BBMF at Duxford

Of course the day would not be complete without a flypast from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight...








And the old enemy too...

Running Outlook 2010 (and possibly 2007, 2003)? Update your rules.

Then you probably have rules and alerts.  But have you spotted this?

Unfortunately I clicked Upgrade Now before I took the screen shot, but if you go into Manage Rules,

then Options, then you get the chance to upgrade your rules.  You get a warning about issues if you are running an older version of Outlook for this mailbox on another machine.

It certainly seems to process faster, but other than that I’ve observed nothing else (so far!)

More here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291608 but it doesn’t really explain what benefit you’ll get..

Why I don't want emails from Twitter when someone mentions me

1. If I want someone to engage in an email conversation, we'll have one!

2. So now twitter is going to forward spam and malware links to my inbox.

If they could offer me the chance to have @mention emails only from people I follow that would make it more secure, but...

How the Olympic tickets should have been done

Having just discovered what money they took, I know I will have tickets to 2 of the 9 events for which we applied. However it is clear (from twitter at least) that the process was poor. Having given some thought, my fairer alternative would have been:

You apply for tickets selecting each event, and if you wish, several price levels. Each event/price combination is a selection in it's own right (however, they remain linked - see later). Secondly you allocate an overall budget for your submission. Finally you set a priority list for the choices.

So for instance you would put down something like:
1. Athletics finals £200
2. Opening ceremony £50
3. Opening ceremony £20.12
4. A swimming event £20
5. Archery £75
Etc etc
budget: £200

LOCOG would then:

Mark everyone's application with a "success" score that in the first instance would be 0. [this is used to ensure unsuccessful applications receive a priority over successful ones].

Then it would run each of the following two steps in succession until completion.

Selection step:
Identify every applicant who shares the lowest success score - in the first stage this would be everyone. Enter these applicants into a ballot for tickets

Ballot Step:
take everyone's top choice (in the first ballot this would be choice 1, but bear with me!)
Allocate all tickets across this choice, using a lottery as appropriate.
All successful applications would get tickets.
The applicant's budget is then reduced by the cost of the tickets.
The applicant's preference list is then modified in 5 ways:
1. remove their top choice just won
2. remove any applications for the same event (to stop double booking)
3. remove any preference whose cost now exceeds the remaining budget.
4. remove any event that is now sold out
5. increment their "success" score by 1

Now return to the selection step, and repeat until all events are sold out, or no applicants left.


This does, of course, assume... that LOCOG had fixed quantities of tickets in each price bracket - but they would wouldn't they?
It's not just about maximising revenue is it?


Cc: @hwallop