Hibernating blog

This will be my last post for a few months, as I’m going travelling to Central America in a couple of weeks time.

When I come back I’ll be busy setting up some new projects so I may be too busy to start posting straight away, but hopefully by around March or April things will have calmed down enough to renew hookjab blogging duties.

Thanks for dropping by to read Hookjab over the last year or so, and hopefully see you again the other side of the winter hibernation!

Milly xx

You’re all nerds and geeks! (otherwise known as ‘how to insult your clients and customers in a press release’)

We got an interesting press release from the University of the West of England (UWE) last week. (Emphasis added by me)

Subject line: Employers flock to support UWE’s geeks

First paragraph: Regional technology firms are queuing up to offer support to students on the University of the West of England’s BSc Computer Systems Integration course. The course which by admission of Directors, Dr Rob Williams and Craig Duffy, is suited to ‘techno nerds’, is a popular springboard into lucrative and fulfilling work in the technology and computing industries.

Firstly, geek. I know a lot of web designers and developers who have reclaimed ‘geek’, taking it away from the ‘generic insults for kid with glasses’ context and moved it into the ‘I work with computers, and therefore I’m cleverer and better paid than you’ context. But it only really works in a strictly wry, self-referential way; don’t you have to be a geek to be able to call geek?

As for techno nerd – well, since there have been no attempts to rescue ‘nerd’ from its derogatory connotations of obsessive friendless losers, that just seems plain rude to me. And it’s all a bit too 80s. Seriously, who says ‘techno’? ‘Computer nerd’ ‘IT nerd’ ‘Web nerd’ or even ‘Technology nerd’ would have been more appropriate, surely. It’s not that the course directors have to be cool with the kids’ new street slang, daddio, it’s just that I’d expect them to be aware of how their industry is currently described.

The PR team that wrote this press release have insulted the students, they’ve insulted the companies that want to work with those students (as presumably they’re full of geeks and techno nerds too), and they’ve insulted the course, by stereotyping it as the kind of course that only losers would do.

What a bunch of dweebs.

How the BBC has discouraged me from ever filling in a website feedback form again

I went to the BBC news website this afternoon, to be greeted by this chipper message:

“Wow!” I thought. “The BBC need me to help them keep their finger on the pulse! Of course I have 5 minutes for them. Although I do want to know what the Queen and Jordan (aka Katie Price, not the country) have in common.*” Exactly whose pulse the Beeb are trying to check wasn’t clear, but could it maybe perhaps maybe have anything to do with selling their soul to advertisers? In any case, I emphatically click ‘yes’.

What is the contry of my residence? I click on the UK.

Oh noes! Only international visitors can waste time filling in the survey. Game over. And yet, I still need to click the ‘finish’ button. Where might that take me?

…to another useless screen. My input has been greatly appreciated. Oh that’s nice. Of course it would’ve been nicer to have a link back to the news website which I was trying to visit in the first place, or even – gosh, this is crazytalk mind – to be told that I wasn’t eligible to fill in the survey four screens ago.

*Turns out they’re both considered extremely glamorous, but in very different ways.