12-01-2003_12-31-2003

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Redmond's Latest Security Stumble?
Hey this is SECURITY with a capital
You Dickheads!!!
I quote from one of the manuals, the Sybex one (Mastering WindowsServer 2003):
.........With Server 2003 you can take a backup of your AD domain database with you to the remote site, and DCPROMO then lets you start a new DC out from the backup of the AD, rather than forcing a complete initial replication over the WAN. From there, you connect the new DC up to that unreliable phone line, and all the DC must do is to replicate whatever’s changed in AD between when the backup occurred and now, which usually isn’t much.
... so it now appears I can, if I get access to an open DC somewhere, take a copy of the catalog, I can then run up a new DC in my bedroom and join the domain? It may not get me full access right away but it's a loophole I could use to access stuff, maybe change passwords, whatever.
Also, (and more importantly) it lets me, as a determined system breaker, maybe get my hands on the DVD which that system admin is carrying around and reverse engineer it for ALL the passwords and other stuff like where the cream of the files are stored?
Damnit, it breaks every security rule I can think of... Am I stupidly not seeing something here, or is it Redmond that have done YAST?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:17 PM Ted
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Out of memory Errol
Here's a thought for you (be careful though!):
Medical professionals told us that we only ever really utilised a tenth of our brain's capacity. None of them can tell you what would happen if we used *all* of it. I mean, are they talking computing power or memory capacity here?
If they meant processing power well then we're probably safe - after all, it takes the same amount of specialised knowledge to be a woodcutter as it does to be a system administrator, just in slightly different areas. We may have to process a bit more than our woodsman ancestor, but I doubt the difference would add much to that 10% load average...
On the other hand, we have so much more information flowing through that processing power, and since it's believed that we never truly lose any memories, that could be a problem for our brains. (We might forget *where* a particular memory is in our brains, but unless the braincells die, the memory will be there, just forgotten...)
We are reading a LOT more information than our ancestors ever got out of tracking game or sitting at their local inn, we are required to process a LOT more data than they ever were, and this information overload is a recognised condition nowadays. And it's growing exponentially, meaning the first real information overload should be happening anytime in the new year...
In fact, this could be a good way to can spammers once and for all, if it can be shown that their actions constitute reckless endangerment of people's mental faculties...
So - at what point will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being unable to add any new memories?
...what point will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being unable to add any...
...will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being...
...'s brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above...
...'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given...
...take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting...
...forget older or...
OUT OF MEMORY ERROR HAS OCCURRED. PLEASE ADVISE - ... SOMEONE... ABOUT... UMMMMMmmm....
Sorry - couldn't resist that one... Back to the show...
Luckily, we can sort of deal with this sort of amnesia already, (or watch the movie 'Memento' for a great insight into anterograde amnesia) so we'll just carry on until someone invents a Compact Flash card for our brains, and then start adding a whole new personality or skillset... hehehe yeh right. Since when have we ever had enough CPU or memory?
But be more selective about what you put in your brain from now on, you hear?
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 10:55 AMposted at 10:20 AM Ted
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Happy New (Accurate!) Year!
So the Earth's gone back to being right on time in its orbit around the Sun.
It's an interesting thing, really. We invented atomic clocks to track time better and then found out that Earth hasn't been tracking time accurately, so we validated the leap year which had been previously introduced to account for this.
Our ancestors believed in whims of gods and random variability. To them, it was quite acceptable that winter might be followed by more winter, or that a day should be cut short because of a god's displeasure. What they attributed eclipses to bears testimony to their way of thinking back then. And lo! - the universe complied, by providing them with an Earth that slowed down and made years a different length.
Our physicists and astrophysicists (now *there*'s a blast from the past term!) tell us that slowing down is the natural course for bodies in orbit, so we also believe in a certain amount of variability, but a predictable variability.
This is unpredictable. So were the ancients right, does everything really depend on the whim of gods, or are we missing some laws of physics? Or is the Universe adapting itself to our new demands on it?
