Sneak is rather impressed by the mightiness of one particular blogger's sword.

The operator of the Much&Brass blog obviously has a bit of a thing for his council representatives, and a rather critical eye. In fact so critical is he, that apparently his blogging has forced a number of council leaders to up and walk out of a meeting, and just because he called them 'jackasses' and some other flattering things (they want to try being Sneak!).

Niall Connolly is the blogger in question. He seems reluctant to accept responsibility for the incident, but Sneak would like to buy him a beer all the same.

The incident was covered live on the Much&Brass blog and went a little something like this, "about 33 minutes into the meeting, it all started to go Pete Tong...

The Vice Chair stood up, put on his jacket and started a brief speech about how he was sick and tired of something or other and how he was going to leave it all up to the Town. At that point it seemed like he was presenting his resignation and this stunning news was greeted by the audience with rapturous applause. This seemed to trigger of a convulsion of action on the part of most of the rest of the council. As one they rose up and the Chair was subject to a proverbial avalanche of resignation letters before he himself resigned."

According to the BBC, Ex-vice chairman and businessman Anthony Canvin, said, "I'm not going to tolerate it when I'm working for the town. I started it. I said 'I've had enough' and handed in my resignation."

Sneak thinks that whoever encouraged Mr Canvin to watch the Tom Cruise film, Jerry Maguire, the night before is owed a beer as well.

"Who's with me?"

October 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's another bit of news to file under the 'accident waiting to happen' banner, alongside 9/11, the economic downturn and Gordon Brown. Microsoft has pulled out of sponsoring a TV spin-off of risque cartoon Family Guy, after execs attended a taping of the show and found it to be, well, not a good fit with its core values.

Eyebrows were raised a couple of weeks ago when Redmond announced it was sponsoring the show, and not through regular advertising either, but by weaving Windows 7 messages into the script. Family Guy fans everywhere gasped; could the show which brutally lampoons the Fox Network on which it runs on an almost weekly basis, finally be going soft?

Well, thankfully, we'll never find out, as Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show, to give it its full title, was decided to be "not a fit with the Windows brand". Who would have thought jokes about deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest were not what Microsoft was quite looking for?

October 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Facebook apparently doesn't subscribe to the idea that when you lose contact with someone it is often for a good reason. Sneak, who once started a group on Facebook just for the pleasure of kicking everyone else off it, does.

Because of this, he's rather disappointed to have started to get messages via Facebook encouraging him to reconnect with people that in the real world he would choose to avoid through such drastic measures as hurling himself under a train.

Like some sort of pushy mother, concerned that her 33-year-old son doesn't have enough friends, Facebook, the social networking site, has become social busybody, and started hurling ghosts from the past into the faces of people who have probably suffered enough already.

The new feature, launched this weekend along with a confusing new Live Feed/Live News Feed split on the homepage, has not only irked Sneak, but also a lot of other users. Not least of all because it has in some cases urged them to reconnect with dead people, animals, and people that they used to be in relationships with.

The twitterati has of course gone mental for it. And everyone who ever thought of a snappy screen name for themselves and has 140 characters to burn has been quick to comment on the feature.

Sneak's favourite post so far comes from daveisanidiot, who sounds a lot like a sulky, younger brother pushed into hanging out with a sibling.

'Dave' said, "Facebook told me i should reconnect with my sister. You're not the boss of me Facebook!"

October 26, 2009 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Analysts at Gartner have urged IT leaders to adopt a 'pattern-based' strategy to driving business change.

The analysts say that there are four parts, or disciplines, to adhere to in order to make such a change, which seem to be just about paying attention to business trends and changes - something that makes sense even to Sneak's addled brain.

Regardless of that, however, the analysts have used a lot of clever terms to jazz it up. These include: pattern seeking, optempo (operational tempo) advantages, performance-driven culture, and transparency.

"A Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators, often-termed 'weak' signals that form patterns in the marketplace," Gartner said, once again muddying Sneak's waters by suggesting that 'leading indicators' were 'weak signals'.

Val Sribar, group vice president of Research at Gartner, said, "We believe that significant market advantage will be gained by organisations that adopt all the disciplines needed to implement a Pattern-Based Strategy, and by those technology providers that seek to enable this transition." Sneak recommends waiting for the tech solution.

Ironically while discussing transparency, which Sneak always assumed was another word for clarity, the analysts added, "If organisations can proactively evolve transparency from a once-a-quarter financial-results event to using it to set the right expectations of seeking new patterns and responding with consistent results, this proactive use will enable them to enter new markets, gain access to funds that competitors can't access and demonstrate differentiation to customers and suppliers", at which point Sneak totally gave up and defenestrated himself.

