Status-Q

I’m sorry, gentle reader, but I feel a rant coming on…

I wish to complain about the misguided fools who try to create those blasted customer support lines which use automatic voice recognition. May your share prices collapse and your banks be forced into public ownership!!

I don’t believe I have a very unusual voice for a native English speaker, but I often get recognition rates worse than 50% when asked simple things like, “Please answer yes or no.”

Me: Yes.

Phone: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please answer yes or no.

Me (trying to speak calmly and naturally because I suspect the machine will just become bloody-minded if I get impatient): Yes.

Phone: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please answer yes or no.

Me: Argghh! Go stick your head in a pig!

Phone: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please answer yes, or press 1, or answer no or press 2.

Me: Thank God! (pressing 1)

Now tell me who, in their right mind, could think that this might conceivably be better than just pressing ‘1’?

I know what happened. Some idiot in the marketing department (who never has to use their system) persuaded management that their company would look much cooler, and that they’d have a lot more happy customers, if said customers could only get through to a support person by having a cheery conversation with a machine while they’re driving down the motorway and are unable to press a button on their phones. (As if a system that has such problems on my landline could conceivably work on a mobile in the first place).

They weren’t bright enough to realise that said customer would die horribly in a crash because their judgement would be impaired by the incredible frustration brought on by the machine, or would unleash their wrath on the poor attendant at the next petrol station and be arrested, and then how would they pay you their 40 quid a month subscription, eh, that’s what I’d like to know?!

Do these systems actually work for anyone else? Is it just me? Am I in need of elocution lessons? Please say or click ‘Add comment’…

Not your average panorama – this beautiful image is from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day site. It’s the Carina Nebula, and you can click it to find out more.

Here’s another (rather different) beauty.

Most of us love climbing trees when we’re young, and I was no exception. How come I never realised one could do it as a job?

There’s an excellent TED talk by Richard Preston which will change the way you think of trees, or the way your kids think of them, in about 20 mins…

You can subscribe to the TED talks on iTunes if you want a really easy way to get them…

Do you wish to mark your place in the history books as one of the great scientists of all time? I’ve been thinking that it would be a good thing to do, but haven’t got around to it this weekend, because I realised I had a fundamental problem to overcome. Yes, you guessed it…

I don’t look interesting enough.

Would Albert Einstein have been imprinted so firmly in the public consciousness if it weren’t for his moustache and hair? Or Charles Darwin if not for his beard? Or Stephen Hawking, poor chap, without his wheelchair?

I suspect that, while they might have transformed their disciplines in just the same way, they wouldn’t have got the same column inches in the papers.

So I recommend that, before announcing your great discovery, you adopt something that will make press photographers flock to you. Facial hair may be overdone now, so I’d go for a dramatic bow-tie or an eccentric hat. Silly glasses, perhaps.

For women, of course, the best thing is to transform yourself into a total knockout babe… but we men have to come up with gimmicks to be taken seriously.

I enjoy riding motorbikes, though I seldom do so these days. But I know, in any case, I’ll never be a true biker because I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed about the sheer noise that’s often involved in having fun on two wheels. Bike engines are, by their nature, more exposed than car engines, but bike exhaust systems have also never really embraced the concept of a ‘silencer’. Their chief aim seems to be the conversion of waste combustion gases into testosterone.

The only bikes I’ve owned have had engines more akin to those of lawn mowers than cars, so this hasn’t been much of an issue. But, for me at least, the near-silent operation is one of the things that makes the Zero S electric bike even more appealing.

It takes four hours to charge, and has a 60-mile range. It’s probably much easier to get it close to a power socket than would be the case with an all-electric car, too.

Now there’s only one other issue to conquer: the terrifying thought of what I’d look like in full leathers…

Very good news this afternoon from DisplayLink!

They have released a nice, simple, Open Source library for driving their USB Display devices. It’s available under the LGPL, which means you can link against it in a variety of ways.

The hope is that this will allow a large range of USB host devices – phones, embedded systems, netbooks, routers – to drive large displays, without the need for a conventional graphics chip.

We started DisplayLink with its roots firmly in the Open Source world, and it’s great to see the company contributing back to the community.

The library and documentation can be found at displaylink.org, and the press release is here.

Congrats to all involved!

A very quick tip today…

Everyone uses cut, copy and paste – we’ve all become so used to the clipboard metaphor that it’s pretty automatic. Most clipboard systems have a big limitation, though – they only store one thing at a time.

If you’re like me, you’re often in the middle of moving chunks of text around in web pages, or copying URLs into email messages, and then get interrupted by an IM message asking for someone’s phone number. You copy & paste the number from your address book and then want to go back to where you were before… but you’ve overwritten the contents of your clipboard.

This is why you need a ‘clipboard history’ utility. If you use one, this will all be obvious to you, but if not, go and get one now. Tools like Quicksilver and Launchbar (my favourite) have them built-in, or you can use a simpler standalone utility like JumpCut or Clyppan – they can all basically do the same thing in this regard: they give you one more keystroke to learn as an alternative to ‘paste’, which, rather than simply pasting the last thing you copied, gives you a menu of the last few things and lets you select one. Some will paste it directly for you, others will put it in the clipboard so you can paste it yourself.

You may want to hunt around for a utility that feels right for you. I like speed and simplicity, and with Launchbar I can just pop up the list, cursor-down a couple of times and then hit return to paste in that big chunk of text I was working on before I was so rudely interrupted. It’s very slick. Launchbar costs money (but does a great deal more for you as well).

It may take a while for the clipboard history idea to become instinctive, but once it has, you won’t want to be without it. Besides, you’ve been doing cut and paste for a long time now. Isn’t it time you graduated to the next level?

Just heard a delightful programme on BBC Radio 4: When Real Women Wore Minis and Real Men Drove Them, about the making of The Italian Job, forty years ago.

Catch it while it’s on iPlayer… even hearing the clips from the soundtrack can’t fail to make me smile…

My friend Andrew Rauh pointed me at this: a coffee machine on Twitter. It doesn’t even look at the coffee – it concentrates instead on the text displayed on the control panel’s LEDs.

Quite fun, though.