I’m afraid we are once again at the verge of something huge, something terrible… people all around the world are pissed off or depressed and racism is pouring out of every crack in the illusion of “wars from past taught us a lesson”, whether we want to see it or not. Assange pairing up with Russia’s State-Run TV? It seems to me that each party in this ‘strange’ arrangement has a hidden agenda. We’ll see.
It’s the television channel that has given voice to a thousand anti-western conspiracy theories, while avoiding criticism of the hand that feeds it. Now state-run Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda arm, has forged an unlikely partnership – with the self-proclaimed defender of truth and freedom Julian Assange.
Anyone with a grain of salt in the head would think twice before letting social media replace CRM system.
Image via Wikipedia
I’m not an expert in this area but… c’mon. Let’s think about some things I observed in last few years:
Most of the companies are very slow at picking up new (social) media.
At the time they create their accounts, set up profile pages and engage in communication, the hype is already gone (most of the times).
“All your data belong to us” – in this case ‘us‘ is not you. If your customer decides to leave Facebook, or Twitter or social media X, and she deletes her account, you can kiss this customer (and data) goodbye.
As Matthew said: do keep in touch through it, but don’t rely on it.
Matthew Collis | 2012/01/24 | 0 Comments Social media as the silver bullet? You’re using social media, and at this point, keeping in touch with your sphere of influence (SOI) through Facebook and Twitter is nothing new. Therefore, a database or contact management system isn’t really required, right? Well, not so fast.
My first set of Lego bricks from childhood is no longer in my “toys inventory”, but memories are still here. Walking along the aisles with toys in almost any store these days makes me think that kids these days are left with no room for their own imagination. Why? You can get pre-packed sets of bricks for building a pirate ship or construction site or I don’t know… a town?, all nicely accompanied by a booklet with step-by-step instructions on how to build this house or that house and how this or that could/should look like when finished.
Image via Wikipedia
Not so long ago I witnessed a scene with father and girl playing with bricks. Father: “No, not this way, why don’t you follow the instructions to build this house?“
Last week my boyfriend and I visited his niece. She took me to her room and pointed at her LEGO harbor with ships, containers and everything: “Look what my daddy built.”
Crazy, isn’t it? I know, I know… kids can still mix and match bricks and characters from different LEGO sets (regardless of instructions), but still…
I don’t quite buy this advertisement about building my own story from simple bricks… LEGO is no longer just a yellow brick, green brick, blue brick or red brick – maybe it still is for some adults but (in my opinion) definitely not for kids – just look at the variety of products on their website. :)
The ads appeared on four consecutive pages. LEGO is a company that has fostered imagination, invention and creativity for over 60 years. So it is unusual for these ads to feature only long copy with minimal imagery.
Upcoming webinar is just one of the webinars in the series describing tools released as LOD2 Stack – tools that will help you (and us) create, enrich, interlink and visualize open data. First webinar (November 2011) was in an introduction to LOD2 Stack, while second one (December 2011) presented Virtuoso universal server for linked open data.
If you think this has nothing to do with you, think again. We all can contribute in this way or another to create new knowledge, better data and share it with others. There are already a bunch of cool projects related to Open data (ever heard about Freebase? Or DBpedia?) and contributing to “open things” it’s a good idea.
Back to announcement…
On January 24, 2012 @ 4p.m. you can participate in third free LOD2 webinar about OntoWiki. OntoWiki is a tool providing support for agile, distributed knowledge engineering scenarios. It enables intuitive authoring of semantic content, it supports RDF, it fosters social collaboration and much more.
I’m challenged… not just vertically (154 cm if you insist!), but also technically. Almost a month ago I heard about Google Refine. Few days ago I started studying how to develop an extension to be able to retrieve triples (open data) from our database. Easy peasy… gutsy squeezy?
Being such a simple girl I don’t need much. A little laughter, ‘thank you’ now and then and… you cleaning the mess you left in the kitchen. Simple, right? I’ll make you coffee and fruit salad and bring you cookies… but only if I’m happy. Wanna be happy? Make me happy.
Almost ran over a gecko with my scooter. That would be so uncool. Geckos are small lizards and this was the first time I saw one in the middle of Ljubljana.
Image via Wikipedia
Candle
Commuting with a train can be quite interesting. Older lady was observing my water bottle and after a few minutes finally said it: “Is this an oil candle?” Why on earth would I have an oil candle (people put on a grave) on a table on train? Dunno. People are strange.
