06.28.09
Posted in technology at 5:09 pm by coldclimate
This is not exactly eligant, in fact is its down right nasty, but it does work!
A few weeks ago I was given a Nintendo Wii Guitar Hero Drum kit to play with, primarily because it was broken. People often send their broken tech junk my way, and normally I pry the back off, manage to not do anything exciting, and then throw them away.
It turned out to be remarkably neat and clean to get into, though the 22 screws on the back took some time. God alone knows why it’s so well screwed shut. Once they’re out however it’s dead easy – just slide the back off. No wedging, no snapping redundent clips, not hot-knifing through random bits of plastic.
Once you’re in it’s all very simple. Each drum pad had a pressure sensor on the back -connected to a small circuit board via nice removable clips. I unplugged these, stuck wires into each, ran these out through the handy hole where the wiimote would go, and plugged in the arduio. Surely this can’t work…..
It does! You’re just checking the state of the switches, nothing more complex. Works for the internal pads, the snare pads and the foot pedal. I’ve not attempted to interface to the midi connector, nor to try and use the inbuild i2c connectivity (I assume this is how it actually talks to the wiimote, but it works a treat.
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06.16.09
Posted in life at 7:44 am by coldclimate
This will be the most boring post on here, period, and it will seem like the most obvious, but it will help de-stress your life, I promise.
I used to run at very high stress levels most of the time. I worked like a trojan, I cleared shit at a good rate, and I punched above my weight and age in the IT business, and then it all went wrong. I collapsed a disc in my spine, came close to a nervous breakdown, thought nothing of doing a 14 hour day, starting it off with a hot shower, a dose of the shakes from nerves and being a little bit sick. 10 strong coffees later, I staggered home.
Now here’s my secret to avoiding this… it was not the stuff on y plate which made me stressed it was the stuff I didn’t know about, and worst still, the stuff I did know about but chose to ignore. Things sneaked up on me, but knowing they were out there in the long grass left me with a nagging feeling of unease all the time, which chewing away, resulting in vomiting and all the rest of the signs.
How did I cange this? Well, I switched job an that changed things, but more importantly I started doing things to remove the known unknows and reduce the unknown unknowns. I also got a routine.
Firstly – I cleared every inbox, and worked on keeping them clear. Zero inbox is a bitch, but it works. No more “things I must do” buried under new stuff. Using “unread” status as a to=-do list is extreamly dangerous.
Secondly – I got calendars. Every appointment and most deadlines now go onto the calendar. One is personal, the other work. I share the work one inside the business, and I share the private one with family.
Thirdly – I got a pocket book. A backpocket mini Moleskin. painfully hipster, but perfect for the job. It goes everywhere, and when stuff pops into my brain and I can’t to it add it to the calendar, I stick it in the Moleskin and dump it out at the end f the day. This is the easiest one to break, and changing trousers throws me off.
Lastly and more importantly I got routine
- Sunday afternoon I check my work calendar for up and coming rk stuff. This avoid Monday Morning Panic.
- Virtually every working day is then the same.
- I get up, shower, come into work a little early
- check my work and personal calendars
- zero my inbox (create to-do items for each thing)
- Check the job queues. We use a few tools at work and it takes me 10 minutes to zip through them all.
- Check the servers and make sure nothing is too short on space, logs getting a bit leggy ect. I normally only do this one once a week (Nagios will tell me if something is wrong later in the week).
- And thats it – from the rest of the day I work from my to-do list (a 4 squares pad) or firefight the stuff that comes up.
End result, less panic, less stress, less dropped items. I can still be reactive etc etc, but I don’t have that pent up stress feeling in my chest. It doesn’t always work, and sometimes I all gets a bit on top of me, but the great thing about a routine is that it’s it’s own warning system. Once you start missing things, you know something is wrong.
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05.31.09
Posted in life at 6:25 pm by coldclimate
This year started badly. Two funerals , a shitty time at work and not enough hours in the day to fix the problems. February licked hairy balls.
This afternoon I was driving up the A1 and Lou Armstrong’s Wonderful World came on radio2. It followed a bit about Satchmo aparently having business cards with him on the loo and “Satchmo says leave it all behind you” printed on them. Life was looking up a bit. The sun was shinying, I was driving home after a lovely weekend and then Jason Donovan’s “Too many broken hearts” came the the radio. I’ve a brilliant story about JD, but had nobody to tell it too, and I realised… Life’s pretty sweet at the moment.
