Flawless logic

Posted on January 12, 2008 by blogmywiki

My eldest son, 8, had picked up a bit on the TV show Smart being pulled off CBBC and the Mark Speight case and asked me about it – I said vague things about him just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’s not a bad person, all very sad. But my youngest son William, 5, must also have been listening.

Today my little girl was looking at a Shaun the Sheep comic.
“Dad”, said William.
“Yes.”
“Is Shaun the Sheep on TV at the moment?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not? Did he kill his girlfriend?”

Posted in children, family life, TV | Leave a comment

Charlie Brooker and the Spooky Coincidence

Posted on December 30, 2007 by blogmywiki

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’.)

Posted in children, Christmas, media, newspapers, TV | Leave a comment

Heckled

Posted on December 28, 2007 by blogmywiki

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.

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You don’t need Slash Design

Posted on December 27, 2007 by blogmywiki

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.

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Tasty waste

Posted on December 15, 2007 by blogmywiki

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.

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