The World According to Tim Skipper

I was reminded this morning, whilst browsing the Microsoft MSDN site looking for MSDN Subscription info, just how important it is to tell the customer what it is they want to know as clearly and as simply as possible.

I was reminded of this, because Microsoft was doing a very poor job of it. I wanted to know what the current MSDN Subscription packages are and a comparison table of what they contain. It must have taken me 15 minutes of clicking before I eventually found the page I was looking for. That’s insane!

Microsoft can get away with this poor customer experience because of their sheer size and industry position. But for the rest of us with commercial web sites who do not enjoy being a household name, the clarity of key product information is an important aspect which should not be overlooked.

If you’ve not captured visitors’ attention within 30 seconds, you’re done for. So make sure the key selling points of your product or service are not hidden 15 layers deep off of some obscure page.

Clarity = conversions!

Tags: Microsoft, MSDN

I found a really useful article on Private Parking Companies and how you should not pay their usually outrageous demands for money. If you’ve had an invoice from such a company for allegedly parking somewhere you shouldn’t have, then you need to read this article from Pepipoo before you do anything else!

Private Parking Companies - A Guide To An Effective Defence

Pepipoo is a great resource for the victim du jour - uk motorists.

Tags: Parking Fines, PCN, Pepipoo

I’ve been aware that my Sony VAIO TZ series laptop tends to thrash it’s hard drive a lot, even when it’s seemingly doing nothing. Since this has got to be adversely affecting the battery life – currently an excellent 6 hours in Power Save mode – I decided to investigate it further.

The resource monitor tool was showing me that Vista was hammering away at a file named C:\System Volume Information\{<guid style value>}

A bit of Googleing later revealed this to be the Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Basically it creates System Restore points at critical times (such as when installing programs or Windows Updates), but also runs on a scheduled basis.

If you’re good at keeping backups, then you can safely disable this feature and stop all the thrashing. Go to Computers -> Properties -> System Protection and un-check your drive(s).

It seems to have done the trick nicely.

Tags: Disk Thrashing, Sony VAIO, Windows Vista

Why are drivers so scared of overtaking these days? I wonder, is it because of the idiotic and poorly thought out way we are all slowly being brain washed into believing that Speed Kills? Whatever, it’s very annoying to be stuck behind a queue of cars who are all driving too close to each other (but slowly, so that’s ok, only speed kills remember) and afraid of pulling out and getting a move on.

Today coming home from Norwich I came upon a typical scenario on the A140. It’s a pain of a road at the best of times, but today I was stuck behind three cars doing 35 mph for almost 10 miles. The reason; the lead car was following a Moped and was afraid to pass it. Not an HGV, or a coach, a bloody moped!

Now I know you should give mopeds and cyclists room (well maybe not cyclists, they mostly deserve to be run over), but come on… at 35 mph any modern car has enough power to pass a moped with a brief gap in oncoming traffic.

But no, speed kills; overtaking is dangerous so we’ll all just plod along. Not me. Eventually I spotted a gap and took the whole lot out in one go. It goes without saying the lead car then starting flashing and hooting at me. A typical response from that other oh-so-British species; The Overtaker-Hater.

Please support the Safe Speed Road Safety Campaign.

Tags: A140, overtaker-hater, safe speed

I’ve never seen this before tonight

Google has apparently taken a dislike to my IP address. I suspect this is because earlier this evening I installed SEO for Firefox, one of the tools on Aaron Wall’s SEOBook site. Whilst it’s a useful tool for retrieving PageRank and Cache data for any results returned from a Google search, I suspect Google doesn’t like the bandwidth it consumes.

I’ve uninstalled it now.

Tags: Google, SEO Book, SEO Tools