:: The Wendy House ::

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

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.

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

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. 

<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…

also known as:  Remembering what to remember

I first encountered the currently popular (in Psychology of memory circles) ‘prospective memory’ as a term to describe remembering what to remember through Baddeley & Wilkin’s 1984 article ‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ .  The Laboratory, Lab, was typically where British psychologists studied human memory using rigourous exprimental methodologies.  The lab was normally a windowless, beige, unadroned room lest participants, then ’subjects’,  be distracted or inadvertantly influenced by non-experimental phenomena that might undermine the effect of the experimental manipulation.  

I liked Baddeleys work because he’d systematically estabished the positive impact of re-instating memorising context on recall levels through various studies including the influence of alcohol (Vodka) or physically being under water (diving) when memorising,  and recalling.  Both these experimental studies sounded fun,  were themselves memorable, and were even repeatable* in less rigorous forms with colleagues at University during normal studenty nocturnal activities. 

‘Taking memory out of the laboratory’ was published in a book called ‘Everyday memory, actions and absentmindedness’ .  This was ground breaking news to me in 1984.  There I was in the middle of a degree course, approved as official content and jargon by the British Psychological Society, where I had focussed my study on memory research.  I had just about got the hang of the technically specific language of psychological memory research such as retro-interference, auditory-loop, digit-span, recognition vs recall and much more.  Then,  THEN!  Those gosh-darn leading memory researchers sprang some non-technical terms that made sense and weren’t part of the current disciplin jargon.  How cheeky is that?

Absentmindedness? 

Cognitive psychologists study the absense of mind.  It was too much, I had a couple of vodkas and fell in a local canal with my miss spelt revision notes to celebrate. 

PS:  If I remember I’ll tell you why I’m telling you about prospective memory in a later post…

* Actually conducting the experiements makes them more memorable and easier to understand an evaluate than just reading or thinking about them over a cup of tea.

The opening and closing phrases used in emails that I receive* from English people are noticably different from those I receive from US people.  Opener-closer pairings tend to be more thematic than systematic:

Most common 2 UK Openers:

• Dear Wendy 
• Hi Wendy
• Other openers: ‘Thank you‘  ’Heya‘ ‘Hello  (Wendy, Love, Angel, Darling etc)‘  ‘Indeed’  ‘Oh my!’  ‘take this quiz its great!’**  ‘Oh cripes yes!’ 

Most common 2 UK Closers:

• Kind Regards (name on new line)
• Best Wishes,  (name on new line)
• Other closers: ’Love’   ‘Cheers’‘  ‘Sincerely‘ ‘ Thank you’  

Most common 2 US Openers

• Hi Wendy
• Hey
• Other US openers: ‘Hello’  ‘Thank you’  ’your question has been received’  ’that time again’  ‘thematic and diverting’

Most common 2 US Closers

• Thanks
• [authors name]
• Other US closers: ‘Sincerely’   ‘          [name]‘  ‘Must go!”  ‘Thank you’  ‘Thanks’  ‘thematic and diverting’

* The data leading to this conclusion was drawn by unsystematically reviewing the contents on my work and personal email inboxes for May 2008 living in the UK and October 2006 when I lived in the US.  The senders assumed-location or citizenship was used to assign UK or US practice.   By far the most common emails I receive come from friends and family with no standard opener or closer, they are written as-if with-in an ongoing conversation and are excluded from the analysis.  In no way can my inbox contents be considered representative of National or International trends. 

** My nieces do like eveyone to join in a good Quiz

My readers are perhaps just a bit geeky, um, like me, because they are coming from universities,  financial institutions and the software computing industry. 

Google analytics tells me the Network locations of computers that have reqested page-loads from the wendyhome servers.  Often these network locations are clearly consumer internet service providers,  sometimes they are not.  Here are some of the Network locations that do not look like consumer internet services grouped by primary business type.

Software/Computing

• Microsoft Corp
• APPLE COMPUTER
• Intel Corporation
• IBM
• Macafee Security
• Research Machines plc
• Hewlett-Packard Company
• Cisco Systems inc
• Opera Software asa
• Honeywell
• Eastman Kodak Company

Financial

• Credit Suisse group canada
• Fidelity Investments
• Bloomberg Financial Market
• Bank of America
• Barclays Capital (UK)
• Nat West Bank group (UK)
• First Rand Bank

Universities

• Cornell University
• Purdue university
• Leeds University (UK)
• North Carolina State university
• University of Brighton (UK)
• University of Cambridge (UK)
• University of Washington
• Charles University

Local government

• Wolverhampton city council (UK)
• East Sussex local education authority (UK)
• State of Arkansas
• State of Minesota
• State of Tennessee
• Government of South Africa

Aerospace

• the boeing company
• lockheed martin corporation
• Patrick Air Force Base

I have trouble keeping my categories stable.  Evolving categories.  By using mini-series such as ‘cute accent’ and ‘dreamy cheese’ I’ve tried to curb my tendancies to create categories and re-assign posts.  The Wordpress categories are painfully insufficiently fuzzy for my taste.

