English Irregular Verbs

On John Prescott’s continuing troubles:

• I participated in an exchange.
• You took part in a discussion.
• They are just a puppet for CCO.

Impressions of Entrepreneurship

I was reminded on the Enviro-Entrepreneurship Summer School that I recently attended of Wilde’s Impressions of America where he claims:

“The exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.”

Remarkably, this is not the only insight of his that could arguably be truer today as in 1882:

“There is a good deal of beauty to be seen in them now and then, but only where the American has not attempted to create it.”

“One is impressed in America, but not favourably impressed, by the inordinate size of everything. The country seems to try to bully one into a belief in its power by its impressive bigness.”

Sadly, some things have changed:

“In going to America one learns that poverty is not a necessary accompaniment to civilisation.”

To Keele and Back

I have just returned from the Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School run by QED Consulting (with help from various kind sponsors) at the University of Keele.

A great time, I think, was had by 30 or so attendees, and we explored the mysterious realms of business planning, intellectual property, environmental regulation, finance, networking, and marketing. We also heard from some established firms in the environmental sector, as described on ecoaesthete.

I attended the course to gain help developing my environmental product business that is based around my ecoaesthete brand. Everyone on the Summer School had fascinating business concepts and ideas, ranging from trained artists looking to develop their work as a business to already established businesses.

Confidentiality limits what I can really say, but some things are publically available:

• Nicola @ Bog (http://www.bogblog.com – UPDATE: she mentioned this address, but doesn’t seem to be the registrant)
• Amy @ PrincessAlmighty (http://www.princessalmighty.com – which sadly doesn’t do her justice)
• + loads of others but I’m afraid until I get the contact list I’ve forgotten their website details…

Getting to Keele on Wednesday was a bit of a struggle: I left College at midnight only to learn three hours later that my National Express coach had been cancelled due to an accident on the M40. Fortunately, I was sent off to Birmingham in a taxi and managed to connect with a coach to Stoke, from where I got a bus to Keele’s campus. Rather rudely a few people were hours late for the start of the School, all blaming public transport; but they clearly hadn’t made the effort to ensure they were there on time, something I found disrespectful. This was repeated at the end of the School when others left hours early, saying that they had to go home early. I was still sat in Birmingham at 3am waiting for my coach home because I stayed until the end thereby missing the coach at 7pm. I was left wondering whether I was mad showing such committment, but I hope the experience of the School and the interesting people I met will pay great dividends in the future.

Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School

I’ve been selected to attend the Enviro-Entrepreneur Summer School, run by QED Consulting (supported by BusinessLink and mustard.uk.com), at Keele University at the end of this month.

Hopefully it will be an excellent opportunity to further develop a wide range of range business skills and meet all kinds of interesting, motivated people.

Windows Live Local

Microsoft have added better satellite imagery to their Windows Live Local mapping service, thanks to signing up Getmapping.

This means that, as opposed to Google Maps, Oxford is now covered at high resolution: the punts in Wolfson's harbor can easily be counted. The images are a couple of years old, however, since construction on Wolfson's new M-block has not even started.

Google ‘Mystery Page’

Tinfoil hats on. Google seems to be 'censoring' the last page of some searches, at least for one of my searches in a domain.

The screen-capture on the left shows the first page, where Google is clear there are three pages of results. But click on the '3' for the third page and Google whisks you to the second page (even though the link is correct).

Strange things are afoot!
(or it's just a silly bug)

Careers in Focus

The Careers in Focus: Management Consultancy event, run by CRAC, is taking place this Friday.

Accenture, BCG, Ernst & Young and McKinsey are sponsoring the event so it should be a fascinating adventure and a unique opportunity to meet and impress some of the very best consultancies.

Oxford in Google Maps

Google Maps finally includes streetmaps for most of Europe.

This will no doubt prove very useful to travelling Europeans everywhere, but the big wow! factor still comes from the satellite imagery also included. For some reason, maybe uniquely for a major city, Oxford is still very poorly served.

Most of the Dreaming Spires are still unavailable at the highest zoom and the resolution of the rest of the city is startling poor. What is going on?

Stranger still, there are whole fields in the middle of the Fens (captured at a time without any cows) in amazing detail.

UPDATE: The imagery of the Other Place seems to date from late 2001 – first half of 2002, because the ‘Thatcher Wing’ of the Archives Centre in Churchill College is still being built. I was resident there during the initial phases of construction (until August 2001), so I’ll be scouring the area for myself.

English Irregular Verbs

On news of Blair's savage defense of his latest crackdown on crime:

• They are out of touch with your voters.
• You make brave decisions.
• I take bold decisions that will be judged positively by history.

Past posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

New Releases: Fluxiom & Boxxet

I received invites to two new releases this week: Fluxiom, which bills itself as the solution to file chaos; and Boxxet, a new “best of” aggregator.

Fluxiom is a web-based digital asset management tool and claims to be the easiest way for people to share, store, and search their media libraries. Okay, that sounds all well and good, but it monetises these features through fairly hefty monthly fees: 9 Euros for 200MB up to 169 Euros for 8000MB [$11 to $208]. Limited 30 day free trials are now available.

Although not exactly a direct competitor, these prices will undoubtedly be compared to Flickr’s pro account (2GB upload/mo for $2).

Boxxet, pronounced ‘Box Set’, is a collection of specialised memediggers, where users decide the Box Score of various news stories and blog postings. Right now it all appears very experimental, but they do have box sets covering sports (MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL), television, and US universities (inc. MIT)

UPDATE: Mashable have followed with a mention of Fluxiom.