Archive for December, 2004

…when the local pole dancers stop tak­ing money from car­pen­ters but instead hand it back in order to get their win­dows cov­ered with plywood. 

Happy new year everybody.

Man tror næppe graden af opfind­somhed hos Jens Ris­gaard, it-boss hos vores alle­sam­mens Post Dan­mark, iflg. denne artikel hos Com­put­er­world:

Tro det eller ej, men fore­trukne red­sk­aber er lap­top, mobil­tele­fon, Word og Out­look. Argh, hvor­for tænkte jeg ikke på det? Og fanme, om ikke han får en sms, hvis noget går galt med driften… For­band­ede smar­tass early-adopter. 

Com­put­er­world, I er ikke just spæn­dende i forve­jen, men hvis der ikke er flere pressemed­delser I kan paste ind som egne artik­ler, og bevæger jer ud for at skrive selv, så sørg lige for at jeres interview-ofre har noget spæn­dende at sige. Man er i sin gode ret til at bruge nøjagtig de værk­tø­jer man vil, hey — måske de egner sig per­fekt til opgaven…men det er jeres opgave at overveje, om det kan have nogen værdi for andre overhovedet. 

I næste uge på denne kanal: Anders cyk­ler til arbe­jde og spiser frokost med kniv og gaffel.

Minor changes in the Base­camp pric­ing struc­ture (which is just fine and not the point), com­ments from the customers. 

While old news in the won­der­ful com­mu­nity of the inter­web, that ‘mar­kets are discussions’-thing sure is some­thing, huh? When was the last time your tele­phone com­pany dis­cussed their pric­ing model with you? How come cer­tain com­pa­nies (like the Dan­ish post, pub­lic trans­porta­tion etc.) increase prices by a lot more than infla­tion dic­tates and don’t explain them­selves to you? It’s so sim­ple, yet I con­tinue to be amazed how noone expects to be informed. “Oh, so you’re chang­ing my cable-tv plan, caus­ing a 34% increase in price? Ok, I’ll just pay.“ 

I guess it’s hard run­ning a larger busi­ness, decid­ing how to run cus­tomer ser­vice, what to charge peo­ple, when to speak and when to shut up. Oh, that last one was easy — speak up — always! And you might make the wrong deci­sion once in a while. But as long as you com­mu­ni­cate, I’m sure peo­ple will for­give and for­get. If you wanna play hard­ball, pro­duce bad prod­ucts or what­ever AND don’t wanna talk, well then I guess you just don’t want my money. 

I hereby declare 2005 ‘talk to the wallet’-year (think a ‘talk to the hand’-kinda ges­ture). Cap­i­tal­ism is here, so get that polit­i­cal consumer-thing going; let the wal­let do the talking. 

It takes time, yes, and I imag­ine it’s pretty damn hard find­ing a decent sneaker com­pany, a well-behaved major record com­pany etc. etc., but I’ll give it a try. I’ll put on my Nikes and run out to my SUV and go change bank this very minute. I don’t like the way they han­dle online bank­ing from my Mac.

Fine lit­tle project over at Flickr, A day in the life of…

A one day only event.

Sub­mit a min­i­mum of five pho­tos and a max­i­mum of fif­teen.

All pho­tos must be taken on the spec­i­fied date and should doc­u­ment your life that day. 

And it’s tomor­row, Decem­ber 21st. [via jill/txt]

Zefrank’s at it again: the carol maker. Drop your elves in the grid and watch the lit­tle ani­mated movie. Or lis­ten to what other peo­ple made. Favourite so far: “Music for elf­ports”. [via zeld­man — so you all already know]

Haven’t had time to tin­ker with the new blog design for some time now, but upon yesterday’s dis­cov­ery of Favatars, it was a pleas­ant sur­prise to find a Fav­i­con MT-plugin over at Gemal’s today. I stum­bled across the idea over a year ago, but never got it to work — plu­g­ins are just right for me. I installed it on the main blog, it works like a charm and caches the images. So now, if you leave a com­ment, your fav­i­con gets grabbed and is dis­played next to your name. 

