Tangential Ramblings

I just read that:

Blogs (web logs) can be used to share a running log of events and personal or team insights with online audiences.

I'd like to think the insight bit is optional.

Recently, I've started asking for people's confidence levels (from 0% to 100%) of project-related events happening. And although in its early stages, I've been disappointed by the results thus far, confidence generally being way higher than the reality.

Richard Feynman beautifully exposed the flawed methodology behind risk assessment at Nasa in his role on the commission to investigate the 1986 Challenger disaster. Nasa failed to realise (admit?) that if there are lots of uncorrelated bits of the Shuttle each with a near 100% probability of surviving the mission, each of which is critical to avoid disaster, then the probability of the Shuttle returning safely to Earth can fall unacceptably short of 100%.

The realisation of risks in projects I manage has a lesser impact. But an impact nonetheless. So I intend to keep a log of all the confidence estimates I receive (column B), together with the person whose confidence is being shared (column A) and the binary outcome of the event in which they have confidence (column C, 1 meaning the predicted event happened, 0 meaning it didn't). I figure that if people's confidence levels are true reflections of reality, then the sum of column B will equal the sum of column C. And sumifs based on people's names will identify the optimists, realists and pessimists.

=SUMIF(A:A,"John Smith",B:B)/SUMIF(A:A,"John Smith",C:C) will give me an optimism quotient for John. I can then divide any confidence percentage I receive from him by the quotient to get a more realistic view of whether the event will happen.

I've mentioned before the existence of a 3G coldspot around Vauxhall. Here's an update, with further data now available.

The coldspot begins midway across Vauxhall Bridge. By midway, I mean midway. Literally. The rising half of the bridge brings with it a successful interface with the internet. As soon as the bus tips to descend down the gentle slope of the western half of the bridge, the connection disappears. Entirely. I know exactly when my last Google Reader article download can be made, and I have to choose it carefully, to maximise my coldspot reading pleasure. The coldspot continues up the full length of Millbank and St. Margaret Street, round the perimeter of Parliament Square, ending at the turn on to Parliament Street, at which point, the 3G warmth returns. Bloody annoying, I tell you. And here is the 3G coldspot map.

View Larger Map

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.

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.

"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

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?

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.

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 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.

There are two posh schoolboys on the bus conducting a post-match analysis of last night's Champions' League win for Man. Utd. over Chelsea. Forgive me, but I just can't take anything they say on this subject in any way seriously.

I read a digg post recently entitled Britain's Tallest 6ft 5in Shire Horse. Just to trump that: I'm Britain's tallest 5' 6" human, measuring a staggering 5' 6".

I just learnt by accident (or indeed happenstance) that chopping refrigerated onions prevents any associated crying. Just thought I'd share, particularly with my Argentinian fan-base.

I sent a fax today, something I rarely do. Whenever I send one and see the confirmation sheet, I'm always slightly disappointed that the status is OK. While I understand that this means the fax has been sent successfully (its opposite being "Failed", I believe), it's hardly emphatic is it?

I remember being confused when first sending faxes back in the '80s, not knowing whether OK was a mark of success. If I asked a teacher at school how I did in a test and (s)he responded OK, I imagine I'd be a little deflated. Surely a more inspired name–value pair would be Sent?/You betcha!

As an aside, my late uncle was adamant that one day, everyone would have a fax machine in their house. He was very wrong on this front, although inspiring in so many ways. His buy-in to instant electronic communication from home has proven accurate, as evidenced by this very post. I always looked up to him, and have a particularly fondly memory of walking down the moor with him to a glorious, deep orange sunrise ludicrously early one morning having dropped his son off at Manchester Airport to go skiing. (Manchester Airport is famed for skiing, you know.) I have no idea what we talked about as we killed time waiting for the rest of the house to wake, but I remember feeling enormously proud to be treated to his company.

(As another aside, I've just updated Wikipedia's attribute–value article to use the en dash instead of the hyphen. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to change its title. Humph.)

Whenever I need to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, a few numbers go through my head. Five in total, including the source and the outcome. Let's call these C and F respectively.

The five numbers are as follows:

• C
• round(C,5)/5
• 9*round(C,5)/5
• 9*round(C,5)/5+32
• 9*round(C,5)/5+32+(C-round(C,5))*2, Or F, if you like.

It's way easier than it sounds, and takes less than two seconds from start to finish. Take 16 for example

• 16
• 3. That's taken by rounding 16 to the nearest five (15) and dividing this by 5
• 27. That's taking that three and multiplying it by nine
• 59. That's adding 32 to the 27
• 61. The 16 was bigger than its rounded equivalent (15) by 1. Times this by 2 and add it to the 59. If it was less than its rounded equivalent, then reduce it accordingly.

