Some people asked me what is this thing I have with Billy Connolly, what’s the reason for such an outspoken admiration, so I thought of using a video I show in one of my workshop when I talk about meanings that go way beyond the language that expresses them.
Not exactly SFW, but then, mr. Connolly in his entirety is hardly that.
I ‘m not sure about the year, must have been the late Eighties. Lotus, a company built around easy to understand desktop software introduced a new product, called Lotus Notes, and we had to launch it on the italian market.
Problem is, nobody understood what Notes really did. We didn’t, journalists didn’t, potential clients didn’t. A classic case of a solution in search of a problem.
What we understood, however, are a few use cases, and around these we built a play on collaboration, the power of asynchronous communication, replication, and a few other things. We didn’t have client testimonials, so we invented two fictitious companies, one backward company called Salumificio Porcelli (loosely translatable as “McPigs salami factory”) and the forward looking Frizzi & Lazzi (“Jokes & Puns”) which were dealing with exactly the same problem, hiring a junior sales executive: request forms must be filled and transmitted between the requisitioning office in Roma and the headquarters in Milano, reviewed and approved. An incident causes the whole thing to be bounced from one employee to another without much notice.
In the end, however, the modern Frizzi & Lazzi overcomes all the hurdles and completes its task without breaking a sweat, while the antiquated Salumificio Porcelli gives up, showing what a difference it makes to adopt a modern collaboration software!
This the plot; in the space of three weeks we wrote the play and “hired” the players, all of them volunteer employees of Lotus Italy, including the CFO Ernesto (the moustached gentlemen reading the intros) the CEO (yours truly), sales, tech support, marketing, receptionist – almost everybody ended up doing something and although we had to pull a few allnighters for rehearsals while we carried our our day jobs, we had an insane amount of fun doing it.
Our marketing agency built a double theatrical stage with a screen showing the product at work in the middle to allow for the conversation between the offices. The application shown during the demo was also locally custom written and tested; everybody got engrossed in making this thing a success: I do not remember exactly who sourced the huge mortadella sausage whose dusting by Enrico provokes the laugh at 7:38 but I remember we ate it afterwards.
The result was luckily captured for posterity and if you speak italian, you may enjoy it below:
Obviously it was meant to be a funny play, so parts were allocated to stir even more laughs, primarily among ourselves: so the snappy, impatient manager was played by placid Enrico, I played the lowest-ranking employee, Angelo (our oldest colleague) played the “junior sales exec” and so forth.
I doubt our US or European HQ ever knew what we were doing, I don’t seem to remember we asked permission, but again, Lotus was never a company where people asked much permission to do anything.
My son travels a lot by train and has retained an insane passion for videogames, so I gave him a PSVita for Xmas. Upon unboxing it and starting one of the free games, it crashed with error C12828-1; unlike his dad he’s a great tinkerer with all things “real” and “physical”: you can ask him to fix the garage door, but has zero patience with electronics.
So the PSVita comes back to me to see if I can get it to work.
Them boards opinate that C12828-1 error could be related to a database corruption when attempting to write a status to the memory card (which we don’t have, but why the hell do they sell the console WITHOUT it if it’s mandatory?) which in turn could be originated by a faulty network connection: when the PSV tries to synch with the PS Network, the faulty connection returns a bogus error message which then screws the database and crashes the whole system.
So, in this order (and multiple times):
At which point I run out of options, and I do what my wife suggested five minutes after my son reported the problem: return it to the store, get another one, works like a charm.
Women will rule the world!
The big thing seems to be 4k television – for those of you who live in a cave, 4k TV is the next reason why you should throw away your 3D HDTV, in exchange for one that has roughly sixteen times as many pixels.
But is this good enough?
Turns out it isn’t – some bloke actually calculated the resolution of the human eye (full paper here): the condensed version is that the human eye has a resolution of about 24,000 by 24,000 pixels.
This is an interesting answer to my friend Roberto @connessoviaggia: “…oh, I thought you said *twenty*four-k!”"
This is a spam post – I have never been to Belarus, so I cannot have a view; apologies to those who may have come here mislead by the title, but I wanted to see if this could intercept some Google juice from Belarus citizens.
There are a bazillion Gangnam Style parodies, but I think this is one of the best – especially when you think there is a PR hero somewhere who convinced the NASA people to do this:
(pay attention to the astronaut at 1:57 – hilarious !!)
Progress in my evil plan to obtain thorough global fame through this blog is progressing too slow, and although I have added a few countries to the list, there are still ample swath of Africa and Central Asia where nobody knows what the “Son of Geektalk” is.
Network, come to the rescue
Getting stranded is no joke.
Getting stranded in the australian wilderness must be even less funny.
But if a hapless motorist leaves for said australian wilderness armed uniquely with an iPhone is now Apple’s fault? I have criticized Apple more than once, I have mocked the mistakes in their maps just like the next guy but are we really growing a generation of people dumb enough to stop reading signs, asking for directions and solely listening to a device which – who knows – may break down, may run out of juice, may not be able to get a satellite fix and whose quality of maps the entire world has jeered at?
And – of course – you don’t even bother to install on your precious iStoopid a shortcut to Google Maps, why would you?
I say, no digital tool ever will replace common sense; for anyone who’s convinced of the opposite, let Darwin run its course.
Anyone willing to guess when Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video will break the one billion views mark?
Anyway, I just love the yellow outfit, where do I buy one?
