Another interesting topic for a master work

Here is another, interesting, unusual and for some people risk-free theme for a master work in SE.

One more interesting article on the same topic

Gräfin Mariza - best memories of my life

I was lucky enough in my life to see the following wonderfull performance in Wien city "Gräfin Mariza" by "Volksoper" in 2006.

I spent a lot of time searching for this or similar performance in Net, but no success - only much weaker alternatives performed by others... and finally today I discovered one, which is extremly close to what was happening back in 2006 and so can share that with You



and



Other fragments are here and here.

All parts can be found by the person who kindly uploaded them to youtube: here at the right hand.

Stephen Fry on twitter, blog and some other stuff

Greetings from Tallinn - 2009 Christmas Is Coming

Unemployment rate

Eurostat

Greetings from Tallinn

Locking customers (loyalty prison)

Joel have written a very interesting article where he describes and interprets one novel approach in the business handling customers.

A short introduction into the article located below:
A typical situation for customers of one café is a long line occurring each morning. Once at the morning customers suddenly discovered a new person working for this cafe, who was walking along the line and was collecting orders and transferring them by the phone to the service (and pay) desk.

At the first glance the primary idea of introducing such position is to optimise orders input flow and so optimise service (production of what will be ordered). In reality, here we dealt with a type of product that cannot be really produced in advance in batch and therefore such pre-ordering doesn’t really make sense especially if it is collected from the end of a long line.

Joel states that the only reason of this was to lock customers into this place – earlier it was rather easy to walk out if you see the long line r you waited a bit and then decided to go into other place (may be less suitable for you, but without such lines). Now, a lot of people will rather stay in the line after their order was picked as see it as an ethical obligation to pay for it as it is already in the production (and so they will wait nearly independently of the line size).

In the summary the author offers to think where else such method can be applied to lock the customer into this company service primary in your personal business or even ordinal life.

Co-working - rules

Co-working is an interesting trend in the modern life. Once I will return to this topic, but now I just would like to share rules of such community hoping that they will not blame me for stealing their content: my intention is just to show how such community live by publishing the minimal law they figured out for themselves as a typical way to organise such groups:

GROUND RULEZ for Citizen Space

• we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. if a key holder asks you to leave, you need to skedaddle
• no bittorrent, no pr0n
• clean up your garbage and recycle (blue bins are recycling, dude)
• you break it, you buy it
• coworking is an extreme sport, don’t sue us if you break a blood vessel in your forehead dealing with windows, apple’s DRM, or anything else
• don’t be a dIck

Software start to convert an ordinal car into a context sensitive vehicle

Today I have read a news that highlighted a trend appeared during last years - car manufactures started to convert cars (i.e. just a combination of metal parts moving by a petrol engine) into something I would call a context sensitive vehicle: "Ford's New MyKey System Helps Teens Drive Safer, Conserve Fuel; Gives Parents Peace of Mind".

The news says: Ford's MyKey feature -- which debuts next year as standard equipment -- allows owners to program a key that can limit the vehicle's top speed and audio volume. MyKey also encourages safety-belt usage, provides earlier low-fuel warnings, disables switching stability/tracking control systems and can be programmed to sound chimes at 45, 55 and 65 miles per hour.

More than half of parents surveyed worry that their teen-age children are driving at unsafe speeds, talking on hand-held cell phones or texting while driving, or otherwise driving distracted. More than a third of parents also are concerned that their teens do not always buckle their safety belts when driving.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), teens are more likely to take risks such as speeding -- a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes. Teens also are less likely to wear safety belts than older drivers.

Notice that this system is not the unique one. For example Green Road's system presented earlier this year is able to identify a lot of different aspects of the drive like acceleration level, breaks using frequency and so forth and report that to the front panel using light of different colours, so you [or parents] can identify the none-econimial driving mode [read unsafe] by the red one or even see that in the real-time if the car was let to a child or a friend of you.

Working with customers

Resently I have read a very interesting article written by Joel and so would like to share it with you in case you will find it to be useful: How Hard Could It Be?: Good System, Bad System.

Happy New 2008 Year

Wish you Deniss celebrating this event in Estonia State Opera