My bro and I went to see Coldplay on Tuesday night, at Crystal Palace in London.
Storms were predicted, and despite fork lightning directly overhead for most of the evening, it only rained briefly. Coldplay were fantastic, beginning with ‘Politik’ and ending with ‘Fix You’, and playing stuff from all the albums in between. Support was provided by Morning Runner and Interpol. About 30,000 people tried to get on the same train as us on the way home. Pete and Gaby made it back to West Hampstead by half past midnight; I got back to Oxford about half past two, Simon got home about half three. Eagles has posted the tracklist over on his msn blog.
Today’s Formula 1 Grand Prix at Indianapolis was a farce for both the teams and the spectators. Formula One seems to have grown into the spoilt brat of the industry - spending millions of pounds on a hugely public series of events, only to completely ignore the fans when they need to sort out an issue; and I’m looking at the FIA here, not the teams or even the suppliers. As David Coulthard put it
the reality is mature adults couldn’t find a solution that would let us go racing
The initial situation is down to Michelin, who seemingly did not do their research beforehand. After they realised the problem, the FIA could have either let the affected teams use different tyres - thus breaking 5 rules, which were written to apply to individual teams, or they could have put in a chicane - as requested by both Michelin and 10 of the teams.
Two more quotes, the first from Martin Brundle (reporting for ITV)
if Schumacher does a victory dance on the podium, i’m personally going to go up there and punch him
and Jim Rosenthal
Coronation Street is on next - that’s a soap opera that is worth watching!
BBC News has an article about
blogging during the Iranian elections, accompanied by the above picture. Only thing is, I can’t tell what is going on in the picture. Maybe i’m not seeing the wood for the trees, but the face in the picture definately doesn’t make sense given the hands. Can anyone enlighten me?
I went into HMV today; not surprising, as I regularly go to check out what’s new on the dvd scene. For the first time in a long while though, I took notice of the price of chart cd’s.
Until recently, current single-artist releases were priced at around �13 on the high street, with back catalogue tracks priced around �16-17 ($30). Many high street retailers offered the same products cheaper on their websites than in stores.
Now a shift has been made to bring these prices more in line with the web, and a browse through HMV’s top 40 albums list shows all but a few of the albums to be �9.99 or less.
Before this change, HMV were not struggling; in June 2004 the company (which also owns Waterstones bookstores) posted a record profit of �117million, up 22% on the previous year. In December 2004, announcements were made of the companys’ intentions to move into the download market by partnering with Microsoft.
Alexa’s site ranking shows the same trend - around the middle of 2004, the site overtook cdwow, the original source for cheap cd’s on the web. The following christmas, HMVs’ siterank fought off a rise by cdwow, installing itsself firmly ahead in both ranking and population reach. The well established
Play.com is still well ahead of both, possibly due to better cross-browser compatibility and less trouble with the music industry; cdwow settled out of court with the British Phonographic Industry, in a row over imported cds, which led to the company raising prices across the board by �2.
The Observer reports that many Indian call center staff are leaving jobs due to the persistent rudeness of British and American callers, while many employees have begun allowing staff to hang up on callers after a third bad language warning.
I have had much experience with the Bombay call center of an unnamed phone company, and have found most of the staff to be unknowledgeable, unwilling to help and quick to hang up on me - I have even been shouted at by some of the customer service reps. This seems to be down to bad training and probably the stress of having to be first line support for one of the worst service providers I have ever dealt with; HSBC on the other hand are helpful, informed and polite.
Some companies still specify staff must anglicise their names, adopting forenames such as Mary and John, to try to stave off resentment.
This just stinks of a bad employer to me; call center managers are trying to help staff avoid angry customers, but the root of the anger is usually poor service (possibly followed by poorly trained support staff).
The employees are therefore caught in the middle - the jobs they hold are sought after due to (relatively) high pay; the company employs them because to western corporations they are cheap labour, and often these are the companies that also cut financial corners on their products and services, leading to more stress for the first line customer service advisors.
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