As of today, I am back with the reliable Firefox 3·0 on my desktop machine as well. Firefox 3.5 would generally crash daily, though I remember there was once a three-day period in January when it did not crash at all. (There were other days when it would crash two or three times, just to make up for it and keep its daily record.) In 2010, Firefox 3·0, on my Asus laptop running Vista, might have crashed once, if ever. (I kept things on 3·0 there, and was right to.)
I liken 3·5 to the Nissan Sunny B210 or Datsun 120Y: a car which offered no improvement over its predecessor and, in some cases, was even worse.
I waited till 3·5 had been out for some time before I even considered it, thinking that Firefox had ironed out the bugs. I think it must have been around November when I âupgradedâ. What a big mistake that was.
I noticed no speed difference and had to put up with the regular crashes. And, judging by feedback, I was not alone.
One helpful netizen suggested Flash could have been responsible and she may be right. However, rather than change to another type of browser, I decided the best course was to âdowngradeâ to 3·0. which worked with Flash, Java, or whatever else could be thrown at it in the course of daily browsing.
Another asked if the crash occurred at the same time each day and, if so, could it be the Firefox automatic updates? After a weekâs study, since I got into the habit of Tweeting each time Firefox crashed at one period, I had to conclude that it was around the same time (evening NZDT), but not the same hour. It varied by around four hours.
Thankfully, Mozilla keeps a copy of it on its website, probably because it realizes that 3·5 is buggy as heck. I only found the link by accident last month and vowed to put restore 3·0 on this machine. Mozilla even continues to upgrade itâthis is 3·0·18, which is a few sub-versions newer than what had been on this machine last year.
I canât tell you how bored I am of seeing the Firefox quality control agent come up every day asking me if I could explain what I was doing at the time of the crash. Well, chaps, I was browsing. And, after today, I hope to only see that window very rarely.
Iâm not even going to try 3·6 at least till August or September 2010. But I think thatâs just the next type of Nissan Sunny, right? It stays with rear-wheel drive but has more modern colours?
You canât help but wonder (without reading the court transcripts and judgement) how the sentencing of Koua Fong Lee could be so harsh. In 2006, Leeâs Toyota Camry, with his pregnant wife, daughter, brother and father on board, accelerated out of control and smashed into an Oldsmobile, killing three people in the second car back in 2006. The judge threw the book at him, giving him the maximum eight years, even though Lee, a recent immigrant, was adamant he was hard on the brakes and not the accelerator at the time of the accident. I donât know Minnesotan criminal law, but one would think this churchgoing man, with no prior crimes, lacked the mens rea to deserve the full sentence; unless it was cumulative for the three deaths.
Investigations showed there was nothing wrong with the brakesâbut, with hindsight, there could have been something wrong with the accelerator or the cruise control, considering that Leeâs Camry was going at 90 mph when it hit the Oldsmobile.
What we can very likely say was that this was not the America that Koua Fong Lee expected to emigrate to.
While the 1996 Camry Lee drove was not part of the Toyota recall, American media suggest that some of these models were repaired for faulty cruise controls. Chances are he will get a retrial, so in light of this new evidence, letâs hope the Lees, and the Adams and Boltons who lost their family members, will see some justice.
Rumour has it that the new Saabâa small car (finally)âwill resemble the ur-Saab, the 92. In fact, inside Saab, it has the codename 92.
Where have I heard this one before? I know. Stefan Engesethâs Detective Marketing, 2001 edition. And from what I understand, since in 1999 I could not read much Swedish, it featured in the original Swedish edition, too.
While I am no fan of retro design, a modern one that has strong inspiration from Saabâs roots could go down well with the marketâespecially if the new 9-1 model had some advanced, non-fossil-fuel powertrains.
A car tied to Saabâs roots as an airplane manufacturer could reinvigorate passion for the brand in the same way as the Jaguar mascot unveiling under John Egan in the 1980s. And new boss Victor Muller, CEO of Spyker, has wasted no time getting Saab loyalists excited about the brand again. He has not set his sights on brand-new customers: he wants the old Saab buyers back.
While it might have Opel underpinnings, it at least gets Saab into the European premium compact car game, one which GM denied it, probably due to overlap with its mainstream brands. It was an opportunity missed as BMW, Audi and others broke in to the compact and supermini game.
I know at least one Swede who finds Mullerâs promises exciting, and I sincerely hope to be proven wrong when I expressed doubts about bringing a 40,000-sales-per-year company back from the brink. Below is the announcement of Spyker finalizing its purchase (via Detective Marketing).
When he talks about âDNAâ, Muller really means brand: it will rediscover and redefine that brand and its entrepreneurial spirit, using it to fuel the corporate culture, and having that drive product quality, R&D and other functions. If he succeeds in reaching his 100,000-per-year goal, then we can say that brand loyalty was a huge driver.