Work it looking up. A painful client has turned the corner, stress levels have dropped a bit, and theres some interesting (if busy) times coming up. Family are doing ok, felling a bit more settled, and generally life has turned around a bit.
It would have been one of those “having a moment” moments, if I hadn’t have then been flipped off by a tosser in a Saab 95 who I undertook because he was sitting in the middle lane doing 70, as was somebody in the outside lane doing 70.1. If you’re going to have both a “baby on board” and a “little princess” sticker in the back window, drive in a way which doesn’t encourage people to ram you off the road.
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05.22.09
Posted in food at 8:08 am by coldclimate
I love the sticky, spicy, tastey ribs you get at Chinese “all you can eat” type places. I’m convinced they’re bad for you, and thats what I love. This is as close to the flavor and texture as I’ve managed to reproduce so far. I’ve not actually used ribs yet, but left over roast pork worked well. The sauce seemed to work well with raw chicken and mushrooms too.
You will need…
- A handful of cooked pork, chopped into inch cubes
- 1 table spoon of chili oil
- 1.5 tablespoons of sweet chilli sauce
- 1/2 teaspoon of Chinese 5 spice mix
- 1 tablespoon of dark soy
I use the sweet chili and chili oil that come in litre bottles for £2 in Chinese supermarkets. Don’t buy the tiny bottles from Tesco, they’re pointless.
- Turn on your grill to super-eye-blistering-hot
- mix all ingredients
- turn out onto tin foil
- grill until slightly charred at the edges
- done
Yes, it turns out it is that simple. I love big tortilla full of fine sliced lettuce, spicy pork and a blob or two of sour cream.
The joy of using cooked pork is that this is super quick, and the sauce does not burn completely as you wait for the meat to cook. There’s a dose of sugar in it so the chances of it burning which pork cooked are too high. I’m going to try it with pork ribs sometime by cooking the ribs in a covered tray in the over (with a splash of apple juice) and then marinading them in this sauce before flash grilling them.
Yes, this does sound a bit like my “spicy chicken for drunken boys” thing.
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05.13.09
Posted in life at 6:41 am by coldclimate
At Thinking Digital, and then at BarCampNE2 (sponsored by Hedgehog Lab and BBC Backstage*). Should you wish to meet me in person then come on down, look for the 7 foot chap in a big hat. He’s not me, but he is easy to spot. I shall be there somewhere, modeling a t-shirt from Threadless that is several years old, and without an Moo cards (because I forgot to order a new box). I shall however be handing out contact details using a Sharpie and and Post It notes, proving once again that they are the most useful devices on the planet.
*you can see me in the pciture on the front of Backstage at the moment. I look shambling, nee shambolic.
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05.09.09
Posted in rant at 1:18 pm by coldclimate
This little gem landed in my inbox at work this week…
I was totally correct about Wolverine (even the name…arghhhh). It is a pile of pants about two men competing to see who has the longest fingernails, and therefore biggest cock. I hated it so much that when my friends said they liked it I felt terribly isolated and afraid. So yeah, thanks for the recommendation.
Love from Chloe.
Ps. The only female characters have the gift of empathy and a diamond bright complexion – for fuck’s sake. Yep, women are really touchy feely or they have nice skin. If you’re lucky you’ll find one with both of these sterling attributes. I was genuinely very angry with this film.
I now consider myself well told, but I still think it kicks arse (and I’m not going to start to discuss Phoenix being the most powerful level5 mutant and also being a girl, I think Chloe might not see this importance of this).
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04.27.09
Posted in randomosity at 10:31 pm by coldclimate
Instructions, copy, paste, and bold the things you’ve eaten (and maybe add some comments)
- Venison: Lots, and it’s one of my favorites.
- Nettle Tea: No and I too have no urge.
- Huevos rancheros: A bad approximation. Chilli+meat+eggs=genius.
- Steak tartare: Not yet. I like raw beef as sashimi, so it’s on the cards.
- Crocodile: in a wild meat box. Lovely.
- Black pudding: vast amount of.
- Cheese Fondue: No – far too french for this man.
- Carp: No.
- Borscht: Yes, made it myself too.
- Baba ghanoush: No – and I can;t think what it is.
- Calamari? yes. I like baby quid on the BBQ too.
