Supermarket group Tesco has bought the restaurant chain Giraffe for £48.6m.
The move will see the supermarket open Giraffe branches near to Tesco stores as it seeks to create “retail destinations” for customers.
Tesco will hope that the acquisition will help revitalise its UK business.
via BBC News – Tesco buys Giraffe restaurants.
This is genius! I wonder how many people at my office are doing the same as a lot of their days seem to consist of the same ‘work days’.
After getting permission to study Bob’s computer habits, Verizon investigators found that he had hired a software consultancy in Shenyang to do his programming work for him, and had FedExed them his two-factor authentication token so they could log into his account. He was paying them a fifth of his six-figure salary to do the work and spent the rest of his time on other activities.
The analysis of his workstation found hundreds of PDF invoices from the Chinese contractors and determined that Bob’s typical work day consisted of:
9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos
11:30 a.m. – Take lunch
1:00 p.m. – Ebay time
2:00-ish p.m – Facebook updates, LinkedIn
4:30 p.m. – End-of-day update e-mail to management
5:00 p.m. – Go home
via Security audit finds dev OUTSOURCED his JOB to China to goof off at work • The Register.
Really interesting article afrom Anil Dash about how the web has changed, a few points I like are his views on single-sign-on – In 2003, if you introduced a single-sign-in service that was run by a company, even if you documented the protocol and encouraged others to clone the service, you’d be described as introducing a tracking system worthy of the PATRIOT act. There was such distrust of consistent authentication services that even Microsoft had to give up on their attempts to create such a sign-in. Though their user experience was not as simple as today’s ubiquitous ability to sign in with Facebook or Twitter, the TypeKey service introduced then had much more restrictive terms of service about sharing data. And almost every system which provided identity to users allowed for pseudonyms, respecting the need that people have to not always use their legal names.
Also his view on personal websites – In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity. In this vision, you would own your own domain name and have complete control over its contents, rather than having a handle tacked on to the end of a huge company’s site. This was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
via The Web We Lost – Anil Dash.
I may have to have children just so I can sacrifice them to Molek (18:21)
Sex seems to be a big no no in the rules stakes, 14 out of 76.
25. Having sex with your mother (18:7)
26. Having sex with your father’s wife (18:8)
27. Having sex with your sister (18:9)
28. Having sex with your granddaughter (18:10)
29. Having sex with your half-sister (18:11)
30. Having sex with your biological aunt (18:12-13)
31. Having sex with your uncle’s wife (18:14)
32. Having sex with your daughter-in-law (18:15)
33. Having sex with your sister-in-law (18:16)
34. Having sex with a woman and also having sex with her daughter or granddaughter (bad news for Alan Clark) (18:17)
36. Having sex with a woman during her period (18:19)
37. Having sex with your neighbour’s wife (18:20)
39. Having sex with a man “as one does with a woman” (18:22)
40. Having sex with an animal (18:23)
via Banned by the Bible | 76 things banned in Leviticus.
File this under things that should not be possible in 2012. The Register reports a Skype password reset flaw that needs nothing more than knowing which email address you signed up with.
The hijack is triggered by signing up for a new Skype account using the email address of another registered user.
That was the attack. Sign up with somebody else’s address, ignore the warning that it is already in use, because Skype lets you carry on anyway, then request a password reset and collect the token in your own client. No access to their inbox required at any point.
It had apparently been doing the rounds on a Russian forum for three months before anybody at Skype noticed, which is the part I find impressive. Password resets are the front door. You would think somebody would be watching it.
via Skype IDs hijackable by ANY FOOL who knows your email address, The Register.
When will brands ever learn? Do people not use the internet and read stuff? When it comes to social media we are now at a point when we have a fat pile of case files detailing how various brands have failed at social media, but this does not apparently stop other brands copying these mistakes over and over again.
This time around it is the turn of American Apparel. It has had the bright idea of rolling out a “Hurricane Sandy Sale” ad and as you might guess has sparked something of a Twitter backlash and ensured its brand will forever be linked with the words “social media fail”.
via American Apparel causes Twitter outrage with ‘Hurricane Sandy Sale’ | The Wall Blog.
