I ticked the wrong box

Group Manager of Enforcement

and it’s not what you’re thinking…

Via: PharmaTimes

Carling has a campaign here – “probably the best beer in the world”. I found tonight they have been beaten in terms of finding marketing phrases that suck.

Companies here seem to resign themselves to positions in the marketplace that may or may not be all they can acheive. Seems to me to be wrong that a company has an attitude that being inferior is OK.

Air New Zealand has recently launched a new campaign. What makes me chuckle, and angry is the folllowing ad:

My response: If you say I can demand it during take-off and landing, why did I have to fly for around 26 hours with you people and have no on-demand service, after the flight was delayed for around 13 hours?

I guess that’s what you get when your national operator turns into a what is effectively a budget airline. Never flying Air New Zealand again.

I’ve recently transferred some funds internationally. To do this I needed a special account code so that the bank I’m sending money to know which of the accounts they hold should receive it. This number is a conventional looking account number, prefixed with a country code, and a checksum value. There is also a website that checks them – http://www.apacs.org.uk/payments_industry/ibans_5.html

Putting in a country that they can’t check the actual account number for causes their little javascript application to unleash a serious dissing.

Ouch!

BTW – Sorry for the Rodney Dangerfield knock-off quote. He’s awful.

I was sitting at a desk last week and overheard a man yelling down a phone to someone else that “People aren’t an asset. They don’t appear on a balance sheet”. I agree with that view – not because of the strict accounting definition of an asset, but because of what I believe people in companies should mean (either consciously or subconsciously) when humans are called assets.

Companies refer to humans as assets for 2 reasons. (1) To make employees feel good and (2) because of the value they create for and contribute to the business.

I believe humans are assets to companies, but they are not assets of the companies. The actual asset belongs to the individual – their time – and they trade it for money. The company gets the output of that trade, but the value of the asset remains in the power of the individual.

They won’t appear on a balance sheet, but the work they do with their time that they have swapped for money is the “asset” in the eyes of the business. That appears on the books in the form of IP, physical goods, inventions, patents, or money received for the company on-selling that time (like the work I do).

me: Countees isn’t in google yet

someone else: You have to put it in there?

me: Yes, I have to tell them about it.

someone else: Don’t they just find it?

me: How would they find it?

someone else: Google.

 

 

BTW – check out countees.co.uk – wear your UK county on your chest.  More about this soon.

I got an email yesterday from Amazon.com about the Verve’s new album Forth.  They were offering me a free, DRM free download of their latest song “Love is Noise”.  Having not heard anything out of the Verve for a while I was interested, and free is a pretty good price so I went to download.

The first thing I was unimpressed with was the Amazon.com downloader they tried to install on my machine.  I understand that some people may not understand how to add MP3s to iTunes, but the “skip this step” link to me was not in an intuitive place.  So, I accidentally downloaded it, went back to the page, then found the skip link.

But the real kicker with this is the below screenshot.

Useless.   

Why would they send me an offer I can’t redeem, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY KNOW THAT I DON’T LIVE IN THE US.  They have my address, I have purchased from them before.  Unimpressed.

Apple released this update a day or two ago. I installed it yesterday morning.

Unhappy customer.

Since then, I’ve had worse performance on transition to the SMS and contacts screen. I’ve also had issues when listening to music and receiving email/sms at the same time. Sometimes the music fades out and then stops, and I need to tap the round button at the bottom to make it go again, sometimes the music just halts (no fade), I head the new email sound, then music starts up again.

I’ve noticed nothing good about this update.

Opening hours. I want them on every physical stores, restaurants, and bars website. They do good store locators in the UK, I guess it’s because postcodes are everywhere, everyone knows them and they identify a very small area (a street, or part of a street). How come stores, when thinking about the data on their store locator, don’t include opening hours. Address and phone are always there, but when I’m going home on the train I want to know if my local stores will still be open when I get there.

Oh well, no spending at that particular store tonight.

At the moment I’m working on a fairly complex extension for Radiant CMS. In creating the administrative pages I want to use a javascript library that is not distributed with the core radiant code. This post will describe how to implement your own extension that can use an external javascript library, without playing around with any of the core radiant files to inject the javascript into the administrative layout.

It’s actually really easy to do. If you haven’t created a Radiant extension before I’d recommend following this tutorial on the Radiant wiki.

Inside the Radiant GEM, the standard page layout resides at app/views/layouts/application.html.haml

The lines of code that insert the javascript tags are:

- @javascripts.uniq.each do |javascript|
  = javascript_include_tag javascript

The @javascripts variable is populated from inside the app/controllers/application_controller.rb file. The culprit is below.

def include_javascript(script)
  @javascripts << script
end

Pretty simple huh? So, all you need to do, is call this method from within your new controller, because all controllers inherit from the application_controller.rb file, so they have access to this method, and you can have different javascript included for each method if you so wish. In (assuming the example LinkRoll extension was built as linked above) vendor/extensions/link_roll/app/controllers/admin/links_controller.rb

def index
  include_javascript("admin/mootools-1.2-core-yc.js")
  @links = Link.find(:all)
end

That will insert a link to admin/mootools-1.2-core-yc.js inside the admin/links/index page. Righto, so now the only thing left to do is get the mootools-1.2-core-yc.js file into the actual public/javascripts/admin directory within the project. What you want to do is alter the vendor/extensions/link_roll/link_roll_extension.rb file so that within the activate method the file is copied over. I’d recommend making a public/javascripts/admin directory within your extension folder, and putting the file in there. Then, when activate is called on the link_roll_extension.rb file, the activate method will copy the file over to the projects public/javascripts/admin directory. You should also delete the file when the deactivate method is called in the link_roll_extension.rb file.

Questions and comments please!