Pazzardous Material Vol 28 – the week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the bottom):
Crash and Burn
Who’s running the show?
Politically, as a nation, we’re in limbo.
Theresa May’s Brexit strategy plan omniclusterfuckshambles has well and truly crashed and burned.
Our political situation is related to this blog because this blog is related to:
- Opportunities
- Collaboration
- Easy cross-border trade
- Partnerships
- Connection
- Legacy
- Employment
- Self-employment
- Business
- Optimism
Inbetweener
Let’s say you have a teenage son or daughter. Let’s say that teenager is old enough to get a job and that it might be a good idea that he or she starts to earn some money.
Let’s say there’s a bit of ‘resistance’ to the idea.
“You don’t have to get a job,” I say. “But you do have to start earning money.”
“Ebay’s a great place to start,” I suggest. “Buy some things that have been listed badly, maybe drumming memorabilia or equipment, re-list it and sell it for a higher price.”
“How do I get the money to buy things in the first place?”
And then we’re off, and I’m boring her about start-up capital before we know it.
Playing With Knives
Internet education is, admittedly, a wide-ranging subject.
But I can see benefits for teenagers of all abilities and backgrounds, and with all sorts of talents, understanding how to use the internet’s abundance of opportunities to help build themselves a life they can be proud of. And, maybe, how they might use social media differently.
Whether they’re aspiring musicians, mathematicians or magicians; dancers, designers or database administrators, I think we can do more to help young people.
Moving Too Fast
I’ve only gone and done it. I’ve cut the chord.
In other words, I’ve told Sky we’re leaving them and have gone for Freeview and Netflix instead. No point paying nearly sixty quid a month for rubbish telly we don’t watch.
On their letters to tell me I’m leaving/they’re sorry/blah blah, I saw the Internet Matters logo. internetmatters.org is:
a non-for-profit organisation that has a simple purpose – to empower parents and carers to keep children safe in the digital world.
Back & Forth
Occasionally I’ll read a tip (always more comfortable for me to say out loud than ‘life hack’) that reckons it’ll give me back ten hours a week or similar.
One that springs to mind sells the idea that flitting backwards and forwards between email, the news, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, my phone – and my work – harms productivity and should be managed.
Is it right? I reckon so. According to Ofcom, people in the UK check their smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes of the waking day.
Leaving email to one check at lunchtime and another in the afternoon is a good idea but not practical for me most of the time, simply because of the work I do.
But there is value in committing to a particular task and seeing it through, rather than bouncing around between devices and sources of info.
Scared
Google Sheets and Google Docs are so useful and so embedded in my daily work that it’d be hard to imagine the pain if I weren’t able to use them one day, suddenly and without warning.
But that’s exactly what happened to someone I know and their business: they went to use their Google account one day, just like any other, and they were locked out.
Quite a scary prospect.
But there’s a quick and easy way to help minimise the pain that’d result from such a scenario: click on ‘File’ and download the most important docs/spreadsheets to your computer every day or once a week.
Get Back
A term I come across fairly often online is ‘reverse engineering’.
Here’s a definition:
It’s working out how something was (or might have been) made or achieved by looking at the result first and then trying to identify how the creator reached that point by looking at the process in reverse order. This might be done to try to duplicate the process and aim for similar success.
An example, in plainer language, could be looking at how Ed Sheeran got to play Glastonbury’s main stage (in 2017) after playing the festival’s smallest stage (June 2011) after playing at the Camden Barfly (in April 2011).
Copying a successful path might not lead to much of course, but studying several might at least help to generate a few decent ideas and fuel ambition.
>>>Playlist<<<
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