I don't recall who in the last century said that 'the Universe looks less and less like a machine and more and more like a thought' but I'm beginning to think they're right. In which case, there are two consequences to this Earth-moving news:
ONE - we're all on time again, but we still have leap years, so we're actually ahead by about a quarter of a second per day, so you can all stop worrying about being late for appointments! and
TWO - since the Universe is a thought, and since I am experiencing this thought, it must be *my* thought, so why am I typing this weblog to figments of my imagination?
Happy New Year all you figments!
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:17 AMposted at 9:31 AM Ted
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Monday, December 29, 2003

Where are they today? Scientific breakthroughs that have vanished into limbo.
I've just picked up a book that's been in my bookshelf for a LOOONNNGGG time - written sometime in the Seventies, it's titled 'Breakthroughs' by one Charles Panati. In the first few dozen pages, I've already found enough material to keep my curiosity motor ticking over at hyper rates.
In the section on dental care, for example, he mentions 'Lauricidin' - go ahead, Google it if you like, there are results to be had - but here's the mystery - you tell me what happened here, I'd be most grateful:
You see, Lauricidin is lauric acid and glycerine. And Mr Panati goes to the trouble of mentioning that it has great antibacterial properties against the bacteria which cause tooth decay and caries, is tasteless, and just undergoing approval by the FDA for use as an additive in foods and motuhwashes and whatever, in order to lessen the chances of these bacteria forming plaques on teeth.
Where is it now? Why are there still dentists making money hand over hand over our teeth? Why does Lauricidin apparently now have a bad taste when in the 70's it was definitely 'tasteless'? Someone needed a reason not to put it into general use? WTF is going on here?
There are a variety of diet things mentioned, and one in particular I remembered, after reading about it again, that I'd heard about it again in the early Nineties, when it was said (on several of the better news magazine shows on TV at the time) that it was only a matter of a few years before we'd see a cheap weight reduction treatment from it. The material was perfluorooctyl bromide, a chemical which was also used in some underwater breathing experiments some 10 - 20 years ago. The stuff has large molecules that we can't easily absorb trhrough alveoli or stomach linings, so it's ideal for carrying oxygen into lungs or blocking food and passing it through the stomach.
Nowadays I find that it seems to be used as a contrast agent for xrays and microscopy, and not much else. And instead of the (and I quote Panati) 'expensive - about $50 a quart' bromide, the latest fad 'fat pill' is more like $500 a month's course, and comes laden with safety warnings and caveats and you try getting a doctor to prescribe them.
Sucrose Polyester - turned out to be a flop. Think Olestra, stomach cramps, etc. But that was in development when Panati wrtoe his book, and it has gone right through all the stages and become first a publicised breakthrough and then a PR disaster. But if it got developed, approved, and then shitcanned in the intervening 20 years, why didn't some of the other products?
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:16 AMposted at 7:36 PM Ted
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What happened to cardboard boxes at supermarkets?
I mean that from the bottom of my heart - what happened to being able to take groceries home in a carton? Once upon a time, stores kept a pile of boxes at the checkout and you selected one and all your stuff got put into it - bingo, no plastic bags. Nowadays, we are choking the whole damn world with LDPE bags.
Supermarkets will tell you it's just not economical to keep the steady stream of cartons to the checkouts, that it takes too much employee time to move them around. But. It takes an employee around 20 - 30 seconds per carton to slice dice fold and flatten it, then it takes the same amount of time whether they take flattened cartons out the back or complete cartons out the front, and then it takes extra time to stack the crusher and operate it.
Not economical? Then maybe you have the wrong idea of economy. You're still using the 'Jack' idiom. (Fuck you Jack, I'm okay) That says that as long as you don't have to pay for the problem of plastic LDPE bags filling up the rubbish tips - along with all your neatly pressed bales of flattened cartons, of course - then that's 'economical' or something...
Fact of the matter is, there is going to be a surcharge on plastic bags here in Australia, which keen retailers will pass on to the customer (with interest I'm sure) and that will ensure that people bring their own shopping bags to the stores. And believe me, your interest on the surcharge on the plastic bags that you didn't need to supply in the first place if you'd only bothered to train employees to think as they pack, that won't even begin to cover the cost of checkout ops puzzling over which odd-shaped carry bag to put the breads in, which bag will hold the weight of the frozen goods, and so forth.
