Category Archives: Society

Business, Marketing, Psychology, Society, Tech, Uncategorized, Work

Bills and Shopping: The Rise of the Machines

Point Four Touch Point of Sale Till

Point Four Touch Point of Sale Till (Photo credit: Cyberslayer)

It’s not that I don’t like banks, or that I’m in some way un-British and avoid queuing it’s just that I don’t like being required to go out on some cold, damp Saturday morning when I’d rather be sat by the heater reading.  This is why most of my bills are sorted out by Direct Debit, even my credit card which is paid automatically every month – as it’s exclusively for online use rather than credit as such.

However there is one, variable bill which I don’t do this way – the electricity bill, because I don’t want them taking the money if they’ve over-estimated it.  So once a quarter I trudge to the bank.  The last couple of times I’ve been intercepted in the queue and guided to the paying-in ATM which can, I am assured, be used to pay bills and sure enough it did, it scanned the bill, took the details from my card and printed me a receipt.  It lacked the friendly hellos and brief chatter of talking to a teller but it did its stuff efficiently without having to wait with the other customers and their queries that computers can’t resolve (yet).  It’s amazing what technology can do isn’t it.

When it works.

This time I queued for the ATM, a member of staff asked if I was OK with doing it myself, “yes,” I replied, proudly, stopping short of continuing with “fear not, I have done this before”.  The woman ahead of me was though clearly having trouble paying a cheque in and was becoming increasingly frustrated by the machine.  Some people would have been mortified at causing a delay for others.  When she went in search of a real person I approached the anonymous grey box, inserted my card and then my payment slip which it chewed a little, thought about and then spat back out at me.

The member of staff who had by now redirected the cheque woman to a teller dashed over, I tried again but still it said it was having trouble reading the slip.  “Oh,” said the smart-suited bank woman “I think it has trouble with the new smaller payment slips.”  Right, so it’s the electricity company’s fault.  I was redirected to the queue for the tellers too, while reflecting that it’s lucky there were still real people present to do the job. The banks say this is to do with improving customers’ experiences, to reduce waiting times and so on.  A while later a man ahead of me was plucked from the queue and escorted to the same ATM, poor unsuspecting soul, like something out of Nineteen-Eighty-Four he walked by, towards the room 101 of automated banking technology, “good luck” I silently whispered.

It’s becoming ever more common though, in the supermarket there have been self-service checkouts for a while, and now the incredible sounding Hybrid Checkouts – you get your own conveyor belt to play with, like your own Generation Game.  A tin of beans.  A lettuce.  A cuddly toy…

I like checkouts with people on them, you can say hello, chat a little, they do all the scanning stuff.  I know someone who can scan goods quickly, accurately and have a riveting conversation with you at the same time, all you get from a Hybrid Checkout is the infamous “unknown item in the bagging area” message.  Which is a further complication – having to precisely place your items in your bag instead of lobbing them in haphazardly.

They say it’s quicker, denying the accusations that it’s to do with saving on the costs of staff, as do the banks.  They encourage you to use them, “it’s for your own good” they virtually scream as they drag you by the basket towards the robot cashiers while you whimper “but I want to talk to the nice lady on till nine.”  I have been known to linger at the end of an aisle, apparently choosing coffee until I see a gap on a conveyor then dump my groceries onto it before they can have my basket away from me.  True story.

I’ve seen people using the Hybrids, repeatedly scanning a loaf of bread while looking around for help.  My friend on the till would have scanned it first time.  If you’ve got alcohol or something else that needs authorisation then you’re left waiting until an assistant can come and release you back into the community from whence you wandered, happy and smiling, ten minutes earlier.  Just nipping in for a bottle of wine and a curry you said.  Now you need something more substantial.  “What kept you?” your partner says as you get into the car.  You mumble something about bloody technology and drive home, which is something that, for now, you can still enjoy doing yourself.

