Tubewhacking
Paul Clarke introduced me today to the pastime of Tubewhacking. Similar to Googlewhacking, it involves finding an English word none of whose letters appears in the name of a Tube station, and for that station to be unique in that quality. The most famous example I know is St. John’s Wood, none of the letters of the word mackerel appearing in its name, a claim that no other station can make.
I wondered whether any stations were themselves Tubewhacks of other stations. So I got to work.
Fortunately, the number of columns in Excel has increased recently—I needed 7,616 columns to complete my logic, along with a tidy 11.8Mb. And below is a summary of the results.
There are 59 stations that have Tubewhacks, although their Tubewhacks come from only 22 unique stations. Bank is the most common, being the Tubewhack of a whopping (not Wapping) nine stations. Each of Vauxhall and Woodford accounts for seven Tubewhacks.
Below is the full list—station on the left, Tubewhack on the right.
Barbican: Temple
Becontree: Vauxhall
Bermondsey: Vauxhall
Bond Street: Vauxhall
Boston Manor: Chigwell
Brent Cross: Vauxhall
Burnt Oak: Chigwell
Camden Town: Ruislip
Canary Wharf: Temple
Canning Town: Shepherd’s Bush
Charing Cross: Temple
Chorleywood: Bank
Colliers Wood: Bank
Dagenham Heathway: Ruislip
East Putney: Woodford
Eastcote: Kilburn
Edgware: Pimlico
Elephant & Castle: Woodford
Elm Park: St. John’s Wood
Farringdon: Temple
Fulham Broadway: Epping
Gants Hill: Woodford
Goldhawk Road: Upney
Green Park: Dollis Hill
Hainault: Woodford
Hampstead: Kilburn
Highgate: Woodford
Holloway Road: Epping
Ickenham: Woodford
Kew Gardens: Pimlico
Knightsbridge: Oval
Leyton: Chiswick Park
Limehouse: Bank
Liverpool Street: Bank
Mill Hill East: Woodford
Mornington Crescent: Vauxhall
Newbury Park: Dollis Hill
Perivale: St. John’s Wood
Piccadilly Circus: Kenton
Plaistow: Debden
Putney Bridge: Oval
Queensway: Pimlico
Richmond: St. Pauls
Rotherhithe: Bank
Royal Victoria: Debden
Shadwell: Brixton
Shoreditch: Bank
Southfields: Bank
St. James’s Park: Hillingdon
Tooting Bec: Vauxhall
Tower Hill: Bank
Upminster Bridge: Oval
Upton Park: Chigwell
Warren Street: Pimlico
West Brompton: Vauxhall
West Finchley: Moor Park
West Ham: Kilburn
West Hampstead: Kilburn
West Ruislip: Bank
Liverpool Street and Bank form the only pairing in the above list that are one stop away from one another.
Journalists: listen up
The following stories are not newsworthy:
- The oldest person in the world has died
- Someone’s found a foodstuff that bears a resemblance to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.
Are there any other stories that need to be added to the list?
Happiness is…
Everything we do is intended to improve the fulfilment of ourselves or others, either directly or indirectly, either now or at some point in the future.
The key to happiness is striking a perfect balance between the three variables, and being in full control of them: ourselves vs. others; direct vs. indirect influence; and immediate vs. future fulfilment.
The first ever breakfast gov tweet-up?
A few weeks ago, I had the idea of arranging a government tweet-up breakfast: an opportunity for some tweeters who work with and in government to get together for breakfast to chew the fat, in both senses. (I chose breakfast to allow for a greater turnout, what with childcare and people’s hectic and conflicting evening social lives.) It was scheduled for this morning and was, in my eyes, a success.
Our turnout totalled seven, joined as I was by, in order of appearance: Sean Garvin, Stefan Czerniawski, Paul Clarke, Simon Everest, Jenny Brown and Emma Mulqueeny.
