Russell Davies

1993 weeks

I missed a week last week. Sorry.

It's because I was busy. Mostly deep in PowerPoint. A correspondent suggested that I should have said keynotin' not powerpointin' but no, I was in a corporate environment where using Keynote would be like using an alien form of electricity. I know they're supposed to be swappable between but they're just not.

And, you know what, I've been using PowerPoint on an almost daily basis since about 1992 and I just know it. It versus Keynote is like a crunchy old Akai sampler versus something sleek and modern, or a pair of 1200s versus Ableton Live. It might not be as good, but there's something about using a tool you really know.

connected

This and this.

1995 weeks

future-o-matic theory maker

Your next book title is here.

pie and mash

I've been working at Canary Wharf a couple of days a week. It's a funny old place. Felt like I had to escape at lunchtime today and wandered into Poplar. And there I found this Pie & Mash Shop. A tremendous place. I can see I might be doing that again. And possibly visiting some of these too.

1996 weeks

I've just finished writing a piece for Wired about weeknotes so it'd be rather sad not to actually write one myself. But to be honest, it's last thing on a Sunday, I've been writing all weekend and I'm not especially in the mood.

Things I did this week:

Lots of PowerPoint, lots of email.

Highlight of the week:

Ben Terrett's Newspaper Club won in the Graphics category in the Design Of The Year thing at the Design Museum. Which I'm especially pleased about because, if anything, what we do is remove the graphic design from things.

We've had a few people tell us that the marketing strategy for Newspaper Club is naive (which is fair, really, because it's non-existent) but so far we've been featured on Radio 4's PM programme, BBC 2's Culture Show and we've been mentioned approvingly by the Prime Minister. That's not because of clever marketing, that's because we're making something interesting and we talk about it without overselling it.

Lowlight of the week:

Got dates on lots of invoices wrong and had to re-do them.

hotel TV

I have a habit of photographing hotel TV - one shot for every available channel, no consideration, just shoot whatever's there as soon the next channel comes on. Occasionally, very occasionally that produces an interesting picture.