A very popular trend in the industry is for generated e-mails to have a return address of "noreply@website". Personally, I find this to be terrible customer service, something we ought to nip in the bud before it becomes absolute standard across the industry and here's why.
Anyone who was schooled in an English country was likely taught the art of the English Language. Along with that, they were taught how to produce letters of a formal nature which is a solid skill for life and business. One key component of any mail worth responding to is the return address of the sender. Even automatically generated mail will have some address to which you can return something and it reach a human being.
So why should the web be any different? I know a lot of people who will ignore calls from unknown callers. Companies are aware of this and consequently you'll often get a number, even if it's a premium number or a switchboard, in order to lure you into answering the phone. "noreply" is such an impersonal and lazy approach the same as "unknown caller".
As an example, if I get an automatically generated e-mail from a train booking, the sender and return address is "noreply". What if there's a problem with the booking? I have to manually find the support address within the e-mail or, far worse, visit the website myself and waste my time sourcing the relevant department.
E-mails are handled by computers - if only there was some magical way of directing return e-mails to some spam filtering service and have the non-spam sent into a central inbox for the relevant department at a company... oh wait there is.
To put it simply: if I can't reply to your e-mail, auto-generated or not, you're not going to get much custom out of me.
Friday, 19 July 2013
Friday, 12 July 2013
10,000 words a day
I'm taking a brief break from my fairly intense work to update my blog which I haven't done in a while. On a personal note, I've been away for a few weeks in China; a beautiful country with a thriving population, although it reminds me of a supercar or pet Lion - fun for a while but in the long run you wouldn't want the running costs or the inevitable mess.
I currently work for a small company teaching computer programming vicariously to children. I say vicariously because of the somewhat unique business model which I can't go into too much detail about for obvious reasons, but in short I'm required to write out lessons. I'm contractually employed to produce a certain amount of work in a certain time frame and how I choose to fit that work in around other things is up to me.
The thing about this job is that I'm given an unfair advantage over most, or rather I'm able to employ my skills in typing to my own advantage. The thing about typing is that people have a certain expectation that an average typist working a full day could type maybe a few thousand words at best. Obviously we need to take into consideration that the thoughts to produce words to be typed will vary hugely but on average I would expect someone doing this sort of work to manage maybe 3,000 words over the course of an 8 - 6 day (long gone are the days of 9 - 5, from what I've seen of the working world). If this is broken down to 9 hours typing it's a mere 5.5 words per minute.
5.5 words per minute? If you've seen my previous blog posts you'll know that I pride myself on my ability to maintain a solid speed of over 100wpm, even over long periods of time. Obviously I'm not suggesting that I can type non-stop for 9 hours at 100wpm, that would be ridiculous although a mammoth 54,000 words could be produced - that's around the equivalent to 2/3 of my work for next year (part time).
But still, 5.5 words per minute is still a fairly low figure. If we take into account something I like to do which is to take some fairly regular 15 minute breaks per hour, we can knock 2.25 hours off and if we consider that sometimes you just want to read a bit of reddit or idle on facebook we can knock another 2.75 hours off for a nice round figure of 5 hours not working with 4 hours working. Those of you who have reached this point and think it's shocking that, over a 9 hour working day, I might only produce 4 hours of work, I understand it might sound shocking. But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to skilled work which requires a lot of thought and mental strain, 4 hours of solid typing is a good output.
If we look back at our original figure of 5.5 words per minute, for 4 hours that would yield just 1.65k words per day. That's half the expected figure of 3k words per day that I would expect from an average worker doing this sort of work with no particular penchant for fast typing. To re-iterate my earlier point both here and in previous blog entries, I do in fact have quite a penchant for fast typing and hence the title of this post.
In light of this thought process, I recently decided to set myself a daily target of 10,000 words. Based on 9 hours, that works out at a mere 18wpm throughout the day which is nothing. On the other hand, I admitted to working a solid 4 hours of those 9 - that's actual head-down, bottoming-out keys, powering through pages of documents. With that in mind, my new target speed is still only 41wpm. For 4 solid hours, that isn't really a lot after all.
