£224m on ContactPoint. Seems cheap compared to the ID card.
Monthly Archive for October, 2008
I didn’t know Shibam existed; shocking scenes now it has been subject to flooding. I hope they choose to rebuild it (as they did Budva and Kotor in Montenegro after an earthquake).
Well almost, if you can believe the science, my brain is almost at its peak operational level. Doesn’t feel like it.
DfT IT spends: £128m is a slight decrease on the shared services project.
Use paper, not EDI (because document capture is getting so good) - is this a sensible discusion to have with NPEDG?
SAP not predicting the future as profits fall.
NPfIT not dead after all.
Can you spot insider trading after the fact by looking at stock markets? It seems so.
Graze offers vegebox-style healthy snacks delivered to your desk. A nice idea. But our post comes in at 2pm at work (and at the home office) so would it be so useful?
Some good ammo / info for start ups from Saul. For example, some serious companies started during recessions and the relentless focus on customers buying product to get to break even.
Funny to see four faces I knew (mostly from Balliol) in the picture of the Bullingdon Club released alongside the Osborne / Mandelson / Rothschild brouhaha.
It didn’t cause much of a stir, and I guess there are plenty of reasons for that, but I’m glad to see that the Digital Inclusion consultation we helped support is out in the market. There will be a Digital Champion - I wonder how well any of the other champions have worked at joining up disparate parts of government.
In the light of reports like this on Ministry of Justice requirements for savings, and the Operational Efficiency Programme, can government manage to make savings while attempting to spend its way out of recession. This has to be a really hard ask to to avoid mortgaging all of our futures in tax.
Interesting question - what will be possible in the age of LinkedIn? Do people really value the conference call conferences that people advertise?
Lies, damn lies, etc. You can have many different definitions of recession, and they don’t all tell the same story.
Gladwell says genius doesn’t necessarily come at speed. I guess this links in to the 10,000 hours concept as well? It ws funny to hear the latter being mentioned on Radio 4 Thought for the day just after I had read about it.
As the first commenter, I really liked the Jerusalem lights.
Just reading Yes! whcih looks like a silly business book, but is really about the science of how the external world affects our internal world. Many of the ideas are touched on in the latest Edge. If you don’t believe it about priming, go to the implicit tests page. How about an example: you’ll say “I don’t believe it”.
You give people a pencil, and have them watch cartoons. First, they watch with a pencil in their mouths horizontally, and then with a pencil in their mouths sticking straight out. And they are rating how funny the cartoons are. Cartoons are a lot funnier if you have a pencil in your mouth horizontally, than if you have the pencil sticking straight out. Nothing has been mentioned about mood or anything else. You are creating a facial shape that is the shape of a smile, or more of a frowning shape. That influences emotions.
Litlle or no chance of a table next year, but AA Gill liked it. “it is a masterclass in the metaphysics of how, what and why we eat, while still being dinner”. I’m afraid I have to agree.
The Windows Mobile 6.1 update is finally available. Deactivate Co-Pilot before you run it and follow the instructions here. Looking forward to threaded text and the important test of whether the machine will still work without connecting to Exchange.
I really like the way that Weave syncs Firefox (browsing history, passwords, cookies, etc) between multiple machines (Mac, PC, Work, Home), but it has been flakey and I haven’t been able to get it working on my own WebDAV on my raggett.net site. So instead, I’ve done the MyDisk.se version advocated here. What do you know? It just works.
These magnetic cable clips look useful and not just for headphones.
Jakob advises us that we get email wrong a lot when dealing with customers. Read on at Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages. Micro content is really hard to get right, and this confirms its importance.
