Mediocrity is the new exemplary
A word of warning. Well, nine actually: never show that you’re good at something at work. If you do, you’ll get a reputation, and every similar task thereafter will be thrown your way.
I showed an aptitude for relentless and organised chasing of stuff recently. The next time there was a need for similar relentless chasing, it was thrown my way. On this occasion, I threw it straight back whence it came.
Yesterday’s Excel pivot-table and graphing task was thrown straight in my direction. I had nowhere to throw it, but luckily it was 15 minutes’ work. It was also fun.
The hierarchy of web knowledge
There is a four-level hierarchy of people in terms of their web knowledge, as far as I’m aware.
At the top, there’s Rob. Rob from Sydney. He knows everything, and woe betide anyone who falls short of the mark. He knows stylesheets, HTML, databases, template systems, php, Web 2.0 and anything else that’s worth knowing.
Next down the chain is Elise. She knows lots of good stuff about CSS, HTML, information design and holds her own on the template stuff. She also has a great understanding of how it all hangs together.
Next is me. I dabble in stylesheets and can find my way around a template, but editing is a trial-by-error exercise which sometimes comes off. Other times I give up and revert back to my handily saved original.
And last but not least is Rob. East London Rob. He shows wonderful willing, but will be the first to admit his limitations.
It’s funny how people look up the chain when they need help. I’m glad to help Rob (East London) out when he needs to do something, but it’s nice to have someone to turn to (Elise, Sydney Rob) when I need help.
I wonder if the chain continues on up, and whether Rob has his own support mechanism above him. And if he does, whether he’d admit it.
Pivot!
I did a pivot table today. Ever since my days with a particularly annoying client in New York, I can’t help but say Pivot aloud while clicking the PivotTable from Excel’s data menu. It’s a hangover from a particular Friends episode, a fabulous outtake of which can be at 8m25s in this video.
Thanks for making me laugh today, annoying client from New York.
Dan likes spicy chicken
I have a colleague. Let’s call him Mark. There have been three times in the last two status meetings in which he has referred to himself in the third person.
Mark will take that action. Mark isn’t happy. Mark will sign off on that.
I love it. If you knew "Mark", then you’d understand why the amusement is heightened. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode in which Jimmy refers to himself throughout in the third person.
I only hope the behaviour continues.
It’s gonna be a good week
The first two tracks that presented themselves to my ears this Monday morning were The Libertines’ Time For Heroes followed by The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks. For the record, these were followed by Van Halen’s Jump. Oh, and the bus arrived straight away.
It’s gonna be a good week
Some neat Excel custom formats
A few nice custom Excel formats, some of which I’ve known for a while, some which are new to me.
- <;;;> Stores a value, but doesn’t display it
- <00000> Always stores five digits. So 453 becomes 00453. Useful for US zip codes
- <[Black] General> To hide error messages (e.g. #DIV/0!). If you make your standard font colour the same as the background (usually white), then this will kick in to give non-error cells a black font
- <0;-0;;@> Not sure why this works, but it hides zero values
- [#.???] This will line up your decimal places in a column, and display three decimal places, but only if they’re significant. "3.2" will display as "3.2", not "3.200". The only slight issue is that "3" will display as "3."
- < @> Put a bunch of spaces before the @, and these will appear at the beginning of the cell, resulting in a padding
- <#,###"km"> Type in 100, and it will appear as 100km, but you can still use the value to do calculations
- <@*.> This will pad your cell out with dots to the width of the cell. So "Excel" will appear as "Excel…………". Might be useful for tables of contents
- <#,###,, "M"> Again, not sure how this works, but it divides the value by a million and displays a trailing "M"
- <[<=2]"Low"* 0;[>=4]"High"* 0;"Average"* 0> This will display the word at the left of the cell, and the value at the right
Go to Format | Cells and click Custom. Then type the bit between the < and the > above to get the desired result.
The beauty about the above is that only change the display format. They don’t affect the value stored.
A streetcar named desire
I had my first experience of Streetcar today. And it was a genuinely pleasurable experience.
Here’s how it works. You pay a £150 one-off, fully refundable deposit, and in return you receive a smartcard, similar to an Oyster card. This allows you to access hundreds of cars located across London, for anywhere from 30 minutes to six months.
