Nokia down with a feather
The world waits with bated breath for the results of our Nokia Man lookalike competition. Which of you looks most like he has security issues? Who will walk away with the brand new Nokia kit?
Thanks to all of you who voted, especially because you provided some excitement in our long leisurely August afternoons by making the results extremely close. The result was only decided at the very end, when we counted the last bunch of votes and found that our winner, by fewer than 10 votes, was… Scott!
But then you know that already, because we printed his picture above, to show how hard-looking our readers really are.
So, congratulations to Scott Sykes, and to Andy Dobson, who was kind enough to nominate him. Our advice to you Andy: if Scott tells you he wants the champagne as well, give it to him.
The song renames the same
Squillions of you have sent in your song titles. You’ll have to go to some lengths to beat China In your Hand in our humble opinion, but that’s no reason not to have a go.
Chris Bristow, at BT, takes the obvious route, offering I Don’t Want to Talk About IT by Rod Stewart. Dave Pridgeon, at IS Integration, offers some high-quality suggestions. We enjoyed the Lipps Inc classic FuncKeyTown, the Blue Öyster Cult (ask your dad) classic Don’t Fear the Reboot, and (excruciatingly) the Belgian punk stylings of Plastic Bertrand, singing SAP Plan, Poor Moi.
More next week.
Paging Al Koholick...
Our old mate Grendon Underwood gets in touch from O2, after we revealed that he’s not really a person, but the very silly name of a village in Buckinghamshire. ‘I wondered how long it would take for someone to comment on this – it happens wherever I work,’ he says. Well, Gren, wherever that is, it doesn’t appear to be at O2. ‘We don’t have anyone working here called that,’ says an unimpressed press officer. ‘We only have two Underwoods in the entire company and certainly no Grendons’.
On the other hand, Gren does have a potentially interesting question: ‘How many of my fellow readers are named after places?’ If you’re going to write and pretend that your name is Melton Mowbray, don’t bother. But we’d love to hear from an Alice Springs or a Shirley Heights.
To the Victor the spoils
Mobiles: the latest cautionary tale. ‘It was much better when you were here – Zenga isn’t worth anything,’ read the text from Romanian footballer Marian Aliuta to his old coach and friend Victor Piturca.
Sadly, Romania’s top star sent the text criticising his new coach to another Victor in his phone book. The recipient was Victor Becali, owner of Aliuta’s club Steaua Bucharest. Cue the exit of Aliuta. Oops!
A quarantine-y little problem
We wish more of your employers would take Saga’s responsible attitude to spam.
A mole forwards a memo from the company’s IT department that is an example to us all: ‘Unsolicited email is becoming an increasing problem across the company,’ it says. ‘The content of this type of email can be offensive, and dealing with it will take up recipients’ valuable time. It is therefore important that we minimise, as far as possible, the amount of spam being received.
‘To this end we have introduced a new facility that classifies emails into three categories: spam, maybe spam, not spam. Emails that fall into the ‘not spam’ category will be forwarded to your inbox, as normal. Those that are categorised as ‘maybe spam’ will be forwarded to your inbox, but the subject line will be
prefixed with “maybe spam”. The emails identified as spam will be quarantined and not sent to your inbox.’
All very sensible. ‘However, given the possibility that some legitimate emails may be wrongly identified as spam, the email system will inform you on a daily basis that emails addressed to you have been identified as spam and therefore not delivered. It then gives you the option of viewing these emails.’
Excellent! No more time wasting. Except when you have to check your spam to see if it’s spam. Or not.
Shake your butty
Last week we asked why Ian Cleator’s sandwich contents didn’t add up to 100 per cent. Martin Liddament, at Yorkshire Forward (which strikes us as perhaps an oxymoron), suggests: ‘The missing food gets stacked in the retail world’s aisle number 9 3/4 along with the functions that disappear from Microsoft software every time there is a security fix.’ Catty! Carl Bennett suggests making his own, to guarantee 100 per cent sandwichness every time. ‘Semi-toasted peanut butter, avocado and tomato is good. But it goes a bit soggy by lunchtime,’ he says.
