Tangential Ramblings

If you're strapped for cash, grab yourself a Short cup, wait for someone in line to order your drink of choice in anything but Venti (Tall, let's say), offer them £1 to upgrade to a Venti, and get them to fill your eight ounce cup. They get their Tall for £1.55 instead of £2.05 and you get your short Short for £1 instead of £1.80.

If you're on holiday in a tourist place without a decent map, take a digital picture of one of the display maps you find around the city, the ones with the "You are here" arrow.

In a single picture, my Ixus 75 seven megapixel camera had the entire thing captured in ridiculous detail, and I had a point of reference for the rest of the day.

(Note: ignore the "You are here" arrow after the picture has been taken.)

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.

Wouldn't it be nice if menus were put together in the form of Venn diagrams?

In a Thai restaurant, there would be a few sets of circles, one for each of the main ingredients. The chicken circle would be surrounded by circles for noodles, rice, soup etc. Inside the intersection of circles would be written entries for each of the meals therein, Chilli Chicken Ramen appearing in the chicken/soup intersect, for example.

There would be a similar Venn diagram for vegetables a little further down, with the colour-coordinated noodles, rice and soup circles hovering around it. And so on.

I could then easily choose what I was after (chicken noodles, for example) and find the relevant dishes all nestled within the appropriate intersection.

What a lovely idea.

Movie websites annoy the shit out of me. Not the sites themselves, but their URLs. I rarely (never) visit them, preferring to get any such data from IMDB.

A Google search for "themovie" brings back pages from the following sites as the top five results:

• www.madagascar-themovie.com/
• www.guysandballs-themovie.com/
• www.simpsonsmovie.com/
• 300themovie.info/
• zeitgeistmovie.com/

The list goes on, no doubt through Google's 493,000 (approximate) results. Basically, when a movie creates an associated movie, they generally strap "themovie" on to the end of the movie's name, possibly with a preceding hyphen, then add whichever domain extension that's still available.

Would it not be better for one of the big movie companies (or even an independent body) to consolidate all of its campaign sites (for that's essentially what they are) under a single URL (themovie.com, for example), each movie taking its own sub-domain? 300.themovie.com, simpsons.themovie.com etc.?

As well as centralising control for the seemingly endless proliferation, it would allow a more logical experience for the end user.

The BBC has some strict editorial guidelines dictating the length of its article titles and surfaced news headlines. All too often, they results in ambiguity in the headlines' meanings.

Today's article about whether the Chancellor should extend Northern Rock's £24bn credit line (Darling pressured over Rock's fate) prompted thoughts (in my head at least) of Chris Rock's lover being questioned over his recent disappearance.

I've wondered for a little while whether I should introduce a new category to my tangential ramblings (ambiguous headlines, for want of a better title) in which I write the article that I'd imagined reading before reading the BBC's version of events, under the identical title.

Would that appeal? Would it generate mirth? Would it be libellous?

I quite like spaghetti. There are certainly better pasta types out there (rigatoni, farfalle, tagliatelle to name but a few); but spaghetti has its place in the pasta family. (As an aside, feel free to check out my US pasta-buying habits.)

My main annoyance with spaghetti, however, is its length. Both when cooking it and eating it. The diameter of the pan of choice is always less than the length of the spaghetti, so it's always a faff trying to get it all submerged. And while eating, I'm one of those uncouth types who likes a knife for my spaghetti, such is the danger of eating it in its natural, full-length form.

My solution: half-length spaghetti. Easier to cook, easier to eat and safer for your whites. It will be called spaghettini.

Thoughts?

Afterthought: shit. Just found out that the word spaghettini is already taken. It means thin spaghetti which cooks quicker. Need a new brand name.

The Google Maps model gave us our first high-profile insight into what can happen on a website when it doesn't wait for the user to do something to prepare what might next need displaying. By downloading the maps immediately surrounding the map you're looking at, it allowed you to drag around the map seamlessly. It was revolutionary and was the forerunner for that horrible phrased, Web 2.0.

Most webpages, this one included at the time of writing, don't do that. They display a page complete with a bunch of links to unloaded pages and wait for the user to click one before doing anything. What if there was a little link counter running in the background that weighted each link on a page based on its likelihood of being clicked according to users' behaviour? And then some Firefox plug-in came along and on accessing a page, called the associated weighting information and started downloading the pages in the background in descending order of weight. Then if the user happened to click one of the most popular links, the page would appear instantly. Maybe the idea is superseded by the speed offered by broadband, but I'd like to think not.

I get frustrated by my bank account. Basically, it's a way of storing money and being able to move money into it and out of it in a simple way, with a little money paid to you as a kind of loyalty bonus. Little more.

But I want something more.

Within an account, I'd like to be able to tag money within my balance according to what I want to do with it. And when I make a payment or a deposit, I'd like to tag it similarly, either all as one or across a number of tags.

In my business account, when an invoice gets paid I'd like a certain percentage of the amount to be tagged as tax. When my salary goes into my personal account, I'd like a certain sum to be tagged savings.

And when I log into my account online, I'd like to see my account balance broken down by the various tags. That way I can better manage my money and understand my position.

Is that too much to ask?

There has long been an issue with the fact that people lie on their CVs. I wonder if there's a business idea in offering some form of verification service, with each item on your CV being verified by the relevant people.