The new version of Wordpress (2.3) has support for tagging and tag-clouds.  Tags could easily evolve to replace my categories because they support the natural emergent and fuzzy quality of both my categories and interests.  Hoorah! 

Replacing my categories with tags could clean-up the Wendy House archive navigation for you and me. Tags do not yet offer some of the useful properties of the category system such as hierarchical relationships and hence similarity groupings.   I’m starting to use tags on my new posts but old posts are not tagged. 

Will adding tags to old-posts spam your RSS readers?  I’ve asked the Wordpress support forum to clarify before I start wrecklessly adding tags to past-posts to while away the long winter evenings. 

11 in Yardley 1

Originally uploaded by BrilliantMistake.

Note: this is a repost of a deleted post where the formatting totally f*******-up my whole blog lay-out. Apologies to people with RSS feed who saw all my attempts to correct the formating.  You’ll have to squint to read the paragraphs because using copy and paste for the repost hasn’t worked,  I can’t work out how to get back to the default font size for this post

My first experience of ‘geekism’ was meeting ‘Transport Management’ students at the Univeristy of Aston in Birmingham. One student had wall-papered his room with the Birmingham bus schedule.  He had a telescope that he used to check whether the buses were running on time. Another had his room full of blown-up photographs of the aeroplane’s that he had flown on. I went on a day trip with three of them to Stratford upon Avon train station. We never left the train station.  We wandered around photographing the trains. One lad went on to become an Air Traffic Controller.  Another lad drives armoured gold bullion vans.  His quirk was kissing cars, he would kiss any beautiful car he saw. Once on a very cold day he left the skin of his lips on a red Porche. Transport students were strange, very happy, individuals. Their enthusiasm was infectious.  From them I developed the skill to love the circular, octagonal, windy 11c Birmingham city bus route. The Transport students understood. They lived in the house with mice.  They didn’t mind because their love of Transport seemed to fill their hearts blinding them to many, personally insignificant, details of social conformity.  In the picture above the 11c bus route is portrayed as an oblong with gently curved corners.

Can you feel the love?

Shall I go back into my hole now or later?

My gorgeous little Sony Ericsson T610 mobile phone reminds me of the answers to all these questions. 

It synchronizes with my Outlook 2003 contacts and calendar.  Both Darling and my phone know where I have to be and when I have to be there.  If they are turned-on, they remind me.  Wonderful for a scatterbrain like me.  My phone is always turned on.  I just need to remember to charge and synchronize it.  I did have to buy a ‘Bluetooth adapter’ to enable Darling and my mobile phone to build a ‘partnership’.  Disappointing that a brand new laptop had neither an Infra-Red beam port or internal Bluetooth given how common these connection methods are on phones. 

Now I dont ‘remember’ anyones phone number or where I have to be when,  my phone does it for me…. 

Geeky GUSH!

<BORING entry warning>

I want a usable blog,  and I want it,  NOW!  Hah,  I’m still on planet fairy-tale,  but I’m coming down to earth FAST.

MoveableType

A quick read of the ‘MoveableType’ instructions revealed that they are very complex and very clearly written.  To set-up a blog I need a ‘Web Server’.  MoveableType let me know that broadband Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) normally include Web Server facilities in the subscription.  Yes Yes Yes!  Other requirements included something about being able install software on the Web Server,  something to do with ‘Perle’.

WebServer

My ISP provide 20MB of web storage and a web-page (not blog) development UI.  They recommended that I purchase a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) package to support moving files between my computer and the Web server.  They provided one specific recommendation that I would have to purchase.  Hmmmmm    No mention of the ability to install software (MoveableType,  Perle).

Are you bored yet?

Shheesh, I was!

Everything I checked out raised more questions.  Are there free FTP thingys, how do I choose between FTP thingys, etc . All potential thingys that would make setting-up a ‘good’ blog painful and drawn-out.  What are the pro’s and cons of using web-server service that is NOT my ISP?  I dont want to learn about how to set-up a useable (by me and YOU) blog. 

 I just want it DONE.

Next step - look into Blog creation and delivery services,  how much to pay for someone who already has this knowledge and skills to do the whole thing for me,  then tell me the advantages and disadvantages of different decisions.  YEA!

Guess what I’m doing tonight? 

Drinking Tea and beer

Hooray!

