Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘work’ Category

Brrrr. I'm either ill or just vaguely run down after this week, which has been kind of a doozy. Last night I was completely out of it, and I mean unable to talk, let alone do anything else; symptoms that, when I flipped back through my mental notebook, I found next to a pencilled annotation reading "←Stress?"

I hope taking it sedentary over this weekend will get me back on my feet, but the cold weather isn't helping. I don't want to go for walks or do anything but huddle with hot water bottles. I definitely hope I won't be ill-definedly sickish all this winter, because the novelty there wears off fast, I can tell you from experience.

NaNoWriMo writing has completely stalled. I won't make the 50k, that's a given, but I'll easily get to 30k over the weekend. Heck, just writing up what I've handwritten on my tram journeys should take care of that.

All that's still to go on Part Two, after transcribing my own handwriting, is some wrapping up on Taupeshank's side. Taupe needs to realise in what ways pe's been rather silly, while Alluring… well. Let's face it. Alluring Swiper isn't learning any Important Moral Lessons any time soon. Alluring considers nerself far too fabulous for Important Moral Lessons.

Lest anyone accuse me of writing only heroes I agree with 100%, this section features binge drinking, the afore-alluded ass-headedness and a downright fist fight. Part Three features FIRE! Also bribery, but mainly FIRE. (Could fire really be a problem on a planet that's 95% water? You bet.)

My job has improved my knowledge of pop culture SO much, seriously.

[Mel] Gibson… is he the Scientologist or the anti-Semite? Directed Lord of the Rings or Lord of the Flies or something too, didn't he?
Herm, today

I wouldn't have known that much before.

Mmmmmmm, I'm sleepy. And very very hungry recently.

I'd better not tell the blood donation people that tonight!

(P.S. no, you cheeky bastards, I'm not pregnant. A pretty important matter of anatomy would get in the way of that.)

So at work I'm kinda beta-testing this thing called the Tagging Tool (well, Topic Link Tool now, because technically it's taxonomy rather than tags after all, but old names stick hard), which is pretty fantastic in an interlinking, contexty, information architecturey, web 3.0 sort of way, and now stuck in my head are butchered Offspring lyrics:

I'm seeing this tool and she just might be out of her mind
Well she's got taggage and it's all the contextual kind
We talk granularity, and all that kinda bull
About linking horizontally so our content's findable
And I say yeah, yeah
My topics are linking, it's good for IA
Yeah, yeah
My badges are win and my website is oh so Web Three…

When I'm allowed to talk about it on Yammer I'm so posting that.

For great justice, in accordance with the prophecy, due to the coriolis effect and in order to let METAL be popular. Infopunxx out.

I seem to have become addicted to posting 'microfiction' on Twitter. This must be how they get you sucked in. #Brains.

Question: Would you like, dislike or be indifferent to seeing my Twitter updates mirrored on my blog (probably in a single post per day from some tool like LoudTwitter)?

If I found a thing that would only collect and post updates that contained certain user-defined hashtags, I'd use that for sure.

I get my two week placement with FM&T soon. Looking forward to it. I think they want to keep me on for longer.

Seen a cool video that will interest Altivo and other fur-types.

That's randomly got me looking at paw glove tutorials on YouTube. I'm not a furry or fursuiter and don't have any interest in the whole full-body itchy-plastic-fuzz deal, but I would love a properly awesome pair of paw gloves with proper pads, like so (but Black Dog, or Grey Dog, instead of Red Fox).

I saw some leatherwork gloves that are nice-looking, but far too fetishy and immobile. I'm nervous about my manual dexterity or movement being impaired in any way. (The shoes are awesome, though.)

I suppose fingerless fursuit gloves would be object-defeatist. I do like my fingerless gloves, though. Shame it's too hot at the moment to wear them.

Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend after all; I'd forgotten until this morning (yay Outlook reminders!) that I'd agreed to help out with DrupalCampUK.

That also answers any questions I might've had about what to do this evening. That's right: get my V6 on and then see if I can get NodeProfile to do what I need it to… namely provide 'child profiles' for main profiles, call them 'character' and 'author' if you will, effectively allowing the author to post in-character. (You see? Everything I do, I do it for you…)

Am now itching for one of these. And a netbook to use it on. I do rather like being technology-lite, being naturally inclined to hold out until direct neural interfaces are available, but the drawbacks of being disconnected from the mothercloudwebnet in the meantime are starting to outweigh the benefits of not being mugged.

We've taken down our Ethics of Same-Sex Marriage section. Yes, I'm afraid it's already gone; I wrote the 410 redirect myself.

It was judged to be not high enough quality to be worth keeping and updating. Shame, but there you go.

BBC News provides coverage of the latest gay marriage news. Other news websites are available.

118 118 man seen in Marmite

It may not be immediately obvious to everyone, but one family is convinced they can see the mascot of a directory enquiry service on the lid of a jar of Marmite.

Claire Allen, 36, said she was the first to notice the image on the underside of the lid as she was putting the yeast spread on her son's toast.

