Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Friday 25 July 2014

Tweaking the calendar months for alphabetic optimisation :)

Not long after posting this tweet (on 20 Dapril 2013) I adopted this strategy in earnest, for ordering some (not all) of my files - this lets me simultaneously order by name ( alphabetically) while ordering them by date, which makes me pretty happy. Though I do always giggle when I get to Haugust.

Visit the tweet on its page to see the replies that people sent me (the original problem I was having was within an Excel spreadsheet file, there's a fix for that but I also wanted something for Windows 'file manager' listings).

I can't believe it took me that long but here's how it's working for some ad hoc meetings notes for the Teaching London Computing project:









I've got the real date in there (which also opens the filename up to searching across folders) but the addition of the modified calendar month-name means they're in correct order. Pro-tip: use 01 etc for single digits otherwise I think 25 would come before 3 (depending on how your system's set up), but it's worth adopting this as much as possible as it seems to solve so many problems.

I wondered who else had come up with this idea and I can see that several fellow geniuses have also landed on this elegant and smug solution :)

A discussion on xkcd's 1179the comic "ISO 8601" (2 May 2013)
The cartoon itself is at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/iso_8601.png

The tweets below are from 26 March 2009.





Not sure Ed has quite grasped the alphabetic feature being suggested but I like his idea ;)


International Date Format (30 June 2008)
Why do we have to suffer American dates (12 August 2007)




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