Wendy avoiding-learning-techy-skills-that-wont-get-re-use

Thanks to Snoo Tea this entry was made from my personal laptop (Tinkerbell) with its new hard drive!! The story involved:

Discovery - Snew Tea took out the new hard drive, looked at it put it back in & looked at the BIOS. It didn’t see the drive. Took it out again to read the information on the drive, put it back in and the BIOS saw it! Quickly we inserted the Windows XP SP1 OS restore disc supplied with the computer. It started installing!!!! I was able to log-on. Hooray!

Diagnosis - the drive wasn’t held in close-enough contact with the machine connectors by the Laptop casing. So we put some buffering material in place (bubble-wrap) to hold the drive in contact with the connectors and fastened up the casing.

Download and Installed

• Driver recovery package (CD came with the computer)
• Phonecall to activate XP SP1
• critical OS updates
• XP SP2
• antivirus
• anti-spyware
• anti-malicious-software
• Camera drivers (Canon Website)
• Office 2003 (and activated it)
• Office critical updates
• MSN Messenger 7.5
• photographs from my camera to my network drive

Tinkerbell is back to full health

Wendy full-happy-service-resumed

At the beginning of the week I had responsibility for 4 PC’s theoretically running <ha!> 6 OS’s.    I could only log-on to one PC OS.  I didn’t have a clue. 

I’ve managed to get 2/3  PC’s to a point where I can log-on!  Hooray, progress.  very time consuming,  painful progress.  

NOT FUN

It’s a waste of my time.  But there is no official support for my machines….  …just me and the goodwill of colleagues…  …who also have more important things to do…. 

My home laptop is still destined for the service center.  At least I CAN opt to call an expert in my personal life…..   

At this point in time I’d rather have a friendly technical computer whizzz than a hug.  Dad’s are good at that sort of thing. Mine’s in the UK…. 

W would-rather-be-using-her-core-skills-at-work

A sensible friend used a pair of pliers to twist the screw-driver on the screws of my hard drive casing.  Simple obvious.  Doh!  

Hooray,  old hard drive removed.  New hard drive in place. All I need to do is turn on the laptop and start loading my software! 

No.  Apparently not. 

We turned on the power and nothing appeared to happen.  Sensible friend checked out the ’set-up’ (like a pre-windows OS).  It told him that the laptop couldn’t ’see’ the new hard drive.  Now I have 2 hard drives.  One possibly broken,  one brand new.  A laptop that doesn’t ’see’ either of them but does have some form of set-up pre-windows stuff that works fine in telling people who can ‘read’ it that it cant see either hard drive.

Sigh. What next?

I’m thinking of taking the little tyke down to a computer service center to ask someone for a quote on servicing/fixing it.  I just want it to work,  I dont want to have to learn how to diagnose problems and stuff.  BIG SIGH. 

Wendy Using-Work-Computer-to-Blog

I took the hard drive out of my laptop,  carried it to a computer store, identified an appropriate replacement, and picked up some small Phillips screw drivers.  Progress!

I was feeling prematurely pleased with myself.  Maybe I could replace the drive and start the long tedious process or re-installing all my software:  OS, anti-virus, applications, anti-spyware etc….

HA! more fool me…

I discovered I need to remove the old drive from a close-fitting case that I had assumed was actually part of the drive. 

My hands are now raw with using all my strength to try and unscrew the casing.  No joy.  not even one of the four screws flinched.  I’m stuck.   Suggestions welcomed.  How do I loosen the screws? Then once loosened how do I tighten them sufficently on the new drive without damaging it?

I feel pathetic and frustrated. 

Computers shouldn’t do that to anyone.

Ineffectual Wendy  

Wendy gets geeky:

These original mold SylvaC Bunnies were produced Circa 1930 (thru to 1970). There are many ‘fakes’ on the Market judging by e-bay listings of what counts as a SylvaC bunny. A lot of the sellers don’t appear to know the legitimate mold numbers or the original colour-schemes. It is easy for someone with a copy of the original catalog (me) to spot the fakes.

A lot of buyers don’t appear to realize that SylvaC ceased trading in 1982. In the 1970’s SylvaC introduced a line of gloss-glazed rabbits and some new molds. I’ve seen sellers have either accidentally or knowingly misrepresented a post-1970 Bunny as “Vintage”. Maybe post 1970 is vintage?

The fakes are actually quite interesting in their own right. I’m thinking of extending my collecting strategy to explicitly collect the fakes. Provenance of the fakes is more difficult to trace. That makes them intriguing.

A catalog entry:

So cute!

All my bunnies have at least one partner except the big blue one,  1028. The big blue bunny was owned by my grandmother. It was searching for a partner for this one that kick started my collection. They are so cute!. But big blue is still in the company of all the little-ones and no partner

According to one e-bay advertisement Mould #1027 was only in use up to 1940… building of rumours and legends online…

Sweet bunny-hopping dreams, Wendy