I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

I have some more information and a list of publications available (pop-up window).

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- February 2007
- January 2007
- All posts from 2006
- All posts from 2005
- All posts from 2004

These are a few of my favourite links:
- Jasmine's site
- Jasmine's blog
- Mikal
- Daveydweeb
- Beth
- Lyn
- Doug
- Marissa
- Lisaloha
- David (Greenomics)
- Paul's Ramblings (music)

Hits since 1 Sep 2004
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[/United Kingdom] permanent link

Lloyds TSB might be improving its call centres, but it's a pity about the rest of the bank

BBC news ran a story this week about UK bank LLoyds TSB reworking its call centre practices. Apparently, the bank had discovered that its customers get really angry when they have genuine problems and call centre staff just mindlessly read pre-scripted answers. According to the BBC article, many other banks had come to this realisation quite some time ago.

As a former Lloyds TSB customer, I can say that anything they do to fix their call centres is a step in the right direction because the ones I dealt with were pretty hopeless. However, I have not heard anything recently to convince me that I should ever think about banking with Lloyds TSB in the future. When I banked with them I had many more problems than their call centre scripts:

• several weeks' delay in opening an account because the bank was too disorganised to realise it needed more detailed information from me;
• the bank opening the wrong type of account, with the wrong cards;
• failure to respond to messages;
• failure to take requested actions on the account;
• imposition of new fees because of the new levels of service the bank claimed to be offering;
• failure to have a staff member available at a time when I was meant to have an appointment with them to sort out some of my account issues; and
• branch staff who always had someone else to blame for problems, but who were often not overly concerned about finding a solution (although they were happy to give me forms to close my account).

I know other people who have had similar problems with Lloyds TSB. I have dealt with multiple banks in Australia, the US and the UK, and none of them was as poorly equipped as Lloyds TSB to deal with basic customer service.

[/Travel/Europe] permanent link

Edvard Munch's The Scream as graffiti

Here's a photo I just found going through some images on my computer. I took the photo in Oslo, Norway, in September 2005. I thought the idea of a graffiti depiction of The Scream was pretty cool.

[/Business] permanent link

Ikea fine dining and baby-sitting

Spiegel Online has an interesting article about Ikea's German stores taking on a role they had not expected (see also a reference to this story on Boing Boing). It seems that Ikea's cafeteria and baby-sitting services, intended for furniture shoppers, are so cheap and attractive that many people from pensioners to travellers seek out Ikea as a dining venue of choice, and parents drop off their children for baby-sitting and then leave the store to do other things!