This post also features on the delightful Colchester Chronicle

I’ve either lived, studied or worked in Sunny Colch for almost all of my life. Whilst I could happily point you in the direction of the finest watering hole (The Brickies, Bergholt Road) or the highlight of the cultural calendar (Colchester Beer Festival. I sense a theme developing…) I couldn’t tell you much about its history, beyond something to do with the Romans.

An attempt to remedy this myself and my dear wife chalked our names up for a Walking Tour through the excellent Visit Colchester interweb site.

Our tour guide, Anne, was superb. I doubt there could have been a finer way to look afresh at buildings and roads I’ve walked along for years.

Below are some of my favourite facts from our walk this morning. No doubt some of them may be familiar to many, but they’re enjoyable nonetheless:

• Camulodunum is not a ‘Roman’ name, its an adaptation of the original name for the town — Camulodunon. The name comes from Camulus, the God of War of the Trinovantes, who were the ‘original’ inhabitants of Sunny Colch.
• Colchester was probably one of the first places in the UK to encounter an Elephant. The Roman Emperor Claudius brought them ashore when he originally laid siege and conquerered the town in AD 43.
• Firstsite/The VAF/Golden Goose/Bronze Banana is one of the finest buildings our town has to offer.
• The lovely shops towards the top of Eld Lane which look like houses were originally houses. Alms Houses.
• West and East Stockwell Street get their name from a well at their bottom which provided water for livestock to drink whilst being driven to market.
• The tiny door way you can see on Holy Trinity Church from Trinity Street is called the ‘Devil’s Door’. It was built so that the devil, unleashed by the cries of child being baptised, wouldn’t be able to open its wings and escape.
• The narrow, terracotta bricks you see on many of Colchester’s oldest buildings are actually Roman Bricks, which are similar in size and shape to a small paving slab. As the town grew they were ‘recycled’ for new building projects.
• The building currently housing Superdry in Culver Square used be the town library, and was requisitioned in the Second World War. The entire Culver Square precinct was built on top of the Roman Barracks, and remnants of Boudica’s famous ramapage were found in the form of charred earth when building started.
• The Arts Centre lost the top of its tower when it was shelled in the Civil War. An unfortunate chap named ‘One Eyed Gunner Thompson’ and his ‘egg shaped cannon’ were also lost, one of the possible origins of the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme.
• Balkerne Gate is no named after it was Balked (filled in) once the Romans left.
• The parade of shops at the top of the high street are housed in the old Fire Station. The entire outside of the building is made of iron, just to make sure it couldn’t be burnt down…
• The building which currently houses Pizza Express used to be an agricultural showroom in the 19th Century, hence the huge glass windows.
• The Dutch Quarter should actually be called the Flemish Quarter. Most of the weavers who came to Colchester weren’t from Holland, they were from Belgium.
• Jumbo is still very beautiful, even from close up. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to it, and catching sight of it as I pull into North Station will be even sweeter having been close up to the old thing.
• The Town Hall Tower is called the Victoria Tower and is topped by a statue of St. Helena, facing in the direction of Jerusalem. The ravens sat around her are a symbol of the Hythe Port, and the figures around the middle of the tower symbolise the main sources of prosperity for Colch — agriculture, the military and fishing.

The most exciting find for me on the whole tour was St. Martins, the church found along West Stockwell Street. The Church looks tiny from the outside but is deliciously peaceful and rather large inside. One of the most interesting features was a ‘squint’ — a portal cut through the wall so that the poorer members of the congregation could see the action.

The tours run most weekends and ours took slightly longer than the 90 minutes (we were a chatty bunch). You can find out more and book here. Get yourself along when you can, it’ll leave you with a feeling that you’ve scratched a bit deeper into the surface of our little old town.

Its a common refrain from many Twitter biographies, designed to protect you if what you say doesn’t quite fit; but it’s worth thinking about what protection it really gives.

If what you do means you have to think or speak on behalf of someone other that just ‘you’, can you really separate your brain between work and personal?

Even broader than that, if you need to use the Internet and its easy to find out who you work for, is it simple enough to say any views you’ve shared online are really personal ones?

These are interesting questions to consider as the social web becomes ever more pervasive.

By the time I collect my pension my entire working career will have been lived out online.

The blog posts I’ve written, tweets about talks I’ve given and recommendations from colleagues and clients — they’ll all be accessible to anyone, anywhere and anytime

Whether you believe in ‘social media’ or not, if you’re working in an office based job right now and use the internet in any capacity just have a think about the digital footprint you’re going to leave behind, and if there really is such a clear line between personal and professional.

A bit of googling inspired by a magnificent spread of Dandelions on the lawn this weekend threw up a tantalisingly easy sounding recipe for wine; amounting to boiling up a load of dandelion leaves with some crushed raisins, adding some yeast and fermenting.

A visit to the in-laws yielded some happily loaned fermenting kit, and the journey home through Haye Lane left us laden with Dandelions.

I’ve just decanted the resultant brew into a demijohn ¹ and it smells wonderful. Heady, gingery and musty, it does kind of smell like you’d imagine drunk dandelions to taste.

2 months of delicate fermentation await. I’ll let you know how it tastes in June…

In response to overwhelming demand ¹ here is the first post about my Butts.

Bought in an attempt to stave off the hosepipe ban ² these two puppies can hold a bulging 400L of cool, Essex run-off.

I managed to install them two weekends ago, and as you can see from the photos, they’re swollen with sky juice.

