I finally remembered what the hell it was I wanted to post on the other day. I remembered while riding into town on Gardiners Creek bike path tonight. This bike path has two detours on it at the moment.. both arguably very very lethal and it occurred to me that no one would dare do something equivalent on a major road. Someone would get seriously hurt… the appropriate authority would get their ass sued off… and while I am not in favor of the current massively litigious nature of society, they would deserve it. And everyone concerned knows it. And so the really stupid does not happen. But bike paths are open slather. And the truly stupid happens all the time
I have probably raved about this before. But it deserves a rave. Eastlink bike path has bits only experts can ride up. It has wooden bridges.. lethal when damp and when icy with downhill curves on them and grates in the middle of the path on blind corners. Gardiners creek currently has a plywood 180 degree 1 metre radius downhill corner on a detour in a part of the path prone to ice. The Dandenong creek path has seen a guy killed recently on a part of the path that Parks Victoria had been warned about repeatedly. They have effectively and competently solved the problem tho. Or not. There have been other fatal accidents on Melbourne bike paths And oopses beyond number.
As I said you could not get away with doing this sort of thing on the road. And the idea of getting cyclists.. wearing cleated shoes as many will be, to get off and walk, is just insane. Way more dangerous walking than riding. A sign saying “ride at walking pace’ would at least make some sense. You think 40 kph zones are nuts try.. “walking pace only signs” The problem is that bikes are supposed to be an actual mode of transport. The way the councils get away with it is to say that all bike paths are shared paths and that they only have to make them safe for pedestrians. And pedestrians not wearing bike shoes at that. Its nuts.
And bike paths do appear to be designed by the work experience guy. Drunk. A man who has never actually seen a bike. And thinks of them as.. maybe roller blades. Rather than the most efficient mode of transport in a energy expended sense ever. As I said nuts.
I went to a seminar on motorcycle safety earlier this year. I suggested that people hired as road engineers by VicRoads should at least be able to ride a motorcycle and drive a truck. Not that hard one would have thought. Nope. Heaven forbid people design stuff they have a clue about. Was not an idea that met with much approval. Bugger.
We pay insurance in case we actually screw a clients data up accidently, and we make seriously best efforts to not do this. My dentist rings up to make sure nothing went wrong. Reasonable care is required by the law in many endeavors and its a reasonable requirement. Why then when its absolutely obvious, at least to any thinking person with a clue about cycling that a bit of cycling infrastructure is lethal do the people concerned not have a duty.. or even think they have a moral duty, to take reasonable care? Its not actually very much to ask.
Heavy experimentation with google addwords at PerfectNotes at the moment. This sort of targeted advertising is brilliant. Am talking to a couple of clients about targeted advertising on their behalf. This stuff is absolutely brilliant. Mark has been using it to sell his bonsai for a while already.
Addwords
June 28, 2010We have been playing with google adwords for the last few days. Its a brilliant concept. I think I wasted the $30 we at ‘Perfect Notes’ invested in it. But for some businesses.. possibly not ours, its the most brilliant brilliant marketing possible. Even though it has some issues. Let me explain
The way adwords works is you can essentially pay google to return an add about you if a search contains certain key words. It all depends on just how targeted those words are how effective an advertisement is. If you can figure out exactly what search a savvy person would use to find your business and the words in that search are specific enough to get to you and not 75 000 other people then adwords is way going to work for you. Otherwise probably not
So if you are one of 3 suppliers of bronze hyperdrive assemblies in Australia, then the search .. bronze hyperdrive with returns limited to Australia is absolutely going to work. But if you are selling batteries in Hong Kong, probably not. One of our customers is selling fire control equipment in Melbourne.. another is a mower repair shop in Portsea… and a future customer is.. heh.. a dentist in an undisclosed suburb.. you can see that certain keywords are likely to work for them.. and for the customer when it comes to that. But you can also see that ‘computer support’ meh.. there are a lot of competitors out there. They mostly are not very good, but its first contact we are seeking.
Problems.. the narrowing down to geographic areas possibilities in adwords suck. We will go anywhere in Melbourne for a customer.. but close is nice. Dedicated as we are to minimizing time spent stuck in traffic. Its nice for customers in a lot of cases too. really good for both business and customer to hook up if they are close geographically. Not always but often. Adds a little bit to the community feeling too. A friend of mine is trying to get a sharehood off the ground in Surrey Hills I do not like her chances.. but all these little attempts to build local communities are to be applauded in my opinion.
Brilliant stuff… the Google analytics stuff works right in with adwords. Meaning that you can tell if it works. Or not. And you can set a daily budget. Absolutely brilliant. Oh and its going to push your site up the google returns list. For most business sites (maybe not for the CIA) more traffic is good.
Mark has been targeting his bonsai stuff heavily with Google adwords. With a very small budget he is moving as much of this stuff as he wants too. And now that we understand how it works we have approached a couple of the customers we think it will work for and now have at least one campaign to run. Its important to us that your businesses succeed, cos that is the only way we succeed for one thing.. but it also goes to that entire neighborhood thing.
Set off for my training ride this morning.. at dark oclock.. rugged up like a very warm thing. Hard to get out of bed it was. A kilometer down the road and right on time my front light fell off. I spent 30 minutes finding all the pieces then slunk home and back to bed. Feeling very like an evil stealth cyclist. Arggghhhhhhhhhh
Posted in IT support, social comment, Virtual Assistant | Leave a Comment »