Believe me because I'm an early adopter. I have a flotilla of carry bags which I take to the supermarket with me and which I insist are used instead of the plastic bags. And it invariably takes almost twice as long because you see, the bags aren't a standard, the checkout person has to think about things, they have to (instead of just starting a new bag when the preceding one has opnly two items in it) worry about whether they can put a bottle of dishwashing liquid in with the frozen, and so on. And of course, the fact that I have my own carry bags makes it a bit more special, they also tend not to crush stuff together they way they do with plastic bags.
I've often asked for cartons, on the basis that they're way easier to pack, cheaper, and may as well get reused, but hey - I'll keep pissing supermarkets off with my odd assortment of bags until they cave in... hehehe...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:16 AMposted at 7:35 PM Ted
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Friday, December 26, 2003

Almost time to...
Almost time to ... ummm ... well, actually, to act like an old fart. Which I am.
Y'see, it's another year almost gone by. Another round of technological advances that made our heads spin, another crop of ideas, technologies, gadgets, and pure scientific discovery that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier.
My father was born in 1927, in a sleepy town outside Austria, in a world that was still recovering from WW1. A world, furthermore, that didn't have half the advantages we have now, so recovery took time. We don't comprehend that, nowadays. A country is torn up by war, we move in the UN and Red Cross and a few volunteer organisations, six months later the news shows this dramatic recovery. Oh yeah, and we have almost instant news now, too - my father was sometimes lucky to find out in the European newspapers, things that had taken place a month ago in the USA. And news from Australia, well that was right out.
My dad ran off to join the German Marine at the age of fifteen, and after WW2 he took an apprenticeship as a butcher, then studied and became an advertising artist in Vienna, and there he met my mother. 1955 or 1956, my mother's parents moved to Vienna from the family farm to join what were soon to become my wedded parents. The first time Mum switched on an electric light, they crossed themselves and were apparently very uneasy about light that didn't come out of a candle or oil lamp.
My father owned a car, which placed him firmly in the well-to-do class at the time. And he went back to studies, this time in agricultural engineering. Soon after, we were on our way to Arabia, to Bahrain Island, to start a dairy / market garden farm for a newly oil-rich sheik, who was making money off people like my father who owned 'automobiles' and needed 'benzene' for them.
On Bahrain, we had air conditioning (gasp!) and (oh envy, oh wonder!) a record player and television. Saudi Arabia of course had all the most mod of the mod cons, with all that newfound wealth floating around, so we lived fair and square among a millionnaire playboy set at that time. Oh yeah, I came along in 1957, we were on Bahrain from 1960 to 1963, at which time we'd fulfilled the contract of the dairy farm. I became used to speed boats, dhows, fast American and European cars, airplane flights back home once a year, Meccano sets of baffling complexities, and much to the credit if St Christopher's Convent run School, I became enthralled witrh books, learned Latin and French (in my first year in school mind you, and was made familiar with set theory and other mathematical and scientific learning, I know now that the time from about age three to age - say - nine are knowledge sponge years, I soaked up curriculata and extracurriculata almost in minutes. On my first day there I spoke not a word of English, by the afternoon I had worked out hello, my name is Rupert (and if any of you readers ever let on I'll kill ya!) and the magic word for all us first-time mum-deprived miserable little bunnies - 'home!'...
By the end of the first year I could converse in poorly accented but grammatically and syntactically correct French, and manage some Latin, as well as having picked up English. My life has always been a little faster because of that initial start of parallel multitasking I needed to undertake to make this all happen. A lot of Baby Boomers were expatria and learning more than one culture. I was learning Arabic, and the gentle art of Arabic crudities, from the coolies on the farm, picking up an English Catholic education complete with formal everything, and still maintaining an Austrian home life. Within a few years, we left Saudi for Australia. After a bried few stints as a farmhand on various farms, my father went and studied again, this time to become a powerhouse engine driver. In that period, stereo became the standard for record players, and cassette tapes replaced the opne reel messagetapes the grandparents sent us the news on.
