I’m often amazed by the number of people I cross who can’t explain what they’re working on. Often after years of dedicated work they’re still defining themselves as “a mix of X and Y” or by what they’re not.
It’s very geeky but I do like this; how do you explain how your new software will work? As a comic.
Google on Google Chrome – comic book
It’s not perfect but they’ve hit on something here.
Flightblogger Breaks Obama Running Mate Story – One Man and His Blog
However, they didn’t give him the credit. Argh!
Hugh is asking for commissions…
“I’m going to be hanging out my shingle more in the cartooning department. I think it’s time.”
gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: gapingvoid commissions
Anyone who has read this and this will know that think that Hugh’s work is fantastic and worth every cent.
I’ll add the final part to the story to the blog over the weekend.
“My nightmare: I’m piloting a spaceship over the surface of the Empire’s Death Cube, which is folding randomly because of a warp in space-time, and my only hope is to fly to the left and insert the trapezoidal nose of my ship into the trapezoidal hole of the Death Cube’s energy portal. And then I look out my window and see that the Cube is made out of seafood.”
For $100 you can buy CDs that contain all the National Geographic magazines since they started over 100 years ago. Basically, they make a fantastic present. Why do I know? I have one.
Now you’d imagine that they have a pretty slick operation around this so that I can keep my software up to date. And even subscribe to updates.
Well think again. From the support web site…
Updates and Replacements
There have been four previous iterations of the National Geographic Complete package (108 Years, 109 Years, 110 Years and 111 Years), and each was released by different companies. All are incompatible with each other and act as stand-alone products. Some were 16-bit (and thus incompatible with our current 32-bit version), others were just constructed differently by the companies contracted to produce them over the past few years.Unfortunately the only solution for this is to purchase National Geographic: 10 Legendary Years. This will bring any version you own up to the year 2000. However, this too will be a stand-alone program (the 10 Legendary Years). It will not be accessible via your older National Geographic program.
So for example if you have the National Geographic 108 Years—it ends at 1996. For any years up to 1996 you could use your original program, but to view the years 1997-2000 you would need to open the 10 Legendary Years program separately. And yes, since the 10 Legendary Years product also includes the years 1990-1996 there will be some overlap.
The only way to have a complete and fully integrated product is to purchase the current full set, National Geographic 112 Years. We apologize for any inconvenience.
National Geographic Magazine CD-ROMs: Technical Support, Help
Part I of this story can be found here… Not loving the core product… (A Hugh MacLeod story: Part I)
On May 4th 2008 Hugh published this…
This I loved for two reasons; first, it was a page of drawing without characters or words; second,it showed a part of the process of creating the larger work. I’m very interested about the process that artists go to to get to the final product. It’s often far more complex than most people believe.
Hugh is one of those bloggers who publishes his email address. Therefore, I simply emailed him. Told him that I loved the series of Moleskins and asked him if he’d consider framing one and selling it.
Hugh replied in minutes that he was planning on framing one for sale. I replied and asked for a price.
This is the moment that Hugh showed himself to be a true gentlemen. It would have been so easy to have sold his work on eBay or to have published on his blog that he was thinking of selling the work. Either way I believe he could have made far more money than by selling it to me. Hugh could have made life very difficult for me but he didn’t. He treated a guy that he didn’t know very well and I’m eternally grateful.
Hugh quoted a price that I think was fair; although it was enough to make me think twice and to discuss it with Mrs Wilkinson! But in 48 hours we had a deal.
Delivery is for Part III.
In the 70s Xerox decided that they could give away the low-end printer business because they could keep the high-end to themselves. That worked so well that the company almost died.
Now the financial analysts that thought it was a good plan have decided to do the same thing to themselves!
“The jobs most affected so far are those with grueling hours, traditionally done by fresh-faced business school graduates — research associates and junior bankers on deal-making teams — paid in the low to mid six figures.”John Robb’s Weblog: Outsourcing Wall Street
So you’ve a spherical touch sensitive screen to demo; so you’ve done the photos and the map of the world demo. Great. But how on earth did you avoid doing a crystal ball demo?
“BTW Jason Carreira, please do stop with the personal insults. I tried to direct message you to discuss further but you dont allow messaging and dont have any contact info. – Andrew Baron”
Scoble never mentioned this aspect of the service.