I got Dawn of the Dumb, Charlie Brooker’s collection of Guardian columns for Christmas, and I’ve been chuckling my way through it since the big day. This despite the fact that I’m clearly the sort of person Mr Brooker would cheerfully toss under a speeding car - I’m middle class, I sometimes buy organic food, I have not one but three children - called Sebastian, Tiger-Lily and Polenta. I even quite like Jamie Oliver, for chrissakes. But I chuckle on, even snickering at columns like ‘Kids are such c*nts’ and ‘Kids and how to murder the c*nting selfish b*st*rds’. Okay, I may have made those titles up, but you get the idea. He is terribly funny, filthy rude and easily the best TV critic since Clive James made The Observer worth reading thirty years ago.
Tonight I finished reading the boys another chapter of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and settled down to finish reading myself another Charlie Brooker column. It was a good one, attacking mystics. Imagine my surprise when the first paragraph I read mentioned Narnia. And the piece immediately following was published on my 40th birthday. I was half expecting the one after that to address me by name and tell me which famous British actress I have a crush on. Which is all very confusing - Charlie Brooker’s coruscating attack on psychics makes me think that something spooky and other-worldly is going on…
(The index is a good read too. For example: ‘nasty grief-raping sucksacks, see psychics’. Or ‘complete and utter c*nts, see psychics’. And then there’s ‘Walliams, David, enjoying sexual intercourse with a potato’.)
Christmas shopping on Covent Garden last week, I got heckled by a street performer.
Yes, I got heckled.
Covent Garden was heaving, you could hardly move. This street entertainer had an audience of, ooh I think maybe two people. I was in a hurry, could see that he was doing his act, so I walked behind him rather than walking between him and his audience. As I walked off he turned to me and yelled “Oi mate, I don’t walk through your bedroom while you’re performing.”
Now I have a couple of problems with this. First, obviously, is the fact that I walked behind him, though it’s possible I did walk between his back and some of his stuff, thus breaking the magic, sacred bond between Perfomer and Scrappy Suitcase. But mainly the thing that annoyed me was drawing a parallel between my own bedroom and the sodding pavement in one of the world’s busiest shopping areas at the busiest time of year.
Or maybe he was just so pleased with the hilarity of his line, he couldn’t resist using it. Even if it didn’t really fit the situation.
Reading The Register’s lengthy but fascinating history of Psion - they could have been TomTom, they could have been Palm, they could even have been the iPod part of Apple - and followed a link to one of their old user interface people who now runs an outfit called Slash Design.
What a dull web site, I thought. Then I looked at the ‘Do it yourself’ section and found this gem:
Do It Yourself
Really, you don’t need Slash Design.
You can start by finding your product’s problems yourself. Take a real product, or a working prototype, or even a rival product if that’s all you currently have, and:
1. Find half a dozen people representative of your normal users. No-one so close to you that they’ll only say nice things; not so far away they won’t feel obliged to do a proper job. Friends of friends, colleagues of friends, etc. No special connection to you or the product you’re going to test.
2. One by one, sit them down with the product, with either a sound recorder or (ideally) camcorder recording this.
3. Reassure them that they’re not being tested - it’s the ease of use of the product that’s under test, and they are helping you test it. Any problems are the product’s fault.
4. Ask them to try various everyday things and speak aloud their thoughts as they try to do so.
5. Get your managers and developers to listen/watch. If they can watch live without bothering your people, then fine. Otherwise, use the recording.
6. Write the list of all the things your people got wrong, misunderstood, or failed to do, the thoughts they spoke that you don’t want your users to have, and ask what you can do about each in your product.
7. Send your “testers” a tenner, or the best box of chocolates you can find.
We do this with every client nowadays. Save yourself some money and try it yourself.
We’ll still be here, if you want a hand with it, or with finding creative solutions to the problems it identifies.
Today in haste I opened a kitchen cupboard and a bottle of balsamic vinegar and a bottle of soy sauce fell out and smashed on the floor. The floorboards were bathed in a tasty, if crunchy, marinade.
It wasn’t the almost-empty bottle of soy sauce, mind you. The unopened, full one. Kikkoman, but only the cheap stuff. Brewed in the Netherlands. Goes down nicely with a can of Heineken brewed in Osaka.
I’m having an odd argument with Spreadshirt, the normally excellent T-shirt company. I have a Spreadshirt shop - it’s a pretty easy way of making a little bit of money from designing logos and artwork.
But now they’ve pulled one of my designs for ‘copyright infringement’ and I can’t work out why. Salbutamol isn’t a trademark, it’s the generic name for a drug marketed under many names such as Ventolin. The artwork was all mine, I didn’t pinch anything from anywhere. I agree it’s meant to look like packaging used for prescription medicine, but it’s not a copy. I’ve asked for clarification and they just keep repeating that I’m infringing copyright. Very odd. And a little stressful. Where’s my inhaler..?
I bought a cross-cut shredder from Tesco. It stopped working, but they won’t take it back because I can’t find the receipt. I think I must have shredded it.
I got TillyPaint working on my eeePC - it’s a very simple finger-painting program wot I wrote aimed at very young children. The idea is that you can make a mark without clicking the mouse, which almost all paint programs require you to do. You can find versions of it for MacOS X, Windows and Linux here.
The Linux version isn’t quite right - it clearly doesn’t run full-screen like it should and holding down the shift key doesn’t stop it drawing like it should, but the basic idea works.
To install it, I just downloaded the ZIP to my personal folder, right-clicked on it in the file manager to unzip it then did the same to change its permissions (under properties) to make it excecutable and then launched it by double-clicking on it in the file manager. This is probably a hideous crime against Linux, but then I’m no Linux power-user let alone developer… :-)
Santa is an anagram of Satan. Discuss.
Anyway, last year we had a hoot making our own cards with some expensive but lovely wooden stamps. This year I tried to enthuse the kids with my low-rent alternative - A6 stamps made out of polystyrene pizza bases. The boys watched Attack of the Clones instead. Tilly and I had a great time. Okay, I had a great time…
To the nice young man in the baseball cap on the train who was drinking Stella and listening to KissFM at full volume: you’ve got my brand new phone, why not get in touch and you can have the charger and hands-free kit too?
The Asus eeePC is great for the photographer on the hoof - especially if your camera uses SD cards which you can just pop in the slot in the side. The default image viewers are okay but leave a bit to be desired if you want to do anything slightly unusual… I tried a couple of others such as Google’s Picassa and Digikam but they weren’t quite for me either… specifically I wanted to be able to crop images to a fixed aspect ratio for making wallpaper. I was pretty sure that The Gimp would do the trick - using it is easy for anyone familiar with Photoshop. I had a look at this interesting post on eeePC tools for photographers - worth noting that to install it I had to press ctrl-alt-T to get a terminal and then type
sudo apt-get update
(note ’sudo’) and
sudo apt-get install gimp
to get the install to work. (Thanks to Eric for pointing out my error here, now corrected).
When running the Gimp for the first time (type ‘gimp’ at the command line) the install wizard buttons will be off the screen, so hold down the alt key and click and drag the window up to get at them. You can use this trick to make sense out of the crowded Gimp screen too!
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