The trouble is: my musical tastes and karaoke don’t strongly intersect.

A karaoke playlist will always have a bit of Radiohead, REM, Kings of Leon… if I’m lucky I’ll find some other moderately popular artists like Mumford & Sons or the Manic Street Preachers. Sometimes there’s an absolute gem like Alabama 3 or Guillemots but this is really pushing it.

What we need is a karaoke bar for snobs. A place where Kylie and Girls Aloud are banned and the playlist oozes with quality songs that really test a singer’s vocal ability.

How amazing would it be to go to a karaoke bar and see more Jeff Buckley, or Antony and the Johnsons, or Kate Bush on the playlist? To be able to choose Super Furry Animals, The National or My Morning Jacket… and to be amongst a crowd of people who appreciate these songs?

What do you think? Who’s with me? Am I nuts??

Here’s my Ruby implementation, if you would like a quick fix:

require 'date'

class XkcdDate

  # Progress indicator formatted as a date, as in http://xkcd.com/1017/
  def self.progress(amount, total)
    percent = (amount.to_f / total.to_f)
    years = Math::E ** (20.3444 * percent ** 3 + 3) - Math::E ** 3
    Date.today - (years * 365.25)
  end

end

It takes two arguments (amount and total, used to form the ratio) and returns a Ruby Date object, which you can format any way you like.

And examples of its uses, as in the comic:

>> [7.308, 31.12, 47.91, 70.33, 90.42, 100].each {|p| puts "#{p}: #{XkcdDate.progress(p, 100)}"}
7.308: 2011-12-18
31.12: 1995-02-15
47.91: 1844-01-17
70.33: -21765-11-11
90.42: -68315229-02-11
100: -13751308941-03-30
=> [7.308, 31.12, 47.91, 70.33, 90.42, 100]

For those implementing it in other languages, when Randall says “percentage” he actually means “ratio”.

Well, I kept that, then…

Normal service will resume when I have even one spare moment to devote to this outlet!

I think it’s been a pretty good year, overall. I’ve bought 14 new albums released in 2011 and attended 9 live events, and none of them were particularly disappointing. I’m not going to try to review them all, but here are my top five albums of 2011…

#1 – My Morning Jacket, “Circuital”

© 2011 Rough Trade

My Morning Jacket are a band I’ve been following at a moderate distance for some time. Their breakthrough success Z and 2008′s Evil Urges were already among my favourite albums ever so I was very excited about this year’s release. Turns out it surpassed all my expectations and earns its place at the top of my list this year.

Circuital is a very diverse, but very consistent, record. The building repetitive power of Victory Dance leads into MMJ’s best song to date, the wonderful 7-minute Circuital, and then through many musical styles telling the story of letting go in various ways, including the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek Holdin’ On to Black Metal.

I also got the chance to see the Jacket live this year for the first time, and their set was a real crowd-pleaser: almost no hits left out.

If you’ve not heard Circuital yet, be sure to get yourself a free copy of the awesome title track by signing up for the MMJ mailing list at their web site.

#2 – Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”

© 2011 Bella Union

I reviewed this album for this blog back in May, and it continues to be one of my absolute favourites of this year. I got to see them perform to a sold-out Leeds Academy in December and they sound just as amazing live as they do on the record.

The Shrine/An Argument was the standout track from the beginning but it just gets better and better on every listen. I’m sure this album will still be spinning on my playlist in ten years’ time.

#3 – The Decemberists, “The King Is Dead”

© 2011 Rough Trade

My top three this year are all by bands I got to see live for the first time in 2011, but I’m quite certain that’s just a coincidence.

The latest offering by The Decemberists is a return to their Americana-influenced pop after their epic and dramatic previous two albums (including The Hazards of Love, one of my all-time favourites by anyone). The songs are catchy, humorous and – most importantly – of the highest quality. Lead single Down by the Water isn’t just influenced by 80s REM, it actually features REM guitarist Peter Buck!

Extra special mention here goes to Calamity Song: the cheeriest song about the end of the world I’ve ever heard…

#4 – Radiohead, “The King of Limbs”

© 2011 Radiohead

The ever-brilliant Radiohead can’t release an album any year and escape my top 5.

This year’s The King of Limbs was a surprise release from nowhere. It’s only a very short album (under 40 minutes) but it manages to pack in a tight and well concocted sound that shows Radiohead have no plans to jack it in any time soon.

Best track by far is the time-signature-messing Codex, which sounds like an answer to Amnesiac‘s standout track Pyramid Song.

And also, let’s not forget the new video to Lotus Flower gave rise to a whole series of Thom Yorke dancing mashups, including these 31 seconds of genius.

#5 – Kate Bush, “50 Words for Snow”

© 2011 Fish People

I’ve only owned this album for 5 days and it’s already made its way into my top five. This is the second album for Kate Bush this year (Director’s Cut is reviewed elsewhere on this blog) after a six-year absence and it is typically beautifully crafted.

