You can modify this to your own situation. Consider this high-rise building with two elevator shafts, two cars, 16 stories high.

“The elevator is never here when you need it” is a common complaint amongst people standing in the ground floor lobby.

I tell them that it is poor programming.

Think about a simple case: In the morning, people tend to leave the building and exit at the ground floor to go to work; in the evening people tend to enter at the ground floor and return to their apartment.

An algorithm that told the elevator “When you are idle, return to the last place you were called from” would go a long way towards alleviating waits.

In the evening the elevator would tend to return to the ground floor lobby and be waiting for the next bunch of people making their way home from the bus stop. In the morning the elevator would ten to return to one of the higher floors – 14, 15 or 16 perhaps, and be ready to scoop up workers on its way down.

You can fine-tune the algorithm a bit – maybe return 90% of the way towards your last call, but you get the idea.

The next time you are waiting for an elevator, think about it.

No more did the telephone, or almost any other tool, replace the CEO.

Almost any professional indexer will tell you that ONLY a professional indexer can produce the best index.

They are right in making that claim.

But some Professional Indexers go further and state that a mechanized indexer can not create a useful index.

That claim is faulty.

Consider a mechanical tool that builds an index automatically for a 50-page training guide for a course that will be delivered to one person on one day. The student does not care that a few extra words appear that ought not be in a classic index; the student cares only that the words they want to find do appear. A bit of extra noise doesn’t hurt at all, for a one-off document.

The situation is quite different for the definitive book on the origins of the Third Balkan War; for that you need hens to peck at all the nits.

There is a spectrum of quality here.

For the high-priced world-broadcast edition, we need eagle-eyed humans to cater for the 5% of the work that a mechanized device can not achieve, but given the cost of indexing, it surely makes sense to employ a powerful device to do the 95% of the grunt work.

Even the 50-page course notes can benefit from automated process PLUS the human Indexer.

Do the Math

Allow for 15 terms per page, 50 pages, that’s 750 index fields to be inserted into a document.

If you think you can achieve a rate of more than 2 terms per minute over the long term you are deceiving yourself. I invite you to measure yourself properly, elapsed time, next time you index a document.

370 minutes is 6 hours work,

Better economic sense is to use the mechanized tool to deliver a noisy index in under a minute, then spend at most one hour weeding out superfluous index fields by reference to the 2-page index that magically appears at the foot of the document.

Here they are, and here too is how I answer them.

I know I said 10 points and delivered 14.

That’s another sign of a good consultant.

Digital versus print as a preservation format

The second link raises more interesting points, from my restricted point of view.

“Do you foresee this situation changing in the next five years?”

Five years seems like a very short-term view for change. Technology is going to change rapidly; so ought an expert’s view. What’s not to change?

“Collecting and storing print formats is currently seen as insurance against the volatility of the current state of digital preservation.”

There’s no doubt about access as a virtue for digital, but I’d have thought the ability to store multiple copies (as insurance) far outweighed the stability of medium. After all, we can transfer stuff digitally to new media as they arrive (and as the 1st link points out, we can separate the physical layer)

“The lack of confidence in digital”

I’d put this down to novelty more than anything else. It’s only 20 years since individuals had to come to term with short-term volatility (accidentally re-formatted my floppy) and it takes a lot longer for established data management principles to filter down to individual thinking (what do you mean “I should maintain a serial number registry for volume labels”?)

“If there is any doubt which format is the most reliable one, all formats are archived”

This seems like the 2nd article’s strongest point.

By definition, libraries are conservative; their very nature is to conserve. While it is interesting to tally responses from 16 experts, it may well be the “renegade” thinker who is correct, the one who can see further into the future, or has the ability to leap man-made hurdles (political, legal etc)

I’d put my money on the most radical thinker of the 16.

I am gradually (as spare time permits) coming to terms with new forms of backup, including ISO files, and, (this week’s thrill) because I can, making C-Drive backups of all computers across the network to a spare external drive logged on as “F” on the old Big Beige Box. That’s just one of the experiments to see how-it-all-works under Win7.

