Category Archives: General

General, GTD

Where are you most productive?

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May be it’s just me, but I find that certain places allow me to be more productive than others. 

For example, I find these places rather good when it comes to getting things done:

  1. airport departure lounges
  2. on a plane
  3. on a train
  4. sometimes, on a bus
  5. hotel lounges / bars, sometimes even hotel rooms

The reason I find most of these places so good for productivity stems from any combination of the following:

  • Public transport, e.g. buses.  We have no control over how fast they go.  If you arrive at your destination late, perhaps because of heavy traffic, there is little you could do about it.
  • Airlines.  Like public transport, there’s little we can do to make the “process” go any faster.  If you are delayed, too bad, nothing you can do will make the aircraft depart any faster or any closer to its original departure time.  And once you’re in the air, headwinds, tailwinds, all you can do is sit there and get one with something, it’ll take as long as it takes.  Use the time usefully and productively.  You may struggle in some lounges where other users insist upon using their mobile ‘phones and are almost shouting to the person at the other end – this is annoying me as I type this, there are two loud-mouths talking tripe on their ‘phones on my left and my right.
  • You are unknown.  In a lounge, nobody knows who you are or what you do.  You won’t get any drive-by help-desk type requests.  You won’t get anybody shouting ay you to deal with their request before you deal with the task that was on your mind when they came over and started shouting, etc.

Even if you manage to play out what I refer to as a “James May Moment” – whereby you realise that public transport is going so slow, you decide to oust the driver and drive yourself, knowing you can drive faster – it’s unlikely that your intervention will have any downstream benefits whatsoever.

So far, I have refrained from buying cheap tickets in order to get time “air-side” where I can get things done without interruption…but it could happen!

Customer Service, Murphy's Week, Rants

Murphy’s Week – 23/06/08

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On Monday…
Flight delays.  Once again I find myself shocked and surprised at the audacity of my fellow traveller.  I have started being very selective in my choice of seat – more often than not I am sitting beyond row 13 as the rear of the aircraft often boards first.  Boarding first has its advantages – for me, it lets me get first pick of the overhead lockers.  The overhead locker is important – after the LHR T5 fiasco, I no longer carry hold luggage for anything other than family trips and where I’m away for more than 5-6 days.  On this occasion, I had secured my bag in the overhead locker, however in order to allow the gentleman in the opposite aisle seat to do likewise, I had moved one row back and was standing behind my allocated seat.  Like a torpedo aimed at the rear of the aircraft, an OAP with ruler-like precision clearly thought we were invisible – she was exercising her “right” to move toward the rear whilst preventing others moving forward.  The chap opposite just shook his head; I was frankly stunned.  However, it happens more often than not.

On Tuesday…
I read an interesting piece in The New Statesman magazine by Shazia Mirza.  Shazia closes her article with the phrase “Google me then”.  It seems that the brand name Google has become the Hoover of the 21st century.  Hoover make vacuum cleaners (amongst other things) – however a lot of folks say “let’s Hoover the carpet” when they don’t own a Hoover product.  People are now using the word Google in place of “search” or “look on the Internet” – I guess this is the kudos associated with being [close to] first to market.  Kudos to The New Statesman for opening up their back issues for free viewing.

I travelled home this evening.  After the T5 opening fiasco, I bought myself a “right sized” cabin bag that is able to hold 4-5 days worth of wearables and all my gadgets and laptop. Usually this bag goes through security without question.  Not tonight.  Fortunately I had a little time to spare, so the full bag search that followed didn’t hold me back too much.  Apparently, I had a corkscrew in my bag…given the amount of travelling I do, that’s the last thing I would pack.  Besides, there are equally as dangerous items that are allowed in the cabin: BA meals are on glass plates, coffee/tea served in china mugs, propelling pencils, broken credit cards….)  Anyway, I digress.  A full bag search involved decanting everything into three trays: one for clothing, books, etc. the other two for electrical goods.  Oddly enough, no corkscrew was found. 20 minutes of time consumed though.

Dell’s D430 laptop is rather neat. I was able to get some typing done mid-flight…whilst the food tray was still in place.  If ever I need to buy a laptop myself, the small foot-print devices will be high on my list of choices.  I found that using Dark Room (thanks to @dchristiansen for the recommendation) helps focus the mind and hinders anybody looking over your shoulder hoping to read what you’re typing.