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Business, Psychology, Society

Just In Time

Old 3-Paned Window

Old 3-Paned Window (Photo credit: Big Grey Mare)

If you were about to drive to the other end of the country but needed to get a new tyre for your car first you wouldn’t get up that very morning, take the wheel off (assuming you had no spare) and then try to drive to the tyre shop.  I know I wouldn’t.  Some would, I’m sure.

I say this because something similar happens with disturbing regularity – people ring up wanting some glass that either takes three days to arrive or is out of stock and they immediately panic “but the door/cupboard/etc is going out tomorrow” or even more preposterous “I’ve already taken the old glass out.”

There are two rules in work like this – “measure twice, cut once” and “don’t remove something until you’re sure you can put it, or something, back.”  I can’t at the moment think of a more succinct way to phrase the latter one to make it more snappy – as things have to be these days, inevitably.

Again it’s another example of the expectation, instilled into us now, that we should not expect to wait for anything, which as I’ve said before can snowball as one person promises something to be ready tomorrow and expects everyone else to fall in line.  And in that lies a third lesson “don’t assume anything” especially regarding delivery times.

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Psychology, Random, Society, Uncategorized

Woohoo, It’s Cold and Raining!

Rain camera

Rain camera (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

How to guarantee it’s warm and sunny just about every time you step outside your front door…  Buy a nice new wet-weather jacket in June.

It’s a lovely, warm and comfortable jacket and I’ve used it twice during a summer that was much better than the last few years’.  It’s a strange psychological reaction, you’ve bought something new and you want to use it straight away, you want other people to see your bright or shiny new thing but you can’t, it’s frustrating and suddenly you find yourself pleased to see something like the rain that you’d normally moan about.  I suppose it’s the same for someone who bought a convertible car, or a barbecue and a freezer-full of meat just before one of our lousy wet summers.

In the last three weeks I’ve used it twice and now we’re back to summer again, with only three months to Christmas.  Anyone fancy barbecued turkey this year?

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Psychology, Society, Uncategorized, Work

All Wrapped Up

Shrink wrapped helicopters

Shrink wrapped helicopters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ikea have a lot to answer for.  Well, not just Ikea really but retail outlets in general, combined with the general idea of everything being available to conveniently take away.

A while back a customer arrived to collect a mirror, this is a custom mirror, hand-cut, semi-hand-polished, we don’t have off-the-shelf mirrors, or double-glazed units, or windows, the world just isn’t that standardised, as I’ve discussed before.  Anyway, I brought the mirror out and carefully placed it down, sitting on its corner protectors which stop the polished edge being chipped.  “Is that it?”  he boomed.  “That’s the mirror you ordered.”  “But aren’t you going to wrap it up in something, it’s gotta go in my van, what the f**k am I going to do with that?”  I use a question mark there but it may have been a rhetorical question.  I said that we didn’t have any cardboard or bubble wrap.  “Right, I’ll go and sort my van out and wrap it up my f*ing self then.”

Someone else ordering a double-glazing unit recently asked “will it come packaged up?”

This is the thing, if you buy a timber door from a DIY store it’ll probably have a bit of shrink-wrap around it it protects it from rubs but not knocks as such, we don’t have the facilities to package everything and it’s impractical to keep packing materials in all the time, if we do have some card and people ask then we will wrap things up, the problem is the expectation of it being packaged and the reactions if we can’t.

Most of our products are supplied to trade people who turn up prepared, with vehicles suited to the task but more often people turn up in vehicles that are too small for the glass or come without anything to support it at all.  At the opposite end of the scale one customer used to turn up with a specially made tray on the roof of his car for carrying mirrors and another had built a timber support inside his car to move one glass unit – which was an impressive level of preparedness.  Most customers at the moment do come prepared in one way or another, even if it means five minutes of me standing by the car holding the glass while they remove jacks, toolboxes, shopping and so on from the car boot before spreading out an emergency tartan blanket as support.

