A Donkey on the Edge

Until this evening, I didn’t know that the side pannel of the G5 is a four-millimeter-thick slab of brushed aluminium. On the inside of the panel, a stainless steel guide is attached with cross-head stainless steel screws. Set in a grove in that guide is a soft rubber gasket.

The side cover registers with the main housing via two large, stainless steel pins so that when you press the cover shut after installing your ram upgrade, you first feel a gentle ‘give’ as the gasket squeezes slightly into its housing. Then, as the pins register, the cover falls closed, its edge perfectly aligning with its mate, leaving but the faintest line to tell that the two pieces are not one.

(…swoon)

Right, let’s plug this mother in:-)

Ok, this made my day:-) It’s a proper Newton web server

No, really.

Clemmie walked up to me this lunchtime and asked:

So big boy, are you good to go?

As clear as day—it just sorta came out. My guess is we really need to keep a lid on the swearing:-)

Tom Hough recently commented on an older post about BT.

As with a lot of the “enraged mutton” posts, it was a bit of a venting session, but I’ll reprint the BT phone number here. I can’t garantee it’s still live, but here goes nothing;-)

…a very nice lady called Alita calls you and gives you a phone number (an 0800 number no less) that gets you straight through to customer care—no queue, no delay, no option-3, just straight through to the nice lady.

So got a problem with BT? Need to vent? Here’s the number:

0800 800 871

That ends this public service announcement…

For a theoretically unemployed person, I seem to be very very busy right now. This is great because one of my iBook’s logic boards (I think it’s a logic board, due to the little beeps I’m pretty sure I heard yesterday but ignored—and decided not to back up my stuff) has just this evening packed up.

It’s very dead—I’m hoping it’s the logic board Apple just replaced. Fingers crossed…

So yesterday morning, the thing that I wanted was a black, v-neck jumper and the chosen interface to get it was Mark & Spencer at Marble Arch.

Most of us grown-ups are pretty are familiar with the way a department store works, but between going through the front door with a pocket full of cash and waltzing out the same door in a smart new outfit, a few things need happen.

Imagine for a second that M&S was a website—first, let’s take a look at the store’s information architecture, the way laying out the shop’s stock in a particular way is supposed to guide customers to their goal. Here are some possible clusters (based purely on the stock-keeping-unit, the basic building-block of what’s on display, as opposed to customer motivation or sales increasing) for a guy looking to buy a jumper:

• all men’s jumpers together
• all black jumpers together
• all v-neck jumpers together

If the store manager didn’t like that layout, the architecture might reflect the stocking infrastructure or the scheduling of the shop’s ‘front-end’ display:

• all recent arrivals together
• all unsorted but barcoded knitwear together
• all returned men’s singles together
• all discontinued lines together

If the manager wanted to get a bit goal-oriented, she might decide to group things according to how the user shops:

• all workplace / uniform knitwear together
• all casual knitwear together
• all back-to-school separates together

I’m labouring through all this because now (actually six days after the fact) I still can’t work out what M&S’s ‘information architect’ was trying to achieve. Was he was trying to get me efficiently through the store, quickly reaching my targeted purchase?

I never found the right jumper, or when I found it, I wasn’t able—through a process of comparison—to ascertain if it was ‘right’

Perhaps the layout of the store (like the infuriating Italian motorway rest-stops that guide you through a maze of produce before you can exit through the only door) was trying to get me to purchase ‘accessories’ or ‘add-ons’—the extra bits that if I saw them on the way to finding my jumper I might pick up as well?

The more time I spent trying to figure out why shades of black, v-neck jumpers were spread across the four corners of the second floor the less I was inclined to browse the otherwise perfectly nice items on sale.

From a design point of view, the fact that I quit the application—I left the store without finding a jumper—means I didn’t find the thing that I want, that the application failed in its purpose. I’ve been buying black v-neck jumpers at M&S for years so something must be very wrong indeed:-)

The web allows shop designers to apply TheThingThatiWant design principles to their virtual shop floors. This means that all the various factors that impact on what is put where in the store (selling sweets at the check-out, avoiding ‘but brush’ in the aisles and so on) can be applied differently to different people. A crude example might be that as women tend to like to browse and men want to go straight to a given sku and leave, the store interface could include both a search by sku interface and a new this season browsing tool…

I don’t think this is the last time I shop at M&S, but the more I think about it, the more I need to shop online.