On Friday…Blackpool – Arrival
Hotel check-in. Discover that the hotel has mysteriously lost its liquor license and is unable to serve booze until further notice.  Some early warning would have been appreciated, I could have brought my own booze down with me.

That night we discover that our “family room” is an oven.  The one fan that is in the room is not suitable – largely because the “family” bit of the room was actually bunk beds in a separate room – which in its own right is actually pretty good. Kudos to the hotel reception though, they quickly brought up a second fan and an extension cable.

On Saturday….Blackpool – Day 1
At Blackpool Pleasure Beach…

It seems that the thrill I get from rollercoasters is getting hard to find in Blackpool.  I’ve done the Pepsi Max Big One, Avalanche, the Big Dipper, Space Invader 2, Infusion and the Tango Ice Blast – none of which are really able to float my boat.  I guess I have to go to Cedar Point and try the Top Thrill Dragster.  Space Invader 2 was a disappointment.  The queue took 45 minutes to process for what was a 2 minute ride.

A lot of places in Blackpool stop serving food at 2000.  Even on a Saturday.  This caused some problems.  Room service in our hotel (no liquor license, remember) managed to offer French Fries and rounds of sandwiches.  My wife ordered two portions of fries and two rounds on white bread…and received one round on white bread, the other on brown bread.  Still it was good service otherwise.  My dinner came from the local Nisa…a BLT, a bag of ice and a couple of tins of beer!

On Sunday…Blackpool – Day 2
Today we took a tram south towards Blackpool Tower.  I don’t think I’d ever reached the top of the tower before, so today was a “tick box moment” (BucketList—).  I took our son all the way to the top of the tower – he was un-fazed by the transparent (but heavily scratched) floor at 380ft- the Walk of Faith as it’s known.  The view from the top was worth it, as was the time spent in the tower facility itself (£10 for adults and £5 for children).

Later today we went to Sealife, just next door to Blackpool Tower.  We had a couple of buy one get one free passes so the entry cost was very acceptable: £12.50 for adults.  There are plenty of fish and other sea creatures to look at here and there’s plenty of information to read and take it too.  The only thing I didn’t like about my Sealife experience was the “exit strategy” – getting out was a maze of stairs and doors, not really very disabled-person-friendly (we had a pushchair).  There is a lift at the start, however that would mean going against the flow of visitors (it’s like Ikea should be, it’s best to go through the exhibit in one direction only).  The exit itself is weird: you end up coming out of the Dr. Who shop…

Photos here.

The Yates Wine Lodge “experience”
Looking for a dinner venue…  After a rather successful day taking in the sights, we found ourselves looking for a place to have an early evening meal.  Now, picture the scene: wife, 3 year old son, mother-in-law and invited guest, the centre of Blackpool, around 1730 in the evening.  We wander around for a bit, pass through the Winter Gardens, everything was closing up. 

We move on to the likes of Talbot Street where I spot an O’Neill’s Irish bar – a decent pint I think to myself.  Wrong: “no children allowed on any part of the premises”.  Too bad, we’ll take our custom elsewhere, now and in the future – one sign kills your custom. 

Less than 100 yards away, we find a Yates Wine Lodge (Blackpool North).  Now these places have a pretty good name.  My wife, mother-in-law and guest decided to have the Sunday roast.  It was Sunday, in England after all – they do roast very well.  Not at Yates, “roast is off today”.  OK, we’ll take three gammon steaks instead, and a bottle of Echo Falls Merlot.  The server turns around, looks in the ‘fridge, consults with his boss then says “No Merlot, we have what you see in the fridge, Rose and the white”.   Right, I keep my red wine in the same fridge as my white and rose.

However, whilst attempting to order food and drinks, the server took a call on his “radio” – he excused himself and disappeared.  Moments later, he appeared from the kitchen carrying three plates of hot food, clearly destined for another customer.  Hold on, we were mid-order. 

We concede and choose the Echo Falls Rose.  The bottle duly appears at the bar, closely followed by three glasses.  Three rather dirty glasses.  I reject the glasses and ask for clean ones…hey, I had the mother-in-law with me! 

