Here’s an exchange that occurred just the other day: colleague A asked colleague B for some help in PowerPoint. B says, “It’s easy, I’ll show you how to do it.” A immediately objects: “I don’t want to know how to do it, can you just do it for me?”
The dialogue continued for a while, with A not happy to have to learn something new and B not happy to become A‘s lackey.
You may have noticed that ZX81.org.uk has been offline for at least twenty-fours hours. I don’t know exactly how long, but I first noticed about this time yesterday.
At the moment I have no idea what happened. The company hosting the site have not been terribly forthcoming — no response to the support tickets I raised, no public announcement of the down time — which in a sense is even more disappointing that the downtime. No system is 100% reliable, but you should at least communicate with those most affected.
What do Britney Spears and Yummy, my iPhone Delicious.com client, have in common? If you had asked me a few months ago I would have said nothing but I’d have been wrong. No, they both have had to grow up in public.
For a version 1.0 product, Yummy seemed solid to me. It was fast, coped will all my bookmarks and had the ability to add, edit and delete entries. I didn’t think that this would remain as a unique feature for as long as it has, but hey, that’s a bonus.
It was all part of the November Plan. Head out of the country for a weekend for no apparent reason, with little research beforehand and no expectations. It’s a great way to travel, even if to say that I planned it that way is an exaggeration.
This year I went to Portugal’s capital city, Lisbon. After the grim summer and recent return to Greenwich Mean Time, I craved some sun and a little warmth. Sure, I wasn’t going to be wilting in the heat on the Atlantic coast but it was a good few degrees warmer than London, with sun forecast and much longer daylight hours. That I’d never made it to Portugal before was a bonus.
It all started ten thirteen years ago. In November 1998 I went with a friend to Amsterdam, and now every November since I have spent at least a few days out of the country.
For the record, those trips were:
It never started as a challenge and you can’t deliberately start a tradition, but I’m keen to keep this one going for as long as I can. Even if it is a little silly.
My iPhone application, Yummy, has been on sale in iTunes for a couple of months now and, as a number of other developers have noted, after the initial launch sales figures take a significant nose dive very quickly. I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase visibility without taking too much time away from actually making enhancements to the software.
As luck would have it, I got a “free trial” of Google AdWords and thought I would give that a try. Results have been… well, not exactly what I was expecting.