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COWS, AND OTHER KAK

// February 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // business, funness, humour, random madness

Today’s theme is COWS, kiddies. For 3 reasons

1. I awoke to this year under a warm steamy pile of cow poo, which appears to be getting bigger faster than I can dig myself out of it. Tomorrow I shall be provided a periscope from my employer in order to see exactly how many more cows’ bottoms are aligned and ready to poop. I am as excited as a very small, furry excited thing, I can tell you. (And everything hippies say about little freezing swallows and warm piles of cow poo? Absolute bollocks – it’s a KAK place to be)

2. I have a strange love of all things bovine (for reasons unknown to me), including the little drawing on the left (artist unknown, but much respected)

3. I was sent this email today – it’s done the rounds a zillion times in a zillion formats, but I particularly like the inclusion of Australia in this version.

Finance for non-financial Managers OR A million ways to worry a cow.

A NAMIBIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You make biltong…

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
• You are surprised when the cow drops dead.

A SOUTH AFRICAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You go on strike because you want three cows.
• They get stolen, so you blame the previous regime’ and steal someone else’s cows and shoot their owner.

A ZIMBABWEAN CORPORATION

• A farmer has two cows.
• You take over his farm, eat both cows and wait for the international community to supply more.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You re-design them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the  milk.
• You then create clever cow cartoon images called Cowkimon and market them World-Wide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

A BRITISH CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• Both are mad.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You pray to them for food.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
• You break for lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You count them and learn you have five cows.
• You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
• You count them again and learn you have 12 cows.
• You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION

• You have 5000 cows, none of which belong to you.
• You charge others for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
• You have 300 people milking them.
• You claim full employment, high bovine productivity, and arrest the newsman who reported the numbers.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION

• You have two cows.
  The one on the left is kinda cute…

MAILFIRE GOES ABOVE AND BEYOND

// March 5th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // business, geek stuff, marketing

This is a post that is way overdue, and to those about whom it is written, I apologise for my tardiness. It is another work-related post, but allow me to allay your fears, dear readers, that this trend toward the serious is not permanent and all manner of frippery, tomfoolery and lollygagging will soon return to this blog.

As I have previously stated, it takes a lot for me to either promote or burn anything online, and a while back I did a serious burn on our bulk mail service providers, Mailfire . What I didn’t say, was that takes even more to get me to change my mind about something (being a Leo, I’m just about as stubborn and single-minded as they come). It rarely happens. Like the Yeti, it is more a rumour than a certainty. Few have seen it, ask my friends (better yet, ask my ex-friends).

That said ladies and gents, here you have it live: Mailfire…I’ve changed my mind. Two days after I posted my rant on the company, I received an email from the General Manager of Web Africa, Rupert Bryant. He requested a meeting with us, apologised for all the problems we’d experienced, offered us a month’s refund and a 100% discount our upcoming fees. He pulled people off leave (and to you guys, I’m really grateful), set up a brainstorming session at our earliest convenience and assigned us our own designated support team.

We duly met 5 days later with Rupert, 2 developers and our sales consultant, Tyron. Far from the stuffed shirts I was expecting, I was utterly astounded at this dynamic young team and how openly they were willing to listen to and work with us (AND they didn’t get all pissy that I’d been so rude online, which is definitely what I would have done, and which is why I’ll never make it in PR ).

I outlined the most pressing problems we were having, namely that:

1.  Their WYSIWYG editor was generating code that was not recognised by the majority of mail clients, where the actual html rendered perfectly in Litmus ( a SUPER awesome app for anyone who designs html email, btw!) testing.

2.  There was no direct html paste and send function, which would bypass the problems caused by the WYSIWYG editor (this is a pretty standard feature on most bulk email clients, catering to companies that have an in-house designer who sets up and sends the mail as desired). So what we wanted was a simple html >> paste >> send, no editing stages to bung in extraneous code where code should not be. For those users who are not able to code, the editor would have to be modified to ONLY generate code which was compliant with email clients.

These were prioritised as the two problems to be tackled first as they would fix the rendering issues we had been experiencing.

We identified a number of further issues which hampered user friendliness and efficiency, which were considered less urgent, including:

1.   A separate image gallery allowing us to upload and delete images, and harvest the image URL to be used for design purposes.

2. A number of issues relating to subscriber lists (which I don’t really deal with so I can’t go into too much detail), including -

• the option to prevent sending duplication when a sender appeared on more than one list selected for sending, but allowing a user to be on more than one list and to move easily from one list to another.
• The ability to search the lists for specific subscribers and modify that subscriber’s user account.
• Uploading of lists via zipped CSV files.
• Downloading subscriber lists with a number of options as to the amount of information required by the user.

