My boss bought a pile of short sleeved shirts for the lads in the office in a sale on Jermyn street. He wore one of them yesterday afternoon, so I thought I’d be OK in mine today. Error. We’re both wearing the same short sleeved shirt, chinos and light shoes. We look like Dr Evil and Mini-me.
Archive for July, 2005
More Government IT Competitions Coming Soon has a neat table of what the various G- and S-Cat category spends were.
Not something I thought I’d see in my lifetime. Let’s hope they all mean it! IRA says ‘armed campaign over’
All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All Volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means. Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.
“The IRA leadership has also authorised our representative to engage with the IICD to complete the process to verifiably put its arms beyond use in a way which will further enhance public confidence and to conclude this as quickly as possible.
Picking Up the Tab looks at how and whether US government sites should use a self-funding model. Of course they should!
Turning the Pages is a great collection of scanned books: they’ve just added Mercator’s atlas of the UK.
UK Stays Top of G7 Broadband Coverage League. We may have the most coverage, but it certainly isn’t the cheapest, and it certainly isn’t the fastest in my somewhat deprived ward.
Calculating the True Price of Software looks at applying option pricing to software, and concludes that the value of software in the initial purchase price is dwarfed by the implied options for upgrades and support. Reminder to self: reread the theory behind these things.
Worthwhile lists Five Tips for Thriving in Your New Job. They’re pretty good, I think: mostly based around relationships and the softer side of work.
- Put all the expectations on the table
- Identify a relatively simple problem and fix it within the first 90 days
- Make yourself invaluable
- Fit into the firm’s culture
- New hires must establish credibility while sharing credit
The Economist suggests thatcopper is at its peak. This is good news for my father-in-law (who has an import business based on copper), as it should stop investors getting into the metal for a while and help bring some profit back.
[In other news, Copper may be the target of some infrastructural destabilisation.]
Nice couple of tips sites: Tricks of the Trade (from a painter)
Before resealing a can of paint, blow one deep breath into the can and close it quickly. You’ll fill it with carbon dioxide, which will keep the paint from oxidizing prevent it from developing the “skin” that paint gets when it sits a while.
and Tipmonkies (for IT things, mostly)
Joel looks back on his quest to create a great working environment for programmers in Hitting the High Notes. It looks like there are different qualities of programmers and that putting lots of them together creates profit. We think; he doesn’t say.
Inkscape is an open source vector drawing package like Illustrator or Freehand. Definitely worth a try, as I only ever need those packages four times a year, and they cost hundreds of squid.
Downloading ‘myths’ challenged discusses research that states:
People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests.
“No shit Sherlock” as my other half would say.
Birmingham Europe’s Top ‘e-City’ is the surprising headline of a piece of EU research. But good news for the UK and the local e-gov programme, I think.
It looks like centralised procurement is working, in terms of driving down the prices of several items, and even getting savings on the cost of consultancy, although consulting fees through the framework agreements have tripled in three years. Question: is that a sign of people working out how to use these agreements more effectively to avoid the morass of EU procurement legislation?
Separately, it looks like “share-in-savings” schemes haven’t taken off in the US (these are where a supplier invests up front in the provision of a government service and pays for its time by sharing the savings realised).
Amanda is having fun doing collaborative poems with Puffins and Autistic detectives.
Even though we’ve had the same cleaner for years, we pay a little extra each year for a service that a) gets good cleaners with references (Ashley came from there) and b) provides replacements for us when Ashley’s away.
This is, in general, a good thing, but not when I open the door at 8:10am with my noise cancelling headphones on (so can’t hear a bean from the world) and find a sweet young lady called Anna, who’s probably been waiting for five minutes for me to emerge. Lord only knows what she thought I was up to (answer: doing some work on the new home pc, but that’s just sad).
If only Homeclean had called to tell us she was coming: it was remarkable that one of us was home (I only was a) for geek new computer reasons and b) because working on the new machine is a dream with a 17in screen (aside: my colleague Stephanie said “I’ve never seen one that large” when she saw the new PC. Joyous.)
But then I think: maybe Homeclean did call, but left a message on my home phone, which neither of us check or answer any more, because it’s always spam or near spam calls.
Hyperion is a funky moon of Saturn with a fantastic “spongy” feel.
How on earth did it get that way? Well, it wasn’t on earth, for a start.
A number of interesting articles yesterday on the e-Gov space: Firstly in Whitehall technology spend to rise, Kable predicts a £.6bn rise in spending in 2007/08. Leeds is using technology to meet its e-Government targets (which should all be about better service, not use of IT, but who am I to fight the flow now we’re six months away from the target date).
There’s an interesting look at whether the digital divide is gender-specific (no), and whether IT is a solution to it (not really). A great summary of the issues is here. As we might expect, DigiTV could actually increase the divide, as it is catastrophically slow and user unfriendly.
My boss, who’s Dutch, used the phrase Darby and Joan in a meeting today and I didn’t know it.
