Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Run Run Run" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Sunday, July 12, 2009
A Gen-X-er's Take on Tech...
So I got a new iPhone 3GS. And its an incredible piece of kit. It's hard to resist the temptation to go on about it at some length. But how dull would that be... There must be thousands of 3GS reviews out there already. Dull, dull, dull.
So instead, I got to thinking, how great is technology today? Is this really a life-changing piece of kit, or just another toy? Is it even conceivable that this could be laughably out of date in just a few years...?
As a Gen-X-er of a certain age, (old enough to remember the Sony Walkman, young enough to be uber-enthusiastic about new kit today) maybe I'm uniquely placed to get some perspective on this wonder-gadget with a cheeky wee look back on the technological hits and misses in my Gen-X life.
1983 Nintendo Game and Watch – Donkey Kong Jr -HIT!-
For me, this is where it all started. Nintendo have had a long history – from making a primitive kind of pub pinball machine in the 19th century (yep, Nintendo are older than Winston Churchill and the penny-farthing) to the mass-mass-market fun of the
Nintendo Wii. But I will always be nostalgic for the Game and Watch. The first hand-held video-game system, it was essentially just a large LCD- watch style screen (hence the name), limiting game play to platform-games and a very small set of possible actions. But it had that ingredient essential to all great games – an increasing level of challenge to match increasing expertise, and was thus perfectly addictive.
I still have mine, though its whereabouts haven’t been definitely confirmed for years (probably under a mountain of lego somewhere), and so I became all dewy-eyed when I found the above picture on the net. The hours and hours of fun the 9-year-old me had with that thing. And yet it could have all been so different. Within hours of buying it on holiday in Spain (I was quite possibly driving my folks bonkers on that holiday), I was having palpitations as it appeared to have packed in on the flight home. Little did I know that 1984's LCD panels just weren't happy in a pressurised air-cabin. A major tearful episode was avoided when the game started belting out its zippy, blippy little tune (haven’t Nintendo always been great at that?) back on terra firma.
1984 ZX Spectrum + -HIT!-
The warbly tapes. The dodgy sound and graphics. The bizarre but fantastic games (was it just me, or was Ant Attack genuinely scary?). And nothing was more memorable from those first gaming days than Daley Thomson’s Decathlon. Battering that keyboard for all it was worth (all
RSI, no Wii) and then hitting the spacebar to throw a javelin (a single line of pixels) through the air, where it would hang for about 3 minutes like a cruise missile, before landing on an unyielding and unconvincing electric-green square… many a sunny afternoon was wasted on that one.
This was the pinnacle of computer game creativity – there were literally thousands of games, you could even write your own in your bedroom – and, on the creativity front at least, its been a mostly bobbly downhill slope from there. To think that Sir Clive Sinclair then made that obscenely shaped plastic-go-kart-death-trap thingy and then turned into a recluse(ish). If only they’d had reality tv in the 80s he could have carved out an alternative career as a bearded pantomime dame…
1987 Hitachi Ghettoblaster -HIT!-
For about 2 months before Christmas 1987, only one subject could occupy
my mind for any length of time – portable hifi. And whilst these-days ‘portable hifi’ might mean something you can stick in your jeans pocket, back then it was something you could barely lift above your head. Undeterred, I would pour over the pages of Kay’s Catalogue, comparing features such as auto-reverse, graphic equaliser (3 or 5 band, 7 band if you were especially posh), bass boost and detachable speakers, this latter feature being something I was especially excited about, for a reason that I can no longer fathom. They were plasticky, they had crap radio reception, buttons frequently fell off at the least provocation… why is it a hit? Well it meant I could play music in my room, and that was revolutionary for me. Since then I’ve been a music freak. Job done.
1990 Panasonic G40 Barcode Reading VHS Recorder -Miss-
Yes, the history of 1980s technology disasters has effectively boiled down to VHS beating up Betamax, and yes we were a Betamax family (wasn’t it great to catch the cat out with that top-loading mechanism?) but that story has been told too many times. Instead, my mention of video-recording tech has to be an example of a laughably bad solution to a (semi) legendary problem.
