Wow – Michael Ignatieff, who is a genuinely intelligent person, unlike the vast majority of politicians, is going to run for the Canadian premiership. I’ve seen him stark bollock naked, because we used the same gym in London – I guess I may have seen the Emperor with no clothes. TheStar.com – No more Mr. Nice Guy
A good round up of all the shopping blogs is in today’s Baltimore Sun: “Crib Candy: Overflowing with eye-catching items for the home, this site features tons of adventurous products for adventurous people.” Perhaps blogs to do with shopping needs a word? Blog Shops – Blops? Got time and money to spend? Click here – baltimoresun.com
T-mobile suck Here’s an idea – if everyone added the tag: badrank ragerank and a company name to weblog posts about sucky customer service, you could aggregate complaints in one place and also Google bomb them. Update: ragerank is a better tag name. I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to T-mobile to try and get a refund on the fees they charged me to reinstall their service because of an error at their end. Unfortunately it was impossible to talk to a human being that wasn’t reading from a script and then the line cut out – because its a T-mobile one and therefore sucks. Ha! I figured that its easier to give them some bad Google juice instead. BADRANK RAGERANK T-MOBILE Anyway, did I mention that T-Mobile suck and just fined me for their own incompetence. Poor Service – T-Mobile Sucks TMobile sucks T-Mobile bad service T-mobile…
‘Crude or profane language Little and his dad both use “Oh snap!” as a euphemism. Dad interjects “Jeez.” Name-calling includes “loser.’… and Little’s dad keeps calling him a daft wee feathered c*nt – I don’t think so. Chicken Little
In England, the more senior you are the less likely you are to ever get expicitly fired – you are leaving to spend more time with your family, taking early retirement, or chose to blow your own brains out with a revolver. Whatever arrangement results in the least fuss – because the English establishment abhores a fuss. Being handed a loaded gun to kill yourself with is more than courtesy. What the Brits really abhore, is comeback, damages – and ultimately, of course, money loss. Courtesy evolves within a culture because it is advantageous for both the donor and recipient and resignation or suicide imply that a decision was voluntary and so there is no comeback. In the US, where establishment and money are more closely linked, by virtue of being a newer country, things are more straightforward. If you don’t have money or you don’t have a track record…
“No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.” “Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-o and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.” I believe – that atheists like Jillette tend to be nicer people because they don’t have to pretend to be nicer. NPR : There is No God
Oooh – I treated myself to the DVD of Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, having missed it on the telly. Bob Dylan was the first person I ever saw in concert, I was 14 and someone gave me two tickets for free as I lined up outside Earls Court with my pocket money. Dylan was my current age then, and already had more than a lifetime’s worth of achievement behind him. It strikes me that Dylan’s generation, my parents’, were the children of people who had been through one of the most bestial periods in human history. Those who had experienced war, my grandparents’ generation, were ready for change and it manifested itself through their children who were brought up differently. These people created the cultural renaissance that was the latter half of the 50’s and early 60’s. Is a shame that not everyone believes that war is…
Jarvis, pretending not to be a techy but really getting it on Google base:
American Rhetoric: McCarthy-Welch Exchange During the Army-McCarthy Hearings
Some people don’t seem to like Google Base – I like it a lot and I’m sure that its a product that will gradually evolve into something truly revolutionary. So far nobody has been able to touch Ebay, but one gets the impression that since they are an effective monopoly Ebay have become very conservative with their product, not wanting to risk innovation which could mess things up. This leaves others who innovate with an opportunity, and Google will innovate here. The people that pay Ebay – the sellers, would switch if they could, but Ebay has the buyers. Only someone like Google could offer a rival marketplace of buyers. As an aside – since the single item Google Base upload allows you to define your own metadata via custom name-value pairs, does that mean that with bulk uploading Google will intelligently parse RSS modules in their own namespaces? If…
“While social commerce is a fairly new concept in online shopping, it is quickly gaining momentum, as more online vendors realize that there are few more powerful sales forces than a personal recommendation, picking up where comparison shopping engines leave off…Wists.com and Kaboodle.com are two of the early social commerce programs. ” Yahoo Unleashes a User-Plugged Shoposphere
Sony’s latest cockup with DRM in CD’s shows that they haven’t a clue – or rather that the media bods in Sony don’t have a clue. More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down. Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent – Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple’s DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive. Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy – they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD’s is dropping as they change from a…