Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tech, Uncategorized

Too Clever?

English: A woman typing on a laptop Français :...

English: A woman typing on a laptop Français : Une femme travaillant sur un ordinateur (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some modern software annoys me because it tries to be too clever and as a result it ends up being slow, or a pain to use.  Take the software I use to quickly crop images or convert to mono – in order to get to the image I want to edit it insists on showing me the contents of the folder the image is in, and all the subfolders and the folders around it, all indexed, tagged, thumbnailed and so on.  If there’s a lot of images it can be a while before you can double-click the one you want, especially if it keeps moving around the screen as it arranges the other images it finds into date order like some overly nervous assistant who’s just dropped all your pictures on the floor.  The problem is that I haven’t found a way to change this behaviour yet.

Then there’s autocorrect in many programs which insists on changing two initial capitals into title-case, or inserts a capital where you’ve used lower case because it assumes you’re just a sloppy typist, which I might be, sometimes.  EXcept when I’m typing a POSTCODE.  (WordPress thankfully doesn’t have this yet.)  Oh, and the annoyance when you start typing a chapter and the first line contains the chapter number, after typing a few paragraphs you look up and find that they’ve all been turned into a numbered list.

I know this is all useful for beginners and it can all be turned off somehow but these things were all there in the past but they weren’t automatic, people read the manuals, we created lists on the fly as required, in the very old days we indented lists after typing them and proof-read what we’d we’d written.  Yes.

Often too software is locked down to prevent novice users changing settings that they’re not supposed to even know exists and for those of us who can and like to tinker with the settings that’s annoying too.  What we need is a little switch that says novice/experienced which switches on an old-fashioned, go find it yourself mode, put it behind a “here be dragons” warning like Firefox’s about:config page if necessary but at least give us something to turn off the pseudo-intelligence in one go.

In my own experience it’s more frustrating finding a way around the automatic stuff than finding out how to do these things as you go but as more software is designed for inexperienced users to use without needing to read instructions it can only get worse.

Standard
Business, Marketing, Psychology, Society, Uncategorized, Work

Sign of The Times

19203945

We have two sites, a glassworks with trade counter and a plastic window factory.  Outside the plastic window factory is a sign with our logo on it which contains the word “glass”.  Nowhere does it say “glass sales” or “get your quality cut glass here, guvner.”

It does have a phone number on it.

A few weeks ago our chap at the factory rang me to warn me about an irate individual who was upset that he couldn’t get glass from our plastic window factory.  “It says glass on the sign and you’re telling me I’ve got to go to the other side of town, it’s disgusting, your managing director needs to take that sign down immediately, it’s misleading!”  He’d said, unnecessarily angrily.

When the man arrived at my counter I was in the middle of taking an order.  I said “I’ll be with you in a moment” but it seems he didn’t hear me because when I turned my attention to him he began to shout “Don’t bother, I’m not being treat with such ignorance by you, all the staff of this company are rude and arrogant, obviously you don’t have any customer care training.”  I told him I had and he demanded to see my certificate, which is at home, I don’t tend to carry it around in my wallet.  This exchange continued for a while, he’d clearly arrived looking for a confrontation as he felt he’d been wronged by our sign.  He wrote a letter to complain about the sign.  He didn’t get his glass.

About half an hour later a woman rang asking for an appointment for a quote, she lived quite a way out-of-town but had been to the main post office and seen the sign for our company on the building next door, and as she hadn’t been aware of our existence up until that point she thought she’d get a price from us for her windows as well as the other firms she’d asked.

Can you guess where she’d seen the sign?

Standard
Random, Tech, Uncategorized

The Sweet Smell of USB

From the random multi-purpose accessories department.

SAM_0064med

In a shop that sells a variety of items I saw a USB hub for 99p, now as I wanted a powered hub anyway I thought I’d get one.  On the box I noticed it had a disc on top marked with Open and Close.  Was this cable storage, batteries?

The cover was difficult to open but when it eventually gave in beneath it was a cotton pad in a holder screwed into the centre of the hub with no apparent means of removing it.

Stranger and stranger.

SAM_0062medThe box text was all in German, as were the instructions in the box.  So to find out what this strange device’s special feature was I turned to other technology.  I scanned the instruction sheet, used OCR software that came with the scanner to turn it into text for me then copied that into Google Translate.  Less than a second later I had my answer.

“USER GUIDE – USB Hub with Scented Oil Distribution”

I’ve seen USB drinks warmers, fans, reading lights, dancing flowers and Christmas trees but now I’d inadvertently found a USB hub that was also an air freshener.  Sweet.