The conversation was marginally geeky, which I enjoyed thoroughly, but mostly I loved putting faces to names/avatars and enriching my appreciation of the personas of Paul and Emma. And it was also lovely to add a follower and followee in the form of Jenny.
Paul is legendary in these circles and I warmed to him immediately. We’ve spoken previously on the phone (about musical note separation) but it was good to meet in the flesh and I already see ideas in the offing that bring the opportunity for us to collaborate in the future.
Although the meeting of some was blind, Twitter provided a great prior insight into the characters in attendance—their interests, wit and quirks—and this made the conversation all the more relevant and rewarding. I’m already looking forward to the next meet-up and progressing the ideas that were seeded this morning.
Thanks to all who made the effort, particularly Mr. Everest given his lack of awareness of that part of the day and for trying to get #danosirrahasalottoanswerfor to trend.
Pic here for those interested, courtesy of Paul Clarke.
Why shoot for the Moon when Milton Keynes will do just as well
I once enjoyed a talk from Stuart Moore, the co-founder of Sapient. It was a talk about, among other things, aspirations. It was only to half a dozen people or so, and was fluid and interactive.
In it, he drew up a chart on a whiteboard, asking whether should aim high or aim realistically. I responded, taking something of a devil’s advocate stance, that in some instances you should aim realistically. (Remember, this is a man worth nine, possibly ten digit dollars, excluding decimals.)
I gave my reasoning. In some instances, if you believe too much in your own hype, then that rosy view view will cloud your perspective, and you may remortgage your house a few times to chase what amounts to a dud business idea. In that instance, it would be much better to chase reality, and if you failed, you wouldn’t have lost quite so much. He struggled to deal with the example, instead arguing that if you shot for the Moon, at least if you missed you’d end up in the stars.
The attitude I portrayed is in keeping with me as an individual. I’m risk-averse, although I can have optimism in abundance when the mood strikes. I tend not to shoot for the moon, which will always hold me back while at the same time keeping me steady. I guess that’s just the way my cloth’s cut. And a reason why my bank balance doesn’t have nine digits—with or without the decimals.
Proofreaders: know your game
Proofreading is unique. Unique in the sense that as well as your CV and cover letter/email containing all of the specifics of your career and experience, they also embody the quality of your work. Before you’ve even been invited in for an interview, I’ve had a small taster for how good you are at submitting error-free documents.
Yet it’s frightening how many people have emailed me recently asking for work in this very area—my business specialises in document editing—only for their covering emails to be littered with errors. Admittedly, if I’d received the emails from people outside the field, people not looking for related work, I would have let the mistakes pass me by. But their context has meant that I’ve either responded with some heartfelt, cotton wool-lined guidance, or responded with a pleasantry only to confine the email to the Never hire folder. (Actually, the latter step is a given.)
Paragraphs have lacked closing periods, proofreader has been written as two words (yet as a single word within the same email), the Oxford comma has been used whimsically, appearing in some places but not in others, hyphens have appeared instead of em dashes, and quotation marks have been used in instances where one might not even expect someone to sign them in a bar with their hands.
Some (all?) of these points might sound pedantic. And they are. But then proofreading is all about pedantry, and if you can’t get your covering email right, what hope do I have that you’ll fare any better with a client’s document?
The power of a retweet
I wrote a blog post recently that I delighted in writing, and that people, it seems, delighted in reading. It drew from experiences from 15 years ago, and highlighted the need to treat deadlines with the respect they deserve.
The post drew no comments. But it drew a lot of hits. (The term a lot here is relative to the number of hits drawn by most of my posts.) The bit.ly link that drew people to the post itself via a Twitterfeed URL that adorned my Twitter feed drew 94 clicks. By way of comparison, most of my posts draw fewer than 20 hits via the same route.
The reason: the retweet.
Paul Clarke retweeted my original tweet within four minutes, together with a humbling pleasantry.
RT @danosirra: Blogged: knowing when to stop http://bit.ly/87wyGE < Dan. You are great. Please can we meet soon.
