May 13, 2008

Let's have a round of golf.. erm. not you. or your 75,000 mates

Virgin Trains bosses must be rueing the invention of email this month after foolishly using the medium to invite precious customers to a golfing day. How irresponsible.

Unfortunately for the firms' PR machine, rather than just asking the elite 75 members of its first class traveller club Virgin invited a lot of plebs, AKA the other poor saps that use its un-premium seats and service… Eurgh… Just imagine.

Not usually known for over estimating capacities, well, apart from on some of its trains, Virgin had managed to email 76,000 customers to the Grove Golf Resort Hotel, Herts, a course with a capacity much much lower than that figure.

Of course the mistake was soon realised and Virgin sent out a second email apologising for the mistake and offering recipients the chance to win a day at the course.

Sneak thought the firm handled this all very well and sent them off a congratulatory email. Except he didn’t.

He is however, offering Virgin's customer service team the chance to win a congratulatory email. Which, he is sure, will be a rare bonus for them.

May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turn it off and on again

Sneak has heard a lot in his daily travels about the increasing IT savviness of the workforce. Raised on a diet of Google and Amazon and the world wide web, worker drones these days have a much better grasp of technology than their parents ever did. Which is probably true, but according to support desk software vendor Sunrise, the stupidity of the human race really does know no bounds.

Top on its list of most ridiculous requests placed to a helpdesk over the last year include the receptionist in a London telco who asked IT if they could de-scale her kettle. Or possibly the senior actuarial consultant who asked his IT manager to arrange for the orbit of a satellite to be altered so that he could get a better mobile phone reception on his journey home. Sunrise chairman Tom Weston said, "IT support is a skilled job, but this league table shows it’s as much about people skills and time management as technology." You ain't wrong Tom.

May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

Jobs for the boys

IT has always suffered from an image problem; a trend that Sneak believes begins way back in school. It's just not cool to want to grown up and become the next Steve Jobs, no matter how natty his polo necks are. Well, new research by security vendor SmoothWall has found that even those who end up in the industry may actually have a secret hankering to do or be something else.

The vendor surveyed attendees at last month's Infosecurity Europe show in London, and found that 15 per cent of IT managers would actually have preferred to be pilots. Astronaut, footballer and doctor were also popular choices for the IT crowd, although Bruce Lee, Bill Gates and "seagull" were slightly less predictable.

May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

I am not eating my dinner off that

According to consumer watchdog magazine Which? Some keyboards are dirtier than toilet seats. In fact they are a lot dirtier says the magazine, and could even give you diarrhoea. Let us not speculate how…

Sneak, however, is not surprised by this, since quite often he can be found sitting on the toilet using a keyboard, and less frequently confusing the two, (sorry Mum, but it has been known.)

So, he believes the warnings, especially as he is incredibly distrusting of the hygiene practices of anyone, including himself.

Not for Sneak is the handshake, the shared water bottle, the communal park bench, or the dish of mints at the takeaway. Nor, come to think of it, is the publications racks in shops and libraries – which is where you might find this fingerpointing periodical.

So, Sneak wonders, just how dirty is the average copy of Which? And, would anyone want to eat their dinner off it?

May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 04, 2008

Domain dangers

There are many important factors to consider when registering your organisation’s domain name, Sneak cautions. How many permutations of the name should you buy up to avoid typo and cybersquatting; how do you manage the re-registration process; do you need to provide legal documentation and proof of trademarks etc? All of these issues should be front-of-mind for any domain name manager worth his salt.

But it seems that some firms were a little, um, hasty when snapping up the “perfect” name to represent them on the world wide web, according to registration expert Sedo. Imagine for example, you run an art business, and have come up with the snappy title of “speed of art” for your store. Well, maybe you don’t actually want to turn this into a URL of speedofart.com. And say you run a therapist-finding service..well, um, might not be a great idea to go for the literal – www.therapistfinder.com. It’ll only end in tears.

