04.21.08
Posted in rant at 8:58 pm by coldclimate
I hate this sofa. I hate everything about it.
It’s a sleek, low grey number, topped with several black leather cushions. Looks brilliant, doesn’t bloody work.
The it’s so low, when you sit on it, your knees come up round your ears, and the depth of the seat front to back is clearly designer for a giant with the fremour abuot 4 feet long. Your arse end up only inches above your ankles vertically, but your knees aren’t actually over the front of the seat so your feet dangle uselessly until they go numb.
Yout can’t curl up on it sideways either, because it’s missing one end, and the material is slippy enough to mean you slowly side horizontal. If you pile the oh-so-manly black leather cushions up they slide off one another like a stack of well oiled ducks.
You can’t even sleep on the fucker - it’s just not long enough and you hang off the open end. If you had an arm or side on that you could curl into it and sleep (all be it a bit crunched up), but that missing end gets you again.
Basically, it was clearly designer by a salesman who thought he knew whaty people wanted, or my a very tall or very small designer, who had no eyes and wears velco clothes. Wankers.
Permalink
03.21.08
Posted in business, rant at 6:27 pm by coldclimate
I think everybody agrees that reuse is a good idea generally. Reusing
glass jam jars is vastly more efficient that recycling them into new
jars. Reusable templates are much more efficient that drawing the
damned thing ever time. Reusing code libraries is the only way the
majority of programs could ever be created. There are however limits.
When reviewing documentation of formal processes, be that performance
testing approaches, or client bids, or upgrade instructions it is
obvious many of them are reused from other projects. His is not a bad
thing, after all if you had to recreate these from scratch every time,
you’d spend three quarters of it re-inventing the wheel, re-finding the
things which caused you problems last time, but reused and reworked
documents have some major problems, the majority of which appear because
the document is a reused, recycled, reworked and reissued version of a
document which has been reused, recycled, reworked and reissued which
is a.. you get the message. Like a copy of a copy of a VHS tape, each
re-iteration introduces problems, not removes them.
Each iteration introduces document creep. Things are not removed
because “they were there already, and it must be for a reason, so we’ll
need one too” rather than being thought about logically. Each project
has it’s own quirks and just because a previous project manager wanted a
break down of the risk profile in it (because they understood that area
and wanted to feel like they were really adding some solid content)
doesn’t mean your document needs on necessarily.
Joel On Software has an excellent article about this explaining that
ever Microsoft document had an Internet section, because one of them
once did (cant find the damned link!). As well as not removing things, everybody adds something.
This is because otherwise they don’t feel like they’ve bought into this
document, it’s not really theirs until they’ve added the section about
refactoring SQL to run more efficiently, or the best method for counting
the spiders using toothpicks, or whatever their specialist subject is,
and thus the document gets a little bit bigger and a little bit less
manageable.
The other thing that people never ever want to remove, are the reviewers
and people who need to sign a document off. Often these people are very
senior, and really, honestly, they are not going to read it, so they get
somebody who works for them to be on the list as well and so on and so
forth. Nobody will ever remove a reviewer or signee (I’m not sure this
is a real word), for fear of the “Why the hell didn’t I see this
before!” conversation that will take place if something goes wrong. The
problem with this is too fold.
Firstly, it gets to be virtually impossible to get the documents
reviewed and signed off, because all 20 people who review it won’t
finish it on time, and then once you finally work in the 87,746 changes
they suggest (20,341 of which will be the same) you’ll never get to 47
senior people on the list to sign it off. Why, because they’ve not read
it. Why have they not read it brings me onto the second reason why this
is bad.
Secondly, people end up completely swamped. With everybody producing
documents wanting everybody else to review it and sign it off, people
stop doing it. They delegate it if they can, or they skim read it and
miss the critical points. They are snowed under with stuff, the content
of which they are interested in 6% of. There’s a greats story about
NASA crashing a probe into Mars which was caused by one group working in
inches and the other in metric units. Somebody actually had an email
about this in their inbox, but they missed it because it was 40 feet
down.
So how do you get round this? What’s the solution? Here’s what I
recommend.
- Do re-use documentation. Get a big stack of examples, not just one, and slice them up into bits.
- Work out which bits you need. Go back to first principles if you have to (I always fall back to who, what, where, when, why and how).
