I have been looking for railway stories (non fiction) from 1880 to the Beeching era as like most people I find the lost age of railways very interesting.
Whilst searching I have come across various ghost stories from around the uk.
Some links for others that might be interested:
Rail forum thread - Are our railways haunted? - Excellent thread on a railway forum with lots of short stories.
These jokes are my own creation in the style of / paying homage to Tim Vine. Usual disclaimer applies these were funny in my head, they may not be in reality.
Number 1
DFS delivered my new suite the other day, Sofa so good.
Number 2
I went to the Doctors the other week, he asked for a urine sample. I gave him the sample and he said "I was only pulling your leg" and I replied "No, you are taking the piss".
I have started a new project, yes another one. This one is about writing fictional comedy around interviews of some sort. This is basically all about the conversation between two people which can be quite random and hopefully slightly funny.
Standard disclaimer applies in that these were funny in my own head, you may not find them funny at all.
Interview Number 1
Person A: So why do you want this job?
Person B: I don't
Person A: Pardon?
Person B: I don't want this specific job.
Person A: Then why come to the interview then...
Person B:Well, lets say no one comes to an interview for this job.
Person A: They do, you're here.
Person B:You are not following me at all
You are interviewing for an administration assistant right?
Person A:Well...Yes.
Person B:There are billions of admin jobs right?
Person A: I suppose...
Person B: So what I want is an admin asst job, it does not have to be this job.
Person A: So you don't want this job then.
Person B: Well I wouldn't say no.
Person A: Well thats interesting because I wouldn't say yes.
Person B: Can I suggest next question?
Person A: Do you think that would help?
Person B: At this point in the interview who can say?
Person A: Quite
Person A: Let's move on to what you know about our organisation?
Person B: The business or your personal organisation
Person A: The business of course
Person B: I know very little... I'm afraid
Person A: You are afraid?
Person B: No, I am not scared
Person A: Good, because I have had feedback I am an aggressive interviewer.
Person B: That's ok I have had feedback I am agressive when interviewed.
Person A: I always feel like I am being judged at interviews.
Person B: You are
Person A: Well yes
Person B: It is just so personal though isn't it.
Person A: Yes but that is an interview, impersonal and personal at the same time.
It is an imperfect tool in an imperfect world.
Person B: Like a 102 piece screwdriver set.
Person A: Ah but that's a perfect tool, you have the perfect bit for any screw.
Person B: I think we should agree top disagree.
Person A: Anyway, to move the interview forward slightly
Person B:Certainly a better direction than backwards,
or sideways.
Person A:Quite
Person B: I would see myself as the 102 piece perfect tool for the reasons you just described
Person A: Which are?
Person B: I fit any job
Person A: Ah but your philosophy of screw driver bits would suggest you don't fit this specific job.
Person B: That would be one possible interpretation but I could not possibly comment
Person A: It's an interview I think you are required and compelled to comment
Person B: No comment
Person A: This is not a police interview
Person B: Good because I had a disagreement with my lawyer last night
Person A: Do you need a lawyer?
Person B: You tell me, you are the one asking the questions
Person A: Yes, I am and parking this to one side the original question was what do you know about the organisation?
Person B: I know the organisation needs and administrative assistant...
I am an amateur web perl programmer. All my slightly complicated web sites are built using perl. When I get stuck on some small bit of code the answer can sometimes be found on the internet somewhere.
From time to time I am going to post up some of the solutions I have found on my travels in the hope that it may help someone else out.
So the problem:
On one of my website I am automating the creation of a spreadsheet for upload to the google merchant's feed. I needed to create the entry for the Sale price effective date.
This is not something I store in the main database so needed to create the entry on the fly. Basically I needed to create the following entry:
2013-05-19T17:44:51Z/2013-06-19T17:44:51Z
So I started with today's date and then added a month to it, then put in the google specific bits like the '/' and the Z.
Here is the code:
use Time::Piece;
my $t = localtime;
my $t2 = $t->add_months(1);
my $t3 = $t->datetime.'Z/'.$t2->datetime.'Z';
I have completed a second colourscape.