Now Paul is a well-respected figure, with 1,855 followers without, it seems, actively looking to build his following. He just writes interesting stuff and has wide respect and appeal.
Seven minutes later, the lovely Emma Mulqueeny (who I also only know electronically) acknowledged the post.
The snail like snakings of SWTrains means I can read all those blog postings @danosirra loved yrs, brilliant
And five minutes later, Chris Thorpe, who I don’t know, retweeted Paul’s retweet.
RT @paul_clarke: RT @danosirra: Blogged: knowing when to stop http://bit.ly/87wyGE < awesome. may have to frame this
The attention brought a smile to my face. But it also highlighted the power of the retweet. I’d noted that I should write a post about the subject two weeks earlier, but only noted its relevance midway through writing it. It was lovely to receive such compliments, and delightful to see so many clicks as a direct result of some lovely twitterers.
Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping: knowing when to stop
While doing my Masters, we were given a project that was to be done in pairs. The aim was to use artificial intelligence (of sorts) to code a computer to act as a player in the game of Cluedo. The language of choice: Prolog. (I say choice in the loosest sense. It was foisted upon us.)
Myself and my good friend Jorge paired up and took the task very seriously. I learnt a huge amount about the strategy of Cluedo—it turned out that as a youngster, I had not used a jot of inference in playing the game, merely capturing in isolation each piece of information that had been given to me. (As a youngster, I was shit at Cluedo.) But once unleashed with this new-found knowledge, we came up with some kick-ass rules, one of which I was particularly proud of but which I couldn’t for the life in me remember some 15 years later.
We coded rule after rule, with multiple layers of logic deciphering any information provided to enhance the knowledge that had been gleaned to date; and yet more intricate logic determining which questions to ask, and who to ask them of.
But our program was shit. We came last as far as I remember. And here’s why.
The information aggregator worked like a dream. But each time it was our turn to ask a fellow player (which was itself a competitor team’s computer) a question, we always selected the same player to ask, and we always asked the same questions.
The reason: it was my fault. I’d come up with the beautiful, competitor-killing logic a couple of hours before the hard deadline, as I remember. We had a brief discussion over whether we had time to code it up. And we decided we would. The discussion probably went something like this:
Jorge: shall we implement it?
Dan: hell, yeah!
So we coded like the wind. And we got the code unit tested. And it kicked proverbial ass. And then, with moments to spare, we did some integration testing. And it borked the whole “asking” logic.
Now if we had any sense at all, we would have grabbed the floppy disk (oh yeah, baby!) containing the version of the program that we’d saved immediately before the killer module had been incorporated, handed it to the professor, and done pretty well in the competition. But in our haste (or speed, as the proverb oddly goes), we didn’t keep any such version. Instead, we had no option but to submit our borked version of the program and watch the result.
It was like watching the words of a particularly annoying parrot flash up on the screen, a parrot that had just been briefed on the basics of Waddingtons’ flagship product. Hell it was funny. (Jorge always helped make light of moments like that.) But at the same time it was so annoying: being so close to wiping the floor with our classmates (for that is what we would have done, natch), yet at the same time, being so far from that goal.
The big lesson I learnt from that experience was that deadlines are there for the client’s purposes, not your own. Define an end time or date for development, either in your head or on a plan, and stick to it. (Development here might mean coding, document production, analytics, basically any client deliverable.) And make sure that this milestone is sufficiently ahead of the formal deadline to allow for all of the necessary post-development activities—be they testing, document review or simply document formatting.
Your boss will often try to push the milestone to the right. In that event, push back strongly. And if this is futile, warn them strongly of the potential ramifications. For in this event 15 years ago, our (my) willingness to take on new requirements at such a time that didn’t allow for them to be fully tested compromised the entire project deliverable. Don’t let that happen to you.
(Sorry, Jorge.)
