Vadimus Post is LIVE!

Click here to be taken to my new web magazine.

Please bookmark it and visit again.

Best wishes,

Denis Campbell

I Am Chuffed (Excited) !

I just saw the final layout for the new site and we're rolling midweek with it.

I love Blogger. It was a great place to start and it is very limiting. I love The Huffington Post even more and wanted something in a more newspaper style but less busy that would give us a chance to dialogue on issues of the day.

We're changing our name from Outside the Boundaries to Vadimus Post.

Quo Vadimus is one of my favorite lines/questions from my favorite television and screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin. He wrote a television series called Sportsnight, a behind the scenes view of a major sports network (not ESPN) and what it was like to produce their daily news show (not Sports Center) - just like Studio 60 was not Saturday Night Live and thw West Wing was not the Clinton White House.

At the close of the second and final season there is a gem of an episdoe called Quo Vadimus - Latin, as you may have guessed, for "where are we headed?" A major acquisition specialist said he used it with his team and encouraged everyone to ask that question everyday.

I especially like the emphasis on the word WE. This is a collabrative effort and there will be many contributors here.

All of the URLs are covered so quovadimuspost.com (or co.uk for those here) and vadimuspost.com will get you there. We'll post a link here to help you get there when it's up.

Hope to see you soon...

Oxy-moron

Limited Immunity

In honour of former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld, who will, according to The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan on Chris Matthew's Hardball program, will likely face War Crimes tribunals (perhaps in absentia) for their Iraq War approval of "harsh interrogtion techniques" which The Geneva Convention and others would describe as "torture." Based on today's news of who was in the room, former AG Alberto Gonzales, former AG John Ashcroft and, in 284 days, former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney, SecState Coni Rice and others could also have standing reservations in The Hague.

Quotes

Former Vice President Al Gore of An Inconvenient Truth fame has an updated speech and slide show which he recently shared on the website TED.

When talking about oil shale exploration he said, "when junkies' veins collapse, they inject the drugs between their toes."

Former SecState Powell Weighs in Obama Experience Issue

Validation or Vindication?

From Yahoo/Reuters...

BT voted worst home phone povider

By Jennifer Hill Reuters - Tuesday, April 8 12:10 pm
LONDON (Reuters) - Consumers in a YouGov poll have voted Britain's largest home telephone provider, BT, the worst in the market.

The telecommunications giant, which has a 43 percent share of the home phone market, came bottom of the survey for the first time since 2005.

Some 30 percent of BT customers polled said they were unsatisfied with the service, 7 percent more than in July last year, the research for price comparison service uSwitch.com shows.

BT was found to have the lowest scores in nine out of 11 categories, including "value for money" for the fifth time running.

It also came last for "ease to interpret bill", "online account management", "ease of use" and "set-up support" and in the "best deal for you" category which assesses whether customers feel their provider has placed them on the most appropriate plan.

So that's why we never heard back from BT Ben...

Best Comedy Sketch of the Week That Was

Quote(s) of the Day

From the New York Times online...

Megan Simpson, a Penn State senior, had not been able to budge her father, a Republican. But the day before the deadline for registering for the coming Democratic primary in Pennsylvania, she handed him the forms and threw in a deal-sweetener as well. “I said, ‘Dad, if you change your party affiliation in time to vote for Obama,’ ” recalled Ms. Simpson, 22, an Obama campus volunteer, “ ‘I will get you the paperwork the day after the primary if you want to switch back to being a Republican.’ ”

Thus did Ralph E. Simpson Jr., 50, construction company owner, become a newly minted Democrat. “I probably will switch my affiliation back,” Mr. Simpson said, “but I haven’t decided who I will vote for in the general election. If Meg keeps working on me, who knows?”

Oxy-Moron of the Day

"Recorded Live"

It's either live or it's recorded. My faourite opening was to the semi-fictional (another oxy-moron, hmmmm) HBO series The Larry Sanders Show when the announcer says, "Live, on tape, before a studio audience, it's The Larry Sanders Show..."

T5 - Kermit cringes...

Denver International step aside, the crown for worst opening has passed 12+ years on to Heathrow's Terminal Five and this green guy is either rolling in his grave or laughing his tail off. He was most proud of the number five in his happy song.

BA Chairman Willie Walsh probably never wants to hear that number again.

Terminal Five has been in the news these last two weeks for everything but the pre-advertised technological wonder it was supposed to be. Much like Denver it was hoisted on its own poor planning petard. What is shocking is no one saw this coming.

I had a flight scheduled from Heathrow 31 March and when I saw T5 was opening moved my departure to Bristol because of Denver memories. No matter how well trained you think your people are, no one is prepared to shift 100,000 passengers and staff from one building to another overnight flawlessly. When we moved 700 people in Charlotte NC from one office tower to another, it took two weeks to get everything sorted. So how did BA expect to have a flawless transition to a building no one knew their way around?

The complaints are even more remarkable, no training for baggage handlers, no late night sessions and trial runs to ensure efficiency, silly limited compensation letters for disrupted travellers to add flame to kerosene. It just got worse and worse by the minute.

Several hundred flights were cancelled during the opening and 19,000 bags went astray, none more telling than Snooker player Jackie Bachmann's £700 snooker cue needed for a competition that evening in Scotland.

I can remember working the neighouring ticket counter in Boston in 1976 when a young rising musician by the name of James Taylor lost his $3,000 guitar. The reaction of the then BA station manager was a sarcastic, "whose banjo did we lose?" as the classic guitar sat in Singapore with him there in Boston for a concert. Corporate arrogance has long been a cancer within BA.

The problem is with 24/7 news everywhere, it's harder to hide when things do go wrong. But hey, everyone's bag got a holiday to Milan where baggage handlers and FedEx work night and day to unite passengers with their lost bags. Why Milan? Because they have a semi-permanent operation already in place there from previous difficulties over the Christmas holidays.

Sing-a-long with Kermit... "Oh 5 is such a pretty number..."

Don't Quit the Day Job

Hillary and John McCain on US late night telly charm offensives laced with alleged humour. You be the judge who is funniest.

69 to -2

That's the number of Super Delegates since February 5th that have declared for Sen. Obama vs. Sen. Clinton in the Democratic primary races. Margaret Campbell (no relation), a state legislator from Montana added yesterday to this growing group and trend. With Obama gaining about 1 Super Delgate per day and Mrs. Clinton losing ground, the "come from behind, I'm more electable" plan to lure prized deleates away from voting for Barack Obama grows slimmer.

Add the firing of chief strategist Mark Penn yesterday for doing what PR executives should not do, play both sides of any issue, the inability of her attempts to make Reverend Wright's statements stick as belinging to Barack Obama and the most recent poll showing the two candidates dead even in a state Mrs. Clinton should win by 15-20 points... well, the fat lady isn't singing yet but she is warming up in the wings.

This opera is, thankfully, nearly over.