Timeout : Celebrating Life
August 31, 2009 at 11:37 am
Sometimes on this like this, we need a little reminder to marvel at life. On this grim, miserable Monday I dedicate this to you.
Came across this by way of @emilytully on Twitter. (where else?)
Dot ie For A Fiver
August 25, 2009 at 8:08 am
For one week only, Blacknight are offering .ie domain names for just €5. You can register or transfer domains for that price. That’s amazing value.
The special price is limited to one order per customer and you can only register one .ie domain for a maximum of two years at this special price. So if you register for 1 year it’s €5, while registering for 2 years would be €10.
They don’t tie you in for hosting – although I find their order form is a bit complex and can often lead people to unwittingly transferring hosting and registration to Blacknight. This offer is available until 29 August, this Saturday, so get registering now!
More information on €5 domains
Tags: .ie domains, blacknight, Domain name registration
Should This Be You?
August 24, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I was racking my brains over the weekend about what to write about the Toyota iQ. I decided to have a little nosy over to the other bloggers to see what they’re writing about and how they’re getting on with their new motors.
- Rob’s been to Dingle and back. And very nippy he found the journey too.
- Keith has fallen in love! His insurance is being suspended and motor tax refunded. “And the IQ will indeed be the only car we use.”
- And Christine?
Christine, the 4th of the bloggers chosen to drive around in a Toyota iQ, doesn’t have a blog. She has a Twitter account, but isn’t that busy on it either. I tweeted her on 14 August to ask her for her blog url so I could link to it in a post, and she only got back to me on 19 August with a reply.
Why did Christine get selected? Is it because she’s in PR
The Toyota iQ that went to Christine could have been given to one of the many hundreds of others who applied. I’m sure they could find someone who actually has a blog.
Do you have a blog and a driving licence? Why don’t you let Toyota know that you’re ready, willing and available to take ownership of an iQ and write about it?
Please note that I’m not just picking on Christine for no reason. I just feel that it needs to be highlighted that 3 out of 4 bloggers are doing their thing about the Toyota iQ. If there is some reason that a non-blogger was selected that I’m not aware of, then please let me know.
Tags: Christine Duggan, Toyota IQ
Dublin City Council Fail
August 17, 2009 at 9:22 am
I tried to pay my bin charges online. Overall a crappy user experience.
The back of my bill says to go to Dublin City.ie and select online payments. Apart from the fact that there are browser issues going on, making content get hidden behind a navigation column, the online payment button is hidden:
Shimmy on over to Dublin City Council home page and have a look. Can you see it? No?
I couldn’t either.
It’s located under top 10 content, under online services, it’s a blue link that’s not highlighted. So obviously the council don’t think it’s very important. Or maybe more people are interested in ‘careers in Dublin City Council’ which appears to be the second most important thing on the site, judging by its position on the right hand nav bar.
I did a search. [Search works] But more problems arose when I tried to pay online. Which would you choose from the following list?
I chose Environmental Waste Charges. But I was wrong.
Then I chose Other Payments. This is where the real dumbness starts. The service and item dropdown boxes don’t work. They have nothing in them. So this entire form is a waste of time.
So how do I pay online?
I don’t. I have to telephone Dublin City Council. I’ve done that before and run into problems trying to pay with Laser. They can’t accept it over the phone for some reason.
This is crap. We have a large highly funded council that moans about people not paying their bin charges. I’m a good citizen trying to pay my way and they make it so bloody difficult! I’m very surprised about this as I know that Dublin City Council is a client of IQ Content – the usability experts. I’d love to hear from someone at IQ why they made the decision to hide online payments on the site. The other errors are obviously programming and I think the internal IT team who looks after the site at Dublin City Council can put their hand up for that.