If you like it and are able, pay for it
I wrote a post recently about the likely demise of certain media. It focused on the proposition that while much media has traditionally been cross-subsidised by other, more lucrative revenue streams, the increasing transparency of non-profitable lines of business means that some of these media will close down.
Media owners are struggling. Bobby Johnson has just announced that he has taken the Guardian up on its offer of voluntary redundancy, and will be leaving at the end of March. The New York Times announced Wednesday that from next year, it will start charging for full access to its website. And whenever I pop along to Wikipedia, I’m faced with a plea from Jimmy Wales for contributions towards the Wikipedia Foundation. (As an aside, that’s no name for an internet entrepreneur. David Filo, Jerry Yang, Sergey Brin: yes. Jimmy Wales: noooo.)
It’s time we started to show our appreciation for what we like about the internet, from apps to content (in its broadest sense), and pay for or make donations towards these things. I like Wikipedia, so I’ll contribute. I like Freshbooks, so I’ve upgraded to the first tier of paid service, partly out of necessity, partly out of respect. Flickr: ditto. (And I happily pay my “TV” licence every year which helps fuel my love of the BBC News website.)
The one I’m struggling with is Google. I pay for Google advertising through AdWords. But I don’t pay for its core apps. offering, which I use heavily. The issue lies in the fact that the charging model is per domain rather than per email account. So the three or four temporary, administrative or lesser-profile accounts that I’ve set up all attract a charge. I’d love to be able to upgrade my own account (and I’d happily pay for this privilege) without having to do so for the wider set of accounts.
So in summary. If you like it, pay for it. Otherwise, you may lose it.
Wessex County Council
I was asked at workto put together a scenario recently of someone in government wanting to do something. (There were more details, but I won’t share them here.)
Within 24 hours, I put the scenario together. I tried to give it a bit of reality so dreamt up a fictional character (Dave Clarke) and gave him a job title, the CIO of Wessex County Council. (For those not in the know, Wessex was disbanded in 1066, its land divided among the followers of William the Conqueror.)
I sent the email to the two people who requested the scenario—from my own account, but all in Dave’s name. Five paragraphs with a moderate amount of flowery detail. I even added a wessex.gov.uk email address to his signature, along with a fictional phone number, using the 846 local code saved by BT for use in films and on TV, much like America’s 555 prefix.
Despite the email coming from my own account, both recipients thought the email was a genuine request for help. Both responded offering services to Dave. (Dave’s chuffed to bits.)
Given my success in duping two people—a 100% success rate thus far, albeit entirely unintended—the next phase of the plan will be to roll out Wessex County Council. Letterhead is currently being printed and we have put out fictional tenders for IT services and office space. I’m expecting healthy levels of response to both.
We will, obviously, need to begin a major recruitment drive as we’re setting up from scratch to provide a wide range of services to a large, if non-existent population.
To do all of this, there will, of course, need to be significant funding provided by HM Treasury. Again, I’m confident that this will be forthcoming. It’s a crazy world, after all.
Media: where’s it going?
I had a conversation with my brother last night about, among other things, the dynamics that are going on in the world of media. I found it quite interesting, sufficiently so to share. So here’s sharing.
Traditionally, the benefits of advertising have been relatively difficult to quantify. So people have done it on the off-chance that it works (i.e. its benefits outweigh its costs), and in the fear that if they pull it, things will turn to dust.
New media (or new meejah) has now come along and made advertising way more measurable. If things work (and are proven to work), then do more of the same. If they don’t, then pull them. Meanwhile, media owners in the less direct media (i.e. those that are generally about enhancing the brand than getting someone to click on the link or pick up the phone) are suffering. A good example here is TV. ITV is losing money hand over fist, partly because of the recession, but also in part because people are questioning the overall value of TV advertising. Further, with the likes of Sky+ and V+ becoming more commonplace, there is no longer a need to sit through adverts. (I generally watch Sunday night’s X Factor in about 16 minutes, avoiding the bulk of each performance and the adverts that litter the programme itself. A question for another time: does my active focus on the advertising as I try to perfectly-time hitting the play button make it more effective?)
