A sprint goal helps to enable the team to focus on for the next 2 weeks.  What does everyone want the team to work on next?

There are many tools to accelerate front-end design, such as Blueprint or960.gs, but, until recently, the tools for responsive design—design and implementation that accounts for all these different devices and capabilities—were few and far between. There’s Andy Clarke and Keith Clarke’s 320 and Up, and Columnal, a responsive grid system. Recently, Twitter Bootstrap went responsive.

I’ve been wanting to do this for about a year now, and not had the chance, but recent improvements in WordPress have excited me, so here we are, my Richard BF site is now converted to WordPress.

If you’re an RSS subscriber, then your feed URL has been automatically redirected to the new URL http://www.kashum.com/feed, and I’d suggest changing the old URL to this new one before it goes away. Permalinks are unchanged, any blog post on the old site will have the same URL on the new site.

Some miscellaneous links and pages are currently broken and I need to fix those, but the basic blog and associated functionality should all be there. I’d appreciate it if you let me know of anything that’s broken.

You memories are not perfect, but the interpreter can help to fill in details which are plausible.  Evidence of this is seen from how people who have suffered trauma that eliminates some of their real memories, will confabulate things to fill in the gaps, in a way to make a consistent narrative.  We do this all the time, and if you memories are complete enough, and your understanding of the context good enough, this confabulation works in your favor.

If you are passionate about what you create, it is virtually impossible to completely disassociate yourself from your work. However, your ability to achieve “artistic distance”—that is, to achieve a place that allows you to contemplate the object (design) on its own merits—will enable you to improve your own work immeasurably and, ultimately, cast off the immature shackles of ego.

The game starts with everyone in a circle. Either a word suggestion is given as an offer, or someone just thinks of a song, but one person then jumps into the middle and starts singing and dancing to a song. Everyone in the circle then sings and dances along. If you don’t know the song, you still commit to singing and dancing by either copying or doing your own thing, but the point is to support the person in the middle. When anyone in the circle is reminded of a different song by one of the words being already sung, then they jump into the middle singing and dancing to the new song. The previous person in the middle rejoins the circle and the circle now sings and dances along with the new person in the middle. And so on ad infinitum, or often ad tedium. There’s also a bunch of other notes given about supporting the person in the middle etc but basically that’s the game.

I remember being in a musical hot spot many years ago which was like an audition for Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, and Bette Midler impersonators. I didn’t know most of the songs, and I hated the ones I did. In fact I thought we’d invented punk so we didn’t have to listen to crap like that. It was not a fun warm up, in fact I hated it, especially since I had to spend the whole game pretending that I was enjoying myself, and it just served to make me even more pissed off and in my head.

The problem is that the game assumes that everyone likes all styles of music, particularly pop music. Don’t get me wrong, I love music, in fact my passion for music usually exceeds most people I’ve improvised with, and the styles of music I like are definitely more wide and varied than most people. It’s just that the songs chosen in musical hot spot are usually popular crap that reflect the average age group and interests of those playing the game, regardless whether anyone  likes or even knows them. 

Of course people can always jump in the middle and sing a song they do know and like, and I guess it encourages prople to keep jumping into the middle. But what generally happens then is that the people who picked all the crappy pop songs then rarely support the obscure ones because they’re not use to doing so, and the person with the exception can end up being externalised from the group because they don’t seem to be working with the group’s choices.

Musical hot spot is a bad improv warm up game. It assumes people have a certain popular and mundane musical taste, rewarding those who do, and punishing those who don’t. You can’t fake being in the moment, and there is no place in improv for warm up games which encourage you to do so.

We own two copies of Mac Office 2011 for our business, both of which have to be licensed (inflexibly) to specific machines. Basically Microsoft licensing works like this: it takes a little snapshot profile of what your machine looks like, what the processor is, how much memory you have, what hard drives etc., and then uses that do identify your machine. Change your machine, the profile changes and the software fails to start.

I added a hard drive over the weekend, an external drive that I just plugged into my Mac with a cable to do a backup. I was going to remove it again but I accidentally started Word and it freaked out, reset my product activation, and now I can’t run any Office applications, which I need for some client work that’s due tommorrow. However the product keys are on the original software disks, and they’re currrently in storage because we’re about to move premises. I have no idea where the box they’re in would be, it was all shipped out by removalists, and it would take several days just to go through everything.

Yet again, Microsoft’s stupid licensing system only hurts real paying customers, when those who pirated it are simply running their no-activation products fine on any machine they wish, completely unhindered by Microsoft’s pathetic attempt to lock them down. Next time I upgrade Office, I’ll be seriously considering cracking it, because it’s obviously pretty easy to do, and I’m certainly not the only one.

Fuck you Microsoft. Fuck you.

I think it’s just lazy, lazy developers calling a simple API to get the data from Google Reader and then calling another couple of pretty basic platform APIs to display them in a list.

What if I don’t want to use Google Reader? What if I don’t trust Google? What if I don’t trust Google with the already incredible amount of personal data they have about me that they sell to advertisers? What if I simply don’t trust a company which makes all its money from selling me to advertisers?

I blame Google Reader for the decline in feeds and feed reading, as people not wanting to use Google are pretty much stuck without much of a choice in RSS readers.

It’s very tempting to write my own and be done with it, and one of its features will be “doesn’t support with Google Reader”.

So here they are. Feel free to use and adapt them without requiring permission or royalties, but I’d love an email from you describing how it went if you end up using any of them. Note that these were designed for Chicago style scenic long form, and may not work exactly as described if played in Keith Johnstone style.

Most character narrative formats use one of three forms: inside out, where we meet the protagonists who know each other at the beginning and we keep meeting new characters through outward connections; outside in, where we meet seemingly unconnected protagonists in various scenes and by the end the connections have been discovered; or linear, where we meet the protagonists who know each other at the beginning, other characters may come and go, but the main protagonists are still there at the end. Outside in is the most difficult, as the structure can negatively affect the show if the players are actively looking for the connections, yet it can be the most rewarding for the audience if done right. The first two formats ahere to outside in and inside out respectively, and the third is open to interpretation.