Tags: Dublin City Council Fail, pay bin charges online
3 Things That Annoy Me About Toyota iQ
August 14, 2009 at 8:40 am
I’ve been driving the Toyota iQ three weeks now and I’ve come up with three annoying things:
- Over anxious petrol alert – there are four quadrants on the petrol indicator thing. As soon as it reaches the last one, it flashes! Flashing indicates to a user that there is something immediate and urgent that needs to be fixed. Having a quarter of a tank of petrol is not immediate or urgent.
- Over sensitive passenger seat. I am unable to fling my handbag on the passenger seat beside me because the car thinks it’s a person sitting there without a seat belt and it bleeps to express its disgust. I’m not into oversized handbags, I carry normal ones. Admittedly I carry a lot of shit around in them, but they do not weigh the same as a small person. Toyota – please adjust the weight settings. OK, so maybe I shouldn’t be putting my handbag on the passenger seat in the big city (thanks Grannymar for pointing that out!), in that case, the 2nd most annoying thing about the iQ is the horn. If the horn of the iQ had a voice, it would sound like David Beckham! That’s not the kind of voice you need when you’re snarling at big cars who cut you off. Or when you’re giving drivers nodding off at the traffic lights a little nudge to move on.
- Not sensitive enough indicators. A lot of turns I take don’t result in the indicator being switched off automatically. I know that my old car switches off on these turns because they’re ones I take every day. I just have to remember to turn off the indicator, and that’s another thing. This may have something to do with:
But I am loving the fact that in the Toyota iQ I have become a Master of the 1 Point Turn!
This car is so small in length, you can do a complete about turn in a single lane! If you, like me, often try to take a nifty shortcut and end up facing the wrong direction, you’ll love this! No more endless driving looking for a suitable side street to turn around in. Now you can simply do a sharp turn of the driving wheel and be facing the other direction in one go.
Tags: Toyota IQ
How Things Change (Not Really)
August 13, 2009 at 9:46 am
I’ve been doing a fair bit of networking recently and have noticed a rake of new Internet Marketing companies about. Some position themselves as social media marketing specialists. Others focus on just search. There even seems to be a mini-industry around events aimed at PR and advertising people teaching them how to Tweet, Blog and take part in social media! I believe there’s plenty of room for everyone because budgets are moving over to digital and with the exciting opportunities that emerge day by day, there’s sure to be plenty of work to keep everyone busy.
What I’ve been reflecting on is how I market my business now as opposed to 2003.
- In 2003 I set up Brightspark as a pure Internet Marketing Ireland provider. Services offered were search, pay per click and email. Much of my time was spent making the case as to why budgets needed to be allocated to internet marketing. This was not long after the dot com bomb which was built on the mantra of ‘build it and they will come’.
- By 2005, Google had IPO’ed and everyone who came to Brightspark wanted a ‘website and a number 1 on Google’. I had added in website design to the Brightspark mix because I had found in many cases I was working on driving traffic to sites that failed due to poor design. I had a lot of conversations at this time about why a number 1 on Google was not necessarily the best bang for a (limited budget) buck. Business blogging and repackaging blog content in the form of emails for marketing were often a strong alternative.
- Web 2.0 dawned in 2006 and we were on the case. For corporate Ireland, this didn’t mean an immediate switch into App-land. But Brightspark made a point of incorporating blogs, links to Flickr, and other social apps into as many sites as possible. We were responsible for the creation of Ireland’s first social networking site aimed at Spanish speakers – created on the Ruby on Rails platform. You could say this was the start of social media marketing. At this time there was a huge appetite for blogging training and writing for the web training. Corporate Ireland had switched on to the importance of content. By now, design focused on the user experience was included in all of our websites.
- Today we are blessed with such a wide variety of tools. The industry has matured and specialisms have emerged. Web design has come down significantly in price thanks to Wordpress. And it’s increasingly difficult to find examples of really bad sites when preparing for the various training courses I offer. Before I presented people with a list of services on offer. Nowadays it’s much more tailored to the individual company’s needs. No, that’s not marketing speak, it’s true! Most internet marketing strategies begin with listening. A quick scoot around Twitter and the blogosphere to find out what people are saying about a brand, a company, or in the absence of that – a need. And then come up with an online strategy that will reach out and engage.