- Pho: Yes, and I search for good Pho the world over.
- PB&J sandwich. Ming ming ming ming ming.
- Aloo Gobi: Yes.
- Hot Dog From A Street Cart: A few here and there, but not many.
- Epoisses:Not a clue what it is.
- Black truffle: Yes, and it smells and tastes like shite.
- Fruit wine made from something other than grapes: Several, and made quite a lot too.
- Steamed pork buns: Yes, and Newcastle has several good shops for them.
- Pistachio ice cream. The nuts go soft. Shame.
- Heirloom tomatoes:Not yet. Planned to grow a few varieties this year,but no garden makes it hard.
- Fresh wild berries: Lots.
- Foie gras: Yes. I don’t like how it is made, and thus would not buy it again.
- Rice and beans. Yup.
- Brawn: Yes. My gran used to make it.
- Raw Scotch Bonnet Pepper: I had a nibble. My face hurt.
- Dulce de leche: good god yes, thought I did have to look it up.
- Oysters: Yes.
- Baklava: Yes, I used to sell them on the olive stall.
- Bagna cauda: nope.
- Wasabia peas: Yes, and then make me a bit sick.
- Clam Chowder in Soudough Bowl: no
- Salted Lassi: Yes, and I hold the record for downing fastest.
- Sauerkraut: Yes. From a jar.
- Root beer float: sNo, because rootbeer tastes vile
- Cognac: Brandy, waste of good champagne.
- Clotted Cream Tea: yes.
- Vodka jelly: Yes, and tequila jelly.
- Gumbo: yes.
- Oxtail: Yes. slow roast and very tasty.
- Curried Goat: Excellent stuff.
- Whole Insects: Chocolate coated ants count?
- Phaal: Not yet.
- Goat’s Milk: No.
- Malt Whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more: Nah – not worth it on my cheap ass palette.
- Fugu (Pufferfish): No. not on the list really.
- Chicken Tikka Masala: Numerous
- Eel: I think I’ve had it as sushi.
- Sea-Urchin: Not yet. Sushi?
- Kispy Kreme original glazed donut: S’ok.
- Prickly pear: no
- Umeboshi: yes, the salted and dried variety
- Abalone: no
- Paneer: yes – had a go at making it too.
- McDonalds Big Mac Meal: Probably.
- Spätzle: and their name made me sniggler.
- Dirty Gin Martini: No. Waste of olives and gin.
- Beer above 8% ABV: Good lord yes.
- Poutine: Yes. s.vile.
- Carob chips:ming. ming.
- S’mores: (Mr Pickard got this one right) no, and I don’t think I could imagine eating one. For a start, it’s got a bloody stupid name, secondly it sounds rather gooey, and finally I think it would be horrendously sweet.
- Sweetbreads.
- Kaolin: Not on purpose. I think it might be in toothpaste though.
- Currywurst: Yes, when my girlfriend lived in Austria. They got something right
- Durian: no
- Frogs’ Legs: no
- Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake: No. I think these are all redneck american fairground foods.
- Haggis: Vast amounts.
- Fried Plantain: nope.
- Chitterlings: nope.
- Gazpacho: No
- Caviar and Blini: yes but caviar is best on Ritz biscuits.
- Louche absinthe: Yes. I’d rather have gin.
- Gjetost or brunost: Norwegen cheeses. Not yet.
- Roadkill: I’ve eat lots of things that end up as roadkill, but not actual road kill.
- Baijiu: Nope. Sake tastes like burp.
- Hostess Fruit Pie: Luckily not.
- Snails: not yet, but planning to.
- Lapsang Souchong: Give me PG tips any day.
- Bellini: Yes.
- Tom Yum: Numerous times.
- Eggs Benedict: I don’t like poached eggs.
- Pocky: Breadsticks with chocolate. Genius.
- 3 Michelin Star Tasting Menu: not yet
- Kobe Beef: Not yet.
- Hare: no. But I have had rabbit…
- Goulash: Yes
- Flowers: Yes. Rose petals by the hand full when drunk. Long story.
- Horse: Rubbish.
- Criollo chocolate: Not a clue.
- Spam: Quite a bit.
- Soft-shell crab: Deep fried they are fabulous.
- Rose Harissa: Harissa, yes.
- Catfish: nope.
- Mole Poblano: I love mexican food.
- Bagel and Lox: Nope.