The fact that not being able to program your video recorder has become synonymous in the English-speaking world with having problems with new technology shows what a major problem this was in the 1980s. But it was a problem that was never going to be solved by scanning barcodes. Not a sensible solution. Obviously. Except that, for a while, all the major VCR manufacturers (including Panasonic) wanted us to think it might be.
Ok, this wasn’t strictly 'my' techno miss, it was one for my parents, but it’s too weird not to mention. Come on – a giant sheet of barcodes where you scan one barcode for the channel, one for the day, one for the start time, one for the length of the program… are you kidding?? After recording just 4 episodes of Baywatch (well come on! what teenage boy didn’t???), I felt skilled enough to give a supermarket checkout lady a run for her money. What was wrong with just typing in numbers? Nothing apparently, as barcode technology was quietly dumped a couple of years after my folks bought the model pictured above. And that’s the barcode scanning pen on the right, which incidentally doubled up as a fairly weak laser-pointer that could be used to distract yourself - and passing drivers - when you realised that you’d accidentally recorded Murder She Wrote instead of Robin of Sherwood.
1996 Sony MiniDiscman - HIT! (and Miss)-
The end of my unwavering faith in technology – a format that I thought would change the world (You
can record in digital! You can skip tracks!) but boomed for roughly 6 months, before fading painfully and gradually like the career of an ex-Spice Girl. Even the combination of my unfailing enthusiasm, and an appearance in the Matrix - the most fashionably futuristic movie of the 90s - couldn't stop its demise. I held out much longer than I should have done – though not as long as my friend Graeme has with cassettes, come on Graeme, 2009 mate, 2009! – and I still have about 200 of the little discs gathering dust in my mum and dad’s attic, with titles like ‘Best of Indie CDs!’ and ‘Stone Roses Second Coming’ barely visible in fading biro on their little sticky labels.
But I loved them, and their demise meant I would never fully trust the technology industry again…
1997 Sony Playstation -HIT!-
Yes that’s right – just “Sony Playstation”, not PS1 or playstation 1, and certainly
not PS2 or PS3. This was the original. And it kicked Nintendo, Sega and Atari in the nuts and ran away with an entire industry. How? Simply by being a little cheaper, better in almost every area, and most importantly absolutely-top in the fun stakes. And never mind that it looked like a set of bathroom scales. Sony would later undergo collective amnesia in launching the over-priced, under-loved PS3, which has given away that colossal market advantage and apparently cost them all the profits they made on the PSOne and PS2. But who cares. Playstation was uber-cool in ’97 with games like Doom, Resident Evil and Wipeout, the latter featuring songs by Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers - who would have thought it… a video game… with a cool pop-culture tie-in!
2002 & 2006 Xbox & Xbox 360 -Miss-
Microsoft tried to repeat Sony’s industry-grabbing game-play in 2001, but the Xbox
(in spite of having just about the best video game ever in Halo) never quite cut-it. I didn’t keep either Xbox1 or Xbox2 for any length of time. Maybe they were trying too hard. More likely the games were just too safe and same-y. And if the Playstation One was a set of bathroom scales, these were the pug-ugly plastic boxes to break those scales.
But I do have one very funny tale to tell from this. Apparently when my dad told my mum that I had bought the original Xbox, her reaction was “A sex box? What does he want with one of those?”. Yep, hilarious. But why didn’t she ask what a sex box was??? Mysterious. Lol.
2007 Ipod Classic 80Gb -Hit!-
After many years of going French and buying Archos mp3 players, I eventually succumbed to Apple as recently as 2007. Within days I realised why Apple were able to charge more, and for a superficially similar product, with apparently less functionality. It… just…works. It does everything so well, and so intuitively. And of course it comes in such a sexy package.
