David Emery OnlineWhere art thou?
Above is St Ives in Cornwall, England, which is roughly where I was over the last week.
Wasn’t quite as hot as it looks like it should be from that pic, though…
Read more ➔Daring
I’m back.
I hope you all missed me.
So, let me see… what have I missed? Remarkably little, really. Google have finally launched Google Calendar, and by all accounts it’s a type a google launch, as opposed to a type b; i.e. it’s good, like Gmail, not bad, like Google Page Creator.
I think the two most interesting stories of the last week are blogging based – the image to the right may give away the first one:
John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, has given up his day job to concentrate full time on writing the mac/geek/computing site.
Bravo! Well done! Go give him money!
He’s one of the best “pundits” out there – very rarely does he write a word I disagree with, and I think it’s incredibly brave of him to go chase the dream in such a public fashion.
The utter flip side to the Daring Fireball story is what’s going on on Scoble’s Blog – Robert Scoble, Microsoft blogger and normally a reasonable read (after you filter out the Microsoft propaganda), has now got someone else writing his blog for him.
What?
The whole situation is mighty odd, and I find the whole “guest...
Read more ➔Disclosure
I’m sure you all read my post yesterday on Be Your Own Pet, and how great they are.
In the interests of full disclosure, I feel I must point out that I work for there record label. Which puts me at a tricky little conundrum. I was a big Be Your Own Pet fan before I started working for there label, and even if I wasn’t working there I would still have bought the album, still gone to the gig on Saturday and still recommended the album.
Which is why I didn’t put a disclaimer on the last post.
But the thing is, I know that the sales of the album have been slightly lacklustre, and I really want people to hear the album – so hence no disclaimer, as obviously it takes the shine off any recommendation.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who goes through small moral dilemmas like this when posting on their blog, and I’m really not sure the best course of action.
For you, the reader, I’m sure the choice is easy – the truth, please; disclaimer and all. We want to make our minds up on our own,...
Read more ➔Byop
Be Your Own Pet.
Go buy their album NOW!
No, seriously.
It’s really, really good. Really good.
On Saturday they rocked out a bowling alley.
A bowling alley.
How can you not want to hear a band that plays bowling alleys?
Read more ➔Late
At work we’ve just launched a mini-site for The Late Cord
Nothing too flash, just trying to get the music out there, basically.
Read more ➔Patant Lunacy
Dear United States of America,
Could you please sort out your patent system, as in this day and age it effects us all as well.
Thanks in advance,
The Rest of the World
Some of you may have read about this already, but it’s an issue I think really isn’t getting enough press:
From April 11th, any ActiveX component in a web page displayed in Internet Explorer – including Flash movies, Quicktime, Real Player etc – will require the user to click first to activate before it’ll run.
The best write up about it, with pictures, can be found here on Robert Nyman’s blog.
It’s all due to silly patent rubbish, but will have an effect on every single web developer out there; any page that embeds an object will require rewriting to use javascript to embed the object instead, which gets round the new patch. If you’ve got javascript turned off, sorry – you probably can’t use flash or quicktime anymore; I imagine almost all Flash etc will be embedded using javascript, and you’ll be lucky if people provide a non javascript fall back.
In many ways I think it’s a slight shame there is a work around – if you did have to click to...
Read more ➔Wintel
If you haven’t seen it already:
Lets you install Windows XP on your intel mac.
Wow.
Also, Apple hasn’t missed its chance for a bit of humour, from the Boot Camp page:
...Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world…
...Once you’ve completed Boot Camp, simply hold down the option key at startup to choose between Mac OS X and Windows. (That’s the “alt” key for you longtime Windows users.)...
...A printer for the instructions (You’ll want to print them before installing Windows, really.)...
It’s a Public Beta at the moment, an will ship as a final version in 10.5. I think it’s very interesting that Apple is getting into these waters – I think Apple may finally be going after some market share…
Read more ➔Questions First
Ok, so my post yesterday did sound quite a lot like Mr Godin.
I admit it.
But I think we can all learn something from Seth, and it’s something very simple really. Something every child does, that most adults forget:
Ask questions.
About everything. Little ones. Big ones. “Why doesn’t it work that way?”. “Why not do it like this?”. That sort of thing.
The corollary to that is quite simple; once you’ve asked the question you then have to do one thing:
Think.
It’s amazing how many times people forget to think. Always a bit of a downfall, I find.
Read more ➔Biscuits
On Saturday this weekend I was out doing a bit of shopping and was faced with a choice between two different supermarkets; the first one is slightly cheaper and also very slightly larger, and is the one I normally go to. However, it almost always has very long queues on Saturday. The second one is a bit smaller, more expensive and has less choice.
To try and avoid the large queues of are normal store, we opted for the second one – hoping that the queues would be a bit shorter. When we got to the checkout we were, however, faced with similarly long queues. We will be going back to the second store next week, though.
The reason?
While we were waiting in the queue, a staff member went round and offered everyone a biscuit from a box of biscuits, and apologised personally for the wait.
The cost to them? In the region of £2.
It’s the small things that can really make a difference from a customer service point of view, and most of the time they don’t cost that much. The first store, in contrast, puts a bored sounding employee on the tanoy who apologises for the queues.
Does your business give out...
Read more ➔