So your qualifications would need to be authorised by your various schools and universities, your jobs would be validated by your employers etc.

I'm not quite sure how it would work, but employers and educational establishments would need to opt in to the service, and responsible officers would be sent excerpts from CVs, which they could then accept or reject. (Obviously there is a slight issue with people's incumbent employer.)

Then, prospective employers would be able to download people's CVs from a central website. Each fact would have a little symbol of authentication next to each fact, representing confirmation of its authenticity by the relevant employer or educational establishment.

Not sure if it would work. Perhaps it's half-baked.

I came across this site recently via digg. It's a collection of handwriting fonts that can be downloaded directly from the page. Some of them are quite neat, but it reminded me of a problem with these fonts, and a possible solution.

The very nature of handwriting (mine in particular) is that we rarely write a particular letter the same way twice. Furthermore, the letters that we form are often dependent on the preceding letter. In the word letter, for instance, the first e is affected by it appearing after an l, the t is affected by the preceding e and so on. As far as I'm aware, these two characteristics are never addressed in fonts, as each character is treated as an independent entity, and every instance of a particular letter is technically equal.

I'm proposing a twofold solution:

• Firstly, introduce a character-set of 676 letter characters. These represent a different form of each character when preceded by each of the letters of the alphabet. So there will be 26 lowercase As: one for aa, one for ba, one for ca etc. The same goes for Bs, Cs etc.
• Secondly, introduce, say, five or so subtly different versions of each letter
  

For the former, the character would only be displayed to its half-way point. The latter half of a character would be displayed as part of the next character. So you'd also need 26 space characters (one to succeed each letter) and 26 of each punctuation mark.

It would be a complex font system (the two requirements requiring upwards of 3,500 characters), but it would much closer mimic real handwriting than do the current offerings, which limit themselves to work within our current understanding of character sets.

It's interesting how the Luna Bar font on the page linked to above uses horizontal overlaps between the characters. Maybe there is something there that could be used.

Thoughts?

I've often thought it would be useful to have an email merge facility in Outlook, similar to Mail Merge in Word. And I've often looked for this feature, to no avail.

But finally I've found it. Instead of being in Outlook, where you might expect it, it's hidden within the Mail Merge feature of Word. Strikes me as bizarre, but there you go!

Some time ago, I created a spreadsheet migration tool for a client of mine at the time. I was heavily criticised by my then employers for venturing outside of our agreed scope.

The tool essentially accepts data input into one sheet (each field occupying a column; each record occupying a row), and spits it out in a pre-defined, fixed-width format (padding each field with the necessary number of spaces), ready for a downstream application to feed off its goodness.

It wasn't the most strategic tool ever created, but it worked beautifully. It was heartening to find out yesterday that the same tool is being used to this day to migrate data into the application. I'm sure some of the official deliverables are now shelfware.

So, ask anyone whether Sellotape (Scotch tape to my American fan-base) is any good, and they'll respond: you betcha!

Ask them whether they find it frustrating, and they'll echo their first response. Why? Because they can never find the end.

Sellotape/Scotch: if you're reading, here's the solution. Invent a tape with three thin layers. The bottom layer is the sticky stuff; the top layer is the smooth bit; the newly introduced technologically-advanced layer sits in the middle.

This middle layer would react to air, turning a lovely magenta colour on exposure. (The colour could be a user preference; I've used magenta for illustrative purposes, mainly because it's quite a nice word.)

When the user severs the tape, either with teeth or scissors, a tiny cross-section of the tape is exposed to the air, and changes colour within a few seconds. The next person who comes along wanting to wrap presents can find the end of the roll by simply finding the magenta stripe across the width of the roll.

Marvellous idea!

Caffè Nero runs a loyalty scheme such that every tenth cup of coffee is free. They do this through a card that they keep stamping on each visit. Today, I received my ninth stamp, making tomorrow morning cheaper than it otherwise might be.

Many organisations, or groups of organisations, use loyalty schemes in which you carry a personalised card around with you to swipe whenever you happen upon their store. I carry cards for Boots and Sainsbury's. (My thoughts on such schemes can be found here.)

What if there were a scheme with a card that was brand agnostic, but which simply identified you as an individual? It would not store any data (except the unique identity of the card), but would allow stores to identify your uniqueness and act accordingly. Caffè Nero would not know who I was, merely that my next latte should be free. Meanwhile, other companies could buy into the card by offering its own small-scale loyalty rewards. I would have thought that the concept would appeal to smaller-scale retailers keen to join the loyalty world without the expense of introducing its own scheme.

I've not thought through a cost model yet. It was dreamt up on tonight's journey home.

All food in the UK comes with a best before date, which I believe is defined by the manufacturer.

First of all, this date should be defined by an independent body. This would save the likes of Jif Lemon would likely be given a longer shelf-life than the ten months which they currently get (a cunning pancake day-related marketing ploy).

In addition to the best before date, food should be given two additional dates:

• A still OK before date; and
• A rank after date

The superlative nature of the phrase best before suggests that the quality of the product is still above par after that date.

Depending on the day of opening, milk is generally good for a full day, possibly two, after the best before date. While dried and tinned goods don't have a genuine expiry date, as far as I can tell.