Morrisons (buyer of Safeway UK): you’re cheap. Your brand image is cheap and ugly. Your image is distinctive, but distinctive in the way that Janet Street-Porter’s teeth are distinctive. Not good.
Oh, and your products suck too.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
Yahoo! buys Flickr
Flickr, my favourite online photo sharing site and yours, has been acquired by Yahoo!. It looks like it’ll remain separate from Yahoo! Photos, and the changes that will be happening will be minimal and user-beneficial (like more storage/bandwidth on free and pro accounts).
Yahoo – once the pioneer – is now the great stinking corporate behemoth, buying up young, hip and trendy internet companies in its bid to keep up with The Great Google. Or something.
Out of the relegation zone (for now)
An heroic performance yesterday from Harry’s boys led to a 3-1 win at Middlesbrough, Southampton’s first away win of the season. Two goals from Peter Crouch (and two references to him as "the lanky striker" in the BBC News report) and one from Andreas Jakobsson were too much for the Smoggies. After leading 2-0 against them at home and then drawing 2-2, this was a moral, if not actual, double against the Teeside team.
With West Brom recording an improbable 4-1 away win at Charlton, this was a must-win game for the Saints. Thankfully, Crystal Palace (to Chelsea) and Norwich (to Bolton) both lost, meaning that we’re out of the relegation zone (for now).
We’re only three points behind Fulham (though they have a game in hand), four behind Portsmouth and five behind Blackburn, so all the talk of the relegated teams being three from Saints, Palace, West Brom and Norwich now seems a little premature.
Best quote of the weekend (from Radio Five Live’s 606): “If Harry [Redknapp] had been captain of the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk”.
Information overload
I’ve recently discovered a thing called GTD. It’s a philosophy based on a book by David Allen, which I haven’t read, but which talks about “Stress-Free Productivity”.
Thanks to a weblog called 43 Folders, and an article at O’Reilly by Giles Turnbull I’ve discovered some Mac-friendly GTD stuff. Apparently it takes some time to set yourself up to use GTD methods, but once you do, it’s well worth it.
So far I’ve just implemented a Hipster PDA – a stack of 3×5″ index cards and a bull clip. It’s already made a difference, though: when I think of things, I write them down rather than mulling them over and not sleeping. I then have a record of the thought, and can obviously recall it.
Another weblog of note is Life Hacker – lots of great tips there, like How to quiet noisy pipes.
Oh, and Stu: it was ace to chat to you last night. You need to get a web site, pal 
Southampton 0 Man. Utd. 4
Saints were outclassed on live TV on Saturday afternoon. It was painful to watch. I guessed that we would either run Man. Utd. close or we would get slaughtered. In the end, we were lucky it wasn’t five- or six-nil. Most of our better players were either cup-tied, injured or suspended (David Prutton – you muppet!).
Only Premiership survival to play for now, though it must be said that our passage to the sixth round wasn’t exactly tough (Northampton, Brentford), and we did have a big slice of luck (Portsmouth).
I guess our name won’t be on the cup this year, then.
Not going to SXSW
After hearing about how great last year’s South by South-west (SXSW) was, I quite fancied going. There’s a whole Brit contingent making the trip this year, which would have been fun to ride the coattails of. As you can infer from the title of this post, though, I’m not going. I don’t personally have the money, I didn’t ask work whether the training budget would stretch, and (to be honest, this is the main reason) I wouldn’t want to be out of the country for a week when Kathy’s six months pregnant.
However, like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter.
Quick roundup
Sorry – I haven’t posted since Friday, and that was only to tell you the blog had moved house.
In short:
- Bill Gates, KBE. Killing British Enterprise, presumably.
- Southampton earned a well-fought point against Arsenal, though David Prutton has been given a ten-match ban for pushing the ref. Eek!
- Saints also beat Brentford in the FA Cup 5th-round replay, setting up a quarter-final against Man. Utd.
That’s about it, really. See you again soon!