Showing all posts tagged: trends
The way we treat service staff says much about who we are
25 July 2024
Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:
I suspect restaurant and cafe customers have little idea of the profound, quiet stigma directed towards service workers. There is an assumption in this country that wait staff above a certain age are where they are because they lack the skills or gumption to “get a proper job”.
There’s an old aphorism that goes something along the lines of “watch the way the person you’re on a date with treats the staff of the restaurant you’re dining at.”
The general idea being that if someone looks down on, or treats hospitality staff poorly, you might want to think twice about having a romantic relationship with them. The way they treat someone — in this case, likely a complete stranger — says a lot how they treat everyone else. Including you.
But it seems to me this wisdom can be applied more widely. Anyone — anyone at all — treating hospitality staff poorly, or other service workers for that matter, doesn’t seem to be worth the time of day. Unless, that is, a server threw hot soup in their face, or something, for no good reason.
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cafe, psychology, trends, work
LinkedIn, a professional network, or a blogging platform?
19 July 2024
Back in 2008, I had a brief tweet exchange with another Twitter member, about the merits of LinkedIn*. At that point, I was a member, but really didn’t like the platform. I thought having a personal website, showcasing your abilities, was a better idea. #IndieWeb me was thinking — all of sixteen years ago — before the #IndieWeb we know today, was a thing, personal websites were the way to go. I also didn’t like the idea of absorbing my identity into some Borg-like collective.
“But, being on LinkedIn makes networking with likeminded people easier,” replied the Twitter member (in words to that effect). He may have been right. If there were enough likeminded people there, perhaps someone could generate a few leads. But, I don’t know. LinkedIn is LinkedIn. It’s not for everyone. But then again, LinkedIn could almost be considered a blogging platform. All you need do is figure out LinkedIn-speak, which includes talking yourself up, way up, and you’re set.
And it seems you’re quite welcome to go overboard, quite overboard, as Thomas Mitchell, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, notes:
This obsessive focus on accomplishments has transformed LinkedIn from a platform for managing your professional identity into a platform for managing your professional lies.
Earlier this year, US-based salesman Bryan Shankman went viral after using his recent engagement to talk about sales strategy in a LinkedIn post.
“I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend,” Shankman wrote in the caption before segueing into his business strategy. “Here’s what it taught me about B2B sales!”
Actually, there’s a heck of a lot of blog posts written in the same fashion. So, is LinkedIn a blogging platform? It could be, but you’re unlikely to ever see me reactivating my account, and writing there…
* I downloaded an archive of my then Twitter account a few years ago, before a mass delete and reboot, on the platform. It’s great to sometimes go and look at the long past conversations I had there.
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blogs, social media, social networks, trends, Twitter
To find #IndieWeb, more people need to know it exists
18 July 2024
JTR, writing at The Art Of Not Asking Why:
Indie blogs are like good spots in town. Sure, they’re on the map, but you need to ask the locals to point them out. In terms of indie blogs, this means other bloggers.
Word of mouth is sure a great way to spread the news about #IndieWeb blogs, but the problem is, I don’t think #IndieWeb itself is really on the map. You’re really depending on someone in the know, being able to you tell you #IndieWeb exists in the first place, who then directs you accordingly.
If some recent posts I’ve seen on Threads are anything to go by, people seem surprised personal websites and blogs are still a thing. What #IndieWeb really needs is a concerted publicity push. Something akin to Love your Bookshop Day, which we have in Australia, or Record Store Day.
But here’s the thing. There used to be something called Independents Day, but that was over twenty-years ago. I remember Jeffrey Zeldman, for one, writing about it. But imagine it: a day celebrating independent websites, and content producers, long before social networks were a thing.
At the time though, larger, corporate, websites were dominating, and beginning to smother the voice of smaller publishers. In a way, it’s a shame Independents Day didn’t go the distance, because today it would be a well established happening. Still, it’s never too late.
There’s nothing to stop an idea like Independents Day being revived, in one form or another. The goal, initially at least, should be to introduce the concept of #IndieWeb to a wider audience, and then from there, once people are asking about #IndieWeb, we can become the friendly locals pointing out what we consider to be the places of interest.
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Should right to disconnect laws be scrapped because of lazy workers?
15 July 2024
Melbourne based Workplace Relations lawyer Paul O’Halloran, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, on Australian “right to disconnect” workplace laws that come into effect on Monday 26 August 2024:
Well, laziness is an increasing trend in the cases I defend for employers. Putting aside pandemic lockdowns where all sorts of things other than work were going on in people’s homes during virtual business hours, more recently I have been involved in matters where employees were surreptitiously sleeping on the job; forging time sheets with fabricated work hours; using fake medical certificates to take sickies; or watching Netflix while claiming to be working from home.
