Into google I typed “Cobra eclipse 30 tripod”.
The second hit is excite bookmarks, which is a page that lists - no not pages that have cobra tripods, but pages that may list pages that have cobra tripods.
From the excite bookmarks page, I can click on uk.shopping.com, which tells me “We found no matches for: tripods cobra. However, we did find 425 matches for: tripod”
So now we have two levels of indirection to click before being told “no”.
Portals sites are all well and good, but portals to portals to portals? A line must be drawn!
Next time you are designing a customer support service, please be aware of, and avoid, the Animal Vegetable Mineral Effect. I explain.
In the 1980s my school had a game for the BBC Micro called Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, which was a computer implementation of the game 20 questions. The player thinks of something and the computer asks questions, starting with ‘Is it Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?’, and refining its questions until guessing, e.g. ‘The object you are thinking of is: a CAT. Is this correct?’.
Support hotlines like those of your broadband, phone, gas, and electricity suppliers tend to have a script for their representatives to follow, and to a degree this is very useful. Maybe they have a pool of engineers able and qualified to answer technical questions and a pool of salespersons fully aware of the full range of products, and you don’t really want your sales-related call getting through to the tech guys.
However, if this is carried through too far, you get the AVM effect. The customer knows what he or she wants, but has the devil of a job navigating the script to be able to actually ask the question.
By way of analogy, let’s imagine our friendly corner shop works that way.
Customer: Good morning, I’d like some cheese.
Shopkeep: Thank you for visiting my store. You are a valued customer. Is it Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?
Customer: Um, cheese? Uh. It’s cheese. Uh, mineral.
After some further questioning (”is it yellow?”), the customer speaks to the Sulphur representative, and finally the Ochre representative, who candidly informs him Cheese is Animal in origin.
Customer: Hi, I’m back, turns out cheese is Animal! Can I speak to your cheese representative please!
Shopkeep: Thank you for visiting my store. You are a valued customer. Is it Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?
Customer: Animal. I just said Animal. I want some cheese.
Shopkeep: Does it go Miaow?
Customer: It’s cheese, no it does not miaow.
Shopkeep: Does it have a Tail?
Customer: No, it doesn’t have a Tail. I mean a tail.
Shopkeep: Does it have Two Legs Or Four?
Customer: It’s cheese! It doesn’t have any legs…
…
Customer: Uh, two.
Shopkeep: Does it have No Legs Or Two?
Customer: None! It has no legs.
Shopkeep: Is it Living?
Customer: No
Shopkeep: You have selected: a Dead Snake. I’m Sorry, We Do Not Stock Dead Snake. Please call again.
Back in the day, the Palm Pilot was a massive hit. The reasons?
1) It did what it said on the tin: Contacts, Memos, Todo list and Calendar
2) It did it very conveniently: Each application was accessed by a single button, which also powered on the device. Imagine that in a PC! There’s your PC, switched off, and you just press the “WORD” button on the keyboard and 0.5 seconds later you can begin typing where you left off.
3) It was easy to develop for: In the ’90s I decided I would like to be able to schedule tasks for “Monday”, and “Saturday” as well as “Today”,”Tomorrow” and “Choose Date…”. It took me about two evenings to set up the development environment, install the emulator, modify the ToDo application, build it, debug it on the emulator, and install it on the actual Palm. Bermilliant! This involved going to the site www.palm.com, clicking Developer, entering some registration details, and downloading everything they offered me: palm compiler, example application (which included the source code to some of the applications that shipped with the device!), and the Palm emulator (to run your programs on without knackering your Palm.
When you use an old Palm, for example the Vx, you are constantly delighted by how convenient and integrated it is. Almost every button and swipe of the pen does just what you expected it to, and it really helps you get on with the things you wanted to do, which in those days could include things that weren’t directly to do with computers. It was clear that the developers of the palm applications all had palms, and were running their lives using the prototypes.
