The Zig » General

Tag, I’m it.

fletchy — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:50:05 +0000

Jana tagged me a few weeks back, I’ve been scouring the anecdotal quarter of my brain, usually only accessible at parties, after alcohol, in the company of pretty women. It’s not been easy, but here we go, mine are a little longer than most, once I start writing I have a difficulty stopping:

1) I hated school and was a totally average student
I can’t imagine a system more designed to producing mediocrity than the english school system, I went to a really bad school but I dont think it would have made much difference where I had gone. I wasn’t the best behaved student and had absolutely no interest in 90% of the topics they tried to teach me (Not helped that I’m instantly turned off by anything with a definate answer which ruled out most of the subjects bar English and Business Studies). I think I was a little mis-understood, here are some of my favourite quotes:

French Teacher: You’re the worst student I’ve ever had.

This was in relation to my behaviour not language learning skills, where I was actually in set 2 of 5.

Science Teacher: You’ll probably work in mcdonalds all your life

Art Teacher: That’s nice, what is it?

Next French Teacher: You’ll have to work very hard to achieve an E (lowest possible pass grade).

- I sure showed her! I’m (and I’m sure my parents) are very proud to say that I never looked a book and still achieved the prestigious honour of the lowest possible pass grade E (not that my CV shows it, in England anything below a C is considered a failure)

The job and interest’s I have now bare absolutely no resemblance to the skills I had then, I was in set 3 of 5 for English (hence my inability to spell or punctuate), didnt opt to study IT (my parents didn’t get a PC until I was 14/15).

2) I used to be an IT tutor for adult learners.
This was teaching a government sponsored beginners IT program for adult workers and the elderly. My oldest pupil was in their 80’s, I would teach everything from launching an application to semi-advanced word stuff like mail merge. I remember once spending 20mins (over the phone) trying to show an elderly women in her 80’s how to turn her PC on. After that time, we concluded

a) Distance learning wasnt for her
b) Distance IT tutoring wasn’t for me
c) She’d been turning her Pc speakers on and off.
d) I’m not so good with the elderly…..

3) I only ever had two career goals, to take over the world (aka fletchycorp) and to work for Microsoft (taking over the world once removed). The first is doomed to failure, the second I was lucky enough to do with my first real, adult job. I spent 13 great months at Microsoft, seeing how a business is run when money is no object. I realised pretty quick that as much as I loved it there, I didnt want to go back, and how hard it would be to give up money/lifestyle once you’ve had it.

4) I once came runners up in a picture of health contest at Butlins.
I have a younger brother and older sister, but we’ve never been into organised fun or joining kids clubs etc. So my parents threw a wobbly about not making the most of the holiday or something, I think maybe I was 7 or 8 (it was butlins after all, not exactly the cultural beacon of the UK). So I was bullied into entering this picture of health competition. Today I think most of men in attendance would be arrested, I guess we lived in different or at least more naive times. I had to stand on a stage infront of a room full of people in just my swimming trunks.

The winner was a fat kid…. It was pity voting at its finest.

It taught me some great lessons though:

a) Life isn’t fair
b) Your parents don’t have your best intentions at heart.
b) Butlins is the first place I’ll close down when I take over the world.

Its a good thing they didnt take into account mental health in their “picture”, mine degenerated rapidly with every minute I was forced to stand infront of a room of people in just my swimming trunks. I’m not sure its ever recovered.

5) I’m adopted but no-one will admit it.
I bare just about no physical or personality traits with the rest of my family. Growing up I used to get alot of stick for the tan I have that no-one can explain, I was taunted for being the “Milkmans son” or being Tunisian. I also have a very fair, blonde sister and a ginger dad (I dont have any photo’s online so you’ll have to take my word for it).

The differing personality traits are even more striking than the physical.

Now I get to tag:

1 & 2 – Christian Bahrendt & Andreas Milles

Two of my team-mates at SS, they entertain me all day with their quirky german strangeness and interesting perspectives. Not sure if Christian has a personal blog, but if not i’ll put up his tag here.

3 – Sparky – My usual partner in crime, tech journalist and further proof of the supremacy of the english sense of humour

4 – Monsieur Lam. Lafraisian and all round interesting guy.

5 – Miles from InnerTee. I’ve interviewed Miles on here a few times, fun guy and I’d like to know more about his background and how he ended up starting innerTee.

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A series of unfortunate events

fletchy — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:42:07 +0000

Sometimes when life gives you lemons the only logical thing to do is………………………… drown yourself in a very sour bath.

Check this out for a series of unfortunate events:

I’m at a hotel in berlin. I’m here for Bright Eyes tonight and Arcade Fire tomorrow. I’ve recently sold 4 tickets to Arcade Fire at a tidy profit of 250eur (ticket touting is most definetely totally wrong and immoral, i usually sell everything at face value, but this time I have reason’s too personal to write here

So I’ve just found out the gig is cancelled. So i’m actually down (ignoring the fact that im actually a very cheery person, that bright eyes is not yet cancelled, that im loving two days on my own to clear mail, think and write and all the other reasons that make this not actually that big a deal):

2 days holiday

2 nights hotel

return accomodation from Leipzig to germany

A second chance to see my favourite band (could have been third I also had London tickets that I wasnt able to use but sold at face value).

