Television

@bbcapprentice–the pitch takes the biscuit

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bixmix

Three observations from last night’s episode of the Apprentice.

  1. If the pitch feels incoherent to you, you really can’t expect buyers to get it. "After school treat for anytime-" – that makes no sense.
  2. Absolute bullshit is apparently acceptable – Jim’s ludicrous ‘we’ll get Harry Potter to do TV advertising for you Asda’ pitch shouldn’t have worked. I suspect the only reason they managed to make the sale was because Asda felt the product could appeal to some of their shoppers that maybe put a higher premium on shutting the kids up with sugary treats than they did on the specifics of the sales pitch.
  3. One of the teams still hadn’t learnt the lesson of defining a target audience. It was Every Dog all over again in that first BixMixPitch.

I genuinely wasn’t sure which way this one would lean, but once team BixMix got left in the boardroom both Amanda and I thought Zoe might be in the line of fire (although I thought Tom might be for it too).

I’m finding it increasingly uncomfortable watching a few of the candidates in action; Melody for her general overbearing ignorance, Susan for her idiocy, and Jim for his total BS-talent. But I guess that’s what makes the show compelling…

No sign of Bix Mix or Special Stars on eBay this time… I guess those had a shorter shelf life than the magazines…

Friends, Personal

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

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I didn’t desperately enjoy boarding school. By the time I left, I’d made a few friends and found a localised kind of happiness and certainly gained a great deal from it – exposure to public speaking, journalism, intellectual discourse, guitar skills, philosophical debate, various sporting activities and the like helped net me a place at Cambridge.

However, a significant part of the time spent there was dotted with pained phone calls back to home, agonised discussions as to whether I should transfer back to a school in Malaysia, spates of bullying and a persistent sense of being marginalised by a community in which I did not really fit. And this resulted in a general sense of misery for myself and my parents for the duration.

Having become a parent, discussing my childhood with my parents, the question was asked: should I have been sent to boarding school at all? Should it be a regret for all involved?

Now, oddly, despite the relative unhappiness whilst I was there, I have absolutely no regrets about taking the decision both to go – and to stay – there. In both cases my parents applied very little pressure – first I wanted to follow in my brother’s footsteps, and then a combination of pride and obsessiveness had me wanting to finish what I’d started. And eventually friendships formed and it became less of a trial, and I grew to love elements of the experience.

It’s funny how any experience, once you’re sufficiently clear of it, can be seen for the ‘character-building’ goodness that it was. The person I am today was not entirely defined by my experience at school but certainly aspects of me were forged there – 15 years ago in the rolling fields of Buckinghamshire. And now I’m an extremely happy adult, it’s difficult to regret anything that got me to where I am today.

I miss some aspects of being at Stowe, and the friends and teachers I had there. I hope to reconnect with some of those people in the months ahead and see how perspectives have shifted in the decade and a bit since we all left… and just rekindle the memories of discussing fantasy novels with Will, cars and Transformers with Mac, Squash and alt-rock with Al and, of course, Radiohead, religion and Tintin with Roy…

Diet

Healthy eating excuses

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I’ve been finding excuses not to eat healthily. Busy-ness, lack of time, stress – these are all the negative self-reinforcing patterns I was in before my great weight-loss-programme of 2009. I need to resume the focus and get Daiylburn going again, so that not eating healthily is more uncomfortable to me than the hunger of a persistent diet.

Here we go.

Personal, Work

Embracing change – the impact of innovation

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The essence of the Lifehacker blog that I’m so fond of is that – for any given action or process, there must be a better way. One of my emerging passions as I watch one service, process or product of the other emerge that has an impact on the way I do things is to evangelise it to others.

After all, if we do five things that save a minute of our day each, in a week we’ve got the best part of half an hour back to other things. And a lot of the productivity-enhancing things I’ve seen emerge in products, services and OS tweaks – purely from a technological point of view – have the potential to save much more time than that.

A non-techie example – the Fiskars weed puller I bought a few weeks back. A simple technological innovation saving me hours of tedious weeding, easily worth the £30 it cost in time and effort saved.

So I’m pushing on with my mission of discovery. I want to learn, try, experiment with and potentially buy products, services and training that will help me and my teams at work save time, work ‘smarter’ (horrible, but precise), and dig our way out from under the growing mound of pointless information and legacy process endemic to the knowledge worker. I speak of email, non-collaborative workflows and the like.

