Everything Express

A Scotsman and an Irishman go to the Wild Frontier – it’s not the start of a joke, it’s Slow West, a low-budget meander through the bleak Wild West. Fassbender’s lone gun-slinger Silas befriends Kodi Smit-McPhee’s lovelorn Scottish laird, Jay. But the girl he’s pursuing has a price on her head and there’s a gang of outlaw’s after the reward money. Will the immigrant odd couple get to her before they do? And what is Silas’ motive for helping?

Sundance-winning Slow West has epic New Zealand standing in for the epic landscapes of the Old West, and despite nods to old Westerns of bank robbers, bounty hunters, men with no name and fewer words, this is an altogether more complex, European-inflected affair. Continue reading →

Article originally appeared on the Speaking Well in Public Facebook page, February 2015

Five key tips for success.

How you sound affects how your message is received. Taking control of the way you speak will help you to capture and keep attention and deliver that message with ease. Continue reading →

Article originally appeared on the Speaking Well in Public Facebook page, April 2015

Our reactions to stressful situations tend to happen in a repeating cycle of habits:

A – An Activating event happens

If you want a conventional website, you’ll need space on a web-server somewhere to run it. That usually costs money. The more space, better bandwidth, better facilities you want, the more it’s likely to cost you. But the Internet is also inundated with offers of free web hosting. And like ‘free lunches’, there are many definitions of ‘free hosting’. Someone has to pay for it in some way.

The obvious one is on-site advertising. Even the best free hosting services reserve the right to lob some ads onto your pages, even the discreet and hopefully tasteful kind such as you find on WordPress.com. So the key question is how much of a free lunch is free hosting and will it give you the kind of web presence you want? Continue reading →

Windows 10 is a Microsoft product, so by default, any desktop search is set to run through Bing, sending everything through Microsoft on the way. Fortunately, this is one of the Windows bindings that is easy to cut, so you can cut Microsoft out of your desktop or local device searches.

Open the Start Menu and type ‘Cortana & Search settings’ into the search box. Even Bing should be able to find that. Continue reading →

Article originally appeared on the Speaking Well in Public Facebook page, July 2015

Redundancy – getting laid off – is now a fact of life, whereas a few years ago, in many sectors, it just didn’t happen. Now it does, and if you aren’t ready when the unthinkable happens, you may go under.

Even if you’re feeling secure right now, you can’t afford to be complacent. And starting to deal with the situation after you’ve been made redundant will put you way behind the field. Here’s your survival kit – start now. Continue reading →

Aiming for the early Sunday night audience again, ITV re-boots the epic poem as a Game of Thrones slash Hobbit generic fantasy in a bleak Cumbrian landscape; it’s dark  earnest, but completely lacking any spark of energy or originality.

Persuaded to pitch his Beowulf as a generic dour Northerner somewhere between Kit Harrington and Sean Bean, Kieran Bew has the accent and the hair to glower through, but appears entirely disinterested in the whole proceedings. Whatever happened to the larger-than-life, passionate and reckless hero of the epic poem? Continue reading →

Web user: I hate ads. They’re annoying, intrusive, distracting, they suck up bandwidth, delay my page loads, scam me with fake content and click-bait, and show me and my kids offensive and inappropriate content that is NSFW or home and bypass my privacy and parental rights.

Advertiser: That’s my revenue stream you’re talking about. That’s how I can afford to serve your content and pay my bills.

Impasse.
Continue reading →