There’s still this perception that people working from home are bludging. Doing stuff-all. Watching Netflix all day (or some of the day). No doubt “all sorts of things other than work” take place in a work from home environment, child care duties among them. But is productivity not measured by, you know, productivity? If the required work is being turned in, why begrudge a busy parent for doing a load of washing in the gaps in-between workplace duties? It’s called work-life balance for a reason.
The solution though to this apparent reluctance to work at home, is to get everyone back into the workplace, where an eye can kept on them to ensure they do their “full eight-hour” day. The problem with the full eight-hour day though, is that it doesn’t exist. An American study found workers putting in an eight-hour day, actually did closer to three hours actual work a day.
Three hours? Say what? Much of the eight hour day is lost to web browsing and social media, making food and snacks, calling family, cigarette/vape breaks, and, last but by no means least: looking for another job. All under the watchful eye of workplace handlers. It seems to me then, if you’re putting in a minimum of three hours work, you’re doing well. Bonus points if it’s so-called deep work.
Certainly, there are lazy workers. Those being paid to do eight (would-be) hours work, but sitting in the break-room all day. Or “meetings”. But they’re in the minority, and are eventually weeded out. But leave the work-from-home people alone. Leave them to get on with their work. If it’s at least three hours per day, then there’s nothing to complain about.
If you’ve noticed posting here as slowed down at tad lately, it’s because work (from home) has been flat out. No Netflix and chill here (during work hours). I’m freelance, so the disconnect laws may not quite apply to me (but I do have do-not-disturb). Nonetheless, I am looking forward to some disconnect, and doing a little bit more here soon.
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Spellcheck, autocorrect: the end of Notepad as a simple text editor
11 July 2024
Let’s go back in time. Way back in time.
To about this time in 2000. I had, or was just about, to start my first job as a web designer, at an exciting, multidisciplinary design studio, on Sydney’s trendy urban fringe. Ok: Surry Hills. I’m pleased to say I was headhunted into the role, thanks largely to the then inception of disassociated.
My job title was “coder/designer”, and I still have a copy of my business card somewhere. I was given a large box of them at the time, and asked by one of the directors to distribute them at will. At parties, at the pub, on the bus. Everywhere. To spread word of the studio, of course.
When I went into a meeting to discuss the role, I said I wanted to work to web standards with the HTML I would be coding/marking-up. One of the people sitting in on the meeting, who worked in the development arm of the agency, and whom I’d meet previously through local web design/personal website circles, shook his head at me.
He was on the same page: he too wanted to work with standards, but many projects of the day precluded their use. “Ok,” I said, “In that case, I only want to use Notepad for the code/markup I’ll be writing.” I said that because I didn’t want a bar of the bloated, ineffectual, WYSIWYG web design editors that were then available. Fun fact: I still don’t; I never have.
To that, they agreed. Notepad is one of the few Microsoft (MS) products I really like, and will miss on Linux. It has come bundled with Windows Operating Systems since 1983, and has remained little changed. I coded my first websites in Notepad, and built the WordPress theme you’re looking at now, in Notepad. That’s because Notepad is (was) a simple text editor. Notepad gave it to you as it was.
It doesn’t (didn’t) attempt to autocorrect or spellcheck your work. Imagine trying to markup a webpage, and have the app tell you the <IMG> tag was spelt incorrectly? Notepad left you to decide what was right and wrong. Why does any of this matter? Because I saw code/markup as a craft. I didn’t want some WYSIWYG web design app interfering with my work. If you wanted a text editor with spellcheck and autocorrect functions, there were other options.
Word among them. But now MS has decided to change the script. Autocorrect and spellcheck are coming to Notepad soon. Why, I have no idea, given the features are completely unnecessary. But MS will be MS. I’m surprised they’re not introducing the feature to WordPad, a surely (slightly) more robust word processor than Notepad.
Ironically, I read the news on Daring Fireball, a website with a distinct Apple bent. John Gruber, publisher of Daring Fireball, seems to be all in favour of the move, declaring it overdue:
Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.
The whole thing is though, it’s not wild at all. The absence of these features is precisely what made Notepad so appealing in the first place. No doubt there are simple text editor alternatives for Windows. I’ve found one for Linux. Maybe the autocorrect or spellcheck functions will be a feature of Notepad only on Windows 11, which I won’t see.
