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Chiperoni weather in Bern

Yesterday I stopped by at the uni library and browsed thru the marketing section. I picked up “How Customers Think” by Gerald Zaltmann. And some pages caught my eye. The 10′000 feet view.

Ways to find original ideas and get out of the customary, surface-oriented thinking about consumers:

He describes the Titanic Effect here:

Another book I browsed thru is:
“Marketing-Erfolg im Internet” by Martin Blatter-Constantin. It stood out of the crowd ‘cos it offers nifty black and white icons in the left column. And I liked the fact that it talks about personas from the beginning.

Other books I brought along for reference purposes, include:

• The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott - a recommended read; I wrote a couple of blog posts here and here.
• Marketing your Business, A Guide to Developing a Strategic Marketing Plan by Ronald A. Nykel - no opinion yet.

Last in today’s list is “The Marketing Mavens” by Noel Capon:

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Reading List

Learnt yesterday:
The number of English-speaking Internet users is decreasing, currently at about 35% of total number of Internet users.

Shared yesterday:
Who writes about African technology developments? From the list, I follow White African, Afrigadget, and sometimes Google Alert points me to IT News Africa.

Photo processing software for Ubuntu:
I’m currently MacBook-less (there are plans to change this very soon), but in the meantime I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.04 on an Acer Aspire 5920. I tried upgrading to Intrepid Ibex, but I couldn’t get my LAN connection to work. Something to do with the MTU count. And I encountered 2 bugs during the install:

• package update-manager 1:0.93.32 failed to install/upgrade: ErrorMessage: SystemError in cache.commit(): E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1), E:Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
• package ubuntustudio-menu 0.9 failed to install/upgrade: there is no script in the new version

So I went back to Hardy Heron. Cost: most of my Saturday. Learning effect: priceless.

I’ve been scanning the Internet for Linux photo processing software, besides Gimp, Picasa and F-Spot. ‘Cos so far Canon’s DPP has not been ported to Linux. I guess I could use it via Wine. But between you and me, I’m just looking for a good excuse to get a new MacBook. Beyond that DPP (still) lacks a good straightening tool.

I tried BlueMarine ‘cos it sounded promising, but I quickly gave up. Not usable.

There are a couple of commercial tools to consider:

• LightZone Linux
• Bibble

In the end I tried Raw Therapee and downloaded Qtpfsgui for HDRs. Both of which are free and look promising at this stage.

BTW, this blog post is good example how I can trick myself into writing a longer text. Initially, I just wanted to write a few Tweet-like text snippets, a summary of various small items circling around in my head. Pêle-mêle off the top of my head.

Please feel free to comment. I would be very grateful for any Ubuntu tips and tricks, etc.

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Text Snippets Circling Around

Blogging…

has become part of the fabric of the net

See these blog posts and articles:
Nick Carr: Who killed the blogosphere?
The Economist: Oh, grow up!

Some things don’t change, though. Old and dying media still feel the need to criticize blogs and the authors for not being critical or original enough. Or whatever. Articles like this show a lack of understanding. A recurring theme in old media vs. new media. I write about Google, iPhones, new MacBooks and the US election ‘cos these topics have become part of my life. I’m reflecting. Collecting. Writing. Sharing. Remembering. Learning. Trying out new technology instead of sitting on the sidelines and waiting until it gets mainstream. I’m not a news site. I don’t have a budget. I don’t earn any revenue.

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The Fabric of the ‘Net

My mind is jumping here, but…

I’m reminded of this text snippet in a widespread and recognized book of poetry:

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

Getting up at 4 o’ clock in the morning to study for school may lead to great things.

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Hope

Marketing is never about a hammer hitting plate glass.

It is almost always about the accrued power of a thousand drips, drips that accrue, drop by drop until they overwhelm the status quo and break through, starting a flood.

The first drip is very exciting, of course. Everyone lines up to cheer.

It’s the last drip that’s lonely. Most of the time, everyone has long left the building, lost interest and moved on to celebrate some other first drip. The penultimate drip gets criticized… are you still working on that?… that’s not so great… is that it?… but then, the drip that comes next, the last drip, proves once and for all that you were doing the right thing all along.

I could write a long blog post on this.

I could sing a reggae song that has the same message.

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Drip by drip

Last week I was sent a .mht file. And now I’m searching the Internet for a solution how to open this proprietary Microsoft file (my perception, but according to Wikipedia it is actually a proposed standard).

MS Word 2004 for Mac said something like this “is not a valid archive”.

I found this forum entry at Mac OS Hints.

The GraphicConverter way didn’t work for me. Only a small graphic file displayed. The rest of the content did not display. BTW, I’m not too fussed about GraphicConverter anyway. Maybe you use GC, if you only want to extract the images…

I’d recommend the Stuff It Expander way:

1. Get the free version of Stuff It Expander and install it.
2. Drag and drop the .mht file to the Stuff It Expander. Stuff It will create a folder with the same name as your file. Within this folder, there’ll be several files with the endings 00, 01, 02, etc. The first of these files is usually the .html file, while the following are image files.
3. Add the ending .html to the file labeled 00 and open with your standard browser… é voilà. Funziona.

Another (probably simpler) way is to get File Juicer.

The easiest way to read .mht files is to install Opera on your Mac. Open the file to see the contents directly. No further renaming or converting required.

Executive summary:
Best Tool = Opera for Mac

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Opening .MHT Files on a Mac

For example, I follow Kathy Sierra’s stream at Twitter. You can see quite a few of her 140 character statements in my Twitter Favorites.

Re: “PR is Dead?” meme–PR has same issue as UI design: it’s NOT something you can slap on afterward. Must be baked into product.

“Job happiness” should not have a single point of failure… but too often it ALL depends on your current boss. Bad managers REALLY suck.

Things Smart People Do: Martin Fowler (software dev pioneer) said he went to a ‘passionate users’ talk *because* he “doesn’t like the topic”

Powerful template 4 learning: “I will do Project A, to ‘force’ myself to learn Skill B” rather than “I must/will learn Skill B” @hrheingold

PR/marketing should fail when it’s about “getting word out”. If they’re about helping “users kick ass”, we’re good. Less pitch, more teach.

I see a huge overestimation of the importance of “social” in marketing/PR or product dev in general today.

etc, etc…

The difficulty arises when other Twitterers ask questions and Kathy responds. I don’t see the question and it gets much more difficult to follow.

Twitter is like a cocktail party. The music is so loud, sometimes you only hear parts of the answer.

Are there Twitter tools that help with this? The only tool I can think of is Twitter Search (formerly Summize).

Regarding passionate users, see this video of the talk that Kathy held at the SF WordCamp 2008:

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On Following Tweet Streams

The GUI is the only contact the user has with the application.

that I found in this presentation:

which I found while surfing thru my Sitemeter stats.

An obvious fact. Yet…

When talking to software developers, I often hear complaints about the quality of code (especially if somebody else programmed the app). While I understand that wild, unruly code creates maintenance problems and is more error prone, I would expect the same care, investment and commitment on the GUI level. At the very least.

See also Leah Guren’s presentation at In Other Words on “It may be GUI…“.

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Techniques for Reviewing a User Interface

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.

I agree with the author. Blogging is so 2004. For the record: I installed WordPress on this server in September 2004. Time to pull the plug.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr instead.

(BTW I’m still the top entry at Google for Boring Flower Snapshot)

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Blogging is so 2004