Its results are perfect (always correct to the nearest degree Fahrenheit), and it's a lot more reliable than the double it and add 30 estimate that works quite well for balmy weather, but gets unreliable for very hot and cold spells, and is downright wrong for oven temperatures.

• 30C gives you 90F instead of 86F
• 25C gives you 80F instead of 77F
• 16C gives you 62F instead of 61F
• 0C gives you 30F instead of 32F
• 200C gives you 430F instead of 390F

Amusing, but hardly surprising that the BBC's article entitled Great tits cope well with warming is their most emailed story. Lots of bird lovers out there, it seems.

I received a marketing/spam email earlier today from the following "person":

Email address: email@sainsburys.emv1.net
Friendly name: Sainsbury's Onlien [sic] Groceries
Subject: Great 'Buy 1 get 1 FREE' deals for the sunny weekend

Despite the content of the email itself seeming to be genuine (complete with professional graphics and generally Sainsbury-esque content, a few things threw me. Firstly, I don't like getting marketing emails from 'people' for whom the domain name is different from the company's online presence. emv1.net is not a domain I recognise.

Secondly, the typo in the sender's friendly name is unprofessional, increasing the "watch out; this might be spam" part of my little brain.

And finally, the inconsistent capitalisation of the subject line, with a capital B for buy, a fully capitalised FREE but everything else sentence-case is a bit weird.

All in all, I'm confident it's not spam. But it did little to avail any worries I might have.

(Oh, and as an aside, what's with the quotes around the Buy 1 get 1 FREE deal? By encasing the deal in quotes, does it mean that Sainsbury's (or indeed emv1.net) aren't obliged to honour it?)

We have just taken delivery of a new stroller for our lil 'un, given that the old one now sounds like it's been dredged from of the bottom of the Regent's Canal. Its instructions inform me that it can't be used for (among other things) horse riding, water skiing or acrobatics, nor can it be used as a flotation device.

If I'd known these severe limitations before buying it, I would've thought twice.

My good lady wife bought me a box-set of the entirety of Seinfeld episodes for Christmas. I'm watching them sequentially whenever I have a few spare moments. I'm currently almost halfway through the first of two sets of disks.

Anyway, Jerry gave his address in a recently-watched episode: Apartment 5A, 129 West 81st Street, New York, NY, 10024–7207. (The zip code I looked up on the USPS website.)

Now I'm sure there are lots of people who live or have lived in Jerry's apartment block. Bully for you. Here's a new competition: who has had multiple addresses, the average location of two or more of which is closest to Jerry's apartment?

I'll kick things off with two of my New York addresses: 7½ West 75th Steet and 189 West 89th Street. The midpoint of these two addresses is at the eastern end of Park West Hospital between 82nd and 83rd Street on Columbus, 110 metres from Jerry's apartment. Can anyone beat that?

B&Q has a bizarre delivery charging policy:

• Up to £100 spent: £5
• Up to £200: £10
• Up to £300: £15
• Up to £400: £20
• Over £400: free

I have no idea why the additional spend incurs additional delivery charges, but that these are suddenly waived once you top £400.

I watched a programme about child geniuses last night. Channel 4 has ben tracking them as they grow older, and they're all around 13 now. With the odd exception, they were all annoying little shits. One girl and her family, who I remember from the last catch-up (their family celebrated 11 plus results as oposed to birthdays), was too busy with exams to partake this time. (I actually think the last episode left the poor girl so ravaged by bullying because of the fucked-up life her parents had engineered that they chose not to partake.) One other kid, Dante (what hope did he have in life) needed to be smacked so hard into next week, but his parents had no intention of questioning any one of his disrespecful, precocious ways.

My daughter picked up and ate a Cheerio (several, actually) for the first time yesterday, at the age of 12 months! I've written to C4 today to ensure she's included in the next episode.

Our fire alarm test happens at 10.30am each Friday. A woman's booming voice shouts over the tannoy, starting "May I have your attention please".

I tell you what: it scares the pants off you (not literally) when you're in the bathroom at 10.30am on a Friday. I speak from first-hand experience.

(As an aside, the subsequent message to evacuate the building comes from a man. Not sure why the woman is deemed incapable of supplying this information. Maybe there's a fear that no one will listen.)

Any gig you can get to by boat that hasn't got a beach is wrong.

Noel Gallagher

According to the BBC's detailing of HMRC's VAT guidelines in relation to biscuits and cakes, the following rules apply.

Biscuits
No VAT applies on chocolate chip biscuits where the chips are either included in the dough or pressed into the surface before baking. Nor does it apply on Jaffa Cakes, nor on Bourbon and other biscuits where the chocolate or similar product forms a sandwich layer between two biscuit halves and is not continued on to the outer surface.

VAT is levied, however, on wholly or partly coated biscuits including biscuits decorated in a pattern with chocolate or some similar product, gingerbread men decorated with chocolate (unless this amounts to no more than a couple of dots for eyes) and chocolate shortcake.