And my personal mission – to do the same thing for life more generally – endures, as ever. If you know about it, I want to hear about it!

Internet, Software, Technology

Should Google push on with social search?

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socialsearch

I have been pleasantly surprised that this blog is coming up in the search rankings for a series of random search phrases at the moment (front page for ‘low emissions cars’ for one reader, apparently). I promise I don’t do any SEO wizardry – I haven’t even had time to update my blogroll! – but I think my polymath tendencies and prolific blogging is working in my favour in Google’s eyes.

It is interesting that Google is increasingly changing the way it manages search to try to link in with your ‘social graph’ – what your network of contacts is seeing, finding and sharing. Google has been notoriously bad at creating social graphs itself (Buzz, anyone?), but what they have got they want to harness to this end. Indeed, it’s so serious about this that they’ve this week announced Google+ – it’s own social network.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like the mass-consensual authority of Google’s PageRank, using determined authority worldwide as the means by which it draws you to content – I’m happy for the ‘database of intention‘ of the search world to be different to that of the social world. If I want a social recommendation, I will ask – on Quora, or – more likely – Tweetdeck or Facebook. It’s a different style of interaction.

That said I’ve not really seen it play out yet (largely because Google’s Social Graph capabilities are so limited), and Rory at the BBC is trying to test if this is really the case. So will have to wait and see what happens.

I know from Google’s point of view that social search is a necessary strategic move – reports are coming in of a decrease in overall web traffic as people move to Facebook. So to maintain its ad revenue, it needs to maintain relevance in an increasingly social web.

Observational

Talking to traffic

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TrafficI’m not mad. I just find it better to vent my frustration at inconsiderate driving by talking at it – well, grumbling at it – rather than letting it work me into a frenzy of internalized stress. It is – very possibly – a trait I’ve picked up from my aunts, who pretty much all do it.

When some people hear me talking to traffic, it raises concerns about my stress levels… but I find it quietly cathartic.

Do you talk to traffic? /I’m not mad.

Media & Marketing, Television

Panorama – always finding scandal

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Jeremy Vine presenter of Panorama

Caught a few minutes of Panorama the other night, investigating medical equipment labelled ‘made in the UK’ but actually manufactured by poverty-stricken (but surprisingly well-trained) metalworkers on the streets of Pakistan.

What I want to know is: how come these guys always find a scandal? I mean, every now and then they find one that isn’t there and overdramatize it – the wifi story from a few years back springs to mind, ditto the Primark story from 2008 – but I’d love to hear some of the stories they have to reject:

"How about this one… all Dyson hand dryers are actually a portal to another universe?"
"What’s the source?"
"A professor of some science I can’t pronounce,"
"Sounds good to me, look into it."

"Hello Mr Dyson? Is it true that your hand dryers spiral underage disabled workers into a parallel universe made entirely of cheese?"
"I WISH. But no."
"Oh ok. We’ll go then."

I’d love to know how that editorial process works.

A cynical part of me thinks they must reject some stories that are ‘important’, but not sympathetic or controversial enough to work on the programme. But that’s a separate issue….

Music, Observational

Nostalgiastunbury

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Collapsed whilst relocating campsiteWatching the footage from Glastonbury took me back four years to my first trip to the festival. I was overweight and underfit, struggled with the camping, and knackered each day by the tramping about in wellies. I hated not feeling clean and I felt properly wiped out by the cost of everything.

But I had fun, after a fashion, and in most respects thanks to Amanda’s amazingness -  and its funny how – looking at the footage – the discomfort in itself acquired a sort of nostalgic charm.

I’d like to go again, or to another festival – better equipped this time – if we can work out a way of making it fun for Emily. I’ve had the Big Chill and Bestival recommended to me as family-friendly, will need to give it some thought….

General update

Focus

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Further to my post about switching off, I’ve had a manic few days and – as such – haven’t had the brainspace free for blogging. It’s a rare state of focal zen for me, to have such a persistent thread of thought running that I can’t find the leeway or willpower to force my brain into a different shaped hole.

Fortunately, I’m a bit clearer of that now and back to it. You can expect me to be my tediously prolific self once again… now.

Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.