Jools Holland

On Saturday morning my wife informed me that we have been offered 2 tickets for "Jools Holland & His Rhythm And Blues Orchestra Tour" in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre.

Now I like and admire Jools Holland from seeing him on TV, but I didn't associate Rhythm And Blues with being my type of music.

How wrong I was! We had a fantastic night. Jools Holland was excellent. His "orchestra" was excellent. His singers were excellent. The music was outstanding.

As well as being a superb pianist, Jools is not a half bad singer!

High point of the night were the performance by Ruby Turner. Here's a sample of Jools and Ruby (and a cast of thousands) blasting out a song:

Only 5

Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to 5 years in prison today for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp.

Apparently, within minutes of the judge’s decision, “Only 5” was trending on Twitter in South Africa. I think that is a pretty appropriate assessment of the sentence.

It seems however that Reeva's parents are satisfied with the verdict.

Here is a picture of Oscar being led away after the verdict:

GTasks

I have always relied heavily on having a "to do list".

Since reading Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done", my reliance has been even heavier (Dave emphasises the importance of having a complete list in order to reduce stress and have a "mind like water" - please read the book for a clearer explanation!)

In the past have had my list on paper, or in Excel. Now I used GTasks on my Android phone.

GTasks does almost everything I could want and it also synchronises with Google Tasks so that I can access my list from GMail if I wish to do so.

GTasks support multiple lists and it is easy to switch between them (and to move items between them). So you have have separate lists for work, home, college, etc. You can also have "someday" or "maybe" lists for things that you may do some day.

And obviously I have a (long) list for things that I want to blog about (I'll be able to check one of these off in a few minutes!)

The two things I wish it had are:

1. The ability to tag tasks as being for "today". I do this at present my moving them to a "Today" list. But then I lose the original list. So really a task might be "home" and also "today".
2. The ability to tag a task as being started. I remember doing a Time Management course years ago and learning about the Japanese Daruma doll. The idea was that you would paint in one eye on the doll when you start a task and then only paint in the second eye when you finish it. So seeing one eye painted reminded you that the goal had not yet been accomplished

You can find the app on the Android store.

Dab Hand

I was at a meeting on Friday where someone used the expression "dab hand" (meaning to be an expert) a number of times.

I noted it because there is something informal (and which I find attractive) in using this expression in business meeting.

So saying that someone is "a dab hand at Excel" is somehow more interesting and colourful IMHO than saying that he/she has achieved a high level of proficiency with the product.

What I still miss from Lotus 1-2-3

I use Microsoft Excel practically every day. It's running right now on this machine as I write this posting.

But there are a couple of things that I miss from Lotus 1-2-3 right to this day.

Slash Commands

The first is the ability to use slash commands. With 1-2-3 all commands were initiated by pressing the slash key. "/FO", for example, was used for File Open.

The great things about this was that 1-2-3 was designed to be used with a keyboard rather than a mouse. Originally this was because 1-2-3 was a DOS application rather than a Windows application. But the combination of the slash commands and the matrix of cells which could be navigated using cursor keys meant that using the keyboard was fast. Much faster than using a mouse.

The benefit of Excel (based on Windows and the mouse) is that it is easier to learn. But it is slow.

1-2-3 was used by power users. Power users were easily able to learn the slash commands. But as everyone migrated from 1-2-3 to Excel that speed was lost for power users.

Deleting Rows

The second thing I still miss was that in 1-2-3 you could define a source (input) table, a target (output) table, and a criteria table and you could, for example, copy all rows from the source table to the target table which met the criteria. And the target table did not need to have all of the columns from the source table. All very useful and powerful. Now Excel does have some of those capabilities (filter and advanced filter). But what was even more powerful and is missing from Excel was that you could delete the rows from the source table which met the criteria in the criteria table. "/ Data Query Delete". Genius!

Farewell Lotus 1-2-3

I worked in Lotus Development in Dublin between 1989 and 1993. When I joined the company, the most important product by far was Lotus 1-2-3. When I left it would be possible to argue that the most important product was Lotus Notes (in 1995 IBM acquired Lotus primarily to get its hands on Lotus Notes).