On 50 Words, Kate strips the music almost down to just her voice and piano, and drums by session legend Steve Gadd, with the usual stellar cast mostly lending their voices – guest vocals are provided by Elton John, Stephen Fry and Kate’s son Albert amongst others – and every track has a wintery theme. Like many of her albums, it plays more as a single long track than as a series of songs.

Kate’s more mature voice is less shrill than people who know her earlier albums might expect, and for once she has produced an album that is both artistically brilliant and also suitable to have on in the background at a party. Preferably with a winter theme.

This brief summary hasn’t given me chance to talk about the brilliant new albums by Guillemots, Gruff Rhys, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Bright Eyes and more, but there’s only room for five in a top five!

What are your favourite albums of 2011?

In the same way that the popular early subdomain “www” identifies web sites to the average person without the need for text explaining that it is a web site (or even the http:// part of the URL that specifies the protocol!), we’re starting to see signs and adverts for businesses just identifying their presence on Twitter with their name preceded by @. Essentially, Twitter now owns the @ symbol for the purpose of brand recognition.

What’s even more interesting about this is that the use of the @ symbol was not a Twitter platform feature in the beginning – it was invented by the platform’s users as a way to indicate replies to a user when no such capability existed in the platform.¹

This is a great example of collective intelligence, as Tim O’Reilly would call it:

Think of how Wikipedia works, how Amazon harnesses user annotation on its site, the way photo-sharing sites like Flickr are bleeding out into other applications… We’re entering an era in which software learns from its users and all of the users are connected.

– Time Magazine, October 2005

In this case, not only has the software learnt from its users, the users have provided first a branding hook for the software, and later for marketing culture at large.

1. Twitter blog: Are you Twittering @ Me?

Well, that’s how it should work, anyway.

Unfortunately, the modern prevalence of identity theft has caused my bank and many others to introduce a cumbersome fraud prevention system on top of this freedom.

I first encountered this in force on a business trip in September – I tried to take money out of a cash machine in Taoyuan Airport, Taiwan without first contacting my bank to say I was going out there. Reasonably enough, it refused the transaction.

OK, so I should be able to call some 24-hour service, like my telephone banking, and get my mistake sorted out, right? That would be the reasonable thing to do at this stage for good customer care.

Well, here’s how Halifax approaches the “suspicious transaction”:

1. Wait until “reasonable hours” in the UK timezone. Never mind what timezone the suspicious transaction occurred in, even if UK time is the middle of the night there.
2. Have an automated message call the customer. My network charges me £1 per minute to answer calls when I’m abroad – so do many other networks.
3. If the customer doesn’t answer, wait a few hours and call them again. Repeat ad infinitum.
4. When the customer finally does answer, reel off a list of transactions really slowly, including legitimate ones, and ask the customer to confirm each one by pressing keys.
5. After the customer has confirmed the activity is not suspicious, hang up and don’t give the customer any option to deactivate the fraud protection.

Thoroughly useful. So, let’s ignore that costly and largely pointless process. (Although couldn’t it be made, like, a billion times simpler, cheaper and less intrusive just by using SMS instead of a call?)

So I called my 24-hour telephone banking to try to get the block lifted, only to find that function is not available to the operators and the department that deals with the block only works regular UK hours, so I had to wait until a hideously impractical time in the afternoon to call again and lift the block, which didn’t actually happen until the following day. Great.

Well, I won’t be doing that again, I thought. So when I had to go to the USA for another business trip this month I was careful to tell my bank all about the trip beforehand. With glee I inserted my card into an ATM on arrival and lo, “transaction denied”!

So I waited again for UK working hours, in the middle of the night of course, and allowed myself to be awakened by the pointless automated call at 4am then immediately called my bank. “Oh, it says on the system that you’re in the USA but for some reason the fraud prevention hasn’t been transferred.” Great. Luckily, this time they were able to sort it out on the spot and I wasn’t cashless the whole week.

There’s my rant. Now, here’s what I think banks should do about this:

1. Be considerate about where the suspicious transaction happened. There are always hours when the UK and place X are both awake, so consider making the call during those hours.
2. Maybe use SMS (or email?) to save the customer money and complications if they are abroad at the time.
3. Make sure there is a way a customer can verify his/her identity over the phone and lift the block at all hours. This should easily be possible with an automated service because you already use one to verify the transactions were legitimate.
4. By all means take fraud prevention seriously, but please also take your customer’s satisfaction with the service you offer just as seriously!

If anyone knows a bank that operates like this, let me know and I’ll switch!

As far as I can tell, this branding exercise was a Microsoft invention, added in early versions of Microsoft Office to associate the components of Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) with the existing four-colour Windows logo (with yellow representing Outlook Express), but it’s persisted much further than that.

Google Docs, OpenOffice and LibreOffice all use the same colour scheme. Even Lotus Symphony has broken out of the Lotus standard colour scheme with its 2.0 icons.

I’m fascinated by subtle corporate branding that makes its way into the common consciousness without being obviously detected as such. What else is like this?

Sadly, the distinction between the comma and the semicolon is a really useful one for comprehending sentences correctly the first time.

