Tuesday, 1PM: buying a jar of apricot jam in Paris – delicious with bread or crepes; Tuesday, 4PM: putting it into my personal bag (mistake!); Tuesday, 7PM: guy from the security gate on the airport accused me of taking a forbidden jar of jam to the plane’s deck as I may throw it at the plane’s cockpit, open a window while flying and throw it into the engine or simply detonate onboard. Sure, I’m mostly known as MacGyver and could have used that jam as an ingredient of TNT which I could have made by mixing the jam with soap from plane’s toilet, ketchup from sandwiches, and cola sold by plane staff. But those smart bastards figured out my master plan… Wednesday: Figuring out if they have already detonated my jar of jam or disarmed the jam by consuming it.
I consider banks as the institutions who lie to us all the time. However these lies are not ones visible at the first sight but rather ones hidden deeply, like in the documents we are asked to sign, which are written in a very formal and not understandable manner.
I hate these situations when after signing the documents in a bank I check my bank account to find out I misread something and they “robbed” me out of my money. It is interesting to point out that I have never experienced a situation when bank gave me a bonus I didn’t expect. It is always the case they took as much as I have expected or more. The “more” being the more probable case.
Although I am used to banks not telling us the whole story about interest rates, mortgage costs, money transfer fees and so on, this time I found the polish Alior Bank TV ad to lie in a bit different way:
This ad tells us that with the Alior Bank card you can take your money from all the cashpoints in the world free of charge. First it shows Krakow’s main square and Floriańska street corner where someone takes money from a cashpoint. The problem is this cashpoint does not exist! I have never seen it there before so I deliberately took a walk to that place to find out a bare wall instead of a cashpoint. Computer generated scenes are popular these days to the extent they drive the reality…
In the subsequent scene there is another cashpoint presented near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As I will be there this year I will take another walk to find out whether that one is real or fake!
I hope for a bank which doesn’t lie to me. I don’t know if I ever found one, but I will keep searching.
PS) Thanks goes to Hubert Gajewski who told me “post it on your blog” once he heard the story.
UPDATE) We were in Paris in September and didn’t find the cashpoint. Lame, Alior, very lame.
Hahah amazing! I really enjoy this kind of fake scenes.
Unfortunately I enjoy less bank silent actions. How was I surprised seeing yesterday that a “free of charge” action in Deutsche Bank can cost me 15 euros!
Nice advert though (even if it’s all based on a lie). I like his bowler hat (or coke hat, if you’re old school) and all the people wearing their hats lining up at the bottom at the end of the ad. Is it normal for bankers to wear bowler hats in Poland too then? Such hats are what, classically, bankers would wear in the City of London (not that you’d see anyone wearing them today, sadly).
Even that hats are not worn in real. I think the bank just pretend to be more experienced and long-established than it really is as it was founded in 2008
A couple of days ago I was enjoying a talk with my fiancée about the myth of cloud computing. As an example of volatility of this kind of solutions I pointed out a hypothetical situation when GMail goes offline and many people loses their emails as they store all the emails on the Google servers only.
I remember that not so long ago one of friends joked at me that I’m so “oldschool” that I still use desktop mailing application for storing my correspondence locally. Well..
Although I was impacted by an outage, I’m using Google Offline with Chrome so still I was able to access my current emails and archive just like if it was desktop application. But no new e-mails or sending ones.
I don’t know exactly how Google Offline works but are you able to export the offline database to a text file or a XML database? So do you actually own the data?
I think you’re overreacting… I think I didn’t even notice the GMail downtime, I just don’t check mail every 5 minutes. It’s not like everyone lost thousands of emails, they just couldn’t access them for 2 hours.
Sure, there are some people for whom it’s critical to be able to access all their emails and check for new ones all the time, but it’s probably less than 10% of the users…
In public opinion the technology industry people are considered as hairy, not-so-clean humans, wearing T-shirts and jeans, who drink coffee for breakfast, eat pizza for lunch, and chips for dinner*. Is it so because such people are attracted by IT industry or because IT industry produces/promotes such people?