A few days ago (on 30th September to be exact) the end of an era came when IBM discontinued support for Lotus 1-2-3. See the image below for the announcement from the IBM website.

1-2-3 was released originally in 1983. So it was a supported software product for over 30 years. Not a bad record!

I worked in the "Advanced Support Group" when I was in Lotus and was there at the time we launched "Release 3.0". As I recall, there were two fairly serious issues with this release:

• It needed a lot of memory. This meant that it needed "extended" or "expanded" memory. These were new requirements for the market and caused lots of confusion.
• There was a problem at one stage in relation to specific calculations returning the wrong results. The passage of time has dimmed my recollection of this, but it may have been related to problems with the Pentium processor, or a floating-point coprocessor. But it certainly was alarming at the time.

The other problem with Release 3 was that it didn't have on-screen WYSIWYG capabilities (while the Release 2 product had the Allways add-in). This was fixed in Release 3.1 but by then there had been so much loss of momentum for 1-2-3 that it was difficult to recover.

In the end, of course, Excel went on to dominate the spreadsheet market and products like 1-2-3,  Borland's Quattro even Microsoft's own Multiplan joined VisiCalc in the software history books.

Oscar Pistorius sentence

My last blog post was about the sentencing of the two men convicted of illegal lending in relation to Anglo Irish Bank.

That reminds me that the sentencing of Oscar Pistorius is to resume tomorrow. Apparently the process may take more than a day.

The sentence could be anything from 15 years in gaol down to a suspended or community sentence.

We will see if the delay between the verdict and the sentence (as was the case with the two gentlemen from Anglo Irish Bank) provides an opportunity to announce a sentence on the more lenient scale of the spectrum.

Pat Whelan and William McAteer sentencing

I blogged back in early April about the fact that Pat Whelan and William McAteer (having been found guilty of giving illegal loans when Directors of Anglo Irish Bank.

I mentioned that they were to be sentenced at the end of that month. And that the possible sentence included "up to five years in prison and/or a fine of up to €30,000 per offence".

Well, in the end, Judge Martin Nolan sentenced both men to 240 hours community service.

To be kind about it, that seems a little anticlimactic. Going from the release of the tapes, to the trial, to the sentencing.

I think that is why there is a delay between the verdict of a trial and the sentencing:so that media and public interest will have dissipated before the sentence is announced.

So it continues to be the case that nobody has gone to gaol for the crimes committed by Anglo Irish Bank.

Oscar Pistorius verdict

There were 4 possible verdicts in the Oscar Pistorius trial (ignoring the minor gun charges and listing from most serious to least):

• Premeditated Murder

This would mean that Pistorius knew Reeva was in the bathroom, and had thought about killing her before grabbing the gun and pulling the trigger

• Murder

This would mean that Pistorius intended to kill whoever was behind the door but there was no 'malice aforethought'

• Culpable Homicide

This would reflect negligence on the part of Pistorius rather than malice

•  Not Guilty

The final verdict was the third of these, Culpable Homicide.

It has been reported that Reeva Steenkamp's family feel that this verdict does not represent justice. I would have a lot of sympathy with that opinion.

I suppose the judge has to work on the basis of "beyond a reasonable doubt". But if one were operating on the principle of "balance of probability" then the outcome might have been quite different. Here are two scenarios:

• In the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013, Pistorius fired four shots into a locked bathroom believing that there was a burglar in the bathroom and believing (without checking) that his girlfriend was safely in bed
• In the early hours of Valentine's Day 2013, Pistorius had a blazing row with his girlfriend who had locked herself in the bathroom, went and got his gun, and fired four shots through the bathroom door

I know which one sounds more credible to me. Killing a burglar who has locked himself in a room would be unusual. Killing a wife/girlfriend in a crime of passion would not be all that unusual.

I guess it is fair to say, however, that nobody but Pistorius will ever know whether it was murder or premeditated murder.

The judge will pronounce sentence on October 13th and it will be interesting to see how she handles that, and whether the family will be happy with her decision. The sentence for manslaughter and firearms could be up to 15 years in prison.