Frightful Bish

What’s the deal with "glossy" screens making a comeback? It seems like only ten or fifteen years ago we were welcoming anti-glare coated screens with open arms because you could see something on the display other than a reflection of your shirtfront shining back at you. (Hoorah for optical brighteners!)

And does anyone else remember all the fluorescent light fittings in offices changing to those downlighter things so that screens didn’t reflect all the tubes?

Well it was all for naught, because I popped into my local computer retail store the other day to find all the "premium" laptops equipped with highly polished displays. Not only that, but Apple and Dell (see links above) are at it too. Tsk, tsk. Must be the fashion I suppose.

I wonder if it’s time to dig out those old bell-bottom flares yet?

It would be easy to become insecure faced with the tide of penis enlargement and erectile dysfunction remedies that flood into my inbox every day despite the attempts of spam filters to keep them at bay. I just have to keep reminding myself that spammers simply acquire lists of email addresses from random sources, and that their campaigns are not carefully targeted.

Having said that, I don’t get significant amounts of spam about breast enlargement, which means one of two things.:

1. The mailing lists are presumed from their source to be predominantly male oriented. Rightly or wrongly, if they are from a technical bulletin board, for example, they might be thought to be composed mostly of men.
2. There is no room for snake-oil around breast enlargement any more. When you can open any newspaper, phone directory  or magazine and find expensive adverts for surgical procedures, why would you prefer to trust an unsolicited email that tells you a herbal pill is the thing for you?

I much prefer to believe the second option. The spammer blasts out as many messages as possible in the hope that some will reach those unfortunate charlies who think that if penis enlargement were really possible by taking a pill it wouldn’t make the front page of every tabloid newspaper and be the talk of the western world. That’s right Charlie, there really is a successful tablet but nobody’s talking about it except spammers.

Anyway it’s amusing to see just how many ways there are of saying the same thing. I’m ashamed to have spent as much time thinking about this as I already have, but if I weren’t it would be entertaining to see all the subject lines collected into a list. I’m sure someone’s already done it.

And if you’re female and thinking of commenting “Ha, now you men know what us women have been facing over our body image since time immemorial!”, then go ahead. You’re probably right.

And if you’re either gender and thinking “No smoke without fire!”, then kindly keep your smutty thoughts to yourself.

I followed a schoolgirl through the automatic ticket barriers at the station this morning. She fed her ticket into the machine only to be presented with the inscrutable illuminated message “Seek assistance child”. She probably didn’t appreciate its deep significance as she was hurrying for a bus and it meant she had to go and beg the gate attendant to let her out, but it was not wasted on me.

I wonder if perhaps they could load the barriers with other fortune cookie-style messages? Does anyone remember the old Unix fortune program that could be invoked to give a pithy saying at login each day? I remember:

“Better hope you get what you want before you stop wanting it.”

“Never eat yellow snow”.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

“Never lay leapfrog with a unicorn.”

And so ad infinitum. Surely it would be rather fun to have one of those pop up in front of each commuter for them to consider on the walk to the office?

Also reminds me of a work colleague of mine from times past who collected the advice from food and drug packets, thinking that several of them were good maxims to live by:

“Keep out of the reach of children.”

“Keep out of direct sunlight.”

“Do not mix with detergents.”

“Shake well.”

As yes, there is much to ponder here, grasshopper.

Apparently British scientists are recommending that we (Britain) send men (or possibly women) to the moon. It seems that after the initial excitement of getting there, everyone kind of gave up because it was, er, rather dull there. No atmosphere.

I’ve an idea. Why don’t we save up and hold the next G8 summit on the moon? These people are, after all, making some pretty big decisions about the future of our planet for us. What better than to do that from a place where you can actually see the whole planet and its place in the universe? Tell me that won’t make a difference to their perspective.

There’s a restaurant fairly near where we live called “The Swallow’s Return”. If they had thought about that name for just a few minutes, do you think they might have changed it? Admittedly written down it looks harmless enough, but when spoken you can’t hear the punctuation, so that “Swallow’s” could just as easily be “swallows”, and their return is better not contemplated.

Not quite up to the level of jobby.com, but a good attempt nonetheless and every bit as unwitting. And no, I haven’t eaten there.

Puts me in mind, for no particular reason, of the takeaway restaurant near our previous residence that offered free delivery, but 10% off if you collected. So a delivered meal costs 10% more, but that’s not a delivery charge, it’s a collection discount. What a great example of how to turn a negative into a positive.

I see from my last posting that we had just tested out the new tent when you and I last communicated, gentle reader. You and I have a lot of catching up to do, but here’s a start.

It is cold at night in a tent; that’s the long and the short of it. Luckily, having picked  local spot for our first outing we were able to despatch a rider quickly for extra blankets on the second night.

 Also, sleeping bags are horrible. We tallish people simply cannot turn over in them because turning over involves bending the knees, which then makes the bag taut across your legs which and brings the whole shebang over with you as you turn, except your blankets which roll off onto the floor.