Jimmy Savile and the BBC the biggest story on Earth? Apparently so. Today the British media placed it above Romney versus Obama, above the implosion of Lebanon and above the birth of the world’s largest oil company. Savile was bigger than killer drones in Lincolnshire, bigger than Cameron’s prison policy, bigger than the sensational Birmingham terrorism trial. The mere “standing down” of the editor of Newsnight led the BBC news, as if the corporation had sub-contracted itself to its house journal, Ariel.
It’s about time A&F had another lawsuit. Clean-shaven males had to wear a uniform of Abercrombie polo shirts, boxer briefs, flip-flops and a “spritz” of the retailer’s cologne, according to an “Aircraft Standards” manual, disclosed in an age-discrimination lawsuit brought by a former pilot. Among the 40-plus pages of detailed instructions: black gloves had to be used when handling silverware and white gloves to lay the table, the song “Take Me Home” had to be played when passengers entered the cabin on return flights and Jeffries’s dogs — identified in the document as Ruby, Trouble and Sammy — had different seating arrangements based on which ones were traveling.
Models on Abercrombie Jet Had Rules on Proper Underwear – Bloomberg.
bing are rebranding from “the decision engine” and have chosen to have people search for the phrase “bing is for doing” sadly on their own site the auto-suggest feature suggests a lot of rather negative things before you complete your phrase. Among them ” bing is useless” and “bing is rubbish” – someone in their marketing team should really have checked that. Still slightly better than the first auto-suggest on google.
London to Sydney in business class on Etihad for the first time, in two legs. EY0012 out of Heathrow at 09:15 on 28 February, then EY0454 from Abu Dhabi at 22:25, landing in Sydney the following evening. Which, this being 2012, meant arriving on 29 February. I had not planned a leap day arrival and it took me a while to work out why the date looked wrong.
Travelling on my own, which is probably the only reason there are notes at all. I took them as I went, largely because I kept being handed things.
This is a small thing that turns out not to be a small thing. On Virgin Atlantic you are pointed at a section of the aircraft and left to find your own way down it. On Etihad somebody greets you at the door and then walks you to your seat, which sounds like theatre until you have done a long-haul boarding and realised how much of the low-grade stress is just not knowing where you are meant to be.
Everything after that followed the same pattern. Small differences, all of them in the direction of you not having to ask.
Champagne before takeoff is standard enough. What was not standard was being asked, while still at the gate, what I wanted to drink once we were up. The order was taken on the ground and arrived immediately after takeoff, at the point where you are normally still waiting for the seatbelt sign and wondering whether anyone is coming.
It was possibly the strongest vodka and coke I have ever been served, by anybody, anywhere. It came with a chicken kebab that I have thought about since, which is why there is now a tag on this blog called Lovely Chicken.
The mezze later on was very good. Not good-for-a-plane good. Good.
Genius. That was the note, word for word, and I stand by it.
This was the thing that actually stayed with me. When the cabin goes down for the night section of the flight, the ceiling lights up deep blue with tiny LEDs scattered across it, so you are lying under a very convincing set of stars at thirty something thousand feet.
It costs them almost nothing. It is not a service, it is not a product feature, nobody is going to choose an airline because of it. And it is the single detail I have described most often to other people since, which presumably tells you something about how this stuff actually works.
Tower Heist was on the return leg. My note about it reads, in full, “Josh or Tony? Charlie?”, which was me sitting at thirty something thousand feet failing to remember that Casey Affleck plays Charlie. He is, for the record, both better looking and a better actor than his considerably more famous brother, and I am not taking questions on this.
Somewhere in among all that was an advert for Pocari Sweat, which is a real drink, sold in enormous quantities, and named as though nobody in the room spoke English. I have no notes on the advert itself. I have extensive notes on the name.
Yes. Obviously yes. The individual things are all quite small and most of them are cheap, which is rather the point. Somebody has clearly sat down and gone through the whole journey asking where a passenger is likely to feel slightly lost or slightly ignored, and then removed those moments one at a time.
There was a hotdog stand in the lounge. An actual stand, in an airport lounge, doing hotdogs. My note on this says “the hotdog stand at anz” and I have no idea why I wrote anz, because it was certainly not at a stadium. Whatever I meant, the hotdog stand happened.
Written up in Sydney on 7 March, waiting for EY0451 home.
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