Archive for the ‘Randomness’ Category

When Business & Pleasure Collide

Permanent Link posted January 17th, 2008

When we first started 3DPixel Ltd. we naturally had to ingratiate ourselves with everyone we could think of in order to generate business. This is how every business has to scrape at first to stay afloat. Anything and everything.

Forums are created, IRC channels are made, phone calls are made, less-than-perfect business is taken on. Naturally, being of that nature, your relationship with people gets personal as well as professional, if only from existing friends taking on business you offer. 99% of the time this works out fine, but what happens if say, the personal relationship turns sour? Could be anything. A falling out, a clash of ideals, simply growing apart. The worry for myself then is that person will hold a grudge against the business because of a personal matter as they are so ingrained with eachother from that early stage. A lot of damage can be done when it’s nothing to do with the professional aspect of the business. I am not generalising here, I have genuinely felt this will happen and have had to dance around to prevent it doing so.

Many will say don’t mix business and pleasure. I wholeheartedly agree, now. When however, when you are (or were, I should say, 5 years soon!) a young business in desperate need of new business; You try it.

I myself spent most of 2007 distancing myself from people I once was talking to all day every day. One event made me realise this ‘pally situation’ could not continue. I was talking to my friends, some of who had accounts with us, in IRC and the network we operate went down for 23 seconds (as part of some maintenance from our upstream providers). I was hounded, I mean literally hounded with cries of derision and annoyance that would not normally be aired if they had to log into our website, and log a support request. In a sentence, we were too available in my mind.

I only post this now as I feel finally that situation has been attained. It’s sad for me as I’ve lost a lot of friends in the process just by simply drifting out of contact. Our business is now more… I want to say stand-offish but I don’t mean that, I mean more professional. We don’t know our customers as friends, we help them as well as we ever did but there is never the risk of anything but professional differences getting in the way of business (bad enough of course). Less complications and less risk of emotional contamination.

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You Are A Pirate!

Permanent Link posted January 14th, 2008

Ok totally random but then I like random things.

Especially pleasing is the hole digging crotch ninja.

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“There’s a mute button?”

Permanent Link posted January 7th, 2008

Today I’m going to have a rant. This is only my second post on our blog, and the first was also a rant, so I’m sure you can see the beginnings of a trend here.

Many people can relate to being “the tech guy” for your family and friends. Being called on for every little technical query is par for the course in my line of work, but I’m starting to become really frustrated with the attitude a large portion of the population has towards anything remotely technical.

Dell Inspiron Mediakeys My laptop is an old Dell Inspiron and has served me well over the years, although apart from when travelling, my mother gets sole use of it. One of the things I particularly like about it is the array of media keys on the front which allow you to adjust the volume, pause, skip etc.

Yesterday she called me to ask “why isn’t the sound on the laptop working?”. I asked her if she’d pressed the mute button by mistake. Her response nearly floored me. “Oh, is there a mute button?”. Now as you can see from the photo, the buttons aren’t exactly subtle and she’s been using the laptop for about 4 years now, how the hell had she not noticed an array of 7 buttons on the front and had the curiosity to investigate what they do.

If the sound from her TV had mysteriously stopped she’d have picked up the remote, had a fiddle and probably figured out that the mute button had been pressed by mistake, but because it’s a computer, she - like many others - immediately assumes that some virus with malicious intentions is keeping her from watching Big Cat Diary on the BBCs iPlayer.

Why are people suddenly so afraid of fiddling?

The human race has evolved because we’re curious, we want to learn, to discover new things, and yet at the moment it feels like we’re being held back by a lazy portion of our population.

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