OK, I’d really like to know what’s going on here

Who would have believed that there were not one, not two or even three different nouns to describe the state of caramelization of sugar in the French vocabulary. According to marmiton.org’s cooking chart there are no less than eleven (11) steps to caramel nirvana;-)

La cuisson du sucre:

I can’t remember the last time I took a little ball of hot sugar between my thumb and forefinger—I may be misunderstanding the language but the above says asbestos-fingers to me…

Monique from Littleton in Colorado says her mommy wants a new president and your daughter should too.

Little Clementine Falby thinks so as well but wonders if those crazy Yankees will get her tee-shirt all the way over to London in time to sway the election;-)

You know, there’s nothing I hate more than spam. So I really can’t figure out why I keep noticing the stuff and posting about it…

Just got this in the mail:

DJ DIVA appears in the house scene after 10 years of night work, serving drinks as a topless waitress and lap dancer in the best dutch establishments. At one of the clubs she gets the chance to try her skills on the decks and there she became the first female topless dj

And of course the note ends on an upbeat note: bookings femaledjs@yahoo.co.uk

I’ve just discovered that if you point the desk lamp straight into your face and stare at the bulb occasionally, you can go for days without sleep.

“Karen Carpenter was of course famously anorexic but people forget that she was also a really good drummer” - Goldfrapp

Well, the shirts finally arrived:-)

Clemmie just left for school hoping to sway any undecided, or Bush voters that might be going to preschool in West Hampstead with her clearly stated political message.

I know I’ve been a bit of a wreck these past couple of days, but I really surprised myself this morning reading Phil Mountain’s letter to Clark County in The Guardian. By the start of the second sentence I was sobbing violently into my coffee and had totally soaked my t-shirt.

Right. So that settles it then. Unless I can’t spell;-)

OK, wee un is now officially contributing to the Kerry cause.

And while I’m banging on about this, there are things non-voting folk like disillusioned Genx-ers, lapsed Democrats and Nader voters can do to help get rid of Bush. You can volunteer or donate — I know it seems crazy sending money across the pond to support the Democratic National Committee, but the Republicans can traditionally score loads more cash, so it make sense.

Just for today, take that tenner you were going to send to oxfam and donnate it to the DNC. In the long run, this will reduce third-world misery and in the short term might make the lives of European NGO employees a little safer on the ground, so I’ll bet even Oxfam would aprove.

A new feature has arrived on my desktop that prevents Nicki and I both using Suitcase at the same time. Until now, Suitcase ran happily in the background, managing font conflicts and opening fonts when required to do so. Great. Nice application. Problem solved.

Except now, I’m told by the support desk that to use the “fast user switching” facility in Mac OS X I need to quit Suitcase before I “fast switch” between users and relaunch it after the new user is logged in. This kinda reduces the functionality of a fast switch. If they insist on this stupid behaviour, the least they could do would be to put a “quit on fast user switch” checkbox in the preferences.

It really pisses me off, I buy software like a good boy and register and license it like I’m supposed to and then wham, upgrades mean less functionality:-(

So am off to find an alternative to Suitcase…

As the election looms, thoughts turn to another Republican congress. UK subjects act now while you still can:

• http://actblue.com/list/ipac
• https://secure.dccc.org/win/default.aspx?id=btnmc
• http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001436
• http://www.democraticaction.org/index.php?id=dtriptv
• https://ipaction.org/contribute.html

(thanks aaron)

Would you guys mind terribly debugging your frigging JS code before you slap it on your website? Please.

I have to run with JS error notification turned on most of the time and it’s getting increasingly difficult to browse without getting syntax error notification pop-ups. It’s not hard to do and it’s not too much to ask, so please get with the programme…

This will have no meaning to most people, but if Bill Bissell reads this, on Saturday 23 October 2004, I finally made it to Sidcup.

In that I quite literally made it to Sidcup. On the bike. Down the A2. Had to visit a guy who needed help configuring his network.

