A bunch of Google Calendar tips from Stopdesign… hat tip to Michael at Binary Bonsai for this link.
Monthly Archive for April, 2006
Someone has made a graph of gasoline prices since 1979 — not only that, there’s a separate line for the price of gas adjusted for inflation.
Most interesting; the price of gas, adjusted for inflation, appears to be lower now than it’s height in ‘79-’80 (on this graph).
I realize the folly of accepting at face value statements made on the internet, but by the same token, from what I know of the inexorable progress of inflation, the graph seems quite reasonable.
Seth Godin (marketing guy) recently wrote on the idea that The Customer is Always Right. He sums up his opinion with this rule:
If the customer is wrong, they’re not your customer any more.
In other words, if it’s not worth making the customer right, fire her.
At first glance, those of us in internal service roles would be tempted to complain, That doesn’t apply to us. We have to serve our customers, right or wrong; so we might as well assume they’re “always right.”
At first glance, we might think that. And it’s true — we can’t “fire” our customers. We can’t decide to “stop helping” somebody — it’s simply not our perogative.
What is our perogative (as an internal department) is deciding what we will, and what we will not, support.
For example, many workplaces have a policy prohibiting (or at least discouraging) employees downloading and installing software, especially non-work related software (Winamp, Weatherbug, that sort of thing. Some places might be strict enough (and silly enough) to include Firefox — others don’t prohibit anything). Regardless of whether this policy exists or not, it goes without saying that if you are having trouble watching videos in the DivX player, your IT department will politely tell you that they are not going to help you with that. Because you, the customer, are not “right”? Yes and no; but most tech support departments, if pressed, would tell you something like this:
The customer is always right if and only if the customer can tell us how the issue is related to his or her work.
Rather than the standard “customer is always right” adage, I prefer this story about Nordstrom. It’s said that Nordstrom has a one-page employee handbook - a single 5″x8″ card. It says: Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1 : Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.
The Nordstrom name, incidentally, has become practically synonymous with great customer service. Not a bad act to follow.
All I know is, if I try to take the phrase, the customer is always right absolutely literally, I’m going to wind up making all sorts of caveats, collaries, exceptions, what-ifs, and so forth.
If I set out to use good judgement, always… Now that, I can do all the time.
If my judgement is not good, I’m probably in the wrong profession.
The great mass of mankind does not love to think closely. They would prefer to do almost anything else. They are like schoolboys who shun the labor of study and go to be taught without having studied their lesson. What they are told they forget before the next recitation.
I shall address myself, in this lecture, to those, and only those, who will take the trouble to think. To address others would be a waste of time and strength. Those who will not think cannot be saved.
Charles Finney, Principles of Holiness, p 55.
Just a thought for Sunday morning; throughout the rest of the aforementioned lecture, Finney strongly exhorted his audience to think about what they believed, and why they believed it. He used pretty strong words, but then again, he obtained some great results from his preaching.
A word from Paul (emphasis added):
For this reason I also suffer these things; nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him until that Day.
2 Timothy 1:12 NKJV
Pipe Dream is a musical animation that is really really cool. On Google Video; check it out when you have a moment.
Roger Ebert’s review of United 93 can be read here.
It sounds better than I expected, and I was already expecting quite a bit. Thankfully, it seems that it was not twisted into a conventional “thriller” but was presented more or less chronologically, with no back-story or foreshadowing.
It looks very good; looking forward to this one.
Okay, so I have a MySpace account, now. I am a little late to this phenomenon, but I have a lot of friends who use it, and it is a convenient way to keep in touch with those people.
There’s only one problem: no offense intended to anyone (really; please!), but MySpace is a showcase for everything that could possibly go wrong with web page design. It is the antithethis of the CSSZenGardens of the web. It seems there are even many external sites where you can find pre-built “myspace templates” — some of which, at least, are not even compatible with Firefox (gasp).
What to do? Well, the obvious answer would be to avoid the site altogether. But, if you’re decided, like I have, that keeping in touch with friends is more important than being a web-design snob, there is hope.
For starters, I assume you are using Firefox for a web browser. (If you are not — why not? Welcome to the 21st century, it can be found here.)
There is a Firefox extension called Stylish — install this, and restart Firefox. Then visit a MySpace page, and click the “Stylish” Icon in the status bar; a new tab or window will open to the site userstyles.org, showing you various options which have been created for MySpace stylesheets — in my case, I chose a style called MySpace Sanitizer which basically removes almost all styles, and presents you with a clean, clear, black-text-on-white-background page instead of whatever abomination had previously dwelled there. Ah. Much better.
Yes, I know, people put a lot of time and effort into the way their pages look; that’s fine. If I’m going to visit someone’s page, though, I’m going to see what they have to say. Not to look at a strange polkadot background and text colored in such a way that I can barely read it, thanks.
Once again; no offense intended to the 65 million denizens of MySpace; I would actually guess that many MySpacers would love to get ahold of this extension. ;-)
I just read Linux: A European Threat to our computers, at the site of one “Shelley the Republican”.
Oh dear.
I am looking at the article, and trying not to laugh… I’m not going to bother commenting as there are already almost 500 comments (this made it to reddit, probably digg, too, but I wouldn’t know). I am hoping against hope that this article, maybe the entire site, is a joke to try to make Republicans look bad. Can someone confirm this for me?
All politics aside (hard to do considering the article attempts to politicize Linux to the nth degree), this article is so wrong it is hysterical.
You know, I’m reading this article again, and I’ve made my decision: it has to be a joke. It is way too funny. I would estimate that it is nearly impossible than anyone could actually believe this…. check out some of these lines.
It[Linux]’s a computer program that was initially developed in Finland as a means of circumventing valuable copyrights and patents owned by an American company called SCO Group.
…
And guess what software Osama Bin Laden uses on his laptop?
If you guessed it was Linux you would be 100% right. Osama uses Linux because he knows designed to counterfit DVDs, curcumventing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and defraud companies like Disney.
…
If you see a company using Linux, it may be that they have not paid for this software. Report them to the Business Software Alliance who have the legal authority to inspect any company’s computers for illegal programs like Linux.
Oh my goodness. This is awesome stuff. If I start laughing… there could be tears.
Please tell me no one could possibly believe this! Either way, enjoy the laugh.
As a caveat, I am a conservative Republican Linux user. I didn’t pay for my OS. Don’t tell the FBI. ;-)
UPDATE: The comments are somewhat funny as well, if only because so many of them take this seriously. The more I look at this article, the more it looks like a satire/parody, one that works because, unfortunately, so much of the Linux community seems quite ready to believe that Republicans really could be this daft.
Have any readers heard of any good free backup clients? Ideally it should be able to backup a specific list of files or folders to a remote FTP server, compress data, restore it if necessary, and be able to schedule tasks.
Oh, yeah, and it needs to run on Windows.
I don’t ask for much, do I?
FileZilla looked promising but did not seem to be working properly when I tested it; there are many other programs out there but most of them cost something. I don’t begrudge people charging for their software, I think they are welcome to do that if they want to. However, I may need this for over a thousand users, and even at $10 per client (a good deal) — that’s too much for this project.
Any ideas for free FTP backup clients? ;-) I am toying with the idea of creating my own simple one, or a collection of scripts to accomplish the same thing. I may wind up having to do the latter.
Finally, a better look at Sun’s corporate strategy.
And all this time I didn’t think they had one. ;-)
Via reddit. Of course.
