Homeward bound
The news of Wayne Rooney’s injury in United’s 3-0 loss to Chelsea yesterday was a big blow. While everyone is hoping that he’ll be able to recover in time for at least a part of England’s World Cup campaign (our first game is 40 days from today), it doesn’t look overly promising.
Not one to shun my responsibilities, I’ve acted on the news, and am offering myself up for selection – I have a call with Sven later today.
On a more serious note, we will indeed be back in England in time for the World Cup. I resigned from work last week, and we’ll be heading back on 15 May (5/15). While I’ll be sad to leave New York, both the people and the place, I’m very excited about the future prospects in London, and it will be great to catch up with everyone again.
We’ll probably be back State-side one day, maybe to the west coast. But for the time being, the future’s bright, the future’s London.
The NFL draft
The NFL draft is taking place today in New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. Officially, it’s called the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting, and it’s the occasion when college players are chosen by NFL teams for the upcoming season.
In the past, there have been up to 30 rounds of draft picks; this year, there will be seven. In each round, each of the 32 teams picks a player based on their own squad’s needs. In the first round, each team gets 15 minutes to choose, a nice round eight hours if everyone uses all of their allotted time. This drops to ten minutes in the second round, and five minutes in the five subsequent rounds.
In each round, the team with the worst record the previous season is up first, and the Steelers take the last pick, being last season’s Super Bowl winners. However, teams can trade draft picks: for example, the Steelers have traded with the Giants in Round One, meaning that the Steelers took the 25th pick, while the Giants will take the final 32nd pick.
Similarly, Denver traded up to eleventh pick, even though they reached the AFC final. Interestingly, they selected a Quarterback (Jay Cutler from Vanderbilt), presumably to bolster Plummer who was sketchy last season.
The whole thing is broadcast live on ESPN. I survived three picks before I had to turn off.
Chelsea’s succesful season
More proof-reading woes at the BBC in the surfacing of this page:
Pictures from Chelsea’s succesful title defence
BBC: its or it’s?
This time a surfacing of this article on the UK homepage, with the following teaser:
My autistic children keep me up all night and its taking its toll
One its is right, the other is lacking, as is the BBC’s grammar police.
All be it
It seems that the BBC has lowered its standards recently on the proof-reading front, resulting in a plethora of schoolboy errors creeping in. So, I’ve decided to dedicate a little corner of my blog to highlighting them, in the hope that the proof-reading part of the workflow is returned.
There will be examples where the copy has been tidied up since posting, but at the time of posting, all errors are present, and I’ll highlight the erroneous text in the post itself.
Today’s example has been highlighted by Elise in this article:
Applying for forfeiture of the van and the euros, prosecuting QC James Lavery told the court the police view of Corrigan was that he was a courier, "all be it a trusted courier".
All be it? Or albeit?
It reminds me of a time in English class at school when Nick ‘Arnie’ Mitchell led the class’s laughter when I pronounced this word as "al-bait" while reading allowed to the class. Literally a schoolboy error.
Earl doesn’t do Excel
I often watch My Name Is Earl on a Thursday night. It’s a solid comedy. Not great, but solid. Also, it segues into The Office (US version), which is always a bonus, unless you fall asleep on the sofa as The Office is about to start.
Last night, Earl got an office job for which he wasn’t qualified. On being instructed to do something in Excel, his thought was as follows:
Since I had no idea what an Excel was, I decided to go stand in the elevator.
Genius. Such people exist?
Hablas español?
I popped to my local HSBC ATM this morning this morning to get some money out. The first option I was given was as follows:
- Ingles
- Spanish
Odd?
Best guitar intro. to a song
The Faces’ Stay With Me. Any advance?
Kylie in New York
So. Kylie came over to New York early this week and didn’t tell me about it. I thought we were closer than that…
Introducing two new languages: Caribbean and Brasil
I wasn’t aware that Caribbean and Brasil were languages.
Above is an extract from BBC News’ left-hand navigation on the Americas homepage. I was under the impression that the Caribbean was a region and Brasil a country, English being spoken in the former, and Portuguese in the latter.
Am I missing something, or is the BBC as confused as I am by its navigation.
Excel: dynamic program plans
I always get frustrated when people use Excel as a drawing tool, putting draggable drawing objects on top of the grid structure. If you want to draw something, use Visio or PowerPoint. Don’t patronise Excel.
In my line of work, the most common way in which people do this is in project and programme plans. They create boxes that represent tracks of work or tasks, and position them relative to one another to show the tasks over time.
The trouble with this approach is that changes to the underyling assumptions result in a lot of fiddly manual effort to move everything around.
Here’s a spreadsheet I created that takes an alternative approach.
