Notes for Week 25, 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

  • This was a mad week, as predicted last week. I was in Cannes during the Lions festival. Which is largely an advertising agency and customer event. But a lot of those agencies are companies I work with in $job, so it winds up being a partner-palooza conference. Just one that happens to be on the côte d'azure, outdoors and very extremely hot for someone from Ireland.
    • It was a phenomenal week work-wise. Lots done, and I've left with a laundry list of todo items, which is good. On the bad-ish side, I had something 'up' with my stomach so I didn't really get into festival spirit, eat much or have any late nights. It made me more productive, for sure, but now I'm absolutely exhausted.
  • As a result of my Cannes trip, an interesting confluence of news events occurred. I don't attend any of the advertising stuff as I'm not in that space. But I did hobnob with all the agency folks (this is their biggest event of the year for customers/partners/vendors). And Mozilla bought a privacy-advocating adtech biz. People are deciding what motivated this & what motivates the ad world. They're all tech folks that are not engaged with the people on the ground, and (to me) appear really wrong.
  • I had my first ever instance in $current_job of someone outside of my remit trying to over-promise on a project that my team(s) would deliver on. Using already-constrained resources to promise something to someone else. I made my feelings clear, closed the laptop and walked away before coming back. Because I've not come across something so unprofessional in my life, at this level at least. The individual is not someone I look to as amazing as it is, but christ they couldn't have made a worse move to win me over.
  • There have been recent debates/podcast episodes/TV shows about the cost of attending large tour concerts. Particularly in the wake of the Black Keys cancelling their arena tour. Apparently Pantera tickets are up to €280 in Dublin. Which is beyond the joke. I’m not a fan anyway but for that kind of money I’d want to see Metallica with Cliff Burton.
  • It's maddening to hear tech execs and pundits talk about the future of what AI is. They're trying to fill a gap that was left behind by Jobs. But the thing they're missing is that they're explaining tech mumbo-jumbo nonsense with wild, swinging attributionless predictions about how all of humanity will change. Jobs didn't do that. He synthesised the thing he (or his companies) worked on and why that was relevant to you, specifically the person watching the video/reading the article.
  • I had a lovely comment on my flickr saying I’m being a fool by not posting pics to groups as they “deserve to be seen.” I don’t feel the need to be seen, I’m happy to just feel good snapping and editing half-decent pics.

via flickr

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Published on: 22nd June, 2024

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