Nature documentaries are great – I’m a huge fan especially of the Blue Planet series which has to contain some of the the finest pieces of motion picture in existence to date. But more than anything I enjoy documentaries that expose important political or social events. ‘The Second World War in Colour’ is a must-see collection of footage that will make your reevaluate preconceived images of wartime Europe. I must also have watched most of Louis Theroux’s productions, with particular highlights including his ‘Weird Weekends’ series, aired on BBC 2, especially ‘Thai Brides’ (Series 3, 2000) and ‘Born Again Christians’ (Series 1, 1998).

Three feature length documentaries really stick in my mind though, and they’re all great exposés of right wing groups or the effect of dirty politics in recent world history. If you get a few spare hours at some point, I really recommend checking them out – but just be warned that none of them are really meant for the feint of heart or easily shocked!

Waco – The Rules of Engagement

This is a 1997 documentary looking at the ‘Waco Seige’ – David Koresh’s Branch Davidian fatal conflict with ATF and FBI agents in 1993 in the small town of Waco, Texas. The production is particularly effective thanks to the FBI providing a hand held camera to members of the group during the seige, meaning that some really powerful footage was recorded including testimony from David Koresh himself – giving the viewer a really unique opportunity to assess the man’s character at first hand. This also includes a lot of film from the court proceedings after the event analysing the responsibility and catastrophic failure of the ATF and FBI in the event. I won’t reveal too much about the events of the incident because it really is an onslaught of shock after shock from start to finish.

His Big White Self

A documentary made in 2006 (follow up to ‘The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife’) presented by Nick Broomfield (absolute legend) focusing on the South African far-right Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, led by recently murdered Eugene Terre’Blanche. It contains some truly fantastic interviews with Eugene himself and JP Meyer (former party member and ex-driver for Eugene), uncovering how much (and how little) for some life in South Africa has changed since the fall of Apartheid in 1994. The documentary also contains some very shocking footage of the Kempton Park World Trade Centre being stormed by far-right groups, and rioting in Ventersdorp in which AWB members open fire on police and civilians culminating in a much publicised execution of several injured AWB members by an army solider.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Filmed in 2003 by a group of Irish filmmakers who initially intended to document the state of post-revolution Venezuela and interview the new President Hugo Chavez, but instead became caught in the middle of, and captured first hand, the events of a savage coup d’état led by army generals sympathising with right-wing and middle class opposition parties and at least partly instigated by the CIA and White House under President Bush. I don’t think you could ask for more revealing footage of every key moment in the entire affair, interspersed with the distorted reality presented by private TV stations at the time.

Enjoy!

Ridekicks describes itself as “a place to share rides – with a twist.”

Social games like Foursquare and Gowalla have been pretty big on the uptake recently enjoying substantial growth and fueling the drive toward a more engaging and integrated social web. For me, their appeal is in how they manage to involve real life interaction with social media applications in a really quite addictive way, though I think they’re quite heavily limited to those of us lucky enough to use a top end mobile device like an iPhone – the charm is somewhat lost whilst sitting at a desk.

Ridekicks connects drivers with potential passengers for the very eco-friendly and economically advantageous purposes of journey sharing. It’s added twist is that you build up points by taking journeys or by giving rides which you build up as a competative game. High scorers are awarded titles including ‘king of the road’, and the site promises other eventual benefits.

For those thinking of attending festivals this year, it could be a really good opportunity to save some money on otherwise expensive train, bus or taxi fares. Or at a more everyday level, consider minimising your outgoings by car sharing the journey to work through Ridekicks. Britain is hideously bad at managing an effective public transport system, so making the most out of the existing road traffic seems like a really progressive move that we can all make as individuals.

I like the idea a lot, and I really like the name. Good luck Lee!

It inspired me to open up the Adobe Illustrator isometric template that I published back at the end of December and get something new drawn. This was the work of about twenty minutes using the guides and some good snapping adjustments. I’m pretty happy at how quickly it’s possible to get stuff made using the template. It’s a significant win if you’re used to trying to draw anything isometric manually.

My housemate moved out and cancelled his account with his ISP, so I ordered a new connection with BT (could you believe that Virgin wouldn’t offer me a fibre optic connection in Westminster?!). After 20 days waiting for the activation, they actually installed it on the wrong line going into the house and I had to get it moved onto one of the others (requiring another 16 day wait). That brings me to today – in which they’ve managed to put it back onto the same line… FFS.

