Archive for August, 2008

Telecom + Broadband + Friday night drinks = Fail

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

For the last time, McCallum + Partners DOES NOT EXIST. The Telecom ad that features staff singing and dancing to the song by Elemno P is completely fictional.

Alarm bells should be ringing left, right and centre when you have:

a) No drinks to be seen on a Friday night drinks event
b) A surprising number of “hot” chicks working for a law firm
c) used a stage set that reminded me of Saatchi & Saatchi’s familiar office in Parnell.

Telecom must be really desperate to feature the use of their technology on a nonexistent company. Perhaps your claim of faster broadband in New Zealand should not be taken literally too. Oh wait, I believe many of us already do.

And Saatchi & Saatchi -- shame on you. It is misleading and unethical -- at least you could have put an asterisk at the bottom of the ad saying “serving suggestion”. Perhaps you should go back and learn transference of brand image and association. When other companies claim their laptop fits into an internal office envelope, it really does.

And this goes without mention the fake ad by Land Transport NZ’s demanding you have side curtain airbags on your next car. Or the fake CGI fireworks at the Olympics or the lip-syncing. Moving along now…

Airport bus = winnar!

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Average travel time by shuttle to city: 1 hour. Cost: $15.00
Average travel time by bus to city: 30 mins. Cost: $5.50

Twice as fast for a third of the price.

Friday night out

Friday, August 29th, 2008

An eventful night – said farewell one of our IBMer who is leaving this Sunday to study at Stanford. So we had a stroll down to the Soul Bar, with the presence of Daniel Carter and Ali Williams sitting diagonally opposite from us as we went on about our random conversations.

Then we went to Wildfire without a booking (duh) and got turned away so we took our moolah to The Korean. Good food but with a very typical expectation from an asian buffet. Left dinner with overpowering BBQ stench on our clothes, thinking instead it could have been GREAT food at Wildfire. But great company is what that matters.

No photos, apparently Dan does not want to appear at a bar on a blog (the apparent response when our girls who wanted a photo approached him) and I’m not asian enough to take photos of asian food. 

Oh yeah, earlier in the day I had Dennys – our one of a kind place (even during the day). One day I will order everything from their menu….

Windows Hate: Part 1

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

So I spent time today explaining to a relative how to create an email attachment. And while that may seem trivial, one starts to realise a lot of patience will be involved when you run into questions like “Which mouse button should I click?”

Most of these concerns raised would not usually exist on a Mac Operating System.

#1: There is only one mouse button to explain to a user to click on a Mac. Imagine explaining a left-button click for an action and a right-button click for a context menu to a user and how to differentiate between them. Would you allow one to get behind the wheel if one does not know which pedal slows down a huge metal contraption?

#2: How do I locate the file to attach?
Simple. 1. Click Start, Then click “Search” (Windows Key+F) 2. Click “All files and folders” 3. Enter search criteria 4. Click the “Search” button. 5. In the results pane, right-click (see #1) on the file and click “Open Containing Folder”. 6. Note the location of the file. 7. In your webmail client, click on the “Browse…” button. 8. Navigate to containing folder and select the file you wish to attach.  9. Click the “Okay” button. (Skip step 2 if you are on Vista)

On Mac OSX: 1. Enter search criteria in Spotlight (Command-Space) 2. Click “Show All” on the first line returned 3. Drag and drop the file over to the “Browse…” button in your webmail client to attach any file..

9 steps versus 3. You be the judge.

Wordpress.app + iPhone =

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Amazing. Having this app on the iPhone takes blogging to a whole new level. Setup was simple and like most well designed apps, it was intuitive. Overall a great app that is worth switching my hosting account to support this.

Download this app for free from the iTunes App Store.

Hosting account change

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Having played around with .NET enough, I have decided it was time to move on and refresh my memory in php and CSS all over again. So enter the new (and hopefully improved) website.