Rain, Rain, Rain

I couldn’t believe the rain today. Incred­ibly heavy. Espe­cially after the good weather we have been hav­ing. And it made the office unbear­ably humid even though it was slightly cooler than yes­ter­day.
rain
I guess it means all the for­eign vis­it­ors for the Com­mon­wealth Games now have a bet­ter pic­ture of what Manchester weather is like! :-)

More Heat

It was unbear­ably hot in the office again today. 92 degrees fahren­heit! :-( :-( :-(
I can’t see how ‘sav­ing money’ by not get­ting air con­di­tion­ing can be truly eco­nom­ical when people are too uncom­fort­able to actu­ally con­cen­trate on work. I would guess that lost pro­ductiv­ity across all the staff would soon add up to the cost of the air­con.
But “what the hey”, the bean coun­ters run all com­pan­ies these days don’t they? The bot­tom line is the be all and end all of everything. “If every­one works 20 hours over­time next month we can make our tar­gets”. Never mind the work­ers. Never mind the pro­jects that aren’t ready to be star­ted. Never mind the mor­ale. Never mind the dealines that can never be met!

The Cluetrain Manifesto

I’ve just fin­ished The Cluetrain Mani­festo by Rick Lev­ine et al. This is the second time I’ve read it and it was just as enter­tain­ing and above all rel­ev­ant this time round.
If you want to check out some of the ideas around this see the ori­ginal cluetrain web­site. Or you can now read (almost) the entire book online at Gonzo Mar­ket­ing.
Coin­cid­ent­ally we received an email at work today entitle “Urgent: Com­pet­itor on premises” and which included the line “It is there­fore para­mount that we appear to be thor­oughly pro­fes­sional”. “Appear”? we only have to appear to be pro­fes­sional. It’s pre­sum­ably OK if we are not actu­ally pro­fes­sional! ;-)
Recommended.