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Birthday Cake Bake October 6, 2022

Posted by mwidlake in Baking, humour, off-topic.
Tags: home life, Humour, private
3 comments

A week or so ago Mrs W and I were watching a TV program called “The Great British Bake Off” – I believe it is also shown in many other countries or they have their own version? Anyway, Mrs W looked at me and said “you better be baking me a cake for my birthday! I want a hedgehog!!!” She was joking, Mrs W knows that cake baking is not one of my skills and the last one I did resulted in something more like a rubber biscuit than a soft, moist sponge cake.

However, I am up for a challenge. How hard could it be? Well…

First, boys and girls, bake your cake!

I knew we had most of the ingredients for baking a basic Victoria Sponge and I picked up the extra bits I thought I might need to do the decoration when I went shopping, so I was good to go. I lined my tins with baking paper, which took almost as much time as making the actual cakes, and I made the sponge mixture. The reason I chose a Victoria sponge is it is almost (but not impossible) to mess up – and it is about the only cake I have cooked before, other than a fruit cake (which I did not have time or inclination to do). The big issue with a Victoria sponge is whether it rises as you cook it.

When I saw it growing in the oven I was very relieved, the last cake I made for Mrs W utterly failed to do that!

I baked two cakes, I wanted one slightly wider than the other and the narrower one higher. This was to make it easier to carve the shape I had in mind. This did mean the cakes cooked at slightly different rates and although I did not open the door until I felt the first one would be ready, I mis-judged and got a little sinkage on both. I could live with that, I knew when I shaped the cakes I would have cut-offs I could fill those dips with.

Carve the general shape.

Now I had to carve the cake into the general shape of a hedgehog. I mixed up some chocolate glaze icing (icing sugar, cocoa powder, much less water than you think) and used that to glue the two cakes together and then stick the chunks I carved for the head together. It’s messy but once I had moved the finished shape onto a clean cake board, it looked good to me and my confidence rose like a fountain of joy. Tell me that does not look like the shape of a hedgehog? (One without feet, admittedly…)

Now, just decorate it!

I had a supply of piping bags and Mrs W’s extensive set of piping nozzles. I’ve even done a bit of icing piping in the past when helping Mrs W or my mum decorate cakes. I’m not bad at it, I say with pride and no modesty at all.

I now mixed up a load of glaze icing and, as I am (well, was) a zoologist, I knew I needed a light brown for the head & shoulders and darker brown for the body. I made both. But because I am (well, was) a zoologist and not in any way a cake baker, I made glaze icing. The clue is in the name. Glaze icing is intend to flow smooth and give a glazed, shiny finish. Any of you who know anything at all about decorating cakes is now shouting at the screen “you need Royal icing for piping you idiot!”. I looked at this gloop, I knew it was NOT what had been in the piping bags I had used in the past. This stuff I had was liquid. I mixed it thicker. It was thicker liquid. This was as likely to pipe into firms shapes as honey is!

A minute of google revealed my mistake. A look at the clock and it told me I had about 30 minutes to get this cake done. I did not have time to whip up egg whites, incorporate the sugar and cocoa, get it wrong at least once and re-make it to provide the royal icing I needed and do the actual decoration. I’ll just see what I could do with the very thick glaze icing I had…

As you can see, it did not go well! I put on some of the glaze icing – and it slid down the cake and puddled on the board. And it dripped everywhere. And the thicker stuff? as I tried to spread it, the icing stuck to the cake and then pulled it apart as I tried to spread the thick blobs wider. The picture on the left is actually after I had scraped off about half a pint of icing from the board and wiped it down. That fountain of joy had splashed down to a become a swamp of despair.

OK, I had Emergency Flakes I had bought. I’ve always regarded the use of flakes or chocolate fingers to make a hedgehog cake a bit of a cheat. I now realised I love cheating.

I cut up some flakes and stuck them on the cake out of desperation.

It was at this point Mrs W came into the kitchen to see what all the clattering & swearing was about. She took one look at the flesh-running zombie hedgehog I had created and laughed in a way I thought was dangerous for her underwear. “What… IS it?” It’s a hedgehog cake. “It’s not!” It’s your birthday, I’m making you a hedgehog cake. She tried to not laugh anymore but it was impossible for her. Oh well…

She took a photo. I knew why. There is a section in the follow-up program to The Great British Bake Off where people send in both their baking masterpieces… and their disasters.

I told her to leave it with me, I had a cunning plan. Sadly I did not have time to get to the shops and buy a cake, but maybe if I just really *believed* I could do this, it might work!

Back from the Brink?

I had lots of flakes. I had about 15 minutes until I would need to take the actual birthday meal I was cooking in the oven (at the same time as creating a zombie horror hedgehog cake) out. I cut and broke up the flakes, slapped on more glaze as glue where needed, picked off bits of cake and gloop, and I got the cake covered.

OK, it was less awful, but I was now out of flakes.

Well, I did what I could to tidy up the glaze icing. I used some final bits of Flake to fill in gaps and re-set some bits. I scraped off the (now fairly set) puddles and wiped off the debris and washed down the board as best I could. And I made some eyes and nostrils out of black fondant.

I have to confess, the final cake (finished as the oven beeped at me to tell me to take the main course out) looked OK – at least to me. What do you think?

By the way (and apologies to John Beresniewicz who had already asked this 2 days ago and was shocked I did let you know the name the hedgehog) – He’s called Harry.

Friday Philosophy – My First Foray Into I.T November 13, 2020

Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, Private Life.
Tags: behaviour, Humour, perception, private, rant
1 comment so far

This is the first computer I ever used. The actual one. It is a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K. It was at the heart of a long, terrible family feud – the source of much angst, anger, and even fist fights. Blood was spilt over this machine. Literally!

The actual first computer I ever used

Anyone who lived in the UK in the early 1980’s and is currently about half a century old will recognise this box with the grey, rubber (sometimes called “dead flesh”) keyboard. It was the model that came out after the Sinclair ZX81, which is itself a classic of early home computers, and sometimes the ZX Spectrum was called the ZX82. The Spectrum could put colour on the screen (up to 8 different colours at a time!), had a resolution of 256*192 pixels, the Z80A CPU ran at 3.5MHz, and it could make a sound. A beep, basically (for a wide variation of too few hertz to hear to too many hertz to hear and all tones in between, and of any duration – but it was still just a beep).

The Spectrum was initially a rival in the UK for the Commodore VIC 20, BBC Micro, Atari 400 and, later, the Commodore 64 (C64). They all had their advantages, the Spectrum’s was it was cheap! Even the more expensive 48K version (as opposed to the basic 16K) was cheaper than most rivals. Sinclair Research even tried to make out it was superior to it’s rivals as it was simpler and had fewer chips inside it. That was pure marketing BS of course. But the Spectrum and the C64 were probably the most common home computers in the UK in the early 80’s and they remainder popular even when more capable machines came out. They might not have been the best machines technically, but they both ended up having a huge number of games you could play on them, and that’s what counted. In my local computer games shop most games were for the Spectrum, then the C64, and all other machines got lumped together in a corner at the back.

The Spectrum was the first computer in the Widlake household. My dad agreed to buy it for my older brother Simon, who made a strong argument that it was an educational tool – and the early advertising material for the machine made a lot of it’s suitability as a such, with lots of worthy software for doing graphs and learning computer languages. About the only game available for it on release was chess. Dad was of the opinion Simon was the genius in the family – Simon was going to go to University! (At the time no one in the family had ever gone into higher education, only about 5% of people in the U.K. did then. As it turned out, all three of us kids went into higher education). So Dad felt it was worth spending the money, as he felt computers were going to become something. He wasn’t wrong.

But before Dad agreed to get Simon the Spectrum, he made Simon agree it was something the whole family was to have access to. He was to share it with myself and Steve, the eldest. Simon agreed.

The spectrum needed a tape record and a TV to be used

So the Spectrum arrived. Back then, home computers almost never came with everything needed to use them. The Spectrum, like several rival computers, needed a cassette tape record to save and load programs from tapes, and a TV on which to show the image. Simon had his own tape recorder and he was of the firm belief that, except when Dad wanted to watch the news, he could use the family TV whenever he wanted. As he was a genius after all.

He quickly lost the TV argument, the last thing our parents wanted was to lose the power of distraction that the TV provided for the other two kids – especially me as I watched a lot of TV and was a right PIA when I wasn’t. Steve did not watch a lot of TV but as he wanted nothing to do with the computer, it would have been really unfair on him to not get to see the few things he wanted.

However, Simon had a back-up plan. I had a portable black & white TV (so much for those 8 colours) and Simon was older & bigger than me. So he took possession of my TV. I complained to the court of Mum & Dad but the Tyrant justified his acquisition of the resource on the grounds that he was going to have to share his Spectrum, a far more valuable resource, with me – so it was only fair?!? “Yes” I agreed, but only when I was not using MY TV for MY watching of what ever (probably crap) I was wanting to watch. The court came down on the side of the Tyrant, but with caveat of the plaintive upheld. Tyrant could use the TV when Plaintive was not watching it. It turned out that the reality of the situation was that Simon was still bigger than me and to my considerable surprise “I didn’t want to watch anything” whenever Simon wanted to use his – err, sorry, “our” – Spectrum.

The next blow to the plans of Tyrant bigger brother was that it turned out his tape deck (the one in the picture) was crap. Most games would fail to load from it. But my tape recorder worked just fine for this purpose, it was a really quite nice JVC model… So, yes, you guessed it, another possession of mine was now to be treated as his – sorry, “our” – possession, still on the basis of shared access to the Spectrum.

