This is really cool. It’s a map of Helsinki showing the current locations of some buses in the city and updating their location as they travel around. No more waiting ages at bus stops if you live there. And are on the routes of the buses covered of course. But very cool.
WORK is not play. But maybe it should be.
CRM, Tech, Thought ProvokingThe future of CRM as reported by the New York Times? I wonder how soon Siebel/SAP/Salesforce will be changing their interfaces to suit this model?
In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management. Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. Unfortunately, most of the software is the business equivalent of calorie counting. No one does it gladly. Worse, the software has a Big Brother aspect to it.
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Munich
TravelSettling into Munich has been really easy. In fact, I can’t think of anywhere I’ve lived in which has been so straightforward to settle in. I visited a bank last week and I already have a Maestro card, a temporary apartment has been a breeze to set up, there is no problem speaking English (although that may be a problem for my learning German) and there is tons of stuff to do. I found the English language website Toytown Germany and there really does seem to be a great community here. I may just be too busy to blog much! 😉
Country Diary
Achill, Ireland, TravelCountry Diary from The Guardian with a nice piece on Achill.
North we went to spend a few days on Achill Island (it is joined to the mainland). We had Slievemore Mountain behind us and sat facing the great Minaun Cliffs which rise from the sea, sheer in places and angled backwards in others. Such soft brown where heather grows, deepening almost to black where turf (peat) is visible. The cliff slabs change in colour from dark violet to black as the sun slants on their adamantine surfaces. The smell of turf burning fills the air with its acrid, not unpleasant scent.
Saving Turf
Achill, IrelandI went back to my childhood today spending it, spreading turf. It is probably about 20 years since I have done this type of work that I did every summer as a kid. It’s pretty monotonous spreading the turf (or peat) so that it can dry in the air and the sunshine before being brought back to the house for the winter. Of course, harvesting turf is done a lot less these days in Celtic Tiger Ireland but it was nice in a nostalgic sort of way. It will be a world away from my new job in Germany next week.
Ireland lagging in broadband league
TechNo surprise there then speaking from dial-up land. My poker career is going to *HELL*.
Firewire
TechJust ordered a new laptop from Dell. Was impressed by how fast it took for them to deliver it to the west of Ireland. Now looking at transferring my files from my old laptop to the new one using my external hard drive and then discover that there is no firewire port on the new laptop. I had assumed that it would be part of the normal configuration. My options are to either do the transfer using my usb mp3 player as a hard drive, order a new external hard drive that uses usb or get a firewire pcmcia card. This is irritating as I am nowhere near a tech shop and can’t just drop by and pick one up somewhere.
My Name Is Yu Ming
CinemaNice short film about a bored chinese shopkeeper who decides to learn Irish and come to Ireland. However, he finds it’s not as simple as he thought.
New Zealand schoolgirls
Thought ProvokingThe Guardian reports that two New Zealand schoolgirls did a science test in school that is going to cost the makers of Ribena a couple of million dollars.
Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world’s biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.
Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.
Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more.
Stock Slump
UncategorizedMany news sources are reporting that stocks are slumping for a second day on the back of the Shanghai index losing 8.8% of its value on Tuesday. However, looking at the web page of the Shanghai stock exchange, the index seems to be up by almost 4% on Wedesday. Is there a negative news bias on economic issues this week?
Update – According to the FT, bloggers seem to think that China was not the cause of the mass sell-off.
Trader Mike seconds that, and runs through the charts. “The selling was broad-based today [Tuesday] — 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined….I’ve said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There’s a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today.”