When you've tried the best (call for list)

In this life, I have certain fundamental beliefs which I hold to be fundamentally true. They are:

Everyone is born equal and deserves to be treated equally.
Habitat, despite being a furniture shop, sells the best dressings gowns in the world.

Just occasionally, you come across a product offering which is so good that you'd never want to try anything else. I have two: the aforementioned dressing gowns (big fluffly clouds of towelling, just perfect for curling up with a cuppa on the sofa - wonderful) and Body Shop's Men's Shaving Cream (not so much for any skin benefits it offers, but because the razor always rinses perfectly). I firmly believe that these are the best dressing gowns and shaving creams in the world. Everything else, I could be tempted to try different suppliers - I'm not picky about what sort of bread I buy, or what brand of car I drive (I'm currently driving a bus pass). But dressing gowns and shaving cream... nah.

My question is: do you have things which you'd never, ever buy from anyone else? Products which will leave terrible holes in your life when they finally cease production? Caviar, cars, socks, hairnets, waffles, whatever...

Amazing transforming fashion (I mean it. Really. Amazing.)

I did have a couple of interesting blogs lined up today on the subject of colour and information presentation, but they'll have to wait, because core77 flags up this amazing video of the work of Hussein Chalayan. Aren't they just incredible? I've never seen anything like this. Such elegant use of smart fabrics - a field which has been promising so much for so long and yet (so far) delivered so little.

Admittedly, it'll still be a while before these are ready for the high street... but by the look of it, not that long. I've never before seen anything that hinted at the possibility, so to me these look just incredible.

The Customer is Always Right (or, A Comedy of Errors)

I have a confession to make.

At the beginning of the summer, I had cause to book some train tickets for a weekend trip to London. I booked them well in advance, via the website of the train company involved - the estimable but increasingly inaccurately named Great North Eastern Railway. The confirmation page poppeed up, complete with the reference number which I had to take to the station to collect my tickets. I duly printed this out, and thought no more about it - until the day I was due to travel. The timetable was a little tight, so I was going to the station straight from work - but that morning, I got to work and realized I had left the piece of paper (with the reference number) at home. With no time to go back and retrieve it, I worried briefly - but then I realized: all I had to do was log on to the GNER website, call up my account details, and the transaction would be recorded there. I logged on, found my account details, and inspected my list of recent transactions.

It was empty.

Huh?

"Okay," I thought to myself (and bear in mind, this was about three weeks after I'd booked the tickets), "maybe I didn't use the GNER website; maybe I used the trainline website." (For non-UK residents, thetrainline.com is a website devoted to selling train tickets. Hence the name.) So I called up the trainline website, and checked. But no! No recent orders there, either! My order had disappeared!

So I got onto their helpdesk, and received this advice: order more tickets, then apply for a refund on your old ones.

That was it, and in about as many words, too. No 'sorry we can't help', or 'you poor thing, what a terrible position'. In fact, it was more like 'we think you're probably trying it on, so buy some tickets you cheapskate and we'll consider whether to give you your money in our own damned time.' On the face of it, this advice, while irritating, stupid and rude, was not utterly foolish; but what got me steamed up was two particularly personal aspects. First, these tickets are not cheap, and if the refund did not arrive promptly, I was going to go over my overdraft limit and get charged by my bank for the privilege. Second, I had originally booked first class tickets (really, the only way to travel), and first class tickets bought 'on the day' are ruinously expensive, so I would be travelling cattle-class instead. Argh.

Anyway, I had a nice weekend in London, and wrote a rude letter to GNER's customer service explaining the situation and grousing about the abruptness of their support staff.

And waited.

Six weeks later (knowing that by now I was going to get overdraft charges two months in a row, and by a margin which a GNER refund would have cured), I wrote another letter, angrier and (um, much) more sarcastic than the last. I printed out the customer support emails I'd received, and was about to attach them to the latter as proof of abruptness, when I realized I'd actually emailed the support staff the thetrainline.com, not GNER. Oops. So now I was complaining about the rudeness of someone else's support staff.

And then several things happened at once. First, I got a nice letter of apology from GNER, saying they were sorry I'd been dealt with abruptly, and of course they were refunding my tickets, and here were some vouchers to spend on more train tickets. (The value of the vouchers didn't quite cover the overdraft charges, but hey ho).

The other thing that happened was that my girlfriend - who'd been living with me at the time, and doing all her internet stuff on my laptop - checked her email for the first time in several months, and discovered an email from GNER saying 'your tickets have been ordered and are ready to pick up from the station.' I'd accidentally ordered them on her login, and they'd been quietly sitting in her account waiting to be used.

So I'd been complaining to GNER and demanding an apology for a mistake I'd made, and topped it off with griping about someone else's support staff.

Bugger.

