SatNaff system fails to deliver
Philip Humphries also has SatNav problems because of his house’s location. His house is in the countryside – he works for East Lindsey Borough Council – and the SatNav sends drivers to a point about a mile from his front door.
‘In the olden days people simply looked at a map to find you, knowing that numbers are odd one side even the other and you count up or down,’ he says.
Recently he called a retailer to ask why they had not delivered, and was told that the SatNav-enabled driver had not been able to find the house.
‘Why didn’t the driver call for directions?’ he asked. ‘He’s not allowed to do that,’ he was told. Presumably it would hurt the little SatNav’s feelings.
Excuses excuses
For all our readers in China the Beijing Times brings the excellent news that an online service is now selling you excuses.
Called Tuofu – which apparently means ‘bring fortune to people’ – its charges are pretty steep: a basic excuse costs 80p, while if you want to dump a girlfriend or boyfriend, you have to pay the equivalent of £8.40.
At the top end of the market, a ready-made marriage proposal costs £100. Apparently, in China, you need an excuse to get married.
There is even a discount if you buy multiple excuses, which we think the majority of the potential customer base would be taking advantage of.
However, we are completely certain that you are more than capable of making up your own excuses, for free. Aren’t you?
Chinese signese
Still in China, English language road signs continue to mine a rich seam of unintentional humour.
Peter Leeson at Q:PIT has several favourites: ‘No drunk driving within industrial estate’ raises several subsidiary questions; the anti-litter sign warns us severely: ‘No tossing’; but we particularly enjoy the sign: ‘Psychos are not allowed in taxi’. If only it applied to the drivers as well.
Nuts and dolts
What is the correct technical term for the sentence case when someone accidentally leaves the caps lock on?
Wilf Forrow, or more accurately wILF fORROW suggests we call it ‘pillOCK cASE’. ‘hAPPENS TO ME ALL THE TIME,’ he says.
It should be called Donkey-Caps, in honour of the donkey who decided to relocate the Caps Lock Key and place it next to the “A”,’ suggests Peter Slegg at Exemplar Associates.
Chris Gay writes from Fife with another newbie typing problem: ‘The other problem that plagued novices using some editors was when they accidentally pressed a non-printing character that entered the text, so everything on the screen looked fine, but nothing worked. If we call it “Non-Useful-Text Case”, we get “NUTCase”.’
We like to think that somewhere a support desk is sorting its callers into ‘pillocks’ and ‘nuts’. But who gets priority?
Do me a favour
Robin Wilson wants to know how to avoid having to save his work web applications in Favorites, when he does not like them one bit.
‘The obvious answer is to switch to Firefox and use its Bookmarks feature instead,’ says Mark Goodge.
‘If Robin Wilson failed to store these apps in his Favorites, would he be “History”?’ asks Gary Cailes.
Richard Moss at GEDYS (which is either an initialisation or an acronym, but we don’t care any more) has a useful solution as to where to store the unpleasant work-related pages in a folder with the compulsory name of ‘Favourites’.
‘There is an easy and less technical alternative. Just create a folder under Favourites called “Not really”. Works for me.’
Bar humbug
We have put so much effort into naming the IT pub, we have not given any thought to the sort of people we want to drink there.
Paul Harper writes from ICI: ‘I for one would not be seen dead in an IT pub. It would be full of gormless people who have just bought their new PC from Comet and want free consultation on how to network it to their video recorder.
‘It is the same reason that after years of putting up with these people, I reply “marketing” when people ask what I do for a living.
‘Go to a pub that specifically attracts them? Not this side of a cold day in Hades,’ he says, making him exactly the sort of person we want in our IT pub.
Every pub has a grumpy old git propping up the bar, and Paul, you’re ours.
A leak in company security?
Richard Jones at Finapps is worried. ‘After reading about security lapses in large organisations I became worried by the plumber in the HP ad in last week’s Computing. Clean shirt, unused tools and tool belt. He’s clearly an industrial spy.’
If he uses phrases such as ‘I can do this, but it’ll cost you,’ or ‘I could fix it, but it will take a few weeks to get the parts,’ he is certainly a plumber. But if he talks like that he could work for HP. It’s so hard to tell these days.
Hang up our boots
And so we return to pub names. ‘How about The Re-Boot Inn?’ says Robert Eccleston at Creation Financial Services. We don’t go there Robert, it’s always freezing.
Robin Jones at the Institution of Analysts and Programmers knows a thing or two about hourly rates, and so we take him seriously.
‘What will the pub sign look like? For intuitive recognition, the name must match the icon,’ he says.
And what would be visual and appropriate for an analyst, we ask ourselves? ‘I’ll be calling my pub The Hand Over Fist, which encapsulates both form and function,’ he suggests.
Already the backlash starts. ‘Although “The DOS House” might sound like “a cool place” according to Graham Scott, it comes with one major drawback. You’ll always be denied service,’ says Andrew Carpenter at Cirencester College.