- Lobster Thermidor: What a waste of lobster.
- Polenta: Hate it.
- Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee: no
- Snake: no.
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Posted in rant at 9:47 pm by coldclimate
So, another day, another story about people wanting to monitor everything you look at on the Internet. What a surprise. I imagine that when books became popular people started monitoring what people read, they certainly started banning books.
When radio came of age people definitely wanted to monitor radio transmissions, and still do. Television also.
The problem lies with what you are monitoring, because with radio and television you are monitoring the transmission, not the consumption. You are tracking (or tracking down) a limited number of sources, and they are easily tracked because they are transmitting. It’s easy to find a man shouting, it’s very difficult to find a man listening.
So how exactly are the government (I would say “The Man”) going to monitor EVERYTHING you type? Simple answer, they’re not. Lets look at a few points…
- There’s a shite load to monitor. I download about a gig a month, and thats not heavy usage. 10 million internet users in the uk – thats a lot to track.
- Encrypted connections. You like to thing your internet banking is safe, and it is pretty safe, so assuming the content of this connection is not viewable to 3rd parties, how is this going to be monitored? Bomb making instruction via https.
- Webpages and not the be all and end all of the internet. I’ve been “online” since 1990. Pre www. Secure communications come in lots of forms, from selective invite darknets, though encrypted p2p traffic and onwards to a bunch of things I’ve never hear of I imagine.
What a fucking pointless waste of time, energy and public money. Will it help catch some bad guys – yes, I have no doubt. Will it cost more than a million quid a person, I would imagine so. Because £2 billion IS A FUCKING HUGE AMOUNT OF CASH. A million million pounds. A million million. 1,000,000,000,000. Thats 20 grand per people in the UK (roughly).
Well, if it gets passed and I have no doubt it will because our current goverment seen hell bent on removing every last liberty, I’m out of here. Packing up, and moving my creative, telented, public money educated ass out of the country. I’ve no idea where is less controlling.
Fuck you Labour, and all those like you.
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04.26.09
Posted in food at 3:14 pm by coldclimate
I’m not really a gadget fan. I use devices every day, but I’m not a man to get excited about about my megabytes of RAMsomething has, or quite how many megapixels have been crammed into anything. I’ve not got an iPhone, or an iPod for that matter, I have no intension of spending money on electronics this year unless something dies. I do however own lots of kit in my kitchen, and most of it is junk. In the spirit of Last Years Model, why not avoid buying something, and see if I’ve actually used the damned thing since I got it.
First up: The slow cooker. Cheap as chips but a bit bulky, it will turn out sauces over night, tenderise cheap cuts of meat and make apparently uses less electrical power than a decent sized sex toy. Well other it.
Orange squeezer – big metal level driven thing that looks like a device of torture (and probably could be used as such). Only squeezes orange, lemons and limes. Bares a passing respenbalence to the bastard child of R2D2 and a one armed bandit. Crap – avoid.
Microwave – super handy, mostly for rapidly defrosting things. Also can be used to dry damp pants on those mornings where your washing has not completely dried. Brilliant and cheap, but bulky.
Icecream maker. If I had one of those self freezing units, instead of the bowl you put in the freezer and then try to mate to a mechanized stirring panel, I might use it more, however it spends it’s time fore-lone in the cupboard, ignored and unloved. Avoid.
Sandwich toaster. Mine is about 87 years old and bulky, but turns out brilliant toasties. I still love my Toastabags (invented by the uncle of a friend) but brilliant a “real toasty” is still brilliant. Also – can be used as a super-lazy bacon cooker. Buy now!
Juice Maker. Not the press-down handle one, but the motorised grazer-come-centrafuge job. Eats fruits, vegetables, herbs and anything you feed it. Bit fiddly to clean, but nothing dreadful. I’m sure the phase will pass, but cucumber, pear and ginger juice is ace. Bought secondhand for next to nothing, I might not renew if it died, but good fun at the moment.
Breadmaker. Could easily be another icecream maker but for one fact – the timer. I can load it with flour and bits the night before, set it to be ready for half 6 and off to bed. In the morning the house is full of wonderful smells. Not as much fun as baking by hand, but an excellent substitute. Brilliant.
Stick blender: Only just copes with mushy soups and never gets you that wonderful velvet smooth of an upright blender. Pointless.