Wee planets - a photoset on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gadl/sets/72157594279945875/
Also from core77, but even better than the paean to foil, is this. Also includes tips on making your own images. ARen't they gorgeous?

15 awesome uses for aluminum foil - DIY Life

http://www.diylife.com/2007/09/11/15-awesome-uses-for-aluminum-foil/
(via core77, which has a particularly good front three pages right now)

In praise of foil! Yay for aluminum foil. If you can read the comments and keep your temper while all around you are repeating themselves (then you're an Internet Zen Master, my son, as Rudyard Kipling never wrote)... like I said, if you can read the comments without losing it, there are some interesting insights there too. Use a bit of aluminium foil to rejuvenate a stripped thread in a hole in a piece of wood? Who'da guessed?

L'hydroptere

It's not the best photo, but you can see the central hull lifted out of the water.

While I was on holiday, sailing the west coast of France, we stopped one day in a sheltered cove for lunch. As luck would have it, anchored in the same bay was this contrivance - which has its own page on Wikipedia. It's a sailing hydrofoil - a rare beast indeed!

More photos of the holiday here.

A Soviet Poster A Day

http://sovietposter.blogspot.com/
I have a weakness for Soviet design, of almost all varieties, and this site of Alexander Zakharov's is awesome. The space posters are great, but the early constructivist stuff - like this work of genius - are my favourite.

A medical update

Realized today that I haven't really been keeping up the medical half of this journal recently, so y'all are due an update. In fact, the last post was in the middle of May, a hefty few months ago... so, let's see, what's happened since then?

Not much, really. I've been a bit hit-and-miss with the alendronic acid, but that seems okay. My colitis, however, does seem to be slowly gaining on me. After a very successful start with the 6MP, my blood tests over the last six months or so show a gradual increase in ESR (more inflammation, basically), to the point where Generic GP sent me a letter about it. As a result, GP consulted with Kindly Consultant, and I'm taking some very baby 'gastro-resistant' steroids for a bit. So we'll see what happens.

For myself, I just feel... well, pretty tired, basically. Very tired. I'm starting to get some stomach cramps again, too, and my poo is very runny and gaseous. For a while, it burned, too, like I'd spent the last year eating nothing but curry! So the prospects don't look so great right now. However, I take comfort from the fact that my stressful summer of weddings, etc., is now over, and I can relax a bit. It's cheering, too, to know  I'm being watched pretty closely by my NHS guardian angels.

Philosophic Friday

Here's a theory:

Technology is ultimately driven by anti-social tendencies.

I don't mean criminal tendencies - I just mean our reluctance to communicate with other human beings. Now, at a fundamental level, this is self-evidently true, because the inevitable alternative to using technology is to use more manpower (I use the term in a gender non-specific way, obviously). Ever since some guys sitting around a dusty river delta on the southern Mediterranean decided that what the skyline really needed was some really big triangles on it, the way to make things happen is either (a) use lots of people, or (b) invent some clever gizmo that means you need fewer people to do the job. If we were a species who genuinely and wholeheartedly revelled in each others' company, then why bother with technology? Every job would be a big party.


This tendency has become ever more obvious as time goes on. The Walkman, of couse, was perhaps the first technology which made the trend explicit, but it was going on for a long time before that. The invention of writing neatly circumvents all that tedious business of sitting around listening to old geezers sounding off about stuff (what overly-respectful anthropologists call the 'oral tradition'). Transport, in general, is devoted to getting you from where you are (where the people are dull) to where you want to go (where the people sound more interesting). Later on, the trend accelerates: the first web cam was invented because a bunch of geeks couldn't keep a coffee pot full - not in and of itself a technically demanding task, but one which required rather more communication than they were willing to partake in.


Now some might argue that certain technologies have enabled us to communicate over long distances - something which must surely be inherently social. I disagree. I would suggest that these technologies actually allow you to talk to people you already know but who are not within shouting distance, thus saving you from the terrible prospect of having to communicate and get along with strangers who happen to be within earshot. Thus you are mercifully spared the prospect of having to make new friends by being able to communicate with your few old ones wherever they may be. What's more, most of the so-called 'enabling technologies' that we're talking about here are ones which enable you to find and talk to people who share a similar view of life to yourself. That's great for making friends quickly; but it also requires considerably less social skill to talk to someone who basically agrees with you, than someone who doesn't. Someone once said, 'each generation is its own secret society'. Communication technologies seem to have the universal effect of exaggerating the barriers which set each group apart as different, simply by allowing us to indulge our anti-social tendency to ignore those with whom we might have differences.


I'm not saying technology is a universally bad thing. I just think we should be honest about our motivations.

