Brill, you’ve finally failed. Now instead of money-grabbing like you’re so used to, why don’t you think about cost-cutting for once? For example, I was having a think about those great tickets of yours…

This is what gets printed for me if I book a return journey from London Kings Cross to York:

So, how about we rejig a few things. Even if you guys don’t save any money from printing, you’ll get that fuzzy warm hippy feeling from using less card or paper.

See, what I did there is applied a very complicated design process called “make the stuff that people actually care about really big”. Unbelievably, it doesn’t matter to me what that long number is, so I made it small. Are you catching my drift yet? “What’s a ToD?”, I hear you cry. I have no idea. I also don’t care.

Using the first, we’re down from five tickets per return journey to three. Now let’s suppose you make the collection receipt optional (I’ve been on your service every couple of weeks since October last year, and I’ve never needed one) and uncheck the box by default. Two tickets per return journey instead of five.

The second’s probably a little ambitious, but wow, imagine the possibilities of a company actually removing stuff that isn’t useful on 99% of journeys (this statistic was very accurately calculated using a technique known as “making it up”).

Yes, I’m sure there are reasons things haven’t changed. National Rail probably set up some beautiful unified system in 1994 that every train company can use to print tickets, or whatever. Once again, I’m reminded of how big business and IT (or the web) are a match made in heaven.

I’ve had my iPhone almost a year now. It’s been out for a little over twenty-four months, if I can add up right. Is there a decent reason that I have still have to jump through hoops to add music I play to Last.fm? Sure, Last.fm is a comparatively small site¹ – but you’re touting Facebook and Flickr exporting features as a pretty major upgrade to iPhoto. Plus, I can’t imagine that something like this would be particularly difficult for you guys to code.

It’s not like scrobbling is really data-intensive, either. Basically, I just don’t see why you haven’t done it yet.

Cheers,

Alex

Click the images for bigger versions. No, you get no points for realising I did them in Photoshop; it’s not tough.

On the 8th of April I opened a ticket to let Twitter know that they’d spelt Twitterrific incorrectly on their downloads page. Fine, it’s a tiny problem, and an easy fix, but nonetheless something that should be fixed. ‘andr8a’ replied within a day, and was very grateful.

Thanks for the heads up! We truly apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Andrea

Poking around towards the end of last month, the problem still hadn’t been sorted. Fine, another support ticket opened, how tough can this be to fix? After jumping through hoops (they now close your ticket with a list of FAQs without even reading it, sigh), this is the reply I was left with this morning:

Thanks. This will not be fixed at this time.

What the hell? How hard is it to fix one typo on their own site? And I didn’t need an essay back, but did he have to sound so pissed off when I was clearly trying to help? Thanks, Twitter. You guys rock.

Oh c'mon, National Express. Surely you've learnt by now that outright blocking stuff isn't the answer. It doesn't really prevent it, and actually just pisses people off. Really, your Wi-Fi can't deal with a minute long YouTube video? A DNS lookup later, and…

Blocking by domain name. Clever.

So, so frustrating that they block this 4MB YouTube download, but won't try to stop me updating my browser (30MB) or downloading some video podcasts (~100MB).

Something that I've been noticing increasingly lately is that the more “stuff” that gets thrown at me, the more I’ve reduced the amount to which it can bother me. When I started out with a Mac Mini and 4:3 display a couple of years ago, I had Google Notifier set up to make an obscene noise, show me my unread email count and display an overlay with the new message summary. I had system wide notifications set up for IMs, tweets, iTunes changing. In short, my computer was really annoying.

Since then, I've switched off pretty much everything. Tweets appear in the background, and I'll read them if I want. New instant message conversations show a tiny exclamation mark in the menu bar. Google Notifier… well, I actually just quit Google Notifier. I want to see how long I can do without it, but hope this is the start of something productive. Honestly, didn't realise how much all that stuff pained me until I got rid of it, and I don't think I'll be going back.

So consider this a poke for you to do something about your pain-in-the-arse computer; the revelation that the world won't implode if I don't reply to email just hit me, and it feels good.

Is it just me, or is that big red WARNING: one of the least Apple-esque things on the Mac?

You can find it at http://alex.mullr.net/lastfm/graph/.

I've wanted to write this for a while, but have only really felt like doing it today, after the ten of us who are living in this house have been forced to share one tiny toilet for 24 hours (and counting). Since arriving at university last October, I've had a great time – but the accommodation has been a complete headache.

So I got here late last year, just as the weather was starting to take a turn for the worse. After a few weeks, it became obvious my radiator wasn't working – everybody else's in the house was fine, but mine never got hot. I reported it to the porters lodge once (as we were told to), and somebody came a few days later (when I was out, though my housemate saw them). Apparently they did nothing though (it still didn't work), so I reported it again. Nobody came this time. It was left until I got hold of a radiator key, on the advice of my dad, and bled it myself. Full of air.

Since January, I can't keep track of the number of things that have gone wrong. We lost power on the top floor for a day (it was a fuse, but of course health and safety meant we were told not to touch it). The doorbell didn't work for about two weeks. The microwave was removed and we were left without one for about a week. The part I find funniest about that is that we're not allowed our own microwaves because they might catch fire, but we were apparently running that risk with the one we were given anyway. With all these things, we report them just like we're told to – and nothing ever gets done.