The final consideration is that my job is to teach programming. As anyone within the programming industry will know, there is no measure of writing code and no way to work out time taken especially when it comes to building hundreds of small problems and solutions for teaching purposes. I would say that this could easily knock off another 2 hours which would be included in those 4 solid hours. Of course to those following the incredibly difficult maths here, we're up to 82wpm for about 2 solid hours throughout the day.
Is this such an impossible goal? Obviously there are a lot of contingencies to plan for; unexpected interruptions, unexpected delays in writing, fatigue, hangovers... all in all, however, 2 hours over the course of 9 of solidly typing at 82wpm is a fairly attainable target to reach 10,000 words per day.
I will report back results in a few weeks. If I can stick to this target, my summer work will be done in 2 weeks instead of 8. My work for next year will be done in a further 3 weeks and I'll be able to earn additional contract work throughout the year on top of it.
Many people argue that money is a big motivator and it is, others argue there are plenty of other things which motivate workers. I'm potentially first person ever to be motivated by my own typing speed goals.
I currently work for a small company teaching computer programming vicariously to children. I say vicariously because of the somewhat unique business model which I can't go into too much detail about for obvious reasons, but in short I'm required to write out lessons. I'm contractually employed to produce a certain amount of work in a certain time frame and how I choose to fit that work in around other things is up to me.
The thing about this job is that I'm given an unfair advantage over most, or rather I'm able to employ my skills in typing to my own advantage. The thing about typing is that people have a certain expectation that an average typist working a full day could type maybe a few thousand words at best. Obviously we need to take into consideration that the thoughts to produce words to be typed will vary hugely but on average I would expect someone doing this sort of work to manage maybe 3,000 words over the course of an 8 - 6 day (long gone are the days of 9 - 5, from what I've seen of the working world). If this is broken down to 9 hours typing it's a mere 5.5 words per minute.
5.5 words per minute? If you've seen my previous blog posts you'll know that I pride myself on my ability to maintain a solid speed of over 100wpm, even over long periods of time. Obviously I'm not suggesting that I can type non-stop for 9 hours at 100wpm, that would be ridiculous although a mammoth 54,000 words could be produced - that's around the equivalent to 2/3 of my work for next year (part time).
But still, 5.5 words per minute is still a fairly low figure. If we take into account something I like to do which is to take some fairly regular 15 minute breaks per hour, we can knock 2.25 hours off and if we consider that sometimes you just want to read a bit of reddit or idle on facebook we can knock another 2.75 hours off for a nice round figure of 5 hours not working with 4 hours working. Those of you who have reached this point and think it's shocking that, over a 9 hour working day, I might only produce 4 hours of work, I understand it might sound shocking. But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to skilled work which requires a lot of thought and mental strain, 4 hours of solid typing is a good output.
If we look back at our original figure of 5.5 words per minute, for 4 hours that would yield just 1.65k words per day. That's half the expected figure of 3k words per day that I would expect from an average worker doing this sort of work with no particular penchant for fast typing. To re-iterate my earlier point both here and in previous blog entries, I do in fact have quite a penchant for fast typing and hence the title of this post.
In light of this thought process, I recently decided to set myself a daily target of 10,000 words. Based on 9 hours, that works out at a mere 18wpm throughout the day which is nothing. On the other hand, I admitted to working a solid 4 hours of those 9 - that's actual head-down, bottoming-out keys, powering through pages of documents. With that in mind, my new target speed is still only 41wpm. For 4 solid hours, that isn't really a lot after all.
The final consideration is that my job is to teach programming. As anyone within the programming industry will know, there is no measure of writing code and no way to work out time taken especially when it comes to building hundreds of small problems and solutions for teaching purposes. I would say that this could easily knock off another 2 hours which would be included in those 4 solid hours. Of course to those following the incredibly difficult maths here, we're up to 82wpm for about 2 solid hours throughout the day.
