Yesterday marked the release of the latest version of Mac OS X (or OS X as it’s now known as), Mountain Lion.
My first instinct with this release is similar to when Snow Leopard came out – the addition of something before the previous cat name implies it’s a bit of a update, rather than a full featured release…
It struck me while on a recent trip to Paris how difficult I found it communicating with people who didn’t speak English. I’ve been abroad before and had similar problems, but (rather arrogantly perhaps) not thought too much off it. Enough pointing and repetition got results, so I was satisfied.
But it hit me in Paris, how hard communication was, and how patient the wonderful people were who we’re dealing with me. I tried my best, I meticulously rehearsed my question in French, approached with confidence, spoke clearly and articulated as best I could.
Then, they replied.
I fell apart quicker than a game of Jenga played by a bunch of students on freshers night. Their response took me off my guard, i understood absolutely nothing they had said, so resorted to a rather pathetic “heh”, followed by “Parlez-vous anglais?” They soon caught on and proceeded to help me and we got there in the end.
These guys are obviously used to it, and had the patience of saints to deal with us, and no doubt many others!
This set my brain bells off, and it occurred to me how easy it is to be naive when serving the public at the council. Firstly, how well equipped are we to deal with the base of people who don’t speak English? We live in a multicultural society, and we expect multi-linguistic communication abroad, but are we just hypocrites? What lengths do we go to ensure our demographic can consume the information we are distributing? Do we ever test the translation software we use, or do we just use Google translate? I see signs all around me with French, English, Spanish and German text, I couldn’t imagine providing that level of communication via our own website, obviously specific to the languages our citizens use most frequent.
How far are we going to communicate with those that don’t naturally understand us? Is it cost effective? Would it require extensive resource and if so, would the results be worth it?
I’d be really interested to hear how other localgov peeps implement and feel about providing content in multiple languages, or if anybody has done any research into it.
In the meantime, I’ll go back to working on my french.
C.
The recent TwitterJokeTrial really got me thinking about the way we interpret the written word, and how that interpreation affects our actions. To bring you up to speed if your not aware, Paul Chambers, made a joke on Twitter about blowing up Robin Hood airport (the irony that Robin Hood was in actual fact, a terrorist still makes me giggle). It was a harmless, bit of fun poking at the inconvenience caused to him by the airport being closed. Well, that’s how most people with an ounce of common sense would take it.
However, the airport got wind of this, then the police did, then the courts did, and eventually he was found guilty of “sending a menacing electonic message”. Muppets. It was a blatant joke, a joke that most people would have not even cared about. I mean lets face it, if i am going to blow up your airport, i am not going to tell you (and the rest of the world) over a social network.
Any how, I’ll avoid a massive rant about the dire situation that exists in this country regarding politcal correctness, moron’s in power and the combination of the two.
My point is that since the written word was invented, i wonder how many bloody problems it’s caused.
It’s that wonderful lack of tone you get from a verbal communication, when i speak to you, i set the tone, mainly using my body language, vocal levels and facial expressions. When i send you an email/text/tweet etc, you set the tone. This is where things can go tit’s up.
In various social situations where this has happened, it appears that most people i know seem to automatically assign the worst “tone” when reading words on a screen, even more so if they are in a bad mood, stressed etc.
An example, the wonderful exclamation mark. Take the following;
“I can’t believe you did that!!!”
When you read that, did you assign an aggressive tone to those words? Did the three exclamation marks make you think i was angry, and if you know my voice, did you “hear” me shouting when you read it? If you answered yes to the above then wahay! It means that i might be making a bit of sense and not talking bollocks (as occasionally i am prone to doing).
Now, what if i added a few extra characters;
“HA HA HA! I can’t believe you did that!!!”
What do you hear this time? Do you still assign that agressive tone to my voice when you read it out aloud? Or this time (i hope…) you might of imagined me laughing, expressing disbelief in what you have just done, but i think the introduction of the HA HA HA really changes the way you interpret the message.
