:: The Wendy House ::

Mumzie:  GWENDOLYN!  Remember to shut the fridge door after you’ve used the milk

Wendy:  ………

In the US my fridge door was weighted,  it fell shut automatically.  Slightly irritating when making a cup of tea at a leisurely pace.  Here in the UK my fridge door is not weighted.  If I forget to shut it the fridge tries to cool the whole kitchen. 

Memories of mumzies wise words shiver around the room…

The staff at Jacksons are solution builders.  When something doesn’t work they fix it,  no unnecessary fuss. 

For example,  this light switch set in the Ladies underwear changing rooms controls 8 different lights in the main store.  The lights cannot be seen from the switch location.  Which lights are controlled by which switches?  You would need 2 people to find-out by a try it and see method.  Would you be able to remember from one day to the next which switch controls which lights?

The staff at Jacksons don’t have to learn or remember which light is controlled by which switch because they’ve cunningly labelled the switches!  Now, which lights are ’spot 3.4′?

A couple of signs outside of the Royal Berkshire Hospital’s Medical museum left me completely discombobulated for all of 10 minutes.  How do these signs work together,  if at all? 

Ambulances only

• as Medical Museum exhibits?
• as Medical museum visitors?
• Can park when delivering Medical Museum guests?
• Can park outside the medical museum but their occupants have more pressing engagements than exploring the undoubtedly fascinating preceding accoutrements of their current treatments.

The Royal Berkshire Hospital building facade is very impressive.  Provision of a museum to enlighten the locals is a very thoughtful addition.

Some snippits from recent cell-phone conversation with the fellow coordinating the builders (occassionally) working on The Wendy House kitchen roof replacement.

Wendy: not having a kitchen roof is very inconvenient.
Foreman: Not for me its not.

…

Wendy: so the slates will all be in place by end of day tomorrow?
Foreman: yes
Wendy: That’s Autumn!
Foreman: more like gruesome
…

Wendy: Cheerio
Foreman: Bye Darlin’

<long sentence warning, take a breath now>

Combat cleaning’s monthly stop-by to put their duster, vacuum, or wet-wipes in all those places that spiders congregate, to make sure that I don’t drown in the discarded natural insulation produced by the fluffballs, is a particularly pleasant luxury.   

<long sentence over, you can relax now>

Pleasant because they

• ask about the building work then giggle endearingly at the answer.  
• don’t complain when my tap (US = fawcett) handles fall-off (if twisted at the wrong angle) in their hands.
• take the drapes diving for the floor, because the super-glue holding the drape-hangers up just isn’t quite as super as the advertising would have me believe, in their stride.

Once upon a time, 
in July 2007,

when Raymond referenced the Wendy House I would receive around 1,000 visits in one day!  GADZOOKS! 

For the sake of introducing a new acronym, rather than an argument, we will call this the Raymond Referenced Readers effect,  or the three R’s effect henceforth to be written 3Rs pronounced ‘3 arse’ followed by an gender-irrelevant obligatory giggle.

Yesterday, Raymond referenced the Wendy House again. 

Raymond’s readers were so keen to click on his links that this year the Wendy House recieved nigh on 3,000 visits in the first day.  ECKY THUMP!  That’s a big 3Rs (giggle).

A couple of Raymonds fabled nitpickers have already helped improve my blog-post content accuracy with spelling details and everything,  what helpful people they are.

Hello Raymond’s readers,  I’ve added a ‘Raymond’ tag so that you can easily find cross,  rather than angry, references.  Am I just too nice to you or what?

On a website called ars technica Joel Hruska points out that a Lloyds bank employee took offense at a customers online banking password ‘Lloydispants‘ then changed the password to ‘noitsnot’ .  When the customer tried to change the password again the Lloyds employee told the customer that several, slightly insulting to Lloyds, suggested passwords were also unacceptable. 

On discovering this story Lloyds officials declared that customers can have any secure password they want and added that the employee in question is no longer with them. 

