The mighty Wigan
Wigan continue to defy the odds with their astonishing performance in the Premiership. Today, they scraped a win over Fulham, their sixth win in the last seven games. Now they sit in second place, only nine points behind Chelsea, with a game in hand over both Chelsea and Spurs and Bolton, lying in third and fourth respectively.
Newcastle have drawn them in the fourth round of the Carling Cup. In other circumstances, this would be a good draw, although at the moment, I’m not so sure.
I enjoy my ‘blog. Maybe it’s not prophetic, but it’s a place where I can jot random stuff, about life, things that I see/do etc. I rarely get into personal stuff on it, particularly about family, emotion etc. Suffice to say, things aren’t too great right now. Hopefully things will pick up over the coming months.
Alpe d’Huez
Great stuff! The course for the 2006 Tour de France has been revealed, with Alpe d’Huez returning the day before my birthday. Should be fun!
I quite enjoy the team trial though, which has been removed from next year’s calendar.
Aaron Neville and Rosa Parks
It was sad to read about the death of Rosa Parks yesterday, although she’d had a good innings at 92.
Before Aaron Neville’s tortuous rendition of God Bless America that split the seventh inning of the third game of the World Series, the crowd was asked to pause for a moment’s silence to remember Rosa. I didn’t have a stopwatch, but I would estimate four seconds elapsed before the announcer resumed normality. Not sure if this is the norm in America (as opposed to our minute), but it certainly came across as disrespectful.
The Chicago White Sox are currently leading the Houston Astros two games to 0 (in a series of seven), and are up 5-4 midway through the seventh. Looks like it could be over before the weekend.
Get safe online
Oh good! Another UK government website to add to the 3,500+ already in existence (not an exaggeration): Get Safe Online. Just what the doctor/citizen ordered. For the moment, it’s merely a single inaccessible webpage, but I’m sure that over time, it will become a complete inaccessible site.
How on earth can the government think that adding to the maze that’s already out there is a good idea? Surely it should be consolidating its already diluted government brands, à la Canada. Please, use sub-domains, maximise the power of the brands that are already out there, and stop the madness.
The idea’s not a bad one, but isn’t there some overlap with IT Safe, which I posted about only eight months ago? It’s important that people are informed by a reputable, independent source (government?) about how to operate in the online world, and what to be looking out for. At the moment though, the various parties that are trying to do this are doing so very badly.
Loyalty case study: the coffee cart
Back in the late 1990s, certainly in the UK, there was an obsession among retail outlets over loyalty cards and associated schemes. Working for a Direct Marketing agency at the time, I was involved quite heavily in various such schemes, helping in the launch of the Boots Advantage card.
In essence, instead of promoting loyalty, they merely reward it, the reward usually just about outweighing the effort required to carry the associated card around with you and swipe it whenever necessary. There were news stories at the time about people who carried around a ‘loyalty’ card for every shop under the sun, often carrying competing cards due to their own fickleness.
True loyalty can only be earned, through consistently performing above and beyond the competition on one or more fronts: service, product, environment, convenience and price, arguably with a decreasing ability to engender loyalty as you run through the list.
Whenever I’m working in the Wall Street office, I walk to work. On my route in, I must see about ten coffee carts on Broadway alone. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, this is an example. I stop off at one (the first on the west side of Broadway as you walk south from Cedar Street), for a large coffee, milk no sugar, with the possibility of an accompanying bran muffin, occasionally adorned with raisins.
Every such morning, there is some lighthearted banter between the owner and myself, usually questioning my abstinence from sugar, which seems somewhat bizarre to him. This occupies the estimated 20 seconds between my semi-predictable order (which is already being prepared) and our respective valedictions.
Despite their almost identical menus, some carts (including the one I frequent) have relatively long queues while others are bereft of customers. Although the net benefits are probably wholly intangible, I wouldn’t consider going to another cart of a morning, and I even panicked slightly a few weeks back when his cart had been moved due to longterm construction work – fortunately, he was only a block away.
Loyalty runs much deeper than a card, and is worth so much more than the associated rewards.
