Author: Alasdair

30 Days – Day #1: My Favourite Song

Posted on by Alasdair

Preface: I thought I’d make an effort to dust my “writing” blog off a bit before the end of the year, as much for the discipline of getting something written every day as anything else. So I’m going to do that 30 Days meme that’s doing the rounds, but there are 5 days that I don’t want to do – the topics are not something I can easily talk about, mostly just for practical reasons. So the first five people to pipe up get to pick (non-fiction) topics for me to write about. Anyway, back to “my favourite song”:

God, I hate it when I’m asked questions like this. I always worry that my answer is going to come across as “I’m a pretentious music nerd snowflake who couldn’t possibly pick just one song because I’m sooo eclectic”. But on the other hand, half my friends probably say the same. So y’know, whatever.

For now, let us simply accept that it is actually impossible to have a single favourite song. Music is a thing of emotion and mood, and humans are mercurial creatures. My favourite song to listen to when lying in bed alone at 2am is not going to be my favourite song to dance to in the middle of a nightclub at 2am.

So: it is a bright and sunny December afternoon. The first frost of winter showed up last night. What do I listen to at at this time of year? There’s a handful of albums I regularly reach for when the nights draw in – Firewater’s “The Man On The Burning Tightrope”, Tom Waits “Real Gone”, The Pogues “The Rest of the Best” (I prefer it to “The Best Of”), The Tansads “Shandyland” and The Sisters of Mercy “First and Last and Always” are all regular winter listening.

But the winter also tends to make me want to reach back to older music, or modern reinterpretations of same. I’ve a CD called “Vox Humana: Ancestral Voices For A Modern Europe” that gets played a lot. As do choral workings of Christmas carols. Recently, Miranda has been playing me various bits of medieval polyphony, and that’s definitely going to be part of my winter playlist from now on.

But that’s not getting me any closer to talking about today’s favourite track. After some thought, it’s this little beastie:

That’s Beef Wellington’s inspired remix of Bing Crosby’s “Happy Holidays”. Enjoy.

Links For Monday 30th November 2009

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Customer Communications

Posted on by Alasdair

I spend a lot of time at work thinking about ways to improve the ways our clients communicate with their customers. This can mean things like how we assemble emails, what sorts of subject lines we use, it can mean making sure that unsubcribe links are clear, and that the customer feels in control of the communication they recieve, it can mean lots of different things, but the end goal is the same – making sure that the user feels like a valued customer, who has a relationship with our client’s brand. (You’ll have to forgive the lapse into marketing speak there – it’s quite hard to talk about the less directly technical side of what I do without sounding like a bit of a cock.) Because if we make our clients customers happy, they spend money with the client, and then the client spends money with us, and I get paid. So I spend time thinking about digital communications, and how we can use new technology to improve things.

I have just been blown away by one of our suppliers. They’ve put all my work in the shade with a five minute job. We use 37signals Basecamp as our project management tool of choice, and we have done for almost as long as the company has existed. And they’ve just sent us a personal note to thank us for it. A hand written, personal note. We’re one of their longest standing commercial customers, and one of them has taken the time to sit down and write us a personal note to thank us for that.

One worth remembering, I think.

Links For Tuesday 24th November 2009

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Links For Monday 23rd November 2009

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  • Ariana Osborne » Not necessarily POD: Internetworking
    Ariana's been doing an excellent series about POD, and generally getting off your ass and making a thing. This, however, is the one where she knocks it out of the park, talking about community, and engaging with people on the internet. The rule is very, very simple: engage with them as humans. Give them space to talk about what *they* want to talk about. And all other things will follow.
    (tags: community pod)
  • Petition to: abolish the proposed law that will see alleged illegal filesharers disconnected from their broadband connections, without a fair trial. | Number10.gov.uk
    A Number 10 petition against the current draft Digital Economy Bill. I strongly urge all of you who are in the UK to sign it – while it will have no legal force, it'll send a message about this legislation that might cause them to back off, especially since we're now in the run up to a general election.
    (tags: uk politics internet copyright)
  • Charlie's Diary: Imbeciles
    Charlie Stross on the Digital Economy Bill. I am going to keep linking to stuff like this, because it is absolutely vital that this bill is seen for what it is: an attempt by corporate interests to screw small and independent creators. Even if there is a reasonable argument for fighting for copyright, this bill is for far the wrong way to do as to be 100% insupportable, and *every* MP needs to be made to realise this. I've a letter written to my MP – I haven't sent it yet, because I'm holding off until just before the bill is actually under parliamentary review and vote, because I don't want my concerns to be weeks old in his mind at that time, as they would be if I sent it now, but I may post it up later on – it's no good for other people to simply send the same text, but I'm trying to summarise the issues, so if people think it would be useful to them, I'll put it up.
    (tags: copyright uk law politics)

Links For Thursday 19th November 2009

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