I find it really interesting to see just how difficult it is to display humor, sarcasm or sadness in the written word, i imagine that’s why people invented smileys! I’ve seen it in the workplace so many times I’ve lost count – all it takes is the omission of a couple of characters (in this case HA HA HA) and you have completely changed the way in which your reader will view your message.
I’ve seen people get a subtle telling off for an email they have sent, that in their eyes was completely harmless and light hearted. I’ve also seen couples fall into a spiral of fighting and hatred, all because the fella forgot to put in a couple of kisses at the end.
Related back to the Twitter incident, it makes we wonder how many people read that message and assigned the voice of a crazed mad-man screaming at the top of voice running towards an airport covered in C4… perhaps the people that thought it was a genuine threat were having a crap day and thus made that negative assignment.
It made me realise how important it is to double check and then check again the words we write on the internet. To us, it could be a harmless jest at a friend, to others, a hateful remark.
I wonder if this story/trial would have got any traction if he had started his tweet with “HA HA HA”….
C
Well, it’s been a bloody long time since i updated this site – to be fair, it’s been offline for about 8 months… why i hear you ask? Well it’s a little something i have come to know as the “Bembridge” effect.
Let me explain.
The Bembridge effect is my own inability to want to show something, until i have it (in my eyes) completely perfect. It’s bloody annoying.
I’ve come to find that i am never actually completely happy with anything i create/design/develop/do etc – even though in other peoples eyes they are just fine – so with the absence of any deadline or commitment to anybody other than myself, personal projects tend to take me a bloody age. Take this site for example, i’ve been fudging around with the design for the last year – i could never be happy with it. I knew i wanted to go down the desktop/wooden background style, and had many little iterations and designs at home that i never even bothered coding. Very frustrating.
Anyway, after having a fair few desires to write about something over the last few months, i thought bugger it. So here i am again, with a design that is not exactly what i want, but very very nice in my opinion.
Perhaps i can get over this in the future by billing myself for my time, at least that way i know i can get to an acceptable level to present, instead of spending years perfecting something that is actually alright as it is.
So – to end this mindless babble, i intend to post here a lot more regularly from now on, aswell as showcasing some photos/videos i take on my travels.
Be interested to hear from anybody who suffers from a similar “Surname” effect when it comes to their own personal projects.
C
It’s been a very long time since I’ve played a gig live, and the last one was a bit of “nobody cares we are here” sort of thing. So you can imagine the nerves when we were asked to perform at a friend of Fouldo’s family, Barry Sargent’s 50th birthday party. It was held on a farm/field like place and cleverly dubbed “GlastonBarry”.
It was quite a last minute thing, we only found out about the gig 5 weeks before it took place, which i admit sounds like ample time to get together and organise and learn a set list. Things were complicated slightly by our Drummer, Ben Foulds, leaving the country and heading to Puru for 4 weeks.
Leaving us with a grand total of 1 week to practice. Throw in a couple of us being in different cities/busy during the week, and you get 1 day of practice before the event.
Excellent.
Despite the odds being against us, much effort was made and a wonderful set list was crafted and learnt to a pretty impressive standard. We performed to quite a lot of people, maybe around the hundred mark?? (I’m not very good at guessing amounts, needless to say it was a lot of people).
They danced, they sung along, and they seemed to have a bloody good time.
We were the first of three bands on, so i think we did a good job setting the tone for the rest of the evening. We also received a lot of positive feedback from people and i believe we have received an invitation to perform at the Repton Beer Festival. We are strongly considering it.
Anyway, my good friend Rich took the liberty of filming the event, I’ve included one video with this post and will make an effort to get them all up online. Just need to edit out the obscene commentary by our mates!
Hope you Enjoy.
EDIT – As Ben’s Mum Sally has kindly pointed out to me, this event was not actually the original GlastonBarry, It was in fact Angela’s 50th birthday, Barry’s was a few years ago.
No wonder Barry looked so confused when the whole band wished him happy birthday at the end of the night….
