An active circle
For those of you about to go into a blue-sky brainstorming session, David Bolt at Royal Bournemouth Hospital has been ‘pondering the abominable word “proactive”.’ As he works in the NHS, he knows far more about management consultancy jargon than the rest of us.
He looked up what it means: ‘taking action by causing change and not only reacting to change when it happens’. So he looked up ‘reactive’: ‘reacting to events or situations rather than acting first to change or prevent something’.
That leaves a small problem for him: ‘Where does this leave the word “active”? We must surely infer that the meaning of “active” occupies a place somewhere between the pro- and re- variants, but doesn’t that mean it has the meaning of the old-fashioned word “inactive”?’ Be assured we will be actively looking into it.
Orange rage
Our series on the colours of misery, and the actions of the Post Office in claiming the rights to the colour red, prompt Chris Belham at PIMSS, who started the whole thing, to point to the actions of Orange against easyMobile, in February.
‘Orange Personal Communications Services, the operator owned by France Telecom, began a court claim against easyMobile Ltd, easyGroup Ltd and easyGroup IP Ltd over our use of the colour orange,’ says the firm.
A little more colour (see what we did there?) was added by Frank Rasmussen, the chief executive of easyMobile.com.
‘If Orange was so concerned about the use of the colour orange, why has it not taken legal action against Sainsbury’s, which is also using the colour orange on its web site,’ he asks.
We suggest that this might be because Sainsbury’s is a supermarket. ‘I am not a lawyer,’ he adds, somewhat redundantly, ‘but I do not believe this court action has anything to do with the use of the colour orange.’
Which isn’t exactly true either, but we’re not standing in the way of a good slanging match.
Board anyone?
Someone who refuses to be named, in case it gives those who work with him an idea, criticises our decision to publicise www.prankmike.com, showing the beautiful cardboard office that Mike’s pals built to replace his real office while he was on holiday.
‘I can only condemn the timing of your piece and link, particularly as our managing director just became a grandad and his PC mysteriously started playing unwelcome chunks of Clive Dunn’s tune instead of the proper Windows noises. No prizes for guessing who was blamed and was given the job of un-grandadding it.’
That would be you, mystery writer, because you put it there in the first place.
So why is our correspondent worried? That would be because he’s about to go on holiday. So those of you who work alongside him, go ahead. Make his nightmares come true.
Back to the future
We have another suggestion on how to measure the speed of your broadband: ‘I use InternetFrog.com to measure my broadband speeds,’ says Norman Brown. ‘It saves the hassle of figuring how many bits to a byte on a wet Tuesday.
‘A year ago, BT gave me a 2Mbit/s link – which the Frog said was 1.89Mbit/s.’ That’s OK, as 0.11Mbit/s is only, er, a few bytes off. Then BT said: ‘do you want 8Mbit/s?’, he tells us, which after testing the line became 5Mbit/s, and after testing with the frog was 2.53Mbit/s, or 50.6 per cent of the claimed speed.
‘Is this progress?’ asks Norman.
If you say yes, you have to tell us exactly how many bytes of progress it is. Go on then, who has the slowest fast broadband? Already, we wish we hadn’t asked.
Fuelling the fire
What inventions, we asked, have been stolen by other countries? This marked a small deluge of mail that we will bring to you over the next few weeks.
‘I have been waging a personal war on the use of the term Diesel engine for many years, as a Mr Simpson from Birmingham produced a Compression Ignition Engine, and carried out much research on the subject, some three years before Herr Diesel,’ rages Jon Anslow.
‘I have a T-shirt given to me by my Australian brother-in-law that says “Great Aussie Inventions No 23: The lawnmower”,’ writes an indignant Colin Anderson. ‘When in fact, as every schoolboy knows, the lawnmower was invented in 1830 by Edwin Beard Budding, an engineer from Stroud.’
And Peter Scott has perhaps our greatest innovation of all: ‘Two words: bad government,’ he says.
Cool it
Now that the heatwave has passed, we finally bring you a useful tip for keeping cool in the office.
‘Our stores man has taken the fans from inside a large server, four in total, and plugged them in on his desk upright next to his PC,’ says Sam McIntyre at Alfred McAlpine. ‘The result is a lovely breeze.’
Just one tip if you’re doing this: be careful which of your company’s servers you take the fans from.
Silence is golden
Sue Nanninga writes to tell us that ‘while on the internet just now I received a pop-up offering me a free silent ringtone.’ And you thought all pop-ups offered things people didn’t want.
‘I declined the offer, thinking it was a silly idea, but I now regret the decision,’ she adds. ‘Maybe I could have sold it on eBay and made some money.’
We would offer to sell it for her, but she didn’t say which model phone it was compatible with.
No hard feelings
Yet again, the reputation for computational excellence that our contributors have acquired over the years is upheld, as we return again to the subject of the G-force suffered by a hard drive when it is pushed – sorry, falls – off a desk.
