Hail to the Chief

I'm a mathematician by apptitude, an accountant by professional training and have strong IT links by a mixture of hobby and work. For the last year or so I've been working on developing a financial reporting system for the organisation where I work.

Today was a major milestone in this project, demonstrating it to the Chief Executive. As always seems the case in such things, the first report I showed him failed. The worst sort of failure, no error message, no clearly wrong results - just a failure to return any results at all. I can't remember whether I mentioned this before, but I always tell the truth. I'm sure a lot of people would be horrified by that and would feel that I was making unnecessarily hard work of life, but I find that (although it can lead to problems at times) it keeps things simple. The truth was given that the system detects who has logged in and what they have permission to see, this was the first time that this particular report had been run, it was also true to say that being at the peak of the organisation his report required more work than anyone else's.

He took the failure in good humour and accepted the alternative of logging in as me and running a report which gave similar results.

Even after nearly thirty-three years working for the same organisation, meetings with the Chief Executive can be quite daunting. But today's encounter gave purpose to what I've been working on and he seemed pleased by what had been achieved. I found the experience uplifting.

I was once accosted by the then Chief Executive in a MacDonalds with detailed follow-up questions from a meeting that we'd had earlier in the day. I was totally spaced-out from a very long very hard day and all my response circuits were frazzled - I couldn't summon up anything to say. After a minute or two, the CE said "Perhaps we'll talk about this tomorrow" and walked back to his exasperated wife. I think it highly unlikely that the current CE would accost me in MacDonalds, for a variety of reasons, but being a blog writer himself (for internal consumption in the organisation), there is perhaps a very small chance that he'll come across this entry. So you see, another way in which telling the truth keeps things simple.

Real visitors!

Well so that's how you get real visitors then. You visit "Petite Anglaise" and leave a comment and her nice readers come and visit you.

Visitors from seven countries (and the one from the US wasn't Google). If I had one of those smiley gadget thingies the ends would be pointing upwards

A visitor!

"Wow!" I thought as I took a quick look at the statcounter stats. "My site has had a visitor". I'd already discounted the UK hits as probably all me (they were). But one from the US - "Wow!" Then I drilled down further. The location was Mountain View, California (now where have I seen that before. Oh yes it's Google and low and behold one of my entries now shows up in a Google search. So not one single person, but potentially millions. Always look on the bright side.

What's in a name?

Why Phase Two (Faceless)? Why any name for anything? Any time that I'm in an ad-hoc quiz team, there's always the struggle for a name, almost always people don't agree with my "witty" suggestion and go for something toe-curlingly bland. I've given up suggesting "And The Winner Is...". But I'm getting off the point (which you'll find happens a lot with me (along with nested parentheses)). Why this name for this blog?

Phase Two because it's my second serious attempt at a blog (the first ran from April to November 2005). (Faceless) is my reaction to the Facebook "look at me, look at me" self-publicity side of self-publishing. My old blog had my photo and profile in the standard top right position. I'm not a particularly avid reader of blogs, but I've noticed that many eschew the profile/photo thing and don't even have any part of a name in evidence. Somehow I like that, so this time round, I'm faceless. And of course (I was taught at shcool that you couldn't start a sentence with and, but what's good enough for William Blake is more than good enough for me) the whole thing sounds like the relationship betwen the Reader and the Blogger - face to face except not quite (less).

Blogs and "Social Networking"

I first posted a blog a few years ago at the height of Blogmania. MySpace was probably around, but below my horizon - just about to appear in my rear view mirror. Facebook and Bebo were both things of the future.

Of course the press still periodically publish stories about popular blogs like "Belle de Jour" and "La Petite Anglaise", but usually once the blog is on the wane.

At the moment there's hardly a week goes by without news stories that mention one of the social networking sites.

The Social Networking sites are much more about the medium than the message. On the surface Blogs and Social Networking occupy a similar space. It's all about self publicity. The social networkers are saying "look at me, look at me, this is what I'm doing 24/7", whereas the bloggers are saying "I'm on a journey through life, stick around if you are interested".

So why a blog now? Funnily enough the initial trigger was an advert for a ticket re-seller which uses someone referiong to "MyFace" to illustrate their ignorance. Then I read in a newspaper about what had happened to ""Le Petite Anglaise" as a result of her blog.

Vast generalisation alert: Social Networking is about showing people everything. Blogging is about showing yourself what you want others to see. At the moment the latter suits me better.