With that pluck and sense of humour Lloyds should have promoted the employee into a position of influence.

Wendy:  Can I have my washing machine damaged phone replaced please?

insurance agent (IA): what time did this happen?

Wendy: about 7.30pm

IA: how was it put into the machine?

Wendy:  it was in the breast pocket of a fleece jacket,  I had checked the side pockets and forgotten to check the breast pocket

IA: was it in a large load or just a single item being washed?

Wendy: scooped up in a large load just after I came home from work,  I took it off and put it in with the load

IA:  When did you notice?

Wendy:  I heard a strange clunking coming from my washing machine immediately and thought,  oh dear,  sounds like I need to get my washing machine looked at.  About an hour later I needed to make a phone call and realised what had happened.  After and hour in the washing machine I decided to wait for the cycle to finish.  Then got the phone out,  took the back off and dried it with a hair-dryer then plugged it into the power supply.  Nothing,  no lights on the phone,  nothing.

IA:  did you try later?

Wendy:  yes,  about 2 days later I plugged it in again,  no lights.

According to the Gaurdian summer music festivals are popular events but there are too many festivals chasing too few ’star’ acts.  The Observer lists ‘Boutique festivals’ as small-is-beautiful with reportedly shorter queues, higher quality food,  and more child-friendly facilities than large such as Reading, Glastonbury and t in the park.

On the August Bank Holiday weekend over 80,000 people visited the town of Reading town for the festival.  I snuck out on the train heading west for the smaller Bristol Jazz festival.  Wandering towards the train station I passed many Reading festival attendees in the de rigeur style that involved:

• denim shorts.
• personaised wellies.
• a British variation on the grunge theme. 
• NO suntan
• sunglasses cunningly repurposed as hair-bands. 
• bum bags (US = fanny-packs)

The day after laundering my phone I trundled along to the Orange store where I loitered with the other customers who stood and waited. I listened to a lady being attended get gradually more agitated with the assistant as she learned that the assistant could not retrieve her phone contacts

“but those are my business contacts’‘

The assistant frowned,  her companion said they could try and use the home computer to try and retrieve the contacts from the SIM.  She appeared inconsolable,  her voice gradually raising as she made it clear that she had no back-up of these vital contact numbers, no way of even telling people that she had lost their numbers.  Tension, amongst those who only stood and waited, grew.   

As time passed the bald fellow in black gradually became more agitated, shifting his weight, checking his watch, glaring at the busy assistants. After about 10 minutes a new assistant joined the beleaguered pair on the floor.  She looked at me stood by the desk and I pointed her to the bald man in black.  An inaudible conversation between them, lasted less than a minute before I heard him loudly announce

“you clearly aren’t interested in what I have to say so I’m going elsewhere” 

He marched out of the store, the assistant stood watching him for a moment then came over to me. She was clearly upset…

Assitant:that was so embarrassing, he said I was spaced-out, that I wasn’t listening to him,  that I wasn’t even trying to help, he was so rude.

Wendy: he’d been waiting a very long time.  We all have.

Assistant: but that doesn’t give him the right to be rude to me.

Wendy: no. it doesn’t.

Assistant:  (continues to enumerate all the ways that the bald man had treated her inappropriately while she tests my SIM in another phone and finds me a cheap replacement and back-up phone)

I left happy,  SIM intact,  cheap-new phone,  my phone numbers previously backed-up on Darling and my work-supplied computer.  There are times when tendancies towards geekyness make my life so much easier than those people who have not ventured into the pain that can be involved insynchronising their phone contents with their computers

Phone.

bouncy hot whites cycle.

It was bound to happen one day.

sign me up for the water-proof, slimline, aesthetically pleasing cellphone.

