When a printer is a gun

Scaramanga's career in hairdressing was short lived

You remember the scene in “man with the golden gun”? Christopher Lee, who plays the assassin, Scaramanga, is having a terse conversation with his corporate backer and whilst he talks he plays with his lighter, pen and cigarette case. The conversation draws to a close and Scaramanga, who has assembled his golden toys into a gun, resigns from corporate service in a brutally abrupt manner. A work of fiction and one with no small degree of panache perhaps, but a not quite a useful insight into the dangers of emergent technology. 

Forgive, forget or just honest reportage?

Your real digital future, don't kid yourself.

"I am who I am today because of the choices i made yesterday" - Eleanor Roosevelt

Should one’s past  be held against you for the rest of your life, and beyond, or should you be allowed to retreat into obscurity? This debate is a fascinating example of how far removed most commentators, legislators and regulators are from the technology which is driving the question in the first place. From the usual points of view this is being driven by people who don’t want youthful and trivial discretions to be held against people thirty years later. This is partially a red herring, there will always be finger prints of past actions available, in the decades and centuries before the internet it was called a reputation and no one was taken seriously without one, for good or bad. What this particular legislative demand is about isn’t the right to be forgotten, it’s about wanting to edit your past, to edit your online reputation to remove the sleazy bits. Now various people will champ at the bit and state that the right to correct errors is vital. But who chooses what is an error and who chooses to edit it? the moment you open that particular Pandora’s box a world of nasties can explode from political figures editing their pasts to criminals attempting to slide away from the consequences of their actions.

Cereal, Obol, cartoons and Fortean times in Bournemouth

Hello, is that the BBC? it's Aliens I tells you, Aliens!

It’s a bit of a portmanteau posting today, frankly I'm mildly hungover and still a bit confused over the depth of thought my daughter has put into her view of the perfect milk-to-cereal ratio.

the dark side of marketing and analytics

too perfect for words..

“Data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Neuromancer: William Gibson

As I’ve mentioned before, once you get enough data in one place you can throw processor cycles at and reach some interesting conclusions pretty fast. What’s stopped us from doing this in the past was two simple factors, not enough accessible data and the price of processor cycles.

A quiet pint

and which one are you?

A day off, well part of a day off anyway. Proposal documents don’t abide by the usual tempo of the working week. Anyway a few hours to read, relax and tune out the mind. In short I could go to the pub. Hopefully to avoid the pillock from a local council with his insane ideas to inadvertently humiliate or enslave humanity in the name of road maintenance.

Marketing in the digital age

I'm a taking a break from completing a proposal. Frankly I’ve been looking at this response template for so long, I'm vaguely afraid I’ll get the bends if I look at something else but it’s time to come up for air. I'm still looking in awe at IBM’s* marketing content from the sixties and seventies. Look at this slice of pure awesomeness.

It really shows that IBM had a distinctive and futuristic in house style but it begs the question, who was this marketing aimed at? In fact it begs the question who is all enterprise marketing aimed at?