“Every fortune is partially justified yet potentially excessive.”
Thomas Piketty (in Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
Dear Bill,
It’s now been 8 years since you sent me the e-mail in which you promised to pay 10 cents for every e-mail I would forward. But as you have so far not responded to any of the e-mails I have sent (and then forwarded MULTIPLE times) on this topic, you leave me no other option than to use a public forum to contact you, such as this guest post on a blog which is hugely popular (or so I am told, and I can assure you: I’m not a person that is easily fooled!).
And please don’t claim that you have never received any of the mails, as I have used several different e-mail addresses: bill.gates@microsoft.com; william.henry.james@microsoft.com; bill_melinda@hotmail.com; Continue reading
“Quality is a science, service is an art.”
no idea who originally came up with it, as I read it
on the back of a truck on the highway some time ago
(and I don’t remember the company it belonged to),
so let’s settle for ‘some undefined copywriter’
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
usually attributed to either Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln,
but there is no conclusive evidence for either case
It’s often claimed that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but still – espcially and increasingly in this digital age – we are daily using en masse products and services that we consider to be free. Or at least where we don’t have to part with some of our dearly beloved money in exchange for the right to use those products or services. Some examples from the digital world include social media, like Facebook and Twitter; e-mail services, like Gmail or Hotmail (yes, I know, the consumer version is also called Outlook now, but everyone still refers to it as Hotmail); free antivirus; free search engines, like Bing or of course Google; free return shipments for online orders; free wifi in hotels, bars, etc.
“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.”
Albert Schweitzer
Well, sort of. Here’s the story. A while ago I decided to order a custom designed t-shirt online, just to give it a try in order to see what kind of quality one would get and to which extent the offline product would resemble (or not) the online product. (At this point I hate to have to admit that all this spamming by Vistaprint does yield some result, it seems.)
Obviously the main issue was what kind of design elements to put on the t-shirt. Continue reading
“Memory is attention in the past tense: what you remember now, is what you noticed before.”
Daniel Goleman in Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception (where he points out that memory therefore has 2 possible sources of skewing: errors made during the original perception and additional errors during the recollection)
Undoubtedly the most striking novelty at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil is the spray can used by the referees (the illustrious goal line technology being a good second, but we’ve already known that for years from tennis, so @FIFA: there was no reason to show off like that). It’s not really completely new, as tests have been done with it before, but it’s new 
in the sense that this is the first time the audience at large gets to see it. For those who have somehow managed not to watch any of the matches (inexplicably some TV-channels have been broadcasting other shows during the matches, and I’ve also heard rumours about Continue reading
THE SECOND HALF 