Perhaps there will be a way to disable the operation of autocorrect or spellcheck in Notepad. Who knows? Of course, it’s moot point as far as I am concerned. But it is a tad sad to see so profound a change coming to an app that turned out to be quite the life changer for me all those years ago.
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Is climate change increasing the strength of Australian red wine?
9 July 2024
Apparently red wines made in Australia — and quite possibly elsewhere, I imagine — have been increasing in alcoholic strength over recent decades. This seems like a mystery of the times, because the go-to culprit, global warming, may not be responsible. Rather, the way grapes are grown, and changes in fermenting methods — which apparently includes a slight decrease in the amount of water going into the mix — may be playing a part.
In the past, water was most commonly “added” to wine in the form of ice-blocks, in the times before refrigeration. Small — quite small, I believe — quantities of water, were always included in the winemaking process, but that’s been cut back more recently as well. So there we have it, some red wines contain more alcohol, but no one seems one-hundred percent sure why. I’m not the biggest wine-drinker though, so I doubt I’ll be investigating this matter much more.
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Threads first birthday gift to users: advertising?
5 July 2024
Break out the coffee and the cake: a celebration is on the cards. Tomorrow, Threads, Meta’s answer — and much needed foil — to X/Twitter, notches up its first birthday. I was there as the platform began rolling out, and managed to score (just) a relatively low (five-figure) badge number. 98,522 for the record. These membership number badges were, for a time, displayed on a member’s corresponding Instagram (IG) page. Mark Zuckerberg’s IG page boasted the surely desirable number one badge.
But the badges have long since vanished, and Threads, after a few fits and starts, has taken its place — albeit if engagement is on the lower side — with the other micro-blogging style social media platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky. And with one-hundred-and-seventy-five million active monthly users, it’s probably been a good first year for Threads.
In contrast, X/Twitter didn’t reach the same number of active monthly users until well into 2012, some six years after launching. But making these sorts of comparisons between Threads versus what was then Twitter, isn’t all that helpful. Twitter had to start from scratch. It was, just about, the first of its kind. I still recall some the discussions around X/Twitter, following its debut. A lot of people weren’t sure exactly what the platform was about, or what it was meant to achieve.
X/Twitter’s relatively slow uptake could be partly attributed to this bafflement that enveloped the platform. By the time Threads arrived though, we were all seasoned social media platform users. On top of that, it was a simple matter of clicking a button on your IG page, to become a Threads member. The boost IG and — to a lesser extent — Facebook, gave Threads, cannot be understated.
Aside though from posting what I call an online journal entry daily, I don’t really do much on Threads, or any of the social media platforms, for that matter. But I do get drawn into some of the conversations that appear, courtesy of the Threads algorithm, in my main feed. These posts are an intriguing combination of day to day happenings and situations. There are retellings of encounters with people nice, and not so nice. Of dating disasters, and weird goings-on at work.
In a sense, these posts from people I don’t follow, or even know of, are akin to the “suggested for you” content that litters many an IG feed. Somehow though, these Threads posts don’t seem quite as annoying, or intrusive, as the — and I won’t mince my words here — shit that features on IG. My big hope for Threads is that it doesn’t go the way of IG, which now borders on the unbearable. But Threads may become a little more IG-like in another way: the presence of ads.
While the prospect is apparently being considered, it may still be a year before ads begin making an appearance on the platform. To my mind, this is not so much a question of what happens, but rather, the way it happens. Threads needs to turn a profit. We, the users, cannot have this online playground to frolic on, without there being someway for Meta to pick up the tab.
Ads of some sort seem reasonable to me. As I say, it comes down to the way, rather than the what. Perhaps then there will be a measured approach to advertising. Or, worst case, perhaps not. The devil is very much going to be in the details here.
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social media, social networks, Threads, trends
I like your old music better than your new music
3 July 2024
I might say that of U2, whose music I once really liked, especially the stuff they did in the nineties. Achtung Baby. Zooropa. Pop. Even 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. These albums mostly represented their electronic music phase. I’d have them on loop for days at a time.
I drew the ire of friends though who told me I needed to listen to their real work, their earlier stuff. From the eighties. Of course: the eighties. The only decade real music was made, apparently.
But back to U2. I tried to get into their really early stuff, but it wasn’t quite the same, as their… (then) newer stuff. Though I still spin (is that the word I’m meant to use?) New Year’s Day (nothing changes on New Year’s Day…), from time to time, usually in late December. Today though, in 2024 — not 1985, or whatever it was — U2’s more recent music, is worse than their older, nineties, stuff.
