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There’s a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of: It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer. Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible. Now I occasionally claim that I am writing this blog purely for me, myself and I....

Shamefully, I don’t read many books so an eBook reader has never been high on my list of priorities as it would probably become a moderately expensive white elephant and yet another gadget to carry around. However, Amazon’s high profile marketing campaign for the Kindle eBook reader sparked my interest sufficiently to download the free Kindle Reader application for Android to sample the experience of reading an eBook on a mobile device....

Frankly I think the pair deserve each other but some excellent quotes from Tevez’s agent, Kia Joorabchian, on Garry Cock. ‘Garry Cock thinks he’s bigger than Carlos Tevez.' ‘Garry Cock has an inflated opinion of himself. I brought him in from Nike after he begged me to get him a job in football.' ‘I got him a job which paid him more than four times what he was earning at Nike and he didn’t complain about me then but it’s all gone to his head....

Last week, I went to see The National at Brixton Academy. Twice. Both shows were great (Monday just shaded it) and the band resurrected a rarely played classic ‘Lit Up’ (one of my all-time favourite National songs) on both nights which was an unexpected and brilliant bonus. I’d been eagerly waiting for these dates to come around since I saw the band on election night back in May at the Royal Albert Hall....

At the weekend, I purchased a new printer after replacing the ink cartridges failed to reinstate the ability to print in black on my Canon IP4000. Previously, I’d researched which printers had decent Linux support and decided on an HP Deskjet 3050. This is a wireless printer so I hoped that the Windows PC’s in the house would be able to print directly and the management of the printer (inkjet levels) would be easier....

In my job as a roving IT consultant, I have given a number of technical presentations about Siebel. During that time, I have learned that I am much more comfortable presenting material and content that I have created myself. I have also presented slide-decks used by technical pre-sales. This has occasionally led to detailed questions arising about a very innocuous looking bullet point which I was unable to effectively answer; not a comfortable situation....

Back in May, I went along to my son’s school to hear James Cracknell speak. Cracknell is an old boy of KGS and went on to become a double Olympic gold medalist. Since his retirement from rowing, Cracknell has embarked on a series of endurance challenges. Cracknell supplements his income by writing for the Daily Telegraph and also gives after dinner speeches about his adventures as well as motivational talks at corporate events....

This blog is now running on Drupal 7 (beta 3). Currently Disqus comments are absent but I am hoping the Global Redirect module and the Disqus crawler will remedy this given time. Most of the modules I require are available for Drupal 7 apart from FeedBurner so I have just re-pointed the feed for now. Let’s see if this appears on the other side. I will probably convert to using MarkDown markup in due course too....

I was recently in a pub when a lady looked expectantly at me and said ‘Fancy a whip for this ?’ I looked a little taken aback and hesitated until she helpfully clarified ‘A kitty. For the drinks. Shall we have a whip round and I’ll then buy some drinks’. In a very polite British way, I proffered a ten pound note and said ‘Oh that will be great. Thanks for sorting that out....

United players line up for the identity parade. Paul Scholes has been excused to ‘quickly go to the toilet’.