Film

My name Borat. I like you. You like me?

Got to see a special sneak preview of Borat last night. It is deeply, deeply disturbing. It is racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic, crass, homophobic… lots of other bad things. Of course, it is only superficially so — playing on all these prejudices to highlight the fact that a lot of random Americans have those ridiculous opinions.

At least, I hope that’s what its doing. Because I found it very, very funny. As did most of the audience.

It is full of cringeworthy moments, absurd stunts, unbelievable ‘reality’ set-pieces, and actually manages to sustain quite a coherent narrative as Borat travels across “U S and A” – an impressive act in itself.

In essence, good stuff. Go see it if you have a strong constitution and have ever found Sacha Baron Cohen funny. Don’t if you haven’t.

Not wanting to spoil you, I instead leave you with this clip from Borat at Comiccon. You like?

Current affairs, Sport

Spurs vs Slavia Prague

I’ve missed the last few Spurs matches (crushing defeats) and kind of been glad of it. Whilst I still make no pretence to know what’s going on, I have found myself quite emotionally invested and am actually getting quite stressed at Spurs inability to score tonight.

Argh. Hope we get a goal quite soon in the next half… expect updates!

Update: WE WON! Come on Keane, you got the monkey off our back! That was fantastic… I was really expecting a 0-0 draw, so a 1-0 victory is approximately infinity better. Woohoo! That feels good.

PR, Work

PR vs Journo: FIGHT

2 Comments

Sorry for the delay in this post. Been planning to put it together for ages, but struggled to find the time and brainspace.

Danny writes about PR hits and misses (and about a specific miss), and highlights some of the things that PRs do wrong when supporting journalists. He very kindly credits me as being someone who stands out from the PR perspective. Thanks Danny, I think you’re a great tech journo and enjoy our conversations too ;). /mutualbackslap.

My job, for those of you who don’t know, often involves (amongst other things) supporting journalists writing stories by facilitating conversations with my clients (technology companies, for the most part) or their customers, and relevant third parties when we have access to them. Matching the relevant spokesperson/angle/customer often requires a certain amount of research/understanding of the subject areas, and the journalists in question. My status as a creative geek and my past experience as a (student/freelance) journalist does translate into a passion for technology stories that helps me here, as Danny notes. And I love doing it — you have great conversations with very bright people on a daily basis, both media and client-side.

Danny laments, however, that many PR people often don’t get it and proceeds to give a whole string of (mostly pertinent) advice… But I had a couple of issues with the post as a whole:

(1) Bashing at inept PRs publicly is harsh. Even the most experienced PR professionals will occasionally slip up (as do the most experienced journalists), but where Danny pretty much names and shames an entire agency, PRs are often not in a situation where they can respond. Not that I think online feuds would be helpful, but the context of these PR slip-ups is often complex – deadlines, client pressure, etc… events that are mirrored and cause parallel crapness in the world of journalism. Given that most people, never mind most journalists, don’t have the faintest idea what goes on inside a PR agency (“PR, that’s like advertising, innit?”) setting the community of PR professionals up to sound like more of a hindrance than a help through public moaning seems unnecessary. I appreciate that’s not what Danny’s doing, but people don’t tend to focus on the positive with posts of this nature.

(2) The advice — great. The tone, I thought, was unnecessarily harsh. How many PRs treat Danny’s emails / requests for interviews for a National story “with contempt”? Is it possible they were ill / away / the email got caught in their spam filter / the story sounded negative so they needed to get client input? Not excuses, granted, but explanations, and things that could happen to anyone. If they were that hopeless, rude or unpleasant without just cause – then I agree, it’s a major issue. You should take it up with them / their managers / the owners of their agency, etc., especially if it had an impact on your story. If it really happens regularly, then they probably sould be sacked, but it does seem hard to believe that there are (m)any PRs who’ll let straightforward National opportunities slip through their fingers.

