LongTail

After dealing with banks all week is time for a micro weekend before the big weekend arrives.

Today I’ll give Anchor Steam ago, had them sitting from the secret santa and now’s the time to give them a try, although Anchor Steam is available in pints in BLOC in Glasgow I can’t see it arriving in Kilwinning for a while, although Home did have a sign outside saying a craft beer garden was on it’s way so you never know.

I was also reading that Anchor Steam have just releases a Sour Mash IPA and while I’ve no idea how it will taste I’ll look out for it when I’m beer shopping in Glasgow (news article) but for now it’s the Anchor Steam Beer original.

We’re going to need some music to go with the beer so although Anchor Steam is from San Fran I think a little Blues slide guitar is the order of the day.

First up we have King Size Slim and his pots and pans drummer

Next up for the Anchor Thursday playlist is French solo Redneck Rocker Dirty Deep, yip this dudes from France and knows a few good ways to open a beer bottle.

To end it’s only right to have a Californian band and here we have surf pop echo’y The Lovely Bad Things, enjoy

I’ve been reading this book by Scott Berkin on and off now for a few months. I tend to take my time with books and rather than burning through a book in a few hours I like to read a few chapters, put the book down, get a coffee and sit somewhere quite and think about what I’ve read and how it can be of use to me.

This book, even thou I haven’t finished reading it, has been the topic of a few conversations in the office and was one of the major motivators for me, along with Getting Shit Done by Niall Harbison, to bring in no rules working from home for all our staff and changing our company structure to a flat system where everyone has a client to manage and there’s no middle management.

These changes have our team communicating and sharing information on a level that we couldn’t have forced them to do.

In the book Scott talks about the seven steps of general work flow that take place at Automattic.

Pick a problem
Launch announcement and support page
Consider the best data
Get to work
Launch
Learn
Repeat

I think these steps can be used as a guide to any project and would be a good structure for young startups that might not have any previous project management experience.

Now time to pack up the caravan and head off to our new location to continue our remote working, goodbye Southerness hello Silloth. Long may the good weather continue

I’ve not watched a lot of football these days but with Chelsea playing against Paris St Germain and down by a few calls is was lining up as a script written in Hollywood, also Real Madrid going through against Borussia Dortmund without Bale (although dropping a few goals) will make existing times in the next round.

We got the screen up yesterday in our 30 seater auditorium, now sort out the audio and we’ll be rocking

So the guy in pc world was blabbing on about miracast when I was buying a new blu ray player, I was wanting out of the shop as fast as I could move before they tried to sell me a mobile phone contract, 60 buck blu ray player under the arm and out the door.

I’ve now been messing about with it and miracast is totally the best thing I’ve ever seen.

So what it does, my blu ray player is connected to my wifi network, as is my phone.

I then visit youtube in my phone and and it asks if I’d like to watch it on my tv, and the first time I’m thinking this is never going to work

.

But here’s the best bit you can queue youtube clips to watch on your tv and make your own wee tv channel.

My channel tonight is all the live versions I can find of Jubliee st by nick cave and the bad seeds

Tommorow ill be mostly watching Street Hawk intro, Street Hawk versus night rider and Happy Mondays

Today the team had a meeting to review one of our hotel chain clients yearly performance and the outcome is a 50% rise is online sales and traffic.

That’s great news and the team working on it did really well despite lots of changes over the past 12 months from google. Now just to boil it down and pass out the findings to our other teams and hopefully something learned for all.

I’ve know added a 3d printer to my office desk, I think every desk should have one off these as you never know when you’ll need to make Darth Vader snowflakes for the Xmas tree

We’ve got the first couple of rows in place for the Boyd Digital Auditorium and should hopefully have it completed next week. We originally planed for 40 odd seats but brought that down to 30.

Next year the Boyd digital guys will be doing mini seminars and talks about marketing, technology and anything else that they think of.

It’s been an experience buying a truck load of cinema seats from London and getting them up here and installed, actually it was all done online, maybe i’ll do a talk on that

My tartan clad legs are in this picture taken outside the WMR cinema in Irvine when I took Gav to see the BMX bandits, see if you can spot Gav? (Second on the left, in the air)

Gav also found £20 that day outside the Co-op in Irvine, the best day of our lives.

The wife’s having a few of these bad boys