So Simon used my stuff as and when he wanted, but did he share? Well, sort of…

Those of us of the correct vintage who got into early home computers would buy magazines like (in our case) “Your Spectrum” or “Sinclair User”. Inside there would be long code listings of programs. Simon “let me” read the text of the code out to him to help him type it in more easily. Or, if he was in a really good mood, he would let me type the code in on my own – whilst he was doing something else (like seeing his friends or watching the colour TV or picking on the cat). If I finished typing it in I was not allowed to play it until he got back. Yeah, like I paid any attention to THAT rule…

These games you laboriously typed in often had bugs in them, especially if they had a lot of code. Some were down to entering the wrong code in, more were down to the actual code really being wrong – quality control was non-existent. And, to give him his due, Simon was really very good at finding and fixing the bugs. Once there was a flight simulator in the magazine, spread over a couple of issues. I think it later got developed further and become “Psion Flight Simulator”. But the version in the magazine did not work properly. Simon found and fixed the bugs and even got them published in a later copy of the magazine. It taught us both that software could be wrong and that it could be fixed. I did fix some of the games myself, especially if I had been left typing it in and got it finished. And sometimes Under Orders from the Tyrant (who was out setting light to papers in people’s front doors or something…)

But I was not allowed to play with the computer myself without permission, and certainly not if he was out. Apparently I was old enough to enter code for him unattended but not to load up “Meteor Alert” or “Ant Attack” and have fun. You’d think from this I was maybe 8 or 10, but I was actually about 14 and more than old enough to recognise hypocrisy and injustice. I would say that’s what older siblings are primarily for, to teach you about these philosophies. Not by saying “this is something you should not do, oh younger brother of mine” but by amply demonstrating for real what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such bullying and unfair treatment. But my oldest brother felt no need to deliver such life lessons, so I could be wrong.

Simon would let me play “with him”. This usually took the form of him playing the game and, once he lost, letting me play until I lost – and then we would swap again. Sounds fair? Not really, as a lot of the time he would be playing on his own or with his friends and I was not invited. He would be using “our” TV and “our” tape recorder but it was still His computer and he was not letting me join in. So given my lack of practice and that I was younger and not so good at computer games as him, when he did let me join in his go would last 20 minutes and mine would last 2 minutes. Basically, he liked to be beating someone. I was better than him at a couple of games, one being “Attic Attack”, as I had learned the layout. We never played Attic Attack. Oh, he did play Attic Attack. He played it on his own, trying to get better, good enough to beat me…

I could beat the Tyrant at Attic Attack

After maybe a year, 18 months, things came to a head. Simon was never going to play fair, in his mind it really was his Spectrum and also now his TV and his tape recorder. After all, as he kept telling me, his computer was the more expensive item. Only, in reality, it was less expensive than my contribution combined. I started playing on the Spectrum when he was not in, as far as I was concerned I’d put more into this pot than he had and I was not going to accept this shit. I could not use it against his will when he was there but once he was out, I damned well was going to get some of my fair share. As you can guess, this did not go down well with him when he found out and the Tyrant did what all bullying, older brothers did and he physically asserted his authority. He’d hit me. I was not really pleased about that, so when he’d go out I would absolutely bloody well would play on it if I wanted to or not, out of spite & defiance (and also to keep my edge in Attic Attack) – and it would repeat. It came to a head when he made my nose bleed – and it dripped on the computer. That was, of course, my fault… “If you’ve damaged the Spectrum I’ll kill you!” Oh, I’m so sorry for bleeding on things after you hit me. Maybe that should teach you something…

It was now warfare. Screw you, I said, you’ve never shared as agreed, keep your Spectrum, it’s useless without my bits. I banned him from using my equipment. A ban which he now ignored of course. I went to the court of Mum & Dad, but not only was Simon “the genius” but he was, back in reality, a lying & manipulative sod and he made out he was sharing and I was being a spoilt child and I was told I had to share as he was (!!!!). So I took things into my own hands – and I started hiding the cables to my tape recorder and taking the plug off my TV. Yes, I physically removed the plug from the cable and hid it. He tried to work around my sabotage, one day I came home from somewhere to find he had plugged the Spectrum into the family TV and he’d got hold of a spare power cable for my tape recorder and he was using it, despite me banning him from it, playing games with his mates.

I went utterly, lost-the-plot nuts. I demanded my stuff back and an apology or something or let me play too and he was having none of it. So I tried to take my tape recorded back and he tried to stop me, but I was so mad I got hold of it (I think I was finally getting strong enough to fight back a bit) and, shouting something like “and you used it to load that game, so I’m taking THAT as well!” I kicked the power plug out the Spectrum. Game gone, no tape player to load one up, games afternoon with his friends was over and there was nothing he could do about it. He went BERZERK, trying to wrench the tape drive back off me and hitting me but I was so furious I held my own and I think I even kicked his computer again. He was straight off to Mum saying I was trying to break his computer. And this time, the Court of Mum & Dad finally realised Simon was being a little shit. He could not deny he had used my things, even though I had told him he could not, and he could not claim I attacked him first (his usual stance), as his mates backed me up and said Simon had hit me first. Yeah, his mates dobbed him in it! I think they found it all hilarious.

This led to a full judicial review and this time the voice of the Plaintive was heard. I might have been a little sod but I had never tried to break stuff before and I utterly refused to accept it when The Tyrant lied that he shared at all – why would I be this mad and and even taking the plug off my TV? Simon had not helped himself in other ways as he’d been caught bullying me by Mum recently and been in trouble at school. Timing was on my side. He was told to play fairly or else… have his precious Spectrum removed. Dad would monitor.

This was my Amstrad, I bought it, Simon was not using it.

After that, it got a bit more equal. I did get some time on the Spectrum myself (though I did sometimes have to get enforcement from the judiciary) and I did not just play games. I had typed in a lot of programs for Simon and fixed a few of them, so I slowly learnt how to program. I wrote a couple of my own simple games and put in stuff from magazines I wanted to try but Simon had no interest in.

But it never did really completely end. He could no longer stop me using the Spectrum. But if I was using it and Simon decided he wanted it, he would just bully me, or tell dad I was stopping him “learning” (I am not so sure what you learn from playing “Jet Set Willy”). That Spectrum came, for me, to represent what a selfish, lying, bullying, devious shit my older brother was. I swore one day the Spectrum would be mine.

And then it all changed, I got my own computer, an Amstrad CPC464. I bought it with my own money I earnt from months of back-breaking fruit-picking work (Simon was “too good” to do manual labour, so he had no money). It had not been bought by Mum and Dad, it was in no way a shared resource, it was totally mine. And guess what I said to him when he asked (well, demanded) to use it?

Yes, he could Fuck Right Off. He had his Spectrum.

And if he tried his old tricks of hitting me, it would be a more equal fight (he was still taller and older than me but manual labour had made me a hell of a lot stronger), so he decided against that. He could keep his crappy Spectrum.

The irony was that, even though my Amstrad was a much more advanced and capable piece of kit, the Spectrum and it’s vast library of games was still the best option for fun.

Well, the Spectrum is now mine. I picked it up from Mum’s house this week. Simon passed away many years ago, so it’s been sitting in a drawer for almost 2 decades. Being a Friday Philosophy I guess I should now tell you what the Spectrum now means to me, the healing process, what we can learn from this? How family, in the end, is more important than mere possessions? Stuff like that?

Well, I can.

I learnt that Simon was always a bullying, nasty, selfish, self serving sod and he got no better as he got older. So there.

And the Spectrum is now mine I guess.

But I don’t have a TV with the right socket to plug it into, and I know already – that tape drive won’t load games…

Friday Philosophy: The Intersecting Worlds Around Oracle April 24, 2020

Posted by mwidlake in conference, Friday Philosophy, humour, User Groups.
Tags: behaviour, Humour, private, user group
5 comments

Some of you may have noticed something about the Oracle Community: How certain other aspects of human nature, factors, and outside activities are unusually common. An abiding love of the works of Douglas Adams (If you have never read “The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy” you should question if you are right for this community – and if you have read it/seen the series/watched the film and disliked it, I’m afraid you have to leave now); Lego was probably an important part of your childhood (and quite possibly your adulthood, though some “project” this fixation on to their kids). A lot of the most talented people, especially presenters, are called “Martin” or similar :-}.

Three Different Worlds Meet

There are two other groups of people that are large within the Oracle community and that I fit into.

Oracle people who have a thing about cats. A positive thing, not those weird people who don’t like cats. It seems to me a lot of people in the Oracle community are happy to serve our feline overlords. This can polarise the community though, so introduce the topic of cats carefully. If the other person mentions how evil or unfriendly cats are, put them on The List Of The Damned and move on to something else.
Making bread, especially of the sourdough variety. This is a growing passion I’ve noticed (quite literally, given the careful tendering of starter mixtures and also expanding waistlines). It seems to be especially common with technical Oracle people. More often than not, when I get together with a flange of Oracle Professionals (or is it a whoop or a herd?) the topic of baking bread will come up. Unlike technical topics, such as what is the fastest way to get a count of all the rows in a table, baking topics are rarely contentious and lead to fights. If you want to put spelt wheat in you mix, that’s just fine.

Mrs Widlake and I were talking about this last night (one of the problems with all this social isolation business is that Mrs Widlake is being forced to spend a lot of time with me – after 27 years of marriage idle conversation was already a challenge for us and now with over a month together all the time, we are getting desperate for topics). She asked how many of my Oracle friends liked both cats AND baking bread?

It struck me that it seemed to be very, very few. Unusually few. I think this is something that needs to be investigated. This pattern would suggest that bread makers are cat haters. But in my non-Oracle world, this is not the case. The best people are, of course, Ailurophiles and many of my feline-fixated friends are also bakers of bread. Just not in the Oracle world.

What makes Oracle people so weird?

Does anyone have any ideas? And have you noticed any other common areas of interest (excluding computers of course, that’s just obvious)?

A few that spring to mind are:

Terry Pratchett and the Discworld
Running
Weird science
XKCD
The Far Side
Star bloody Wars.

Let me know. Or don’t.

And for all of you who don’t like cats…

Meow

Friday Philosophy – Presenting Sex January 24, 2020

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Presenting.
Tags: behaviour, Humour, perception, Presenting
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These slides are from the first ever presentation I did. And yes, the presentation was at work.

The Evolution Of Sex

My first real job after college was as a trainee analyst programmer for the National Health Service and, as part of the “graduate training program”, we attended a short course on presentation skills. As you would expect, we all had to do a presentation at the end. As most of us had never had a job before and we were dull with no interesting hobbies, most of the presentations I could see being put together around me were a little… boring. I decided to try something different.

If you think the photographs with this article are a little poor with odd reflections, that is because the original images are printed on transparent acetate sheets and were displayed by putting them on an overhead projector – a large box-thing with a blindingly bright light that shone through the acetate sheet and cast the image onto a screen or wall via a mirror/lens bit. Laptops had not been invented back then and I’m not even sure a PC (if you could afford a PC 386SX) could drive a projector. This was all manual – you had to change sheets by hand. At least you never had problems with connecting the overhead projector to the acetate sheet, you simply put the sheet on upside down and back-to-front and had to re position it 3 times before you got it right. This is important, I could not quickly flick between images.

