Freelance SharePoint Consultant and Trainer

Oh I just love technology. It’s all soooooo sweet the way it desperately tries to please us, like an overenthusiastic puppy that covers you in canine saliva and humps your leg energetically. Actually of course it’s the techno-geeks who create the technology who are projecting their desire to please onto their mechanoid creations. Unfortunately it all gets perverted by the marketing people.

Take the new trend in ChatBots, for example. Yes, as the name might suggest, it’s a software robot that sits chatting on MSN Messenger (or Live Messenger as it has become). Of course what it can chat about is strictly limited by its programming. However, you should at least have some hope that it knows something about its chosen subject. To extend the example, here’s a conversation I had with the robot entitled “My Fashionable Life” which claims to have “Answers for all of your fashion and beauty questions”.

Jon says:
hello
My Fashionable Life says:
Hello Jon! Welcome to My Fashionable Life, brought to you by CLEAN & CLEAR®.

To check out the info I have on the newest CLEAN & CLEAR® skincare line, just type “CLEAN & CLEAR.”
Jon says:
what is empire line?
My Fashionable Life says:
That’s a bit beyond my expertise. Please try asking me another way, or type “?” to see examples of questions I can answer.

Jon says:
what is a pencil skirt?
My Fashionable Life says:
Hi again, Jon. Check out the info I have on the newest CLEAN & CLEAR® skincare line! Just type “CLEAN & CLEAR.”

Type “home” to see everything I can do or just ask me a question!

Sorry, I know about skirts, but I don’t understand your question. Can you try rephrasing it? Or, to see all of my fashion info type “fashion tips.”

I have a ton of new makeup demos. Type “demos.” and check them out!

Jon says:
what is this season’s colour?
My Fashionable Life says:
That’s a bit beyond my expertise. Please try asking me another way, or type “?” to see examples of questions I can answer.

Jon says:
which fashion house does karl lagerfeld work for?
My Fashionable Life says:
You’ve totally confused me! Please try asking me another way, or type “?” to see examples of questions I can answer.

Oh dear. All my fashion & beauty questions? No, it’s just a gimmick conceived by marketing people to sell more “CLEAN & CLEAR® skincare” products. Will it work? I very much doubt it. But undoubtedly there is a small, dark office somewhere, where, slaving away over a hot keyboard in a little alcove, there’s a techno-geek who’s very proud of his creation, and imagining how much pleasure and life-improving goodness he’s bringing to millions. Ahhhh. Bless.

To enjoy the same magical experience, add “myfashionablelife@hotmail.com” to your MSN or Live Messenger.

Many years ago, when I was still a teenager, I decided to translate the lyrics of a song. The only language I knew at the time apart from my mother-tongue English was a smattering of school French. But nonetheless I had enough French to do it. And the song? The most ridiculous thing I could find, which was “Yes we have no bananas, we have no bananas today”.To my none-too-great surprise, the French lyric fitted none too well. So, I wondered would other languages fare any better? German soon followed, the “heute” translation for “today” proving especially awful in terms of its lyrical quality. Wondering further, I started to collect translations from lots of different languages. Of course pretty soon they dried up. The whole project was forgotten, especially when I discovered girls. Much more interesting.

Eventually along came the Internet, and one day when I was bored (it happens a lot) I decided to register a new domain name bananastoday.co.uk and its somewhat less rhyming bananastoday.com and create a web site where I could once again collect translations for the beloved lyric. Of course I never had any visitors, which made the whole thing rather sad. Actually I did get a few. I even received the Klingon translation. I kid ye not. Someone actually bothered not only to translate the song lyric into Klingon, which is enough of a feat by itself… but what truly amazed me is that someone else had even gone to the trouble of creating a Klingon word for “banana”. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but Worf in Star Trek never used the word “banana” in American English, let alone Klingon. Hmmm. I think they could be making it up as they go along.

I actually lost the Klingon translation somewhere along the way before it had a chance to enter the archive. If you were the originator, or indeed if your Klingon is up to the task, perhaps you’d oblige.