VAT is levied, however, on "Snowballs" (without the base described for marshmallow teacakes above), partly or wholly chocolate-covered shortbread and cereal, muesli and similar bars with honey or other added sweetening matter.

This was the statement from John Loughrey, the guy who resigned from his job and got up at 5am every morning for the last six months to attend every moment of the Diana inquest.

He followed it up by saying "It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a portrait of me hanging in Kensington Palace in 100 years' time".

Sorry to bring you down to earth, mate, but no you're not going down in history. As for your second point, and only if you analyse the negatives very carefully, neither would it me.

Overheard in Whitehall

Suit on cell: nothing is 110% stable, especially with Vista.

I saw the beginning of a Thames TV programme earlier today, along with its powerful ditty (D crotchet, G crotchet, B crotchet, G crotchet, C crotchet, B quaver, G quaver, D minim, I believe) and its PowerPoint build-like reveal of the London skyline.

As a boy, I associated this logo and feem-choon with second-rate ITV fare. And as a boy, I also believed the skyline to be a true representation of London's skyline (complete with a pixel-perfect reflection in the Thames).

Only today did I combine sufficient attention with the more intimate knowledge of London that I now have to realise that Tower Bridge, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Post Office Tower (as it was then) and Big Ben are not positioned to make the above picture possible without some clever photoshopping.

Obviously, Photoshop (I believe the noun warrants a capital letter, the verb does not) was not around back then, so how they did it Lord only knows.

Mum on Underground platform: stand back.
Four year-old daughter: why?
Mum: because the train's coming and if you go over there, you'll get killed.

I saw a private coach in Vauxhall on Friday advertising that it was headed for "Snodland and Darnley", including the quotes, via its orange, digital display.

I noted it because of the ludicrous destination names, both of them. But on looking them up later, I noticed two things:

• They are both real places in the UK
• From Vauxhall, the journey to the two places is ludicrous.

Assuming it was visiting the two locations in display order, which makes sense (given that it was travelling east along the south bank of the Thames), it would be heading 32 miles east to Snodland, Kent, before turning back towards London, rounding the M25 and heading 451 miles north west to Darnley in Glasgow, Scotland.

Rather bizarre.

Throughout a project, the PMO should record the project's beard quotient, calculated as the total number of unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. Actually, to avoid any possible mis-interpretation, the total number of male unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. (This qualifier saves the possibility of a quotient over 100%.)

I'm not sure what the quotient means yet, but I'm convinced it is correlated to the RAG (red/amber/gren) status (it may even be a predictor of future RAG). Any suggestions?

There are two big problems with most risks and issues registers:

• They're difficult to read
• They're difficult to maintain.

Let's start with the readability. Usually, they're a lifeless grid in a tiny font with lots of columns and, depending on your project/programme, lots of rows. There is nothing to distinguish between the rows other than the contents of the eight-point type in each of the cells. Risk or issue titles are unnecessarily verbose, and it's often not clear what an item represents by reading it.

To solve this problem, include a Headline column in 14-point bold. Maximum of ten words to give a high-level description of what the row is all about. People will read it and say "Ah, yes. I know that one". And make sure all of the columns are absolutely necessary. Nugatory columns are a pain to fill in, and deflect from the important columns when viewed.

Use 90° text alignment for the short fields like who raised it and assignee to save width for the columns containing important textual information.

Now some pointers to make your registers more manageable.

Don't hive off closed items. Just close them in the status field. It's important that you keep them for posterity and completeness, but use Excel's Custom Views to make sure you don't see them unless you have to.

Have a single register to house both risks and issues. This is a biggie that I can't stress enough (or indeed too much). Although some of the columns for each register are subtly different, there are quite a few that are consistent between the two. Keep two registers and your reference numbers get cumbersome, and cutting and pasting from one to another when risks come to fruition is a right pain.

If a column for risks is sufficiently similar in nature to an issues column, then combine the two. Have three heading rows, one for risks, one for issues and one for a combined view. Again, use Custom Views to hide the two title rows that are redundant for a particular view. If you're showing risks, hide the issues and combined titles, for example.

If columns are being used to determine the Custom View via filtering (e.g. Status: Open; Type: Risk), then hide these two columns in that view—they're redundant. Instead, include a cell above the title row saying "Open risks" that can be displayed for that view. For each view, have a dedicated row above the title rows purely for this function, summarising the view. This can be printed on every sheet through repeated titles. And if you want, you can succeed it with the number of such records.

A few other points worth making.

