that canadian girl

Latest adventures…

  • One step closer to being British

    I had to hold back from calling this post “Welcome to Hell”, but I have to admit my day wasn’t quite as bad as I expected. I spent it in Croydon, queuing, waiting, hoping, stressing and finally getting my Indefinite Leave to Remain visa.

    This means I’m now free to stay in the UK for as long as I’d like, and it’s up to me whether I want to get British citizenship or not in a year’s time. I probably will get it, if only for the fact that travelling around Europe will be possible without filling in those bloody Landing Cards every time and slowing down entire queues of people at airports!

    I’ve had so many emails from Canadians asking about getting a visa to come to the UK, I’ll most likely build a page with information on the topic to help the legal, hard-working, educated people who want to come to this country know what to expect from a day visit to Croydon. It ain’t a fun-filled day, to say the least, but walking out of there with the necessary visa feels great!

  • Brand envy: The innocent fruit drinks

    You know what, I think I’ve got brand envy. It’s a bit like penis envy, but it’s specific to marketers rather than men (though men working in marketing can have both, I imagine).

    I envy the innocent brand. There, I said it. I feel a bit better already.

    Innocent SmoothiesTo put how I feel simply, think of lastminute.com for a moment. Most Brits will know of their hot pink logo and omnipresent uhh… presence, when travelling around London in particular. In my mind, they’re the bad guys – not because in my daytime work environment, they’re considered competition, nothing to do with that. It’s because on the scale of genuine brand hipness, they’re at the very end of the “Trying too hard” extreme with their advertising and brand positioning. Quite at the other end of the scale, I feel the innocent brand is surrounded by an aura of natural hipness.

    Now I know this is all perception, and the team at innocent are probably working just as hard to make their brand work, but they’re doing it like ducks – pedaling madly underwater, looking calm and composed above the surface. The pieces fit together perfectly – product, print and billboard ads, tv ads, PR. I bet it’s one fantastic and creative team of ducks to work with as well!

    What prompted me to write this was finding out that innocent organises a free music festival in Regent’s Park, and it’s called, wait for it, Fruitstock. Normally, if I saw a name like that, I’d probably bash my head against a hard brick wall until I forgot I’d ever heard it, but in this case, it’s just… cute. It just fits right.

    That brand as a whole fits within the same category of things that give me that feeling of happy-hippy-dreamy lightness that I get from summer-print prom dresses, listening to Corinne Bailey Rae or watching the little giant girl video.

    Brands change and people change, but I hope innocent keeping doing things this well.

  • Latest Shiny Shiny entries

    I forgot to link to my last few articles written for Shiny Shiny, so here they are.

    This week: Be Safe, Part II: Woman looking for man, lots of money, nice car, washboard abs
    Last week: Be Safe, Part I: When Good Scams Go Bad
    The week before: Get it while it’s hot – Apple introducing movies to iTunes?

    Go on, it’s Friday… Go leave a comment then head to the pub!

  • How to ruin your day in one easy step

    This sounds like the alarm clock from hell.

    Clocky the annoying clock“Hit the snooze button on this carpet covered Clocky and it will scoot off on its pram wheels, seeking out a suitable hiding place (which will inevitably be right under the bed). When your snooze time is up, Clocky’s alarm will make merry hell under you, panicked and disorientated, locate its hiding place and switch the alarm off.”

    I don’t use the snooze button much (usually set the alarm for 6:45am, and get up at 6:50 when the first snooze ends), but it doesn’t sound like a nice way to start the day. Might as well wash your face with hot chilli oil and brush your teeth with toilet cleaner while you’re at it.

    Plus it kind of looks like a poop on wheels, which can’t be a selling point, really! 😉

    [Found via Katie at Shiny Shiny]

  • Simply beautiful

    Possibly one of the most amazing videos I’ve ever seen. Watch it here or go check out the original in full size.

    Feels very Bjork’ish…

  • When good demos go (very, very) bad

    So we all know that Microsoft have now announced that “Vista will be released when it is ready”, so don’t hold your breath, you’re likely to go grey before we see it.

    But how are the existing features coming along? Well, let’s see…

    At Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Vista product manager Shanen Boettcher set out to show just how easy to use the speech recognition technology built into upcoming Windows Vista software will be. Like, for example, dictating aloud a simple, heartfelt letter to mom, and having one’s voice automatically transcribed into a computer.

    The result was a disaster.

    Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.

    Based on this report from Reuters, I think we can agree that there’s still a tad of tweaking to be done…

    And until next time, dear readers, remember: “Let’s set so double the killer delete select all.”*

    [*: I think we’re onto a winner here. It’s bound to compete with “All your base are belong to us”…]

  • How clever!