250eur profit, some of which is already spent

In the dumps.

I’m off to squeeze a bath

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T for Trivia

fletchy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 13:35:48 +0000

A prestigious honour was bestowed upon me this week. It was a proud moment for me, my parents and $!*% you to all the doubters.

What could this honour be? I was crowned…………. Spreadshirts Brainteaser Champion for this week! Recognized for my outstanding trivia knowledge. Check out my trophy:

How did I win such an astoundingly beautiful trophy? Being the only correct answer to this question. Feel free to guess the answer in the comments, you wont win the trophy, just recognition, self-respect or something equally intangible:

You’ve probably heard of all these famous urban myths before but you might be surprised to discover that only one of them is true. which one?

1. The athletic shoe Adidas gained its name from an acronym for ‘All Day I Dream About Sex’.

2. The word ‘golf’ is an acronym formed from “gentlemen only; ladies forbidden

3. Van Halen’s standard performance contract contained a clause that asked for them to be provided with a bowl of M&Ms, but with all the brown ones removed

4. The Great Wall Of China is the only man-made object visible from the moon

5. The word ‘posh’ is an acronym for ‘Port Out Starboard Home’ which was printed on the first-class tickets issued by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.Â

6. The John Steinbeck novel The Grapes of Wrath was published in a Japanese translation with title The Angry Raisins.

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Traffic.

fletchy — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 19:30:35 +0000

I’ve been thinking about what drives traffic to a site. Maybe running a little marketing series for the spreadshirt shop-partners. I thought i’d look at what works for other sites and ~~blatantly steal their ideas~~ leverage their concepts:

1. Paris Hilton naked
eg 99.9% of all websites. Oh yes, nothing drives traffic like nakedness and paris hilton or even better (and far more likely) a naked paris hilton. I havent really been able to come up a valid reason or hook to post photos or videos of Paris Hilton naked though. Maybe just writing “see paris hilton naked here”, will net some uniques. Its unlikely to help a tshirt site though. I’ll let you know. It’l be like an experiment, or something. I can wear a labcoat and poke things with a ruler.

2. Ecletic content
eg Boing Boing. Only without all the hippie crap they always post about freedom this, equality that. If Boing Boing was a receipe it would be:

a) 1 part cory plugging his geek stories.
b) 1 part the most random things you’ve ever seen.
c) 1 part freedom of speech, global citizenship, web hippie stuff.
d) 1 part companies are evil.

Heres my attempt at a day in the life of boing boing:

a) Once there was a computer in the future and it one day it was hit by lightning and developed ai and everyone freaked out, there was some moral discussion about what this meant for civilisation. The american government tried to destroy it, some geek radicals smuggled it to sealand and “interface” with it whenever they think no-ones looking. Its now spends its time attempting to compute the number of friends Tom has from myspace in real-time, and looking at pictures of paris hilton naked when it thinks no-one is looking.

b) Did you know someone made a whole church out of lego. I have nothing poignant to say about the sheer amount of time you must have to want to do this, but its frickin’ awesome, quite like the word frickin’. No, actually a little more.

c) Open source is good, Creative commons is better. Read T & C’s. Save trees. Get out more. Love your e-neighbour. Carbon offset.

d) As the future leader of the world enslaving fletchycorp, I have no problem with this notion.

3. Post photos of me in tshirts
eg Tcritic – Theres nothing I like more than seeing a beautiful tshirt on the fine physique of karl the tcritic guy with the ginger goatee. Sometimes I like to put tshirts on and stroke my non-existant goatee and just pretend for a moment that I could have 1700 readers on feedburner

4. Jokes
eg Dilbert blog. This post was supposed to be funny and have jokes and stuff. People like jokes. I think.

Now I just have to sit back and wait for the readers, oh and also for my goatee. I wonder which will be finished first.

Anyway, posting at hiphipuk has returned. Rejoice!

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Threadless Research now available

fletchy — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 15:57:12 +0000

The Threadless guys kindly agreed for me to add my dissertation to HipHipUK entitled

“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet?”
A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design.

It will go up later today but the page is ready here http://www.hiphipuk.co.uk/research/

I surveyed over 200 hundred people from the Threadless Community and the result is 85 ~~fun~~ packed pages of research, pretty graphs, bad spelling and grammar all about Virtual Communities, Involvement vs Uniqueness, Manufacturing Approaches, Design Contests, oh and tshirts.

I didnt want it to sit gathering dust with the ideas going out of date, so hopefully somebody might find it useful.

I’ll also use some of the content on future posts here in the next few weeks/months.