Volvos in films Last updated:29 October 2010

OK, I’ve just been writing some more serious stuff about dealing with people, so as an antidote for myself, here’s something really trivial that’s been bugging me for a while. Is it me, or are there a disproportionately high number of appearances of Volvos in films. Here’s a list of ones I’ve noticed (so far).

  • School of Rock – This is a true Volvofest. The car park at the school where Jack Black works has, at various points at least two XC70s, an S80 in the background, a V70, and a V40. One of the fathers drives an XC90. When Jack arrives for the parents evening the first five cars he drives past are Volvos. Right at the end a V70 drops a child off for the new school. You’d think it was filmed in Sweden…
  • Freaky Friday – Jamie Lee Curtis drives an S60
  • Garfield – his owner drives another S60
  • Two Weeks Notice – Sandra Bullock drives an S80
  • Cheaper By The Dozen 2 – Steve Martin’s daughter drives what looks like a V70, although you don’t see much of it
  • The Fly – Jeff Goldblum’s girlfriend drives a 200 series estate.
  • The West Wing - CJ’s Dad has an old 200 estate when she visits him in series 4
  • The Sure Thing - John Cusack initially gets a lift from Tim Robbins in an Amazon estate
  • Mrs Doubtfire – Sally Field drives a red 850 saloon
  • New Moon – Volvo XC60 from New MoonRobert Pattinson drives an XC60. Even vampires drive Volvos…
  • Twilight – …and change them quite regularly it seems, as in the first film he drives a silver C30.
  • Eclipse – my daughter tells me there’s a different one in this as well. Currently unconfirmed.
  • Back To The Future – Near the start, where Michael J Fox and his girlfriend are in the town square, you can see a 240 in the background
  • Son of The Mask – Again near the start, there’s a big explosion at a party, and two 240s get turned over. There might be some more Volvos in the film, but frankly, I couldn’t take more than a few moments of this one…
  • Must Love Dogs – Diane Lane’s boyfriend drives a gold C70
  • Music And Lyrics – Hugh Grant’s agent drives an S60
  • Sydney White – at the hustings for class president (or whatever it is) there’s a black XC60 prominently behind Amanda Bynes
  • The Shaggy Dog – I literally only saw 30 seconds of this, honest, but the dog was being driven around in an XC90…
  • Something’s Gotta Give – Diane Keaton drives a C70
  • Marley And Me – Owen Wilson drives a navy blue S80
  • Never Been Kissed – Drew Barrymore’s friend drives a 240 estate
  • 27 Dresses – Katherine Heigl drives a 240

This list also gives a slightly embarrassing indication of the sorts of films I watch, doesn’t it? I cite a 1311 year old daughter as partial defence, m’lud. Street cred improved slightly by New Moon, I think, but then Son of The Mask messes that up a bit.

The answer, no doubt, is that those clever Volvo marketing types are placing their product squarely in front of their target market – parents. People like me, in fact.

Posted in Mutterings | 2 Comments

Photographing felt with a compact camera Last updated:29 October 2010

I wrote an article about photographing felt a little while ago, but it occurred to me that it assumed quite a lot of expensive photographic gear, so here’s how I got on trying the same thing with just a compact camera.

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The lifespan of IE6 Last updated:29 October 2010

Read an interesting article this morning about the use of Internet Explorer. Specifically, the article suggests that now that IE8 is launched, users will migrate from IE7, but many who are still using IE6 will remain, to the point that IE6 will become more popular than IE7. Sound mad? Not really, because many corporate web applications were designed for IE6 when it was effectively the only browser available, and they won’t work with IE7. Larger companies tend to be intrinsically risk-averse anyway, upgrading a browser is low priority – my own experience certainly supports the argument.

A couple of sets of web stats highlight the issue. Looking at some stats from a large public sector website, 80% of visitors are using IE, of which 40% use IE6. This website will be frequently accessed by people at work. By contrast, one of the sites I run, which tends towards consumer usage, has only 60% IE users, of which only 15% use IE6

So the bad news is IE6 may live a lot longer than we might like…

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Posted in Web Design and Build | 1 Comment

Project management documentation Last updated:29 October 2010

A couple of weeks ago I ended up talking for a few minutes about project management and what it isn’t, and thought I’d post it here as well.