Before you need the car, you book a time and location, so I booked 12–6pm this afternoon to do a spot of shopping in Croydon. The charge is £4.95 per hour, and includes up to 30 miles’ petrol per day, or per session if your booking is less than a day. So a 30 minute booking will cost you £2.48, which includes 30 miles’ travel. (You’d have to do a constant 60 miles per hour throughout your half hour.) If you do more than the 30 miles per day, you’re charged at 19p per mile.
Insurance is included, with a £500 excess, or you can pay an annual fee of £95 to reduce your excess to zero.
When you get to the car, you show your smartcard to a sensor in the windscreen, and hey presto, the doors unlock. Enter your PIN into the radio, and the glovebox opens revealing the keys. And off you go.
My nearest car is just 0.21 miles’ walk away, but there are five car locations within half a mile, so it seems that coverage is pretty good. Well, in my area at least. There are almost 200 pick-up points across the whole of London.
When you’re done, you just park up again, and lock the car using the smartcard.
All cars are VW Golfs, 75% of which are manual, 25% automatic. All have MP3 connectors.
Great concept, one which I’ll be using again.
Waterloo Bridge
A couple of overheard comments that tickled me on separate occasions while on the approach road to Waterloo Bridge lately.
- Man to wife: "It’s that fine rain", in reference to the somewhat drizzly conditions
- Man to person on the other end of mobile phone conversation: "We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it". I assume that bridge wan’t Waterloo Bridge
I sniggered within.
Help! My dog’s as fat as I am
BBC Three is currently advertising a programme that will be coming soon entitled "Help! My dog’s as fat as I am".
And who said British TV was going to the wall?
Confusing URLs
The other day I noticed for the first time a .travel domain name. It was a TV advert, promoting Florida with the following url:
With that capitalisation.
It’s odd that I’ve not seen more of them, given they’ve been around for almost 18 months. Maybe people have steered away from them because they are as confused by them as I was. The fact that there was a UK at the end of the URL didn’t help at all, as my immediate reaction was to look for an associated CO.
But even without the extension, it’s confusing. It just seems odd to have such a long string as a top-level domain. (The only other six-letter TLD in use is .museum.) Maybe that’s why they opted for the bizarre (and to me similarly confusing) capitalisation.
Whatever the reason, it’s hardly a memorable URL.
Sentences you never expect to hear
I really want to go and see Spamalot.
I heard that today, and it was said without a so much as a modicum of irony.
You live and learn.
Familial feedback
My brother is not exactly one for embracing change. While he now buys CDs, he’s still deeply attached to his record collection, which continues to grow. And while he is au fait with the whole email thing, he’s not a big fan of the web in general, and has little good to say about blogs. Mine included.
So to continue his policy of not commenting on this blog, he decided to email me with a couple of his thoughts. I’m surprised they didn’t arrive by telegram. Here is a slightly doctored and abbreviated synopsis of those thoughts, my interjectory comments appearing in square brackets:
- I expect a full "my wife and I" retraction of your damning of English cricket, off the back of this. And an acknowledgement of the fact that there’s few professional sportspeople who have to head off from home and spend three months in another cocking country over Christmas just for the sake of their sport
- Big Brother racism: I noted with interest your hammering of the goodies [sic. I think he means the Goodys, not Bill Oddie and co.] et al. and complete absence of comment on arguably the more direct and extended torrent of abuse from mr. michael richards recently. i hope you’re not being class-ist in your commentary
- [Brooker] is a genius
Let’s take these points in the order in which they were raised.
First to the cricket. Yeah, fair point. They won something. It wasn’t quite the Ashes, more like the Sherpa Van equivalent. But they won something. Bully for them. One of those Bully tankards that they used to win at the end of Bullseye. As an aside, I once spent six months in a bunch of ‘cocking’ countries including the Christmas period, just for the sake of travelling.
Next, to the racism. I’m not sure why I didn’t comment on the Richards incident. But my offline reaction to it was similar to that to the Big Brother incident.
One thing that did spring to mind at the time, and which should have received a couple of blog-inches, was the consistent reaction of Goody junior, Michael Richards and Mel Gibson when confronted about their respective racist tirades. They all cited something deep within that they needed to understand better. They all claimed that they didn’t know where it had come from. It seemed a convenient excuse to avoid the racist label.