Anyway, I digress… as usual. The site still exists and there are still a lot of translations I’ve yet to collect. So if you’re a specialist in one particular language, or indeed several, please take the time and trouble to visit the site and use all your incredible language skills and long years of study to translate just one line from an old music hall song into the languages of your choice. Oh go on. Please. You know you want to. Don’t make me beg now.

You can find the Internationally-Localised Version Of Yes We Have No Bananas at www.bananastoday.co.uk. If you have been, thanks for reading.

I went for a sort of job interview the other day. Yes I already have several jobs and I’m very happy with them, but an old friend and colleague was wanting me back working for his new company, an international consultancy of which he is the Technical Director. So I thought I’d at least go and have a chat over lunch. Lunch was quite nice food at silly London prices. The role was a brand new one – a sort of pre-sales consultant to work closely with clients, acting as a foil for the salesmen in a way, actually representing the best interests of the client even if it meant saying “sod off” to one’s own salesmen. A trusted advisor who knows inside-out the business of making information technology actually work for the business process. Functional fit, in the old language. Since integrity was always one of my strong points – push me towards corruption and dishonesty and I’ll push back twice as hard – I thought it sounded right up my street. The interview was with one of the sales team. Of course he talked that most specialised of languages reserved especially for salesmen within the IT industry – complete bollocks. That alone meant that he and I were never going to see eye to eye. Perhaps this is a rather flawed role after all. If the salesmen are part of the recruitment process, they’ll recruit a salesman. On day one at the client, the new recruit will be found out, exposed as just another salesman, and distrusted from the start. When will the corporate UK learn? Never probably, or maybe one day, but I might be beyond retirement age by the time plain simple common sense prevails in the consultancy business. It’s a shame… all those fine brain cells, MBAs, first class degrees and mission statements borne of high ideals – and it’s all made crap because nobody can get beyond the double-glazing sales ethos.

As Homer Simpson once said, “I know they’re all God’s creatures, but why did he have to make them all so tasty!?”.

I like eating dead animals. However they taste much better if they were happy animals during life. I think Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is doing a fabulous job with his Chicken Out campaign in the face of bigoted opposition from parts of the media, the supermarkets, and those idiots in the pub spending their £12kpa on beer & fags.

So much better than the Channel 4 Dispatches programme on the truth about your food or somesuch unadulterated crap, where they decided their conclusion in advance and then did their best to fit the “facts” to support it. They give journalism a bad name.

Anyway, back to chicken. My local ASDA stocks not a single item containing free-range chicken. What am I to do, ASDA? I’d like to buy the products I want, and so would all my friends, but you simply don’t stock them. So… byeeeee!

Choice Butchers in Preston Drove, Brighton… now there’s a likely supplier. Mind you, Sainsburys is doing pretty well, for a supermarket chain. Watch out, Tesco & ASDA… ignore the consumer at your peril.

My sons keep talking to me in a language I don’t quite understand. I seem to have developed a catchphrase: “I see… I think.” which pretty well sums up how I feel. I understand the words, it’s the concepts I have problems with.

Of course this is nothing new; for centuries, indeed since the dawn of time, parents have had moments, sometimes long, langurous moments lasting years, when they have been unable to understand the first thing about their children. But this is different.

Being ages 8 and 11, their attentions are centred on trading cards such as Yu-gi-o and Pokémon. Even worse, about a year ago they started to design their own series of trading cards which have their own nomenclature, and they talk about them incessantly. Conversations such as “what did you do at school today” and “how’s life” seem to be short and stilted until the banter turns to the subject of DJ Cards, and then becomes suddenly animated, enthusiastic and passionate on the part of my sons. However I find myself feeling guilty at my lack of enthusiasm. Of course I love their imagination and their fabulous drawings, but I find it hard to keep up with it all when it’s a monotonic drone of cyber-dragons and machine prototypes which are, of course, of no consequence to a forty year-old man with all the stresses and responsibilities of real life.

I wish I was 10 again.

I’ve been blogging for a while but I’m not exactly what you might call prolific… in fact it’s been hard to throw off the old days of my journalistic writings and stick to short, regular pieces. So most of my blogs tend to be long and expansive like my old magazine columns. This is intended to be different. Here I’m going to keep it regular (hahahahahaha) and short (hmmmmm ok Jon). And on that note, this is probably already long enough. Bye for now.