Meanwhile, the server (behind the bar) is trying to process my credit card…my BAA credit card with pictures of foreign national on it.  The server had some issue using the credit card so was forced to call in the manager.  Now, the manager’s appearance was so similar to the pub manager bloke in Men Behaving Badly – it was uncanny.  He looked at my credit card and went for the swipe card that authenticated him for that till.  You won’t believe what he said next: “a credit card with foreign people on it, we don’t want that in here”.  Of course, he didn’t realise that I was right beside him when he said this…the server however, did.  The manager left the scene, with my eyes following his every move – I was very tempted to take my business elsewhere.  By now, the server was shaking, probably wondering what I was about to do.  You know, I’d love to be a ghost customer in these situations – working for head office, weeding out the establishments that fail to meet even the most basic of customer service standards.

The food itself was perfectly acceptable, even though the garlic bread with cheese was cold.  However the toilet was unclean, there was a lack of toilet paper and there were many flying and crawling insects.  Similarly, the cleanliness of the area around and behind the bar itself was unacceptable.  We cleaned the table with a wet wipe, it was demonstrated that the tables needed cleaned rather than dusted down.

We’re unlikely to use this chain of eateries in the future.

Here’s a photograph of the said establishment.

Blackpool 2008 Summary
Blackpool opening hours: they suck. 

Sealife: good value, worth it.

Staff on the trams, they’re pretty damn good. 

Yates Wine Lodge Blackpool North sucks.  Tweet 1.  Tweet 2. Tweet 3.

Blackpool Tower: good value, worth it.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach: expensive, consistency between the ticket selling facilities needs to be achieved though.  My son’s wristband wasn’t put on tightly so I went to the nearest ticket booth to have it re-issued – I was told to go back to the main entrance!  At the main entrance they asked for the original receipt – which was with my mother-in-law elsewhere in the facility.  Thankfully they re-issued it after I explained who much effort it would take to find her quickly.  Something needs to be done to manage the queuing situation: waiting 45 minutes for a 2 minute ride takes a lot of time out of your day…

General

Master or Shepherd?

Martin Parry poses an interesting item of "idle chat" over at his blog.

In a nutshell, Martin’s post revolves around classification of developers on a scale from M (master) to S (shepherd).   The notion of master and shepherd came from a sheep dog analogy.  Martin’s particular example, probably quoted from some real code that is running live somewhere, is a good example of a developer failing to understand the basics of event-driven development (you’ve put the odd Sleep(500) in your pre-production code too, right?)

Martin asks us to rate ourselves using the type indicator below:

MASTER <——|——> SHEPHERD

I would say that it’s probably a sliding scale that we need to adopt.  Sometimes I do swing towards the Master side, whereas other times I lean towards the Shepherd side (resisting the temptation to replace S with Servant, of course).  If I had to be specific, I guess I would swing to the left (I never thought I’d hear myself say that, never mind put it in print – no doubt somebody will quote me out of context!).

For me, the position really depends upon the nature of the task, the time available to complete the task and a variety of other external pressures.  Perfection is a good goal, however in a commercial environment, it is one that comes with a high price tag.  Your boss doesn’t really care whether you’ve implemented the cleanest data access layer using ACME ORM – he just cares about the data being inserted, updated, deleted, processed and displayed (to him, even the data has a semantic difference).

For example, whilst I’ve used Sleep(500) in pre-production code, I do find myself under time pressure to complete and as such do find myself leaving the odd "to do" in my code.  I may not write the most memory-efficient algorithms all of the time, I may need to use a code profiler from time to time – is it not better to be feature complete than behind schedule?  Sometimes, more so in a commercial environment, getting the job done is more important than writing perfect code.  As long as the tests pass, deadlines/budgets are met and the user/product owner is happy with your offering, you’re on the right track.  So yes, feel free to swing as far left as your schedule and budget allow.  If you reach the extreme left, excellent stuff (I’d be interested to learn more about your definition of Master!)  But don’t be too worried if you find yourself sitting left of centre, it’s probably a very popular place (again, another phrase I never thought I’d say let alone write).

Ultimately though, Martin’s key point revolved around understanding the machine that you are developing against.  I’d say it goes beyond understanding the machine, you need to understand the framework that you are developing towards (e.g. Microsoft .net) and the tools that you are using (e.g. Microsoft Visual Studio).

It’s fair to say that what started out as a little idle chat, Martin’s post certainly got me thinking.

