John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Humberside police chief: 24 June 2004: The Humberside police chief should go. This isn't the result of a wrong decision made in a moment of tension. The erroneous storage and deletion of data was something that had clearly been going on for years and he is ultimately responsible. His behaviour with the media has been poor, leading to a bad impression of the force. Blunket has been elected to represent the people. Westwood should certainly leave and the longer he stays, the more embarrassing he becomes.
Orwellian news: 24 June 2004: In this Big Brother story about the impending toilet roll crisis, Victor is quoted as saying "People are going to be wiping their hands with their arses,". The story goes on "But is that what he meant?"; In fact, when you see the video, that's not what Victor says. He gets it the right way around.; Is this deliberate news manipulation by Big Brother, or an innocent mistake? Don't believe what you read. Perhaps Big Brother is intending to be more Orwellian than we imagined. previous
Land of the free citizens banned from visiting Cuba: 24 June 2004: This news happened while I was away in Spain and I'm still occasionally picking up notes to myself to blog about them. So this ironic story in which freedom loving Americans are banned from visiting Cuba popped up a few months ago and I thought it worthy of mention.
Blood cholesterol: 23 June 2004: I just had the results back from a blood cholesterol test and it's groovy at 4.5. Under 5 is good according to NHS Direct so I'm afraid I'll be around a little while longer yet.
Chuffed runner: 23 June 2004: I managed something today which I've been working towards for a while .. I jogged continuously to the sea life centre and halfway back .. I had to walk up the hill. Until now I'd been jogging some lamp-posts and walking some, gradually decreasing the walking proportion. Today was the full-jog day, and I didn't disgrace myself so I'm proper chuffed. Knackered, but chuffed.
Ox: 23 June 2004: Apparently, I'm an Ox which, besides the negative parts, seems pretty accurate.
Tap & Spile: 22 June 2004: Again, while I'm on a roll, we're boycotting the Tap & Spile pub in Falsgrave. I've a very good friend who was boycotting it too but I forget his reasons. But anyway, we went for Sunday lunch a weekend or two ago. It was raining hard, but we try to get there early to get a seat. A couple of friends arrived at about twenty to twelve, walked in and were turfed out to stand in the rain until twelve because it wasn't open yet.; Once we got inside, Lisa, who used to be on our course and is currently bar staff there while she's waiting for her job to become available, came over to apologise that the food wasn't available for two weeks because the chef was away.; While we waited a few minutes for others to arrive and decided what to do, my partner heard the (we think) owner come to the bar and say something along the lines of "well, they could buy a bloody drink while they're waiting". Maybe it's a little thing, but to mess up our arrangements, to leave us out in the rain, and then to be sulky about us not buying a drink was too much for us. So we left, and we don't intend to go back.
Emma: 22 June 2004: While I'm on a roll I may as well say I'm gutted by the loss of Emma from the house. I can't think of anyone else I want to win, and I've lost interest. previous
Admission: 22 June 2004: I've an admission to make. I once made a system that was lacking in usability. I'm sorry, but it's true. It was two years ago. It's an interesting example of the power of usability though, so I'll tell you about it.; The Tin Shop has a maintenance screen that allows them to maintain all the codes you can see after the postage and packing text and before the buttons here. The manufacturer's maintenance screen required a manufacturer's id code, and the manufacturer's name. Here was my first mistake .. I thought it would be apparent that any list, for instance the drop-down chooser on their item data entry screen, would be sorted by manufacturer's id, so it would make sense, for instance, for Spiller's Homepride to be coded either Spillers or Homepride. So I neglected to explain this to the client who coded this one Fred (the character from the Homepride ads). Many others went the same way. Unexpected, but people don't think like computer people. The result was when Tin Shop was entering a new item for sale, the list of manufacturers looked unsorted, and they had to read through the whole list to find what they wanted. As a result, they mostly couldn't be bothered with that, they couldn't see the benefit of coding anyway, and most of the text descriptions were pre-existing and contained the manufacturer's names, so they began to default to the manufacturer "see description". Now, unseen by me, the majority are coded this way.; The Tin Shop did try to put things right at first. Because I'd written the maintenance screen to a tight deadline and budget, I'd said they couldn't delete a manufacturer's code that was in use. My error message listed the products using the code, so to change a code meant adding a new one, trying to delete the old and writing down all the items that used the code, changing all those items to use the new code, then deleting the old code. Understandably The Tin Shop didn't want to spend time doing that.; Gradually, then, the system for coding the manufacturer of a tin broke down. It broke down as a result of usability issues. It's an example of the power of usability.; Now, we've had the bright idea of adding to the bottom of a tin description something along the lines of "Click to see more Cadburys products". This isn't just a great idea because Cadbury's collectors who find one Cadbury's product can find all the others on the database, it also means the search engines can find a dedicated Cadbury's page which might rank highly for the keyword "Cadbury's". So manufacturer coding is back on the agenda, and I'm re-writing the maintenance pages to provide easy ways to maintain the manufacturer codes and a new brand coding too.
