July 2022 month review - sporty summer

The Welsh for July is Gorffennaf - literally gorffen (end) and haf (summer), which given how it always tends to rain in August seems right. This July we had a three day heatwave that badly disrupted things and is possibly a sign of things to come unless humanity can collectively get its priorities in order and prevent the climate changing drastically. 

The heatwave coincided with the Grangetown Zoo. We also had a visitor stay with us during the hottest few days. She was a good deal younger than us so Cathy and I took advantage of having a helpful young person around and bought new phones. My previous phone had served me well since I bought it in January 2016. If this phone lasts a similar length of time it should be good until 2028. 

July was also a sporty month. I enjoyed watching the Euro 2022 football tournament, although I didn't get around to putting up the wall-chart for this one. It was an excellent tournament and a great example of how football is football, regardless which gender is playing it. The goal of the tournament was an audacious backheel that actually made me yelp with shock it was so unexpected. 

I had decided not to go to any friendly matches in the run up to the new season. My first game of the season was therefore at Taff's Well who were playing Ynyshir Albions in the league cup. 

My first goal of the season was a toe-poke from three yards out after the Ynyshir goalie dropped the ball from a cross. I went with my friend Paul, who also accompanied me to Barry's first league game of the season, over in Ammanford on a Friday night. A long trip after work!

On the last Saturday in July, I went up to Cwmbach to watch Cwmbach Royal Stars play in the Welsh Cup. I went with my friends Sara and Leanne, and we took their twins, who were too intent on watching the game to pose for a selfie.

We also met up with Allan, who is the club photographer and committee member. He is a great source of local football knowledge. I met Allan through my previous job and had been promising to go up to watch  Cwmbach for ages, so I was glad to finally make good on my promise and see him again.

To cap off a great game, Leanne won the half time raffle!

In addition to all the football, BT Sport were generous with their coverage of San Diego Padres games this month. I watched four and a half Padres games - against the Twins, Dodgers, Mariners and twice against the Giants - but I only saw them win once! I was beginning to think I was cursed until I finally saw them win a game at the fifth attempt of watching. 

And I shouldn't forget the two Blood Bowl games I managed to fit into the month as well.

And finally - and what a way to finish off - I got to meet up with my buddy Connor for a Saturday as well. 

Connor brought me some belated birthday presents, including the epic Lego minifigure at the top of the post, which he had designed himself on the minifigure printer in the Lego Shop in Birmingham. He really timed his visit perfectly because both the Lego Shop and The Entertainer toy shop were giving away free Lego on the day he was in town. A double free Lego day doesn't come along very often. We made the most of it!

Interesting developments in communications

I've been seeing some interesting charts and diagrams on Twitter over the last few days, which anyone who works in Comms may find useful. Here are three of them. Obviously all the copyright remains with the organisations who created the diagrams, but as they've tweeted them, I hope they won't mind me reproducing them here with proper attribution.

First up is this breakdown by Microsoft of PC v mobile usage. (Edit: the blue is PC and the pink is mobile in the graph.) The main learning point is that very few people use mobile devices for email. In work we have recently talked about optimising our email newsletters for mobiles, but I now wonder how much we should be concerned. Obviously we want to make sure they are readable, but the assumption that everyone gets email on their mobiles isn't accurate. 

Click the image to embiggen it to readable size

On the other hand, using social media to drive traffic to websites requires making sure the website is optimised for mobile as 66% of social networking usage is on mobile devices. Two thirds of  SoMe consumers will potentially be clicking through from a mobile device. That has implications for website design.

The next graph is from The Economist and shows how Whatsapp is overtaking SMS text messages. What’s also interesting is how SMS has plateaud and even fallen back slightly. 

This usage graph suggests that Whatsapp may give you as much reach as SMS if you were exploring a new comms channel. Although you’d need to know more about user demography. I suspect Whatsapp is still very much an under-30s medium, a bit like Instagram. (These are my suspicions, I haven't checked to see if there is data out there. I'm basing my assumption on the people I know using either Whatsapp or Instagram.) 

