“Don’t blow it all at once.” This is good advice, but there’s no point giving it. You watch your mother, their grandmother, give your child £20 for its birthday and you give the advice that you know won’t be heeded. Appreciating the benefit of delayed financial gratification has to be …
Twelve months. Twelve images. It’s not easy choosing a single image to define a month when you take dozens. What does “defining” mean? Here is my definition of defining. It’s not about me. It’s not about Instagram. It’s about me and Instagram. January 7 This image works on both literal …
I blog therefore I am… …obliged to post a review of the year past. Well fuck that for a game of soldiers. Tweetdeck is amok with links to review and prediction posts already. They’ve even managed to displace the “7 ways to write a list-based blog post” brigade. And I …
Optimise for humans, not for robots. That’s always struck me as good, sound SEO advice. Write good, relevant, useful stuff for human beings and the Google algorithm that is doing its best to direct humans to good, relevant, useful stuff will reward you. Don’t waste your time trying to game …
I posted this image to Twitpic a while back, with the comment that Noel Gallagher looked more like his Spitting Image puppet than his human self. The Spitting Image puppets were three dimensional caricatures of famous people, mainly politicians, that were used to extreme satirical effect. And I got to …
I’ve drastically restructured my approach to Twitter. This goes waaaay beyond my “Twitter cull” earlier this year. Back in May I wrote about how and why I’d cut the number of people I followed by about 200 (from 968 to 770). This time I’ve gone from following 945 accounts to …
I called this blog Sawdust because the stuff I write about is intellectual sawdust from the sawmill that is my career in marketing communications. I post here anecdotes and opinions that feel more at home on my own blog than that of my current employer. However, until today, the header …
Player One describes itself as a novel in five hours. It is subtitled “What is to become of us?” So what happens in those five hours, what is to become of us and what is it all about? My first thought upon finishing it was that it was constructed as …
My wife trained as a nurse. Before we had kids and left London she worked on the oncology/haematology ward at The Royal London Hospital, where the care provided to patients and families was as much emotional as it was clinical. This stood her in good stead when, as part of …
I have a few shares in Standard Life. They are my scant reward for having taken out endowment policies with them back when “you couldn’t lose” with an endowment mortgage. (FFS). Those endowment policies made me a Standard Life member/owner back when it was a mutual organisation. The process of …