Then the Palm caught a case of the Suits. Palms started coming in different shapes and colours. Extra buttons appeared, which worked properly in some applications and not in others. Applications showed up that didn’t sit well alongside PalmOS’s funny GUI model of having only one application on the screen at a time. Its grip on point (1) was wavering. Then came WiFi, Internet in everybody’s home, and ‘convergence’. (Convergence is the bastard offspring of the James Bond digital watch and the “MORE FEATURES!” fetish of American technology: It thinks that you won’t buy a radio unless it’s also a cassette player, picnic hamper and roller skate) The Palm, rather than a compact, re-writable alternative to carrying a file-o-fax and an alarm clock around with you, now had to become a phone, a web-browser, an email terminal, a GPS. All those features would be nice, but they outgrew the PalmOS and that, combined with apparently hasty design, resulted in kludgy implementations that usually worked but never felt right. To this day, the WiFi settings on my Palm and I maintain a respectful distance. I don’t change the settings (or try to use the memory card slot), and it continues to recognize my home network. To cut a very long paragraph slightly less long, (1) went out the window, as the Palm was no longer sure what it was supposed to do, and (2) went with it, as it wasn’t sure how to do it.
Still, at least we can hack about our own code and customize our own personal palm.
Tonight I went to www.palmos.com, where I squinted at the page until I found Developer way down at the bottom in minuscule letters, clicked and got asked to log in or register. After failing to log in using the details I have on file, I registered. I had to tell it what sort of company I was, repeat my email address, tell them my country and my market sector and my role in the company. Then I was given a glitzy page which included the following:
To develop for Palm products on the Palm OS platform, complete the following steps:
1) Join the ACCESS Developer Program
…
So… wait, I joined the PalmOS Developer Network — twice — and I’m not able to download the palm emulator unless I sign up? When I get there, they’ve renamed PalmOS (Palm Operating System) to Garnet.
There goes (3).
I’m scared to play any more official levels, in case it drives my ranking down!
Yesterday I used the Cinquecento to take a kingsized mattress to the tip. [/edit: I held on to this mattress for months in the belief it would save money when I wanted to furnish the spare room. I finally decided it was not worth waiting for a suitable sized bed, and threw it out. Today a kingsize bed came up on freecycle. Ho hum]This mattress was too big for any room in the house, requiring storage on the stairs. Having recently passed my futon along the Freecycle food chain, I wrassled the mattress to the lounge floor like a rodeo calf and roped it good. I bunged it in the back of the Cinq and took it to the tip.
A cinquecento, yesterday
When I finally do buy a real car, I will miss the little punk.
Hurrah, if I search for Live Free Die Hard Stupid I get reviews more consistent with my opinion.
One forum poster asked whether the vehicles used in the chase were supposed to be a reference to Transformers - he could have a point! That may make the film worth watching twice.
Rachael and I went on our first cinema date last night, to see Die Hard 4.0, which was completely rubbish and very enjoyable at the same time.
I have some thoughts for die hard 5, I was thinking that maybe if there was a girl who was a computer hacker by day and stripper by night, but really she’s a family type of girl, she could be hacking into everybody’s chip-n-pin cards with her iPod whilst riding semi-naked on a nuclear missile, that is on fire, heading straight towards you know them big space-shuttle transporter rigs, being driven by a pride of lions, that are also on fire, and John McClane is right there at the point where the nuke hits the shuttle transporter, right, only his gun and badge have been personally taken off him by the President of the United States on account of someone who speaks a European Language having stolen his identity. So John McClane is there, right, his left leg is completely off, he’s treading water in liquid nitrogen that has piranhas in it, and it’s raining sulphuric acid (get an Eco angle on the story, too!) and just before the impact right, he beats up the lions with the soggy end of his leg, which is on fire, and uses the boss lion’s own teeth to chew through its own neck, then at the last minute manages to swerve the shuttle transporter out of the way and the nuke harmlessly zooms past and wipes out the Pentagon instead, which it turns out was at the bottom of the WHOLE THING.
