Monday 20 November 2006 will go down as one of those days in which I was prevented from doing anything useful through the necessity of doing a whole number of utterly forgettable mundane jobs.
Somehow today I missed the opportunity to meet and interview some of the big names in this new fabled Web2.0, plus failed to cover the filming of a new big film in Oxford city centre, and then managed not to get my hair cut, or write an important news story that should have been done on Friday. Or in fact reply to a very interesting email about a subject I am researching heavily, or get on with an important brief for a documentary, or eat my lovely Thai chicken red curry sat on the hob.
What did I do today? Nothing. Well, I news edited Techworld but it was a dull news day and I will be hard pushed to remember anything about it. Yep, today, I missed all my chances in a rush to do absolutely nothing at all.
Sherriff’s in town
What was nice was that I got see old friend Lucy Sherriff who was in Oxford to cover the “Silicon Valley comes to Oxford” event at the Said Business School. I had completely forgotten all about this until Lucy calls at 12.10pm to see if I’m around for a very quick coffee in 20 minutes with the event starting at 1pm.
In attendance were people from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google etc. I was actually invited and now I know that the Said Business School organiser woman is going to hate me because she thinks I didn’t reply because I was annoyed about being told I couldn’t have an interview with Steve Wozniak when he was in town a few weeks ago. Actually, I was a bit annoyed – I was going to write on behalf on of Techworld and The Register, and these readers were prime candidates for people that would read the book he was plugging.
But whoever Wozniak’s PR people were, they were determined to get him on the big media outlets. And they succeeded, except it was entirely the wrong strategy. He appeared on Radio 4’s MidWeek for chrissake. Not one single listener of MidWeek is going to buy iWoz so you have to question the logic of sticking him on it – especially when no one in the room is going to understand or even care about computers.
Anyway, I promised the Said woman I would turn up anyway to the book signing but then the night before I was invited to an Internet security conference in London in the morning and I had to be in London in the afternoon and evening anyway, so I went to that rather than stand in queue to get my book signed. But now I’ve failed to turn up to a second event at Said (a more interesting one too). Actually a third event if you include the Oxford Internet Institute’s efforts to snub me both last year and this year.
Christ, I’m going on a bit.
Golden Compass
Anyway, wandering back through town, I came across the new film being made of Philip Pulman’s novel The Golden Compass. This is perfect for a bit of freelance journalism. Hang around, talk to a few people, find out what’s going on, what future filming schedules are, track down where the actors and director are staying, grab Philip Pullman (I keep seeing him in Oxford and keep failing to stop him to talk to him), and then you have a stock of information to sell to whoever you fancy. But I had to head back home to get on with the news editing.
I need to get my hair cut – it’s an amorphous blob at the moment, so I decided to combine a quick covered market snack with a quick haircut, thereby killing two birds with one stone. But it fell apart when the food took ages so I had no time for the haircut because I’d been away from news editing for over an hour. And of course I had forgotten to bring my PDA with me so I couldn’t edit from the cafe.
By the time I got back, the backlog of work was such that I didn’t have time to get involved in some extra research I am doing on the Net child pornography issue, and for which I am still desperately trying to finish a brief for a TV documentary on. I just about had time to call the UN in Geneva about ongoing IGF matters, but not enough time to respond to the countless emails about this that have been arriving in my inbox.
Feature rehash
And then I got a call from The Guardian asking me to rehash and extend my article on domain names which was supposed to be in last week, but was bumped out and has now been bumped up to the front page lead (I think anyway). So I have to do that this evening, after I’ve eaten, and hope that I get it done in time to relax and get some sleep so I can get up early to clear myself a path for all the work I was trying to do today – most important of which is a story on Nominet’s EGM on Wednesday.
Oh, and I have to pick up a dinner suit, buy a dress shirt, make sure I have a black tie to head to a computer dinner in London that evening. Somewhere along the line I also have to book flights to my mate Jonny’s wedding in North Carolina at the end of December (I’m best man), buy a new computer, sort out the contract on my house, pay the overdue electricity bill, build not one, not two, but three websites – no, I’m wrong – four websites, and then, I don’t know, do something enjoyable.
If you suspect I have written this list down in order to remember what to do tomorrow, you are absolutely right.
Today has just been one of those days.
