Brain Surgery for Rob

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I’ve been having headaches for a while. Last Sunday I found out why. The technical term is“ chronic subdural haematoma”. The upshot was three holes in the skull and a bit of drainage action.

The NHS is completely wonderful. In the midst of a pandemic I had scans and whole bunch of focused professionals finding the fix and applying it. I had surgery on Monday evening and I’m now back home with strict instructions to stay away from keyboards. Which I’m obviously following to the letter.

I’ll be back after a rest.

Home

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There is no better way to start the day than with a chap pulling pipes out of your head and then stitching up the holes. I’d been on regular doses of pain killers, so I didn’t notice that much though. One major hospital tip: If they offer you painkillers take them. At one point I thought I’d show everyone I was a real man and could manage without the drugs. This turned out to be a bad plan, so the next time I was asked I gave a hearty “Yes please” to everything.

In the morning we had the “ward rounds” when consultants, doctors, nurses and students all gather round your bed and discuss how you’re doing. The best bit was when they said that I’d be able to go home today.

After lunch a charming nurse came to see me and ran through a test to make sure that my brain still worked. This involved drawing a clock face and remembering five words. I can still remember the words even now, which is very pleasing. I thought I might be able to impress her if I ever see her again by reeling them off. Unfortunately I’ll never be able to do this because I’ve completely forgotten her name or what she looks like. The best bit of the test was when she asked me to list as many words as I could that began with the letter “f”. Well, that was fun. As I am now “Wordle trained” I went off like a rocket and she had trouble keeping up with them all. Apparently I have a wide vocabulary for my age.

The best part of the day was heading home. Nothing like your own TV remote control. And bed.

Ward life

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Being in hospital has a lot in common with going on a long distance flight. The best way to cope is to totally give yourself over to the system for the duration of the journey and just go with the flow. The staff here are all awesome. I found myself chatting with the the various people who came to change bits of things attached to me and take readings and the stories were very similar. One chap was just finishing his fourth 12 hour shift in a row. Another nurse had come in on what should have been her rest day because she wanted to make sure that things were OK on the ward. I feel genuinely humbled to be around these folks. And angry with the way that society seems to reward hedge fund managers (who do nothing more than convert sums of money into larger sums of money by breaking things) more than these people.

The policy on mobile phones and whatnot is great. You can just use them and being in a big high hospital seems to result in good signal strength. I’d taken the precaution of taking my headphones and phone with me, along with a large rechargeable battery. I was able to watch movies and buy things on the internet with no problems, which got me through the day nicely.

They are hoping to remove the the drains soon, which means that I’ll lose my “borg” attachments and begin the process of turning back into a normal human.

I need this like a hole in the head

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Today started with scans. First a CT scan followed by an MRI scan that seemed to go on for ever. Then a discussion about what may have caused the problem and what to do about it. A while back I was cleaning the stairs in what turned out to be a horribly dangerous way. The result was that a vacuum cleaner fell on my head, knocking me down to the bottom. At the time I thought I’d got away with a cut and a feeling of intense stupidity, but it may well be that I’d done more damage than that. I’m now known to the doctors here as “Dyson man”.

Anyhoo, I decided to go for an operation to fix it. All they had to do was drill three holes in my skull, attach some drains and let the fluid out. I was relived to find that I’d be knocked out for this procedure. The idea of sitting there while someone takes a Dremel(tm) to my head was a bit frightening. The wonderful thing is that they were actually able to get a team together and do this right in the middle of Covid and a healthcare crisis.

I had the operation late afternoon and woke up in the recovery room a couple of hours later. They had the radio tuned to one of these “Eighties hits” station and about the first tune I heard, no word of a lie, was “I’m still standing” by Elton John. Talk about omens. Loved it. Things got even better when they took me down to the ward and gave me tea and biscuits. Both custard cream and bourbons were present and correct. Awesome.

It’s a bit hard to sleep when you’ve got two tubes attached to your head and connected to collection bags, but I think I’ll manage.

My brain hurts

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The doctor probably expected me to be more upset than I was. After all, he'd just told me I had a "subdural haematoma", which translates to blood in the head around the brain. For me this was actually good news. They had found something that might be causing the horrendous headaches I'd been having. I was thinking that the worst thing they could have told me was that they could find nothing wrong. Then I'd really have been in trouble.

I'd gone into casualty after dialling 111, the UK patient advice service.. After a brief delay they'd shoved my head into a CT scanner left me in a room for a while before coming and giving me the news. More scans tomorrow when they’ll decide what to do.