Punters can find out more about pattern-based strategies at one of Gartner's upcoming symposiums. Sneak will stick with his own PBS, which in his own small little world, means making sure that his socks match.

October 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Windows 7 is out now and Microsoft is spending rather a large amount of time and money on stunts designed to raise awareness of something that you are probably already reminded of every time you turn on the telly, walk down the road, or heaven forbid, use your Windows Vista machine.

It takes a lot to impress Sneak, but it looks like Microsoft has finally managed to do just that. Having spent far too long this morning scouring the net for marketing lunacy Sneak has finally found his favourite piece of complimentary marketing fun - an insanely large Burger King burger from the land that bought us dolphin game fishing, and bizarre cartoons ... Japan.

The Windows 7 burger looks like it could choke a horse, or a very hungry Japanese salaryman, and has made us weep for cows everywhere. Not only does it come with two halves of a bun, and a nod in the direction of some salad, but the bastard creation boasts seven burgers! Seven, get it?

Apparently it will cost you about £5, or if you prefer, heartburn and a rather bloated tummy.

October 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lucky couch potatoes with an aversion to high streets can now expect Amazon to deliver their items on the same day that they order them.

You have to be around til eight in the evening, but we suspect that the firm isn't really pitching the service at people that get out much, and the firm isn't offering weekend deliveries. Which seems fair.

The same day service is currently only available in the US and even there only in a number of states. For example if you live in New York, the city that never sleeps, you can order goods for same day delivery up to 10am in the morning, meanwhile people in Las Vegas, the city that never goes to bed, can order up til 11am - which depending on whether you are working there or living there, is either early in the morning or very late at night. The other cities covered are Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and Baltimore

This means that the morbidly obese in San Francisco will still have to hop on a tram to go and buy their books and whatnot. Girish Lakshman, vice president of Transportation at Amazon said, "We're continuously working to speed up delivery times and customers receiving items on the same day as ordered is an exciting step. Now, if a customer needs a last-minute present for a birthday or wants a copy of their book club book before the weekend starts, they can order from Amazon instead of the hassle of a last-minute trip to the mall."

Yeah man. Forget all THAT hassle...

October 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is interested to read the response from Talk Talk to claims from consumer comparison site uSwitch that its call centres prove difficult to get through to.

In an indignant statement the firm said, "We strongly dispute the findings of uSwitch's highly unscientific research. It appears to be based on old customer research from February 2009 which simply asked people to estimate how long they spend on hold. Our own data is based on facts as we time every single one of the hundreds of thousands of calls we get each month. In September the average TalkTalk customer spent 53 seconds on hold, which if uSwitch is to be believed is way below the industry average. We are of course not resting on our laurels and are continually investing to bring waiting times down even further."

Sneak was so interested that he decided to call up the firm to discuss the issue. Failing to get through the first time he tried again, and then again, and then again and then got someone else to try from another phone in another town. Following this failed outsourced attempt he tried again, and then once more for luck. Still no answer. Finally he gave up.

"Want an interview, looking for a case study, keen to get a statement, please feel free to contact us with queries on the TalkTalk brand," reads the chirpy statement next to the press office number. Yeah, feel free to contact, but don't expect an answer.

Good work Talk Talk, it's been a pleasure.

October 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Security pro Graham Cluley may be considering retirement having totted up the amount of money he could potentially make from responding to spam emails.

In the course of a week Cluley received a large number of spam mails to his account and set about totting up exactly how much he could have made if antelopes were elephants and spamming email gits were actually honest decent people. Cluley's running total just for responding to mails about Thai lotteries, surplus gold, and missing bank accounts is a massive $3bn or thereabouts.

"In total I calculate I made a spectacular $290,259,462 in a week, without having to do very much at all. It looks like there are many individuals out there who are just dying to throw money in your direction for lotteries you never entered, and inheritances from people you've never heard of", he said.

Cluley is no fool, however, he knows a scam when he sees it. Particularly when it comes from a British business man called Philip Chris who uses an Argentian email addresses to offer him a share of a $52,000,000 inheritance and writes things like, "May this mail find you well?" and, "I stand %100 percent chance to claim this fund with a foreigner within the space of ten business days".

It's all good fun until you remember that some people aren't as smart as our Graham, who signs off by saying, "You might be wise enough not to fall for confidence tricks like these - but the only reason the scammers spam out these campaigns is that occasionally they do hook someone who is elderly or vulnerable who can't tell the difference between a genuine windfall and a cold-hearted scam."

Won't someone think of the grandparents?

October 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google's Sergey Brin has used old time media to talk about how blooming great e-books are.

