Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Voice recognition software sure is great sometimes.

Works efficiently and gets easily well over 95% of words and phrases right. it works so well in fact that it loves to lull you into complacence, happily transcribing away at high speed, just before dropping in something of outrageously dada-esque inappropriateness right into some important piece of correspondence you were just reaching for the send button to fire off.

Like for instance as I was sending a quick e-mail asking for something to do with code and a “slightly more complicated” logic this of course is taken to be:

(This one) I caught just in time. Yes Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I would like to retrain your understanding of that phrase…

As if you didn’t know, Makamba is the capital city of the province of the same name in the southern part of the central African Republic of Burundi. Clearly, the younger and more lascivious-minded of the population there could be understood to have in common a specific type of deductive reasoning.

So in the future or the past, should you see an e-mail or a post from me that’s a little more haiku than you were expecting, now you know.

And if that headline doesn’t get me click-throughs I don’t know what will.

My latest podcast is up! #5 20 awesome songs for christmas.

A mixture of new and old indie and punk rock classics. Every year I used to burn a CD of punk rock christmas songs (much to the sometimes lamentation of my younger sister, my typical traveling companion of the annual cottage/family-visitation roadtrips).

This time, I’ve spiced it up the classics with a bunch of modern indie xmas tunes (some great stuff this year!) as well as christmas blues and a Tom Waits Christmas Bonus Track… But some of my favourites will always be “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues (the original and a brilliant Stars cover in this mix) and the punk renditions of “12 days of christmas” (the Sex Pistols, clearly, and hillariously, hammered out of their gourd make it as far as number 4…) and of course the hardcore/tongue-firmly-in-cheek punk-christmas anthem “A Gun for christmas” by the vandals.

Click on this thingy to play the whole thing:

Or try these download options:

• The individual mp3 files: Link to directory listing
• As one long 66 minute mp3 file: Link to 66min mp3 audio file (all sequenced and mixed together fancy)
• all 20 songs in “one bigass zip file”: Big-ass zip file

Subscribe to my podcast
Go in to Itunes, select Advanced –> Subscribe to Podcast then paste in this secret address: https://www.thomaspurves.com/music/feed.xml

and remember, you can always find all my music podcast on my podcast page.

Promised at least 5 people I’d stop by “>the event but unfortunately an incipient cough and some last-minute distractions get me away.

hope all in attendance had a cheerful xmas drink! I’ll catch up with you in the new year.

And meanwhile some conversation threads to pick up on

Yes Bryce, an intensely practical Enterprise 2.0 unconference in January sounds like a great idea. I’m in! to help organize how I can. Looking forward to working with some of the usual suspects to flesh this idea out. (and anyone else who’s interested)

Mark, lets pick up that. This idea you sent me has some legs. There really is a great need for great need and potential for 2.0 tech in coalescing social organizations and un-organizations (just as we’ve seen through the amazing self-propagating BarCamp phenomenon). Let’s keep this conversation going. There is good to be done.