Europe: 22 June 2004: Can I just say, before this whole Europe debate kicks off, that I am pro Europe? Sadly my main reason is a negative one, but it's the true reason. I think Europe is equivalent in size to the US and could offer a counterpoint to their currently pretty-much unopposed power. Not that I'm proposing we go to war with the US or anything, obviously. Just, that two heads are better than one, and Europe could be that second head.; In terms of lifestyle, my gut feeling is that the Europeans have got it more right than the Americans. So for us, I'd prefer us to be more European than American.; I acknowledge that I say those things from within a country that's fairly eurosceptic, so in taking that view I'm assuming that the general population won't allow all the major things to be ceded to Brussels, eg. tax and economic policy, at least not yet. Maybe if I thought that was imminent I might think differently.
Quiet: 22 June 2004: Things have been quiet on the blogging front I'm afraid, and they'll get even quieter. There's lots going on so I'm pretty much focussed on those things (one of which is my increasing involvement in drumming for my next door neighbours band), and I needed to take a break from my computer over the weekend. I did do some DIY and successfully hung a door .. well, not only that, I successfully hung a door in a doorframe I made in a hole in the wall I created .. I'm still riding the wave of euphoria from that.
What's that in today's money: 18 June 2004: My first proper job was for International Press Marketing Group (now defunct) in 1981 or thereabouts, for £3,750 pa. I'd dropped out of my first university course after my second year, I studied Computer Science at Leeds University. Anyway, to compare with the students I just studied with, I was wondering what that is worth today. Using Economic History Services it turns out to be £8,835. Not a huge salary :-) No wonder it took me forever to pay off my student debt. It was frequently reviewed though so it rose nicely.
Big Brother: 17 June 2004: You'd have thought by now they'd have gotten a website that would handle surges in interest, such as that caused by last night's re-entry of the bedsit-two. Alas, no, it was failing to deliver stories this morning, and gave a few 'empty document' errors, and now (14:28) it's completely offline. previous
Sitka, Alaska: 17 June 2004: Did you know that Scarborough is at (from astro.com) 54n17, 0w24, England, whereas Sitka Alaska is at 57n03, 135w20, which makes Sitka more north, possibly 191 miles more north according to fcc.gov (probably the wrong tool). Didn't you say you always wanted to know that? Damn, musta been someone else.
Eels graphic design: 17 June 2004: Eels' products display some nice graphic design.
Friends: 15 June 2004: A friend contacted me yesterday by email after searching for his own name in a search engine, and finding an entry in my blog from four months ago in which I mention him. I'm a little overawed to be honest. I've not spoken to him in almost twenty years. So I'm just thrilled that my blog, and the Internet, made that possible.; Of course, I'm also glad I've not made too many enemies in my time.; I'd best mention that I'm still curious to know what happened to Neville Tooby. C'mon, there can't be that many Neville Tooby's in the world.