 Also, leaky airbeds don’t help. My turning-over technique involves lifting the derriere by pressing down the shoulders and lower legs. In a leaky airbed this simply squashes those portions down and pushes the middle section up, keeping the unwanted contact and rendering the move highly ineffective, not to say comical.

Also, people are blinking noisy through the walls of a tent, and someone snoring on the other side of the campsite can wake one up if one is not sleeping terribly soundly anyway. Bah.

Anyway, that aside it all went very well really. I think we now have some ideas about things we’d need for a longer trip, and chief among them is chairs. You really miss sitting in a chair very quickly when you don’t have one. The MiniBishes enjoyed themselves though, and slept like logs of course while we grown-ups froze and struggled and cursed through the long watches of the night.

So now we just need some time off (hah!) and a campsite not too far away to try our hands. And a roof-box or a trailer for the car to carry everything in. And a stove. And a book to read, must take a book. And lots of blankets. And a patch for my airbed.

Finally, proof that Frightful Bish is an influential blog, read by those in power in the railway networks.

A while back, when blogging was a new and exciting activity for me I wrote of the problems of splitting trains and how passengers were to know which part of a train they were in. Well, thanks to Bish, you need fret no more.

On my way up to London on Sunday I perceived that an upgrade to the on-train information system now allows the screens and announcements to inform the travelling public how many coaches form the train and which coach they are in. The novelty was wearing off by the time I reached home, I must confess, having had it announced to me several dozen times in a stuttering voice: “Thi..i..i..i..s…co..o..o..oach..ch…thre..e..e..ee… of..f…fo..o..o..our”, but I’m sure that’s just a teething problem.

Even better, I can vouch that it works when the trains join and change direction too, although I guess the upgrade is still rolling out across the fleet as at one point the message disappeared entirely after an extra train was attached. Still, a step in the right direction.

Next problem to solve: as a train approaches a station, the list of stops disappears to be replaced by “The next station is Wherever”. We demand that this alternates with the list of stops, so that we know whether to stay on the train or whether we should change at Wherever for a train to our destination.

I’m sure they’ll be working on it as soon as they read this.

Bish Towers has just embarked on its first Freecycling adventure.

Freecycle is a system based on Yahoo! groups for matching stuff you don’t want with local people who do want it or, conversley, for finding stuff you don’t want from local people who don’t want it. Like classified ads but everything has to be free, and the buyer collects.

If I were more business-minded I would sell stuff online instead, but Freecycle has advantages. First, for bulky stuff that’s awkward or expensive to post, it’s jolly convenient to have someone local just come and take it away. Second, it’s slightly greener as the stuff isn’t being driven or flown around the country or even the world. The groups are very local for just that reason.

When we first moved into this house it seemed huge and I wondered how we were going to get enough furniture to fill it. I had reckoned without Ikea. Now I can’t even get into the garden shed as stuff is piled up right to the door. If I want to go out on my bike, should chance allow, it’s a twenty minute job to excavate it from under the old clutter and get it anywhere near a road. Hence our first Freecycling venture is to get rid of the old cycle seats that the children have long since grown out of, and which have found a home on top of my bike.

It was surprisingly scary posting an ad for the first time; I felt sure I must have violated some netiquette or other. However, it seemed ok and we had half a dozen responses within 24 hours of posting. We’ve contacted the first two correspondents and invited them to pick up the stuff tomorrow afternoon. I hope they don’t turn up in urban 4×4s to collect! If all goes well I’ll start picking on some more stuff to send out into the wild, and yes, for smaller items I’ll probably have a crack at ebay too.

Less is more. Vive l’espace.

In case anyone from the Student Loans Company reads this, let me explain something.

A file of data in comma separated values format (CSV) is just that: a text file containing data items separated by commas, one record per line. On a MS Windows machine it is conventionally named with a file extension of .csv, for example student.csv. Here is a sample of some student data in CSV format showing surname, student number, date of birth (yyyy-mm-dd style):

Appleby,123456,1999-04-06
Bloggs,123457,1998-06-18
Carter,123458,2000-11-02

If you are running MS Windows and if you have MS Office installed, files with the .csv extension are associated with the Excel spreadsheet application. That is to say that if you double-click the file’s icon, the application used to open the file will be Excel. This does not mean that the file is in “Excel format”, only that the file is in a format that Excel understands.

Furthermore, if one or more of the data items in the file looks like a date, Excel is clever at recognising them and will display them in your chosen date format, whatever its format actually is in the file. For example the file might have the date as 2007-03-30, but Excel will display it as 30/03/2007 if that is the format you have chosen for dates. Thus you cannot rely on Excel to show you exactly what is in the file.

Even furthermore, if you open the file in Excel and then save it under new name (providing that you keep the .csv extension), the dates in the new file will be in Excel’s display format. In other words it has changed what was in the original file.

The fact that a file is named with a .csv extension does not mean that you have to open file with Excel, even though that might be the default action on your Windows/Office PC. You are free to use any other application. If you don’t use Windows and/or Office you would have to use something else (yeah, alright, you could have Excel on a Mac). If you have a student records system that has been programmed to read such a file, it can do that without you having to open the file in Excel and save it again, and hence without having Excel mess with the date formats.