Psyched/Spotlight

Jonathan, my wife Louise, and myself devised a trio format called “Psyched” or “Spotlight”, depending on who you ask, which we played several times before Louise had to stop playing because our toddler wouldn’t let us go out of the house together.

The format is an outside in form, mostly with open play and involves the interactions of three protagonists who are each gradually introduced via a therapy session with a psychologist.

The show opens with each player accepting a different type of ask-for from the audience. The first scene then begins with a character (protagonist #1) in an actual spotlight if you have the lighting option available, preferably sitting on a stool or chair, speaking with an invisible psychologist in the audience. We only hear the character’s responses, and silence is left for the psychologist’s voice, during which the character can be seen to be listening and reacting. The second scene is a typical open scene with protagonist #1 and a bit player, using some of the information which came out about them in the first scene. The third scene is a new protagonist (protagonist #2) (not in either of the first two scenes) with a psychologist, much the same as the first scene, followed by two open scenes which can be between any of the characters introduced so far, or a new character, but each scene must contain one of the two protagonists introduced so far. Scene six is a third psychologist scene, introducing the final protagonist (protagonist #3). At this point the audience should be familiar with most of the characters, and each of the three protagonists have been introduced via a psychologist scene and the first two also in an open scene. Play is then open for the rest of the show.

The structure of the first six scenes doesn’t have to be fixed as PSYCH1, OPEN1, PSYCH2, OPEN2, OPEN1, PSYCH3, you can play around with it, but if you do follow that initial structure then you should reach a good balance between two many opening psychologist scenes in a row, and the audience forgetting the early protagonists because they haven’t returned in open scenes for a while. Protagonists should come back to the psychologist every so often to get additional information about their character, and to summarise events from the open scenes, or whatever you think the audience wants. At least 2-3 psychologist scenes per character throughout the show seems about right.

As play progresses, connections between the three seemingly disconnected protagonists may appear, or they may not. It is common to have two protagonists eventually know each other and the third to have an isolated narrative, perhaps with connections between bit players, but there doesn’t need to be any. What comes out, will come out.

Every scene in the show must contain at least one protagonist, as the show is about them and their journey of self discovery. You can play with time as well if you wish, through flashbacks or flashforwards as entire scenes, but the psychologist scenes must be in the now, as they’re a reflection of what happens to the protagonists. Tagouts etc. aren’t used, but at least try them and see if they work for you. Scene transitions are simple jump in replacements, which may feel clunky at first if you’re new to smaller troupes, but works better than sweeps or other transitions as they don’t pull focus.

Each of the three protagonists is played by one of the three players. For newer players it’s recommended that each player looks after their own protagonist’s character development, else they could flounder in the solo psychologist scenes.

The show can end at any time the players feel is right. Perhaps some of the protagonists have addressed their problems discovered with the psychologist, perhaps others are destined to simply repeat their mistakes. It’s up to you and the audience on the night.

The format sounds a little too structured, but once you play with it a little, it’s not really. Think of it as an open format, but with the psychologist scenes as an additional tool for developing characters.

The key skills are solo monologue like scenes with missing two character dialog; an understanding of therapy question and answer (do your research on how therapy works); and the ability to find or at least identify narrative and character connections.

When Louise left the trio, Backstreet Stories player Emily joined Jonathan and I, and we devised a format which was never named, but we kept calling it “that format with Duncan in it”, so let’s call it “Duncan”. We played it a half dozen times (and maybe 20-40 times in rehearsal). It’s a lot of fun and you spend a lot of time on stage, especially in a trio.

Duncan

The format is an inside out form where the show leads up to scenes of increasing numbers of returning characters at or near the end of the show. Typically we follow one of two protagonists who finds themself meeting friends and family of the other protagonist, and shows the interactions and personal discoveries of each as that person is potentially integrated into that social circle. An example would be where a girl brings her new boyfriend home to the family farm, and he meets the mother and father, brothers and sisters, ex-boy and girl friends, and anything else that could be thrown into the mix, and then the girl meets her old town boyfriend and tentions form between the two protagonists. You can probably think of other examples where various acquaintances are forced together in an uncomfortable environment.

The fun begins when the characters are mixed into varying scenes where they discover new things about each other and their relationships, and usually ends with a situation where most of the characters are present, like family dinner, a meeting, an exhibition, or a community group etc. This involves the three players switching characters throughout the scene, even providing back and forth dialog between two characters they’re playing, or dialog with invisible characters, depending on what you’re trying to get out of the dialog and the emotional reactions to it. It’s fast paced and fun to play, and teaches you interesting skills for normal improv such as being able to quickly see and respond to different character perspectives.

Like most small cast shows, the differences between the character voices and mannerisms are important so the audience can tell the difference between them. The largest group scene is usually played near the end, so there’s a build up to it and the audience and players are very familiar with all the characters being played. You can also do a few half-cast scenes in the middle of the show to give the audience some ooh ahh moments before raising the stakes in the larger scene. Alternatively, the large scene can be in the middle of the show, and the second half is about the fall out from it, with possibly another one at the end if you feel you need.

The end of the show tends to leave the first protagonist stuck in the middle of all these other characters with their issues, with only some kind of radical way out, if indeed there is a resolution. If the large scene is in the middle of the show, then the second half can be like a runaway train, as the players will be reacting faster than normal, having just done lot’s of character switching in the larger scene.

Players can switch to any character they wish at any time, there’s no character ownership by the players. If two character that one player started meet each other, then another player should jump in as one of them, taking on the voice and mannerisms of the character. You can also get an ask for at the top of the show if you need one.

The key skills are the ability to play multiple characters at once, including dialog for each, or solo dialog with an invisible player; and to be able create notably different characters and impersonate those created by other players.

In late 2010, Emily went overseas, so Peter joined Jonathan and I, and we devised a format called “What If”.