Today marks the release of the iPhone 3GS – Apple’s latest mobile phone. As a big fan of the iPhone and a launch day purchaser of the iPhone 3G (Yes, i queued up early!!) i was a little disappointed with the latest iteration of what i consider to be the best mobile pc/phone/multimedia device on the market!
iPhone 3GS - the fastest, most powerful (and expensive) iPhone ever.
The latest device comes equipped with 256mb of RAM, which is double the size of the previous phones memory and a faster processor. This leads to apps launching quicker and the ability to end phone calls much quicker. You also don’t get that horrible lag on the messaging app, so I’m told. The device also comes equipped with a compass and a, wait for it, 3 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA!!! This wonderful updated specification allows the phone to have a few distinct features over its predecessor.
So essentially you are getting a snappier phone with a compass and a video recorder. Brilliant.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic device, i would and do recommend the iPhone to everybody, it is a truly fantastic device. But my grumbling lies in the Apple style “go on, upgrade, you know you want to” effect that has plagued all existing 3G phone owners.
As i purchased the 3G on its release date ( just under a year ago) i am still tied into my 18th month contract. Now i fully understand how contracts work and that 18 months means 18 months, not 12 months. Still, with the original iPhone, we were allowed to upgrade from to the the iPhone 3g free of charge, by extending our contracts. Now, i am being asked to pay the remainder of my contract, which equates to £270 + the cost of the new phone, which ranges from Free to £185.
No thank you.
o2 and Apple have spoilt us by allowing us to upgrade early last year and by charging us a premium tariff (£45 for 1200 minutes and 500 texts! I could get that with unlimited messages for £30 on o2′s simplicity contract!) so we went ahead and assumed we were special!! I guess not.
A visit to the o2 iPhone forums and other iPhone/Apple forums shows that a good majority are in the same dilemma as myself. Will be interesting to sit this one out and see whether o2 reduce prices or cut upgrade costs similar to AT&T in the US.
But, as i overcome that technological, nerd based desire to own the latest and greatest possessions, i can take comfort in knowing that the new iPhone is actually not much different from the one next to me at the moment. Bar a few scratches on the back.
So, i will not be purchasing/upgrading to the iPhone 3Gs until January at the earliest. I will keep my eyes on forums and twitter to see just how many people broke and decided to take the costly plunge…
Right, i have finally joined in this blogging malarky. I have no doubt that only my closest friends and people looking for bad things to say about me will read this, but being an active web user, i occasionally stumble upon the blog of a somebody who actually provides me with some great information, be it jokes, tutorials or a rather similiar opinion to my own. So with that in mind i hope that with appropriate tagging, blagging and twittering, someone somewhere, may find something here useful.
Brilliant.
So my next revelation, my father died a few months ago and it upset me much more than i could have imagined. It has however allowed me to reinvent myself, to find the motivation to correct all the things i dislike about myself and aspire to learn more and develop myself further, hence the beginning of this blog. (I hate the word “blog”, but not as much as i hate the word “diary”…).
So, i’ve covered why im doing this, next a bit about me (and i mean a bit).
Firstly, the current design of this “blog” is naff, it uses a default wordpress theme that i am in the process of changing, however these things take time, so expect to see the look and feel change around quite a lot for probably the next year or so.
Secondly, i am very opinionated, so as a small disclaimer you may disagree with a lot of things i say on here (don’t worry, it wont all be personal opinions on things…) but some of you may agree with my views. If you do, i invite you to participate in commenting on my “articles” and share your views with me. The same goes for if you disagree, tell me why i am a snot nosed, opinionate tosspot and hey, i may even change my mind.
Finally, the word bollocks sums up my ability to spell, puncuate and use grammar. I prey WordPress has a spellchecker. We shall find out soon. So please, no “you have spelt blah blah” wrong comments, i appreciate your effort but if you read it in your head correctly then i’m more than happy.
So, next stop, the wordpress plugin library. There i can find pointless nifty things to make this site look snazzier and “enhance your user experience”.
So until next time (which more probably be me complaining about something not working…) Fairwell.
Carl