I’m heading off now (6:15am!) on a road trip to Jo’burg for a few days. Will be offline most of the time, but back on email briefly next weekend then fully probably on Tuesday or Wednesday from Bangkok.
Adios amigos… 
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
If you name a class anythingCheckBoxElement it will cause wonkiness in IE. Very frustrating. Took me almost 6 weeks to figure this out.
The behaviour I experienced was that a div wouldn’t move properly when other divs around it were moved. Changing the class name of a child table row to filterCheckBoxElement2 resolved the problem. It would seem that CheckBoxElement is a reserved word and may not appear at the start or end of any names. Weird.
Naturally, the vastly superior Firefox has no such limitation!
I was at the Cape Town Vespa store a few days ago. All the sales people we met were talking trash about the much cheaper Vuka bikes. One chap said to us “The brakes fail after 500km.” When pressed, what he meant was, the brakes need tightened regularly on the Vuka bikes.
True, it does need maintenance. It doesn’t ride as well as a Vespa. Some would say it’s not as stylish. The Vespa has much better brakes. The Vespa is probably a lot safer. But the Vuka range starts at R5′000 ($600 USD) while the Vespa range starts at R40′000 ($4′800 USD) for an equivalent CC. So naturally you’d expect the Vespa to be better quality.
Just for the record, I ride a Vuka.
The end result of my experience is, I actually think less of Vespa. Simply because they talked down the competition. If they’d talked up the benefits of their brand, I’d probably hold Vespa in much higher regard.
It was a great, real life example of the old marketing adage, focus on your positive points, don’t put down the competition. From personal experience, it’s absolutely true. Talk up your product, don’t talk down the competitor’s.
I’ve never been a fan of resumes. It always sounded like such a boring job, cataloguing all the things I’ve done, listing all my various endeavours. Seth Godin has an excellent post on why great people don’t have resumes.
People often ask me how I found my current job, how I manage to work and travel, etc, etc. I don’t have a simple answer. I didn’t apply for my current job. I’ve never applied for a job in the traditional sense. I’ve never submitted a resume for a job. I make connections in various ways, and sometimes they lead to work.
Maybe I’ll start a new page with an explanation of why I don’t have a resume instead of actually having a resume.
It’s taken a while for me to notice, but I don’t get any messages from Twitter any more. I no longer receive SMS notifications, or IM notifications, or anything else for that matter. I just don’t get updates. I’ll probably have to start reading twitter via RSS. Bah.
Apparently this is old news.
I wonder how it will affect Twitter’s business. They’re so popular the system can’t cope. Yet they still haven’t shown a clear revenue model. Who’s crazy enough to be paying for the whole thing? It all sounds very .com bubble to me.
This morning I learned that Bennett Robinson passed away about a year ago.
I met Bennett on a flight from Singapore to Bangkok, he gave me the push to actually install Linux on my laptop. He was running it himself (a man in his sixties), and convinced me it was easy to make the switch. We kept in touch. There was talk of working together on a few projects, but nothing materialised on that front.
Bennett was a real open source evangelist. His business was built around open source software. He presented it as a genuine business alternative to commercially licensed software. It was inspiring to see a man of such experience so vibrantly engaging with the concept.
I’ll be back in Bangkok in a month, so I dropped Bennett an email. It bounced. I tracked him down online to the American Chamber of Commerce in Thailand. They kindly informed me of his passing. He was skiing in Japan when he suffered a heart attack they said.
Bennett left a wife and young children, my condolences to them. Bennett my friend, rest in peace.
My biggest complaint with MySpace is, the profile pages get out of hand. They become outrageously long with vast numbers of images, videos and other junk. Facebook by comparison has always been cleaner, simpler and lighter. MySpace profiles take forever to load, even on broadband. Facebook profiles were snappy.
No longer.
I checked a profile today that contained a total of 1750 files coming in at 11.83 Mb. It took a total of 9minutes and 19 seconds to fully load. Outrageous. This user has a total of 75 Facebook apps installed.
Facebook need to fix the problem. There are a few simple solutions. For example, split the profile into multiple pages, with a few apps on each page. Or let users load one app at a time. Whichever way, something has to change.
I wonder if this signals the beginning of Facebook’s end.
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