Tangential Ramblings

Following Icann's decision to allow a free-for-all of TLDs, my plan is to register http://intranet and make my millions through advertising aimed at users looking for their colleagues. Don't tell anyone though; it'll be our little secret.

My friend Rob is stepping into the world of psychology. It's a bold move that he took a couple of years ago, leaving behind the world of management consulting in favour of mental stuff (stuff about the mind, that is), having spent the intervening years learning stuff at university.

Anyway, my friend Rob would like your help, and I too would like it if you would help him. It's a survey. It's for his dissertation. And your reward for 20 minutes' effort is knowing that you've helped him. What more could you ask for?

Please click on this link to take the survey. I thank you, as indeed will Rob.

The controversy should not be over Jay-Z headlining Glastonbury. The controversy should be over the fact that Westwood is there to represent him from a reporting perspective.

Not sure why, but the strapline for the '80s TV advert for Weetabix has entered my head recently and not found its way out. I'm quite enjoying it.

If you know what's good for you, you do, OK! Weetabix!

Thinking about it, the Ribbons in Excel 2007 are not that revolutionary. They're horizontal, visual representations of what were the dropdowns that appeared from the menu bars; re-organised allegedly to be more logically grouped. For some reason, I felt that they were marketed as something more than that in the run-up to the launch of Vista and Office 2007.

It's the re-organisation that troubles me, possibly because the grouping is still not fully logical, possibly because it's different from the File | Edit | View | Insert | Format | Tools | Data | Window grouping of its predecessor. I read a very short article on Daily Dose of Excel recently that said nothing more than if you can't find what you're looking for in Excel 2007, you'll find it on the Insert menu.

Apologies: I'm rambling, but I'm allowed given the title of the blog. (I've never really considered after naming the blog whether it lives up to its name. Another segue.) Basically, I still don't quite know where to look for stuff in Excel 2007. My preconceptions are obviously still there, formed by 20 years in Lotus 1–2–3 and pre-2007 versions of Excel. But when I can't immediately find something now, I try to ask myself "where would it logically be" and often fail to come up trumps. The Home menu doesn't seem right to me, combining lots of formatting stuff with content movement (Copy/Cut, Paste and its various offspring, insertion and deletion of columns and rows), and sorting and filtering.

To me, it would make more sense to have a Format menu item and an Operate item, the latter to cover the likes of insertion and deletion, clearing, filling, finding, selecting. (Shit! I've just realised that almost nothing in the Edit sub-menu within Home has anything to do with editing. Sort, Filter, Find, Select, Sum, Fill have nothing to do with editing!) All of your filtering and sorting should be firmly in the Data menu item.

And why the fuck PivotTable/PivotChart button is under the Insert menu and not the Data menu beggars belief. (If everything inserted goes in the Insert menu, then why don't Insert Function and Insert Row/Column join the party?)

I like the concept. However I believe there was a set of workshops held by Microsoft (some of the most important workshops in Excel's history) in which Post-Its containing all of Excel's functions were arranged into areas on a whiteboard. But the wrong people turned up. (I didn't get an invite.) So the result is OK, but it's not quite right.

As an aside, I'm wondering whether things should ever appear in more than one location. Or should everything have one and only one home?

BTW, I've held off on writing such a post until a month after starting to use Office 2007, to allow my opinion to mature.

The contents of my pockets are reaching mammoth proportions, and that's not me boasting!

As I posted some time ago, summer exacerbates the issue surrounding pocket contents, as there are more things to carry with you (sunglasses) with fewer pockets across which to distribute the contents (owing to the lack of coats and the like). Of late, my pockets are asked (at various parts of the day) to support some or all of: iPod, wallet, BlackBerry, phone (a chunky MDA Vario 3), keys, loose change, sunglasses.

Having done a benefits analysis, a pocket rationalisation programme has been commissioned which aims to significantly reduce the volume of artefacts that will be supported by my pockets. The programme will include a stream to assess the number of necessary objects, one to understand the most appropriate transportation device for the objects (pocket or other), and one to assess the volume of each—there is thought to be scope for reducing the volume of both the wallet and sunglasses case. There will be an underlying change management piece aimed at instilling new ways of working in myself to avoid future Costanza-esque wallet proportions.

My daughter rarely sees the dishwasher being loaded, as most of this activity is conducted after she's fast asleep. So she only ever sees it being emptied, something I often do with her 'help' at 6.30am while her breakfast is warming. Given that she only ever sees clean dishes being taken out of the machine and loaded into the relevant cupboards, maybe she thinks it's a kitchenware delivery machine, new crockery and cutlery being delivered to the house every morning. How cool would that be?

