News Archives

New Experiences

New experiences are great - I love trying new food, learning new skills, buying new gadgets and I would recommend that other people try as many new experiences as they can for themselves, rather than relying on other people's opinions.

Today's new experience is the exception to the rule as I had a taxi back into me while I was crouching down using the air pump at the garage. I couldn't recommend it to anyone.

Average Speed Cameras

Do they take the average of the speed you are doing as you pass each camera, or work it out from how long it took you to cover a certain distance?

It could make quite a big difference...

My blood did boil

So the other day I was on the train and I pulled out my laptop to do some work. Pretty normal thing to do I reckon, as do most people I should think. Clearly not to the obnoxious guy sitting opposite me. Clearly my laptop was taking up more than its fair share of the table because he kept shoving it with his magazine that he wasn't even reading (it was lying on the table folded up).

Then he made a comment about people with laptops on trains to the female passenger sitting next to him who in retrospect I lost all respect for due to her laughing reaction. He said something to the effect that no one can possibly do any work on a train and all they do is check emails. Well hold on, I think a lot of people would consider checking and replying to emails work. Maybe he doesn't know that mobile internet isn't really all that commonplace just yet... If he'd heard of it at all and wasn't just spouting rubbish to try and 'impress the ladies'.

Then he went on to expand upon his dislike to gadgets in general stating that they were 'everywhere these days'. NO WAY! I hadn't noticed! This is a major revelation for me. Welcome to 2008. Actually, welcome to 2002. Seriously, people have been fiddling with their phones, MP3 players etc for years... decades if you think about walkmans etc. This guy is really a fool.

Just to cap it off he exclaims 'You can even get a portable Playstation now!'. He didn't, however, see the point of them or the people that play them at 7am. 'Why would you want to play an entertainment game at that time in the morning?' (my emphasis). Wow. Yes it's amazing that you can get a portable games system now isn't it? Except you've been able to get portable game systems since 1989 when Nintendo released their first Game Boy.

I'm not even going to comment on why you might want to play games while commuting to work.

It made me really angry and I spent the whole journey thinking up smart replies to say back to him which were of course too late as the time had passed. I don't know why I can't come up with these things more quickly, it's the most frustrating thing in the world as he really needed taking down a notch or two.

Needless to say I got plenty of work done despite my mind being half occupied with being mad and earned my fare in at least twice over while he sat there staring into space looking like a gormless pillock. This was satisfying but not as satisfying as making him look foolish by countering everything he said would have been.

I wonder if you can take classes for that.

Wow.
 

Web Standards Rap

This is great. Someone put this guy on tour with Zeldman!

Computers cannot say they are sorry and mean it

I think I might have pretty much put my conclusion for this blog post in the title, but that's not going to stop me from going on about it.

Let me explain.

This morning I was waiting for the train to go to work when the announcement came across the tannoy: 'The next train at platform 2 will be the severely delayed whenever service to wherever. Once again, I am extremely sorry for this delay and any inconvenience it may have caused'. Wait a second. YOU're sorry? You - the computer? No you're not, you're just saying that because you're programmed to. You are actually feeling zero amount of remorse or regret and so what you just said is a LIE in an attempt to appease angry customers.

Of course saying your sorry does work as an appeasement of sorts, but it's not the automated voice system that is sorry. A better option would probably be to say '...Rail network are extremely sorry would like to apologise for any inconvenience'. It's not a big change but it would certainly sound a little more sincere.

It wasn't even my train that was delayed, but I still felt like the announcement program was mocking me and everyone around me with its insincerity!