What If

The format follows no particular structure, you can either set that beforehand, or just play the show and see what comes out organically. We usually introduce the show with the line “What if… something wasn’t quite right with the world…”, and the key is to be strict on believability (not reality) and then introduce a single off the wall “reality tilt” mid-way through the first scene. Play continues believably, but there are real world consequences based on the reality tilt being acceptable and believable fact. The audience goes through an “ah ha” moment as it tilts, with some catching on early, and others a little later. For audiences used to the Johnstone style with its absurdity curve and parody, they tend to find in it a fascinating realism, but with some of the weirdness they’re used to. Some examples might help…

A boy and his father are fixing his bicycle in the garage, with talk about when the father was a boy and he did the same with his father. After a few minutes, the father drops a short yet obvious reality tilt into the scene, for example “Yeah, my dad was pretty angry whenever I crashed my bike. It took me ages before I got my flying bicycle license.” From then on the reality is that bicycles can fly, you need a license and you can potentially get them when you’re fairly young. The play continues believably, and is about the father/son relationship, but anything the reality tilt affects also becomes reality, such as what clothes you wear while riding, whether the boy’s friends have licenses, whether you need to be a qualified bicycle technician and the boy and father are breaking the law, whether other vehicles fly, and how did bicycles first start to fly were they endowed by other beings or is there a scientific explanation. Another example from one of our rehearsals…

A scene in a bar between two people, and several minutes in another player enters saying “OK that’s enough, shutdown the simulation please Ted.” Turns out they’re in a virtual reality and didn’t know it, at which point the scene dissolves to a black boxed room. The supervisor and technician enter, and something out of the ordinary has happened. The show is about how any scene could be virtual reality, and most times when the on stage scenes change, we eventually find that the scene is in virtual reality. When the scene dissolves, the story of the real world continues. There’s effectively two story lines, one inside and one outside of the virtual reality.

It’s important that the reality tilt and consequences aren’t the focus, they’re just the background in which the characters interact as they would in a normal show. It’s also important that the play has believability, and that the characters respond and act believably, not realistically, but believably, something key to the Chicago style, but not in the Sydney (where we’re based) variation of the Keith Johnstone style. So this needs to be drilled into the players.

Once the reality tilt has been given, the other player identifies it, accepts it and responds to it, which makes it more significant in the scene, and let’s the first player know that they’ve recognised the tilt. In the flying bicycle example, the boy might then respond “Well times have changed dad, flight licenses are pretty easy to get these days. You can even get them on the black market.” Once the reality tilt is given, that’s it, there’s no further attempt if you don’t like what’s offered, and no further tilts are given in the show, it’s just the one offer and its consequences.

Reality tilts tend to be one of three types, something special about the person (e.g. can see the future, can breath underwater, came from a parallel reality), something special about the world (e.g. there’s no gravity, there’s a big brother hierarchy amongst humans, only men can have children), or in rare cases the audience’s perception of reality or structure is changed (e.g. time travels backwards but the characters don’t know it, scenes repeat themselves, one character is really two characters in different time periods). Note that the reality tilt is discovered in the opening scene, it’s not preplanned or taken from an ask-for.

What If is the most difficult of the three above forms to get right, and involves a lot of rehearsal of opening scenes. You can also get an ask-for to begin the show if you wish, but it must be mundane and simply used to generate an idea for the first few seconds of the opening scene.

All of the rehearsals and shows we’ve done for “What If” have turned out as what is commonly known as classic science fiction. Not the parody and film cliches used in Theatresports or most “science fiction” shows, but real science fiction as you would read in science fiction novels. There may well be exceptions, but we’ve done 20-30 runs of this format and they could all be classified as science fiction to varying degrees, if they were a novel. See if you can do otherwise. But also a warning, once you’ve seen this work, you’ll begin to look condescendingly at those traditional Theatresports sci-fi genre parodies.

The first “What If” we did in front of an audience, which was about an unemployed youth trying to emulate his father and do him proud, with the backdrop of it only ever raining on certain days because we’ve engineered it to in order to deal with how badly we’ve looked after the planet, is still one of my favourites shows.

Enjoy, and have fun!

I’ve been reading Jurgen Appelo’s book Management 3.0, a complex systems’ perspective on, and guide to agile management, which is basically about managing software development, but I’ve been surprised how much of his writing also applies to improv.

In Sydney we don’t normally embrace the idea of a troupe, we’re a Keith Johnstone Theatresports town, and most shows are very much the rock up and play type, where you play with different people in each show. There’s a lot wrong with this idea, but as a consequence there’s few if any regular troupes who rehearse and play together. I’ve been one of the lucky few, in that I’ve spent the last 3 years rehearsing with various troupes pretty much weekly, and had the opportunity to really explore with some likeminded people.

One of the things I questioned was the term group mind, the idea that a group of players as a whole can think likemindly as a single being. To overly simplify, some of the defnitions of group mind have included: you and your scene partner think the same way; you and your scene partner both know what should or does happen next; we all think the same way at the same time; we can count to 20 without surprising ourselves; and, knowing what your scene partner is about to do. To me these all seem like bad things, and the antithesis of what it means to improvise.

And then there’s the mystical definition, that something inexplicably magical happens to the group. I’d put this more down to coincidence and wishful thinking, a side effect of having worked with the same players for a while, which has good and bad facets to it. To come at it from a different perspective, how often does your troupe not have something magical happen? Coincidence is like that, it’s an exception masquerading as a rule.

Management 3.0 on the other hand has some good insights into what I think is really happening when we have those group mind moments.

The idea that a system can be better than a some of the parts, is born out of systems theory. Complex adaptive systems are called such because they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements, and have the capacity to change and learn from experience. An improv troupe is a complex adaptive system, especially if there’s no clear directorial leader, and is at least a sum of its parts, the players.

Emergence is the idea that complex systems produce emergent resultants, results and effects caused by the sum of the parts and not attributable to any clearly traceable part. Emergence, or strong emergence when applied to a creative team like an improv troupe, causes the troupe to be greater than the sum of its parts.

