School of Curiosity
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Call me Clementine
June 22, 2012
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Ahem……allow me to introduce myself. I’m called Clementine and I’m the public face of The School of Curiosity. I’m nearly forty you know! I’ll be coming home today after some mechanical work and I’ll be getting ready for my new School of Curiosity paint job. The suspense is killing me.
Anyway, just wanted to tell you that you can follow all of my adventures on that Twitter thing @clementinz
The absolute level of simplicity
June 21, 2012
The UK Government announced plans this week to make the Civil Service more efficient. It’s all very simple, according to Minister Francis Maude. The Civil Service will become “Digital by default”. As if that wasn’t enough they are going to engage in “Rigorous daily collective self-evaluation”, “lean continuing improvement” and follow a “Demanding methodology in the delivery landscape”.
I think this means that they are going online, they are going to talk to each other and try to do their jobs better. Though heaven knows what they will say when they try to explain what job they are supposed to be doing.
Contrast this with Apple insider ken Segall who says that CEO Steve Jobs would go berserk if his team brought something to him that had not been boiled down to its absolute level of simplicity. Thank goodness our Civil Servants didn’t work at Apple. We may have ended up with a “Digital sonic portable platform with self-select functionality for integration in an advanced entertainment landscape”. Personally I think iPod sounds better.
Thought for the day: Boil everything down to its absolute level of simplicity.
Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success, Ken Segall
Friendly flyers
June 20, 2012
Lewis Dryburgh lives in Aberdeen. A few years back he began hiding messages, like the one pictured above, around the city in the hope that they would be found by random strangers. He included a website address on the back. Some people thought he was a driven by religious fervour or promoting a business. He was doing neither. He just wanted to cheer people up.
So many people replied via the website saying how the message had affected them. You can see all his messages and the replies on Friendly Flyers. It’s heartwarming stuff.
Make someone’s day today. Hide a friendly flyer.
James Ward. He likes boring things.
May 31, 2011
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I had lunch last week at The Scandinavian Kitchen in London http://www.scandikitchen.co.uk/ with a man I came across on Twitter. His name is James Ward and he has become fascinated by ‘boring’ things. His interests and activities include The Stationery Club where people meet to discuss their stationery; a project he calls The London Twirl in which he photographs and documents Cadbury’s Twirl’s making a note of how the shopkeeper has displayed them whilst compiling a league table of prices (apparently you would be amazed at the price variations); and Bonving – if you want to know what that is you had better look him up.
In 2010 James was looking forward to a conference called Interesting 2010. When it was cancelled he Tweeted that there should be a Boring 2010. So many people responded that he has made it an annual event and discovered that if you take a bit of time and trouble to focus, then seemingly mundane things can be extraordinarily fascinating, funny, entertaining and unexpected.
Speakers at Boring included a man who has kept a ‘sneeze diary’ all of his life, noting down the time, place, power rating of the sneeze, and what he was doing when he sneezed; a car park spotter; and a milk connoisseur. James, despite being a DVD Distribution Manager, is an avid reader of The Grocer magazine and is taking a keen interest in a new range of burgers which can be cooked in a toaster.
Looks like boring is the new interesting.