Greens in the European election: 14 June 2004: If I'm reading this right, the UK greens got 5 seats in the European elections. Ignoring population differences, the Germans and the French are the only ones with more greens, and Spain has an equal number. Although green politics has always seemed to play well in German, it's nice to see we're up there with the rest.; I don't reckon much to the usability of that table. How do the headers relate to our political parties? Oh, I see .. but that means our 5 green seats include any from Plaid Cymru and SNP, so actually, it's just two green seats. Damn. OK, so now we're far behind France with 6 green seats, and the Spanish vote's split like ours. So there you go. My confusion testament to the poor usability of the way the data's been presented.
Big Brother: 14 June 2004: I just had a quite look through the evictions in the previous series', and looking at the first three housemates evicted, the proportion of males to females is three males to nine females. That backs up what I've been thinking, that the guys support each other, while the girls actually don't. So girls vote for both, while guys at first vote for girls, which means girls go up for eviction, and the public vote them out. I cite that as evidence that there is a bias against women in society.; One of my first jobs was driving car spares for Sandicliffe Motor Group. The new supervisor of us four drivers had the explicit aim of replacing the women drivers, one of whom had been there for many years, with men. I was his first replacement, and he succeeded over the next few months. previous
Big Brother: 14 June 2004: I'm definitely taking this too seriously (and of course, everything I say is very much affected by the editorial control BB has over what is shown), but here goes. Jason, the blond muscular guy, and Vanessa have been getting closer, with Jason very much acting as the persuader. Strangely, I felt like he'd crossed a boundary when he tried to persuade Vanessa to show him her breasts in the bathroom one night .. it was almost like he wouldn't take no for an answer, not good. Then I realised that three other girls had set upon him not five minutes earlier and done their very best to remove his pants, and I hadn't raised an issue there.; Anyway, a story on the website suggests that Jason now wants to cool off his relationship with Vanessa. This fired off a whole series of thoughts on Jason that went something like this. He said he'd slept with over 250 women, and he's bi. I think Jason has a huge need for approval. But once he has approval, he's done, finished. Jason drove the Vanessa thing. I think he chose Vanessa because she was the most difficult housemate to get close to. Having managed to get cuddles and kisses from her, having gotten her to open up to him, to let him in, he's achieved his goal, he has her approval. Since hers was the most difficult to get, he's achieved the highest approval available in the house. Now, he's done. Leaving Vanessa hanging. It feels like that's why he slept with 250 women, and why he clearly spends so much time building up his body, shaving his chest, and planning to get a small bump on his nose removed. The guy needs help. previous
What cats do: 5: 14 June 2004: While you're showering and your clothes are on the bathroom floor (sorry, no, not hung up neatly), they get a mouthfull of food, bring it to your clothes and deposit it there so as to eat more comfortably. previous
Green: 13 June 2004: I was in a room with two friends the other day and it turned out all three of us had voted green in the European election. Wow. And none of us were obvious green voters. According to the website, in local elections the greens took 10% of the vote .. that's significantly more than I thought they were getting.; Oh, and I found, eventually, the book I mentioned before and read ages ago about how media bias happens even without any active pressure from politicians or media owners. It's "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky. This is an amendment, I thought before it was by the awesome, beautiful and essential George Monbiot, but it isn't, he's got something else out atm.
eBay wedding gown: 12 June 2004: I've talked before about differences between American and British humour, but here's something that makes me think I might be wrong. A guy selling his ex wife's wedding dress, while looking like a hard-nosed biker, ends up coming across intelligent, restrained, with soul, and enormously funny. Yay to that (and thanks to Nathan for the link).