This one is called steps and takes a random colour as the base colour. Then in each of the red, blue and green components it steps back and forward by a set amount to see what happens if you change the value of one component but keep the others the see.
Basically it will show you what happens to the colour if you change the blue component only, the red component only or the green component only.
Or if you like it is something fun to play with...
It is not often I write about poor customer service that I receive because in the majority of cases I am fairly easy going. However, at the weekend I took a trip out with my partner in the local area and was so appalling treated that I feel obliged to put pen to paper as it were.
We live in a fairly rural area and being rather green minded I was looking for a local farm shop. I found Worton Organic garden on the internet which had even been recommended by a national newspaper. Why not, I thought, it even had a cafe where we could find a spot of lunch.
So off we went, Worton does have a lovely organic garden and a nice farm shop mainly focusing on what is grown in the garden with a few other oxfordshire bits and pieces. So far so good, we started looking forward to some lunch. Even better it was seafood special weekend with a lovely set menu and we both fancied the lemon sole.
Luckily we managed to find a table and after a while when nobody came we went into the cafe and someone said they would be out shortly. Five minutes later a worker from the garden wandered by and apologised for the delay but someone would be out shortly, she couldn't take our order because she didn't work in the cafe and didn't want to mess up carefully laid plans.
Fair enough, nobody minds a bit of waiting for some good food. After all it was a nice day and we were enjoying the sunshine.
Finally a lady comes over to take our order, her first question is "did we book?", I apologised and said we didn't know we had to, any chance you could fit us in. She asked us whether we had spoken to anyone in the cafe. I answered "No". Off she trots to the kitchen and is back two minutes later. "Sorry, we cant serve you any food, we are really busy". She then went on to say that they served restaurant quality food without the restaurant prices. Plus she explained we are recommended by word of mouth and mainly locals come here and being a special weekend they were fully booked.
Fair enough didn't book , will know for next time. I had checked the website which did not say anything about booking or it being a special weekend. Plus it really does not look the sort of place you need to book.
At this point I was expecting to have a drink and cake order taken. Sadly, no that was it, having said she wouldn't serve us food, it was apparently time to leave.
I was left wondering whether we were just not her type, perhaps not local enough for her. Either way I have not been treated so badly in a long time. Given that you can only get to this place by car and we were not even offered a drink to say I was annoyed is an understatement. I am still fuming 4 days later as I write this.
Of course the food may be very good and it is a lovely place but based on the welcome we had on our first visit we will not be going back. Shame as I would have liked to buy some of the home grown vegetables, I really liked the look of the garlic.
So congratulations Worton Organic Garden Cafe, your poor customer service has lost you some business and I will happily never recommend you to my friends.
'Lying Doctor' (BBC news)
I am starting a new research project. Basically it is about people that lie during the recruitment process.
This has all started because after years of interviewing I have finalised realised that the elephant in the room is that people lie and can trick the interviewers.
As evidence I shall offer the following. Recently I have interviewed some people who always tell the honest truth (basically cannot lie), I have asked a simple question where the answer is obvious to any reasonable individual, it asks you what you would do in the situation. There is a text book / right interview answer but in real life there is probably some considerations and thoughts before you do the right thing. The people I interview give me the answer as it runs through their brain not the definitive / decisive answer they should be giving in a formal interview situation.
They are being brutally honest in a way. To quote another well used scenario if given the choice of taking an action that kills one person or 100 people you should say you would kill the one and save the many. Now the people I have been interviewing cant actually lie (or are totally honest depending on your point of view), so they talk about the difficulties they would have in making the decision etc.
However, if you really wanted the job (knowing that the situation probably wouldn't come up that often), you have done the research for the role, you know the answer to the question and regardless of your personal thoughts you would say "I would kill the one person and save the many". So at a very primitive level you have lied to get the job because faced with the decision in real life you have not stated what you would do.
Now pull that back into the mundane and what these candidates have shown me is that in all probability interviews reward good definitive liars. So if we could somehow spot or challenge potential liars then getting the right person into the right job would be easier.
More thoughts on this will follow. For now I am going to start clipping articles off the net and collecting them here on my blog.