(3) The move to RSS. Yes. Absolutely. I agree — all of our clients should have RSS enabled newsfeeds. We advise them accordingly. But… how many PR agencies have complete control over website content, and therefore any control over how quickly that happens? Not many. And does the fact that we have clients with RSS enabled newsfeeds mean that our clients will be happy with us not sending out press releases by email / calling journalists etc? Of course not. So the press list issue will be ongoing, I’m afraid, and will face the same difficulties any significant adminstrative task does.

So in essence: yes, PRs sometimes mess up. So do journalists. And the advice that people like Danny and Charles give out is often helpful. But getting het-up about inadequate PRs in specific circumstances (just like getting het-up over specific journalists in specific circumstances) is, I think, going above and beyond the call… After all, if every PR who had a blog posted about circumstances where journalists cancelled at the last minute/forgot to turn up to/were late for/were rude at meetings with our clients… well, I’d have a lot more stuff under the tag ‘whinge‘. And of course – we couldn’t do this anyway. As a workmate pointed out, four things would likely happen:

    we might get the sack
    the journalists might not write about our clients
    we might damage opportunities for the rest of the agency’s clients
    we’d look petty

…which is probably a bit more of a risk than any of us would be prepared to take just to get it off our chests. And my thanks to the colleagues who looked at this post to make sure I wasn’t risking any of the above!

Update: Chris spotted that I misread one of Danny’s points, re; RSS. Danny seems to suggest that PR agencies should host newsfeeds for their clients, not their clients’ websites as I implied, as an alternative way of receiving press releases. This is a whole separate debate which I’ll come back to at some point… but apologies for now, I stand corrected.

Writing

Just wiped the whiteboard

2 Comments

It’s a good buffer space, brainstorming site etc, but want to keep it as a short term store. Think that’s going to be one of the ways I motivate myself. To try to fill it up every so often, capture the information digitally, then wipe it clean and start again, hopefully a little further down the line. I’m still very much planning this novel, I’m coming to realise, and need to keep fleshing out ideas at least until I can give a straightforward answer to the question: “what’s your novel about, then?”

“My novel is about…
…a man coming to believe in himself”
…gangsters in London with big plans”
…pan dimensional aliens plotting sinister things and the forces of good that stop them”
…demons! explosions! football! death-defying stunts!”
…lemons”

Back to the whiteboard….

Internet, Technology

Birthday admin (a tech story)

I love having big birthday bashes, no matter how irrelevant the occasion – in this case my 26th, which, other than being the 5th anniversary of my 21st, is completely pointless.

The tech story (how do I always find one?) – is that I’ve been using Google spreadsheets to manage the dinner reservation (it involves tedious working out of set-menus in advance) — it’s very useful. 5 years ago the concept of an online-only service would have driven me nuts, but am actually finding myself moving away from the ‘thick client’ MS model – and there are two key motivations for it.

    1) I need to access the content from multiple locations, usually at least home and work. Being online makes this easier.
    2) I really, really can never be bothered to wait for my Office apps to load. Even on quite fast machines. It’s why I so often end up taking notes in ‘Notepad’.

So here’s my guidance for MS in their next release of Office.

    1) Provide a pared down, simpler, SAAS, web-based version of all the apps online.
    2) FIX Windows Live Mail so it is as quick and easy to use as Gmail
    3) Work out some clever integrated online storage scheme so that people can store large amounts of data securely online

If you do all that, reduce the license fee and provide the basic versions for free or a low subscription cost, you might make Google nervous. With broadband everywhere, and rumours of Mesh cities popping up here, there and everywhere… More people will be happy about moving online for basic software needs.

Travel

Cubacuba

2 Comments

Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Holiday booked. Negotiations not that complex this time, just four of us going and all fairly laid back. The complications largely involved finding somewhere Central America-ish that didn’t require flying for 20 hours, transferring onto a mule train and then scaling the side of a mountain to get to. We’ve only got a week off – otherwise would definitely get on the mule train.

