Dogwonder

“thin-slice” : to rapidly make judgements at an intuitive, almost instantaneous level
“continuous partial attention”: momentarily shift attention to register the snippet of info, and then shift back

Fame….

est. February 17, 2005

….at last. And in the Grauniad as well

SWP_TRON

Hung_Over

est. February 17, 2005

Very hung-over. The booze monkeys well and truly kidnapped me and refused to let me out of the pub until closing time…

I am now hung over and annoyed. Had to endure one of those VERY IRRITATING bus journeys this morning, where it seemed as thought every single passenger was out to annoy me with their constant bloody coughing, sneezing and general breathing! Might have well said NUMBER 76 TO LEPER COLONY on the front. Bastards.

Urban warfare

est. February 11, 2005

Soooo. There was a pitched battle at my local IKEA over the promise of 45GBP Sofas. Oh dear, really not good when people are prepared to fight over Sofas. Still suppose its no different than things like oil. The Grauniad refers to it as ‘a kind of religious frenzy’ where ‘The kind of “must have” mania that infects some shoppers as they close in on a good deal is more akin to the imperatives of religious devotion than those of personal finance’.

So then, in this comparison is the IKEA catlalogue like the bible then? Will there be holy wars between IKEA and Habitat followers?

Eh who nose, weird tho.

IKEA

The lost art of filing

est. February 8, 2005

Interesting article over at the Beeb (link). It discusses the concept of using a web based email system such as Gmail to store information (pictures, phone numbers etc). This certainly something I do on a regular basis. Infact if something doesn’t exist in my inbox then I am unlikely to action it. Further I have taken to sending myself emails to remind me of certain tasks and things for future reference as do others: “You want to remember something, so you send it to your mailbox.” .

However there are certain things I have noticed in such a system. This is something that people are never trained in using. Information management is an extremely complex subject, sure Google et al. can build very powerful search tools, but the searches require people to have entered the information correctly in the first place (rather akin to looking up a word in the dictionary without knowing how to spell it). For example you search for a phone-number – what do you type into the search? If the user has not entered Phone-Number in the body of the text or the full name then it could produce incorrect results. Or possibly zero results leading the user to believe that the entry was not there.

I was once researching information management and an interesting concept was discussed about electronic information management. It basically suggested that when many office tasks shifted from the real to the virtual many roles such as secretaries were no longer necessary. This was because people now had access to word processors and filing systems, yet the skills that the secretaries boasted such as filing were not ever passed on into the electronic sphere.

As I can see it much electronic information is poorly labeled and poorly organized making the task of retrieving it much more difficult. People like Google go a long way to helping us trawl through the mess, but surely effective information management and good practices must be considered.

Ideology of the day

est. February 7, 2005

Existentialism:

I am what I am
And what I am needs no excuses
I deal my own deck
Sometimes the ace
Sometimes the deuces
Its one life And there’s no returning, no revising
One life and so its time to open up your closet