Such powerful words from someone so young.
Read MoreA guy goes in to consult for a company and runs across a bug. He raises the issue and the boss says “Oh boy – another ‘Bob bug’ – Bob created a lot of bugs.” (Bob has moved on by now). After the guy was there for a while he comes to realise that Bob wrote most of the code while the rest of the staff wrote very little. The perception that Bob created a lot of bugs was technically correct, but an analysis of bugs per line of code written show that Bob actually made fewer mistakes than his co-workers, but since he generated the majority of the app, he had the majority of the bugs.
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You don’t consciously set out to put on weight so it sort of creeps up on you. You don’t put effort into getting fat. You just wake up one morning, look in the mirror and go “Geeze, what the hell happened?”.
Getting fat is easy and comforting. You can relax and eat all the glorious tasting things. Losing fat is a constant battle. You’ve got to kill yourself in the gym and resist the temptation of eating too much. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing and not possible though!
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My TalkTalk broadband hasn’t been working for the past three days and it looks like it’s never going to work as technical support refuse to believe that there is a fault.
Of all the years I’ve spent calling various company’s technical support numbers, I can honestly say that TalkTalk’s is the most appalling one of the lot. I’m completely livid with their so-called “support”. I’ve spent more than five hours on the phone with their “technical” team since yesterday, all while having to listen to nothing but lies and apologies for being unable to help me. Today I was on a single call that lasted three hours, which had me bounced to-and-from the same departments only to be hung up on. And I don’t mean disconnected, but actually put through to the end of call customer satisfaction survey with a cheerful “Thanks for your call”. One person even said I would have to upgrade my account to get technical support. I don’t think so.
“Oh, there’s no problem with your line”. Yes, I know there’s no problem with the line, I just can’t authenticate with the exchange.
“Oh, your router is not supported”. Yes, it’s worked fine for the past 6 years, so explain that.
If I even dare mention I’m on a Mac, that opens a whole other can of worms.
The only way I’ll be able to get any sense out of them is to have them send me a new router which I guess I have no choice but to do. Either way, I’ve had enough. I’ve already got a reconnection date from BT to move my line back to them and a Virgin Media engineer is coming round next week to get me on their internet service. I’ve heard some bad things about VM, but I really want to take advantage of the high speeds when it does work. I still have a backup broadband connection in the house I can use if it goes down at least.
Whoever thought offshoring technical support/call centres was a good idea should be shot. Has anyone ever had a good offshore call experience? Everyone I’ve mentioned this too has their own horror stories. Yeah, great, it cuts costs, but at what expense? Offshoring wouldn’t be so bad if it meant I could speak to someone who was actually technical. But what’s the point if I’m going to speak to someone who just reads a script to me.
Avoid TalkTalk at all costs.
Update 6/1/12: Inexplicably my broadband has now started working again, a full six days after it first broke. So much for “I can assure you sir there is no problem at our end”. A new router will be arriving soon, which I had to threaten I would cancel my account over to get for free (They wanted me to renew for 12 months). Honestly, I wish I could shove the thing up someone at TalkTalk’s arse.
Read MoreAnother year another list of books that I read in 2011. I never read as much as I want/should.
- Why We Get Fat (11/1/2011)
- Start Small, Stay Small – Audiobook (30/1/2011)
- Never Let Go (2/2/2011)
- Ignore Everybody (10/2/2011)
- The Hero Handbook (21/2/2011)
- Mindfulness in Plain English (3/3/2011)
- Programming Amazon EC2 (18/3/2011)
- How to Make Money (7/3/2011)
- Eloquent Ruby (6/5/2011)
- Snow Crash (18/5/2011)
- Get out of Jail Free Card (19/5/2011)
- Hyperion (6/6/2011)
- Anything You Want (1/7/2011)
- The Fall of Hyperion (29/7/2011)
- Motorcycle Roadcraft (6/9/2011)
- Sport Riding Techniques (20/9/2011)
- Recipes with Backbone (19/12/2011)
- The Secrets of the Rainmakers (20/12/2011)
- The Lean Startup (25/12/2011)
The only book that really stands out for me this year is “Hyperion”. I don’t usually read fiction, but on this occasion I’m extremely glad I did. Never before has a book gripped me as much as this one did. And excellent story which had me desperate to keep going to find out what happened. “Why we get fat” is a very good book on the basics of the modern science behind the obesity epidemic spreading across the world. I found it very hard to read Gary Taubes previous book “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, but this was extremely easy to take in.