Standard
Architecture, Psychology, Society, Uncategorized

Standard Issue

tape measure

tape measure (Photo credit: redjar)

In these days of flat-pack, off the shelf furniture whether it be from Ikea or Argos people seem to expect to get everything straight away, packaged, ready to go, as I’ve written about before.  Part of this expectation is the idea of things being “standard”.

People will ring up wanting a new double-glazed sealed unit and say “it’s just a standard one” without noticing that there’s often not two of the same size in the same house.  It’s the same with door locks and when you tell them they’ll have to measure sizes, thicknesses and so on they often seem most put-out by it – it’s just a standard lock, why don’t you stock them?  They assume that today everything must be a standard type or size and what they’ve got is, by definition, it.  As such we should be able to just pull a new sealed unit off the shelf.  We’d need a very, very big warehouse to do that, and a lot of time to fill it.

Admittedly there are many things that are to a standard specification in new-build houses but that doesn’t cover the last few hundred years of bricks and mortar.

Standard
Business, Meta, Society, Tech, Transport, Uncategorized

And Now a Travelling Keyboard

Option key on a third-party keyboard (Logitech...

Option key on a third-party keyboard (Logitech) designed for use with Apple computers. 22x20px|border Deutsch: Wahltaste auf einer für Apple-Computer konzipierten Dritthersteller-Tastatur (Logitech). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I promise that this won’t become a blog about parcels, but here’s one more post.  Ba dum tish!

I’m typing this entry using its subject.  Last week I wanted a new keyboard as the one I was using kept missing large chunks of what I was typing and for some reason I’ve never been able to type properly with it anyway so I went to my local Currys (the UK equivalent of Best Buy) to buy a good, low-cost Logitech wired keyboard…

I had looked on the websites of a couple of local retailers, they were the cheapest, they appeared to have it in stock so I visited on my way home from work.  I couldn’t see any of the basic Logitech keyboards only the more expensive ones so I had to ask someone.  It turned out that it wasn’t “reserve and collect” that was available but “pay and collect” which means ordering it for delivery to my local store.  So I went home, got out the credit card and ordered it.  The confirmation email said it would be three to five working days, definitely available by 29th January.  My fingers would soon no longer be numbed by a lousy keyboard, it was worth the wait.

Three days passed, on the fourth day I checked my emails – no notification that it was ready to collect.  Fifth day, five PM, still nothing so I went to the store again on the way home – it was actually there but they’d had computer problems, I was told, so I hadn’t been sent an email.  So all was okay, I had my keyboard.

This wouldn’t seem preposterous if it wasn’t for where I live.  You see on the outskirts of this town is one of the largest distribution warehouses in the country, in Europe in fact.  It was built a few years back in two parts and belongs to DSG – the parent company of the Currys store I ordered the keyboard from.  Knowing that it would have come from that warehouse and being naturally inquisitive (read cynical) I looked up the package’s tracking number on the courier’s website and found the full details of its travels.

It left Newark, went to the courier’s hub in Birmingham before coming back to Newark.  Using normal roads between the warehouse and the store (it’s effectively a straight line, along the ancient Fosse Way) it’s 1.5 miles, taking about five minutes.  The parcel travelled around 163 miles over about 3 hours total on the road.

In the old days they’d order one in from the warehouse, it would be allocated to the store, as it’s just literally minutes down the road a local van could have brought it down but it seems that in these days of complicated “logistics” that’s perhaps just too easy.

Standard
Marketing, Meta, Tech, Uncategorized

Still Free After All These Years

36236699I’ve written a few books, I have only ever half-heartedly attempted to get one of them published – thinking that I’m not really a writer, more of the outsider thinking I talked about recently.  Writing these books though was enabled by free software.  I’d had an Amstrad PCW which was a word-processor but I only used it for programming at the time.  I didn’t write stories, despite being told at school by my last English teacher that I was a good fiction writer, because again I feared being laughed at.  By the time I decided to write again I’d moved onto a PC and suddenly I was confronted by word-processing software like Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and so on costing hundreds of pounds.

Thankfully, I got a free copy of Protext 4 for MS-DOS with a computer magazine.  This was a big deal in those days, free software was often written by hobbyists and tended to be utilities, text editors and drawing programs were mostly shareware which you could “try before you buy” and then there was the commercial packages with their eye-watering price tags.  Today my laptop cost less than them.  I used Protext for years, those who don’t remember early nineties computers may be amazed that you had to control the whole thing with the keyboard.  No mouse.  At all.  It was surprisingly quick to use though, no distractions of formatting and pictures, no internet, no emails, just you and your words.

I moved onto Windows word-processing when I worked for a PC shop and got a cheap copy of Lotus WordPro which we used to bundle with the computers we built.  I’m only now moving onto the next big thing – which is something we kind of hoped for but didn’t expect back in the days of ordering a 1.44Mb floppy disk of freeware programs from a paper catalogue.