Rants

Profiteering from fuel shortage…

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In the midst of a fuel crisis, I was somewhat appalled to learn that some garages are raising the price of their fuel…the most famous case so far appears to be of the Rix garage in Kirkcaldy (the address of which I believe is Bridge Street). Whilst the garage in question blame a computer fault, we all know that computers are only as good as the folks who enter data into them…so I’m not so sure I buy their argument. Similarly, I read that Rix themselves “distanced” themselves from the garage, saying that they hadn’t contacted the garage since 2007…yet they still carry the Rix branding. Perhaps, there’s something odd going on?

A colleague suggested that a list of the garages that are profiteering is maintained, such that we can boycott them after the strike action. Sounds like a good plan. I suppose it would be possible to add some to the comments of this post…

The Courier carries the full story over here.

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Rants

This isn’t just any gin & tonic and glass of red wine…

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Here at the Hotel Pas bon marché we like to think of our guests as king. However, that rules out the fairer sex, so we really like to think of guests as royalty. Of course, most of us associate royalty with wealth, exorbitance, and so on and so forth. You get what you pay for, royalty know this almost as well as Michael Jackson does when he is looking to purchase a new vase.

So that’s why, here at the Hotel Pas bon marché, we have to afford our customers the luxuries that they expect from a £200 per night mid-week stay in our fine establishment. We don’t skimp, we don’t save and we pass our costs along the line, all the way to the final arbiter in the equation: the customer. If they end up paying through the nose for our services, who cares? They’re royalty and they can afford it, right? Well, that sounds fine and dandy, however we’re a business, so of course we skimp and save. But we still pass our costs on to our loyal guests.

That’s why we like to charge £20.78 for a gin & tonic and a glass of red wine. Royalty pay that kind of price. And in that price, you’ll find our service charge of £2.03 added automatically for your convenience. I mean, you wouldn’t want to have to go through the process of working out the tip we required: our service is such that it deserves a sizable tip. Of course, the service charge is optional, but we’re not going to tell you that up front because that might mean less money passes from you to us, and that’s the name of the game: we want your money.

But this isn’t just any old gin, we don’t appreciate references to current prime ministers and nor do the real royals when they find themselves in need of a place to rest their weary heads after a hard day watching or playing polo. No sir, royalty needs to remember the Empire: we serve only the finest Bombay Sapphire Gin.

Our red wine isn’t any old red wine and it’s not from M&S either. We choose to serve the smoothest Côtes du Rhône in 250ml glasses. At least that’s what we on print the receipt you receive as a souvenir of your stay with us. Who knows if we are serving cheap table wine or the fine vintage that you believe you’re sipping? Let’s face it, we’re in the money making market, so we’ll probably have sourced the cheapest Côtes du Rhône that we can find. It’s psychological, probably.

We do all this with a smile. We take your money, your £10 note, we go to our point of sale and return with the receipt, politely tell you “this is not a £100 note sir, it’s a £10 note, your drinks cost £20.78”. We’ve done this many times, we know the reaction we’re going to get, we know you’re a comedian; even Scottish comedians are amongst our most humorous guests. We should start a comedy club; it could a money spinner. But we’re not into spinning money, we’re interested in taking money from our guests, so that’s why we can get away with charging what amounts to £10 per drink. Every round is a winner, our bar manager loves it. Ka-ching squared.

It’s humour all the way, because we know from experience that you were simply winding us up when you gave us a £10 and expected change. You’re royalty after all, you’re loaded – it’s our job to exploit that fact and make you part with your cash because you yourself, you don’t care. It’s only money, you have plenty of it, you must do, you’re staying in our establishment and we charge £200 per night mid-week.

Craig stayed at a major hotel in Jermyn Street. It was nice. He’s not royalty, but was surprised about many aspects of the service. Breakfast was a fine motion of dining excellence: cooked fresh, the presentation was impeccable and tidy. The plate was heated to a decent temperature to ensure that the waitress burnt her fingers and the bacon was kept hot for as long as possible.

However the dirty napkin let the Executive Chef’s branded service down somewhat. The warmed bread that was offered as toast was not becoming. I’m sure the Executive Chef would cringe had he seen the serving mechanism for the butter and Flora – they were supplied in delightful little white tubs, carefully shaped with a fine lining of foil on top: these are little containers that are so popular outside of royal circles. Those containers aren’t the finest bone china, no, they’re made of plastic. And let’s not get started about the ironing board in the room – the one that would not stay up. With no hand-pumps in the bar, this hotel will not make it into any CAMRA guides.

