gamboling.co.uk

A while ago I ran through a few of the phrases that I use at home http://www.gamboling.co.uk/2009/02/tragedy-of-self-mong.html and yesterday I asked you for your suggestions http://www.gamboling.co.uk/2010/01/what-is-your-favorite-at-home-phrase.html. I’m sure everyone has this kind of thing, but Katherine and I seem to have more than most. Now I’m not really talking here about something like slugabed. This is a phrase that means kind of layabout. I’d never heard it before I started going out with Katherine. I assumed she had made it up, but no, apparently it’s a real word. This is rather like, “honest indians”, that I use and I assume is American. It means, “no this is really true”, or “I swear”.

But no, I’m talking about phrases here that have been created in the homestead or have been at least wildly taken out of context.

You’ve met me before

I don’t know where this comes from, but in some ways it is the most normal of this bunch, so I guess it gets to go first. This is used by me a lot to diffuse the mock shock and surprise that Katherine demonstrates when I go on one of my damn foolish idealistic crusades*. Eg.
Katherine: “Why are all of the spoons on the dining room table?”
Me: “I was trying to magnetise them.”
Katherine: “Why?”
Me: “You know… you’ve met me before.”

Tiny dinosaur arms

Katherine does have slightly shorter and weaker arms than me. I seem to remember suggesting that the reason she couldn’t open something one day was because she only had tiny dinosaur arms. I was thinking along the lines of the T-Rex style. However, this one has slightly backfired on me as I now often hear, “Can you do it? I can’t because of my tiny dinosaur arms”.

They’ll be closed

This one can be pinpointed exactly. In the first live stage show of the TV series Bottom, when very few lines of the play seem to be actually getting said, Rik Mayall says, “Come on, they’ll be closed”. Meaning the pub. This is invoked at home whenever one person is faffing. It sounds a pretty generic phrase but it still seems to cause confusion because other people say, “What’s closing? When’s it closing?”

Trouble with a capital TR

This is pretty straightforward as it goes. Some people are trouble, others are trouble with a capital T. Katherine is trouble with a capital TR. Because she’s more trouble than your traditional captial T Trouble-maker. This actually does rely on a strange understanding of the word trouble that we seem to employ, which is quite similar to cheeky.

Are you Joaquin Phoenix?

Well instead of saying “Are you joking?”, I tend to say, “Are you Joaquin Phoenix”. Yes I know. It’s not great is it?

Joaquin Phoenix it in

Well you must know that really you don’t pronounce Joaquin like joking. In fact it’s pronounced much more like “wha-keen”. And in my addled mind it sounds a bit like “whacking” hence “so take that cake and just Joaquin Phoenix it in the oven”. Yes it does tend to get me looks.

[And sighs from your Editor as you can spell neither Joaquin nor Phoenix. I thank the stars that these are spoken phrases.]

* This is from Indiana Jones and the last crusade. I’m pretty sure Nick said this about some crazy scheme I was plotting when I was about 12 or 13. It’s been accurate ever since.

There is a really broken thing on your computer and I am constantly amazed that it hasn’t been fixed. It’s the way addresses and contacts work. The issue is this: on a computer, you should never have to enter the same information twice, but that’s what keeps happening in your contacts.

Think about Katherine and me. How do we feature in your address book*. Most people used to have the couple at their home address in their address book with the house phone and then underneath you have something saying, “Alex Mob” etc.

But now in the electronic world you want to be able to know that when one of us calls you on the phone you have the right name pop up. So you set up both people individually, with their own mobile number. But where do you store the home address and the home phone number? Generally, you end up putting the home number on both people. Luckily my iPhone is smart with this and would say “Alex or Katherine calling” if the home number calls me.

But there is a problem. Something is broken. I’ve had to enter the home phone number twice, same problem with the address. But why? There is no real reason.

Personally, I think the way it should work is that you are able to nest information. So a regular person that you put in the contacts is at the top level. When you scroll through the contacts you only see this top set of people exactly as you do now. However you would be able to add a subordinate set of information – these would be houses, offices, children, etc. They would, in reality, be contacts exactly like the normal contacts, but they would be owned by at least one other contact, so don’t show up in the normal list.

