I was amused when, while working in North Carolina in 2003, I visited some friends for Thanksgiving. All their neighbours introduced themselves and then, on finding I was English, apologised. “It’s not our fault, we didn’t vote for him!” Stood amongst those liberal, well travelled and smart people it was difficult to reconcile this with the fact that they lived in a country that had a president that was none of those things.
This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is Destruction. My entry is a US tank left destroyed in Vietnam. I guess it did more than it’s fair share of destruction when operational.
Please vote for my entry in last weeks “Thin” theme. I’m entry 318.
Last night we went to the Royal Albert Hall to see the Secret Policeman’s Ball, a charity gala in aid of Amnesty International. Despite the great cast — everyone from The Mighty Boosh to Eddie Izzard — beforehand I was worried that the “charity” aspect would take too prominent a position compared with the comedy. Obviously there’s a need to make people remember what the show is all about but often these events become preachy and, ultimately, a little dull.
Sometimes a quote from the article can say more than I ever could:
Alton Verm’s request to ban “Fahrenheit 451” came during the 25th annual Banned Books Week. He and Hines said the request to ban “Fahrenheit 451,” a book about book burning, during Banned Books Weeks is a coincidence.
I think they should look up the word “irony” in a dictionary.
The premise
I have become increasingly disaffected by Apple’s .Mac service, so much so that when I recently got an email congratulating me for subscribing for another year I immediately went to the website and cancelled.
The background
But before we start going into all the details, what is .Mac? Basically it’s Apple’s on-line services that are geared for Mac users but are also usable by those stuck in the Microsoft world. When I first got my iBook back in 2001 it was called iTools. It had a more limited set of features back then, but that included a something@mac.com email address.
I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than £100).
I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.
However this article caught my eye:
AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249
What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.
I think, over the years I have left companies for most of the reasons listed in this article. Not that I’m claiming to have always been a “star” employee.
I left my first job mainly for money. My third wins the honour of collecting most of the reasons in the list, but would gain special commendation for management BS (as the article calls it).
It was no surprise that they assumed that more people would leave for money. Most people incorrectly assumed that I left my last job for a pay raise too. The part that rang most true for me was “too challenged”:
It seems like only last week that I was at a friends wedding (in fact it was just over two weeks), but on Tuesday two more friends tied the knot.
I’ve known R since my time in Norway. We met up a few times in Oslo and continued when we both returned to London. She had dreams of travelling, going back to Norway or Paris, or, generally, elsewhere. But she drifted back to her home-town, Bristol. Later, T, a Polish tree surgeon, moved into the flat-share she was living in. She jokes that while I tried internet- and speed-dating, she just stayed at home but had greater success.