Forget the degree and the postgrad thing and probably all manner of forgettable on-the-job training since. It's official. I have IT User Skills. Not that you'd actually notice from the time it takes me to put together a Kindle-ready book cover in Photoshop, but it's true. I (will shortly) have the certificate to prove it.
I think I've just got myself a GCSE. My training course of a few months back, the Digital Peninsula Network one in Photoshop and Wordpress, mentioned elsewhere on this site. I passed, apparently. So, as of today's notification, I have a < OCR level 2 Certificate in IT User Skills (ITQ) – including Website Software and Imaging Software >. This magnificent achievement is equivalent, apparently, to a GCSE at somewhere between A* and C grade (we'll accentuate the A*, I think) and eventually comes with a certificate.
Forget the degree and the postgrad thing and probably all manner of forgettable on-the-job training since. It's official. I have IT User Skills. Not that you'd actually notice from the time it takes me to put together a Kindle-ready book cover in Photoshop, but it's true. I (will shortly) have the certificate to prove it. Sitting over a flat white at the Costa Coffee in the departure lounge of Dubai International Airport the other day, not twenty-four hours after I'd visited the Waitrose in the main Dubai shopping mall (the one with the aquarium, in the financial district), I happened to notice, above my head, an ad for Samsonite luggage.
In the picture, a woman with a couch behind her and her Samsonite hard-shell, four-wheeled carry-on bag beside her. She was wearing a long, one-piece item of clothing that perhaps she'd pulled on over her head after getting up off the couch. Standing in a white cube/bedroom/consulting room. About to step out into the rather more colourful world around her white space. Now, if I was a digital native, I would have snapped a pic and uploaded it here. But ads (still) need words, and the words were what got my attention, and I'm going to use words to zero in on that. The tagline for this ad was: < Step out. Listen to that inner voice. Follow your heart. Embrace every possibility. > With your Samsonite carry-on bag beside you. I like that the tag wasn't < Room for lots of socks > or < You can squeeze everything into this bag > or even < Cubic capacity: x litres > or whatever. I like the way that (some) advertising is flying free of whatever product is being advertised, and describing instead a (spiritual?) quest for some kind of self-actualisation. Follow your heart, et cetera. We should listen to these ad agencies. They seem to be onto something. But I'm not quite sure what to think about my early-morning visit to the Samsonite website. My bag will hold out for a few more possibility-embracing excursions yet. Although it isn't shiny-red. And it hasn't got four wheels. Okay, so a certain well-known President recently made a speech to his people, in which he told them that their country's military "don't do pinpricks". His intention was to get across that when those soldiers do a "limited" or even "targeted" strike, it hurts. But those of us in the cynical wing of the listening public took it the other way. They don't do anything, not even pinpricks. Can't do anything. Military solutions, at that level, somehow don't seem to happen any more.
Maybe that's because past "adventures" have turned out so badly. Maybe it's because credible military strategies can't be built around what they're NOT going to achieve - this is NOT about regime change, etc. - and maybe we should bear in mind that there aren't many happy precedents for firing missiles into the Middle East and getting "Sorry, you're right and I was wrong" in return. Life isn't like that. Maybe it'll all kick off tomorrow. But at the time of writing, the whole thing seems to have been drowned in words. Plans to put chemical weapons beyond use. Debates, resolutions. A happier ending if not a happy ending - no, not an ending at all. We've all seen those pictures. The people who did that are still in place. My question is, where are the religious leaders? There's so much religious motivation inside these conflicts, that maybe the (attempted) outside interventions should be religious rather than political? A cleric preaching a message of hate is not outranked by a politician blathering about targeted blah-blah, but such a figure might be outranked by a more senior cleric preaching a message of love. Or even a message of "killing is not the answer." What would [Who would you like? Gandhi, maybe?] say? |
Dear Diary: The Archive
April 2024
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