When I put up my first sheet, with the cute little couple holding hands, our tutor screeched and said to one of the other delegates “Oh God! I thought you were kidding when you said what he was presenting on!”. Before I could even take this opening image off the projector sh had stepped forward and told me I could not present this.

“Why not?” I asked, “we are all adults!”. She refused to let me swap to my first proper slide, “This is not the sort of topic that is suitable at work.”

Stand off.

“Well, what do you think I am going to talk about?”. Our tutor was now quite flustered. “I think we all know what you are presenting on – and I shudder to think what the next slide is going to be of!” (or something like that, this was a long time ago). I had no choice. I got her to come closer and look at my next couple of slides…

Her relief was visible. She could immediately see the next slides were not based on “The Joy of Sex” or similar publications and after she’d looked at each of my acetate sheets carefully (just to make sure) I was allowed to continue.

Of course, this had somewhat diluted the tension & expectation that had been building up, but I felt I had milked the initial surprise as much as I was going to be able to. I moved onto the next slide and most of the audience was disappointed by the lack of limbs, bodies and appendages to be seen. As you can see to the left, the next slide was an odd set of little diagram of dots & letters and what many of us would now recognise as a sort-of family tree diagram. As some of you know, my degree had been in genetics (and zoology but that is bye-the-bye).

There is a very interesting thing about sex, as in sexual reproduction. What is the point? Well, apart from the immediate pleasure for animals like us that seem to enjoy the initial act, why do we mix the genomes of two organisms to produce new offspring? It is not mandatory, many organisms (especially plants and bacteria) employ asexual reproduction. All the children are effectively clones of the adult. There is no finding a mate or the need for pollen to arrive, the actual process biologically is a lot simpler & more reliable, and you don’t need males running around using up resources for, let’s face it, a pretty small contribution to the effort. Asexual reproduction is a lot quicker, simpler, needs less energy. A species that does away with sex can out-compete sexy competition.

My little talk was all about that, about why you have male and female, why mixing the genes from two individuals and, over time, across the gene pool of your species, is beneficial. I won’t bore you with the details here.

That first presentation of mine went down very well and it was remembered by everyone there. A lot of people (who had not even been there for the premier of that talk) mentioned it to me when I left the company. It made an impression on me too – if you can grab people’s attention at the start of a presentation, it really helps make it a success.

And, of course, as anyone in marketing will tell you – Sex Sells.

In this case, even the lack of sex.

Philosophy – Treating Illness As A Performance Issue December 24, 2019

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Private Life.
Tags: Humour, perception, private
4 comments

Firstly, I’m on the mend. This is not a post about “oh woe is me, I am so ill”. But I have been rather ill. I’ll just give you the highlights: The highs of UKOUG Techfest19 at the start of the month were followed very quickly by me developing full-blown influenza (Type A). After about 5 days of being ill in bed I realised I was fighting for breath just laying there. I analysed the problem and came to the conclusion “something else is very wrong and paracetamol is not the answer”. I was taken into hospital and put on increasingly powerful ventilating machines until they could get enough oxygen into me to keep me (sort of) functioning. I’d developed secondary infections & pneumonia, seriously reducing my lungs’ capacity to exchange oxygen & carbon dioxide. {Update – no, I was not an early, uncrecognised COVID-19 case. If that was so my type of influenza would have almost certainly come up as unknown – the two viruses are quite different}.

Wearing this thing was like being up a hill in a force 8 gale!

A normal oxygen (O2) blood saturation level is 100. Below 90 is a cause for concern. A constant level below 85% is medically deeply worrying as 80% and less is harmful to several organs and confusion/unconsciousness are likely. Below 75% and you are almost certainly unconscious. I do know that when I first got to hospital they could not get me up to 85% and they could not understand how I could still talk and be (mostly) rational. I went from nasal O2 to a face mask to a machine that blew damp, warm O2 up my nose and finally a pressurised face mask. Next step was sedation and full mechanical ventilation – but they did not want to do that. My blood O2 became my main metric and I followed it like a hawk.

So I’m in hospital, very unwell (but not dying {update – at least they didn’t tell me at the time. They told Sue I was seriously ill and would probably be put into a medical coma} ), under excellent care. And I’m almost, but not quite, totally incapacitated. To me it was a bit like I was a computer system with a serious deficiency of CPU power. Or a toy robot with failing batteries. Energy conservation is paramount. So what do you do in this extreme situation? Turn off everything you don’t need turned on, and save energy for things you have to do.

Turning things off was relatively easy. After all, I was connected to a load of monitoring technology and breathing kit so I was not going wandering about. I didn’t move much. If I needed to sit up I was not going to use those stomach muscles, the bed was powered and would move me about. If I wanted something from the table besides me (like a drink) I’d relax, breath deep, get my Blood O2 up – and then get it. A little rest and then I’d e.g drink or look at the phone.

Some things I had to do (or insisted on doing) and I realised how much energy they took:

Having a poo

It takes a lot more energy to have a poo than you think. I was just about mobile so I was allowed to look after my toilet needs. They would bring me a commode, position it so I could get there still attached to the ventilator keeping me going, remove some of the monitoring (but not all, heart monitor and blood 02 had to stay on) and get me ready to swap to the commode. And then leave me alone for 10 mins. I think at first they hung about by the door listening for a thud, and I had a call button. Getting onto the commode was OK (breath-breath-breath, move, pant for a minute like you just sprinted 100m… relax), but the actual job itself uses more abdominal muscles than you probably every realised. Tiring.

All the monitoring kit was on one arm. The one I normally use to “tidy up” with. Using the other hand was very odd. And again, tiring, I had to take it in stages!

My PICC line. patch in armpit, line along vein almost to my heart.

Post event I would need to rest and let the blood O2 lift back above 90% and then I could shuffle back to the bed and press my button. The nurse would come in, congratulate me, and attach any removed monitoring. I’d lay there and wait for the O2 to get back above 90% and the bloody monitoring machine would stop pinging.

For 3 days this was the hardest thing I did, it was my main exercise…

Eating

Actually chewing & swallowing was easy. But to do that you have to get the food into your mouth. Holding your arms up to eat is hard work! I took to cutting up what I had (if it needed cutting up), having a rest, then eating with one arm, mostly balanced on the table with brief bouts of effort to ferry morsels to my mouth. I was incapable of lifting a pint. Even more incredible – I had no desire to lift a pint!

I’d have a little rest after eating and I found I had to listen carefully to my body about how much to eat. Anything more than about what you would feed a cat in one sitting, and I would lay there, 2 or 3 hours later, conscious of the need to move that food out my stomach and into my gut. Who knew the mechanical side of digesting needed effort.

Washing

You can’t have a shower if you are attached to breathing machines. And I was not able to leave my room anyway as I was an infection risk to other patients (I had ‘flu remember). Plus, at first, no way could I do all that waving arms, applying shower gel and the rest of the business. So it was washing with a bowl, cloths, and lots of towels. If I took it steady I could do this myself, except my back and, oddly enough, my legs. lifting them up was exhausting! Nice nurses did those bits.

Weeing

I’m a man, weeing was not an issue. They give you an endless supply of little bottles with a hole towards the top. So long as you tuck the relevant part into the hole (having sat up using the bed) you just “let go” and pressure does the rest. No energy. The first time is worrying – “what if I miss, what if I fill the bottle”. The bottles are designed to be bigger than a human bladder.

This pushed warm, O2 laden air into my lungs and Was My Friend

However, if you do what I did and then drop the bottle of wee on yourself, do not attempt to sort it out! I did, I stared trying to use a towel and get out the wet spot and I nearly went unconscious as my O2 plummeted from the effort.

What you do do is call the nurse and say “Nurse, I just poured my own wee over myself and I’m wet”. Nurse will remove your wee-covered clothing (a hospital smock), un-plumb you from some machines, move you to a chair, plumb you back in, and then clean up the bed, bedding, floor etc. They don’t either laugh at you or grumble. You just sit there feeling like a pillock.

Nurse will then ask how much you had wee’d. Why? I’m on a high dependency ward, they measure everything. A key thing is fluid in (via saline drips and drinks) and fluid out – blood taken for observations and weeing. I knew I was getting better when the weeing increased compared to drinking. This is because my lungs had swollen with fluid and, as they recovered, they released the fluid. A pair of swollen lungs hold a lot of fluid!

It had been a good wee, I guessed 350ml. It certainly was enough to make me and the bed very wet.

Coughing

Having a good cough (which I did a lot of, of course, what with all the lung issues) would send my blood oxygen plummeting. Again, lots of abdominal muscles and the diaphragm (the sheet of muscle between your lungs and stomach) are used in coughing. If I could, I would build up to a good cough, conserving my strength and getting my O2 up in preparation for a real good go. But if it caught me by surprise, it could drop the blood O2 dramatically. But the good thing was, coughing helped expand the lungs and I recovered quickly and was “better” for half an hour.

Thinking

At rest, your brain uses about 20% of your total energy. This is true even for stupid people like Donald Trump :-). Biologically it’s very interesting that humans have such large brains and put so much energy into it – far more than any other animal (in relation to body size). Our brains makes us different to all other animals, ie “intelligent”, but at a significant energy and nutrients cost.

If my blood O2 dropped too low I would start shutting down. This is why people with breathing difficulties pass out, once blood O2 goes below a certain level, your higher brain functions stop to reduce demand and protect the rest, unconsciousness comes quickly.

Thinking was hard. I’ve never been one for just sitting there “thinking of nothing” but I did an awful lot of that in hospital. It was my brain saving energy.

Socialising was a real drain. I could do the 2 or 3 mins with the nurses or docs when they came to do observations (oh, so many observations in a high dependency ward!) or put drugs in me, take out my bood (Oi! I wanted that blood! I was using it to ship the small amount of O2 I can absorb!). I had to be really on my game when the docs popped in once or twice a day as this was my opportunity to try and ask smart questions like “so we have a diagnosis, what is the prognosis?”. Don’t worry what it means, medics live by it so asking them makes them think you know some of the secrets… Docs don’t tend to tell you much in my experience, unless you can ask pertinent questions and show you understand the answers. They seem to think ignorance (on the part of the patient) is bliss. If I knew when the docs were going to be in, I’d try and have a pre-visit snooze so I was at the top of my game.