So if you write a specification for a data transfer file in CSV format and in that document you specify a format for the date items, you can’t trust Excel to tell you if you got it right in the final output. You need a text editor, like Notepad, which doesn’t lie to you about the contents of your file. Try right-clicking the file, click Open With, then Choose Program…, then select Notepad from the list. Now you shall see the truth.

Is that clear?

In my last post I mentioned the growing disparity between customer service rhetoric and reality. We had some great examples of this at the university recently while we were enjoying some consultancy.

Picture the scene: we have half a dozen people in a room for several days, it’s dry old stuff to work through, so they need some stimulating drinks of coffee and tea on arrival and then mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and they need a sandwich lunch.

Problem 1 is that some misguided soul decided a few months ago that staff didn’t need two training rooms in the admin area and that one could be relinquished for use as office space, so we have only one left. Consequently it is busy a lot of the time and if you want to book a three-day consultancy session there, fitting in with the diaries of half a dozen staff and an external consultant, your chances are slim to nil. So we end up in a student pool room (sorry students, you’ll have to go elsewhere). But, the student computers are on a different network from the admin computers, so the requisite number of workstations have to be switched over to the staff network for the duration and given temporary IP addresses, network configurations and security permissions.

Problem 2 is that the catering department don’t deliver to that building because it’s a student building, and in any case food and drink normally aren’t allowed in there. So we have to get the no drinks rule waived and then send a runner from the meeting to collect the tea and coffee twice a day. We make our own signs to try and prevent students walking in unaware every five minutes; they mostly work.

Problem 3 is that the room is freezing. The cooling is set to cope with a room full of forty students with PCs running, we have six people and two machines. The cooling cannot be controlled from the room (it is a student room after all) so we have to ring the estates department to turn it off. Towards the end of the first day, they do.

Problem 4 is paying for lunch. Although coffee and tea can be ordered on a hospitality form and collected from the restaurant, it is felt that a more flexible approach is needed for lunch so that everyone can have something they want. Choices:

• Everyone pays for their own lunch, and claims it back on expenses. Lots of paperwork.
• One person pays for everyone’s lunch and claims it back on expenses. Expensive for one person and difficult to arrange as there are no less that three different food counters, each selling different things.
• A hospitality form is left behind the counter and catering staff complete it with the purchases made (like a tab at the bar). Too many food counters to be practical.
• Give everyone a fixed-price voucher to use as payment instead of cash. Purchases are then charged to the cost code on the voucher. Seems simple and flexible.

Problem 5 then is that catering staff need to know before they touch the till that you are paying with a voucher because for reasons no-one can explain, food purchased on vouchers is not rung through the till. What this does to stock control goodness knows, but as soon as the till is touched it becomes a problem for the staff and they will surely let you know it. Of course this means that they cannot use the till to total up the value of items so much anguished and unaccustomed mental arithmetic is called for. On top of this, the staff have no clue afterwards what it was you bought. Of course the budget will be charged the full cost of the voucher regardless of how much is purchased on it, so they are happy if you go under, but go over and woe betide you.

Problem 6 involves an open day coinciding with one of the consultancy days. Attendees are given a very similar voucher to ours with which to purchase a drink to the value of £1. So now, even when presented well in advance of their touching the till, the staff think that it is a drink voucher and that we are trying to spend it in the wrong place,until all has been patiently explained by each of us in turn.

Problem 7 occurs because not all the counters serve the same things. If, for example, you want a hot meal with a cup of coffee, it involves a trip to two different counters, but only one of them can have the voucher so it can’t be done. Apparently, although it can’t be done for coffee it can be done for fruit and other sundries. It seems beyond imagination that someone could write “taken £3.00″ or some such on the back of the voucher, presumably because you could then walk off with the voucher and not hand it in, thus getting a free meal. But you can have free fruit and other sundries by the same mechanism? Whatever.

Problem 8 as the language barrier. Not all catering staff have, let us say, English as their first language. When they serve, every difficulty is magnified.

Problem 9 was staff attitude. This actually happened on the last day. You won’t believe it but it’s true. A member of our party had settled on a menu which maximised the value of the voucher: a toasted sandwich, cup of coffee, piece of fruit and yogurt comes to within 10p of the voucher value. Staff can’t quite believe you can get all this for the money and work it out differently each day until the correct arithmetic is explained. On the last day, the lady behind the counter says to her “You can’t have much going on in your personal life if you can remember from one day to the next that this lot costs £3.90.” Seriously, she actually said that to a customer. Amazing.

I’m sure that if we sat around carefully trying to design a more onerous, obstructive and ineffective system we could probably do it, but just how it might be made worse I can;t think right now.

Eventually our tales of how we had each fared at redeeming our vouchers became the chief topic of conversation over lunch. So all in all I wish that whoever-it-was hadn’t given away that second training room.