If I was to summarise what I’m doing now, it’s less about offering services from a menu - more about listening to the company and having a conversation with the management team about their vision for the business. Our job is to know what’s hot online and to advise on what will work and what won’t work for a particular business. We work with clients to help them to translate their business vision into something that will work well online, generate a return on their investment, and make us all happy.
There you have it! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Tags: Blogging Training Ireland, Business Blogging Ireland, Email Marketing Ireland, Internet Marketing Ireland, Search Engine Optimisation Ireland, Social Media Marketing, Web Content Writing, Write for Web Training
It’s All About Perception Baby
August 11, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Driving around in an 09 D motor takes a bit of getting used to. It’s all about perception and I know that people who see me in a brand new car must look and make certain assumptions about who I am, what I’m doing. Maybe I’m a trophy wife who’s traded in the Beamer runaround for something more green and kinder to the environment? Nah. I don’t look the part. Maybe I’m one of those people I read about who live off the credit card and hire purchase agreements and pay on the never never? Nah. Not enough bling in my style.
My neighbours all think I’m doing ‘awfully well’ because I’ve upgraded cars from a 92 D to a 09 D in the middle of a recession!
When I’m on the motorway, assuming my rightful place in the fast lane, other cars (and their owners) are looking at me! “What’s that little smart car doing in the fast lane”, thinks the fat Audi. The BMW thrusts and pulls at its owner to be allowed to ride up my ass and overtake me. Ubiquitous brands merely glance out of their wing mirrors as I flash by at speed.
It’s a nippy little thing the iQ.
The thing is – I would have looked askance at a half-a-car if it flew by me. When I’m driving my MX, I look like I belong in the fast lane. But I forgot that I wasn’t driving the lean machine last weekend, when we took the iQ on a trip up North. I had to be really careful about speed. My old car lets me go up to 140km and then starts to get a bit rattly and loud – so much so it drowns out the stereo. So I kind of keep it in check.
The new baby, Toyota iQ, allows me to creep upwards and upwards. It remains calm, unrattled, and keeps churning out the tunes. I did a double take a few times when I looked at the speedometer and it was on 160km! This is what I believe is comfortable cruising speed (on a fairly deserted motorway in daylight). My Toyota iQ is more than able to handle it. So if you’re considering buying one of these babies for yourself, the nice men in Toyota won’t be able to tell you this, but this speed is more than comfortable and I’m sure you could push it a little higher if you dared:
Tags: Toyota IQ
More Silly Typos
August 5, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I wouldn’t go to a college that had a big obvious spelling mistake on its home page. No, not even if the course was not English. It shows a lack of professionalism. Certainly give the impression of ‘put together at great haste’. I wouldn’t spend €1395 on a course with these guys – Institute of Business & Technology. What do you have to do to become an “Institute” anyway? Can I be the Institute of Spelling & Grammar?
Tags: grammar police, Spelling mistakes
Getting To Know My iQ
August 4, 2009 at 8:59 am
I’ve spent the last week nipping about town in my new little iQ and this is my first report.
When I picked up the car at Toyota, I had to sit through an engineering/tech spec talk. You know in school when you did those aptitude tests? The ones about colours, words and numbers I always scored really high. But the one about the folded out boxes that are meant to check your spatial awareness? Let’s just say that I would still be in the hall right now trying to work out the answers! So the thought of enduring a talk on it was a little off-putting.
But I’m so glad I did it. Understanding some of the unique features about the iQ has enabled me to talk about the car with interested people. And boy – does everyone want to talk about it! Even non-car people like my mum came over all “petrol pump queen” on me. So being able to tell people that the way the heating/air conditioning system for the iQ was designed is so great, that Toyota are going to roll it out across all future models of car in future – is a good thing. Or to demonstrate how the under leg air bags would work in the event of a crash is comforting; they would push your legs up which would have the effect of pushing you down in the car seat and enabling the seat belt to hold you in more.