- Write a framework. If you are having to juggle layouts to get things to fit neatly, you’ve probably got too much in there (see my post on implicit feedback loops in PowerPoint)
- Do not review by committee. Get individual sections reviewed by single people who understand that area. Get a peer to review it over all to make sure the individual bits hang together.
- Consult people before picking a way forward, if the review is the first time they see it they will go in cold and be surprised by everything they don’t understand,
- Have a single overall reviewer. They need to be the person that is going to have to do this stuff or be responsible for it.
- Have a single overall sign off person, they might then delegate it, but do not add their delegate to the list. If Jeff nominates Steve to review it on his behalf, Jeff will sign if Steve does. So why have both? If Steve isn’t senior enough to be seen to shoulder the responsibility, just have Jeff (who’ll still get Steve to read it). If Steve is senior enough, why bother with Jeff.
- Be vicious with what you write. A diagram can save hundreds of words, if it’s the right diagram.
- Don’t add content just because you feel you should. Include what is needed eg. The approach, the steps to do it, the justification and the timescales. You do not need to include, other than as a single line, all the other options you discarded.
- Put a summary at the beginning. Each section of the document should be summerisable into a couple sentences. Having this allows a super busy person to glace it and see the things that they needed to glean from the 40 pages of fine detail included later. A 150 line details plan can be turned into “Starting on 19 of May, finishing on 25th of May, 5 daily check points, each server being brought online one at a time, approximately 2 every day, and this will give enough information to point out that there is a strike on the 20th.
Who knows if this works, but once you’ve staggered through some of the 40 pages documents which say absolutely nothing, you’ll give anything a try.
Permalink
03.18.08
Posted in food, rant at 12:46 am by coldclimate
I am not Irish. Really. Not even slightly. And this is why I’m not out drinking myself to destruction tonight, on some vague claim to be decended from the people over the water. This however is a subject for another day, probably tomorrow, in all honesty.
No, tonights diatribe is reserved for American cooks mutilation of the world cuisine. I am sick to death of reading about habribo-lime pestos, lemon salsa, diary free fat free no Arabic style salt mayonnaise.
What joins these two subject? This vile collection of faux Irish food over on about.com which drives me insane with rage. The list looks about as Irish as my left foot. Irish Mint Flavored Coffee Creamer is not I feel authentic. Fudge Mint Pie probably falls into that catagory too. Making the food green, or worse still drowning it in Guinness does not make it Irish, just like adding whisky does not make it Scottish or garlic French, pasta Italian or rice Indian.
There are how ever some names on there that atleast fit. Colcannon for example, and Irish Stew, lamb shanks and Corned Beef and Cabbage Skillet Casserole. Lets have a look at these in turn.
The Irish stew contains garlic which is a travesty, but nothing compared te the included refrigerated potato wedges. Yes, you read correctly. Now hold your breath and wait to read…”16 oz. pkg. refrigerated prepared roast beef in gravy”. Yes, I kid you not. Now take a deep breath and venture into the horror that is Corned Beef and Cabbage Skillet Casserole.
Corned Beef casserole (or tattyhash as it is sometimes known) is a great meal. Boiled potatoes gone oversoft with onion and meaty goodness of cornbeef. It’ll even work ok with the tinned stuff (in fact some probably prefer it), but never ever should the instructions open with… (hold on tight now)
8 oz. egg noodles
NOODLES? IRISH? NO!
So here are the rules. America, you have some wonderful food. I’ve had wonderful hotdogs in Chicago. The best burgers I’ve ever eaten were in New York. The food tour of Greenwich Village I went on was simply brilliant. You’ve got some great cheeses and beers (yes - really - you don’t need to drink Bud!), Texas and the southern states do the best BBQ’d meat I’ve ever eaten, and I’ve eaten a lot, so can you please please please stop fucking around other countries food. No instructions that includes a whole ready meal is going to be remotely authentic.
Permalink
03.12.08
Posted in rant, technology at 4:48 pm by coldclimate
Now I’ve got myself into a huff about nation id cards before now, but it would appear that the government is steaming ahead, regardless as to whether people want them, re interested in them, or would pay for them. I listened to a discussion on Radio4 as I drove into work this morning with an MP advocating them but saying that “people wouldn’t adopt them unless they were free and actually had a use”, which made a lot of sense. There would appear to be two ways to go here, either they are completely free and you have to carry them (a la ID cards in many other countries, and ID cards during the war) or you charge for them but they have a major benefit (like a passport or a driving license). I prefer the latter, but any ID system where your populous doesn’t have to take part is never going to work (NI numbers being voluntary - never going to happen) so unless the card made thing substantially easier, faster or cheaper, it’s probably a no go.
