1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe – low mileage, slightly muddy
The tee shirt has a phrase book printed on it
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Linkblast
Mechanical calculator – Knex has a little way to go to catch up with Lego
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
Dammit, dammit, dammit, how did it get to be so late? I’ve got to be up early to get to RAL tomorrow.
…I’m well aware that you are owed significant amount of updateage, but thats going to have to wait. I’ve not forgotten you all.
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
Linkblast
Crash test of Chinese car (scary)
Crossing the road – Hyderabad style
Tonight we dine in Cleveland (300 spoof)
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
“Software quality – as an industry we don’t half ship some rubbish, I’m doing my bit to make things better not worse.”
I’m considering adding this statement to my CV under a section entitled ‘Interests’. My aim is to make sure its not too dry, as CVs are wont to be, in the hope that a little appropriate humour might get remembered by the sort of people I want to work for. What do you think? Is this a good thing to say? Bad thing to say? Good thing in bad words? A bad thing in good words? Better ideas?
(also, anyone got any comment on whether that should be a comma or a semi-colon? Microsoft standard grammar says its a semi-colon but I never learned how to use them properly so I’m not sure whether I trust it)
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
Linkblast
This was a purely trouser-based disaster (worksafe)
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
OK, so I was a little premature in calling the bottom, but only a month off. Rationalisation of the company occured in more or less the way I had predicted around six months ago, theres a few details that still need working out and I’m not going to talk about that here. It *is* a going concern, its just that I’m not part of it as of next month sometime. This makes it rather better than last time around.
There is some thinking to be done before my meeting with Kevin tomorrow to figure out what the future looks like – whether there is any possibility of rescuing my client from the ashes, and, if so, what could be done with it once its dusted down and dressed up in new clothes.
“This would, of course, in many ways, be fortuitous timing for such freedom.”
The timing has only gotten better since I wrote this – mostly because of the situation I alluded to in my going offline post, but which I won’t expand on in any more detail yet (mostly nothing to worry about on *my* side, the friends-only thing is an attempt at protection for other people involved in the situation for who seeing my ugly mug might cause rather more pain than necessary right now, I’ll open things up, including most of these friends-only posts, once I’m sure its not going to be painful any more. They are, incidentally, slightly filtered, so I’d prefer you don’t talk among yourselves unless you already know what is going on).
So now I have a bright new future again, one so wide open that anything goes. But it does put plans for a new car on hold for a little while, at least until I can see where the next meal is coming from.
12-Jul-2007: entry set ‘public’
Going offline
For reasons that will become clear over the next few weeks (indeed, may already be clear to you), this journal is becoming ‘friends only’ for a while. I don’t intend this to be a permanent change.
Please feel free to call or email me.
Book review: Opening Skinners Box by Lauren Slater
(Ok, so I’ve gotten somewhat distracted from doing book reviews of late, its not because I’ve stopped reading…I’m still spending plenty of time on trains…just that I’ve been growing a pile of ‘things I should do when I get around to it’)
This book describes a series of psychological experiments carried out in the last century, focussing on the social impact of those experiments rather than the overt science of them. It is written in an informal style following the journey of discovery about the experiments and some of the people involved in them. At times just meeting the people, others attempting to recreate the experiments in a world that has seen them before.
In some ways it paints a depressing picture of how little impact some of these experiments have had on the mental health care systems. It starts with the Milgram experiment and describes the effects it had on some of the participants. Certainly I had heard of most of these experiments, without either understanding the context within which they were run nor how recently they have all been conducted.
The book is an easy collection to start understanding some more about psychological experiments, how to perform them and what has been the impact of some of the higher profile ones. It isn’t a science book as such, rather a book about scientists interacting with a world they don’t seem to understand.
Who should read this book? Armchair psychologists, anyone who is interested in the social impact of scientific process.
(book 7, week 23)