Writing for life

Time is a curiously elastic commodity. One minute it’s flying by so quickly you don’t even notice it’s passing, the next it draws out into what seems an eternity. Have you ever looked at the clock, thought you had plenty of time to do whatever it is you needed to get done, only to glance up at it again a few moments later to find all of that time had evaporated?

It happens to me… a lot. Time, in our house, compresses and expands with gleeful abandon. Take this morning for example. This morning started off normally enough, time seemed to be behaving itself. Then the children started “playing” with a bit too much exuberance, time compressed and in the blink of an eye I lost a couple of hours. Suddenly it was lunchtime.

Take an arbitrary period of time… let’s say two weeks. If you were off on your holidays for two weeks, and were set to leave in exactly two weeks you can guarantee that the fortnight before you travel will drag on interminably, while your two weeks in the sun will veritably fly by. You’ll be home again almost before you realise you’ve been away. That’s time playing it’s “funny” little games again.

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 24/03/2008

I’ve published this week’s Working It column — a review of the Internet Marketing seminar “Getting Results in Online Marketing” by Praxis Now — to my Digital Marketing blog, because the subject matter fits.

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I can’t believe it… I won!

The Glengarrif Lodge competition that sparked all sorts of interest and debate amongst Irish bloggers about what does and doesn’t constitute legitimate SEO linkbait is over.

And I won!

I got a phone call late this afternoon from Alan Callender, who owns the lodge, to say that mine was the winning entry.

So the family and I are heading for Glengarrif on the 11th of April. It looks fantastic… I can’t wait!

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Technorati Tags: St Patrick’s Day,Clonakilty,Evening Echo Column,parenting

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 19/03/2008

On my left marched one of the twins dressed as a pig; on my right the other dressed as a bull, and in front of me, the little one dressed as what was supposed to be a chicken. The signs around their necks read “Danish Pork”, “Brazilian Beef” and “Thai Chicken” respectively. Behind me trotted another little girl – a “New Zealand lamb”. Somehow my wife and I had managed to avoid being transformed into denizens of the farmyard, but we were given banners to hold extolling the virtues of buying local produce.

Beside us a friend had a two-week-old Irish lamb tucked under his arm – an incredibly cute and lively counterpoint to the artificial foreign imports represented by our children. Glancing around I thought Old Macdonald, eat your heart out!

I hadn’t planned on even going to a St Patrick’s day parade, much less being part of one. In fact I’d spent most of Paddy’s weekend suffering the effects of food poisoning (probably the result of eating imported meat that had been thawed and re-frozen one too many times). Then a friend called us out of the blue and asked if we could help him out. Would the girls like to dress up as farm animals and march in the Clonakilty parade? We explained that they probably wouldn’t do it unless we were with them, to which he replied the more the merrier. And so here we were, marching through Clon with the Sustainable Clonakilty contingent.

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 17/03/2008

I’ve started using LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) a sort of grown-up social network for business contacts. It’s kind of like the business world’s equivalent to Facebook and MySpace, but it’s serious stuff – no Vampires, no throwing sheep, no movie quizzes and no posting embarrassing photos of your friends for all the world to see. LinkedIn may be an online social network, but it’s all strictly above board.

The reason I mention it is that, though I’ve had the account for quite a while, I only started to use it last week. I uploaded by e-mail address book into it and hey presto, it found loads of people in my contact list who were also on LinkedIn. Great… I invited the ones I actually knew to connect to my network. Some of them even accepted. Wonderful. I looked at my profile. There was nothing in it.

I needed to dig out what I’d been doing over the years, and when… now, where was I going to find that sort of information? Certainly not in the sieve like contraption that serves as my memory. Oh yes… it would be on my CV: that long neglected document languishing somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 12/03/2008

Henry Kissinger, America’s National Security Advisor during Nixon’s presidency, once remarked that “ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation”. Surveying the Irish political landscape today you’d be hard pressed to disagree with that assessment. We’ve got tribunals coming out of our ears, accusations of corruption flying left, right and centre, a government that nobody really trusts, and an opposition that’s basically woeful.

Did our esteemed government win the last election on the merits of their own policies? Did they cruise back into power, perhaps, on the back of public confidence in their performance? Or did they endure purely and simply because the electorate baulked at voting for even more unpalatable alternatives?