About a week ago, I unsubscribed from the digg feed in Google Reader. The move has added immeasurable value to my life, saving me from navigating through pages and pages of tat in search of that mediocre gem of a story on my morning bus journey to work. I can instead spend the very time saved writing similarly tatty posts to contribute to the wealth of information and drivel that is the internet. Everyone's a winner.

As far as I'm aware, there are few songs whose titles are a non-finite clause including a gerund. (Surprised no one else has writen about this very subject.) The only two I can think of are Squeeze's Pulling Mussels from a Shell and Shed Seven's Chasing Rainbows. The only such band is Counting Crows, although not sure whether this is acting as a present participle.

That is all.

Google is great. Probably not the opening sentence you'd expect given the post's title. Let me explain.

If I had a multitude of email accounts, I could get all of my mails consolidated into a single place, all with a lovely Google-esque front-end. My calendar is similarly lovely in its Google look-and-feel. And with Google Reader, all textual content I could ever wish to read is also presented in a comforting, consistent interface, all of the titles appearing underlined in blue (to indicate their clickability), content in Arial black, mimicking the interface of its other offerings, Search included. Hell, even Google's adverts are comfortingly consistent.

But has this consistency and predictability ripped the very heart and soul out of the internet? I no longer visit my friends' blogs; nor more business-related ones. Instead I access them via Google Reader. When I shared the concept of this post with a colleague today, he relayed a recent story of someone asking him whether he liked his blog's re-design. "What re-design?" came my friend's reply, as like me he'd been accessing all of the guy's content via Google Reader. Before and after the re-design, all content had been available in 12-point Arial black, with bold, blue, underlined headings and blue, underlined links.

Information has been commoditised, in a similar way to how Apple has commoditised music with iTunes. We as users have gained hugely through consistency, immediacy and ease of access. But we have lost out too. No longer are we delighted by the beauty of someone's site design, nor do we appreciate the painstaking effort that has gone into the stylesheets that underpin it. Instead, we scroll through our content through a consistent front-end, hungry for the content itself over and above the beauty of its presentation. With iTunes, content of the musical variety is accessible literally at the click of a button, without the opportunity to experience the joys of the physical products that accompany the music, the record sleeve, the vinyl itself, or the CD artwork and the booklet's contents.

Maybe it's time to take a step back, to appreciate the frame within which the content sits, or to appreciate the artwork accompanying a music purchase.

"We're not going to give up our country for a mere X on a ballot. How can a ballpoint pen fight with a gun?"
Robert Mugabe, 16 June 2008

Now that R. Kelly has been acquitted, is it OK to listen to his music again? (I completely understand that an embargo of the music of Gary Glitter is a given.)

I used to estimate that the average shirt took five minutes to iron. Tonight, I added some science and accuracy to this. Below are the results.

Dress-down Fridays meant that tonight's quota of creased-up shirts totalled four. And tonight I decided to iron to music (iPod and earphones), something I rarely do but something which brings with it a mechanism for time-based accuracy.

Shirt two was a cerise, difficult-to-iron item, the ironing of which took exactly the same length of time as the first: the first 3m 27s of 4Hero/Minnie Riperton's Les Fleur. Third up was a very simple purple-check number, complete in a lightning 2m 44s, accompanied by Dolly Parton's 9 to 5. And the blue shirt that used to have a twin came last, reverting to the three and a half minute standard, this time to The Human League's Together In Electric Dreams.

I think the 2m 44s shirt was a freak, and I'll probably find out in the week that one of its sleeves remains unironed. So the verdict is 3m 30s for a shirt, 30% quicker than the original estimate.

The nights are drawing in.

That was my favourite saying that my Dad used to say during my childhood, usually within a couple of days of 21 June.

For the last hour or so before leaving work yesterday, I was longing to leave the building, plug in my new in-ear earphones (in-earphones?) and blast The Libertines' Can't Stand Me Now into my head while walking along sun-drenched Whitehall. I have no idea why. But I was. And I did. And I loved it.

Yesterday evening marked a first. I got into a Streetcar that I'd hired and adjusted the seat so that it was further away from the steering wheel than when I got in. Bring it on!

A story's strapline in tonight's London Lite reads Little Brit Matt in first gay celebrity divorce. I question the order of the adjectives, believing the article to be about a gay divorce that happens to involve celebrities, as opposed to a celebrity divorce that happens to involve gay people. Thoughts?

