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Account your blessings, or not.

Accountants of the certifying kind are still searching for their purpose. In life but moreover, in business reality.
Which isn’t too strange. They exist only for a couple of centuries, so at the speed of thinking they do, now is about the right time to do a second round of thought about their role.

First, a picture to freshen the mind:
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[Memento for outdatedness..?]

To start off, accountants [from here, I presume them to refer to the external auditors of the annual financial statements] were involved in checking all detailed financial data as well as seeing these represented in a standardised form into the annual statements. These annual statements had not very, very much flexibility, (so / because) any statement’s line item had a quite limited interpretation space. Sort of XBRL avant la lettre, in practice.
But since, data representation standards have complexified so much that there is no ‘standard’ anymore; interpretations mushroomed. Which is why exactitude of the summaries in the annual figures isn’t anything important per se anymore, and the fuzzy representation of performance is.

Along came many more types of accountants, of auditors even. Though some may narrowmindedly think all ‘auditors’ are actually the external certifying accountant type, they are dead wrong.
Continue reading “Account your blessings, or not.”

Wired / Tired / Expired, May 2014 edition

DSCN1125
[Symbol of …, still in T or moving into E ..?]

So, here’s the May edition of my Wired / Tired / Expired jargon watch overviews:

WIRED TIRED EXPIRED
Small wine appellations (see below) Microbrews Quasi- but very failed hip beers from global brand breweries
For the discovery of them. See below Most are technically drinkable but no more than gimmicks in taste. Awww, they’re as hip as LOLcats!
French, Italian, Spanish (very) small appellations Eastern European wines New world wines
Côtes de Toul, for one. Various Savoie sub-appellations. Knowing your way around Italy’s appellation-per-village / -anthill landscape. The many (sub)regions in Spain. The better quality Luxembourg reds (and whites). Try them, and be begeistert! (Oh, German – still ever so tending to over-sweetness… jammie US/Aussie taste failure) The very few good ones, they keep for themselves. The easy currency inflow, they dump on us. [Sigh] Apart from a very few, still very boring, boorishly simple.
Teen Twitter Terror Threat Bugs like Heartbleed Snowden et al.
Because the panic. By one tweet. Out of …? What if (among) the others (there) are encoded similar ones..? Dude, that’s sooo 1980-2013 (give or take some years); self-referential. From the Eastern front, no news. (Unless one would count the many same messages and very, very long spun out aftermath. Tire to kill ..?
Back to the absolute multi of multimedia Game of Thrones Mad Men
Back to the explosion of formats to communicate through; i.e., not only social media but all forms blended, off-line, online, text, video, paper, F2F, just anything, mixed ad hoc. Frantically searching for the right format – per sound bite. Yeah, yeah, just kill eachother already. Might have stayed fun when it would have some actual history. The mehhh of series.
Home cooking Street food French. Or pure Thai.
Because, if (!) one can, this is best, in quality of ingredients and control to not have the bad ones of those (e.g., salt… light if any, not tons to extract flavour from bland wholesale stuff). Pure Markets, hipster cooking vans, et al. Watch out, the hoi polloi of wannabe classy but middle-aged mediocre-minded drones are picking up and overflowing the area with passive-agressive bitchiness..! There’s so much more specialised kitchens – that actually are purely themselves, not still simpled-over-to-fake(!)-narrowminded-average tastes.
Home garden vegetables Bio (-dynamic / organic) veggies Plain supermarket veggies
The purity – of pleasure in seeing them grow, in nurturing. Passive-aggressive B12-insufficients, couldn’t feed the tiniest part of the world population if they’d try to roll their methods out beyond their little kindergarten acre. Semi-purified water, supplemented with E-numbers to add flavour.
OK, one more for this month, on the tech side:
Software Defined everything Managed security services SIEM / IAM
Because abstraction is good for business; mixing less under-standing, less overview and more complexity and (hence) much error-proneness (if that is a word). If they weren’t managed already, move over to Little League / Internal or external, what’s the difference ..! (fundamentally) Process nay procedures infrastructure driven by erstwhile point solutions. Yeah, baby, fire up the klesydra!
And a final one, to throw it in here by lack of a better place
Google Now Siri Dragon
Going strong, and working Joked about often enough. May have started to work i.e., not too little anymore, but too late. Same, big time; desktop oriented hence mehhh.

OK, any suggestions for next month’s edition ..?

Who controls the Watsons…?

First, a picture for your viewing delight:
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[Seems chaotic, yet navigable]

Who controls the Watsons in your pocket, once they arrive ..?
Anoher one triggered by Clive Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think: When not if Watson has morphed into a Software Defined Anything something small enough to fit on your mobile, just about everyone will use it in cyborg / centaur ways to augment oneself. This will require adaptation of the way one goes around in the world, and …
may create a dependence on the Machine, possibly a big one for those that had gained the most by this new ways.

But

  • Where will the database sit that hold all the info to be brute-force searched, in breath and depth ..?
    If it is local, then how are the inputs screened; are they, and by whom ..? Who would know anything about the stuff you/they miss out on ..? Homophilia (groupthink/narrowingmindedness) and its grave dangers.
    If it is somewhere remote, the control issues loom even larger. Yes, capacity-wise this may work much better. But the Central Scrutinizer (eternal thanks) may … will be the blue pills all around solultion …!
  • Even if primarily stored locally, who will have access to the images stored remotely for ‘backup purposes’ ..? Due to the enormous dependence that the PocketWatsons will create, backups are ‘more essential’ than ever, and by their nature must be kept at some distance. What a TLA wet dream would it be to lay their hands on yours…!

That’s only two questions that popped up already. There will be many more. And the answers …
Who will provide those, who will pick the best ones, who will decide what’s best ..!?

To Be Continued.

What’s the Edsel App of 2014 ..?

Would any of you be interested to help me start a competition to find, and have voted, the Edsel App of 2014 ..? Or have an award ceremony every quarter, or so ..?

This would be about the app, or application, or system, or any invention in general, where all that see it at its publication go like what were they even thinking!?

To be clear, this will be called the Edsel App for a reason, being it is the high water mark of an idea smash-bombed into oblivion by its utter ugliness.

Which brings us to all sorts of criteria and competition requirements.
Re eligibility; there are gazillions of apps that never gain any traction. There are even more, that are ugly and/or operationally/practically disfunctional as @#$%&*. But I aim for the ones that were designed by serious, large teams of developers, designers, etc., in reputable large companies with reasonable track records.
Where do we find them; who brings them to us?
How do we ‘ test’ them?

Etc., to be continued. I’ll leave it here for now, with a picture for your viewing delight (??):
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[The Hague parliament, dreadful design outside, same in its operations…]

The age-old question of transcendence

First, a picture of course:
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[“Mehh, why not just put a concrete slab over the canal..?”; Calatrava at Hoofddorp]

After finishing reading (partially as in ‘studying’) Smarter Than You Think (again), I saw this little piece on transcendence … taking it from another angle. Unsure how to marry the two perspectives…

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord