I have jury service until the 19th January. If you need me, contact me on my mobile phone and I’ll get back to you when I can.
And a Merry Christmas from Dataflame
Got this on Christmas Eve from my host, Dataflame.
Dear Customer,
I hereby request you to upgrade all the online webapplications which are hosted with us. Please check the following is the list of online web applications provided and hosted on our shared servers. If you have any of these hosted under your webspace, please take quick measures within 24 hours tp upgrade, else there after we will be upgrading them by ourself. This is required for security measures as depreciated and outdated scripts are hack prone and hence need a upgrade asap. Thank you for cooperation.
…
So if I don’t upgrade all my Dataflame-provided scripts on Christmas Day, they’ll do it for me, in their best possible English.
Ho, ho, ho.
It’s sad to see PRs stabbed in the back by their clients
To a certain extent, I imagine doing Apple’s PR must be a slightly cushy number. Apple are usually extremely reticent to talk about anything you want to talk about, preferring instead to drone on about what they want to talk about; if you’re writing a feature on almost any subject except what was in the last Apple press release, you’ll usually find it impossible to get a spokesperson out of Apple.
Unfortunately, it’s not like there’s much you can do about it. You can’t exactly hint that most of your Macworld feature will be about Dell as a result, now can you?
So that’s easy PR living, right? No pesky interviews to arrange, just press events aka ‘parties’. Although there’s a large number of people who got into PR to be professional communicators, etc, there’s still a sizeable number who got into PR because they wanted to be party planners but couldn’t pass those tricky entrance exams. Again, I imagine that within the tech PR industry, there’s a group who aspire to work on the Apple account as the zenith of their profession because it’s all the ‘good’ bits of PR without the ‘bad’ bits.
Or at least it would be if it weren’t for the facts the parties will typically be composed of those highly socially skilled, meterosexual fashionistas: tech journalists.
Bite PR is the firm that currently has the Apple account. Wherever two or more tech journalists gather, if those two names are mentioned in the same sentence, you can guarantee the next 15 minutes will be spent relating amusing tales of inefficiency and cluelessness. I’ve already told you about a few of my personal experiences (company four here, here, here, here, here and here) and I’m sure if you search around, you can find tales from other UK journalists. Sorry, Bite. That’s just the way it is.
Worryingly for you guys, Apple appears to be cottoning on to this fact.
Continue reading “It’s sad to see PRs stabbed in the back by their clients”
VNU’s big sell-off
3i – who I occasionally do some work for – has just bought up VNU’s European business mags, including Computing and IT Week.
Worryingly, VNU also plans to cut 4,000 job. Good luck everyone.
Ramada Jarvis Bristol
Just spent the weekend at the Ramada Jarvis Grange near Bristol. I can’t say I had a great time, but it wasn’t bad for the price.
What’s wrong with our language teaching?
So the British are rubbish at languages, that much we know. What’s the problem, though? Why are we rubbish? I don’t know, but I have a few ideas.
The British Academy thinks bringing back compulsory language GCSEs is a good idea.
Onora O’Neill, President of the British Academy, said that “A prompt return to mandatory study of foreign languages at GCSE is crucial, since otherwise schools will not have the complement of staff to teach any languages to a reasonable standard.”
The Academy also believes that longer-term measures are needed to incentivise foreign language study and to improve teaching and learning opportunities. Robin Jackson, the Academy’s Chief Executive, added that ‘The decline in school level language learning results in damage to language-based degree study and also to the many other university subjects that involve linguistic skills, with further malign effects upon the standard of UK research in these fields“.
Hmm, actually teaching children languages might help them to speak languages? Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before? Silly government.
But I have a question. We all know that the Dutch, some of our closest neighbours and fellow speakers of a West Germanic language, are incredibly multilingual, speaking English, French, German and Dutch fluently almost to a man (or woman). Now, there are probably plenty of reasons for this, including easy access to foreign language TV stations, thanks to signal leakage from neighbouring countries and cable TV, and a healthy number of people to speak those languages with.
All the same, I can’t help but wonder this: why don’t we just send a fact finding team over to The Netherlands, find out how they teach languages there, and just do that here – rip out our entire language-teaching system and use theirs instead?
It’s just an idea.
Who’s the tramp? Me.
I’ve descended to hobo levels of existence. It’s ridiculous. I’m absent-minded at the best of times, but my Monday activities were just silly.
In a fit of efficiency, I went out to recycle the household waste, get a couple of pairs of trousers dry-cleaned and post a letter. Given that I had two bags for everything, what do you think happened?
Yes, you guessed right. I put the trousers and the post in the recycling bag and then accidentally recycled them. Fortunately, the recycling bins were close to the house so I was able to run back, fetch a broom and use that to hook out my trousers and post.
But I am now, officially, the kind of guy who wears trousers that have been fished out of wastebins. Oh dear.
Why don’t ISPs and hosting services tell you stuff?
I’ve already told you how my slightly rubbish hosting service, Dataflame, chose to change all the permission requirements on PHP files without bothering to tell me. Now my ISP, Be, has decided to get in on the “zero communication” act.
On Friday, mid-way through the day, they suddenly decided to implement an anti-spam measure that blocked all outgoing emails (technically, they closed ports 25 and 465). Took me a while to work out what was going on, and a bit less than a day to respond to my support request but it’s all sorted: if you’re a Be customer and you can’t send emails, set your SMTP server to smtp1.bethere.co.uk.
But why couldn’t they simply have emailed me (and everyone else) and told us that we’d need to change our email settings on a particular date? Or have a transition period? I ask you…
I sure know how to pick ’em
Although its readership was increasing and it was making a profit, another one of the mags I write for has decided to close. There’s no winning, sometimes, is there?
Economists: always surprising
I’m always surprised by economists and the things they come up with. If you’ve ever read Freakanomics, you’ll be aware of the exciting trends they can uncover (abortion as the cause of reduced crime in the US, etc).
But they can also devise some extremely clever ways of encouraging certain behaviours and discouraging others. Take carbon trading: it’s worth billions already and is encouraging industry to become greener using the motivation of large profits for those who are environmentally friendly. Carbon taxes, currently being argued about by all the main UK political parties, are a way of discouraging environmentally unfriendly behaviour.
The most clever green proposal I’ve seen is to discourage electricity suppliers from charging per kilowatt, but instead to provide a warm, well-lit house as a service, to be delivered in whatever way the supplier deems necessary:
“People aren’t fussed about how much power they buy,” explains Philip Sellwood, chief executive of the trust. “If energy suppliers sold a service – a lit and heated house, rather than units of gas or electricity – then they would face incentives to provide it as efficiently as possible.” In theory, such companies would even pay to improve their customers’ homes, cutting their own costs in the process. One is already operating in Woking, a green-minded town; another is planned to start in London.
See? That’s clever.