Hamstaa!

Down the road from our office is a stage props company. Over the last year I've seen some interesting and creative pieces in the loading area but recently, some of it spilled into the street.

The first time I saw the crow sitting on the parking sign, I initially mistook it for the real thing. It was only on second glance that I realised it was one of the props.

I'm a big fan of things that make you not only look twice, but make you stop and think.

In my recent wanderings into the more residential parts of West End I came across a couple of houses with posters entitled "Save West End – West End, Many Stories, not 30 Storeys".

Reading the information about this campaign on the website www.savewestend.org it appears to be a community action to have a say in the draft plan by Brisbane City Council for West End. From what I gather, the plan is to take into account an increase in the number of residents in West End and includes the increase of height restrictions for buildings, in some cases now allowing 30 storeys. It's this increase in height that is identified as one of the key problems by the community campaign.

One of the things I love about West End is the atmosphere of the older homes, the characteristics of the shops and the overall eclectic nature of it. Replacing it with multi-storey residential and business blocks will have a significant impact on all of this.

The problem we face however, is as our population continues to grow, we are also increasing the area our city takes up. This "urban sprawl" eats into our remaining "wild" places, something that I expect many residents in West End would also agree isn't acceptable. If we are to limit our impact on the environment, then we need to consider high density living. In other words, building up, not out.

If we intend to continue our population growth and not impact on the environment, the challenge is how to do it while maintaining the "atmosphere" many of us look for in residential areas like West End.

In a previous post I talked about the "art" of Graffiti so when I came across this piece in my recent wanderings, I had to share it.

The piece is on the side of a small shop and by the looks of it, it's been there for a while. I love the feel of the piece and how it seems to fit within the character of the building and the business within. In fact, this was confirmed when I showed one of the others in our office and they immediately identified the name of the business.

So can good graffiti contribute in a positive way to the character of a space? I believe so and this piece seems to achieve both enhancing it's space along with becoming iconic for the business within.

For the last 6 months I've been contributing to the TinyMCE forums. In this time I've noticed a couple of disturbing trends, one of which became quite evident in a recent members post to a very old thread.

From time to time people will ask questions about how to make TinyMCE do something that it's not really designed to do. This is mostly to output non-standard HTML and is usually due to the "client requirements". The most common one is the use of <BR> tags instead of <P> tags.

I'm not going to join into the argument of using <P> tags as a good friend and colleague posted a great round up of the importance of P tags already. What I'm interested in, is the way people respond both in terms of the initial question, and the followup responses.

From what I've seen, the response to these sorts of questions can occasionally be quite harsh and usually question "why" the person is even contemplating doing this. Now while I don't always agree with the tone of the responses, I can empathises, especially if they've had to answer the 100th question that has been addressed elsewhere, including the documentation.

The disturbing trend I've recently seen however is in the reaction of some people to this "criticism" or questioning. It appears people believe we should ignore the reason why someone is doing it, and simply answer the question. I tend to disagree.

As a developer I believe it's my duty to educate, as well as assist people. This includes both other developers and clients.

I believe that there are a lot of people out there who don't know any different with respect to the choices of output. By questioning why they are doing this and ideally providing the more acceptable alternative, the respondent is potentially educating them. Now it may be that the developer knows this already and is unable to educate their current client, but for others, they may now know an alternative. They still mightn't be able to change their clients mind this time around, but they will be better armed for future engagements.

It's been 3 weeks since the flood that hit Brisbane shutdown the city and affected thousands of people in Australia's third largest city.

While our office in West End wasn't flooded, being on the fourth floor, the buildings underground carpark was. This resulted in our office being closed for a couple of weeks as everything from communications systems, to fire-control and the lift were affected.

I went for a walk along the Brisbane river near our office this week to see what the area that was inundated looked like now. The first thing that hit me was just how quiet the river is. The water traffic that you associate with our city is gone. No ferries, commercial or pleasure boats. In many cases, the pontoons that they would use are gone as well.

As I walked along the path beside the river, the signs of the flood were still in evidence in the trees around me. Rubbish is stuck in the branches a metre or more above my head. That said, the road, the gardens and buildings are mostly clear of the sludge and rubbish the flood waters dumped, testament to the hard work of the local people and businesses.

As I got towards an open section of the river, I came across the first boat I'd seen. A recovery team was next to what, at first appearances was a shipping container caught on the embankment. It wasn't until I was closer that it became clear this was an entire trailer from a semi-trailer. Who knows where it came from, but it highlighted the force of the river at it's peak that it could wash this away and down the river.