For the rest though the explanation is the takeaway society – people expecting to not have to do anything themselves, just turn up, have it wheeled out and put in their unprepared car.  Their food comes in packages in the supermarket, their furniture comes in boxes, or delivered in vans, so it comes as a shock to find something that doesn’t conform to their expectations it’s just unfortunate that so many people’s reaction today is not to either ask politely if we might have something to put round the glass, or say that they’d go and get something themselves or a more suitable vehicle but instead to refuse to acknowledge that they may have overlooked the transport issue, to blame the supplier, to lash out with indignation and exclaim angrily that it should be wrapped up, that it’s our duty, that it’s the law – nothing comes unwrapped these days, don’t we know that, it’s a basic human right for goodness sake.

Ahem, sorry.  Anyway, it’s late here so I will just wrap this up for you now.

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Psychology, Society, Tech

Hanging On

iPhone Original/3G/4/5

iPhone Original/3G/4/5 (Photo credit: Yutaka Tsutano)

As I write this many, many, many Apple devotees will be glued to their laptop screens, sorry, MacBook screens or iPads relishing the latest “one more thing” revealed by Tim Cook*.  I’ve not gone out of my way to have a look at the new iPhone(s) or whatever, I’m neither an Apple fan or an Apple hater though I’m not a fan of some of their actions surrounding patents though that’s something for another time.

What I’m thinking about is the trend of getting a new gadget every year.

Moore’s Law is an observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit tends to double every two years or so, this is usually misquoted as computing power doubles every eighteen-months.  There was a period recently when phone manufacturers seemed to be releasing new phones every month, though in truth they often catered for different markets and budgets, now though every major phone or tablet is refreshed every year, it’s like Christmas – literally, for the manufacturers, in June, August, September.

Computers are less obvious because there is still a steady stream of new models with slightly different cases, tweaked internals, new chipsets.  The common factor is that often the jump in actual power between last year and this isn’t that great, and usually the main difference in phones has been screen size and resolution.

Still though some people feel the need to buy again and often the reason they give is that the new one is so much faster than the old one.  Sometimes I’m sure this is true – as new software and features make an old phone, tablet or pc seem slow, if you’re trying to watch an HD video on an older phone for example but sometimes it can simply be that over time the device starts to feel slow.  When you first got it it was blindingly fast, menus appeared instantaneously and web pages were super-quick to load.  Now though you’re waiting forever.  What’s changed?

Ok, sometimes new software has features that cause an old laptop to chug, some websites (Flickr is a personal annoyance) have redesigned in such a way that you need quite nifty hardware to get a smooth experience, and of course you might only be able to watch a video in SD.  Much of the time though nothing has changed except your perception, you get used to the menu appearing, your memory of the previous computer fades into the mists of time and you don’t have anything to compare your current computer to but…

…the shiny new one at work, or in PC World.  The difference is miniscule, the slow website might still be slow on your new PC but confirmation bias will tell you it’s still faster.

My laptop is from 2008 and with the exception of a couple of websites (do I need to mention Flickr again) it’s still fast enough for everything I do, even my new copy of Photoshop Elements.  My Nexus 7 is less than a year old and has been superseded by a new N7 with an even higher resolution screen – I won’t be “upgrading” because I don’t really need to watch films in even more sparkly high-res on a small screen than before.  My phone is similarly a year old and still feels nippy and crisp, it still does everything I need it to do and I don’t feel the shame of having “last year’s phone” that drives many people to upgrade.  I know that one day my laptop will either completely die or the web will get too much for it to cope with, then I’ll upgrade,  Sometimes it seems that the only upgrade people need is to their need to define themselves by their possessions or their patience, though it does seem that that’s something lacking everywhere these days.

Perhaps I’m in the minority, there will no doubt be lengthy queues outside Apple stores soon.

* – yes, I know “One More Thing” was Steve’s thing, not Tim’s.

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Society

24-Hour Party, People?

pub

pub (Photo credit: Pretty/Ugly Design)

It’s been ten years this months since I moved into this apartment and eight years since pubs were allowed to open pretty much when they liked as long as the council let them.

