Monthly Archives: July 2004

It’s Getting Warm In London

So I opened an account with Flickr for no real reason other than to see what it did. As a celebration of the London heat I took a photo of our office water cooler. There really wasnâ€™t anything else to point the camera at â€“ which is slightly sad, donâ€™t you think?

Unrelated to water coolers but my entry fromÂ this day last year is interesting to me as Iâ€™ve been trying to remember what I felt before we started battle in Iraq. I am often grateful that I wrote something here and, yet again, I have been surprised by what I do get round to writing about.

On this day…

2003: Business Like Apples
2003: Dannii Minogue ‘invents new dance’
2002: Ministry of Truth

Administrative Apologies

Well it would appear that some malicious spammer is using a mailing address @musak.org to mail people. I know I’m not the only one affected at the moment but there’s very little I can do about it.

On this day…

2007: Read The Manual
2005: My Idea Changed
2003: Buffalo Soldiers
2003: Another Russian Birthday
2003: Not Another Teen Movie
2002: How do you say Happy Birthday in Russian?
2002: Marry Me

The Madness Of Business Travel

image from my hotel window with a view of the stage in the car park next door you can not see the loud music It’s taken hours and hours to get to Sardinia. I’m here for a two hour meeting tomorrow morning before I take the plane home. I am in a reasonably nice hotel but right now I really wish it had a pool as it’s so hot. There’s also some kind of concert that is taking place just outside my hotel window – you can see the stage on this picture. They are rehearsing right now and the walls are shaking. I am hoping that it doesn’t go on into the night.

UPDATE: 21 JULY – By the time I got back from the excellent meal with the customer and some other interesting folks the music had stopped.

On this day…

2002: How far is 10K in Miles?
2002: A Cool Forty Million

My Data

Leave a Reply

At some point – I do not remember exactly when – I needed to start to organise my life. I was, no doubt, a typical teenager and needed to keep addresses and ‘phone numbers for friends in a book. Then I needed a diary to organise my life (in fact, I am fairly certain my first diary was about 1984). So, I started to keep an appointment diary. The addresses and telephone numbers were in the back. Of course, back in the dark ages, I didn’t need to keep track of email addresses and mobile numbers. Each Christmas as a new diary was purchased for the forthcoming year the addresses/phone numbers were cleaned up and entered into a new book. Life was easier.

When I went to University then my diary started to become more of a necessity as I needed a way to organise. Sometime after I started work it morphed into a Filofax which helped organise a little more but wighted considerably more. But still the pages with the telephone numbers kept getting cleaned up each year. When I lived in a flat I started to need to keep more names and numbers (you know, the people who you have to pay bills to, the man who fixed the leak in the roof etc.).

In 1997 (I have the exact date somewhere) I bought a one of the original generations of Palm Pilot (specifically the Palm Pilot Professional as it had more memory than the personal version) and life – at least when it came to diaries and personal data – changed forever. Seven years on I can conclude that the addition of a digital diary (or personal information manager as they are known) has both made life easier and more frustrating in equal measures. Now, with the addition of mobile telephony to the device, I yearn for a simpler way.

I will be writing more later and when I have done I hope that somebody who develops these devices will come across my words and think about ways to come good on the promise of making the management of our personal data banks easier.