PETERBE.COM

Picked this up on a food blog in one of the comments; a female commenter wrote:

"Guys went for me all the time in my late teens and early twenties. I’m no great beauty, but they did anyway. I was slender.
I did not remain slender. No one looks at me now.
I'm the same person."

Err! Wrong! You're not the same person! If we assume that this "slender" versus "not slender" is the differentiating factor and ignore age for now then with beauty changes the person.

It's such a common misconception sometimes heard from women that the personality is one factor of attraction and that external beauty is another. In the opposite, women do play down the external beauty factor more when considering men's total attraction value. Take heed women, your beauty factor matters more than men's. No news there. The mistake here is to think the opposite sex thinks like you do.

So what's the reciprocal lesson in this? For a man. Quite simply: don't think that women think like men. Or in plain English, just because you're a stud, don't think that you can be an ass.

You know all those blog comments that slip through our blog commenting filters. The ones written by humans who pass the captcha tests. The ones who pretend to say something generic but really just want to put a link in to their viagra|laptops|watches|meds selling sites. Yes, those assholes.

What we do is to take their links and stick them on the worlds most spam full website which one of us set up. Access to edit it can be controlled by a ring of trust amongst web developers and tech savvy blog owners. Because being featured on a site like that is going to be noticed by Google as a terrible spam site and therefore flag those URLs as spam thus blocking them from searches and thus ruining it for their owners and thus them giving up on spamming our blogs.

Perhaps someone at Google like Matt Cutts could weigh in and tell us if it's feasible. Perhaps Google already have some tool where individuals can flag individual URLs but that wouldn't have the group-power of something like my idea.

For those familiar with how the Linux Kernal is developed with a distributed source code tool, this could work the same with github patches and layered layers of trust all the way up to Linus Torvalds.

Is it a completely bonkers idea?

First I tried Things for the iPhone which I tried because some people I work with said it was good. It lasted about a week. I think it failed, for me, because I didn't feel how time slowly wipes away old stuff that isn't relevant any more. My todo lists are usually about work projects which mainly means writing code and sending emails to people on the project. Things being on the iPhone meant I had to take my hands off the computer.

The second one I tried is the app with perhaps the most brilliant UI I've seen in years: TeuxDeux There's only three things you can do, enter events and mark them as done. I tried the iPhone version but even though it works well it wasn't as neat as the web version. Eventually I gave up because I think I couldn't keep up with moving past day events forward to today's date. That meant that new events entered "today" sort of got higher priority than old ones and that just felt wrong in the long run.

The third one wasn't really a todo list but that's how I ended up using it: Workflowy Again, an absolutely brilliant UI and technical achievement. I had it as an open tab for about three weeks until I ended up not bothering any more. I love writing bullet point lists to the n'th degree but I felt that every time I came back to it I had to "search" for where I was and had to make a tonne of micro-decisions about where to put stuff. When I had a thought in my head I didn't want to first think and plan where to put it.

What did work?

It's far from applicable to everyone but one thing that has worked (has for many years in fact) was our work issue tracker. We use IssueTrackerProduct, written by yours truely. It's not really fair because when you add the fact that multiple people are using the same tool the personal choices don't really matter. Also, I think project issue trackers like this have the added bonus that you don't clutter them with small basic things like "Check database log X".

The perhaps most successful todo list for me in 2010 was keeping a TODO.txt file in my project source directory. This is a personal file I rarely check in to git because my colleagues don't need to see mine (well, sometimes that's useful too). It's a simple text file and it looks something like this:

 * (MEDIUM) render the shared classes in calendar.html on page load 

 * (HIGH) Find out why all CSS is lost when an event is added

 * (LOW) Experiment with http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ to write
  some nice stats

 ...

I guess it works because it's my own invention. From scratch. Generally todo list apps work best if you wrote the app yourself. It's immediately in context because each code project gets its own file. Its order is implied usually by writing to the top of the file but you can be a bit cowboy about it and just jot things down without doing it "the correct way".

All of this week and last week I'm working at a client's office in west London. So I've been away from the sanctuary of our office now for a while. At my usual office I have bought some nice Twinings Earl Grey tea bags. Definitely a favorite of mine.

When I started working at this office last week I had to resort to a difference tea that tastes less good. The first couple of cups were all a disappointment but addiction to caffeine probably pulled me back into the kitchen for more cups as the days got on. I drink about 4-5 cups per day and at this stage I don't even remember what good tea tastes like. I actually enjoy this cheap tea just as well.

Because one drinks such vast amounts of tea the taste just becomes what it is and it's only when you change from a quality tea to a cheap tea that you notice the difference. The question is then, as long as you stick to the same tea does it really matter if you drink fancy Earl Grey or cheap industrial tea? Surely the health factor is negligible but the price difference isn't thus going for a cheaper tea would be smarter? And by drinking cheap tea, when you a precious afternoon tea at the Ritz you're going to enjoy the tea even more.

Or should I be stoned and lynched for wasting thinking time on this?

This just arrived in my inbox:

 From: Carmen <tkunpgdng@jumpy.it>
 Subject: metting you

 Hi there lovely,
 This kind of oppcortunity comes ones in a life. I don't want
 to miss it. Do you? I am coming to your palace in few days
 and I though may be we can meet each other. If you don't mind
 I ccan send you my picture. I am a girl.
 You can correspond with me using my email eh@freemailserv.com

If that's just plain spam, how does the spammer intend to benefit from this? They're not going to sell any porn or dodgy medicine on an email address are they?

If the evil spammer intends to catch horny idiots who reply and so keep a list of people interested, aren't there easier ways than having to do it this way?

Or is this just a weird girl who tries to make contact. If so, I'm afraid that I don't live in a palace. I live in a flatshare in Shoreditch.

Here at Fry-IT we use timesheets, like so many other companies, to track the time we spend on each client project. Despite being a very "web modern" company we still don't use a web application to do this. What we use is a python script that I wrote that uses raw_input() to get the details in on the command line. The script then saves all data in a big semicolon separated CSV file and is stored in cvs. This works quite well for us. It's in fact all we need in terms of actually entering our times which is usually very easy to forget.

But, here's an idea for a timesheet tracker that will not guarantee but will really help in not forgetting to fill in your timesheets. The idea is that you have a web application of some sort that is able to send out emails to registered individuals. These emails will be sent at (a configurable time) the end of the work day when you're about to leave for the day. You might have seen this before on other timesheet tracker applications; it's not new. What is new is that the email would contain lots of intelligent URLs that when clicked fills in your timesheets for that day.