I happened to read two stories in the news yesterday. Each annoyed the hell out of me. Combined, they made my blood boil.
First up, a piece of Neanderthal scum who drove a car at high-speed in a chase with police. During this chase, he drove at insane speeds on the wrong side of the road with no lights on. He damaged police and private property. He killed one police dog (well, broke it’s back so that it had to be put down). He injured two police officers. Oh, and of course the car was stolen.
He was sentenced to two years… suspended. And 200 hours unpaid work that he undoubtedly won’t do, a curfew he won’t stick to and a driving ban that’s irrelevant as I’d be amazed if he had a license anyway.
Criminal number two is a radio producer (or more likely was) who enjoyed a bit of a fling with a few of his work colleagues. Thing is, he had a couple of cameras set up to record the fun that he didn’t tell his otherwise willing partners about.
When his girlfriend moved in (the story’s not clear as to whether he was seeing her during the flings or after), he dismantled everything and stuck it all in a box in the loft. Note that he didn’t blackmail anyone, shove the pics on the internet, sell the stories to the tabloids or anything. Nobody was hurt. Nobody knew.
Until his other half found them in the loft. And told one of the “victims”.
Now understandably she was a little shocked and upset. But to go running to the police over it and somehow getting him convicted on criminal charges – not civil seems a bit harsh.
Wait, did I say “convicted”? Yes, I did. 8 months. In jail.
Contrast and compare – have no regard for people’s property, safety and lives; kill a serving police dog; cause actual bodily harm… and walk out a “free” man. Be a bit of perv who keeps mementoes of private events which remain private… and get shoved in jail.
Can anyone please tell me in what way, shape or form this makes any sense at all?
[note – issue resolved in a very positive manner. Details here]
I had some fun and games getting down to Norwich on Friday (which will be detailed on another blog shortly), mainly due to French air traffic controllers being complete arses. Please, if you happen to know where one of these ignorant sods lives, please let down all of his tyres and see how he likes being delayed.
National Express assed to my misery somewhat by “fining” me for being on a delayed flight… and then allowed people who hadn’t changed their tickets onto the later coach for free. That isn’t on. Hence the following letter. Let’s see what I get back.
I booked a return from Stansted Airport to Norwich online a couple of days before travel. Unfortunately due to French air traffic controllers, my plane from Glasgow was delayed by three hours. I called your helpline who told me it was £5 to change my ticket to a later bus which I duly paid by debit card.
However, when I got to Stansted I found that several other people had fallen foul of the same delay and were boarding the bus happily without a changed ticket.
Given that this delay was due to matters outside of our control I felt that this was a nice gesture by your driver. However, I feel aggrieved at being charged £5 as I went through the “correct” channels. After a long delay (with no food due to EasyJet never being adequately informative about when the plane was actually going to turn up) this really added insult to an injurious evening.
Incidentally, your call centre staff and website also mistakenly listed my arrival time in Norwich as 02:40 when the bus arrived at 02:00 – which seems correct judging by the timings of earlier schedules. As a result, I ended up waiting in the freezing cold of the bus station for ages to be collected by a friend who’d expected me to turn up 40 minutes later.
I’m going easy on them as, in fairness, my ticket change and fee were within the sale conditions. I just feel “punished” for going through the correct motions to change the ticket when those who didn’t/couldn’t were given a freebie.
A large number of people received the new facebook layout yesterday. I gather this was facebook’s “6th birthday present” to its users. Some had had it since earlier in the year and others still haven’t got it – but will.
There are a lot of ways of looking at the design, but the single biggest flaw is that things have changed. It’s not so much what they have changed into, but the fact that things people have become used to have been moved or tweeked for no discernible reason.
This might not sound like a big deal to a lot of people, but I know of one user who’s dyslexic. For him to get used to finding something that’s moved from one corner to another is a big deal – he uses interfaces by memorising the location of things, not by visually recognising them. He has to relearn the interface from scratch – and for what purpose? None that I can ascertain.
I don’t use facebook to any great depth, so what I’ve spotted is likely to be fairly superficial. However, none of it makes any sense to me. First up is shifting the bottom bar around. The chat area is still at the bottom of the screen while the rest of the bar has been removed. Notifications are now in the top left instead of the bottom right.
This does give an extra line of screen real estate. I think. Or is the top now a little larger? However, it’s this particular move that’s caused problems for my dyslexic friend (and I’m sure many like him).
My particular bugbear is that I can’t be bothered with the news feed. It’s a mess and I really couldn’t care two hoots who is giving stupid virtual gifts to who, or who’s just got a highscore on some crappy game. I just want status updates.
In the previous version, I went to the correct area and dragged “Status” to the top of the list. Henceforth when I visited my “Home” area, I received status updates. This is no longer possible. “Home” now takes me to News Feed. It won’t even default to “Most Recent” so I have a completely useless splatter of informational crap that is of no use whatsoever.
I now have to go into “Friends” in the leftmost column. This in itself is badly-designed as there’s no indication whatsoever that “Friends” opens up sub-menus. There is a reason we have design standards, such as little boxes with “+” in them, or arrows with move from right-pointing to down-pointing. It’s simple design practise which facebook have chosen to ignore.
