FOO Camp

I was lucky enough to go along to the Friends of O’Reilly camp; it’s a dif­fer­ent style of con­fer­ence. The recipe is to put a bunch of geeks togeth­er, give them a num­ber of rooms, feed them reg­u­larly, and see what they come up with. 

I was lucky enough to go along to the Friends of O’Reilly camp; it’s a dif­fer­ent style of con­fer­ence. The recipe is to put a bunch of geeks togeth­er, give them a num­ber of rooms, feed them reg­u­larly, and see what they come up with. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “FOO Camp”

Knees and NHS

Exper­i­ences with the NHS after knee dam­age incurred while dancing…

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School, there was a rock night fea­tur­ing a num­ber of Sum­mer School speak­ers and attendees in the band. I decided dan­cing was more my style (I sing, but my voice is bet­ter suited to dif­fer­ent music). And then I man­aged, part-way through the even­ing, to dam­age my knee. It was still hurt­ing a lot in the morn­ing, so I decided that I should get it checked out. 

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Knees and NHS”

CSW XML Summer School

The CSW XML Sum­mer School is where I typ­ic­ally spend the last week of July each year. As the name implies, it’s more like a school than a con­fer­ence, with the emphas­is on teach­ing imme­di­ately use­ful stuff rather than bleed­ing edge dis­course. I really enjoy going each year and there are lots of reas­ons for that.

The CSW XML Sum­mer School is where I typ­ic­ally spend the last week of July each year. As the name implies, it’s more like a school than a con­fer­ence, with the emphas­is on teach­ing imme­di­ately use­ful stuff rather than bleed­ing edge dis­course. I really enjoy going each year and there are lots of reas­ons for that.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “CSW XML Sum­mer School”

Browser Blues

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

Being on instant mes­sen­ger all day is like being in a vir­tu­al cubicle.

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

I hate being upsold. Do it to me too much and I will nev­er vis­it your estab­lish­ment again.

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.