I loved my Ipod… but I wasn’t IN love with it… and then I got my iPhone. (lmao)
So there we have it – my entirely selective, one-man history of technology. And one last point – anyone who says that the old days were better just needs to spend 10 minutes with my iPhone (if you can prise it from my cold, dead hands). That we might soon have such technology would have been an incredible idea, in fact unthinkable, just half a dozen years ago. And there's no doubt this gadget would have been like an alien visitation to the nine-year old lad with his Donkey Kong Junior Game and Watch.
With this rate of progress there is surely so much to look forward to in the next few years. Might they even get round to inventing… …a sex box?
So instead, I got to thinking, how great is technology today? Is this really a life-changing piece of kit, or just another toy? Is it even conceivable that this could be laughably out of date in just a few years...?
As a Gen-X-er of a certain age, (old enough to remember the Sony Walkman, young enough to be uber-enthusiastic about new kit today) maybe I'm uniquely placed to get some perspective on this wonder-gadget with a cheeky wee look back on the technological hits and misses in my Gen-X life.
1983 Nintendo Game and Watch – Donkey Kong Jr -HIT!-
For me, this is where it all started. Nintendo have had a long history – from making a primitive kind of pub pinball machine in the 19th century (yep, Nintendo are older than Winston Churchill and the penny-farthing) to the mass-mass-market fun of the
Nintendo Wii. But I will always be nostalgic for the Game and Watch. The first hand-held video-game system, it was essentially just a large LCD- watch style screen (hence the name), limiting game play to platform-games and a very small set of possible actions. But it had that ingredient essential to all great games – an increasing level of challenge to match increasing expertise, and was thus perfectly addictive.I still have mine, though its whereabouts haven’t been definitely confirmed for years (probably under a mountain of lego somewhere), and so I became all dewy-eyed when I found the above picture on the net. The hours and hours of fun the 9-year-old me had with that thing. And yet it could have all been so different. Within hours of buying it on holiday in Spain (I was quite possibly driving my folks bonkers on that holiday), I was having palpitations as it appeared to have packed in on the flight home. Little did I know that 1984's LCD panels just weren't happy in a pressurised air-cabin. A major tearful episode was avoided when the game started belting out its zippy, blippy little tune (haven’t Nintendo always been great at that?) back on terra firma.
1984 ZX Spectrum + -HIT!-
The warbly tapes. The dodgy sound and graphics. The bizarre but fantastic games (was it just me, or was Ant Attack genuinely scary?). And nothing was more memorable from those first gaming days than Daley Thomson’s Decathlon. Battering that keyboard for all it was worth (all
RSI, no Wii) and then hitting the spacebar to throw a javelin (a single line of pixels) through the air, where it would hang for about 3 minutes like a cruise missile, before landing on an unyielding and unconvincing electric-green square… many a sunny afternoon was wasted on that one.This was the pinnacle of computer game creativity – there were literally thousands of games, you could even write your own in your bedroom – and, on the creativity front at least, its been a mostly bobbly downhill slope from there. To think that Sir Clive Sinclair then made that obscenely shaped plastic-go-kart-death-trap thingy and then turned into a recluse(ish). If only they’d had reality tv in the 80s he could have carved out an alternative career as a bearded pantomime dame…
1987 Hitachi Ghettoblaster -HIT!-
For about 2 months before Christmas 1987, only one subject could occupy
my mind for any length of time – portable hifi. And whilst these-days ‘portable hifi’ might mean something you can stick in your jeans pocket, back then it was something you could barely lift above your head. Undeterred, I would pour over the pages of Kay’s Catalogue, comparing features such as auto-reverse, graphic equaliser (3 or 5 band, 7 band if you were especially posh), bass boost and detachable speakers, this latter feature being something I was especially excited about, for a reason that I can no longer fathom. They were plasticky, they had crap radio reception, buttons frequently fell off at the least provocation… why is it a hit? Well it meant I could play music in my room, and that was revolutionary for me. Since then I’ve been a music freak. Job done.1990 Panasonic G40 Barcode Reading VHS Recorder -Miss-
Yes, the history of 1980s technology disasters has effectively boiled down to VHS beating up Betamax, and yes we were a Betamax family (wasn’t it great to catch the cat out with that top-loading mechanism?) but that story has been told too many times. Instead, my mention of video-recording tech has to be an example of a laughably bad solution to a (semi) legendary problem.
