…and while I’m forgetting things until just after I press the ‘send’ button – whats happened to the travelcard system? I got a one day card from Cambridge this morning which was rejected by every single barrier I tried to put it into, leading to the hunt for a guard on the gates who will actually believe its a real ticket and let me through, I thought this technology was supposed to make peoples lives easier?
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Oh, and while I was on the tube back to Kings Cross I spotted an advert for ‘Flake Ripped’ – whats that all about? They are just trying to outdo the guys who put guarana in their bar last year, aren’t they?
Today I finally caught up with the marvelousmrchip – the first time since his return to these shores. I dragged the poor lad along to the SymbianExpo, at Excel, to talk geek at various companies with interests in the mobile devices arena.
Highlights of the show included:
– Bitboys demoing their graphics accelerator and floundering around rather when I asked how I could get hold of one of their cores…
– completely bypassing Pete-falcons stall in their unmissable by-the-door location
– “Neil, do you know that guy with long hair just signing in over there?”, “Yeah, thats Romek” … “who I haven’t seen for, maybe, three years.”
– bluetooth control cars, utterly uncontrolable with P900s
– cute finnish girls talking technical about digital rights management (she wasn’t /that/ cute or /that/ technical, but the concept is good, and theres something captivating about Finnish girls)
– finding out that GeraCap are Teleca
We escaped to try to find some lunch in Excel, which, considering its size is more difficult than it should be. There are maybe 15 food places, of which two or three were open, one was being measured and the rest closed. So we headed back toward the station and found a pub sandwich before heading up to Golders Green for an impromptu board gaming session in the Youth Hostel followed by a curry. Rar.
During which time I blew out an interview I had vaguely arranged with a company in Waterloo – they’re trying to get me to commit to a contract following my current contract, so for around end of january or something. Should I really be talking to them yet, anyway?
Mobile User Interfaces Rant: Simplicity, Hierarchy and Cruft Prevention
“Though I think the S60 UI is relatively clean and useable, there are definitely a lot of friction points in the UI which cause new users problems.”
Ok, I’m worried now, when did I get a dance version of ‘killing in the name of…’?
It keeps grinning – It’s got to bleed
Just back from an expidition to Bluewater, mecca of the shopping classes. What a fabulous setting for a desolate future-gone-bad style film it’ll be once it falls into disrepair – the concrete sticks supporting the Thurrock crossing lit with red beacons in the background as you curl around descending into the pit, for a moment I was in Gibsons future (again), All Tomorrows Parties were mine.
Walking from the car park (I’d left it in Pink-E) entering John Lewis was reminiscent of the entry to Disneyland, you transition from the real world of cars and traffic jams and motorways and rain into the manufactured shopping experience, something happens when you cross that threshold, its all gone and you’re just a walking wallet with flashing lights and bright posters trying to extract the money from you.
Maybe I shouldn’t have snapped quite so at the ‘assistants’ there, I know they were just trying to do their job but I felt they were just trying to make me move on, I’m not the kind of person who can afford to shop there. Wait – what is so much better about this 100 pound shirt than the 40 pound one over there? Sure its got a nicer display rack but I’m reasonably sure the build quality isn’t significantly different. Besides, I spend to much time having guiness poured over my head to want to spend too much on the kind of shirt that’ll stain.
I did, at last, find an 80s compilation with ‘Safety Dance’ by Men without Hats – I’ve got a couple of bizarre industrial covers and a low bitrate version of the original but I’ve been looking for it for a while now. Thats one quest over, next the 69 Eyes DVD, but Bluewater isn’t the kind of place that’d sell well. And another Lego Spybotics – the blue one this time, I got the purple one before – they’re selling them off at 25quid each, end of line, if anyone lives near a Lego shop and find a green or a red one, let me know…
This week in Cambridge has been a bit more interesting – things are starting to pick up a little now I’ve gotten writing some specs. I’m hoping to pick up some keys for my new house on Monday, but I’ll say more about that later – I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it too much.
The Calling on Tuesday was interesting, with Ozzy doing a storming set of Germanic/EBM/Medieval/EarlyMusic crossover. Must get to more of his sets, they’re damned good. Even if they do have too many bagpipes.
Then Thursday I met up with lark_ascending and crazyscot for fabulous food (Thank you!) before hitting the Carlton Arms….where the evening started with an argument about ISO2022 character set encoding, covered a small collection of stations (mainly on the Cambridge-London line), and eventually ended up with a gaggle of geeks outside who didn’t really want to go home. These are my people, even if I didn’t actually talk to that many of them (and caught the lj-usernames of even less, introduce yourselves, if you’re reading) I did at least feel like I could fit in. Geeks, the lot of ’em.
“While the viewing of child abuse images is illegal, the new “conditional defence” is meant to reassure staff in ISPs and systems management that they can store illegal images as long as they are to be used as part of a police investigation.”
“I wanted to combine British film tradition with Bollywood – what better marriage than Pride and Prejudice?“
“Hello. You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a f**k about you. We are never here. We just will f**k you about, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just f**k off and leave us alone. Get a life.”