Other features I’m liking a lot but which I’m told are standard in all new cars are:
- Bluetooth – my phone hooks up with the car and whenever there’s a call, the music on the stereo lowers down and I can choose to accept or reject the call. It also tells me when there’s a text.
- Heated seats – I will get great value out of them come winter, but yesterday they came in handy to dry my jeans which were wet after a walk on Brittas in which waves came quite close!
- Stereo – the speakers in my own car are blown so when you put the volume above 15, audio gets a little shaky. Not so in the iQ which also comes with a jack for your ipod.
- Smooth – I feel like I’m cruising up high, rather than rumbling down low as in my old car. [My fiance misses the ball caressing vibrations that come with the MX!]
Things I’ve noticed driving:
- I don’t get so many looks as I do in my MX5.
- The car is much shorter in front and back, but yet the same width, so it’s rather like driving a square. Took me a day or two to get used to this new scale.
- There’s no such thing as a 3 point turn in an iQ. Because the car is so short, you can about turn in the middle of the road in one. I used to live in Australia, a country that is very fond of its ‘U-eys’. I developed a dependency on U’eys as a way of navigating, so doing it in one go is sweet.
- iQ is easy to get a park. And I do believe that iQ drivers should only have to pay half price for car spaces – because we only use half a space! My MX5 is half a car – but it’s halved across the top, making it low to the ground. The iQ is also half a car, but it’s halved vertically with bits gone in front and back. Here’s a photo taking on a rainy night last week beside Trinity:
Things I’m not liking:
- The car stereo is controlled by a button the driving wheel. I like the fact that the driver is the only one who gets to control the sounds (!), but I’ve noticed my hand will flick off the button while driving and will change the channel on the radio accidentally. Maybe I just need to get used to this and maybe I need to programme the stereo better…
- I’ve had one go at tuning in the stations on the radio but it’s darned difficult! At the moment, I’m enduring the presets of Q102 and 98FM which are very un-me. I will not be beaten by a car stereo, more time will be devoted to this task this week.
- Overtaking going fast on a motorway… I didn’t feel like I had as much power as I do in my automatic MX5. When I want to overtake in my MX5, I floor it and go. Yesterday on the N11, I found I was willing myself to go faster to overtake a fairly fast moving car. I know that this might be me and getting used to driving a stick again. I will know more next week after I take the car out of the city, we’ll see how she fares then.
- Because it’s all space conscious, there’s only a small round space in the middle of the two front seats for dumping odds and ends. In my old car, this is a long rectangle shape and I use it to keep all the kit a girl needs when driving her car: nail file, spare lip gloss and lipstick, tissues, etc. They all have to live in the driver’s door which makes them not as accessible.
Overall though I’m liking the iQ.
It’s not as good-looking as my MX5, but is not as bone rattling or noisy either. It just doesn’t have the same smile as the MX. If we were to liken the two cars to girls I went to school with, the MX is the good looking popular girl with the long shiny hair and the perfect smile; but when you spend an afternoon hanging out with her, you find she’s a little disappointing. Not so disappointing that you wouldn’t go to her house after school some other day. But the enjoyment of hanging with her is more to do with being seen and the boys she’d attract.
The iQ on the other hand, is one of the quieter girls at school. Not so pretty, in fact her face looks like she got a punch in it and it stuck… but once you spend a little time with her, you find she’s got a quick witted mind, has depth and ideas that the other girls don’t know about. You would enjoy going to her house after school.
First petrol report: €29.90 to fill the tank.
I’ve done about 200 km so far.
Here’s how the others are getting on:
Rob Cumiskey is planning a trip to Dingle in it this weekend
Keith Bohanna has a video showing his parking skills
Christine Duggan who I can only find on Twitter – you got a blog I can link to Christine?
Tags: Christine Duggan, Keith Bohanna, Rob Cumiskey, Toyota IQ, Venntertainment