Since 2000, nothing by U2 has excited me. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, no. No Line on the Horizon, ditto. Songs of Innocence (remember the iTunes release?), forget it. Songs of Experience, nope. And if I hadn’t have looked it up, I wouldn’t have known U2 released a new album — albeit a re-working of earlier songs — called Songs of Surrender, in 2023.
In contrast, I pre-ordered All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and was outside the music shop before opening, on release day. The guy behind the counter, who (coincidentally) was Irish, and a U2 fan, told me this album was different from their previous three, and would take a few listens to enjoy.
And he was right. I did come to enjoy it. But that was over twenty-years ago. Today though, I barely listen to any U2 (except while writing this). None of it, however, fits into the category of being “gold”, as Nick Heer writes, compared to the new music being recorded by other artists in 2024. A lot of old music might be good, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than contemporary work.
But the bashing of recordings made in 2024 goes on. It’s noise. It’s garbage. It’s getting worse. It’s too easy to make. Whoever said that has obviously never tried to record a song. In any era.
This is the reason I continue listening to Triple J, which predominately plays new and alternative music. It’s an Australian radio station, but I think anyone, anywhere, can stream it. The main point being, it is none of this “hits and memories” stuff. These are the good old days, not some past decade. They’re also more Billie Eilish than Taylor Swift, if that makes a difference.
But look, if you can’t stand today’s music, I suggest you lock yourself away with the songs of, say, the Mama’s and the Papa’s, a sixties act, and whose music is surely “golden age” enough for you. Please do so immediately, so the rest of us can go about enjoying today’s new stuff.
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Ye Old Blogroll, a trove of links to blogs, personal websites
26 June 2024
My thanks to Ray for recently adding disassociated to Ye Old Blogroll, a directory of small and independent websites and blogs. Directory websites like Ray’s are invaluable when it comes to promoting the work of Indie and Small Web writers and bloggers, which is often overshadowed by all sorts of things, including some of the search engines.
Blogrolls and links pages were once often a common feature of websites and blogs, as were web directories — similar to Ye Old Blogroll — in the past, before search engines emerged. They were one of the few ways website owners could make their work known to a wider audience.
While looking around Ye Old Blogroll, I spotted this post about Substack, by Ray. Substack, an online publishing platform, was flavour of the month about two years ago. I even opened an account myself. Bloggers and writers were drawn in by the appeal of earning real money for their work, and I believe many did, or still are, doing well.
But, it was not for me. For one thing, it would have meant “starting over” again. That is, building up a following on Substack, when I already had one, or a semblance of one, here. And why would I go diluting my online presence? It would almost be the same as setting up on something like Instagram. Plus, some other entity would have ultimate control over my page there. They could decide to pull the plug at whim. And then there is this point made by Ray:
On a related note, when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web.
The platform has also drawn the ire of some, including Jason Kottke, who is critical of the sort of content Substack allows to be published. No, stay in your own place. There’ll be ways to make it pay, if that’s what you need.
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blogs, history, IndieWeb, technology, trends
Windows 11 forces data backup to OneDrive, possible workaround
26 June 2024
Maybe it’s time to start a Windows 11 is going just great website, similar to Molly White’s Web3 is Going Just Great. I say this after reading about another instance of heavy-handedness on Microsoft’s part, at Neowin:
Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it.
Quietly and without any announcement. What a way to treat customers/users. OneDrive is a little like Apple’s iCloud, which stores data (files, photos) according to choices made by the individual. The difference, now, between iCloud and OneDrive, is one is user configurable, the other isn’t.
This is foul. Every time OneDrive tried to open on my old Win 10 install, I promptly closed it down. No doubt Microsoft was watching my every move as it was, but there was no way I’d trust them with copies of my data files.
As a result of this move though, some inadvertent OneDrive users are apparently finding their auto-backed up data exceeds the default five gigabyte OneDrive folder limit. Any excess above five-gigs needs to be paid for. Marvellous.
But there may, possibly, be a workaround.
It involves transferring (cut/copy and paste) all files from the default data folders, e.g. Documents, and moving them to a separate folder on your hard drive. Perhaps call the new folder My Data, and then set up sub-folders inside that for your data, e.g. photos, word documents, etc, etc. This is what I’ve been doing all along, I’ve never kept anything in those default folders. I even set up my own separate downloads folder, and configured all downloads to save there.
Trying this might keep data and files out of OneDrive’s reach. For now, anyway.
Despite using Dropbox for a lot of the files I use daily, I also keep backups of everything on thumb drives (which are stowed securely elsewhere). It was a bit of work to set up, but is quick and easy to use now. Hopefully my data storage system also helps keeps my data and files a little more secure.
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