Online noone can hear you scream
And finally: art lovers can relax. With the likes of a half-eaten banana and footballer Kieron Dyer having been offered for auction, reader James Durrant reassures us he‘s scouring eBay for the first sighting of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Rock of wages
More songs for jobs. ‘Project managers fill their time making tea and coffee, so a suitable soundtrack would be China in Your Hand by T’Pau,’ suggests Roger Kirby, coincidentally a project manager at The Infrassistance Company.
He also suggests the Beatles classic Gannt Buy Me Love, though you’d have to be a project manager to fully appreciate that one.
Guy Dawson, at Crossflight, suggests network engineers suit Led Zeppelin’s Communication Breakdown.
Dave Meeks, at Whitechapel, likes the album Pipe Dream by Alan Hull for Unix gurus, though for all users he recommends Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Perl. Keep sending them in.
More dead than alive
Another episode in our occasional series on how egovernment is revolutionising society takes us to Antwerp, home of Christina Lauwers. Or it would, if she weren’t dead. The problem is that Christina keeps insisting to the authorities that she is alive, and they keep telling her that she is not.
The latest chapter came a few weeks ago, when the Central Administration for the Registration of Vehicles refused her permission to register a car in her name, telling her she had died two years ago. Previously, the Belgian Central Administration had written to her husband with their condolences, and cancelled her identity card until he wrote to tell them differently.
A few months later, she wasn’t allowed to pay her taxes, what with being deceased again. We don’t know why the Belgian government wants her a goner, but it’s nice to see that egovernment is working so well.
Up the shirkers
If you’re busy setting up spoof webcams to avoid work, you’ll be delighted that the Department of Work and Pensions is sticking up for your rights to be indolent.
When Beryl King, who runs an employment agency in Totton, Hants, wanted to advertise in her local Jobcentre for warehouse workers last week, she asked for ‘hard-working and reliable’ staff. But the Jobcentre wouldn’t let her, saying that the advert discriminated against people who are not industrious.
Little point to big things
Guy Mason adds a further explanation for the letter to LinuxFormat that expressed the opinion in pure gobbledegook that UML was ‘The Next Big Thing’. ‘What it is trying to say is that if you produce a load of diagrams with stickmen, ellipses and boxes with lines joining them, followed up by text
documents stating things such as “if an idiot turns off the server then the system will go down”, you will impress your boss or customers,’ he says.
‘The main benefit to the system is that if at some point your boss or customer shows any sign of understanding it, then you can update it to a later version which is even more unintelligible.’
Ah! So UML is just like all the other Big Things then.
A stacked lunch
‘I work for a large insurance company and recently purchased a cheese sandwich from the staff canteen,’ says Ian Cleator, who is yet to master the technique of the arresting opening sentence.
Hang on, though, it gets better: ‘I read the label and was surprised to find that the contents listed only added up to 96 per cent. Where is the other four per cent?
‘The following day I purchased a ploughman’s sandwich and discovered it was much better value, with contents totalling 101 per cent.’
His joy was short-lived. He later bought a ham sandwich (77 per cent) and a tuna roll (95 per cent). Where has the rest of his sandwiches gone? Is this practice widespread? Check your labels at once, and let us know.
We Fridgedaire you
Following our series on spoof webcams, Steve Kesterton, at HomeZone, has a demonstration of the power of the cam. His head office security system is being upgraded with alarms and CCTV cameras.
As the engineer installed an alarm sensor in the common room ceiling one lunchtime, Steve told his colleagues that it was actually a management webcam to monitor unauthorised access to the fridge.
And lo: a recent rash of fridge pilfering stopped immediately. He hasn’t found the culprit, but we can conclude that he or she isn’t the sharpest employee at HomeZone.
It’s time to put on make-up…
Ben Rodway, at Lan2Lan, would like to disagree with Paul Morros and point out that the Nokia Man in no way looks like Beaker from The Muppet Show. ‘I should know, as “Beaker” has become my office nickname because of my spiky hair,’ he says. ‘I have attached the photo taken from my page on the company intranet.’ (Note: Ben duly supplied us with a picture – not of himself, but of the actual Beaker – as if we’d fall for that one: we at Backbytes remain Muppets aficionados). We feel a whole new lookalike competition coming on. Does anyone else want to nominate a colleague who looks like a Muppet?
And the Nokia nominations are
But before that, it’s time to vote for the winner of the Nokia Man lookalike competition. What a funny looking lot you are. After much consideration, we have narrowed down the field to four.