I’ve got to say, my experience with BT so far has been incredibly poor. As a new customer, I do expect some pretty good treatment if something goes wrong, after all its the start of a 12 month [contract] relationship during which I will be parting with a fair bit of cash.

Here’s a few tips for business owners hoping to learn from the mistakes of hideous, over bloated corporates like BT…

1. Things go wrong sometimes, as a customer I’m happy to accept that and move on. But do your best to make it right and apologise or at the very least acknowledge it when it happens.
2. Resolve problems quickly and efficiently, don’t leave your customer waiting.
3. If a resolution takes a long time, explain why.
4. Don’t palm your customers off onto department after department. Recognise that internal divisions are meaningless to me, your Twitter agents are the same as your Call Centre Agents and your Engineers for all I care – speak from your company as one, with one voice.
5. Take personal responsibility when something goes wrong. That means actually checking a resolution is being or has been reached at some point when you put the phone down. Don’t just assume that because you sent an email about it, or entered it into a problem log that someone has actioned it. Calling me back would be nice, whether its to tell me that the problem has been fixed, or just to update me on progress (or lack thereof).
6. I don’t care where you locate your Customer Service department, but you need to revise your recruitment policy to include a very high level of English language ability – I’d call it fluency. Especially if your business is about telephone communication, it kind of looks bad when your staff can’t communicate properly over the telephone.
7. Get some cool hold music, you only need to license one good track because…
8. Never keep someone on hold for long enough for a track to end.
9. If you need to keep someone on hold for more than 3-4 minutes, just arrange to call them back!
10. If you promise to call someone back, it’s generally a good idea to do it.
11. SMS updates can be useful, but not if they include very unexpected information – like scheduling downtime that starts within hours.
12. If you contact your customers via SMS, email, or letter and you need to track that conversation with a reference number, make sure that your CSAs understand what to do with that reference number to look up the conversation history.
13. Make sure your CSAs record a conversation history accurately and document a problem thoroughly.
14. If a problem escalates heavily and you think its unacceptable, acknowledge it, take responsibility, and offer a refund.
15. Don’t charge your customers for any amount of time that your service was not being delivered, that wouldn’t be right, would it?
16. If you process a refund and a customer is paying by Direct Debit, explain to them that DD requests are submitted to the customer’s bank about 10 days in advance of the amount being withdrawn. That can affect the time in which a refund can be processed – your customer needs to understand that. Don’t promise them that they won’t be charged if you’re not sure of it.
17. Its not always necessary to apologise profusely, or even at all, so long as you do everything under the sun possible to get the problem rectified.

Get those bits right, and a happy customer I would be.

Sorry BT but you’ve utterly failed me over the past month and if the one last remaining, sane, English speaking person I emailed there today can’t resolve this for me and take some personal responsibility for the problem, then I just have no choice but to switch supplier (which will probably be cheaper anyway).

Moral of this post – everyone knows BT have been useless throughout their history, why did I think they’d be any different today?

It’s been an inspiring read. I started off quite skeptical of it, because although I have a huge amount of respect for him, I have in the past found some of Jason Fried‘s comments and business ideas to be either arrogant or counter-intuitive to how I would normally work, but I have to say that Rework has given some of his remarks more of a context. I was pretty much a 37 signals convert before reading this, but now I realise that they really are a cut above the rest.

The book is cut up neatly into individual tips that last about a page or two, not nearly big enough to describe as chapters – instead they’re nuggets of advice, and this really helps to make what is actually quite a sizable book very digestible, navigable, and memorable.

There’s just too much in there to summarise so I really encourage you to read it yourself, but I think my favourite tip was in relation to using ‘ASAP’ to describe project / task urgency. It’s one of my pet hates because proper prioritisation is just critical in getting anything done. It’s used by clients and employers all the time and it can be very frustrating. Here’s what 37 signals say about it in Rework…

“When you turn into one of these people who adds ASAP to the end of every request, you’re saying everything is high priority. And when everything is high priority, nothing is. (Funny how everything is top priority until you actually have to prioritize things.)

ASAP is inflationary. It devalues any request that doesn’t say ASAP. Before you know it, the only way to get anything done is by putting the ASAP sticker on it.

Most things just don’t warrant that kind of hysteria…”

I won’t post too much from the page, but they’re spot on with most of their points. The book has inspired me to look again at how I’m working day to day in the office, but also on projects at home and some bits that I manage externally.

More than anything it’s made me get some of my priorities straight!

I’d love to know what you thought of the book, if you’ve read it yet, and if you think any of 37 signals’ advice is going to impact your business or the way you work.