They felt quite hip because they had a small tabletop reel to reel tape recorder, (oh, about 30cm by 30cm by 17cm high, weighed about 8 to 10 kilos...) and we with our newfound Arabian sophistication, wished they'd discover cassette tapes. By the time I was ten I was firmly hooked into electronics, could service some appliances and equipment, and finally took a traineeship with an airline to develop my skills. In here, things like transistors had started making themselves felt, although a lot of aircraft back then flew with valve technology under the hood. Panasonic's donut-shaped Panapet wrist radios were all the cheerful rage.
I started to predict how technology would help foster even more technology once I realised the implications inherent in video cassettes, of being able to transfer a whole visual concept in mov ing visual form, and how that would start accelerating as phones and videos came closer together (hey I'm a visionary, what can I say) and started to look at this relative newcomer on the scene, integrated circuits. With integrated circuits, I thought, it was only a matter of time before they stacked up the layers to get more into one chip. Well, they're still trying to do that now, so I may yet be right...
And with the advent of chips and logic gates, one could now build a 4 bit computer that programmed through front-panel switches and outputted through what were then very high tech front panel red LEDs. I bought one and built it. And lost interest fairly quickly while I tried to design a way to make a small dirigible fly with a video camera and transmit signal back. I never got either off the ground...
But by the late 70's when I left the traineeship and came back to Australia, Sir Clive Sinclair had made a small personal computert for under $200, and I bought one. A few years later, in the mid 80'2, I was busy buying enough parts to build a 286 AT class PC, and in mid 1990 I had my first Pentium, now I have P4 machines, Xeon machines, mobile Pentium laptops, and a pocket organiser that runs Win CE. (As well as rings around my 286, 386SX, 486DX33, and probably my first pentium 75 as well...)
Also in that time period, we went from stethoscopes to xrays to mri and CAT scan and PET and hundreds of other medical techniques like laser eye surgery, stainless steel stents to keep arteries open, keyhols surgery with cameras inside the patient, exploding of kidney stones, hundreds of pharmaceutical innovations, and a leap from basic genetics to a map of several species' entire genomes.
My father's stroke after surgery last year could have been prevented had it happened this year, with advances in the treatment of stroke, and advances in the carotid stentowhatevery that he needed on hos right carotid and which sent the blood clot shooting up to kill half of his brain.
Similarly, if I manage my emphysema wisely, I expect that before it becomes too bad there will be treatments available, there are already fine high-efficiency artificial lungs out there that can put oxygen into the blood, and it can't be too long before they develop another one to scrub the CO2 out.
In this year I've seen almost twice as many new ideas and technologies emerge and start prducing results, as there were in the two years before. Nanotechnology has been whispering along ever so quietly in the background, and now suddenly, there are nannies at work in a variety of manufacturing processes and products, and in a few more years, nanaparticles with receptors and iron pellets will detox my body should I overdose on Es or some other drug, or if I catch several varieties of diseases, or possibly even for various heavy metals, and while the developers say that FDA tests are five years away, I think three years is more a fair estimate.
Each technology reinforces another, which then leaps ahead and reinforces yet another discipline. There are websites out there now devoted to picking when the so-called Singularity will occur, the moment when scientific and technological advances hits the asymptote of the curve, when advance overtakes the capability to cope with it.
I don't think there's far to go. I learnt to multitask and learn fast due to my childhood experiences, many of my contemporary Boomers aren't quite there. But GenXers are there, they are so fully there... They grew up with multitasking, learning things fast is the rule not the exception - and are more capable of absorbing the multitude of new things that come along these days than your elders, aren't you?
To you, it seems unthinkable to not have a wired world. You probably can't imagine that my homework right through to the end of High School was all done on paper, usually written by hand but later I got my hands on a small Lettera Olivetti typewriter, and I saved my pocket money for several months to buy a Casio calculator... I planted vegetable gardens and wasn't overcome by ennui when the seeds took months to grow into plants and then another few months to produce vegetables... And I knew for a fact that cancer would kill you, there was no such thing as AIDS, and we'd have a base on the Moon as soon as we got that first load of astronauts up there...
You *expect* things to happen fast. Most would feel like we were missing a limb if we couldn't read news online, would feel timewarped if we picked up a magazine with this month's date on it and last month's news inside.
