Chris Saul's Blog

Friday March 09, 2007

Why do musicians have such awful websites?

Why do most musicians have such awful, Flash based websites? I'm sure they look great on the designer's Mac in LA or London's Hoxton Square, but they're appalling when viewed by normal users - they take ages to load even if you have a fast DSL link, you can't bookmark or search them and music invariably warbles in the background whether you want it or not.

Amy Winehouse and Muse's sites are perfect example of something that looks superficially rather cool, but is irritating and unusable in reality. Motorhead's site takes things one stage further and combines Flash with frames. Hideous.

Total quality Deutschland

I spent Sunday to Weds of this week in Frankfurt and in Haslach in the Black Forest, visiting an excellent reference customer we have there. I was there with a friend of mine who works for a Sun partner and his customer, the CIO of a bank in the Middle East.

As always when in Germany, I was totally bowled over by the quality of everything that we saw. Beautifully built houses, solid cars, exquisitely furbished office areas. Incredible. Britain is not a shabby place by any stretch of the imagination - but compare and contrast the average regional bank branch or small village houses with the local Sparkasse we visited and the guesthouse we stayed in. The difference is apparent.

It was great fun to travel with two guys my own age, each with a similar sense of humour to mine. Instead of it just being me on my own on planes and in hire cars, hotels and airport lounges it was three blokes generally having a laugh. A welcome change. (Note to Sun shareholders - we got a lot of useful work done as well).

UK no longer doctors' destination of choice?

I was disappointed to read what Eashig has to say about the state of medical training in the UK.

How can the UK go from being the number one choice for so many trainee doctors to the state it's in now? Having doctors from the UAE and similar countries come to the UK to train is good for our country in so many ways. If what Eashig says is generally true and our reputation has diminished, not having these students will be the UK's loss.

Off road in March

We did a great trip last week in the big dunes opposite Big Red. Aaron has a nice write up. His tire came off and we did a textbook 'pop back on'.

The Hummer did really well - turning off the stability control is definitely recommended.

I'd been wanting to get out in these particular dunes for a while - we'll definitely be going there again before it gets too hot!

Some pics here.