In public opinion politicians are considered liars. Is it so because liars are meant to be politicians or because if one becomes a politician he or she has to lie?
The general question is: are you a cause of your character or an effect of your interactions with the society? I think both, but the society can’t deny your character. The effect can’t deny your cause. It will eventually come up.
What do you think about it?
*) I can assure you it is not 100% true. We do not eat chips for dinner…
On Saturday president Bush presented a plan to donate $700 billion dollars to the US market;
On Monday US House of Representatives voted down the plan, stock exchange indexes took a deep dive; (some) investors lost a lot of money;
On Tuesday president Bush presented another “refined” plan;
On Wednesday the House of Representatives US senate backed the plan;
Stock indexes will go up (at least for a moment), investors will need to rebuild their wallets;
My question is why president Bush presented 2 plans?! Doesn’t he have his people in the House of Representatives, who should tell him: “Look George, make it better or we turn it down!”.
I think it may have been well planned by someone, who knew the first plan would be rejected. Sell shares before Monday, buy them on Tuesday, and you just got richer. I am asking this, because it is not clear. And if nobody knows what something is all about, it is probably about money.
PS) I’ve just realized it hasn’t been backed by House of Representatives yet. But let’s wait till Friday.
PPS) As supposed House of Representatives backed the plan on Friday. Anyone surprised?
Recession. A very popular topic these days. Even in Poland, despite quite good growth rate, there are signals of slowing down. In US and western Europe it has started a few months/years ago, because of delays in mortgage payments, banks investing in risky stuff, people’s wallets depending more and more on credits and so on.
Due to the recession, it’s a good time to consider spending less. But it’s a wrong assumption! It’s always good time to speak about spending more wisely! No matter what’s the situation on the market we should always tend towards a balance between what’s earned and spend. Why? As human beings easily adapt to propitious environment (that’s why we gain weight easily, and loose it not that easy!), once the good time ends, it’s simply very tough to adjust to the harder conditions, be it less money, more responsibility, or further way to work. Thus it’s wiser to ‘pre-adapt’.
A solution is to always leave a reserve: to spend less than you earn, to be more responsible than you meant to be (it always pays off!), drive economically even if you can afford for extra gas, or don’t buy 6th pair of jeans if you already have 5 in your wardrobe, and only one worn at the moment. Treat yourself like an investment and your wallet as investor’s one. No one wants to overspend. Try it and you’ll sleep better.
Let me know what do you think about it. It works for me. It should for you too.
If you know me then you probably already know I’m a perfectionist. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad, but it definitely helps.
Right now, I am finishing two projects at my work where I’m responsible for web UI. That means a lot of coding in HTML/CSS and JavaScript but also putting a lot of attention to visual appearance. And there is where my perfectionism shows up. I found myself deliberating on moving an image one pixel in either way, aligning panels, elements, caring about white space, character spacing, proper font use, and a lot of other things.
And that’s fun! I really like this part of a project when almost everything is done and I can focus on making small adjustments which could make a huge difference. Think of MacOS X. Guys at Apple already admitted they have a special group working on each software product release, which analyzes the application pixel-by-pixel ensuring the UI is laid well. And if you have ever seen an application made by Apple then it’s obvious they do their work perfectly well.
And that’s super cool. That’s making a difference. That’s what I really love doing!
PS) If you want to know what software I use for tweaking the visual appearance then here’s a list: Firefox + Firebug + Pixel Perfect + Pixie (Mac “software” magnifying glass).
I’ve been just playing with WordPress RSS and while fixing some stuff in Firefox I unexpectedly found the following line in the response HTTP headers (stuff send alongside the real data, like web page, image, etc):
“X-hackerIf you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header.”
Looks like guys at Automattic (WordPress.com) spread the info about their open positions via HTTP headers! It’s probably the most clever way I have seen so far. Simply brilliant!
I’ve been recently thinking about it, and no matter how hard I think it makes no sense to me at all. So the question is: why so many cars can drive much faster than usual speed limits? As there are only a few countries without a speed limit (A-roads in Germany for example), let’s pretend these are only exceptions of the general speed limit rule.