The amount of emergence is commonly based upon the number of components and their interactions, which in the case of improv will increase over time. Many of the interactions may be negligible, not useful or may create noise that prevents emergence, however rehearsal and performance allow the troupe to refine and better their group play, the amount of emergence.

You can optimise emergence in several ways. Firstly, the system must be self regulating and self organising, not merely directed via hierarchy or by a single component of the system. This is also my experience in working with troupes. Creativity, capability and skill all improve when the group builds together, so long as the players are experienced and at a similar level of ability.

The diversity of a complex system is also important, as it increases flexibility by making it resilient to environmental changes, and feeds innovation due to the varying combinations and interactions between the component parts. This is particularly true of an improv troupe, including Theatresports teams with the old 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th player categorisations.

So what is group mind? I think it’s emergence, a team of creative people building something greater than the players themselves, but tempered with the coincidence that comes from working with the same people for a while.

Management 3.0 has many more great insights into improving creative teams, and while it would probably be a hard slog for an improviser not involved in software development, I’d certainly recommend a skim through it on Amazon or in a technical library if you can find one.

Slain whale on the deck of a factory ship. Such vessels can take aboard whole carcasses and process them very quickly. Whaling in the Antarctic has declined rapidly with the near extinction of most humpback whales, caused by indiscriminate slaughter; most civilized countries have now abandoned whaling.

It would be nice to be able to paste dollar values into MYOB fields and have MYOB remove any leading $ symbols. Apart from some users accidentally hitting $ before the value, its a right pain to copy and paste dollar values from say a spreadsheet or PDF invoice. You can copy, because most applications support that, but MYOB just ignores the paste because the $ symbol.

Sure, not a bug, but something annoying none the less. Again, make it simple, make easy to get the job done.

If you read the web, most opinion considers Pro Tools best for audio editing and recording, and Logic Pro best for MIDI, and I kept on believing that, version after version. However, since Apple bought Logic, they’ve been greatly improving Logic Pro into an awesome editing tool, which is most of what I do. Don’t believe what it says on the web, Logic Pro is now at least as good as ProTools in this area, and while the user interface is more complex at first, you do get used to it.

But the kicker was the hardware restriction. Pro Tools 8 removes support for my audio interface, which is also made by DigiDesign, so they’ve removed support for their own equipment. That’s just braindead, considering that Logic Pro 9 on the other hand, not only still supports my DigiDesign hardware, but when I decide to get something new, I can get pretty much anything from any company and it will work.

Its taken a few hours to figure out my Logic Pro workflow, but after a few short projects, and changing a bunch of the keyboard command to match Pro Tools, I’m almost as productive as I was before, and I can see it being way more useful and productive than Pro Tools in the long run.

Its sad saying goodbye to an old friend, but I’ve never really liked Avid, who bought DigiDesign a few years back, so adios Avid!

The old adage rings true, kids laugh around 400 times per day, and adults around 15. What happens to these disgruntled parents that makes them want to have kids but only from a distance? Two many hours couped up in corporate offices to think about having fun?

Regardles whether the parents enjoy it or not, the show is still for kids, their kids, and I’d have thought that by joining in they’d make their kids’ experience more fun. Jay was a slow starter and the crowd wasn’t exactly responding that well to his call and response, so even more reason to join in, to make it better for everyone.

I used to say this before I was a parent, and my opinion hasn’t changed, most people are just plain selfish by having kids, and shouldn’t be allowed to take on the most important roll we can have in life: bringing up a child.

I did a interwebs search and found dozens of Panasonic headsets available.

So I called Panasonic and spoke to what sounded like 16 year old boy in support:

RBF: I’m looking for a headset for my office phone, model xyz.

Panasonic support: I’m sorry, that phone doesn’t support a headset.

RBF: Hmm… then why is there a headset jack on the side, with a picture of a headset, complete with microphone?

Panasonic support: I don’t know sir, but my documentation here says that it doesn’t support a headset.

RBF: What, the phone doesn’t actually support a headset, or you don’t make a headset for it?

Panasonic support: It doesn’t support a headset, so you could try a third party one, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

So I called Simply Headsets, who not only had a Panasonic headset for the phone, but a bunch of other providers of professional headsets for it as well. I bought a Plantronics noise cancelling one. (I always buy Plantronic headsets for the computer, and Sennheiser headphones for my pro audio work)

You can buy Panasonic, just don’t expect support to know what they’re talking about.

Dad requested that my sister and I speak, and she didn’t feel she could, so sure I’ll speak for both of us, and Mum as well. During the arrangements there was talk of a celebrant MCing, and I’m not sure how it happened, but I ended up saying sure, I get up in front of hundreds of people each week and make stuff up without a script, wouldn’t it be better if I did it instead of someone Dad didn’t know. How hard could it be?

So then we got to the music. Oh, I had to do the soundtrack, based on Dad’s wishes, and in consultation with Mum and my sister. Oh, and we need a program, because the funeral directors don’t do that, and the few I’d seen looked like some school kid had done them in Word, pretty amateur, so sure, I’ll professionally do the program as well, nothing but high production quality for Dad.

And you know what, I may as well do the running order and Stage Manage it, considering most of the detail of that was in my hands anyway. Pre-show, intros, cue sheets, it felt like a show. We were running a show, and I would make Dad proud.

So somewhere in there I managed to write my speech as well, not as good as I’d like, I ran out of time, but pretty good I reckon.

I’m not sure what the tradition is, but people were saying afterwards how different the service was, in a good way. I figured it was the obvious to be honest. Four special speakers requested by Dad, including myself, and then intersperse it with fragments of my speech, tailored to also serve as introductions to each speaker. The narrative turned out well, and I think the pace was good.

I think Dad would have smiled, laughed, teared up a little, and said “Good job mate. Probably could have left out the fuck.” He’s right, I could have left out the fuck.

Never in the history of the free market have shareholders complained because their shares increased too much. In the end, the fury about corporate salaries is simply an expression of unfulfilled greed – this time not by directors, but by shareholders.

