vickytnz

tl;dr I decided to take interest in something that lots of other people do so I could talk to them.

I remember reading an article about the British show Bullseye that pointed out that the blue-collar workers shown in the 80s episodes actually knew more about current events at the time than some educated people might today. It was expected as common knowledge and things you would talk about. These days, sport is still the key cross-section.

And I'm pretty sure that football transcends class in the UK these days (I know to be at least a little interested in Sunderland and NUFC games due to moving here, just as every Kiwi worth their salt knows at least a little about rugby).

OK, I missed that, but still, that suggests two US links (not that I can see the actual data, it just links to the homepage), and ... Wikipedia? What does that mean in terms of a data set?

A comedy channel in the UK decided to rename the channel a few years back. They bandied names around, then someone said. "How about Dave? Everyone knows Dave, Dave's your mate." Dave it was. As it turns out, David has been in the top 3 names from 1954-1994, so reality is if you're a Boomer, Gen X, or Gen Y, you really do know a Dave. (Stats table here: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.h...)

Gah, I hate stats that a) don't say where the information comes from b) don't say which part of the world they're talking about (US sites are particularly prone to this). I'm assuming this is from US census data, but it's not particularly obvious. There's a rest of the world, you know.... [EDIT: looking at the app, maybe it is worldwide? Still, referring to things like "Republican" doesn't inspire confidence that it's international]

The real problem with Wikipedia redesigns is that they don't address their real issue: editing. Wikipedia have serious considerations encouraging a wider audience of editors, and to do so in a verifiable and generally professional manner. Show me a good means of encouraging people to edit and use Mediawiki, then I'd be interested.

Case in point: I had an edit war on Guy Fawkes' since one person refused to let me include information about Australia and NZ celebrating it but only in organised displays due to fire concerns (with news references and all), as they considered it 'irrelevant'. Started off an entire battle about it.

When I started working on my thesis, I immediately set up my entire document directory for it to be in Dropbox. At the time I paid extra for versioning but now I think it'd built into even the basic model. This also saved my friend when she was in writeup and someone stole her Macbook.

Or as usability people say: "you are not your user".

A pattern library is normally a collection of best UI practices: see the Yahoo UI pattern library http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ or http://ui-patterns.com/ for the two most well known examples. (It comes from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language and it being adapted to object orientated programming by the Gang of Four in 'Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software'). The ALA version is a bit odd as it's more style-guide like (you normally have more options).

Aral Balkan's Codename Prometheus revealed as Indie phone indiephone.eu

3 vickytnz 13 years ago 0 comments

… though as someone who's done conference reporting, it can get pretty exhausting fast (though for me I usually did the writeups that night and had to have them up the following morning. I used to go home after the conference and basically sleep for a day!)

I hope everyone knows you're quoting "The Elements of Style" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

An aside: I've been reading Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. Good, breezy, semi-techy read.

I was at a girls' school. As a straight-A student in a rough school, helping fellow students was a tactic for not being bullied. But all it takes is one kid to decide to take an exception to you and it can all go horribly wrong. And you might have done absolutely nothing (I know I didn't, many years later the bully apologised and admitted exactly that) but it's the one wave that can turn a tide. And that was with all girls!