Is this such an impossible goal? Obviously there are a lot of contingencies to plan for; unexpected interruptions, unexpected delays in writing, fatigue, hangovers... all in all, however, 2 hours over the course of 9 of solidly typing at 82wpm is a fairly attainable target to reach 10,000 words per day.
I will report back results in a few weeks. If I can stick to this target, my summer work will be done in 2 weeks instead of 8. My work for next year will be done in a further 3 weeks and I'll be able to earn additional contract work throughout the year on top of it.
Many people argue that money is a big motivator and it is, others argue there are plenty of other things which motivate workers. I'm potentially first person ever to be motivated by my own typing speed goals.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Serendipity Search
Recently my 2nd year University of Nottingham group project fell somewhat into the "public eye" by chance; a photo of myself and teammate Katie was shared on the university's official facebook page and was shared by a number of people including my previous school.
Because of this, I thought I'd write a quick blog post explaining what the project was, what use it had and how we went about doing it. Obviously I don't take all the credit for the project, the proposal was not our idea and was provided by the university. In hindsight I think we managed a decent approach to the problem and, as group leader, I'm proud of the way our team worked together more than anything else.
Serendipity Search is a simple concept: coming across a "happy accident" when searching the web. One important foreword is that this isn't, at present, a search engine. It takes the results of a Google search and provides them to the user. But here's the important part: because they are receiving the results by proxy of us (SS), they are getting completely straightforward results without any targeting.
By "targeting" it's important to understand how Google orders results at present. Google tracks you a lot - even if you aren't logged in, they have (allegedly) 13 different ways of targeting you. This gives you relevant results not only to your search query but also to everything else. For example your interests, location, friends and more. This is great and many people find this a good feature, however some people don't and that is where SS comes in.
The anonymity provided by us of course has the immediate benefit of unaltered Google results, ordered by what they deem to be the most relevant to the query rather than the most relevant to you. This can be helpful in areas such as research where someone might want to very quickly find information within a certain context which goes against their personal interests and beliefs. For example, if all of your Google results are being targeted towards your location, but you want to find things in a more general sense, that's quite difficult to do via Google. If you go through SS, you get completely non-contextual results.
Services like this already exist, a simple proxy would do the same thing, but SS provides a permanent solution to it, however gives back the control of some additional Google functionality which others might still want. We have an "interests" system which will highlight certain results if they match any of your interests. You, the user, specify all of your interests. You have complete control over a very simple list of things which interest you, a single textbox and a button. You can remove any interests, view all of them and even import them from facebook. The important thing to note about the last stage is that we don't store any of your facebook information, we simply import the "Likes" as text and save them in your account, the connection and permissions are then relinquished.
When searching on SS, you will get all search results relevant to your query but things which might interest you, essentially how Google might target you, are given a visual highlight. Most importantly, they stay in the same place in the results list and aren't shuffled around by Google to encourage more clicks.
Post will be edited in due course with technical information on the project, possibly eventually open sourced.
At present we have no future plans for the project but if anyone is interested we are likely to open source it.
Because of this, I thought I'd write a quick blog post explaining what the project was, what use it had and how we went about doing it. Obviously I don't take all the credit for the project, the proposal was not our idea and was provided by the university. In hindsight I think we managed a decent approach to the problem and, as group leader, I'm proud of the way our team worked together more than anything else.
Serendipity Search is a simple concept: coming across a "happy accident" when searching the web. One important foreword is that this isn't, at present, a search engine. It takes the results of a Google search and provides them to the user. But here's the important part: because they are receiving the results by proxy of us (SS), they are getting completely straightforward results without any targeting.
By "targeting" it's important to understand how Google orders results at present. Google tracks you a lot - even if you aren't logged in, they have (allegedly) 13 different ways of targeting you. This gives you relevant results not only to your search query but also to everything else. For example your interests, location, friends and more. This is great and many people find this a good feature, however some people don't and that is where SS comes in.
