How to prioritise at work?

June 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Learn how to prioritise work from Bolly, the zen mistress

If you’re one of those people that works from home or you work for a corporation and find yourself taking the job and your career too seriously sometimes, then a kitten can be counted on to remind you of life’s true priorities. They have no judgment so don’t take sides or waste time gossiping. They have no ego so won’t be found trying to claw their way up a corporate hierarchy. And best of all, they have their boundaries hard-wired. When it’s time to sleep, it’s time to sleep and everything else has to wait. If we only learned that lesson from kittens the world would be a far healthier place.

Picture of cute kitten asleep on laptop

Filed Under: smile

Amazon reviews: why encourage non-buyer reviews?

June 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Allowing people to write reviews for things they haven’t purchased devalues the review system, surely?

I always thought that you had to purchase a product via Amazon to be able to review it. That would make perfect sense, right? You couldn’t come up with a simpler and more straightforward way to ensure the veracity of the reviews that other buyers refer to when considering how to spend their money.

It seems such an obvious and simple way of ensuring the credibility of reviews that I’d assumed that Amazon worked to this system. The other day I discovered I was able to write a review for something I that I hadn’t bought.

Screen shot 2013-06-06 at 16.32.26I made it a nice review with 4 stars because the seller didn’t deserve to be a victim of my little experiment. Today, I checked back and it was duly published.

I was pretty shocked at the idea that Amazon could allow anyone to write any review for anything. My comment (see pic) shows my reaction. The potential for ‘gaming’ the system is obvious and there’s no doubt at all that there are people doing just that.

On closer inspection, I discovered there is a difference between reviews I make for things I’ve bought and those I haven’t. The reviews for things I have bought through Amazon are labeled “Amazon verified purchase” to attest to the review’s credibility and distinguish it from reviews for things that I haven’t bought.

I’d be more impressed if Amazon labelled reviews for things that the reviewer hasn’t bought something like “Not an Amazon Verified purchase” so that the reader can take it with a pinch of salt. 

 

 

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, feedback, GRRRR!!!

Rimmers Music – spam hall of shame

March 27, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Sorry, Rimmers Music but you chose this way of marketing, not me

Rimmers Music

You’ve made me waste my time contacting you to request removal from a list which I never asked to be on in the first place. That’s crappy. Stop and think about what that actually means for a second from my point of view, not yours. Annoyed. To make matters worse, you then failed to honour my requests (via your ‘unsubscribe’ link and via email) – as the picture of my inbox above clearly shows. More annoyed.

The result is that I’m now choosing to tell everyone else about your chosen method of marketing. It’s the easiest way I know of getting your attention and making you accountable for your decision to do your marketing this way. Don’t act surprised and don’t get pissed off  if people find this post when they go searching in Google for ‘Rimmers music’. This  is what happens when you annoy customers and prospects.

To anyone else reading this who isn’t the owner or an employee of Rimmers Music but owns their own business, please take note: firing off emails to lists of people might seem (from your end) to be a smart way to drum up business. It isn’t. This is what happens when you do. Or worse.

At least I’m willing to publish any response from Rimmers Music on this issue (because that’s what I do). Other pissed off customers / prospects who don’t have the professional, balanced interest in online reputation that I do won’t be so generous or fair.

 

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!, online reputation management

Your video is turned off – Skype

March 24, 2013 By 1 Comment

Apparently, video is OFF the menu for Mac users since Skype was bought by Microsoft

At least that’s the view out there on the web.


Screen shot 2013-03-23 at 23.02.29If you’ve come here because you’re a Mac user and suddenly, out of the blue, you can no longer use Skype to make video calls, then join the club. You dialled someone, they answered and then Skype shut off your video with the message “Your video is turned off”. That’s annoying but even more annoying is that nobody will tell you why.

This must be (is) happening to hundreds of thousands, if not MILLIONS of Mac Skype users and there is a massive information hole about this on the web.