Each track has a start and end date. The matrix compares these dates with the date that a column represents to determine whether or not to shade the associated cells. Cells are given values of "S" if they’re at the start of the task, "M" for middle and "E" for end. Conditional formatting uses these values to format the cells accordingly.
Applying a custom format of ";;;" to the cells means that the contents of the cells (the S, M and E) are hidden. Nice little tip.
Change the start and end dates, and the bars move accordingly. In this particular version, tasks are rounded to the month level, but the same concept can be used for week- or day-level plans.
The summary bars for each project are merely mins and maxes of the underlying start and end dates.
The nice part about this is that you can import the task data from MS Project to get a more visually appealing view, or you can use Excel formulae for the dates to make tasks dependent on one another.
The BBC goes tabloid
I’ve long known that Matt Frei for being staunchly political, specifically anti-Bush. It often comes through in undertones in his articles.
But today’s article about the effect of rising petrol prices and the president’s response takes this to another level. It is almost as if it has been written by a Democrat out to oust Bush. And it’s not just Bush that he takes a pop at; the third paragraph targets the whole of America:
Bewailed in country songs and popular ballads, it is forcing ordinary people to do extraordinary things – like car pooling, riding the bike to work, selling their second SUV, or doing a "walk-thru" at their local burger joint instead of a "drive-thru".
This isn’t where the BBC should be, and this article, while containing elements of truth, will only serve to weaken American/British ties. It could have been so much better without the emotive phrases that belong in the red-tops, not in the world’s most respected news organisation.
Strange t-shirt
I saw a guy in the supermarket this evening wearing a t-shirt saying the following:
- Children beginning with school
- Escuela enpezandos con los niños
I hope the Spanish reads better than the English, but it’s hardly a great advert for education beginning at school.
For some odd reason, it reminded me of the sign painted repeatedly on the cycle path parallel to the West Side Highway. It reads as follows:
YIELD
TO
PEDS
(Peds is short for pedestrians, btw.) The lines have a bit of space in between, and given that the instructions are written on the ground, I’m not sure whether to read it as "Yield to pedestrians" or as "Pedestrians to yield". I think it’s the former, but it’s quite an important distinction.
Better safe than sorry, I’d say!
A couple of videos for you
First of all, news of a tornado being caught on camera by a helicopter in Oklahoma is greeted by possibly the most apathetic reporting ever caught on microphone, courtesy of BBC News’ Fiona Graham.
And secondly (courtesy of Francis), a rather sycophantic yet impressive demo of some of the functionality that will be included in Excel 12. It’s quite neat, especially when compared to the three conditional formats included in Excel 11. Zip along to 6m15s if you want to see the cool stuff.
Change to BBC News’ left-hand nav.
Today saw a change to the left-hand navigation on the BBC News website. The Sport, Weather and On This Day elements used to be differentiated from the rest of the navigation, as they were graphics with a background colour: Sport was yellow, Weather was blue and On This Day was turquoise.
They now appear in a regular font, albeit in capitals. I don’t like this.
First of all, there are too many different facets of the website being amassed in the left-hand navigation. Geographical areas (including a clickable map), high-level news topics, features (e.g. In Pictures and Week at a Glance), the RSS feed, other BBC offerings (e.g. Sport, Weather) and versions in other languages. These appear in three different styles: bold, regular and capitals.
The module separators are not consistent with one another: an inexplicable dotted line below Entertainment; a small space before the RSS icon; slightly larger spaces before the related sites and language sections, each of which has a capitalised, grey heading.
And finally, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between what I would describe as the primary navigation (up top) and the left-hand navigation.
While I adore the BBC’s website, its navigation strategy needs some serious work. There are a lot of places to point people to, and it strikes me that they are not doing this well. Maybe it’s time to expand the real estate to accommodate more navigation (the left-hand navigation is very narrow), although browser stats suggest that 20% of people still use the 800×600 screens for which the BBC caters, down from 30% a year prior. Or maybe it’s time to introduce personalisation, something that was promised when Pete Clifton was editor – I will never use the language module, for example.
(As an aside, in IE, links on the BBC site do not scale with the rest of the text. On 1 July, 2005, Pete Clifton confirmed that this would be addressed within four weeks. Still not done.)
Even if they don’t choose either of these routes, they need to do better than turning off background colours to address their navigational issues.
Nepali king steps down
A fantastic outcome, with the stepping down of King Gyanendra tonight in Nepal. One of the world’s most beautiful countries with one of the world’s most genuine and beautiful people.
Lyrics and stars
I’ve never been a big one for lyrics. I love music, but many songs pass me by without me noticing the message behind the song.
Only when I come to really like a song do I bother with its lyrics, one notable exception being the works of Mike Skinner.
Recently, U2’s One was deemed to contain the UK’s favourite lyric, beating Nirvana and The Smiths. (As an aside, I’ve always thought of The Smiths purely as a band name; I’ve never until today thought about the name itself being the plural of Smith.)
