OMG – now *I* get to re-live my childhood!

Apparently New Kids on the Block are reforming.

If they come to Sydney I will totally be going.

(Disclaimer: I actually have “Step By Step” on my iPod)

Dare to be different

I saw this ad for the first time last night. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons.

When the Commonwealth Bank announced they were taking their (incredibly lucrative) ad account to a San Francisco ad agency there was considerable backlash from the Australian ad industry. After all – what could a bunch of Americans tell us about an Australian institution like the Commonwealth Bank?

The Commonwealth said they were going offshore because they wanted something “different” to the regular bank ads, The “We’re just regular folks like you, and we’d love to give you our money” ones

And that’s why I love this ad. It manages to poke fun at Ad agencies, American’s perceptions of Australians, and marketing generally.

Will it convince more people to bank with the Commonwealth? Probably not.

But it did give us Koalas dressed up like Mad Max.

And that’s got to be worth every penny they spent.

I’m with the band…

A couple of my friends are musicians. This turns out to be a bit of a mixed blessing, on the up side, I go to cool funky pubs and support the independent Sydney music scene, because I’m being supportive of my friends.

The down side is what I call “RSL Hell”

See, the best way to actually make money playing in gigs (assuming you’re just the average jobbing muso) is to get on the Tribute Band circuit and play clubs – because they’ll actually pay you.

This means – as a supportive friend I get to go to RSL clubs…

Last night was a Queen Tribute Show at the Merrylands RSL

Gigs at RSL clubs are all the same. People are sat at tables – so you’ve got a place to put your drink, and the audience is made up from about 10% friends and family of the band, 10% people who actually want to see the Band because they’re fans of the originals, and 80% people who see every show the club has on a Saturday night, because that’s what they do. At the Robbee Williams show there were people in the audience who didn’t know who Robbie Williams was.

The band last night was pretty good (it’s the first time I’d seen them) Their Freddy Mercury impersonator was good (although not as good as this guy) and parts of the 80% seemed to let their hair down and enjoy the night.

And even when the venue is an RSL club, and most of the audience is old enough to be my parents it’s still cool saying “I’m here ’cause I’m with the band.”

Let us pray

 I’m a Pastafarian

but perhaps you’d prefer to worship at the Church of Google

Overheard at the pub

<Girl 1> “I can’t believe you spent all night smoking dope!”

<Girl 2> “Why – what’s the problem?”

<Girl 1> “It’s dangerous, you don’t know where it’s grown, or what they’ve grown it in, or who’s been doing the growing.” <very seriously> “that’s why I only take speed – because it comes from a *laboratory*”

… There is nothing I can add to that

Sometimes the search is half the fun.

Over at the Infovark site Dean has an interesting post on the semantic web including and analysis on why he thinks there are some faulty concepts particularly around the idea of having a search-bot search for you.

Which got me thinking about content management systems and searching.(1)

There are two basic concepts behind every content management system.

1. Putting stuff away
2. Finding stuff

In the early days it was finding stuff that was hard, searches weren’t very accurate, and finding things that had just been tossed in the “bit bucket” was almost impossible.

If you think about the Web for a minute, and how Google’s ability to find relevant information completely changed the world you’ll get a bit of an idea.

Because the Web had always been a bit of a free for all – the only way to find things was to make better search engines, because, with the best will in the world no-one was going to voluntarily fill in pages of meta-data if they didn’t have to.

In enterprises it was different. You could *make* people fill in meta-data, so you didn’t have to build such sophisticated searches. Make everyone fill in a “subject” field and you don’t have to try an infer the subject from the document.

The problem is – almost universally people hate filing, and filling in meta-data is filing by another name. On the flipside, nowhere near as many people (particularly those of us who have grown up in the web world) hate searching.

So why make people file – when they don’t mind searching to find stuff?