Screen shot 2013-03-23 at 22.53.40If you go to Skype, you’ll see nothing about this. The only place you’ll find any reference to “Your video is turned off” is in the support forum – with a few exasperated Mac users seeking some kind of answer. Do they get any answer from Skype? No. All they get are a few people in the know saying ‘Mac user? You might as well forget using Skype now that Microsoft has bought it.”

From where I stand, they’re spot on. It seems that Microsoft don’t even consider Mac users worth an explanation.

An added little Skype joke (tell me how this isn’t deliberate) comes when you go to the Mac download page. “Get Skype for Mac” says the link which, when you click it, mockingly downloads “SkypeSetupFull.exe” for you. Yes, that’s right – SkypeSetupFull.exe.

“Start using your shiny new Skype” it taunts you, at the top of the page.

Why not use the comments below to tell Microsoft how much you appreciate their thoughtfulness. As for me, I’ve gone over to Google Hangouts as of tonight. So long Skype and thanks for all the fish.

 

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!

Authorize 360 Panorama to do WHAT??

March 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you sign in to 360 Panorama with your Twitter account…

Screen shot 2013-03-16 at 23.01.52…you’re giving them the power to do anything, it seems. It’s mad. Isn’t it?

Why would you give 360 Panorama permission to follow new people?? Or update your profile for you?? Of course, giving access to your data is a very Facebook App kind of thing to do, so maybe the makers of these things just hope nobody will stop and think about what they’re doing.

I’m not going to do it. Like when I was thinking about using ‘Ad Blocker’ to disappear Facebook’s ads – until I read the line in Ad Blocker’s terms and conditions that said “You give the program permission to record your purchasing and browsing history”.

 

Filed Under: madness, what do you think?

Triang hand-cranked go kart from the 1970s

February 24, 2013 By 2 Comments

The internet is lacking any reference to my hand-cranked Triang go-kart from the 1970s…

…so it’s my duty to fill that information vacuum so that anyone else looking for reference to this innovative little go-kart won’t be disappointed.

My brother Steve and I each had one of these Triang go-karts in around 1973. I don’t know how we got them or whether they were new or second-hand (we were pretty poor in those days) but I remember us both racing down the bumpy, steep little alley behind our house on the them.

What made the Triang go-kart special was that you powered it with your hands and steered it with your feet – the opposite of every other go-kart I’ve ever seen. Two metal tubes topped with rubberised hand grips were connected to a crank that drove the rear wheels by long, bendy steel bars. I can remember these bending under power, but they never broke. You pushed and pulled on the hand-tubes which drove the go-kart forward. The front wheels were on a single axle and you steered by pushing your feet (tucked under a little bar) forward.

Triang-ish3

These fat rubber wheels with gold hubs are the same as on our go-karts

The Triang hand-cranked go-kart had a very comfortable seat and plush rubber tyres. I can’t remember ever putting air in them, so they must have been solid but they were soft and bouncy and gave a very smooth ride. The whole go-kart was painted red and the grips on the hand-cranks were shiny black and moulded to fit your fingers.

Triang-ish2

The seat on this conventional Triang go-kart is very similar to the ones on our hand-cranked machines

The images here show other conventional foot-pedalled Triang g0-karts but are useful to show parts from the hand-cranked go-karts. Our hand-cranked go-karts had the same seat as the one shown here with the green wheels. And the one with the yellow seat (above) has the same fat rubber wheels (in the same colour) as our Triang hand-cranked go-karts.

Filed Under: smile

Why choosing a name matters in business

January 30, 2013 By 2 Comments

AudioBoo may have limited its revenue by its choice of name

AudioBoo is a social audio site, offering a very effective and simple podcasting power to the masses. Their free version lets you either record and post short mp3s from your smartphone (adding text, picture and tags as you go) or upload audio files from your laptop. Their ‘Plus’ version gives you the same plus up to 30 minutes duration for each file, making it a fairly simple – but dependable – podcast hosting option. Which is exactly why I’m comfortably paying £60 a year to use it to host my ‘Glider Show’ podcast. 30 minutes is as good an ‘imposed limit’ as anything so I can work with it. The next nearest option would have been a LibSyn account which – while I like their service a lot with its in-depth statistics and other podcasting features – would have been closer to £250 a year.