I have mixed feelings about this, I enjoy a good night out as much as anyone else.  Ten years ago in this town we had pubs that shut at eleven and two clubs you could go to afterwards, I went to one of them every friday night, then across to the chippy for some food then wandered home.  Good times.

Now we have pubs open till two in the morning and no clubs, at all, just a dancefloor in the corner of a couple of pubs usually serviced by a mobile disco that is far too loud for the venue.  It just isn’t the same experience.

Then there’s the noise problem.  24-hour drinking was meant to stop people bingeing at ten to eleven, getting totally slaughtered and being anti-social on the way home.  It doesn’t seem to have reduced the fighting, or the shouting or the kicking down of walls it’s just moved it to two o’clock in the morning.  If I’ve been out myself it doesn’t bother me I’ll fall asleep anyway but when, like last friday, I need to be up early the next morning it’s a pain in the proverbial to not be able to sleep until gone two in the morning because of the noise of people screaming at each other outside the pub opposite followed by people walking home from town screaming at each other.  It’s even worse in summer because you have to keep the windows shut to reduce the racket and as such can’t sleep anyway.  It’s a lose-lose situation and you wake up next morning, ten minutes before you’ve got to get out the door and feel lousy.

Ten years ago I could leave my windows open in summer and be asleep before the loud-mouths returned from the clubs, or simply join them if I could afford to wake up at eleven the next morning but now it’s not so simple and with every passing summer I’m less convinced that the experiment has worked.

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Psychology, Society, Tech

Windows 8 – A Tale of Love and Hate

Accessori Hardware mouse tastiere e webcam inn...

Accessori Hardware mouse tastiere e webcam innovative per Microsoft Windows 8 presentazione milanese press day esclusiva – 25 (Photo credit: Michele Ficara Manganelli)

Most people will by now be aware at least of Microsoft’s latest platform for playing Angry Birds on – Windows 8 – but some may not be aware of the controversy it caused.

It was a radical change in how people operated windows and this annoyed many who were familiar with the Windows 95 to Windows 7 era as gone were the familiar start button and desktop in favour of the flat, unadorned, information-heavy tiled interface. The comments weren’t simply of dislike, many they were downright venomous – from the likes of “Microsoft are idiots” to “Microsoft have killed the PC” and worse.

It’s pleasantly colourful, not garish like the Windows XP “Fisher Price” look of ten years ago.  The thing is that many of these complaints seem more about resistance to change than anything, the Start Menu alone for example – that had been made slightly redundant in Windows 7 by the ability to dock apps to the taskbar, a lot of people ran apps by hitting the Start button on the keyboard and typing the name of the app – this is how Windows 8’s start screen works by default, the only thing that’s changed is, in effect, the size of the menu which is now a screen full of information.

I remember the last time Microsoft radically changed how Windows worked – Windows 95.  The same arguments came out, “how can this Start menu replace Program Manager, how will you find programs”, “look at how much screen space the “taskbar” takes up”, “why do you press Start to shut down the computer, that’s stupid” and so on.  Ironically the new Start Screen reminds me of the old Windows 3.1 way of working more.

The flat tiled interface reflects how computers are being more familiar and how they’re used, thanks to the modern web’s design users no longer need the reassurance of buttons that look like real objects simply an area of a different colour or a label to indicate an action.  Yes Microsoft is designing to appeal to consumers but these days it has to, more computer users than ever are home users and Apple have been doing the same simplification to target the same market for years.  The difference is that whereas Apple tries to lock down parts of its operating systems so that non-technical users can’t do anything to affect the “user experience” i.e. make the product look slow or faulty, Microsoft and Google still allow tweaking if that’s your thing.

We’re seeing similar arguments about the new Xbox which is being turned into a media hub for the home rather than just a games console, there are complaints about its appearance and so on.  Many of the complainers in both cases simply don’t like the idea that the PC and the Xbox are no longer theirs, the domain of the gamers and the techies, no longer mysterious to consumers.  There’s a side issue to this feeling of ownership over an area of technology – the sometime horrific online treatment of women who play games by male gamers who think it’s not a “girl thing”, but that’s for another article.