While that battle has continued, with neither of us giving way, I was very impressed that the MYOB team took the time, within 3 days, to find my post and respond. OK, it was just “call us”, but still. And I never called anyway, so I only have myself to blame for the ongoing problems right? No, because as I said in that post, these are really obvious problems that any developer or tester worth their pay would discover. Which makes me wonder if MYOB are so under staffed technically that they’ve had to live with a really high level of acknowledged defects, but I don’t buy that, because they’d have to be rolling in cash, seriously.

I don’t want to call MYOB and have them show me workarounds for my problems, or promise that they’re going to fix them. Just fix them!

Which brings me to my latest bunch of MYOB issues.

• The built in forms are crap. I don’t know any other technical way to describe them other than just plain old crap. If one of my developers delivered these to me, I’d be questioning them whether they have any problems at home at the moment, or whether they have a medical condition at all. Here’s a tip for MYOB: hire a contract form designer for two weeks, and have them provide some usable forms.
• The form designer is crap. For form design, its worse than Windows Paint is for graphic design. Here’s just a few of its problems:
  • There’s no way to pin an axis when moving an object. One of the key things with form layout, is lining up of objects on an axis, but in MYOB, you click to select and drag the mouse, and you’ve just got to hope it looks alright when you let go. You can then double click the object to see its left axis offset, close it, then double click the other object and type in the same left axis offset, but try doing that with a whole bunch of fields. Tip: add a simple shift key lock to the axis that isn’t moved first by the mouse. This is how all layout programs work.
  • When you double click on an object, you can’t select a position or size value and copy it to the clipboard. Likewise, you can’t paste from the clipboard. Considering all the values are of the form xy.abc, its a pain in the arse to have to remember 4 or 5 digits, close a dialog and then double click open another one and then have to type them value in manually from memory. If you want to copy the left axis and the width, then good luck remembering both. Tip: make the clipboard work in EVERY text field in MYOB. And I do mean EVERY field, because it doesn’t work in about half of them.
  • If you add a jpeg with the picture object, don’t add any white, because white prints as cream. Which means that any logo with a white background will end up printing a cream coloured box around the image, instead of blending with the page. Also, nowhere in the documentation does it say which graphic objects are supported. From my testing, jpeg is OK, but has the lossy cream background issue, tif is OK for black and white but it completely mangles colours.
  • The print preview doesn’t. i.e. what you see in the print previous is completely different line up wise to what’s in the form designer!
  • The printing of a form with real data also bears no resemblence to either the form designer’s view or it’s print preview.
  • The customise forms window is modal, which means if you want to change a form, probably because you’re tweaking the form and printing with real data is the only way to be sure, then you have to close and leave the form designer in order to get back into MYOB. This makes small tweaks to form painfully slow.
  • There’s no way to line up objects other than by entering the position of the top left corner of an object, which means if your text field is right aligned, then you can’t line up your objects without doing a mental calculation of xy.abc + de.fgh, where xy.abc is the left axis offset, and de.fgh is the object width. You then have to calulate the other object as well, and compare them, then subtract the difference from the object you wish to move, and enter that into the dialog. That’s seriously insane! The workaround is to make both fields exactly the same width, and then put them at the same left offset, manually typing each. The problem with both of these methods is that you then can’t line up the position of the first character in a right aligned text field, with the start of a left aligned field, which you definitely want to do if you’re pinning fields to the left margin. Well, when I say left margin, I mean your manually chosen left indent, because the form designer doesn’t show or support print margins, it doesn’t even suggest that you leave margins.
• The process payroll screen shows an initial Select Pay Period panel, and none of the five vertically displayed fields are horizontally aligned, except for the two radio buttons which are on top of each other. The text field next to one of the checkboxes isn’t vertically aligned either. But that’s not the most annoying thing, its more the fact that: the pay leave in advance checkbox has a colon after it, which gives the impression that the pay start and end period is to do with paying leave in advance; and again the pay leave in advance checkbox only being enabled when you select to pay all employees and not just one. I should be able to leave in advance for an individual.

Here’s one more tip: hire a contractor who knows how build user interfaces, and give them a month to just go over the line up and layout of all the various screens, and do mock ups for the refactoring of some of the more braindead wizard dialogs. The next build will just pick up the new layours, and the developers can then recode the wizards at a later date, based on the mock ups.

Having said that, here’s a couple of the changes in the most recent version of MYOB:

• You can now record leave information when you process the payroll. Well, they don’t say that you can only do that if you’re paying by the hour, not a salary.
• New tax table validity tests. In other words, when MYOB supply you with new tax tables, they now validate that data to make sure its valid. Umm… I’d probably want it fixed at the source, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m still seeking an adequate replacement for MYOB, preferably for the Mac, but I’ll survive with a Windows application if the developers are professionals. If you know of such a replacement, then please let me know.

There’s a lot of information out there on how to convert Outlook to Apple Mail, with some Thunderbird along the way, but most are old enough to be out of date, but not old enough that people realise this.

The upshot is, just follow the steps documented at Migrate Mail Messages (Mac Thunderbird to Apple Mail version 4).

Now for the detail.

Apple’s Mail application used to store messages using the popular mbox format, which is pretty much the most widely used mailbox format, except for in Outlook, which uses Microsoft’s proprietary .pst format.

But around Mac OS X 10.4, Mail was changed to instead use the .elmx format. The different is namely that mbox files are pretty much an entire file full of the raw headers and text from every email in that mail folder; but .elmx uses parent mbox for each mail folder, but individual .emlx files for each message. Apparently in support of Spotlight, but I’m not sure.

This means that any import of mbox data may not work for OS X 10.4 and above.

On the Outlook side, .pst files are proprietary, and as far as I’m aware there are no non-Microsoft applications that can successfully parse these files. This will change, because Microsoft are currently working on documenting and open up the file format, as part of there open source promise. So the main (only?) way to export from Outlook is to write a program that asks Outlook directly for each email, and manually build mbox files. This is handled through the Windows MAPI interface, and requires Outlook to be running at the time so it can respond to the events being asked of it. Most programs that you buy for converting Outlook files, require you to have Outlook running at the time. They don’t really parse .pst files, they convert them by asking Outlook to hand over its message objects.