<list-overdose event warning>

Below is a list of the stuff that GAP recommended that I pack where the ticks (US = check mark) indicate how many of an item I carried.  Items not actively used during the holiday are struck-through:

• Passport (with photocopies)  ü
• Travel insurance (with photocopies) ü
• Airline tickets (with photocopies) ü
• Euros and travellers cheques ü
• Credit or debit card (see personal spending money) ü
• G.A.P Adventures vouchers, pre-departure information and dossier ü
• Any entry visas or vaccination certificates required ü
• Camera and film ü
• Reading/writing material üüüü
• Cover or plastic bags for backpacks ü
• Flashlight ü
• Windproof/waterproof jacket/rain poncho ü
• Small towel and swim wear üüü
• Warm sweater ü
• 4 shirts/t-shirts üü
• Sunhat üüüü
• 2 pair of shorts üü
• 1 pair of long trousersü
• 1 pair hiking pants/track pants ü
• Hiking boots/sturdy walking shoes (for shore excursions) ü
• Sport shoes with light colored soles/sport sandals (while on board) ü
• Biking gloves (if you wish to participate in sailing - optional) ü
• Sunblock ü
• Sunglasses üüüü
• Toiletries (biodegradable) ü
• Flashlight ü
• Watch or alarm clock ü
• Water bottle ü
• First-aid kit (should contain lip salve, Aspirin, Band Aids, anti-histamine, any extra prescription drugs you may be taking). ü

Striking holiday characteristics hidden in the above list include my:

• Not falling-over (band-aids not used) .
• Not loosing my passport.
• Not wearing more than one pair of shoes during the fortnight.
• Only getting 4 mosquito bites.  I think the high winds helped.
• Wearing only 3 different pairs of glasses during the fortnight.
• Managing with only 4 hats,  I suspect I needed more.
• Being able to see by the light of the moon.
• not wearing trousers or knickers.

<list-overdose temporarily suspended>

The cyclades are not only littered with churches,  they have more than their fair share of windmills.  We experienced the impressively powerful winds during our sailing motoring trip, gale force for most of the vacation.

Tucked-in behind the obligatory church bell tower modern windmills were clearly harnessing the power in Santorini.  Older mills were converted into Tavernas,  modern residences,  and some left without their sails. 

These renovated old windmills even stood guardrd over familiar modern green plastic rubbish wheely bins

As part of our briefing Afghan told us that we could not charge our small electronic devcies (phone, CAMERA, shaver, other) on jojo, the sailboat.  Evidently six guests with several small devices each could drain the boats motor-charged battery by device recharging.  Instead,  Afghan recommended that when buying use of a loo,  and drinking our free coffee,  we ask the waitstaff to charge our devices,  behind the bar.  

Real sailing experience #6: charge your small devices in Tavernas

Taverna staff were extremely obliging.

Reasons to retire Darling,  part 4

1. Increasing requirements to contact computer support services

2. I am developing obstreperous-w intolerance.

3. 8loody hail, breeding task manager

4. I WANT Vista

I’ve used a Vista machine and I love all the search-stuff (start menu, control-panel),   I no longer have to remember where I put things.

Its got a thing called ’snippit’ which takes pictures of what’s on your screen in a much easier way that control-print-screen,  open-paint,  then paste. 

It’s pretty! The computer I used running Vista is a rather ugly thing,  unlike Darling.  I want to marry the two,  prettiness of Darlings body-work with the human-memory-complimenting functionality of Vista.

Words of wisdom from my outrageously expensive and handsome, former professional-brick-layer, young product-dispensing hairdresser:

treat your mum to a night in the Mallard suite at the Malmaison,  it has a ground floor patio,  an en-suite train-set and wooden sinks which look like you can pick them up and walk away with them

As usual,  I’ll be taking Alan’s tip very seriously and following up on this gem of wisdom

Jacksons pay attention to branding detail. 

The store is branded with a dark green background to its main name sign above the mannequinned window displays and below the large lettering that eponymously announces ‘Jacksons corner’ .  The text on its custom plastic bags and the piece de resistance is the wonderful font used to announce Jacksons on the green marble entrance way. 

I swooned. 