That way, if we move you only need to change the address once. If your work friend, Karen, is in the phone and you want to add their partner’s name, you would make a subordinate contact. It wouldn’t normally show up, but when you need to remember Steve’s name, it’s there. Suddenly Karen can’t come to the football and Steve’s coming, you have a place to put his name and you can later work out which Steve it is. Then after the game, you actually exchange e-mails and suddenly Steve is a real mate so you promote him up and he no longer belongs to Karen. He’s just a regular contact and you don’t have to copy and paste that info out of some notes field you were using.

Surely this is the right way to do it?

*Obviously there’s a good chance we aren’t in your address book, but instead replace the names with some other random names of a couple that you know that you pluck from the air that make sense for your address book.

It would seem that men and women run at different temperatures. This seems to be a universal truth. I am warmer than Katherine at almost all times. And that’s because, like most girls, Katherine is a radiator. All of her heat is being transmitted outwards.*

So what do we do about this? We turn the heating on. Or we don’t if we’re fourstar. The problem is that this isn’t necessarily the correct approach. Christine complained that is not necessarily the right thing to do because men quite often then go on to make the women feel guilty. Christine would rather put a coat on and be done with it. But if men see a woman with a coat on indoors they would want to turn the heat up to “do the right thing”. But then they have to take clothes off.

In my office our desk is populated currently by three males and one female. And the thermostat has been turned up so the coldest person is warm. This means that we were actually running desk fans while it was snowing outside. Surely this isn’t right? I’m not sure I know what the solution is. But maybe you do?

* The reason for this is that men’s fat deposits tend to be stored in a couple of key areas (mainly the stomach) whereas women’s are more evenly distributed. Added to which, women also have thicker subcutaneous (under the skin) fat deposits as standard than men. This means that the fat is near the surface. And the fat is your insulation. Now it seems counter-intuitive to think that this everywhere insulation is worse. But it is, because more heat is gathered from the outside world than is created by you. So women are insulating against the heat source. Whoops.

As we’ve been talking about my mythical travel planning website idea, we’ve had a couple of pieces of feedback.

First my friend Rich, hot on the heels of his converter of the London BBC Weather site for degrees Andronov has made an implementation of the distance to hot problem mentioned in this post last week. It’s really nice and, of course, it shows the temperatures in degrees Andronov as well. Check it out here: http://andronov.rjmd.eu/holiday/

Second, my father has mentioned another really simple thing that is almost impossible to do. He recently wanted to travel somewhere as a quick weekend break and because he wanted it to be easy he wanted to be able to travel from his closest airport. So all he needed was a list of all of the places you could fly to from that airport.

This is something that you can’t get hold of. You could go to an airport website and say, “show me all flights from Birmingham International to Prague” and see if any flights come up. And then repeat the search with, “show me all flights from Birmingham International to Copenhagen” and build up a list that way. But that seems a really inefficient way of doing this.

As I said in my last post. I keep finding different ways that I want to be able to get to the data.

How many top notch restaurants are there in the city? How likely is it to rain? How many museums are there? How many clubs? How hot is it? Are there public beaches? How far away is it? Is it available from my local airport? How much is it?

Each of us has different mechanisms to decide how we go on holiday. We all go through a process. And that’s what I want to simplify here. I want to put all those factors in order of importance to me and then have the destinations which are most likely to work to bubble to the top. So at the moment I want to get some winter sun. I want to go somewhere on holiday in February which is not too far away and has some nice restaurants and a few museums. So say that list above was the complete set of questions, I would put them in order of importance on the screen of my mythical website like this:

Most Important
1 – In February
2 – Warmer than [25 degrees C]
3 – Closer than [Not set – order by this factor]
4 – More than [2] top notch restaurants
5 – More than [3] museums
6 – Less than [£xxxx can’t think of a good number to put in here]
Least Important

So what it would do is bring me back a list ordered in bands. Band 1 would be places that match every criteria ordered by distance from the UK. Band 2 would be places that match the first 5 criteria, but cost more than the limit price, etc.

I think that would be a really neat way of helping me decide where to go. But what other criteria can you think of? Which other questions do you have when you are deciding where to go?