Anyway, what I wanted to bring up wasn’t anything to do with the politics or economics of these cards, its their development methods. What will happen (I guarantee it) is that a couple of large IT provider will be asked to bid for the work, and it will narrow down to two, the cheap one which should be ok and the expensive one which will be rock solid, and the contract will got to the cheap one who will then try and bolt on some of the expensive system.
The key to an ID card, like any security pass, is that it should be extremely difficult to copy, clone or modify. If somebody can know their own up, or change theirs so when it’s scanned it doesn’t show them up as Jeff Smith the bank robber, then they become virtually pointless. This presents many challenges, after all the process for making a fake passport is well documented, and the actual leather folders and paper seem to be being stolen left right and centre. I watched a reported filming one being made on the BBC a few year ago, and the guy started by opening up a big box of them and picking one at random. They are clearly not kept well under wraps.
I imagine what will happen is that the cards method of storing information and revealing it will be shrouded in mystery, with big words like “unbreakable encryption” being banded around. It won’t be unbreakable, nothing is given enough time, power and money, but it should at least be something other than a bit of bit flipping. There’s lot of good encryption technology out there already, and much of it would be applicable.
Technology aside, I have a development idea - why not open source the entire thing? And don’t mass produce version one, or three, or even version 47. How up with a hard and narrow set of requirements eg. Must store full name, birthday, eye colour and a lookup_id (for comparing against a list). Something super simple. Then get a first version out there, and offer up £10,000 to every person who can find a crack, a hole, a work round or a sneaky way of misusing or modifying the data. Get 10,000 cards out there to ever academic, highschool kid, sneak bastard and clever git. If they find a hole, just pay up. Don’t quibble, try and say it’s not a hole, just bit the bullet, hand over the cash, and fix it.
Once you’ve had the first 100 bugs (and there will be that many), issue a new card, and the same challenge. Repeat as required. Set up a fast feedback loop and make it worth peoples time to break the damned thing. A sharp team will find 4 or 5 good holes in the first week, and they can go buy a new car. They’re happy, and you’ve for a more secure card. It won’t take more than 8 or 10 generations of these cards before something really bomb proof starts to show.
The other thing about being completely open about your spec and technology stack is that people will have a much better idea of the card and what’s on it. At the moment, most people are pretty suspicious of everything around ID cards, but if you get it all out there people can go and understand everything involved. It won’t quash everything, but it might help.
Security through obsfucated details is no security at all.
Permalink
02.18.08
Posted in rant at 10:45 am by coldclimate
Capitalist society puhed you to make enough money to have other people do things for you. At the very lowest level, most people don’t grow their own food, they pay somebody for it. They don’t make their own clothes either, they buy them. Once you move up the food chain (the financial food chain) a bit, you pay people to do other things for you. To drive. To cook. To clean your house.
Once you reach the very top however, you’re paying people to do things that are very personal (even more personal that cleaning yor loo). To look after your own children. To buy presents for people you know. To remind you of your own childrens birthdays.
And why? Well this free up your time to do “your things” to “live your life” and (unfortunatly this is probably most common) to make enough money to pay to deligate thee things to other people.
What you’ve done, what other people seem to be aiming for, is to have other people live your life for you. Doing things, making things, growing, cooking, eating, cleaning, loving, caring, thinking and playing re what life is made up of, and everytime you pay somebody to do these for you, you’re loosing a little bit of your life. You’re dieing one action at a time, and paying to do so.
Permalink
02.08.08
Posted in news, rant at 6:45 pm by coldclimate
Dear Paranoid Ameriica,
Putting police men with fuck off huge machines guns on the street will not make you more safe, it will just make your populus more scared, meaning yet more draconian laws can be passed.
If your police men can’s kill a suicide bomber with their current arsonal of 9mm semi automatic pistols, having what looks to me like a fully auto M16 (correction, aparently it is an M4) will not help, it will just result in collateral damage aka. innocent people’s facing getting a 5.56×45mm NATO through the face.
If the collateral damage’d people are lucky, it’ll only be on three-shot burst mode, and not full auto.
