Silicon Vallergy

"Nobody talks about teleports to Japan."

Not true!

Few things give me a headache like tech marketers. Unfortunately my organisation has been invaded by Silicon Valley alumni. You can tell. Long term scientific programs have been cut in favour of short term trendy "research" and "innovation". Apparently, a huge amount of data simply comes into existence in a magic cloud without anyone needing to do the unexciting task of collecting it in the first place.

So there I was stuck in a meeting with an ex-Yahoo marketing "guru" and entrepreneur.

He was "taking us on a journey" in our quest for "followers". Or some such crap. I was busy wondering how anybody could speak so many words yet say so little.

At the same time he spruiked Zeetings, some Web presentation/conversation web application he had some connection with. What I found telling is that as soon as he stopped using it, so did we. Not a compelling piece of technology then.

Marketing dude asked us for some words to describe the venture.

"How come nobody is talking about disruption?"

In the best moment of the day, somebody piped up that it was because the organisation has been in a permanent state of disruption for the past 5 years and everyone (barring the consultants) is sick of it. Disruption is a dirty word, we said.

And so the tide turned in the meeting, with the more forceful techies and researchers taking control and the only one paying attention to Mr Marketing was his offsider. We actually got some real work done figuring out practical requirements rather than meaningless aspirational buzzwords.

I still got a headache.

Holey bags Batman!

You know the superstition that bad luck comes in threes? Happened to me today. I was carrying a bag of cypress woodchips out of the garage when the bag disintegrated.

I thought the leaf blower/vacuum was doing a pretty good job of cleaning the mess up. Then I looked behind me and the garage was covered with cypress dust while the vacuum bag was virtually empty. The vacuum bag's zip had failed.

Later I was making dinner and had just finished putting half a packet of dried spaghetti into the pot. I tipped the packet containing the remaining spaghetti upright when the contents suddenly emptied on to my feet. The spaghetti packet had developed a hole in the bottom.

Lucky the groceries survived the trip home!