Interesting article in the Observer today which finally manages to pin down what I’ve been noticing but couldn’t quite bring together into a clear idea.
Many companies are so bad at customer service that people are going around discouraging their friends from buying the products being sold.
This seems to be really common in many (possibly all) of the companies I seem to deal with and it’s really, really bad.
We contacted online retailers asking why they don’t respond to queries, but they didn’t respond to our queries.
I read today that Jim Baen of Baen books fame has passed away.
I think I have more Baen SF books on my shelf than any other single publisher and to a great extent Baen Books the publisher was always strongly connected to Jim Baen the man. Baen have published some of my all time favourite books (including Bujold and Weber) and their approach to electronic publishing is by far the most rational, sensible and intelligent of any publisher.
Although I never met him online or off; I feel, somehow, that reading the books that his company published changed the way that I think, and to a certain extent who I am.
My sympathies are with his family and friends and my hope is that the spirit he brought to Baen Books will continue long into the future.
This is a bit late, but I see that the mobile phone shops are starting to merge.
O2 has bought The Link.
I suspect very strongly that this will lead to substantial closures of stores. There seem to be any number of locations where the two companies have adjacent stores. My local shopping center has both and I think many other shopping centers have too.
I’m not really sure whether the mobile phone stores can keep up the density they currently have, especially given that things seem to be past the initial goldrush period of mobile phone buying.
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I was having a problem with some java one day, I’d made a change to some code and I kept getting a StackOverflowError. Unfortunately the stack trace didn’t help and some time inspecting the code didn’t offer any quick solutions. So I turned obviously to Google. The answer was simple, although it took some work to find it.
If you get a StackOverflowError in java it can sometimes be difficult to identify where the problem is occurring. This is because in some versions of the JVM the relevant stack trace isn’t automatically provided. This is the case in 1.4.2 when using the JIT compiler. (which I was)
One work around that worked for me was to add the -Xint option to the java call. This forces the JVM to use interpret the code rather than attempt to compile it. The interpreter will provide a stack trace and the problem can be easily found and fixed.
The bug report that gave the answer is at Sun:
Bug Report.
When I first read this I genuinely thought it was a joke, but as far as I can tell it’s absolutely genuine, the companies involved really did change their names. Some of them had to have new names; obviously if you demerge from another company you need to be called something new, but others had perfectly good names that they changed. Much of it makes no sense at all!
As it stands, the only value the Titan TTC-K8ATB/825/SC holds is as scrap metal waiting to be recycled.
There’s nothing quite like paid shills for writing reviews, but that obviously didn’t happen here 🙂
I often find really critical reviews to be more interesting than positive ones.
(From FrostyTech via the inquirer)
I was just looking today at Disney DVDs when I made a curious discovery and an odd realization.
You CANNOT currently buy most of the main animated feature films AT ALL on dvd. They are simply not available. In some cases films may not be released until 2007 or 2011, in other words years away.
The realization was that there may be children who will never see classic disney films, because they are neither being shown in the cinemas or available on DVD.
It also made me realize that I’ve only seen a fraction of the Disney animated movies. I think this is mainly because the others were not available easily (or at all)
Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why Disney isn’t doing very well financially.
An obvious rule of commerce: If it’s not on sale your customers can’t buy it.
It’s taken me a while to write about it, but last week, Natwest in Edinburgh held a really great session for business banking customers. A breakfast and two seminars. Starting at 8am they gave an excellent breakfast and then went on to give two really interesting talks for people starting or running businesses.
It made me feel really positive and gave me an opportunity to hand out my new business cards, as well as meet people in a similar situation to myself.
I came across this site the other day when I was looking for information about radioactive fiestaware.
The author collects radioactive artifacts
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