Love and hugs,
coldclimate
PS. I’m probably not coming back for a while, you kids really scare me at the moment
Permalink
02.04.08
Posted in rant at 2:53 pm by coldclimate
…they sometimes don’t say what you want them to say.
Personally I beleive in being a speaker of unplesent truthes, and generally it serves me well in work, life and hopefully other areas. The easy thing to do in nearly all cases is to ignore the really rough bits, and hope everythign works out ok, but frankly, thats a pathetic way to live your life.
Eerily echoing somethign I was discussing with a randomly met self made millionaire on the train on Friday, it would appear there are yet more stpes being taken to remove expert from our legal system. In this case, coroners.
Why? Well one suspects its because they have a nasty habbit of not towing the line in our “democratic” society. They tend to not come out with pathetic and lilly-livered copouts such as the Labour years seem to have generated.
So whats the solution, well, you can spin everythign they say, or you can stop them from saying it somewhere that matters, and that would appear to be our wonderful governments new move.
Permalink
01.11.08
Posted in rant at 8:50 pm by coldclimate
Of late I’ve reached near nuclear levels of frustration dealing with people on the phone. This is nothing new, if you’re one of the call centre workers who’s rung me to try and sell me a new mobile phone contract and I’ve either used the airhorn on you or put you on hold by leaving the phone next to the radio, you’ll know how much phones infuriate me.
No, the new thing driving me crazy, is ladies of a certain age not announcing who they are. Calls then fall into one of two patterns, The Repeating Hello or The Insulted.
The Repeater:
- (pick up phone)
- (me) Hello Coldclimate Towers
- (them) Hello
- (me) Hi
- (them) Hello
- (at this point this may loop round the cycle again as many times as need until my patience breaks and I move on to..)
- (me) Hi, who’s speaking?
- (them) What?
- (me) It’s Coldclimate here, who are you trying to get through to?
- (them) Coldclimate? (or at this point, they name a random member of the rest of the clan)
- (me) Yes, Hi
- (them) Hello.
Eventually They get confused and just start talking, sometimes I’m none the wiser who it is, and very pissed off.
The Insulted:
- (pick up phone)
- (me) Hello, Coldclimate House of Love
- (them) Hello, it’s me, im wondering if you’re making it to the Magic Circle Spider Organizing book club this week, because Sid’s not going to make it and we’re…
- (me, interrupting) Wow - wow - hang on a second, who’s speaking please?
- (them) It’s me, anyway, the Spider Organising thing are you able to
- (me, interupting again) Sorry, you’ll have to bear with me I was just doing the accounts, who’s speaking, I’m a bit lost?
- (them, now insulted that I don’t know them) It’s me Lady Jeff jeff de Jeff, we met last year at that Teaparty in the Forbes Hameltons?
- (me) Oh, yes, hi, how can I help you? Sorry about that I was in the middle of something a bit complex and didn’t have my brain wasn’t in gear.
- (them) Well, I’ve said, we need you to…
And there the sad tale end, they’re pissed off, I’m confused, and the level of rage in the world has gone up just a bit more.
The problems all stem from the fact that these people all expect you to recognise who they are form their voice, probably because they don’t call that many people, and don’t receive calls from that many people, and thus recognise everybody who rings them. It never occurs to them that I speak to upwards of 30 people a day, many of whom a have never spoken to before, and who have a multitude of accents.
So, some simple lessons when ringing somebody:
- Say who you are
- Say who you want to speak to
- Say slowly, when you rang them they were probably doing something else,meaning they will need a little time to come up to speed and switch paradigms from whatever it is they were doing.
- Don’t launch into a massive diatribe about whatever it is you rang about until the person you’re ringing has acknowledged who you are.
There - simple - use that script when you ring somebody, and no matter who it is, they won’t end up wanting to poke you eyeballs out with a broomhandle.
Permalink
12.20.07
Posted in rant at 11:46 pm by coldclimate
edit: Oh look - another big data fuck up
I’m getting bored of all these government agencies losing my data and it coming out in the papers weeks later, and I’m sure you are too. As such, I urge you to sign the following petition(if you are in the UK) - I’m rebranding it the tell me you lost my data petition.
Encryption people - it’s not difficult. openSSL is free, easy to push your stuff through and not terribily easy to break, so long as you don’t marker pen the password on the disc.
