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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.
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?
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.
‘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.
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 of litigation, then you get fired. If you do, then you get resigned.
There are people that I have worked with, who were fired, for very good reason, who would sue if anyone told the truth and were to say that - like here. So everyone keeps their mouth shut as a ticking bomb is passed on to another unsuspecting company without detection.
Silicon Valley is full of second tier, mediocre executives who are paid enough to afford a good lawyer to bury their track record through threat of litigation but who aren’t quite senior enough to have to be exposed to public shareholder or media scrutiny. Here there is an obvious advantage for both prior employer and employee to be ‘economical with the truth’.
This medocrity flows from one organization to another, its path lubricated by recruiters who like the idea of people moving from company to company. It eventually becomes the dark matter of corporations and the thing that contributes to the inexplicable inneficiencies of certain firms.
Of course Judith Miller was not this kind of dark matter, but it is weird how, even when everyone knows that she was fired, there is still an advantage in it being couched in euphamism.
“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.
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 the absolute last resort. I owe it to my grandparents’ generation to never forget, and to tell those who do to go fuck themselves in the same way that my parents’ did.
Anyway, suffice to say that No Direction Home is truly great, genius portraying genius.
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 this is the case then RSS has taken one mighty leap forward.
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