‘After falling 0.5m from rest, the hard drive will have a velocity of 3.132 m/s’ says Alan Johnston. ‘This is then brought to rest by the carpet over a distance of 5mm (0.005m), so the braking deceleration is about 100g.’
The solution: don’t leave hard drives on your desk. Or if you do, buy a shag pile.
Palm funday
We asked last week why Lite-On bothered to invent the mouse with its own in-built fan.
‘Maybe the makers, accepting that users seem to take great delight in filling peripherals with coffee, have added the fan to help dry out the internals quicker,’ says Antony Hawkins at the University of Sheffield, who sounds like he spent some traumatic years in hardware support.
‘Does this mean this company has recognised another physical feature of your average IT professional?’ asks Chris Carter at the University of Nottingham.
‘Along with the bad dress sense, bad body odour, bad breath, bad social skills and extreme pizza eating habits, are we now all classed to have sweaty palms?’
We couldn’t possibly comment, looking at our feet and whistling innocently.
Cardboard copout
You’ve eaten the internal packaging, but what do with the cardboard box it all came in? We suggest you visit www.prankmike.com.
Discovered by reader Graham Scott, it is the visual record of when the mysterious Mike went on holiday, and his co-workers built him an entire office from cardboard boxes.
Enjoy the fabulous detail on Mike’s cardboard awards, read the error messages written in biro on his cardboard monitor, and call him on his cardboard phone. Then go and build one for your colleague before he gets back from holiday.
Beware exploding traffic lights
Jon Szwer, a man who has featured in our pages before, seems to be the sort of chap we can do business with: a thorough reader of the technology press, with time on his hands and a talent for nitpicking.
He has spotted a claim in Ricoh’s marketing that the traffic light was invented and first used in Ohio.
‘I recalled a question on a quiz programme: “What injured a policeman outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868?”’ he tells us. So he checked, and indeed it was as he remembered – an exploding gas-powered traffic light. If Douglas Adams had written historical fiction, we assume it would have been something like this.
Anyway, he’s not happy: ‘What other inventions or ideas do readers think may have been “stolen” by foreigners?’ he asks, indignantly. Over to you guys.
Faxed off
Fax Revenge III: the Junk Faxers strike back. But first, an admission from Phil Beynon at Infolink Electronic Systems.
‘Sometimes I will send them a childlike drawing of a fish, about 30 feet long, suitably shaded so the paper roll can’t be reused,’ he says.
However, even rather sweet acts of revenge such as this might be helping your adversary, says Keith Hirst.
‘Does your correspondent who sent infinite loop faxes to a perpetrator of junk faxes realise that the sender probably had the last laugh?’ he asks. ‘Their fax machine was probably a computer, not a paper-based machine.’ So you can’t use up the paper.
‘Also, his company has to pay the phone bill for the time his fax takes to send, and if it is sent to an 0870 number the recipient gets money for the number of minutes the fax takes.’ The worst case? The return number is premium rate. Be careful before you fax that fish.
Shrink to fit
More ideas on saving office space. We have already suggested stacking the furniture – and the people sitting in it – vertically, but we have missed an obvious trick, says Alistair Maclean: ‘Shrink your workforce.’
He admits to being vertically challenged himself, so he has some knowledge of the subject.
‘Considerable cost-cuttings can be made: smaller people tend to be chubbier and need less heating during the colder seasons; they also need less food and so can be employed for less remuneration,’ he says.
If you’re Alistair’s boss and you want to save on your salary bill, you might consider paying him by the vertical inch in future.
Red peril
Peter Denyer at Interdean London was looking at the Royal Mail web site to find out about SmartStamp software, but found some frightening terms and conditions at the bottom of the page.
‘Royal Mail, the Royal Mail Cruciform, the colour red and SmartStamp are all registered trademarks of Royal Mail Group plc.’ As he points out: ‘How do you copyright the colour red?’
Just drop it
‘Matthew Glenholme needs to dig out his old physics books and do a bit of revision,’ says Tim Yates, a former physics teacher, following our correspondent’s calculation on the shock that his hard drive suffers when it falls off a desk.
‘Apparently his hard drive has reached just under mach 3 on its way to the bin. Perhaps he should throw his calculations in the bin and hang on to his hardware?’
Trevor Anderson attaches his calculations, which show an impact of about 20G – so don’t panic that you’ll exceed the Seagate 75G limit unless your desk is stacked vertically on top of several others to save office space. Which still leaves the question: how will you know if the drive has suffered a 75G acceleration?
‘Maybe they contain some kind of miniature accelerometer, like those glass widgets you can put in packing cases to see if they have been dropped in transit. They probably hide it under the label that says “Do not remove this label”,’ says Phil Britton at Granada Learning. Go on, have a look.