Permalink
Posted in business, rant at 10:16 am by coldclimate
As I got off the tube to walk to my hotel this week, I passed a couple and their children buying Twix’s before getting the tube home. I think they’d probably been to the theater. I was staggering back form the office, it was 11 at night, and I realsed what a complete mess I looked. You can almost hear the conversions….
“See Johnty and Henry, when you grow older, and after you’ve passed a handful of A-levels, a degree, a masters and some industrial certificates, you to could be just as successful as this man! Look at his sallow skin, his sunken eyes, look see, the left one is all bloodyshot from sneezing because he’s ill but still at work!
You could spend hours trying to understand something thats intractable and complex with virtually no introduction to what it is, and then be told you’ll have to work right through Christmas and New Year, and that it is vitally urgent that it happens correctly first time. Imagine all that time you could spend away from your friends and family, and the hours on the train! Look look - I think he’s even got stress related excema on the backs of his hands! Wow - imagine that! Better than being a racing driver or a fireman hey!”
Fucking hell, how depressing.
Permalink
12.11.07
Posted in rant at 2:10 pm by coldclimate
Hummer, because you have a small penis. A really small penis.
Permalink
12.02.07
Posted in news, rant at 6:33 pm by coldclimate
There is a world of fuss about Gillian Gibbons, a teacher who’s class of children in Sudan named a teddy bear Muhammed, and was thus accused and charged with “insulting religion”. Now, my level of patience with religious crazies, but lets look at this another way…
She visited another country, she broke the law in that country, and now she is spenting 15 days in jail as a consiquence. Whether or not you agree with why she went to jail, can we not just move on, and in two weeks, she can come home and sell her story to the Daily Mail, who will no doubt agree that it was all terrible, and life goes on.
If someone from Sadan came to the UK and broke a law here (by doing something that is not illegal back home) would we expect that they shouldn’t have to go through the same process as somebody form this country breaking the same law?
Permalink
11.27.07
Posted in rant, technology at 10:18 pm by coldclimate
I always come back to the power of Unix tools, and the ideology of using many small tools in stages to achieve a goal rather than crafting a monolithic solution. Tonight was a great example how how a little automation can save a huge amount of time.
My dad has a massive stack of Excel spreadsheets called Book1.xls, Book2.xls etc etc. Each is representative of a single day, and needs renaming to reflect this. Like any good Windows user, he was opening up each one, finding the line with the date in, closing the spreadsheet, renaming Book43.xls to 07 06 2007.xls, and moving on. Ironically he was working on his Mac for this as it’s for user friendly. So - prime from some automation.
Firstly, all of the books he has renamed already needed renaming in the format YYYY_MM_DD.xls so that they can be ordered easily. Step in a bit of ksh programming.
Firstly - copy them all off to one side, and work on the copy. It is very easy to cock up and cp -pr making knocking a copy off to one side easy.
I like working from a driver file, so I did an “ls *.xls > list.txt”, then start a shell script that loops through the driver list using “for i in `cat list.txt`” and split out the three bits of the file name by piping it through awk, and spitting it out of the other side in a new order. To do this I used “echo $i | awk -F” ” ‘{print $3 “_” $2 “_” $1}’. With a little more pipe magic, I used this output to mv all the files around and job done.
Next, and more interesting, renaming all those Book*.xls to YYYY_MM_DD. The Unix command strings pulls ASCII out of binary files, so doing “strings Book1.xls” gives back a whole pages of text. One of the lines has “rubbish rubbish Date: 9 September 2007″. This is excellent news, because we can use awk again, splitting by “:”, and then select out column 2 with “awk -F”:” ‘{print $2}’. This splits back “9 September 2007″ which we can then use with awk again, splitting by spaces this time with awk -F” “, and use the same trick as the first set of files to rename the Book1.xls to $3_$2_$1 (2007_september_9.xls in this case).
OK, so far too much detail in there for the cusual user, and I imagine there are a million and one neater ways to do these things if you ask a really good hacker, but the point I was going to make was this this is only possible because of the Unix philosophy of being able to plug together little tools in a million and one combinations. All I used here was ls (to list the files), mv (to move them), awk (to separate things out separating by different characters) and cat (to read out files). The whole job took about an hour (including all the time to work out how), and saved at least 5 hours. It would scale too, saving 500 hours for the same investment of 1, and it’s just not possible on todays dumbed down Windows world. Shame.