Now the trouble is, traditionally the media owners have made a wedge of cash and used that very wedge to cross-subsidise the making of programming that, in isolation, isn’t worthwhile financially but which enhances the value and perception of their medium. Wildlife programmes may be a good example of this: they’re costly to make and don’t necessarily draw the same viewing figures as an X Factor, but they’re made to broaden the range of the channel and the overall appeal of the offering. And it goes even wider than this: for the big boys like News International, they can afford to keep the Sun website going because of the wedge of cash they make out of Sky. (Note here the difference between Sky the platform and Sky the media channel.)
Now with the media owners struggling, they will focus more and more on doing the profitable and avoiding the unprofitable, likely at the detriment of the overall quality of TV programming, perhaps even bringingabout the demise of TV as we know it.
The internet revolution means that people are less and less willing to pay for stuff (although the escalating costs of entertainment platforms into the home seem to buck this trend). And given that advertising is increasingly seen as an ineffective method of paying for good quality programming (TV advertising costs have reduced by 15% in the last twelve months), the only logical outcome is for TV to become unviable, just as newspapers seem to be going. (While the cost of content delivery is variable, the cost of producing good quality programming is somewhat fixed.)
But people generally miss things when they’re gone, as John Willshire pointed out with respect to Media Week and its recent move to an online-only medium. And rarely are those people given the choice (not that they’d necessarily take it) to pay to save what they unknowingly love. So unless there are some forces that come into play fundamentally change the dynamics of the media industry, we’ll lose some stuff that we love but aren’t prepared to pay for: newspapers and TV to name but a couple.
Thanks to Ben for the insight.
Ministers: stop tiffing about!
Once in a proverbial blue moon, I receive an email containing a communication from a government minister. They’re not sent to me directly. Instead they’re forwarded a number of times until eventually they end up in my inbox. Today’s example was from an MP to another MP.
The letter is always attached to the email as a tif file. And the tif is a multi-page file (scanned at a jaunty angle) containing a scanned letter. It’s often on letterhead with the MP’s details and is always typed with a hand-written signature and, depending on the MP, sometimes a handwritten salutation up top.
I’m always amused by the process that I assume must go on in advance of the file arriving in my inbox.
- Minister dictates letter into Dictaphone
- Secretary types up the letter
- Secretary prints the letter and gives to minister for amendments
- Minister makes handwritten amendments to letter and hands back to secretary
- Secretary makes amendments on the electronic copy
- Secretary prints the letter and gives to minister for amendments
- Repeat steps 4, 5 and 6 as necessary
- Minister tops and tails the letter and hands back to secretary
- Secretary scans letter at a jaunty angle and saves the file as a tif
- Secretary emails tif to the intended recipients.
Genius. Utter genius.
Bog standard
I recently read a Facebook update from a female friend complaining that after six years of nagging, why was it that her other half continued to leave the toilet seat up. A comment on the update from one of her friends explaining the ridiculousness of the request prompted this post.
First of all, terminology. The topmost leaf of the seat will hereafter be called the lid; the one leaf with the necessary hole will be called the seat.
Generally, when women request that the toilet seat is left down, they mean just that. They want the toilet seat left down, and the lid left up. This is perfect for a lady, as both of her functions are performed with the leaves in this position. No touching necessary.
For men, one of our functions is performed with the seat in that position; the other is performed with both leaves up. So the ladies’ requests mean effort on the part of the man.
The request cannot be justified on hygienic grounds, because leaving the seat down (and the lid up) leaves any germs as free to escape into the ether (if indeed that’s what germs do) as if both leaves were up. And it cannot be based on aesthetic grounds, as surely the most aesthetically-pleasing toilet arrangement is to have both leaves down.
So the only basis for the request must be one of convenience, which suggests that convenience for a lady is deemed more important than convenience for a man.