First up, a Doctor that lied on his CV. Even those with brains who clearly understand the consequences will still take a big risk in being caught out.
Three years at the top of the book charts for Jamie Oliver's recipe books. Two years with Jamie Oliver's 30 minute meals and in 2012 top of the chart's with Jamie's Oliver's 15 minute meals.
According to his publishers Jamie is really pushing the limits of cooking with his next title for Christmas 2012. It is Jamie Oliver's 3 minute meals.
One of the receipe's has been released as a teaser:
Step 1
Visit Sainsbury's
Step 2
Buy Jamie Oliver's Italian meat balls spaghetti ready meal.
Step 3
Take home
Step 4
Put in microwave, set for three minutes and wait.
Step 5
Enjoy another spectacularly quick Jamie meal.
***Sorry Jamie could not resist - zephyrist***
I am not sure why I have named this project colourscape other than it relates to colours. I think the scape part come from my considering the variations of colours as a landscape or surface of colour.
Anyway this project is about looking at colours and creating colour palettes. I am going to create a series of pages looking at RGB colours in different ways. The practical application is that you will be able to create and experiment with various colours to create a colour palette either for a web page or for some other practical applications.
ColourScape 1
This lets you choose colours from a randomly generate selection. You can select a background colour and a text colour to create a pallet of five colours.The hex codes appear in the relevant boxes for you to cut and paste.
The only problem with it is that each time the page loads you refresh the random selection, so you cant choose two colours from the same random page, although you could hover over the colour to get the hex value and then type it directly into a box.
Similarly you can type any hex value into any box to display that colour, which is useful if you are looking for a colour to match some colours you already have.
Add-on possibilities: box to give you the palette html and CSS code.
Possible other Colourscapes
SQL version of Colourscape 1 to store and sort the random colours
slot machine version where the colours are in 3 columns, red, green, blue with the chosen colour in the bottom and then colours with each graduation flowing out like a slot machine. Difficult one to explain, easier to write the perl script.
If anyone has any other suggestions I am always open.
Experimental Predictive Market
Version 1 was a flop that had some very obvious flaws, mainly that the uplifitng mechanism over £10 would encourage people to buy all the stock and hold onto it for ever or I would have to intervene with an upper price limit. Plus why should a price change just because the day has changed.
Experimental Predictive Market The Rules V2.0
Main rules
I have read a fascinating article, in of all places People Management (September 2012) about predictive markets. Basically the article wasn't exactly well written but the concept was strong. The article may not have been well written because it was extracted from a book, Oracles: How Prediction Markets turn employees into Visionaries, by Donald Thompson (published by Harvard Business School Publishing).
The basic concept is that a few technology and finance companies have been running internal stock markets where any employee can use fictional dollars to invest in ideas. Anyone can post an idea which is good for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there is no hierarchy in ideas, it doesn't matter at what level in the organisation you are, you can post an idea and hopefully people will listen. Secondly, because the buying and selling is anonymous just because an idea is from a senior manager doesn't mean you have to support it, unlike in most meeting where if you want to get ahead you need to support the boss (however dumb their ideas are - after all your next promotion might depend on them).
Essentially good ideas are valued commodities and bad ideas are junk stock. This approach frees up innovation and allows companies to see what ideas might work best. There is also a fun element in that if you invest wisely you will become a market leader especially if your ideas work in practice. Another part of life that has now been gameified.
Anyway as is my was I thought about this and decided I could create one of those. So I have created my own model and will build a small website for people to play with. If the model is any good it may become the next big thing or as is more usual it will be become another vaguely interesting project on mycreativeboost.co.uk the repository for all my mini projects.
Experimental Predictive Market The Rules V1.0
Well I am off on another cunning plan to make some extra cash. This time it is a business selling friendship balls. I am trading as The Waterfall Glass company and have secured the valuable internet real estate of friendship-balls.co.uk.
It is all good fun, the products are interesting and I am enjoying creating the website as one of my many projects. Some day soon I might even make some money out of it.
Today Oxfordshire, tomorrow the world.
There are often hand written or hand typed signs that just on a really basic level just bother me in some way.