Permalink
10.30.07
Posted in rant at 8:06 am by coldclimate
There seems to me to be something very fucked up about using private security firms once you invade another country. Mercinaries have always existed, so lets call them what they are. Somehow it is even worse when they are being offered immunity when they screw up, something that might well not be offered to a serving soldier. If your army can’t do everything you need once you invade, you shouldn’t be there, in my opinion.
Permalink
10.24.07
Posted in rant, technology at 11:18 am by coldclimate
I did have a post about how I didn’t hate Windows media Player quite as much as I did last week having used it for a little while and found some useful things, however….
As I was looking through some Unknown Artist files, I noticed some funny items in the Comments section of the mp3 tags. They look like hexadecimal numbers, here is one as an example: 00001A39 00001801 00007A8B 00008713 00030D57 00030D57 00008000 00008000 00009C85 0001ADC7
At first I wondered if these were something added for tracking mp3s through p2p networks, which would make sense. A company could add comments, and then share them, and then track their dissemination. I have some files which I’ve downloaded, so that was possible, but i checked a little further.
These numbers appear in the comments to each and every one of my mp3s! Include those I’ve ripped from CDs I own! Now I’m pretty sure cDex hasn’t added them (I’ll rip something this afternoon and see), and I have a few mp3s on my laptop that WMP has seen nothing of, so I imported one and…. the magic comment numbers appeared!
I suspect they might be a way for the internal WMP library tracks files, but surely they could be used for far more things, many of which are EVIL EVIL EVIL!
Permalink
10.16.07
Posted in rant at 9:12 pm by coldclimate
yes, it would appear that lighting a pipe and smoking it on set on Top Gear causes the health and safety Nazis to get their knickers in a twist again.
“Ash’s spokeswoman said smoking was “not appropriate for the BBC”.
“There are no exceptions,” she said, adding: “You cannot smoke in a public place. This isn’t covered by artistic integrity.” ”
What about a character in a film who smokes, and it is an integral part of their character as depicted in a book? Should the chararacter in the book not smoke. Maybe we should just pretend smoking does not exist and it’s just a myth, otherwise “the kids” will find out about it, and die.
Personally, I don’t smoke, but silly shit like this makes me want to start.
Permalink
10.05.07
Posted in business, music, rant at 11:17 am by coldclimate
It would appear the music industry is just not thinking, listening or doing anything more than bitching a sueing to try and maintain a business model thats just got working anymore. They’re even contradicting themselves now, for example check out these gems, only lines apart.
“when people steal, when they take music without compensation, we are harmed”, a far point , if you want music you should be paying for it in some form, and for that payment you should recieve something that you can use in multiple places in my book (aka. DRM free, or some form of open DRM).
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.”
NO NO NO - he bought that CD. He paid for it. You were not harmed in this process. If he rips it, and then does not distrobute it out to other people but just uses it for personal use in multiple places, you are not being harmed by this action!
Using this crazy logic, should I be expected to buy a different copy of each thing for the places I want to use it? I like music in my car, but it has a minidisc player (yes yes - I know, but I bought a car, not a stereo). Should I ignore the recordability of minidiscs and re-buy Nick Drakes back catalogue on mni-disc? Is it actually sold?
Should I re-buy all my Rolling Stones CDs on tape so I can play them in the kitchen when Im cooking? No, thats just plain stupid, much like this idiotic stance Sony BMG are taking.
Play fair, sell it for a fair price, in a fair format, so people will actually buy it and listen to it. Yes, people will probably distrobute it and other people might get it for free, but if you don’t stard doing this, you’re locked into an ever decreasing circle of lower sales, higher prices, more piracy, lower sales, continue until existing music industry is gone.
Personally, I like CDbaby’s mp3 downloads. A bit cheaper than the cd cost, open format, 90%+ of the money going to the artist, massive choice.
Why would I pay £15 for a cd only to be told I can only play it on my shelf bound stereo at home when I spend half my life onthe road. Idiots.
Permalink
10.02.07
Posted in business, rant, technology at 10:59 am by coldclimate
Between my Outlook install for work, and my gmail account which aggregates the mail from about 4 or 5 pop3 addresses, I was drowning in a sea of email. I got about a thousand messages a day, of which a good 800 were spam, and of the remaining 200 I probably only had to deal with about 20 of them right now, instantly, when they arrived. Ignoring my gmail situation (which I dealt with separately), I have finally reached a state of inbox zen, and I’m working far more efficiently for it. There are some useful tips in several articles, but here is my journey.
