gamboling.co.uk

At the end of the weekend away at Rob’s (Weakened away), Stew was unable to take my brother and I to the station and so Rob stepped into the breach.

We packed all of our stuff into the back of Rob’s car, waved goodbye to the house and set off to the local station. Soon after setting off, we could hear a strange scratching and scraping noise coming from under the car. Rob was worried, could it be his exhaust? We didn’t have much time before our train, so Rob decided to go for the pragmatic approach and hope for the best. We’d check it out once we got to the station. All the way there it continued to scrape. It was a strange transition, at first the noise was unwelcome – a sign that something had gone wrong. Once Rob had decided that he was going to hold on until the station the continued noise was a blessing – it meant that whatever it was hadn’t fallen off.

We pulled into the station and all three of us got out of the car. Immediately it was obvious what had caused the noise. Sticking out of the rear passenger door that none of us had used was a small branch of a sapling – something about half a metre long with about 10 twigs on it. We all had a good chuckle of relief; Rob opened the door and pulled the branch out. Then he started breaking the branch into bits and putting the twigs back onto his back seat. But as he was doing this, a young boy approached.

“Why have you got a branch attached to your car?”, he shouted.

We didn’t really know how to respond to the question. We hadn’t planned this thing, and yet that was clearly the only way that this kid could imagine something like this could have happened.

“Why have you got a branch attached to your car?”, he shouted again, although he didn’t need to shout as much this time as he was standing right near to us.

Rob is, I think you could say, somewhat of a hippy nature. And he decided to emphasise that style in his response.

Rob: “I think it just wanted to come for a ride, man.”

Rob had, as this was going on, almost finished putting the bits of branch into the back seat.

Boy: “Why are you putting a branch back in your car?”

Rob: “It just wants to go home man. I’m just going to take it home.”

Boy: “No. Seriously, WHY ARE YOU PUTTING A BRANCH IN YOUR CAR?”

The boy, it would seem, had a small number of rage issues. My brother judged the moment…

Pete: “Hey, stop giving us so much stick.”

We chuckled to ourselves about this joke. The kid was clearly not best pleased.

Boy: “Don’t you insult me mate. Don’t you insult me you pr!@k!”

Pete: “It was only a joke, mate.”

Boy: “Oh, you think it’s funny to insult an 11 year old kid, do you? Think you’re tough insulting an 11 year old kid?”

Pete: “No.”

Boy: “My dad’s a f*£king traveller and he’ll do you if he finds out that you’ve been messing around with his kid.”

Pete: “Right.”

Me: “I think we have a train to catch.”

Boy: “You better get on that train because my dad’s going to come down here in a moment and he’s a f*£king traveller and he’s going to get you.”

We all started to edge towards the station, except the kid who seemed to be edging towards wherever his dad was. Just as we were almost out of earshot, Pete again judged the moment correctly…

Pete: “I can’t believe you two didn’t stick up for me.”

We all started laughing again. We are quite easily amused. This, however, wasn’t wise as the kid, who presumably hadn’t heard what Pete had actually said (not that it would have mattered) thought we were laughing at him.

Kid: “Right, I’m getting my dad.”

We should have told him to leaf it out, or we’d call the copse.

Katherine called out to give me an update on matters of laundry, “you have a hole in your shirt”.

“Oh dear, that’s a shame,” I answered, “I’ll have to buy a new one.”

This, I knew was the nice safe answer. The answer that would steer me out of danger. It wasn’t the answer I was thinking of though. I really wanted to say, “that’s good, otherwise I’d never be able to put it on”. But I guessed, rightly I’m sure, that this wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear.

Of course this got me thinking, just how many holes do I have in my shirt?

Well when it’s buttoned there is the one for my neck and the one for my torso. There are the two for my arms and there are the two for the cufflinks I’m not wearing (this shirt has buttons and cufflink holes). There are also the two holes that are there so that when you roll up your sleeves you have enough material to do so. These are the kind of slits (or darts if you prefer) that run down the last quarter of your sleeves on the inside. Also my top button is undone giving one extra hole (the buttonhole). And finally the shirt pocket hole. So done up my shirt has 10 holes.

What about undone?

Well, if I roll up my shirtsleeves I don’t actually change the number of holes as I gain two for the buttonholes and lose two for the slits as they are now subsumed into the sleeve holes.

On the front of my shirt I get two extra holes for the collar buttons and I lose two for opening the shirt. The head and torso hole disapear. But I do gain one hole per button. There are eight buttons on the front of my shirt but the top one was already open. So I add seven.