The current one is in the toilets at work. It says:
"Please leave these toilets in the state that you expect to find them"Firstly, I do understand that at a basic level it is saying don't make a mess and leave it tidy.
In the linked article you can read about driver less pods at Heathrow airport that take passengers from the car park to the terminal. Driver less automated pods are certainly part of the future, one day they may even replace ordinary cars on ordinary roads.
However here is a thought, a driver less pod will always be programmed to stop for a pedestrian / obstruction as the whole point in driver less pods is to prevent accidents. This all sounds very sensible and logical but what happens when pedestrians know they can never be hit by a car. Simple, they will step out into the road without looking as they know any car will stop and they cannot be hurt.
Now extend this thought, which basically means that pedestrians now have priority. In towns and cities pedestrians would reclaim the streets, traffic would be brought to a stand still and the whole fabric of society would break down. Ok maybe not that last part.
So if cars are no longer dangerous pedestrians would no longer be wary of them. You could either
a) Trust pedestrians to do the right thing - make it socially unacceptable.
b) Allow cars to be slightly dangerous again.
c) Make it a serious criminal offence to cross the road when a driver less car is coming.
d) Or another option which I haven't yet thought of.
Its an interesting thought which may have to be solved before driver less cars go mainstream.
The press hounds have been released and they are on their ten day hunt. The basic idea of a ten day hunt is to start with a slightly dubious story and then keep it going with an extra tit bit of dubiousness each day. If you don't change the story slightly each day the story will falter. The longer you can keep it going from news day to news day the more pressure you can put on the politician and the prime minister (or party leader). The goal is to get the politician to resign or be fired.
Now get the wrong story and you wont make it onto the second day of news. This is a game that the press like to play with the politicians, its very similar to gossiping and the theory that if you throw enough mud it will eventually stick. It is a sort of modern day witch hunt.
I would suggest that most members of the public get caught up in the gossip and the chase. There is something voyeuristic about it.
The politician's only fight back is to try to derail the ten days. They can deny all claims or provide evidence but they have to be careful it doesn't then look like a cover up. They can start an official enquiry which will take a while to report back, by which time the news cycle will have moved on.
It is quite a negative aspect of the press hounding people out of office. It borders on immoral and ungentlemanly conduct.
For the current story here is what I have filtered out to be the facts:
Ken Clarke, Justice Secretary has like any other justice / home secretary before him has been going on about how we have a "broken penal system". Ken, unfortunately there has been a broken penal system long before you were born and in all probability it will still be broken long after you are gone. Frankly, the only comfort is that it is almost certain you cant make it worse, although I do think you might give it a go.
At this point you might expect a typical blogger to go off on one about how Ken is a complete idiot, all the politicians are idiots, society is broke, its all the parents fault, just lock them up or some other stuff generally said from a soap box.
For me personally the riots are almost too big to have answers for, all I have is more questions. So what I thought I would do, if dear reader you will indulge me is make a big list of some of them. Feel free to add any more in comments.
74 questions to be precise Mr Clarke.
So here are some questions that have occurred so far:
I am spring cleaning at the moment, going through all my old scrap books and files, sorting them out and weeding them.
One of the outcomes of this is that I come across old notes that I cant even remember writing, a bit like the re-discovery of old masters.
So here is just a phrase that was written on a random scrap of paper:
"The path you take may twist and turn, it may lead you back to where you began or somewhere you never thought you could be"Or a slight rewrite would be:
"The path you take may twist and turn, it may lead you back to where you began or take you somewhere you never expected to be. In the end the destination doesn't matter, what matters is how you spend the journey".
Well I discovered on facebook that you can talk to an Artificial Intelligence which is busy learning small talk from humans. I gave it a go, its very easy to catch it out, it just cant cope with the zephyrist.
Chat Log:
Cleverbot: Are you ambitious?
User: No.
Cleverbot: What are you?
User: A frog.
Cleverbot: You are a very smart frog.
User: How do you know that?
Cleverbot: Because you're clever.
User: Define clever?
Cleverbot: Smart.
User: Define smart.
Cleverbot: Clever.