The rule for when to use a semicolon is actually really straightforward; once you know it, you’ll probably never confuse it and the comma again.

Use a semicolon when you want to connect two strongly related phrases that could stand on their own as sentences.

Here’s an example I saw on the Manchester Metrolink tram the other day. When a stop is announced, an LED marquee displays something like the following:

This is an Altrincham service, the next stop will be Cornbrook.

Here a comma is used when a semicolon would be much better. Reading this sentence with a comma causes the reader to double-back and try to work out how the second part fits with the first part. A semicolon would break the sentence up properly and alert the reader to there being two separate phrases in the sentence.

This is an Altrincham service; the next stop will be Cornbrook.

The stop system gives us four “levels” of stop and, in most cases, the rules are pretty simple:

• Comma [,]: Most of the time the comma is used to delimit non-defining clauses, like “in most cases” above. A non-defining clause is a piece of the sentence that can be removed but cannot stand on its own as a sentence. Commas are also used to separate items in a list.
• Semicolon [;]: As above, the semicolon is used to join two phrases that could stand alone as sentences but are strongly related to one another.
• Colon [:]: The colon does the same thing as the semicolon, except it usually ties together one phrase with an explanation of that phrase. For example, “Rich is a blogger: someone who writes pedantic articles on the web.”
• Full stop [.]: Separates entire sentences, as I’m sure you know.

Join me in reclaiming the semicolon and making long sentences easier to read!

We live in the time where the laptop computer is ubiquitous. Most people who have a home personal computer use a laptop now, and it’s starting to become the primary workplace device too. Although tablets are gaining in popularity, it’ll be a while before they have anything like that market share.

So let’s talk about laptop lids.

Laptop computers fold away for ease of portability. It’s very easy to carry around a cuboid-shaped device. This isn’t news to anyone.

But wherever I go — home or office — I see people walking around with their laptop lids open, precariously balancing the computer and anything else they need to carry, such as notebooks and cups of coffee. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. It’s such a common image it’s almost unnoticeable but when you think about it, it’s pretty hilarious.

Why does this happen? Well, most modern operating systems are configured by default to initiate an ACPI sleep event when the laptop lid is closed. This shuts down the monitor, hard disk and CPU and leaves only the RAM powered up — great for saving battery power when on the move, but causing a delay of a few seconds on wake when the various hardware springs back into life. On top of this, most authentication systems will use this as an excuse to lock the machine, requiring a password or fingerprint to unlock.

The delay caused by the wake and unlock event is traded off against the distance travelled and in most people’s eyes a journey from desk to meeting room (or living room to bedroom) is too short to warrant that delay and effort and so we end up in that silly state of balancing the laptop instead of closing it for easy movement.

But my engineer’s brain is not satisfied with this! There must be a solution where we can have the best of both worlds!

The easy solution would be to have a switch on the taskbar to say whether to sleep & lock when the lid is closed. I’m sure such features already exist. But I don’t want to be having to remember to click this, especially before going home for the evening or travelling — the risk of accidentally leaving my laptop fully powered and wasting energy (or not having any power at my destination) is too great.

We could program the ACPI based on our calendar information — my laptop already knows when I have meetings so perhaps it could decide not to sleep when it knows it’s being transported in or out of a meeting room. But this relies on the information in my calendar being accurate and it doesn’t solve the same problem at home.

What about just allowing us to specify a minimum time after the lid is closed before the sleep and lock events kick in? If I could say that any journey of less than a minute should be considered just closing the lid for convenience’s sake, and not because I’m travelling or leaving my laptop alone, that would probably work. There’s a tradeoff here in battery power (not much) and physical security (I could still manually initiate the lock if I’m worried about that) but I think the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

This would be easy to do in GNU/Linux where ACPI is scriptable, but do similar tools exist for Windows 7 or OS X? And if we can solve this problem, how do we go about retraining everyone out of this habit?

When this happens on a long-haul flight, the passengers are subjected to something rather odd: They are asked to stay on the plane. In the dark. With nothing to do.

From asking around, it seems the explanation for this has two key components:

1. Pilots are only permitted to work for a certain number of hours, so they can guarantee alertness. For this reason, letting people back into the terminal building when there is a race against the clock could be disastrous, as one lost passenger could cost the entire flight.
2. The main cabin lights, entertainment system and microwave/fridge for food and drink are powered by an alternator in the jet engine. No engine = no power (well, OK, some power but just enough to keep low-level lights on and a tantalizing flight information screen saying “Ground speed: 0 mph”).

The in-flight experience on a 747 is a very pleasant one. There is an entertainment system with hundreds of films & TV programmes to choose from. Staff walk through the cabin and offer you cold drinks and hot meals. And there is a galley where you can go at any time and request snacks.

Unfortunately, when you are grounded at the airport all of these luxuries vanish (evidently) because of the lack of power. This seems like a major oversight for the passenger experience!

I’m not sure if there’s a good solution to problem number 1. But surely number 2 could be solved in some way. Maybe the airport could have ground generators that the aeroplane can connect to?

I’m sure this is a common enough problem that someone should have come up with a solution by now!