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Friday Link: the secret to productivity is the free food

Interesting article on Slate today, on Idiotic Corporate Penny-Pinching …



“Such coffee cutbacks aren’t just petty, they’re self-defeating. Companies get a lot of bang for the buck by providing coffee—a legal drug that keeps employees pepped up. Workers, including this one, need caffeine to get through the day. Get up from your desk, go to the nearest coffee place, and return. Now repeat. That’s how much time a company loses by not providing company joe. On my first day on the job at Bloomberg 14 years ago, I was surprised and pleased to find not just coffee but the entire contents of a convenience store on offer, gratis. The reason? Billionaire Mike Bloomberg didn’t want people leaving the building to get coffee, cookies, or anything else they needed to keep them going on his dime.”


Sure, there are some new perks coming… many we pay for and fine by me as a shareholder. Bloomberg paved the way on keeping up productivity, and many companies realize that it’s good business and boosts employee morale



“Like employees at overgrown startups Google and Yahoo!, Facebook exudes a “Let’s stay in tonight,” vibe–all three companies offer its employees some type of laundry service, and Google and Yahoo! programmers and executives often prefer to eat in their posh corporate cafeterias than venture out.”


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Friday Link: buzzcustomer.com for customer service stories

Many thanks to my friend in support for the link to http://buzzcustomer.com/ which covers the good, the bad and the ugly of customer service:



“All customers have experiences. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. All of them matter. BuzzCustomer.com organizes the world’s customer service stories.”


If you’ve ever wondered what the inside of an international call center looks like, you’re in luck. Also of interest on the site: the BuzzCustomer Rant of the Week.


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Friday Humour: Cartoon characters as Korean art

Thanks to boingboing for the reference to this exhibition at the Arario Gallery in Korea, Hyungkoo Lee’s”Animatus” …



“This Korean art exhibition explores the fictional anatomy of cartoon characters, with elaborate faked-up skeletons for Looney Toons characters, anatomical drawings of Mickey and friends, and many other artifacts from the study of toon anatomy.”


You gotta see this to believe it. My favourite: Mickey Mouse.


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Pluto’s out: will Rhode Island be designated a “dwarf state”? (Friday humour)

As was widely reported, the International Astronomical Union voted to remove Pluto’s designation as a planet in the solar system. Now, it’s considered a “Dwarf planet.”


Note that the IAU has not updated their official page page on the topic of Pluto’s status on the org’s web site, but have published this post on the last general assembly meeting. NASA has already updated their page on the new scientific definition of a “planet” which does not include Pluto. (NASA: “Pluto has now been classified scientifically as a “dwarf planet”. For more details, see the IAU resolution.“)



Download Fullsize TIFF   Download Fullsize JPEG  Credit: The International Astronomical Union/Martin Kornmesser


I take offense to this casual rewriting of history, with Pluto occupying volumes in history books since it was first discovered in 1930 (on February 18th by Clyde Tombaugh, named after Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld). Want to make your opinion known? Contact the IAU’s Secretariat or the Division III president for Planetary Systems Sciences, Iwan Williams.


For traditional (print) textbook companies, this will mean a bonanza of new book sales as they rush the findings of the IAU revision into print. Up to 2 million pages, according to msn Search, will need to be updated. Countless observatories and museums will be spending millions on renovating their exhibits of the solar system: the National Air and Space Museum’s exhibit will no doubt have to build a new broom closet for the dwarf planets, or at least crowd Pluto’s area to include Ceres and 2003UB-313 along side Pluto.


Not likely.


What’s next… will someone decide that Rhode Island is too small to be a full-sized state and designated it as a”dwarf state”? No one in Canada calls Prince Edward Island — the smallest province in Canada — a dwarf province. Perhaps the mini will be classified as a new type of automobile.


This will no doubt carry over to the tech industry, with mini SD storage cards casually referred to as “dwarf storage,” Ultra-Mobile PCs would be Dwarf PCs, and WindowsXP Embedded known as a “dwarf OS.”


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Friday Humour: Star Trek Inspirational Posters

You’ve heard their renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Gentle on My Mind” on The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner.


Spaced Out - The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner


Now you can be inspired every day by these Star Trek Inspirational Posters. 



“BASED ON THOSE DELIGHTFUL INSPIRATIONAL POSTERS WHICH HAVE BECOME A FIXTURE OF DENTIST’S OFFICES EVERYWHERE.”


Some of these are very funny. As the creator of this site said that they’re running up to bandwidth limitations, maybe they could benefit by setting up a free OfficeLive Web site.


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