nocto

it’s impossible to buy an average priced house on an average income across most of the uk. at least that’s what i think this survey is trying to say. across half of the country the average house is priced at around the £90k mark which means a household needs to earn about £30k a year to borrow three times its income as a mortgage. the survey doesn’t take in to account the fact that the average priced house may not be the ideal home for the average family. nor does it take into account that mortgage companies often don’t lend three times income when its joint incomes they are considering.

A new name joins the ranks of epublishers:

the famous publishing house has racked its brains and come up with the new name ePenguin for the electronic books, but its decision to embrace the format – and, so it says, launch books purely as ebooks – is a great step forward in making electronic books a more mainstream concept.

ePenguin’s books are going to be 20% cheaper than their printed copies. I hope that means cheaper than their paperback prices. they also stress my favourite point about ebooks here, to hell with portability and accessibility, ebooks never need go out of print!

hmmm, apparently google has just got better at keeping it’s search engine up to date. it seems to have gone backwards today to me though. the cache of this page is from 22nd june and my “crap organ muzak” search has vanished.

i’ve just messed about with jblogger and hashed josh lucas’ example code to produce a simple gui interface. it’s not up to much yet but i think that it’s pretty cool anyways i’ll have to work on it some more. if anyone else wants to play with it, here’s the java code.

the guardian’s weblog links to a great collection of articles under the title the gender divide. the collection is sparked off by doris lessing’s recent comments about how we’ve reached the end of feminism. as jeanette winterson says: ‘yeah, right!’.

i thought that the today programme on bbc radio 4 was a pretty serious type of affair. perhaps not. on their website they have a flash game that allows you to demolish buildings you hate. you can knock down the arndale centre (manchester version), buckingham palace, heathrow airport or the barbican. out of that lot i’ll have choose to knock down buck house.

one of joel spolsky’s hobby horses is that humans don’t multitask. he argues, quite correctly, that it’s better to get one task out of the way before starting on the next. i love his example of bob being scheduled to do three tasks at a time because all the tasks need doing within a month and that management’s refusal to allow him to do the tasks sequentially is really their refusal to see the reality that bob needs a month to do each task. if they were really three tasks that took a third of a month each surely they’d like to have two of them finished early.

joel’s reasoning is that task switching takes time. in addition to the time you spend working on project a and project b you have to spend time moving from working on one project or another. if bob were a builder who needed to build two houses a hundred miles apart no one would think that getting him to build one in the mornings and one in the afternoons would get the houses built faster. it’s obvious that it’ll be slower that way.

i don’t tend to find that i have two major projects going at a time (at work anyway, at home it’s a whole different ballgame). what i do find is that as well as one major project i have any number of smaller unrelated tasks assigned to me. and the smaller projects are always urgent and the major project isn’t so urgent. so i have to drop the major project for a bit whilst i work on the smaller stuff. this is like having bob building one house, but needing him to go and make minor repairs on other houses while he does it. the repair houses are often miles away from his main build. so bob takes an afternoon off from doing any building and goes out and buys a faster motorbike. now he can get from his housebuild to his repairs faster. his house still takes longer to build than it would have done without interruptions, but he has speeded up the process.

what i need is a faster motorbike. i need to be able to get from my major project to my minor tasks and back in quicker times. in software terms this comes down to being able to switch my environment easily and remember what i was doing. this means that any time i invest in writing and upkeeping scripts to set up environments, run things automatically, etc pays me back huge dividends over a number of task switches. it also makes it worth my while to write down exactly what i’m doing all the time so that when i get torn away from something i can find my way back faster; this is like leaving myself a bookmark in my thoughts to return to.

so task switching is certainly harmful, but when you can’t avoid it you should invest some time in trying to minimise the time and effort it takes.

i’m on the side of the ‘it’ll never work’ people, as well as being on the wrong continent to take part in this experiment; but the concept of painting the moon stll appeals.

to “paint the moon” may become the modern equivalent of ’tilting at windmills’. … i’m willing to take the risk, even in the face of all the harsh realities that tell us the idea won’t work. and i hope those who ‘know’ that it won’t work will release the shackles of their hearts, and come out to play with lasers, anyway.

the whole concept of cloning is a pretty scary one, but the idea of needing to copyright your dna is even scarier.

copyright protection would not necessarily prevent someone being cloned against their will, but it would offer them legal remedy.

and what exactly happens to the illegally created clone?

i found a hardcopy of this in one of the trillion cardboard boxes of junk i own today (i now only have a billion cardboard boxes of junk). it’s the issue of the telegraph’s connected supplement that featured my website loquax as one of it’s featured sites. i found it online again and what surprises me is that all the other sites in the netlife selection for november 1998 are still going too. (the paper came out on bonfire night and i remember that they used the slightly dodgy logo that we’d thrown together for halloween rather than our regular one!)