When you’re working in a Microsoft environment, each application tends to demand to have your attention every time something happens. Each time an email arrives a little box slides into view in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, with a helpful first line of the email and the senders name. You can’t help clicking on it, it’s just instinct. I’ve tried to ignore them and if I’m really really busy it works, but most of the time I’ll stop what I’m doing and flick back to Outlook and see. AIM is the same - each time a contact logged in, up comes the status box and a little tinny sound is played to make sure I know something has happened. AIM aside (because I turned off all of the attention seeking little blighters), these constant interruptions reduce your productivity both explicitly (by dragging you away to another application) and implicitly (by breaking your concentration). After seeing the improvements in moving to word processor (one that is not a DTP package in all but name), I was determined to do something about the curse of email.
First think is first - sort out my 1500+ message inbox. In Outlook I created a set of folders. One for the current project. One for time and expense reports. One for training, holidays and other such company admin. One for Promo email from external companies. One for personal banter. I then groups all of my inbox by subject header (going on the idea that threads of emails are generally on one subject) and cleared down my inbox. There’s no magic bullet, you’ve just got to put your head down and plow through the backlog. It took a couple of hours whilst some scripts were running on one of the servers.
Thats the history sorted out, now to deal with the present. I went through my newly filled folders and created rules for the big bunches of mails along the lines of “If it’s from them, put it here”, “if it’s got this in the subject, put it here”. They don’t need to be fine detail, you can refine it later. I did run up against the problem whereby Exchange server limits the number of rules you can have (or our exchange servers do - possibly this is a customised rule). Now most of the mails I receive get filed automatically.
Now, instead of watching my inbox, I have Outlook defaulting to the Unread Items smart-list (I’m sure there is a M$ term for it, but the Apple smart-list is the only one that comes to mind), and have added the col um “folder” to the display, removing the size column (you’ll never sort this by size) and ordering by date received. As email arrive they are filed, and I can see they are new. Occasionally Outlook defaults back to the inbox which is a pain because you miss the new emails that has been squirreled away, but it happens less and less. Maybe it was just me in old habits clicking on inbox.
At the end of the working day I take 10 minutes to go through all the messages in my inbox that didn’t get auto-filtered, and file them into the correct category. I’d probably create a few more rules if I had the option.
The last three of things I did have made the biggest difference. First I switched off the automatic highlighting, and thus the little pop-up boxes in the bottom right of the screen have fucked off forever. Now I check back to my email when I’m finished doing something, gone are the interruptions.
I switched my email editor away from being Word (bloatware if ever there was one) and then switched by mail format from HTML to RTF. Ideally I’d go for plain-text, but as most people don’t switch the default font from system, my emails arrive virtually unreadable for more of the company. By not having Word fire up each and ever time I wrote an email, I don’t have the pauses, hangups and memory overhead that comes with Word. I also don’t get the highlighting of incorrect spelling, which I liked, so i turned on “force spell-check before sending”. It’s a small price.
Lastly I increased the amount of time between automatic updates. When Outlook hangs, even briefly, all of the other M$ Office applications hang also, and even the briefest flicker of hesitation causes me to alt-tab to see if my machine has hung. The majority of these brief hangups seemed to me to be when n outlook scurried off and checked the exchange server over our slightly dodgy network, and either had to wait to poll a response or suddenly had to drag a large attachment across. By increasing the time between send/receive sweeps to a full 5 minutes (from 30 seconds) these glitches have all but vanished. I don’t know if Outlook is doing some stuff in the background (I doubt it) or if the reduced frequency simply means reducing the frequency of glitches in proportion, but I barely notice them.
So now I have achieve inbox zen. My inbox is always zero at the end of the day. Email no longer gets under my skin and breaks my concentration. My other applications seem to run a little happier, and all it took was breaking “doing it the way it is always done”. Not everybody I work with likes the new regime, and I’ve had several phone calls along the lines of “but I emailed it to you 5 minutes ago!” and if it really is important, I can hit send and receive and in it pops. Normally it’s already there, and I have just been too busy to see it, and if it’s really really important, they’ll call me to demand an answer.
