Indeed. And what’s possibly more amazing than that is that someone managed to get a FT article out of the fact.
Here: https://www.ft.com/content/8c1d4e0c-2180-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b
Mmmm! Catchy URL!
And how do you get enough data to write a FT article about Post-it notes?
I have spent much of this past year asking people in tech and tech-heavy companies about their Post-it habits.
And it seems that they continue to be popular.
Who knew?
Ladies and gentlespoons, we are approaching the end of the year and – as ever – I’m going to be craving some (or more) downtime. Part of this plan involves not committing to posting a blog post every day, but at the same time, not allowing my record of – ooh, several years now – of daily posts to be broken.
That’s why I’ve written blog posts ahead of time to carry us all through the festive season and into the New Year. That’s not to say that these won’t be supplemented with actual “live” posts should I feel the need or want to share something, but it is to say that I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to. After around 386 posts and 75,677 words this year, I think I deserve a couple of weeks off.
For the record, on December 31st, this blog will have published 1,192,954 words in 4,924 posts.
Including the ones you’re reading right now.
I read this very interesting NYT article and thought that I should share it with my readership.
Obviously, I have many apps on my phone that use my location to offer me better, more accurate services. Indeed, some apps rely solely on tracking my location and sharing it with others. And for me, that’s really not a problem: the benefits far outweigh any potential negatives.
If I was in a job where that sort of information could compromise my security, then yes, I would be concerned.
But if anyone can weaponise my weekly visit to Pick n Pay by hacking into the logs of my location pings, then good luck to them.
It’s Christmas. The festive season. Holiday time.
Call it what you want, but down here in Cape Town, we also call it SUMMER.
However, the weather this SUMMER has not been very SUMMERy. Rain on and off over the last week, temperatures peaking in the low 20s, cool winds blowing in off the Atlantic and making us all miserable.
This is not what I signed up for.
I signed up for SUMMER where I could be outside in the sun. Playing in the pool, lounging on a… on a… lounger. Not running across car parks trying to stay dry. Not wearing LONG TROUSERS. IN DECEMBER.
It’s annoying other people too. Like the staff at Pick n Pay Liquor in Constantia Village, who were feeling anything but festive this morning. Opening ten minutes late, snapping at customers who knocked on the door pointing out it was after 9 o’clock. My breakfast plans were rapidly becoming brunch.
Seriously, rarely have I seen a group of individuals give less of a toss about anything. Everything was too much trouble.
And it was grey and raining. Coincidence? Well, yes, possibly, because they might well be like that all the time.
But anyway – back to my main point, which is that SUMMER hasn’t arrived in Cape Town yet. Will it ever arrive? After all, we went through a few years when winter never turned up.
I’ll make the best of it, of course. I mean, what choice do we have? But I’d much rather be at risk of sunburn than of hypothermia.
And so I googled the weather for the next seven days. And… well… I mean… just look at the state of this:
EIGHTEEN on Christmas Day? I’m going to have to wrap my kids up in swaddling cloths. SEVENTEEN on Boxing Day? No wonder the shepherds want to come in from the fields: it’s pissing down out there.
And don’t tell me that it would be colder in the UK. Of course it would. It’s meant to be. It’s WINTER and it’s all evocative and romantic, innit?
This is not what I signed up for and I am understandably very unhappy.
It’s mid-December and I’m beginning to write a few posts for the upcoming weeks in order that I don’t have to write a few posts during the upcoming weeks. Bloggers need a break too, you know.
I watched this video today: a comparison of golf and photography, which (eventually, excruciatingly) gets around to the point that much as you don’t have to break a course record each time to play a round of golf to enjoy your day, neither do you have to manage to get amazing photos each time you take your camera out.
Be realistic. Manage your expectations. Concentrate on getting the basics right. Don’t sweat the stuff you can’t control. Have fun smashing the ball around the course, never mind if you don’t hit the green every time. Enjoy getting out and about taking photos, and worry less about the results. Learn from your mistakes.
It’s all good advice.
I’ve taken over 12,000 photographs this year. I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations, and I make that over 1,000 each month. And this month hasn’t even finished yet. The vast majority of those were for a work project, and I’m pretty happy with the way that things worked out there. But maybe only around 120 of those were real top-notch “keepers”.
I’ve been doing some rudi… ag… look, it’s about 1%.
The joy of digital photography is that you can go and shoot almost limitless numbers of images in the hunt for that 1% or that 120. Had I not been a) traveling and b) often under time pressure, I’d like to think that I might have managed the same number of good shots (or even more) from a much smaller overall total. There are different ways of getting a reasonable amount of decent photos and this high volume approach suited my needs for this project. Incidentally, if I did the same project again, I’d also probably manage a better ratio: it was a steep learning curve.
As for Flickr, I uploaded “just” 143 images this year, against my overall average of 630. 35 of that 143 were from our Karoo road trip and 17 of them were from the above mentioned work project, meaning that just 91 (64%) of them were from “non-specific” occasions.
And of them all, I can count just 10 that I think are really good. Not worldbeaters, not course records, but just decent images that I am properly happy with. 10 out of 143 out of 12,175.
Sadly, very few of that 10 can be used as easy blog fodder over the festive period, because I have already shared them because I liked them so much. Which leaves me the choice of about 133 mediocre images to put on here until whenever I start “properly”blogging again.
Lucky you.