Local Education Authority. Make sure you don’t rely on them to make any decisions and don’t allow them to have any role that could impede your progress because it they can, they will.
I was spending too much time on Facebook and I was starting to worry about just what sort of place it really is. So I deleted everything and deactivated my account.
You may not know this, but you can’t really delete a Facebook account. It always remains available to be re-activated so that you can return when the cold turkey gets too hard to bear. There is a way of making the account un-useable though. You just have to add the contact email address of your account to someone else’s account. Because the Facebook computers won’t let the same address appear in two accounts your deactivated account will completely lose its email address and thus become impossible to reactivate.
Now all I’ve got to do is find someone who will add my email address to their account temporarily, and I’ll be gone forever. (Having said that, I have just opened up a new Flickr account…)
I just found out that a band I really like, The Books, wrote the music in a TV advertisement for a car I quite dislike, the Hummer H3. In the advert a nasty, anti-social SUV (capable of driving just over 4 miles on a litre of petrol) is crashing its way through a formerly pristine jungle. The Books’ subtle meanderings drown out the cries of mangled monkeys and squashed snakes as well as the chuckling and dry hand-rubbing of the evil car makers. Such a shame.
Craig Stephens look-alike Mark Speight, presenter of kids art show sMarT, has been arrested and released on bail after his girlfriend was found dead in the bath of their North London home. Mark had just finished a successful run in Cinderella at the Watersmeet in Rickmansworth, he was playing Buttons. He has been developing a new character for the next series of SmaRT.
We’ve made it more of an entertainment show. It’s a bit more upbeat and I dress up and play a loud brashy northern woman, who’s a bit like Les Dawson in drag. I’m thinking I might go for the dame next year. I’m very comfortable in that role.
I don’t know why I’m writing about this really. It’s sad. She was an out-of-work actress, he’d just finished doing panto, on the way back to his TV show. I feel really sorry for him, for both of them.
The heavily trailed report to Congress by Gen David Petraeus about how well the ’surge’ is going was given a special 2.5 hour programme on the World Service. This is what happened when the General got up to speak.
Is that hilarious or what?
And now, this advert has appeared in the Washington Post:
I just got a letter from Land-Rover:
Dear Mr Ward, In view of recent events in the news, I’m writing to apologise in case you received a mailing about Range Rover Sport that could have caused concern.
It was a slim box with a flashing green light. Although marked as originating from Land Rover and clearly labelled as a marketing communication, we realised that in the current climate of heightened security, an electronic device like this could have aroused suspicion at first glance. We stopped the mailing as soon as we could, but some had already been sent.
It was never our intention that the mailing should cause any anxiety, so please accept my apologies if it did. If you have any concerns or questions at all, please don’t hesitate to call us free on 0800 *** ***.
So SUVs aren’t just a security concern when they’re full of burning doctors, they can also cause problems when the idiots from marketing get their hands on them. Come on Gordon, let’s ban the obnoxious things.
Latest Comments
RSS