Huge stone mortar and pestle: Bit of a show piece, much loved birthday present, weighs in at 20kg, it will take some serious abuse, and will give it too. Love it, but rarely used.
Rice cooker: does what is says on the tin, and no more, unlike a pan which will cook rice brilliantly and do a lot of other things. Pointless.
Silicone cake “tins”- Dead to use, easy to clean, don’t cook quite as well as metal cake tins, but less fuss and much funkier. If you’re buying for the first time, not a bad replacement for old style tins.
Coffee grinder: if you drink coffee and you keep beans, then you probably have one of these. Is it essential - no – you can buy pre-ground coffee, but if you want real coffee from beans, then nothing else will do.
Electric scales: beat the pants off all scales. Essential.
Great big bloody cleaver: Not really a gadget, but probably the most useful thing in the kitchen. Go for a cheap one from a Chinese supermarket, not a styling stainless steel one. Non-stainless steel can be much much sharper, but you’ll have to oil it.
I think thats everything I have at the moment. Notable exception is the upright blender (left at my old flat), and the cooker itself (something of a given).
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04.22.09
Posted in rant at 9:54 pm by coldclimate
I really must stop swearing as much, it does me no favours at all in the long run, the words fall out of my mouth and drop onto the world like so much cold custard. Nobody is shocked, rarely am I ever pulled up for it (very occasionally) and all in all I imagine I have a better turn of phrase. Mostly I swear when there really is no need. I imagine most people are the same sadly.
Stopping swearing is not easy, much like drinking too much, taking drug, driving overly fast on the motorway and punching people who move slowly in queues, it’s only when somebody points it out to you that it registers as “a bit wrong”. My cunning, neh devious, plan to get round this is to make not swearing fun. Just as it was exciting to say fuck around your friends when you where 15, so it is amusing to replace swearing with Victoria era phases.
“Fuck off” becomes “Skidaddle”, or “push off” or “begone you oaf”.
“Fuck” becomes “bother”, or “drat” and “botheration”
“Pissed off” is replaces with the far more cad like “most annoyed”.
“Give a fuck” as in “couldn’t give a fuck” becomes “could not care one hoot” (offensive only to owls, and frankly I do not care one jot about enraging an owl or two).
“Bollocks” is substituted out for “rubbish”, a wondefully english word that my American fiends think is historical.
Annoyingly the list of fictional swear words has been deleted from wikipedia, or I’d be fraking using them instead.
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04.10.09
Posted in randomosity at 11:06 pm by coldclimate
I hear something on Radio4 the other day that made me laugh, how your book name meaning change when you miss the last letter off. Pure genius. So I fired up my LibraryThing account and ran through knocking off the last letter to create…
- The Righteous Me
- IS HARRY ON THE BOA
- No Country For Old Me
- Dreaming in Cod
- Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Bi
- THE QUEEN AND
- Dr.N
- The Da Vinci Cod
- Layer Cak
- Little Green Me
- About a Bo
- Little Wome
- Stupid White Me
- Does God Play Dic
- Gone for Goo
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04.08.09
Posted in randomosity at 7:15 pm by coldclimate
Its funny what makes you think about things isn’t it. Despite all the crap in the last few months, it’s Buffy which makes me think.
Anya – Dies completely unnoticed in the chaos of the last series and the world just moves on around her. It’s only when the dust settles that Zander realises she’s gone, and she died saving somebody else, but they can’t congratulate her.
Tara – Is shot in the middle of the day, in a non-magical way, by an angry young man waving a gun around. You don’t see it coming, it destroys Willows life, and nearly bring about the end of the world.
Mrs Summers – its only when she’s flat out on the family sofa that the Scoobie gang realise how she way the only stable thing in most of their lives.
Sometimes telly can really get to you.
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03.16.09
Posted in technology at 8:02 pm by coldclimate
There’s an old saying, and I suspect it biblical (though I’ve not checked even through it would take me less time in Google to do so that writing this sentence) that goes something like … “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” It leads me to the subject of the day, spam.
First up, a bit of ‘fessing up. EmailCloud are one of our suppliers at work, and as such I know them pretty well. They’ve got us out of a few messy holes, and hopefully visa versa. I get my personal EmailCloud services for free at the moment, though I would happy pay for them.
Spam, much like death and taxes, is virtually unavoidable. Even not having your email address listed anywhere doesn’t work any more, because spam sending scum (the SSS) will just bombard your domains with a@, b@, c@ etc until they strike gold.