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Rants

A runway, a rucksack, heightened security, just one idiot?

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My trip to London on Wednesday and Thursday was meant to be simple and run-of-the-mill. I had even planned to meet up with @irascian and @olivers thanks to the power of Twitter. Indeed I did meet up with Ian and Oliver, however my meeting with Oliver was rudely cut short because some clown, idiot, tube decided that his rucksack had to be deposited at the end of one of Heathrow’s two runways. He managed to carefully place this rucksack within the airport grounds during a state of BAA’s heightened security.

Whatever his intentions, he managed to force the cancellation of a lot of domestic flights. I’m not hugely interested in the international flights that were cancelled – I was on a domestic to Edinburgh. It didn’t take me long to realise that the end-game for me involved staying over in London for another night. I re-arranged my flight to depart the next morning at 0755 – resigning myself to the fact that I had to find accommodation (huge thanks to @zimakki and his other half for that).

However what really infuriated me about this incident was that I was no longer able to record a short video teaser with @olivers for DDD Ireland. Yes, it was great catching up with Oliver for a beer, however we were unable to grab some recording time to make a 5 minute teaser video. It will happen, I hope to pop down to Oliver’s place of residence, taking my Sony HDD camcorder such that I can record his teaser video!

BAA, please pass your compensation requests on – make this idiot pay for it. Give him a job in your customer service department. But don’t pay him; make him take the worst customers, the ones that shouted at British Airways who bore the brunt of the cancellation woes. Make him deal with those folks, he’ll soon realise the power of democracy and the state of our nation. It wasn’t British Airway’s fault, yet still a handful of customers “kicked off” at their customer service team. Wrong on so many levels – the minute you annoy a customer service representative, you’re lost. Resign yourself to the fact that “shit happens”. You’re staying in London for another night or you’re getting a 8-10 hour coach ride home to Edinburgh. Live with it.

However, whilst he might have been an idiot, we have to consider the fact that overall airport security was stated as being “heightened”. Whatever that means… It surely means that muppets like this can’t just traverse the perimeter fence, saunter up to the end of the runway and then drop his rucksack. Surely not. Heightened security. You gotta be kiddin’ me?

He might be an idiot, a muppet or whatever. But please, surely airport perimeter security are sailing in the same boat? They must be feeling a bit red-faced right now.

This incident saw one of the runways closed for a while. It might have been useful to have that third runway that everybody’s ranting about…but that’s another blog post and should be considered rhetoric.

The icing on the cake: I returned to Edinburgh on the 0755 flight some 14 hours after my first flight was cancelled. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my baggage had been left behind at Heathrow…It turns out that flights from Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow had baggage issues – the queue at British Airway’s baggage services was very long indeed. Out of the hours from Thursday 1700 to Friday 1100, I must have spent 4 of them standing in queues. But anyway, baggage is being located and couriered to me in due course.

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General

Walking whilst using a mobile ‘phone…

Last night, I missed a train because of an old coot who was on his mobile ‘phone – here’s the tweet. Walking whilst using a mobile ‘phone (texting or calling) can be a dangerous thing. The old coot in question happened to be going down stairs at the time, staggering left to right, making direction changes at exactly the same time I was, just as if he had eyes in the back of his head. His meandering cost me 15 minutes. Yes, a whole 15 minutes, doesn’t sound like a lot, but these things add up. Get a couple of those close proximity butterfly effects and it’s easy to see 10-20% of your working day being affected by the actions of other people.

I was, therefore, pleased to read Lucy Mangan’s Shortcut in today’s edition of The Guardian. It should come as no surprise to learn that mobile ‘phone users walk into things whilst trying to keep themselves on the cyber-pavement – so it’s no wonder that they are banned from use whilst driving. However, it gets worse. Seemingly Brick Lane in east London has padding surrounding its lampposts – to prevent mobile ‘phone users from inflicting too much personal damage when they walk into them.

On the subject of self-inflicted injuries, Lucy’s choice of words made me chuckle::

…these are injuries caused by people who do not understand the importance of peripheral vision. Until, that is, they compromise it by texting as they walk along the street and into lampposts, signs, bollards and other pedestrians.