• Unless you're using some shared web interface, use Excel. Don't consider anything else.
• For the risk or issue titles, word your items as statements of fact. Risks should be phrased as if they've happened. Issues similarly, because they have. "There is no environment available for performance testing," for example
• Keep update summaries brief, and archive old updates into a separate, hidden column in four-point. This is for audit purposes and is rarely referenced. Its font can be increased as and when you need to read it
• By combining your risks and issues, you can have generic reference numbers that support both
• Build Custom Views for: open risks; open issues; open items; all items. You can add more complex views if necessary, such as: imminent risks; high-impact issues; escalated items
• Use conditional formatting to work out how to colour items, but only colour the rating cell and make it narrow

Boring post, but necessary. Comments welcome.

A friend from work today pointed me to tenbyten.org, a site designed to surface 100 identically-sized pictures every hour (displayed in a ten by ten rectangle) that best summarise the news of that hour, each with a short news snippet available on clicking the picture. (On first reading the url, I thought it might be a site dedicated to ten wrongly tried people from South Wales.)

His proposal to me was to develop an algorithm that could use the relative traffic of the pictures to determine their relative size, and to display them similarly as a continuous rectangle, complete with edges smoth as a jigsaw.

It's a conundrum that I've often thought about, sparked by puzzles popular with children and indeed the Krypton Factor, where you have to fit various shapes into a fixed, two-dimensional square. But those puzzles were designed for the pieces to fit neatly into the solution. The problem posed is open to the vagueries caused by pictures whose relative sizes are beyond our control. Unless you're willing to accept some undesirable gaps, or similarly unacceptable raggedy edges, it can't be done I'm afraid. Unless you're very lucky with your traffic volumes.

Steve recently vented about the idiocy of the DayClock. I have to disagree.

First a description: it's a clock divided into seven 51.4° segments, Sunday appearing in the middle at the top, with the other six days following in a clockwise direction. Its solitary hand moves 14 times slower than the hour hand on a regular clock, completing a full revolution every week.

Admittedly, it's of limited practical value: on the few occasions that you don't know which day of the week it is, it's unlikely that you'll be in the room graced with the DayClock (unless you buy them en masse, of course), and by the time you've wandered into the appropriate room, you're likely to have remembered that it's Thursday because you were watching That Mitchell and Webb Look before being interrupted by that nagging uncertainty as to the day of the week.

And admittedly, their logo is heinously shit to the point that anyone who had any inkling of buying one (me included) would be immediately put off from adding one to their shopping cart.

But aside from the shitty logo, I'd like one.

On the subject of clocks, I had a strange idea recently. Three digital clocks, each a silver die-like cube that you put on a shelf next to one another. The first displays the hour, the second the minute and the third the second. (I know, that sentence was a bit confusing owing to the meeting of our ordinal number system with our unit of time measurement. I wonder how that happened, btw.) The three clocks are kept in sync. with one another wirelessly, the hour cube passing a message to the minute cube every time it increments, telling it to reset, and likewise the
minute cube to the second cube. Maybe each has an full concept of the time, and the correct time can be established by taking a regular average from the three.

The importance of the three clocks being in sync. is increased significantly by their design, because if the minute clock is a bit slow and the HH:MM units read 15:59, then it will flip to 16:59 for a few moments before flicking to 16:00.

Like the DayClock, its design serves no real purpose. But its logo would rock.

Headline in Monday's Metro: Mouse with cold could cure asthma

Impressive. Very impressive indeed.

"It's just a phone. As long as I can play silly sounds and make calls, I'm happy."

Overheard in Clapham.

I was all ready to have my teeth waxed (ouch!), before getting close enough to read the sign properly.

I had quite a few issues with the BBC's iPlayer, so much so that I uninstalled to avoid its sapping of my intel® Centrino® Duo CPU. But if you needed a reason to install it, look no further than tonight's Horizon.

In the programme Dr. Brian Cox, whose Wikipedia entry informs me that he used to be the keyboardist in D:Ream, brings to life the beauty behind gravity along with its ongoing mystery at the sub-atomic level.

Fabulous TV.

I heard a promotion on the radio this morning offering a free coffee mug with every McDonald's big breakfast meal bought with a coffee. The disclaimer ran "excludes all drinks except coffee". Somewhat unnecessary double-negative, I felt.

A few things.

First of all, I'd like to know the production ratio between Bounty blue and Bounty red, the milk and dark chocolate varieties respectively. The red variety (30–50% better, in my opinion), is difficult to come by in shops, although the one at the top of my road sells it.

Secondly, I always felt slightly cheated as a child when my dad bought a Bounty (invariably blue) from the petrol station as a side dish to his petrol. I remember it being a toss-up between a Bounty and a Yorkie, a decision he made within the shop while we/I waited in the car. The Yorkie, with its seven chunks (don't get me started on their decision to take this down to six), was much more conducive to sharing (I always loved getting a chunk), particularly given my childhood hatred of the Bounty, both varieties.