3.  The actual appearance of some of the back end features, which were quite small and difficult to work with.

4.  The order in which sent mails were displayed and the ability to mass-delete old and defunct mails which tended to clog up the account (pretty quickly with us, as we send so much mail)

These were the chief issues – I think a number of others have since been identified and tackled by the Mailfire team (please feel free to correct me guys).

Once the meeting was concluded, Mailfire snapped to action and immediately provided us with our own ‘point man’, Constant Laubscher, who has been an absolute pleasure to work with. He sent me almost daily updates on the progress the developers were making (which was much speedier than I had anticipated) and we proceeded to test and tweak the new features as they were released. Within a week (10 days after the blog post – WOW) we had a fully functional plain html paste feature, meaning an end to our rendering issues.

A few days later, we had the gallery function working properly (a huge bonus for in-house designers, and one the many bulk mailers don’t offer). When using Internet Explorer obviously there were issues with getting this right, and it works a bit differently in that browser than in browsers that sane people use, like Firefox.

With these 2 things in place, compilation and accurate sending of the newsletters was made infinitely quicker and easier and they went out and were now received by the end user as they were designed.

The developers have been working on the other issues on the list in the background, and we still have a few kinks to iron out and extensive testing is ongoing as there seem to be, for example, text conversion errors on Outlook 2007 (CURSE your suckiness Microshit and your sucky email client and your sucky web browser!) Also, there have recently been some instances where it has taken several hours for a mail to be processed. We head into a follow-up meeting tomorrow in order to go over these final problems, and if the support we’ve received in the last 2 months is anything to go by, these will be resolved in no time.

I actually cannot say enough good about these guys though. They totally went above and beyond for us – how often would you find a company that is not only willing to listen to a client’s issues, but totally redesign a system for them? They admitted mistakes had been made and rectified them quickly with no ‘ands’, ‘buts’ or bullshit, and they continue to offer prompt and competent personalised support for any problems that may occur (which, if you are sending out emails that have to go out at a certain time such as press releases, is an absolute life-saver).

I’d venture to say that I think we’ve done them a favour too, by helping to improve a application which would probably have hit problems down the road if we hadn’t thrown our toys. But they met the challenge and pulled out all the stops to make sure we had a fully functional system. And this in time for an election campaign, of which a large part is digital, and of that part, at least 50% in the form of email.

SO…my mind is solidly changed, well done guys – you have restored my faith in that elusive dream of service excellence!

And here’s the kicker: Mailfire is by FAAAAR and away the most affordable bulk email solution available in South Africa – at around R3000 per month for 200 000 emails, it’s about ¼ of the price of any of the other recognised bulk mail solutions, such as Mailchimp – between R8500 and R10 000 per month ; Campaign Monitor – R14 000 for 200 000 emails, plus R50 per email, and Striata who quoted about R13000 for 50 000 emails, meaning 200 000 hits the R50 000 mark!

The Mailfire 10 out of 10:

score 1 | the guy at the top took an interest and got involved personally.

score 2 | they admitted they were wrong.

score 3 | they compensated us.

score 4 | they showed a firm commitment to rectifying the problem from day one.

score 5 | they listened to us and took our concerns and advice seriously.

score 6 | they fixed the problem quickly and kept us informed.

score 7 | they continue to provide amazing support (a huge improvement from before), and we have our own ‘point man’.

score 8 | they are continuing to improve the system and keeping us informed as they do.

score 9 | they have been professional, courteous and engaging throughout the entire process.

score 10 | their rates KICK ASS!!

THE DA WEBSITE – MY TWO CENTS

// February 25th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // business, geek stuff, marketing, politics

I very seldom write about work on this blog as it is largely dedicated to pure self-indulgence, and the two really don’t mix in my experience. That said, last week saw the culmination of nearly two years of effort in putting together the DA’s new website, launched last Thursday and that definitely merits a mention.

We began serious conceptualising on the site around 18 months ago, although I had been squirreling ideas away since 2006, ideas which got ever more exciting as developments in Web 2.0 and social media unfolded. Using these, I drew up a long and detailed proposal which went through numerous collaborative reviews after which we put it out to tender early last year. After reviewing quotes and companies, we chose World Wide Creative headed up by Mike Perk and Fred Roed to harness our vision and optimise our most important means of communication with South Africans online.

From the outset, Fred and Mike inspired confidence in making the whole creative process crystal clear and outlining the design and development procedures step by step. The first thing we did was brainstorm the needs of our prospective audiences and potential for including social media elements and we later moved on to the more detailed processes like site design and structure. The actual process was way too involved to go into here, suffice to say that we felt we were in good hands from day one and all my fears in tackling a project of this size were quickly allayed.