Lots of files

There’s a strange sort of mystique about project management and what it involves. Clearly project management is about getting your documentation right – plans, risk registers, PIDs, issue logs , change requests, progress reports. No.  Most of the really good project managers I’ve had the privilege to work with have used these things. But all of the project managers I would judge as less successful have used these as well. There is an unfortunate tendency to mistake intense activity completing all these things for actually getting something done.

I can illustrate this with a personal example. Way back before I was a project manager I was on the receiving end of a project, as it were, when I used to manage a call centre. Every Friday I – and five colleagues doing the same job elsewhere – had to complete a document reporting progress and risks and issues. I used to complete the form religiously. Far more religiously than my colleagues, it turned out, since I was publicly congratulated for doing such a good job. All well and good. The problem was that I was making a right hash of actually completing the project…..

In recent years one of the least successful programmes I’ve worked on used the most documentation and adhered most rigidly to project management standards. It passed two heavyweight QMS audits without any major problems. And yet, ultimately, this particular programme failed. Another instance that sticks in my mind, on a different programme, was the use of very detailed documents to specify the interface between two different systems. Everything you could possibly need to know about this interface was contained in a single document. Great, eh? No. Our supplier had a highly intelligent lead programmer working for them who really operated on a higher intellectual plane than the rest of us. He was heavily involved in all the discussion about these interfaces, but even he couldn’t understand the resulting document – it was too complicated. And if he didn’t understand it, what hope did the rest of us have?

At the other end of the documentation spectrum I’ve also seen a project deliver an application to 6,000 people pretty successfully, which never had a risk register or an issue register. (Actually, it did have one right at the end of the project because it got audited, and one was “found”, ahem, but that doesn’t really count.)

So don’t be fooled into thinking that project management is just about filling in documents. The difference between good and bad projects isn’t documentation and all the hideous apparatus of the project management textbooks. It’s the people working on the project.

We all know this anyway, because good people in any sort of work make things variously easier, quicker, cheaper, and even, perhaps, more fun. It’s no different on projects. Good project managers find it helpful to use risk registers etc to help them organise a project. The key word here is help though.

Risk registers and project plans are not an acceptable substitute for sensible project management.

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Integrating WordPress into your website Last updated:29 October 2010

In the last couple of weeks I have incorporated WordPress blogs into two sites, applying the existing site style to the WordPress pages.  You’re looking at one of these right now…

I didn’t particularly want to replace all my existing pages with WordPress pages, I just wanted to use the WordPress functionality to power the blog element. Pretty common requirement I’d have thought. I found this article a useful starting point.

So, if you have an existing site with its own css file and you follow this tutorial exactly then you will end up with two similar css files, your original one and one just for WordPress files called style.css. So then you have to make changes in two places…I didn’t want this so additionally amended header.php to point at my “main” css file. The downside of this is that you can’t update your css file through the WordPress admin module, but that wasn’t at all an issue for me.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that this will break the display of at least some of the wordpress pages, as chances are you won’t have entries in your css file corresponding to the html markup that WordPress generates. The same things will happen of course, if you replace the contents of style.css with your own css.

For example, my main site uses #header and #footer as id names, just as WordPress does, so no changes required here, but I used #maintext instead of #content for the main page content. So you can either amend the html so the WordPress files use #maintext, or add #content to your css.

In this case, you can identify #content just by viewing the various .php files – but some classes and ids are directly generated “on the fly” and don’t appear.  I found the easiest way to do this was to view the actual pages using Firebug, and make additions to my css file accordingly.

This isn’t quite as painful as it sounds as WordPress is pretty consistent about the markup.

I’d guess it took a couple of hours in total to do, including actually amending the contents of sidebar.php. Worth it as all my styling sits in one file.

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Posted in Web Design and Build | 2 Comments

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