Permalink
09.26.07
Posted in news, rant at 5:00 pm by coldclimate
It breaks my heart when people come out with such complete rubbish as “Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose” (Archbishop Chimoio). HIV will ravage and rape your entire flock is you preach such complete tosh. Interestingly though “Archbishop Chimoio told our reporter that abstention, not condoms, was the best way to fight HIV/Aids”, which is a round about way is an excellent message.
Either don’t fuck about (or prefereably don’t fuck), or use condoms. It’s not rocket science, and if I hear one more person telling me that sex with a condom on is rubbish, I’ll break their face (or point out that they are probably shit in bed if thats is really the case).
Permalink
09.18.07
Posted in business, rant at 5:32 pm by coldclimate
Elitism is alive and well
One of the perks of my job is that just occasionally I get to travel first class on the British Train network. This afford plenty of opportunities for a spot of people watching.
First Class travel by train not like first class air travel. The cost is roughly double, rather than five or six times the cost, and thus the comparable increase in luxury is not that as seen with airlines. I’ve never flown first class, but by all accounts is falls into the “super luxury” category of life and thus possibly the massive mark up is justified. I suspect however it (the mark up) is there to engender the “fear of standard” as described so eloquently in The Undercover Economist.
First class trains are another matter. If you have a full price, completely flexible, expensive enough to make your heart falter ticket, you may use the first class lounge in the station. There are nice seats, free tea and coffee which aren’t bad at all, and no station announcements to wake you from your slumber, resulting in a very restful 40 minutes kip, and a missed train. Thanks God you had that fully flexible ticket hey!
Once aboard the train (the one after the one you planned to get), the seats are a little nicer, and theres a it more leg room, and the free tea and coffee continues (though this time at greatly reduced quality in my opinion). The carriages are a bit quieter, generally screaming children free, and if you keep your ears open you get to pick up some wonderful titbit’s from big companies. This afternoon I could have noted down the major players on the client and service provider for a nice juicy front-page-of-the-tabloids government project, the money involved and what a bunch of fairly junior employees thought of their clients. I didn’t note it, I couldn’t be bothered. You are generally spared the ear achingly pathetic tinny tones of be-tracksuited yoof playing piss-poor happy hardcore “remixes” of 1980’s TV theme tunes, which is a blessing worth paying the ticket price for alone in my book. Many times I’ve been driven almost to psychotic rage when the dulcet tones of Nightrider (Screaming Ecstasy Remix featuring DJ Dust and MC Fuckwit) melds into the throbbing beat of Smashface and Fucknuts genre challenging bangin’ house rework of Bagpuss’s “Fiddlestick and flap noodles”. Christ Almighty, even making up these shitty track names makes me angry (and laugh).
So as my train now glides tiltingly (yes, this is being written on the train right now) down through the country, whom am I sharing this journey with? Well, across from me is a lady in her middle 30’s, sporting a knitted waistcoat over a loud spotted brown silk top, a vacant smile on her face, eyebuds wedged deep into her ears. Maybe she is enjoying a little happy hardcore, but she is gracious enough to not play it through her speakers.
The rest of the carriage look a little like me, all be it me three years ago (less jaded, better groomed, louder and not yet beaten into submission by SLAs, client requests and contracts) or a little older. The older group split wonderfully into two groups, those who have achieved for the day and at 5pm can unfurl the paper and attempt the crossword, and those who must be either under the cosh or chasing promotion because they’ve printed enough documents to highlight with pen for the journey.
There are a scattering of people who are joining me in the frantic typing and editing, mostly using Word from what I can see. I’ve gone for the full-screen old-school editor JDarkRoom which is have been evangelizing about for a little while. It’s unlikely anybody will read over my shoulder, but not impossible.
The train company are providing free wireless, which I shall make use off in a little while to post this. I wonder how secure people are being? My copy of Ethereal is playing up and I don’t have my Mac about me to have a noisy through the traffic, which is a shame. You’d be amazed at what other corporate juicy nuggets and gems of private information float about the airwaves.
Right - I’m off to make use of the loos, leaving all my valuables in plain sight, safe in the knowledge that they are extremely unlikely to be lifted in this atmosphere of genteel business casual. I’ll lock my keyboard though, you never know what sneaky bastards are about 
Radio silence for a few days, I’m off to learn things, the likes of which will never impress at cocktail parties nor Christmas tables.
Permalink
« Previous entries