Despite the great work of everyone involved in cleaning up, there is still alot to do to return our city to normal.

For many years I've been interested in environmental concerns and the impact our "throw away" culture has.

I've previously talked about going out for coffee and so I felt it was high time I started bringing my own cup and hence reduce the amount of rubbish I was contributing with takeaway cups. I wanted to ensure whatever I bought would be accepted by my favourite barista so I raised it with Gemma at Stove. She immediately pointed me at Keep Cup.

The important thing about these cups is that they come in the standard coffee sizes that will fit under the group head of an expresso machine. This makes it so much easier for the barista and hence reduces the objection some may have to trying to make coffee into any old cup you bring in.

So, if like me, you buy a few coffees a week, consider getting something like the Keep Cup. Oh, and you can customise all the colours on it to make it your own.

It pays to keep your eyes open when walking around as you just never know what you will see.

I noticed a number of small insects near an access plate on the footpath. Upon closer inspection it looks like a Native Bee hive has taken up residence right in the middle of the West End cafe precinct.

I know, it seems obvious, but preparation is definitely crucial to the success of your presentation/demo.

The other day I watched a presentation by Jesse Desjardins called "You Suck at Powerpoint – 5 Shocking Design Mistakes You Need to Avoid".

Along with many useful design mistakes, he made an interesting observation that

Most experts say: An outstanding 1-hour presentation takes 30 hours or more of prep time.

– Slide 39

Shortly after I was doing a demo with our European sales rep. It was the first time we had demo'd together and during the post demo debrief our VP Sales, Tom Smith, observed that role playing the demo together could have smoothed out a few rough edges in our interaction. This was especially important given everyone on the call was remote from each other.

In the book "Great Demo", by Peter Cohan, he discusses the cost of a failed demo. As this can be quite significant, including loss of the sale, it pays to take the time to prepare properly.

Now this got me thinking – just how much time should we invest in preparing for a demo?

Obviously there’s the time spent setting up your demo environment, ensuring you have data/examples relevant to the customer and identifying the key features of your product that the prospect is really interested in. However there is also the time spent with the sale rep going over the "game plan" for this particular customer.

Now I normally work with our APAC sales rep and he and I have built a good report. Interestingly this was built initially face-to-face when he was on a sales trip to Australia. In the case of the demo with the European sales rep, while we had prep'd with the customer the technology to do the remote demo, we hadn't spent any time together going over how we would interact during the demo.

So, the time to prepare for a great demo can be quite significant and involve setting up the demo, and working through the approach with the sales rep. Of course, if you are doing a demo for the first time with a sales rep, then you need to invest even more time working out your interaction and how each of you prefers to work with the prospect during the demo.

At the end of the day, all of this effort is there to maximise your success in the demo and ensure you move even closer to closing the deal. So spending less time preparing could be lead to a failed demo.

When I lived in Melbourne and worked in some of the inner suburbs I often saw some amazing graffiti. Some of it I’d classify as Art. Now I differentiate this type of graffiti from the simplistic "tagging" where the person sprays a basic signature multiple times in an area, sometimes over the top of much better work.

I saw this particular piece of ”art” while walking down Montague Road past some of the more rundown industrial buildings. Upon closer inspection it appears to be a sticker as opposed to sprayed on. Despite this, I love the simplicity of it and the way it brightens up a rather drab bit of construction.

I was catching up on some blogs recently when I came across the article "Now that’s what I call service!" by Mike Taylor. Mike received some outstanding service from his local pub when he mistakenly left change behind. As an exponent of the Fish! Philosophy I can related to the idea that a business would want to "delight its customers" in this way.

His story reminded me of the differences in service I experienced earlier this year during the migration of our two phone lines when we moved offices.

We have one line for voice, and the other for internet, each provided by one of the two major telecommunication carriers in Australia. As such, migration was to be simply installation of a suitable line at our new office and termination of the existing line. Of course these things never go smoothly but it was the approach to customer service that surprised me.

When I wanted an update, or had an issue with the line Telstra was responsible for, I had to ring their support line, battle through the "voice recognition" system, explain to the person what we were doing, why it wasn't right, etc, then wait for a response. Everytime I did this I had a new person so the process was repeated.

Optus however allocated me an account migration manager and I was given their direct number. At any time I could call her up and she'd be able to give me an update, or get back to me with one if she didn't have details to hand.

Compared to the experience with Telstra, having one person to talk to with Optus greatly improved the process for me. This simple difference resulted in the customer service experience with Optus being a "delight" and contributed to a less stressful migration of their line than Telstra.