Was that a song by the O’Jays?

Anyway, its very exciting. Looking forward to Mojitos, Castro… everything. I don’t really know what to expect – imagine some of the more ‘developing nation’** aspects will remind me of some of the crappier bits of Malaysia, so there’ll be some familiarity. But culturally I suspect it’ll be very, very unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before and I’m v. excited as a consequence.

What should I do when I’m out there other than:

    1) Say ‘hi’ to the Castros
    2) Drink lots of rum
    3) Smoke some cigars

Suggestions in the comments if you know anything about it, please, and will be greatly appreciated. I may even bring back gifts for people who tell me of interesting things to do out there.

** is that the PC thing to say? I don’t know anymore.

Music, Technology

Hi Fi indie house

I’ve done two things lately: first, got a bit carried away on eBay and used some knowledge (and hi-fi prejudices) acquired from time spent with my father when I was younger to get a new (2nd hand) sound system. B&W 601 series 2 speakers matched with a Cambridge Audio A300 amp has got me some sweeeeeeet, awesome value bi-wired sound. Works well for the music recording too, but note for all wannabe rockstars: the A300 doesn’t have a headphones output (!!) so to monitor recording you’ll need to split the signal coming out of your soundcard and run the sound through headphones there. Or find some similar solution.

The thing that’s probably more interesting is the music I’ve been playing through it lately. I had a pretty hard-rockin’ 90s. Not death metal or anything – but lots of G&R, Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, Weezer, Metallica, Ugly Kid Joe etc… Hard rockin’. Recently I’ve been acquiring a taste for more indie music… partly influence of some of the people I’ve been hanging out with (like Chris and Tom) but also was pointed to Athlete by Mazmo and have pretty much been listening to their album on repeat for a week now, as you’ll see if you check out my Last.fm page. I’m enjoying the music (Athelete are chilled, catchy, singalongtoable). I am slightly worried that by the 2010’s I’ll be onto folk music, and by 2020 I’ll be listening to Mongolian throat singing. My hard-rockin’ ness is degrading…

;-)

Also really getting into Gorrilaz. I need more exposure to music generally, I think. At school, we used to visit each other with a stack of CDs and go ‘listen to this’… and so got a lot recommendations on a lot of new music. A similar thing happened at Uni with MP3s… but more recently this has subsided somewhat. Ah well – am signed up to an Indie night next weekend so hopefully get some new recommendations then (might need to use Shazam a little…).

In the meantime, if you think of anything I should listen to let me know in the comments. Some further useful indications of my musical tastes from Last.fm – but be warned – a couple of occasions when I left iTunes playing on random has somewhat messed with my history there**.

** also my excuse for listening to any really awful music. I’m sure I don’t own the Hanson album. I can’t do. Can I?

Writing

Armand’s writing wall

The work on the novel is ongoing, and still painfully slow. This is my latest writing-aid – a rollout whiteboard! Cheaper and more easily mounted than its steel-framed colleagues, it’s allowed me to do character mapping, multi-colour scene setting and other generally fun things.

Actually helps as a mode to motivation – I don’t know whether its the egocentric exhibitionist in me or perhaps some missed vocation as a teacher but I do actually love writing on the whiteboard. If only I could write the whole novel that way…!

Books, Personal

Creovationâ„¢

Just finished reading the v. entertaining ‘Who moved my Blackberry‘ — a book which hits so closely on everything that is bad about big corporate and marketing environments it is just eerie — and thought, as a laugh, that I’d check if www.creovation.com was registered. Creovationâ„¢ is a concept that the lead protagonist, one Martin Lukes, comes up with – marrying innovation with creativity (obviously!) — which is singled out as being a particuarly ridiculous marketing non-concept.

And amusingly, a London-based marketing firm has that name, although its proposition seems a little more solid than most of the rubbish that Martin Lukes comes up with in the novel.

Thanks to Douthers for pointing me in the direction of the book and lending me his copy.

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