More cheap gags on this subject next week, if we can think of any.
It’s all gone nuts
We like to have names for everything, as our readers know. So, the words with big letters in the middle are called CamelCase, but this generates as many questions as it answers.
How do we categorise the companies and products which refuse any capitalisation at all? ‘Inappropriate external non-capitalisation should be termed “ien” or “ielc” – inappropriate external lower case,’ says Michael Strelitz at DataSafe Services, who is clearly relieved he doesn’t work for datasafe instead.
‘Never mind the deliberate use of capitals part way through a word. Is there a term for text written by a keybord novice: when you look at the screen, you realise you have accidentally hit the Caps Lock, so all capital letters are lower case and all lower case letters are capitals? Is this mONKEY cASE?’ asks Steve Wright.
Suggestions please. mUPPET cASE? nEWBIE cAPS?
A right pair
We have been covering the story of the reader who accidentally deleted half the shoes in the Freemans catalogue. Does this explain the sign that Jon Hammond saw in the window of a shoe shop in Carlisle: ‘Buy one, get one free’? And how do you know which one is free?
All fingers and toes
Antony Hawkins at the University of Sheffield has been reading about the new Apple iPhone at www.apple.
com/iphone/. You know, the revolutionary one.
It says: ‘iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers.
‘I can control my aged Nokia without recourse to my toes, or any other appendages, so I am wondering if any readers can recall any phone that was impossible to control by fingers alone?’
We know of many phones that are impossible to control using fingers, toes, or any other appendage because of the menu system – most of them made by Motorola – but that is not quite the question, is it?
On the road to nowhere
Steve Masters has also become a non-person because his house is not on the current postcode file that most applications use.
‘I am in a road that is less than two years old,’ he says. ‘When I moved in, NTL told me it does not supply my area at all, although I was a customer of NTL just down the road for seven years, and there is an NTL box on every house in our road.
‘I opened an account with BT, but when I phoned back to ask about it, customer services told me I didn’t exist. The utility company came to read our meter and the meter reader said he was confused because our house is listed as “plot 9”.
‘The most annoying aspect of living in a new road is that delivery drivers and taxis rely on SatNav. Our road is not listed, so they pick the nearest road with a similar name, go there and wonder why they can’t find us.’
It is probably easier, and quicker, to move the house.
All of your least favourite things
Robin Wilson writes: ‘With the increasing use of Explorer as a front end to applications, I am forced to store lots of links to such exciting items as the company time-sheet application, and the monthly budget forecasting tool in my “favorites”,’ he laments.
These applications, he points out, are very far from his favourite (or favorite) things, so he feels that Microsoft has failed to represent the true nature of his working life. He is looking for a new name for this area, and wants our suggestions.
And of course, we will need one of you to work out how to change the name on the screen, too.
The long and the short of it
Our thread on which series of letters are abbreviations, which are acronyms and which are initialisations is giving us a headache, so unless there is something really good to write next week – or we have lots of space to fill – we suggest you resolve the argument by repeatedly re-editing the Wikipedia page on the subject until someone gets bored. That person, under internet laws, will win the argument.
However, as our final contribution to the debate, we bring some ideas. ‘Rather than FLA for the new four-letter abbreviation standard may I suggest IVLA which, you will notice, is four letters long,’ says Jon Bagshaw at North Tyneside Council.
‘Another problem is how to upgrade existing TLAs to conform to the new IVLA standard. My initial thought would be a simple addition of the letter F. So RTM becomes RTFM, RTS becomes RTFS, and so on.’
This would have the advantage that it would accurately reflect the expanded version used by IT departments everywhere. Less contentiously: ‘Since we are informed they are not acronyms, TLA is clearly an improper standard to use and we should move to IL3 (Initial Letter 3),’ says Murray Grainger at Elizabeth Finn Homes, who could have a good career at a top software house redefining common ideas as proprietary standards if he plays his cards right.
‘We know that the stock of IL3 labels is exhausted so we can move on to IL4, IL5 and so on as the need arises. An RFC on the new IL4 and IL5 standards will be published soon,’ he adds.
And finally: ‘Reading the articles on abbreviations I wonder why “abbreviation” is such a long word?’ Mike Gooding at Xtrac. Which is a good place to call a halt. Unless you know better.
Stop press
Actually we are only calling a halt to the debate on what you do with four and five letters, because we have breaking news following last week’s initialisation story: ‘I actually invented “LRF” (little rubber feet) as part of a sales campaign Infolink was running in the 1990s, along the lines of “all our systems come with LRF as standard”,’ says industry veteran Phil Beynon, now at Infolink Electronic Systems.
‘At the time there was lots of talk in the media about screen radiation and monitors were starting to appear under the MPR2 low radiation specification. So a lot of people assumed the LR part was to do with low radiation. We finally shared the joke with some of the staff at Ideal Hardware, including Seamus Twohig, our account salesman.
