Day: 12 July 2026

Weeknotes #181: heatwaves and show tunes

Heat, theatre, football and friendship made another eventful London week.

Week commencing Monday, 6 July 2026

A Victorian cast-iron fingerpost in Shrewsbury's Quarry Park, signposted for St Julian Friars, the Swimming Centre, Children's Play Area and Town Centre, with the riverside boathouse and pavilion below and Shrewsbury's rooftops and a clock tower visible beyond the trees on a clear summer day.
Shrewsbury’s Quarry Park signpost basks in summer sunshine.

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 6/7. (81%). Morning walks: 0/3. Office days: 2/5. Total steps: 53,841. 23 hours in meetings.

Life

  • The week started on Monday morning with a message: “Morning… See the news?” It meant this: Will I still be able to watch Love Island and Coronation Street for free?
  • In the evening, there were ten surprisingly filling courses inspired by dishes from around the world as part of Six by Nico’s Street Food tasting menu. Lovely.
  • London has spent the week behaving as though it has been moved several hundred miles south without anybody bothering to tell us. The temperature reached around 30°C, the capital was still under an amber heat-health alert, and this is apparently already the third heatwave of the year.
  • A visit from the police on Tuesday was to the wrong address, but it was still a bit alarming. Although there was nothing to worry about in reality, it’s disconcerting to look at a Metropolitan Police ID badge and wonder whether it’s real. Maybe I should have gone to the office three days this week instead of two.
  • Lovely dinner in Woking on Thursday to celebrate C’s birthday. It was all very nice, but the restaurant was quiet and lacked atmosphere. The staff were trying to stay busy, but I think there are only so many times the bottles behind the bar can be washed.
  • Saturday, to The Producers at the Garrick. Seeing the same production of a show seven or eight months after the first time is interesting. How much do I remember? Was this bit in the version I saw previously, or have they tweaked and changed it? The songs are very well known, but was there always a giant sausage on a fork in one scene?
  • Related, Alex Lodge, playing Leo Bloom, was fantastic, and I hope I am not just saying that because he’s one of the Crazy Coqs regular performers. He had all the right comic timing, and given that we’ve seen him before and know he doesn’t normally speak like that, the wonder of acting astounded me.
  • COMMENTATOR: It was a game of two halves — and then some extra time for good measure — as England were rocked by Schjelderup’s 36th-minute opener in Miami, hauled level in the dying seconds of the first half by Bellingham, then spent a tense and nervy second period unable to find the winner before the Real Madrid man pounced on a Nyland fumble in the 93rd minute to send Tuchel’s side into the World Cup semi-finals for the first time since 2018 — a place in the last four secured against a Norway side that lit up this tournament and can hold their heads high. (h/t: Claude.ai)
  • Remember, I said this last time about the AI commentator.
  • On departing London Euston aboard a Glasgow-bound train — albeit one from which I would alight well before Glasgow — I heard that the onboard shop had no hot drinks. Scotland would be a fair way for me to go without tea or coffee.
  • Some of the reviews for the “Sam-Ryder-looks-like-him” version of Jesus Christ Superstar seem to think it was better than I did, while others were more middling. I still recommend something else.

Media

  • It’s been too hot to sit in and watch TV. Really, go outside.

Geo-targeting Dilemmas

Here’s a digital advertising dilemma. It’s about geo-targeting and first-party data, which, admittedly, isn’t a ‘thing’ for many people.

Anyway, here’s the scenario.

This week I have been working in Australia. It’s lovely to be here, even if it is one of those weeks when it’s warmer in the UK. I have been using the hotel’s overpriced Wi-Fi because I have work to do during the UK day. As a result, I’ve spent some time surfing the web.

As you would imagine, I am seeing lots of digital ads for Australian things, including a campaign for ING Direct featuring West Yorkshire’s very own magician, Dynamo. The magic’s quite clever, and you can see it on YouTube . It’s this campaign that got me thinking.

This bank account isn’t much use to me. I don’t live here. I’m sure it’s a very fine account, and they have noble aims to make Australians take a better lunch break. But I am not going to open one. Sorry.

Or there’s this video for the ‘Australia Works’ campaign. I think it’s a very well-made video, but it’s party political, and I’m a visitor, not a citizen.

Now, I’ve also seen a reasonable amount of this Nivea campaign. This may or may not be a local campaign (it’s certainly a local voice-over in the video and a local landing page), but at least most of the products would, in some form, be available to me at home. The sites in question probably used the data I provided them to tell them I am male so that I get the version of the product that tries to reassure me it’s very butch to moisturise.

If I’d seen all of these advertisements on a local Australian site, that would be fine1 but I didn’t. I saw them all on sites where I am a known, registered and logged-in user. I’ve given all the sites in question some information – partly because they promise to better target ads to me – and they probably collect a lot more data about me. All of which would tell them I do not live in Melbourne; a fact from which they could infer I am probably visiting. Why show me advertisements that are lovely to look at but, ultimately, wasted on me?

It’s not just the sites at fault. Some advertisers specify that ads should be geo-locked within a specific county, which will limit the pool of available creative. That’s enormously short-sighted if you’re placing them on sites that understand I am probably travelling. And that explicitly know I am British.

I know the technology exists to solve this problem so why, in 2013, when we’re all talking about understanding users better to show only relevant advertising, are we getting this so horribly wrong?

Notes

1Actually it probably wouldn’t be fine; there are plenty of audience data sources that could work this out for them, but for the purposes of this argument we’ll let it go.

My Data

I have a lot to say about PIMs and have decided to start to vent here. Oh dear.

At some point – I do not remember exactly when – I needed to start to organise my life. I was, no doubt, a typical teenager and needed to keep friends’ addresses and phone numbers in a book. Then I needed a diary to organise my life (in fact, I am fairly certain my first diary was about 1984). So I started keeping an appointment diary. The addresses and telephone numbers were in the back. Of course, back in the dark ages, I didn’t need to keep track of email addresses and mobile numbers. Each Christmas as a new diary was purchased for the forthcoming year the addresses/phone numbers were cleaned up and entered into a new book. Life was easier.

When I went to university, my diary became more of a necessity as I needed a way to organise. Sometime after I started work, it morphed into a Filofax, which helped organise a little more but weighed considerably more. But still, the pages with the telephone numbers kept getting cleaned up each year. When I lived in a flat, I started to need to keep more names and numbers (you know, the people you have to pay bills to, the man who fixed the leak in the roof, etc.).

In 1997 (I have the exact date somewhere), I bought one of the original generations of Palm Pilot (specifically the Palm Pilot Professional as it had more memory than the personal version), and life – at least when it came to diaries and personal data – changed forever. Seven years on, I can conclude that the addition of a digital diary (or personal information manager, as they are known) has made life both easier and more frustrating in equal measure. Now, with the addition of mobile telephony to the device, I yearn for a simpler way.

I will be writing more later, and when I have done, I hope that somebody who develops these devices will come across my words and think about ways to come good on the promise of making the management of our personal data banks easier.

I Like Yahoo!

A nice clean interface for the new look Yahoo homepage which is very nice indeed.

The new-look Yahoo homepage (http://www.yahoo.com/) carries on Yahoo’s tradition of a clean interface but brings a fresher look. I have always liked that clean feel about most of Yahoo’s interface. I hope they bring it to the UK site soon and make similar changes to My Yahoo! It’s so sad that this makes me happy!

UPDATE: Of course, the problem with a post like this is that it dates very quickly. Still, back then Yahoo had a very clean interface!