Gotta watch Feynman in action! Presentation Zen has a set of contributed presentations that look well worth the time. Oh yes, when will I find the time?
Archive for April, 2006
Nice 12-step summary of how to find things. The best advice is knowing when to stop and wait for the object to pop up of its own accord.
A good looking summary of the zeitgeist with multiple feeds on one page.
Interesting point from Sviokla: RFID requires a smart centre tracking dumb parts on the edge. Maybe this works for 80% of inventory, but it is the 20% that it doesn’t that causes all the problems. So smart “motes” might be the answer which add some smarts to the tricky 20% to feed them into the system that runs the 80%. This general idea - use a system that works for most everything and then innovate around the edges has to be a good rule of thumb.
Sounds like a spam name, but is actually what I found on the front porch this morning at 1:30am after a noise woke me up. Yup, our thieving chums came back. They once again didn’t get in, but jemmyed the window up half an inch - my DIY screws-in-the-frame held. Hurrah. Continue reading ‘Menacing dustbin’
The lads at work have been trying to generate the mother of all sandwiches.
The current one, which has defeated all but Richard is as follows.
Bread: Soft ciabatta bread with ketchup on one side, mayo on the other.
Filling: Bread-crumbed chicken escalope, crispy bacon, cheese and sliced onions with optional Tabasco on top.
It ends up five inches square. FIVE INCHES! It costs over a fiver.
Caroline suggests that it should be toasted and that that would allow more fillings in, as the grill would crush the sandwich.
Alan Mather is absolutely right - people won’t vote if they can’t find anything out about their candidates. I have been postal voting for the last couple of elections, and it has been near impossible to find out anything of any interest or that would help me chose. I can find out who they are and write to my existing councillors.
Surely there’s a mysociety.org thing out there? I couldn’t find anything, so I suggested one.
Separately, I have been advised to vote LibDem if I’m anti-war, and to worry about the CPZ.
Great name! More seriously, Guy points to him as an excellent source, and he’s right.
- Why doesn’t Disney create whole new mobile experiences? Equip everyone who goes to Disneyworld with a device and you’ll soon get a sensible working population.
- Is Wikicalc a disruptive spreadsheet?
- What are the new 4Ps of marketing?
- Presence (not place)
- Persuasion (not promotion)
- Price (dynamic) not price (static)
- Personalisation (not product)
Good stuff and thoughtful.
Caroline points out a nice battling artist blog - like Fark’s photoshop competition, but only two of them. I wish I could even draw as well as Mr Squiggle.
Dom does his first full-on blog post, and its a cracker. “bye bye little man” will become a catchphrase in casa Raggett, I’m sure.
It’s dark - very early Tuesday morning, just after the bank holiday. We both wake - we’ve heard something odd. A crack, crunch, scratch or something like that, but in the wrong place. I pop on a dressing gown and wander downstairs calling out “Hello? Anyone there?”. [1]
There’s nobody around, so I peer (shortsightedly[2]) out of the front window. Two kids (fifteen? Hoodies[3]) are in the street. They run off (unexpectedly to the posher parts of the Highgate slopes[4]) when my ugly mug pokes above the half height pull-up blinds (terribly clever design, dahlinks).
I think nothing more of it, and go back to bed, noticing that Bridie, my next-door neighbour has woken up as well. Neither Caroline or I sleeps well after that.
It’s Tuesday PM now after work, and I’ve spent 20 minutes trying to wrest the stylus for my Treo out from under the seat of our car, where Caroline dropped it on the weekend. I fail. Wandering back to the house I notice the toolmarks on the windows.
The little bastards from last night were trying (and failing, thankfully) to jemmy the sash windows! One window is externally scuffed but with no obvious structural damage, the other has a hole at the bottom and a serious crack in the top of the frame. The window locks did their work and stopped the break in, but broke the frame in doing so.
So I report it to the police: “attempted burglary”, they say. They arrange for someone to come round Wednesday AM.
We don’t sleep well on Tuesday night, either. Wednesday two young coppers arrive[5]. Not much they can do, as I wasn’t wearing glasses the night before and they didn’t take anything. Before they go they take details for SOCO to contact us on. SOCO is CSI for the UK.
I get a phone call at work at half-past five asking if we can be home at seven. Caroline drops everything and rushes home to find that SOCO don’t arrive until nearly eight - just about the time I get home.
There are two young SOCOs - one is doing the work - fingerprint powder everywhere[6]. They find one perfect print on the underside of the frame - just where you’d brace yourself. Sadly it looks like it was me[7]. They take my prints as well to eliminate me - “It won’t go on the database or anything”[8].
Now the unpleasant job of waiting to stop waiting for the thieves to come back. It takes as long as it takes[9].
No harm done, overall, save yet more sleepless nights - we’re both knackered, and a likely £3,000 bill for replacing our sash windows[10]. First time I’ve had to make an insurance claim in years.
Ten points I found interesting:
- According to colleagues, friends, there are two options here: a) call the police, b) go downstairs. I guess b) sounds more heroic, but I’m not sure that it is. I just went - thinking comes later.
- You see, if I had been thinking, I would have put my glasses on. I can see without them (even did a driving test without them) but really, it’s not clever. Shows that we didn’t think of “crime” as the first option for the noise - much more likely foxes.
- After Islingtonite sneering at the idea of a Hoodie peril, there they were outside my house!
- Stereotyping - all the lovely lads who used to try to nick our Punto in Tufnell Park hung around the estates. Is this the start of a Ballard-esque destruction of the middle classes?
- But doesn’t everyone seem young when you’re in your mid-30s?
- The powder definitely looks black when they are applying it. It goes grey after a night’s sitting on the window.
- First thing you do when you see that your window is slightly open? You close it a) to stop more burglars and b) to prevent a draft (how mumsie). Not to preserve the crime scene. D’oh.
- Seems that they know that there is public suspicion around collecting DNA, fingerprints from non-suspects.
- Like getting on the tube after 7th July (for those of us who were fortunate enough not to be affected). And yes, having a non-burglary was nowhere as bad. But I don’t sleep on the tube.
- Sash windows cost £1,000 each! Amazing but true.
It’s great when you come across a digital phenomenon you had never heard of. Here’s the factoid: 90% of South Koreans in their 20s are signed up to Cyworld.
An interesting list of books (business ones, mostly) from Guy Kawasaki. Well worth reading. I wonder if he checked their Amazon rank to see if he will have any affect on their sales?
Thanks to Juice for their Excel chart cleaning tool. I will be trialling it for a while, but boy is it necessary.
Two neat science stories: why do beans make you fart, how do mobile phones vibrate and (finally) an answer on how tattoos (and by extension scars) stay in place despite your skin shedding regularly. [Answer: epidermis is what sheds; dermis is what gets tattooed or scarred]
Bissantz has done a neat Sparkline add-in for Excel. Lovely stuff.
Another set of blog essays (blessays?) from Guy Kawasaki.
- Customer service 2 - some nice vignettes of how to make people mad by excellent service
- 100 days blogging - how the experience has been
Some tricks of the trade:
- Start your voicemail with contact info [because some people will just ring back]
- Use Google Images to check the sex of names you don’t know
- And how not to do a trick!
Genius
Joel defends himself and our ilk (management) showing that what matters is that we make it so that our “superstars” don’t have to think about anything other than doing what we pay them for. While this is true, there’s a whole chunk of useful management in nudging the superstars in the right direction, where right comes from experience, not from some reasoned application of mind power. It frustrates me enormously when my boss does this - it’s a painful process, but nine times out of ten he’s right when he pushes against something we’re doing.