The reasons for this change were to embrace emerging technology and ways of using it, tablets are more convenient for casual computer users so Windows needs to encompass that, though they have been trying to accomplish this for a long time without the hardware being up to the challenge.  Secondly they wanted to present a consistent look and feel across all devices so users only have to learn once, and can use the same apps on all devices and share information across them all too, once more applications start using the new interface it will become ever more familiar and usable.  Lastly the idea of the live tiles is down to this “information age” where people want all their appointments, reminders, Facebook and Twitter updates and so on up front and ready for them.  Immediacy is the key these days and Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 priorities this information while still doing so in an attractive way.

Unfortunately for the doomsayers Windows 8 has sold well, it has recieved much acclaim, people do like it because it feels like an appliance, like their phone and not like a computer as such, it reduces the fear of “pressing something and deleting everything” in inexperienced users, it’s easier to use – though admittedly you still need to learn how to use it, like anything else to a degree.

Personally I don’t need all this information in my face as soon as I switch on my PC, tablet or phone so I don’t need Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 but if my PC came with it then I’d happily use it – and yes I have tried it and I do like it.  My PC, phone and tablet all have minimal interfaces, Windows 7, Android 4, this was why I chose the Sony phone because the default homescreen is relatively scarce with just a few icons and a clock, same with the Nexus 7.  It suits the way I work with my technology but that doesn’t suit everybody.  With Windows 8 Microsoft took a brave decision to give consumers something that would suit them but didn’t suit everyone either but at least it has listened to those complaints and is tweaking it in an update due in the next couple of months to give those who don’t need or want the live tiles more control, and a start menu of sorts.

Change is inevitable for progress, sometimes it’s difficult but one day you look back to what came before and think “how did we ever make do with that?”

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Nature, Science, Society

The Needs for Bees

bee eating

bee eating (Photo credit: acidpix)

It is said that if you ask the question “where does our food come from?” today you’ll get the answer “the supermarket” more often than not and it’s true that many people are increasingly further along the supply chain from the raw produce than ever before – I am guilty of this myself, for convenience’s sake I eat much frozen and processed foods and it would be easy to not realise which animal beef comes from or that potatoes are grown in the ground or peas are pulled from one natural packet before being shoved into an artificial one.

The thing is that so much of our food still relies on nature to help in its production, despite irrigation systems, spray-on pesticides and nutrients.  Sometimes an apparently insignificant change in nature can have catastrophic implications that science can’t (yet) get round effectively – the most extreme example of this effect on our food being the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher in which a devastating plant virus wipes out all species of grasses – including wheat leaving us without cereal crops for either us or our livestock to eat with the result of a rapid breakdown of society to a barbarous state of desperation for survival.

But it’s just science fiction isn’t it, we’re ok.  Aren’t we?  Well, to a point.  Bees are one of the main pollinators of plants, we need them in order to grow our food crops as well as gardens full of pretty flowers but they have been, across the world, in decline in recent years and scientists don’t fully know why.  It is thought that if we lost the bees the knock on effect would be the loss of up to a third of our regular diet. 

Various theories have been put forward such as mites like the tracheal mites that killed off all native British bees during World War I – which needed to be replaced by imported Dutch and Italian bees.   It is also theorised that, ironically, pesticides and other chemicals used to protect the crops the bees are pollinating are responsible.

So what can be done?  Well another possible contributing factor is that people are either removing wild flower areas that supported the bees or concreting over gardens and having low-maintenance patios and so on that have no flowers at all or only plants that are no use to bees whatsoever.  So while science tries to find out why the decline is happening and the debate over pesticides rumbles on consider how that humble bee sitting on your windowsill ultimately affects your life, it’s not as insignificant as it may seem.  There are lots of posts on Facebook at the moment advising helping out struggling bees with drops of sugar-water and more importantly the planting of bee-friendly plants.

