David Forster

I’m getting in on the act early for this years version (for 2008) of my strangely popular Sasco style year planners. As before, they’re done in Microsoft Excel format and are available in both horizontal and vertical formats. Please feel free to download them.

2008 Horizontal Planner and 2008 Vertical Planner

The holidays are official UK holidays taken from the DTI’s web site.

If you find these planners useful, please consider making a small donation

powered by wordpress 333999

Following the moderate success of last year’s Sasco style year planners, I have finally gotten around to doing a pair for 2007. As before, they’re done in Microsoft Excel format and there are both horizontal and vertical versions. Feel free to download them.

2007 Horizontal Planner and 2007 Vertical Planner

The holidays are official UK holidays taken from the DTI’s web site.

If you find these planners useful, please consider making a small donation

Update 05/06/2007: 2008 versions are now available.

Question from here and here (and probably lots of other places on the net by now!).

“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”

Rob sent this to me this morning. I said ‘No’ the plane wouldn’t take off. I understand completely the point that the thrust from a planes engine does not act through the wheels of the plane, and I used to fly so I’m fairly sure that I understand the principles of lift/drag etc.

The issue is that the question has been specifically worded to cause to differing opinions in two types of people.

The practical thinkers will assume that the plane is using it’s engines and that the thrust will simply push it forwards, regardless of the conveyor’s speed, as the frictional force between the conveyor and the wheels is negligible and the thrust from the engines acts upon the air and not the wheels. They will say the the plane does take off, and they’d be correct.

However, the theoretical thinkers will ignore the real-world practicalities of the situation because it would never exist. Instead they abstract it to a simple object with a given speed, which is being kept motionless by something exserting a force in the opposite direction. They correctly calculate that the net speed of the object will be nothing and therefore there would be no airflow over the wings of the plane to allow it to take off. They are also correct.

In reality, both answers are equally valid depending on your point of view and how you interpret the question, which has been worded very badly (on purpose, I’m sure).

This reminds me of a question once asked by my physics teacher. If popeye is sitting in a sailboat and blows on the sail, will the boat move?

Earlier today I searched the internet for a 2006 wall planner - kind of like the Sasco wall planners that you see on office walls. I didn’t find what I was looking for, apart from a couple of sites wanting to sell me the real thing and a couple of dodgy looking JPGs, so I spent some time during my lunch hour creating one. It’s done in Microsoft Excel format and there are both horizontal and vertical versions. Feel free to download them using the following links.

2006 Horizontal Planner
2006 Vertical Planner

The holidays are official UK holidays taken from the DTI’s web site.

If you find these planners useful, please consider making a small donation

I’m not entirely sure about the colours or layout, so if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment and I will see what I can do.

Update: 19/10/2006 - Due to popular demand, I have created a set for 2007 as well

I was a very lucky boy this year… I must have been on Santa’s ‘nice’ list for sure! I got:

• A PlayStation Portable (a Value pack & “Coded Arms” game)
• A big wad of cash, which I used to buy PSP stuff (512Mb Memory stick, Burnout: Legends, Archer Mclean’s Mercury, Prince of Persia: Revelations and Lumines)
• An excellent pocket tripod for my camera - Much better than the cheap Hama tripod I had. It’s a Kaiser pocket tripod 5005, which can be used as a clamp-on or table-top tripod. I’ll post a review and pictures another time.
• Some really nice clothes
• New boots
• A couple of nice books
• Lots of smelly stuff (shower gel, soap, deodorant) - Do you think people are trying to tell me something?!?
• Lots of chocolate!
• Lot’s of other smaller bits and pieces which are too numerous to list!

Today’s my first day back at work after Christmas. I have to say it’s a pretty slow day, but I guess that’s to be expected.

I’m proud to announce that I managed my new-years resolution of getting up and getting to work earlier today. I hope I manage to keep it up!

Meeeerrrrrrry Christmas, and a happy new year!

The lifts (elevators for the americans) at work need reprogramming. Their strategy is clearly wrong.

We have three lifts at work, they all service the above ground floors, but only two go down to the basement. However, when I press the ‘Up’ button to call a lift from the ground floor, the program will bring one of the two ‘basement enabled’ lifts to me, even if the other one is already at ground level! This is clearly wrong, as the system knows I am going up and therefore letting me use the ‘above ground only’ lift, which is already at my level, is by far a better option than:

1. making me wait for another one
2. making me use a lift that could restrict other’s movements around the building if they want to go to the basement

The only time that I have ever got the ‘above ground only’ lift to open it’s doors is when there has been more than one lift already at ground level which, again, is wrong. the system should only offer me the ‘above ground only’ lift as it suits my known purpose of going upwards and would keep the others for people who may want to go to the basement.

The lifts are made by Kone - I wonder if it’s possible to download and patch the firmware

I went to the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience 2005 Conference with Rob on Sunday and Monday, and attended the Information Architecture tutorials given by Peter Morville from Semantic Studios, author of the Polar Bear and Lemur O’reilly books.

While the tutorials were interesting, I found that the content was mainly stuff that I already knew. Perhaps it was because when I worked on the redesign of MFI.co.uk I was quite heavily involved in the information architecture stage (even though I did not know it was called that at the time).

The conference served as a good refresher though, considering that I will need to dig up my IA skills as part of another redesign project that I’m working on now.

I have just ‘upgraded’ my blog to use WordPress instead of Blogger.

Blogger is a fine service, but I wanted to use categories from the start and also have custom pages which could be tricky to do. WordPress gives me all these things and more. It was my second choice to Blogger when I started blogging, but after my friend Rob Roy switched recently I decided to follow his example.

For those of you using the RSS feed, you need to update your reader to one of the urls at the bottom of the page.