How to convert Outlook to Mail 4.0

Thankfully, Thunderbird provides its own MAPI import of Outlook files, so launch Outlook first, then download and run Thunderbird, and select import from the file menu. This should leave you with Thunderbird containing all of your Outlook mail.

Next you need to copy the Thunderbird mailbox files over to the Mac, because unsurprisingly enough, the Mac version of Thunderbird uses the same file format, a slightly modified mbox format. Just copy all the files in c:Users[username]Application DataThunderbirdProfiles over to the Mac and put it in /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/.

You could now run Thunderbird for Mac if you wanted, but you don’t need to if you’re importing into Apple’s Mail application.

Next step is to clean up the files so that Mail can correctly import them. If you import them as is, using Mail’s File/Import… function, you’ll end up with all the correct folders, but most of them will be empty. To clean them, you need to run the free Eudora Mailbox Cleanup. Don’t be fooled by the name, it also cleans Thunderbird files and imports them into Mail. You can download it from here: http://homepage.mac.com/aamann/files/EudoraMailboxCleaner.dmg.

It’s compiled for PowerPC only, so if you run it from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), then it will prompt you to install “Rosetta”, the PowerPC emulator for Intel Macs. Let Finder install Rosetta, and then copy the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application from the .dmg image onto the desktop, as you need to run it from a read/write disk..

Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a drop application, so you need to drag the parent directory that you copied from the Windows version of Thunderbird, and drop it into the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner application icon. You’ll get a prompt for the mailbox format, so select Mozilla/Thunderbird and click OK. It should then start converting all your mailbox data.

Once done, just run the Mail application and all your mailboxes will magically appear under your other mailboxes. If you click on them, most won’t have any messages, so select each folder in turn and select Mailbox/Rebuild from the Mail menu. Your messages should now appear correctly.

You’d think that Apple would have this all sorted by now.

I don’t think I’ve done as much as a lot of people in my lifetime, but I have done quite a lot of really interesting and fun things, including quite a few unrelated community ecosystems, which are worlds unto themselves and an entire blog in the making.

In the late 80s I took up guitar again and wrote a lot of music. I also spent a lot of time in recording studios in the early 90s and hacking away on 4 track recorders at home throughout much of the 90s. Its really interesting looking back on some of those songs, revisiting moments in history, because I’m so in a different place right now.

Here’s a couple of things I was listening to tonight. I was in the combined schools choir in school in the upper registers, but fell in love with punk and spent the next 30 years trying to sing badly, something that’s unfortunately set me back in recent years, but that’s another story. Strangely my music usually wasn’t punk.

I wrote Out to you (3.4MB) at a time when my world seemed to be crumbling around me, I still don’t know why, but I still remember who. Never really one for lyrical subtext, this was written for my best friend at the time, and who has been ever since. It must have been written around 1994 or so, but this is a dodgey 2 track from 22nd June 1996, strangely using a Radio Shack PZM.

Rigor mortis (3.8MB) was written in 1991 while learning my way around Cubase. The vox samples are from the Australian film Bodywork. The instruments are all from a couple of Yamaha and AKAI samplers, I can’t remember which.

I’ll find our way home (3.4MB) is another dodgey 2 track with PZM, coincidentally recorded on the 23rd June 1996, but written probably around 1987-1988 or so. It’s my favourite of all my songs, mainly because it had the most emotional impact at the time. Yes, it was for a girl. I don’t really have a good recording of it unfortunately. The guitar is an old 12 string with only 6 strings and rattling tuning pegs. I still have the guitar, I don’t have the girl.

Giddy was written and recorded on 11th February 1997 as a one off attempt to do a Gerling song. That was before they stopped being a rock band. Not particularly successful, but I like the recording.

And finally No place (3MB) is a silly little sampler piece from 2007. I was trying out Apple’s GarageBand software to see how easy it was to use. It didn’t seem that much easier than a professional sequencer, but not bad for 30 minutes of hacking around.

Apart from the last one, they all seem a lifetime away, almost unreal. Almost like I simply manufactured the memories. I guess because it wasn’t really me, it was a different me, the angst ridden me.

You could say, “well maybe you’re just shit.” I’m not, but there’s an old improv saying “you’re only as good as the last show I saw you in”, so maybe the last time people saw me was many many years ago? Still, some of my friends don’t even come, even the players who I’ve played with recently, so its not like they’re over seeing Richard do yet another improv show. Its like they consciously just don’t want to come and see something new that I’m in.

Initially I thought it might be because they weren’t cast in the show, maybe they’re just jealous they’re not in it, so they refuse to come. That can’t be the case, because I don’t believe my friends, or even players, would be that petty. And anyway, its just one show of many, so big deal. When I first started, I would go and see every show I could, even the ones I wasn’t interested in. Some of these I would have liked to be in, but that’s just life, even if you’re the best improvisor in town, the group mind is more important in a cast than how skilled you are. Successful shows, even if you’re not in them, mean more shows to play in, and that’s just good for everyone.

Then I thought maybe its the “well, you didn’t come and see mine”, but that’s also petty. If I didn’t see their show, then its probably because I was just plain couldn’t make it, and I usually try to apologise for that anyway.

Maybe players just don’t want to see different types of improv beyond Sydney’s formulaic short form. I can understand that from some, that’s all they play. But there are a lot of Sydney people who’ve recently got the long form bug, yet few of those come to my shows either.

So finally I figure maybe its just that I’m not good at publicity. I’m not a professional publicist, and my shows are pretty niche so can’t cost justify one, but I know for sure that with the publicity we do that the Sydney improv community well and truly know when my shows are on.

I don’t know. It makes you want to stop doing shows, both innovating and playing. It would be so easy to just revert back to playing in regular Theatresports shows and be done with it. In fact its probably easier to just move away altogether and back into film and radio.