At the front of our factory is an area that hadn’t been cleared of wild plants and flowers for some time and as I was making a mug of tea the other day I noticed it was a hive of bee activity, so to speak, so we’re doing our bit, in a tiny way.

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Meta, Science, Society, Tech

Format This

English: 8-inch, 5,25-inch, and 3,5-inch flopp...

English: 8-inch, 5,25-inch, and 3,5-inch floppy disks (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some people reading this may have at some point wondered why the hard drive in their computer is the C: drive, not A or B, not the first but third.  The answer of course is obsolescence, not planned but natural as technology has progressed.

I remember computers at school where the whole front of what would today be considered a desktop computer was just a pair of floppy disk drives, 5 1/4″ drives they were at the time, flat black plastic flexible squares that needed to be handled with care and would probably today just about hold a single grainy picture from a basic cameraphone.  I also remember the rise of 3 1/2″ floppy disks, the 1.44Mb disks which were the HD of their day – High Density that was.  These were the contents of the now abandoned A: and B: drives.   The problems of getting Windows 3.0 to read a new-fangled CD-ROM drive is a story for another time.

The thing is that today if I wanted to read something from one of these 5 1/4″ disks it would be difficult, if not impossible.  You can still buy external drives to read 3 1/2″ disks but how long before they’re gone too?  Admittedly much of the information I still have on these old disks is past its prime and most of the really important stuff I still have on my laptop today but some of it would be as good as gone forever if I didn’t transfer it to today’s media.  Even today’s storage has a finite life; hard drives die, home-burned CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs don’t last forever although new developments are on the horizon that claim to make disks that last for 1,000 years – we’ll see, or rather we won’t, but someone on a future edition of Time Team will and they’ll laugh at our clothes and feeble social networks and search engines.

Or will they?  The other problem with that old data on floppy disks is whether we have something to read it with.  Years ago we had a plethora of different wordprocessor file formats, spreadsheet formats, image formats and some of them, like JustWrite are as illegible to Microsoft Word today as Spanish is to me.  Qué?   Unless someone bothers to devise a universal convertor to rescue all these obscure file formats then the data is doomed.

I still have the ability to install the old software and manually copy over the text to LibreOffice which I use because it uses what has to be the future of our data – standardised formats and structures.  Many software packages still use proprietary formats for the raw data but can output a sharable and standard format – like JPEG images or MP4 video, whilst many office packages are moving to open standards like the Open Document Format which should extend the amount of time our letters and journals, notes and novels remain readable.  Then there’s the cloud again, services like Google Docs, Flickr, Facebook or Evernote storing data for you without needing to worry about file formats.  As long as the host is still there and the internet is still there your data could exist indefinitely if your account is passed down with the inheritance when you leave for the cloud yourself.

Which is a sobering thought, better get the to do list finished or it could become a puzzling historical artefact.

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Business, Psychology, Society, Tech

Too Good To Be True?

Texting Emoji

Texting Emoji (Photo credit: IntelFreePress)

So I received a text from my mobile network, it’s an offer to entice me to buy a new phone.  It’s the next phone up in the range from the one I have and if I was to wander down to my local network shop and buy it right now, and top up with £20 I’d get a FREE Bluetooth speaker worth £70.  Seventy pounds, yes, really.  The phone alone costs £79!

Immediately I thought, that’s good, tempting, I could take the old phone to Cash Converters.  It’s all to easy to just go ahead and get the deal but as I do I thought, hang on is that really a good deal?  Via the web I found that the phone doesn’t look as nice as the one I have, the screen is only a smidge larger, the processor only a tad faster, the memory only a whisper bigger and the version of Android only a decimal point newer.

On top of that the FREE speaker can be bought on Amazon for £30.  Which is £70 less than the total cost of the new phone.

It’s easy to be caught in the headlights of a speeding special offer but it’s best to leap aside and have a good look at it as it goes by, think “do I really need this” and if not watch it recede into the distance, maybe wait for the next one.  Which won’t be far behind, inevitably.

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