Could it be Andy Hughes and his undeniably silly hair, as proposed by Rod Wallace?
Might it be Andy Williams and his copious embonpoint, as recommended by Lee Bustin?Perhaps you prefer the scary intensity of a man who genuinely has issues, Scott Sykes, as submitted by Andy Dobson.Or finally, the goofy expression of Alex Blewitt, who had the astounding lack of self-awareness to put himself forward.
Language for beginners
Last week we published a letter from LinuxFormat that appeared to be written in a strange language, and we asked for your translation. Some of you have nobly stepped up.
‘The paragraph basically says that it is possible to design software that does what users want instead of what the developers and architects want it to do,’ says Leon Jollans, at xaman.
‘Clearly if this information ever gets out, everybody will be doing it. It’ll cause immeasurable problems for developers and project managers, so the analysts have carefully and kindly expressed it in Martian. Which can only be a good thing.’
Robert Williams, at InferMed, adds: ‘Basically, the letter says that you can draw pretty pictures to help write requirements documents. I’ve heard it touted as the next big thing in IT for several years now.
I think it’s waiting in a queue just behind the paperless office.’
Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?
It’s August, the time of year when columns publish cute animal stories until everyone returns from holiday. Would we do that? Judge for yourself as we bring you the tale of Jasper the cat. The furball was found wandering around Oxford recently, but luckily he had a microchip which identified where he was from… the US. Jasper’s owners are nowhere to be found. The RSPCA is speculating that he’s a strong swimmer.
Happiness is a warm pun
We note with interest that few of you seem to be recommending appropriate song titles that suggest fulfilment and achievement. ‘Neil Young’s Piece of Crap could possibly apply to the output of any
and every government project,’ says David Covey.
Pink Floyd, meanwhile, turn out to be a very fertile ground. ‘For all programmers jumping on the Java bandwagon: Sheep,’ says Malcolm Buckingham. ‘Anyone working for Microsoft: Money. All of those still waiting for BT to provide ADSL: Wish You Were Here.’
On a less literal level: ‘How about Donovan’s Try to Cache the Wind,’ says John Radcliffe, at Sharp. ‘Or The More I CPU, The More I Want You?’
And Mike Chatfield fancies KC & The Sunshine Band’s That’s The Way I Like IT.
That’s the sort of excruciating pun we would like to encourage. Any more of these?
Chamber-Pod music
It has been a while since we featured a boring webcam, but thanks to Neil O’Connor, we can show you one that really makes our blood boil.
‘This one is trained on someone’s iPod, which unfortunately is not even present for much of the day,’ he says, sending us to www.ieatpaint.com/webcam/. They even gave their iPod a name: Orpheus.
As a combination of the insufferable smugness of iPod owners and the teeth-grinding self-importance of
web developers who think we care what music they like, this is perhaps one of the most infuriating web pages on the entire internet.
Here’s to you, Mary Robinson
And finally: a heartwarming tale on the BBC news web site, spotted by reader Dan Ryan.
It’s all about Mary Robinson, a 98-year-old former midwife who had never used a computer in her life but who, since completing a five-week computer course, now shops online.
‘Computers are marvellous,’ she told the BBC. ‘I’ve been shopping, played cards and created files.’
‘Shopping and playing cards,’ muses Dan. ‘Sounds like she’s ready for a career on an IT helpdesk.’
And the winner is… weight for it, weight for it
Three of our readers wait in barely contained excitement, wondering if they will win our competition to find the most amusing way of bullying trainees.
Last week the votes piled in. Some were for Helen George, tricked into growing a shag-pile carpet of maggots in ICI’s basement. And some were for Julie Dearsley, who bared her soul to us: yes, she did go and queue at the Post Office for a punch card operator’s licence.
However, in a close three-way fight, the winner is Alex Bailey, who might still be waiting at the Post Office Telecommunications stores today for his ‘long weight’. A worthy winner: not only a classic gag, but a trick that you can all play on your trainees, unless they have prepared for their interview by reading Computing.
Well done Alex! Get in touch, and we’ll send some champagne.
It‘s a Nokia-out
With feverish anticipation, we publish our last two Nokia look-alikes. Next week, you get to vote on the four finalists. Our winning Nokia man gets some spanking new Nokia kit.