Big complicated software like Office packages take big teams of programmers or a lot of time, or both, to write and in the old days collaboration was more difficult but now there are organisations like Mozilla, Apache and others who organise teams of coders who volunteer their time and skills to create fantastic free software like the Firefox browser (which I’m using at this moment) and the Microsoft Office-compatible OpenOffice (and it’s offshoot LibreOffice).  These charitable foundations and teams who code for the enjoyment and achievement of it are creating ever more sophisticated software and giving it away for free, only perhaps politely asking for a donation towards their efforts which flies in the face of the idea that people will only create something if they are financially rewarded.  A large number of the coders on these projects are professionals volunteering in their spare time too.

There will always be a market for commercial software as many people and businesses either want or need to use software that has become industry standard no matter how closely compatible the free software is, and often the commercial software just has features that free competitors either haven’t got or can’t have due to patents.  There is also the issue of future updates and technical support though with the use of online forums you can usually get an answer to any problem you have with free software pretty quickly and even updates and bug fixes are generally quick in appearing.

With the advent of smartphones and apps there has been an explosion of free software yet again.  The centralised nature of the App Store and Play Store has encouraged people to learn to code and get something they’ve made out there, just like the old days of PCs, as it’s now even easier to get your app seen and used.  Of course much that appears to be free often isn’t quite free and many apps are also supported by advertising or the dreaded in-app purchase which I’ll write about in a future post.

Sometimes though some people expect free software when it isn’t at all though as other companies have shown giving away old software can be a canny move, introducing people to the brand, giving them skills which can lead to employment using the current version etc.  Serif in the UK have always been good at this, every version of their software I’ve used has been either a free version or more recently a two-version-older copy at a bargain price, and Google’s products like Chrome, Google Earth, even the Android O/S are free because they encourage you to use Google’s search products.  Even Microsoft now gives away many very good pieces of software like Live Essentials and Security Essentials.

So long live free software, what would some of us do without you.

Standard
Society, Tech, Uncategorized

Mobile Etiquette – Retail Staff Are Real People Too

Interior Market Decor | Market Decor Design | ...

Interior Market Decor | Market Decor Design | Interior Co-Op Signage | Co-Op Check stand | Grocery Checkout Area | North Coast Co-Op (Photo credit: I-5 Design & Manufacture)

There is a habit going round at the moment that I find particularly rude, as do many others, especially people who work in shops, bars and restaurants.  I don’t know whether it’s more noticeable now because more people have mobiles or because people are becoming more ignorant but the habit is of talking on your mobile while being served and either expecting the assistant/waiter/waitress to wait or just ignoring them like they’re insignificant and not worthy of your full attention.

It happens to me regularly, a customer comes in and I’m entering their order and their phone rings “hold on, be with you in a sec” they say – but to me, not to the person phoning them.  If it really is someone they can’t call back and they explain this and apologise then that’s fine, I’ll wait, go and do something else or make a cup of tea; often there is actually time to make and drink the tea before they’re back with you.  But when they just carry on talking while gesturing at you, waving a credit card and then taking their invoice and leaving while still talking on the phone it makes you feel like you don’t matter.

I was in the supermarket a few months back and the man in the queue ahead of me did this, he didn’t say one word to the assistant on the till, not “hello”, not “thank you” just talking on his phone and as I could hear the conversation clearly, as could half the store and probably people sat in the car park beneath the store, I could tell it wasn’t that important a call.  When he’d gone I said to the assistant “I hate it when people do that”, she let out a sigh and visibly relaxed saying “me too, it really annoys me” clearly relieved that someone understood how she was feeling.

Gizmodo UK recently published a piece about posters created by cartoonist Ted Slampyak highlighting other no-nos to remember, like keeping the volume down, using appropriate ringtones and not avoiding difficult conversations by texting – which is a whole other issue by itself.  One commenter who worked in a restaurant told how he had taken revenge on such an ignorant diner by firstly not going over to take the order until the man put his phone down and then pulling his own phone out and having a fake conversation while taking the order.

Now please excuse me, I have a text.

[Gizmodo UK]

Standard
Uncategorized

talin401's avatarTalin Orfali Ghazarian

In My life I have learned not to keep anything bottled up inside and always spill the beans no matter what. I actually feel so much better everytime I do because if I keep anything bottled up inside of me, that makes life a lot more stressful and a big burden on your heart and it may suffocate you in the long run. Blogging takes a lot out of me as I express my feelings with writing and I talk to close people and loved ones in my life who understand my situations. If your going through rough times, or if you feel like venting out, do it. It is very good for you and it takes a big load off your mind and heart. You may not be aware of it, but you actually do make it better by speaking out about it.

People get sick, stressed, over-analyze themselves…

View original post 501 more words

Standard