Sabbath elevators, Discmans and memory revision
It seems that my most recent additions have been unworthy of comment by the audience, either due to lack of visitors, lack of interest or leaving people with nothing to say: the last comment was a facetious one made by a certain "Al K." on 3 October at 17:27.
A few items of note (at least to me) of late, all of which can neatly be compartmentalised into the "Random thoughts" category.
First of all, I encountered something for the first time yesterday: a Sabbath Elevator. I wasn’t aware of their work, but here’s the deal. They automatically stop on every floor between 4pm Friday and 10pm Saturday to save Jewish occupants from ‘working’ the elevator by pushing the buttons.
On reading the above link, it’s also fascinating to note that the regenerative brake is also deactivated. The regenerative brake basically stores up some of the lost kinetic energy as the lift decelerates. It is disabled as otherwise, the occupants of the lift would be doing ‘useful work’, which contravenes the rules of the Sabbath. I find this sort of stuff fascinating, although some of the workarounds for not doing useful work seem at odds with the essence of the religion (e.g. putting lights on timer-switches).
Last night on the subway, I saw a guy revising from a textbook. His subject of choice: memory. Good luck!
Finally, with the plethora of iPods of various styles adorning every other subway rider at the moment, I’ve also noticed an increase in the number of people with Discmans, which seem oddly retro. I even spotted a girl with a Walkman the other day, too cool for the latest trends.
To PDF or not to PDF
PDF-ing (for that is a verb) a document makes it beautiful. Not only is there something more professional about sending a PDF than the native document, the recipient also gets more than they might otherwise expect, both tangibly and intangibly.
I’m not sure whether printing results in a difference, but the fonts that appear on-screen in a PDF document are much better defined than those of a Word document: it just looks better. Also, file sizes are usually much smaller.
Also, there’s something strangely satisfying about PDF-ing a document (despite the cumbersome way in which you have to ‘print to PDF’), and as a recipient, there’s something heartwarming about knowing that someone made the effort.
Although there are tangible benefits, it’s the intangible stuff that appeals to me more.
For those without Adobe Writer, the freeware CutePDF is allegedly equally as good.
Excel oddities
A nice sub-site dedicated to Excel, which you can’t beat. Particularly quirky is a set of Excel oddities, which are quite interesting. For instance, although 29 February 1900 never existed (1900 not being a leap year), it does in Excel. The claim is that this is a hang-up from a Lotus 1-2-3 oversight, but due to Excel’s compatibility with Lotus (the single biggest reason for Excel’s success in this market), fixing it would have caused more issues than it solved.
So, if you want to find the number of days elapsed between two days, one of which is before March 1900, then make sure you take one off the result, and the WEEKDAY() formula will be a day out for such dates too.
Also, there’s an interesting explanation of the inclusion of the rather odd BAHTTEXT() function that comes standard in Excel. (This converts numbers (e.g. 11) to the word equivalents (e.g. eleven) but the feature is only available in Thai.)
I stumbled upon the site by looking up references to the BAHTTEXT() function midway through reading Spolsky’s latest article, which I’m sure many can relate to.
Minnie Driver
Spotted Minnie Driver earlier today, popping into Han’s, a deli on the west side of Broadway just north of Bleecker. She’s lovely, and very freckly.
Amusing error-handling
On dictionary.com, if you don’t type anything into the text box, and hit ‘Search’, you’re presented with the bog-standard dialogue box reading "Please enter a word to look up".
The URL that results when you successfully search for a word is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q= followed by the word that you’re looking for. This can be handy to know, as the time taken for the homepage to load and the focus to be set to the text box seems inordinate. If you just type in the above URL without a word, then it returns the dictionary definition for ‘nothing’. Probably not in the BRD, but amusing nonetheless.
DARPA Grand Challenge
I remember reading about this event last year, and it’s come around again. Basically, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has sponsored a competition in which vehicles unassisted by humans must complete a 132 mile course, complete with obstacles, in under ten hours. (The complete rulebook can be found here for those interested.)
In last year’s race, none of the vehicles managed to get beyond eight miles of the course. This year’s event is well underway, with Stanford still on course at the time of writing, having completed 115 of the 132 miles in six hours 35 minutes. It’s being closely pursued by Team Red Too (112 miles in 6h40m) and Team Red (111 miles, 6h33m).
