Only the two hundred and thirty fourth member with this mighty title

Today I was invited to take the newly introduced GA IQ test and passed with a fairly reasonable 85% (You need 75% to be assured of the award). It tests you on a variety of the subjects covered at the so-called “Conversion University” and is actually pretty tricky. You can only take the test once and have about 90 minutes to scrabble around dredging your brain for answers. I became increasingly worried as I went through due to how hopeless I was being with the answers. This was made far worse by the onset of time passing by. I kept doing annoying mental calculations for how long I had for each question and due to some truly awful arithmetic it seemed like I had not long for each. In the end I had about 30 minutes to go over everything again and change a few things around.

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Status reports are a necessary evil these days. I accept this and produce them as thorougly, concisely and candidly as I can. This does not mean of course that I like this task. It may well be one of the worst of the week.

Last week I had every status reporters worst nightmare, a blank template to fill. This is bad on a number of counts. Firstly last weeks items are not there to jog your memory and remind you of such banalities as a verb at the beginning of each sentence, the date format and the things actually promised the proceeding week. Secondly, what to write? The blank page of doom is troublesome in any profession, but in this act of aimless literature it is twice as tricky because there are so many variables to consider.

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Had my first real go creating Omniture reports and graph shaped things today. It gave me an interesting perspective given the free Google alternative that I have far more experience with.

Getting started was pretty easy once I started using the right version. v13.5 is extremely clunky and slow. v14 is much better and let’s you do some cool things with the data.

I couldn’t get the ClickMap plugin to work in either IE or firefox and it doesn’t support chrome, so I gave that a miss. Next I started to play with some of the reports… All the usual stuff is there and the different graphing options are really great. When google integrates their chart API with their analytics package things will be really fun.

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At work, in their attempts to build communities between otherwise very separate business units, they send out “Faces of…” emails. These consist of short biographies and work histories of the person to somehow bring them to life a bit. There are always a few semi-amusing anecdotes and the line “I love travelling” plus at least one grinning alcohol induced picture.

I think it is a great idea and one that should take place more. At the very least it gives someone with the least creative job ever a chance to express themselves in an alternative and interesting way. It does pose it’s risks though.

People with unnecessary taglines below their email signatures may see an opportunity to extend the dreadful paragraph beyond what anyone could tolerate. Equally those who havnt been traveling, never go anywhere or never take any pictures are left with a tricky dilema.

My humble obiturary, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I have written a couple of these. One was done in the style of an obiturary. The slightly subversive format seemed to perfectly mirror the requirements albeit with a few references to everything in the 3rd person. I really hope I can think of another format like this. The only other time you get little reviews of peoples lives is on the back cover of a book. Just need to work out what kind of a book I might write.

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Last night I went to see a recording of a new radio 4 panel show pilot. These are generally always good and seeing them live and in their entirity is even better.

Given the recent popularity of twitted there were tons of people there. Far more than ended up getting in. It would have been too much for them to turn people away at the door. Oh no we had to wait at the bar for an hour like waiting for a plane to board with ever increasing numbers called to get people seated in the auditorium. Rather unluckily for me I discovered that the capacity for blue wristbanded individuals, ie me, was 188, and since I also appeared to share that numbered ticket with someone else, I didn’t get in at first. Like some kind of prize-less careless lottery we stood for a few minutes fairly nonplussed before finally let in to take up the last few pirches.

In addition to Brooker the guests included David Mitchell, Victoria Coren and Marcus Hound. The format was pretty loosely tied around wrongness an failure, but really it was basically a panel game version of Room 101. It was a bit hit and miss and although Brooker had some good lines, David mitchell saved proceedings with excellent rants about the Internet, notably (moreorless) “is it really worth throwing TV on the bin for the ability to find out the names of the wombles in less than 2 seconds”. Also when Brooker suggested that celebrities will soon be filmed in the toilet, Mitchell retorted “that’s progres is it?”

So pretty worthwhile on the whole. Or at least better than a night working out how technically to implement google analyitics over multiple domains. For some reason I am convinced that question will surface in my google interview later. Who knows?

I have been working as project manager to help build a website for a local school. There have been various difficulties, not least the obsession by some to send any if not all content in word documents.

Your in the supermarket you buy some stuff, it goes in a bag….but hang on, the bag cost 5p. Hmmm maybe I won’t take that bag after all. I think microsoft need to levy a similar charge when people reach for the word icon. They should probably be charged a £1 when using the medium exculsively for pictures… Just to cover network costs.

But why this obsession. Word files are no different to standard files. Why can’t the individual Jpg or gif be attached to an email. There must be ecameras, probably Kodak easyshare ones, that take pictures directly into word? Or perhaps on some PCs, notably those bought at supermarkets, Word is the default operating system. Fuck windows… All you need is the ability to make things bold, change text to comic sans ms and do a word count every 10 mins or so.

Sending pictures aside, surely when sending an email you write hello. Seems sensible to throw the rest of the content in there. The internet is not some sprawling word document tied together by dodgy tabs and misaligned paragraphs.

Anyway I have most of the content now but have all sorts of ideas to incorporate this habit into perhaps a key feature of the site. I could design the site entirely in Word and link the main URL to it so that the download starts straight away. It would time out half way through because of the file size exceeding the browsers buffer.

At some point some training will be necessary. I fear that the concept of a complex CMS may be too much. Today I connected excel directly to a mySQL database through ODBC. If the same could be done in Word to CMSmadesimple then I think they would be sorted. In fact, what started as a ridiculous post may have some merit after all.