Once you realise this, you just have to have the good grace to live with it. You’ll lose the odd email in the digital detritus, but you’ll not lose a limb. I used to bring all of the mails from 10+ domains through to gmail and let it’s spam filtering do the job, it’s pretty good, but if you don’t want to trust our data to a remote cloud (and after last weeks outages you might be thinking along these lines) then having some spam filtering in place and keep your mails on your own box.
There is however something you can do, and that is pony up and buy in a bit of help. Here’s how it EmailCloud works:
- Sign up for an account
- Add your domains to EmailClouds online interface
- Point your MX records to EmailClouds servers, they provide some guidence on how to do this
- Setup EmailCloud to point to your server(s)
- Setup your server(s) to only receive incoming smtp traffic from EmailClouds servers
- Enjoy spam free life
The major bonus of using EmailCloud that I’ve found is their stats. I like seeing how much spam has got trapped, I like being able to whitelist domains and scratch through logs more. Give it a few more weeks and I’ll be attempting to build a spam dashboard for the office too, reducing the incidences of “Email is broken, this email hasn’t come through and I know it’s been sent”.
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03.12.09
Posted in randomosity at 11:36 am by coldclimate
Yes – this weekend it’s the first Make Faire outside of the US and it’s here in the town of heros – Newcastle Upon Tyne (and Gateshead).
Come down and see what people are making – I should have been exibiting my 8×8 leds display (homebrewed, Arduino powered) but I’ve not finished it in time. Shame.
The night before I shall also be doing a firewalk for charity – if you feel like it you can donate some cash to a good cause.
Amended so the image links/p<>
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03.01.09
Posted in business at 11:01 am by coldclimate
I’m bored of having marketing messages yelled at me via my inbox with giant image only emails demanding I click on things to get full details. So I am going through my inbox unsubscribing from all the sales mail subscriptions that I get. Some notes on how hard it is to actually unsubscribe…
- STA Travel – link is a single word, about an inch up from the bottom, with no descriptive text. Takes you to a page which you enter your email address in, but told me (in a big flat JPG image) that “the system was down for maintenance”. Will try again another day.
- Tescos – required me to log in. No idea of my details (not sure i’ve ever signed up actually), so have requested password.
- Ebuyer – clicked link (not too bad too find) and was unsubscribed, but warned “may take 5 working days”. Why – batch processing for unsubscription seems unlikely.
- Audible – link required me to log in (no idea of details) and the email address mailto: link was wrong (included a fullstop on the end of the address). Corrected address and emailed off – suspect it’s a manual process.
- Seetickets – simple link – requests email address and then gives you the friendly “sorry to loose you” message. Not bad at all.
- LOVEfilm shop – no unsubscribe link in email. Very bad.
- Virgin Wines – no link so you have to email them to request you removal.
- Play.com – easily clicked link which took me to a page which requested my email address and then informed me that my email address had been removed.
- Amazon.co.uk – no unsubscribe link at all, “contact us” link takes you to the generic help section of the site. Dreadful.
So if you are going to use the megaphone approach to reminding me you exist…
- Put the content in text so I can see it without downloading your images
- Make your unsubscribe link easily findable
- Structure your link so I don’t have to re-enter details
- Let me unsubscribe
Yes, if you don’t do these things it makes it harder for me to leave and you can keep trying to sell me things, but I’ll just hate you and tell all my friends about you sucking hairy balls, and thats worse than having me leave.
STA Travel, Amazon and Lovefilm all provide great services (well, Amazon and lovefilm do) but their email marketing sucks hairy ball sacks.
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02.26.09
Posted in business at 7:31 pm by coldclimate
During these troubled times, lots of companies will try and “do something new” to make more money. There’s nothing wrong with this (so long as you do it well), but I like this…
Set your goals and don’t suck. Eg. Stop trying to be everything to every man, and be everything to somebody.
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02.15.09
Posted in business, ideas at 8:32 pm by coldclimate
I’ve just had a bath, and a very large gin, and whilst sitting there reading INC magazine, I ran across some words on mangement styles which seem extreamly obvious, but extreamly useful.
On the subject of managing your staff, “Trust, and verify”. Now this at first is super obvious, but I’d never through about it. If you don’t trust your staff to get on with things, you end up with Geek Hero Syndrome, of which I will write another day. If you don’t verify, then when it all goes wrong you have to point at your staff and say “but they screwed up!” and this leaves you AT BEST with staff who hate you, and at worst, with staff who hate you and no job because you were fired.
