Wizard New Media

A Creamed Cage in August. Never heard of it? What about Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow? Still no?

Actually, they are one and the same. It’s a Marc Bolan and T.rex Album from 1974. So what, I hear you say, some old shite that nobody listens to any more. You’re almost right. I own two copies of this album. Both are vinyl copies that I haven’t played in more than 20 years. The single sleeved version was played a lot back in the day. The gatefold sleeve version which is rare has only seen a couple of outings.

Normally when working, anywhere, I need my music. It helps me concentrate and get things done. Take away my music and my attention deficit order kicks in big time – look a squirrel! Of recent weeks when working at our home office, with my partner at the next desk it has been a bit awkward. Sharron is the opposite of me – she can’t stand music when she is working , and that includes when I wear headphones. This usually means I go sulking off to the living room with the laptop.

Sharron is off site today, so I took advantage of Spotify at full volume. Normally I just let it run, but today I thought a bit of Bolan would be good. Spotify pulled up some really duff covers of Raw Ramp and Motivator by Steve Overland. Leave the guitar solos alone. Bolan wasn’t a great guitarist but I loved these solos – shame on you.

So I’m scanning and I find Zinc Alloy, selected all the tracks and off we go. Some of the songs I though were crap when I was 14 sound so much better to my (almost) 50 year old ears. I now have a new favourite T.rex album. Thank you Spotify – you’re real pal.

Truck on Tyke………………..

My signature edition of Windows 7  Ultimate has arrived – hurrah!

I had just fallen in the door after an exhausting trip back from Edinburgh. The rain, the traffic – I swear my next bike will have a fairing. I was greeted, firstly by the dog and secondly by a rather large box. There was no plain packaging to be seen. The package is actually larger than the one Hayley’s Dell laptop arrived in yesterday, and is emblazoned with Windows 7. As Rolf Harris would have had to say, you’ve guessed what it is then!

As I write the install is underway. Update to follow.

Technology expectations should be realistic – don’t promise bang wizz and then fail to deliver. That has always been my mantra and, over the years, I have often moaned about what a service says it will do and then been disappointed with the actual results.

Sometimes, however, its not down to the service itself, but rather how the service is delivered. We are at the mercy of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the bandwidth they provide us to go about our daily tasks.

It was good to catch up with content guru Gerry McGovern today. He was taking me through his latest incarnation of Customer Carewords – if you haven’t heard about it  hang your head in shame. So there we are Skype to Skype and having a blether. Gerry moves me on to a meeting using gotomeeting.com so that we can discuss the finer details. It doesn’t quite work. Disappointed? Not a jot. Once we have a established the limits, it is perfectly possible to have a business discussion. We make allowances for Gerry’s broadband playing up. As a fall back he moves to using his mobile broadband dongle and we get a positive result.

So what is the point of all this waffle, I hear you ask, and, be honest, some of you started thinking this at the very first sentence! The point is; a couple of years back we couldn’t have had our meeting online. It would have seemed like a magic lantern show. I have been talking up web conferencing for a long time – usually to an audience that seemed to be thinking “burn the witch , burn the witch” – and now we just accept it as being like radio or tv. When it doesn’t work – some people get agitated – us old heads don’t.

Stop to think about it. I am sitting at home in Dunoon. Gerry is sitting at home in Ireland. We are using telephony over the internet, running through slides and websites via Citrix and all we have to complain about is a five second delay. To me that is still amazing – will I ever grow up?

I downloaded the new E-consultancy report “Effective Web Design” Here’s my thoughts on it.

T-Mobile and Orange plan to merge their UK businesses, creating a mobile phone giant with 28.4 million customers.

The deal between Orange-owner France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK will see a business with sales of 9.4bn euros (£8.2bn; $13.5bn).

Holding about 37% of the mobile market it will be the UK’s largest provider, overtaking Telefonica’s O2.

It is the second large corporate deal in two days, after Kraft Food’s £10.2bn takeover proposal for Cadbury.

Orange and T-Mobile said their deal – due to be signed by November – would “bring substantial benefits to UK customers”, and promised expanded network coverage, better network quality and improved customer services.

However it is likely that competition authorities in the UK and EU will probe the deal.