It’s hard to work out exactly what’s gone wrong, but my guess is that the balance of the side is a bit off, particularly in midfield. The fans have been moaning about the formation, but 442 vs 451 vs 433 isn’t the problem.

The problem is that playing Dani Parejo (on loan from Real Madrid!!) as a deep-sitting playmaker was asking too much from him, but dropping him is equally stupid. We need players of his quality on the pitch, but we can’t expect them to do everything.

I’d put Parejo back up front, dropped off behind one striker, as he played earlier in the season. We can rotate him and Buszaky in this role (and Vine, when he’s back). I’d also make the striker Agyemang or Balanta, and not Blackstock. Balanta was excellent in the early games, and I don’t understand why he’s not featuring. Blackstock may be popular, but I don’t believe he ever makes goals for us. He pops up to tap/head the ball into the net, which is obviously a valuable quality in a striker, but he is way too passive most of the time, and I don’t believe that any of our other strikers would get any less tap ins.

I also think that dropping Ledesma is ridiculous. We can’t expect him to be on fire every game, but his delivery, especially from corners and free kicks, is infinitely better than any other options we’ve got, and he makes things happen.

Rowlands is truly awful on the right, and if we have to find a way to lever him into the team each week (I’m not convinced that we do), that is not the solution. I think Rowlands is decent as a more defensive midfielder, but if Dowie feels he needs two out-and-out defensive midfielders, then I’d rather see Rowlands play on the left instead of Cook from time to time. He played well there a few seasons ago, and although his left-footed crossing is poor, he would cut in and unleash some great right footed shots which got us a few goals. And Cook is still a shadow of the player he was a couple of years ago - I don’t think it would do him any harm to be rotated or come on from the bench from time to time.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve heard surprisingly little in the mainstream media, which is a travesty.

He always came across as a quiet, private and modest person, but he was a key part of a great band - and will be sadly missed by many, many people.

Then it turns out that the job involves something I know nothing about, would never want to do anyway, pays less than half of my current salary, and/or involves working for a company that I’d rather not touch with a barge pole. A very long barge pole. Operated remotely. From a different planet.

Frustrating though this inevitably becomes, it does occasionally prompt me to wonder what I would actually like my next job to be. Ok, not occasionally… all the time.

Not that you should read this as me saying “I want a new job” or “I’m leaving SI” (don’t forget, I left SI once already, and they still managed to drag me back! If you count freelance contracts, I’m actually on my fourth stint at SI).

What I’m describing below probably won’t happen for another ten years if at all, but just for the record all you recruitment types, this is what you’ll have to do to get me even vaguely interested:

1) Find me a way to work for myself, to my own deadlines, and sell my own software. This is most likely to be the next move I make anyway, but if someone can help me do it, then fine.

2) Find me a Mac or iPhone job. I still work on a Mac every day, but I don’t write proper Mac software any more, and I miss it. Failing that, funky technology is good. Funky languages are good. Yet more tedious legacy C++ is bad.

3) Find me a job on a very small team. I’m talking less than 10 people. All of my most enjoyable jobs have involved working closely with 2-5 people.

4) Find me a research focussed job where I don’t have to work to unrealistic deadlines. I don’t mind deadlines at all (despite what some people think!). The right deadlines are essential if anything is ever to get finished. I do mind it though when I can see what needs to be done, but don’t get given the chance to do it. Ever. Year on year. Job satisfaction does matter, and too many years spent making too many compromises inevitably lead to a loss of morale and motivation.

5) Find me a job with people I can learn from. There are some amazing people out there, but only a few of us are ever lucky enough to actually work day to day alongside great coders like Kent Beck, Scott Meyers, et al, or great managers like Fred Brooks or DeMarco and Lister. I’ve been programming for nearly thirty years but I’d gladly halve my salary and give up all responsibility or kudos to be apprenticed to one of those guys for a while.