At first I was quite disenfranchised with this idea on a number of points.

My main objection is that this seems to work in the favor of big players who can bankroll faster servers, faster connections and co-location. This isn’t something I feel benefits Google’s end users, nor is it the kind of possibility for abuse that they have traditionally allowed.

Secondly, I don’t believe that speed is a key factor that users expect their search results to be filtered by. When I run a search on Google, I expect to find the most relevant answers listed first – I am either looking for a specific piece of information, the answer to a question, to find a site, or maybe I’m looking for a specific bit of media, etc… I am not looking for the fastest site, the best designed site, or even the best organised site, I’m just looking for the right site.

Thirdly, this directly penalises sites who are non-commercial, those hosted in developing nations, or ultimately sites that might be directly relevant but who just aren’t fast loading. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Now with a little further thinking, my perspective on this has changed a little. Matt’s post did say that this doesn’t affect more than 1% of sites indexed in Google (though that probably means it does affect millions) – so the impact is relatively minimal. Speed, like it or not, is also an important factor in user experience, and it does have an impact on the end user’s ability to get hold of the information they’re looking for.

But most importantly, when you really think about it the people who are in the best position to benefit from this change are probably not big corporate players – its those of us who run small, agile sites and blogs who can quickly zip through them and optimise code a bit better, improve image compression, and those of us who don’t rely on ads for revenue generation (woop!). Ironically, its Google AdSense that often makes pages drag in their load time, and frankly I’m quite happy that I might get a better SERP position because my site will load a hundred times faster than one that’s bringing in five Flash based tower ads or something ugly like that.

It’s also worth considering that the mobile web is really blowing up right now, and speed efficiencies on your site are going to make it a lot more accessible for those browsing on an iPhone, a Blackberry, or another mobile device. 3G services are pretty slow compared to a landline broadband connection, so don’t fall too easily into the trap of not optimising for speed as best possible because it does probably matter more to users now than any time since the demise of the 56.6kbps modem.

So, being Easter and all that, it’s time for a bit of spring cleaning, and I’d much rather some of these domains get some better use than they’re currently able to from me, so I have some domain names currently for sale as follows…

brighton-music.co.uk
brightondesigner.co.uk
brightondesigner.com
brightongraphicdesigner.com
londoncitydesign.co.uk
londoncitydesign.com
recordr.co.uk

I’m happy to do a very good rate on these as they’re going unused at the moment, so please get in touch if you’re interested in any at all… I’d rather see them go to some good use!

1985 Texturepack 001 – Click to download
This is a series of 47 high resolution photographs of macro textures. Largely these are organic surfaces, from grasses and dirt, to animal shells, shattered ice, and a few man made surfaces like eroded brickwork and carefully carved walls. There’s a few liquids too like thick gloopy jam.

The total filesize of this set is 85.1Mb (zipped). Each photo is about 1.2Mb full quality JPG.

Please comment!
I really hope that some of you can use some of the shots in your work. If you do find some use for it, I’d love to see some of the results and am happy to link to your work, so please let me know or drop a comment onto this post!

Creative Commons
No credit is required, these photos are free to use and totally royalty free. Please do with them as you like!

Now I had hoped to release these photos under a Creative Commons license, but you know what, I can’t find find one that just says do what you want with them for commercial or non-commercial purposes, so in this case… do whatever and enjoy!

More to come
I’m going to publish some more sets of free photographs if this set gets enough downloads to justify it. If you think anything would be particularly relevant, or you’d like to get access to anything in particular, then please let me know. I have sets of quite a lot of materials… not the absolute finest quality in the world mind you as I am very much an amateur photographer (it’s not be primary skill!), but some are quite useful as components to work with as part of a piece. If you think of something you’d really like to see, why not leave me a comment t?

I’ve been blogging across a number of sites for several years now, and think I’ve created some articles that have been fairly poignant, timely, or mildly amusing.

And although each time I post a new article I get a good swathe of new visitors, and progressively increase the traffic to my site through organic search as a result of having more keywords listed and fresh content, etc – I still get very, very few comments on any of my articles.

I’m looking at deploying some additional comment plugins that interface with Facebook profiles, for example, to make commenting [as you] much easier. But I’m a little skeptical about how much difference that will really make.

Could you recommend me some ways in which you think I could encourage or better position my site that would get more reader comments?

I’d love to hear what you can come up with…

(…Oh and if this post gets zero comments I might just give up!)