All has been fine with using AudioBoo Plus so far. All except one thing; the name. There’s a kind of unhelpful, unconscious ‘non-business’ logic behind the AudioBoo name which is surprisingly and depressingly common in the online world. It goes something like this: because our basic offering is ‘free’ (because we’ve mistakenly come to believe that we’re giving you something for nothing) then we can give it a name that you might be uncomfortable and less than willing to use. ‘Boo’. You can almost imagine someone at a development meeting saying “Yeah! We’re gonna kill the word ‘podcast’ and replace it with ‘boo’!”

Making customers use your terminology when they’re more comfortable using their possibly isn’t that great an idea. They may be willing to ignore it as just a part of the exchange for getting the service free. They may find ways to minimise it when paying £60 a year to use AudioBoo as a hosting service for their podcast. But will they want to introduce AudioBoo into their professional organisation?

Because, for a couple of years now, our business has been looking for a way to capture (among other things) audio on the fly so that our team can share information and updates on important projects in an intuitive way and without the hassle of going back to the office and writing up notes which all too likely end up as unlooked-at files in the back of some directory structure somewhere. Obviously we would need this to be private, with the – NO! I DON’T WANT TO SAY IT!! – ‘boos’ available only to our team.  Several times, I’ve looked at AudioBoo to find out whether its possible to make ‘boos’ private. Now, it appears that it is – with their ‘Pro’ option. “Extended recording time and private boos” it offers (with no indication of the kind of cost involved). “Contact us for package info”. Bad move, AudioBoo.

So while I’m reasonably happy with the ‘Plus’ option for my podcast hosting the reality is that if something else came along with less emphasis on its own brand (and without a silly name and new word for ‘audio file’) for the same kind of money the point is I’d probably go in that direction simply because in business it’s about what the customer wants, not the supplier – and the reality is that I need a solid audio host more than I need another social network to play in. And that’s a pity because AudioBoo deserves to hold this territory longer since it got in there first and did the hard work and there’s no reason why it can’t offer people like me what they need in the way they need it.

And so I don’t think that I’m even going to click the ‘Contact us for package info’ button for two reasons: one, I can’t see myself forcing my colleagues to use the word ‘boo’ in their day to day business and two, making me contact them for some indication of the price of this service is just another example of it being all about their needs and not mine. A pity.

It’s a lesson I learned the hard way myself several years ago when running my own business – mukaumedia. People we met and heard us talking about our business knew we were ‘moo cow media’ because they heard us saying it. But the very first time I took a phone call from a prospect and heard them struggle, self-consciously over the name – “Is that er…mm-m-makoo-m-media?” – I knew it was a big mistake, no matter how much the name mattered to us. We live and learn :-)

 

Filed Under: feedback

1,000 visits in a single day tells me that McIntyre and Dodd are at it again

January 29, 2013 By 1 Comment

With their ‘UK Allocations Office’ so-called ‘prize draw’ promotions

The news from my site statistics today is both depressing and pleasing. Depressing because, yet again, it’s clear that today was one of those days when tens, if not hundreds of thousands of MacIntyre & Dodd’s ‘prize draw’ rip-off promotions went through letterboxes all over the country. And pleasing because I can report that at least 1,000 of those people found themselves here on this site after doing a search in Google – and were able to read the testimony of many others before them who had wasted their money on these so-called ‘promotions’ and wished they hadn’t.

Despite the OFT ruling over a year ago that MacIntyre and Dodd’s activities at the time breached the law, it clearly didn’t stop the company who changed a word here and there and gave a few meaningless assurances and then went right back to doing essentially the same thing.