It is well known truth that the lowest fuel use is while driving at about 110 km/hbelow the 2500 rpm (petrol) and 2000 rpm (diesel) which is about 90-100 km/h in my case (I figured it out after couple of months of driving). Because of that many countries have a speed limit set at about 100-130 km/h. As it is also a safety barrier when driving (keeping in mind state of roads, human reflex, trust in other drivers etc) then looks like it’s a reasonable limit.
So why the heck are there cars with speed limit up to 200, 250 or even 300 km/h? For street racers? Boasters? Road hogs? Probably all of them. There may be also another reason which comes from car corporations: diversity! If they want to sell multiple car models, then differentiation is crucial. There are various segments which differ by car size, maximum speed, acceleration, engines, quality of work, etc, but really only the maximum speed drives the imagination of future owners. “- You know what? My new car can do 120 miles per hour! – Oh, you are boring. My can do 150!”. Got it, right? It’s something easy to compare and boast about. Not a surprise car companies care a lot about this, but you don’t, do you?
PS) If you are careful reader of my blog, then you may be surprised by this topic. “Cars? What happened to him? Is he sick?” Actually, not. I passed my driving license exam about a week ago and we will be buying the first car really soon!! Hurrah!!
As you said, you don’t really need a fast car. And as you mentioned, fast cars are more handy if you’re running away from the cops or if you’re a drag racer. So if you’re neither of the two, your car is just fine.
….We don’t need them. It’s a matter of materialistic goods. Companies make them because people want them. People want them to show off to others. Do you notice how fast teenagers go these days on the road? Why do you think they do? It’s all about status.
Sorry for the late comment, but I was just doing some research and your blog came up. By the way, I’m thirteen.
A few weeks ago I spotted a very interesting article on famous 37 Signals’ SvN blog. It tells a story about some experimental and highly successful workplace changes guys at 37 Signals made. Among others there’s one idea this post is all about: 4 day work weeks (free Fridays!).
Last week I’ve got a chance to check how it works as I took the Friday off. And it works great! On Monday I came to work relaxed, better motivated, and with mind full of new ideas and things to be done. I even had better attitude towards things I don’t particularly like doing, like fixing bugs in IE6 (aka kicking Microsoft in the ass), or filling in some reports. I must say (again!) that guys at 37 Signals have really cool ideas!!
By the way isn’t that silly that we work for 5 days and have only 2 days off? To me it’s breaking the symmetry in favor to work. Do you think we are meant to work such hard? Shouldn’t we take a more balanced approach such as 4/3? I’d really like it and I’m pretty sure so would you.
When I was younger, I could easily work 5.5 days a week, and frequently did. Now I am older (and wiser?) The last thing you will find on my gravestone is “She wished she worked more.” I would *love* a 4/3 schedule, because my job has become so stressful that I need a full day just to decompress.
I couldn’t agree more. As you said with time we are getting wiser, and so realize that there are far more important things than work.
Unfortunately our *silly* world is based on needs we were told to have, not we really have, and that’s why many of us work too hard. But realizing that fact is as I believe the first step to living a better life.
Dexter 11:47 am on February 27, 2009 Permalink |
Hahah amazing! I really enjoy this kind of fake scenes.
Unfortunately I enjoy less bank silent actions. How was I surprised seeing yesterday that a “free of charge” action in Deutsche Bank can cost me 15 euros!
Jakub Pawlowicz 10:14 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink |
Let me guess – it was “free of charge but…”?
Alan 2:04 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink |
Nice advert though (even if it’s all based on a lie). I like his bowler hat (or coke hat, if you’re old school) and all the people wearing their hats lining up at the bottom at the end of the ad. Is it normal for bankers to wear bowler hats in Poland too then? Such hats are what, classically, bankers would wear in the City of London (not that you’d see anyone wearing them today, sadly).
Jakub Pawlowicz 10:20 am on March 3, 2009 Permalink |
Even that hats are not worn in real. I think the bank just pretend to be more experienced and long-established than it really is as it was founded in 2008