First up, Alex Blewitt sends a picture of himself. ‘I’m looking for a new job at the moment and hope that this might be a good chance to advertise myself,’ he says. Fine for any job specifying ‘must look like plasticine Nokia man’ in its requirements. Second, we’ve been wondering why no one from BAE Systems has been in touch yet. Ben Buttigieg helpfully supplies a picture of his boss, Roger Huxley. He also provided a helpful green Photoshopped version, but we know that even BAE Systems doesn’t have employees that look like that.
One final comment: ‘The Nokia man shares a stunning resemblance to Beaker, the lab technician from The Muppet Show. I wonder if somebody at Nokia looks like Dr Bunsen Honeydew - in which case should we start worrying about Nokia’s latest offerings exploding?’ asks Paul Morris, at the Nottingham Building Society.
Go with the flow
So many of you are inspired to write by our piece on whether glass is a liquid or a solid because old windows are thicker at the bottom, that we thought we should give you some more information.
‘Its atomic structure is liquid-like (amorphous) in that it has no long-range order, unlike crystalline materials which are made of atoms lined up in an orderly fashion,’ says David Allsop, at Qinetiq.
‘To see the effect described, you’d need to make the windows out of jelly, or the gooey “smashing orangey bit in the middle” of a jaffa cake,’ points out Jeremy Kimmons, at Robert Dyas.
Simon Brockbank, at United Utilities, claims that anyone who wants to know more (more?) can find it on most of the web’s urban myth sites, or at www.glassnotes.com/WindowPanes.html.
He knows, because he found it a few weeks ago, when researching the exciting news that a colleague had told him: apparently £2 coins where the Queen is wearing a necklace are worth up to £15! Or maybe, as he found out, not.
Songs sung blue
Our request for songs to match your job titles has not unleashed a tidal wave of positivity.
‘Speaking as a Unix administrator forced into basic software testing on Windows systems, the Manic Street Preachers’ Suicide is Painless is the best fit I can find,’ says Stewart Wilson.
‘One song stands out regardless of which job you do… Talking Heads’ Road To Nowhere,’ says Andrew Tait, catching the mood of the correspondence.
Letters seek enlightenment
Les Hawkins, at the General Register Office (GRO), needs your help. He’s been reading the letters page in LinuxFormat, and has some exciting news.
‘It is possible to specify a business system completely and unambiguously from a domain model consisting of a static UML class diagram with dynamic business use-cases defined in structured English in terms of the static model,’ says the letter. ‘Such model-driven development form essentially a requirement-level model will be the Next Big Thing in IT…’
Only thing is, he’d really like to know what on Earth this means. So for the sake of the requirement-level models at the GRO, could one of our Linux-using readers please tell us the secret?
Call waiting...
A few weeks ago we suggested you cut down on the calls to your desk by implementing a pretend webcam of it, showing a picture of the empty desk. Scott Doughty, at Dignity, tried it out, with excellent results.
‘A user from our finance department wanted to report that the system wasn’t working,’ he reports. ‘He was about to call the IT department, but checked the page and saw that we weren’t there, so decided not to call.’
Imagine how much work you could do if you didn’t have people phoning you up asking you to do things! Just try it.
Lazy for a living
For all of you who are fluent in French, some great advice in a new book this week. Bonjour Paresse (translation: Hello Laziness), is a popular how-to manual on the other side of the channel, with excellent advice on ‘the art of doing the least work possible for your employer’.
Sadly, author Corinne Maier’s insights have not been appreciated by her employers, the French electricity board EDF, and she has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing.
Could it have been the chapter entitled Business Culture, My Arse, or The Morons Who Are Sitting Next To You?
Perhaps it was her advice that if you want to do as little as possible, do the most useless job: become a consultant. After all, Maier is a consultant to EDF, so she should know.
Here’s to you, Mary Robinson
And finally: a heartwarming tale on the BBC news web site, spotted by reader Dan Ryan.
It’s all about Mary Robinson, a 98-year-old former midwife who had never used a computer in her life but who, since completing a five-week computer course, now shops online.
‘Computers are marvellous,’ she told the BBC. ‘I’ve been shopping, played cards and created files.’
‘Shopping and playing cards,’ muses Dan. ‘Sounds like she’s ready for a career on an IT helpdesk.’