On a related note, I recently put in a captcha-test on the com­ment pages; I’ve been hit hard by com­ment spam­mers lately — they made a big mess and my host started send­ing wor­ried emails. Not good. So far it seems to work — if you expe­ri­ence any prob­lems when leav­ing com­ments, please let me know.

So I recently installed a sec­ond Air­por­t­Ex­press, this time in my kitchen. A set of cheap speak­ers and I was good to go; if they get all greased up I just trash’em. So far so good. Just now I lis­tened to Elec­tronic Per­form­ers by Air — but my elec­tronic per­for­mance didn’t go as planned. A few sec­onds after I turned on the microwave, the music stopped play­ing and my iTunes came to a stop (which I’ve expe­ri­enced before when the AXes don’t behave as planned). The microwave oven and the AX is both just put on top of the fridge — radi­a­tion fuckup?

Reg­istr­erede et nyt domæne for en uges tid siden, og ville checke sta­tus på Gratis­DNS i går, men det lod sig ikke gøre; siden kunne ikke findes — nav­ne­serverne virkede til gengæld fint. 

I dag kan man så bl.a. læse dette på siden:

Står www mask­i­nen stadig på Samsø ?

Nej.

Hvor­for ikke?

Fordi mit liv er for kort til bøn­der der ikke kan se forskel på kartofler og fiberkabler. 

Løs­nin­gen involverede både færger og andre lands­dele. Smider straks nogle penge i deres retning.

So, you’re think­ing: How can this guy Pol­las afford all those flashy cars, fat golden ear­rings and pedi­gree dogs? After 9/11 that cer­tainly isn’t easy, but I’ll let you in on my secret as I actu­ally stole the idea from some of the big (Dan­ish) play­ers in the busi­ness, Jubii and B.T.

See, with all these ter­ror­istsearly-adopters using every­thing but Inter­net Explorer, pop-up adver­tis­ing isn’t pay­ing off any­more. So what you want to do is to tar­get other parts of the web­site. And as you want to dis­play your logo as much as pos­si­ble, why not go for tiling? That’s right: The background. 

With­out ruin­ing the over­all graphic design of your page, a sim­ple logo in a colour you don’t con­trol, gen­tly takes over your back­ground. My cur­rent back­ground helped me buy a yacht; Folke­ti­dende, a regional news­pa­per from where I grew up, didn’t hes­i­tate when I offered them a non-clickable, lo-res ver­sion of their logo as a back­ground tile. Notice the work that went into lit­tle details like mak­ing sure the over­all colour blends smoothly into the site and the tiles don’t get cut off by the cen­ter container. 

Get out there, make money. Let’s cel­e­brate soon.

Dear Microsoft. Just wanted to con­grat­u­late you on that world domination-thing. You’ve suc­cess­fully made the worst pos­si­ble browser on the mar­ket the most pop­u­lar, turn­ing nor­mal peo­ple into slaves and web devel­op­ment into a painful game of “let’s see if we can find some way out of hav­ing to throw in tons of stu­pid, lit­tle IE-hacks instead of spend­ing time on real devel­op­ment”. On some projects, I think I spend about the same amount of time adjust­ing my orginal design for the IE users (aka ‘the real audi­ence’), mak­ing design­ing a lot less fun and fig­ur­ing out what to charge the client a big fat joke. “Oh, so your cus­tomers belong to the IE-crowd? I’m sorry sir, I think I have to charge you dou­ble.” And then you go: “Sorry, can’t cor­rect our mis­takes — we’re afraid we’ll break the web.” It’s already bro­ken big time, dum­b­asses. Get to work. Now. I’m work­ing hard to give your users a decent web expe­ri­ence, why aren’t you doing the same? 

And now: More CSS-adjusting…and maybe a cold beer and some sleep. I’m los­ing it here, I know…