Improv is all about making others look good, being supportive, and not having an ego. Maybe a lot of Sydney players need to learn a thing or two. Or maybe I just need to play better short form.

Or maybe not.

Its just weird, I can’t figure it out…

“In economics, the marginal utility of a good or of a service is the utility of the specific use to which an agent would put a given increase in that good or service, or of the specific use that would be abandoned in response to a given decrease. In other words, marginal utility is the utility of the marginal use — which, on the assumption of economic rationality, would be the least urgent use of the good or service, from the best feasible combination of actions in which its use is included. Under the mainstream assumptions, the marginal utility of a good or service is the posited quantified change in utility obtained by increasing or by decreasing use of that good or service.”

The Ultimatum Game, in which test subjects respond to take-it-or-leave-it offers, has allowed psychologists to explore how humans handle issues like fairness and punishment. But a new study shows some people attempt to punish even when the rules of the game are stacked in a way that makes it impossible.

Canada’s telecoms regulator has concluded that Internet audio and video does count as “broadcasting” and could therefore be regulated like a TV or radio station—complete with levies to subsidize Canadian content. But the regulator has decided to exempt the Internet from the rules… for now.

Lawyers in this year’s two highest-profile file-sharing cases have joined forces, and they plan to file a class-action lawsuit against the recording industry later this summer to claw back the “$100+ million” that the RIAA “stole.”

“[..] Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson explains why justice compelled him to take on the Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing case, why the RIAA’s legal tactics are unacceptable, and how he hopes to take down the music industry ‘Goliath.’”

“The following instructions are intended for members of the Apple Developer Connection (ADC), running an iPhone with a developer version of the iPhone OS 3.0 software. This guide also only provides Australian carrier settings for Telstra, Vodafone and Optus (plus resellers like Virgin), but if you follow the link to Crunchgear in the first step there are instructions on downloading and modifying the carrier setting bundles.”

“Unfortunately, the only way to get a definitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court. Judges use four factors in resolving fair use disputes, which are discussed in detail below.”

“Key stakeholders in the MySQL development community are joining together to turn the tables on Oracle and select a distinctly brighter future for the project. This fifth column will create a unique new order, where inclusiveness and community-driven development replace the arbitrary constraints of top-down development. We queried Kurt von Finck, one of the members of the MariaDB inner circle, to learn more about the group’s plans.”

“RealNetworks says that the DVD Copy Control Association and the movie studios have conspired to prevent anyone else from entering the fair use DVD market, and that they have illegally banded together to refuse appropriate licenses to third parties. The RealDVD case is clearly heating up, and Real looks like it won’t go down without a fight.”

Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is headed to federal court this summer to defend an accused file-swapper, and he plans to mount a novel defense: P2P sharing is simply “fair use.”

“Gorgeous, artistic icons are an important part of the Mac OS user experience. Users expect beautiful icons that tell an application’s story in a clear and memorable way.”

“iPhone, other mobile apps can turn enthusiasts into annoying know-it-alls”

I had the amusing experience of connecting my iPhone to a Windows box today. Windows is so user friendly that it prompted me for which iPhone application it should run.

“CSS is really cool. It is useful for a lot of things. The basic idea of separating content from presentation is sound. But when it comes to layout, the design of CSS is fundamentally flawed.”

“Having done the research and analysis, here are the most important SEO factors, from the highest priority to the lowest.”

I remember seeing a demo of the original version of MYOB back in the late 1980s at the Apple Users’ Group in Sydney. I remember clearly the guy saying that he’d written it himself, although a quick refresher course on Wikipedia seems to suggest otherwise. Being a hard core Apple IIer at the time, my mates and I thought strange name, but its still Mac shit as we rather affectionately called it.

I didn’t realise that 20 years later I’d be using it myself. My first mistake was actually choosing MYOB to do my accounts. I was thinking that its been around a long time, so its probably the Microsoft Word of the accounting world. Wrong. My second mistake was buying the Windows version, assuming that the Windows version would be better than the Mac version, due to how many Windows MYOB users are out there. Wrong again.

MYOB has been around for around 20 years now, yet the user interface (of the Windows version) is almost unusable. I’ve been struggling with it for four years now, and every six months when an update comes out I think to myself “ahh, this will be the update where they refactor the UI”.

For those who don’t use MYOB, here’s a few of the stupid braindead things that it does. The developers should be ashamed of themselves letting a bad quality interface like this out the door.

• You cannot open more than one transaction at a time. I can’t remember invoice details off the top of my head, so I just copy the information from the previous invoice. Things like the item title, the purchase order number, and regular monthly invoice totals that never change. In MYOB you cannot open an old one and edit a new one at the same time. It’s impossible. You have to open the old one, write the details down on paper, then close that and create a new transaction, and hand enter what’s written on the paper. Unbelievable. There is absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be able to do this.
• Window content in many windows is fixed size with scroll bars. If you make the window larger, the scrolling pane inside the window stays the same size. So you end up with a scrolling list and hundreds of pixel of blank padding between it and the window edge. Why allow me to resize it if its not going to make any difference. There’s absolutely no reaon why the window shouldn’t resize its content. That’s what a window is for!
• If you’re creating a transaction and you click on account number cell, the first cell you edit in a new transaction, then it will not let you leave that cell unless you enter a valid account number. You cannot hit Esc to exit, Delete to clear it and exit or anything else. You have to enter a valid dashed account number to get past it, and this gives you a new line in your transaction which you don’t want. Hitting tab at the end of an item line also starts a new item and puts the cursor in the account number cell, causing the same problem when all you did is accidentally tab off the end of a line. And once the new unwanted entry is created, the only way to delete it is to erase the entire transaction.
• Key presses seem to be randomly assigned across the application. Its as if different people wrote different parts of the interface, and they all had their own master interaction style guide, which was different to anyone elses.
• Finding anything is impossible. There are so many menus which give no indication of whats inside them, and finding a particular function is very difficult when there could arguably be a half dozen different menu items where it might be hiding.
• The BAS tool is just plain buggy. It runs outside of MYOB, which is braindead considering it is the only really mandatory accounting task for every Australian business. Once you’ve entered your data, you can save it, but it only saves some information. It doesn’t save your name, phone number and business name for example, things that don’t change from BAS to BAS. So if you open up the current BAS from the saved version, it won’t print or validate, because your name and phone number, of all things, are missing!

