Verbo.se

MMM: Audi A1

22/10/2007

Sorry for the lack of MMM last Monday. One Of Those Weeks.

Mark sent me an article about the upcoming Audi A1. Unfortunately it’s in Swedish so I haven’t a bull’s* notion what it says, but I must look into it later so I’ll report back if I spy anything interesting.

Audi A1

Not bad looking in general, nice pillarless design, but what’s going on with that silver swoosh at the roofline?

* Have I gone overboard with the apostrophe there?

Choosing to be Great Instead of Big

18/10/2007

This is how I want to run my business. I try to do a lot of these already, but obviously scale applies to others. Scale is coming to us, I think. The fact that it’s ‘us’ now, and not just me, is a start. :)

Tucows Blog: Mid-morning brought an inspirational business session titled Choosing to be Great Instead of Big, led by Layne Sisk, president of The Plus Group. His talk was about focusing your efforts on satisfying key groups of people rather than appealing to mass audiences. Layne used five ways to be “great” to illustrate his point:

  • Great in your customers eyes
    • Not just in customer service, be great from their perspective
    • Make the relationship personal
    • Make your customers a branch of your marketing department
  • Great in quality
    • If you don’t believe in quality, you’ll never produce it
    • Get customer feedback to gauge quality levels
  • Great in community
    • Participate in/set up community involvement programs
    • Get involved in what you truly care about
  • Great place to work
    • Promote a culture of intimacy
    • Make pay a secondary reason for people to work for you
  • Great for you
    • Make your business something you love; it becomes like your second family

“I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience.”

09/10/2007

That’s what Ian Rogers, boss of Yahoo* Music, said to Digital Music Forum West last week. Here it is in context.

Ian Rogers: I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Someone buy that man a pint.

* Sorry Ian, I don’t do the bang.

Books To Go

09/10/2007

Very clever. Natty bookshelves that become easily transportable, with books, with a few twists of a screw.

Books To Go

(Hopefully Rose won’t be one of those arsehole designers that doesn’t get WOM.)

Cleaning the Paris Sewers

09/10/2007

Apparently they used to shove a big wooden ball down there and let the water pressure push it along the sewer, until it and all the gunk it caught up in front popped out somewhere. I’d hate to have that coming at me Indy-style!

Sewer Ball

kexec looks kool

08/10/2007

Sorry, that’s probably more appropriate for a KDE app, and this most certainly ain’t one of those. IBM explains it far better than I can:

developerWorks: Even if your work doesn’t require you to reboot your Linux machine several times a day, waiting for a system to reboot can be a real drag. Enter kexec. Essentially, kexec is a fast reboot feature that lets you reboot to a new Linux kernel — without having to go through a bootloader. Faster reboot is a benefit even when uptime isn’t mission-critical — and a lifesaver for kernel and system software developers who need to reboot their machines several times a day.

Unfortunately kexec doesn’t unload your apps before loading the new kernel yet, but apparently that’s on the slate. Given that some of my servers are solid-but-cantankerous old farts that sometimes stall at the BIOS level when booting, this’ll be a boon when I want to reload them remotely.

Bring me the head of the person responsible…

04/10/2007

…for the traffic lights and 60kph speed limits on the N25.

I mean, seriously, only a moron would put traffic lights in instead of a flyover when three large local businesses would be feeding into such a busy road, and only a complete moron would keep working on it when one of the businesses announced a two year delay.

Yes boys and girls, the scumbags in Amgen pulled the plug on the Cork plant. They say the project has been indefinitely postponed, but we already know they’re lie through their teeth, so that’s that. Now we’re left with a dual carriageway with traffic lights and a 60kph speed limit, that doesn’t actually deal with one of the major arteries into it.

Seriously, I want that guy’s head. I want to play football with it. I’m pretty sure I won’t have a problem putting a team together. I could probably start a tournament.

(BTW, I’m running a book on when the Gardaí will start enforcing that speed limit. By rights they should wait a while now, but don’t forget that comfy little weighbridge shed at just the right spot. If there’s a kettle in there, the odds could rise dramatically.)

(Thanks for the heads-up Despod.)

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