For some reason amongst the enterprise content management crowd there seems to be a belief that people don’t like looking for things. When I worked in the field we used to toss around spurious statistics like “Workers spend 80%of their time looking for information and only 20% of their time using it” to justify why you’d want to implement a filing system that would reduce the search overload.

Except that people hate filing, so they won’t do it properly, and they’ll still have to spend 80% of their time searching, only now – because their search assumes things aren’t mis-filed they find it *harder* to find the stuff they need.(2)

Which made me think – why is searching the internet for information “fun” and searching the “Corporate Document Repository” for information “not fun” even when you’re looking for exactly the same information.

I think it’s serendipty. I mean, I’m pretty good at using “Dominant Internet Search Engine”TM I can construct a query that will return one or maybe two results that perfectly give me the information I was looking for.

But I hardly ever do that – because it’s all the other odd things I discover while doing the search, the things I learn, the answers to questions I didn’t know I had, that making searching the internet fun…

And you almost never get that from the “Corporate Document Repository”

Well – not without running the risk of coming across information that might get you into serious trouble

Which is a whole different kind of fun – and a post for another day.

(1) Disclaimer: I used to work for an Electronic Document and Records Management Software developer who tried to change themselves into an Enterprise Content Management Development.

(2) Mis-filing is caused by laziness – Try going to ebay and see how many hits you get for palystation or Plam. In this case people have a really good reason to try and get it right – if buyers can’t find your stuff, they can’t bid on it and you may not sell it, or get the money you want. But people still make mistakes..

Thanks guys.

My birthday was today. As these things occasionally happen my husband was overseas. No big deal, it’s just a birthday, I have one every year, and this wasn’t an important one…

So, in collusion with my best friend, he arranged for our friends to break into the house while I was out, and throw me a party.

It was a very cool day, ‘specially since I wasn’t expecting it.

Thanks guys.

Bureau of Statistics – We’re not really the clever country

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey

Of Australians aged 15 to 74 years

• 46% only got to the second level in the basic literacy test

  53% of surveyed Australians reached just the second of five levels in a practical numeracy test,

• 70%, the equivalent of 10.6 million people, only managed to progress to level 2 in a series of problem-solving exercises.

Level 3 is regarded by the survey developers as the minimum required for individuals to meet the complex demands of everyday life and work in the emerging knowledge-based economy.

Gun, samurai, taser seized in car search

Gun, samurai, taser seized in car search – National – smh.com.au

I was disappointed by this story – turns out it was a samurai *sword* not an actual samurai…

So for the headline writers of the SMH

This is a Samurai

This is a sword

It really shouldn’t be that hard to tell them apart…

Magic Fireballs – and Girls joining Scouts

This is pretty cool – metaphorically speaking.

Home Recipes Note: How To Make Magic Fireballs

It reminds of a game we used to play when I was in Scouts.

Night-Soccer.

That may not sound very interesting – except that we weren’t playing on a lit field. So, how could we see well enough to actually play.

Set the ball on fire.

Regular soccer-balls don’t burn very well – so you have to make a special one.

Step 1 – gather up old rags and material from the back of the Scout Hall.
Step 2 – grab some of the chicken wire from the cubs vegetable garden
Step 3 – wrap chicken wire around the rags into a ball shaped object
Step 4 – siphon some petrol from Skip’s car.(1)
Step 5 – Soak ball in petrol
Step 6 – set alight and play!

The advantages of this game of course is that no-one hogs the ball – because if you keep it too long – your sneakers start to melt.

(1) The best way to siphon petrol is to use a tampon tied to a longer piece of string, thread the tampon through the hose to the end you’re putting in the petrol tank. Let it soak for a couple of minutes until it swells to block the end of the hose then pull it gently back through. The vacuum it creates will start the siphon process – and you won’t end up with a mouthful of petrol. As an added bonus – you now have a very effective fire-lighter.

And *thats* why it’s a good thing Girls were allowed to join scouts – easy access to tampons

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