Presentation tips

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In the old days it was considered useful to be able to do things like make fire and slay mammoths. These skills are in less demand these days. But an ability to present well in front of an audience is something that is always going to come in handy. Here are my tips:

  • Decide what you want your presentation to achieve:

    • Leave them knowing something

    • Get them to do something

    • Change the way that they think about something

  • Try to pull out five or so really important things that you want the audience to take away. Don't try and do too many. Say what they are at the start, do each one and then say what they were at the end.

  • Make acting on the outcome of the presentation as easy as possible.

  • Never apologise at the start. It will only lower expectations.

  • Don't expect to enjoy giving your first presentation, but don't be surprised if you get a taste for it.

  • Do not try too hard to judge how your presentation went. What you think was a bad presentation might well go down a storm with the audience. And, unfortunately, vice-versa.

  • If you think you're having more fun than the audience, stop at once.

  • Don't expect things that are important to you to be important to your audience as well.

  • Expect to have to sell your subject, so try to put it in a context that works for your audience.

  • Don't think that you have to show off your knowledge to impress the audience. They are going to be more engaged if they can see how what you're telling them will improve their lives.

  • The ultimate sin for a presenter is to overrun. Underrunning is fine. I find it easier to pad out a bit with things that I'd like to say than chop stuff out on the fly to hit the end time. Although I've done both.

  • Always take questions. Make it clear when/how this is will happen.

  • If a question only seems relevant to the questioner, take it offline. Some questioners like to ask things to show that they know more than you. Allow them to do this (you look a lot bigger that way). Don't start trading points. If the answer is a matter of opinion, take it offline.

  • Never argue with the audience, and never set the audience up against a questioner.

  • Don't be afraid to be wrong in front of the audience.

  • The audience will be more inclined to follow you if you are amusing/interesting but they will be very inclined to follow you if they think what you are saying is useful/valuable to them. So make sure you tell them why the content is important. And use their words.

  • Make sure you have a backup plan in case everything breaks. Test the backup.

  • Don't write down everything you are planning to say but do have something that you can look at if you need inspiration. Me, I love a good slide deck, but I may be out of fashion. Bullet points are a good compromise.

  • A rehearsal won't do any harm, particularly in respect of getting the timing right.

  • Having something fun you can look forward to (a trip to the bar, etc etc) that you will definitely be doing after the presentation, whether it goes well or badly.

HALF-PRICE OFFER

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I’ve got a special offer for anyone too busy to come along to my Lecture in Rhyme this Friday. You can remove any guilt you might feel about letting me down on this special occasion by simply sponsoring the event for just twice as much money as you would normally give.

This means that anyone turning up on Friday at 7:00 PM GMT is getting their presentation at half price. And you get a chance to win prizes, play silly games and laugh at both of my jokes. What’s not to love?

Improving user interfaces

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I’ve been using my PICO Pomodoro timer and I’ve decided that the user interface is rubbish. When I designed the system I thought it would be cool to use the control knob as an input button. That way you can turn the knob to set a value and then press it in to make a selection. Clever eh?

Actually no. Why? Because when a user sees something with a button on it the first thing they will do is press the button. They will expect the button to do things. When it doesn’t do anything they turn the knob. But the user has to know that the knob can be pressed in to make a selection. If they don’t have that crucial fact the whole device is useless to them.

I’ve upgraded the code to version 2.0. This lets you press the button or the knob to make a selection. If you press the button when the time is set to 0 the device now shows a message saying “turn the knob to select a time”. The device still works like it used to, but now it is much easier to get started with it.

In my experience this is how user interface design goes. Things that you think are intuitive frequently aren’t. If I’d shown this to someone before I shipped it they’d have come straight back with the obvious question “Why doesn’t the button do anything?” and I could have fixed it. So the lesson is to show what you’ve made to other people as much as you can.

Update: The original title for this post was “Stupid user interface design by Rob”. After some thought I’ve changed this title and edited this post to remove the word “stupid”. I try not to call people stupid. So I shouldn’t call myself stupid either.

Blogging is back (or at least a diary)

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I read a thing on the internets a week or so back where someone said that they thought blogging is returning. My dear, for some of us it never went away. I’ve got around 20 years of blogging under my belt. My older stuff is here. Good luck with that. Actually, I’m really pleased I’ve got these posts lying around. I’ve rediscovered lots of things that I’d completely forgotten doing. I’ve just spent a happy half hour reliving past glories and humiliations from way, way back.

I think that if I have one piece of advice for folks starting out in life I’d strongly advise them to blog, or at least keep a diary. There are a whole bunch of good reasons to do this:

  1. Writing a diary will keep memories that you might otherwise lose. OK, in these modern days it is very easy to snap pictures or post things on social media about what you’ve done, but who knows if Facebook and whatnot will be around in the long term (more than 20 years or so). And writing about something lets you add a personal context.