Backlash: 12 June 2004: I'm having a bit of a backlash against Lost in Translation now. Maybe it's a racist film. Bill Murray is unimpressed by Japan, reminded constantly of his family back home, while Japanese people milled all around doing crazy looking things .. not one of them showing any sense of family .. family life being the bedrock of American society (or am I wrong?). He clearly doesn't understand Japan, makes no attempt to learn the language or culture, and the humour of the film derives from his disparaging attitude to everything he sees. The only person he connects with is another American. I guess the film wouldn't be anything without all of that, but it does remind me of the way American films have depicted the British at times, as completely weird, unrecognisable caricatures. So while Tokyo is shown beautifully, I'm sure I don't trust the depiction of Japanese culture. And in that, the film represents the American view of the rest of the world. From on high, looking down. Even on Japan. So my question is, does it, for the majority of viewers, show Japanese people in a good light, or does it just take the piss? Is it, in fact, the equivalent of an artful paddy joke?
Visio / Inkscape: 12 June 2004: I've been using the same version of Visio .. sub version 1.0 .. for absolutely years, hang on, it's copyright 1991 - 93, LOL, since it fell off the front of a magazine. At uni, it was very useful because there wasn't anything better installed for drawing system diagrams, and because the whole package fitted on a single floppy, I could run it without falling foul of the rules about installing software.; However, I'm doing a lot of learning about the Rational Unified Process atm, and the time came to update my Visio. A quick look around, and it turns out that Visio is now a Microsoft product, integrated into Office, and Visio 2003 requires Windows 2000 or above. I use Windows 98, so that's kinda that. I had a quick look for earlier versions on eBay but lost the will.; Then I found Inkscape. Free of charge, chocabloc with standards, open source, multiplatform, and it works nicely (it crashes occasionally, but besides that). So, I'm converted. I just love it when a plan comes together.
Laughing too much: 12 June 2004: A funny thing keeps happening to be today. I keep laughing. Since watching Lost in Translation, I keep remembering scenes from it and just laughing. I remember laughing in the cinema, but afterwards it seems even funnier.; I tried to tell my partner about the Fed-Exed carpet squares and "lip my stockings" and it took about 15 minutes because I simply couldn't contain myself. I was uncontrollably laughing until she couldn't help but laugh too. It took all my control to reach the word "Fed-Exed". Once I'd got past that I could begin to gather some control.
Insulting software: 12 June 2004: We re-mortgaged the other day, and the person who walked us through the process had worked for twenty years for the building society branch and was now the manager. She was witty, sharp, engaging, friendly, helpful .. everything you could wish for, and the products she sold were equally friendly .. they were flexible, we can take payment holidays, pay more up front, we're not tied to regular meetings, and so on.; When it came to working through the software she'd been given to raise our quote with, things got a little out of hand. Remember, this is someone who does this every day and is super-experienced. The software, simply, was complicated, hard to use, and slow. At one point it refused to give up the correct figures until she realised that a previous field which contained a currency value had to also contain the £ sign. Bearing in mind that they don't offer any products in any other currency, that's usability madness.; Then there was the option we needed to click that looked available but it wouldn't acknowledge our click. We had to work out that it wouldn't let us click it because there wasn't enough of this value to cover that requirement .. there was no error message, no helper, nothing.; Somewhere along the route, we took the remortgage road and ended up after twenty minutes or so of data entry, with a new mortgage to the same value of the old. We wanted more, to pay for improvements. So we had to go back. We ended up deleting whole swathes of what we'd entered in order to put it right, and the 'missed turning' ended up being a single radio button among many.; Besides this being difficult to use software and a good illustration of how important usability is .. this couldn't have been tested with users .. it's more than that. It's disrespectful. It turned this perfect employee into an incompetent fool. And it did that in front of a customer. Software should be empowering, an invisible helper, it should have let her fly, not make a fool of her. It should have been a pleasure for her to use, something that, when she came into work she thought "thank goodness for the new software", not something that day in, day out ridiculed her, made it more complex, too control away.; Just let me at that development team!
