What a (insert every curse word possible) day for Scottish football. Within the space of a few hours, Rangers lost the UEFA Cup Final to Zenit St. Petersburg, and Celtic coach Tommy Burns lost his battle with cancer.
Appropriate then that it’s grey and chilly today - football is not a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that.
Of all the tributes I’ve read to him today, this one spoke to me the most.
When he was let go by Celtic in the 1990’s he was offered the opportunity to leave by a side entrance and he, rightly, refused instead walked out the front door with his head held high.
While I spent the weekend having fun in the sun at a holiday resort, my good friend Paul was blogging for Time Magazine from under siege at his new home in Beirut. Read here:
I had a great Skype video chat with him this evening, with the goal of telling him - as one poster in a blog post said - to “knock off the Hemingway crap”, but I left the chat completely reassured. The contrast of the chat could not have been greater, as I sat here in the sunshine with my daughter napping in my lap while he sat with blackout curtains drawn and the call to prayer wailing outside. Technology never seemed so surreal.
My executive coach told me that my old web site design was an unconscious mirror of where my self confidence was when I first started up my business: like me, the design was so small, ornate, and confined that it made me appear to be whispering from behind a screen in a small box.
I don’t feel like I’m whispering from a tiny painted box anymore. And that’s a very good thing.
I had never heard of Books from Scotland until today (there is no offline marketing or strategy for it), even though I worked at a fellow Scottish arts organisation when the site had just been launched. Even if I had heard of it, I would not pay £20 for a book I could get off Amazon for £10.
And doesn’t every six-figure site have an 800px layout, pixilated JPEGs, and a minimum of 40 coding errors per page? The design looks like a wireframe rough draft. As a customer, I would look at that and say to the designer “that’s great for a start, what comes next?”
It’s a shame too. It’s a great idea and it looks like a great database. But as their business development manager says in defense of selling fewer books in a year than most high street bookshops sell in a week:
“We never said sales were going to be a prime aspect,” she said. “As long as sales have been made of books by Scottish publishers, then we have done our job.”
Only in the Scottish public sector would a business development manager say it’s not her job to sell the product. At the current rate of sales, it would take six and a half years to recoup the site’s original cost.
But hey, who needs solid business decisions - just wave the flag and the objective’s been met. And the gravy train goes on and on.
Here is a fantastic blog about the differences between museums’ online photography collections in the US and the UK.
British photographic collections lagged far behind their American counterparts, not only in what they offered, but also how it was offered, and to whom. In Britain, the collections are either divided into small bundles of infotainment, or offered as a business transaction to specialists, picture editors and the media, who buy reproduction rights. In America, by contrast, there is much more of an understanding that accurate and methodically catalogued online collections can appeal to academic researchers and photo enthusiasts alike.
Lots of food for thought there: just who are these collections, and these web sites, really made for? If one system views their collections as art for the public and the other system view them as a revenue stream, can each of these systems learn from the other?
I’ve often said, only half-jokingly, that I want to be the V&A’s resident ghost someday to give me time to go through all the collections; if the article is correct about their display rotation policy, it looks like I’ll have to.
When I worked in the public sector I learned very quickly that “rebranding” is trotted out every few years as a convenient excuse to present the appearance that something is actually getting done, slap the backs of pals at a sexy marketing and PR firm, and waste astonishing amounts of money on a single process to justify a higher budget allocation from the trough next year. Very rarely does rebranding reflect an actual need or a change in service provision; that’s simply not the way the UK public sector works.
Lest you think I’m on my soapbox, I give you this. Read the comments below the post as well.
A few months ago I blogged about the way the Vista fonts displayed on my non-Vista machine. The edges were ragged and nearly transparent, and I had to squint at my screen to read them at smaller sizes. This created a dilemma for me as a web site designer: do I use something I can’t even see?
Today I asked the Wise-Women for their opinion on integrating Vista fonts into web sites, with that dilemma in mind, since I have a client whose site was made for Cambria. I mentioned how the Vista fonts didn’t display correctly on my machine, and resident web deity Al Sparber told me to enable the Cleartype option. I had disabled it, along with all of the other memory-sapping graphic display options, a few years ago at the suggestion of my dead friend (this was before he was dead, he doesn’t help me with my computer anymore, lazy b*****d).
Dayum! Thanks to Al’s advice I feel like I have a whole new machine now. All fonts - not just Vista and not just fonts in browsers - now look smooth and sharp, and the screen resolution is now practically 3D.
The dilemma still remains, though. If I didn’t know that the option had to be enabled, how will a client? In this client’s case, we can answer the dilemma through marketing know-how: her own clients are a high end corporate market using state of the art technology on Windows systems. They’ll have Cambria, and it’s highly likely they’ll have Cleartype enabled by default. Happy days!
Yesterday I received a letter in the post informing me that I’m one of the people affected by the latest data loss snafu.
Boots is the latest company to be embarrassed by the loss of confidential information after a drug addict stole a back-up tape with details of customers to whom the company had sold dental insurance. Boots is blaming Medisure, the insurer, which is blaming the security firm that was transporting the tape. No one is saying much more, and the whereabouts of the tape, or indeed why it should have attracted the interest of an opportunistic thief, is unclear. The thief was caught on CCTV. The pharmacist and the insurer have written to an unspecified number of customers reassuring them that the data, including dates of birth and bank account details, are inaccessible without specialist machinery. As The Register, the online IT magazine, points out acidly: “That’s all right then, because surely there are no ties between thieves in this country and hackers in, for example, the former Soviet bloc?”
As an expat, I’ve spent five years dealing with people who have a preconceived expectation of how I “should” speak and communicate, and then seem somehow offended that I don’t match the stereotype. People like this are why those preconceived notions exist.
Sage, on behalf of runaway expat Americans everywhere…could you not be so, you know, American?
