Posts

Dragons Den Starts Again Tonight 27th July 2010 3:30 PM
A hamster wheel would take up too much by way of space, but I daresay we could manage some sort of set-up with some pedals... faster the kid pedals, more power they have for the computer, once homework is complete, computer will allow games to be played.
Dragons Den Starts Again Tonight 26th July 2010 9:56 PM
Surely the most sensible way to do the lock would be a keypad with a single-use code. When the receipt for the shopping delivery is printed, it will include a new code for the delivery driver... when he uses that code, delivers the shopping, and closes the lid, a fresh code is generated and sent by text or email to the customer. Yes, it would be hackable, but it would not be worth hacking for
Inappropriate marketing 26th July 2010 8:10 PM
It's not really a notice in the sense of "I am making an announcement and posting this notice and I want people to read it," it's more like giving notice at your job - notifying the relevant authorities. You need your boss and the people in HR to read it, but you'd rather it wasn't being squinted at by all colleagues, clients, and random strangers passing by.

So I'll just have to carry on imagining every revenge from ringing their doorbells and running away, to an unlikely but exquisitely-planned vengeance involving three cats, a hairdryer and seven tons of graphite.
Happy Birthday Trena!! 26th July 2010 12:51 PM
Hurrah, happy birthday Trena!

As my special gift to you, I won't sing.
James Caan?? Advert saturation? 26th July 2010 12:48 PM
Don't know what you're talking about, haven't seen a thing...
Inappropriate marketing 26th July 2010 12:47 PM
Cheers Mike, I am pretty much calmed down although it flares again every time another third-rate photographer's badly-produced bumf lands on the doormat. My slightly evil inner self keeps coming up with interesting "not technically illegal" methods of revenge, or at least extreme annoyance and time-wasting... Most of the ideas are infantile, they'd waste my time as much as theirs, and I'd never put them into practice, but it makes me feel better to dream them up.
I think it goes with the territory.

When profits/share prices/whatever goes up, a CEO gets to take the glory, and when things go badly, a CEO has to accept responsibility and decide what to do about it. He hasn't personally supervised every transaction or even met every employee, but he's in charge of the overall outfit. Much like when exam results are good, head teachers are covered in glory even though they didn't teach every individual lesson, much less sit every exam - and when exam results are bad, the head teacher must decide where the problem stems from and how best to instruct the regular teachers to deal with it, even though they cannot be expected to personally tutor every pupil.

The major difference being that I've yet to meet a head teacher who woke up one day to discover that his trusted senior staff had cut so many corners that they pumped 2.5 million gallons of oil into the world's oceans every day for fourteen weeks, knocking
You Tube Favourites 25th July 2010 1:14 PM
This has to be my fav at the mo. Nice to see the lads having a bit of fun

Soldiers do Lady GaGa

Good grief, there's hundreds of these. I'm not going to get anything else done this afternoon.
It's not just capital, it's also inclination and aptitude. What's wrong with being a small income stream, single-person business entity? The one that isn't ever going to become Google, and uses outsourcing rather than employees, but is nevertheless earning one person a respectable living? Why is it necessary or even desirable for everybody to think bigger? Can't we have a range of business sizes to suit all requirements?

I strongly feel that no matter how often you say "no offence", terms like "bedroom business" and "hobby" to describe the way a person makes a living can only be construed as disparaging. I'm hardly crying into my keyboard, but it's not exactly polite to make your contempt for people who work alone so transparent. Let's at least pretend to respect one another.

Some businesses really are better as one-person enterprises. The most obvious example is those skilled services that depend on a depth and quality of understanding in a one-to-one relationship between client and provider, such as tutoring, gardening, beauty treatments, or counselling services, to name but a few. Clients of these services don't hire the company, they hire the person because they like that person's work.

And some people are just better as one-person enterprises too. I do what I do because I enjoy it and I'm good at it. I can do management stuff, I have done it professionally in the past and I employ and manage my personal assistants. But I can't bring myself to aspire to spending my whole life managing other people and not getting to do any of the actual work that I enjoy! Do I have to be a manager to be a business?
BBC News website 24th July 2010 9:12 AM
I don't like it. The disorganisation and all the different font sizes make it look cluttered, no matter what they wibble about "white space". Categories at the top makes navigation awkward (getting sick of scrolling) and ugh.

Admittedly at least some of this is going to be because I've enjoyed using the old version of the site for so many years, it was familiar. Learning my way around new things can be fun, true, but the BBC news goes with the First Cup Of Tea, at that point in the day I don't want to be trying to get my head around unfamiliar layouts, I just want to see what's going on in the world.

Biggest thing for me is the removal of the text-only part of the site. When I was looking at the news on my phone, that would load in under five seconds. It WORKED. Why take it away? I hate viewing video on my phone, I don't want to see it and I certainly don't want to twiddle my thumbs for a minute or more while it tries to load. I bet people with limited mobile data connections are annoyed too. I saw something about a mobile app but I haven't got round to playing with that yet.

I also hear that a lot of screen-reader users are upset at the removal of the text-only site - apparently the new site is not WCAG 2.0 compliant, although previous versions were. It's not like the BBC News site was designed by one of the cameramen who had some spare time fiddling about with Wordpress and asking his pals on a SME business forum "what do you think of my website?" It would have been put together by a team of well-paid professionals who should have known about the industry standards it had to meet. Why did they not do their jobs properly? Were they too stupid to know how to implement access or did they just feel that blind people didn't need to read the news?

Ironically, to find out why the site is no longer accessible to screen readers and people with certain visual or cognitive-processing impairments, you have to be able to navigate through the site to the FAQ. Halfway through that, they say that at some unspecified point "later this year" they are "expecting to roll out a suite of accessibility tools". No deadline, no suggestion of what should be done in the meantime, no explanation or apology for the delay. It's one of those slow handclap moments.

Oh dear. Eleven minutes past nine on a Saturday of all days and I'm already ranting. I should probably go back to bed.