6) Find me the right money/quality-of-life trade off. As a just mentioned, I’ve been doing this a while now, and consequently I earn a decent wage. I think I’m a decent coder, but I also think I’m an ideas person, and sometimes these days I feel trapped in a world that doesn’t give me the chance to express any of those ideas. To a large extent that’s just the human condition, I know. Nevertheless - I have no children and no mortgage (but no house, mind you). I’d be very happy to trade money for intellectual freedom.

So there you go. I don’t want much, do I?

And finally, if there is anyone from SI reading this who is determined to interpret what I’ve just said in a negative fashion or get all insecure about it (which is really not how its intended), then all I can say is this: I’ve just given you a great list for how to keep me happy! What you do with it is entirely up to you :)

I, on the other hand, love mine (despite the occasional glitch, random departure of what appeared to be a fully charged battery, or stupid loss of preferences when upgrading).

This may be something to do with the fact that Tom seems to have about 100 third-party apps installed on his, and I (remembering the days of OS 9 extension madness all too well) have about 10 on mine.

I suspect though that it’s all about expectations and the managing thereof.

I can’t speak for Tom, but all I really wanted from my iPhone was something that replaced my old iPod and phone, and by the way was a better internet device than my previous Sony Ericsson not-at-all-smart phone. Expectations well and truly met.

Throw in the fact that I’ve now got always-on, eat-as-much-as-you-can data access wherever I am (yes, at super slow 2G speeds - so what? How fast can you read RSS feeds anyway?), and I am a happy bunny.

Apart from the bloody recessed headphone socket of course, which is right pain in the arse.

For what it’s worth, my list of apps, in rough order of usage:

• NetNewsWire (news)
• Things (to do)
• iFooty (footy news)
• TubeStatus (travel news)
• Remote (kewl)
• Palringo (chat)
• LastFM (music)
• OmniTuner (making music)
• VNC (nerdery)
• Facebook (social)
• Stanza (ebooks)
• eReader (ebooks)
• Light (illumination!)

Admittedly my list of feeds is a bit bloated (typically I have between 1000-2000 unread items, which I have no doubt is actually a comparatively small number by Tom’s standards).

However, I’ve found NetNewsWire to be slow, crash-prone (although definitely improved with the 2.1 os upgrade, so maybe we can blame Apple for that one), and generally not very smart about the way it works.

On the whole I think I prefer the NewsGator iPhone site, which essentially does the same job in a browser - but only because it gets me there quicker, not because the interface is necessarily better (in some ways it is worse).

In the unlikely event that Brent Simmons is reading this, here’s my quick fire list of how you could improve NNW on the iPhone:

• allow me to order my list of feeds; alphabetical is so not how I want to read my news

• give me a way to read the previous item; sometime I click “next” too soon…

• update the unread counts quickly; surely you can cache the list of unread items on the server and download them first, before refreshing the actual articles?

• fetch stuff from the feeds that are empty first; I have a few feeds I read a lot, and a lot of feeds I read rarely. The rare feeds already have tons of unread stuff in them. The popular feeds are empty, because I’ve sucked ‘em dry! Refresh those ones first please.

• fetch the articles in a more just-in-time manner; I know this may be trickier given the format of feeds, but it ought to be possible to just start by fetching one or two articles, then get the next one whilst I’m reading, and so on. I often seems like I’m waiting a long time just to find out if there’s anything to read

• be a bit smarter about moving on to the next feed or category; I have a bunch of Mac related feeds grouped together into a folder - I often find myself moved on to another folder, only to go back and discover that somehow a bunch of unread items in the Mac folder got skipped

• mix things up a bit; off the top of my head I can’t remember whether the feed formats give dates per item, or just an update time for the feed, but I’d quite like to view a bunch of related feeds together in a mixed up order; in other words, it would be quite nice not to have to read all the Register articles, then Slashdot ones, then the TUAW ones, etc - juble them together a bit, sorted by posting date if possible

• spot and remove duplicates; sometimes I end up with the same story twice because I subscribe to a main feed and a filtered version of it. It would be good if NNW could spot the duplicates and mark them as read for me

Until I got my iPhone, I tended to use Flock as my browser, and blog via that (not that I’ve blogged much in recent months anyway).