Where it was hard was dealing with Mrs Widlake. Mrs Widlake was wonderful, she would ask me what I wanted and the next day she would bring it in, let me know what was going on, if people had been in touch, who was annoying her. And kept me company. It was very important to me. But after about 1/2 an hour I would start shutting down, the thinking (and talking) reduced my low energy levels. We worked out a solution. She would come in, give me my new book and the bizarre, random items I asked for and chat to me. After 1/2 an hour she would go have a cup of tea in the visitor’s room whilst I zoned out, then came back for more chat. Resource management and time sharing! Sue did not want to leave me alone but after a few days we both accepted that a daily visit in sections, kept to maybe 3 hours, made the best use of the resources available. It was a bit like my batch processing window!

My Nemesis – The Evil pin-Ping-PING machine!

Monitoring

So I was managing my resources and finding out which ones took effort. But like any good system, you need monitoring, real-time feedback. And boy was I monitored! I was on a high dependency/close observation ward. Every hour, every single damned hour all night too, they would come and do blood pressure, record my heart rate and O2, measure my wee, what I had eaten, temperature etc, steal blood.

But the main thing was the machines I was attached up to. They constantly monitored. And pinged. Oh god, did they all bloody Ping. If a chest sensor fell off or I sat on the connector, that machine would ping. If a drip (drug or fluids) ran out, it would Ping. Breathing machine ran out of water? Ping Ping Ping! The ventilator had to up pressure or I moved too much (I duuno why) – Ping Ping Ping.

But the worst, my nemesis (and also my KPI) was the blood O2 monitor. If I dropped below X, usually 86 or 88, it pinged & pinged & pinged. If I dropped below 85 it would up the volume and multi-ping: “ping-Ping-PING! ping-Ping-PING! ping-Ping-PING!”. You could not even cheat it by taking the monitor off, as then it went ping-bloody-crazy. All those tasks I mentioned above that took effort? They all made this blasted machine ping or ping-Ping-PING!

The one biggest challenge to me during my stay was not boredom, not pain (I was lucky, no pain other than what they inflicted on me putting in drains etc, or headaches due to low O2), not fear – it was trying not to go crazy due to the the pinging. I did everything I could to stop the pinging. The only time I really lost it with the nurses was one night as I improved and they changed the warning levels up to 90 and every time, every time I started to fall asleep it bloody ping-Ping-PING’d. I told the nurse to turn the levels back down else I would rip the damn thing off the wall. She said she could not, as she was not qualified to make the decision. “Well find someone who can as, if it does not let me sleep, I will lose my shit”. It’s the only time I swore at any of the people looking after me. It got turned down.

This is exactly like having OEM monitoring a database and alerting on a KPI such as CPU usage when usage spikes and is actually OK. Just endless, endless false alarms. What the damn things should have done (in my opinion, for me) was only Ping if I was below a limit for over a minute, or went down to critical. Then it should go absolutely crazy.

And it was not just my machines. Other people in the ward had their own pinging machines. They. All. Pinged.

I’m back home now and recovering. I can breath unaided and slowly, slowly I am able to do more without running out of breath. Like have a shower or make my own cup of tea. Give me a month (I’ve been told it’ll take a month) and I should be back to sort-of normal. I won’t be running marathons or using the axe in the garden for a while. I’m still treating myself like an under-resourced computer and dolling out effort where best used. But each day another core comes on line and I can expand the extra effort. I think it’s called getting better.

Controlling The Presentation Monster (Preparing to Present) November 18, 2019

Posted by mwidlake in humour, Perceptions, Presenting.
Tags: Meeting, perception, Presenting
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As I covered before, nerves before a presentation are not a bad thing. In fact, many excellent presenters/performers recognise that those butterflies of anxiety are necessary to make your presentation really sing. But you need to control the Presentation Monster. You need ways to reduce its malevolence to a level you can handle so that you are going from lion taming to annoyed-but-fundamentally-not-evil-cat training.

Presentation Monster Gonna Get You

Embrace the Emotion

As the linked-to post above describes, nerves before a performance (and presenting is a kind of performance) are normal. So the first thing to do is accept that you not only will be nervous/anxious/really wanting the toilet very badly but that, if you didn’t, your talk is probably going to be poor.

Just accepting that and knowing that the people you see presenting, apparently in an island of calm, are mostly faking it helps. If they can fake it, so can you. Some of the below will help you turn down the anxiety dial or, if there is a need, even turn it up a little to get you buzzing.

Practice, Practice…. Practice.

I know it sounds obvious, but this is so true. You need to run through your presentation several times and in the right way. And people often don’t do it well.

When I prepare a new presentation, once it is written, I want to run through it from start to finish, in real time, 3 times. This is where most people go wrong and they make one of the following mistakes:

They will spot a problem on a slide, for example some text is garbled or an image is too small. And they stop to fix it, and then continue the practice session. Well, you just stopped the flow of it all and any timings you do will broken. Don’t do this – if you are still correcting big mistakes then your talk is not ready for the practising step, small mistakes you can go back to once you finish.
As each slide flicks up they go “yeah, OK, I know what I am going to say” – and move on. Don’t. Say it. Imagine the audience, talk to them, include any anecdotes or side points you plan (or suddenly think of), and speak slowly. It is way better to be faster for the real thing than slower as most presentations lead up to a Big Point or the Most Interesting Bits at the end, and if you run out of time…
They never time it. How do you know this takes 45 minutes unless you have done it in 45 minutes?

Practice any anecdotes or jokes. Ideally you want them to sound spontaneous but, like sincerity, you can fake spontaneity 😄. You will know if you are the sort of person who will wander off topic or throw in something you suddenly think of. If you do, the speaking slowly during the practice is vital. And make the talk 5 minutes shorter. You know you can fill it. You can’t so easily drop content without it being obvious and dropping content usually goes down poorly.

Once you have done a presentation for real a couple of times then it gets a lot easier to repeat, but you really do still need to do a full run though before each time you present it. It is very common that presentations gain a little content each time you do them as people ask questions that you now want to cover or you think of things you feel you were missing the first couple of times you gave the talk.

The aim is to ensure that you know your material, you know it will fit, and you will not be surprised by a slide coming up when you don’t expect it.

Just One!

A Little Glass…

If you partake of alcohol, consider having a drink, ONE drink, about 1/2 an hour before you present. A glass of wine or a beer.

Why? Well, alcohol is a depressant, in that it turns down the nervous system a little (as opposed to making you sad and morose, which it can in larger quantities). It enhances the activity of a neurotransmitter called GABA in your brain. The end result is it relaxes you a little and it also slightly suppresses the social filters we have in our heads to stop us saying things we worry we should not say. It actually helps when presenting if you are a little more… open and verbose.

By having the drink half an hour before you present, it will be having it’s full effect as you get going. By only having one you are still in control. If you are having 3 beers or half a bottle of wine before presenting, you are probably doing this very wrong and should stop!

An alternative is to have a coffee before you present. The caffeine gives you a mild lift, makes you a tad more buzzy. However, if nerves are a real problem for you, this might not be the best option. But if you want a little more energy, it can help.

Stop Messing With The Content Dave!

A few years ago I was at a conference, and the evening before it started I was having a drink and a chat with friends. Dave (not his real name, it was Rob) said he was going to tweak his demonstration for tomorrow. An early session tomorrow. I told him to leave it alone, the last thing you need is to stop it working. He agreed.

The next morning I went a little early to Dave’s session as I wanted somewhere quiet to drink my coffee. I was a little …tired from the bar the night before. Dave was already there. He was hunched over his laptop, typing like a crazed chimpanzee with a sugar rush, swearing.

“Dave – did you mess with the demo?!?”

“It won’t work anymore, I can’t make it work anymore!!!”. And then the audience arrived.

What followed was 45 minutes of high stress for Dave and a somewhat below par session for us.

My advice is change nothing just before you present. People who know me in the presenting sphere know this is advice I don’t always heed myself, I’ve been known to be in a talk before mine, quickly polishing my slides. And it is not a good idea.

The “demo that fails to work” is the worst case, but often you will see people present and suddenly say “oh, I thought there was a different slide now”. Or refer to something they had intend to say, but they dropped out the talk. Or re-ordered a slide and broke the flow or even logic of what they are explaining. And now they are flustered.

Do yourself a favour: by all means review your slides just before you present, I recommend that. But change nothing of substance. You will be a lot calmer. When you change stuff, a chunk of your brain is now tied up going “you changed the slide on mutating monsters, remember you changed the slide on mutating monsters”

Chat To The Audience/Friends Just Before You Start

I find this works for me, maybe it will for you. Hopefully, even if you are a new presenter, some friends will be in the audience. I find there are usually a couple of “dead minutes” before you present, especially at larger conferences. Time is left for people to change rooms and swap over laptops. You are either by the stage waiting or up on it staring at people as they come in, sit down, look at the agenda, leave again.

I use that time to chat with them (from the stage, I don’t mean go sit next to them and ask about the kids). A bit of light banter or just telling them to shut up and sit down. I might take a couple of pictures of the audience or comment on how early it is/close to lunch it is/too late in the day for this lark it is/did anyone see X talk/isn’t the coffee dreadful.

I’m not sure why this seems to help me, maybe it is acting to lower the communication barrier or, like if you are going for a run and jogging for the first minute to wake up the system, it eases you into it.

Post Performance Routine

How does what you do after you present help with your presentation? Well, because it is part of the whole experience. Your enjoyment of presenting is to a large degree down to what you got out of it the last few times. I have some friends who present that will be at the side of the stage before they start, adamant they are never doing this stupid thing again. But they do so as they know that, despite the fact that the Presentation Monster is currently feasting on their liver, over all they get something out of presenting.

I know some people who really want a quiet beer after presenting. I tend not to go to another session directly after I have finished one of mine as I’ve realised I struggle to listen as I am too keyed up. I like to chill & chat to people or check social media, usually with a coffee and also some water.

I recently asked around and it seems to be pretty common for people to have a post-presenting routine and it is usually around calming down and letting the adrenaline that comes with a performance ebb away. One person I know has to go pee a couple of times. Maybe it’s the beer before presenting.

Turning Up The Dial

Sometimes you might have the opposite problem. There are no real nerves or you are feeling flat before you present. That is not good as the adrenaline, the nervousness, that helps make you dynamic when you present. In this case I might turn the dial up a little.

I might talk myself into a little bit of anxiety – “What if they ask me about that bit I never looked into properly? Is the relevant product manager going to be in the audience?”.