The anonymity provided by us of course has the immediate benefit of unaltered Google results, ordered by what they deem to be the most relevant to the query rather than the most relevant to you. This can be helpful in areas such as research where someone might want to very quickly find information within a certain context which goes against their personal interests and beliefs. For example, if all of your Google results are being targeted towards your location, but you want to find things in a more general sense, that's quite difficult to do via Google. If you go through SS, you get completely non-contextual results.
Services like this already exist, a simple proxy would do the same thing, but SS provides a permanent solution to it, however gives back the control of some additional Google functionality which others might still want. We have an "interests" system which will highlight certain results if they match any of your interests. You, the user, specify all of your interests. You have complete control over a very simple list of things which interest you, a single textbox and a button. You can remove any interests, view all of them and even import them from facebook. The important thing to note about the last stage is that we don't store any of your facebook information, we simply import the "Likes" as text and save them in your account, the connection and permissions are then relinquished.
When searching on SS, you will get all search results relevant to your query but things which might interest you, essentially how Google might target you, are given a visual highlight. Most importantly, they stay in the same place in the results list and aren't shuffled around by Google to encourage more clicks.
Post will be edited in due course with technical information on the project, possibly eventually open sourced.
At present we have no future plans for the project but if anyone is interested we are likely to open source it.
Monday, 1 April 2013
Some typing tips of the day
I created this blog because something strange happened today. But first a little background: I am an "avid typist" - someone who enjoys the art of typing quickly and typing well. Keyboarding is a skill I think we can all benefit from in the modern workplace and social sphere where being connected is everything. I don't put too much value in the power of things such as voice recognition; whilst they can be very helpful in certain situations, for example updating your friends in 140 characters or less on your immediate thought whilst driving along or shouting into your Google Glass until it recognises the correct contact to message, I don't think there is even a remote possibility that it will replace typing. Typing in itself allows us to express our creative selves through the power of prose, the power of punctuation and of course gives us privacy in situations where the thing you want to say is personal so you type or write it instead.
So enough about that, I was having my usual semi-productive morning of 1 hour work followed by 2 hours procrastination today, when during my procrastination I suddenly realised something: I can type much faster after some "natural" typing than after "competitive" typing. What on earth is "competitive typing"?! Well as the name implies, racing your typing speeds on TypeRacer.com has become an incredibly addictive hobby of mine, so much so that I indeed try to compete against friends and unknown internet keyboardists. Now it's important to note that I am not a very fast typist by some standards - my top speeds on TypeRacer are 140-150wpm, averaging 110-120 on most days. However, my averages went up today because my hands just felt more accurate. I decided to therefore do a bit of a "meta-experiment" - I wanted to see if I could simulate "natural typing" (but of course I didn't want to do any work) so I opened notepad and started typing about typing itself.
This is now the "strange thing" which happened to me - instead of simply blasting through a load of nonsense, I instead wrote what I believe to be fairly useful, if what somewhat convoluted, advice on typing. I will paste it as an appendix to this blog post, however in future I will expand on this in a much more formal and structured way if there is any interest, to help those of you out there who are hitting 60-100wpm but want to push over that 100wpm hurdle. One thing I didn't mention is this: read more. The more you read, the faster you can read, the faster your brain has time to think about things and output them again. Typing competitively in the instance of TypeRacer is a process of input, little thought, output; don't consider typing quickly to merely be a test of the last part - all 3 are equally as important as one another.
The purpose of this blog therefore is my "train of thought" - ramblings I decide to type out which I think others might enjoy reading. It isn't much now, and my prose certainly needs a little improvement - doing a science degree has made me a little rusty.
Appendix: Typing tips
When practising typing at home, it's important not to go at a rushed pace.
When rushing your typing, you're more likely to make stupid mistakes and consequently slow yourself down.
You're also more likely to build up lactic acid in your hand muscles which will eventually cause them to cease up and become useless, thus slowing you down much further than if you had simply paced yourself.
When typing, your fingers should be rubbery, like clever wooden animatronics pulled by elastic bands, stretching and quickly retracting at each key stroke.
