Unwise product codenames
I think it’s about time that someone told Intel that their codename for their new Pentium 4 processors is not going to play well in the UK. They obviously don’t know the John ‘Two Jags’ Prescott that we all admire so much, or they wouldn’t be burdening their technologically advanced, ground-breaking new chips with the name of someone who eats his with brown sauce and a pie.
Actually, you can tell a lot about a company by the codenames it chooses. When I think of Apple, I think of Jaguar, Panther and Tiger: sleek, fast, efficient creatures. And then there’s Microsoft’s Longhorn: a breed of cattle.
I rest my case.
Travel writing
Maciej is a wonderful writer, and never more so than when he writes about his travels. I’m a complete sucker for writing about Britain by non-residents, and this passage had me rolling around with recognition:
Great Britain is a deceptively small country; it’s very easy to get distracted and find that you’ve overshot it altogether, which is how I found myself standing near a petrochemical plant in Calais just a few hours after boarding a train in Sheffield, a city that I thought was safely removed from the southern coast.
Given the state of our railway system, I’m quite impressed that he managed to get out of Sheffield on a train, let alone make it to Dover to catch a ferry. There’s probably some kind of award available on receipt of proof of such a feat of derring-do. I gather that Visit Britain have had a concerted campaign to encourage more tourists, so apropos of Maciej’s comment, how about this as a marketing slogan: “Britainâblink and you’ll miss it.”
