The High Wood

I’ll keep this rant brief as I’m sure many have done it before me. It concerns the insidious influence of the spelling checker.

On the same day I have encountered the following:

1. The SMH refers to the US being keen to take advantage of Castro’s resignation by “reigning the island back into its sphere of influence”
2. A requirements document I was assessing referred to “breeches of regulatory requirements”
3. The same document refers to various systems as not being “effected” by the project

The concepts are not difficult.

1. reigns are for monarchs; reins are for horses. Despite American ambitions I think we can be clear the the metaphor here is referring to horses.
2. regulatory requirements do not wear trousers
3. effected/affected are best understood via their opposites. Consider the difference between ineffective and unaffected. We do not require our systems to be ineffective.

And while I am ranting, it is a spelling checker not a spell checker. The latter can be useful when reviewing necromantic incantations or demonic summonings (where the consequences of mistakes can be extreme) but they have no place in checking spelling.

Rant over.

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The Department for Increasing Productivity via Coloured Cardboard has been at it again at my place of employment. Posters have been appearing all over the place exhorting us to I’m not quite sure what.

There are five and they read as follows:

CHALLENGER SPIRIT – Be the enemy of the average

Unexceptional, I guess, albeit a bit clumsy. I think we’d do better being the enemy of the incompetent – there seem to be more of them – but hey I’ll fight the average if they pay me.

PERSONAL EXCELLENCE – Play to win not just to play

It’s not a game we’re playing here son…

CUSTOMER FOCUS – Continually lifting the bar on customer experience

I’m not sure this came out quite the way they intended. Certainly we do sometimes make things harder for our customers but it’s not usually intentional.

TEAM WORK – Cabinet solidarity and team before individuals

I think they nicked this one from the Labor Party manifesto. Cabinet solidarity? I didn’t even know we had a cabinet.

INTEGRITY – Live by your word with a strong heart and clear mind

Honest, I’m not joking. This one is really there. Possibly stolen from Baden-Powell or was it Biggles?

It’s amazing. I can feel my morale soaring already. Productivity gains I’m sure are just around the corner.

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Pamela’s publishers decided that we had to change her website (www.castingstrilogy.com). Specifically they wanted an RSS feed for her updates. Better have a blog, they said.

Well, I’m not a great fan of blogs as a way of getting across anythiing except ephemera. I believe a website needs to be a little more solid. And yet it is a good idea for announcements and sundry musings be available on a feed.

So I’ve ended up building a half-blog half-website. I’m actually quite pleased with the results. The front page is a blog and there are links to essentially ephemeral groups entries – Reviews, Interviews and Events/Appearances – which are handled by the blog. But the more solid stuff like details of the books and biographical info are real webpages.

Technically I could use blog ‘pages’ to do this as well but it is much harder to deal with them hierarchically and I like the extra bit of freedom that comes from making your own pages.

I am sufficiently pleased with the concept that I will be doing something similar with my own commercial website which will appear when I actually get my book published. Which is another story.

We’ll see if the concept survives real-world use.

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