I had to fashion a makeshift down-pipe made of 34mm waste pipe which is connected to the gutter with a liberal splurging of solvent cement. This beastly thing creates a chemical reaction between the two types of PVC which makes them liquid. When they solidify they’re welded together.

What’s missing is some form of proper overflow device, but I quite like the dangly drip hose option in the third photo…

I promise to keep you updated on the status of my Butts throughout the year.

1. Ketchup for Bacon.
2. HP for Sausages.
3. Toast your bread.
4. Fry your egg.
5. Make the tea first.

Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, speaking at the Federated Media’s Signal in March this year:

“Our atomic unit of communication on Instagram is an image,” Systrom says. “Advertisers all around the world speak in images.” ¹

Facebook knows that its inability to make money from its mobile products is a potentially major risk to its upcoming IPO.

From their S-1 filing:

We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. ²

I think the real reason for the Instagram purchase, and the incredible price tag, is access to a potentially lucrative mobile advertising product.

Dear Person Who Monitors This Email Inbox,

I am writing to you inform you that, once our policy has expired with you, we will no longer remain a customer of yours. I’m sure this will not necessarily be earth shatteringly interesting news to you, but I thought it might help to let you know why. It’s nothing personal.

We made a claim with you earlier this month for some damage made to an iPad we own.

Since this happened, I’ve spoken to TWO entirely different companies, both of whom who seem to suggest they handle claims for you. This was a surprise to me.

The first company, dubbed “The Claims Unit”, told me they needed to pass our details to their Underwriting Team.

The Underwriting Team needed to check if we’d declared any other claims we’d ever made about anything, anywhere. This process was so complicated and intricate that it was impossible to offer any form of estimate upon its completion. Similar, perhaps, to the sequencing of the human genome, or untangling Christmas Lights on Christmas Eve when you’ve forgotten to buy the Turkey.

I mean, it’s not as if this information is just *available* anywhere, is it?…

 I can only assume that there was some kind of sinister error when sharing this information. Maybe you used a bad batch of USB thumb drives, or there was a nasty accident involving a large magnet, some paperclips and an intern called Brian.

I was expecting that our claim would be stuck in some kind of Time Vortex. Endlessly spinning about whilst your Underwriting Team searched valiantly for the information (which is above, by the way). Generations of Underwriters would pass this story along. It would become legend. Maybe there would even be a film about the crusade for our claim information (which is above, by the way) starring Tom Hanks.

But NO!

Excitement!

Today saw a letter, and a delightful phone call, from a company called ‘Be! Valued’

I can’t comment on the branding approach desired by choosing such a company such a name. It wouldn’t be fair to. However, I am very impressed by the sheer quantity of ampersands used in our letter, and the jaunty angle of the exclamation mark:

Lovely stuff that.

I’m excited to see if there are going to be any more companies joining our little party? Perhaps there is an underwriting firm called called ‘Our Risk, Our Decision’ or a loss adjusters called ‘Your? Guess! (Incorporating: Is As Good As Mine)’?

Anyway, the delightful folk at Be! Valued are sending a special little box for our iPad to be whisked off and repaired tomorrow, which I can only assume will be inspected by 27 different businesses and after 6 years, finally actually repaired.

I’m hoping that once we’ve potentially managed to sort our silly little claim we can still be friends.

All our love

Mr & Ms. S & O Watts & Coulson.

xxxx

$180,000,000 is a lot to pay for a company. Especially one which has only really been popular for 6 weeks.

OMGpop, a small network of largely flash based games released ‘Draw Something’, a game for iOS and Android where you draw a picture and your friend guesses it. It may sound extremely familiar, but its incredibly addictive. ¹

As usually accompanies runway hits on the social web, the app achieved multi-million numbers of active users and downloads, and (reportedly) billions of drawings shared. After 6 weeks of this success, OMGpop were bought by Zynga, the current doyennes of the ‘social gaming’ world, and publishers of FarmVille, Words with Friends. ²

When I first started working with the web, the dot-com bubble was in full deflate mode. ³ Acquisitions like OMGpop’s were unheard of. The story instead was of companies like Boo.com; painting themselves into a corner with insane valuations, ruinously expensive offices and no revenue. ⁴

In the last 10+ years the landscape which both of these companies operates in has changed dramatically, but what are some of the key reasons why one succeeded, and the other failed?

Boo.com was attempted to innovate in an established market. Zynga has created an established market entirely from scratch. Why did the innovation fail and the creation of
new market succeed?

1. Simplicity of route to market.Boo.com had to build an international logisitics network. Zynga publishes a game directly to its customers pockets through the app store.
2. We know what is shit. Boo.com needed to hire smart people with no experience of running a technology business (because almost no-one had). Zynga can hire from the pick of the people with the last 10 years experience.
3. Quality of product. Boo.com required two things most people didn’t have: a fast modem and a fast computer. Zynga can rely on the fact that it’s customers have a powerful and highly connected device to consume their products.
4. Price point. Boo.com sold luxury products with a premium price tag. Zynga sells games with an average price of around £1.69

I am an emotive chap — and one given to almost professional levels of Irrational Worry.

The last few weeks have been the best of my life, and as they come to a close I’ve been pondering why.

Getting married was important to me because it’s a chance to let the world know how much you know you love your partner.

It also offered a chance to bring all our favourite people together and celebrate.

Being married isn’t the only way to do these things, but I found it the easiest.

The excitement of those few weeks has left me feeling pleasantly settled, and scarily confident that I’ll be able to navigate the next 50+ years contented, challenged and happy.