The thing that’s depressed me most about the response to the recent budget in the UK is the same thing that depresses me at election time (or for that matter when reading most of the commentary in most of the British press).

It’s the fact that there appears to be such a lack of empathy amongst the general population. Most people’s perspective, be they rich or poor, seems to be so narrowly focussed on themselves.

The media plays its part, by endlessly focussing the debate on individuals, asking people how they think this or that policy will effect them. The media isn’t to blame though, it’s just not helping.

Rather than just moaning (I’m good at that), I came up with a crazy idea.

The next time you’re going to vote, forget about yourself. I’ll say that again, just in case you got confused. Forget about yourself. Don’t vote for your own interests.

Think of the two people that you know who probably need a lucky break most right now. Then work out what would really help them, and vote accordingly.

I’m not saying you should imagine your way into the mind of a homeless person sleeping under Waterloo bridge (unless you happen to know one). Just pick a friend, family member, someone you see on the bus each morning, whatever. Someone “normal” like you. You don’t have to be an angel - just try to be honest and pick people who need the help.

Picking two people gives a bit of balance - maybe they’ll need different things, so you might have to compromise a bit.

Perhaps you’ll still end up voting for selfish policies, but at least you’ll be doing it for someone else, and not for yourself. Who knows though, maybe the act of thinking about others will give you a bit more perspective.Don’t forget, you need not worry about yourself whilst doing this - your friends and neighbours will be looking out for you. Just worry about them.

Of course I realise that there’s a danger of this ending up with little cartels of people voting to preserve each other’s interests (sounds awfully familiar, come to think of it). Taken to extremes, it could get parochial and insular, nationalistic even. Ok, fine, don’t take it to extremes - obviously (like, duh…). Maybe pick someone from, oh, the next town or something!

You never know, maybe, just maybe, thinking about other people might turn out to be habit forming.

PS.

If you’re one of those shit-for-brains people who doesn’t vote because “they’re all the same, nothing I do will change anything” etc etc, then this counts double for you. If you look hard enough, you will find a policy that someone is proposing which will help someone who you know. If you can’t find one, you’re not looking hard enough. Put aside your own cynicism, and vote for them.

Despite being a bit of a Mac fan, I don’t make a habit of bashing Windows or Microsoft - I got bored with all that religious warfare 20 years ago, and I happy live and work on a combination of OS X, XP, and Vista.

There are times, though, when I am rudely reminded why exactly it is that I like Macs, or rather, why I don’t like Windows. Today is one such occasion. All I’m trying to do is install the “Service Pack 1” update to Visual Studio.

You’d think - naively - that it is just a case of downloading an installer, running it, perhaps restarting. Sadly, when I did this, the installer sat there for a couple of hours, stuck at an unknown point of the install. Four or five slightly different attempts later, it is still doing the same thing.

After various searches of the internet I came across the release notes for SP1:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/2/8/A2807F78-C861-4B66-9B31-9205C3F22252/VS2008SP1Readme.htm#Installing

This read me lists nineteen different known issues with the installation process!! WTF?

These are major issues which prevent you from installing an update to an IDE. That. Is. Fucking. Pathetic.

As if that wasn’t bad enough - none of them appear to be my problem. Remind me again why I bother using this shit?

Apropos nothing at all…

This phrase is often used to mean the wrong thing. People often use it to mean “the rule must be right, because I’ve found an exception that seems to directly contradict it”. Which is plainly nonsense in many cases.

I had always suspected that the real meaning was “the exception tests the rule”, but it turns out that I’m wrong too.

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtheexc.html

The real meaning seems to be more like “if you have to make a new rule for an exception, then there’s already an implicit rule for the normal case”.

In the example given, there is a statement: ‘Special leave is given for men to be out of barracks tonight till 11pm’. This statement is talking about an exception (‘special leave’), but it’s also implying that there’s a normal rule that men have to be back before 11pm.

You live and learn…

Update: see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

I came across this piece on Gamasutra the other day, and I thought it made an interesting read. If anything the comments are more interesting than the article. There’s definitely some good insight in there.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21488

One of Brenda’s key pieces of advice seems to be “complain upwards” - ie go to your boss, don’t just moan to those around you, that just spreads the negative vibes. I can see the sense in this, especially as someone who often gets frustrated and ends up moaning.

As one of the comments hints at, that only really works if you have a sufficiently structured team: “this article was really important, teams melt-down follow me around, and now I see that this is because of the trashtalk that we do (basically, in the university the team structure ends with noone being the lead, since we have noone to complain from other person, we complain with everyone else…)”.

For some reason, it’s been a day of random musings and serendipity.

I stumbled across http://betterexplained.com/, which has some nice, intuitive explanations of mathematical and technical topics. I can’t even remember now how I got there in the first place.