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June 30, 2007

LBS Videocast

I've talked about the London Business School podcast before.

Stepping up the technology a bit, the latest episodes that they've released have been videocasts. The School has done a great job with professor Donald Sull talking about promise based management. I'm a fan of general ideas that hint at other threads that can be researched. Books like Freakonomics do that, good business books do it too. The podcast talks are rather interesting and provide that level of detail as well.

Check it out.

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Posted at 2:50 AM
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June 15, 2007

The Office

www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts
Prediction: someday we will be able to travel faster than sound. We will “break the sound barrier.”
Hah!

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Posted at 3:11 PM
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May 03, 2007

LBS Podcast

For all the business podcast subscribers out there, London Business School has its own podcast!

It's accessible at: http://www.london.edu/podcast/podcast.xml

The content provided so far is interesting, which is to be expected. The production value will probably go up as the school gets more comfortable with the format and the technology.

Do check it out.

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Posted at 2:08 PM
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October 17, 2006

The Party

Definitely not what it looks likeThe Pre-Reno Party turned out rather well. Thanks to everyone who could make it out. Amidst the hilarity, there was:
On a work related note, Beckman Coulter has left a bad taste in my scientific equipment purchasing mouth. Their website does not have the most intuitive organization making it particularly difficult to find information about their products, including part numbers for replacement parts. The help files and documentation for their 32 Karat software is annoying in that it explains only self explanatory terms but not actually what things do - it's like defining a word using that word in it's definition.

I've also had the worst customer service I've experienced from a scientific company. Out of the numerous calls I've made, I've only had two positive experiences. In one of the less positive ones, in searching for a price for a part, I was transferred twice. The first time from a woman who firstly snapped that she could only help me if I had a part number, which I didn't have unfortunately because I couldn't find it on the website. She transferred me to the parts department, who could not help as it wasn't that particular person's product. So he, in turn, transferred me to the PF2D specialist. He promptly hung up on me after telling me the part number so that I wasn't able to transfer back to the pricing woman.

My latest annoyance is that I just found out that they charge $30 for a Beckman tech to e-mail me a PDF version of a product's instruction manual. This actually ends up costing them money in the long run - think of the number of relatively minor service calls that could be avoided if people had a manual around to answer simple questions. Less service calls equals less staff paid to handle the existing call volume. Not like it matters to them though, customer service seems to be the last thing on their mind.

Finally, in the world of my television, Heroes is turning out to be a wicked show. I was a little turned off initially because of the corny dialogue, cheesy flying effects and Ali Larter's special power of having multiple personalities. It's really winning me over with every subsequent episode though because of Ali Larter herself, the interesting ways the characters are using the powers, the special effects that they use for Hiro's time stopping power and how badass Hiro looks as a time travelling teleporting ninja from the future. Yatta! (やった!)

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Posted at 8:52 PM
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