However, the utility of bookmark syncing with the iPhone was enough to force me back to Safari once I had one, and in any case Flock’s no use if I’m sitting on a train with just my phone.

Entering any amount of text is pretty painful on the iPhone at the best of times, but doing so in a web form via Safari is just too awful for words.

Which is annoying since I use my phone a lot now during my commuting, and it would be the ideal time for sharing the occasional random thought with this world - if only there was an easy way to get them down onto (digital) paper.

As I write this, I’ve just switched back to MarsEdit to give it a try. I used it all the time before switching to Flock, and might go back, especially since I gather that there’s an iPhone version in the works…

Nothing quite seems to do it right, so a while ago I started working on my own solution. Unfortunately, since I tend to have about half an hour of free programming time per century these days, I haven’t got very far.

In the interim, I also ended up with a manual solution based around Confluence (the very excellent Wiki software we use). This is better than nothing, and in fact the rest of the team adopted my scheme as a way to manage their lists too, but to be honest I find it very cumbersome.

So recently I gave up on a large number of my requirements (for now at least) and decided to go back to basics and try an existing commercial tool.

I realised that these days at SI I tend to spend about 50% of my time dealing with, or recovering from, interruptions of a non-programming nature. As a direct consequence of this, I spend a lot of time thrasing. I concluded that it’s most important for me to just be able to enter small tasks quickly into some sort of vaguely ordered list. It has to be easy enough that I can force myself to do it (the entering of the task, that is), as a matter of course, as soon as something occurs to me - even if I’ve already started the task in question.

Getting into this habit is essential, since I often start a task then don’t get to finish it immediately because I get interrupted again; or I start something and that immediately prompts me to think of five other things that need doing.

The simple of act of entering tasks like this reassures me that eventually I’ll come back to them. Even if I do get interrupted and completely forget what I was doing, the task will be sitting there, somewhere quite high up the list (since I tend to enter them near the “top” to begin with).

The tool I’ve started using is Things, from Cultured Code - which so far I really like.

It doesn’t do everything I want, and it does a few things I don’t really need, but it has the great advantage of being simple, nice to look at, and easy to use. It is a native Mac application, and also has an iPhone version (not free, but only £6), which is a major bonus.

Of my “ideal” requirements, the main things it doesn’t do are hierarchical sub-tasks, and group-wide task sharing.

For the group-wide sharing, I’ve just given up for now. Yes it would be nice to have team task lists, but I decided it was more useful for me to be able to get my own house in order first, before worrying about everyone else.

For sub-tasks and hierarchies of tasks, Things seems to have a concept of Areas and Projects, but they don’t seem to be multi-level, and they appear to be exclusive - move a task into a project and you seem to move it out of an area. That wasn’t quite what I expected.

So instead I’ve just gone free-form and decided to use tags for everything. I tag a task with a category, a project, a vague area, and try not to worry too much about it. This may become unruly eventually, but for now it’s working fine. I’m not trying to strictly order or decompose tasks - most tasks seem to have from one to three tags, and related stuff gets tagged similarly and seems to cluster naturally. That’s the theory anyway, and so far, so good.

If you’re looking for some “To Do” list software, I’d suggest that you give Things a try.

Ho hum.

I'd be interested to hear of anyone else who's having this problem - especially if they can figure out a solution...
Tags: synergy, macos

One of the features of the new version is publishing your library to the web, which means that mine is now online.

Unfortunately it doesn't do a particularly fantastic job of the export - everything is there, but there's not really any sort of index, and since I've got over 1100 items in the library, it's kind of hard to find anything.

Tags: deliciouslibrary

I’ll let Neil tell the story.

Tags: lost-and-found, qpr, keys, football

I’m not sure quite why some stations don’t do this, but apparently they do!