Simply Jonathan

Archive for 2008

Great service

My favourite football team is Brøndby IF. Over the summer, they signed a player who had formerly played in the youth ranks of the club, but later signed for the large Dutch club Ajax Amsterdam. His name is Michael Krohn-Dehli. After returning to Brøndby, he has made an instant impact on the team, clearly fighting to be one of the best players in the entire league.

I’m a great fan of Michael’s play, so it seemed natural that, in buying a new Brøndby shirt, I’d get one with Krohn-Dehli on the back.

So I ordered such one at the newly opened online Brøndby shop. I placed this order on Friday the 14th of November (a week ago now). Yesterday, however, I received an email telling me that unfortunately, Krohn-Dehli shirts had been so popular that they had sold out. I would have to wait for a week before I could get mine.

This, all in all, was quite decent. Sure, it’s bad to sell out before you can inform new customers that you have so, but I would certainly have placed the order anyway. The great thing, however, was that they went at greater strides to satisfy me.

Yesterday, Denmark played Wales at home in a friendly. (In a game we lost 1-0, alas.) This match was played on Brøndby Stadion, which — you guessed it — is owned by Brøndby IF. What the shop did was to offer me two tickets, absolutely free of charge, that I could pick up at the stadium.

To rephrase: they offered me free tickets worth about 200 DKK, because I would have to wait another seven days to get my order. That is damn fine service. This essentially turned an experience where I could have become a little sour (“why didn’t you write so on the page?!”) into one where I was deeply awed with their generosity.

Of course, they could offer me the tickets, because they had far from sold out, and there was no chance that they would. My coming to the stadium would only result in a little more potential revenue from beer or hotdog purchases. Still, I found this a perfect example of how to treat your customers, once you mess up on your end.

(Also, because it was with such short notice, I was unable to attend. So in effect, they made me more than happy with the experience of shopping with them, and they didn’t even have to give me the free tickets.)

John Resig on EtherPad 

Permanent location of 'John Resig on EtherPad'

I never really saw the appeal in multi-user editing when using SubEthaEdit, but as a proof of concept, EtherPad sounds cool, and I’m a big fan of proofs of concepts.

Cameron Moll on Showers and Thinking 

I think he’s definitely on to something, although I believe, and he himself points this out as well, it’s more the act of disrupting what you’re doing. I think the monotony point is a bit far-fetched.

Thank You, Tim Bray

Tim Bray, How I Use my Mac:

I don’t use iTerm and I don’t use tabs and I don’t use screen. I just keep as many Terminal.app windows open at a time as necessary, and rotate among them with command-`.

Holy bloody crap. Not that he doesn’t use iTerm, but the command+` thing. I didn’t know. For years, I have been using Witch, which is a fine app, but is painfully slow on my old Powerbook. Thank you, Tim Bray, for enlightening me.

The Clash – Lost in the Supermarket

I came in here for a special offer: Guaranteed personality

Happy Birthday, Honey

My girlfriend turns 20 today. Happy birthday, honey.

Re: Kottke's YouTube video hack 

If you need to link to a high quality video on your blog, append &fmt=18 onto the end of the YouTube URL

Clearly, you meant &

Burn•E

Burn•E is a great example of how Pixar sweat the details. I would have loved to make this a link, but it seems Disney are moving in quick on available YouTube clips. The Kottke post that made me aware of the short film now also sports an unavailable clip.

Cory Doctorow: Why I Copyfight 

Cory Doctorow on why copyright is broken. Long story short: culture.

Tips to avoid alligator attacks 

Keep it simple stupid.

(Via Seth Godin.)

This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.

Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.