‘The best part, though, was that no customers ever admitted they did not know what LRF actually stood for.’
We wonder if Seamus, who went on to become a director of Ideal Hardware, can confirm this scurrilous story – and reveal whether LRFs were responsible for his rapid promotion.
Poetic justice
Fewer of you should be protesting about speed cameras, and instead agitating for an Indian road sign policy from our leaders.
This week’s contributor is Rachael Maddock, who sends a long list that she found in Ladakh in 2005, including: ‘All will wait better be late’, ‘Darling I like you but not so fast’, and ‘Do not be a gama in the land of the lama’. It is almost poetic.
Beer googles
Back to the question of what to call the IT pub, and this week we have some suggestions for those of you who just like to hang out with people like yourselves.
Oli Whiteside suggests: /dev/pub. Someone who signs himself ‘holdmykidney’ (we assume it is a him) has a similar idea, in which case, he suggests you would have:
>more beer
>more beer
>/
Now which of you could say you would not want to go to one of these establishments? Be honest.
Blown away by hurricane news
After our piece about Nasa using Google Earth to map hurricanes last week,
Anthony Cartmell points us to a deal where Nasa and Google have agreed to share technology. This is potentially a great bonus for Nasa astronauts: searching on ‘drive rocket’ gets 648 hits, although ‘where is the space suit?’ gets only one hit.
But not everyone is happy. ‘Heaven forbid if we get a hurricane in rural Lancashire, because Nasa will not pick it up for at least three years until Google updates its maps,’ says Jeremy Richards at Premierline Direct.
Name and shame
Just a few more of the squillions of pub names you have sent in.
‘How about The Select Star? It is something I say about 10 times a day,’ says Chris Cope at Trinity Expert Systems.
‘If the pub was near a waterway or the sea, it could be called The Floating Point,’ says Paul Richmond at In2Connect Europe.
‘Ctr-Alt-Deli is a bit naff. How about the much more elegant Three-Fingered Salute?’ asks Bob Mould.
Andy Siviter at Betterware has suggestions for the sort of pub names that would be a final resting place for you poor retired programmers: The Stopped Run, The Final Exit, The Last Process, The Terminal State and The
Unmatched Return might not do a big trade in alcopops, but they have a sort of poetry to them.
Oh no, not again
Martin Cawley at the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust has been thinking about the ohnosecond – the time in which you realise you made a big mistake and you cannot undo it.
He is wondering if it could be tested, because it would be a useful benchmark of your ability not to cock up at work, or at least, to limit the damage.
‘Someone who is quick off the mark will be measured as a couple of ohnoseconds, whereas someone a tad slower would be in the tens or higher. If we get to large numbers of ohnoseconds this would be someone so slow that everyone else knew before he or she did.’
On the other hand, if you have a positive ohnosecond measurement, would you be prime employment material at all? Any suggestions for ways to test or grade your colleagues on the ohnoscale, let us know.
A porcine sign
Andrew Scarr at British Energy recalls a road sign that said: ‘Do not proceed when this sign is under water,’ at Sunderland Point in Lancashire. This was one of a pair of signs: the other one just said: ‘Your attention is drawn to the sign opposite’.
But once again pride of place goes to India, where Peter Fitzpatrick of BAE Systems has a friend working for a medical charity. He saw a sign painted on the road outside a ramshackle doorway. The sign simply said: ‘No porking’.
Heil HITLA
Back in the office, Liz Read suggests that our XTLA is a much better abbreviation for extended TLA, not least because it involved CamelCase. She also adds a tip for those of us who are patronised by shop assistants in electronics shops.
‘Next time, just ask if the product has LRFs,’ she says. LRFs? ‘Little Rubber Feet’.
Dave Burns at Kent & Medway HIS is more a man of science. ‘Surely we should take our lead from astronomy and use LTLAs for large TLAs (four letters) and VLTLA (five letters)’, he says.
Mark Tilyard at ENCO Systems prefers Hugely Increased Three Letter Acronym (HITLA), which because you can say it like a word really is an acronym, unlike the other abbreviations in this week’s item.
Controlled, altered, deleted
It is one thing to accidentally delete half the shoes in the Freemans catalogue, but a lot less amusing to discover that you have been deleted by someone else.
‘I regret to report that in the past week, I have discovered that I have been deleted, or at least my home and much of the structure of my building has,’ says a reader who, to add to the mystery, requests anonymity – perhaps in case the deleter wants to finish the job.
‘This is courtesy of the Royal Mail address finder service, which no longer acknowledges my flat or several other flats in my building. The problem with this is that as many web sites use the Royal Mail database for address search, if you cannot get your own address up on the screen, you cannot get an insurance quote – which is how I found out.’
Any more of you ceased to exist recently?
