Personal

I am really looking forward to a relaxing day today!

This weekend kicked off on Friday, as Cathy and I drove up to Thetford Forest to see the Pet Shop Boys play, which was pretty darn cool.

Actually, it was pretty darn hot, and yesterday was the same, but with even more humitidy - which wasn't great, as I had to go and find a suit for a wedding next weekend. On the same day that everyone else decided to go to the Summer sales, apparently. Yuck. Oh well, got the suit and some other clothes too, so it wasn't too bad.

Today finally feels like we're in for some relief from the heat, so, I think I'll go and buy a DVD player, and sit in front of the TV. (Our NTL has been down for about 2 weeks now, due to them not turning up to fix it last weekend, and my being inflexible about being willing to sit at home all day again for them. They are supposed to come tomorrow evening, so we'll see...)

Okay, this isn't news. Everyone knows that the word "intuition" no longer means what it really means.

But that's not going to stop me pointing out this gem:

The on-screen menu is intuitive even without looking at the manual unless it's the first time you've installed a DVD player.

I don't think I even need to explain how incredibly wrong that sentence is.

Drat. I missed the Chap's Olympics, despite the fact it was just down the road from work, because, you guessed it, I was working. Oh well. End of big project is in sight!

On the other hand, because I worked late, and came home directly afterwards, I've been winding down by updating the gallery, so there's a couple more photos in there now, if you're interested...

Exactly.

Five nines is a goal every marketing deparment would like to be able to claim. Normally, we'd be talking about computer system uptime, but I'm sure any marketing team would love to be able to talk about five nines of customer satisfaction, or widgits that pass muster; whatever. You'd like to be able to market your company by saying that your success rate is at least 99.999%.

Of course, that's not easy. In fact, it's really tough. In terms of computer system uptime, image your computer system has a 30 minute outage. You can imagine that happening easily enough - one server down, one mistyped command, one bug in the code. It happens, sometimes. However, if it does, that means that you need to have at least 3,000,000 minutes, or about 5 years, 8 and a half months of uptime up your sleeve to maintain your fine nines!

So, often five nines isn't considered to be worth the effort, regardless of how nice it would be from a marketing point of view.

[As a result, you can almost be sure that any company that does promises you five nines is not taking scheduled outages into the equation, and could very well only be promising you a predicted uptime, not a real uptime.]

However, regardless of the fact that five nines is really hard to achieve, I found it a little odd to see that BT are marketing themselves with the far less impressive one nine: at least 90% of payphones are working.

Maybe BT are hoping that most people won't be able to figure out that their claim means that, of the 75,000 public phones in the UK, up to 7,500 phones aren't working. That seems like an awful lot of phones to me.

I wonder how many of those phones that are broken are stand-alone phones, so that when it's broken, you can't just use the one in the booth next to it?

In Australia, you expect that in Summer, you get up to go to work, have a cold shower, and then, after you've brushed your teeth, you need to have another shower.

But not in London. It's unnatural, I tell you!