Anyway. What made me feel patriotic was the wonderful staff at the cinema who were as embarrassed by the huge portions of soft drinks as we were bemused, and who were impressively down-to-earth regarding the price and the quality of the “food” on offer in the foyer. Despite having parked by a Frankie and Benny’s American Style Diner, in the middle of a horrid American-style strip mall, and had a thoroughly American-style dousing in crass commerce as we entered the cinema, these stalwarts of light-hearted British sardonic sincerity reminded us we were still in a land of sanity and of soul… i.e. Britain.
Duran Duran used to have some good ideas but, 12 year old metalhead that I was, I dismissed them on account of the fact they rapidly went from intense, tone-deaf arty posers to dense, tone-deaf commerce-friendly posers.
They’ve been good since then, I’m sure of it.
They were on the telly today as part of the get-wembley-on-the-telly-again-this-time-for-uh-global-warming-yes-that’s-it.
They were rubbish.
Girls On Film has always been an innocuous enough funky dance track, though its popularity may well have more to do with the accompanying not-so-soft porn video that was banned on the telly, but played in the nightclubs. It starts with a drum-machine latin pattern that is a kind of broken cha-cha-cha: it goes 1,2,cha-cha-cha, 1,2, cha-cha-cha. (Of course I don’t need to tell you that a real cha-cha-cha goes 1,2,3,cha-cha-cha,2,3,cha-cha-cha).
Anyhow, they did a spirited, if somewhat creakily zimmer-frametastic rendition of GoF until they got to the fancy bit in the middle. Back in the 80s this was an explosion of the then very fashionable rototoms that went on for several bars. Today it was a slightly confused snare solo that tripped over, dropped two beats, picked up three, and exited with Roger Taylor playing a beat ahead of the rest of the band and, crucially, of the fixed electronic percussion loop.
After the rest of the band realised he was not performing an exciting Jazz improv live in front of the world’s telly watchers, and nor was he going to come round to everyone else’s idea of where the beat lay, the rest of the band moved a beat up and played in sync. The result was a peculiar inversion of the Girls On Film we all know.
On the bright side, with the drum machine a beat later in the bar, at least they were doing an authentic cha-cha-cha for the rest of the song…
I’m reading “Diamonds Are Forever” by that fascinating, flawed, contemptible and vulnerable Ian Fleming, in which a fascinating, flawed, contemptible and vulnerable James Bond goes to the horse racing at Saratoga Springs. The book’s from 1960 and it shows.
Bond had a natural affection for coloured people, but he reflected how lucky England was compared with America where you had to live with the colour problem from your schooldays up. He smiled as he remembered something Felix Leiter had said to him on their last assignment together in America. Bond had referred to Mr. Big, the famous Harlem criminal, as “that damned nigger.” Leiter had picked him up. “Careful now, James,” he had said. “People are so damn sensitive about colour around here that you can’t even ask a barman for a jigger of rum. You have to ask for a jegro.”
The memory of Leiter’s wisecrack cheered Bond up.
I read this passage to Rachael, who was amazed that this hadn’t been edited out and sanitized. But we discussed it and we decided we were glad it hadn’t, as it’s important to have a record of how far we’ve come. She expressed regret at the PCifying of children’s literature (her favourite Faraway Tree books now star Rick and Frannie, not Dick and Fanny). I said yes, it’s sad, because it’s akin to Orwell’s nuspeak and it stops you having a healthy debate about racial prejudice and harmony. Like ‘dusky gypsies’ from the Famous Five, and - was it in the Secret Seven? - the very early edition that had a character called Auntie Cunt.
To be fair, it was early in the morning, but nonetheless, I did expect her to catch me on that one.
I’m not colourblind. I can wire a plug, even if it uses old colour schemes. I can read a resistor value, though sometimes red and orange bands are inscrutably similar.
However, if colour were English I wub rithg liyk disth. I can’t for the life of me picture a colour scheme and then carry it through to execution. I can hold up paint swatches and not manage to tell one from the other unless they are adjacent, then not be able to tell that one goes or does not go with another.
This means I probably shouldn’t go with the painting cars on the walls idea just yet.
/edit: I blame the Sinclair Spectrum. Check out these game loading screens: (mouseover to see them in their unfettered glory)
and this game in progress:
