Travelling.

Travelling always gets me. I’ve been on the go for the past three weeks, including weekends. No vacation. All business travel.

• Back when I was single I often did two loads of laundry the first night after returning home. Now I’m beginning to depend on my wife to have my shirts done when I return home the next time around. She doesn’t travel professionally. While it’s nice not having to do laundry myself I hate the idea that she might feel like a housewife.
• I’m beginning to lose track of the days of the week. Is it saturday or tuesday? I’m not sure. – notmarcus looks at calendar. Calendar says wednesday.
• It hasn’t gotten too bad this year, yet. Alas I know that when you lose track of your schedule, you can always call the reception to ask what day of the week it is, or what city you’re in. They’ll let you know. Without the slightest hint that they might find the call funny. (But I’m sure they do.)
• I do not mind people travelling with children. I do not mind noisy kids. I only mind the senior citizen couples who talk to each other at a volume at which they might as well have left their hearing aids at home. And then complain about noisy kids.
• I also mind senior citizen couples loudly discussing the train ride or flight itself. Or bodily functions. Or what impact the former has on the latter. “No you can’t go number 2 now. We’ll be at a station in 20 minutes. Then you’re going to have to wait until we get moving again. You’re not supposed to flush the toilet while in a station.”

There’s more things that nag me. Anyway, I need a break.

Statistics.

I used to have a client who called them Sadistics. Anyway…

Miles has written a lengthy report about user interfaces and accessibility. A lot of the passages seem highly redundant to me. I skipped over most of the paragraphs. Then I stumbled over these two bits of information:

About 1% of the population is color-blind.

And:

About 8% of the male population is color-blind.

Let’s assume that color-blindness doesn’t occur among the female population. Do a little math. It would mean that only 12.5% of the total population are male. Or in other words: there are 7 females per male (or neuters, though I consider that to be unlikely). If I weren’t married I would investigate this further. And soon migrate to a country or region with the same statistics and color-blind females.

Borrowing hardware. #2

Borrowing hardware is a wide-spread phenomenon.

I’ll be at a conference over the weekend. I’ll be expected to speak. And I would like to take a laptop computer with slides and notes… Normally this is not an issue. There’s a laptop in the department for such occasions. It is rarely used, but it’s purpose has been made clear to people many times. Apparently not clear enough. – Andrew has taken the machine on his vacation to Moscow.