There’s a complex, narrow part of the course at 125 miles which could scupper their chances yet.
New York subway threat
Let’s hope that the recent threats to the New York subway come to nothing.
Before I left work this evening, there was an elevated level of concern as to the potential consequences of the threat. This compares to what used to be the case in London, when the main impact of a Tube bomb scare was concern as to how to get home as opposed to how to avoid the wrath.
London seems to get way more bomb scares than does New York, which has made Londoners complacent as to the potential ramifications. I’m sure the reaction has changed somewhat since the July attacks.
Fingers crossed for the days to come. Welcome to New York, Ben!
Oceanus chronograph
There’s an advertisement for Oceanus chronographs (watches, I think) adorning one of the New York Waterways’ ferries at the moment. It’s one of those clever ads that covers the whole side of the ferry, including the windows, without obstructing the view from within.
Unfortunately, the positioning of the advert means that the OCE of Oceanus appears on the window section, while the ANUS appears on the side of the boat itself. Although the advert is clever, at certain angles, the window portion is less than clear to the passer-by. Memorable: yes. Appealing: hardly!
Just not in the mood
I’ve not been in the mood for ‘blogging of late. Not sure why, but it’s the first time I’ve not been compelled to write for some time.
I have often wondered just when/whether the stark front-page of Google would become more busy, and now it has. Using the credentials it has gathered from Gmail, it’s offering the equivalent of My Yahoo!
The GUI that goes with it is a lot neater than Yahoo!’s clunky one, with a beautifully designed, if inaccessible, drag-and-drop facility. It’s got a few teething problems, though.
Search history gives timestamps in a seemingly unconfigurable PST timezone. Also, a few of the RSS feeds that they have chosen to use are temperamental, with New York’s weather being delivered fine, while London’s information is "temporarily unavailable". And it is a little lacking in flexibility, although I’m sure this will improve over time.
Some points of note from the BBC
A few stories of note from, whom else, the BBC.
Firstly, a valiant attempt by a Burmese python to eat an alligator whole in Florida left both dead. Here is the story, and here is the baffling picture.
Secondly, a headline that grabbed my attention for a moment before I read on: UK online ads ’set to top £1bn’. Quite an expensive advertising campaign for a now-defunct brand. Nice to see that the redirects are still in place, however.
The BBC has been doing some inspired features of late, one being a celebration of the World Press Photo foundation’s 50th anniversary. In doing so, it has been interviewing photographers responsible for some impressive photos from the past 50 years. Many of the photos are powerful and stark, but compelling nonetheless.
1,234,657, the answer
Few (no) comments on the revised look-and-feel, save a couple of gripes from my Mum about overlapping issues between the two columns; hopefully they’re resolved by now.
For those of you on tenterhooks, here’s the answer to the numbers conundrum. 1,234,657 is the lowest prime formed by using each of the New York subway numbers, now that the number nine has been retired. (The previous honour went to 12,345,769.)
Maximus Decimus Meridious
This is how TBS is advertising its screening of Gladiator. It reminds me of when Cadbury’s advertised its Creme Eggs with the slogan "How do you eat your’s?"
Yankees vs. Red Sox
It doesn’t seem that long since Boston won the World Series, but the end of the baseball season is again upon us. In the divisional championships last season (a.k.a. the semi-finals), the Red Sox came back from 0-3 against the Yankees to win the series 4-3 on 20 October 2004, the day of our visa-equipped arrival back in the US.
At the end of this year’s regular season, they face each other again for the final three games, before which, New York topped the American League East with a 94-65 record with Boston a game behind on 93-66.
Last night, Boston won the first of the three games 5-3 to form a tie at the top. The next two games (today at 13.15 EDT and tomorrow at 14.05 EDT) will decide who will progress as of right. I believe that winning a game apiece will set up a play-off game to determine the victors – run difference is not a factor.
Whoever ends up in second place will need to have a better record than Cleveland (currently 93-67) in the American League Central to secure the wildcard spot. Should be a fascinating end to the regular season.