I will probably have a coffee but I find the stuff does not do that much to me, but it might for you.

What I often do is add in a bit of new jeopardy. I’ll swap my intro slides to something new (or at least different) or slot in a new slide which is sort-of relevant. Or decide to try a joke early on that might not work. The most extreme thing I ever did was change my clothes (everything but the smallest items) on stage – using a huge banner to hide behind. I made the decision to do that only about 10 minutes before so I had to rush off and get the change of clothing too. That was the only time that I morphed the Presentation Monster from a kitten to a sabre toothed tiger, and it nearly got me.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is you want the Presentation Monster in the room, you want it a little hungry, but not ravenous and determined to have your liver for lunch. You don’t want it to be any larger than you can handle with a good stick and a bit of determination.

Friday Philosophy – Top Ten Influencers in my Technical Career October 18, 2019

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions.
Tags: Humour, perception
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Earlier this week I was sipping wine late at night and cogitating on what led me to where I am now. Part of that was the more specific topic of what, or rather who, influenced my technical development and career, especially early on. As a little game for myself, I decided to jot down the 10 first names I came up with and did not discard within 5 seconds. And then excluded those who’s influence had been negative!

The ones you will know…

It’s OK, don’t get your hopes up, you are not on the list.

That list was:

Cary Millsap
Craig Shallahamer
Mike Cox
Jonathan Lewis
Barry
Maria Colgan
Steven Feuerstein
Rachael Carmichael
Tim (OracleBase) Hall
Dominic Giles.
Richard Foote

I really hope you have heard of most of them. I’d be amazed if you know all of them. And yes, there are 11. I was, if you remember, sipping wine late at night. In the morning I looked at the list and thought about refining it or expanding it (and boy, I could expand it to 50 people plus in 10 minutes) but that was not my game. First 10, with very little analysis.

You know what is coming, I’m going to step through the list. I’m so obvious. But the reasons are not always so obvious (though some are, sorry). Remember, I was slightly drunk.

Cary Millsap. I detest Cary Millsap.

I’m joking of course! But a tiny little bit of me always goes “Grrrr” when I think of this man who is fundamentally a really nice person, very bright, and a wonderful presenter. Why? Well, he came up with OFA, the Optimal Flexible Architecture. This specified a logical, sensible way to lay out an Oracle database, it’s files and the directories they went in, file naming conventions etc such that the database was performant, easy to navigate, and you could have multiple databases on a server without confusion. And that could have been me! I came up with almost the exact same thing and I was damn proud of it. And 6 months after I came up with it and thought “I need to make a big thing of this and get some credit for my genius” – I came across OFA. I was gutted.

Optimal Flexible Architecture 8.1.5 style

The thing is, Cary was one of the first people I came across who was putting out stuff to help all us DBA types back in the 1990’s. I am sure I must have seen stuff he did that became the OFA and it influenced me. His OFA was first published a couple of years before I came up with my design, but I had not seen it. We did not really have the internet back then!

Cary did not influence me simply by producing great stuff, he made me realise that several people can come up with similar ideas and, actually, being “first” is nice – but really the key thing is to spread the knowledge. Making our jobs easier for everyone around you is really doing something for the community. Cary also came up with Method R for performance tuning which is great, but time to move on.

I sometimes mention I have a decent dose of dyslexia. In my mind Craig is Craig “Shalamar”. His last name is too long for me and I “spin” in the middle of his surname “Shallahamer”. Too many repeated letters (in my mind there are 2 m’s too). Thus when I only knew him from printed materials my brain would stick with the wrong name. Few people were putting out stuff in the early 90’s and because his stuff was so good he was a key, early source of received wisdom for me. Then in the late 90’s he disappeared, or at least from my view he did. But now he’s back and I’ve met him. He is about the only person (him and Kerry Osbourne, sorry Kerry) who I have been a little hem-touchy with (go right to the end of that post). ie went “Oh wow! You are blah blah!” when meeting them (follow the link if you want to know what I mean). It’s OK, Craig let me off. I got him a beer. It was a free beer, it was at DOAG! One day I’ll actually buy him a beer to say thank you for all the help he gave me early on. I might even buy him two, but let’s not get too giddy.

Mike Cox is fundamentally a brilliant developer & incredibly smart and he will never, ever present. It’s not for him. He represents the huge number of very talented I.T people you never hear about as they just get on with the job. I worked with Mike when I was at Oracle in the early 90’s and again at the end of the 90’s when he {grudgingly} told his boss I was not totally useless. His boss knew that was high praise. I remember someone telling Mike his code did not work. Mike replied “Yes it does! I’ve checked it. Twice!”. His code worked. He is one of the few people I know who can write a page of PL/SQL and execute it and it does what he wants, first execution. But that is not what he taught me. He taught me that what we do is create solutions and the absolute one thing you have to do as a developer is create something the user wants to use. I.E. it makes their working life easier. Everything else is secondary. Thanks Mike.

Sharp tools – everyone here is one

If you are in the technical core Oracle RDBMS sphere and you do not know who Jonathan Lewis is, I’m stunned. His approach to methodically understanding problems and how Oracle works is second to none. I think there are one or two people as good as Jonathan is but personally I know of no one better. So that is why he influenced me? Well, yes and no. Oracle Names, those top people (and this is true in all disciplines) are people, just like all of us. Very talented but, fundamentally, normal people. Jonathan is a friend, I like chatting to him in the pub and we will discuss bread and chainsaws on twitter. And he has given me advice and help over the years, as a friend, and I very much appreciate that. And if it is not Oracle, sometimes I’m teaching him. If you meet those presenters and writers of good stuff then yes, of course, respect their skill. But don’t hero worship them. Most of them don’t actually like it. Treat them like regular people (because they ARE regular people) and you might make a friend.

I’ve written about Barry before (and no, I can’t for the life of me remember his last name). Barry taught me that you don’t need to be technically the best to be great at what you do. You need to care and you need to be willing to try and you need to be willing to learn. It’s all about attitude. In the little team we were in we had a guy who was technically superb. And no one liked him, as he was an arrogant and unhelpful bugger. Everyone liked Barry and asked him to help. Be like Barry. I try to be like Barry.

SQL Maria (She’ll probably never lose that nick name in the Oracle sphere) used to the product manager for the optimizer and I was a performance nerd, so of course I knew of Maria Colgan. The number of times she said to the audience “I’m not technical, I don’t understand this stuff…” and then gave a really good description of that stuff. She was a little liar! She knew her stuff (and still does), you can’t present like that and not know your topic. She was also one of the first product managers in Oracle I started chatting to, both about technical topics and as a friendly face. Oracle Names are just normal people and Oracle Names From Oracle are just normal people too. Who knew? Maria now looks after In Memory and stuff like that, but if you google her, the top hit is still “Maria Colgan Oracle Optimizer”. I wonder if Nigel Bayliss, who has been the PM for the optimizer for a few years now (and very good he is at it too) has a doll in a drawer with pins in it…

Well worn indeed

Steven Feurestein. I can’t spell his last name best out of three due to the aforementioned dyslexia. Anyone, and I mean ANYone, who was coding in PL/SQL in the mid 90’s onward probably had/has the Ant Book on their desk, Oracle PL/SQL Programming by Steven. I consumed the first edition of that book, pretty much working it to ruin as I referred to it over the years. I still have it and boy it is tatty. Thanks for that book Steven, and the ones that came after it. However, Steven has influenced me twice. He now works for Oracle, leading the Oracle Developer Advocates team which includes the Ask Tom team. And that’s sort of what I do now, advocate Oracle and the community. Only I don’t really get paid for it. Can I have a job Steven?

{Why did I not pick Tom Kyte? Looking back now he was a massive influence on me as he was on many others, he should be in the list. But he isn’t. So aren’t a lot of excellent people like Arup Nanda, Chris Antognini, Kevin Closson, Uwe Hess…}

I thought I had written a blog about Rachael Carmichael but it seems I have not. Rachel was really active in the Oracle presenting circuit back in the 90’s and early 2000’s and wrote/contributed to several books. I met her at one of my first UKOUG conferences when I was a presenting newbie. Rachael sort of took me under her wing and not only gave me good advice but also introduced me to several of the really well know presenters, a lot of who were in the Oak Table. Both of those things had a big influence on my career.

Rachael then decided she’d had enough of technology and followed a different path and swapped to working with animals. Because she wanted to. You can change career totally – if the current one has lost it’s sparkle, go find something else to do. I did not leave the Oracle sphere (I thought about it) but I decided to stop being mostly a technician and more an enabler, encouraged by Rachael’s example.

Tim blogs as well as writing articles

ORACLE_BASE must be one of the most visited and highest quality sources of Oracle technical information on the web. If you did not know, Tim Hall writes it all (I think he writes it all. Maybe he has a team held captive in his basement. I’ll ask him). If I need to check syntax or how a feature works, I google it and if an ORACLE-BASE page comes up I go there. Tim’s a great guy and a very good presenter – but don’t let him near an Oracle panel session. And oh boy don’t let him sit on one! Like me he is a biologist really, so an absolute top, fantastic bloke :-). Tim also has a very philosophical outlook on this Oracle technology bollocks, which I am sure encouraged me to do my Friday Philosophies.

Dominic Giles is a Master Product Manager for the Oracle Database here in the UK. I don’t know what you do to become a Master product manager, maybe just get old? For years Dom has been a real friend to the UKOUG and the conference circuit in general, doing great talks about the core RDBMS, what is new, what can and cannot be done. But the reason he really influenced me is he came to help us when I was working on the human genome project. Most consultants going on-site for a company would never tell the client to “just grow a pair and do it Martin”. Dom did. Bloody brilliant. We did know each other quite well at this point and it was a kick up the arse I needed. Be real with people, it’s so much more effective (if perhaps a little more risky?)

Unfortunately, Richard does not look like this anymore

Finally, and well done for reading this far, is Richard Foote. Actually, I reckon almost no one will have got through this whole list, my wife keeps telling me to split this post into 2 or 3 parts. But Richard will get this far, he wants to know what I say about him and if it includes anything about David Bowie. Richard is a bit of a Bowie fan, as am I. Bowie’s “Black Tie, White Noise” is playing as I type this. What Richard does not know about indexing you don’t need to know. I learnt a lot from him. But then I learnt a lot from many people, so why Richard?
This blog. I stole his layout for mine. In fact, before I changed the graphics for the banner and stretched the format it looked EXACTLY like Richard’s blog. Also, I liked Richard’s presenting style – Relaxed, jokey, but with good technical content. I sort of nicked that too. Part of me just want to be Richard, except for the being Australian bit 🙂

Well done, that’s the lot.