Her husband Gareth, 37, said he could not believe his eyes when he saw it.

Mr Allen, of Ystrad, Rhondda, said: "The kids are still eating it, but we kept the lid."

He explained: "Claire saw it first and called her dad to come and take a photo of it.

"When I first looked at it I wasn't sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she's right – that's the moustache bloke from the adverts.

Mrs Allen told the South Wales Echo: "Straight away Jamie said "that looks like 118", and my other boys (Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11) even said they could see a face.

"People might think I'm nuts, but I like to think it's 118 118 looking out for us.

"We've had a tough couple of months; my mum's been really ill and it's comforting to think that the jogging man from a commercial directory enquiries company advert is watching over us."

Read the original story here. Doesn't make much more sense than my parody, does it?

So I've been was agonising with colleagues about how this was ever considered to be 'news' within the BBC's remit to inform (no), educate (…no) and entertain (?).

Other text services are available, including AQA, which has sexy goffboi harlots working for it.

And now it's time for….

Psalm or Marmite advert?

Marmite advertisements use the attention-grabbing tactic of claiming you may hate their product.

But are the following quotations prophecies from the psalms associated with Jesus, or adverts for the goopy black stuff? You decide!!!!

1. "More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause"
2. "You either love it or hate it"
3. "All who hate me whisper together against me"

Marmite's next campaign: "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. Some of whom will eat peanut butter. Shun them. Shun them."

(Old news, actually, but I've only just come across it.)

Condom condom condom condom

At a wedding!

And no, the post tags are not lying. This was made by the WST. Now that's awesome.

Booya, Daily Wail. Pwned.

(My, what a tabloidy-sounding title.

(Firstly, the Outlook-centricness of this post is sadly unavoidable. That's just what they have at my workplace. For Thunderbird and Gmail, where we talk about coloured 'follow up' flags, feel free to substitute tags.)

James Cridland has collated some useful tips from BBCers on how to deal with email. Worth a read if you're in any busy organisation and get flooded by work (and not-so-work) emails.

Follow-ups since James posted:

JF (person who originally asked for tips):
Thanks very much to all of you. Really helpful thoughts – for what it's worth, my top tips are below. I'd like to collate all these into some tips to share with colleagues – James, hopefully I can use your blog entry as a starting point for this. It will be interesting to see what else you get.

But first, how many people would love to be able to search your mail archive as easily as Gmail, or the internet more generally? It's amazing what I can find in my personal Gmail archive from six or seven years ago at a touch of a button. And it would save SO MUCH TIME at work, as well – say, looking for people who seemed good but weren't available last time I wanted to arrange an interview on a certain topic. Of course the Outlook search takes so long to find something, that I find I rarely bother, and never try using a second keyword when you don't find the item you were seeking first time around.
I've been lobbying various people for a Google Desktop, or Xobni (inbox search software) implementation for ages, but it all falls on deaf ears. Too expensive, too uncollegiate, and so on. But imagine what a treasure trove of useful ideas and information our inbox archives are! I know some people are allowed Google Desktop, restricted not to share outside the BBC, but someone, presumably at [the BBC's contract IT provider], has kiboshed any future users of this. Any ideas? I've even considered a petition…

Anyway, ever since realising a few months ago that I was spending half my life scrolling through my inbox trying to figure out what to do next, and constantly updating several handwritten to-do lists, I've developed a system that seems to work as a dynamic, constantly updated to-do list.

I use the principle of Delete it, Deal with it, or Delegate it. Sadly I don't really have anyone to delegate to, so I have to delete or deal with things. This is really nerdy I know, but every message on its way in that can't be knocked no the head immediately gets a coloured flag:

Red: urgent to do
Blue: less urgent to do
Yellow: something to hold until the issue is dealt with
Green: Generic stuff it's handy to be able to access in a second
Orange: ideas to present at meetings or to others
Purple: ideas to pursue if I ever get any time

The best thing about this is that you can sort by coloured flag, so you can see what needs doing in a second. You can email yourself, instead of keeping to-do lists, and if something becomes urgent, change the colour from blue to red.

You can also, on the flag button when an email is open, tell Outlook to give you a reminder at a certain date and time, so it handles deadlines nicely as well. Given all that, I still never seem to get below 200 items in the inbox, and that's not including all those yellow-flagged items which get stuck in a pending folder to go through whenever I get time.

I know it sounds complicated, but I reckon I manage to get a lot, lot more done that I used to. I don't seem to send many more emails (still around 1500 a month, unbelievably, or one every six minutes…), but this has helped focus my time immensely.

JF in reply to HB:
Sorry, one more thing – does anyone have any tips for part time people dealing with email? A lot of my colleagues are only in the office two or three days a week, so find an absolute barrage of material when they arrive back from a few days away – more than can realistically be dealt with, especially as they may have to be on air or producing a programme within half an hour.

HB in reply to JF:
Part-timers? First off, they should ask to be removed from all the distribution lists they can.