The fact that not being able to program your video recorder has become synonymous in the English-speaking world with having problems with new technology shows what a major problem this was in the 1980s. But it was a problem that was never going to be solved by scanning barcodes. Not a sensible solution. Obviously. Except that, for a while, all the major VCR manufacturers (including Panasonic) wanted us to think it might be.
Ok, this wasn’t strictly 'my' techno miss, it was one for my parents, but it’s too weird not to mention. Come on – a giant sheet of barcodes where you scan one barcode for the channel, one for the day, one for the start time, one for the length of the program… are you kidding?? After recording just 4 episodes of Baywatch (well come on! what teenage boy didn’t???), I felt skilled enough to give a supermarket checkout lady a run for her money. What was wrong with just typing in numbers? Nothing apparently, as barcode technology was quietly dumped a couple of years after my folks bought the model pictured above. And that’s the barcode scanning pen on the right, which incidentally doubled up as a fairly weak laser-pointer that could be used to distract yourself - and passing drivers - when you realised that you’d accidentally recorded Murder She Wrote instead of Robin of Sherwood.
1996 Sony MiniDiscman - HIT! (and Miss)-
The end of my unwavering faith in technology – a format that I thought would change the world (You
can record in digital! You can skip tracks!) but boomed for roughly 6 months, before fading painfully and gradually like the career of an ex-Spice Girl. Even the combination of my unfailing enthusiasm, and an appearance in the Matrix - the most fashionably futuristic movie of the 90s - couldn't stop its demise. I held out much longer than I should have done – though not as long as my friend Graeme has with cassettes, come on Graeme, 2009 mate, 2009! – and I still have about 200 of the little discs gathering dust in my mum and dad’s attic, with titles like ‘Best of Indie CDs!’ and ‘Stone Roses Second Coming’ barely visible in fading biro on their little sticky labels.But I loved them, and their demise meant I would never fully trust the technology industry again…
1997 Sony Playstation -HIT!-
Yes that’s right – just “Sony Playstation”, not PS1 or playstation 1, and certainly
not PS2 or PS3. This was the original. And it kicked Nintendo, Sega and Atari in the nuts and ran away with an entire industry. How? Simply by being a little cheaper, better in almost every area, and most importantly absolutely-top in the fun stakes. And never mind that it looked like a set of bathroom scales. Sony would later undergo collective amnesia in launching the over-priced, under-loved PS3, which has given away that colossal market advantage and apparently cost them all the profits they made on the PSOne and PS2. But who cares. Playstation was uber-cool in ’97 with games like Doom, Resident Evil and Wipeout, the latter featuring songs by Leftfield and the Chemical Brothers - who would have thought it… a video game… with a cool pop-culture tie-in!2002 & 2006 Xbox & Xbox 360 -Miss-
Microsoft tried to repeat Sony’s industry-grabbing game-play in 2001, but the Xbox
(in spite of having just about the best video game ever in Halo) never quite cut-it. I didn’t keep either Xbox1 or Xbox2 for any length of time. Maybe they were trying too hard. More likely the games were just too safe and same-y. And if the Playstation One was a set of bathroom scales, these were the pug-ugly plastic boxes to break those scales.But I do have one very funny tale to tell from this. Apparently when my dad told my mum that I had bought the original Xbox, her reaction was “A sex box? What does he want with one of those?”. Yep, hilarious. But why didn’t she ask what a sex box was??? Mysterious. Lol.
2007 Ipod Classic 80Gb -Hit!-
After many years of going French and buying Archos mp3 players, I eventually succumbed to Apple as recently as 2007. Within days I realised why Apple were able to charge more, and for a superficially similar product, with apparently less functionality. It… just…works. It does everything so well, and so intuitively. And of course it comes in such a sexy package.
