Olympics

Well done Yorkshire in London 2012.

Close to top 10 in the country table I think.

That’s what you earn by getting up before you go to bed and eating cold coal (MP ref).

I hope you have all been enjoying it as much as we have here. We have had to re-enact many sports, like…

Badminton: the kids actually play badminton and I stand by with the ladders to get the shuttlecock off the roof

We have also done swimming, diving, sprinting  (could barely walk next day), long jump (struggled to drive home) and loads of others. I tried for sprint spreadsheeting but no one was interested.

funniest so far, one of the kids tried to Anna Mears me on the BMX track. turns out a 20 kilo kids tends to bounce right off an 80 kg adult. Lucky they bounce well at that age, and he beat me the next race (again).

Worst bit: British media coverage, I think the bbc has spent more time in ‘pundit analysis’ (largely vacuous bullshit) than showing actual sporting achievement. Post race interviews were/are generally sickeningly intrusive. BMX was comical, every time they called a time trial fast it was slow and vice versa, literally 100%. Loved Cav and Chris Boardman though

Fave bits so far… anything with Bolt and/or Blake in, Jess Ennis (no pressure!), any GB velodrome action (except the commissars of course), especially Trotty, and Sir Chris (stunning last ride!). Also delighted for Handy Andy to win at Wimbledon. And the C2 slalom boyz. I thought Greg Rutherford was excellent on the field, but truly magnificent with the media.

Hoping for Irish (and GBR)  gold in the boxing, and a BMX medal for Shanaze.

What are your worst and best bits?

cheers

simon

More Ironical Irony

As you may know I am a bit of a rich client fan, and have a pretty low opinion of browser based ‘apps’.

Of course the advantage of a web/server based systems is you can throw any old shite together and call it released. Then roll fixes out hourly, or more frequently, until it finally does enough of what the users want, to get them off your case so you can go back to cv polishing.

When aiming for a richer client experience the deployment and update story is often not quite so easy. So much so that we sometimes make sure things actually do what the user needs before releasing.

The thin client guys have looked down on us ‘legacy’ fat client guys for a long time, with our excessive client side requirements (eg client needs MS Office installed, etc).

S000 … The biggest block to big biz migration to Windows 8?

Excel/VBA apps? no

Access apps? no

VB6 apps? no

Read it and savour the irony.

Not only have your users had to put up with a truly dysfunctional interface with appalling user interaction features, now your crappy browser apps have locked your org into a 13 year old operating system.

Thin client my arse!

cheers

simon

 

New name for Metro?

It seems Microsoft has had to sack off their chosen name for their latest UI catastrophe (Metro).

What would be your suggestion?

Mine is:

Specialised Human Interface Tablet Experience.

or SHITE for short.

cheers

simon

Any of you buy into FacePlant ™?

I just happened across a comment that it is now trading down below twenty having IPO’ed at 40 odds. No wonder so many execs are getting trampled in the stampede out the door.

I can think of more fun ways to lose half my money.

GB comes to mind…

I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.
George Best

I also read about the Knight destructacon algo disaster, potentially driving them titsup. I am sure this was a ‘proper’  HFT algo tech, not some Excel/VBA monster. But the effect seems pretty similar (Google Dr Evil spreadsheet). Please, please, please let the Knight rider ‘system’ be called KITT.

In a similar vein I also spotted that UBS are suing NASDAQ for their part in the FacePalm debacle. (Or FaceBerg as it is now known). Presumably they ended up owning too many of these citrus shares.

So its been a good few weeks for crap systems, no national spreadsheet horror stories though (Unless you include the Olympic ticketing/empty seat fiasco, which we were told last year was spreadsheet based).

What little spreadsheeting I have been doing recently has been Gnumeric, I can’t remember the last time I fired up Excel (or Windows in fairness).

I am still resisting the pressure to participate in Facebilk, I think they will probably rename it to facespace as people leave in droves, and evidence emerges of millions  of fake accounts. Too old for faceache, too young for linked in, what should I do?

On the investment front I guess you could always try to recoup your FB losses with MS shares ready for the Win8 effect? (buying puts of course ;-)).

cheers

simon