Paul Grenyer

Hopefully you've read my guide to Death Metal. Death metal isn't the only type of music I listen too. In fact I don't only like rock based music, I like some other stuff too. Wikipedia describes Jazz as “...a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.” As with my Death Metal guide, I'm going to run through the Jazz bands I feel are worth listening to, I have enjoyed and have made a difference to me.

There aren’t many sequels as good or better than the original (obvious examples are Aliens, The Empire Strikes Back, Lethal Weapon 2, etc), but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is! It’s a totally different type of story, more in the classic sci-fi vein. Stories where you don’t have to start by building all of the main characters are often easier to get straight into. I had one, for me, huge issue with the film. They used Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” in the most brilliant way for one of the action sequences, from almost the beginning right up to just before the bass lead section the BBC and Channel 4 use for the Formula 1 theme. Then the song stopped. Later on in the film they used it again and I thought “Great, we’ll get it all this time!”, but no, it finished too early again. Maybe this was a deliberate tease for the Fleetwood Mac fans and I’ve just fallen for it 100%. As well as all of the main characters, Kurt Russell was excellent. My other slight issue with the film was that th...

5 years ago today, on the 26th April 2012 Naked Element was incorporated by Matthew Wells , Chris Wright and our CEO Paul Grenyer . Over the 5 years Naked Element has successfully developed software for a wide variety of clients, helping them to improve their business processes and to increase their efficiency, saving them both time and money. A couple of most recent projects that we’re proud of: Fountain Partnership - An online marketing agency. “Naked Element’s software for Fountain reduces processing time by 95%.” Naked Element were chosen to build a script which would allow Fountain to manage one of their largest clients in Google AdWords. In simple terms a script was created that allowed the user to specify AdWords accounts, campaigns and ad groups and then to enter a search, replacing each with a phrase or word. IDSystems - Suppliers and installers of doors and windows. Naked Element developed a bespoke web application for IDSystems. The new application is designed ...

Cities, by their very nature, aren't small (unless of course you're a pretend city like Ely). According to Wikipedia there are over 141,000 people in Norwich and over 370,000 people in the ‘travel to work’ area. I've got a lot of contacts on LinkedIn, but these numbers of people are large by anyones’s standards! Since I came back to work in Norwich for the third time in 2011, I've been expanding my professional network at an exponential rate. From time to time, and more frequently as time goes on, I encounter people I was at school with and Rebecca White was one of those people (although she was a year or two above me at Notre Dame High School). Rebecca is a social entrepreneur and CEO of the social enterprise Your Own Place .  Your Own Place equips young people with the skills, confidence and knowledge to live safely and securely. They achieve this by continually developing innovative and entrepreneurial solutions as well as collaborating for the benefit of  you...

Despite growing up and spending the vast majority of my life living in Norwich, I haven’t really been to the seaside town of Great Yarmouth that many times, despite it being only 20 miles away. I certainly never imagined finding work there. I’ve visited Yarmouth for business three times since Christmas this year, secured one piece of business with a local company and now it’s looking like Naked Element could be securing some more. I’ve been fascinated by engineering since a young age. From the differential which helped drive the Lego car I had as a child, to internal combustion engines, power stations and large ships and planes, I like to know how things, big and small, work. When I was younger I even wrote to the BBC’s Playschool programme to find out how their clock worked and received a photo and a full explanation in response (I wish I still had them now). So when a Norfolk Chamber breakfast offered the  opportunity to hear from a senior member of Seajacks, who own and ...

By Alastair Reynolds ISBN-13: 978-1910935309 This book is quick and easy to read at only 98 pages. It’s a long way from being Reynold’s best work, but it’s enjoyable enough. Often I struggle to put books down, but not so with the Iron Tactician, not until the last 30% anyway, which I read in a couple of hours one afternoon. Possibly the smallest number of characters Reynolds has ever had in a story I’ve read of his, each of them is likable and easy to relate to. A couple could have been explored in more detail. It was clear there was a twist coming, but if the clues were there to what it was, I missed them and was oblivious right up until it was revealed, which is how I like it! Sometimes nothing spoils a book like a predictable ending and in fact there were two surprises for me! I’m looking forward to Revenger which is released in just over a month (18th May), but I’ll be reading the next book in Peter Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga first, so it may be a while until I ...

“Speaking at nor(DEV):con  is a good indicator that people know what they’re talking about” If anyone knows the truth of that sentence, it’s Dom Davis . People in the tech industry know him for many different reasons – as CTO of TechMarionette , providing consultations through Somewhere Random, or perhaps even his YouTube gaming channels – but his speaking career was launched by nor(DEV):. “I started doing the local talks for the Norfolk Developers evening sessions, then speaking at nor(DEV):con , eventually graduating to larger and larger rooms at the conference. That eventually led to offers to speak from outside Norfolk.” ‘Outside Norfolk’ ended up being Israel. A conference over there was looking for interesting international speakers and found Dom’s talk from nor(DEV):con on YouTube. After negotiating travel arrangements, they flew him out to give the closing keynote. “Off the back of that I got to speak at Foundercon in Berlin. So now I can say I’m an international key...