His first announcement alone has been praised, Saabâs 100-day plan gives distributors and loyalists some certainty, and the folks in this video actually look enthusedâalready this is not like a tired, Rover-style attempt at getting the company back on its feet, even if the annual salesâ figures are far worse than what the English company had prior to its collapse.
I thought it was cold enough in Stockholm when I hit town a month ago, and temperatures were in the â9°C to â15°C region most days (with a high of around â2°C). But, Stefan tells me, temperatures plummeted greatly over the past week, down into the â30°C region in some parts. Stockholm was in the minus 20s, but when you add the wind chill, we are talking â30°C, too. When the trains stop running in Sweden (though Rogernomics-style cutbacks on staff who would normally have cleared the snow have not helped), you know itâs frighteningly cold. These folks donât panic at the first sign of snow and things ran as normal when I was there, but not with this sort of blizzard.
Stefan does not know this but on the last day, I took a pic outside his window as a memento. He took one on the 24th to show me how cold it got. Here is a comparison (both are cropped to give roughly the same frame):
January 27, 9.34 a.m.
February 24, 10.16 a.m.
Minus 15 is still cold enough for me, and if I am willing to brave that for Wellington (on my own money, incidentally) to study the public transport and meet with companies that can help us on the environmental angle, then Iâm willing to do a lot for my city. Iâd do â30°C if I have to, but bear in mind, such a trip would not have been terribly productive if everyoneâs stuck at home and thereâs 50 cm of snow at your door.
My Wired for March 2010 arrived today (things take a while to reach the antipodes), with the most interesting article being on the Google algorithm. And hold on, this isnât a Google-bashing blog entry. Steven Levyâs article was probably written before the furore over the Google Buzz privacy flap. And it points out how Google has learned from users for search, producing more relevant results than its competitors. With 65 per cent of the search market (and close to 100 per cent of my searches for many years), it has a bigger pool to learn from, too.
Recently I have noticed in ego-searches that Google is now smart enough to distinguish between searches for yours truly and those for Jack Yan & Associates (both in quotes), so that the former results in a mere 53,800 references, and the latter with 124,000 (quite a bit down from yesterday, when I first hatched the idea about blogging this topic). That is smart in itself: knowing when people are looking for me (or my blog) and when they seek the company. By comparison, Yahoo! lists 280,000 for the former and 42,500 for the latter, as the latter is (if you look at terms alone) a more specific search.
Once upon a timeâeven as late as 2009âa search for my name would result in both my personal and work sites.
Iâm pretty proud of my company and the people who work with me, and in election year, if someone were checking out my background, I sure would not mind them getting to JY&A as well. On the other hand, thanks to this distinction, my mayoral campaign site comes up in the top 10 in a search for my name. Either way, itâs relevant to a searcherâso all is well.
But is this really how people search? If I were searching for, say, Heidi Klum, I would probably want (I write this before I even attempt a search) her bio, a bit of news, pictures to ogle, and Heidi Klum GmbH, her company. This is exactly what Google delivers, with her Wikipedia entry in addition (as the first result). (Bing does this, too; Yahoo! puts Heidi Klum GmbH at number one.) Maybe someone could get back to me on their expectations for a name search although, as I said, Google is doing me a huge political favour by distinguishing me from my business. The ability to distinguish the two is, by all accounts, clever. Levy cites an example in his article about mike siwek lawyer mi which, when fed into Google at the time of his writing, gets a page about a Michigan lawyer called Mike Siwek. On Bing, âthe first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, thereâs no direct referral to Siwek.â (A Bing search today still does not have Mr Siwek appear early on; in fact, most now discuss Levyâs article; sadly for Mr Siwek, the same now applies on Google, with the first actual reference to his name being the 18th result. Cuil, incidentally, returns nothingâso much for supposedly having a Google-busting index size.)
But I have one that is puzzling to me. Ten years ago, Lucire published an article about the 10th anniversary of the Elle Macpherson Intimates range. One would think that the query “Elle Macpherson Intimates” “10th anniversary” would bring this up firstâin fact, I did have to search for the URL last year when writing a blog post. On Google, this is, in fact, the last entry. On Bing, it is the first. On Yahoo!, it is second.
Of course, Google may well have judged the Lucire article to be too old and that the overwhelming majority of searches is for current or recent information. And being 10 years old, I hardly imagine there to be too many links to it any more. However, I thought the fact that we can now, very easily, sort our searches by dateâespecially with the new layout of the resultsâ pageâit might just give us the most precise result. The lead page to the article is in frames (yes, itâs that old), which may have been penalized by Google. But many of the leading results that turn up that have these two terms do not have them with great proximity (in fact, numbers one and two do not even have the term Elle Macpherson Intimates any more). However, I donât think the page I hunted for should be last, especially as none of the preceding entries even have the words in their title.
