Executive contracts

"François Barrault, who has been chief executive of Global Services [of BT] since April 2007, has resigned with immediate effect - although he is expected to receive a year's pay." (source ) Isn't it nice for him that he can quit without any notice period yet get paid for another twelve months when he has reduced the value of BT to below that at which it floated in 1984. Nice for him maybe, but not for the many thousands of shareholders (including my mother, as it happens) who have lost out by mis-management at the company resulting in today's profits warning. In any other 'normal' job where you had so dismally failed at your tasks you'd either be fired or someone would micro-manage you while you corrected the position; you certainly wouldn't be able to walk away with an effective bonus of a year's pay. No wonder people complain that CEOs of major corporations do not live in the 'real world'.

What's in a name?

My name is Alison Wheeler — Alison Mary Wheeler, in full actually — and Google alerts regularly sends me 'news' that I've just joined facebook or some other online website that they've crawled.

Except it (usually) isn't *me* that they have come across but one of my many namesakes. When I created one of my earliest personal websites I included a page of links to other 'Alison Wheeler's and I've received telephone calls mistaking me for one of the others (and presumably vice-versa) which even resulted in an interview on BBC Radio and Television news about the issues of having the same name as someone else. Not that it is really that unusual to have the same name as someone else in the world, or even one's own country, as someone else …

Anyway, today I decided to recognise this in a proper "Web 2.0" way. I created a new facebook group called … "My name is Alison Wheeler" ! I also searched out many of the others already on facebook to invite them along and some have also 'friended' me, which is quite weird getting a message "Dear Alison Wheeler, Alison Wheeler would like to friend you" sort of thing!

"Alison is now friends with Alison Wheeler, Alison Wheeler and Alison Wheeler"

To backdate or not to .. etc.

I've been writing an online diary — a 'blog' in the vernacular — in one form or another since 1995, though this particular one only appeared to the world wide populace quite recently. This leads one to the question prevalent each time one starts all shiny-and-blank-canvas anew as to whether to populate the fresh tabula rasa with content from the older editions. Should one provide links? Copy and update content? Trust that anyone really interested in one's musings will avail themselves of search engines — which, of course, may fail to find some older pocket lint as it may no longer be extant or discoverable — even if one used the same nom de plume (de ma tante) throughout one's wanderings around Tim Berners-Lee's hyperlinked universe. Which I didn't, and leads one to ponder whether one should inflict some past content on others when the world has so clearly moved on. Yet at heart we are all the sum of our experiences, and I have certainly had some interesting experiences! Maybe I should select random entries from the past propositions and comment refreshed on them. Ah, life can be so difficult on "teh interweb" …

Connections

With all the 'Web 2.0' services come 'Friends'. They aren't necessarily people you've met face-to-real-face or even people you might want to ever meet, but the standard phraseology appears to be 'friends' nonetheless. Today, therefore, I added some new friends to my Twitter stream and to my Blogroll. Some of them by seeing who had 'friended' me and others on the recommendation of others. An interesting web of connections gets created by all these relationships, meaningless in many ways but indicative of levels of interest anyway. Yesterday's creation of a short-url service has resulted in my updating my ReadTwitter module to recognise links in a twitter post and convert it to a link. The new version will be available for download later today.

Privacy for pointers

Link-length reduction services like TinyURL, bit.ly and is.gd have been around quite a while now, but I've tended to steer clear of using them as it leaves a trail of interesting links which I probably don't want others aware of. Added to that, some of them don't store the full link so are semi-pointless. Last night, therefore, I 'rolled my own' and am happy enough with it now to start using it as required. Writing code can be fun, though wasting over three hours trying to work out why something just won't work and — eventually — finding out that you had typed a ',' where you should have had a '.' is most annoying!