So - what's 2004 going to bring us? No coals please, but I reckon we'll get a few things that will have definite wow factor.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:15 AMposted at 9:39 PM Ted
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HGH of the century
I was watching a thing on TV on the life of Jesus, and it suddenly became clear to me - we're not a spiritual people any more.
See, there was this picture of a tribesman laying beside his little fire and tending it, and you could tell that even though he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, he was having deep thoughts. Unlike us.
He was having the deep thoughts because, you see, he had bugger all else to do except think philosophical and spiritual thoughts. No boss breathing down his neck for 'that job that was due yesterday,' no need to worry about finding parking for the car, nothing like that disturbed his little pool of calm. Unlike us.
He wasn't worried if his PC was infected with a virus, he wasn't reading spam about viagra and human growth hormone, and he didn't have to fret about a mortgage. Seems all too idyllic doesn't it?
Because that's what we get today - all that pressure to live forever, perform forever. No wonder we don't have time to sit and poke little twigs into a fire and think deeply fulfilling thoughts about eternal life...
We rush from one thing to another, out of a bed that's 1000% better than this guy's sleeping position in the dirt beside his fire, to a breakfast which is probably what his local king would eat, to a job where we can feel fulfilled and productive, unlike him whose only imprtant function was probably to act as a human fence to a bunch of goats.
Lunch is something he would think about while chewing up a couple of freshly preserved olives and some dry fetta and flatbread, he wouldn't even dream about a lunch like we're having with a chicken schnitzel burger with salad and mayo, or a sit-down meal at Old Papa's or Il Vecc or whatever our favourite nosh spot is. Hell, one of our meals, he'd probably split with his family because it's so big.
While we go home to a house that's a few hundred squares, he'd go back to a cosy little cabin, where our place is filled with spouses and kids, his would also contain the family goat and the family dog, the grandparents, and his brother's family as well, there'd be camaraderie and people all around, real love none of this "love you daddy i'm going to bed now' stuff for him.
Then while we were catching up on the news after dinner, and logging into our ISP to check our emails, he'd be tending the sickest child and repeating the stories he'dheard from the other herders, and whatever it was he'd thought of while he was burning that stuff in the fire.
We'd tell our other half the best of the latest crop of jokes, he'd be discussing what Ali bin Yussef has been doing with turning seemingly ordinary mud into superb cooking utensils.
He was so lucky, we're so unlucky - yes?
Because then, when we in the present get to the bit of email that says "live forever! HGH will fix your knackered old body, make you feel better, and make your whole life better!', well that's the part where, in his world, he opens his eyes really wide and asks if anyone's heard of this Jesus person, because, he says "this Jesus says we can live forever! Religion will fix our knackered old body, make us feel better, and make our whole life better!'
And that's where, suddenly, it becomes unclear whether the old spiritual and new clinical modern couldn't just be the same thing but under a different layer of snake oil...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 10:35 AMposted at 9:39 PM Ted
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Thursday, December 11, 2003

Another thing I hate
Robbie Williams.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:12 AMposted at 10:43 PM Ted
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Sunday, December 07, 2003

MDM and the Microsoft Way
I'm just buying myself a P75-powered Libretto 50CT. Years behind the in-crowd, I've found a secondhand miniscule PC which I quite like. I intend to use it for programming external devices like door access systems, PABxs, PIC programmers, and so forth. (Also, I like the size of it, I haven't seen as versatile a communications machine since the Tandy M100/M200 'laptops' of 20 years ago. I still have and use my M200, it's inbuilt comms software and port have been a godsend on more than one occasion.)
Another thing about the Libretto, it runs Windows. I'm not biased, but much of the software written for serial programming and control of those devices has been written for Windows and never ported to any other operating system. I don't fancy doing any porting myself, as my knowledge of C or whatever is approximately zero. So the fact that this palmtop came with Win98SE on it was attractive.
I also like things to work reasonably well, so I started uninstalling stuff that I know isn't needed, unloading processes that do nothing for the operating system, and generally taking out stuff I know destabilises Win98. (I think I had some sort of record once, I kept a Win98 machine with a record uptime of 84 days, and it was running a web server and chat server... But that was probably a fluke...)
