Entries from July 2006 ↓

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What is this load of technobilge about? How would you explain this to a Masai tribesman or a Peruvian llama shepherd?

I’m very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

What surely must have started out with good intentions at the first letter of the opening paragraph of this Technorati announcement turned me cold because I was thrown a load of technobilge that I do not understand. I read no further. For all the good it did to get my attention, the article might as well have been written in Sanskrit!

Far from impressing me with his expertise and knowledge, which he undeniably must have, Tantek Çelik lost me as a possible punter because he wrote in Technobilge. When oh when will people learn that to captivate the audience and to get them to want to read further, the best way to do it is to use simple language that will hook the reader to read on.

Technobilge does not attract me to want to read an article. Maybe I am the only one in Blogoland who feels this way, but unfortunately for Tanek, I blog about it and hopefully others who read this post may come to realise that they too do not enjoy being forcefed meaningless bilge and acronyms that soothe the authors’ ego but do little to get the undivided attention or curiosity of the audience the author needs to pull in.

It iss 08:22am and it is clear sunny blue skies and hot, hot hot! The UK summer is really turning out to be a sizzzler and the weatherman expects the day to top out at 35 degrees.

It will be seriously hot

Wherever you are today, especially in UK, wear a hat and use sunblock. The sun is vicious and the warnings put out on TV (the weather slot) should be taken notice of.

Please protect your children with wide-brimmed hats and factor 50 sunscreen.

I listened to Pamela Slim’s radio interview on Lifestyle CEO and have concluded that Pamela needs to host her own radio programme.

Pamela has the voice, the expertise, the knowledge, the charm, the curiosity, the dynamism and subject matter in bucketloads to make for a very, very, very interesting series of interviews with CEOs, CFOs, COOs and all the other CXOs of corporate Planet Earth.

On alternate weeks, Pamela can interview ex staffers from these corporations who have since happily chucked/turned in their lease on a cubicle in corporate world for a career and destiny and all the success, elation and the few pitfalls that come with creating your own company.

Pamela, will you think it over and take the challenge to host your own show?

According to Dutch scientists at Utrecht University, meat made on a slab in a lab could line up on supermarket shelves in only a few years time! The scientists “hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings”.

The report from Wired further says, “If successful, artificially grown meat could be tailored to be far healthier than any type of farm-grown meat. It’s possible to stuff if full of heart-friendly omega-3 fatty acids, adjust the protein or texture to suit individual taste preferences and screen it for food-borne diseases.”

Read it HERE

Next:

Trade A Red Paperclip For A FREE House

Go read how Kyle MacDonald traded a red paperclip which has now, one year later, resulted in him and his partner taking full ownership of a free house at Kipling, Saskatchewan Canada.

I think the web exists much as it did before Google googled it. The only difference these days is the attention and striving to become Top of The Blogarade and the attention most bloggers give to the Blogebrities (the A B & C lists).

Commercial sites still remain as they were. Bloggoland will not survive in its current state. Blogging has been the internet’s growth sector but it is a fad and will dissipate when the new wunderkinder create a new fad or re-engineers blogging into a new form.

Seth Godin wrote:

The web used to be a collection of sites, loosely linked. Domain was king.

Google blew up the web. The web became a collection of pages, more tightly linked, and you could find any page you needed.

I wonder if too much emphasis and credence is being given to the impact Google has had on the internet. How do we the plebs see the result of whatever miracle thay performed? I don’t. I just think they improved the search engine sector is all. No big deal for me but the market seems to think it is.

As for the following comment by Seth:

a basic human need… to do what others are doing, to read what others are reading. It reorganizes the scattered threads of discourse, creating a few (instead of a million or a billion) reading lists.

I am still amazed that Seth slots me into his perception of what he thinks I want to do. I do not want to do what others do nor waste my time trying to digest the gazillions of posts the ‘few’ feeds provide. I’d go mental trying to suck it all in and then what do I do with it all? Blog it? Why?

I have better things to do like writing this stuff and interacting with my readers. Now, Seth cannot say he interacts with his readers but I can and he does not.

So where is all this crap leading to? Dunno. It is all just blarney that we apply an artificial value to and then believe the false crap we perpetuate. Some take it so very seriously too! Sad.

C’est la vie!

You are the only one who can decide your destiny.

I cannot think of a single moment in our lives where the need to ENGAGE our Personal Values is not required to help us decide an appropriate action. The problem a lot of us have in this fast-paced modern world we live & work in, are the inordinate number of decisions we take to not decide.

Yes folks. 10 points to the person who decides to postpone making a decision!! I don’t get it. Why review incomplete data. I prefer to tell people to only come to me for a decision with complete data and to not waste time on speculating the “maybe he will if I blag it”. No I will not. I know my business and can spot a blag a mile off.

What a waste of energy.

ENGAGE is all about just that - ENGAGING your brain to carry out a process to make a decision.

ENGAGE is about taking personal responsibility for your destiny and not deferring to others to make those all important decisions for you.

ENGAGE can help you reach that monumental decision to go ahead and experience quality of life at home and work. All you have to do is decide to do it.

Most of us will have procrastinated previously about something important or not so vital and then have lived to find ourselves in a different situation to which we wanted to be. C’ est la vie! But don’t worry. There is a way to get to where you want to be. All is not lost. You can change your situation now. But you need to have the will to ENGAGE your future immediately.

Improving your future can only begin the millisecond that you ENGAGE your brain and fire up those millions of electrical impulses and decide to ENGAGE the DI Principle.