I don't have experience with university accommodation in general, but I do know other people at York – and I know that none of them have had problems like the ones we've come across. Sure, Vanbrugh has its pigeons and Eden's Court has its damp… but this has been continually going on for seven months.

To quote a college porter yesterday “the whole place is falling apart.” He's not wrong. We're waiting for somebody to come and fix the stupid loo. So here's what you need to know: don't let this put you off the university if you're considering coming but, for your own sake, do everything you can to avoid Halifax College in your first year. It's not worth it. I can't be alone in thinking that it's pretty ridiculous we've paid quite a bit of money for this place, and nobody seems to give a crap.

It's midday on Thursday the 28th, and we're back to sharing two toilets between ten people. Life is good better again!

However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable.

Except they haven’t even prevented that. If my friend replies to somebody I don’t follow, I now don’t see it – when I would have previously. If one of my friends then replies to this reply that I haven’t seen, I end up getting a fragment (only seeing half of the messages). Stupid.

Tagging a photo with, say, facebook:profile=012345678 would add a link to that person’s Facebook profile, and could then be used (effectively in reverse) on Facebook profiles.

June 6th: Since writing this post, I’ve come across a really cool Flickr machine tag browser that you should check out.

However, that’s all just changed. I found a thread on a music site entitled "MS Paint Your Favorite Album", encouraging users to recreate the front covers of iconic or important albums (to them) using the standard Paint included with Windows.

If you’ve got thirty minutes or an hour spare, it’s a really great way to spend some time. I wanted something simple to start with, and I think this turned out pretty well.

So, give it a go: Microsoft Paint if you’re on Windows, the open source Paintbrush if you’re on a Mac. No layers, no fancy text tools, no nothing. Brush, line tool, eraser… and get to it, without forgetting to post the results somewhere.

There’s been big discussion on the Internet for a few weeks now, I think, on rev=canonical. If you need to get up to speed, take a quick look at Jeremy Keith’s post titled Revving up. I’ll wait, it’s ok. You can even skim or speed read if you’re desperate to get back here.

So, the benefits should be obvious. Providing short URLs from a domain that you have control of, so as not to rely on a third party service. That’s how I interpret it, anyway. It’s important to note that big sites like Flickr are already implementing this, taking links like http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexmuller/3473217214/ and turning them into http://flic.kr/p/6hV9tq. Cool stuff, definitely.

I have an incredibly short attention span. There, I said it. If you’re like me, with the concentration of a tired racoon, here’s what you need to do. Readers, consumers, everybody: grab the rev=canonical bookmarklet created by Simon Willison and use that to find short URLs before other services. Creators, bloggers, people with a website: if you’re using WordPress, install the WordPress rev=canonical plugin which will provide shortened URLs for your blog or site. Everybody’s trying to reduce the impact that linkrot could have, one step at a time.

And there you have it. Every article on this blog now has a short(er) URL, which you can find using the bookmarklet I linked above. Those links will be good for as long as this blog is around, which is potentially longer than URL shortening services. The link for this post is http://mullr.net/blog/pap.

Small update

The plugin broke fairly soon after I implemented it this morning, possibly because of a 301 redirect I have going on from mullr.net to alex.mullr.net. Duncan Robertson, the plugin’s author, replied to my plea for help within half a day with a fix for the issue, so massive thanks to him. I’m sure an updated version will be released on his site that sorts this problem.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).

Here’s hoping Tweetie for Mac fills the void.

So, our connection died at about 4pm on Monday afternoon. I called up their support number at 9pm and got put through to India. I was asked to reboot the modem, and when it didn’t work again I was told we could wait for it to be sorted, or book an engineer.

I decided to sleep on it, and called them back on Tuesday daytime (again, Indian call centre). Again, I had to reboot the modem, and was told to disconnect my Apple router because they couldn’t support that. She didn’t sort the problem – when I tried to get her to report an issue (open a ticket, have an engineer look at it on their end), all she’d say was the stock line: "I’ve checked the system, there are no issues in your area."

I was out all day Wednesday, but called them back that night. I was put through to John in Swansea; whatever Virgin are paying John, it isn’t enough; VM should be proud to be employing somebody so competent. He did some tests straight away on my modem, saw some strange power fluctuations, and said immediately that it needed an engineer to look at it. He booked one for Monday, commented on how their internal support systems are so slow, and let me off the phone.

At 1pm today (Thursday), I got a text saying they’d fix the problem within eight hours and that they’d cancelled my engineer. At 4pm, I received a voicemail saying the problem was sorted. I don’t know whether John was correct that my modem needs looking at, but if so… it can happen some other time. The connection’s working fine now, and I’m happy.

Here’s the interesting thing (to me): I was really pissed off on Tuesday afternoon. Truthfully, I was incredibly pissed off until I spoke to a UK call centre. Quality of phone support is so important, and I hope Virgin aren’t moving more of their operations out of the UK. That’s the kind of thing that, in the long run, would lose us as customers. And finally, to the people behind @virginmedia on Twitter: what you’re doing (openness & pretty immediate availability) is really cool… please keep it up.