This morning I find myself staring at a set of 4 DVDs labeled 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4, anything from 12GB-16GB, so probably an ISO or similar of the Notebook, OEM install + recovery + HP software, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.

But no documentation. Not even in my “Rebuild.doc” which I maintain to be sure I have a step-by-step process for re-installation at any time.

I probably made the 4-disk image the first time I used Trueimage, or Acronis, or any of the other ISO-making software tools.

I should have included a boot disk of some sort, suitable for the machine of which the ISO was created, and I should have included a copy of my Rebuild.doc in RTF form and a set of basic (for me) utilities such as TrueCrypt, RoboCopy and so on.

Now I face an hour or two of experimentation, to be prefaced by a complete backup, of course, to find out

(1) What program drives these 4 discs

(2) Whether I still have a copy of that program after all these re-installations

(3) How to use that program and

(4) Whether that program really will do what it says it will.

Otherwise I may as well toss the 4 DVDs, and the time that went into creating them.

What’s your point, Chris?

The the lifetime of media is shortened MORE by not knowing exactly, 15 or 50 months from now, how to use it.

Corollary

Documentation is just as important as ever, the more so for tasks we perform infrequently, if ever.

I was teaching 6 days and 4 nights each week, and had plenty of time to smile and walk back to the student’s computer to inspect the problem.

In about 90% of the cases I recognized the dialog box that was holding up the student and could re-assure them to plough right ahead. It was a novel dialog box, not a malevolent one.

The remaining 10% of the cases required that I actually READ what was in/on the dialog box, and then offered a suitable course of action, which was inevitably to click the highlighted button.

Then I began examining the initial 90% closely. Same deal.

In all cases the safest, surest line of action was via the highlighted command button on the dialog box.

The alternative to “clicking” is of course to tap the Enter key.

• Hence the maxim:

If in Doubt, Press Enter

Try it for Yourself

A great many users of spreadsheets are mystified by cHarts. The dialog boxes appear in a sequence of 5 or 6, each dialog box cluttered with options, buttons, boxes, drop-down lists, and so on.

In your favorite spreadsheet program (doesn’t have to be Excel) key in a small block of data and select that data, row-headings and column-headings too.

From the menu system choose Insert, cHart, glance at the confusing dialog box for 2 seconds, then tap the Enter key. Continue tapping the Enter key until a chart appears.

OK, so it’s not the chart you wanted, but you didn’t have to sit and stare at a hurdle for 20 minutes.

Repeat the process (Insert, cHart …) and spend just a little more time at each dialog; see if you can spot where you might make a change before proceeding.

The Point is this

Regular Windows Applications (1) are always designed to highlight the safest, best option for the user.

• Tapping the Enter key will ALWAYS move you forwards.
• It will SOMETIMES take you places you didn’t want to go.
• It will NEVER take you places you didn’t ought to go!

How Confident Am I?

Around about this time (1994) I wrote a short article, a challenge, that the trade paper Computing Canada picked up and published, offering $50,000 ($US 50,000 on Fridays!) and a free lunch anywhere in Toronto to anyone who could find a regular Windows application that violated this trust.

I got a few arguments by email, but no winners.

Do You Really Want to Delete?

The most anxious question surrounded this prompt, which I always countered by repeating the title of this article “If in doubt, press Enter”, and asking “What is there to DOUBT about deleting files? If truly you are not sure, then don’t delete!”.

If in doubt, press Enter

(1)  “Sex Goddess of the Midnight Vampires” and stuff like that obviously excluded.

Another day in recovery. And it took too long.

Which made me think.

I backup my data drive to TWO external drives each night, so I was up-to-date as at the close of business yesterday, but I did lose one email that arrived after that backup, and losing the boot sector on my C: drive meant I had to go back to the post-installation system of three weeks ago.

Perhaps I should take a snapshot (called an ISO file) of my system drive each Saturday morning to a third drive. And immediately after that I should install any Windows Updates lurking in the wings. And then I should install any system enhancements I’d been planning.

It’s what Saturday mornings are good for.

