That John Martin

Gordon “Butch” Stewart, the founder of Sandals Resorts, on dealing with a hotel close to the airport in this month’s Inc magazine:

Everybody thought we’d be out of business the first month because the hotel is very close to the airport. We came up with the idea of everyone waving to the people that were leaving in the plane, and kissing the one you love when a plane flies by. I don’t think we have five complaints after that.

And then the Concorde started flying to Jamaica once a week:

[The Concorde] made more noise than any airplane I’ve ever heard. The buildings shook. So we turned all the beach lounges to face the airport, and that magnificent airplane would get up right in front of everybody on the beach. Guests would come rushing in: “Has the Concorde taken off yet?” We made a promotion out of it.

Clever.

I publicly thanked the folks at Fog Creek for kindly switching our account subdomain for us (due to a company rename), so when the Beanstalk guys did the same thing, and upped the ante by allowing us to nominate a time for it to be done, I thought I should extend my thanks to them. So, thanks Chris!

BTW, if you’re a startup and buggering about maintaining your own Subversion installation, configuring websvn, and integrating with things like FogBugz and Campfire… you should seriously think about giving Beanstalk a go. We pay just $25/month for 20 users.

Ahh, life in the cloud.

I just discovered Datawocky, a blog by Anand Rajaraman, cofounder of Kosmix. Anand has an interesting post up on some attempts at the Netflix prize made by some of his students at Stanford. The most successful strategy, at least among this group, was to make use of a second, independent dataset: IMDB.

But the bigger point is, adding more, independent data usually beats out designing ever-better algorithms to analyze an existing data set. I’m often suprised that many people in the business, and even in academia, don’t realize this.

Great article by Avinash of Occam’s Razor on adding context to your audience metrics.

So what is this mysterious magic potion?

Its quite simple really, in its simplest form it is surrounding your Metrics, Key Performance Indicators, Reports, Dashboards etc with other information (quantitative, qualitative, tribal knowledge) that adds a pinch of color. Context.

I am constantly switching my Mac’s sound output between headphones and speakers, and as a result, am constantly bitching about having to open up the Sound control panel, switch to the Output tab, change the setting, then sometimes switch to the particular app, open up Preferences, switch to the Sound tab, and make the same change again.

And then along came SoundSource. It took exactly 0.24 seconds of Googling to find and not much longer to install. And now I have a nice dropdown in my menubar.

And for bonus points, the license had very plain “What that said” explanations below each section.

Happy days.

We’ve had some shitty customer support experiences lately — I won’t name names — so when we asked the Fog Creek folks if they could change the subdomain of our hosted FogBugz account and then woke up to find it done and dusted in a little over a day with the perky email confirmation below, well, we were chuffed.

Your wish is our command.

Your website is now [new co].fogbugz.com.

Let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you!

We even forgot for a moment that the FogBugz wiki doesn’t surface a text-based markup language! (Markdown support would be so sweet.)

Thanks Eric!

Despite a suggestion to the contrary, Ray Poynter suggests that land lines are becoming increasingly rare, and that it’s not only the “socially excluded and the odd” that are sans terrestrial telecommunications.

I’m with Ray. I haven’t had a land line since 2002.