I just thought of another hero: 12 June 2004: Previously I tried to think of a hero I'd happily look up to, and could only think of one. I just thought of another. Sharon Osbourne. It seems to be only because of her that there's an Osbourne family, forged from such unpromising material.
Lost: 11 June 2004: I went to see Lost in Translation this evening, what a beautiful film. When I came out, in front of me was a hugely fat woman wearing tiny stiletto boots, it reminded me of the type of women in Belleville Rendez-vous and I thought of the immense force that must be at the stiletto point. As I walked back through town I noticed a man in a wheelchair overtaking me. It was a manual wheelchair, but because of the slope of the street at that point, he moved quickly and gracefully ahead of me, right up close to a guy tunelessly playing a plastic organ in the doorway of Clinton Cards.; I heard him say "Are you ready for this mate", and I assume he gave him some money. Then the wheelchair guy caught up with me as we walked. "I was enjoying your freedom" I said. "I can get further in this than I can walking". We talked about the evening which was beautiful, clear, pleasant. "Muscular dystrophy, that's what I've got", he said. Then "my girlfriend's in hospital, she miscarried three days ago, so I'm off to buy beer". The cynic in me thought he was trying to get me to buy them for him.
Look before you vote: 9 June 2004: On this site, you can check out your local MP's record.
Monkton: 9 June 2004: I really like this Edward Monkton stuff (thanks to John Eckersley for that).
Postal voting: 8 June 2004: How weird. I've just voted in the European Parliamentary Election. I actually read all the pamphlets that came through the door, and they were almost universally poorly produced rubbish.; But what really threw me was the instructions about how to vote. Ours is the first all postal vote in the UK, until now we all visited a polling station. We are given a list of candidates, and a space next to each. The instructions say "mark your vote clearly and in secret". It doesn't say what I think you should do, which is put a cross next to the candidate you want to win, and no other mark. It does give a helpline number, but surely it should have said that. Putting a cross is counterintuitive. A cross is the negative where a tick is the positive. Young people voting for the first time will have come through school where ticks are good and crosses are bad. I'd have thought their first instinct would at least have been to tick their chosen candidate, if not to also cross all the rest. I think that would be a spoiled paper and be discarded. I can think of many other ways people could do it wrong. They might push their pen through to create a hole (based on the idea of machine readability, punched card, and maybe fed by ideas from the whole hanging chad story), or even cut out the strip representing their candidate and discard the rest. From a usability point of view, then, not to the standard I've been trained to apply to websites (which are surely of less importance).; Overall, the polling station approach seems less hassle. In this postal vote it's been quite a lot of fuss and, strangely, stress to handle the two envelopes and the proof of identity, and it doesn't save anyone the trouble of leaving the house (if they are disabled for instance), because you still have to go out and post your vote. Our polling station is nearer than our nearest postbox. So I suspect many people will not bother, and the hoped-for rise in the percentage of people who vote won't materialise.
Abe books: 7 June 2004: When Amazon failed, and not just with their current stock but their secondary option of placing a request with all their resellers, Abe books succeeded in finding graphic design book Sagmeister: Made You Look - Another Self-indulgent Monograph which is presumably out of print now, hence so difficult to find. I'm so excited :-)
No one race: 5 June 2004: I wonder why the news today chose to highlight Roosevelt saying sixty years ago ".. the United Nations are determined that in the future no one city and no one race will be able to control the whole of the world".