I certainly want to be able to read more in 2012. But that’s something I say every year.
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I finally finished reading The Lean Startup. The main gist is that we need to be creating fast feedback looks for products/changes we make, so that we can quickly see what is and isn’t working. It’s a good extension of what to do once you have you minimum-viable product up and running, as it’s easy to fall into the trap of just adding features, without actually adding any value. I especially liked the parts on doing a cohort study of your users. Instead of measuring figures like engagement as a total for a specific time, you would track engagement for people who signed up in January only, then sign ups in February, then March, etc. This gives you a better picture of whether you’re actually improving your service or only appearing to improve because of growing figures.
Overall the book wasn’t too bad. I felt that perhaps the first half was a lot more “actionable” and my interest fell off once past the half way point, so I ended up just steaming through after that. Definitely worth reading if you’re in the startup arena though.
I’ll be getting another copy soon anyways as I’ll be seeing Eric talk when he comes to London in January.
Read MoreThis recent post from 37Signals reminds me a lot of the brilliant post by Derek Sivers on there being no speed limit.
It can be hard at times to know how hard you should be pushing or how fast you should be going. It’s easier to go with the flow rather than to push ourselves to see what we’re truly capable of.
Read MoreMy generic SEO strategy for a startup is a) be the best on the Internet for b) as many topics as you possibly can be that c) matter to your paying customers – Strategic SEO for Startups
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time learning about SEO and how to go about applying it to our day to day business. There’s a lot of stigma attached to doing “SEO” and while a lot of it is very shady, once you learn how to do things properly, it’s not as dirty a subject as people would have you think. Personally I’ve found the whole learning experience absolutely fascinating.
It’s very easy to think that SEO is something you do to your site. Adding keywords, making sure things are tagged correctly etc, but the real meat of SEO comes before all that. Researching competitors, finding keywords to compete on and own, building trustworthy and relevant linkbacks, etc. The SEOMoz Beginners Guide is an excellent resource for learning the basics while the link at the top is a a great way of learning how to apply the concepts to your startup/site.
For anyone thinking of hiring an “SEO Expert”. Be extremely cautious. There are a lot of people out there dying to sell you their black hat techniques to drive your search engine performance up, there are also a lot of people out there who really don’t know what they’re talking about. If someone offering to give you advice doesn’t first ask to see your analytics and your content, but rather focuses on technical changes (especially things like LOC and embedded Javascript), I’d personally look elsewhere for help.
There’s no point having the best content in the world if people can’t discover it, and really SEO is all about making that content discoverable.
Read MoreI’m generating PDFs with PDFkit/wkhtmltopdf on a current project. While the output is fine in the browser, £ (pound) signs in the generated PDF were showing up incorrectly as:
£
The fix was relatively easy as PDFs have their own view layout, so all I had to do was add an extra meta tag to the head:
Read More<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
How anyone can think that Adam Sandler isn’t a fraud after his latest film “Jack and Jill” is beyond me. RedLetterMedia do an excellent job of talking about the poor storyline but also about the production back story of it’s funding and product placement. I haven’t seen the film myself and have no intention of ever doing so, but how it’s staggering to learn that it’s budget was $80m, which is nearly half of what James Cameron’s Titanic had. Fair dues to the guy, he get’s at least $25m a film, but I can only assume he has no shame or self respect. Personally I couldn’t live with myself while making that much money by basically swindling my own fans. If you want to get to the real meat of the Adam Sandler “scam” skip the first video and watch the second part.
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