The fourth podcast in a very occasional series:
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We may hate Tesco, but who in their right mind would trust a “National Food Service”?
The reason why postmodernism is simultaneously rubbish and a target for fierce and animated criticism is that it is corrosive rubbish. And no, it is not corrosive to science. With few minor hiccupps (e.g. Rene Thom), postmodernism passed sciences and mathematics by. It changed absolutely nothing, it influenced nothing. It isn’t on a different planet, it is in a different universe. But postmodernism managed to impact massively on humanities and social sciences. At best, it made much of them into laughing stock, at worst it caused lasting damage to generations of humanities scholars and social scientists.
Comment at Harry’s Place following the death of Baudrillard
The beginning of Pulcinella, Stravinsky in his neo-classical phase. Lovely.
When we handle a tech support incident with a well-qualified person here in New York, chances are that’s the last time we’re ever going to see that particular incident. So with one $50 incident we’ve eliminated an entire class of problems.
Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again
Joel Spolsky, Seven steps to remarkable customer service
In publishing on this site I’ve chopped and changed the software used so many times the data’s now a bit of a mess and many of the links are broken. I started with Blogger, using it to post to this site, moved on to a set of custom PHP scripts, then took up MoveableType, then used a short-lived custom XML publishing tool I built in Delphi, then Wordpress, then Drupal, then Wordpress, then Drupal, then Wordpress and now Drupal again.
There’s something unsatisfactory about all this…
This is an OpenID server endpoint. For more information, see http://openid.net/
A man accused of robbing a Belfast lingerie shop at knifepoint has fallen back on a time honoured defence – namely, his claim that he believed he was a female elf at the time.
Metro, Elf thief
Stepping to the rhythm of Kurtis Blow/ Who needs to think when your feet just go