Some intelligent filters can help – for example, delete anything with *junk* or JUNK: in the title and anything marked as Low importance (look for "marked as importance" in Outlook's rule building wizard). Use colour rules too, to colour red anything with High importance or a deadline attached. (As a company we should encourage good email practice on the part of the sender, which would help with the previous two points.)

They should compose an intelligent Out of Office saying "I'm part time. Please re-address anything important to…" My Out of Office gives two different addresses: one in the internal address book for internal people and an external-facing address for others.

AW in reply to HB:
Personally, I want to be on MORE distribution lists. Quite useful sources of information most of the time!

HB in reply to AW:
Agreed – but I work here five days a week (and enjoy the general hum and occasional great idea from [our high-traffic internal mailing list] rather than find it annoying). If I only worked two or three days, I'd be drowning.

JF in reply to HB:
Really useful tips there H. Email etiquette is so important though – it's almost a separate topic. How many times have you sent an email to someone that was then forwarded to a group of 20, which would have been drafted more thoughtfully or slightly differently if the wider audience was the original intention? There's no malice intended I think, it's just one of those habits people have.

DH in reply to JF:
I don't know. Two of the things that make e-mail so powerful are the ease with which you can forward e-mails and the fact that it is so simple to send to multiple people. I can see that etiquette around forwarding needs to cover confidentiality, and possible offence, but if you start making rules about things not being drafted well, in a format that is mostly about speed and convenience, I think you're getting into baby and bathwater scenarios.

Finally, Jason in a comment to James's post adds: "Best tip I've heard is to set a rule to delete anything you're only CCed on. If it's important, then they should have sent it directly to you."

Use that last one if it works for you. Myself, I'm not CCed on things all that often, and when I am it tends to be things that are relevant to me (such as people discussing things they're going to ask me to fix when they decide on them).

We have a nifty new Hindu history section, put up last Friday. It's much better than the old.

It was written for us by a real professor. (And illustrated by me by courtesy of stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons et al.)

I dreamed we were setting up a new board game, but I was tired and knew I wouldn't be able to take in the rules.

This dream confirms two things:

1. My Tuesday night activities are seeping into my subconscious,
2. I am feeling professionally insecure.

I also recall someone in the dream saying this was a cooperative game (i.e. "players against game", not "players against each other" – e.g. Pandemic), which tantalised me, because I've never played a co-op and would very much like to try one. If only to keep from inadvertently pwning Phil.

Currently reading: Women's Work for Weft. Just finished Elizabeth Bear's Dust, about which I hope to post more in future.

Currently wondering: if it makes sense for a hypothetical humanoid, pre-industrial silk-based economy to make some kind of toy that was a hybrid of spindle and yo-yo.

Um. OK, that was a little odd. I just got the strong urge to buy a mobi phone or other cheap camera so that I could start a Flickr blog of five-word food reviews.

I don't even eat that much bought/packaged food!

Can't even blame the water cooler for this one. (It's only 1.5 arm lengths from me, but I'm known to get crazy ideas during the couple of steps to it, which my brain appears to categorise as "my time" rather than "company time".) This one appeared while I was sitting at my desk eating a Sainsbury low-fat Moroccan butternut squash wrap.

Nice. Right side of spicy.

Can anyone reassure me that it's normal to be mobbed by low-flying ideas at any time of the day or night? (Either that or I'm turning into my mother…) Have you had many doozies while at work/at college/meant to be doing other things? Mine generally tend to be better subconsciously-thought-out than the whole tortilla photoblog thing…

Yes! I want to be a slush reader while I work on one or another of my embryonic novels. :D

(Actually, I like my current job a lot.)

So, on the downside, a total LEGEND is retiring. He's been the kind of overboss of my team since I've worked in Religion, boss of my immediate manager (I think; never been shown an actual map). And he's a great dude, esoteric, brilliant, equally at home converting philosophical texts to plain English and working around SQL Server's inanities. Would come into our office, back when we still worked physically in the Religion department, and ask us random ethical questions from whatever article he was writing. Great dude.

I'll miss him. On the plus side, I got to rifle through the skip(!) of books he's chucking out in preparation for leaving. Adoptees are sitting on my desk by the names of The World of the Polynesians, Dominion, The Art of Deception and On the Art of Writing Copy.

I also have a slim paperback named Geometric Patterns from Churches and Cathedrals, quite rightly wondering why I picked it up. If none of my artsy offliners wants it, I'll offer it to you lot.

Tomorrow there will be goodbye luncheons and drinkypoos and presents and speeches, which'll probably embarrass the poor sod. If I ever stop working here, there'll be very specific instructions…

Nice to be back at work.

Sad, I know! But when I'm off for extended periods I always seem to do nothing but sleep and don't get much creative work done. I need the routine.

Sometimes I think you're actually a 'Help' programme built into all BBC computers.

I mean that in a good way.

– a colleague in London who has never met me

This is not the first time someone has asked if I'm a virtual construct. Seriously. Welcome to my world Mister Anderson.