Thanks to Freddie Daniells for drawing my attention to John Scalzi's tips for good writing.
It's pretty good advice, although it is missing my current bugbear; APOSTROPHES!!
Luckily one of the comments to John's post gives the hyperlink to Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.
If the rules are still not clear enough, here's a link to the Apostrophe Protection Society, which covers most of them pretty succinctly.
I bet it won't do much good though.
I spent all of yesterday (and I mean all… 12 hours pretty much on the dot and that’s not including travel time) helping my buddy Paul pack his belongings ready for his forthcoming relocation to Google-land.
57 boxes of all sizes (mostly quite large) were made up, packed, lugged and stored ready for the freight company to come and pick them up today.
Happily, nay VERY happily, Paul had had the good sense to employ the services of Sophie March, a professional declutterer, to organise the packing. I’ve moved more times than I can remember (for the first 8 years of my adult life, I moved on average every 6 months as I pottered around Europe) and I can safely say that without Sophie, who organised proceedings herself, we would have been at it through the night and it still wouldn’t be finished.
The de-cluttering business is nascent and just beginning to organise itself (Sophie is a member of the Association of Professional Declutterer and Organisers UK) but I can see it has huge potential. Paul's case is an example.
Paul has eclectic talents/interests and consequently it’s not surprising that he has so many belongings that need moving (in comparison, I once shifted a similar number of boxes from Paris to Stockholm – but that included all of my then girlfriend’s gear too!). Largely thanks to Sophie, he has a lot less now than he did two days ago!
From what I saw of Sophie yesterday, her greatest strengths are: an ability to get on with the task; lots of charm when it comes to helping clients decide what to keep or what to let go and (most importantly?) bundles of common sense. The combined effect was a huge reduction in hassle.
The upshots of yesterday for me are threefold: firstly I got to meet Sophie, who is lovely, secondly, despite my having pigged out this winter (what do you mean I was supposed to be getting fit?), today I can hardly notice that I have been doing lots of lifting and finally, on my way home I was finally able to try a pie from the ‘Gourmet Pie Company’ in Waterloo Station (verdict: average).
I guess it’s time for me to kick off my Spring Fitness Campaign, isn’t it?
Well, it hasn't been substantiated yet, but it appears that Ecademy has been 'out' for the best part of a day now.
Now, I've had my run-ins with Ecademy, principally because I dispute the membership numbers they've been claiming for the past few years. I also disapprove of their management style (I was a member for over five years).
Notwithstanding the above, I don't wish Tommy P and the gang any ill-will, so hopefully they'll soon be in a position to pay their telephone bill...
If anyone hears anything, please do let me know.
UPDATE AS OF 23:15 ON WEDNESDAY 15TH FEB, 2005
I just received the following good news. Apparently it's nothing to do with Ecademy's technical capabilities, it's all the fault of some of their suppliers... Dell in particular (although it seems that Cisco has something to do with it):
>>Ecademy: Yes down now for 5 hours we have hardware failure on all 7 Dell Bladeservers with redundancy failing 6 times on backup and recover
[19:43:55] Thomas Power says: recovery
we have Dell and Cisco on site now at Globix replacing all servers and routers however full recover is likely to be 24 hours total hardware failure
7 of these have failed on us today http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1855?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~page=1<<
Naturally, I'll post any news as and when I get it. In the meantime, the CEO of Last Thursday has made the following generous gesture:
A Note To Our Friends From Ecademy
We are very sorry to hear of the technical issues that have taken the Ecademy site down today. We understand that work is underway to fix these problems as soon as possible.
In the meantime we would like to extend you the hand of friendship and offer you a temporary home, here at Last Thursday, where you can keep in touch with members of your network etc. Private clubs are available for you to use and you are more than welcome to use our facilities to keep in touch with each other during this time. There is no obligation for you to stay here once Ecademy is back up and running and this offer is sincerely made as a gesture of goodwill between our two platforms.
Damon Surridge
CEO
Last Thursday Limited
I do think that's a friendly gesture.