 I am easily pleased

Reasons to retire Darling,  part 3

1. Increasing requirements to contact computer support services

2. I am developing obstreperous-w intolerance.

3. Generally increasing bizarre behaviours that do not actually require support calls because they are solved by reboots. 

In this example we see the results of my having hit control-alt-delete (CAD) in an attempt to get the task-manager so that I can Zap the program that for some reason is now using all my processing power….  nothing happened… then…   …I didn’t press CAD that many times,  its been breeding…

8loody hail, breeding task manager

Jonathan Feinberg’s free (creative-commons licenced) web-tool,  wordle word-cloud, made the picture below.  I gave wordl the Wendy House blog address as the word-source. Wordl analysed the content and produced a black and white display.  I played with the presentation tools,  colour scheme,  font,  word orientations…  Thank you Jonathan,

Much fun

The internet and free creative tools have enabled me to fully express my full mediocrity in public, see:

Title: The day before my Greek holiday

Garden designer guest:  it’s not many people that can look straight into their garden when sitting on their toilet

I will have to put something in the line of view to make it a tad more pleasurable than just patio and fence.  As I’m sure you can imagine,  I’ve been contemplating the garden rather a lot recently…

According to the principles of Feng Shui,  I should change the layout of the bathroom, keep this door closed, change the colour scheme from blue and white to red and red then add a few candles or my career will flow into the sewers.  Alas,  I’m way too busy building my career and going on holiday to bother with arranging and paying for builders to rebuild my bathroom in a Feng Shui approvable layout and colour scheme.  Pleasing plants in line of view will have to suffice.

Since leaving my parents’ home in the early 1980’s I’ve hankered after a classic wool dressing gown bordered with coloured-chord. Over the years I’ve compromised with fluffy-cotton dressing gowns, Kimonos and stylish smoking jackets.  Finally,  the exceptional Jackson’s summer sale delivered the real thing.  Extra-large mens’ was the smallest size available.  The shop assistant said that they had ordered the ‘Lloyd Attree and Smith’ (Gentlemans outfitters since 1857) dressing gowns based on regular requests from customers.  Unfortunately, when the dressing gowns arrived the customers were not prepared to pay the full retail price.  

Jacksons will not be restocking these Lloyd Attree and Smith 100% wool dressing gowns. 

Much to the mature, mens department, shop assistant’s amusement I tried-on the XL dressing gown.  It did not trail on the floor though I will have to roll the sleeves up by about 6 inches to keep them out of my breakfast. 

I treated myself to the warm stylish, oversized, high quality gown and a couple of white hankerchiefs in readiness for the impending onset of winter…  …it really is a wonderful experience in the early dawn, wrapped in wool beneath the dew-covered conservatory with a hot mug of tea.

Darling and I have trouble communicating multiple U’s. Darling’s w-key is getting fussy about being pressed,  it requires twice the pressure of any other key before it ill register a letter.  The increasing dodgyness of the keyboard as one of the core early symptoms of Tinkerbell’s stealth senility and eventual NMI Parity death. 

After over 2 years of daily blogging and travelling all over the place (and Spokane) maybe Darling is seeking retirement perks.

While packing a day-bag to attend a local water-festival I noticed that my Oakley prescription sunglasses were not,  as expected, nestled amongst my collection of spectacles dating back to 1979,  in my spectacle drawer. 

There was a minor panic outbreak  because I will need these glasses for my rapidly impending Greek Sailing Holiday.  I quickly searched all sensible places where I may have put a pair of sunglasses.  They weren’t anywhere sensible.  The following morning I double-checked all the sensible places,  the following morning I looked in a few down-right silly places to put sun glasses (e.g. spare tea caddy).

3 days later,  my morning random search for the oakleys included my winter-jumper draw. There they were,  between two wool jumpers…..  

The passport under the sink and the sunglasses between the woolly-jumpers are two of the Wendy House mysteries that may never be explained…

Google analytics reported visitor loyalty (probably unique IP addresses?) for one week in July 2008 as significantly* BIGGER than during one week in January  2007.

