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July 23, 2005
Being Busy
Astute observers will have noticed that I wasn't at OpenTech today. This was not for want of trying. However an incident at Mile End took out enough of the Central line to make it impossible for me to get there at any sensible time.
I hope it was good, and I hope travel problems didn't mean that Etienne, Dave, Ewen et al weren't out of pocket.
As it turned out, it was probably for the best that I didn't make it, as the other big event of the day proved to be a little more involved than I had planned, and repeatedly testing a *very* broadband-centric site over a wifi connection shared with a hundred other people would have been slightly antisocial.
But I can at least tell you what I've been working on for the last six months. Say hello to a new moblogging service disguised as a competiton.
MTV:starzine (UK)
MTV:starzine (NL)
MTV:starzine (IT)
MTV:starzine (ES)
MTV:starzine (FR)
MTV:starzine (Nordic)
Still got some more functions to roll out over the next week, and there's tuning to be done, but Glue, Mobrio and internal guys Andy, Vihung and last-minute addition Sreenivas did a great job.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 09:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
July 07, 2005
Bombing Day - Stream of Consciousness
It's been a very very very strange day.
I got into work before it happened. The folks at the well-known Music Television station I work at are slackers anyway, but it took a long long time before I realised what had happened - just thought there must have been extensive after-work drinks the night before and everyone was groaning at home.
And then the news was of 'power surges' at first. London's electricity billing company recently got bought by EDF (electricite de france) so I joked about "Oh, that'll be them getting us back for the olympics then".
And then the bodies started coming out. From stations I'd been through on my way in that morning. And from stations five minutes walk away. And then there was something about a bus exploding - three streets away.
People were drifting in, and Sky News was on everywhere. (Except Nick in the far corner, they were watching BBC News24)
And the word came out that everyone not in should stay away, and that those who were in should stay in the office as it was safest, and it just got more and more surreal.
Eventually I cracked, as more and more people drifted home anyway, and at 3:30 walked across london from Oxford Circus to Liverpool St station, getting the overground train home. Only to have to get in the car and drive round all the exclusion zones to go an pick up my stranded wife way over in west london. To find that her well-known British Broadcaster had just been cordonned off as well, with her trapped inside.
But we were eventually reunited, and got to pick up our daughter from nursery five hours after I left work. All safe and sound.
It's a strange feeling. I've had my office blown up by terrorists once before, back when I too worked for the well-known British Broadcaster, so I'm kind of blase about it. But this country has been buoyed up with all the political pressure we were creating about Africa, about climate change, about debt relief. We won the 2012 olympics to our suprise. We were thinking we were the good guys.
And then someone reminded us that we'd backed the war on Iraq.
We'd forgotten about that.
Which makes you realise that the terrorists may have put our minds back on the real issues we should have been chasing our governments about after all. How fickle we are. How easily we can be manipulated.
Posted by Tom Dolan at 11:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
