Hypothetical roadsigns

Via Dave “RSS is a cure for cancer” Winer, a hypothetical roadsign.

My current motorway irritation (which is entirely an irritation as a result of reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves) are the signs on the M1 which read “Don’t drive tired”. Don’t drive tired what? If what you mean is “don’t drive while tired”, then say so…

And they’re made doubly-annoying because they’re usually preceded by the same kind of signs with a placard tied to them reading “Sign Not Yet In Use”. Which I’m sure is a split infinitive, or something similar, but it just sounds so terribly grammatically over-precise.

Maybe I get annoyed by “Sign Not Yet In Use” because I’m driving tired…?

Saying ‘no’ to mortgages

What exactly do you have to do to convince an estate agent that you do not, absolutely not, need a mortgage from them? The question was prompted by a conversation with the Halifax, after putting in an offer on the current favourite house. I’d assumed (because that’s the way it’s always worked previously) that I would put in my offer, they’d take details of who I was and what I was selling to check that I was in a position to buy, and then pass it onto the vendor. But not the Halifax, oh no. They wanted me to come into the branch to talk to their mortgage advisor - ostensibly to clear the money laundering checks. Which would have been fair enough, had it not been for the phone-answering droid suggesting that I’d best get there quick otherwise the vendor wouldn’t get to hear about the offer.

Which (I think) is actually illegal, or at the very least exceedingly dodgy practice. So I had another “discussion” with the mortgage advisor in question this afternoon, and made it clear that no, I did not need nor want one of their mortgages - after which I was assured (her words) that the offer had gone forward, and that the money laundering part could wait until after the vendor had accepted the offer (assuming they do, because I’ve not offered asking price…)

But then I got home this evening to find a letter from the Halifax confirming the appointment for my “mortgage review”. Which has really pissed me off, because the whole process is quite transparently about trying to drum up business for their crappy overpriced mortgage products and has bugger-all to do with “managing the transaction chain”.

Shrook aren’t crooks

Ok, so it would appear that the author(s?) of Shrook aren’t crooks, just marginally incompetent. Having finally found the “I’m really pissed off and I’d like you to do something about it” link on SWREG, a mail to the vendor account expressing (ahem) mild displeasure and a day later I have my activation code. All of which is probably a gross over-reaction on my part to what is a tiny transaction in the grand scheme of things, but hell, there’s a principle at stake here…

Scary 70s interiors

I’ve spent too long house-hunting in York for this gallery of extravagant Seventies interiors to be really scary - trust me, there are far worse out there, and they’re on the market right now - but I was slightly disturbed by the horse in the kitchen. The scary part is that my parents were my age in 1974, which presumably means this sort of thing appealed to them in the same way as wood floors and halogen lighting are meant to appeal to me. What kind of a genetic headstart that gives me, I’m not sure…

How much do I want one of these?

I cannot begin to imagine what I’d do with all that screen real-estate, butohgodiwantoneofthese30inchmonsters…

Too late now

About the last place you’d expect to find a political polemic is the website of Bruce Springsteen. But here it is - Al Gore ripping the miserable failure a new one over Iraq. If only he’d sounded like this four years ago, none of this would have happened…

Embrace and extend

There’s currently much flapping on Slashdot about a Washington Post (dumb registration required, see BugMeNot) report on the latest security problem with Micro$oft products, particularly the fact that (allegedly) CERT has advised Explorer users to get the hell away from the product and use something like Mozilla.

It pains me to say it, but I’ve got a degree of sympathy for Microsoft - after all, they are the company that everyone loves to hate, so they get more than their fair share of attention from the hackers and the script kiddies. But then that degree of sympathy comes to a rapid end whenever I start thinking about Internet Explorer, because if ever there was a product that demonstrates the attitude of a monopoly, it’s this one. Compared to Mozilla, or Safari, or Firefox or any of the alternatives, it’s light-years behind the curve. Example - I can’t imagine using a browser without tabs, but I can’t imagine when IE will ever get around to them (although I’m half-expecting Robert Scoble to tell me. And incidentally, Robert, for goodness’ sake get yourself a domain name, man - radio.weblogs.hokeycokey2000.gibberish just doesn’t cut it. Scoble.org is available, get on with it. £21.99 from 123-reg.co.uk, you can run to that, surely?) And that’s just one tiny example of how the competition has forged ahead while the IE product atrophies. I can imagine the conversations going on in Redmond - “why bother putting any more development effort into IE? We’ve got 99.9999% market share. We’re the standards, now, baby!”

Shrek 2

We took the kids to see Shrek 2 this afternoon (OK, I wanted to see it as well), and it was £6 well-spent. It’s incredible to look at - City Screen in York has a THX auditorium which is equipped with 70mm; not that they were showing Shrek in 70mm, but the fact that they’ve got that sort of kit around means that they seem to know what they’re doing and keep the print clean. So you get the full effect of the rendered fur.

I’m not really sure it’s aimed entirely at kids - there’s so many in-jokes and innuendos and piss-takes that you’re going to miss half the enjoyment if you’re under 18, but the offspring enjoyed it nonetheless. And I’m convinced it was Jonathan Ross providing the voice for the Ugly Sister, but it was Larry King that showed up in the credits. What was all that about?

It would seem that they are…

…a bunch of crooks. Email to the contact address listed in SWREG bounces, and there’s still no reply via the address on the webpage. So, Graham Parks, whoever you are, prepare for a credit card chargeback.

Weblogs as an interview tool

The pace of the projects that we’re currently working on is starting to pick up, so we’ve just recruited an undergraduate student to work with us over the summer. We’re fortunate in having a number of highly-rated universities within easy reach of us, so there’s a good-sized pool of talent to recruit from - and we’ve been extremely impressed with calibre of applicants that came to us.

One of the problems of recruiting technical expertise is that it’s rare that you’re in the position of knowing more about the field than they do - after all, if you’re recruiting a specialist, it’s usually because you need them to do the work that you’re unable to. So assessing their level of expertise can be difficult.

What made the process very much easier for us was the fact that both we - and several of the candidates - run weblogs. From the entries that we’ve posted over the last few months, the potential candidates could get a pretty good idea of what we’re about, and also an insight into the way we’re working. Some of the candidates mentioned their blogs in their applications, so one of the first things that we did while sifting through the pile of likely people was to take a look at what they’d been posting about. It quickly became obvious that the strongest candidates knew what they were talking about because they’d posted about it over an extended period of time. It’s a great way of establishing who’s a genuine expert, and who’s just read a couple more pages in the manual than you have!

Not only that, but reading someone’s blog is something of a window into their personality. That’s not to say that we were assessing them on the quality of their prose - but it did mean that we had more to base a decision on than just an hour’s conversation, in what’s an extremely stressful situation for everyone. And the same is true for the candidates getting to know about us - there’s only so much you can tell someone about your organisation in an interview, because the interviewer is supposed to be the one doing the listening. But by reading through the past entries on our blog, the candidates were able to get a much clearer picture of what we’re like to work with than they would get through an hour’s conversation.

Our new colleague - who’s a prolific blogger in his own right - joins us next week, so we’re looking forward to a third voice cutting through.