Key strokes should be brisk and striking - not slow and mushy. It goes without saying that, to type fast, keystrokes should be fast, but fast in such a way that you can still control what you're typing and concentrate on what is being said rather than concentrating entirely on the speed and ability to mush 8 keys at once.
More advanced typist, the sort who regularly attain speeds upwards of 200wpm, are able to effectively strike keys at a rate which almost implies they are hitting more than two keys at once, however in reality, of course, the order is still absolutely fundamental in ensuring your text reaches the screen in an appropriate manner.
If you are mushing keys, you aren't typing. You're simply trying to apply your force to the keyboard in a way which resembles typing, probably making lots of mistakes, especially when moving between keys.
Raise your fingers high from the keys, imagine a famous pianist striking each note as he goes, only ever sliding over notes when specifically trying to slur between them. There is no slurring in typing; it is simply a task of moving from letter to letter, key to key in "sticcato", without any need to ever touch the side of a key. If you're striking the sides of keys at all with your fingers or especially finger nails when moving to higher rows, it's time to start lifting your fingers higher off the keyboard!
A note on the shift key: When you want to capitalise a letter, don't adhere to the standards of the QWERTY typing standard. Remember that typing is a skill, your own skill, such as handwriting, where your own style and what's most fitting for you are just as important as the standards themselves. If you find you can type faster by using shift on the same hand as the letter being shifted, do so. Standard typing guidelines indicate that the "best practice" is to use the shift on the opposite side of the keyboard to the hand you're striking the key with. This certainly works well for most of the time, however if you find yourself, like me, contorting your hands all over the keyboard as you start to hit 140-150wpm, it is often more useful and faster to simply slide your right hand across a it when hitting the shift and letter "I" if your left hand is busy halfway across the keyboard itself typing out the word "where".
In my personal experience, I developed an awful habit. I read once that "practice makes perfect, but imperfect practice makes bad habits". Bad habits are difficult if not impossible to eradicate, I've been trying to get rid of a particular habit relating to shifting myself for a few years.
Over the past decade of typing, I decided early on that the fastest way for me to shift keys was simply to tap the caps lock key on and off incredibly quickly as I typed the capital letter between them. Obviously this increases the number of keystrokes from two to three for a capital letter, however no matter how desperately I tried I couldn't make the switch without a serious reduction in speed - having to think about typing whilst typing is a bit like having to think about how to change gears whilst driving a manual car; once you have it hard-wired into your brain, it just happens naturally. More recently, I've been able to slowly move towards holding shift instead of hitting caps lock, however I would say that possibly 90% of the time I still use it, especially for the letter "I".
In conclusion to this ill-structure and nonsensical rant, learn to type in your own way by writing lots of stuff. Use typeracer and challenge your friends, don't get upset if you can't type 100wpm straight away, keep at it.
Lift your keys from the keyboard, elegantly glide through the air striking each key with purpose. Think of "single buttock [piano] playing" ["How we can all relate to classical music" - TED Talk]
So enough about that, I was having my usual semi-productive morning of 1 hour work followed by 2 hours procrastination today, when during my procrastination I suddenly realised something: I can type much faster after some "natural" typing than after "competitive" typing. What on earth is "competitive typing"?! Well as the name implies, racing your typing speeds on TypeRacer.com has become an incredibly addictive hobby of mine, so much so that I indeed try to compete against friends and unknown internet keyboardists. Now it's important to note that I am not a very fast typist by some standards - my top speeds on TypeRacer are 140-150wpm, averaging 110-120 on most days. However, my averages went up today because my hands just felt more accurate. I decided to therefore do a bit of a "meta-experiment" - I wanted to see if I could simulate "natural typing" (but of course I didn't want to do any work) so I opened notepad and started typing about typing itself.