I loved my Ipod… but I wasn’t IN love with it… and then I got my iPhone. (lmao)
So there we have it – my entirely selective, one-man history of technology. And one last point – anyone who says that the old days were better just needs to spend 10 minutes with my iPhone (if you can prise it from my cold, dead hands). That we might soon have such technology would have been an incredible idea, in fact unthinkable, just half a dozen years ago. And there's no doubt this gadget would have been like an alien visitation to the nine-year old lad with his Donkey Kong Junior Game and Watch.
With this rate of progress there is surely so much to look forward to in the next few years. Might they even get round to inventing… …a sex box?
Thursday, July 09, 2009
An Amazing Six Months
After a couple of weeks of mixed weather, things brightened up at the start of last week and the temperature was pushing 20C every day. Not bad for winter. Last weekend was the best of all with two full days of sun and blue skies. And there’s so many great places to be in
Some of the wildest parts are at the headlands at the mouth of the harbour. North Head and South Head (which sit on the north and south side of the harbour respectively – nothing, if not informative, this blog) are a couple of hundred metres apart, but separated by almost 25km of coastline (and bridge).
I took ferry, bus, foot to north head on Sunday and had a really peaceful afternoon in the winter sunshine. Wearing just a t-shirt and jeans for much of the time, I spent a good few hours wandering around, admiring the views and watching the whale watchers – who seemed to be having a frustrating, whale-less day (as opposed to a whale of time), which was a shame given the immense beauty of the place.
For me, it was a good time to relax and get a bit of perspective on the first half of the year. In the spirit of talking about ‘we’, rather than I, it's good to be able to say that
And the chocolate event was a big success! Fanny and Alex’s chocolate creations were the absolute business. Liquid chocolate, mousse, sorbets… fantastic stuff. And my first experience of a panel interview wasn’t as terrifying as I’d expected, though I was perspiring quite intensely – I blame the warm, chocolate kitchen atmosphere hitting my unaccustomed Scottish noggin.
And that's about it for this week. Given such amazing news at work, everything else seems unworthy of reporting.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
From William Wallace to Willy Wonka
Hey, I'm trying to jazz up the website a bit again, hence the elephants marching across the top of the page (from Etosha National Park, Namibia). I'm not sure it looks ok on everyone's computer, so if you've any feedback on the new look, let me know! (Time permitting) this is still a draft of the new look. (I seriously need to dig out that html book I slept through a couple of years ago.)
It's the depths of winter, but Sydney is still a beautiful place to be outdoors. This morning I went for a run in the botanics. When the notion takes me I can run through the park down to the edge of the harbour, round the edge of the water between the botanics and farm cove (the site of the first white settlement in Australia) and jog up to the Opera House in about 15 minutes. A round tour back through the botanics takes about 30 minutes and I never see a single car. This morning it was spectacularly beautiful and peaceful too. Why do I not do this more often??
Well of course I'd do more outdoors-ey stuff like this if I did a little less socialising at the weekend, but being unattached in Sydney is always going to keep the number of 'quiet nights in' to a minimum. Similarly I'm typing this on the roof of my building - from the 17th floor you can see the bridge and the opera house to the left and out to the ocean to the right. Why is it two months since I was last up here??
My running route. Out my front door, past Brett Whitely's matchsticks, out past the Boy Charlton pool and round farm cove to the Opera House (to the right of the bridge in the photo). This was the view from the roof today.
Work continues to be really sweet for me, and it will be even sweeter than usual this week. On Wednesday night I will be part of a panel being interviewed in front of an audience of young professionals in Sydney. We will be talking about Opportunity International of course, and also talking a little about the impact of the global economic crisis on the fight against poverty. The venue is a chocolate shop (ooh, free chocolate!), Boon Chocolates on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst. And the prospect of free chocolate has me very excited.