In a one-off column in the New York Times - a newspaper - Brin said that the digitisation of media was important to the future of books that have already been forgotten by the passages of time, presumably just before going off to wash the newsprint off his hands.

Brin managed to compare e-books to unicorns while also being rather ranty about Google's much-delayed Books project, which is currently working its way through the courts - so a career in column and opinion writing could be a good choice for him.

"This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers," he wrote.

"Nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organisation from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns."

A judge is currently debating the future of Google's plans to digitise old books and is expected to announce his final decision on 9 November.

We'll stick with our digitised unicorns for the time being.

October 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clive Sinclair is a well-known figure in the UK and has widely been credited with bringing the computer out of the lab and into the home. Sneak has been lucky enough to have a sneak preview of a new comedy docudrama from the pen of Tony Saint, which digs deeper than ever before into the character of the man who brought us the ZX Spectrum.

Micro Men, to be aired on BBC Four on Thursday evening, follows the parallel careers of Sinclair and his one-time employee Chris Curry. This not entirely flattering portrait of one of the most important and influential inventors of the 20th Century paints Sinclair as a megalomaniacal, bipolar tyrant who would hurl abuse at his employees just as easily as stray bits of office equipment.

Sinclair is the first person to introduce a useable pocket calculator to the world, and invents the LED digital watch, but all of his inventions are ruthlessly cribbed by Japanese electronics giants and Sinclair is repeatedly priced out of the markets he single handedly created: "Hijacked by the Japanese and their ugly plastic grot," as Sinclair so succinctly puts it.

Poor quality components and some poor quality business decisions also mean that Sinclair's Pocket TV (yes they really did have pockets that big in the eighties) bombs so badly that the Cambridge-based company has to be bailed out by National Enterprise Board, a government department intended to help finance burgeoning British tech companies.

Sinclair is so incensed by what he sees as government interference that he sends Curry off to work for a shell company he has set up, but Curry is determined to be more than just a caretaker, taking it upon himself to design and create a microcomputing kit, which will allow punters to build their own basic computer.

Obsessed as he is with his singular vision for a personal transport vehicle, Sinclair rudely dismisses Curry's idea to spark the home computer revolution and when Curry mocks the C5, Sinclair throws him out of his house mid-dinner in yet another petulant strop.

Rather than turning up to work the next morning as Sinclair confidently predicts to his long-suffering wife, Curry sets up on his own with amusingly louche Austrian wine maker Hermann Hausser, and Acorn Computing is born.

What comes next is a parallel tale of two companies. Sinclair struggles to stay afloat while blowing millions of pounds on the C5 and Acorn poaches the cream of the Cambridge Processor Group band of socially dysfunctional nerds who build cattle-feeding computers for fun.

Sinclair soon realises that Curry was onto something with this whole personal computer theory and decides to take on the likes of Apple, Commodore and IBM by inventing a home computer which will sell for the magical sum of £99. At the time, an Apple II would set you back something in the order of £2,000 and even the Commodore Pet, which was seen as affordable at the time, was £695, a sum which was way out of reach for anything other than a college or large company.

The Sinclair ZX80 was a revolutionary failure. It sold by the shedload to an audience eager to jump on the computing bandwagon, and is probably responsible for setting off the UK computing revolution. But it overheated, made the screen flicker with every key press and probably convinced as many people never to touch a computer again as it did to go on to become multimillionaire superstar programmers.

Curry, on the other hand, is forced to go cap in hand to the banking system in order to fund his digital dreams and spends most of his time trying to second guess his former boss in order to get the upper hand in the fledgling computer industry.

Micro Men is a tale of hard work, greed, friendship and redemption, all wrapped up in the giddy boom and ultimately catastrophic bust of the first home computing gold rush.

Anyone who grew up with computers in the eighties will be spellbound by the attention to authentic detail the programme makers have lavished on this show. Every car, every hideous jumper, every hand-soldered circuit board and every note of the soundtrack is spot on. The battle between Sinclair and Curry is well-paced and fascinating even to those of you who wouldn't know your Jet Set Willy from your Manic Miner, even if poor old Clive does come out of the whole deal looking like a bit of an arse, while Curry comes up smelling of roses at every juncture.

In fact, the main protagonists are drawn with such broad strokes as to render them almost cartoonish, no doubt for comic effect. Alexander Armstrong's portrayal of Sinclair as a bumbling, single-minded sociopath is often clumsy. But it's Martin Freeman's too-cuddly-to-be-credible reading of Curry which ultimately fails to ring true.

Unbalanced but unbelievably affectionate all the same, Micro Men is one you really should not miss.

October 6, 2009 Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)