I am not complaining about the Google situation since a 2009 Lucire article that links to the old Elle Macpherson one comes up in the top 10, so itâs still reasonably easy to get to via the top search engine. (Cuil lists the 2009 article from Lucire in its top 10, too.) Thereâs also a blog entry from me that links it, and that appears on the second page.
Itâs just that I hold a belief that many people who search using Google (or any search engine) do so for research. They want to know about Brand X and, sometimes, about its history. If I type a personâs name, there is a fairly good chance I want to know the latest. But when I qualify that name with something that puts it in the past (anniversary), then Iâd say I want something historical. That includes old pages.
While few rely on a fashion magazine for historical research (though, believe me, we get queries from scholars who want citations of things they saw in Lucire), Google results nos. 1 through 53 and the majority of Cuilâs results (which are very irrelevantâthe first two are of a domain that no longer exists and a blank page) donât hit the spot.
For the overwhelming majority of searchesâwell over 90 per centâGoogle serves me just fine, which is why you donât see me complain much about the quality of its results. Even here, itâs not so much a complaint, but professional curiosity. It would be sad for Bing or Yahoo! to be labelled as search engines for historical searches, but someone should fairly provide access to the older, yet still relevant, pages on the internet for everyday queries (so I donât mean the Internet Archive).
PS.: Thereâs one more search engine that should be considered. Gigablast, which I have used on and off over the years, does not list the 2000 article, either. Like Google, the 2009 one is listed, and only five results are returned.âJY
A few authorsâand not crappy ones, but those who have proven they can sell booksâhave resorted to giving them away online. Stefan Engeseth gave away his The Fall of PR and the Rise of Advertising online at the time of launch, while I received word that Eric Karjaluoto is now doing the same today. Earlier this year, I reviewed Ericâs book (if you donât want to click through, my review was positive), and this should allow more people to enjoy it. Two chapters are already online, with parts to be added to this collection over the next few months.
Iâm all for information-sharing, and this seems like a very good model to follow in the 2010s. Online: free; print: pay.
Is it just me, or does it feel like the budget for Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei has been cut even more? This preview does not seem as spectacular as the last two seasonsâ (and last season felt cheaper already). And where are Dieter and Horst?
Back on March 11 on RTL.
As of tonight, the Beyond Branding Blog, where I first cut my teeth blogging, is no more.
The posts are still there, but no further comments can be entered on to the site. The nearly four years of posts remain as an archive of some of our branding thought of that period.
The blog had a huge number of fans in its day, but as each one of us went to our own blogs, there seemed little need to keep it going. Chris Macrae and I were the last two holding the fort in late 2005. Since January 2006, no new posts have been entered on to the site. No new comments have come in a year.
Googleâs announcement that it would end FTP support for blogs in May spurred me into action, and I advised the Medinge Groupâs membership this morning that I would take it off the Blogger service.
I altered the opening message to reflect the latest change.
I was very proud of the blog, because it was the first one I was involved in. It was also the first I customized to match the look and feel of the rest of the Beyond Branding site, which I designed in 2003. While the design is one from the early 2000s, it has not dated as much as I had expected. Beyond Brandingâs core message of transparency and integrity remains valid, so while the blog is no longer updated, I think the book remains relevant to the 2010s.
My friend Pete informs me of his Google Buzz experience, and itâs not positive, either.
He is no stranger to technology and is more expert than I am on these matters. He had turned off Buzz, and was surprised to find that it was still taking his information and publishing it to his followers.
His sister took a screen shot of what she saw on her screen, which is shown above. Notice at the top of the screen, it says that Pete is following herâeven though by this time he had turned Buzz off. In Peteâs words: âIâve now had to go into settings where there is a further option to disable it altogether and kill all your posts. Iâm hoping that stops it!â
I hope so, too!
If any of the old Voxers are still around reading this blog, I met up with Paikea (a nom-de-plume of one of my neighbours and friends on the old Vox blogging platform) on Sunday. It was a wonderful catch-up and it was as though we had been Real World 1·0 friends for years. Sometimes, blogs really do help you get into the mind of others so you know if you would hit it off or not.
I look forward to meeting her husband in the near future, too, and we have exchanged phone numbers and emails. I wonder if Linda-Joy and her husband might be next, as they are nearby in Melbourne.
Finally for tonight, how about the above? These are the followers on one Twitter account (I have an inkling who it is, but itâs not my place to say so). If you want me to feel honoured and very flattered, then following HM Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan, Shakira Ripoll, Sir Richard Branson and Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger immediately afterme will do it. I am also in good company with my dear friend Manas Fuloria over in Gurgaon.
As of today, I am back with the reliable Firefox 3·0 on my desktop machine as well. Firefox 3.5 would generally crash daily, though I remember there was once a three-day period in January when it did not crash at all. (There were other days when it would crash two or three times, just to make up for it and keep its daily record.) In 2010, Firefox 3·0, on my Asus laptop running Vista, might have crashed once, if ever. (I kept things on 3·0 there, and was right to.)