Not that I need free chocolate of course. But - not unusually for a Scot - I have a very sweet tooth. It's an affliction that comes and goes. At various times I can handle my condition (sic) pretty well but then at other times I just can't resist at least two 'treats' per day. This past month has been such a time. What constitutes a 'treat'? There's a modest list of top quality goodies that will satiate my junkie-like need for a sugary hit: crunchies (or violet crumble in Oz), mint aeros, McDonald's M&M Mcflurry and caramel slices are all near the top of the list, while home-baking (with it's built-in disregard for the dietary common-sense that afflicts products sold to the
general public) is almost an obsession, especially tablet, fudge and shortbread, all of which have that insane level of sweetness needed to satisfy a long-time sugar-abuser. (If my metabolic rate ever slows down I'm in so much bother...)
But chocolate of any form will do nicely, thank you very much.
So needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to Wednesday. I may not sleep until Friday, and then of course I'll have to go cold turkey at the weekend. But by God will it be worth it.
And hopefully Andy Murray will give all Scots an excuse to stay indoors (and away from ice-cream vans and sweetie stories) next weekend. Come on Andy, surely the insanely high hopes of the British public will be met with Nadal already out and only 14-times Grand Slam winner Roger Federer standing between you and the title.
Seriously though, I do think he has a chance. Could be a cracker on Sunday.
Weather update: spectacular change in the weather in the 30 minutes since I started writing this update. I'm now back in my apartment as the expected lovely sunset vanished, usurped by a sudden storm and potential rain. Hmmm, it'll have to be an episode of peep show in front of the telly this evening.
Still love a good fix of quirky British comedy.
It's the depths of winter, but Sydney is still a beautiful place to be outdoors. This morning I went for a run in the botanics. When the notion takes me I can run through the park down to the edge of the harbour, round the edge of the water between the botanics and farm cove (the site of the first white settlement in Australia) and jog up to the Opera House in about 15 minutes. A round tour back through the botanics takes about 30 minutes and I never see a single car. This morning it was spectacularly beautiful and peaceful too. Why do I not do this more often??
Well of course I'd do more outdoors-ey stuff like this if I did a little less socialising at the weekend, but being unattached in Sydney is always going to keep the number of 'quiet nights in' to a minimum. Similarly I'm typing this on the roof of my building - from the 17th floor you can see the bridge and the opera house to the left and out to the ocean to the right. Why is it two months since I was last up here??
My running route. Out my front door, past Brett Whitely's matchsticks, out past the Boy Charlton pool and round farm cove to the Opera House (to the right of the bridge in the photo). This was the view from the roof today. Work continues to be really sweet for me, and it will be even sweeter than usual this week. On Wednesday night I will be part of a panel being interviewed in front of an audience of young professionals in Sydney. We will be talking about Opportunity International of course, and also talking a little about the impact of the global economic crisis on the fight against poverty. The venue is a chocolate shop (ooh, free chocolate!), Boon Chocolates on Victoria Street in Darlinghurst. And the prospect of free chocolate has me very excited.
Not that I need free chocolate of course. But - not unusually for a Scot - I have a very sweet tooth. It's an affliction that comes and goes. At various times I can handle my condition (sic) pretty well but then at other times I just can't resist at least two 'treats' per day. This past month has been such a time. What constitutes a 'treat'? There's a modest list of top quality goodies that will satiate my junkie-like need for a sugary hit: crunchies (or violet crumble in Oz), mint aeros, McDonald's M&M Mcflurry and caramel slices are all near the top of the list, while home-baking (with it's built-in disregard for the dietary common-sense that afflicts products sold to the
general public) is almost an obsession, especially tablet, fudge and shortbread, all of which have that insane level of sweetness needed to satisfy a long-time sugar-abuser. (If my metabolic rate ever slows down I'm in so much bother...)But chocolate of any form will do nicely, thank you very much.
So needless to say, I'm very much looking forward to Wednesday. I may not sleep until Friday, and then of course I'll have to go cold turkey at the weekend. But by God will it be worth it.