Reviving an iPad and On-Premises lesson 2. July 19, 2019

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, Private Life.
Tags: behaviour, Humour, private
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Unlocking it was not so easy

In my previous post we finished with my mother having bricked her iPad – that is, having turned it onto a useless lump. So I drove up to see her again to sort it out. {BTW if you think I am being a bit mean to my mum – yes I am. But I do love her and in the end the iPad has resulted in us being much more in touch. But I think it helps to share the frustrations of getting someone utterly unused to technology on line}.

The first thing I did was to get Mum to turn it on and put in the password. Martin with an I (not a Y – “as some people spell it like that!”). Mum was, very slowly, putting in the password correctly. And then staring at the screen until it flashed up an error. She had forgotten about pressing DONE. Now, if she’d called me when she had started having trouble… The thing is, that is so true across all of IT support. If only people called up when they first had a problem or did something wrong (like deleted all those rows…). If you call up quickly, there is much more chance the problem will be solved quickly. Anyway, I digress. I now knew what had gone wrong, she may or may not type the password correctly but it was timing out each time. Of course, by this point the iPad would no longer respond to the correct password, it was locked out.

You may not know this but if an iPad is locked out as it thinks it might be stolen (password put in wrongly too many times), you can’t just factory reset it. At least, I could not and google-fu mostly confirmed this. You have to plug it into another device with iTunes on it. And you can’t just plug it into the device you set it up on and refresh it, even if you backed it up to this device. At least, I could not. Maybe I am not very good at this tech lark. You have to download the latest version of the OS to your device, plug the switched off iPad into your device, turn the iPad on and then press certain buttons on it in a given way within a 0.731 second window that occurs at an unspecified time after turning the device on. I don’t know how often I tried to get the sodding iPad into recovery mode and recognised by iTunes, but it sure as hell amused my Mum to watch me try. I then re-set-up the iPad to be the same, simple set-up I had done so before. See post 2 for some hints on that. All the time Mum was making snide comments about “how simple this all is, Martyn!”. I think she was having revenge. Sue was keeping out the way.

After all the issues with “Martin with a Y or I”, I set the pass code to be a number. Yes, it’s less secure but I have the Apple ID details for her account – if she loses the iPad I can either track it or wipe it remotely. But we were up and running again, we had a working iPad and on-premises lesson 2 could begin. I’m not sure either of us was 100% happy about this…

Mum wants 2 main things from “the interweb”. She wants to be able to contact me (and, I presume, her other Son and her daughter-in-law) and she wants to be able to look things up. If she can do the former than I can help, remotely, with the latter.

You need the patience of this person…

So I showed her how to use messenger to contact us again. It’s been a week or so since the last lesson so I knew she would need a reminder. I pointed at one of the various icons and asked her what it looked like “It’s a phone!” So what will it do? “I don’t know, you are supposed to tell me!”. If it looks like a phone, it’s probably… “{blank look}”. You pressed this by accident last week and it made you scream? “Oh, it’s a phone!”. Excellent, we gave it a quick go.

What about this one next to it? What does it look like? “A box and a little box”. Fair point, but it looks a but like a tv camera? She agreed. So, what will it do? “blank look”. You know this one, we tested this with Sue in the kitchen last week… “the kettle?!?”. It was like Star-Trek… “Oh yes, she appeared on the iPad and I could talk to her. It’s just like Star Trek!”. We tried that one too. All good.

OK, let’s re-visit sending messages and using the keyboard. I show her me sending her a couple of messages again. Enter some text, any text. Press the icon to send the message. “Which one”. The one next to the message, it looks like a plane. “Which message?” The one you just typed. “So I press this one {points to the enter key}” No! No, the blue plane one. “This one!” No!!! that is a phone symbol, I explained that one 5 minutes ago and you seem to have no trouble hitting that one despite that it is in utterly the wrong place and no where near the message. “What message?” THE ONE…..The one you just typed, there, the one that says ‘GFRYTSB’. “So I click on your name?” NO! NO! THE FUCKING PLANE! TAP THE FUCKING PLANE!!!!

She taps the plane.

It sends the message “Oh. It did that before. How do I know who it sent it to?” It sent it to the Pope. “Why did it send it to the Pope?” {sigh}. How many people did we set this up for? Me, Sue, Steve, no Pope. But you see my name at the top of the conversation? You know, third child your bore? The name right above all the other messages? It sent it to me.

“But there are three names {moves finger} over here”. THAT IS OVER THERE!!!!!!! You have spent 10 minutes calling me, star- treking me, seeing messages from me, who the hell do you think it sent the message to?!? “Susan?” {I’m losing it…}

OK, send me another message. You know it’s me, my picture and name is above the conversation. Here, look at my screen your picture and name is above *my* conversation and those are the messages you have sent me.

She types something.
and stares at the screen.
And stares at the screen…
And looks at my screen…
And back at her screen…
“It’s not sent! Has it gone to someone else?”
The. Plane. Tap the Plane.
‘Ping’ – “Ohh! you got the message! How does it know where you are?” The bloody computer pixies know. They track everyone in the world. “Can I message anyone in the world?” I lie a little and say no. only the people in the list. “Does it know Steve is in Wales?” Yes. Look, do you ask the phone how it knows where I am? “No, but this is not the phone”.

We exchange a few more messages for practice and then I get her to tap on the other names, to change conversations. She swaps to Sue and Mum sends her a couple of messages. Once again Mum is asking how the computer knows where Sue is. I point out that as Sue is in the room, the iPad can see her – and then realise that was a really stupid thing to say as Mum did not get the joke. “So it CAN’T message Steve if it can’t see him?” No, it can, it can message anyone on her list.”Shall I message him?” No, he lives in Wales, life is hard enough for him already.

It’s time to go home. I make mum turn the iPad off, turn it on, put in the code and send me a message. She’s got it. “What about the internet?” The internet is not ready for you yet Mum, that will be lesson three. Read the book I got you and give it a go if you like. You can’t break… Actually, just wait until I come back over.

I have to say, since then Mum has been able to message me without issue and can turn the iPad on and off with no trouble, so you do get there eventually.

But I do seem to be buying a lot more wine these days…

UKOUG Conference Survival Guide November 29, 2017

Posted by mwidlake in conference, humour, UKOUG.
Tags: Humour, Meeting, UKOUG
7 comments

I’ve been going to the UKOUG conference for about… Well, most of this century. I think this year (2017) will be my 14th visit. Not only that but I’ve helped organise the tech side of the conference for several years. I was the Database Stream or whole Tech Stream lead for the last 3 years (though, this year, blame others as I passed over the duties to Neil Chandler as Tech17 lead and Chris Dunscombe as Database lead). I also grew up 30km North of Birmingham, in a little city called Lichfield – but to be honest that does not help as my family was from Nottingham and we went there to shop.

So with my many years of experience, here is my Survival Guide to UKOUG Conference in Birmingham.

Oh, and just to be clear. I sometimes say “we” when talking about organising the conference. It is habit. I was not involved this year.

Getting There

Train

A lot of people arrive by train, coming into the main train station, Birmingham New Street. This used to be a dark, horrible, Stygian nightmare of a train station but now it is bright, clean and has a nice shopping centre above it. It is just a 10 minute walk up the road called New Street, through the German Market and then bearing left-ish (probably past the Birmingham Town Hall) towards Broad Street where the conference centre (the Birmingham ICC) and most hotels people stay in are clustered. There are underpasses or bridges to take you over the horribly busy road that is in the way.

There are a few other train stations in Birmingham city centre (Moor Street, Snow Hill and Five Ways ) but I have never used them, sorry. Apparently you can walk to the ICC from them. Or get a taxi, but as it is Christmas and Broad Street is very close to the shopping areas, expect a slow taxi journey.

It is probably too late for this advice, but buy UK train tickets as soon in advance as possible. Train fares in the UK are stupidly high (for a crap service) and the sooner you book, the less eye-wateringly expensive it is. The UK is about the only European country where the trains are run privately for profit rather than by the government, which is why they are so “efficient and good value” here. Not.

Plane

Again, a bit late for advice on your actual plane route but if you come into Birmingham international get the train in. The service is regular and quick. Taxies, especially at this festive period, are likely to be slow and expensive. I have never tried Uber in Birmingham but UK Uber is in a lot of trouble at the moment as they have been accused of not vetting their drives much.
If you are coming into London, again get the train. From London Euston to Birmingham NEW STREET (not Birmingham International, that is the airport). It takes about 90 minutes.

Automobile

If you are driving into Birmingham then in some ways it is good, in some ways it is terrible. For example, the A38M gets you deep into Birmingham pretty quickly and smoothly but, like a lot of cities, at times the route is a bit confused and, as it is Christmas, the centre of Birmingham itself will be hell to drive around. Once you get near the centre the traffic will just stop.
I advise you allow for at least half an hour or more extra for driving into or out of Birmingham than you expect. If you arrive on Saturday or on Sunday afternoon add an hour.
If you are leaving by car on Wednesday afternoon, I suggest you consider having a final coffee or light meal in Birmingham before you go. Trying to drive out of the Broad Street area between 4pm and 6pm is something I do not want to have to do again in my life. One year (when it snowed a bit) it took me 2 hours just to get onto the M42 that circles the East and South of Birmingham.

If your hotel has reserved parking, great. If not then good luck. Check the UKOUG web site for suggested car parks, plan which car park you go for and remember, Saturday and Sunday all public car parks will be very, very busy. I had such a nightmare last year when I arrived on Saturday that I am parking 20 miles away and coming in by train!

Once There…

Once you are at the ICC you won’t need public transport – unless you booked a hotel a distance from the conference, in which case you are on your own. Or you are local and coming in and out each day. In which case you know the place and you are on your own.

You can walk to enough bars and restaurants as you could want, taxies in the evening for a couple of miles are not too bad. Access for wheelchairs is pretty good in the UK, there is step-free access to the ICC. I have a nasty feeling you cannot go across the canal to the main bars & restaurants from the back entrance of the ICC by wheelchair, but you can go via Broad Street.

