Boardmad » Musings

Time travel

Scott Brown — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:38:06 +0000

Taking a little reverse chronological journey through my FNM back catalogue for the lulz after I read a recent (unrepeatable!) comment on YouTube on the ‘Evidence’ video. Extraordinary trip these boys have been on – it’s true…just listen to Midlife Crisis, Everything’s Ruined, Jizzlobber, Naked in Front of the Computer, Take this bottle, Ricochet….every goddamn song a challenging listen or a visceral ‘gouge out your eyeballs’ assault on the senses and most of the tracks are ‘album fodder’ !? And you’ve never experienced the mosh-pit until the opening bars of this kick in.

From out of nowhere

King for a Day

Ricochet – written for Kurt C

God…I love this band

Flight in this morning

Scott Brown — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:34:03 +0000

Bouncy on the way out of Edina this morning with a 1st timer/nervous flier infront of me. Shame …she didn’t enjoy the trip and the pilot left a dent in runway at LCY when he came in?! Think might have let out a wee involuntary squeal ;0) Stunning over the downs this morning and beautiful in town. Let the day begin ??!

On virii and belief

Scott Brown — Sun, 01 May 2011 08:43:08 +0000

“Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.” Richard Dawkins

It’s not lost, I just don’t know where i put it down….dammit

Scott Brown — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:53:38 +0000

So like WOL for your PC or Mac I think a mobile needs a ‘turn myself back on when someone calls’ capability…obviously you’d need to make sure that the numbers that CAN do the WOL answer were programmed somewhere but surely this is a useful feature for other dumbasses (such as myself) that have their corporate crackberry timed to go off and then promptly forget where they put it down?

There should be an app for that…

And on that note – time for a bit of work before lights out accompanied by Screamadelica…sorted

Who are the Millenials…?

Scott Brown — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:38:02 +0000

The Millenials

Are you Gen-Y ? Great infographic on the generation we’re building technology, marketing products and trying to keep ahead of…It’s funny how many people I come into contact with on any given day who tick most of the demographics for a “post Gen-X’er” but profess to ‘not get’ facebook or twitter and have no time for Social Media. 10 or 15 years from now we’ll be patronisingly forming plans to ensure their social (sic!) inclusion, much as the last 5 years saw us condescending to the over 65′s (or that hateful phrase “silver surfers”) in order for them to avoid being marginalised?

And don’t get me started on the privacy question…

Halloween 2010

Scott Brown — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 22:15:50 +0000

Just finished a great guising session this evening (‘trick or treating’ for my Merkin friends) with the kids and our neighbours families in the steading where we stay. We’re one of 16 homes and more than half of them have kids…so over the last 2 to 4 years all our broods have arrived and grown up with one another. This year Halloween was a full on dozen or so of ‘em crashing from house to house, showing off great costumes, making up jokes and generally causing havoc.

There was much in the way of lanterns, some games (well done Tim and Sonia) and I managed to scare up a spooky green light and played some graveyard effects on the kitchen PC when the guising party arrived.

Great night!

It’s almost Zen-like in it’s rightness !

Scott Brown — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:43:05 +0000

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.

[Linus Torvalds]

Contrast this with the monumental effort needed to initiate, elaborate and get momentum behind big programmes…and we continually, year after year are surprised that flagship scaled projects have difficulty delivering. The eternal and utterly human triumph of optimism over experience.

Make the right, informed, smart and pragmatic changes to key functional components within your architecture. Publish the API’s to your solution, be utterly transparent to those that would leverage your product and be generous with your time and FR’s…’Field of Dreams’ stuff folks! If you build it – they will come.

Here endeth the lesson…off to watch footie and drink beer. Apparently someone’s scored and the ITV ad break made everyone in UK miss it.

RoFLMAO

Pay your goddamn license fees, get the Beeb funded properly and stop bitching people.

Six things about deadlines…

Scott Brown — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 05:53:11 +0000

Cross post from Seth Godin’s blog

People don’t like deadlines. They mean a decision, shipping and risk. They force us to decide.
Deadlines work. Products that are about to disappear, auctions that are about to end, tickets that are about to sell out–they create forward motion.
Deadlines make people do dumb things. Every time I offer a free digital document or an educational event that has a deadline, I can guarantee I will hear from several (or dozens of) people with ornate, well-considered and thoughtful arguments as to why they missed the deadline. Never mind that they had two weeks… the last fifteen minutes are all they are concerned with. If it’s important enough to spend an hour complaining about, it’s certainly important enough to spend four minutes to just do it in the first place.
Deadlines give you the opportunity to beat the rush. Handing in work just a little bit early is a sure-fire way to tell a positive story and get the attention you seek. The chart below tracks the day (out of 10) that I received each of the more than a thousand applications for the free nano MBA program. Want to guess which day’s applications got the most attention from me?
When we set ourselves a deadline, we’re incredibly lax about sticking to it. So don’t (set it for yourself, in your head, informally). Write it down instead. Hand it to someone else. Publicize it. Associate it with an external reward or punishment. If you don’t make the deadline, your friend gives the $20 you loaned her to a cause you disagree with…
They have a lousy name. Call them live-lines instead. That’s what they are.

Stuck in YVR

Scott Brown — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:13:49 +0000

All geared up for an overnight flight back to the UK last night and sat waiting to get boarded when the plane outside gets closed up and the lights go out…Uh oh ! Sure enough the flight’s been cancelled due to the inbound leg getting struck by lighting as it came in to land…Nice !

So off we trot to the airport hotel and spend the night while some engineers busily fixed the problem (I hope !) and we’re due off just 10hrs or so late.

That’ll teach me for putting my watch back onto UK before I was in the air…I put a whammy on the trip home ! Hardest part’s been not getting back to the family for another day. We explained to my eldest why daddy wasn’t getting home when we said because we’re stuck in the snow and she promptly informed us she’ll come and rescue me and fix my plane…bless !

So…terminal 5′s a duffer then ?

Scott Brown — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:31:06 +0000

Just arrived in Terminal5 on my way to Vancouver for a week’s workshops on a new project I’m taking on and other than the odd bit of hastily erected hoarding to shield one’s eye’s from unfinished partitioning the place seems pretty much done to me !

Firstly and of particular interest to me, is it’s internal scale. In a previous life I once bandied aesthetics and the troubles the human condition suffers in the urban fabric with architects and fellow planners. They (the architects) invariably felt this was of secondary importance to the nature of the architectural statement being made. I argued at length and vociferously in opposition :0) I can’t stand Stansted, it’s amuckle great modernist cowshed of a place with fragments of humanity sloshing about at the bottom of this great container like day old coffee dregs, there’s no sense of scale, you feel (and are in every sense) dwarfed my it’s grandeur and that irks me somewhere deep down inside ! Archtectural statements of this scale remind me of the great state rooms of the modernising Qin dynasty of China designed to awe and demand respect and obedience…maybe there’s something of the rebel in me that illicits these feelings

Back to Terminal 5 then…it’s light and airy with a ‘just new out the showroom’ smell to it still ! Good range of shops but definitely verging on the pricey side…I can’t recall the last time I felt compelled at an airport to by a £250 pair of Bulgari cufflinks but there you go…I am Scots ! Facilities that I’ve sampled are excellent (sat in the BA lounge atm!) and overall I’m much impressed and not surpried to find that the British press hysterical ramblings are largely unfounded. Having said that I’ll blog again once I get to Vancouver and I have my luggage in my hand !

More soon

Arrived safely in YVR and after a mahoosive wait in line to get through immigration there’s my luggage checked right through from Edinburgh. So much for all the hysteria !