I read this wrongly at first and thought the writer had blown $4,000,000 on a single customer complaint. This somehow made me quite happy and I was ready to splurge some words on a well upholstered article about how a single crappy customer can bring down your whole company and why you should really leave people to their own devices. Then I realised I'd got the wrong end of the stick, which is probably why my customer service doesn't tend to make any money for anyone.

I found this rather good post on the Buffer blog today - I definately notice that a bit of exercise makes me happier and the lack of it makes me quite arsey.

Nice Legs is a piece I like a lot - it's fast moving, funny and slightly icky. However, it also serves as a lesson in the perils of topical writing. When I first wrote it the Olympics were in full swing and those nightmarish mascots were everywhere. Now a few months have passed and I can hardly remember what they looked like. By this time next year we'll have forgotten all about them. Except that they were slightly icky.

But it's not all people in Phoenix bedrooms talking about zombie elves - some of those podcasts are quite professional. Some of them actually are professional, like this one, the BBC Drama Of The Week.

I've added the first two free downloads to the Stories area of the site. They are a jaunty 500 word flash called Find The Key and my attempt at something in the Sherlock Holmes universe - Sherlock Holmes-Adler. 

So I cycle to work. I'm one of those cyclists who always stop at the lights, always stay on the road (never of the pavement), wears a helmet, uses lights even when it's not really dark and wears a vile fluro jacket. In short, I'm a very sensible sort of cyclist. Which is why, against all apparent logic, I often attempt to make hand signals while turning left and right. It just feels like one of those things that a sensible cyclist would do - like checking your brakes before setting off (which I have definitely done once I'm sure).

In computer science (was there ever a more scintillating opening gambit than those three deathless words?) students learn about Bayes Theorem. I'm pretty sure I did. Although if I'm honest, all I can remember about it were the pictures.  They showed a box on the left hand side with a bunch of lines coming out of it. These lines extended from left to right (or occasionally from top to bottom) and each line ran into another box, or possibly a circle, from which emerged still more lines which in turn fed into more boxes and more circles.  Pretty soon the lines and boxes would take up the whole of the page until it looks like a giant, hairy shuttlecock. All the boxes and circles are options and the lines leading into and out of them are paths through them. Each diagram represents all* of the possible outcomes stemming from a single decision, and then all of the possible decisions that could lead to and the possible outcomes of those and so on.