We also still don’t know if Whatsapp’s growth is a bubble that may burst when something new comes along. But what it does show is how quickly a new comms channel can develop. In three years it is reaching the heights it took SMS almost 20 years to reach.

The third diagram has been created by Hootsuite and I really like it. It’s a honeycomb of user experience to guide the creation of web content that will engage people. 

I don’t think this is limited to creating content for websites. I have seen a lot of material produced that tick off none of these characteristics. I may even have been guilty of producing some myself - that web-page that someone has requested because they want a web-page rather than for any compelling user-oriented reason.

As a final thought, I wouldn't have seen any of these if it hadn't been for Twitter. People don't often regard social media as a learning channel, but I find more and more interesting stuff that makes me think turning up in my feed these days. There is a lot of data out there to drive good comms. It's just a question of noticing it.

Dependency

I left my phone at home this morning.

Unintentionally.

I realised as I was on my way to work. I almost turned back, but thought I could make it through the day without it.

I was foolish.

I felt bereft all day. While I waited for my computer to power up I reached absent-mindedly for my phone to check Twitter, only to realise it wasn't there. Every time I got up to go to the kitchen or the loo or downstairs to move some boxes I looked for my phone. It wasn't there. I always take it with me. Today I couldn't. It felt weird.

Cathy says this is evidence of something that she has known for a long time - I spend too much time looking at my phone. I think she may be right.

10 'Best Bits' of 2009

These aren't the only good bits, but they are ten things that made me feel good this year.

1) Getting prayed for by a Bishop before he interviewed me for a job at Lambeth Palace. (I didn't get the job but it was a great experience.)

2) Buying my first new phone in a decade. I need never be out of reach of Facebook ever again!

3) Being rated the number one presentation at our work's Staff Conference, beating all the 'star names'.

4) Being interviewed in the studio by Premier Radio. I've also done several interviews for UCB and will now be doing a monthly slot!

5) Finally getting copies of the book I wrote a chapter for in the post. (I'd written it back in 2007!)

6) Seeing The Tragically Hip in Manchester and Glasgow. And getting to sing into the mic in Glasgow - I still haven't really come down after that.

7) Getting the weather we wanted at Soul Survivor, for once.

8) Two early morning dips in the sea on our youth weekend on the Gower. The water was freezing and yet surprisingly I loved it.

9) Playing on Cathy's Nintendo Wii - getting a gold medal on Tank is one of my ambitions for 2010.

10) Cadbury's going fair trade on a growing number of their chocolates. (Okay, there's rumours they may be bought out by Kraft or the scumbags of evil Nestle, but even so one of the big boys has finally, finally, got the Fair Trade label on their chocolate and apparently others are going to follow suit.)

Micro SD Cards and the pace of technological change

Almost two weeks ago I bought a new phone. My previous phone was one of the first ‘flip phones’ produced by Samsung, which had a ‘call screen’ on the top so you could see who was ringing you before you flipped the phone open.

My new phone is also a Samsung. It’s an iPhone wannabe with touch screen and scrolling menus and other gizmos. Like just about every phone these days it has a camera. I can get the web on it and update my Facebook status and so now I am constantly fiddling with it like a teenager!

It also has a Micro SD port to ramp up the memory. I bought a 2 gigabyte card which promised me space for 250 songs, 1200 photos, and 3 and a half hours of video. The card was tiny – about the size of my fingernail.

Just over ten years ago, when we set up our own business, Cathy and I paid a small fortune for a ramped up computer with 6 a gigabyte hard disk! At the time it was the most we could afford.

Years later we took that computer apart for spares and the hard disk was the size of a dinner plate. Now I’m carrying around a third of that space as an optional extra in my phone, and if I’d bought an 8 gig card, then I’d be carrying round a more powerful machine in my pocket than we bought for our desktop back in the day.

Job description

The line that says: "and any other duties in keeping with the role." Today that meant registering/programming my boss's new mobile phone. At least he didn't lose this one on a canoeing trip, unlike his last one...

Once I made sure it was working I took a picture of myself with the camera phone and set it as his wallpaper, as a "reminder of your favourite employee."