Stupid label guy

There's a Dilbert cartoon about ISO 9001 and it's requirement that everything be labelled. The joke is that the guy doing the labelling has a label of his own declaring that he's the 'stupid label guy'. He seems to have started work at the business school.

Apparently everything in the school is to have it's own bar code. These are being attatched to things with little plastic loops. Once everything has one they'll be counted or checked or something, and presumably removed again. It's a huge, mind numbingly dull task and I can't work out for the life of me why they're doing it. Probably some misguided idea about efficiency.

Or perhaps SBS is going to be ISO 9001 compliant. There's a scary thought.

Update the stupid label guys (there's two of them) are labelling our office as I type. They have many many bits of paper to fill in and look every bit as bored as I thought they would...

De Ja Vue

Next years class are starting to get themselves together at their Yahoo! group. They'd got up to about 25 members through networking before the school sent out an email to all the new admissions pointing them to it.

If you're coming to SBS next year follow the link on the left and sign up for the group. They're sorting out accomodation, arranging meet ups and doing all that good networking stuff people should. Last year we didn't have anything like this until a week or two before class started. I reckon by the time this years class arrive they'll already be buzzing with stories, have made a few friends and planned their first few nights out.

Right, I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a while now and update the doing the MBA section of this website with revision notes and coursenotes for term 2, or Hilary term as it's known in Oxford (no, I don't know why).

And I so wanted to be dangerous

According to this quiz I'm a morally deficient threat to Bush's America.


Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.


What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not really the kind of thing I was hoping for.

This is damn good

It's not often I come across a piece of internet marketing and can't work out how to improve it, but the Howard Dean campaign is awesome. No clever technology, whizzy animation or anything else, just killer content, a genuine voice and enough interactivity to get people involved. It's awesome, and we've got to hope he wins the Democrat nomination just so he can refine these techniques for longer. And the brand, no need to piss about with Logos or slogans the Dean brand is stamped straight through everything here like the letters on a stick of rock, just the way it should be.

Regardless of your politics, this is a good thing for democracy.

The website

The blog

It also raises the prospect, should he ever be elected, of a blogging president. Sadly I'm not american, so I can't vote, and it's pretty hard to see Bush losing the next one, but there's a long way to go yet and this looks like a good start.

How open to business is Oxford?

There's been a recent report, followed up by the press suggesting that Oxford isn't sufficiently open to business. I think they're being a bit harsh, Isis, Oxford's arm for spinning out companies has been responsible for firms with a market cap of $2BN and of 40+ spin outs to date none had folded as of January this year. Thats a frankly amazing result for any investment fund.

It is true that there's room for improvement here, but things have been improving and they're continuing to do so. If Oxford needs to sort out one thing in relation to the business world it's its own internal administration. At the college level Oxford is run horrendously badly with innefficiency and waste all over the place - the result is higher rents for students and a system that seems at once ludicrously wealthy while trying to claim a lack of funds. This has nothing to do with how well Oxford interfaces with the wider business world though.

Tough job market?

This article about unemployment suggests that maybe things aren't as tough out there as people thought after all. If a recovery starts soon we'll be building the next business cycle from a very strong base - with all the attendant risks of inflation, but still its better than a nation on the dole.

Back to the drawing board

The Infernal Tony sent me a link to this article a while back through my comments system, but I only just got round to following it up. I'm not sure things are as black for the online job search as this suggests, but the more time I spend on these sites the more I realise that they're badly built and hard to use.

Not to sound like Jacob here, but the first one of these sites to sort out its usability issues and evolve into a top class online service will bury the others. Since I imagine that most of these sites are struggling for funds once things are moving in your direction acquiring the others should be easy - if its worth it at all.

Things to read

If anyone ever tells you there's a more popular, influential or just plain incredible sport than football get them to read this. Then hope that Rwanda can build on this.

Stuff to read

It all started with an attempt to read every single episode of Doonesbury (thwarted only by a few missing years in the online archive) but lately I've been reading *a lot* of online cartoons. I thought I'd post a list here of my current reading.

From the broadsheets

Doonesbury
Dilbert
Boondocks

Online daily reads

Scary go Round
Goats
Wigu
Diesel Sweeties
Somthing Positive

Occasional reads

The comic section of Salon (registration / day pass required)
Redmeat and Pathetic Geek Stories, both linked from the Onion AV Club

Football crazy

Manchester United have signed a goalkeeper with Tourettes syndrome. Bound to make for some interesting post match interviews...

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

This weekend it was time to enjoy the heatwave, hire a car and head into the English countryside. Saturday was a drive to Stonehenge followed by a sightseeing visit to Bath. Sunday was falconry at Batsford (a manor house about 30 miles from Oxford) and then lazing about at Borton on the Wold, which was about as English a village as you can get, icecreams, cream teas, a brass band playing on the village square and a visiting posse of Hells Angels.

OK, so that last bit isn't strictly traditional English, but its true. The Angels had turned up to visit the Bourton motor museum and chat to each other. Quite what their 60's forebears would have made of this I don't know, but when they came to leave, gunning their engines and revving loudly on the side of the road young couples brought their children over for a closer look and people reached for their cameras.

Their museum tour complete the Angels roared off into the distance, presumably taking their own brand of rebellion, intimidation and two wheeled photo opportunity to other quaint little villages where they too might purchase a cream tea or possibly take in a game of cricket. The power of Little England will get to us all in the end.