In future, dear mobile ‘phone user who happens to be in front of me, if you are using your mobile ‘phone whilst walking in public, do be considerate of others: slowing down may impact those behind you, as does aimless meandering.

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Community, Developer Events, Scrum

[Event] Agile Malta – 19th February 2008

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1st International Conference on
Agile Development Malta 2008
The 2008 Agile Gathering is the 1st International Conference on Agile Development, to be held on February 19th, is the first event to be held in Malta section that focuses specifically on the topics of agility within the software development process. The event brings together leading industrial practitioners and users of agile within the fields of information systems and software engineering and targets the practical applications and implications of agile methods.

The conference aims to put people in touch with other agile practitioners on the Maltese islands, and give attendees an overview of practical experiences gained by companies and individuals currently practicing Scrum and other agile methods. The conference is targeted at executives, managers, software development practitioners and software engineering students.

The conference is not intended to be a place for instruction but rather an occasion for the exchange of information on agile software development in general.

Event web-site: http://www.agilemalta.com

The agenda can be found here: http://www.agilemalta.com/2008programme.php

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Developer Events, General, Podcasts, SQLBits-10/2007

038 – SQLBits – With Barry Dorrans, Fernando Guerrero and Akim Boukhelif


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

Welcome to podcast#38. This is a mixed show with common content from myself and Barry Dorrans. In the first half, you’ll hear Barry and I talking with Fernando Guerrero about his SQLBits grok talk (the one that he had to cancel as he had a flight to catch!) During the second half, Barry and I talking with Microsoft’s Akim Boukhelif about the Microsoft MVP Programme.

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast: http://www.craigmurphy.com/podcasts/038-SQLBits-Fernado-Barry-Akim

Blogs mentioned in this podcast
Fernando’s blog
Barry’s blog

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On blogging, Opinion

When you receive bad/poor customer service…what do you do?

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Receiving poor customer service is somewhat unacceptable. More so if you have paid for a service and aren’t receiving it.

Paul is enduring such customer service pain and has blogged about it here.

Companies need to understand the power of the Internet – and whilst it’s a current medium, the power of the blog should never be under-estimated.

The effect that bad publicity can have on your search engine rankings can be devastating. One need only search for “company name+suck” to realise why. See what I mean here.

Here’s another example.

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Community, Developer Events, General, Podcasts, SQLBits-10/2007

031 – SQLBits – John Van Hoof

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“Great conference, really enjoyed, it has been fantastic, well worth the Saturday”


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

Welcome to podcast#31 – In this show I’m talking to John Van Hoof. John asked me about Martin Cairney’s session about Securing SQL Server, which I knew very little about. So I invited John to follow me to the speaker’s area where I knew Martin was busy prepping – unorthodox perhaps, but Martin was very willing to “sell” his session! SQLBits. Watch out for a podcast with Martin – coming soon!

“So you came to SQLBits to pick up some bits”…I’m in the wrong business, move over Peter Kaye, Ricky Gervais, you’re on my comedy turf.

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast: http://www.craigmurphy.com/podcasts/031-SQLBits-John-Van-Hoof.mp3

Recorded at SQLBits, 6th October 2007, Dave does a good job entertaining a packed room of 120 delegates in a Top of the Pops style!


Video: SQLBits – Dave McMahon – Top Ten SQL Keywords

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On blogging

Comment Spam – The Return?

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I’m starting to see a handful of spam comments getting through.

They are taking the form of “…wrote an interesting post today on…” – the “person” making the comment and their URL look reasonable enough, except the URL points to a copy of the original post and a shed load of useless adverts. For example:

[…] The Social Programmer wrote an interesting post today on DDD6 – The Recruitment Panel – Your help is needed!Here’s a quick excerpt Colin needs your help! Whilst we’re still voting for the DDD6 sessions, … : Founder of Girl Geek Dinners and software Engineer at Cardinal Health. She has grown up around technology … Insurance Services in Glasgow. His team writes enterprise applications for internal customers using […]

The same trick has come from a couple of domains, I’m tempted to blacklist anything that has “wrote an interesting post today on”, however not right away.

Has anybody else hit upon this problem? Any solutions?

I’m using WordPress 2.3 with Spam Karma. I’ve not looked at Akismet, should I be running that too?

Thanks in advance.

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