This week I went to a reading by Jasper Fford. For years, my friends have been recommending that I read his books. There is an outline of his work on: http://www.jasperfforde.com/
His presentation was very relaxed and entertaining. Already I regret not having followed my friends advice. I will start reading his books in publication order…
He talked about games that he plays with his family. These included
- “The Starbucks challenge“: try to present your order to the Barista so that they do not ask you any follow-on questions.
- “tele-marketer challenge“: when answering a phone call from a telemarketer only answer questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ the game ends when you cannot answer with yes or no. Their family record is 11 questions. Can you beat that?
- “Tesco’s (major supermarket chain) challenge: attempt to place a highly inappropriate article in another persons basket, or place. For example, put diapers in the deep-freezer, or place meat in the basket of someone who is obviously vegetarian.
Jasper was wonderful, he so obviously enjoys life and finds fun in the most mundane of activities. He talked about ‘Ordinaryfication’, making the bizarre seem acceptable and the ordinary stuff appear facinating. He likes to make-up words, like ‘ordinaryfication’. I was totally captured and inspired by his imagination, what fun…
Wendy
And I’m annoyed.
I spent several evenings using WMP 10 to create 3 stories using songs. I carefully ordered the songs to tell the stories.
When I uploaded the playlists to MSN Spaces it decided that the songs should be ordered alphabetically.
If you surveyed music lovers would you discover that ‘alphatetically’ ordered songs is the most popular way to arrange playing them?
NO, no, no….
I suspect it is the easiest way to write new code to arrange them.
Lazy, lazy, lazy
Both MSN Spaces and WMP 10 are Microsoft products. WMP has the code to create and maintain a song order. Why didnt they give that code to MSN Spaces? Why can’t they manage to be functionally equivalent? Failing that, they could have at least warned me not to spend the time to use one product to create a story that couldnt be maintained by another product. A nasty suprise.
Feedback = Poor show Microsoft, with one silly implementation decision you’ve undone a lot of thoughtful, time consuming work on my part,
Disappointed Wendy
Saturday on the Northwest coast was overcast. Rainy. I went is search of sunshine, drove east through the fabulous cascade mountains. For breakfast I stopped at a ‘Truck Stop’. The car park was full of Trucks and pick-ups. The cafe cooked me a fabulous omelette sandwich. Sunshine filled the sky. Life happening, people moving on and eating. It felt good.
Wendy-on-windy-roads
Snow Lake is at the end of a 4 mile hike from Snoqualmie pass (Alpentol) into the Alpine Lake region. The gentle hike was a fabulous way to spend a sunny 3rd July. The scenery and light were exquisit.
The hike was busy, as you pass people you catch teasing snippits of their conversations:
“…I must get a new heart…”
“… I’m not interested in dating…”
“…so you use a VPN from home?…”
“…we can catch a boat from Vladivostoc…”
The mosquitos by the lake were numerous. I took way too many photographs. This is my favourite:
W
