Barking

I have the pleasure of putting together our company newsletters and also those for Tactile CRM. We currently use Campaign Monitor, which is a great piece of software, however Outlook 2007 isn’t.

Currently, I am redesigning and testing the Tactile CRM newsletter. It works fine in all browsers, until I come to Outlook 2007 - Campaign Monitor have an excellent tool for checking your email across a variety of clients. The first screenshot below is how it should look:

and this is how Outlook 2007 renders it:

Now as I am a bit of a perfectionist I needed to fix this. My next port of call was the MS website to get the Outlook 2007 trial. Signing up was a bit of a pain, but my frustration was complete when I got the following error message trying to do ‘Download 1′:

Of course I haven’t completed the second download. I have just come to the page and am trying to do the first one. If you want me to do the second one first, why have it as the second one?!

I still don’t have it installed but I have vented my frustration for the time being!

Senokian are pleased to announce what we believe to be the first ever Cat-5 dog lead - the item is for sale on E-Bay, and all proceeds will go to charity (the Lymphoma association in the UK).

UPDATE: After a few requests I am going to post a bit more about the chosen charity and why I chose them.

The proceeds of this charity auction will be going to the Lymphoma association in the UK. I have personally had first hand experience of the work they do, after my Father passed away from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma over 4 years ago and I was diagnosed with, and now successfully in remission from, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma - the fact my father and I both had types of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is not related and just chance.

The Lymphoma Association provide emotional support and information on a range of issues to anyone with lymphatic cancer and their families, carers and friends. They do a fantastic job and were one of the first organisations I came into contact with after my diagnosis. The support they offer is invaluable.

Today I forgot my dog’s lead when bringing him to work (Archie is on Twitter, he has been banned from Facebook for not being human, this blog is named after him, and he is mentioned in our ‘working with us‘ section on our website). As a result and after a quick bit of engineering in the office we came up with the hand crafted Cat-5 dog lead you see below:

We are fairly certain we have invented the first ever Cat-5 dog lead (please let us know if there is any prior art) and thought as other people have sold a load of old crap old rope on E-Bay, we’d give it a go too and sell our high quality Cat-5 dog lead on E-Bay and donate the profits to charity.

I had a great time at the Fuel Conference last Friday. I thought it was very well organised and the content/speakers were great. As usual, missrogue was very good (and jet lagged) - slides are below:

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I also had a chance to meet the guys from soocial, and rummble amongst a load of other really interesting people. I hope the soocial guys made it home after the football (they are Dutch and were enjoying the win over France when I left them!).

They also had a weird sign on some chairs that clearly weren’t broken:

I went out last night for a drink with a few friends and we were discussing viral marketing and how many large companies can’t do what they want because of processes that they have in place.

We came up with a few various ideas and ways around them, but in the meantime we got onto the John West Salmon advert (below). This is another one of those adverts that has gone around the web, it has currently had over 1.8 million views.

It’s not as funny as the Brains one in my opinion, but I still find myself amused by it:

We’ve added a new category to the blog called ‘Meet Us‘. It’s a list of events that Senokian people are going to be at.

If you fancy meeting up or finding out more about us and what we do then keep an eye on it and let us know.

I thought the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert was quite funny but I never really got it.

I know it is sad, but this is my new favourite advert. I think it is absolute genius, it has a connection to the product and brings a smile to my face whenever I see. I don’t think it will be as big as the Cadbury one, but well done Drench:

I saw this on Twitter last night from one of my friends and it had me laughing all the way through - quite childish I know but I thought it might bring a smile to a few people’s faces!

I’m not quite sure it is what Sir Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the World WIde Web but you never know!

We get quite a few emails about why the blog is called barking so I thought I’d right write a quick post as to why.

As many of you will know, Archie is our office dog and he comes in every day to keep everyone company. Technically he is ‘Head of Morale and Security’ although he would soon sooner lick you to death than get aggressive!

Unfortunately the story is no more interesting than we needed a name for the blog and thought barking seemed like a good a name as any - we did think it would be nice to name it after Archie but thought that didn’t fit quite as well as barking - so there you are.

You never know, we may one day get a guest post from him; the best you will get for the moment though is some pictures of him enjoying himself on a recent trip to Cornwall.

We are currently looking for a new developer to join our team in Coventry. Full details are on the main website. We’re also offering a £200 thank you to anybody that suggests somebody we eventually appoint.

I am a stickler for perfection, anything less than perfect irritates me and I have to do something about it.

Today was no exception, I wrote a quick management script a while back to email me with the number of people who have signed up for Tactile CRM but not logged in 24 hours after signing up so that I can follow them up (I thought this was enough time to let them get the email Tactile CRM sends if the signed up in the evening and it hadn’t arrived before they signed off).

Today was the first time that it ran with only 1 user who hadn’t logged in - imagine my horror when the email said:

There are 1 people that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

Urgh - quickly logging into the server, updating the script, testing it and changing my neat 4 line bash script to 6 lines and my sense of well being has been restored. It now says:

There is 1 person that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

It is this level of detail that goes into the products we produce and hopefully makes them run just that bit better for users.