Use Tables!

Oh no! I was tagged by Axel Hecht. And I don’t even understand his reason for tagging me (id est, he gave a reason and I don’t understand it). By the laws of the internet (and to make myself and my relationships to others “less one-dimensional“) I had better comply, however.

So, the rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven facts:

1. I am a Dutch national, currently doing my MSc Advanced Computer Science in Britain, and taking intermediate-level French lessons on the side. The accent of (some of) my classmates drives me insane.
2. I got into Mozilla (and eventually its development) by writing scripts in VBScript for a fansite of an MMORPG (to calculate experience gained from using certain skills), and having the website owner tell me that the result “didn’t work in Mozilla”. Very badly written JavaScript versions were published later, and I vividly remember cursing the various differences I ran into when converting my code. Everything seemed much harder in JS. I’m afraid the damning evidence of all this is now lost, as the website was taken down some time ago.
3. I once taught first-year students in highschool (when I was a fourth-year, out of 6 years) how to make websites with Frontpage. I am hopeful none ever got published somewhere remotely important. I repented before the end of highschool.
4. I had the dubious honour of working for McDonalds once, for 6 months on a temporary contract. I declined staying afterward.
5. The pronunciation of my first name (and the difficulties people have with it) is a subject of hilarity among some of my international friends that I have by now resigned to. For those who don’t know how to deal with it still, I wrote about it some time ago. For something that even people who read that post might not know, it is short for “Gijsbert” which is equivalent to the name “Gilbert” in German, English, and French. Except nobody there actually calls their kids Gilbert.
6. I have 5th cousins who live in Alberta, Canada, who randomly found me through Facebook.
7. I was robbed in my own home (student flat) at knifepoint about 2.5 years ago. Fortunately, nobody got hurt. I still have the IRC log from that day and at the time its timestamps helped me, bizarrely enough, to identify precisely how long the robbery took to the police.

Seven people who shall also have to go through this harrowing experience:

1. Nadya Peek, because she always has something to say but never blogs.
2. Aaron Leventhal, who tends to have interesting stories about his history, and certainly has more of that than me.
3. Ben Millard, who doesn’t seem to have been tagged yet.
4. Okke Formsma, who is in the states at the moment and would presumably love to share childhood memories while far away.
5. “Schrati”, because she keeps blogging in different languages and I really wonder in which she would write this.
6. Daniel Glazman, because so much of his life is public knowledge by now that I wonder what we do not yet know.
7. Shawn Wilsher, because if I remember correctly he got into the Mozilla Project after me, is now definitely in much deeper than me, and still did not respond to the previous person who tagged him.

And finally, if you were wondering, the title of this post means “Seven freaky things”, not “Seven without linge cases” as Google would like you to believe.

While I was in Brussels for the European Meeting of Taizé, I was co-responsible for the rubbish collection during meals (with 25,000 people eating in big exposition halls, you need people to take care of the trash they create, obviously).

We would separate bottles from all other rubbish, so we could recycle the empty bottles separately. So, we needed some way to label rubbish containers which were for bottles, and containers which were for other rubbish. While worrying about this, I was told that the company providing the containers had already “taken care” of labelling the containers so that some would be used for bottles and some for other rubbish. Curious as to what they had done, I went to look.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures, but basically what they had done was taking 2 A4 papers for each container, printed “PET” on them as big as possible, and stuck them on either side of the container with one piece of doublesided tape.

There are several things wrong with this. First, and most importantly, the target audience (young people from all over Europe and in some cases the rest of the world) will largely have no idea what “PET” even means. In fact, I would guess that some part of the people reading this blog don’t. In the Netherlands and Belgium, it is a fairly common abbreviation used to indicate plastic (even if it’s not strictly speaking PET). 9,000 of the 25,000 people were Polish young people. Some of them don’t speak English very well. Even those who did would most likely have been baffled by the signs.

The other mistakes are smaller: the papers had been attached in such a way that some would be upside down on the other side if the container was opened, and in other cases they were only attached on one side, meaning people approaching from the other would have no idea they couldn’t put their rubbish there.

Finally, using one bit of double-sided tape to attach a bit of A4 paper when there are 25,000 young people coming is naive at best. The papers that we did not take off the containers ourselves had, by the end of the meeting, been taken by the young people, or fallen off.

Instead, our team improvised a different solution. We stuck signs with a big image of a bottle, and the phrase “Bottles only” in several languages on the containers, using large quantities of duct tape. We taped shut the bigger openings of the containers which had two, so only the small opening remained, through which people would have more trouble putting their normal rubbish. And finally, we taped actual empty bottles to the top and sides of the containers.

I guess the lesson I learned from all this is that it is surprisingly easy to make stupid mistakes when you don’t realize who will be using your “product”. For the Belgian rubbish collection company, “PET” was probably clear enough in the case of big expositions with reasonably well-educated Belgian people manning stands from where the rubbish would come… For large crowds of young people from diverse backgrounds, clearly it was not.

Update: Patricia Clausnitzer translated this article to Belorussian.

Dear Lazyweb,

For Chrome List, every now and again people report issues they are having on its Google Code website, using the “Issues List”. This is very useful, and I would like this to continue. However, for some reason, I don’t get email for these issues that people report. I need to manually check every now and then, then star new issues so I get email for them.

Can I change this? I’ve googled around, I’ve gone through all the options in “Administer” three times, but I can’t find it. I would really like to have those emails, though, because right now sometimes I don’t check that list for a few days/weeks/months, and people’s problems don’t get solved…

Thanks!