As for me, I have a relatively good track-record on this front (I can imagine my wife hovering over the Comment button as we speak), but tend to leave the toilet with both leaves down, thereby necessitating effort on both of our parts when visiting.
Interestingly, our cleaner always leaves both leaves up.
Non-human primates
I heard today about a fierce debate that allegedly took place in advance of the publication of this information bulletin: Guide to help owners of non-human primates proposed.
During what was doubtless a truly fabulous debate, for which I so wish I was a fly on the wall, there was heated discussion as to whether the “non-human” qualifier was necessary.
I think it is, if only to add untold humour to the article.
One bus at a time: fabulous project
While trying to find the route of the Number 24 London bus for a colleague on Friday, I stumbled upon an inspired and fabulous blog titled “London buses: one bus at a time”.
Have you ever hopped on a bus and wondered where you would finish up if you did not hop off? Well, I have been thinking about London buses since I retired from paid work. Assisted by the TfL website and encouraged by a couple of other ladies who bus, with my freedom pass in hand, I am making 2009 ‘Bus Year’. Since there are about 500 bus routes in London, it may well be ‘Bus Decade’: I’m going to travel from end to end of every bus route.
Basically, the lady in question writes a post about each bus route, complete with pictures from the bus and commentary about the journey. And here’s the best bit: she’s doing them sequentially by bus number.
She’s averaging about a bus a week. And having started in March with the Number 1 (Canada Water to Tottenham Court Road Station), yesterday she did the Number 29: Wood Green to Trafalgar Square. And on 17 April she did what is arguably the best bus in London: the Number 8 (Bow to Oxford Circus). Shit: when did the Number 8 stop going through Mayfair to Victoria? I may have to revise my stance.
Anyway, I’m hooked!
Google SketchUp
I’ve been using Google SketchUp lately to help visualise some improvements we’re looking to make to our house. And I have to say, it’s lovely. (I’m using the free version—there’s also a professional, paid-for version.)
Basically, it allows you to create 3-D visual representations of things. Its main building blocks are straight lines, rectangles, circles arcs, which sounds rather limiting but in my experience is perfectly adequate for the vast majority of stuff I’ve had to mock up.
Its beauty lies in the ability to drag planes to move them into the third dimension. This makes the creation of accurate mock-ups simple, quick and wonderfully pleasing. Once you’re done with your shape creation, you can use an array of surface treatments to put glass in the windows, tile or carpet on the floor and colour the walls to your satisfaction and heart’s desire.
It’s a local client install and I can’t understand why the app. is still labelled “beta”. It’s been around under Google’s branding for well over two years to my knowledge, so surely it’s ready for the tag to be removed.
So if you need to mock something up, I wouldn’t look much further than Google SketchUp in the first instance.
FreshBooks invoice management: it’s lovely
Back at the beginning of June, Katie Lee, who writes a technology blog on the Telegraph, recommended FreshBooks.
It’s a fully online mechanism for invoicing. I enrolled a few days ago, and so far, I love it.
It allows me to manage invoicing for up to three clients for free, or upgrade to manage up to 25 clients for $19.99 per month. There are levels after that (up to 5,000 clients), but I’m not quite there yet.
I can create all of my invoices—fully branded with my company logo—within the interface, log and track payments against each one, and easily see which invoices haven’t been paid; and it’s all supported by email notifications, with password protection for invoices where I deem it appropriate.
So when I need to raise an invoice, instead of sending an email with an attached Word document, the system now triggers an email containing a link (password protected or otherwise) to the invoice.
All in all, it’s a pleasing experience to create and send an invoice, and all of the calculations for VAT and the like are sorted for you.
It also manages time-tracking and expenses, but I’ve not got into that just yet.
Even though I’m signed up to the free package, I received a call from John in the support team a couple of days later, who talked me through a couple of the features I wasn’t so familiar with, and educated me on how to upload historic invoices and payments without the associated notifications being sent. Lovely to get the one-to-one treatment when so much of the internet is commoditised at the detriment of service.