Damn that kitty: 3 June 2004: Damn. There I was starting to like Kitten and defend her. Big Brother clearly has an armoury of psychologists which they've deployed to stop her wrecking the show. If she doesn't walk now, she'll seem selfish. Am I taking this too seriously? LOL. Previous
More sacred geometry: 2 June 2004: According to the book (follow the 'previous' links), everything we see, everything in the universe, is a result of waves, rhythm, pattern. Like wave interference patterns. The divine created it all by uttering "Om".; Now that's a God you can respect. I mean, what happened as a result of the rest of the sentence? There's none of this pansy stuff about not coveting another mans ox. Joking aside, that really gives a sense of the infinite doesn't it? I love it :-) previous
Omicron: 1 June 2004: I was wondering why I chose Omicron as the female alternative to Big Brother's Victor's alpha-male. The symbol for Omicron is O, a circle. Wholeness, togetherness. An embrace. It occurred to me that it symbolised the female means of getting things done through networking and micro-actions, and that that covers everything that needs doing. The male way, set a huge goal and then everyone works towards it, leaves huge gaps as everyone looks towards the goal and drops what they're doing. Yes, it allows us to put flags on the moon and in Baghdad, but everything else gets dropped in the meantime. I prefer the organic Omicron approach, I like the things that work to stay working. I don't see much point in making something new happen if, in the process, something else that works will fall apart.
Friends: 1 June 2004: I confess. We watched the last episode of Friends. More to make sure they actually went, I think. Channel 4 had played Friends more or less continuously since lunchtime on the previous day so it was hard to avoid. I thought Channel 4 was supposed to bring new creativity to television. I don't see how playing Friends solidly from noon till midnight on two days running fulfils that promise. Or is that long gone and forgotten about?; I read in an English newspaper that Friends is really funny. I don't think it is .. it's funny to Americans I'll bet, but the Americans and the English have very different senses of humour. For me, Friends is all about being cool and smart. Brits don't do that. Friends is something to entertain people who grew up watching the Fonz.
Allotment stories: 1 June 2004: So there we were, the sun on our backs, working in the allotment idyll. The seagull couple in the chimneypots (because we're on a hill, we can sit on the downhill houses' roofs) had just, before our eyes, hatched their chicks, and the guy in the next allotment started to tell us about the house next door to where we live.; He was staying there, the woman who owned it used to take in holidaymakers, the day they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.; Jeez. What a contrast.
Big Brother: 1 June 2004: Are you watching Big Brother? We were always big fans but I think everyone's agreed that last year's was boring.; So this year, they seem to have done their level best to choose extreme personalities that are guaranteed not to get on. Guess what? They're getting on. It's early days yet, but so far the group has gelled really well.; And Kitten. It'll be sad to see her go in the first nominations, which is almost inevitable. At first she was plain annoying, but now we know a little more about her background (why she is the way she is), I warmed to her. And WOW, she's got the Big Sista thing going (Big Sista is the voice of the people, the housemates, and she's a lot friendlier than Big Brother) and it appears like all the housemates have bought into it. Fantastic.; The now inevitable will happen again I guess, the most irritating housemates will be voted off first, leaving a bland core. Oh, and top of the list is usually irritating females .. the males tend not to vote for each other until they can't get away with voting women off the set any more. Innate misogyny revealed I'd say.; For the record, we think Emma will win. If not her, then Shell.; It appears that the first evictee gets to stick around in the background and make life hell for those who voted them off. Kitten won't do that I don't imagine, but it would be great to see her omicron-female Victor, a man more self obsessed than any of the prima-donnas (and there are plenty of those), and with quotes to make even Daily Mail readers cringe "I have a very large penis", "men don't mind lesbians if they're attractive", and his Swiss Toni, done in all seriousness, "I'm going to do this like making love to a woman, warm her up, get the mood going, and then go for full penetration". Victor also talked about being nice, getting people's trust, then 'alpha-male-ing them to death', hence the omicron-female reference.; Which reminds me of Top Gear again, still the most entertaining program on television, and irrepressibly male, but fun male .. I can't believe they tried to outmanoeuvre an Apache helicopter with one of their cars, talk about boys and their toys :-). Clarkson said of one car "Alpha males drive BMWs. Nice people, drive the ####".; While I'm at it, who can forget "Only two types of people drive Range Rovers. Murderers, who need it to get deep into the woods, and Wendy Craig". Inspired and wonderful.