SECOND UPDATE 24:25 16TH FEBRUARY, 2005
Last Thursday continue to be helpful. They've just made the following announcement:
LAST THURSDAY OFFERS HELP TO ECADEMY MEMBERS DURING SIGNIFICANT SITE OUTAGE
16th February 2006 00:00
The business and social networking platform Last Thursday (www.lastthursday.net) has offered members from fellow networking site The Ecademy, a temporary ‘home’ whilst the management there struggle to resolve major technical problems. The Ecademy went off-line early afternoon (GMT) Wednesday and was still down some twelve hours later.
Damon Surridge CEO of Last Thursday said,
“We have offered Ecademy members the ability to keep in touch with their personal network by using Last Thursday’s platform. They can use our private clubs and the Front Page to communicate with each other. This is a genuine good-will gesture – Last Thursday has many friends at Ecademy, and we can only imagine that they’re having a bit of a nightmare trying to resolve the technical issues.”
Last Thursday was launched last September and has been designed to offer a 21st century social networking organization for business people. Members meet on the last Thursday of every month at free meetings around the UK, Europe and Asia, but pay to be a member of an online platform which they can use to publish information and gain business intelligence. The concept is that people get to know other members socially in an informal environment, and in time, get to do business with people they have got to know and trust. This method of ‘slow networking’ has been developed as an antidote to the elevator pitch and business card fests that are a feature of more traditional networking organizations. www.lastthursday.net
currently attracts around 40,000 page views per day from its 1000 strong membership as well as a significant number of external visitors.
For further information, please contact:
Damon Surridge, CEO, Last Thursday Limited
+44 (0)20 7193 0695
Helen Moore, Director of Communications, Last Thursday Limited
+44 (0)20 8340 1043/+44 (0)7767 402984 Skype: helenmoore
They're clearly a really nice bunch at LT.
------------------
THIRD UPDATE 09:30 17TH FEBRUARY, 2005
Happily, it looks as though Ecademy is back. According to member comments on the site, the outage lasted for approx. 36 hours and the management team managed to send initial explanatory emails to their preferred customers (Blackstars) after only 24 hours of the site going down.
Ouch!
Texone.org appears to be the sandpit of quite a talented programmer (the site doesn’t have any details, but there are references to ‘my’ on various pages). He or she is interested in sound and visualisation and the site includes several tools, some of which are probably very useful indeed.
tree, however, is just very cool. It visualises websites as trees. I find it quite mesmerising.
Here’s a techie explanation from the site:
“tree accesses the source code of a web domain through it's url and transforms the syntactic structure of the web site into a tree structure represented by an image. this image illustrates a tree with trunk, branches and ramifications. first each tree is initialized, than all html links are detected, chronologically saved and finally displayed.
“the first tree corresponds to the domain; according to the syntax of the web site each further tree that builds up represents a sub page including all existing elements. the color of these trees reflects the color values of the domain and its sub pages.
“parallel to the graphic conversion, a permutation of the source code into midi data is generated analogous to the evolving trees, their branches and ramifications. any midi compatible hard- or software can be triggered by these midi data.
“the structure of any url can be visualized and transformed into sound. the aesthetic is not arbitrary or accidental, rather each url/domain determines the variation of trees in form and color.
“tree is a translation program. the simulation of real space by software as a starting point and basic question characterizes the search for an algorithm (design specification) which illustrates a real tree. tree interprets each html page as a design specification; the html space determines the algorithm and generates the visual world of the translation beyond simulation.”
When I figure out how to, I’ll paste a picture of DomPannell.com’s tree picture.
Oh, you need Java.
It's good to know that others take security seriously. Julian Guppy, the IT dude, is one such fellow, but it seems that he's not been having much fun with Norton or McAfee this week.
<<“I am thinking I would rather have the virus-at least I could work and just infect other people….” are these bad thoughts?>>
Well, yes they are Mr G...
I hope he calms down soon.
It's good to know that others take security seriously. Julian Guppy, the IT dude, is one such fellow, but it seems that he's not been having much fun with Norton or McAfee this week.
<<“I am thinking I would rather have the virus-at least I could work and just infect other people….” are these bad thoughts?>>
Well, yes they are Mr G...
I hope he calms down soon.
