Hot off the press. There has been a lot of focus in the last couple of years from Human Resources (HR) on “work-life balance”. Now the evil managers in HR have decided to no longer refer to “work-life balance” but instead to “work-life integration”. Doesn’t this sound a whole lot more sinister!?
Category Archives: current affairs
13th Tee?
Yes, this is a Japanese zen garden. But does anyone else think it looks like a zen golf course?
What we Value — Branding
I was interested to see a recent article in Businessweek showing the world’s top 100 brands. No I’m not going to list all 100, you can find the full article here, but the top five are:
A number of things surprised me about this. First of all that GE (General Electric) were in the top five. Secondly the significant difference in brand value between the first four and Nokia in too surprised at most of the entries. Perhaps not surprisingly I had at least heard of all the top 100 brands. I was surprised that Ford and Kodak had both fallen over 10 places in the last year. The top UK brand is HSBC in 23rd place, and the full list contains only 6 UK owned brands. Of course just over half the brands are US owned, followed by 10 which are German owned.
Zen Mischievous Moments #132
From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007
Calendar chaos
[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.
Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.
Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …
Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.
One is left with just one question: Why?
Doctoring the Toilet
Excessive DUST?!
Absolutely brilliant — so much so it is stretching my credulity neurons.
As @j-sin syas: I’ve lived in the UK long enough to know that this is the only country where “leaves on the track” stop our trains but this seemed a new level of sillyness. Was the dust “high in fat or low in fat” I wonder?
Terrorism
I have never yet blogged about terrorism. And I am not going to start now. To do so would be to give the perpetrators one of the things they desire: attention. The best solution is to get on with life and leave the law to deal with criminals.
Naked Cyclists
Nice little piece today on BBC News about naked and near-naked cyclists protesting in London and elsewhere about traffic and climate change. Lovely quote at the end:
Bikes and naked bodies harm nobody. Car fumes … are driving us all to climate chaos.
But I’m miffed that I missed it. I would have been there.
Mass Circumcision to Fight AIDS
Here we go! I did warn you.
There was a BBC News item yesterday under the above title tells of a mass programme to circumcise males in Africa because doing so reduces AIDS rates (in males!) by 60%.
Effectively they start by “offering” the procedure to all boys born in hospital. But how long will it before adult & adolescent males are being “offered” the operation; just as men in India were bribed into vasectomies some years back. I put “offering” in quotes because I have no doubt that the offer will be heavy handed and not exactly optional.
I find this type of attitude obscene in today’s world (no, any world). Mutilation of someone, for any reason, when they themselves cannot opt out is to me a violation of human rights and an abuse. The medical profession really should know better. There would be outrage if the equivalent operation was “offered” to females — indeed there is outrage, because it is done to females (tho’ not as an anti-AIDS measure).
Oh yes, and what about the women? Circumcising men does nothing to reduce the chances of a female catching AIDS from an infected male.
Come on guys. Let’s have some medical responsibility — in the round! A little holistic thinking. Let’s find proper ways to tackle AIDS and not resort to barbaric, medieval, mutilation. And let’s stop name-calling against those who don’t agree with you, too.
Charlotte Church Savaged to Death
Charlotte Church* savaged to death in the Beckhams’ back garden
(*that’s the lamb Gordon Ramsay named after the Welsh singer and was rearing for his TV show)
The above is a headline from today’s Daily Mail. You can find the full story here.
Someone please tell me it’s actually April 1st! Or are these people total tossers?