The article highlights the impact media has had on increasing people’s perception that Britain is in a ’social crisis’. The disappearance of local newspapers focused on local issues has left a void for national papers that are quick to make local bad news a national issue. In the comfortable burbs of the South the reader is constantly bombarded with doom and gloom stories of rampant gangs of knife-wielding teens, the hordes of healthy people sponging from the social security system and the invading mass of criminals from Eastern Europe. Isolated issues become national obsessions. Bad news quickly becomes big news as Brits love nothing more than a something negative to moan about at work.
I don’t believe Britain is facing a social crisis; I believe that Britain is struggling with its identity in a global society in which it becomes less powerful and relevant by the day, causing people to obsess about non-issues that scare up a fervor of fear-mongering. Instead of focusing on bad news Brits should focus on opportunities, the positive impact it can and does have on the world, and on helping one another correct the mis-perception that the country is going to the dogs!
The rather embarrassing recent hack of RockYou’s servers a few months ago provided researchers with 32 million passwords to carry out some interesting research on. You would have thought that with the all the media coverage of security leaks, privacy and confidentiality breaches that people would be more careful about what password they use, but no; one out of five Web users choose a simple, easily guessed password like ‘abc123′, ‘iloveyou’ or even ‘password’ to protect their data!
If you are guilty of using a simple password, or even the same password for every site you visit, change them now!
Mt advice; if you are a Mac user get 1Password (http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password) – now!
In past Christmases I have set myself fitness/weight and cycling goals for the coming year – a New Year’s Cycling Resolution of sorts. I would imagine lots of self-described cycling wannabees do the same thing. My goals typically revolve around some lofty aspiration to achieve Cat 1 status, ride across America few times and mount a serious challenge to Lance Armstrong in the next Tour de France! Not unsurprisingly I spectacularly fail to come even close on any of these…and instead join the melee on the ‘B’ ride each week – or get dropped by the ‘A’ ride after 10 miles and end up riding alone and dispirited for the remaining 50!
2010 will be different – why, because I want it to be, and I will be coming into 2010 in somewhat better shape than previous years, which allows me to delude myself that I have ‘momentum’.
So what will 2010 look like for me, well for one I want to actually do some races, rather than just enter them and then find a reason to not turn up – like a few too many drinks the night before. I also plan to turn up the pressure on myself by joining a training team, as I fully anticipate the peer pressure among teammates will be simply too much to resist. Finally, I want to actually get a license upgrade, rather than aspire to one; Cat 5, which my 4-year old could probably qualify for, is where I will have to start, to Cat 4, at which point you actually get prizes (assuming you finish in the top 3 and not amoung ypur former Cat 5 sufferers!
I’ll use my blog to post progress so watch this space…especially in around Nov next year when I will either be trumpeting my successes or quietly admonishing my inability to achieve much!
G’day. In early November I am heading to Melbourne, Australia for week to work with a start-up there I am advising. If anyone knows of other interesting start-ups I should check out while down-under please let me know in the comments or email me at warrickt [at] gmail dot com.
For a little over a year I have been at Zuberance, initially as an Advisor to guide and support the company through its first venture round, and later as VP Business Operations, where I managed pretty much every aspect of scaling a company from 2 employees and 1 customer to what it is today; several Fortune 1000 customers, around 20 employees/contractors, new offices and a new exec team.
Its been a fun journey but despite the ongoing economic gloom, I have decided to strike out and beat a different path. As a I write this I am sitting at home, working on a very cool new start-up that won’t change the world, but will make it a little more fun.
Thanks to everyone at Zuberance – I have made some new friends, learnt a lot and gained the confidence to do what I am doing now!
Goes to show that all that public money spent on cameras was worth it!
For the past several years, the UK Department for Transport (DfT) has heralded the drop in the number of serious traffic accidents as evidence of the success of its speed camera policies. For the first time, the agency admitted last Thursday that injury numbers have dropped because its statistical method is incomplete. Although DfT reported 230,905 injury accidents took place in 2008, the agency now believes the true number of accidents is actually three times greater.
Source: Reported Road Casualties Great Britain 2008 (UK Department for Transport, 9/24/2009)
We recently bought and installed a Hills Supafold clothes line on the side of our house. It has ample room for two washes, and given the weather here in N. California it’s at most an hour before we have lovely dry, fresh-scented clothes. All for almost $0. Which leads me to the point of this post….around 36 people live in Califonia in approx 12m households and yet very few of those have washing lines. My exhaustive research, which entailed asking a sales clerk in Bath and Beyond how many packets of pegs they sold each week, leads me to conclude that virtually no one has clothes lines (BTW just finding a store that sells pegs is a challenge!).
What with the rising cost of utilities and increasing awareness of our carbon footprint its deplorable that more people haven’t ditched their costly clothes dryers. I reckon a clothes dryer costs around $2 in electricity per load – which means that we only have to do around 120 loads before we are saving money – or about 14 months in our 4 person household! The ROI is far better than pretty much any other attempt to lower utility bills. Maybe the govt should have a program to encourage folks to help the planet rather than one to help them buy new cars which only harm it.
Posted by warrickt 
For a little over a year I have been at 
