Status-Q

Google Pages is simple but effective. Another entry in the list to suggest that Firefox will become the new desktop.

Here’s a quick test page that I created, partly because I couldn’t resist that photo…

The thing that annoys me most about sitting on the phone in a call-centre queue is the underlying assumption. Companies who do this are saying, in essence, “You are our source of revenue. We rely on you. But we consider your time to be less important than that of our lowliest operatives”.

Anyway, that’s why I was grateful to John for the link to this NYT article about gethuman, “a consumer movement created to change the face of customer service”. They have tips on how to bypass the IVR systems and get to real people.

Companies are slowly waking up to the downsides of annoying their customers. My own bank, LloydsTSB, recently made the news by ditching the scripts that their employees used to follow. I always found their phone support to be good, but it’s even better now.

I hope this could also have a beneficial side-effect: the greater the variety of queries that the operators have to deal with, the better trained they’ll need to be and the more interesting their jobs will become. Well, we can hope…

In November I wrote a little piece entitled The Patent Cold War, outlining my frustrations with the patent system and a couple of thoughts on how it might be improved.

I stand by everything I said there, but it’s a pity that I hadn’t seen Kenneth Cukier’s excellent survey for the Economist, “A Market For Ideas“, published a month beforehand.

I was lucky enough to sit next to Kenn at a dinner recently and he listened with great grace to my outpourings without even hinting that most of them were a small subset of what he had worked on only a few months before.

This is a very interesting, well-researched and well-balanced 14-page survey, and comes highly recommended for anybody with an interest in this area.

It’s too bad that the Economist makes it so hard to get hold of a copy if you’re not a subscriber. I almost never pay for premium online content, but I would recommend doing so for this. It doesn’t look as if there’s any way to buy a copy of one survey without signing up for a subscription, though, so if you don’t subscribe I’d find a friend who does and ask them to order reprints.

Ah, and as a follow-up, have a look at John’s Observer column about the Blackberry proceedings.

Some work on Multi-touch interaction by Jeff Han, Yann LeCun and friends. Very pretty videos; well worth watching.

On the latest TWiT programme they mention a job advertisement… a company looking for somebody to establish a good reputation in online forums and then promote their products. We all suspect that this happens, but it’s starting to get more blatant.

Don’t believe what you read on the net, guys. And remember the user reviews and comments may be much more suspect than the page content they’re commenting on…

I have happy memories of a small backpacking hostel in Indonesia, where, in the evening, the owner and some friends sat around strumming guitars.

I joined in, in my amateurish way. We played variations on the greatest hits of Eric Clapton – the variations coming from the fact that they, without much knowledge of English, often misheard the original lyrics and were very keen to check with me that they were getting them right. They knew the basic sounds, and I remember one guy earnestly singing, “Snog, snog, snogging on the seventh floor”, where I think Clapton had intended to convey the concept of knocking on heaven’s door.

But I’ve been guilty of some of these, too. I remember being puzzled, in my youth, by the Toto song ‘Africa’ which stated that “there’s nothing that a hundred men on Mars could ever do”. (It’s actually ‘a hundred men or more’.) And, at a rather earlier age, my somewhat parochial horizons could be deduced from my belief that the Abba lyrics, “I was sick and tired of everything / When I called you last night, Francesco” actually referred to somebody calling ‘last night, from Tesco’ (a big supermarket chain here in the UK). Rose thought it was nice that Paul Simon could report that “Rene and Georgia agreed with their dog after the war”.

Anyway, I discovered today that such mis-hearings have a name. They’re called Mondegreens. Rose found a nice section on this page entitled “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind” which explains the name, and, of course, there are quite a few on Wikipedia.

But, go on – add your own favourites in the comments. The original ones are the best…

What’s this?

It’s my attempt to photgraph this chap using a cheap camera and a cheap pair of binoculars:

I actually got some rather more successful shots, but they weren’t so pleasingly mysterious 🙂