Month: July 2006

2900 miles (about 4700 km) and over 1000 photos later, our two weeks tour of the UK is over! What a beautiful country. And the best part was that most of the places we did go were not packed with tourists. Coming down from Scotland (see my previous blog entry) on the East cost, we stopped many times on the way to visit York, Cambridge or Hastings, just to name a few places.Continue reading Visiting the UK, Part IV and End – Heading South East

We finally arrived in Scotland. First things first, we either got very lucky, or the weather is a lot better than the reputation would make you think it is! Starting with the Lowlands, we found our ways on the West Highlands, then heading east and finally back down to the Borders region. And once again, for those who think about web services, universal Internet access through WiFi is not yet a reality in Scotland (and it’s the same as the rest of the UK we visited)… many regions don’t even have cell phone coverage!Continue reading Visiting the UK, Part III – Scotland

We’ve travelled almost 1000 miles through the UK since the last posting in my blog… What a beautiful country this is. As we don’t really have a pre-defined travel itinary, I won’t say we got lost many time or took many detours, but we did (this blog entry was written a few days before posting, but finding an Internet connection in the middle of the countryside in the UK while not really actively looking for it is not as easy as in London)Continue reading Visiting the UK, Part II – Heading North

OK, here we go: Just left Maidenhead, Berkshire to go for a two week holiday tour of the UK (Marielle and I will stay on the same island, e.g. no Ireland this time around). After over three years living in this beautiful country, it is time to go and to see more than London and the Reading area. So far, we’ve headed south and west and are now in Cornwall.Continue reading Visiting the UK, Part I – Heading South West

Interesting how red has a negative connotation and blue has a positive one. Mr. Kim and Mauborgne, in their book “Blue Ocean Strategy” compare the bloody red ocean strategies (doing more of the same) vs. re-defining the name and rules of the game in a nice blue ocean (without the bad weather). This book provides great ideas about thinking about the customer first, making the competition irrelevant in the process.

Why do many companies compare their products with what the competition is doing and fight a features war while needing to be very careful on costs? Why not look at what the customer needs and wants to focus on that instead? In a step-by-step approach, “Blue Ocean Strategy” provides a way of defining a strategy that will make the competition irrelevant and minimize costs at the same time. A well-worth read!

It is taking a lot longer than what I initially expected, but I finally had the chance to make a big first step toward the redesign of my web site. As you can see, the look of my blog has somewhat changed compared to the previous slightly tweaked standard template.

A little background about the new look. It was created using CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3 on my Macbook Pro… yes, that’s right, CDGS on Mac OS. I wanted to put Parallels to the test and wanted to use my favorite graphics suite to create the web page layout (with CorelDRAW X3) and the slicing on the images (with Corel PHOTO-PAINT X3). The CSS was then hand-written using Textmate which replaced HomeSite as my web-editor of choice since I moved to the Mac.Continue reading Slow progress with the update of my web site…