This is a terribly written book - albeit one with an important message. Eat That Frog is about how to avoid procrastinating. But rather than approach it from a scientific or methodological point of view, Tracy just gives some basic tools for arranging your work day. There are no citations in this book - something the author is strangely proud of. I do not dwell on the various psychological or emotional explanations for procrastination or poor time management. There are no lengthy departures …
Continue reading →
I once drove my company car to my company's office and then drove around the company car park for 20 minutes looking in vain for a parking space. Whereupon I double-parked across a couple of cars, flipped on my hazard lights, and dialled in to my Very Important Meeting. Half-an-hour later, I drove home to think about my life choices. I then started looking for a new job. From the moment I entered the workforce back in the early 2000s, I've been in open-plan offices with a mandatory hot-desk…
Continue reading →
An utterly superfluous movie. Have you seen Cube? Or perhaps Saw? Maybe My Little Eye? All identical. But this has put last year's zeitgeist as its title as a selling point. The major problem with this outing of the plot is that it invites us to participate in a puzzle but provides none of the clues. A good story lets the audience guess the answer just a second before the cast. Or, at least, make the answer obvious in retrospect. But, in Escape Room, we just get people shouting at each…
Continue reading →
This blog runs on WordPress. Using their JetPack plugin, I get fairly detailed stats on views and visitors. But, bizarrely, the API is undocumented. Well, sort of... Let me explain: Just Show Me The Code Here's the API call to get a year's worth of data about your blog. https://public-api.wordpress.com/rest/v1.1/sites/shkspr.mobi::blog/stats/visits ?unit=day &date=2021-01-03 &quantity=365 &stat_fields=views%2Cvisitors' Replace shkspr.mobi::blog with your blog's ID as found on…
Continue reading →
For the past decade, Richard Herring has been answering sexist trolls on International Women’s Day when they ask ‘when is International Men’s Day?’ in the mistaken belief there isn’t one. If only the trolls had learned to use Google they would realise that there is an International Men’s Day – it’s on November 19th. In The Problem with Men Richard expands on his Twitter discussions and tackles some of the big questions surrounding the problems of toxic masculinity – for women, but also f…
Continue reading →
Welcome back, friends! I've identified all of the mobile phones used in every episode of Doctor Who! This post looks at the New Year's Day Special "Revolution of the Daleks". Do feel free to rummage in the archives. Wooooweeee! What an episode! Only a couple of shots of mobiles in this one - but worth sticking around for. Graham is rocking his iPhone - which we last saw in the S11 episode "Resolution". In the S12 adventure "Spyfall", Graham has a sleek black Android - which he promptly…
Continue reading →
This is a quick round-up of the blogs which "did numbers" this year - and a few which I feel were cruelly overlooked. I posted a new blog every day in 2020 - so don't be surprised if you missed a few. OK? Here we go! January Watch out; there's a scam about. People love sharing horror stories. Scammers registering date-based domain names A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming Why do we have different programming languages? A nice security report to Google but, sadly, no…
Continue reading →