So when open my shirt has 17 holes! So what’s an extra hole here or there? I was obviously just trying to make it an even 18. I thought about mentioning this to Katherine but I decided this might cause more of my shirts to develop extra holes.

So, readers, how many holes do you have in your shirts?

I have been trying to become slightly more organised. I don’t know exactly what I’d like to be slightly more organised than. Perhaps an elephant? Yes, I think in a fight to the bitter foolscap hanging file, I would like to be more organised than an elephant but I’m happy to be pipped to the lever arch by an ocelot. Caveat emptor, dear reader. Do not try and out-organise an ocelot*.

I have employed an application called Omnifocus to get things going for me. It is available for the Mac and iPhone only. So IN YOUR FACE BILL GATES, how are you ever going to get organised enough to conquer the world now? Oh… wait… Perhaps he is using an undocumented feature of Outlook?

So I have been using this software on my iPhone. It only costs £10 and it works really well. There is a £70 version for the desktop and so far I haven’t seen the need for it, so there you have my review. It is really really really worth £10 if you have an iPhone and you want to be more organised than an elephant but less organised than an ocelot.

What it does is basically provide you with a task list that you can categorise in two ways. So you can say this thing I have to do is to do with Christmas and to do with Shopping, because it’s buying a Christmas present. But this other thing is to do with Christmas and being at home because it’s writing my christmas cards. The projects are things like Christmas, Contexts are things like Shopping and being at home. It’s very handy because when you are out shopping you can look and find all the things you were supposed to do when you were out shopping.

However there does seem to be one really annoying problem. There are two kinds of tasks in the world***: those which are like publishing an article on gamboling and those which are like making the potato mountain in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Lots of people think there is a distinction between tasks that have steps and tasks that don’t but I think that’s a lie. Every task has multiple steps, sometimes it’s not worth breaking them down because you’re only going to do the thing once. Do you think Richard Dreyfus ever planned to make that potato mountain again? No, of course not. That was it. The thing was done. But once he had done it, it was done and he knew it, we knew it, even those aliens knew it. He had it checked off. But even something as simple and crazy as a mashed potato mountain has inner steps:

Step 1 – Wash Potatoes
Step 2 – Peel Potatoes
Step 3 – Boil Potatoes
Step 4 – Drain Potatoes
Step 5 – Mash Potatoes
Step 6 – Sculpt Potatoes

There is, believe it or not, a process for Gamboling articles too. It has far less to do with potatoes and can be described like this:

Step 1 – Ignore Potatoes
Step 2 – Come up with idea for article
Step 3 – Write article
Step 4 – Edit article
Step 5 – Get Katherine to edit article
Step 6 – Publish article

As you can see the concepts have exactly the same number of steps. The difference is that I do the same thing time and again. Over and over. Round and round. For years. And the difficult part is keeping track of which article is at which stage. What I need is to basically be able to add an idea and then have it create all of those steps for me automatically. I guess this would be called something like a template. And then I would be able to tell what is actually going on.

Why is this important? Without templates the software just doesn’t do what I need at all. When I look at my entry which says “Build Mashed Potato Mountain”, I can see that because it’s unchecked it’s not done. And when I start the project, it’s hard not to fall through the sub-steps without ending up with a mashed potato mountain. I mean if you miss out certain steps then you could burn your house down. That sort of thing will tend to focus your attention. But with the gamboling articles there might be weeks between the beginning and the end of each one and more than likely multiple articles being worked on at different times and at different stages. Keeping track is quite a lot more complicated. And at the moment I can’t cross off each bit when it’s done, so I can’t tell at what stage each of the articles is at by looking at it on the list.

So yes, I guess until they get this sorted, Bill Gates can rest easy, which is a shame.

* I did attempt this in the long lazy summer of 2003, by breaking in to his filing cabinet and rearranging everything, much to the ocelot’s chagrin.**

** In fact the only disorganised ocelot I’ve ever met was the one which kept Salvador Dali as a pet.

*** There may be more, let me know.

At the end of 2008, a leap second was added to the last minute of the year. This makes sense because if it weren’t added then after a while the sun wouldn’t be at it’s height at noon. And as that’s basically what noon means, it would lead to all kinds of problems.

My issue is this. When it’s a leap year you add a day to the year. This event was advertised as a leap second and yet we added a second. Surely we should call it a leap minute if we’re adding a second. No?