For christ sakes, not rice cakes.

[peterbirks]

I knew that I would be a bit busy today, but that was before I managed to engineer a quite stupendous disaster on myself.

I edit two newsletters each morning. At around 2.30 in the afternoon I will usually have a fair wodge of "back-up" stuff written for the following day for both newsletters. This often gets shunted along from day to day until even I admit that, like the vegetables that have turned into mush in the fridge, the stories are past their sell-by date and have to be consigned to the bin. However, sometimes I need them and they serve as a kind of comfort blanket. Kind of like a culture for yoghurt. They help get the process in motion.

Anyway, yesterday, I managed the staggering feat of saving one newsletter (called, for the sake of argument, IIN24, because that's its name) as IIN24_50406. Which was good, because that is what I shuld have saved it as. Unfortunately I then saved IIN24 as ID_Asia_050406.

Which was bad, because it meant that I wiped all of the back-up stuff for today's issue of ID_Asia. And, to make matters worse, I did not realize that I had done this until 5am this morning, a mere three hours before ID_Asia had to be ready to send to the eager awaiting hordes in Singapore and Japan. (OK, perhaps I exaggerate a bit here, but please allow the dramatic effect).

Even worse, I didn't have much material for the other newsletter either.

But, well, needs does as needs does, and everything went out on time. Not the best pair of issues I have produced in my life, I must admit. And I couldn't be bothered to write the story about AIG sponsoring Manchester United to the tune of ten million a year. My god, what would Man Utd want with AIG? (Or rather, the other way round). I know that AIG is now run by an Essex boy, nearly all of whom these days seem to support either Arsenal or Man Utd, but AIG is hardly brand-name material in the UK or, indeed, worldwide. It's more of a commercial insurer.

I have to assume that they just want to do the deal for corporate entertainment.

We quite liked the idea of Hank Greenberg, ex-boss of AIG and considerably richer than just about anyone apart from Bill Gates, I reckon, of coming in as the sponsor of Man Utd on behalf of CV Starr, a minute Bermudian operation one of whose main purposes was to ensure that ex-AIG executives drew a nice pension. No longer.

But a meeting of Greenberg and the Glazers would be like Ali going into the ring with Tommy Hearns. Both decent fighters, but one of them would still knock out the other without much trouble.

Comments

Backups

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Peter,

What kind of software are you using to write and save these stories? And can't you set the preferances so that all previous saves are backed up somehow or noted as revisions to previous versions, thus allowing you to salvage them in such a situation? If not, then perhaps saving the stories separately as files in a directory for each day's work might provide a way for this not to happen in the future.

BTW, and excuse me if you have given the answer to this question in the past and I missed it, but a few months ago you were looking at different ways of distributing your newsletters so that they couldn't as easily be copied. Did you ever change the method of distribution?

BluffTHIS!

Re: Backups

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

I just write stuff in a single Word Document. Our company back-up system can take me back to where I was at midnight the previous day. But that isn't (wasn't) much use in this situation, since it was 5am and (understandably) there was no handy IT person around to telephone to get me any back-up.

However, even that wouldn't have been any use, because the time sequence was along the lines of:-

11am: Created new ID Asia File for use following morning.
11.05am: Overwrote new ID Asia File with the wrong file.

Hardly any back-up auto-restore sytem in the world could cope with that.

It was my own fault. I got over it. No sweats.

We were looking at RMS and trying to work out how a system whi ch was designed to drive traffic to web sites could be adapted to a subscriptionmodel.

We couldn't work it out, and it went (as many things do in this company) onto the back burner.

PJ

Not RMS

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

By RMS, I meant RSS.

PJ

[jellymillion.livejournal.com]

At least AIG will know they'll get their name seen on TV screens around the world. Whether that has any value I don't know. I'm still bemused by the discovery that my employers are Aston Villa's shirt sponsors. Which seems odd because they don't really have any retail presence in the UK - nor, as far as I can tell, any interest in getting one, since they sold the UK funds to Aberdeen. So what value is seen in having "DWS Investments" sprawled across Juan Pablo Angel's chest as he screws another shot wide?

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Although I don't spend much of my spare time looking at Juan Pablo Angel's chest, even if I did, I would not have known that DWS Investments was a Deutsche Bank subsidiary. In my innocence, I thought that you were called Deutsche Bank Asset management.

On Bluff's point re multiple back-ups (aka "versions"). Yes, this is theoretically possible, but the impact would be the creation of some 100-odd separate files in a three-hour period, since I am a compulsive typer of the save command CTRL+S. So I would really have to delete a lot of those at the end of the week, which would be aggravating in terms of time taken (think of how annoying it is tidying up e-mails).

Most "solutions" that IT people come up with involve a small amount of extra time (and extra memory). When these are all added up, they come to a large amount of extra time and a large amount of memory. The Pavlovian system at work here (it was a pain in the arse, so I will make sure that it doesn't happen again) is likely to prove more efficient in the long run.

PJ

Sponsors

[geoffchall.livejournal.com]

The one thing I admire with Man U is that they stick with their sponsors for a decent length of time. Sharp & Vodafone is it as far as I can remember, whereas my lot wander from Brother to First Advice to Thomas Cook. The whole thing is ridiculous in that the only seriously worthwhile sponsorship from the 'buyers' side is where you want to raise profile to Joe Public. There is a tiny amount of Thomas Cook/Man City cross-selling but it can't make them much.

Thus Middlesboro's 888.com is a piece of good sponsorship. It's memorable and it raises their profile quite effectively and isn't really going to alienate Sunderland & Newcastle supporters.

For every Arsenal fan who might choose O2 for their phone, there's a Spurs fan who will boycott them and I think O2 don't need their profile raising. My favourite was Potsmouth's Beanie Baby Ty sponsorship. The mind boggles as to what Ty thought they were getting out of dressing up footballers as beanie babies.

I remember a much earlier sponsorship of the Gillette Cup (then the 60 over cricket format). After around 10 years of sponsoring the thing, Gillette pulled out when a survey told them that people's association with the name Gillette was with the cricket and not the razors. But since then I couldn't tell you a single sponsor of the premier limited overs cup game.

Re: Backups

[(Anonymous)]

Peter,

If you go to the options box and the save tab, you should be able to specify that Word always creates a backup copy.

Bluff

Re: Sponsors

[andy-ward-uk.livejournal.com]

A Scottish double glazing firm sponsored both Celtic and Rangers for a couple of seasons for precisely the reason you mention ; their research had told them that if they sponsored Celtic, they would lose more business from Rangers fans than they would gain from Celtic, and vice versa.

Andy.