10 May 2002

Having a Senior Moment I'm having one of those senior moments. I just cannot remember where I put my USB CD burner. I can hear Tony Buzan grating his teeth. He's the memory expert who offers Getting Ahead tips for improving your memory and your work life. You could run a TIme and Motion Study on the effort I expended trying to locate the CD burner. As I was rummaging around, I had flashbacks of friends searching for papers, documents and CDs. And I  remember how stressed they felt. So, I've taken Buzan's advice. I tried to play back in my mind the last time I recalled touching the CD burner. Then I tried to remember what I was thinking about how I was going to take care of the thing. I remembered telling myself to put it in a bag so it wouldn't get separated from its power or data cables. Voila! The mental snapshot worked. I remembered it was in a black bag from the ICT Expo. Trouble is, I can't remember where I put that bag. Sent en route from Urlingford to Thurles. 18km. 15 minutes. In an Ignis on a sunny May Day.

There's a lively spam discussion raging on the Irish Internet Association e-business mailing list. Siobhán Tyrrell of www.Strata3.com stunned a few readers when she revealed there are some marketers that abhor spam. In her mind, "Marketing is about affecting behaviour to meet predefined objectives. Stating the bleeding obvious but quite apart from the usual and valid arguments re bandwith, inconvenience, clutter, and intrusiveness, the use of opt-out unsolicited email is lazy, inefficient non-effective marketing! It takes the increasingly outmoded and failing principles of broadcast/mass communications and appies them to an environment which is built around micro markets, peer dialogue, interests and all that other good stuff. "It's not going to work is it? Just because it's cheap and anyone can press the send button doesn't mean you're going to get results. Marketers who don't get this should be forced to hand in their badge." Subscribe to the e-business list at www.iia.ie