ELROY BOS, MSC.

CONSULTING AND TRAINING IN MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS 

elroy@elroybos.com  | 0490 851 429

Category Archives: Blog

Home / Archive by category "Blog"

Respect!

Today, an older gentleman, retired from the military, complained about youth climbing and singing on a war memorial. He was offended, because the kids showed so little respect for the fallen. I kept my mouth shut.

But I felt like doing a rough psychoanalysis. How dare he speak on behalf of the fallen? Many soldiers in the first World War were bitterly disappointed about the purpose of that fight. Even soldiers in WWII, whilst happy to beat the monster of Hitler Germany, were not overly enthusiastic about the fighting itself. Would any of those ‘ heroes’ claim a memorial, and then stifle the life around it?

If there is any motivation to join the army, then it is to defend family and country, and life and freedom. Only few fight for death, most fight for life – and a better life. How then to better celebrate the ultimate sacrifice than by laughter and singing, and defying the powers that decide on war and peace?

Did this older gentleman ever see action? Or did he just get on his high horse to associate with fallen heroes and fill up his meagre life with condescension on youth? Perhaps that is the reason I felt angry.

When a statue or memorial is vandalised, there are people offended. We gather around the dead stone, shout our outrage at ‘them’, and forget there are more important battles to be fought.

Impact of ceiling insulation

The insulation in our ceiling was old: weathered bats and lots of uncovered areas. I put in new ceiling bats to keep the house warmer in winter- it was freezing inside! Well, not really freezing, but cold..

Last night I measured the temperature and came up with the following graphs. Please note that the fireplace was petering out around 7:30 PM and relit at 7:00 AM. 

 

The left graph shows the inside temperature (blue), outside temperature (red) and the difference (yellow).

The right graph shows the loss of temperature per hour – between 0.2 and 0.4 degrees per hour.

Subjectively, it is refreshing to wake up to a house that doesn’t feel cold. Objectively, the temperature loss before insulation was at least 0.5 degrees per hour, and that was on nights when the temperature stayed above 7 degrees and was mostly around 11.

I have as of yet been unable to find a benchmark from other houses to know whether this is as good as expected or not.

Anyway, these preliminary results show that $1100 and twenty hours creeping through small spaces (and a bit of itchy skin) were worth it.

 

My shattered identity

How many online accounts do you have? I couldn’t count mine. There are proably fifty sites that I visit regularly. From my bank to transfer money to Facebook to see cat videos.

Digitisation progresses. More and more agencies, businesses and non-profits make their services available online, and ask you to create an account. Another username, another password, and another set of obligatory fields to fill out.

I am increasingly worried about my (online) privacy. All that data spread out over different sites. All those CRM packages that track my behaviour (after I visit a site, I get an ad on Facebook for that same service?). And all those sites that have been hacked – 9,544,527,795 accounts have been compromised today, with emails, passwords and more available on the (dark) web.

Do I have a choice NOT to use these sites? Often I do not. Do I have a choice to discuss their privacy policy or security measures? Nope. Am I sure that my data is safe with them, and not being traded, enriched and analysed? Haha.

Is there no other way than to allow this digitisation to progress, and trust in the government watchdog(s)? Or can we create our own little data-vaults, and share only what we think is necessary for others to do their work? I hope for some blockchain form of the latter, but am afraid it will be more of the first..

Scraping websites

I am currently working on the migration of a website. The old one – after ten years – has a lot of content, including more than 3800 documents in different shapes and sizes. To complicate matters, they are hosted on a web server that is not directly accessible, and in a CMS that is not very user-friendly.

Scraping the html content was relatively easy. It allowed me to make a sitemap and find all active pages, the resources linked to them, download their content, and the date they were last modified. Finding the same for the PDFs and DOCs was harder to do.

A preview with metadata was available, yet the extension was .pdf or .doc, and the scrapers I used do not follow those links.

The solution was to get into the javascript of webscraper.io, and there remove the filter to exclude documents. And voila: the crawler follows the links and captures the content of the preview.

It allows me to see where pages link to documents, which documents just sit there, and when they were uploaded or last modified. Whilst you still have to go through some of the records manually , you can now decide on 95% of your content when you implement simple rules, e.g.:

  1. Delete stubs and content older than 5 years
  2. Delete all vacancy announcements older than 30 days
  3. Keep all annual and financial reports, etc.

Should you migrate your website, then scraping may be an option. It may also be useful when you want to do a spring clean. But better still: get a decent CMS and make sure that it is managed!

Giving meaning

Ok communications people,

When asked, what communications actually is, one of the preferred answers is ‘giving and sharing meaning’. You are wrong.

Because people who give that answer are working for corporations, governments and NGOs. Giving and sharing meaning only have their place in the lifeworld. Once you are institutionalised, i.e. sell your soul to the corporate or non-profit devil, you are part of the system. Read Parsons, Luhmann, and Habermas to get my point.

The system – you are part of – has a formalised mandate, based on the public discourse of a time gone by, and you can only share meaning if you are willing to debate that mandate. If you don’t, and most of my colleagues do not, then you are an instrument of the status quo, your master’s voice and part of the colonization (Frankfurter Schule) and normalization (Foucault) of society.

Yes, it is that bad. You are pretending to be Robin Hood, but you are his master’s voice. What do I want? Go into that management meeting or the board room, and tell them times have changed. You need to engage on three levels. And not to mitigate or manage risks (Beck), but to change wisely.

Change slowly, or fast. But don’t stay the same. Because then you lose. And everytime you keep up the myth you are sharing meaning, you perpetuate the myth. And you lose time, and we don’t have time. Because change needs to happen now.

Recent Posts

RSS Elroy Bos

ABN

34327374178