Finally, I'd like to do a comparison of chocolate bar prices. I recently refused to pay 57p in a WH Smith for a Bounty, my refusal being made after the counter-scan, flummoxing the assistant somewhat. In an effort to understand WH Smith's mark-up, please could you comment with the price of the following three staple chocolate bars, together with the outlet at which they were being sold:

• Bounty (blue, standard-sized, two-part bar)
• Chunkie Crunchie (there are no varieties here)
• Mars Bar (standard)

Thank you. Feel free to respond more than once with prices from more than one outlet. If there is enough response, I'll do some spreadsheeting.

I've always been thrown by the whole quote unquote thing. Not the fact that people are quoting other people—that's fine. But the fact that their closing quotation marks are always said before the quote itself. So how much of the ensuing wisdom was actually quoted? Does it ever end? Surely it would be more sensible to follow the written standard by de-quoting the quote at its conclusion rather than before it's started. Quote, it's just an idea, unquote.

We often have subtitles on our TV. It helps, particularly if the TV is on low. On tonight's prelude to the Brits on ITV, the following lyrics flashed upon our screen when some lady performed a rendition of Whitney's Count on Me.

You can c*nt on me through thick and thin...

UK TV's subtitling on the whole is impressive, but for some of the more up-to-date programming (news, award shows etc.), it seems some automated tools kick in that are far from perfect. Sometimes its results are amusing to read.

Not only does the BlackBerry sport the brightest light in the solar system with the sole exception of the Sun (this fact is yet to be proven but I'm confident of its outcome), its choice of light colours is open to confusion.

As for the former, unconfirmed fact, the green light that flashes when the BlackBerry is bereft of new mail is capable of blinding small children from 50 paces and severely compromising the sight of their parents. Particularly at night. If left face up on the bedside table, the night-time experience is much like having a 747, nay an Airbus A380 (depending on the width of your bed), land in your bedroom, such is the luminosity of its flash. Well, one wing of which at the very least. Unless you and your partner both have BlackBerrys (for that is the plural), in which case I assume it's like the entire two-winged plane coming in to land, your bed being the start of the runway. You'd have to turn them on at exactly the same time of course, to synchronise their incessant flashing.

In terms of the colour confusion, it's only when you look away. If you see the BlackBerry flashing out of the corner of your eye, a green flash (no mail) can often be mistaken for a red flash (you got mail). When I say you, I actually mean I, for I've not validated this experience with anyone else. I assume it's something to do with the whole red/green colourblindness thing, not that I am colourblind. It's just when it's right at the edge of my range of vision.

In December, I received eleven marketing emails from Amazon.co.uk and twelve from Amazon.com. A total of 23 in 31 days.

Surely this transcends the line from marketing to spam, no?

My friend Rob posted his best bits of 2007, kindly crediting this blog as the best other blog. I started putting values against the same list of attributes, but the first three centred around my daughter, so I refrained from continuing for the sake of my audience's respective (needed?) stomachs' contents. Instead, I compiled what I consider to be my favourite nine posts of 2007. Here they are in no apparent order:

• How to guarantee a draw in football: the strategy McLaren should have adopted against Croatia
• Rising sea level: if the world's population jumped in the sea at the same time, what would happen?
• Happy 1000th Birthday, little blog: self-explanatory, with some detailed analysis of the first 999 posts
• Universally challenged: a witty retort from my lady wife
• Much anticipated lines in Simon & Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson: pretty self-explanatory
• How can you miss it?: a big hole in the universe. But how big, exactly?
• Law and Order shorts: another witticism from my lady wife
• Slices of pi: the Oregon pi mystery solved
• String theory: if you tie a string tightly around the earth and then add a metre, what will happen?

I've just found this fabulous little API from Google. It allows you to create parameterised charts of any size which display within a URL as a png file. Here are the details.

You provide the parameters, including data, as part of the URL and the PNG can be embedded wherever you like.

Lovely.

Promotional codes are there for certain members of the public to benefit on certain commercial deals. For example, I keep getting offers from ocado for a few pounds off my shopping, as my account has lapsed. A code supplied in the email allows me to claim this discount at online check-out. (In actual fact, my wife now holds our ocado account, and she gets no such offers—frustrating.)

But often, the codes that are issued are not tied to specific user accounts, and are advertised on the web. While halfway through the process of registering a package online to send via Parcelforce the other day, I decided to Google for such a number, and easily found one that offered 15% off any Parcelforce order, taking the price down from £72 to £61.

I used the voucher, but is this morally wrong? Or should we be happy to exploit the fact that companies put generic vouchers out there for anyone to use.

It's the story that's gripped the nation for the last week or so: the story of the guy who allegedly went canoeing off the Humberside coast a few years ago, allegedly died in the process, and then showed up the other week suffering from forgetfulness, a condition that thankfully is subsiding by the day. The newspapers and their online equivalents keep putting the word missing in quotes, given the clear distance that separates the word from the facts at hand. Yet they don't seem to be similarly compelled with respect to the word canoeist. Surely the veracity of this word is similarly quesionable, no? Did he go, or indeed as he ever been, near a canoe?

