Now, there’s nice phrase I hadn’t heard before: someone on the Today programme said that it would be bad for the Labour Party to form “a circular firing squad”.
Friendly fire
June 5th, 2009
Voice of reason
June 4th, 2009
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’…
Parental transport responsibilities
May 30th, 2009
You know how people say (when their kids reach a certain age) that they’re just taxi drivers now?
It could be worse. They could actually be the taxi!
I had great fun with my friends Martin, Hilary and Eddie today in my… ahem… two-man canoe…
Regular readers will no doubt be amused that four days after writing proudly about my iPod-waterproofing system, I bent a little too far forward while standing on a pier and my phone, which of course wasn’t in such an enclosure, slipped out of my shirt pocket.
So I ended up doing a little swimming in the Great Ouse that I hadn’t really planned, and it was actually most refreshing. For me. I haven’t yet dared ask the phone how it feels…
Homecoming
May 28th, 2009
I know you’ll be pretty amazed by my artistic ability, as demonstrated here. When your pulse has stopped racing, you can look at this little Quicktime movie to see how I did it.
This was my first experiment with the Brushes app for the iPhone/iTouch, which would be little more than a toy if it weren’t for the sort of things real artists are managing to do with it. This guy‘s getting a lot of attention.
Thanks to John for the initial link.
A bit nebulous?
May 27th, 2009
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.
Water Music
May 27th, 2009
I love swimming but have to admit that, when done as an exercise, it’s not always the most riveting occupation. So my latest gadget is an attempt to remedy that.
It’s an Aquapac case for an MP3 player, and when combined with an iPod and some waterproof headphones…
…it should allow me to listen to lectures from Cornell while ploughing up and down, thus enriching both body and mind. Prepare for some energetic and terribly erudite posts after the weekend!
(If you don’t notice any change, I probably listened to Britney Spears instead.)
Climbing the world’s tallest trees
May 27th, 2009
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…
Feathered friends
May 26th, 2009
These three have grown fast since they fluttered down out of their nest a couple of weeks ago. Still definitely not adults, though!
VNC2DL
May 25th, 2009
Warning – for geeks only…
I’ve just posted an alpha version of VNC2DL on github.
This is a VNC viewer which uses the new Open Source library from DisplayLink to display a VNC session on a USB-connected display, rather than in a window.
Just in case it’s useful to anyone…
Thought for the day
May 25th, 2009
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.
A GPS treat for Mac users
May 17th, 2009
For nearly a year now, I’ve been geotagging all my photos (marking them with latitude and longitude) with the help of a GPS logger that I hang from my belt. The upshot is that in Aperture, for example, I can right click on any photo, and select ‘Show on map’. Google maps pops up with a pushpin at the location of the photo.
My camera and the GPS logger don’t actually talk to each other. The photos and the recorded GPS positions are linked up using their timestamps after I’ve copied them onto my laptop. I’ve been using Jeffrey Early’s GPSPhotoLinker utility to do this, which has worked nicely, but this last week he released a new, renamed, and much-enhanced version: PhotoLinker 2.0.
This lets you browse your GPS tracks with a map interface, geotag your photos with a great deal of control, and is definitely the best Mac utility that I’ve tried for this stuff. I’ve been beta-testing it for a little while, but it’s great that it’s now public. Even if you don’t do the photo-geotagging thing, it’s a nice way to view GPS tracks. You can select from a variety of background maps.
Have a look at the introductory screencast to get a feel for what’s involved.
Recommended.
For those interested, in my case, PhotoLinker is just part of my ‘workflow’. The AMOD device records NMEA logs as plain text files, and appears as a USB flash drive when I plug it in. Chronosync fires up automatically and copies any new logs onto my hard disk, then runs a Makefile which uses GPSBabel to do some filtering and create GPX versions of the tracks. GPX has now pretty much supplanted NMEA as the lingua franca of GPS logs and PhotoLinker can read GPX files directly. I use Aperture to manage my photos, but I’ve told it not to keep them in its library: it manages them in an external directory, which also means that apps like PhotoLinker can access them easily.
The sound of (two-wheeled) silence
May 17th, 2009
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…
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