The site that was launched last week, while adhering to the underlying ideas laid out in the proposal, ended up being not only very different, but much improved in a number of respects due to the extensive research and marketing expertise added to our ideas by the development team.

Unfortunately, the launch date was unavoidably moved back several months from the intended date last November due to changes in our corporate identity. Several people have commented that we’re too late to launch this close to an election and that the site won’t have any impact on our campaign. I have 2 comments here. The first is that the website is way more than an election campaign tool, and is intended to serve as a portal for communication with our supporters at all times (reinforcing the fact that we are not just a party who pops up around election time, but wants to engage with the public all the time).

The second (and I am generalising here) is that Joe Public generally doesn’t take an interest in politics until a couple of weeks before an election. I can tell you this from personal experience as the one who watched the web stats in the last 2 elections (2004 and 2006). The peak in stats only started around 1 month before the election, with the highest spike in interest occurring from about a week before the election until about 2 days afterwards. As has been pointed out, we cannot compare the situation in this country and thus this web strategy to one like Obama’s in the US where web penetration is almost total, and while an earlier launch would have been nice, I don’t believe it would have made that much difference in terms of the stats and their implications.

When I talk about Joe Public, incidentally, I’m referring to the majority of web users in this country – I mean the people who are generally logged in for less than 10 hours a week and who are actually out getting on with living the rest of the time, not the small community of several thousand online social media experts (self named?), bloggers and geeks whom I all love very much, but some of whom (as Melissa said on Nic’s post) “are so far up there arses that they are out there to slam and test and poke holes in any new SM strategy”. So far up their own arses they’re seeing daylight in some cases, methinks.

The sites (and I’ve only really focused on the main site so far, www.da.org.za – the other one launched was contributetochange.org.za) actually provoked a lot of positive feedback online as well as the usual blunt dissections by the whingers and moaners which we’ve come to expect. In the end and without meaning to offend anyone, while it’s great that the site stands up to online review (and we did invite bloggers such as Justin and Chris to the launch because we wanted feedback from those in the know), the ‘experts’ are only a tiny percentage of our target audience, and the site and strategy are really not aimed at them (except perhaps the more specialised online tools such as twitter and the social media links).

The internet provides such a comfy mask and such a versatile soap-box that it is very easy for the online-savvy to be critical (of almost everything actually) – what they tend to forget is that their narrow world view is just that, narrow – a mere sliver of the rich and powerful tapestry that makes up the collective experience of South Africans. Some people are so busy knowing everything that they stop thinking about anything outside the paradigms they are comfortable with and forget that the majority of South Africans are just regular ouens, who may know what Facebook is, but don’t give a toss about SEO, social media strategy and blogging. The experts who forget this would do well to pull their heads out and subject themselves to some serious self examination.

It’s actually something I see quite a lot working in politics, and something that we are constantly reminded of by our brilliant strategists “Do NOT assume because your friends, parents, tennis partners, the lady in the shop (insert stereotype here) think XYZ, that the rest of the country thinks XYZ too” – it’s a special form of psychological extrapolation that’s easy to fall prey to. The number of times I’ve heard some cougal pipe up and say “well my MAID says that…..”, the implication being “all black people think that…” – It just isn’t that simple, people just aren’t that simple, and to assume they are is the grossest of insults.

The first thing Fred said to us when we met to discuss the site and something which really stuck, was “be authentic” – great advice on both personal and professional levels. Advice that we followed. So the long and short of it is this. These sites area tools – tools made to be gripped with both hands and used by the people who want to know about us, the people who want to talk to us, the people who want their voices, ideas and opinions heard and responded to, the people who want to engage and get involved on any level they desire. These are not people who are going to look at our online presence and try to pick it apart. They are the people who are going to look at it and say “hey – these guys are making it easy for me…perhaps I will get involved…perhaps I will write a letter to the press, or donate R10 via sms” That’s what we’re after, and judging by the response to our volunteer programme so far, that’s what we’re getting.

As for the place of our onlince strategy in the campaign as a whole, Nic questioned the amount of money put into the online campaign and its potential returns. While we obviously can’t divulge that, the cost is but a fraction of that being spent on the election campaign as a whole (as the potential reach is but a fraction of that of the more traditional methods of campaigning). As for the returns, we will only see them as they happen, as we are as curious as everyone else to see what kind of impact our strategies will have.