I bought my first £1+ per litre unleaded petrol yesterday. Here's the proof: 48.12 litres for £50.00.

For all those Americans out there, the £103.90 per litre equates to $8.08 per gallon.

I saw a TV advert this evening for Woolite, a liquid for washing machines that prevents ruination of your clothes in the wash. But wait: it's not your average washing liquid. It's not a detergent; it's a safe-tergent.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's a safe-tergent. You most definitely heard it here first. What a dreadful strapline; which dreadful copywriter came up with it; and which member of the client organisation accepted it?

I don't think Virginia Hayward will be particularly happy with the typo in her name in Ocado's recent marketing email, nor on their associated product page.

Luxury indeed.

My bus journey to work affords me the time to catch up on my subscription feeds using Google Reader from my mobile phone. The interface is specially tailored for the mobile screen, and being above ground means that I can download a whole bunch of stuff as I go, and read it along the way.

The first post I happened upon this morning was from Stephen Fry's wonderful blog. It was also the article I was reading when I arrived at work. The last third remained unread.

It was certainly an enjoyable read. But it was incredibly long. 5,611 words in total, spanning eleven pages of the Word document I've just pasted it into, the purpose of this exercise being to count the words. I was quite impressed with the length of my, er, post last night, but its 614 words pale into insignificance when put alongside Fry's interminable rants. (They were primarily rants in this instance; and I use the word interminable to mean seemingly without end, without casting negative judgment on the associated content. I smiled and laughed out loud on numerous occasions, much to the bemusement, and possibly fear, of my fellow passengers.)

So Fry: that I can get through the rest of my subscriptions on the 40 minute journey to work, please try and curb your enthusiasm and keep the posts a little shorter, there's a good chap.

And the rest of you: subscribe to Fry's blog. It's a joy to behold.

Now in most walks of life, sex sells. Or at least creative directors claim it does so that they can incorporate it into their work in the name of art.

But in this instance, I beg to differ. The lady reclining in front of the fires that Robinson Willey has on offer looks positively chilly. She should wrap up, or else get herself a Robinson Willey fire.

In its article about the recent deal between MySpace and Google, the BBC included the following paragraph.

Tens of thousands of developers have now written applications for Facebook, ranging from online Scrabble, to movie reviews and video sharing services.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the application allowing you to throw virtual poo at your friends. I'm still struggling to get into Facebook, and am seriously considering committing Facebook suicide.

Apparently, the British army is looking at some form of invisibility technology to hide its tanks on the battlefield.

Somewhat pointless in the example highlighted by the photo, I would've thought.

Doorbell for the disabled? Or one that no longer works?

I stumbled upon this shop in King's Cross yesterday.

It struck me as a little odd.

01 phone numbers were replaced with 071/081 in May 1990. which were in turn replaced with 0171/0181 in April 1995, and with 020 in April 2000. (As an aside, to research the dates I searched google.com for "01 071 0171 phone numbers", to find my own post of May 2006 topping the rankings. A cause for concern? Possibly.)

You'd have thought a sign shop would be well placed to replace its own signage more regularly than every 17 years.

Every so often, I get an email from those nice people at Friends Reunited, a site I've barely returned to since registering during the buzz that surrounded its launch. Here's the title of the email:

Dan, New people listed on Friends Reunited

And here's the crux of the email itself:

Your Friends Reunited Update: NEW people listed and NEW profiles for you to read.

Putting aside the grammatical faux pas of succeeding a comma with a capital letter in the title (something that never fails to irk me), it's not particularly compelling is it? Two or more people who I may or may not know have added themselves to the FR user base. And there are two or more new (NEW, even) profiles for me to read too, which I suppose could actually be those of the two (or more) people who've just registered. Forgive me please for dragging my mouse swiftly towards the Archive button.

"Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were so directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what was said was true."

Feynman, R. P. (April, 1963), The Meaning of it All. London: The Penguin Group

The sign at the top of St. Margaret Street just outside Parliament reads "Road closed following diversion", with an accompanying arrow directing traffic towards Victoria Street. Surely it should read "Diversion following road closure". Unless, of course, the traffic police decided to put in place a diversion for shits and giggles, after which the road was closed due to lack of traffic.

Most mornings, I'll say a courtesy "hello" to the chap standing outside the Whitehall entrance to Horse Guards Parade. He never responds. Miserable bastard.

(In fairness, the bastard in question is doubtless numerous bastards, given the rotation of staff.)

Below are the answers to the altered image puzzle that will appear in tomorrow's London Lite.

• One or both of her earrings is missing
• Her dress is shorter
• Her shoe strap is missing
• Her cleavage is more pronounced
• The strap on her bag is thicker

For those unaware, altered image is the daily offering for the mentally challenged in one of London's free evening newspapers, in which two near-identical images of a celebrity (almost always female) are shown side-by-side, with five subtle differences. The differences are a subset of about eight that constitute the entire imagination of the Photoshop expert at London Lite.