Yesterday, I had my day in court. Actually, my day in court lasted about six minutes. But 'day in court' sounds a lot more impressive. So yesterday, I had my day in court.

It came about after being metaphorically screwed by a drain-unblocking company back in October. For their 3h 30m visit, they felt it appropriate to charge me a staggering £975.

Having previously completed and faxed across a form adorned with my debit card details, I had no recourse with the bank after they'd stung me.

So I filed a claim for £539 with Money Claim Online to cover the disputed amounts, including a premium they charged as a result of their doctoring the completion time after the invoice had been signed. Scum.

Money Claim Online is associated with Northamptonshire County Court and provides a mechanism for getting a claim filed online. They then process the paperwork necessary to invite a defence (which the company filed) before the case is referred to your local court (in my case Wandsworth) for the hearing.

My hearing was scheduled for 10.15 yesterday morning. No one from the defence showed, and after walking into the courtroom at 10.35am, I was out by 10.41am. When I say courtroom, I actually mean a guy's office laid out in a T-shaped table arrangement, him sitting at the T-bar, with seats either side of the stem allowing the warring parties to face one another to discuss their dispute. For a few moments while readying myself in the sparse, uninviting waiting room, wondering whether any of the fellow occupants represented the defence, I felt like Atticus Finch.

The judge (for that's what I think he was; no wigs or hammers though) reviewed my case, asked the odd question, and summed up (for my ears only, since beyond his, there were no others in the courtroom/office) by saying that I'd put forward a strong case and judged in my favour.

The company has until 1 July to pay the £589 owed (including the £50 fee that I paid to Wandsworth for the privilege) before the nasty boys are sent in.

All in all, it was a pleasing experience, despite some nerves on Monday night. The end-to-end process took too long, and it was irritating that Money Claim Online was not integrated with the local court system (hence having to pay court fees twice), but all in all, I have few complaints.

Let's see whether the money comes through. As soon as it does, I'll name and shame the organisation in question, mainly to warn others of their unscrupulous ways.

Now I love the apostrophe as much as the next man, assuming of course the next man is an apostrophe-crazed fool. But there is one use in particular that aggravates the shit out of me: when people head documents Do's and Don'ts. Or Do's and Don't's. The latter may be worse, with two faux pas, or better as at least it's consistent. If you have to use the phrase, Dos and Don'ts, please. Thank you.

They only took one official photo of me during the Bupa 10km run. Here it is. Not my best side, I don't think.

My friend Francis posted some pics on Facebook, and I couldn't help but reminisce when seeing this one. The view from our old office window, a view that includes our old apartment. Happy days.

I got into an interesting e-discussion recently about what constitutes news. It was prompted by a colleague's very interesting post suggesting that true news can actually be measured by the amount of risk it brings to you as an individual. And if a news story introduces no risk to your life, should it be classified as news?

Income tax increases add risk to my life, so I class any related stories as news. But arguably, a reduction in income tax rates does not introduce any risk and according to the above proposition, any related stories should not constitute news to me. I'd beg to differ, as they offer opportunity.

Three "news" stories annoy the shit out of me on an annual basis: Spaniards throwing tomatoes at each other in the street; Spaniards running away from angry bulls, again in the street; and backward people from Gloucestershire injuring themselves while throwing themselves down a hill alongside hunks of cheese. (Maybe if the bulls were combined with the tomatoes, it would become newsworthy. Somehow, I think not.)

But there is a category of information currently classified as news that does fall foul of the risk-based definition, but that I would want to know about: Sport. Maybe "news" should be classified into one of two buckets: risk and interest. More on this another time.

When I comb my daughter's hair after her morning bath, I can't help thinking that the comb-across makes her look a little like Adolf Hitler. (She's not got a moustache, I hasten to add.) I hope that the hairstyle was not the cause of Hitler's genocide tendencies and general nastiness. If it was, then perhaps we've created a monster.

[sic] applies to all content below. Here are a couple of paragraphs from a BBC article I read today:

He said: "He was shocked and devastaed. The man who died was a collegaue, he asked for help and collapsed himself."

The proest added: "I went onboard to console the man's partnet, who is also a crew member.

Four typos in two sentences. The subsequent paragraph continues with the quote, so the omission of the closing quote here is correct; but the subsequent paragraph doesn't bother. Shocking.

I enjoyed perusing the menu for Himalaya, a new Indian and Nepalese take-away establishment in our area. It was amusing to see some of the pictures associated with some of their offerings.

