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Gerry Gaffney: July 2012
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2012_07_01_archive.html
Friday, July 13, 2012. Gobsmacked. What a great word. It usually describes a fleeting or momentary sensation of utter surprise. The new app was a disaster. Users hated it. Twitter was awash with complaints. Mainstream media concurred. This is where the gobsmacking began. Instead of acknowledging a major screw-up, PTV blamed the users. The CEO said ". the thing we really did wrong here wasn't so much the new app - people are not used to it; it's got lots of great features." (. A spokesperson said ". Publi...
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Gerry Gaffney: April 2010
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2010_04_01_archive.html
Friday, April 30, 2010. Riding a Gazelle city bike. My father taught me how to ride on my mother’s bicycle, an old black ladies’ bike, probably a Raleigh. Not the bicycle of an old black lady. The bicycle was old and black. Soon I had a bike of my own, racing style, with narrow tires and drop handlebars. Years later I switched to a mountain bike when they became popular, and later a so-called flat-bar road bike. And all the while, I rode in a hunched position. Bike shop personnel would sometimes tell...
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Gerry Gaffney: October 2011
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2011_10_01_archive.html
Sunday, October 30, 2011. Two rules for social media engagement. There are two rules for businesses establishing or maintaining a social media presence:. 1 Monitor the channel. 2 Respond to commentary. A few months ago, I tweeted a somewhat acerbic comment about @museumvictoria. They'd emailed their members an offer for discounted tickets, but when I followed the link, the destination page was missing some functionality required to make the booking. More recently, I tweeted about CityLink in Melbourne:.
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Gerry Gaffney: November 2010
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2010_11_01_archive.html
Sunday, November 07, 2010. Unintended consequences are not necessarily negative, however. Last week I bought an Echo Smartpen. From Livescribe. It can record and play back audio, but I wasn't interested in that particular feature. What interested me was its ability to record my handwriting and, with the aid of add-on software MyScript. Convert it to text. As soon as possible after each interview I sit at a computer and type in my notes. It's not entirely wasted time, since it's an opportunity to revi...
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Gerry Gaffney: November 2011
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2011_11_01_archive.html
Tuesday, November 01, 2011. The Steve Jobs biography. Walter's Isaacon's biography of Steve Jobs. Is big (a fact I didn't really appreciate untilI I saw the physical book in my local bookstore). At over 600 pages it doesn't lend itself to rapid reading. However, it's certainly worth the effort. Steve Wozniak and others were building rough-and-ready machines that they showcased to their friends. Jobs had the business acumen to see that there was a market beyond the special-interest groups. The author is c...
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Gerry Gaffney: October 2010
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2010_10_01_archive.html
Wednesday, October 13, 2010. A failure of empathy. Telstra is a major Australian telco. CEO David Thodey has a stated goal of making the organisation more customer focused. This is laudable and necessary. Thodey suggested in June. That it could take 5 years to achieve. Telstra may argue that it's necessary to use account numbers, since some customers will have multiple phone numbers on a single account. This explanation has some credibility when it comes to businesses, but even in that circumstance I...
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Gerry Gaffney: July 2011
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2011_07_01_archive.html
Monday, July 18, 2011. The ineluctable modality of the cloud. A long time ago, records (those grooved vinyl discs) were replaced with compact discs. I don’t lament the demise of the album. They were tricky, subject to wear. Each time an album was played, it deteriorated. Albums would also warp irretrievably when left in direct sunlight, loaned to careless friends or handled when in party mode. I’m a big fan of the digital book, but I’ve always been a fan of the book as physical entity. Wh...Our personal ...
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Gerry Gaffney: January 2011
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011. Most of my books are in traditional format, printed on paper. I have a growing collection of online books; I began using an Amazon Kindle over a year ago, and more recently have been using Kindle and iBooks on the iPad. Being of a mind to re-read Flann O'Brien's darkly comic classic, "The Third Policeman" recently, I purchased a copy through Apple's iBooks (since my printed copy is in storage in Melbourne somewhere.). Some of the errors were relatively trivial, in the form of o...
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Gerry Gaffney: September 2012
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2012_09_01_archive.html
Thursday, September 20, 2012. Apple iOS terms and conditions. The image is a word cloud (created using wordle.net. Of the iOS terms and conditions for iOS 6. I think it's at least as useful, and certainly easier to read, than the original 5,955-word version (below). IMPORTANT: BY USING YOUR iPHONE, iPAD or iPOD TOUCH (“iOS DEVICE”), YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE FOLLOWING TERMS:. A APPLE iOS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT. B NOTICES FROM APPLE. IOS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT. E) You agree to use the iO...
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Gerry Gaffney: May 2010
http://www.gerrygaffney.com/2010_05_01_archive.html
Sunday, May 09, 2010. Don't blame it on the sunshine (Blame it on the user). I think overtly hostile error messages are less common than they used to be. Years ago I was closely involved in an application that included, to my embarrassment, the prompt "Incorrect" (even though the application was supposed to be for exploring people's preferences for categorisation). It's not a freaking Rubik's Cube". (I'm not making that up.). Oh, and by the way, have a nice day.". Links to this post. I realised that I ha...