"I think he lived a pretty good life, considering he was so fat."

Aussie girl into cell phone on the 77 bus, four and a half hours after his death

Yesterday, I heard a guy in Whitehall start a sentence to the guy with him, "On what was a rare Thursday...". I find them as rare, and indeed plentiful, as any other day, each occupying a little over 14 percent of my time. (If anything, Thursdays have the edge for me, as I was born on a Thursday.)

As an aside, there should be a word to describe an acquaintance of unknown closeness, as was needed above. Possibly there is and I just don't know it.

I got a comment from Hannah this evening, who was searching the web in an attempt to answer her homework assignment: what is the difference between latitude and longitude?

I'm happy on two counts: one, that she stumbled upon my post on this very subject; and two, that she felt the urge to comment.

I also enjoyed re-reading my own post. Not sure if that's wrong. I also have no idea whether any of the content therein was used by Hannah in her response to the question.

Here's the article. Maybe James Doohan didn't come back to earth after all.

The Tories have unveiled a new plan to apply inheritance tax on axes handed down from one generation to the next. That's how I interpreted the headline, on first reading. I love it when the BBC's attempts to get content to fit in the available space results in odd, often confusing headlines, usually bereft of prepositions and joiny words™.

I scored 32. You?

American woman to fellow tourist, while visually comparing Parliament and Westminster Abbey: no, that one looks more like an abbey (pointing at Westminster Abbey, phew).

BBC Sport's article covering the Community Shield between Man. Utd. and Chelsea was written by Caroline Cheese. Great name.

If you want to go from Euston to King's Cross St. Pancras, you can either take the northbound Victoria Line or the southbound Northern Line (Bank branch).

Confusing?

With the Summer Holidays well and truly upon us, kids are often seen with their working parents meeting for lunch and the like. Today I spotted one such kid of about 14 years stopping occasionally with his dad on the Strand to look at the menus outside the various eateries. Nothing untoward, until you notice (without the need for a second glance) that said dad is a Town Cryer or some form of Beefeater, dressed to the nines in his full red cloak and accompanying garb. All credit to the kid for going ahead with lunch.

While picking up some essentials for my daughter in Sainsbury's Clapham this evening, an announcement came over the tannoy calling Chris Martin to the Customer Service desk.

How the great have fallen. I hear Gwyneth is working in the Elephant & Castle branch of Superdrug.

Paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!!!

One of the occupations I could choose in Canon's dropdown for product registration today was Housewife/Person.

I suppressed the temptation to select it.

A sentence in today's Metro lifted itself off the page (page three, I think) and circled around my head, before smacking me across the cheeks, leaving me in stunned disbelief at the hopelessness of its writer. The sentence:

Thousands of people are shunning airport queues and heading instead for the increasingly 3D world of Google Earth.

It was near the beginning of a half-page feature on the product, the rest of which failed to attract my morning reading eyes as they instead searched for news based at least in part on reality. While Google Earth is indeed impressive, I doubt very much whether its introduction is causing airline bosses to rethink their strategies.

There's a guy on the Tube this morning wearing a white t-shirt adorned with the word "BOMBER" across his shoulder-blades and the number 30 on his back. An unfortunate nickname, I hope. Either that or a terrorist with at least 29 likeminded friends.

Shit! He's just switched to the Victoria Line with me.

While the circumstances around Chris Langham's alleged child abuse are distressing, there is a moment of Beadlesque comedy genius 20 seconds into this video covering the trial. Certainly worth watching.

I have a lot of thoughts throughout the day, some of which I consider blogworthy. When I encounter such a thought, I sometimes type it into a file called blog.doc on my phone, prompting me to blog about it at a later date. (Often, looking through this file, I delete items whose blogworthiness was over-estimated at the time of thinking.)

Other times, I mentally label the thought as sufficiently momentous not to need a prompt. Yet almost every time I do this, I remember later in the day that I had a momentous thought, but I can't for the life in me remember what it was.

The result: this blog is left bereft of some genuine insight, amusement or most likely general tat. Either way, you the reader are losing out. I will endeavour to be more diligent in the future, for your sake. For those posts that have fallen by the wayside: rest in peace.

It seems that two of my friends are have an over-zealous love of cheese. The two friends are Rob and Steve.

I was exposed to Steve's addiction to the dairy produce back in 1998, and vaguely remember the addiction being limited to the hard, British cheese. Rob's addiction is a more recent discovery, evidenced by the reported polishing off of a full wedge of brie in a single evening.

I'm keen to understand who's addiction is greater, and I would appreciate it if Rob and Steve would wage a war of words via commenting on this post to defend their respective corners.

