Monthly Archives: May 2010

Like Moldova Beating England

In December last year I wrote:

“Italy are ranked #4 in the world and are defending champions.  Expectations will correctly be low when we play them.

But, I fear, by the time the matches actually start there will be a number of people who will expect to see the All Whites compete against the other two teams in our pool.”

– Olé Olé Olé

And, sure enough… after the stunning win against Serbia on the weekend some journalists here are starting to dream the dream.

For example, Tony Smith, in this mornings Dominion Post:

“Serbia are a better side than Slovakia, New Zealand’s first-up opponents in South Africa on June 15, and are probably at least the equal of Paraguay.

Could Ricki Herbert’s class of 2010 become the first New Zealand team to win a game at a Fifa senior tournament and qualify for the second round?

You wouldn’t have thought so a week ago. But bookmakers around the world may be rapidly revising their odds.”

– Serbian millionaires made to look like paupers

Dylan Cleaver in the NZ Herald, with tongue firmly in cheek, goes further and outlines the All Whites’ path to glory:

“The All Whites’ path to the semifinals is relatively straightforward.

A 3-0 win over Slovakia (they’re not even as good as Serbia), in the opening group game will be followed by a gritty, Ryan Nelsen-inspired, goalless draw against an Italian team resting its best players.  Paraguay will be no match for the aerial assault and are brushed aside 3-1.”

– All Whites’ path to World Cup title

I think it’s usually better to have low expectations and exceed them.  And, especially when it comes to World Cups.  You’d think that sports journalists, of all people, would have learnt that lesson by now. Or, perhaps, the headlines they can write when the team falls short of those massively inflated expectations are better as a result – who knows?

Either way, comparing this result to “Russia beating the All Blacks” (as Tony Smith does in the article linked above) seems fanciful if not hyperbolic.

Is it?  Here are some facts:

FIFA ranks 202 countries – from Brazil at #1 to Papua New Guinea at #202.

IRB ranks 95 countries by comparison – from the All Blacks somehow at #1 (how?) to mighty Finland at #95.

So, the All Whites (current FIFA ranking: #78) beating Serbia (current FIFA ranking: #15) is the football equivalent of Moldova (current IRB ranking: #36) beating England (current IRB ranking: #7) in rugby.  Imagine that!

Or, if you want to consider the gap in the rankings between the two teams, then it’s the equivalent of Tunisia (current IRB ranking: #29) beating the All Blacks.  Russia by comparison has an IRB ranking of #19.

Either of those would be an outrageous result, even in a friendly game, and especially a couple of weeks prior to a big tournament, would be big news.

And yet the All Whites remain 1000-to-1 to win the World Cup. :-)

Bring on Slovakia, I say!  I’ll be watching.  You?

(*) On the outside chance that you’re interested in and/or confused by my maths… I just adjusted the FIFA rankings to take into account that there are less than half as many teams represented in the IRB rankings, so a FIFA ranking of 78 out of 202 teams corresponds to an IRB ranking of 36 out of 95 teams, and a gap of 63 places out of 202 teams on the FIFA list corresponds to a gap of 29 places out of 95 teams on the IRB list.

Look after yourself

Feeling depressed?

According to this report from crowd-sourced health site CureTogether …

If you’re feeling depressed forget about fish oil, writing a journal or caffeine.

Just go for a run, and then get a good sleep.

If you can’t get to sleep, they have a few interesting suggestions for you there too:

It’s true – sites like this really do encourage you to look after yourself!

Off Switch

“So, what might be the best of green design for 2010 are the things that don’t get designed. Don’t design me a new iPhone, figure out how to make my old one last. Don’t design me a new “green house”, figure out how to make the one I have more efficient. Don’t sell me physical objects, help me re-purpose the ones I have or otherwise give me digital tools for a higher quality of life that don’t require Chinese injection moldings.”

– Saul Griffith on Green Design

I want an off button for our house.

That is, a single button, probably located somewhere by the front door, which we can use when we’re leaving or when we got to bed in the evening, which turns off all of the lights and all of the appliances that don’t need to stay in stand-by.

If you’re building a new house then getting this sort of thing setup is relatively easy, if not cheap.  Either way, I don’t think it would be too hard to justify the cost of installation if you ran the numbers, as I’d hate to think how much of our monthly power bill is wasted on these two things alone.

But, if this sort of stuff is so expensive that it’s only installed in new homes then the savings will be a long time coming.

Who is solving this sort of problem for old/existing homes?

Related:

Is Home automation the new green choice?

Learning from Flathunt

An old friend sent me this piece of nostalgia:

(full size)

This screenshot was taken in late 1999, shortly before launch.

If you look closely you can see some SQL debugging code and even a “blank cell” at the bottom.  All of the click HERE links are also a special touch.

Anybody else remember this old design?

Looking back, I can’t believe that I quit a perfectly good and well paid job to do this!

Everybody who thought I was a bit mad was clearly right.  I literally knew less than nothing when I started – because as lot of what I assumed I knew was wrong.

The very first feedback email I ever got was from a friendly stranger who explained why contextual links are generally better.  You do well to only make each mistake once, I suppose.

It’s now just over 10 years since I started working on this stuff.  That’s getting to be so long ago that it feels like a completely different time and place.

The web as it was back then is barely recognisable today: a relatively tiny population of connected users, the vast vast majority on dial-up (browsing with images turned off, to make it faster and cheaper was not uncommon); very primitive browsers which were rapidly evolving and quite unpredictable (CSS and JavaScript were only for the brave); tiny screen sizes (remember 640×468?); development tools and languages that required a bit of brute force; no conventions to build on or follow, etc etc.

The way we thought about the web back then, and what it took to create a successful site and successful business, is in some ways starting to look a bit dated  too.  Or, perhaps idealistic is a better word?

Here is one of the lessons that does still hold, I think:

The people who got up the learning curve the quickest were those that took off shoes and just jumped in, however unimpressive the initial things we were building seem looking back.  Those that sat on the sidelines desperately hoping to come up with a great idea for a website, or worse, spent all their time refining a concept or design until they considered it good enough to actually show people, were generally left behind.

I think there are a lot of parallels with the web back then and the way that mobile applications are developing at the moment: there seems to be a new or improved platform every week; nobody really has any idea about the best way to present applications to users (Objective-C or HTML5?) or to try and make money from them; the conventions and standards in interaction design are to a large extent still to be discovered and agreed; there is only a tiny user base (I’m told there are now ~50,000 iPhones in NZ, compared to about 8x as many internet users in 1999); pricing is an evolving art; and yet as all of this is playing out there is a huge amount of innovation happening.

If I were a discontented 24-year-old today this is what I’d be working on.

Or, a reasonably contented 34-year-old, for that matter.

More about that soon…

(In the meantime, if you’re a Powershop customer please download our meter reader and top-up app which launched this week).

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