Entries Tagged 'Tech commentary' ↓

Errr, hi Westpac. You might need to update your internet banking site pretty soon to let people pay bills in 2010!

Unless you think no-one’s got any money over Christmas to pay bills. Bit distressing that your choices don’t go beyond December 09.

So I survived my first ever presentation at NZX to the Australian Investor Relations Association conference on 12 November. The presentation was ‘Xero & Social Media’. I was totally petrified and worried that what I had to share wasn’t rocket science or anything particularly educational for a group of CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and comms/marketing people but it seemed to go down well. In the end it was a small case study (only had to survive at the podium for 10 mins!) on how we use a blog and Twitter at Xero to communicate with our customers.

I featured on the NZX blog pretty much straight away! And eventually got a recording of the presentation to go with a write-up on Xero’s blog.

Here’s the presentation below (click the big ‘play’ arrow to watch it now directly on your computer) or if you have an iPod or dodgey internet connection or speed you can download this version of it (17.7MB)*.

*Right click on that link, save to your computer; then find where you saved it and double click to open. Please note if watching this version on your computer (if you have the right software (if you don’t it won’t play)) that it is designed for a small iPod screen so it will be quite small to look at.

Really irks me when product writers put those of us who are damn good at our jobs to shame. Or perhaps in this case there was no product writer, that they thought their users would ‘just figure it out’ or they left the writing of instructions in the geeks hands … don’t get me wrong, geeks are brilliant, it’s amazing what they can do, but they and the people that employ them need to realise that there are just some things they’re not good at. And that that’s OK.

It’s just a small thing, and yes I did figure out what to do, but I ALWAYS notice stuff like this and get annoyed by it:

Errr, where’s ‘No’?

Aaaaaaand we’re back!  Blog now brought to you by WordPress. Didn’t The Mister do well? Obviously looks a bit different and loads of things behind the scenes to make management better for me. For you, hopefully still much the same and all my old content, blog pics and categories are in tact. Mothers, making a comment should be easier – at the moment there’s no need for the secret code thing however if I get unsolicited comments we may have to put it back. At minimum, complete just your name and leave your comment. I think those of you that have a feed will have to use the RSS button on the right somewhere to get a new one.

For the moment the family website is gone and orangethings.com and orangethings.com/blog both go to the same place. All the family photos will come back eventually and as I don’t really want those public I’ll send a link when I know what’s going on.

Enjoy!

BLOG GOING OFFLINE:
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Some time in the next week it’s highly likely that the Orange Blog and website will go offline as due to circumstances beyond my control involving the physical relocation of a server all my data and photos have to be moved somewhere else. Yikes!

But rest assured we are in the capable hands of The Mister and even though when everything turns back on it will undoubtedly look very different, he assures me that it will still be living at the same URL (web address). Bad news for the throngs of followers using the RSS feed, there’ll probably be a new feed URL … will let you know!

For daily addicts, if you’re following me on Twitter (twitter.com/orangegirlnz) you might get some warning.

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Over & out.

Bye bye Das Blog (yes, am probably the last person on earth still using it).

Have to manage a few conversation threads at work now and so as to not get confused I found where to completely personalise my own Twitter account so that it looks totally different from the work one.

I have to say, that’s a LOT of orange! Hope it doesn’t scare people off!

Blog is another year older – that’s 5 years now I’ve been rambling away. Take a look at my first week of posts back in 2004. A rather tentative start. But in that lot of posts you’ll see the first Sunday visit to Nikau and the first rave about their date scones! God, that’s 5 years ago?

Will have to see if the Mister can extract again how many blog posts I’ve done since I started. People sometimes scoff at me because I don’t do Facebook – quite apart from the fact that they won’t let me be Orange Girl, I don’t need it, I have my lovely blog.

Some time later: the Mister saved his ‘how many blog posts are there?’ script and can report that as of today, there are 1230! That’s a lot. And considering this time last year there were 868 I’ve been rather prolific this year!

My Office Buddy has told me about 1-day.co.nz before, a website where there is a one day sale of one item only – something totally random. Today the item on sale is ‘a bag of crap’ for $11. I don’t think it’s literally crap, but rather some random items with a minimum value of $11.

So I went to the site to check it out. And it’s overloaded. But they have such a cool error message – they basically just say upfront that the site is overloaded and you have to try again, but while you’re sitting there refreshing the page, random pictures of overloaded things are displayed to keep you occupied. The one I like best is this poor little donkey …

… how on earth does he get down? I guess he’s just up there braying and flailing his legs around until they slowly lift off the boxes until the cart is light enough to lower him down. The unloaders would have to be careful not to take a big heavy item off and lower the cart too quickly!

Ommigod, while I’ve been tying this she’s gone ahead and bought a bag of crap! Wonder what it’ll be …

Look! It’s The Very Hungry Caterpiller helping to spell ‘Google’ this morning in honour of the first day of spring. Takes me back to my childhood – that big hardcover book with holes in the pages.

Hmmm, guess that means it’s first day of autumn on this side of the world.

So last weekend The Mister’s niece started blogging and today I got an email from my niece. Pretty cool.