The lyric: One life, with each other, sisters, brothers.
Ihave a playlist on my iPod containing nothing but tracks that haveearned five stars, according to the Danometer, a subjective, yetfrighteningly accurate scale. As you can imagine, it’s saved for thebest of the best, currently 83 of the 3,433 tracks to choose from(2.5%). (A further 393 tracks earn themselves four stars, btw.) Iwonder if anyone has a playlist called Five Star’s Five Stars, dedicated to the best of Five Star?
To give you a flavour of the five star playlist’s contents,below is a taster: the first three tracks when sorting by each of theprimary iTunes columns. (At the time of writing this, I don’t knowwhat will pop up, so I’m opening myself to potential/probable ridicule.)
Song name
- (Come Up And See Me) Make Me Smile, Steve Harley and CockneyRebel. Ah, the beauty of the parenthesis in getting you to the top ofa list
- 9 to 5/Eple, 2 Many DJs. Credit here must go to Dolly Parton for the fantastic sample
- Alright, Supergrass
Artist
- 9 to 5/Eple, 2 Many DJs (as above)
- I Say A Little Prayer, Aretha Franklin
- Complicated, Avril Lavigne (that will be the ridicule kicking in)
Album
- Don’t Look Back In Anger, Oasis ((What’s The Story) Morning Glory?)
- Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles (1)
- Lady Madonna, The Beatles (1)
Track length
- Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles (2:06)
- Blister In The Sun, Violent Femmes (2:08)
- Molly’s Chambers, Kings of Leon (2:15)
Play count (descending)
- Ever Fallen in Love (The Buzzcocks)
- Mr. Raffles (Man It Was Mean), Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel – great track, btw
- Parklife, Blur
I regularly play both the 5 stars and 4+ stars playlists, which has meant me becoming much more familiar with their tracks’ lyrics.
BillyBragg is quoted a few times in the BBC article, which reminded me of awonderful lyric that I’ve only recently appreciated from hiswonderfully simple track A New England: I was 21 years when I wrote this song, I’m 22 now but I won’t be for long.
That’s all. I’m not sure what the post was about, but I enjoyed writing it.
Congrats, Alan
Just a quick word of congratulations to Alan, who completed today’s London marathon in three hours, 51 minutes and eight seconds. He will no doubt shave some time of this to account for the time taken to reach the start line. Either way, he accomplished his two targets: under four hours and top 10,000 (9,061st).
Over £6,000 winging its way to Macmillan Cancer Relief. Click here if you want to retrospectively sponsor him.
Congrats!
Search rankings
It’s always questionable behaviour to post about people’s search habits in getting to your site, as the mere act of doing so further promotes these keywords and elevates your site in the rankings. However, I find it interesting, which over-rules the questionable behaviour argument.
Apparently, the query that people have used that returns this site highest in the average Google rankings is chelsea m harrison, bringing it in second. Searching now, I can’t seem to find it.
maximus decimus meridious [sic] brings it back in third, as does draggable dan. "dan harrison", both with and without quotes, brings it back fourth. And karl pilkington’s diary earns a respectable fifth. jimmie krankie comes in ninth!
My posting on the BSI’s PAS 78 guidelines had the highest overall ranking.
I subscribed to Google Sitemaps, the source of this data, a few months ago mainly to see what it had to offer. I have to say, it’s quite vanilla, and I’m surprised there’s not more information available. Since my initial interest, I completely forgot about it, until reading an interesting post about search engine behaviour written by Google’s Vanessa Fox on Matt Cutts’ blog.
My forays into web dev.
So, my reading the books on PHP and CSS got me playing with my stylesheets and code a little, getting out of my depth, some may say.
One of my regular readers (thanks, Andrew) pointed out a bug to me that affected the rendering of the comments form in IE. The right-hand panel was stacking below the main post, and some of the form elements were not rendering at all, making commenting impossible. For whatever reason, Firefox was fine.
Given that it was Andrew wanting to comment, some may say the bug was actually a welcome feature. Nonetheless, I tried to resolve it immediately, but after some futile efforts last night, I recommended he join the Firefox world, which he has now done.
My friend Elise kindly troubleshot for me this evening, and identified a rogue exclamation mark in closing a comment in the html. Not in a month of Sundays would I have found that, yet she was there within two minutes, after having been sidetracked by an unrelated issue with the stylesheet.
I now know that I introduced the bug when commenting out some fields that were redundant in the comments form about a month ago. My exclusive allegiance to Firefox means that I never picked it up.
Apologies to any IE-using, comment-hungry readers out there. It’s fixed now so get commenting, so long as they’re savoury. My latest commenter was promoting an Asian p*rn site.