Human interfaces
Lately we are paying much attention to human-computer interfaces, but somehow we started to neglect human-human ones. Half-listening to customers requests, not recognizing new onces or the less frequent ones. Let me give you an example. Two older women decided to make a trip to Ljubljana with the train. They bought return ticket or at least they thought they did. As it turned out, they had one way ticket only and had to purchase tickets on the train, which is much more expensive. You can guess they weren’t pleased with the situation, especially not because they could get discount for seniors if they bought the tickets at the train station. Now, who’s to blame? The woman behind the counter at the train station or these two seniors not verifying their purchase? Me? Don’t even try.
Can you remember the times when we didn’t use Google? When Altavista and Yahoo! or metacrawler were the only ones you could ask for the meaning of life and stuff? Boom and then it came Google.
Image via Wikipedia
Today I realized how deeply Google sneaked into our lives behind our backs. Don’t get me wrong, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should make you at least think about it… It’s like an addiction. Here’s my story.
Every now and then we have to print a number of small tickets (we call them stories) for
planning purposes. Every story has a title, a description, a list of tasks and estimated value of this story. Ever heard of agile development or scrum? No? In few words: our work is organized in cycles (e.g. 14 days). At the end of current cycle we define what to do in next cycle in the form of stories (more abstract descriptions of what to do). Stories are written in a document (e.g. Google Docs) and later manually transferred into a template, created in Adobe Indesign. Because I’m a big fan of simplifying tedious tasks, I decided to surprise our project manager and help her automate at least part of the dull repetitive task of copying stories into template. Indesign already supports Data Merge, but it needs a comma or tab separated text file as an input. No problem if your data consist of single-line values, but as soon as you have to include multi-line text values, you have a ‘it’s complicated’ relationship – not an option in my case. Well, I figured out how to overcome this obstacle, but I still had to transform semi-structured text of Google Doc document into a structured text (spreadsheet) and export it as csv. Hmmm, how should I do it without additional tools?
People, let me introduce you Google App script. Have you noticed that Google offers Google app script for Google docs? Oh yes, it does. I used to write (not record!) a lot of macros in MS Office and I must admit Google app script kicks ass. You don’t believe me? Try it. It is based of Javascript or VB script and it can do magic… well almost. It solved my problem though! You can even create your own custom menus. Niiiceeee.
Lesson learned: Watch your back or next time you’ll find Google underneath your sheets instead of your partner.
Whine smart or drift apart
It’s been a month since I started working in Z-company. So far so awesome. One of the things I learned here was to ‘whine smart’. It is actually a part of agile software development – a retrospective in which team members share their thoughts and opinions what went wrong or not so good and what to do about it in next (development) cycle. I’m a ninja with academic background, where whining is by default useless (mostly due to the complexity and rigidity of the system), therefore I was surprised to see that smart whining works, while not being whining at all!
If it doesn’t work any more, it is time to drift apart (before it is too late).
Praise a lot, sir Lancelot
Honesty didn’t kill the cat, neither did curiosity. If you tell people they’re good, when they deserve it, if you give credits where due and if you are true to yourself, you probably won’t take over the world, but you’ll be able to sleep at night. Guess what, praising is also a part of agile software development, just like whining. Ego-trippers you’re welcome to praise others… it won’t hurt you.
If you’re born and raised among “if you’re bad you’ll go to Hell” people, you expect to go to Hell when you die (if you’re bad) and not a second sooner! Although I’m not such a bad person in general and I’m pretty much alive at this moment, I had to go through MIME Hell today. This is what happened… I was waiting for a very important e-mail with attachment and when I finally got it – it was a MIME multi-part base 64 encoded message. If you ever received one of those, you feel me. If you haven’t – consider yourself lucky, but if you do it starts like this:
Sometimes not even Google is able to decode it. If you insist on pointing fingers – Microsoft (especially Outlook and Microsoft Exchange) does a pretty good at encoding forwarded messages or attachments in this way.
If message received is not important, who cares, forgetaboutit. If it is and asking sender to re-send the message this time carefully using alternative works swell. What if message is important and you can’t or don’t want to further annoy sender? You’re doomed.
Oh noez.
Or not. Here it is: Online base64 sample decoder and encoder to the rescue! Copy relevant parts into appropriate textbox, hit enter, do some magic and you’ll be able to retrieve at least some parts of the message. If I did it so can you!
It’s the television channel that has given voice to a thousand anti-western conspiracy theories, while avoiding criticism of the hand that feeds it. Now state-run Russia Today, the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda arm, has forged an unlikely partnership – with the self-proclaimed defender of truth and freedom Julian Assange.
If your customer decides to leave 
