Marketing doesn’t have to be subtle. I was recently sent a DVD from Lovefilm that contained a small complimentary bar of Green & Black’s chocolate (5p at cost price?). Being the greedy man I am, I knew this bar wouldn’t be enough once I’d started it, but even the thought of eating it got me salivating. Cursing the marketers involved for being so cunning, I immediately hastened to Sainsbury’s to stock up (in my defence, I bought some other stuff too).

Just before a trip to London a few days ago, I inserted my Woolwich card in an ATM near Winchester Station. I hit the ‘balance on screen’ button, and saw ‘your card issuer has declined your request’. A bit mysterious. I don’t normally keep much money in that account, but obviously I still wanted to make sure that someone wasn’t in the process of stealing it. So I phoned up the ’lost and stolen’ line on the back of the card and explained the problem. I was told that, because I wasn’t an Openplan account holder (whatever that is), it wasn’t possible to do any telephone banking past 5.30pm. Although my security details could be verified, I was told that no further information could be given. The card could be cancelled, and a new one sent out, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle for the risk attached to such a small sum of money.

We’ve recently got some new break-out rooms at Hursley, which contain some very comfy sofas; I must go in there more often. I tried the new coffee machines therein too - they were more disappointing. I’ll stick with my no-way-to-obtain-good-coffee-at-my-workplace theory. Back to plan A.

I’ve just signed up for an account with Zopa, a UK-based peer-to-peer money lending market (for a similar US-based site, see Prosper). It’s going to be a few weeks before I can seed my Zopa account with some capital to lend, but the concept looks absolutely fascinating (as well as potentially lucrative), and I can’t wait to see how well it turns out. It looks like it has the potential to cause some disruption to a part of the financial market in the same way as Paypal did, and I hope it does well. Given the recent news of Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his novel microcredit form of lending, let’s hope that innovation in finance continues, and governments don’t choose to regulate it further.

IBM loves patents. We’ve held the record for thirteen years for the most U.S. patents granted each year. IBM’s margin over the competition is also good (2941 in 2005, compared to 1828 for our nearest competitor, Canon). IBMers are actively encouraged to develop patents (which is probably why we do so well in the patent charts), and IBM is a large company with a lot of resources and a disproportionately large R&D; spend - perhaps no-one should be too surprised.

Well, it looks like writing about customer service can have an effect. About two months back I wrote about how 82ASK had disappointed me - they found my prose, replied, and made it all OK. Now, another recent posting about the LOVEFiLM/Screenselect merger has elicited a comment from the LOVEFiLM team. They haven’t entirely addressed my concerns, but their proactive approach is encouraging, and might tip the balance in favour of hanging on, if and when problems do occur.

Getting your hair cut is normally dead time, unless you find the conversation particularly stimulating. So as I was having mine trimmed this morning, I got to wondering:

Why going to the barber’s is like going to the dentist

• You have to sit very still or bad things happen. This is tricky and you tend to squirm. From time to time they re-orient your head.

• They have a special chair that goes up and down.

  More ...

Get on a train at Waterloo bound for Winchester. Discover that there is a bus ‘service’ from Basingstoke to Winchester, due to mid-week engineering work, despite having checked online and the timetable asserting no such thing. After a brief chat with them, discover that the three pretty ladies sitting opposite you are actually travelling to somewhere this train doesn’t go, them having been misinformed by someone from SWT - they will leave the train in short order. Realise that all the podcasts you have on your phone are dry and boring, and the Pomegranate juice you’ve bought from M&S; tastes weird. When you get off the bus in Winchester, walk home through the pouring rain in a nice suit, with no umbrella. Curse a deep and hidden puddle that creeps up on your shiny shoes.

Folks, this is the power of well-constructed fiction. Grave of the Fireflies is an astonishingly powerful animated film about a Japanese brother and sister orphaned during a firebombing in WWII. It’s a film to move you to tears, and feel that frustratingly ironic anger at evil folks who drop bombs on innocents. The characters are so well focused they just draw you into the story, and I found it easy to ride the emotional rollercoaster the entire way. The younger sister (Setsuko) is perfectly honed to behave the way a young child might in such upsetting circumstances, and the older brother (Seita) makes promises he cannot keep, and suffers accordingly.

I didn’t realise this was going to happen, but after my recent posting about the virtues of corporate blogging, ibm.com has gone all-out and has posted a directory of IBMers who are blogging externally on the front page, so it’s entirely possible you’ve arrived from there - in which case, welcome!

I work on one of the test teams for WebSphere ESB, and we’re currently working hard on the recently announced 6.0.2 version, so I haven’t been posting quite as much on work topics recently as I normally aim to do. But if you’d like to take a look at my past postings on SOA and ESB or WebSphere, or indeed anything else on my blog, please do, and please feel to leave a comment, ask a question, or get in touch.