From Overheard in New York | The Voice of the City…
Sassy flight attendant: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will be released from the overhead above your seat. After the screaming subsides, please place the oxygen mask around your nose and mouth. If you are traveling with a child or an adult who is acting like a child, place your mask on first before attempting to help put theirs on. –Flight out of LaGuardia
From an email reporting an exchange overheard in New York:
Old lady, to woman speaking on Bluetooth headset: “Excuse me, but are you talking to yourself?”
Woman just looks at her and keeps talking.
Old lady: “Because, if you are, you should be nicer to yourself.”
Reminds me of the time a colleague of mine was walking down a long, deserted corridor in Denver airport at night. Coming towards him was a very large black guy who spoke thus: “First I’m gonna whip your ass, then I’m gonna kill ya”.
Just as my friend was composing himself for sudden death he noticed the hands-free wire dangling from the chap’s left ear.
Amazing goings-on at Hewlett Packard, once one of the best and the nicest companies in the world. Here’s the report from Good Morning Silicon Valley…
Hewlett-Packard, long known for its open and egalitarian corporate structure, is making headlines today for an astonishing lapse in judgement that may forever tarnish the the core values established by its founders some 50 years ago. According to reports, HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn ordered the surveillance of HP board members in an effort to out a director who was leaking information to the news media. On her sayso, a team of security consultants gathered board members’ private telephone records and used them to finger longtime HP director George Keyworth as the source of the leaks. Dunn outed Keyworth and demanded his resignation at a May 18 meeting which quickly went bad when she revealed her surveillance scheme. (Keyworth will not be renominated to the company’s board.)
Enraged at Dunn’s methods, well-known venture capitalist Tom Perkins abruptly quit the board and stormed out of the meeting. HP announced his resignation the next day, but without explanation. Since then, Perkins has been after HP to make a full and accurate report of the circumstances surrounding his departure. HP refused, so Perkins forced its hand, going public in an irate letter to company directors attached to which was a memo from AT&T’s general attorney confirming an unauthorized review of his phone records. “As the Company failed to make a full and accurate report (as required by federal law) and having given the Company several opportunities to correct the record, I am now legally obliged to disclose publicly the reasons for my resignation,” Perkins wrote. “This is a very sad duty. My history with the Hewlett-Packard Company is long and I have been privileged to count both founders as close friends. I consider HP to be an icon of Silicon Valley, and one of the great companies of the world. It now needs, urgently, to correct its course.”
Dunn ought to be fired. Pronto.
Ironic footnote: “First and foremost is that privacy is actually a core value at HP. As a company, HP is 100 percent committed to excellence in consumer and employee privacy…”
— Scott Taylor, Chief Privacy Officer, Hewlett-Packard, June 20, 2006
Overheard at a departmental meeting today.
The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.
My colleague thought it might be attributable to Margaret Mead but according to this the original source was Dennis Potter, the great TV playwright.
Hooray! My esteemed colleague, Ray Ison, has started a Blog which gives him a soap-box on which to rant about the idiocies of the governmental and corporate world.
I’ve been following links on Squidoo and found this useful introduction to Web 2.0 by Joshua Porter. It’s got a good list of canonical references.
Microsoft has announced the US pricing regime for the latest incarnation of Windows:
Security vulnerabilities thrown in at no extra charge.
Don’t you just love the nomenclature — Basic, Premium, Business, Ultimate. No Latte, though.
From today’s Guardian…
John Reid will sanction the forced removal of up to 32 Iraqis today after telling the high court he would ignore any last-minute legal challenge to their deportation. The Guardian has learned that the home secretary has told the high court that today’s specially chartered flight will not be stopped by anything short of an injunction.
Last November, an attempt to deport more than 70 Iraqi Kurds ended with just 20 going home because of a host of last-ditch legal applications. Mr Reid has since decided to take a tougher stance and told the high court today’s flight would go ahead regardless of any legal applications.
Footnote for overseas readers: Dr Reid is the British Minister of the Interior. For some reason, he is called the Home Secretary. It’s a sinister post which turns almost all its occupants into monsters. The only exception I can think of is the late Roy ‘Woy’ Jenkins, an erudite, civilised and liberal man who wound up as Chancellor of Oxford University.
According to Techcrunch…
New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.
The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.
Search related advertising last year was a $5 billion market, still small compared to $22 billion in magazines and $74 billion for TV advertising – but the landscape is changing. The Financial Times ran an article on Tuesday about the belief that the shortage of marketers skilled in negotiating sites like MySpace and YouTube is one of the biggest barriers to the growth of advertising online.
Even in the short term, it’s still up in the air between the big players. Google’s advertising, which is generally believed to be more effective than that of competitors, hasn’t kicked in at MySpace yet. If Google can make MySpace search more bearable when it takes over in the fourth quarter of this year, then you can expect MySpace to drive more traffic to retail sites than ever. At the same time, IE 6 doesn’t have a native search box in the chrome of the browser and IE 7 will – to search either MSN or Live.com. We’ll have to compare these numbers with Live.com in the future…
Hmmm… This is from the Daily Mail, so I’m not sure I believe it.
After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle.
But the young man behind the counter had other ideas. He said she was barred – because she was too old.
The 75-year-old would only be allowed to sign the forms for the Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk phone and broadband package if she was accompanied by a younger member of her family who could explain the small print to her.
Mrs Greening-Jackson, who sits on the board of several charities, said: “I was absolutely furious. The young man said, ‘Sorry, you’re over 70. It’s company policy. We don’t sign anyone up who is over 70.’
“Later a young lady said company policy is that anyone over 70 might not understand the contract. She said, ‘If you would be prepared to go to the shop in town and take a younger member of your family we might give you a contract.’