Writing for life

I

The Mullroy Bay II wallowing half submerged at high tide – lit with orange filters on an array of 5,000,000 candle power handheld lanterns.

I was invited by Marc Holden of Firehorse Imaging to attend and photograph an extremely unusual event on Saturday 15/11/08. Local artist Sheelagh Broderick was inspired by the half submerged hulk of a disused trawler, The Mulroy Bay II, to highlight the plight of the local fishing industry, and the effect it’s having on West Cork’s coastal communities.

Sheelagh contacted Chantelle Stewart of Guerilla Lighting and together they hatched an intricately coordinated plan to light the stricken vessel from the water. They used two RIBs and an army of volunteers armed with 5,000,000 candle power handheld lanterns and filters to pick out the vessel in the darkness.

I’d been given a Manfrotto 055ProB tripod with the amazing 322RC2 trigger-grip ball-head for my birthday the day before, so jumped at the chance to put the combination to the test. Still, I was VERY wary of the poor low-light performance of my trusty old Nikon Coolpix 5700.

Focussing was a huge challenge, as was time between shots (each was an 8 second long exposures + 8 second “noise reduction” exposure + write time to the card) – but a couple of the images came out OK – including the one they used (without acknowledgement… grrr!) with an article in the Southern Star.

… and the same vessel lit without the orange filters.

The view from the other side of the vessel.

Trying to use a tripod from a RIB moored to a buoy gives interesting results….

As an exercise in low light photography it was extremely challenging; as an experience it was wonderful… racing around Baltimore harbour to church strand on RIBs in the pitch black was invigorating… if a little chilly… and Sheelagh’s hospitality at the house before and after the event was fantastic.

Image via Wikipedia

I sat watching the depressingly slow advance of the little blue progress bar on my laptop screen. Downloading the 150 odd e-mails that had accrued in my mailboxes over the last 24 hours was taking an age… and as for checking the various websites that help keep me connected and up-to-date… forget it.

On Friday evening we unexpectedly lost our fixed wireless broadband connection. One minute it was there, the next it was gone. Like most broadband connections in Ireland it was an overpriced and under-performing beast – but it also put a wonderful world of information and connectivity at our fingertips. Now it was gone, and we were back to the excruciating crawl of a dial-up connection.

You don’t realise how much you’ve come to rely on something until it’s taken away. I can’t count how many times a day I’d look up a website, do a quick Google search to double check a fact, go online to communicate with friends, family and business contacts and to generally stay connected with the world around me. Going back to dial-up was like stepping back into the dark ages… I had to remind myself that this was, in fact, still the reality for a rediculously high number of households in rural Ireland.

No broadband… it took a while for the implications to sink in. My first instinct was to go online, do some research and explore other options, but of course I couldn’t. That’s when it hit me – how could we run our home-based businesses without internet access? The answer: not very well at all!

Everything about the businesses depends on the internet: the websites, e-mail, payments, banking, accounts. Even the business phone line is delivered online. Dial-up simply isn’t an option for us any more.

Unfortunately we live in what can only be described as Europe’s digital backwater. While Ireland has made great strides to improve broadband availability over recent years, we typically pay through the nose for much slower connections than our European peers, and an unacceptable proportion of Irish households still can’t get a broadband connection at all.

It’s curious that we find ourselves in this position as Europe’s digital poor-relations. To listen to our government you’d swear we were ahead of the curve in the technology stakes. They talk about Ireland leading the charge towards a knowledge based global economy, but while they pimp Ireland as the technology hub of Europe on the global stage, small businesses at home are struggling to compete because they don’t have access to the bandwidth they need. It’s a shambles!

And it’s not just small businesses that are suffering in this impoverished digital environment. The internet, and the suite of communication and information technologies it enables, is a vital educational resource for our children. They’re growing up in a technology centric world; to thrive and succeed tomorrow they need to engage with that technology today. Without a decent internet connection at home and at school they simply can’t do that.

The next day I rang our telephone provider, praying that our local exchange had finally been “broadband enabled”. Luckily it had! I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and signed up straight away. It’s going to take three long weeks for us to get connected, and because we’re a long way from the exchange, there is no guarantee we’ll get the connection speeds we need.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. It’s going to be a long three weeks.

Image by caribb via Flickr

Last week Irish trade union SIPTU sent a letter to Aer Lingus letting them know that its members have approved strike action if the airline proceeds with plans to axe around 1,300 jobs.