This is now the "strange thing" which happened to me - instead of simply blasting through a load of nonsense, I instead wrote what I believe to be fairly useful, if what somewhat convoluted, advice on typing. I will paste it as an appendix to this blog post, however in future I will expand on this in a much more formal and structured way if there is any interest, to help those of you out there who are hitting 60-100wpm but want to push over that 100wpm hurdle. One thing I didn't mention is this: read more. The more you read, the faster you can read, the faster your brain has time to think about things and output them again. Typing competitively in the instance of TypeRacer is a process of input, little thought, output; don't consider typing quickly to merely be a test of the last part - all 3 are equally as important as one another.
The purpose of this blog therefore is my "train of thought" - ramblings I decide to type out which I think others might enjoy reading. It isn't much now, and my prose certainly needs a little improvement - doing a science degree has made me a little rusty.
Appendix: Typing tips
When practising typing at home, it's important not to go at a rushed pace.
When rushing your typing, you're more likely to make stupid mistakes and consequently slow yourself down.
You're also more likely to build up lactic acid in your hand muscles which will eventually cause them to cease up and become useless, thus slowing you down much further than if you had simply paced yourself.
When typing, your fingers should be rubbery, like clever wooden animatronics pulled by elastic bands, stretching and quickly retracting at each key stroke.
Key strokes should be brisk and striking - not slow and mushy. It goes without saying that, to type fast, keystrokes should be fast, but fast in such a way that you can still control what you're typing and concentrate on what is being said rather than concentrating entirely on the speed and ability to mush 8 keys at once.
More advanced typist, the sort who regularly attain speeds upwards of 200wpm, are able to effectively strike keys at a rate which almost implies they are hitting more than two keys at once, however in reality, of course, the order is still absolutely fundamental in ensuring your text reaches the screen in an appropriate manner.
If you are mushing keys, you aren't typing. You're simply trying to apply your force to the keyboard in a way which resembles typing, probably making lots of mistakes, especially when moving between keys.
Raise your fingers high from the keys, imagine a famous pianist striking each note as he goes, only ever sliding over notes when specifically trying to slur between them. There is no slurring in typing; it is simply a task of moving from letter to letter, key to key in "sticcato", without any need to ever touch the side of a key. If you're striking the sides of keys at all with your fingers or especially finger nails when moving to higher rows, it's time to start lifting your fingers higher off the keyboard!
A note on the shift key: When you want to capitalise a letter, don't adhere to the standards of the QWERTY typing standard. Remember that typing is a skill, your own skill, such as handwriting, where your own style and what's most fitting for you are just as important as the standards themselves. If you find you can type faster by using shift on the same hand as the letter being shifted, do so. Standard typing guidelines indicate that the "best practice" is to use the shift on the opposite side of the keyboard to the hand you're striking the key with. This certainly works well for most of the time, however if you find yourself, like me, contorting your hands all over the keyboard as you start to hit 140-150wpm, it is often more useful and faster to simply slide your right hand across a it when hitting the shift and letter "I" if your left hand is busy halfway across the keyboard itself typing out the word "where".
In my personal experience, I developed an awful habit. I read once that "practice makes perfect, but imperfect practice makes bad habits". Bad habits are difficult if not impossible to eradicate, I've been trying to get rid of a particular habit relating to shifting myself for a few years.
Over the past decade of typing, I decided early on that the fastest way for me to shift keys was simply to tap the caps lock key on and off incredibly quickly as I typed the capital letter between them. Obviously this increases the number of keystrokes from two to three for a capital letter, however no matter how desperately I tried I couldn't make the switch without a serious reduction in speed - having to think about typing whilst typing is a bit like having to think about how to change gears whilst driving a manual car; once you have it hard-wired into your brain, it just happens naturally. More recently, I've been able to slowly move towards holding shift instead of hitting caps lock, however I would say that possibly 90% of the time I still use it, especially for the letter "I".
In conclusion to this ill-structure and nonsensical rant, learn to type in your own way by writing lots of stuff. Use typeracer and challenge your friends, don't get upset if you can't type 100wpm straight away, keep at it.
Lift your keys from the keyboard, elegantly glide through the air striking each key with purpose. Think of "single buttock [piano] playing" ["How we can all relate to classical music" - TED Talk]
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