Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The 'Knowledge' and computers
Can you do 'the knowledge' on a computer? No, say the black cab drivers of London. You need to drive around the streets to physically imprint all those highways and byways on your brain.
So a little strange that it's been proposed that the powers that be are seeking to test 'the knowledge' by computer. It strikes me that what they would be testing would not be 'the knowledge', but something else.
When was the last time you took a black cab in London and the driver got lost? It's never happened to me.
Perhaps these people could better spend their time getting London's appalling mini-cab drivers - who don't do the knowledge - up to speed on routes, rather than trying to fix what isn't broken.
5:53 PM|
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BlackBerry saga draws to a close, but not before I go ballistic
I finally went ballistic on Sunday, when I discovered that my BlackBerry was downloading email from November...2004.
Apparently the BlackBerry Internet service completely ignores 'mark as read' tags in gmail (according to the Vodafone 'engineers'), and is oblivious to email date stamps too. The trip to Bilbao - two days of no GPRS - triggered a kind of overall reset, where the system went back to square one with all my email.
So I eventually found a solution: completely empty my gmail inbox and start again. And then I at last started getting email for November 2005 again.
So the technology is determining my behaviour; I have to adjust my behaviour - and all my data - in order to get the damn thing to work at all. And nobody at Vodafone could work this out. What a waste of time.
10:37 AM|
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EPIC
EPIC - Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference - took place in Seattle last week.
You can find the conference blog and lots of others stuff on the EPIC website, including session abstracts and the full proceedings.
I couldn't make this first edition, but I'm sincerely hoping it was so successful that there'll be another next year.
10:06 AM|
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Thursday, November 17, 2005
Broken, part II
Apparently I have broken the BlackBerry/Vodafone service. Or that's what I'm hearing at one removed, after some seven hours of phone consultations with tech services (apparently the Vodafone "engineers" are not "customer facing" and don't speak to the hoi polloi, like you and me, only through intermediaries - leading to some pretty hilarious Chinese whispers).
Apparently my trip to Bilbao last week has triggered some untoward process where the Vodafone server is trying to upload all my gmail from ancient history (read 2004 onwards). Apparently, the Vodafone server is seeing all my gmail history as unread, even when it's marked as read. Apparently.
Apparently the problem is being posted onto their message board.
Too many 'apparently's there, but it's all I've got to go on until some darn thing resolves itself.
3:47 PM|
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This service is broken
Against my better judgement, I acquired a BlackBerry this month.
This week, I've so far spent around 5 hours on the phone with Vodaphone, trying to reanimate the thing. [That follows more than 3 hours at the Vodaphone store the previous week, as they tried to set it up.]
Apparently, emailer devices - being bears of very little brain, I suppose - go and do their own thing if you travel between countries (even where the mobile operator is one and the same), and that's what happened to me last week. I went to Bilbao, and it seems GPRS extends not much further than the airport and the city centre, so going as I always do into greater Bilbao killed my email, and - apparently - my BlackBerry.
We - me and the technical services people at Vodafone - have tried everything. We've removed and replaced everything removable. We've dumped Vodafone and signed up for Orange and O2 and gone back again. We've removed gmail and reinstated it. We've sent umpteen test emails to a variety of locations. And I've been merrily sitting here issuing network commands - under instructions - and so forth from the device, all to no effect. When I could have been doing something much more productive.
I receive yet another phone call from Vodaphone. Next stage is apparently for the 'engineers' to get involved. I'm waiting to hear...
So, not very inspiring if you're a frequent traveller.
(And I haven't even started on BlackBerry usability...Or on how crappy Vodafone customer services is until you get a number for somebody useful who 'actually knows what they're talking about'...)
1:02 PM|
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005
World Usability Day
Usability is now on the home page of the BBC News website, with World Usability Day-related stories on the website from Max Gadney and Bill Thompson and Tom Stewart.
And in the run-up to the UK usability awards on World Usability Day, I've just about had my fill of press offices. Are press offices the new call centres? (Or are call centres the new press offices?) They certainly sometimes seem to be God's way of saying "not bloody likely".
A warm round of applause for Dave Green, David Hawdale, Dave Cook, Suw Charman, Bill Thompson, Sarah Ronald, the whole UK World Usability Day team, and all lovely souls in companies, nominated or not for the UK UPA usability awards, who make things happen, rather than trying to frustrate them.
12:04 PM|
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