Category: General

OK - so before I go any further, I realise that I'm a lone voice in the wilderness. I fly in the face of accepted wisdom - that management is an activity based around control and measurement, and so if you can't measure you can't manage. But there have been three separate news stories this … Continue reading The minute you start to measure is the minute it starts to go wrong

The journey to Microsoft's Reading campus that I took back in the early months of 2011 for one of the rounds of interviews I had before joining the organisation was one of the most stressful trips I have ever made. It wasn't the prospect of three, one-hour interviews back-to-back that worried me (let's be honest, … Continue reading Liberated

I've been looking this morning at a mobile app building service called Conduit - it's an interesting proposition: point it at a website and it will automatically generate Windows Phone, iOS and Android apps based on the content available (including RSS feeds, Twitter streams and Facebook content). Pay a one-off fee, or set up a paid subscription, … Continue reading Software development: Self-deskilling/Self-perpetuating

There was consternation last week amongst Watford fans with the unveiling of the new club shirt. The team's kit sponsor, recently announced as "The Happy Egg Co." (a free-range egg brand) led some to be worried that the new top would be sporting a large cartoon chicken. As it was, we were spared the fowl, … Continue reading The QR Code Mystery

When I was 15, I spent a week of work experience at the Watford Observer, the paper locally published where I was brought up. In between trips to the local Crown Court to watch proceedings, and time spent looking for ambulances to chase, most of my time was spent taking rather verbose press releases from … Continue reading The joy of brevity

One of my stock, slightly barbed, responses to people who refute the idea of Cloud computing on the basis of trustworthiness and security goes a little something like this: "Does your company store its most important asset, its money, underneath a large, corporate-sized mattress? No? What is the banking system, then, other than a public … Continue reading The financial cloud

The exciting announcements from my American colleagues earlier this week (see http://www.surface.com/) illustrated one mighty strange thing about how social networks in general, and Twitter and link shortening services in particular have changed quite fundamentally the way in which hyperlinking works, and how we are dangerously reliant on these closed services. On Tuesday morning, I … Continue reading Redirection

A few nights ago we had a chap from a local building company visit us to start to quote for some work we are looking to do. At the end of the evening, he left us with a business card and a DVD. The next morning my wife gave the disc in its sleeve to … Continue reading My digital life