It might also help to copy my mail boxes across to a spare networked computer every hour. Just in case.

There’s probably more I can do (“there’s always a better way”), but these changes would make my life easier the next time the system crashes.

And it will.

The Best?

The trouble with trying to achieve the best Right Now is that it’s usually unattainable, because once we have implemented a solution, we have learned more, and can see a better way.

• If I wait until I’m sure I’ll get it absolutely, one hundred percent perfect, I’ll never get it out-the-door.
• If I stockpile enough articles to be sure of having on ready each day for the next year, I’ll not publish my first blog post, whereas “this is my first blog post” tells the truth and gets me going.
• If I wait for the perfect introductory tweet, I’ll lose six months compared to someone who tweets “I’m tweeting”.

My backup policy will never be perfect, because the world and I aren’t perfect, but instituting a better backup policy is a step along the way.

Same thing applies to our Windows skills. There’s more to the keyboard than Alt-Tab to switch between tasks, but that tip alone will save you hours of needlessly closing and opening applications and files.

It’s better than it was.

Same thing applies to losing weight. If I can shed just one pound this month, I’ll still not be at my goal. But I’ll be one pound closer.

And next month …

• Drone, drone, drone, push agenda, evade the issues.

The question required a simple answer, “Yes” or “No”, but the question was dismissed and a self-serving statement took its place.

The next morning, facing a class of end-users for a course in Advanced Excel I found myself droning, pushing my own agenda (“I’m really great, you see!”) and avoiding the issue.

I decided to be better than any politician, by listening to the question (Now there’s a concept!) and answering the question; elaborating only if the enquirer asked for elaboration.

Two weeks later I confided to Bess King that I’d discovered a shocking fact:-

• I’d answered every question in class with “Yes”.

No “No’s”.

In two weeks, 5 days a week. Intelligent business types, Windows desktop applications.

How Could this Be?

It turned out that the ONLY question students asked were of the nature “Can I bold this?”, “Can I copy this?”, “Can I paste this?”, “Can I rotate this?”, and so on.

So at the start of the next class, 9 a.m., I announced that I was going to answer every question with “Yes”.

Stunned silence for ten seconds, and then “Really?”

• Yes.

“All day?”

• Yes.

“No matter what the question is?”

• Yes.

Why is this?

It turns out that people attend classes to get answers, and the questions they pose are realistic, and all boil down to one type:

“Will this computer system help me get my job done?”

Now if the answer to that form of question is ever given as “No”, then the next question has to be “Then what is this lump of metal-and-plastic doing on my desk?”

Of Course!

We had a few interesting questions. Like the petite brunette who smiled at me from the front row and asked cheekily “Will you marry me?”.

• Yes.

And why not? I could do worse than marry a woman who has courage to ask cheeky questions, who thinks outside the box, who enjoys mental tugs-of-war.

That September I ate in the Al Lago with Rick and made the comment that I’d driven in every mainland state of the United States except for Alaska.

“So, are you going to drive to Alaska?”.

• Yes.

(Astonished) “When did you decide that?”.

Just now.

And the next May I drove my little Hyundai Excel to Prince Rupert, then through Terrace, Whitehorse, Fairbanks and Anchorage, back through Whitehorse, Terrace to Prince Rupert, and then back home to Toronto.

23,000 kilometers in 29 days.

Was it The Trip of a Lifetime?

Yes

• Copying, Cutting and Pasting rank there on the list, for sure, as does Bolding text, Saving a file, and the ever-ready Edit-Undo to correct mistakes.
• Do you ever want to change the font in your Microsoft Word document? I bet you do!
• Find-and-replace? For Sure!
• Closing the current document Window? Yeah!

For me, selecting the entire document, worksheet or folder is pretty high up on my list. I often want to copy all the text from a Microsoft Word document and paste it into Notepad, then copy it back again, to shed extraneous fluff that has accumulated.

So what do we have on our list?

Take a look at the table I’ve made.

If you think that those operations make up about 90% of what you do with a word-processing document (or spreadsheet or email …), then read on.

Otherwise I don’t want to waste your time.