I’d like to prepend trust and verify with two of my own. “Educate and enable”.
Educate – if there is a job that you are asking your staff to do and they are stuck, don’t no it yourself or you’ll always do it for yourself. Show them how. Empower them.
Enable – if they can’t do their job because they are waiting for somebody else to do theirs, or for something else to happen, it might well be your job to kick this into touch and make it happen. You can’t come down on somebody from not finishing Task A because if they are waiting for Object A (something which another team were supplying) then you are at fault until you massage Object A through the system.
So, for a more productive life, Educate, Enable, Trust and Verify – it’s your duty as a good manager.
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01.26.09
Posted in ideas, technology at 10:21 pm by coldclimate
Ever typed a text message and had t9 screw you over? Well, I once tried to say “Late, fucking queues in tescos” and it came out with “Late, fucking steve in tescos”. Anyway last night I couldn’t sleep so I decided to write something that would take a text message and give you all of the possibilities of what you could have typed. I’ve done it before in php but it was crap, this time it was UNIX tool set’s turn. I’ll wrap this in some RESTful goodness another day but here we go….
1) Take a dictionary file and loop though it putting everything into lower case
echo $WORD|sed ‘y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/’
2) take each word, replace all the letters with their numerical equivalent and output it in the form of “numerical form | word”, this is your dictionary. This may take some time.
sed ’s/a/2/g;s/b/2/g;s/c/2/g’ | sed ’s/d/3/g;s/e/3/g;s/f/3/g’| sed ’s/g/4/g;s/h/4/g;s/i/4/g’| sed ’s/j/5/g;s/k/5/g;s/l/5/g’ | sed ’s/m/6/g;s/n/6/g;s/o/6/g’| sed ’s/p/7/g;s/q/7/g;s/s/7/g;s/r/7/g’| sed ’s/t/8/g;s/u/u/g;s/v/8/g’| sed ’s/w/9/g;s/x/9/g;s/y/9/g;s/z/9/g’ followed by echo “$CODE|$WORD” >>lowerwords
3) for a given word, find it’s line in the new dictionary, split of it’s numerical equivalent. Be careful with line endings to match only the complete word.
4) search the new dictionary for this numerical equivalent, again being careful with line endings.
5) for each one you find, split the line up and split out the wordy bit (not the numerical pattern match).
3+4+5 in one handy liner:
grep “|abac$” lowerwords | cut -d”|” -f1 |xargs -I {} grep “^{}|” lowerwords | cut -d”|” -f2
Job done. Next trick – to split up strings by spaces and feed whole sentences through it.
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01.25.09
Posted in business, rant at 11:58 pm by coldclimate
Well, it would appear that the UK is perma-fucked when it comes to all things economic at the moment. Those heady days of rising house prices making you more money that your job earned you are over, and cheap trips to the USA to do a bit of shopping are gone, diddly gone gone gone.
We’re about to head into a serious depression, lets say the word no, come it took us ages to admit we were heading into a recession, let alone invent a new economic term “credit crunch” to describe the weird scenario for “not being allowed to self-certify your income and being leant 110% mortgage”. Weird scenario to all those who don’t remember the late 1970’s, or at least those of us who have had out ears bent about it since early teendom.
So, what are we do do in this odd economic situation? Turn lemons into lemonade, if we can.
The Pound is at an all time low (well, 23 year low) apparently. This is great news for those who can export. Yes, it means bring things into the UK is now painful, but it means things that we make, sell or do for, the outside world are comparatively cheap. UK manufacturing might be fubar, but we are a skilled nation and can provide some great things to the rest of the EU and the world beyond. Now if we dropped export duties a bit and maybe made money transfers a bit easier, we could start doing plenty of business outside of the country.
Interest rates are the lowest for God Alone knows how long. Now this “Crunchy Credit” does make getting a loan far harder (you are going to need a serious deposit, and probably a pretty good business model), but if you do secure that lump of cash, it is going to cost you peanuts. A mortgage at the moment will be at a simalar rate to my student loan when I left uni.
Unemployment is rising. as companies that were just surviving take a nose dive and vanish under the waves there are going to be some talented people hitting the market. Yes, the first people to go when a company is struggling are going to be the very expensive or the very crap, but if entire companies are shutting there might be a few gems hit the market and want hiring.