And hopefully Andy Murray will give all Scots an excuse to stay indoors (and away from ice-cream vans and sweetie stories) next weekend. Come on Andy, surely the insanely high hopes of the British public will be met with Nadal already out and only 14-times Grand Slam winner Roger Federer standing between you and the title.
Seriously though, I do think he has a chance. Could be a cracker on Sunday.
Weather update: spectacular change in the weather in the 30 minutes since I started writing this update. I'm now back in my apartment as the expected lovely sunset vanished, usurped by a sudden storm and potential rain. Hmmm, it'll have to be an episode of peep show in front of the telly this evening.
Still love a good fix of quirky British comedy.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Winter in Sydney
WW takes some time-out from the battlefield to attend to local morale...It’s been more than a month. I’ve tried a few times but…
…I’ve had mixed feelings about this website since I stopped travelling. I’ve been reluctant to talk about the day-to-day stuff. It could get rather tedious (whadda ya mean ‘could’ I hear you say?). It’s much easier to make this lively and interesting when I’m talking about foreign travel, because the focus is on… exotic places and weird customs and freaky things happening. And I’m not talking so much about me…
But I do want to keep the blog going. It's good to blog. It's something for me to look back on if nothing else.
But maybe... maybe I can keep things interesting by not talking about me. Instead of talking about me, I could talk about ‘we’ – what ‘we’ at Opportunity have been doing, what ‘we’ as in me and friends have been doing, maybe even talk about ‘we’ as in me and my romantic interests. Nah, actually I might leave that for another day... tmi…
Because ‘we’ is what life should be all about (aaaahhhh!). Ahem, ok… definitely going to get on with it now, before this becomes nothing other than semantics and naval-gazing.
Opportunity International is a big part of my life at the moment. We (hey this is easy!) are going through a big big year in 2009. Not an easy year. We are working through the biggest global recession in 60 years – it affects our donors, it affects our partners (in
We are relying more on the work of our ambassadors – our highly involved volunteers, who are running projects for us, not just to raise funds, but to raise awareness. Most of all we want to make friends this year.
Last weekend we had an event for ambassadors in
Job satisfaction is often elusive. But if you can see an outcome (a product, a service, a change in the way things are done) making a positive change in peoples’ lives (whatever field you work in), and if you can know that you have made an important contribution to that outcome, then I think you’re there. I think we’re getting there.
Willie Wallace finds that freedom means different things to different people...
Party
Photos in this update are from last weekend’s (that was one busy weekend) fancy dress party. We had an awesome time, with great outfits (Jessica Rabbit, Mr T, Braveheart (yours truly), ballerinas and playboy bunnies). At the end of the night (ok, the next morning) it dawned on me that my wig was missing. Returning to the scene of the battle to ask for your wig back is something I’ll bet William Wallace never had to do. Mind you, even the bar staff had been trying it on, so it’s not surprising it went walk about…
It’s been great to reconnect with friends in
Next week sees the shortest day. The temperature is never too low (it’s never in single figures), but it feels somehow freezing at times. Wearing a jumper to work has become a daily necessity. Going out for a coffee seems a justified defence ‘against the cold’. How did I ever survive in
Iceman!!! Bogie at your 6, bogie at your... ahhh, whatever, let's just pose with Betty Boop.
Fluff
Lots of things have tickled me in the last month. For a week I was a geeky follower of the shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. There wasn’t a battery replacement, a module installation, a stubbornly resisting screw that I didn’t read about three or four times. That’s not drama?? Are you kidding me??
I’ve been to
I’ve been back at the physio. Being ancient, I break very easily these days. This time it’s the other shoulder. I now have lots more funny little exercises (steady!) to do over the next 6 weeks. At least I can still swim this time, though not in the ocean… and yeah I’m not missing that too much at this time of year.
I could go on, but I'll shut up at that. More fluff and 'we' soon.
And not an NRL player in site...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
