Another work of art from Dilbert
Last year I stopped putting “Hi xxxx” and “Regards, Brad” type stuff on emails; initially people were a little lost but then realised that the fact the email got to them meant the first bit was unnecessary, and the fact their inbox showed the email was from me meant I didnt need to remind them at the end of every email.
Email: use it wisely….
Like most people, at first I thought twitter was a load of rubbish – then people started developing applications around the concept and you can go crazy with it now – I am quite heavily into twitter nowadays.
Windows Twitter Clients
The best of the bunch is TweetDeck, perhaps the most popular professional Adobe Air client for Twitter. Supports, searches, groups, multiple accounts
CRM
If you are serious about doing business through twitter, you will most probably use some kind of CRM tool for Customer Relationship Management.
Twitter User Directories
If just searching for someone isn’t enough for you to find people you could always use one of the directories that have sprung up.
Enhancements to Twitter
Twitter has only very basic features, even Twitter clients offer only a few more. Since the Twitter API was released so people could make their own software to interface with Twitter there are literally thousands of tools.
Other favorite of mine is Twitter Fall which makes for interesting viewing.
1: You don’t need to put the name of the recipient at the top, and your name at the bottom – these are quite clearly defined in the structure of the email anyway, and I know it was from you before I even open it.
2: You never need to come to my desk to tell me you “just sent me an email” – email is pretty intelligent in that if for some reason I don’t get your internally sent email – you will know about it automatically. When I have finished dealing with other things that are higher priority than your email I will get around to yours. If you are prepared to come to my desk regarding the matter then why bother to write the email in the first place?.
If you want to give your peers the illusion that you are busy, try not to waste my time doing so as I am far too busy doing something either productive or fun or perhaps both.
3: If you send email #1 to a bunch of people who might be able to help, then one of them replies to you to say they are going to help you, any emails in that conversation almost certainly only need to be between you two from then on; there is no need to keep including everyone on every email…
Consider this to be intermediate knowledge…..
After about 6 months of occasionally wondering why when someone commented on one of my blogs, I never heard about it (you usually get an email to say someone commented and you need to do something about it). It turned out to be rather technical stuff which if you are so inclined can read about on my main site, the article on wordpress email bug. I don’t use the term bug lightly either, it seems like a pretty inconvenient hole in the framework if you ask me.
Along with other scandalous bugs I have come across with popular freeware in my time such as the fantastic firefox browser (my favourite), where all you need to do is copy someones profile and you get their entire browsing environment.. history.. cookies.. stored logins.. bit of an easy hack really once you know where to look.
So if anyone can be arsed to comment on this, I will be eagerly awaiting the emails that tell me you did so.
We are getting ready to take our two month old boy on his first flight, off to see his family in Macedonia, it is going to be a very exciting time!.
I have been thinking for a few weeks to change our huge 32″ dolby la de daa bass subwoofer thingy on top built in JVC telly to something a little more LCD, same size is OK as we are modest people and don’t have the hugest of houses.
Week and a half ago we had a walk around the big outlets to see what the picture looked like on the main brands, I thought Toshiba looked good with their “regza” thing (current buzzword BS), samsung looked shite, and LG looks wooOooO very nice. But the ones that looked good enough were around the £500 mark which I wasnt prepared to spend on a 32 inch telly nowadays. I told my mum and wife that it would be pretty easy in this economy to get a £500 telly for around £350, in the following week low and behold the group that encompases currys, PC world, pixmania put the 32LG5570 that usually retails for £499 for sale for the bank holiday weekend for £348, 32 inch full HD rated 8.9/10 overall by shitloads of reviewers across several sites and I knew this was the perfect upgrade. I placed my order online quickly from work that day as I knew this would be a sellout once the word got out (I find out about good deals pretty early with my network of sites and retailers contacting me directly).
I was expecting delivery the following thursday, after bank holiday weekend and all was set, just sit back and wait for free delivery. Then I thought to go to PC world and see what this set looked like for real to see if the stats matched up with the real deal, and yes it is indeed a great box with a really nice picture. I got home then thought hmmm why not go to the store cancel the online order by phone and just take the thing home today… then I read about people getting stuck pixels on TVs and such and it’s far easier to get your money back without the hassle of testing etc if you just get it delivered.. so I left it for Thursday.
Right at the end of the bank holiday weekend (one hour high street trading left) I got an email from PC world saying there was a problem with payment… ring your bank… which I did.. they said nobody attempted to take payment.. so I called PC world and the show begun… ending up me realising I typed by credit card number into their site incorrectly (FFS a little verification would have noticed that on the spot, hole in the website me thinks..).
So I went to PC world once the guy on the phone confirmed there were still 3 in stock there. Now if you are in the UK and have ever graced a PC world store with your presence then you will realise they are painfully understaffed, all of them… if you ever get to speak to a sales assistant in PC world you are in the minority.
20 minutes of stringing along begun that I wont bore you with except to say that they did not have 3 in stock (centralised stock control fail) but they had “4 on display”… now WTF would convince a store manager to take so much stock of a great deal and stick it on the friggin shelves on display….
I got this guy to check currys and to cut a long story short I drove over there like a maniac and snagged the last one in west London.
Had it resting on the other telly all week enjoying the crisp clarity of the LCD picture and ordered a wall mount from ebay, which arrived thursday… today I drilled the wall and mounted the telly… and it really is a nice sight :), now all I have to do is flog the JVC, I put an ad in the loot.com website for £150, seems that is towards the upper end of the second hand market pricing scale for this type of TV… so I can see myself dropping the price to just £100 to free up some space in the living room this week when I try to resell… damn that seems like such a cheap price for a big TV with great sound.. but then we as humans must constantly upgrade…
If you are considering getting the 32LG 5570, go for it the picture, even standard non HD broadcast is great!