January 2007 (July 2008) :

• 8 (22) visitors visited between 7 and 14 times.
• 11 (27) visited 15-25 times.
• 11 (21) visited 26-50 times.   
• 0  (32) visited 51-100 times.

 Up to 29 (101) visitors (unique IP addresses) , other than my good-self, return frequently enough for me to assume they drop-by on a daily basis.   Out of pure, unfettered, cussedness I am also assuming that at least half of these loyal visitors are naughty, naughty, spam-bots or or other bots of an icky nature, as opposed to pleasantly pert bots.  This assumption still leaves me with about 50 regular, daily, visitors who may actually be people!     

* Significance in a formal Statistical sense identified by using Excel’s t-test function for a one-tailed, independent groups t-test that lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis, h0, p< 0.001

 h0 ‘= there are no more people reading my blog regularly in July 2008 than in January 2007′

The result is statistically very powerful but I have low confidence levels in it because of the low signal-noise ratio introduced by the way the variable (a loyal blog reading person) is operationalised (unique IP address) that introduces a lot of noise mostly from bots. 

Even worse than low statistical confidence is my inappropriate test-selection.  Inappropriate because although the data fulfills some of the assumtions of the independent groups t-test e.g. parametric,  it is sufficiently naughty to potentially violate other assumptions such as truely independent groups. 

In summary,  we can probably ignore the statistical significance of the numbers because of all the non-number related issues. 

Statistical escapades put aside, I am still convinced that the Wendy House has quite a few more regular readers now than in January 2007. 

windows support answer to my query

No curmudgeonist moments for me today.

In less than a 24hr turnaround I got a response that was concise and useful.  I also tried to report my ‘bug’ to Google,  I couldn’t find a way to report it,  I used their ‘questions’ section and,  to my knowledge, no-one replied. 

Words of wisdom from my outrageously expensive and handsome young product-dispensing, ex-pro-brick-layer, hairdresser:

Your job should be something you are passionate about

As usual,  I’ll be taking Alan’s tip very seriously and following up on this gem of wisdom

in less than one hour of excited pre-holiday preparation I called the:

• credit card company to check on how to deal with a lost or stolen card while out of England and gave them the dates and location of my travel to make sure they didn’t cancel my card when used in GREECE.
• medical insurance company to verify my coverage and what I should do when I fall over in GREECE.
• home insurance company to order a copy of my policy and check on what’s covered if taken out of the country (to GREECE) and find out if I need to replace my locks*.
• Water authority** to check some billing details.
• mumzie to let her know that I’m ok,  haven’t fallen over today,  yet and I will be safe when abroad.

* Apparantly, my contents are insufficiently valuable for them to require that I upgrade the Wendy House stable-door bolts.

** This has nothing to do with my HOLIDAY,  but I was on a roll with the phone-calling and wanted to keep the momentum going.

Not irritating graffiti or marks that appear on your fabulous benches. Benchmarking, to me, means sensible comparisons.

While I was wandering along the corridors of Technorati,  I started to sulk because the Wendyhome blog only warranted an ‘Authority of 5′.  I have no idea what an Authority of 5 means,  but it sounded fairly lowly.  My bottom lip protruded as I read the information provided by Technorati on who had linked to my blog.  Then.  OH YES… ….THEN,  I noticed that Raymond Chen’s blog got a Technorati rating of 9.  NINE.  

Lets look at this relatively.  I’m not related to Raymond but our blogs have relatively different readership and page-load numbers.  If my blog is rated 5 and I had to subjectively estimate what Raymonds blog would rate on the same scale I would guesstimate Raymond’s blog would rate at an approximate 3 zillion 4 million 5 thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine point five.  Taking regular daily hits into account and deducting 5 points for nitpickers.  