If you’re interested in using it, click here to find out more. And if you then decide to sign up, please do so from here, as I’ll get a little kickback from them. Which would be nice.
Anyone for agamama’s?
I walked past our local branch of Sheraton Law estate agents yesterday while embarking on a day out wandering the streets of London.
The “e” of Sheraton was hanging off. And if I remember correctly, it has been for some time—months, not weeks or days.
Later in the day, I ate at the original Wagamama in Lexington Street, and couldn’t help but think that you would never see the W hanging off their sign.
All members of staff that I encountered seemed to care about my overall experience. From the moment I walked through the front door and was greeted with smiles from the chefs upstairs, to the moment they acknowledged me again on my departure, everything was geared to ensuring my experience was one of quality. Admittedly, my beer glass was dirty, but the profuse apology from the chap—not my server—who quickly replaced it more than made up for the initial issue.
I had the feeling that if the W was hanging off the signage at the front of the store, it would get lots of attention from the staff, regardless of whether the issue fell within their remit. And if necessary, someone would get up on a ladder to address the issue before a strategic fix was found.
People form impressions and make judgments based on all sorts of aspects of a business, and it’s important that everyone within the business is sufficiently passionate about those impressions being good ones to have a sense of responsibility for issues being rectified, regardless of whether they are within their official remit.
All too often, there is fingerpointing within organisations, together with a culture that promotes such fingerpointing. Departments blame other departments for failings, even to the end customer, while the brand suffers.
Do you work for Sheraton Law? Or are you more of a Wagamamas employee?
My name’s Dan and I read my own blog
It’s a bit sad, isn’t it? But I subscribe to my own blog in Google Reader. And I read most of the posts that appear there.
Before publishing a post, I’ll preview it, allowing me to assess the prose before it is exposed to its audience, however small that audience may be. This gives me the opportunity to correct any issues with flow, and any howlers I may have made along the way.
And some time after I’ve hit the Publish button, the post will pop up in Google Reader. And invariably, I’ll read it in its entirety. Occasionally, I’ll spot a mistake that slipped through the net—I find my own work the most difficult to proofread, as I’m too close to it—but more importantly, I’ll read it as an audience member, given the delay since having read it.
And I like little better than stumbling upon old posts from years back to see what I had to say. I’m happy to say that my writing has improved over the last five years, as has by my grammar. Notwithstanding, I enjoy the things I had to say back then.
I’d be interested as to whether others out there read their own work.
The calendar headache and sullied applications
Most applications start off simple. And as they grow, morph and change direction, complexities come along that satisfy the user requirements, while compromising the purity of the application.
The purity of Excel has been compromised by the introduction of Pivot Tables, for example (pivot!).
I often struggle to comprehend the enormity of calendar applications; and get frustrated at how they don’t necessarily behave as expected in certain quirky scenarios. And this is a symptom of that very problem.
Basic calendar management is easy. The business requirements are simple to define (ability to schedule stuff and invite people), and they can be developed without any compromise. But then you strap on some other requirements—calendar delegation, ability for invitees to invite others, management of re-scheduled entries—and suddenly the requirements are not obvious, and their implementation Is likely to impact on the original functionality.
Who is allowed to edit a meeting request? Who gets notified if a meeting is changed? (How) do invitees get notified of additional or removed invitees?
Calendars seem to me the most complex applications that we use on a day-to-day basis. They have so many branches that sully the core, but that are necessary to the richness and usefulness of the application.
I often imagine the various teams at Microsoft, the Oulook team neurotic and literally pulling their hair out at the compromises they need to make; and the Excel team, walking with their heads held high at the relative purity of their application, with the exception of the Pivot Tables and Styles sub-teams, sat embarrassed in the corner at having marginally sullied purity (along with the guy who made 29 February, 1900 into a recognisable day).