The competent politician appears to be an endangered species in Irealand today. Try picking one out the next time you catch a glimpse of the sparsely populated Dail Eireann on the telly. It’s a task that seems to be much harder than it should be, given that these are the people we’ve selected to represent our best interests at the very pinnacle of public office. Isn’t that disturbing?

So you have Bertie, Brian and Co. sitting pretty, knowing that they don’t really have to excel to retain their primacy. All they need to do is perpetuate the general perception that they’re a wee bit better than the alternative “team” across the floor of the Dail. Let’s face it, that’s hardly a tall order at present, is it? Continue Reading »

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“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 10/03/2008

What do you think of your boss? It’s OK, they’re not listening… so go on, what do you really think of them?

Perhaps you’re one of the lucky ones, and have a boss who really values his or her team, listens to what you have to say and actively seeks constructive contributions; a boss who offers direction and guidance when you need it, but is wise enough to step back and let you get on with your job when you don’t.

Then again, perhaps not.

Bad bosses, of course, have always been around, and always will be… but for some reason its a problem that seems to be on the rise, and it’s generating animated discussion off- and on-line.

Survey results indicate that approximately 40% of employees have, at some time or another, had to deal with a bad boss. A Gallup survey of more than 1,000,000 employees discovered that if a company is losing its best people, it can normally be traced back to problems with their immediate supervisors. Bad bosses, it seems, are the primary cause of staff turnover. “People leave managers not companies,” says Gallup. “So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people – in the form of better pay, better perks and better training – when, in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue.”

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I’ve just posted a piece about “Reality Mining” on my digital marketing blog. From a marketing perspective it opens up all sorts of options. From a consumer and privacy point of view, I don’t know….

I’m not really comfortable with the concept that my phone will be better than my friends and family at diagnosing depression.

How about the fact that using data from your mobile analysts will be able to predict exactly who you’re going to meet, and even on which day of the week you’re going to meet them.

Yikes!

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Stumbled across this wonderful writing advice on the web. It’s an article by best selling Science Fiction novelist C. J. Cherryh, and, as the author encourages sharing I thought I’d post it here in its entirety. It really is great advice, and although its naturally biased towards fiction writing (which is what most non-fiction writers secretly long to write anyway), there are heaps of useful suggestions that will help to make any writing more dynamic and engaging.

The most important thing to remember, as always, is that when you’re writing rules are never absolute. They offer guidance, but if breaking rules helps you convey your message more effectively, do it! Or as C. J. Cherryh so eloquently puts it: “CHERRYH’S LAW: NO RULE SHOULD BE FOLLOWED OFF A CLIFF”.

Enjoy….

Writerisms and other Sins:

A Writer’s shortcut to stronger writing.

by C.J. Cherryh

(c) 1995 by C.J. Cherryh

Copy and pass ‘Writerisms and other Sins’ around to your heart’s content, but always post my copyright notice at the top, correctly, thank you, as both a courtesy and a legal necessity to protect any writer.

Writerisms: overused and misused language. In more direct words: find ‘em, root ‘em out, and look at your prose without the underbrush. You may be surprised by how much better it looks.

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Tom Raferty of “Tom Referty’s Social Media” has just set up a new blog to explore green issues. He ran a competition on his blog to suggest a domain and ended up choosing lowerfootprint.com — which was one of my offerings.

Tom passed on a Fire Eagle invitation (thanks Tom) for the winning suggestion. Fire Eagle is Yahoo’s new geographically aware platform that, in theory, will let other applications “know” where in the world you are at any given time, allowing them to tailor their services accordingly. I’ve signed up, but so far there’s no user-level application for the technology… although I see there are a few things in the pipeline. I’ll write more when there’s something to report.

Meanwhile I’d like to wish Tom all the best with his new venture. The more we can all do to bring the issues surrounding climate change to a mainstream audience, the better. Check it out, subscribe to the RSS feed, comment, encourage debate, spread the word, raise awareness.

Businesses are slowly coming around to the fact that they need to become more ecologically responsible — and the greener application of technology certainly has a big huge role to play in that transition. At present jury’s still out on how many are doing it for ethical/environmental reasons and how many are simply jumping on the eco-PR bandwagon — but the fact that they’re doing it at all is, I suppose, a step in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: climate change,environment,lower footprint,carbon footprint,Tom Raferty,fire eagle

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