Champing at the bits
Talking of digging out textbooks. ‘Your correspondent John Loader complains he only sees 3Mbit/s from his 8Mbit/s broadband connection,’ says Matthew Adams at Digital Healthcare. But it’s often not the ISP’s fault, he says.
‘The sites he connects to may not offer anything like 8Mbit/s upstream to him. Many sites throttle bandwidth to a connection.’
He adds that John is ‘probably doing a conversion from the “240kbit/s” reports he receives from his progress indicator. Because of protocol overheads, you really need to count a byte as about 10 bits, not eight, which also chops a bit off the reported performance.’
There’s a lot more, but we stopped reading. So lay off the ISPs. They might be giving you 8Mbit/s – you’re just counting wrong.
Inbuilt fan-tastic
Recently we asked for ideas on how to cope with the summer heat in the office, and all of a sudden we’re back into ‘you couldn’t make it up’ territory.
Exhibit one: the mouse with an inbuilt fan, found by Rick Dove.
An end to hot mouse misery would be virtually guaranteed, if only the problem existed in the first place. But there’s one question the copious technical specifications fail to answer: why bother?
Fast thinking
You must all be worried, wondering, like Julian Coles, how you could invalidate the warranty of your Seagate hard drive by exposing it to a shock of more than 75G.
‘Julian does not need to drive them through a brick wall at high speed to experience 75G,’ says Matthew Glenholme, who, using the equation v2 = u2 + 2ax, where v = final velocity, u = initial velocity, a = acceleration and x = distance, has done his sums.
‘If I have a hard disk balanced on my desk, which is 0.5m above the rubbish carpet they have in my office, which is 5mm thick above an inelastic concrete base, using the above equation, the velocity on impact is 3.13m/s, assuming that the carpet deforms completely and a = 99.87G. So all you have to do to invalidate the warranty on your hard drives is push them off the end of the desk. Hope this is useful.’
Full time
So, you have pushed the hard drives off your desk. What next? Nick Livingstone has an idea: you could find the longest set of T&Cs on the internet.
He subscribes to the National Lottery online. ‘When I was notified of a change to this useful service, I was about to press the button to say that I had read them. Then I decided to have a second look. Curious, I copied them into Word, where they run into more than 38,000 words.’
Can anyone beat this?
Bad choice
Before we deal with this week’s stories of revenge, we receive a plaintive email from Tobie Fysh.
Last week we covered Mike Gathergood’s story of how he created a web site of complaints against his holiday company when it refused him the compensation, extracting the compensation he wanted as a result.
‘His story of revenge is very close to mine,’ Tobie says. ‘The only problem is I don’t have my money yet.’ If you’re curious as to which firm has decided to play hardball, the clue is in the URL: his web site is www.firstchoicesucks.co.uk.
Maximum benefit
Lots of office organisation ideas this week: ‘In summer, why not make use of the poor discarded coat stand?’ says Andrew Simpson at Fred Lawton & Son.
‘I use mine as a cable tree. Hang cables over the different pegs and gravity keeps them untangled.’
Alan Jones has a radical plan for creating space and time, and saving electricity. ‘By removing the PC from my desk, I free up the space taken by the base unit, keyboard, mouse pad and speakers, as well as three electricity sockets. This has increased my productivity because no one uses the phone to chase me for work any more.’
He did, however, email this to us, confirming that this is not yet official policy at his company.
Revenge is costly
Fax revenge, episode three: how to deal with firms that keep sending junk faxes.
‘If you fax between 10 and 20 blank sheets of A4 three or four times and remove the “sent from” number, they think their fax machine is broken and call out an engineer. Annoying, and it costs them money,’ says Richard Cavanagh.
The aforementioned Mike Gathergood points out that most faxes today use a toner cartridge. ‘Compile a large document comprising white text on a solid black background. This will rapidly use up the toner cartridge as they are designed for five per cent coverage. Also, black pages are far more likely to curl up and jam as they go through the fuser.’
Mike, we are starting to suspect, may have issues.
Fuelling speed
In the world of free broadband and high speeds, John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services asks: ‘Has anyone ever recorded 8Mbit/s on 8Mbit/s broadband? The fuel computer on my car once told me it will do up to 500 mpg, but the manufacturers modestly only claim 52mpg.
‘However, my broadband provider claims “up to 8Mbit/s” and not the 3Mbit/s I get.’ When we’re holding up car fuel consumption figures as the model of honesty, we know we’re in trouble.
Flag the weather
We wanted suggestions as to how to decimalise the weather, and Alec Cawley at Quantel comes to the rescue.
‘Computing should represent the weather not in decimal, but in binary. The British attitude to the weather can be represented with binary flags: Too Hot/Too Cold, Too Wet/Too Dry, Too Windy/Too Calm. The weather can then be summarised in hex, which shorten weather forecasts considerably: “A2, becoming B4 later, with patches of 42 in Scotland”.’