Just a final word: This post was not written to diss ‘online experts’ and I do apologise if I’ve offended anyone, it was merely meant to provide a view from this side of the fence

L2R: Me, Anthony Hazell (back - director of relationship management), Ryan Coetzee (CEO), Helen Zille (Party Leader), Fred Roed (World Wide Creative)

Read more here:

SA political party launches impressive, Obama-esque campaign site

The DA, social media and the masses

I was invited to the Democratic Alliance social media launch campaign

DA, gurus and the online circus

DA reaction has me puzzled!

The DA’s use of Social Media | Can we really call it social?

BRANDING AFTER THE FALL

// February 12th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // business, humour, marketing

So it’s official…the world is in the worst economic crisis since the great depression and that’s no laughing matter. Some very near and dear friends and family have been cast into very dark places by the goings on in international markets, and a lot of people out there are wondering for the first time what the future really holds.

We’ve been relatively lucky here in South Africa and compared to those in Europe, America and especially Britain we’ve been pretty sheltered from the worst of it (so far), thanks to some sound fiscal policies implemented just in time (thank god for Clever Trevor!).

But again, to all of you feeling the pain out there, my heart goes out to you. Some enterprising soul redesigned some of the better known brands, just in case they survive the crisis – hope they bring a smile to your tear-stained faces

SHAMELESS SERVICE III – MAILFIRE

// January 5th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // business, geek stuff

This is going to be a full on rant, so if you are allergic to people whining then don’t read it! I am sitting at work with my hands tied by bad support and unreliable infrastructure, in both cases, thanks to Mailfire, a bulk email service provided by Web Africa. Just as it takes me a lot to pimp something on the net, it takes a hell of a lot of frustration, hair pulling and teeth gnashing to actually write an entire blog post complaining about something. In summary, all I can say about Web Africa/Mailfire is that if they wanted to set up a bulk html email* programme, some research on the matter might have saved them (and us) many tears of frustration.  Now, I don’t actually know what kind of research they did do when setting up the service and I won’t speculate, but the evidence suggests they missed some fundamentally simple things .

What I do know is that after approaching them several times about specific coding issues, I can still not send out emails set up in basic html and get them to render as they should when ground through the mailfire system, but which render perfectly when sent through another system**. In addition, their user interface is not simple, or rather, it is not intuitive.

Being an organisation that sends out a lot (and I mean a LOT) of html/electronic mail, some of which (for example weekly newsletters) HAVE to go out at at specified time on a specified day, we need a reliable service, and if something does go wrong, quick and dependable support (even over the “holiday season” peeps – not everyone stops working). The call I had to make today is typical – their server was offline / paralysed-tortoise-with-broken-leg slow, meaning that:

1.  I couldn’t open my html docs in Dreamweaver to edit them (partly DW’s fault, as it gets a nappy-rash when it can’t find image locations / download images), leaving me the option of editing in Notepad or the like (no, I’m not whining because I’m lazy, I’m whining cos I’m busy).

2. In order to send out the letter on time, I would have to relocate all 25 or 30 images to another online location and redo the entire newsletter (an exercise so time consuming that it would still go out late).

When I called “support” to complain I first got “but it works on our side..”

DOH! “That’s not the issue.. I am the customer and it DOESN’T work on my side, and NO it’s not our connectivity – the rest of the internet LOVES me and wants to show me all sorts of things”

“Please send us an email”

“Why? I’ve told you what the problem is “

“It will have to go to a higher level”

“So take it to a higher level”

“Send us an email”

“fine”

I send them the following email (not the politest ever, seeing as I have had issues of various kinds with them from DAY 1 and by now I’m well fed-up):

“I cannot access your mailfire server to send out a message (YET again). Images in our documents (hosted on your server) are thus unavailable to us. We will thus (ONCE again) not be able to send out a message on time. “

Four hours later, I receive an email back from them:

“Hi Niki. Would you mind providing me with the client code for this account.”

NO: “we’ve fixed the problem”, “we give a shit” “we understand your frustration”

MORE: “we have not made the sodding effort to find out your client code and get started on the issue.”

AAAAARRRGGHHHH!

Now perhaps it was that we simply got exceptional service from our previous provider, Striata – a no nonsense CMS/backend mail setup, and ONE liaison who KNEW the system, was friendly, efficient and if developer’s/system advice was required, would get back to me by telephone in under 20 minutes. ALWAYS. In addition at holiday times like this, there were also ALWAYS standby staff – one person handling our account with some technical knowledge.

When I requested a meeting with the Mailfire developer to sort out coding, rendering issues, I was told that the end of January was the earliest meeting I could get (he’s apparently on extended leave) …with additional time for development, etc, a working system by mid to end Feb? For a political party with an election coming up in March/April? I think NOT. I explained this and could still only get mid January as an option, rather than in December as I had requested.

