About
rc started off as an experiment to find out about the capabilities of blogging by trying, originally it was postings on the AlwaysOn Network, a Blogspot blog and a now dead blog that was hosted on Yahoo! Small Business Hosting with my own URL. Relatively early on I roped in a couple of journalist friends who contributed a couple of items, but despite pretending otherwise its just the effort of one person.
Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought. Hopefully, I take up my place among the sellers. - Bertolt Brecht
I work for a PR agency, so it made sense to find out about blogs as a way of directly communicating with public audiences. Prior to falling into this game I worked in a number of roles, from McDonalds prep rooms building racks of frozen chips for frying, to heading a shift team in an oil refinery and a brief spell in marketing for financial institutions.
Probably the role that was closest to my heart was club DJ, because of my love of music. I still like to step behind the wheels of steel and play the latest jackin’ cuts with some classics and some surprises just to keep people guessing.
I guess this kind of gives you an idea of the lens through which I view the world when I write the posts:
- An inquisitive nature
- A love of reading instilled by my parents
- An engineers view of quality from my Dad
- Being a stranger-in-a-strange-land having come from an Irish household in the middle of the UK
- A contrary outlook on life coming from being an only child
- Being a counter-culture fanboy
I found my way into technology mainly because I wasn’t afraid of it, rather than any real ability. I learned about technology in a very hands on way because there wasn’t any budget for an IT department in many of the early companies where I worked. I got experience on Macs, mainframes, DEC VAX mini-computers IBM and SGI UNIX boxes during five years or so in industry. I had my first email address early in 1994 when I contracted for Corning Optical Fibres. In the tradition of the early net, I was a number rather than a name. I also managed to send my first spam email pretty soon after as I tried to offload some unwanted Marks and Spencers vouchers on my unsuspecting colleagues. Corning’s HR were more concerned that I was creating and selling counterfeit vouchers (I wasn’t, but then I would say that wouldn’t I?) rather than the act of spamming itself.
I took up technology that made a difference to my life: pagers, mobile phones, PDAs and Mac laptops.
I am not very talented in the programming skills area, but was self-taught to write macros in Lotus 1-2-3 to automate lab equipment (so I had more time to do my chart returns from the work fax machine to record promotion agencies) , but that was well over over a decade ago and I have forgotten more in that time than I’ll ever know again.
My tag cloud on Ziki says more about me than any self-penned description: adidas originals, maggie q, appropriate technology, blogger, caffiene, carhartt, consumer_tech, consumer_technology, contemporary_art, counter culture, dance_music, design, dj, dry_humor, dry_humoured, edelman, flickr, generation_e, generation_x, graphic novels, irish, iwc, japanese_culture, korean_culture, lee van cleef, leftfield, liberal, Lipovitan B3, lucille ball, mac, mountain dew, old_school_hip_hop, otaku, palm, phil_silvers, pirate, pixar, pr, public_relations, publicrelations, quality, rolex, root beer, roots, soul, spaghetti westerns, stussy, technics sl 1200, Tôkyô nagaremono, trend watching, trendwatching, tripped out visuals, vinyl records, wagg ed, wagged, waggener edstrom, web_2.0, weber group, yahoo
Why renaissance chambara?
If you need to ask about the name you just won’t get it, just roll with it and we’ll be in like flynn.