Other Musings

This section of the website contains a series of musings across a range of topics from business to humour, some of which originate back to September 29th 2010:

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  • How to make Agile work for product development… It’s all about the people

    Originally posted on Stuart Lynn – Masters Athlete: Some background before I get into the detail, I’ve been developing small, medium and large ‘shrink wrapped’ products for the past 12 years and before that I worked on large multi-million pound in house projects. Why do I give this background? Well it’s to set context in…

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  • You need to hire for Innovation

    Innovation is a topic very close to my heart and a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop delivered by Dr Anne Stevens the VP of Design at Kone elevators. The session was hugely insightful and very educational… and whilst I’m not going to share the details verbatim, I thought

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  • How ironic that the Red Bull team are relaxed, did they know they were going to win?

    Another video post from my visit to the British GP at Silverstone this year. This time it’s looking into the Red Bull garage. Of all the teams in the pit lane they looked (and sounded) the most relaxed. Surely you would expect the opposite effect with Red Bull! Did they know Mark Webber was going to

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  • Memories from Silverstone with the Marussia Team (Turn up the volume the sound is awesome)

    Following on from my “Petrolhead Dream Heaven” post a few days ago I promised to share some of the videos I took from inside the Marussia garage. The first is of the mechanics making some last minute changes to the cars before practice starts: Not long after here’s Charles Pic leaving the garage (how clean

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  • F1 Safety Car and Medical Car Racing… turn up your volume

    From the British Grand Prix, the safety car and the medical car having a race… What if they crash? Not to worry they have two safety cars… But they only have one Medical Car

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  • Petrolhead – Dream Heaven

    Being a certified petrolhead one of my long time ambitions was to go behind the scenes of a Grand Prix and witness first-hand what goes on inside a F1 garage. Most people normally associate F1 with the world of designer attire, fine wine, and of course a fair amount of corporate schmoozing. Whilst I don’t

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  • Scottish Power – A story of Excellent Customer Experience

    If you read my blog you’ll know I’m a great believer in shouting about great service when I come across it and this time I’d like to shout out Scottish Power. We’ve been a customer of Scottish Power for a few years now and we’ve generally been happy with their service. However a few weeks

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  • The UK Tax system explained (in beer…)

    I recently picked this up on Facebook and prompted by the recent LibDem conference I thought I’d share it here on the blog… Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to £100… If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something

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  • Jaguar XK – The Seducer

    Finally got round to taking some pictures of the new pride and joy… Also been playing around with iPhoto which is really cool…

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  • Seduced by a thing of beauty…

    This is a sequel to my “Almost Seduced by a thing of beauty” post a couple of weeks back As you’d expect from the title, the temptation was too much and I’ve finally been seduced by the thing of beauty. Putting aside my own petrol head desire to own such a beast… this was only

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  • The one question that every CIO should ask themselves… What are you going to do when (not if) your cloud systems fail?

    I’ve deliberately used the word Cloud to grab your attention but the question is equally applicable if you use Cloud systems or in house systems. This post was prompted following an interesting twitter conversation I had last night with Frank Scavo and Dennis Howlett around yesterday’s outage of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Frank started

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  • Amidst the doom and gloom, two great customer experience stories

    It’s a well-known fact that bad news sells… and that’s probably the reason that most blogs you read are full of doom and gloom or are pointing out the inadequacies of someone or something. Having just done that with my previous post I thought I’d buck the trend and write about two good news stories

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  • Almost seduced by a thing of beauty…

    For anyone whose seen the Jaguar XK you’ll know it’s a thing of beauty…  not only does it look gorgeous but it’s a masterpiece of engineering packing a super smooth 5.0L V8 power unit a chassis that makes it stick to the road like glue and a state of the art Aluminium body shell. To

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  • Converting from a PC to a Mac, it’s dead easy and you’ll never want to go back!

    A month or so ago I fuelled my apple addition further with the purchase of a iMac. I have to say I’ve been delighted with the iMac so far and thought I’d take a few minutes to share some of the things I’ve discovered. As with all the other apple kit I’ve bought getting started

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  • Customer Service whose job is it anyway?

    If you follow my blog you’ll be well aware of my recent trials and tribulations I’ve been having with Dell. I suppose like many others before me I innocently thought that when I placed the order that I was buying from Dell and that they would take accountability for my order until it was delivered.

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  • My last post of 2011 – Shoebox Humour

    After my serious posts of late I thought I’d end the year with a bit of humour… Bought my son a new pair of Puma trainers yesterday and I wanted to share a couple of gems that I discovered on the box. The first as you can see here is “Average Contents 2” … as

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  • Dell – a story of Great Expectations (but mostly failure)

    Dell is probably a very reliable company most of the time, but I’ve seen a very different side lately… I’ve been a Dell advocate for at least 13 years now… Having bought a number of Dell machines for home use and having lost count of the many many Dell machines I’ve bought and used in a

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  • What to do if your iPhone won’t sync after upgrading to iOS5

    If you’re having this problem then you’re not alone. A quick look on the Apple forums will tell you that there is a problem with the sync getting stuck either on step4 or 4 if you’re trying to sync by wireless, or step 6 of 6 is you’re plugged in. Read through the forum replies

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  • How to turn your iPad into a valuable boardroom tool

    I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to show a keynote presentation, or flash up a spread sheet on my iPad and I haven’t had my VGA adapter handy and have had to go through the well documented workaround of screen dumping each slide to a photo and then using Airplay to show

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  • Tip : How to improve iPhone and iPad battery life

    There have been lots of reports in the press about how battery life has taken a hit following people buying the new iPhone 4s and from people who have upgraded to iOS5. This isn’t something new as I found that my battery life used to be poor on iOS4 until I turned off spotlight search.

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  • This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.

    There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it is Everybody’s job. Everybody thought that Anybody could do it but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that

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  • Is Apple losing the plot??

    If you read my blog you’ll know I’m a fan of all things Apple but of late I’ve been noticing a few things starting to go slightly wrong: When I connected my iPad to my PC for an update last night the update was a whopping 500meg allegedly only to fix a small security vulnerability.

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  • Stories vs Facts

    There is a great piece by Johann Hari in today’s independent where he gives a personal apology around using some not so ethical techniques when creating stories, I’d encourage everyone to read it here: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-personal-apology-2354679.html This piece struck a chord with me for a number of reasons. As someone on the receiving end of this type

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  • Amazon = Amazing Customer Experience

    I’ve not posted for a while but I feel the need to blog tonight about the most fantastic service I experienced lately from Amazon. If you’re a regular visitor to my blog you’ll know that I’ve previously raved about the Amazon Kindle. It’s a fantastic device and I have to say that it’s been used daily

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