Opinion & Humour

Easter Snow: Devant le Deluge

First an earthquake, now a White Easter, if I were superstitious, I should be expecting some further meteoro- geo- or otherological event to be coming up soon.

The snowy countryside is certainly pretty…
easter_weather_compressed
..but maybe it could presage the inundation of the low-lying lands by the rising seas.

In that event, the Lincolnshire Wolds where I live (ringed in yellow on the map below), would become an island off the east coast of South Yorkshire.

sea_level

Almost serendipitously, I read that the Met Office launched its new “traffic light” severe weather warning system, which was rushed out a day early to announce the snow-storms over the weekend.

I am sure that traffic light afficionados, highways engineers, and railway signalling engineers all over the country will be grinding their teeth because it really is nothing like a proper traffic light at all. It does have the good old red and green, which do not work for the one in 10 red-green colour blind men in the population, but bizarrely, it has both yellow and orange aspects, just to confuse the other 90% of the population. Very democratic, but not very ergnonomic.

My wife and I have been telling the neighbours for some time that we are going to build a jetty at the end of the lane and park a boat there ready for the floods. So in anticipation of the Deluge, and our future status as island dwellers, it seems an appropriate moment to take a leaf from the Met Office book and create a localised version of the Severe Weather Warning System, below. The legend is helpfully mostly coloured blue…

weather_table

From Antiques to Comedy Electronics

Horncastle in Lincolnshire is quite well-known for its antiques shops where you can filch through piles of broken crockery, dusty books, rusty buckets and dead peoples sheets.

It is less well-known as a venue for comedy electronics. However appearances can be deceptive, as indeed I discovered when wandering through the town centre in the vain hope I might find a shop selling something less than ancient.

I was actually looking a phono-to-3.5mm jack convertor cable, but when I saw this…
Comedy_Remote_Control
…I had to have it.

No chance of losing this one down the back of the sofa!

The Tyranny of the “Customer Journey”

I cover many miles in my working year and am now very familar with the various petrol stations on the routes radiating from Lincolnshire. In my travels, one of the most irritating new inventions of the retail designers is the “Customer Journey”.

The Customer Journey is an useful design concept in the web world to ensure that somebody using an online or multi-channel service gets a joined-up experience, alas more often in the talking than the execution. However, the designers laying out shop formats have now to make this a physical reality, taken to a level of absurdity by the constraints of some service station buildings.

For example, one petrol station I have visited many times used to be like this:

Customer Journey Part 1

Now it looks like this:

Customer Journey Part 2

By the introduction of a silly little metal gate and some plastic signage, they try to make people walk all round the shop so presumably they will suddenly discover they need an electric tyre inflator (only £2.99 with every 20 litres of petrol), or an overwhelming need to stock up on anti-freeze in July.

Maybe the incidence of casual purchases does rise with this type of shop format. However, it does feel much like the customers are treated as dumb cattle being led by the nice man down the corridor to the stunner and the sharp knives.

If other people feel the same way, then I think that the overall effect is probably exactly the reverse of that intended by the designers. Much like that perhaps when Edinburgh drivers rebelled against the disastrous City Centre Traffic Management Scheme which showed that all the modelling in the world is of no use if you do not take account of human quirks and cussedness.

On the first journey when I came across this particular “customer journey”, I clearly had too much time on my hands whilst driving home in the dark hours when I invented a riposte in the form of the Customer Service Self Feedback Form (or the Unhappy Voucher), which I present to you below.

Unhappy Voucher

Click on it, print a copy or two and give some unhappiness to the next person who treats you badly or whose company inflicts some lunacy upon you…

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Single Retail Banana: How does that work then?

“How does that work then?” is one of those phrases like “What’s that all about, then?” used by stand-up comedians to punctuate their observations about life and “that”.

One of the curses (and blessings) of my personality type is that I probably can tell you how “that” works, or have a very good guess at synthesising an answer. This ability derives from my encyclopaedic knowledge of how stuff does actually work, built up from lifelong study driven by unending curiosity.

Knowing how stuff works is very useful, but sometimes of course, the curosity can lead one into strange directions.

And so to the Single Retail Banana (SRB), which I have now observed in various motorway service areas, and wondered on how it came to be.

The Traditional Bunch Banana (TBB) is quite a good product with its own fully recyclable packaging, in multipack format (i.e., hands/bunches). The SRB is however an interesting development – somebody has managed to get bananas to grow as singletons, rather than in bunches with a little vestigial stalk, rather than the full monty torn off a bunch (see the picture below)
Comparing Banana Stalks

The SRB could of course be a variety of banana that just grows that way, but my guess is they stick a little band/ring on the stalk to restrict total growth and make the fruit drop off (just like farmers do with lambs tails)

So, imagine the excitement as the group of fruit design consultants and edible plant engineers got together and realised that they could make a banana that saves money by picking itself, requires no processing to tear the bunches and with less stalk, costs less to transport. What a thrill!

Web 4.0: Watching the Web Grow Old

I was interested to see in a recent article in The Economist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave an analogy between Web 1.0 being, to paraphrase, the “Net in Nappies”. With Web 2.0 we now entering the teenage years (going out, getting drunk, making a fool of yourself, showing off, sharing stuff with your mates, generally extraverting in many ways).

Which, although the article does not say as such, extrapolates to the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) being the grownup “web of data”, or the adult Internet (note the lowercase 'a', as the Adult Internet was hijacked years ago).

But extrapolating further still, what will Web 4.0 be then?
The Beige Bulletin Board?
The Cardigan Connection for Crumblies?
The Stannah Stairlift of data?
The Walk-in Bath of Bytes?

I hope it is more exciting than that…