But for today (and coincidentally it happens to be my first day back after a short “holiday”), Mailfire scores an EPIC FAIL from me (perhaps I should send them t-shirts?)

I have resorted to sending out our most popular newsletter using the old (less) hassle-free system, as we still have credit there (thank GOD!). I am now seriously casting around in desperation -we have limited time and need reliable service…where do we get it without riding this off-road learning curve again?

To be fair, I should add that by all accounts, Web Africa provides excellent support in the other services they offer, such as web hosting.

* Anyone who works with html email will tell you that it is an irksome beast. Each email client (and there are MANY) selectively supports html and css, in other words, what works with one won’t work with another, and one has to be very careful (and bloody patient) when designing html email to ensure standard rendering across the board. Essentially, you use very, very old-school html and keep css inline and to a minimum.

**The mailfire system seems geared towards novices, who can pick from templates and compose their emails in the WYSIWYG editor (which seems based on WordPress), which is great for them. But many/most well established companies will have their own designers/e-communications department who will want to send out the emails they compose as they have designed them to render. Mailfire does not support this approach unlike our older system, which allows us to simply paste the code into its interface, choose a list and send AS IS, meaning if we have done our own checking, testing, etc, there are no hassles (not friendly for the novice, I’ll grant). Mailfire simply does not allow a code-list-send scenario – the only option is working through the WYSIWYG editor, which adds in much unwanted code (as they do) – I’ve even seen code added in there that I know is not compatible with certain email clients (hence my query into the research these guys have done).

CS4 UNLEASHED…DID I SAY WOW YET?

// October 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // business, friends, geek stuff, marketing

It’s been a restful yet exciting couple of days in Cape Town, having squeezed in the last couple of days of annual leave I shall see until the election in April next year (sheesh)…all shore leave officially cancelled as of last week..the campaign ship sets sail. Being the procrastinator I am, I’ve only got down to this now because I really wanted a last couple of days sans PC before the madness begins..

I had the great (and somewhat surreal) pleasure this weekend of meeting face to face with an internet buddy, Jason Levine, who hopped through here with his fellow Adobe evangelist Greg Rewis to launch Adobe’s CS4 (just say WOW people..all together now…)

I had a groovy time chilling at the waterfront with the guys pre-launch…honestly two of the funniest blokes I’ve met in ages, getting an insider’s view on the gut-churning scariness that is Sarah Palin (I WEEP for America if that pineapple gets into office) and the upcoming American elections which are but one month away.

Also, on a more sombre note, I watched these guys gutted to witness the stock market crash on Monday evening (the DOW was down by 730ish points by 8.30pm), brought to us live via i-phone. Like anyone who’s ever had a sore tooth and can’t leave it alone, the refresh button was being used frequently. I actually inadvertently (for 10 whole minutes) got sucked into this scary black hole that I shall call social cyber-separation for want of a better phrase (you know…when you twitter the guy sitting next to you instead of just telling him he’s got spinach in his teeth?)

I pinged (new word..lol..thanks Jase!) my boet who works for a hedge fund in London to make sure he wasn’t balancing on the edge of a tall building – he’s also lost a fair whack of cash, and says his mantra for now is “think long term…think long term, find money, buy low…” It really makes me glad that I have the financial acuity of an oyster and can only afford to buy things I can see (well actually, I can’t afford to buy those right now either)..and while lame platitudes are probably the last thing you want to hear, my heart really goes out to all of you feeling the pain right now..

Upside to this, and in addition to the wonder that is CS4, I got to behold for the first time close-up the wonder that is the i-phone. EISH…I knew I’d been artfully avoiding looking too closely at these things for a reason because now of course, I want one. Who can scorn the sheer coolness of a gadget that can listen to the radio for you and not only recognise the song you want identified, but find it online for you to buy, should you so desire to…WTF? Apparently it’s ‘all about the apps’ but I’m also reliably informed that the battery life totally sucks. I’m someone who literally only uses my phone for sms’ing and phonecalls (yes folks, there are still some of us left) and I tend to avoid gadgets at all costs, so for me to say that this has me seriously excited is really saying something…YES Jayx, you were right (..again).

On to the *actual* topic of this blog (at LAST you say!) the launch of Adobe’s CS4, which was held at Canal Walk on Tuesday. I stupidly didn’t take my camera with me, for which I have kicked myself the prescribed number of times, plus a couple more for good measure (aargh). First to take the stage were Jason, Greg and our own local evangelist, Mo Jogie (where’s your blog dude?) who delivered slick energetic and highly amusing presentations (my fave line? Mo: “moms are low res, dude”).

