A few weeks ago our family cat of many years had to be put down. She had been poisoned by antifreeze. A few days later another nearby cat also suffered the same fate and there were rumours of many more in the area.
Category: Life
Random thoughts on life
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BMTG – 4 years later. Egos, rants and eggs.
Having had a break from Beeston Musical Theatre Group for 4 years it was good to see what’s changed. Sadly not much has.
Let me bring you up-to-date. I was a member for about 7 years and in the final couple of those I moved to being their Stage Manager. I decided I missed the stage so decided to perform again but with lots of friends having departed and the imminent arrival of my youngest daughter I abandoned it and, for 4 years, BMTG totally. During the latter few years of working with BMTG I feel I’d been treated rather rudely and so, to be honest, were glad to leave.
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Tax Dodging
Shaming companies who avoid tax, although legally, is big news at the moment. Whether it’s Google, Amazon or Starbucks no-one seems to avoid massive headlines, being pulled before MPs and the more extreme members of public refusing to shop with these companies.
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When is spam not spam?
Spam. We all hate it. Our email services normally complete with filtering services to try and keep it at bay.
But what is spam? According to Wikipedia, it’s…
the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages (spam), especially advertising, indiscriminately
Sounds about right. But, where does Twitter’s targeted adverts fit into this? To raise revenue advertisers can target tweets at individuals to promote their products. It’s Twitter’s equivalent of, say, Gmails targeted adverts that appear next to your emails when you view them.
But, because you didn’t ask for these messages, are they spam? They are unsolicited because you didn’t ask for them, although they are part of the T&Cs of Twitter…
The Services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the Content or information on the Services, queries made through the Services, or other information.
However, even though it is clear when viewing Twitter that these messages are officially targeted rather than genuine spam being sent outside of Twitter’s arrangements, people don’t seem to realise this, leading to often hateful messages being sent to the advertisers.
This isn’t the fault of Twitter because, as I say, it’s quite clear that these are official sponsored messages. Twitter is used as an example here because it’s lead to an environment where people say what they want when they want – even the most innocuous messages from a company can often lead to a nasty reply. In particular, it seems impossible for a company to even promote anything on Twitter without a service issue being thrown in the face as something they’d prefer the company to be working on.
Maybe that definition of spam needs re-writing and we need a re-think of what constitutes acceptable targeting.
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The iPhone 5s and the Foil Hat Brigade
Since the iPhone 5s was announced, complete with its fingerprint detector, comments have been awash with people assuming that using it will mean your fingerprints reported back to the NSA. The fact that Apple have said otherwise seems to hold no sway – the fingerprint data is held on the phone and is never sent anywhere else, they say.