While I feel for the Aer Lingus workers’ plight… I really do, reading part of the letter (released into the public domain as part of a SIPTU press release) made me cringe.

In a couple of paragraphs it demonstrates everything that’s wrong with communication in the workplace. It’s pompous and utterly unintelligible business writing at its very worst. Here’s an extract from the letter to show you what I mean.

This decision of our members in the Aer Lingus Branch, Cork No. 5 Branch and Shannon Aviation Branch has now been sanctioned by the National Executive of SIPTU and you are hereby served with fourteen days official notice of same.

Following the expiry of notice the decision will be activated as decided by the Union arising from the unilateral implementation by the company proceeding to implement new or changed terms and conditions of employment without agreement contained in their proposals of October 6, 2008 or any variation thereof. In this connection you should note that the sanction covers strike action and the full withdrawal of labour with the placing of pickets on the company locations, and [for] industrial action which is [for] limited work stoppages with the withdrawal of labour and the placing of pickets on … company locations. The nature, timing and duration of any or all of the foregoing will be determined by the Union.

Again, please… clearly, and in English this time! Reading the above made my heart sink, and my head hurt.

If workers, or anybody else for that matter, really want to get their message across they need to stop trying to sound important by throwing in formal, over elaborate and superfluous verbiage (much as I did there ), and start writing clearly in plain, easy to understand English.

The latest entry in the Plain English Campaign’s “Gobbledegook of the week” reads as follows:

"By aggregating a range of public and commercial datasets, including global addressing and Directory Enquiries, voter databases, commercial data and documentation including dates of birth, and voice-based verification solutions, 192.com Business Services delivers the most comprehensive global online ID verification solution available. "

(from www.192.com)

I think the SIPTU letter trumps that with ease: it’s in a league of it’s own. Or rather, it isn’t, which I guess is the material point here. All too often business and workplace communication is bloated, jargon riddled dross written by people who think that throwing long words into overly intricate prose makes them sound more important than they really are.

But here’s the rub… when the name of the game is getting your message across, you’re audience doesn’t care how “important” you sound, or how many syllables you can cram into a single sentence. They care about the clarity with which you deliver the essential information. People are busy, they don’t have time to decrypt your missive – they need to understand it instantly, first time round.

Communicating clearly with your target audience – whether that’s your customers, your co-workers or your employer – is critical to any business, and never more so than during hard economic times. So, before you send anything – letters, e-mail, blog posts, comments… anything at all – read it through to yourself at least once, aloud if necessary, and ask yourself truthfully “does this achieve what it sets out to do efficiently and effectively”? If the answer is no, perhaps you should stop and take another look.

And by the way, if you happen to be a national union executives looking to serve strike notice on the CEO of a major company, and you’d like some help writing your letter, you could always drop me a line .

Related articles by Zemanta

• Aer Lingus staff to vote on strike action
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Image by jmtimages via Flickr

On the 4th of November 2008 Barack Obama made history when he was elected as the first black president of the United States of America. It’s an achievement that is remarkable for a lot of reasons… and one that has far reaching implications not just for Americans, but for people around the globe.

One of the most striking things for me about Obama’s election has nothing to do with race. It is the overwhelming impression I get that here, finally, is a politician who has been elected into office on merit. That may not sound like such a revolutionary a concept – but here in modern Ireland it’s practically unheard of. Our incumbent administration endures because a large chunk of the electorate has zero confidence in the competence of the opposition to govern. It really is that simple.

Back across the Atlantic (I refuse to call any ocean a “pond”) you could argue that the same thing applied last week. The alternative to the Obama / Biden ticket was hardly a compelling proposition. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who could convincingly dub John McCain a dynamic force for change, and as for Sarah Palin… well, I think enough has already been said on that score.

But despite the fact that Obama would probably have won the election anyway, through lack of viable opposition… I’m still left with the very strong feeling that he won the votes of the undecided masses largely on the merits of his policies, and the overwhelming belief that here was a man who had the best interests of the American people at heart.

That last point is an important one… but one that seems to have been overshadowed by the “Obama Mania” that’s gripped the world over the last week. Buoyed on a wave of euphoria that spread from its epicentre in Chicago to engulf the globe, people seem to have lost sight of the fact that Barack Obama is, in fact, President Elect of the United States of America. He is not President Elect of the World at large.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Mr Obama will make an excellent president. His biggest obstacle will be the incredible burden of anticipation that now weighs heavily upon him. People expect incredible things from this man, and I’m sure he’ll prove a force for long-overdue change in the US. The knock on effects of that change will ripple out to impact many nations around the world – our little island state included. Much of that impact will be positive; some of it won’t. Whatever changes the new president decides to implement, you can be certain of one thing: those changes will be driven by policies forged around the best interests of the American people. The wellbeing, economic or otherwise, of Ireland, Europe and the rest of the world, simply won’t factor into the equation.