Let the cheese debate begin. If anyone else out there feels their habit can outdo that of either party, then please wade in there. I'm looking forward to a constructive, fair and respectful war of words.

My previous post (see below) was quite long. Just after hitting the Blog this! button (that's what the button says), I decided in an instant to click back into the content entry text box, hit CTRL+A (highlight everything) swiftly followed by CTRL+C (copy to clipboard). All this while the next page was loading, over broadband.

That next page was the you've been timed out page. The annoying thing about my blogging software is that it doesn't auto-save partial posts.

Imagine my delight when I could copy my clipboard into a second attempt. I think you can only imagine.

Apologies to Simon for not holding the lift for him on leaving work this evening.

I get very confused between the <|> and >|< buttons. When you analyse the buttons, they make complete sense; but when confronted with the option accompanied by a very aggressive deadline (the lift doors closing), I never fail to fumble for the right one. Tonight, Simon was delayed by this fumbling. I, however, suffered no such delay.

"Dan's nipples are like a money-off voucher for a tin of dog shit."

No context necessary, nor would it be forthcoming.

Below are the most recent comments from Angry Rob, my hosting provider:

• On the list of things that make being a bloke great, this has to come pretty low. Perhaps you're not quiet as much of a bloke as you think you are?
• I suspect they will laugh at you 1.3MP rez-low-tion.
• Hmmmm... depends if you like to eat something akin to dehydrated wallpaper paste (goes right back to paste the moment it hits your mouth) or an alternative that's more natural, tastes better and has some substance. Imbecile for even asking!
• Dude (I use that term lightly - as you are clearly getting even less 'dude' like each day), if you must carry your offspring in a pouch, put it on your back, like nature intended. They can still look forward and see where you're going, but you don't look quiet such a dick and it's better for your back.
• Dan, you've really got to kill all this soppy BS or I'm going to have to stop reading your blog. Come on mate, remember Iraq, climate change, world poverty, the impending bird flue epidemic and the rest. There, don't you feel better already?

He seems very angry at the moment. And somewhat defensive of his manhood, or at least questioning of mine. I'm confident in myself. Are you, Rob? ;)

Five months and eight days after the Cabinet Office announced plans to cull 551 websites, www.beefyandlamby.co.uk lives on, and is still being advertised on the telly.

In fact, of the first 20 on the BBC's cull list, only three have been closed:

• Bus Priority Resource Pack: now links off to a regional and local transport page on the DfT site
• CycleSmart: links off to the domain site 123-reg.com, although apparently the domain's still taken
• DrugDrive: is now a campaign site within the DfT site

It seems that at least the DfT took the edict seriously.

Anyone fancy trying out the other 531?

Ever since I can remember trying, this site has come second when searching for my name on google.com. I don't mean when you search for my name itself; I mean when you substitute the words my and name with the names that make up my name, first name and last name. I've always been pipped by www.myname.com.

Well those days are over. I'm now number one in Google's rankings. Huzzah!

A genius video. The concrete mixer and the truck at the end are particularly impressive.

My wife is obsessed with wipes (yeah, predictable joke about me being an ass wipe). Yet tonight's Ocado order baffled me, with three packets of wipes arriving, all different. Here's what we got.

• Dettol 4 in 1 Multi-Action Wipes (48)
• Flash Multi-Purpose Wipes (48)
• Flash Multi-Surface Wipes, now with Flashguard Barrier (60)

All of them double up in quantity if you choose to rip off half a wipe at a time.

Apparently, each different wipe-type serves a specific purpose and house area, mainly according to its accompanying smell.

Thanks to Doug for appealing to my sense of humour, and to Jason for his photography and bluetooth skills.

In yesterday's Metro, we said Charley was born in jail to a prostitute who was later strangled. In fact, it was BB housemate Chanelle. Sorry for the confusion.

Taken from Tuesday's Metro

Anna is indeed right. Marti gives out a lovely belch after the first line of Angel Eyes.

Genius!

There is no worse image than that through a car windscreen of a woman driver holding a cigarette sticking out of the middle of the top, offside quadrant of the steering wheel, ready to tap those next few centimetres of ash out of the window.

With the possible exception of images of war.

"Kayleigh is one of the many cat owners who've been delighted by the difference Purina ONE® has made to their cat. Developed by Purina vets and made with high-quality meat, it contains all the vitamins, minerals, omega oils and anti-oxidants a cat needs. The results could be everything from healthy teeth and fresh breath to high energy levels and a shiny coat."

Lucky Kayleigh.

It took me a while to type that advert into my phone on the Tube the other day, but I loved the promise that was being made, emptied by the words "could be". The last sentence makes zero promise about the effect on your cat, or indeed Kayleigh's.

Helvetica is 50 today. Happy Birthday!

I love a good font.

I thought I'd found exactly what I wanted of my next job while watching this video:

But then I saw this one, and now I'm torn: