Another year, another round up of the top-read posts on this (and also the stamplondon.co.uk) blogs. 20 Implosion September 2013 A review of Andy Law's great book about the Internet and what it's doing to us 19 What is a… Cinema? November 2012 Part of a short series that looked at ways in which many … Continue reading Top Posts for 2013 – 20 to 16
Category: Other Stuff
My favourite French post-modernist sociologist is, without doubt, Jean Baudrillard. The knowledge that Baudrillard is the only French post-modernist sociologist that I know is immaterial. And yet also material. And statements like that give a little flavour of what you are getting into with post-modernist sociology. I did enjoy reading Baudrillard two decades ago … Continue reading Has everything gone hyperreal?
IT security is a hellishly boring subject. It's riddled with nonsensical militaristic metaphor, which ends up with most people confused, scared, and none the wiser. IT security people are, as I've argued before, possibly (and undoubtedly unwittingly) the biggest part of the security problem out there. Recent hacks - the Adobe one in particular - … Continue reading For your own safety
So it's two months now since I launched stamp London in anger at the Silicon Beach event down in Bournemouth at the beginning of September. What's been learned so far? Well, the good news is that I've been able to generate some revenue, and whilst it's not yet at a level that's sustainable long term, … Continue reading On starting up: two months in
At the weekend I listened to a long conversation between my wife and a friend talking about the buying of a birthday present for a mutual friend. It struck me that the rapid pace of digitisation has significantly changed the way in which we give "meaningful" gifts. First off, let's get this clear - very … Continue reading Meaningful presents
I somewhat jokingly describe myself on my Twitter profile as "skirting the thin line between polymath and jack of all trades". My career has been one where I've had exposure (and exposed myself) to a number of areas which means that I've found myself often in a position to be able to translate things across … Continue reading The importance of adaptation
I've spoken and written many times in the past about the folly of prediction. It's something that we are seemingly hard-wired to look for as a species (if someone can tell us the future, we mitigate away a whole series of risks); the people who predict the most extreme versions of the future are the … Continue reading The Watford Probability Index
There's a bit of a tidy-up and refresh going on here at mmitII. I'm slowly going through all of the old posts and putting some sort of coherent tagging on them all, and you'll see a new menu structure as a result. "Themes" are the general topics of my day-to-day blogging, "Projects" are the occasional … Continue reading A bit of a tidy-up
In the next hour I'll be handing over my staff pass, my laptop and my phone, and getting the TVP shuttle bus to Reading Station as I leave Microsoft for the last time as an employee. It's a time of mixed emotions; in many ways last Friday, the last day that my kids attended the … Continue reading Thoughts on leaving
So it's time for another chapter in my career to open. Two years and five months after starting, it's time to gracefully exit, stage left from Microsoft. It's been a fascinating time. Remarkably, when I joined in March 2011, only the first inklings of the company's future product set were public (or even private internal) … Continue reading Leap, and a net will appear*
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