I always find it amusing when blockbuster Hollywood disaster movies – the likes of “Independence Day”, “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Armageddon” – portray the rest of the world waiting with baited breath for America to save the day, save the planet and save humanity. The truth of the matter is that, despite the hype surrounding this election, we are not beholden to the US or any other nation.

The US president is not, in fact, the “Leader of the Free World”. The independent nations that constitute “The Free World” are, and always have been, free to make their own decisions, based on what’s best for their own people. What it ultimately boils down to is this: Barack Obama will do a great job of looking after America’s best interests… here in Ireland we’ll have to make do with Brian Cowan!

GadgetRepublic.com, a new tech-review site, and sister-site to the excellent technology news site SiliconRepublic.com, launched yesterday and I have to say that it looks very promising.

Gadget Republic is edited by award winning technology journalist Marie Boran of Siliconrepublic.com, so the standard of the reviews on the site, as you would expect, is very high. They’re well written, insightful and hit that elusive balance between personal opinion and technical expertise perfectly.

This is a great resource for anyone looking to keep abreast of what’s hot and what’s not on the tech-gadget front; if you’re anything like me you’ll be adding Gadget Republic to your feed reader pronto.

Congratulations to Marie and the team at SiliconRepublic.com on a job well done… I look forward to reading many a great review on the site.

“Trick or treat, trick or treat, give us something nice to eat….”

When you’re answering your own door to an assortment of miniature ghouls and goblins it’s a phrase that brings a smile to your face, or would if you weren’t trying so hard to look suitably terrified. Standing in the freezing cold on somebody else’s doorstep as the words trip from the tongues of your own band of little monsters it becomes positively cringe-worthy.

Standing begging on people’s doorsteps isn’t exactly my idea of a fun night out – but we were running late for the Halloween disco. So, I took the kids around the neighbours’ houses while my wife put the finishing touches to her own ghastly outfit (this is probably the only time of year I can describe what she’s wearing as ghastly and get away with it…).

The neighbours had been expecting us, and had all sorts of sweet goodies at the ready. By the time they’d finished, they’d managed to accrue a fairly impressive stash, despite the fact that we live in the middle of nowhere and have very few neighbours within walking distance.

I checked their bags to see what they’d got… sweets, crisps, bars, lollipops and, lurking near the bottom of each bag, a solitary apple… the only thing in the haul really worth eating.

Halloween is great fun for kids… but it’s a shame it’s become so synonymous with gorging on sweets, chocolate, crisps and fizzy drinks. It’s yet another example of “US spin” warping traditional heritage and culture and turning it into so much less than the sum of its original parts. It’s like synergy, only in reverse: more is less, as opposed to less is more.

I can’t help wondering why

we’re always so eager to emulate elements of American culture, when in so many ways they’re patently flawed. But we do it time and again in all areas of life. Take childhood obesity, for example; America has a huge problem with overweight and obese children. Now… thanks largely to the fact we’re so quick to hop on the American bandwagon… so have we.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that the annual sweet-and-snack-fest that Halloween has become is the cause of rising levels of obesity in Irish children. That would be daft. The real problem is the lamentable fact that this rubbish has become a staple of Irish children’s diets.

The National Children’s Food Survey found that far from being an “occasional treat”, sweets, snacks and biscuits now account for a fifth of the average Irish child’s energy intake. That’s a staggering figure for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, researchers in Dublin are beginning to uncover a correlation between obesity in childhood and the early onset of “adult” diseases like cardiovascular problems and type 2 diabetes in Irish children.

Studies, reports, think-tanks and government recommendations are all very well, but ultimately it’s parents who need to take a lead in tackling Ireland’s growing obesity problem. Looking after our children’s wellbeing is paramount for any parent, and their diet is a fundamental part of that responsibility. It’s our job to introduce children to good food and to instil healthy eating habits from an early age.

By all means let children have fun, go a bit OTT on the sweets and run riot on special occasions… just don’t let it become the bedrock on which they’ll build the eating habits of a lifetime.