Above their clay oven section is a lovely picture of a fry-up, complete with mushrooms, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread; while above the chicken main courses is a picture of surf-and-turf, despite the esteem in which the cow is held in India.

I was surprised at the entrance policy of this school in Balham that I discovered in Balham.

I stumbled across a pair of black knickers on the path while walking my daughter across Clapham Common on Saturday morning. (I initially started that sentence "I came across…" but redrafted.) So refreshing to see everyone enjoying the joys that the Common has to offer.

I read yesterday of Caroline Spelman's defence of employing her nanny to perform secretarial duties. The BBC article details a reference she makes to her home becoming her office when she became an MP in 1997, following the "untimely death" of her predecessor.

Her predecessor was Iain Mills, who died aged 56. At what age, or in what situation, does a death become timely? And are deaths ever "a long time coming"?

There are a few issues with our date system. First of all, everything's based around a specific religious belief, BC representing time before the birth of Jesus, and AD representing time thereafter. (The fact that the exact year of his birth is in question adds to this issue.)

And why is time before his birth described in English (a language that wasn't in existence at the time), while the subsequent years are described in Latin—Before Christ versus Anno Domini. Would BC and AC not make more sense, or would that create confusion for electricians? It also seems a little unfair now to refer to a chunk in time as the length of time before a future event, as it would have been difficult for people at the time to hazard a guess as to what year it was.

Maybe all time should be described as ABB, After Big Bang, although a team of physicists has recently discovered that there may indeed have been a BBB period. Or maybe the BB should represent Big Brother, and all time should be referenced as before or after the arrival of Big Brother, when the terrible danger of the human gene pool was exposed.

I absolutely love buying stuff from Amazon. I rarely do it, but when I do, everything about it (save the revised user experience) is unadulterated pleasure.

On this occasion, I bought a variety of things: a present for each of my wife and daughter, a new pair of earphones to use with my iPod, Sideways on DVD and a fabulous nasal clipper a month shy of my 35th birthday (one that I'd recommend to anyone in need—fabulous little tool).

By choosing the free super-save delivery, I saved money but more importantly the anticipation of the delivery increased with each passing day, culminating in the delivery itself today.

My ears were treated wonderfully on the bus home; I can't wait to read my daughter her new story in the morning; Sideways is making me laugh, and pine for New York; and my nose has never been clearer.

I bought Sideways on DVD from Amazon last week. Watching it tonight, the following excerpt amused the shit out of me.

Jack: And if they wanna drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot
Miles: No. If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving, I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot.
Jack: OK, OK, relax Miles. Jesus, no Merlot.

Top 20 films of all time. If you've not seen it, watch it.

Whenever I’m the first to use the photocopier of a morning, I’m always unsure whether to believe the status messages it provides me in advance of being ready to do the job at hand. Yesterday morning, I patiently waited for while the print quality was being automatically adjusted, for my benefit I can only hope. I’m glad it was automatic, as I wouldn’t have known where to start if it had asked me to adjust the print quality. Usually however, the machine’s busy calibrating, something I wish it could do on its own time.

I noticed recently that there is no official pedestrian access to Parliament Square; none of the traffic lights have pedestrian crossings taking you to the island. Maybe Brian Haw doesn’t actually want to be there, but alighted a European coach there in 2001 and has been stranded ever since. Luckily he had some tents with him at the time; and some anti-war placards.

One of the biggest problems with risks and issues is the fact that they appear in a dry, uninviting list view, little differentiation between one and the next, the only semi-useful point of reference being an item’s position in a list. Oh yes, I remember, the one at the bottom of page two about environments. It would be great if there was a bubble view of the world, each risk or issue appearing as a bubble. (I’m thinking hovering bubbles that move slightly with time to indicate their dynamic nature.)

Bubbles could be coloured based on their severity (or maybe size indicates severity), risks appearing slightly differently than issues (maybe a slightly different shaped bubble). And the more granular details of an item could be revealed on hover or click, the standard view merely giving the key information. Two items could be associated with one another by dragging between them, and the system would deal with the positioning to make the resulting connectors as unobtrusive and sensible as possible.

I’m thinking something like the Pandora interface (if I remember it correctly), but with risks and issues instead of musical artists. Different views would allow you to display based on age, track, only display the high-severity items etc.

The whole thing would be driven by a structured database (or even a spreadsheet, heaven forbid), but this new view would bring a project to life.

Thoughts?