General

It must be said that, when the nascient Internet gurus put their heads together and came out with SMTP as an e-mail sending protocol they never considered the base nature with which humans endowed with that dubious quality of "business acumen" would approach the relatively harmless concept of web advertising.

Spam was the result. An insidious, creeping consumer of human time and energy, of precious bandwidth and valuable processor clock cycles.

You see, I'm not opposed to advertising. Anyone is welcome to inform me of the products they sell. My requirement is that they only tell me when I want to hear. Which is not when I'm trying to work, and it isn't when I'm trying to play. In the same way that I expose myself to the market when I venture into a shopping centre, from time to time, in a curious, exploratory kind of way, I might establish contact with the world of advertising when I desire to find a particular product which meets one of life's needs in an efficient, harmless way. A well-developed website available from any reputable webservant can allow me to do that. Believe me, if at any time in the future I require Cialis, my recourse will be to my doctor and thence to an e-tailer I find through a search engine that algorithmically indicates reputation. It will not be through clicking the first Cialis ad that rattles through my IMAP account!

Why would I bring this to the fore today? Spam e-mailers are normally not trying to build a reputation of innocence and honesty. But when Match.com, which is advertising in meatspace as well as on the net sends me spam and tells me I requested it, I take offence. Running an opt-in scheme is right and proper, but signing individuals who have never even visited (indeed, I'm opposed to artificial community websites (other than those addressbook ones, which are simply convenient) is sheer gall. I announce a boycott! As if you need a dating website, you Valentine-blog-reader, you.

With some of the longer-term projects that I start when working for Kohera there can be a combined feeling of excitement and fear. Normally it is during this period that I break the back of the project (especially if it needs designing and coding. The excitement comes from having a plan, through which I can help someone else achieve their goal. I take great pleasure in establishing that person's goal through long telephone conversations and short meetings, and sometimes a lengthy exchange of e-mails. The e-mail exchange approach is only enjoyable when the other party has a good understanding of e-mail ettiquette and convention: otherwise what should be a simple and useful process turns into a stunted paperchase.
The fear comes from realisation that this project may last for months (quite legitimately) and that can really hit cashflow.

That said, however, I gain much more than the final cheque from any project I start (that's right: I said "start": I don't finish them all for a number of reasons). Firstly, I learn through application. Secondly, I gain insight into another individual or, more commonly a business. I can leave my brain to work out the connections between the different jobs that I do. This makes me quicker at solving problems if I have completed similar thinking efforts of other jobs.

David Seah has posted an interesting article on decoupling my expectation of financial reward from my work. That means I can have the enjoyment without the fear, right? Read on after the jump. Read More

Tony Blair recently boasted that the World Bank had described Britain as being among the most "lightly regulated" countries in the world.

In other words big business can do pretty much whatever it likes.

And big business in the 21st century is driven more completely than ever by the short-term desire for the maximum possible profits – so for them public services can never be too paltry, or wages too low – because the less we have, the more profits they make.

So while the government has no problem spending money (for example current costs for the occupation of Iraq are running at £5 million a day) it does everything it can to resist spending money on improving our living conditions – because it is not in the interests of big business.

...screams the Socialist Party manifesto. To what extent am I comfortable with that? First things first. Let's find the source of that quotation. We don't want the socialists making things up. More after the jump. Read More