Hello and welcome to the new Simple Salon blog.

My name is Oz. If you think that sounds like a nickname that’s ‘cause it is. I never had one in high-school but when I started working with the imaginative team at Simple Salon all that changed. I’m not sure exactly who came up with it but one day I returned to my desk from the tearoom and found a sticky note on my keyboard with the anonymous message: “Welcome back Oz!”

My co-workers are such jokers!

But where does ‘Oz’ come from?

I’m glad you asked. And, I promise to reveal all sometime in the near future. What I will say now is I do what my name does: I make long things short.

Oz is short for something long.

Spending my days surrounded by technically minded computer geeks, happy to sit in front of their computers all day (spinning propellers on their hard hats), lately I’ve found myself becoming overloaded with computer talk.

If it isn’t one techy boasting about his ‘Ad Hoc Network’ it’s another upping him with his ‘Active Matrix’. When I heard mention the other day of a ‘Boot Sequence’ (and knowing the term wasn’t being used to describe a shoe shopping expedition—or a scene from a ‘70s disco flick) I wondered what normal people would think of all this tech talk.

“Hey guys,” I said, “maybe we need to think about taking the mystery out of all this ‘load balancing’ and ‘latency’ lingo. I reckon our Simple Salon clients would really appreciate some straight talking de-mystification.”

As the propeller heads stared blankly at my epiphanic revelation I realized I’d been bombarded by their ‘batch process’ babbling for too long. I was turning into one of them! I’d made something simple sound complex—exactly what I was trying not to do!

So, I tried again.

“I want to make computer stuff sound simple.”

This time they seemed to get me. Though they doubted I would succeed.

“Good luck!” said one of our developers, before proceeding to take the back off his hard-drive with the excitement of a fourteen-year-old boy set free in the Adult section of a newsagency.

These tech guys really love their hard drives!

But it’s a good thing they do. Without their expertise I wouldn’t have a job, and, thousands of hairdressers wouldn’t have the time-saving, money-making benefits of the Simple Salon software.

We need each other, sure, but we don’t need to make things more complicated than they need to be.

And in these posts I’m doing something about that. Here, the needs and challenges of hairdressers using Simple Salon are our first priority. A close second is to have some fun with, and offer a unique perspective on, the Simple Salon community.

And this community is rapidly expanding.

So, if you don’t really care what the difference between a ‘yottabyte’ and a ‘yobibyte’ is, and you’re keen to know how easy this computer stuff can be, drop by and have a quick read of my tips and summaries about all the latest developments with Simple Salon.

See you again soon.

Ciao for now,

Oz

P.S. Check back next time for a fun post about what makes ‘cloud’ technology so cool.

P.S.S. A ‘yotta’-byte is the largest unit of measurement for computer data; a ‘yobi’-byte wears moccasins to the pub.