Now I’m going to reproduce that table with the Microsoft Word short-cut key combinations alongside each operation. The shortcut keys are about the same for Excel and your eMail program, although Excel doesn’t have a Font command as such.

Chances are strong that you recognize and use some of these shortcut key combinations.

If you’d like to take a moment to try them out on a Microsoft Word document, go right ahead.

I’ll wait.

Ah! You’re Back!

What did you notice?

That’s right!

All those keys are clustered at the extreme left of your keyboard.

That’s why I recommend you super-glue the little finger of your left hand to the Ctrl key of your keyboard.

You’ll save yourself hours of time, each week!

About 450 Km each way.

On Foot.

Took him forever.

Walking.

About a week each way, longer if the weather was bad and he was forced to take shelter in a diner; small fortune in shoes. The works.

“Why not buy a small car?” I suggested, and after a few months of arm-twisting, a little 4-cylinder was purchased and off he set at great speed.

Six months later we met again for lunch. “So. How’s the car?” I asked.

“Absolutely marvelous” came the eager response. “You should have told me to buy one earlier” (It’s always the consultant’s fault). I never could have believed I could make the trip in a single day. Less than 15 hours if the weather’s not too bad.

15 hours?

Yep!

At the car dealership, the dealer had shown my colleague how to put the car in first gear and start forwards.

“But it’s true what they say about road-rage”, my colleague continued; “You wouldn’t believe the abuse heaped on me by people going past, and I lost count of the number of times I was almost rear-ended.”.

That’ll happen to you if you try to putter along Highway 401 at 30 Km/hour.

“PUT IT IN DRIVE”, I screamed. “You’ll get there in 5 hours instead of 15, won’t damage your engine, and have a better chance of staying alive”.

Oh no. You see, it’s already so much better doing the trip in 15 hours instead of seven days, what with all the savings in shoe-leather for the feet, shoe-leather in the diners, and motel costs. The ROI is already so great; why complain or risk upsetting the apple-cart?

OK, so I made this story up. Sort of.

It’s not about a car; it’s about a computer, and a client who finally went out and bought a computer, had the sales clerk show her how to double-click with the mouse and has been driving in first gear ever since.

Her spreadsheets are built not with formulas, but by calculating the results on a hand-held calculator (I’m NOT making this up) and then keying the numeric result into the adjoining cells.

“Why bother to spend time learning about formulas? This is already so much more professional than the old hand-written spreadsheets I used to produce”.

And we haven’t got into functions, or automated procedures with GUI input forms, let alone logging transactions into a database.

You know who you are.

Get into Drive.

Now.

Gerry arrived with a manila folder and a memory key and a worried look.

And a “Let’s Get Started!”

I led Gerry to the board-room table where sat a manila folder of my own, within it a single sheet which bore the word “Goal” and about ten numbered lines “Objective 1”, “Objective 2”, “Objective 3” and so on.

Against Gerry’s protestations that we go straight to the computer, with his memory key, to solve his problem, we sat at the table.

Because the computer ultimately spits out a result, because the computer can and does process our data to give us information, we tend to see the computer as the solution.

Reality: The computer is merely the vehicle for our solution.

Our solution is a process, devised by us, to transform our data into information.

Firing up a copy of Microsoft Excel is arguably the worst thing we can do when faced with a problem.

• What’s the point of jumping into a car and driving off, if you don’t know where you want to go?
• What’s the point of jumping into a spreadsheet and keying in formulas, if you don’t know what you need to calculate? Let alone HOW to calculate it.

As an experimental device to see if there is an ROI function, or whether rounding occurs, by all means. That’s the equivalent of testing the turning circle of a car.

But the solution is a process that will always be devised by the human mind, and as such there’s no substitute for human thought, cogitation by humans, specification by humans, clarification by humans, documentation by humans, propositions by humans, tests by humans.

And most of all, the setting of goals by humans and the serialization of objectives by humans, all with the thought of satisfying the needs of humans.

Give me the board-room table and a pile of paper and a pencil any day.

P.S. Also an eraser.