They were followed up by some of our local trainers who went into a little more depth on the applications and their shiny new features. As I am currently still using CS2, my brains were pretty much on the wall by the time it was over – there is simply no comparison between the two…I obviously can’t contrast CS3 and 4, but I know for a fact that the changes are a far cry from the “general “service” update on CS3” that many people predicted (your words there, Shukri lol). So here’s my wow by wow rundown, I’m gonna limit this to 10 wows or I’ll be here all night and most of tomorrow (apologies to the boffs if I get the lingo wrong). Bear in mind I mainly use Photoshop, Indesign and Dreamweaver, so I’ll stick to those and leave the media geeks to their own wows…

WOW1: The first thing that struck me was that the integration of the macromedia elements (Fireworks, Freehand, Flash, etc) is now completely seamless, which I don’t think it was post-macromedia acquisition in CS3 (I stand to be corrected of course).

WOW 2:This has allowed for almost TOTAL cross-platform integration or ‘sharing the luuurve’ (right Jase?), meaning that live-time edits of one object are possible in several different applications at once (think the “edit original” function in Indesign CS2, which allows you to tweak your images in Photoshop in real time without the opening, saving and closing of documents, but across ALL the applications…did I say wow yet?)

WOW 3: The government in this country could learn a thing or two from Adobe…it’s very obvious that they’ve actually been listening to their users and have pimped the end user experience to allow for maximum efficiency with massive time-saving implications and have replaced the teeth–grating features with things that actually work.

WOW 4: Photomerge in Photoshop, which was available in CS3 but (I’m told) is vastly improved in CS4, plus ‘content-aware scaling’, which means you can horizontally or vertically compress/expand an image without the objects in that image distorting (people getting fatter/thinner/taller/shorter etc). The “3D postcard” function allows you to rotate a 2D image and actually get realistic perspective alteration. 3D object manipulation, which I believe is much improved, is another thing I can’t wait to sink my teeth into having skipped CS3.

WOW 5: Improved gradient tools and functionality – the gradient tool is now a slider bar (with the relevant colours visible) which appears on top of the object you’re working on and makes the whole gradation job so much quicker and easier – opacity settings are also much more easily accessible.

WOW 6: The workspace itself is supercool and smooth panning, rotation and scaling functions, as well as newly introduced side-by-side viewing panes in several of the apps (notably Dreamweaver) and tabbed file displays (similar to those in web browsers) mean that the creative process is no longer hampered by jumping between images, entering rotation values (angle values are actually visible as you rotate) and all those other little irritations.

WOW 7: Adobe Illustrator, of which I’ve always been very nervy, now not only allows you to have multiple artboards (THANK YOU Freehand), but for all of us security-blanket-huggers out there, also allows you to adjust your workspace to look just like Freehand, so the lure into new waters isn’t scary at all.

WOW 8: Image alignment and spacing in Indesign – something which always irritates the crap out of me and means that I invariably can’t see my product by the end of the process because it’s enmeshed in a web of guides – is now virtually all automatic – a few clicks and it’s done for you (I see much longer lunchbreaks on the cards here folks). According to the trainer, guides will soon be a thing of the past (yessss!)

WOW 9: Which isn’t a wow for most of you is RAW image formatting in Photoshop – I haven’t had the pleasure yet as it only became available in CS3. Now that I have the camera, and spent a very instructive hour in their (very blue) hotel bar with Jase and Greg (whose horrified expressions at my use of the flash were quite priceless, and which is where the accompanying pics were taken), learning about all those *other* settings aside from full-auto, I can’t wait to try ‘getting RAW’! Putting the ‘pro’ in procrastination, I’ve been putting off the instruction manual/training video thing since I got the camera, and I guess I now no longer have any excuses to get busy.

WOW 10: I have been converted by the power that is evangelism (you have been HEEEEEEALED my child) …two apps I’ve been way too scared to even attempt to date, Flash and Fireworks, are now on my doable list of things to do. Greg succinctly described my exact experience with Flash…I woke up one day and stated (assume superhero pose): “TODAY I will learn Flash”… by 10am I was crying and pulling out my hair…by 12, I was morose and contemplating drowning myself in a bottle of vodka. From the brief demo, the app now seems well within reach, as does Fireworks, which (who knew?) is SO much more efficient at image compression for web than Photoshop. The migration of files from Fireworks to Dreamweaver deserves a *wow* of its very own, and for a n00b web-type such as myself, cuts the turnaround time for the creation of a basic web page in half.

