Russell Davies

This week in references: tidying

This is all great. But this bit (from 10:45) with the school kids tidying up is especially marvellous.

Beyond words

Chanel

This is the ad / sponsorship thing that Chanel run at the beginning of the Revisionist History podcast.

It's a fascinating example of the post-linguistic way fashion businesses talk about themselves. It's just a string of meaningless words that could easily have been generated by taglin3r. I suspect we don't normally notice this nonsense because it's accompanied by striking visuals or art direction, so the eye/brain just bounces off. When you're forced to actually listen to it, it's a different matter. It's like someone's just reading out a mood board.

I've attempted to transcribe it:

"Gabrielle Chanel's life can be summed up in three ways; to choose, to desire and to be. Choose simplicity over excess, comfort over appearance and intuition over principles. Desire to look like nobody else, be an allure, a way of living, a style, Gabrielle. Dare, invent, create and, just as young Gabrielle did, let passion inspire you. Use audacity, desire beauty, be what will happen next, in the image of Gabrielle, the relentless, invincible and eternal rebel. Gabrielle, a rebel at heart."

It's also a great example of a business operating outside a familiar context. Presumably Chanel don't do a lot of audio-only stuff, they certainly don't sound like they do. There's a sort of generic classy piano soundtrack with a gabbling, garbled voice-over, presumably so they can fit in all the extra meaningless words. In most channels Chanel has an effortless ability to do 'premium' and 'luxury'. On a podcast, where the currency is comprehensible ideas, no clue.

Interesting.

Anyway.

This week in references: fast and slow

The state of things

I'm talking at this in a few weeks. I talked at it last year too and they've asked me to do a sort of 'state of the nation' one year on. I assume I don't have to talk about the 'actual' nation, that would way too depressing, I'm going to limit myself to the tiny world I know something about, which I might have to label 'creative industry / internet'. To that end, this video seems very pertinent:

Also I'm going to try and send my first newsletter this evening. So, if you want to, sign-up. All new - exactly the same stuff as on here - content.

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This week in references: The Art of Japanese Life

The Smell of Bad Software

pic.twitter.com/RNZGHjkEiP

— Sean's Work Computer (@seansworkcomput) March 14, 2017

There's a magnificent twitter account called Sean's Work Computer. It's a record, in screenshots, of the trials of dealing with a bad corporate IT environment. The account's bio is "Not an official account of the Government of Canada // Pas un compte officiel du Gouvernement du Canada."

I have a similar collection of screenshots because I'm trying to work out how to capture the smell of bad software. Not terrible software, not stuff that won't load or might take down a network, but the stuff that just adds tiny increments of unnecessary friction to every transaction.

Because you sit in meetings and people tell you about the new expenses system that you're going to get and you just start to sniff that bad smell. But no one else is smelling it and you feel like such a complainer pointing it out. Software is hard and everyone's trying their best and it's better than doing it with a spreadsheet and it's built into the corporate IT deal so we have to use it, really, but you just want to say CAN NO ONE ELSE SMELL THIS? This is going to drive us INSANE.

For instance, you might be asked to enter a City of Purchase when you incur an expense. (Which is odd in itself when many of your expenses are on Amazon. What city is that? And what if you're in, say, a town? Anyway, never mind.)

And so you type London in the dropdown and the first thing that pops up is London, Ontario. Hard to know why, it doesn't seem to be alphabetical, but it's very easy to miss the fact that you've done this. I imagine the world is going to end up with more transactions being recorded in Canada than you'd imagine.

I'm not arguing that London, Ontario shouldn't be on the list. Just that maybe there should be a way of defaulting to the country that the system already knows you're in. Or something. There are ways of doing this. I've seen them.

Or, for instance:

You have a Payment Type dropdown. It only offers 'Cash' as an option and if you type anything else in that box it just changes it to 'Cash' when you move to the next item. Honestly, I don't use that much cash.

You could tell it was going to be like this from the first moment it was mentioned and yet here it is. I can't work out why. I think it must be because the friction isn't recordable, it doesn't directly impact the balance sheet in the same way that the deal with SAP does. It just makes everyone's lives slightly harder, their morale slightly worse and their likelihood of leaving slightly higher. And that's hard to measure.

Maybe Sean has the right idea.

 

 

 

This week in references: listening

RSSxit

I sometimes feel like the last believer in RSS. I've gone from being a determined member of a dwindling guild to being someone like the Protein Man.

I like to write on here, I'm not especially concerned about numbers but writing entirely for myself seems pointless too. RSS used to be a convenient way for people who wanted to read things to get them without me having to shout about every post on twitter.

So, the next most RSS-like thing seems to be some sort of newsletter. That's what I'm going to experiment with now. So, if you fancy, you can stick your email address in the box below and blogpost like things will appear in your inbox. Probably once a fortnight.

They will also appear here, if you're still in the RSS massive, because RSSxit DOES NOT MEAN RSSxit.

 

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