As for Charlie Brooker, not seen much of his work, but so far so good.
Some pics of interest
First, some thought-provoking ways of interpreting various countries’ flags.
Next, a photo on Slashgear of an elevator floor that you might think twice before stepping on.
Some great examples of what kids’ drawings might look like if they were drawn by artists.
And finally, quite a neat way of making photos look three dimensional.
Bank account tagging
I get frustrated by my bank account. Basically, it’s a way of storing money and being able to move money into it and out of it in a simple way, with a little money paid to you as a kind of loyalty bonus. Little more.
But I want something more.
Within an account, I’d like to be able to tag money within my balance according to what I want to do with it. And when I make a payment or a deposit, I’d like to tag it similarly, either all as one or across a number of tags.
In my business account, when an invoice gets paid I’d like a certain percentage of the amount to be tagged as tax. When my salary goes into my personal account, I’d like a certain sum to be tagged savings.
And when I log into my account online, I’d like to see my account balance broken down by the various tags. That way I can better manage my money and understand my position.
Is that too much to ask?
(Oz Clarke)^3
There were two Oz Clarke lookalikes on the southbound Victoria line tonight. Both were bald. One was listening to an iPod. Neither one was drinking wine. Neither one was Oz Clarke.
Doing The Knowledge
I’ve often thought it would be great to do The Knowledge. For those not in the know (or without the knowledge), it’s the exam that London taxi drivers must undertake to qualify to drive a black cab. It’s basically a comprehensive test of someone’s knowledge of streets within a certain (rather large) radius of Trafalgar Square.
Most of the prospective cabbies learn the Knowledge while riding around London on a scooter, generally on a Sunday with an A-Z map strapped to the handlebars.
I often think it would be a much more impressive task to do it purely from the A-Z map, without any reference to the physical streets. I wonder if anyone’s ever done that. I wonder if I should try. It would be quite a feat.
Are good developers good at grammar?
I bet there’s a high level of overlap between developers and digg posters. No rocket science there.
But as I’ve said a couple of times before, the grammatical correctness of digg posters is dreadful. Some of it is plain ignorance; some of it is laziness and is symptomatic of a low attention to detail.
I’m not so worried about the ignorance. You don’t need to know how to spell to be a good coder, nor do you need to be able to punctuate its/it’s correctly. My concern is with laziness.
If the posters are this lazy when it comes to content that could be seen by thousands, possible millions of readers, why would they be any different when it came to coding?
Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it. The moral of the story: never employ a developer with more than three mistakes in their CV. If you do, there’s a risk that your code will be messy and buggy.
Thoughts?
Telegraph vs. Guardian online
A little war is being waged in the publishing world about the Telegraph’s current poster advertising across London. Its strapline reads: Britain’s Number 1 Quality Newspaper Website.
Simon Walden has done some in-depth research on the claim, and in analysing according to his interpretation of the strapline, he is correct in ranking the Guardian’s way above that of the Telegraph in terms of its website popularity.
Simon interprets the strapline as follows: the number 1 website associated with a British quality newspaper, and disproves it accordingly.
While the Telegraph has no doubt intended people to interpret it such, its actual claim is as follows: the website associated with the number 1 British quality newspaper.
My view is that the marketing is purposefully misleading. Let’s see if the press complaints commission agrees.
Odd headline
Here is a headline from this morning’s Metro: Britain "not ready for bird flu".
It’s not like joining the euro, you know. We can’t join when we’re ready.
Tube smiling
Yesterday, Anna defined the seven types of Tube/train smile. I experienced two further types on my southbound Northern Line journey home tonight, taking the total to nine.
The "Ah, finally! smile"
This is usually a reciprocal smile given after an event has taken place before which there was an inordinate delay. This could be an announcement about the reason for a delay, or as in today’s scenario, the Tube train finally moving after being stuck mid-tunnel for ten minutes or so. Myself and a female commuter gave each other a wry smile which said "ah, finally".
The "I’m listening to a great track, outward enjoyment" smile.
This smile, sported by myself, lasted four minutes and six seconds this evening, the entire duration of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Come On Eileen. I think I’m quite rare in my outward display of musical enjoyment.