So, enough wowing now, it’s bedtime…like I said there is just *so* much cool new stuff I haven’t even scratched the scratches on the surface. There is a ton of stuff out there on the web – here are a couple of places to start…

Layers Magazine

Photoshop user

Macworld

Adobe TV

Or straight to the source… adobe.com

Thanks again to my new American friends and all at Adobe who made the launch such a pleasure. With that, time to flex the fingers, dust off the wacom tablet, set up camp by the post box and wait…

Arrrgghhh… pardon the layout of the images in this post .. WordPress is being a bitch and it’s 2am, so bugger it!

THE OLD NEW FACEBOOK

// September 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // business, humour, lists

Guys, forgive me for this…I HAD to post it because I’m still giggling. To those of you who have Facebook accounts, enjoy. To those who don’t, GET Facebook accounts, and then enjoy!!

(Click image to view full size – sorry about the poor quality)

P.S. You can catch me on Facebook here >>

GEEKS ALIVE!

// August 2nd, 2008 // No Comments » // business, geek stuff, marketing

I went to my second ever Geek Dinner on Thursday night and actually paid attention this time, so I enjoyed it far more than I did the first time.

My take-home messages from the evening:

1. I’m glad I don’t live in Nigeria
2. Yaaaay…I’m not alone
3. I really need to get out more
(and maybe 4.don’t go to a loan shark – borrow from your friends instead?)

Arrived a little late which turned out OK, cos so did everyone else. At de Capo, which is where Primi’s used to be in GMS (a vast improvement) we were greeted by Jonathan with a pink ticket which led to a yummy fruit cocktail.

I naturally gravitated outdoors to be with the other stoics of my kind (smokers) where I met Stii “wheeling and dealing” Pretorius, the legendary Joey de Silva , Ross “Mudthang” and Alexander the Musician.

I was privileged to spend the evening in the very good company of Ross with whom I roundly dissected life, the universe and everything from children to cats – Ross, it was a pleasure to meet you!

Being a complete n00b, I was concerned that the subject matter might be a little over my head, but once the talks got underway I found myself thoroughly engrossed and wholly enjoyed all of them

First up was Andy’s take on Nigeria, which was quite an eye-opener. Amazing to see the juxtaposition of such a backward or degraded infrastructure mixed with such a burgeoning dependence on and wide use of technology as well as the ingenious (and probably character-building) methods people have of overcoming the limitations they are forced to live with. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Nigeria houses MTN’s largest market, having had a friend who went up there as part of the security detail when they were setting up a few years ago, who described the scale of the operation and the huge demand there. I had to take time to reflect on the amount of moaning I do about power cuts, slow bandwidth speeds and all the things we don’t have that Americans do, and I guess we’re actually doing pretty well compared to some.

Next up was Donna Metzlar, involved in several kickass grrrl-orientated projects overseas like the Girl Geek Dinners, whose talk left me both gratified and a bit wistful. Grateful to hear I’m not the only one who stumbled onto geekdom in a very roundabout way, having studied Marine Biology for 8 years before I’d ever entertained ideas and prospects that didn’t involve the entrails of a fish.

Wistful, because in stark contrast to the vision of Nigeria, the reality in Europe still seems far away in terms of freedom of information and concepts like the recycling of technology, government funding for projects and education initiatives. I certainly agree that men and women go about the technology thing in different ways, and that in certain contexts I’d be way more comfortable asking silly questions and figuring stuff out with women like myself, who don’t have the formal training – it would be truly fantastic to have something similar here. As to the Girl Geek Dinners, call me old fashioned if you like – the dinners just wouldn’t be the same without the boyz around!

Last up was Kerry-Anne Giloway the prettier half of the dynamic Cape Town Daily Photo team (sorry Paul). She gave a very slick presentation about some of the more practical aspects of running what is definitely one of my favourite blogs including privacy issues, not making money, the curse of Blogger and a bit of SEO thrown in for good measure. From this presentation I got my ‘take-home’ message of the evening…”if you want to sit at home watching TV all weekend, move to Joburg!” – Too right Kerry-Anne. Got me to thinking that these guys spend an enviable amount of time out and about which I find inspiring, especially as I’ve reached never-before-attempted degrees of hibernation this winter.

The cherry on the top of the evening was the slideshow karaoke, bravely tackled and superbly conquered by Mandy Watson leaving us with some sound financial advice involving gambling and loan sharks.

All round, a thoroughly enjoyable evening – the venue didn’t disappoint at all– the Carpaccio was sublime, the pasta a little heavy on the peppercorns (but I’m fussy that way) and the latte’s (the litmus test of any restaurant for me) were to daai for … but guys, pleeeze, next time pick somewhere where the pariahs can smoke inside (god, why does everyone have to be so damn healthy these days!)? Especially in winter…poor Joey was trying really hard to pretend not to shiver in that t-shirt!

Thanks a million to the organisers and The one with the Zebra, already signed up for the next one, so looking forward to seeing you all there!