Today John Peel died.

:-(

Wow, more DJ spam. I must be the new hub of the online music scene. It’s the ususal enchanting copy, connecting their minds to their bodies I mean who writes this stuff ;-)

Luca Ricci is a talent to be watched. His sound and style make him a favourite anywhere he plays. His music has taken clubbers on a voyage - connecting their minds to their bodies with the drum beats as their guide.

For booking: djbooking@hotpop.com

and I love the way the emails always end with a hopeful 'bookings' email address. If this keeps up, I'll be taking bookings for Kittin ;-)

…Boy Scouts and S&M fetishists both spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with rope…

I mean I don’t have a problem with pain or yuckiness or whatever otherwise weirds people out about various fetishes, it’s just that I can’t get all hot and bothered about watching someone spend fifteen minutes adjusting cross-tailed toe-loops and half-hitches around a naked woman hanging from the ceiling :-)

I figured if I let Clementine paint my face as I painted hers, I would be able to make a reasonable likeness of a ginger cat’s face on hers.

In the end, my face was covered with red stripes and Clemmie had what could be mistaken for a rash on her forehead—not a very succesful attempt, but I imagine this face-painting lark has some miles in it yet, she’s only two-and-a-half after all…

So it’s comming up to three o’clock and I’m off to her nursery’s Halloween party:-)

You know, my dad, Jed, has for most of his long life been a master with a pair of scissors.

The man can cut an elaborate 20-foot-long banner in one go without tracing the letters in pencil first (he can also draw you upside-down. I mean never mind that he can actually draw you, he makes an upside-down picture so if you’re sitting opposite him in a restaurant, you can see the drawing right-side-up—but I digress). He’s also handy with a knife, and as Clemmie and I made our first jack-o-lantern (spelling?) together at 05:30 this morning (thanks, Clem) I was reminded of a couple of lanterns Jed cut for the family home in November 1967.

I don’t remember the lanterns exactly, but I remember the feeling of horror at finding out that they had been smashed to bits by the morning. I don’t remember if Ohna was as upset, but I couldn’t figure it out—when I went to bed that night these two, enormous, intricately carved pumpkins where happily glowing away on our front steps and in the morning they were compost…

So anyway, I decided I’d put this lantern in the garden so Clemmie could see it peering in through the kitchen greenhouse. We lit it (rolled-up kitchen roll, large flames, lots of smoke burnt fingers because I didn’t cut the lid large enough) at around 06:30 this morning and it welcomed in the morning.

And there’s a small video for Jed and Ruth :-)

So Clemmie was wearing her mommy wants a new president teeshirt today at the toddler playgym and a couple of people commented negatively. One said, “what has George W Bush done to your daughter” and Nicki practically spat her breakfast. Just for the record, Clemmie wears the shirt (at least in part) because

1. Without the UN in a believably strong position, her world is less safe.
2. She is more likely to die as a result of freedom-fighting initiatives or civil unrest.
3. Her cousins in Connecticut are less likely to be able to go to college.
4. The water she drinks and the air she breathes are less safe without Kyoto.
5. She can say “class war” with the best of them, and she knows that the American babies that are killing Iraqi babies before themselves being mutilated, dehumanised and blown up are the children of America’s poorest families, the same families that feed all war. These kids have very few practical options open to them as they grow up in towns with no jobs, no education and no future. I was amazed by the performance of the United States marines recruiter in Fahrenheit 9/11 who convinces a black teen that because Shaggy was a Marine, this is really his best chance of making it. Sadly, this may have been true, but Clemmie isn’t happy that in George Bush’s America, those sorts of realities are accepted without question.
6. She would like to eventually read De Tocqueville without him being an amusing anecdote.

One of the many revitalising things about hanging out with little children is that they have a binary view of morality. Something is right or something is wrong, good or bad. This may seem simplistic, but morality was invented under just those terms (I am an intermittently jealous god doesn’t quite have the same ring to it).

I guess I’m writing this because I can’t time-travel back to the gym to defend Nicki and Clemmie from the onslaught of the merchant-banking middle classes who seem to think Bush is the best thing since Margaret Thatcher.