On The Nose

Money/mouth interface

Martin Ross — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:03:27 +0000

Blimey it’s been ages since I’ve posted. Anyway…

Very, very chuffed to be able to demonstrate the efficacy of the UGC training that I spend much of my time either touting or actually doing.

Here are two videos made by a lovely bloke at the Foreign Office.

He made this one before the training…

And this one afterwards…

See what I mean?

On the road again

Martin Ross — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:44:03 +0000

Another month, another timezone. This time Madrid, helping our lovely friends at O2 record their time volunteering in Latin America.

Employees spend their summers working in projects aimed at stopping the tide of child poverty in places like El Salvador, Ecuador, Peru. We train them to do video diaries, and make documentaries, and we edit their footage.

Results are coool. Take a look at

http://www.o2.com/media/employee_volunteering.asp

And the training is a blast. We hope.

Snow stories

Martin Ross — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:00:59 +0000

My road, Monday

Big respect to yesterday morning’s train driver who got on the tannoy and said:

Passengers alighting here for services to Peterborough should cross to Platform 6 and get the next train back home ‘cos it ain’t happening today.

Crisis, what crisis?

Martin Ross — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:47:32 +0000

Either some deft understatement or some raging idiocy from the IT recruiter who emailed me today and said

“With the current market climate we have seen a slight slowdown in permanent recruitment and an increase with candidates.”

That’ll be a yes.

Vov, vuf vif, vov vov, grrrr vuuuuf

Martin Ross — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:45:45 +0000

Vov, vuf vif

In Copenhagen for a meeting the other day, and saw this outside a local supermarket, above a place to tie your dog lead to.

It says “Hundeinfo” at the top, and you can figure out what that means. The hard-to-read yellow text at the bottom says “Rolig nu! Det ta’r kun 5 minuter…” which means something like “Quiet now! It’ll only be five minutes”.

Nice.

Iggy Pop, sell-out

Martin Ross — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:09:04 +0000

I thought I’d never say those words. But I’m on a train somewhere in Surrey and above me is an ad for car insurance featuring the man himself. And that makes me very sad.

Say it isn't so

On being good

Martin Ross — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:13:27 +0000

In the middle of a rather overlong post about how computer programmers should work and don’t, this. Apparently in the Ministry of Defence here in the UK

if you design software for a plane you go up in the test plane when the software is beta-tested.

Now that would concentrate the mind.

Gaming Facebook

Martin Ross — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:31:33 +0000

Big respect to my old friend Mike. He’s pretty new to Facebook, but has already hit on a brilliant way to get friends’ attention. He posted a scan of a painting he’d done (abstract, colourful, kinda cool) and didn’t tell his friends about it, but instead tagged 28 of his friends in it. So our old compadre Martin Croome (as in “I’ve had a Croome of a day”) occupies an area of black paint in the bottom right, while Michelle Shedro is the rather fetching violet on the left hand side.

When you’re tagged in a photo, you’re messaged on Facebook, and like a shot you check yourself out. Vanity. I guess.

Clever.

And, as Mike Yarwood used to say, this is me:

My best side, by Mike

My new favourite joke

Martin Ross — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:14:12 +0000

Well it’s the end of term. What a cool year. Can’t wait for the next one.

And to end a year of blogging, a new favourite joke. Son #1 had to bring some jokes into school for homework the other night, so got to google some good ones. And here it is.

An egg and a chicken are lying in bed, smoking. The chicken says to the egg, “Well, at least we’ve sorted one thing out”.

Happy Christmas to y’all.

You don’t want to do that

Martin Ross — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:28:44 +0000

A splendid post from Chris Applegate entitled “20 signs you don’t want that social media project” including such gems as:

5. Client wants something edgy “like that suicide bomber viral” – but first subject to clearance by their legal department.

and

10. Client panics over a random blogger’s negative post about them and orders you to get it taken down. Won’t take “sorry, it’s impossible” for an answer.

and

20. “We want our site to be as popular as, you know, Facebook.”

I’m glad I work in internal social media…