Food & Drink

The UKOUG conference is great for breadth and depth of content. It is not so good on the catering front…

Coffee & Tea

It seems like a small thing, but getting a cup of tea or a coffee at the UKOUG conference can be a bit of a trial. Unlike other conferences, such drinks are not always available. I know, it’s mad. I’ve tried to argue about this when I’ve been involved in organising the conference but the ICC charge silly amounts for constant provisions of these conference basics and the UKOUG want to use the provision of drink and food to drive footfall through the exhibition. When it is the allotted time for Tea/Coffee, the queues are of course bad. And the ICC staff take some sort of evil delight by directing you to a different queue. Which turns out to be just as large or, occasionally, not even open yet. (They do this at lunch time too).

To make things worse, providing drinks as an exhibitor seems to be a real challenge too. I looked into having my own stand a couple of years back, with decent coffee. To provide anything more than the odd jug of real coffee would have cost me a fortune, if even possible.

I would advise you just hang about a bit. Maybe get a biscuit before someone who is trying to get a week’s calories from just the conference food hoovers them all up. Then get a coffee/tea once the rush dies down.

There are water coolers around, so you can get water. If it does not run out. Don’t drink water from the bathrooms, it is not “potable” unless otherwise stated – it will be going through a tank which may or may not have a dead pigeon in it.

However, on the floor below the main conference reception area (so technically outside the conference) there is a coffee company that will sell you something approaching coffee or tea. And if you go out of the “back” of the ICC and over the canal, there are some coffee places out there.

I suggest you get a bottle of water and keep it filled and with you. The conference rooms can be warm and if you “enjoyed yourself” the night before you could be dehydrated from that too. I used to get tired and suffer headaches until I realised I was constantly dehydrated.

Conference Food

The lunch will be OK. Probably. It varies from year to year. Last year we had a buffet as opposed to a “real” meal and, I have to say, it was a hell of a lot better than the slime provided the year before. If you are vegetarian or have allergies I hope you said so when you registered. In any respect, let your needs be known to the catering staff or the UKOUG staff. If the member of catering staff you are asking does not understand you, go ask someone else. It’s just not worth the risk.

The food provided on Tuesday evening is OK and, if you are determined, you could eat enough to count as a meal. But most people will go outside the ICC for evening meals and drinks. I would recommend you do so.

Drinking and Eating in Birmingham

The conference is in central Birmingham. There are lots of options. If you go out the “back” of the ICC (the opposite side to the main entrance, where there will be some sort of winter fair) you will go over the canal and find many plastic bars and restaurants. You know, All Bar One, Wagamama, Pizza Express, Slug and Lettuce. If that is your thing, you will be happy.

The conference centre is on Broad Street. If you come out the main entrance where the fair is, go right and then once at the road, go “back” along the side of the conference centre. If you come out the back entrance, head left (by the canal or once you have reached the bars). If you are not on Broad Street within 1 minute, you went the wrong left. Here there are more bars, restaurants, even an executive gentlemans dancing club. I have no idea how entertaining executive gentlemen getting groovy is, I never popped in. There is a lot of choice of types of food up and down Broad Street, though the national cuisine of curry is most in evident. Please do not ask me to recommend anywhere, I loose track of where has been good. Use an App.

I would suggest you do NOT go out in a gang of 20 and expect to get seated. Go out in a gang of 4 or 6, maybe 8 and you will fair better. If you want a bigger group, use your search app of choice and book somewhere.

I would also suggest you be willing to walk more than 5 minutes, it really increases your choice and places are less busy. There are some nice Chinese and Thai places a little further out and lots of other food choices. For drinking I like the “Wellington” pub and there are a couple of other real-ale places scattered about but near by. There is also the *speaker’s pub* but I won’t tell you where that is as you will all go there and I won’t be able to get in. I’ll happily take you there though. Let’s just say it is much improved since it was renovated and stopped smelling or urine.

Most people end up in the bars and restaurants near the ICC but if you walk back towards New Street (not all the way to New Street!) you will find the German Market where you can get Gluhwein and other bars with more character.

As the years have gone on, I’ve been more likely to pop out from the conference to get lunch or have a quiet coffee. It helps me keep fresh for the rest of the talks I go to.

Alcohol

Alcohol is of course utterly optional. But it seems a lot of British people and international conference presenters opt for it. There should be non-alcoholic options at all UKOUG organised social events. If there is not, feel free to complain like hell as it has been an issue once or twice and should not be.

Given you do wish to partake of the odd alcoholic beverage I feel I would like to offer some advice. That last pint in the hotel bar before you go to bed? Why is it always that one that is bad? I try and keep things in moderation until the last night at least Trying to concentrate on index internals whilst the Hangover Pixies bang hammers on the inside of your skull is not easy.

As a general rule, alcohol is not available in the conference during sessions.

As a general rule, after all sessions are finished, alcohol seems to be appreciated by many.

If you are not English (and in particular if you are from the US) you should be aware that our pints are a bit bigger than a US pint or a half litre. Also, though I know that the US have finally got their heads around “craft beer”, English beer (especially Real Ale) tends to be a bit more flavoursome and stronger than what many people thing of as beer, namely lager. You can get lager from most of the bars around the ICC and nasty, bland pap it is too. I’ll be holding out for beer that is brown, above 5 degrees C and is not mildly fizzy. Preferably delivered from the keg via hand pump, not just pressure-squirted out of a tap.

The Conference

Firstly, I’ll admit my prejudice. Other conferences have their own selling points, I actually personally prefer a few of the smaller national conferences, but for breadth of content and the technical validity of what is on offer, I don’t think you can beat the UKOUG conference. DOAG is on a par and is a little larger, but I think is less relaxed than the UK experience. Oracle Open World is a massive, ball-achingly on-message sales and marketing event that frankly I can live without. The UKOUG conference is independent of Oracle and, though we love having their presence and speakers, you will get talks that are not all “Oracle is the best”. You even sometimes get Oracle corporation speakers letting slip the occasional negative word or admission that something could be better. We put things in the water to make them more honest. Yeast, barley and hops, mostly.

Sessions

The UKOUG conference is big. Tech17 has something like 12 concurrent streams, 3 or 4 of which are database, a similar number across development and middleware. And you can move between Tech17, Apps17 and JDE17 as you wish now.

There will be times you want to see more than 1 session on at the same time. Sorry, this is impossible to avoid for the organisers. I’ve spent days in darkened rooms working on the agenda in the past. We try to make sure that talks in the same technical area (e.g. Database) are not on similar topics, we try not to put popular talks/presenters in small rooms or against each other. We try to look across the agenda so that a database-based talk on PL/SQL is not clashing on a PL/SQL talk about database management. But it is impossible. We organisers make mistakes or we simply do not see what is obvious in retrospect. Add to that short-notice changes in speaker availability and other run-time issues, the planning is not ideal.

But the main reasons we get such clashes is that:
(a) We have no control over what you lot are interested in. You might be passionate about APEX and database performance, or in-memory and Java. There are too many variables to plan to suit everyone
(b) There are so many good talks submitted by known speakers we could pack the event with only known, established speakers that you all want to see. And we don’t as we want to encourage new speakers and new topic areas.

So, when there is a clash, please try to be mellow and just accept that the UKOUG put on SO MUCH good content you are going to have to miss something.

And for when there is nothing at all you want to see? Sorry, it will probably happen too, it’s called random variation. Read below for suggestions.

Try to plan your day and what sessions you are going to. I have a piece of paper or the full agenda and I put big circles around the talks I intend to go to, so that I don’t have to keep thinking about this stuff as my head fills with new information.

Go to one or two sessions outside “your” area. It’s good to expand your viewpoint. Some of the best, most useful talks are ones I had to go to as I was chairing them. So now I throw a couple of oddities in each year. This is of course an ideal thing to do if you hit a point where there is no talk you really want to see. Rather than go see a talk you have seen before or a speaker who is well known, go see a talk on something you know nothing about.

HAVE A BREAK. If you feel your head is full or you cannot concentrate anymore, skip a session and chill. Have a coffee. Chat to people. When I first started coming to UKOUG conference I would go to 7 or 8 talks in a row. I did not really remember the last couple from day 1 or 2, or most of them from day 3. Because I was too tired to process new information anymore. Now I take the odd session out and, over all, I learn more. Pace yourself.

GIVE FEEDBACK! You buggers are getting worse and worse each year for filling in the feedback forms. I know, you all think you will do it online later. You won’t. You never do. I know, I’ve been reviewing the feedback for years. Fill in that paper form. And be honest. Don’t give everyone 5 or 6 for everything, apart from Derrick who was crap and you give 1 or 2 for everything. Of course, any talk I do (I’m not doing one this year) is 6’s across the board. But use the whole breadth of the scoring. (update, see the comment section).

Those feedback scores not only help the presenters personally, we use them when planning who gets to talk in future years. We really wish you would just tell us what you did and did not like. Please.

Speakers

Speakers are there as they want to be there. Well, most of them. So feel free to go talk to them when you see them around and about. Obviously don’t rudely butt in when they are deep in conversation with someone else, but of course you can chat to them in a queue for bad coffee or when you bump into them in the exhibitors hall. Oh, if you are between them and the nearest loo and they have a slightly determined look in their eye – leave them alone. And don’t follow them in! Yes, I had that once. I did not want to talk to that gentleman about Index Organised Tables right at that moment.

In my opinion, the worst time to try to talk to a speaker is… just after they have spoken! They need to get out of the way of the next speaker, you might be one of 4 or 5 people vying for attention and (true for me at least) often just after presenting you hit a bit of a lull in cognitive ability. I actually don’t tend to go to a session after I have presented as I know I won’t concentrate. So do ask your question, but ask it a little later when you see them about.

Oh, and you know those Oracle Hero Names? I’ll let you in on a big secret. They are just people, like you are. Obviously smarter and more handsome/pretty than you, but just people. Do you object if someone chats to you? No. So chat to them. And you don’t need to have a question you can, like, just talk to them like they are normal people. Apart from Tim Hall, he is strange. (Joke!)

Social

Conference is anything but just sessions. You are surrounded by people who all have an interest in Oracle, many of whom have a shared interest with you. Sessions are great but often the best stuff comes from conversations with people. It can be hard to talk to people you don’t know, but then those people you don’t know often feel the same. Come and talk to me, I hardly ever tell people to go away.

There are social events Monday and Tuesday nights. Come to them. Relax. Drink Whisky (Monday tech Community Networking). Or water. And chat.

