Image not found? 29 April 2008

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.

My first Drupal site 29 April 2008

Now live at

http://www.u-cancoachingservices.com/

A genuine pleasure to do and to complete.

::does Soul Train line through the living room::

Rebranding cockup 27 April 2008

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.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/04/the-original-lo.html

Vista font mystery solved 25 April 2008

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!

This bites! 22 April 2008

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?”

Story from The Times.

Fings wot I fot:

1. I left the dental plan three years ago. Isn’t a bit strange to keep old customer records live on servers and backed up every night for that long?
2. Tape? Backup? TAPE?
3. “Specialist machinery” - like a 1994 Packard Bell from Sears.
4. It can’t have been that secure of a security vehicle.
5. What does tape smell like when you light it to inhale the fumes?

…and that is what’s in the news! 17 April 2008

*sigh*

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?

An observation 17 April 2008

When the code says

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd

it really means

“auuuuugh screw it, here’s some code, what does DTD mean?”

Banking rant, chapter 258 14 April 2008

UK banking rant continued:

In my business banking account’s online service, if you go to set up a new online payee, which you do by simply inputting their bank account numbers and name, it takes two working days for that online payee to appear in the list and be eligible for fund transfers.

How. Does. It. Take. Two. Days.

UPDATE 16 APRIL:

Today I received (you guessed it) a letter in the post confirming the setup of the new payee in my online banking. You know, the one I put into the system on Friday. But the letter said: “as part of our commitment to customer service, a recent audit has highlighted the Bill Payment Arrangement listed below as an unusual transaction based on your past usage of the service. If this arrangement is not genuine, please contact us to discuss the security of your Internet Banking service…”

Eeee friggin’ gad. Biggest irony - the payee I was setting up? It’s myself, in my own name, to my personal banking account. Someone’s having a laugh.

How is business expected to progress in this country if every basic internal update is subject to a 48 hour embargo, a security scan, and a snail mail response?

I try to be constructive, so to the banks, it’s like this.

1. Online means online. Not letters in the post. There’s this thing? It’s called email? Ever try it? There is absolutely no reason, aside from busywork job preservation, to use snail mail for online banking.
2. Unless a team of scribes in a Devon monastery are manually calligraphing new payees into a large book, it should not take two days for an internal update which does not involve a funds transfer to appear in a proprietary online system.
3. If there had been a fraudulent transaction placed into my business bank account on Friday, and they’ve flagged it as suspicious in a postal letter which arrived on Wednesday, that was five days that the fraudster could have been throwing a party. Why not pick up the phone to be sure? Fraud is either a critical emergency or it’s not. Don’t use it as an opportunity to patronise your customers with the pretense of caring concern.
4. From here on in anybody (supplier or client) who uses the phrase “commitment to customer service” will meet my friend, Mr Cricket Bat.

I don’t think so… 14 April 2008

The other day I registered for an IWA/HWG course on web site promotion, hoping it would help me to tie together the dozen different appraoches I take into one tidy package. I was quite keen on the course until I went to order the textbook on Amazon, and found a frightening number of one-star pans. Readers said the book was so out of date it does not even discuss blogs or social media, but it still suggests banner advertising and web rings as good ways to get hits. A browse through the index, provided by Amazon, showed references to newsgroups and CompuServe (!!!!!) Having read those warning signs, I double checked the IWA/HWG course syllabus again and sure enough, part of the course is banner ads.

Folks, the sun is shining, the world’s a lovely place, and I am not going to spend the spring of 2008 in the park with a textbook that references banner ads and Compuserve.

So I’ve asked for a refund and have found something else to spend my training budget on - one that looks forward to 2012, not 2002.

That’s how we roll at Idea15. 13 April 2008