Don’t design in customer traps on your systems

You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?

The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.

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A little change on this website

In the past, this website was sort of my place to keep family and friends in touch. I first set it up in 2005, just before going away to Peru on travels. It was a great. Facebook had been invented but wasn’t generally available or popular yet, other platforms weren’t well thought through or scattered, Twitter didn’t exist. But installing WordPress on my cheap Yahoo web hosting turned out to be one of the easiest ways to publish content and share it with the world.

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