If you get into a good discussion with someone and a new session is about to start, well maybe change your plan and go to the same session as them. Or. Don’t go to a session. If you have found someone who has had the same slow-death-by-frustration as you with feature X or implementing Payroll version 666 then spending half an hour with them might be the best thing you both get out of the conference. It’s what the Oracle Community is all about.

Odd Stuff

Toilets

I have not noticed queues outside the ladies loos. This is because IT is still a distressingly male-dominated sphere, most conferences even more so. Though UKOUG try to encourage a better balance, one benefit for the ladies is no queuing for the loo. Men however, may need to queue! The problem is, several talks will finish at the same time and those in need head off to the loos. The same ones as everyone else, right next to the hall you were in. Take a tip from me, if your bladder can hold on for 95 seconds, go and find a loo away from the hall. The ones down by halls 10 and 11 are quieter, it is worth seeing if there are loos by a hall that is not in use. I have my “favourite” loo, where it is always quiet. I’m not telling you where it is.

Wandering Around the Area – Safety

You will be safe in the vicinity of the ICC, Broad Street, down towards the centre of Birmingham. Of course, be sensible! Don’t wander down some dark alley on your own and don’t tell a bunch of Youth they look stupid with their trousers around their assholes (still a fashion thing for some here in the UK, I don’t get it). But you and your mate(s) will be safe wandering around where there are bars & restaurants. If you suddenly realise you are surrounded by only dark, lightless buildings – you are probably STILL safe. But maybe go back towards the bars. If I was a lady on my own, I would like to think I would not feel threatened on the main roads and thoroughfares. But I’ve never been a lady on my own. Several of those ladies I know who frequent the conference are at ease walking back to their hotel on their own. Though as a gentleman I find it tricky to let them do it, but that’s my latent sexism coming out.

Weather

Birmingham in Winter is world renowned for it’s warm climate and sunshine. Or more specifically, for how it is NOT warm and is only rarely sunny. As I type this I am looking at the long-term weather forecast and see no snow is predicted. But last time I told people there would be no snow – it snowed. (We do not get snow like say Canada or Norway gets snow. We get an inch or two that confuses everyone driving a car.)

It will be cold, I can be absolutely sure of that. A few degrees centigrade above freezing in the evenings, with a breeze. You will need a coat, gloves and a hat will help. If you are from America, it will be about 40f. You will still need a coat, hat and gloves. Maybe throw in a scarf.

It will almost certainly rain at some point.

German Market and Shopping

I should not be encouraging you to leave the conference for a period of time, but in the evening the German Market and lots of shops are open. I personally don’t bother with the German Market anymore as I’ve been there soooo often (and, as I said on social media recently, you only need so many wooden toys and sausage in your life). But it is well worth a visit if you have not been before, or at least not for a while.

I know some people who include a mooch around the shops as part of their conference experience.

Coats and Luggage

It is warm in the ICC and blinking cold outside in Birmingham in December (see weather). So you will probably want to drop off your coat and maybe your luggage. There is a cloakroom in the ground floor of the ICC where you can do so. They will charge you a British pound or two. People complain about this charge. A lot.

You work in I.T, you are paid well, you do not want for money to pay for food and water. Just pay the damned pound will you? Take it off whatever charities you contribute to if it bothers you that much. Just don’t keep complaining at me about it.

If you stayed in a local hotel, they should be willing to hold on to your luggage for you on the last day. Depending on which hotel you are in this might not be convenient of course. If you do, how many of you will tip them more than a pound for doing so?

Friday Philosophy – Smart or Smart-Arse? October 20, 2017

Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions, rant.
Tags: behaviour, Humour, perception, rant
1 comment so far

(Note – this post is intended to be humorous, and also partly laughing at myself. Imagine a tone of “British, self-deprecating irony”…)

Many of you know what a “Smart-Arse” is. For those who do not…

A “Smart-arse” a person who is irritating because they behave as if they know everything or try to catch you out by misleading you.

A smart person will look at your problem and say something like “have you tried checking the array size?” and, 8 times out of 10, their input will help you solve your problem. It may not be THE answer but it makes you think about root causes.

A Smart-arse will say something more like “well, I would never have your problem as I would not have joined a company full of Java Nerds!!!”. Yeah, maybe that would have avoided my specific problem #1, but it is of no practical worth right now. .

You can usually pick out a smart-arse just by the tone of their voice. Think about the two situations above. The Smart person probably gave their advice in a quieter voice and with a passive or supporting manner. The Smart Arse person will usually have a higher, louder voice with a slightly sarcastic tone. Basically, in a superior or attention-seeking manner.

Another “Smart-arse” thing to do is to try to catch you out, in the misguided belief it makes them look cleverer than you.

In these situations always ask – “what is a Smart-arse hoping you won’t spot”

I’ll put my hand up right now. Sometimes, especially looking back on my past, I have been the smart-arse. (And, as humans, we hate the fault in others that we see in ourselves). And I bloody hate smart-arses. And I keep seeing smart-arse crap all over the internet. Let me give you an example. Look at the figure on the right.

This is the perfect example of the “Smart-Arse” question. You are faced with what looks like a simple logic puzzle and normally the tag line is something like “93% of people will get this WRONG!!! – Only Geniuses can solve it!!!!!!!”. They never cite a basis for the “93%” as it is as utterly made up and is as asinine and bloody annoying as whatever trick is in the post. What they are doing is giving you what looks like a genuine puzzle that needs a bit of thinking about but most of us can solve (though not you Dave, you really are an idiot). BUT! But they have hidden a detail. The are purposefully leading you astray so they can go “Aaa-Haaaa!!! Noooo! You forgot to check for the closed pipes!” (check tank 5 to 2). Or whatever the trick is.

This is “Smart-Arse”. It is not checking if you can solve a problem, if you are smart. It is checking if they can con you. Checking if they can give you a load of information and then go “Ahh HA!! Got ya!!! You did not check for the tiny bit of info we hid from you!!! O-hohohohho we are so clever!!!!”

Well, I have news for you, Smart-arse. You are a bloody idiot. Your answer is wrong, as any fool can see. (Bear with me on this…)

More boxes, same smart-arse shit

You may have seen other “tests” like this such as the one to the left – a bit more complex but the question is the same, which one fills up first.
In my head my response is always “which one fills up… *first*????”.

First! That is my response. Not which one but the fact that the question itself is wrong. It should be “which one fills up” full stop, as “any fool can see”. Not which one fills up first.

I better justify that claim.

Look at this second example, clearly labelled with the icon of utmost smarts Mr Einstein (who, I bet, could not plumb a toilet let alone all these pipes as, back in his time, there were no push-fittings – just copper and solder. I think he once said he was rubbish at practical tasks). They think the key “got ya” is that the pipe from C to D is blocked so water goes from C to J. And then from J to L, as the pipe to I exits higher than that to L. One sneaky trick and then a bit of good physics – it is not the input but the output that counts. So water pours into L and then to F – but not H as, again, a sneaky block has been inserted. So F fills up.

And only F fills up!!!

As as soon as it is full it overflows. It overflows below the height of any other buckets the fluid had flown through – and so no other bucket will fill. Their initial question is flawed. “Which will fill first” indicates one will fill second. No other bucket will fill second. The question is not logical! Bloody idiots.

I can’t say why I initially was struck by the fact that only one bucket would fill when I saw the first example of this, even before I spotted the blocked pipes, but we all think in different ways. It does not make me smarter, just different. I’m interested to see if any of you can point out a flaw in my logic above though as I have a sneaking suspicion I could still be wrong.

However, this is not the major flaw… (I told you that I was also an utterly insufferable smart-arse).

Figure 2 has a drip filling the A tank, figure 1 has a gushing tap filling tank 1. Now ask a simple question. No matter if the tap is gushing or dripping, can the pipe out of tank A (or 1) empty the water faster than the tap supplies it? Well, if the tap is dripping you would say “yes” – but if these tanks are 5mm cubed and the pipe out is less than 1mm thick then no! No scale is given. And in fig 1 the tap is gushing. Have any of you had a shower where the plug hole drains slower than the shower produces water? After 2 or 3 minutes your feet are in a shallow bath and if you keep the shower running it overflows into the rest of the bathroom.

With figure 1, the one with the gushing tap, my brain says that tank 1 will fill as the tap supplies water faster than it will exit through the pipe to tank 5. Tank 1 will fill and piss water all over the shop and whatever goes down the pipe to 5 will eventually fill that tank. Which of tanks 1 and 5 fills first is “it depends” (the classic answer to most I.T performance questions). The question is how much slower is the flow out of the pipe from tank 1 – if it is, on average, above half the rate of the tap flow then tank 5 will actually fill first. In any case, you have soaked the bathroom floor and the people in the flat below are banging on the front door…

With that new idea in your head, if you turn up the tap in figure 2 you can now see that which tank fills first is probably A or.. C – depending on the max flow out of the pipes (all pipes are the same bore so flow rate is the same, increasing header pressure in each tank as they fill allowing…) I think it might be C as it’s outflow is higher in relation to the tank top than B or C…

So depending on the tap flow rate, the drain pipe flow rate and the relative height of the clear output pipe it could be…. absolutely NOT the answer of the Smart-Arse original poster. That is the problem with smart-arses! They are so fixed on their clever “gotcha” answers that they stop thinking of the real world.

And don’t get me started on those images where bananas are added to cans of beer and divided by a plate of cakes, designed to look like some sort of Algebra test. Always they are being smart-arse. They try and hide the introduction of multipliers where all the first examples are addition, or you need to count the number of items, or yellow is 3 and green is 6, or it is in base 23. I was going to include an example (again, a really wrong one) but I’ll save that for another week when I am also in a bad mood.

And, of course, I am a “smart-arse” for pointing this all out. Did I say how much I dislike smart-arses?

I promise you, when you start looking for the smart-arse aspect to all those “are you smart enough” bollocks things on social media it just turns into so much blargh and you can either answer them easily or just decide you can’t be bothered being misdirected. And you can use that saved time for looking at funny kitten videos or, I don’t know, doing some productive work?

Is there any other relevance to your working life? Maybe. Next time your management structure asks you a seemingly benign question about what you are doing this weekend or when you think you are on leave (hang on, “think”?), or how minor will be the impact of a small change to how the business functions to the application you are developing – just switch on the bulb with “smart-arse” painted on it. They are asking you a question where they are expecting you to think in the clear, simplistic way most of us would. Now ask what the bloody hell they are up to.

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