In short,  which Raymond is,  relative to Average US adult male heights,  that my blog got 5 on a scale that rates Raymonds blog as 9 is a significant achievement.  My bottom lip retracted and the champagne bottles were popped.  Hoorah.  The Technorati Benchmarks are in my good books for today.  Just for today mind,  there’s no telling what tomorrow may bring…

<Essay warning>

Not distributed within the mind, distributed across people and other things.  The work of Yvonne Rogers in the 1990’s introduced me to the idea of distributed cognition.  Here are some examples from my everyday life:

• placing my empty bottles by the front door to remind me to take them to the bottle-bank when I leave the house (memory distributed between bottles and Wendy’s absent mind)
• going upstairs to get my passport,  when I get upstairs I’ve forgotten why I went there,  going back downstairs and seeing the holiday (excitement level: Amber) details on Darling I remember why I went upstairs. (memory distributed between holiday details on Darling and Wendy’s absent mind)
• At the pub quiz,  trying to name a song title from hearing a snippit of the tune,  I can only hum the continuation of the tune,  another team member can sings the lyrics to my hummed tune,  a third team member can now name the band then the fourth team member can remember the song title (memory socially distributed between team members). 
• I can’t remember my password as letters and numbers,  I can’t remember the layout of a keyboard,   when infront of Darlings keyboard I can reliably produce my password (memory distributed between keyboard layout and Wendy’s absent mind).  The recent move from US to UK keyboards has been a bit password-disruptive.
• I can’t remember how to get from St Nicolas’s market to Clifton,  but when I am in Bristol I can walk the route directly with no trouble whatsoever,  very pleasant it is too  (Memory distributed between the city-scape and Wendy’s absent mind).  Note that the Schrocks recently experienced the way that St. Nicholas market can suprise you by turning out to be exactly where you are wandering.

People, sensibly, strategically delegate the effort involved in constructing some memories to post-it notes,  lists, calendars, address books,  mobile phones, bag-contents, places, blogs, photoalbums, family and friends. 

A die-hard cognitivist might say this is just context-cued recall.  Both paradigms provide the means to describe human behaviour,  but the approaches to psychological  theory building and research are radically different.  The cognitivist would attempt to identify the specific cues that work most effectively and assess them in a lab,  one specific unusual context, rather than analyse everyday activities in commonly meaningful contexts.  These different research techniques would yield different practical,  application, recommendations.

The cognitivists make the research language and approach to understanding human behaviour their domain as specialists,  ‘everyday’ approaches enable results to be readily recognisable, understandable and communicable to people outside of a specialist discourse.  They also afford more meaningful pragmatic applications. 

<Essay warning over>

My next essay will probably be on Reading’s buses…

The Euro may not have been adopted by the UK as national currency but the UK has adopted providing easy access to the Euro.  I can pick-up my Euros, for my rapidly impending Greek holiday,  at this bank cash machine in downtown Reading!  Hoorah!  

My debit account card will actually work in Greece charged in GBP at the conversion rate on the day of purchase and a per transaction fee of 75 pence.

Not ‘Our father’ in a christian sense,  in a continuously circulating open entry elevator sense like a vertical escalator!  I coudn’t find any explanation of why this name was applied to this type of elevator,  maybe because it felt so scary that you were advised to say some Paternosters before attempting to jump onto it.  Of its origins the elevator museum say:

Englishman Hart developed idea of a continuous human bucket elevator called “The Paternoster.” 1884 — J & E Hall installed the first Cyclic lift (Paternoster) in England.

Things are developed and possibly patented at different times in different countries,  with different names and different design details,  the US patent for a Paternoster style elevator was granted in 1934.

In the early 1980’s Aston University’s main science building had a working Paternoster inside to the left of where where the external ’sky lift’ was added in the late 1980’s.  I vaguely remember that it ran between the 2nd and 7th (top) floors. 

It was good fun jumping on and off the ever-moving Paternoster, especially during the then annual Charter (May )Ball in the early hours of the morning wearing a ball gown and under the influence of cheerful freinds and alcohol.  Many people would not use it because it just didn’t look safe.