And right there, when I was trimming the running processes down to Explorer and Systray, it hit me. What sort of pants-down-bend-over-assume-the-position operating system runs a process like mdm.exe? (For the uninitiated, mdm is the Machine Debug Manager.) 'We accept that our software is so full of holes that we've written this special program to watch over it all and assist in debugging and recovering of crashed software.'
Okay, so maybe that's not precisely the way it works but the secret to gauging the company's attitude to it's own software IS in the naming of the program. It's like the famous 'Shouldn't See This' window that sometimes comes up as Win98 or 95 is spectacularly crashing - why bother to name such a process unless you fully expect it to be visible? And why would you expect that, hmmm?
So the culture of MS is pretty obvious from things like that. They build it fully expecting it to crash, to fail. And all those developers follow their lead, building ever more software for a platform that's already doomed by its own programmers not having faith in it. No wonder there's such a huge market of malware makers out there, they can all see the head-hanging attitude and immediately *know* they're going to have no trouble showing this software who's boss...
Worst of all, you can't just kill the mdm process, Win98 keeps resurrecting it. That about says it all... %)
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:11 AMposted at 12:04 PM Ted
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Thursday, December 04, 2003

Sandlots shops and other shit
Here in Western Australia, Perth in particular, we have sand all the way from surface to bedrock. Greyish sand, yellowish sand, sand with humus in it if we garden, sand with black mangrove mud through it if we live on reclaimed low-lying areas. You get the idea, we have sand sand and more sand.
And sand can actually support grass, trees, and decent vegetation. It's supported native plants for millenia, and it can support our imported plants as well. In fact, surprisingly, the sand also supports some rather large buildings. A geologist friend of mine shudders everytime he sees the Business District, he reckons one decent wash of water over the place and all thos buildings will just sink below the surface, because bedrock is hundreds of feet down.
And those businesses, they vary in how successful they are, because of what they plant outside. In Perth's CBD, they get the Council to plant parks and verges, anywhere that can be planted, is planted. It's one of the reasons I love Perth so much, you can drive along the coastal highway for miles and look towards the most densely packed suburbs and all you really see is an expnase of trees and vegetation with rooves showing here and there. It's one of the bonuses of living here.
The most successful businesses outside the CBD have their verge sorted out, they have a nature strip with decent plantings of green and flowering plants, and if they don't, well not only do they look dodgy, they usually don't do all that well either. The other day I drove past several one and two dollar storeswith dried up bushes around the doors, sand blowing over their footpaths, and went to a slightly more expensive cheap shop to buy my plastic tub for soaking mulch in. This store was in a shop and carpark complex but they laid it out neat and clean, a kind of 'we can't plant neat rows of stuff on asphalt but dammit we'll keep it clean and the kerbs painted and the buildings looking neat!'
I was immediately impressed, and several things about this struck me. If you take premises which have some garden outside, you damn well better look after it. A dodgy slovenly looking piece of ill-cared brownery makes customers wonder if they won't get the same neglect, and if the stock inside has been similarly left to age, and many of the bypass those premises. Places like this, I've found, usually cater to a fanatic specialty crowd who just need the goods and will go to any lengths to secure their curtain material or fishing tackle or whatever.
Anyone that doesn't have a special interest group niche and has a crappy surroundings and exterior, well you usually find the wrecking ball swinging there within a few years at the outside. And Feng Shuei claims that since old times - keep your Feng Shuei clean and neat and you will be successful. They knew a thing or two, did those Chinese.
So - shops with better gardens - do they really do better? Hell yeah - after all, they can afford a gardener to maintain the place, they can afford to replace tatty looking plants, and they couldn't do that if they were going broke... By starting out looking affluent and well-cared-for, they have established a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd shop there because my gut would say 'hey those people have a well-tended shop' and I'd beleive they were more well off than the dodgy looking shop with the blasted desert outside.
People will tell you that 'the product sells itself, it really does' and you can look them straight back in the eye and say 'nope - my hard work setting up my shop and the fifteen feet out front, THAT sells the product' and you'd be right. Packaging of a product starts in the carpark.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, January 18, 2004 10:11 AMposted at 1:07 AM Ted
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