    I truly love advertising campaigns that get noticed without being driven by a big budget, like the Logitech QuickCam YouTube girl or any good ol’ virals, but I’m also a sucker for the likes of the Bravia superballs and the VW Singing in the Rain.

    And here, the big McGuys have created a pretty cool billboard ad.
    McDonalds Billboard

    Hate to admit it, but it’s a pretty funny idea. For every hour of the morning from 6am til noon, the sundial is advising people on what they should be eating. When noon comes, the shadow of the Arches is perfectly centered straight down.

    I like it because it doesn’t involve aggressive messaging, there are no flashing lights or posh technologies. It’s just a sundial. How clever.

  • Just think about it

    “80 years of life is a number that is easy to grasp. If you broke down the number of days and used people to represent them, it would fill a large hockey arena. That’s a number that you can grasp, that you can process visually (or so this person argues). The idea is that there’s way too much to do in life to ever be bored.”

    [Found via Limmert]

  • Welcome to beautiful Germany

    I’ve been happily showing off pictures of Sammy the cheetah, but it’s time to post a few of the other photos of our friends Alex and Eric’s wedding in Germany this weekend. Discovering where a friend grew up, who and what they were surrounded by is always interesting and eventful!

    For those of you who know Alex & Eric and would like to get all the photos, drop me an email and I’ll send the rest over. 🙂

  • GTD Slacker Drowns in Own Disorganisation: Community Devastated

    In late 2005, out of desperation and after a few months of feeling like I couldn’t make head nor tail of the JCB-loads of projects I had on, I ordered and read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’d first heard of it from some truly zealously organised people and I thought if I could gain a tenth of their organisational skills, I’d be well ahead and leaving the pile of mud I felt I was on. [For those unfamiliar with GTD but curious, here’s the basic workflow chart.]

    Some months on, I’ve had flings with just about every productivity software for Mac, web-based or else. Quickly running through them, this is what I thought of them:

    • Thought I’d be brave and start with the paper low-tech version, as David Allen had given me the urge to leave fiddly technology behind and just throw everything on paper as soon as it crossed my mind. As it stands, I type a lot faster than I handwrite, and I’m much less likely to let my laptop dissapear below stacks of invoices, printed spreadsheets and other desk junk, so I deemed it best to keep it on my computer’s desktop if there was any hope of me keeping this up.
    • Having used Basecamp as a single free user before, I thought I’d give it a second go, hoping GTD would help me make better use of it. Not bad, but seemingly I’m a slightly forgetful idiot, and I would slack and forget to log in for a couple of days, letting the more random selection of tasks take over again. Nowadays, I’m a light Basecamp user for work purposes and for shared tasks with others, but not as productivity tool for myself.
    • Next I went for the other extreme, the complex kGTD: Kinkless GTD harnesses the power of OmniOutliner Pro to become a hefty productivity tool. Unfortunately, I started spending more time organising kGTD and playing around with it than working, which was completely counterproductive. To put it simply, I was worrying about the cup rather than enjoying the coffee.
    • I tried the classic text file recommended by so many users as a low-tech option, but it just turned into an immense disorganised list, causing me to forget priorities by just going top-down through the tasks.
    • At the moment, I’m in a steady relationship with Mori, which I’m sure I could use it as more than a glorified stash of text files. But I’m also having an affair with DEVONnote, though we’re still just flirting and I haven’t figured it out yet.

    So I’m still hopping around, looking for the ultimate app. I came across the demo for Thinking Rock, which seemed structurally so tightly organised based on GTD that I couldn’t go wrong, but haven’t yet installed it or played with it beyond looking at their demo. It’s not visually the most pleasing thing I’ve ever come across but it looks like it’d do the job.

    What I need from a GTD app:

    • Easily throw ideas to be processed as they happen (brain like a sieve means everything needs to be written immediately) so that the inbox of ideas doesn’t distract me any further
    • Good structure of multiple projects
    • Forcing me to deconstruct projects into tasks rather than think it’s too much hassle to break it down any more because it’s fiddly to do so
    • Good archiving of old done tasks, for when I start doubting myself about whether something was done or not and when (brain like a sieve… Is there a theme here?)
    • Hopefully, good looking and easy to use

    What are your GTD apps or techniques of choice? Any advice for a slacking GTD user?

    I do feel I’ve gained in mental organisation and planning from the book and its concepts, as well as from reading the blogs of some true GTD geeks. I’ll follow with another post of my top GTD/Productivity tips, but leave me yours too!