Solar Decathlon hits Washington

Start:	Oct 12, '07
End:	Oct 20, '07

This looks really interesting - in October, the biannual Solar Decathlon competition hits Washington. From across the country - in fact, from across the world - teams of students will be converging on the city to erect houses - houses they have designed, and which run on entirely self-generated electricity. The 'solar' in the title implies that it's all electricity from the sun, but at least one of the entries in 2005 had a hydrogen fuel cell, so I dunno. Anyway, it looks utterly fascinating, and I wish it was coming to a city near me.

My li'l sister got married

My little sister got married at the weekend. Sorry Kev, but this is by far the best photo I have!

Resource: NASA measures up

I should say, this is one for the really hard-core geek - or design professional. I've long struggled to find a good resource with some figures for basic anthropometric data - average heights of people, grip strengths, etc. I finally stumbled on this a few weeks back: it's a NASA standard for man-machine interfaces, with a handy section of 'Human Capabilites'. Of course, it's strongly biased towards the sort of thing that might come in handy when designing spaceships, but it does have a lot of really useful stuff - plus a lot of random stuff about how bodies react to microgravity (they get bunged up noses, apparently - food should therefore be saltier. Remember that).


As a design tool, it has lots of flaws - essentially, it's based on young, fit American males, so using it to design, say, a playpen for toddlers would be a bit silly. Nonetheless, v interesting - in a dry, NASA-speak sort of way.

Black is the new Green (according to Google)

http://www.blackle.com/


It sounds like a wind-up - probably because the logic of it is so beguilingly simply and obvious. Some bright spark (or possibly some much more eco-friendly, less energy-consuming dim spark) at Google has pointed out that powering all those white pixels on Google's front end is more energy-intensive than leaving them all black. Hence, Blackle - Google's search, but in black. Individually, each screen won't save much... but there's an awful lot of people using Google. Cute.

BMW publishes 'The Secret Life of Cars'

Via dezeen:

BMW have just published a report entitled 'The Secret Life of Cars' (download the 3.3MB pdf
here). On one level, it's a long paean to BMW dressed up as research; and there are a few places where some juicy nugget of information has, one suspects, been deleted (I can spot at least one reference to a paragraph no longer there). But there's still some interesting stuff. I especially liked the guy describing how the seating arrangements in British cars varied according to class:


"My American friend sent me a description of where English couples sit in cars. It made me laugh because it's so true. It said with a working class couple the two men sit up front and the women behind. With a middle class couple one couple sit in the front with the man driving and the wife in the passenger seat. And if its an upper class couple the couples mix up so one man drives and the other man's wife sits in the front. Genius."

There are also some interesting observations about who we allow in front of us (small cars let other small cars in, women are more likely to let others in, etc) - although it seemed obvious to me that similar cars are more likely to be polite to each other. After all, the drivers have something in common already.


I do, however, harbour a secret suspicion that every driver quoted is a BMW driver.

Full emotional disclosure - in infomatic form.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/59770086/

One suspects that Hell might have no fury like a woman reduced to six symbols on a chart.

Like ships in the night (52º23'01''...)

http://platial.com/paiges/map/1535#hopeless_romantic_map
Ah, the romantic notions conjured forth... such sweet little messages!

Tour de France 2007 - Prologue

I had an unscheduled trip to London this weekend, where (as luck would have it) about a zillion other people had also decided to spend their time. Also, as luck would have it, it was the Tour de France. I suspect these two might have been related.

Anyway, I spent a considerable part of Saturday up a tree, with my camera, taking photos of the time trials which preceded the race proper. I'm afraid I got a little trigger-happy - I managed to take something like one hundred and fifty photos before the battery died. This is a selection of the best, from which you can infer the number of photos I shot which consisted entirely of some blurred pavement.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
I'm sure all you star-nuts (yeah I'm thinking of you, charl) will already be aware of this, but I only just found it. It's full of lovely images, and (if I read the jargon correctly), there's a little program which downloads a new one each day and makes it into your PC wallpaper.

A little bit of greetings-card philosophy

I've been rereading Andrew Smith's Moondust - an excellent book for anyone even vaguely interested in the Apollo moonlandings, by the way, when I accidentally misread the phrase " I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent beng unnecessairly less than that myself". I thought it said:

"I realise how few people I know who might be described as happy, and how much time I've spent being unnecessarily less than myself"...

....and I would have gone on thinking that that was what it said, and nodding to myself at the profundity of it, if I hadn't checked the quote in order to post it here. Hah. Still, for some reason, the misquote chimes more deeply with me than the actual one.

Hello random people!

Over the last few months, I've noticed a distinct pick-up in the number of Multiply people who, despite being entirely unrelated (and generally being in some far-distant part of the world) have randomly found their way to my homepage. Hello you random people! Welcome!

Feel free to say hello back... I'm very curious as to how you ended up here.

(I've also noticed there must be a fair few non-Multiply people stopping by, too. Hello to you too! I'm sorry there's no way for you to leave comments - mind you, you're all probably related to me anyway so you can just jolly well use email, or pop over for a cup of tea)