The government really is trying to help. Despite my views on fat boy Gordon and his fellow wastes-of-space, they are trying to get us out of the shit. Local councils are starting to run “banks” to encourage businesses is one thing that caught my eye this evening.
Oil is the lowest price in blooming ages! Now whilst is breaks my green-tinted heart, it does mean that the cost of transport should eb a bit lower AND that the crazy price was basically down to speculative traders (chuff monkeys the lot of them) Might not be a bad time to stock up a bit if you’re of the survivalist nature too.
Speaking of the trading chuff monkeys, the FTSE is scraping the barrel a bit lately too, but it’s maybe not a great time to get into shares. Despite dropping 4million points or whatever (ask Peston for the latest) it’s worth looking back over the last 25 years. Take a squint at this one for example. We may be down at 4k as aposed to the heady heights of the 6k mark just a year ago, but check out 1985. It’s not adjusted for inflation, but I’m better Gordon Gecko is not shouting BUY BUY BUY right at this moment.
So what am I suggesting from my all powerful seat of “pulling it out of my arse”?
- Stop spending money abroad. You are getting less for your cash
- Start selling abroad. Can you get your product or service in the eye line of some new folks who’re not from round here? Good. Take their cash, and say thank you (in their own language).
- Get some new people on board. Somebody might be willing to work for less, or for shares, or on something really cool because their cushy job for life just vanished.
- Don’t believe the hype. Yes, it’s not looking rosey at the moment, but if you listen to Radio4 all day and believe the Daily Mail’s headlines you’d end up quitting before the battle is really started.
However, as the BBC Two science program once said, Take Nobodies Word For It, especially mine
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01.22.09
Posted in food, rant at 10:57 pm by coldclimate
Healthy cooking has it’s place, and given the state of the nations waist line, that place might be more and more pressing, but I am sick to death of the War on Fat. Too many times I have been served meat which is dry, tough and flavourless, primarily because it has been grillind to within an inch of it’s life, and because it’s a lean cut which has then been denuded of the only thing which could have saved it from becoming a re-fried chunk of shoe leather, it’s fat.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking grilling, far from it. Flash grilled chunks of meat which are just burnt enough on the outside to be delightful yet pink and moist in the middle are one of lifes great pleasures, as is food cooked over a fire with it’s smoky outside, crunchy burnt edges and perfect bite, but this is only true if the right cuts of meat are chosen. Lamb grills brilliantly, chicken thies also, but beef steak is risky and pork chops a bloody nightmare. Fat is the key – it melts, releasing the tension in the meat and releasing wonderful flavours as it does so. Pick a lean chunk of meat and grill it and you might as well just pop a nice slice of hot water bottle into your sandwich.
Grilling is not the only problem we have though sadly. People keep pouring the fat off dishes where it is essencial. Tonight I baked some fantastic Cunberland sausage, the stuff thats as thick as your wrist and comes in one continuous length, not these measly thin little swirls that ever pub serves and look like a dog turd. I put it in a big cast iron pan with a lid, sitting on top of some onions and leeks, and baked it for an hour, taking the lid off for the last 10 minutes to brown the top surface.
The foot of sausage produced fat galore, and it was swilling round the bottom of the pan, gently basting and browning the onions. The temptation would be to pour it all away and have a semi-healthy saisage and veg. A crime tanamount to cutting a painting down to size for your living room in my book.
The thing about this dish was that if I’d tipped out all the fat half way through it would have been perfectly pleasant, but by keeping the lid on and not pouring the fat off the pressure in the pan rose nice and high, cooking the onions in the fat much like those preserved ducks legs in fat. When the lid came off and everything had cooled down a bit what II was left with as that cooking perfect, the goal of all gravy makers, sticky, clarty, gooy, slightly browned and over sweet bits. The fat worked it’s magic, the sugars caramelized, and the end result was brilliant.
Fat is where the flavour is people, and don’t forget it. This goes for things other than meat too. Butter is king. The rind on the bacon is what gives you the flavour. The fat round a pork chop is the best bit. Crackling alone should have convinced you of this. Andy Peters learned it in Master Chef, Hugh Fearlessly Eatitall preaches it, and I’m sure Heston BloomingEejit would agree – you pour off all the fat and you’re pouring off all the flavour.
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