I’ve had it, I really have. I understand its a Windows application, so my expectations are already pretty low, but they don’t even meet that. I understand that Windows developer are on the whole pretty stupid and ignorant, and that Windows developers can get away with not knowing what interaction design is. But if their millions of Windows users aren’t complaining about their shit UI, then surely their test team complain every time they have to jump through hooops just to enter test data for each release?

Using MYOB is like pulling teeth. Every month I sit down and wrestle with something that hasn’t even been designed properly for its primary audience: small businesses who need to do their accounts, quickly and easily, so they can get on any do things they do better, like building their business and satisfying their customers. The most basic requirement of MYOB I would have thought, aside from it actually doing accounts. And after 20 years, these idiots still can’t get it right.

I need to change, but I don’t know what to change to. I’d prefer a Mac app, which is what I should have done from the start, but are there any good ones for Australian accounting standards?

I rarely go to big concert events/shows. I’m not into mainstream entertainment, and large venues aren’t the best way to enjoy a performance. But once in a while, an artist visits us who for whatever reason can only do those big venues.

And so it was that yesterday I found out that French & Saunders, whose show I loved back in the 80s, were coming to Sydney at last to play the Capital Theatre, and as a farewell tour.

Worried that I’d only just found out, I went to the Capital Theatre web site (which subsequently tells you that it is designed for Internet Explorer 5, like who uses that these days?). Amazed that web sites still use “Enter site” links, I clicked and ended up on their internal home page. Strangely enough, there’s no link to buy tickets, weird considering that this is their core business.

So I click on the Shows menu link, and suddenly a second level menu appears for every menu item, in really small type. Reading through all the menu items, none of them mention purchasing tickets. The Shows menu strangely has two second level links Current show and Previous shows, as if for some reason people visiting their site would be more interested in shows that are no longer on, than ones that are coming up.

Under the Box office menu, there’s a Booking details link, so I click on that and are presented with information about the box office, such as when it is open, special needs information and a quite large and useless photo. At the bottom, finally, is a section titled Ticket sales, and then a link to the Ticketmaster site.

Before heading over to Ticketmaster, I notice that the Links links at the bottom of the page, is just a page anchor link to… the line above it, which is… a link to their disclaimer and privacy statement. Brain dead.

So on to Ticketmaster, who you would presume are in the business of selling tickets, and thus their primary concern would be the happiness of their customers for potential return business. Their monopolistic practices may well compensate for the fact that they don’t really care after all.

The first thing you notice about the Ticketmaster web site, is that there’s no phone number on the home page. Their business is selling tickets, so we can assume that what they’re hoping to do is push people towards web purchasing, so they bring their bricks and motar costs down. Problem is, most people would like to speak to a person in order to get the seats they prefer. Everyone is different, and an automated system is never going to be able to suggest the best seats for everyone, instead everyone gets the seats that they aren’t perfectly happy with.

Without continuing the long narrative, basically you have to click on the Help menu item. Then a page of about 30 links appears. Under Ordering Tickets, you click on Ticket FAQ’s, which gives you a long scrollable page of FAQ questions. Right at the bottom, under a heading unhelpfully titled Contact Centre, is the text “Find your local Contact Centre number to order by telephone”. So click on the Contact Centre link, and a page of Order by Phone information is displayed. The first phone number listed is General Events/Enquires, and that’s the phone number to call. You’d think customers would be happier if the number was on the home page and titled Buy tickets by phone.

Once you navigate the phone menus, for French & Saunders there’s a choice between Premiere seating, Reserve A seating, and Reserve B seating. In this case they’d actually got the costs for each around the wrong way, with Premiere seating as the cheapest, and Reserve B the most expensive. If of course you knew what each kind of seating was. The phone menus don’t tell you, the web site booking doesn’t, and the Capitol Theatre doesn’t. Here’s some news for you Ticketmaster, we don’t all work in the ticketing industry, so how about explaining some of these obscure terms to us?

The next problem, after hanging up because the phone pricing was all wrong, was that most of the shows had already been sold out. Not because they’d been on sale for a while, but because Ticketmaster have this great facility whereby Mastercard subscribers are given two weeks free run at tickets before anyone else. Remember that Ticketmaster is supposed to be providing customers with the tickets they want. Instead, they’re giving people who read their latest Mastercard junk mailout and thought to themselves “Dawn French, wasn’t she in Vicar of Dibley?” all the good seats. And then anyone who is s member of the My Ticketmaster program gets a week of booking tickets ahead of the general public.

So by the time normal people get to buy tickets, all the good seats have gone. That’s just plain fucked, and the only people to blame are Ticketmaster.

I don’t have a Mastercard because my bank supports VISA, so that’s what I have, a VISA. It’s completely fucked up that I can’t buy good seats to a British comedy duo because of the deal that my bank has with a credit provider. That’s insane!

Ticketmaster should be selling tickets to everyone at the same time. Sure, they’ll lose a probably large sponsorship from Mastercard, but they’ll end up keeping more return business. I’ve never bought tickets from Ticketmaster before, because of their bad reputation. This has just reinforced that, and I will now never buy tickets from them. And may the artists who support Ticketmaster, have really bad audiences whose only real interest is what other shows they might be interested in because they own a Mastercard.

Ticketmaster have a lot to learn about customer satisfaction. As do French & Saunders’ management.

This article’s concern, accordingly, is with what a globally expanded use of nuclear energy would mean for nuclear proliferation specifically (as opposed to the issues of nuclear waste disposal or the risk of catastrophic accident, which also merit serious consideration), and this topic as it centers on state actors (rather than nonstate actors such as terrorist groups).