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From the News:

Retail focus is key to Alibaba's new London datacentre

from Computer Weekly
China’s e-commerce giant has been slowly expanding into Europe and is now heading for a clash of the titans against AWS and Azure. Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba has expanded its European public cloud business into the UK with two new availability zones. But its goal in London is not about chasing after Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure business.…
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Good Question

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A couple of blogs ago I was berating the Today Programme for, amongst other perceived sins, asking the wrong sort of questions to get people to open up and actually say something interesting rather than, robot like, stick to the party line. I didn’t name any good questioners. Yet, almost in front of my eyes was a journalist who does […]
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Positive Feelings

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I read an article in New Scientist recently – it is a recent addition to the magazines at my barber. I don’t need to get my hair cur very often these days, but having free access to New Scientist may make me go more frequently. In the latest edition Dr. Alia Crum who heads up the Mind and Body Lab […]
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Any Questions?

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I wake up to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 most mornings. My internet radio gently increases volume to reach the desired point and it’s a pretty painless experience. But nothing can prepare me for the hectoring approach many of the presenters adopt. The Today programme has come in for criticism recently. It appears listeners are leaving in quite […]
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Predicting Failure

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Just this week, we’ve been told that the world is about to burn up because of man-made global warming – as exemplified by this glorious summer, and (yet again) that Brexit will be an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. There is a long and inglorious list of predictions which turned out to be nonsense. From Thomas Watson’s perspective that […]
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Digital Diversity

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CIO Connect ran the final workshop before the summer break a couple of weeks ago on the topic of diversity. We invited our largely male membership to bring a female colleague with them. Although this was slightly awkwardly done – it’s hard to word such an invitation effectively – we had, probably for the first time, an audience roughly split […]
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Not Normal

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As the late, great Douglas Adams said “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” Whenever the world seems a […]
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Summer Time

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.. and the living is easy, as the great song by George Gershwin, perhaps best known as performed by Ella Fitzgerald, says. But as I write it is summer time, and the weather pretty much has been hot and sunny with a few short breaks since the beginning of May, but the living isn’t easy. On the political side, we […]
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Mac Musings

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I wrote the bulk of this blog on the train. Nothing unusual about that I spend a lot of time on trains these days. But I wrote this on my MacBook Pro, and that is unusual. I like my MacBook – it has a great screen, sufficient power for the sorts of things I do on the move and a […]
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Run for the hills

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“Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Samuel Johnson was wrong, tragically so. Traveling to a recent CIO Connect workshop I was struck by how much I dislike London. It’s noisy, dirty, dusty, full, rude, smelly. There are too many people in too small […]
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Alphabetic Serendipity

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I have rediscovered bookshops, and with them, books. Perhaps bookshops have been reinvented since I last indulged, Bookshop 3.0, you might say. I’m up to Kindle 6.6 on my iPad after all. 2.0 brought coffee shops some time ago and 1.0 always featured knowledgeable staff, who knew about the books as well as the shop, especially in the independent bookshops. […]
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I’m back

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It has been a while since I last blogged, though through the wonders of foresight not quite so long since you read my last blog. A lot has happened over the past few weeks, most notably for me my Mother died. Those of you who read this blog regularly know she had dementia, so in many ways it was a […]