Once there, I’m stuck in the default Friends page and I then click on the newly-appeared “Status Updates” menu item to get what I used to find by simply clicking “Home” in the past. As far as I can tell, there is no way to set this as my default view.
Given that the press release from facebook read as follows:
A simplified home page to provide easier access to what you’re looking for on Facebook. You can now quickly navigate to commonly-used areas of the site from the top and left hand menus. From the Top Menu, you can now easily find new messages, requests, and notifications using the icons in the top, left hand corner. The left hand menu is now where you can find all of your applications, previously located in the bottom dock.
I would take issue with the use of “easily find”. Something that’s easily found should be immediately apparent, not located by means of a random search. I would also be tempted to say that the left hand columns isn’t a menu – it’s a list. Until you click on it and realise it just looks like a list.
Sure, it’s functional. There’s no denying the new look is tidier and reduces redundancy (there were so many ways on one screen to do the same thing before). But it’s very poor design. For a brand new user it lacks indication of the functionality of certain areas and for experienced users it’s moved things too far from where they were before with no obvious indication of where to look to find them.
As an aside, I think it’s badly programmed as well. This may just be coincidence, but when I left my browser (Chrome) on the Status Update page for about 11 hours yesterday when I was out, I came home to find that it was using stupid amounts of memory and froze. I never had this issue with the old design.
A couple of weeks ago I sent a 6-page letter of complaint to National Van Hire (a.k.a. EuropCar) regarding a huge mess they made of a rental on January 9th. After giving up on getting a reply, I rang them today. It seems they “received” (i.e. logged) the letter on January 27th, fully 8 days after I posted it. The chap I spoke to said someone would call me back this afternoon.
Several hours later and someone did. They admitted that it had all been a complete mess and that what happened simply should not have happened. The booking that we’d been told had been cancelled hadn’t been, or at least there was no indication on the system that this was the case.
The van sat outside which we were told was “too big” should have been rented to us. Standard practice if a rental can’t be fulfilled due to vehicle shortage is to upgrade. Although not ideal, it would have meant getting a van while there was still daylight and over three hours before we were actually supplied with one.
Methinks the Dundee manager may be in for a bit of a roasting. However, Jonathan from Stirling will receive the praise he deserves. I was assured of both.
In addition, the entire cost of the rental was refunded (the incorrect cost as they overcharged), plus £30 to cover costs plus £40 in vouchers in the hope we’d use them so that they could prove they weren’t always a shower of useless halfwits.
I think I’ll pass the vouchers on to someone else…
I don’t post much beyond film reviews and the occasional complaint letter so I thought I’d pop a quick catchup on the page.
Right now, I’m approximately halfway through my PGDE (Secondary) and very close to my second School Experience. I have a one-day visit tomorrow followed by 6 weeks beginning on the 8th of Feb. This one’s going to be a lot of work as, in addition to lesson planning, I’ll have assignments to do for my additional module (“Teaching in the Outdoors”), Contexts and ICT – plus the handful of short tasks and portfolio updates.
Just to be clear, though – I am still very much enjoying the course and the teaching.
In other news, I was recently up in Thurso to see Laurie. She’s a friend who ticked the “I will go anywhere” box for her qualifying year as a primary teacher. And ended up on the north coast of Scotland! This may well happen to me as I’ve ticked the same box for next year. On the Friday I walked up to Dunnet Head – the northernmost point in mainland Britain. Details of my visit are over on the travel blog. Thanks you to my kind hostess – I had a lovely, chilled (and chilly!) weekend.
On the downside I’m currently carless. On Friday I was due to head over to Mugdock Park for some orienteering, part of my Outdoors course. It snowed briefly in the morning and the roads around my aunt’s aren’t gritted. Despite driving really slowly, when I turned the wheel right about 50m from the house, the car decided to keep going the same direction.
The left front wheel hit the kerb while turned and there was quite a bit of a bang as I bounced onto the kerb. Partly the outside contact and partly the airbag erupting from my seat. It did no good at all, actually causing me some injury (nothing bad – just skinned my head and ear) and adding a few hundred, I expect, to the repair bill.
I changed the wheel as the rim had been damaged and I didn’t trust it, then tried driving on but something wasn’t making a nice noise so I returned to the house. An exceedingly kind uncle drove me to Mugdock and picked up the three classmates I’d agreed to give a lift to… and picked us all up again in the afternoon. Thank you, James!
As it stands, the damage to the car is:
one sheered bolt behind the wheel (fixed for pennies)
steering assembly jiggered (£161 cost price for the parts, plus markup, plus tax, plus fitting)
driver’s seat needing replaced, or at least the airbag canister “recharged” and the seat restitched
Methinks it will be going via the insurance. And I was only doing about 5mph when it happened. Still, it’s nowhere near write-off and I’m fine apart from some scabbing behind my ear courtesy of that flipping bag.
And now back to ploughing through a Higher grade computing paper to see how bad the marking scheme is…
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=840)