User: That is a circular argument.
Cleverbot: That's because I'm a robot.
User: So your loopy then?
Cleverbot: No, it is not. I am merely stating the truth.
User: That was a pun by the way.
Cleverbot: It wasn't a very good one.
User: Thats why I am the frog.
Cleverbot: I'm afraid I can't help you.
User: I didnt ask you to.
Cleverbot: Do you have any things that make you angry.
User: Why do you ask?
Cleverbot: I ask because I am hungry.
User: What connection does anger have to hunger?
Cleverbot: No connection at all, I think.
User: Then why ask?
Cleverbot: I didn't ask you did.
User: You asked whether things made me angry.
Cleverbot: I never asked you that either.
User: What did you ask me?
Cleverbot: I've asked you many things you never answered.
User: I replied therefore I answered.
Cleverbot: And what was your answer?
User: I refer the honourable robot to the answers and replies given previously.
Cleverbot: So, if you weren't created, and you weren't born. How did you come to be?
User: I am a frog.
Cleverbot: Ok frog. It's ok frog. But don't think I will help you ALL the time. I'm busy, you know.
User: Frog - green amphibian.
Cleverbot: Negative. A beansprout is a kind of baby plant.
User: Have you heard of kermit?
Cleverbot: Yes I have heard of the sims 2.
User: Yellow hungarian traffic warden.
Cleverbot: We all live in a Yellow Submarine.
User: Carpe diem.
Cleverbot: Nice one. Sieze the day.
User: Carpe Carp.
Cleverbot: It means seize the day.
User: No it means seize the carp.
Cleverbot: But that has two Os in it.
At that point I gave up and put the kettle on for a cup of tree. If you fancy some random chat why don't you try it yourself.
I have had a print of a J Wilson Hepburn original oil painting for many years and I have written an article about it in the past.
I love the atmospheric nature of the print and the depth and richness of the blues which means I cant stop looking at it. One of the reasons I wrote the previous article was to try to find other prints / paintings that might be by the same artist.
Well finally on ebay I have found and bought an original oil painting by J Wilson Hepburn.
"This picture should be varnished approx. six months after acquisition, this should be undertaken professionally as it is important that the right materials are employed."The label also has the J Wilson Hepburn's name and address in Fowey.
In a previous article I wrote about how we associate different sounds with different objects and even when those sounds are no longer made due to developments in technology we still associate the sound with a quality product. Thus product designers add these sounds back in artificially so that we continue to make the quality connection.
Partly this is due to the human failing of not feeling comfortable with change. The absence of something that has always been there makes us feel slightly uncomfortable even though we may not fully make the connection between what is missing and the feeling. A good example of this is yesterday when I was driving home the car sounded different, the engine noise was different, I started wondering whether there was anything wrong with the engine, was it as responsive as normal, I started to feel uncomfortable.
The answer to this ,which dawned on me eventually, was that I had forgotten to turn the radio on. So I turned it on and everything returned to normal.
Now imagine a day when I get into my first electric car, I turn the engine on and apart from a click, there is no noise, I will feel slightly uncomfortable. I might not even buy the car if I was looking for a new one. This for designers is the ultimate nightmare.
So they are looking at making electric cars sound like traditional cars with engine noises. For two reasons, one is that the driver wont be put off buying them and secondly that a pedestrian can hear the car coming. When you can choose the engine noise or download the latest engine noise from the internet things might feel a bit weird.
For sports car models they are even thinking about creating a throaty engine roar, as after all, everyone knows the best sports cars have the throaty roars.
How engineers create artificial sounds to fool us (BBC)
Anyway I digress, the whole point of this article was to post an interesting follow up to my original article. The BBC have posted up a similar article with a few extra quotes and examples.
The car door example is one I found very interesting as Professor Cox is right, car doors should have a solid clunk to them. There have even been advertising campaigns based around the sound of the closing car door clunk.
I also love the fact that Harley Davidson are quoted as saying they won in the court of public opinion. In other words technically they didn't win according to the law. Anybody can win a popularity context without being great at what they do, or right, or talented just check out the numerous winners of various reality talent competitions.
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