Charles on… anything that comes along

Although I have a preference in the upcoming US election, I’ve refrained from commenting, because (i) I don’t think I’ll make a significant difference (ii) more importantly, I’d find it offensive if someone in the US was trying to tell me why I should or should not vote Blair/Kennedy/this season’s Tory leader, so I’m avoiding hypocrisy.

Still, the Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004 is one to make all but Karl Rove shudder. If you’re being polled for it, lie! Let’s make the polls really inaccurate so the two sides don’t know what’s going on, and have to fight it on their manifestos for the future, rather than stupid name-calling about 30 years ago.

(Link thanks to Lance over at Davos Newbies, back from the summer break with a vengeance.)

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It’s only occasionally tedious, but someone has occasionally to point out to Paul Thurrott (the Eeyore of Mac blogging®) that it would be nice if he could be faintly accurate sometimes.

For instance, when he goes off on a rant* about the design of the new iMac G5, and the Briton who heads Apple’s design team: You know, screwing with Ives is about as dangerous as screwing with Jobs: The guy is so revered in the Mac community that few will admit he’s capable of a bomb. But the iMac G5 is such a bomb: Derivative and uninspiring. … I won’t be buying this version, and someone needs to call the pretentious Ives to task for his pompous and conceited baloney about the iMac G5 design. There, I’ve said it. And I feel better now.

Nice that you feel better (despite not having seen it, and thus basing your decision on images that don’t do it justice). Now, for accuracy’s sake, the guy’s name is Jonathan Ive, and always has been. But this being the web, you can correct it.

Actually, Ive isn’t pretentious. When I met him, he was very focussed on the problem of how you get all the stuff into the space while making it look good. I asked him which existing designers he admired. “The people who do satellites,” he said. “They can’t waste the tiniest bit of space.”

* Update Tues 1700: ah, the Ive/Ives spelling mistake has been corrected, though not acknowledged. Psychiatrists are invited to analyse this behaviour. Orderly queue, please.

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Hey, I won a prize. In one of the press conferences this morning, Simon Singh (of the Fermat’s Last Theorem book fame) set us a problem: what numbers are the factors of 323? (As in, what numbers multiplied together produce that number?) Prize, a green spinny thing “because I know you’re not motivated by money”.

I wrote the answer but was trying to do the maths to confirm it when he called time. But he acccepted my scribbled numbers as proof. (Generous - I might just have been a chancer who was quick at writing.)

Answer in the comment, because I know you’ll want to do it yourself. Give yourself 30 seconds.

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I’d always glided past the “management analysis” pages in the Observer’s Business section before, but last night happened to start reading Simon Caulkin on Service that doesn’t deliver.

It’s a fantastic explanaton of why having more targets actively makes these companies worse, rather than better, at what we want them to do, such as fixing a water leak.

Sample: How can a company construct a system that allows it to live with such opposites, claiming in good faith excellent customer service and conservation at the same time as it leaves the water running for a month, give or take a few days? That requires a minimum of four transactions with the company, up to six if the leak is underground (work it out), to fix a domestic leak?

The answer is, very easily. This is the norm, rather than the exception, in service companies. You do it by managing the trees and ignoring the wood, in the name of efficiency breaking up the process of serving the customer into individual activities (phone the customer, send a surveyor, send a plumber) and managing the activities according to detailed specification. The underlying purpose gets lost in the process.

It has scary implications for politics, and e-government, and pretty much everything around us which is getting broken down into “processes” in order to be measured. Read it. Then cull the people who implement these things.

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Here’s some more commercial madness. The coffee and tea in the press room at every previous British Associantion meeting was done in a rather simple, effective way: big vat of hot water; industrial-sized barrel of coffee, food parcel of tea bags, styrofoam cups, milk and sugar to taste. Very cheap, fast, unlikely to break down unless the heater element in the vat did.

But here in oh-so-modern Exeter we have the Kenco Capsule Filter System which has finger-sized prepacked slot-in packets of coffee. Put packet into hole in machine, balance paper cup on not-quite-right-sized slot, press button and you get a precisely-measured guaranteed-identical cup of coffee. No chance of self-medicating for a heavy night or early morning. It must be more expensive - these things are pds36.10 for 160, or 22p each, and that’s at wholesale. It’s also hugely more wasteful - you get a piece of plastic for each one, plus a strip of silver foil, and so on and so on.

Come the revolution, this sort of thing is the first that I’ll put against the wall and shoot, in a measured-quantity manner.

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I’m now in Exeter for the British Association of Science Festival. Beautiful sunny day, so the press room is in the gloom. (Then again, in the past we’ve been in greenhouses, and baked.)

For the first time ever, the press centre has reached the 1990s, and anyone can get a wired Ethernet connection. But instead of being a boon, this has bamboozled various of Fleet Street’s finest, leaving them grubbing around under desks for phone sockets (”why won’t this thing fit?”) and bemoaning the fact that they can’t get a good old dial-up modem link. “What’s a network card? What’s Ethernet?” Still, plenty of people are happy to help.

Interesting too to notice a growing number of iBooks. Not huge, but it’s not only me and The Guardian and the snappers either.

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