May 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

In Earl's Court, no-one can hear you scream

Little known fact for you all to mull over. Sneak has spent approximately 58 per cent of his working week this last fortnight attending IT conferences. Not that it doesn't come with some compensations – Sneak has spent many a happy hour on trade show floors observing the spandex clad beauties IT vendor X has hired for the day in the vain hope of attracting some sexually excitable potential customer to its stand.

But one of the common complaints Sneak has about these events, beyond the depressing sandwiches and the lack of a ready supply of tasers to get through the bovine crowd, is the press centre facilities. Um, Internet World, for example – judging from the title, you would expect a little internet access perhaps? Wrong. Expect no WiFi, no fixed broadband, and just a single 3G dongle which wouldn't work on Sneak's laptop. Nice biscuits though...

April 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2008

Squatting again

Seems like the London mayoral election is the latest big name event to have been hijacked by cybersquatters – those pesky critters who buy up lucrative domains or near misspellings of them in the hope of monetising the site somehow, or just causing mischief. Yet, according to domain name management firm NetNames, Ken seems to be getting a rather rough ride on the world wide web.

Apparently domains such as ihatekenlivingston.org, and kenlivingstone.org are doing the rounds. The latter boasts a picture of the man himself dressed as a cowboy with the headline “Do you really want to pay for Ken Livingstone and his cronies?”. Sneak isn't sure why Boris has escaped relatively unscathed but imagines it must be something to do with the vigorous defensive registration activities his camp has been involved in. A total of ten other domains point back to his site backboris.com.

April 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Funding black holes at CERN

Sneak as been pondering the IT infrastructure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is warning PR firms whose clients have kit installed there to get those press releases in quick, before the avalanche that is bound to occur just before the apparatus fires up in July occurs.

The reason being that there are prophets of doom out there predicting that when LHC fires up, it will create a ‘strangelet’ – a mini-black hole if you will – that will quickly devour all human life forms on earth – and Boris Johnson. Ironic really, considering all those stories about black holes in UK science funding – who’d have thought that we were actually funding black hole creation – literally. Still, it might answer the age old question of whether there are other intelligent life forms in the universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project may be drawing a blank because when the unknowing extraterrestrials get to the evolutionary stage where they can transmit their presence to the rest of the universe, firing up their LHC equivalents quickly turns off their broadcasts.

One can imagine the Omnipresent Being responsible for the creation of the universe chalking off the civilisations firing up LHCs, on his/her/its map of the universe – with the dulcet tones of Freddie Mercury hammering out Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ in the background.

April 25, 2008 in Science | Permalink | Comments (6)

April 22, 2008

Jerome and the argot nerds

Pixmania, which is one of those online tings, brud, innit, erm…, Let's start that again.

Digital equipment e-tailer Pixmania has released some research that claims that more and more l337 speak (that's what geeks do) is being added to the english language every year. 200 new words, the firm says, will be added to our language over the next 365 days, which seems rather precise a number – does Pixmania has a nonsense word generating machine? Or legions of propeller hat wearing geeks ready to spread its radical new language?

Anyway, announcing the news, Ulric Jerome, the managing director of pixmania.com, said: "Technology has infiltrated our lives in many ways and at such a pace it is natural that it has developed a language of its own."

Which is rather disappointing. You think he could have at least chucked a smiley in there.

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A data what?

No, it isn't a still of Doctor Who taken from an episode where Dalek creator Davros returns. This photo shows Sol Squire of data archive company Data Íslandia, with The Data Scooter, a ruggedised container for physically shipping terabytes of data out to the firm's Iceland-based datacentre.

What Sneak would like to know is whether the Data Scooter is very large, or whether Squire is particularly diminutive. And why does he appear to be sitting in it?

Whatever the answer, it certainly looks tough enough to survive even an air accident, so Sneak would also like to know whether the container can be obtained to carry luggage on ordinary passenger flights. Let's see the ham-fisted baggage handlers at Heathrow try to mangle that up.

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

	HAVE YOU GOT A STORY FOR SNEAK? Confidentiality is assured if requested. Send your mail to:itsneak@vnu.co.uk