Browser Blues

 Technology  Comments Off on Browser Blues
Aug 312004
 

These days I typ­ic­ally use Fire­fox as my browser; it’s quick, sup­ports a goodly amount of CSS, and seems less vir­us-prone than some of the com­pet­i­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, there are still web sites out there that only sup­port Microsoft Inter­net Explorer and older ver­sions of Nets­cape Nav­ig­at­or for some use­ful func­tion­al­ity (when the site require­ments read IE 4.0 and Nav­ig­at­or 4.0, you know you’re in trouble). In my exper­i­ence, send­ing the sup­port people email sug­gest­ing they upgrade their site to sup­port oth­er mod­ern browsers only eli­cits a response along the lines of “you’re using the wrong browser so it’s not our fault”. Then I found out about the IE View exten­sion. Prob­lem solved.

Virtual Cubicles

 Technology  Comments Off on Virtual Cubicles
Aug 272004
 

One of the worst things about being an inde­pend­ent con­sult­ant is that you don’t have a lot of col­leagues in the form­al sense of people who work at the same com­pany. You have people you work with on pro­jects, and you have friends, who are often people you work with on pro­jects, or have worked with, or will work with again. It’s easy to get lost in your own world when you work on your own, only com­ing up for air when you notice the sky out­side is get­ting dark­er and it’s not just that it’s rain­ing. Get­ting a cup of cof­fee is not the way to take a break and talk to some­body; it’s just a way to get a cup of coffee.

Instant mes­sen­ger (of mul­tiple brands) fills that gap for me, and gives me a sense of work­ing in a group. It’s like being in vir­tu­al cubicles. I can see if people are around, I can see if they don’t want to be dis­turbed. I can knock on their vir­tu­al door to see if they have time for a quick chat. And when the names start to dwindle on the buddy list, I can tell it’s time to knock off for the day. 

Upselling Considered Harmful

 General, Rants  Comments Off on Upselling Considered Harmful
Aug 202004
 

I hate being upsold. Rel­ev­ant upselling (I’m buy­ing a wash­ing machine, the per­son says “this soap powder is spe­cially designed to work with this style of wash­ing machine”) is one thing. Irrel­ev­ant upselling, or upselling that takes more than one sen­tence just annoys me. 

The latest example was, I call my bank about some­thing this morn­ing. We fin­ish that trans­ac­tion, I’m ready to get back to work, when the woman starts talk­ing to me about who my long-dis­tance phone pro­vider is and telling me about their offer­ings! This was­n’t rel­ev­ant to the pre­vi­ous trans­ac­tion, she did­n’t ask if it was a good time, and she did­n’t even both­er with the hitherto-oblig­at­ory “is there any­thing else I can do for you today” which used to be the stand­ard clos­ing formula. 

Hairdress­ers (and the beauty busi­ness in gen­er­al) are par­tic­u­larly prone to this; I just don’t go back to estab­lish­ments that upsell too hard.

Making Trade Shows Interesting

 Conference  Comments Off on Making Trade Shows Interesting
Aug 192004
 

One of the hard parts about run­ning a con­fer­ence is fig­ur­ing out a reas­on­able strategy for the trade show. Some con­fer­ences don’t have a trade show at all; if you can get the attendees to pay all the costs asso­ci­ated with an event, then that’s a worth­while strategy. 

Con­tin­ue reading »

More Amusing Spam

 General, Rants  Comments Off on More Amusing Spam
Aug 052004
 

One of the recent spams arrived as a dual text/HTML mes­sage. Pegas­us duti­fully showed me the text ver­sion (one click to the HTML ver­sion, should you wish it), which ran

Your mail­er do not sup­port HTML mes­sages. Switch to a bet­ter mailer. 

Ah, the sense of des­per­a­tion on the part of the per­son writ­ing that! The idea that someone might not be able to click on the link to dir­ectly buy whatever it is they’re selling! Of course for me, ped­ant that I am, the top­per was the bad gram­mar. If only all spam were so amusing.

Tour de Thoiry

 General  Comments Off on Tour de Thoiry
Aug 042004
 

En route to the CSW XML Sum­mer School I vis­ited friends from Mel­bourne who are cur­rently liv­ing in the French coun­tryside, a little out of Geneva. As luck would have it, the Tour de France was passing through the vil­lage nearest to them, so we decided to make the most of the event and go and watch.

Con­tin­ue reading »

/* ]]> */