I WANTZ A BIGGER LAWWNN

// July 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // business, humour, marketing, random madness

Strolling through Rondebosch the other day, I did a serious double-take, checked my pockets for evidence of psychedelic materials, and finding none, went for a closer peek at the lawn I had just seen driving down the road.

Seems that with the FIFA World Cup drawing ever nearer, everyone is getting into the spirit…a spirit which will undoubtedly blossom into full-blown soccer fever in the near future.

If this eye-catching mobile lawn created by AGA (Artificial Grass Africa) is anything to go by, I can’t wait to see what else our local marketing wizards have up their sleeves for 2010!

I must confess at this point that I’m a total n00b where soccer is concerned, and i fail to understand the murderous rage it incites in rival fans, especially in Cape Town, where most of the fans seem to support teams that aren’t actually in South Africa. In addition to this, the teams supported, such as Man United and Liverpool are seldom made up of people who actually come from Manchester or Liverpool (etc) – I wonder what percentage of premier league teams are composed of geographically correct individuals?

I do admit to a twinge of the soccer madness over the last world cup where we elected to do a random pool at work to draw teams. I ended up with Italy and Uruguay, and bemoaned the fact that I had two teams that didn’t stand a chance in hell. As the cup progressed I watched with growing fascination as Italy began to beat the odds. By the final match I felt a distinct urge to bite the ears off any nearby Frenchmen (not in a good way either) and almost wet myself watching the penalty shootout.

The madness soon passed and I returned to watching rugby, which is raaight, lekka and as it should be, but come 2010, who knows? Perhaps I should stock up on nobbly boots and a silly scarf in the mean time in case the madness strikes again.

OH, RAPTURE…

// June 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // business, geek stuff

I was truly delighted to learn today that one of my favorite celebrities in the whole world, one of the top ten ‘people I’d love to have over for coffee and crumpets’ and definitely in the top five ‘people I wouldn’t mind getting stuck in a lift with’, Stephen Fry, actually has his own blog, which he actually updates, albeit fairly infrequently.

“Moving from chair to chair, from coffee machine to coffee machine is the limit of my action in most films. But I enjoy being cast in them because I love watching them.” – SF

I’ve loved Fry’s dry wit and rather somewhat staid character roles since my school days and endless reruns of Blackadder episodes. He also starred in A Bit of Fry and Laurie with Hugh Laurie, who is, incidentally, his godson (??) and Jeeves and Wooster. I’ve always likened Fry’s droll nature in some way to Oscar Wilde, a character he also played in a movie that didn’t really blow me away. He’s done countless cameo roles and has also had smallish parts in V for Vendetta; Gormenghast, A Fish called Wanda; The Young Ones and (eek) Spiceworld, the spice girls movie. He’s done loads of stage work and documentary work and also narrates the pretty disappointing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Harry Potter movies, which I confess I’m addicted to. Most recently I’ve been watching his show, IQ which I thoroughly enjoy, it showcasing him as the true geek I always suspected he was.

“I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.” – SF

It was only about 5 years ago that I realised Fry was a writer and a damn good one at that, his style eminently Wildesque. I found his first novel, The Liar , side-splittingly funny and have read it at least 3 times. Fry also smokes a pipe (obviously), loves Jethro Tull, Led Zepplin and Abba. He was a good friend of Douglas Adams, and reportedly one of the three people in the whole universe to whom Adams confessed the meaning of the enigmatic “42″ – sadly he’s sworn to take the secret to his grave. When in London, he drives his own black cab for ease of transportation (I wonder if he picks up fares?)

“Digital devices rock my world.” – SF

I was really excited and surprised about this blog because, as it turns out, Fry is “’deeply dippy for all things digital’, claims to have owned the second Macintosh sold in the UK and to have never encountered a smartphone that he has not bought.”

The blog posts consist mainly of his column “Dork Talk” published in the The Guardian . It also includes “podgrams” – narrations of his life and experiences over the last couple of years, as well as “Bloggery” and “Blessays”.

Do yourself a favour and check it out here: http://stephenfry.com/blog/

Here are some of my favourite Fry quotes:

“I think animal testing is cruel. They get nervous and get all the answers wrong.”

“The e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail”

On being gay: “My first words, as I was being born… I looked up at my mother and said, ‘that’s the last time I’m going up one of those.’”

“Complete loose-stool-water. Arse-gravy of the very worst kind.” (Speaking about Dan Brown’s novel, “The Da Vinci Code.”) (I agree there)

“I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.”

“An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.”

“Many people would no more think of entering journalism than the sewage business – which at least does us all some good”

Nuff said…