And why not? They’ve learned well enough over the years that there is neither the will nor the means to stop them in this country. Ah well, at least 1,000 people didn’t waste their£15 today. Let’s hope they don’t go and waste it on something equally pointless :-)

Filed Under: scam warning, Scambusters!

Drift HD stops recording after 40 minutes…

January 19, 2013 By 2 Comments

But don’t expect Drift Innovation people to tell you.

I bought the Drift HD camera for recording some group sessions at work. The picture quality of the GoPro camera is superior but only the Drift HD has the magical 2.5mm external microphone ‘in’ jack that lets me capture high quality audio from a wireless mic at the same time.

Good quality audio is often overlooked in favour of the image but poor audio ruins more videos than poor image. If you’re trying to communicate (and not just dazzle with snowboard stunts) then audio quality ends up being more important than picture quality. Can you find a reasonable digital video camera with a socket to take an external mic? Can you buggery.

My first experience of the Drift was good; I liked the ‘wide angle view’ but was annoyed that it mysteriously stopped and restarted recording at about 42 minutes into our 90 minute session. I had a big class 10 Micro SD so I couldn’t understand why it was stopping – and restarting. I didn’t want my session in two chunks, dammit, because that meant I had to edit the thing together and that meant hours of struggling MacBook, overheating trying to handle several Gigabytes of video in one go. Not ideal.

I contacted Drift Innovation via a support ticket and via Twitter. I described exactly what was happening: “Stops recording after about 40-42 minutes, consistently, and restarts…why?” Nobody could answer me. Eventually Drift Innovation support came back to me saying “Well, your camera is obviously faulty, you are welcome to send it back”. Which I did for a refund.

I bought another one and it arrived today. I charged it up (4hrs) and then started a recording to see if it would record past 40 minutes. Guess what? It didn’t. I did some more searching until I found, in the small print of the manual pdf, a sentence that says:

“Note: If the video being recorded is very long, the video file will be separated into multiple files every 3.6 GB (i.e. every 40 minutes in 1080p). This is automatic – you do not need to monitor this process. The camera will resume filming after a few seconds, once the file is saved. Please be patient while the file is saving.”

Well, that settles that. Shame that Drift’s support staff don’t know about it.

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!

MacBook Pro trackpad not working, won’t click, mousepad broken?

January 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Has your MacBook pro trackpad stop working? Does it become unusable when the computer gets hot?

Mine does. Every time I most need to use it. Like on a train, at home or on a plane. Recently, I flew business class to the far east and first class back – the idea being I could work on a particularly important project on the way. Imagine how annoyed I was to get my MacBook pro out, start it up and then find, within minutes that not only couldn’t I use it but that trying to use it was ruining every document I was working on because at a touch, the mouse would stay clicked and drag-and-drop everything everywhere. That’s bits of text inside documents and files, applications and folders outside of documents. Within a minute or two I was swearing aloud in the First Class cabin of a 747, making myself very unpopular.

The problem is, I have since discovered, that the battery expands over time and presses against the track pad, causing it to compress. This gets worse when the computer heats up (hot things expand even more) and when I take the MacBook on an aircraft. I guess this has something to do with pressure but I’m not sure what. All I know is that I can forget trying to work – at least with this great big silver hot water bottle.

Someone on a forum advised taking the battery out and trying to run the MacBook on just mains power. I did this and – presto! – I immediately got back the nice, crunchy, positive, clicky mouse functionality. I also got to handle the battery and was amazed to feel just how expanded and distorted it really is. No wonder the mousepad doesn’t work properly.

So the secret is either to run your MacBook pro on mains only (I’ll remember this next time I need to work on a plane) or grudgingly buy a new, flat, slimline battery and wait for it to become middle-aged in its turn.

Filed Under: feedback, GRRRR!!!
« Older Posts