The DOBlog

TwentyMajor isn’t the only blogger in the pay of a publisher (I’m conveniently ignoring Grandad and the others as Irish bloggers are too darned fond of publishing these days. If you want to know who all the Irish bloggers with publishers are then Damien Mulley probably has a list)!

I recently wrote an industry report for a UK publisher on Information Quality strategy. The publisher then swapped all my references to Information Quality to references to Data Quality as that was their ‘brand’ on the publication. I prefer the term Information Quality for a variety of reasons.

As this runs to over 100 pages of A4 it has a lot of words in it. My fingers were tired after typing it. Unlike Twenty’s book, I’ve got pictures in mine (not those kind of pictures, unfortunately, but nice diagrams of concepts related to strategy and Information Quality. If you want the other kind of pictures, you’ll need to go here.)

In the marketing blurb and bumph that I put together for the publisher I mentioned this blog and the IQTrainwrecks.com blog. Imagine my surprise when I opened a sales email from the publisher today (yes, they included me on the sales mailing list… the irony is not lost on me… information quality, author, not likely to buy my own report when I’ve got the four drafts of it on the lappytop here).

So, for the next few weeks I’ll have to look all serious and proper in a ‘knowing what I’m talking about’ kind of way to encourage people to by my report. (I had toyed with some variation on booky-wook but it just doesn’t work - reporty-wort… no thanks, I don’t want warts).

So things I’ll have to refrain from doing include:

1. Engaging in pointless satirical attacks on the government or businesses just for a laugh, unless I can find an Information Quality angle
2. Talking too loudly about politics
3. Giving out about rural/urban digital divides in Ireland
4. Parsing and reformatting the arguments of leading Irish opinion writers to expose the absence of logic or argument therein.
5. Engaging in socio-economic analysis of the fate of highstreet purveyors of dirty water parading as coffee.
6. Swearing

That last one is a f***ing pain in the a**.

If any of you are interested in buying my ‘umble little report, it is available for sale from Ark Group via this link.. . This link will make them think you got the email they sent to me, and you can get a discount, getting the yoke for £202.50 including postage and packing (normally £345+£7.50p&p. (Or click here to avoid the email campaign software…)

And if any of you would like to see the content that I’d have preferred the link in the sales person’s to send you to (coz it highlights the need for good quality management of your information quality) then just click away here to go to IQTrainwrecks.com

Thanks to Larry, Tom, Danette, the wifey for their support while I was writing the report and Stephanie and Vanessa at Ark Group for their encouragement to get it finished by the deadline.

Regular visitors to this blog will know that I always appreciate stuff wot does work. Be it the excellent OnlineMeetingRooms to a humble bluetooth keyboard, I am a ferverent champion of kit that humbly bows its head and goes about doing what it sez on the tin in a competent and reliable manner.

I was faced this week with the god-awful challenge of upgrading the first of my wordpress installations. I f*cking hate wordpress because of the complexity of its upgrade (let’s be honest -it’s a full monty reinstall) process, so I usually hold off for as long as possible. 2.3 passed me by. 2.5 made me sit up and ponder that perhaps I should bite the bullet. The announcement of 2.5.1 made me realise that soon I’d be spurned by the masses for being a lazy barsteward who didn’t bother to update his install.

Also 2.5.x has some nice improvements in structure, layout and design of wordpress that I was hoping to to try out (I am, they are nice).

But the pox-bottle dilemma of the upgrade had me frankly underwhelmed as my WP install was not broke so there was no urgent need to fix it. So I was quite happy when I came across the appropriately titled “Wordpress Automatic Upgrade“. This spiffy little plug-in takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of doing a wordpress upgrade.

It is not perfect but it allowed me to upgrade the DoBlog to 2.5.1 in a matter of moments with relative comfort that all was going well. Being a tad paranoid about these things I’d already taken my own backups of the DB and filesystem, but WAU did it automagically for me as well. All I need to know was an FTP login and FTP path for my host (which as I run the shebang meself I do).

Some minor hiccups with things not quite happening in the order the screen messages said they would but other than that a spiffy simple tool that did what it said on the tin.

I’ll miss Ultimate Tag Warrior (specifically being able to select from existing tags) but look forward to using the improved tagging support promised in Wordpress.

The Irish Times website is carrying a story today that Starbucks has experienced a downturn in coffee sales in the US in recent months and is not as economically bulletproof as they may have previously thought.

This makes perfect sense to me. When your negative equity hell kicks in and leaves a sour and bitter taste in your mouth and curdles your stomach, the absolute last thing you need to drink is a cup of overpriced shit coffee that will only add to your intenstinal woes.

And for the record, I’m a big coffee drinker. I gave it up for Lent once. The children of Bolivia apparently had no new shoes for Easter Mass. It’s just that what American’s call coffee I, erm… um… don’t.

So, according to the Irish Examiner, John Cleese has hinted that he may offer his services as a speech-writer to Barrack Obama should Obama get the Democratic nomination.

Oh good grief.

Hilary Clinton has no option now but to go after Eric Idle to counteract the gag-meistery of Cleese. I’m looking forward to her speech to the Democratic Convention where she reminds delegates that Obama “Isn’t the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” and other choice quotes from The Life of Brian.

From time to time the DoBlog allows honoured guests to write posts (well I would if anyone asked). When I’m stuck for honoured guests, sometimes I invite family, and I even let them get a byline on the piece. No cuttypasty-and-claim-as-my-own here thanky much.

This post is penned by the brother. If he would actually get off his backside and do a proper blog hisself (he lives over at “Another Crying Shame“) I’m sure the O Brien clan would soon be festooned with Obsessive Blogger badges from Fergal Crehan.

So… here’s the brother’s take on the Great Big Bertie Bye Bye:

While it’s certainly good news in a visceral ‘Death to my Enemies’ kind of way I think it will in the long run mean very little or even be a bad thing for the Irish body politic
(more…)