  2. Writing a diary lets you practice your writing. This is a huge thing. Writing is how a lot of communication gets done, even in the days of visual media and video. You need to get good with your writing skills. Writing regularly will make you better at writing and what better subject than yourself.

  3. Writing a diary lets you “park” things in your life. If there’s something worrying you just whack it in the diary and then forget it for a while. I find that writing about something greatly reduces its power to upset me. And when I go back and re-read the entry I frequently wonder why I was so upset at the time. Conversely, I sometimes spot things that at the time didn’t seem to be important but actually turned out to mean a lot.

  4. It makes you like yourself a tiny bit more with each post. Reading about cool things that you’ve done (even if it’s wash the car or tidy the office) makes you realise that actually you are doing stuff and making a difference, starting with yourself.

When I started blogging I joked that I was doing it to force myself to make my life more interesting otherwise I’d have nothing to write about. This is not really how it turned out. Eventually I found a writing voice that worked for me and I managed to find a way (or feel that I’d found a way) to write about nothing much in a vaguely interesting way. I set myself a completely artificial challenge of blogging every day. I’ve not always managed it, but I’m quite proud of what I have achieved.

I’m not saying you should blog publicly if you don’t want to. I keep a diary of stuff I’m doing which is a bit of a log book/personal journal and I take things out of that to use in the public facing blog. You can just open a text document and type something every day.

Cunning tip - you can use the lowly Windows notepad program to automatically time and date your diary entries. Just put the text “.LOG” at the very top of the file and each time you open it you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the document, with the date and time added.

I’d strongly advise you to have ago. One other piece of sage advice. Don’t feel you have to write something every day. Only an idiot would do that. Don’t consider a lack of posts a failure. You are putting your thoughts down every now and then to make yourself feel better, not worse. Just do it when you feel like it. And after a while you might find that you are making five minutes here and there to jot things down at regular intervals, and then you’re a diarist.

Talking Pomodoro Timer in Useful Shock

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I’ve found a use for my Talking Pomodoro timer. I’ve decided that I’m never going to tidy my office properly. I start the task and then, after a while, I either run out of steam or find I’ve added so many extra tasks to to the job that the whole enterprise just collapses on itself.

So, spending a day tidying up will never happen. But half an hour a day, that sounds possible. So I set the timer for half an hour and then start tidying. When the timer goes off I stop tidying and go off and do something else. That way I don’t expand the task or give up because the job is too large. It’s kind of working so far, in that there is a tiny corner of the room where I can see the floor….

Double Exercise Bonus

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It turns out that the Apple watch can’t tell the difference between piano practice and exercise. Perhaps it is the way that I get cross when I make a mistake and wave my arms around, plus the nervous energy that I expend navigating some of the trickier parts of “The Entertainer”.

Anyhoo, this works rather well for me in that I get a double whammy of virtuous credit just by sitting down at the keyboard and failing to play something properly.

Red Nose Design Ideas from PowerPoint

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I’m working on the slides for the Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme. Sponsor me. Then come back and read the rest of this post.

Ah, there you are. Thanks very much. I’m using the latest version of PowerPoint. It has this “Design Ideas” feature that takes your slide, does something “AI” with it and then suggest a layout. The original design is below, and is perhaps a bit boring.

OK, forget perhaps. It is a bit boring. PowerPoint Design Ideas suggest this instead:

This is a lot less boring. I love the way that it has found suitable icons for all the points and then laid it out for me. I’m not sure that I’ll use it in this case, but it has suggested lots of other options too which I can incorporate into the presentation. It also found a wonderful piece of animated art for the start of the presentation. Which you’ll have to come along on Friday the 18th of March to see.

Up until recently I thought that a tool like PowerPoint had probably got about as useful as it could get. It’s nice to see that there are still ways it can be improved.

Communication Matters

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I’ve long been convinced that communication skills are crucial for engineers. Actually, I think they are crucial for everyone, but their importance needs to be sold to us techies. We tend to focus on solving the problem rather than telling people what we have done and why it is a good idea. In my experience an engineer can make themselves around 10 times more useful simply by learning how to communicate properly.

And the critical message for an engineer is that presenting is a skill that can be learned. I used to tell students that they should approach being able to present well in the same way that they would learn a new programming language or application programmer interface (API). In other words, find out how to do it and then do it.

It’s lovely to see that other people take this seriously too. Clive Maxfield and Lucy Rogers have some great things to say about the importance of presentation and how to do it. Both are splendid folks who are well worth following.