I’m really happy that I’m starting to see articles questioning the marketing value of social media. I’ve been using social media for over a decade, since before people used the term ‘social media’. As I say in my Twitter bio, I ‘live on the internet’. I’ve met my wife on the internet, and so on, [...]
We recently tried an experiment in selling stuff on the internet. It was a bit of a departure from our normal area of expertise, so it was definitely heavy on the ‘experiment’. I’ll say it right at the start: it was a complete and unmitigated failure, but not in the way I was expecting at [...]
I have a mortgage with Northern Rock, a UK bank which collapsed (triggering the first run on a UK bank) a couple of months after we got our mortgage. It’s a bit of a nightmare, and one of the (many) things that I lie in bed thinking about at 3am when I should be sleeping. [...]
I love technology. It’s what allows us to have the awesome existence we live – from the wheel to a quad-core Xeon, all this technology is what enables human civilisation. All properly designed technology is morally neutral. Like a hammer, it just is – neither inherently good or bad, since moral judgements like that derive [...]
I’m not going to write anything significant about my personal life here, so when I title a post ‘Relationships’ I’m referring to my relationship with technology, not my wife. If you want salacious gossip you’ll need to go elsewhere! There’s not a day that goes by in my day job where I don’t exclaim ‘I [...]
I’m not going to make a habit of posting memes on my blog here. My experience is that memes are the blogging equivalent of small talk – it’s just making noise so that people don’t feel uncomfortable in the silence. As a result, there may be periods of silence here, if I don’t have anything [...]
Somewhat ahead of schedule we’re taking on some shared hosting customers. Our plan had been to build a special VM to use as a shared hosting platform after we work on the server at the end of the month, but events overtook us and now I’ve discovered that the shared hosting strategy I came up [...]
Sometimes, this industry confuses me. For example, HP’s DL140, which is a perfectly nice 1u rack server, costs just over £600 (including VAT – we’re not VAT registered) here at Insight. On that same page you can see the cost of adding in a second matching processor. Just under £600. By their logic, the entire [...]