Is indecision ruining your life? Is procrastination now your way of life? Do you shy away from making difficult decisions that might just change your life and those around you for the better in favour of that warm, dull, same old day in day out, decision-free comfort zone you have created for yourself and subsequently for those loved ones or your work colleagues as well?

Kind of selfish aren’t you?

ENGAGE is about taking yourself out of your comfort zone, to shake up your bones, to free yourself of past anchors that hold you back and to experience new stimulus to assist the assessment of the criteria in a bold, crisp ‘n colourful, outrageously scary & fresh way.

Change is difficult. Change can only begin the instant you decide to do it. You do want a better life don’t you? Go on, manage your indecisiveness and blossom.

It may come as a surprise to learn that eating too many magnets is dangerous and plain dumb.

According to scientists at Popular Science, you really should not eat more than one magnet! Now it should be obvious to anyone that eating a magnet is not quite the correct foodstuff our sytem requires. But no, people do eat more than one and this is what Radiology journal said about it

Swallowing more than one magnet poses a series health threat and may require emergency surgery, according to Alan E. Oestreich, M.D., from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.

In a letter to the editor of Radiology, Dr. Oestreich expressed his concern: “All radiologists should be on the alert. Moreover, if the possibility of magnets in the abdomen exists, MRI is to be stringently avoided lest damage be done.”

He explains that when two magnets lie in adjacent bowel loops, they may attract each other across the walls, leading to necrosis and eventually perforation and peritonitis.

The X-ray below is of a 12yr old who complained of a a tummyache and high temperature.The x-ray reveals a line of objects that were identified as magnets “and the surgeons who removed them said they had aligned in formation through opposing walls of tissue, bounded off loops of guts, and caused swelling, necrosis and perforation. After witnessing the dangers firsthand, Oestreich wrote an urgent, all-doctor alert to the journal Radiology”.

While swallowing magnets is not nearly as common as swallowing coins, jewelry or toy parts, there have been a number of reported cases of multiple magnet ingestion over the past five years. According to information gathered during the press release process, nine incidents have been reported in the United Kingdom involving children who swallowed industrial-strength magnets worn to resemble body piercings.

Multiple magnet ingestion alert,” Radiology, Nov. 2004

(Radiology 2004;233:615)

Why Bother? Popular Science scientists say that eating metal intuitively sounds like a bad idea, but 80 percent of swallowed foreign objects pass right through you. Magnets, however, pose a serious danger. “Urgent surgical consideration is required,” Oestreich wrote.

Hugh over at Gapingvoid headlines this morning with Armani attacks Saville Row

I am absolutely enraged at the sheer gall of Mr Armani to attack Saville Row’s quality and professionalism. Two things it appears Mr Armani missed out on when personality and character were handed out and which Mr Armani will never ever remotely get to be. On what grounds does Mr Armani dare try to compare his poor quality mass produced junk with the years of training, tradition and incredible craftmanship and superb fit from quality cloth the professional tailors of Saville Row have and will continue to produce in abundance day in day out, year after year long after Mr Armani has become maggot dinner?

And to think that I nearly used Armani aftershave this morning! It’ll be binned.

Armani’s clothes fit like sacks on a donkey. Can we start one of those fascist protest gigs like ‘come to the mall and burn your Armani products’ ? Just like the Americans did to the Beatles back in the ’60s when they burnt all those vinyl records?

Hugh has thrown down the gauntlet to Mr Armani. Go read the blog in full.

This morning, an English bluebottle fly buzzing around a horse’s arse has more class than Mr Armani has!.

Naturally, as you would expect of the English, the horse-arse flies come equipped with the latest in English designer spectaclewear for flies by McFlyswat! They need to distinguish superior English horsearse from a junk Armani clad donkey’s arse

Photo: Courtesy Micreon GmbH

Life seems a bit lite this week. It must be post World Cup blues. But for the marketing guys at the World Cup, I guess Zidanes exit stage left was that bit of miraculaous story every marketer dreams of. The spin offs must be worth a few bucks.

C’mon someone will make money off the headbutt.

If you have a desire to be a better writer then you need to go visit this website
It is packed with excellent advice on how to write simple and clear English. It has other distractions too which I found very useful and interesting. So interesting in fact, that I need to revisit Matthew’s site again and again and again.

Go visit Bad Language

Zidane’s sending off was a shameful end to a brilliant career. You can only imagine what was said to have provoked such a reaction.

What price a career of footballing superhero if you cannot defend insults against your family? What type of man would not react to defend the integrity of one’s mother against the insults of another man?

Some say that blogosphere needs order!

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Sound familiar to you?

It does? Good, because I am sat here waiting for the phone to ring. How many times have you heard this before?

So why I hear you ask, don’t I be pro-active and do the calling instead? Hey, stop being a smart-ass! Why should I when I am the one who is paying for a service. The vendor should call. I am the customer and I deserve more respect and attention than what I am getting at this time.

Oh yeah right, I forgot. You forgot to mention that we have communicated to you endlessly to advise that your demands are unreallistic and we have requested (nicely) that you scale down your requirements to a more appropriate and manageable level. This will allow us to meet your expectations and accomodate any subsequent ad hoc requests comfortably within expected timescales.

Is it too much to expect the customer to be always right? I think the customer can be wrong and is. A lot more often that we are letting on. But as long as we communicate, we stand a chance to take the sting out of any problems we encounter along the way and end up holding a decent conversation that can lead us to a successful resolution.

Not even a superstar can get ordinary folks to talk to him!